Here’s all the stuff I never got round to writing about:
Regular Shit
The National - Laugh Track and The First Two Pages of Frankenstein
It is no great tragedy, of course, to no longer connect with a band you've liked for nearly two decades, even one whose records have unintentionally traced and tracked your own story. A single band cannot and should not be your life, and they've never been close to that for me. There are bigger problems in every life, and there are enough albums by enough bands for 100 lifetimes, anyway, The National representing but a sliver. Other incidental soundtracks obviously exist.
I am left to wonder, then, if it is too much to want The National to become something more than they've always been, to write or sound like more than a sad-dad repository after nearly a quarter-century working. Is it fair for a fan to hope that a favorite band happens to come along for the ride that is their life, or should they simply be content that the band still exists, that it's still making music for anyone else who needs it? Fandom, of course, is a parasocial relationship, with one side receiving or rejecting what the other is offering. That doesn't mean the bonds don't feel real, that it doesn't smart when a connection that felt crucial starts to snap.
Getting older, with — or without? — The National by Grayson Haver Currin
Drop Nineteens - Hard Light
I’d never heard of Drop Nineteens until a few years ago, when they got brought up as a lot band of the heyday of the first wave of shoegaze in the early 90’s. The Boston band released two albums in quick succession, then broke up and the members disappeared from music. Then out of the blue, a new album Hard Light was released with that original line-up. It’s a beautiful thing, tastefully updating the band’s sound to include some woozy and glistening guitar work.
Tiga & Hudson Mohawke - L’Escstasy
These two producers teased us in 2020 with a fantastic collaboration single, “Love Minus Zero” but waited another 3 years for the full album. The Canadian and Scottish DJs & producers really delivered with a slick sounding, upbeat album that plunders dance music’s past. From squelchy acid house bass on “BUYBUYSELL” to classic rave sirens on “TR Smooth”, L’Escasty is a really varied listen but it’s a fun and energetic one.
PJ Harvey - I Inside The Old Year Dying
The last few years have seen a lot of PJ Harvey material released but not a full album; a glut of compilations of her demos for her older albums came out, as well as a few soundtracks. I Inside The Old Year Dying is her first original album since 2016 and it goes back to the spectral, folk inspired sound of 2006’s White Chalk. PJ’s voice is hushed and tender, especially on the gentle acoustic melody of “Lwonesome Tonight”. I do prefer it when her songs have some bite, but the tracks here are beautiful nonetheless.
Oneohtrix Point Never - Again
What is supposed to be a mediation between his the past and the present, Again is very much an album of two halves. The first has plenty of the avante-garde leaning electronica based on older synth arpeggios; but the latter part is much more engaging, with strong melodic parts and beautiful ambience. “Ubiquity Road” and “A Barely Lit Path” making a great ending to the album.
ANHONI and the Johnsons - My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross
This is the first album credited to ANHONI and the Johnsons in over a decade, coming six years after her fiercely politically charged 2016 album HOPELESSNESS. This is a much more mellow listen, much more akin to the chamber pop of the group’s early work. But there’s more of an influence of Motown and soul records of the 70’s, and it’s no less socially aware either. There’s some admirable restraint too, I really thought “Sliver of Ice” would really erupt into a something fierce but it held back at the very last part.
Heavy shit
Godflesh - Purge
Godflesh had put out two previous albums post-reformation, but I think this is their best one. It’s a real lo-fi production, it doesn’t sound nearly as slick as other metal bands I’m going to list here, but I think it fits in with Godflesh’s grimy roots. There’s also a much more pronounced hip-hop element with the programmed beats, and I swear “Army of Non” has a Cypress Hill sample.
Khanate - To Be Cruel
Stephen O’Malley of SUNN O))) revived his long dormant post-metal quartet Khanate along with members of Blind Idiot God, Gnaw and Scorn. In a lot of ways this new album To Be Cruel is like the stripped down, more conventional version of what SUNN O))) sound like. There’s an actual drummer and vocals, and long passages of noisy feedback, but it’s stripped down a lot more to hear the hum of the amps and the resonance of the chords. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still plenty heavy but compared to O’Malley’s main band, who regularly sound like tectonic plates moving, this is fairly approachable stuff…. comparatively speaking.
HEALTH - RAT WARS
HEALTH are probably still best known for their iconic scores to the videogames Max Payne 3 and GTA Online. Their blend of electronic production and crunching industrial rock has maybe peaked here. The synths are beautiful and serene, but the chugging guitar riffs are their heaviest. But compared to their previous albums, especially 2015’s DEATH MAGIC, the songs here aren’t as potent as before. Still, definitely bonus points for sampling “Like Rats” by Godflesh on the track “SICKO”.
Vale - A Senseless Procession
For me, my interest into more extreme forms of heavy music, like black and death metal, is the way artists can combine the harshness of the form with softer, more melodic parts. If it’s full on heavy all the way through, then I’m not interested. The one man death metal project, Vale, manages that balance pretty well, especially on the second track here “Monadic”. A soft acoustic guitar and background ambience give way to a song that’s crushingly heavy but still has this hopeful sound to it.
Reissues (making you buy stuff you already own again)
CoLD SToRAGE - wipE’out Zero Gravity Soundtrack
Gonna have a bold take and declare the wipEout soundtrack was more influential than the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack; the sci-fi racer was released a few years before the skateboarding game, and it came at a time where Sony was positioning their console as the cool thing for teens and adults to play. This reissued soundtrack doesn’t have the licensed tracks from Orbital or Chemical Brothers, but in house composer Tim Wright. It obviously sounds a bit dated, but the remaster does make the tracks at least feel contemporary. The remixes are a mixed bag though, but it does kind of lend credence to the album’s importance as a starting point for UK electronic producers.
Sonic Youth - Live In Brooklyn 2011
People didn’t know it at the time, but this was Sonic Youth’s last US concert, on outdoor show in New York where they mined their back catalogue for songs rarely played live. The setlist is stripped of almost all the band’s well known singles and hits, instead it flows together incredibly well for a band with a 30 year career. The live recording sounds great, and it’s fascinating to hear the group’s early 80’s material sound fresh and energetically played. After some contracted gigs a few months later in South America, Sonic Youth were no more.
Urusei Yatssura - We are Urusei Yatssura
Glasgow indie groups in the 90’s tended to be pretty nerdy, but even so, naming your group after a less than well known manga, was pretty out there. This expanded reissue of the quartet four piece’s first album shows what the band were really good at, writing scratching lo-fi but energetic indie rock. They’re not a million miles away from other bands in the city, especially BiS. “Kewpies Like Watermelon” is super upbeat sounding but that’s clashed against the darker “Black Hole Love”.
Shizuka - Heavenly Persona
Shizuka Miura was a cult underground personality in Tokyo in the 90’s, a singer songwriter who only produced this one album before her death in 2010. This is Heavenly Persona’s first Western release on physical formats, and it’s a timeless sounding album. It sounds incredibly haunting, all echoing guitars and distant vocals, similar to Western contemporaries like Low. It’s the kind of thing that if David Lynch had heard at the time, you know it would be the soundtrack of one of his films.
Vaporwave and other weird shit (I mean, weirder than normal… weirder than the stuff I usually…… you know what? Fuck you!)
Mountain Ruins - Grayshadow Ruins
Dungeons synth is having a bit of a moment right now, with plenty of labels putting out a good amount of murky, analogue ambient music. If you haven’t heard of dungeon synth, imagine if blokes that played in metal bands also had a fondness for making ambient electronic music inspired by musty, fantasy novels and old computer games. This debut release by Mountain Realm was released on Cyro Crypt records, an offshoot of the popular and prolific, dark ambient label Cryo Chamber.
Cryo Chamber also release a yearly sampler, on a “pay what you want” basis. It’s one long track with samples of the label’s releases from the year; dark hued ambient and drone music. It’s all based on fantasy and sci-fi world building, it’s exactly the type of thing to listen to during a tabletop RPG game:
Infinity Frequencies - Hologram Person
Infinity Frequencies is maybe the biggest name (“big” being a real subjective thing in such a niche micro genre) in Signalwave, an offshoot of vaporwave that’s designed to emulate broken transmissions, old TV signals and foreign radio. It’s downbeat and fairly sinister sounding stuff, with the album’s title track and also “Night Office” sounding particularly unnerving.
US Golf 95 - [PlayStation] jungle.psx
This short 5 track EP really leans into the faux nostalgia of Playstation 1 era games that heartily embraced the advantages of having games on a CD to have licensed music on them. Of course, if you asked me to name the games that had a mix of drum ‘n bass and jungle on them, I would struggle. I suppose I’ve listened to too many of those YouTube mixes (see below) but this is still a fun, upbeat mix of tracks.
I’ve actually spent a fair amount of time listening to these YouTube mixes, as it’s easy to load them up on my phone with my Bluetooth speaker on and leave it running:
slowerpace 音楽 - Barbershop Simulator™
I appreciate that the fact the producer behind Barbershop Simulator™ lets you know in his bandcamp page bio “Almost everything is plundered. I take some credit but keep in mind nothing here is totally original.” The Vaporwave subgenre known as “barberbeats” (if you want other examples, Haircuts for Men and Macroblank are worth listening to) is well known for producers just taking existing music, making incredibly minor changes and re-releasing it under their own name. This can make it a tough sell for listeners, but I think slowerpace 音楽 does a good job on this album making the tracks at least sound like a cohesive album. And let’s be honest, that cover art is awesome.