The Ten Best Albums of 2023

So all things considered 2023 was a pretty good year for music – good enough that I am still regularly listening to both of the albums I reviewed positively, and also that neither of those albums made it onto my top-ten list. Competition was fierce! In addition to Nature Morte and Heavy Heavy, an honorable mention also goes out to Feist’s Multitudes, a collection of very sweet indie folk numbers somewhat let down by the completely incorrect tone setting of the opening track, and Boygenius’s the record, an album about which I have nothing negative to say except that I didn’t like it quite as much as the number ten album on this list. 

Which is… 

No. 10 – Corinne Bailey Rae, Black Rainbows 

A remarkable career re-invention, Black Rainbows is a raw, wry rebuke against any attempts at pigeonholing the author as an easy-listening balladeer (who, as she is keen to remind people, once played in a punk rock band). It’s also a vivid exploration and celebration of Black art, protest and triumph. Its feisty, upbeat confrontationality recals US Girls, while its fondness for juxtaposing sultry pop grooves with pummeling riffs has notes of Rina Sawayama; Rae, nonetheless, goes further than either, concealing the razor-sharp edge of hard bop and blues within her silky R&B lines and then riffing with the kind of scratchy ferocity normally found in 80s DIY basements.  

No. 9 – Sufjan Stevens, Javelin 

2023 was a strong year for folk music in no small part because many of the records gaining traction ditched the floral tote-baggery of singer songwriter indie for the grave-shovel, the alcoholism and the murder ballad. Still, Sufjan Stevens has emerged as the king of floral tote-baggery for a reason. Tonally, Javelin positions itself neatly in Stevens’s sweet-spot at the intersection of upper-midwestern magic realism, homo-romantic tenderness and whatever the mainline Protestant equivalent of Sufi is; musically it’s gorgeously and fluently composed, nodding often to the stripped-down confessionality of Carrie and Lowell to all the better contrast the baroque majesty of its climaxes. 

No. 8 – Lankum, False Lankum 

Folk music, to paraphrase Ani DiFranco, doesn’t come from an acoustic guitar; it comes from heritage, from community, from the outsider art traditions that live on as much in punk and hip hop as anywhere else. It’s for that reason that, while often veering into industrial and noise territory worthy of post-revival Swans, False Lankum nonetheless feels ancient and pure, a bandcamp-spanning revival of something extinct outside Irish pubs. Don’t mistake that for twee, though: False Lankum is often beautiful but just as often resoundingly terrifying, a throwback to an era when the hangman could make his own justice and the town’s lamplights were only just sufficient to keep out the wolves.  

No. 7 – PJ Harvey, I Inside the Old Year Dying 

An avowedly English counterpart to the comparably Irish – but equally eerie – False Lankum, I Inside the Old Year Dying has a tad less verve but a smidgeon more experience, and is all the more haunting for its pace and restraint. I say “English”, but there’s no London lights here – this is a spectral, cryptic evocation of the wilds of Dorset, feral and sorcerous in its vivid descriptions of plants, beasts and dark unseen deeds, yet also warm and domestic, replete with the affable esotericism of deep, impenetrable local dialect.  

No. 6 – Desire Marea, On the Romance of Being 

Not the best release of the year, Desire Marea’s effortlessly genreless opus is still without a doubt the most ambitious. On the Romance of Being soars like pop, hollers like gospel, grooves like world music and commands like industrial noise. Hot-hearted sophomore anthem “Be Free” is an immediate stand out, as is the madcap free-jazz deep-soul thrill ride of album closer “Banzi”; while the album doesn’t always keep up the energy of its finest moments it offers some of the richest, most blistering pleasures of the year, and stands as a testament to the fundamental tenderness to which the most vivid carnality stands in tribute.  

No. 5 – Wednesday, Rat Saw God  

At once eloquent and endearingly charmless, Rat Saw God is the sun-baked, off-smelling evocation of lower-middle-class backwater emptiness that Arcade Fire have dreamed of being since The Suburbs. The sharpness of the imagery is backed up by a titanically raw guitar sound – as far as pure walls of guitar noise go, they don’t come much more satisfyingly dense than here – and real musical bravery, fusing grunge angst with shoegaze volume and honest-to-goodness country twanging. In fact amid the sludgy humidity of the album’s riff monsters, it’s telling that the album’s standout moment – the deliciously country-fried bridge of “Chosen to Deserve” – is one you could probably play to your grandad.  

No. 4 – McKinley Dixon, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?  

“Problem wit this preaching is it might just make my wrist hot/ 9 n****s masked up in that van, them boys Slipknot”, from “Tyler Forever”, is a line that had my ex-metal-kid ass giggling in my chair. In context, it’s remarkably bittersweet, the song a testament to a young friend taken before his time – “celebrating a life”, as Dixon has put it in interviews, in a way few musical obituaries really manage. Less than 30m long, Beloved!… is a slice of gorgeously rich jazz-rap in the vein of The Roots or Butterfly-era Kendrick, and fully warrants the comparison: the piano and horn arrangements here are marvelously fluent, subtle and cinematic, and could recommend the album on their own. That Dixon is also a nimble and eloquent rapper is nothing short of remarkable.   

No. 3 – Model/Actriz, Dogsbody 

I recommended this to my guitarist; she shook her head, “I tried, but it was a bit synthy for me”. I saw the band live a while later and there was not a synth in sight. It’s been a while since a serious album has so perfectly re-imagined the guitar as not plaything but foundry: every note hacked out from the wrong place of the instrument, assembled into razor-sharp grooves by keenly practiced hands (Berklee alums, all of them – they were bored of playing jazz). Model/Actriz’s brand of deranged noise-disco is at once visceral and genuinely danceable, finding its sound somewhere between Special Interest and Daughters and its tone somewhere between Lord Byron and Lady Gaga. It’s hard, it’s horny, it’s relentless; it’s here to shower you in pig’s blood and you’re here to dance to it. I promise.  

No. 2 – Mitski, The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We 

After two albums of beat-driven indie pop, Mitski is back to live instrumentation, this time predominantly acoustic and yet every bit as raw as …Makeout Creek. But what really elevates The Land… to a high point both in this list and in the artist’s career is its sheer restless extremism. Mitski is bold to make this album as desolately stripped-down and solitary as it is most of the time, and no less bold to pepper it with such intricately flourishes of quartet and choir, turning bridges and one-line choruses into fabulously lush oases amid the desert. The Land… is a masterpiece of both intimacy and artifice, reflective of a songwriter and storyteller in absolute command of her own vision; bonus points also for “As I got older/ I learned I’m a drinker”, my favorite lyric of the year.  

No. 1 – Squid, O Monolith 

Separated from the second-place album (well, from the next three albums behind it in this list) by only the thinnest of hairlines, O Monolith is nonetheless the album I found myself coming back to the most. 2021’s Bright Green Field was a strong debut, but typically chose to tie itself down to the beat, something which ever so slightly clipped the wings of a wildly creative ensemble of young musicians. O Monolith has no such restraints. This is experimental music by way of the jam band, playful and breezy even in the way it lobs stacks of atonal horn harmony, dial-up-modem electronica and post punk yowling at the listener. It’s subversive and often sinister, but also unapologetically fun, sometimes all at once – see the malfunctioning lead line on “Undergrowith” or the lurching waltz of “Devil’s Den”. In the density of melodies and harmonies it pushes on you, O Monolith is baroque, but its spirit and texture are unapologetically post punk. No band since Radiohead have so effectively combined the two.   

My Nick Cave Deep Dive

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (a term I am here using to refer also to Grinderman, the Birthday Party, the Boys Next Door and the recent Cave/Ellis duo, as there is no clear membership distinction between these groups but also to simply refer to them as “Nick Cave” would be to surrender too much to the remorseless march of auteur theory) is my favourite band of all time. They have also released albums at an almost annual rate since 1979, and I am increasingly embarrassed to have not listened to all of them, something I committed to remedy in 2023. With this blog live again, I wanted to document the experience. These are my thoughts on every album by Australia’s least-Steve-Irwin-adjacent contribution to popular culture, 1979’s from Door Door (lol) through to 2021’s Carnage. I initially accompanied this list with a rating system but as the list went on I became more and more frustrated with trying to reflect my full opinion numerically; however, as the initial raison d’etre of that raiting was to provide a “where to start” guide for people looking to get into the band, I will do a quick beginner’s guide here:

Best overall album: Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus

Best “career in a bottle” summarization album: Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!

If you want goth shit: Let Love In

If you want the blues: Junkyard

Best Grinderman album: Grinderman 2

Best Birthday Party album: Grinderman 2

If you heard about Nick Cave cause he’s PJ Harvey’s ex: The Boatman’s Call

Right. Let’s get going.

Door, Door (1979) – with The Boys Next Door

Reviled by its creators and forgotten by fans, Door Door is an adolescent mashup of Wire’s Pink Flag and The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat. But honestly it’s not a terrible impression: the future Birthday Party lineup have a real knack for twisting post-punk chicken wire into tight and pacy melodies. The weak leak here, surprisingly, is Cave himself: not only is his gulping moan still undeveloped and often flat, but he also brings entirely the wrong kind of charisma, sounding as uncommitted to the pop-rock cliches he is imitating – the melismatic “woah-oh-ohs” in choruses and pre-choruses, the teenage relatability of the lyrics – as a church pastor singing a chart hit at the youth group. Both men are much more at home with fire and brimstone.

The Birthday Party (1980) – with The Birthday Party

“Huh,” said my girlfriend. “It sort of sounds like Madness, but less whimsical.” No longer mall-goth-mopey, but not yet gothic-architecture melodramatic, the band’s eponymous album is a clattering, angular mess of funk rhythms and bleating guitars. Satisfyingly nihilistic and hostile, The Birthday Party flexes Cave and co’s noisemaking muscles well but lacks the charisma and character of later releases – Cave’s strangled yowl is a suitable companion for the furore backing it, but not yet the protagonist.

Prayers on Fire (1981) – with The Birthday Party

The first album to feel somewhat of a species with the most recent Bad Seeds records (although the distance is still vast – think Beowulf in comparison to The Sun Also Rises), Prayers on Fire debuts some of Cave’s long standing strengths and weaknesses: in the former camp, his penchant for elevating post-punk raving to biblical heights, and in the latter camp, his over-fondness for dismal spookhouse kitsch. That slows the album to a sore crawl on some moments (“Capers” is less than 3m long but feels much, much longer), but overall the musicianship saves it: the screeching brass on “Zoo Music Girl”, Cave’s voice at last distinguishable above the clamour, the scurrilous basslines rushing to hold up the melody.

Junkyard (1982) – with The Birthday Party

As chaotic as the self-titled album and as vigorous as Prayers on Fire, Junkyard sprawls like a gothic melodrama and sounds like botched dentistry. While furore and clamour are the order of the day, reaching into American blues music (an enduringly fruitful vein for Cave and his troupe to mine) gives the less frenetic songs a stately, almost anthemic swagger – “Several Sins” is perhaps the only song the Birthday Party ever wrote that can be fully enjoyed while sitting down.

From Her to Eternity (1984) – with The Bad Seeds

From Her to Eternity’s percussive bundle of soapbox-twangs and organ clangs create a piecemeal, theme park attraction evocation of the bluesy southern gothic that would define the Bad Seeds’ pre-Boatman’s Call output. Still, the tone here is closer to 2000 Maniacs than to Blood Meridian. Not yet a fluent poet, Cave is nonetheless already a master mimic of narrative voice, and the blackguards and bible thumpers he impersonates sound convincingly terrifying. From Her to Eternity is an eerie and surprisingly witty bag of vignettes, but lacks the coherence required to support its more ambitious tracks – the +9m closer, “A Box for Black Paul”, decidedly outstays its welcome.

The Firstborn is Dead (1985) – with The Bad Seeds

The Firstborn is Dead boasts a magnificently ominous title, but finds the Bad Seeds at an awkward crossroads. Once the most auteur of punks, Mr Cave begins a long-term transformation into the most punkish of auteurs, and neither he or his band have quite got there yet. The Firstborn… draws out its razor-thin blues lines like it’s removing them from a wound, and while the effect is affecting and at times compelling (opener “Tupelo” is a standout) the overall package is just a little too haphazard to be eerie, and ultimately more dull than patient.

Kicking Against the Pricks (1986) – with The Bad Seeds

Bashful as its creators are about in retrospect, what makes Kicking Against the Pricks a great album is just how much fun everybody involved is clearly having. The band approaches this suite of covers and traditional arrangements with scholarly reverence, fanboy aplomb and real interpretive verve – their surging rendition of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” deftly preserves the languor of the original even in the early Seeds’ pacier, punkier tone.

Your Funeral… My Trial! (1986) – with The Bad Seeds

Recorded in the throes of heroin addiction, Your Funeral… is about as inaccessible as the Bad Seeds would get until Skeleton Tree. Its 42 minutes of sickly, haunted blues feel like an approximation, via 3-5 minute confessionals (and the +9m “The Carny”) of the kind of mood that Godspeed You Black Emperor would flay and rack-stretch their songs to achieve a decade later. Ramshackle and exhausted, Your Funeral… nonetheless sees the Bad Seeds master the art of grooving and jamming, and is a richer and more rewarding opus than any previous records, the secret perhaps being the kind of carefree performance you give when you genuinely don’t care if you’ll be alive to read the reviews.

Tender Prey (1988) – with The Bad Seeds

Iggy Pop, on hearing “About a Girl”, predicted Kurt Cobain could make his fortune with “a record full of that.” The same might be said of “The Mercy Seat”, which opens Tender Prey with a comprehensive and confident statement of the Bad Seeds’ two-part modus operandi: first, never shy away from melodrama, and second, write that melodrama like you want it to win the Booker. The album that follows – blues dial a tad down, goth dial a tad up – is compelling and oddly charming (even the ghoulish “Up Jumped the Devil” is weirdly adorable, in a Bruce Campbell sorta way) but messy, romping from ramshackle pop (“Deanna”) to eerie, allusive balladry (“Sunday’s Slave”).

The Good Son (1990) – with The Bad Seeds

The turn of the decade found Nick Cave sober, in love and happy. Album opener “Foi Na Cruz”could almost pass for Christmas music, but don’t let that throw you: this is a lesser ‘Seeds album, but not quite as chintzy as you might fear. Cave writes love songs well, arguably better than spooky ones (he is, at the end of the day, closer qua goth to a performance-artist bible-thumper version of Gomez Addams than to any corpsepainted bat-eater) and his songwriting here does a good job filtering Dusty Springfield and odd notes of Latin pop through a goth lens. Ultimately, though, The Good Son needed much longer in the editing room: it drags, in a way no prior album by the band had done and few have done since.  

Henry’s Dream (1992) – with The Bad Seeds

Moody but less monotonous than Funeral, passionate but less messy than Tender Prey, Henry’s Dream jump starts the wretched blues of Firstborn in tighter, brighter package. It’s the sound of lessons being taken on board, but also the first appearance of long-time bassist and secret-weapon-in-residence Martyn P. Casey, a titanic and yet magnificently hooky presence who riffs and swaggers like a 50khz Keith Richards. Compellingly dangerous on “Jack the Ripper” and richly panoramic on “Loom of the Land”, Henry Dream’s one shortcoming is that it’s a touch repetitive: “John Finn’s Wife”, “Brother, My Cup is Empty” and “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” are a great song but… well. Still, if I can forgive Motorhead filling their whole career with “Ace of Spades”, I can forgive this.   

Let Love In (1994) – with The Bad Seeds

“R is for rape me, M is for murder me, A is for answering all of my prayers” swoons Cave on “Loverman”; that sort of adolescent edginess (along with a sudden fixation on the words “jangle” and “jangling”) blemishes what is nonetheless the first truly great Bad Seeds album. Let Love In is a gnarly record, raging and churning like good post hardcore on songs like “Jangling Jack” and “Loverman”. When it does pause for breath on “Red Right Hand” or “Ain’t Gonna Rain Anymore” the intake is cold and leaves a plume in the exhale. Cave’s piano and Harvey’s guitar sound for the first time cohesive and massive, and a band that has never been fond of bridges fully embrace in their stead the art of the colossal, richly layered climax: album standout “Lay Me Low” fuses dourness, arrogance and humour into one entity with the same force that, in the heart of a star, turns hydrogen into helium.

Murder Ballads (1996) – with The Bad Seeds

Murder Ballads is possibly the best Halloween album ever created, and the fact that it is treated as the magnum opus of a career as expansive and ambitious as Nick Cave’s feels like a glimpse into an alternate universe where, even after the Return of the King awards sweep, we still refer to Peter Jackson as “the Brain Dead guy.” Far from incompetent (Martyn P. Casey may be the most overlooked white man to ever play the bass), Murder Ballads nonetheless apotheosizes the kitschy morbidity that has long been one of this band’s bad habits, both in the sense that it is here carried too ponderously to be enjoyed as boarding-school shockery, and in the sense that there’s almost a full damn hour of the stuff. “Song of Joy” and “Death is Not the End” are well chosen respectively as opener and closer, and “Stagger Lee” is a cool musical B-movie, but Murder Ballads is musically as repetitive as Let Love In is climactic, and narratively is as compelling as a well-written chain email.

The Boatman’s Call (1997) – with The Bad Seeds

Approaching middle age, Cave seems to have developed an interest in oulipou: toning one’s creative muscles by restricting oneself to a small part of one’s artistic palette. Boatman’s… lays the blueprints for the ensuing decade-plus of the Bad Seeds’ output, casting aside the macabre camp of the Let Love In era in favour of nominally secularised but undeniably religious fervour, in devotion to life, wife, the sweetness of loss and the self-evidencing sanctity of love itself. For the next almost-twenty years that emotional tone would find expression through rollicking guitar-gospel, heady jams and some of the gnarliest guitars since the Birthday Party era, but it first found voice here, sketched out with little more than a piano, some bass and the odd nylon-string flutter.  

No More Shall We Part (2001) – with The Bad Seeds

At its worst, No More… revives the easy affection of The Good Son but trades the retro-pop magnanimity for rheumy, slow burning intimacy, into which Cave’s stalwart baritone fits like a hernia in a greeting card. That takes up far too much time on what is already one of the band’s more overlong albums, and that’s a shame because there is plenty to love here: the mad violin-hacking of newly-formalised bunyip-in-residence Warren Ellis (a member of the noble tradition of pet virtuosos sitting behind self-taught auteurs – see Greenwood, Jonny and Gilmour, David) gives “Oh My Lord” a hell of a climax. There’s panache on “Hallelujah” and wit on “God is in the House”, but it’s a commitment to dig these out from beneath the 15+ feet of pure white snow burying them.  

Nocturama (2003) – with The Bad Seeds

Less challenging than Let Love In but better than No More Shall We Part, Nocturama finds the Bad Seeds at their most accessible. The piano ballads are too hooky for Boatman’s but also not cloying with schmaltz, the rock numbers are cleanly produced but massive, and the one truly out-there moment of the album (well, the truly out-there fifteen minutes – you’ll know it when you, father, mother, brother, the athlete with his hernia, picasso with his guernica, warren, blixa, the lighting guy and the mixer, mick, marty and everybody at the party hear it) is stashed right at the back and is, even in its silly, politically incorrect way, an extremely good time. It’s Nick Cave pretending to be Elton John, is what it is. It’s a bit goofy, a bit uneven, and deliriously fun. It is, however, the last Nick Cave album to date to be somewhat average. From here onwards, stuff gets really interesting.

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004) – with The Bad Seeds

Half-ringtone and half-evangelion, the manic piano shuffle of “Get Ready for Love”, trumpets the arrival of Nick Cave’s to-be-concluded golden age in awe-inspiring fashion. Never as complex as Cohen or as timely as Dylan, Cave makes truly evident here his USP as an auteur: though his personal faith waxes, wanes and morphs, his favourite book is the bible. And “biblical” is the operative word here, both aesthetically – gospel choirs, freewheeling rubato, Cave’s own preacherly fervour – and tonally: the emotions are unabashed, universal and mythically vast. Its fear is apocalyptic, its mischief is prophetic, its love is devotional; its bittersweet moments speak to the fate of nations and its humour evokes the inscrutably symbolous scatology that first endears Ovid and Shakespeare to eleven-year-olds. Tom Waits could out-eerie Murder Ballads and The Pop Group could out-transgress Junkyard, but whatever is happening on Abattoir absolutely could not come from anyone else.

Grinderman (2006) – with Grinderman

It would seem that when presented with an electric guitar, Cave’s response is not to learn the basics but rather to try and throttle it to death – it’s less like Steve Jones and more like six strings worth of pitched percussion; amelodic squawks and squeals, rather than riffs of any sort, are the order of the day. It’s intense, obviously, but found so far from his comfort zone here Cave is also self-effacing and almost humble. Intoxicating as Abattoir’s Miltonian excess was, after a double album of the stuff it’s a giddy thrill to hear Cave outline with trademark vividity stories of getting laid (“Get it On”), avowedly not getting laid (“No Pussy Blues”), trying to own and reclaim not getting laid (“Go Tell the Women”) but also really wanting to get laid (“When My Love Comes Down”).

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (2008) – with The Bad Seeds

Released halfway between the colourfully-literal Let Love In and the fully abstract Ghosteen, Lazarus is a faintly Tom-waits-esque collection of character profiles that leaves its deepest marks when placing those characters amid the surreal, vividly drawn worlds they inhabit: Lazarus losing his mind amid LA paparazzi, a jilted obsessive stalking ruined city streets with radio in hand, Odysseus sauntering through clubs and backrooms. More than that, though, Lazarus is a lean-ish 53m spent casually perfecting nearly every idiom with which Cave has toyed. “Hold Onto Yourself” sits with the loveliest of Boatman, “Moonland” with the most perverse of Let Love In; “Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)” out-rocks Grinderman, “We Call Upon The Author” out-thrashes The Birthday Party. “More News From Nowhere” is as mythic as anything on Abattoir and when Cave murmurs “and now we hit the streets…” on “Night of the Lotus Eaters”, the grisliest Murder Balladeer would quake.

Grinderman 2 (2010) – with Grinderman

Grinderman 2 consists of the fleshed-out anthems one builds on the experimentalism of Grinderman; it’s overall gnarlier, more accessible, a tad less consistent and better. Dragging a bit in the middle with a few songs that are touch ponderous (“Kitchenette”), a touch messy (“Evil”) or both (“What I Know”), Grinderman 2 nonetheless opens and closes with four of the most vivid statements in this whole vivid discography: the one-chord train crash of “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man” careens into the shamanic horndoggery of “Worm Tamer” at the start; the album then re-emerges with the Barry-White-by-way-of-Salvador-Dali love song “Palaces of Montezuma” before finishing off with “Bellringer Blues”, in which Cave swaps book recommendations with the Angel Gabriel in one of the first post-apocalyptic wastelands to feel hot rather than irradiated.  It’s great. I love it. Full marks.

Push the Sky Away (2013) – with The Bad Seeds

Listening to Sky feels like staring at an optical illusion: these are such full, rich songs, and yet there is so little going on at any one time. Chord progressions alight for a moment on piano, and then dart to guitar and then synth, never staying, never forming into a clear motif – and yet from this nothing, songs emerge which are clearly structured and surprisingly accessible. If Abattoir was Ulysses, Sky is Waiting for Godot, both in its inscrutable minimalism and in its existential bleakness, which is unobtrusive, almost polite, and all the more horrifying for it: in a world full of somethings, hinting at an elusive nothingness behind it squares far better with everyday experience than the Sartre-via-Rick-and-Morty nihilism that would be de rigeur in pop culture this decade. There is love, adventure and colour on this album no less than on Abattoir, but also candour: the love is impermanent, the adventure is increasingly tiring, and the colour is only a small blue dot in a very large night indeed.

Skeleton Tree (2016) – with The Bad Seeds

“You fell from the sky, crash-landed in a field near the River Adur”, goes the first line of Skeleton Tree. However Cave performed that line when first ad-libbing it in 2016, the solemn murmur committed to Skeleton Tree is reverent to the point of shellshock, recorded only months after, not far from that river, his son was tragically killed in a fall. That is the nature of Skeleton Tree: it is an album whose meaning was wrenched savagely out of the artist’s control in the march from conception to creation. Grief is everywhere and nowhere, rarely the subject but inescapably the context. The songs, already risky forays into a new language of bluesless ambiance, often feel incomplete and sometimes clumsy, and yet if they were otherwise, it would imply some ability or desire to sculpt and re-purpose absence. Skeleton Tree testifies to the lack of that, and yet it is still in its own way universal: it speaks to climate grief (“Anthrocene”) and addiction (“Magneto”), to the capacity of any loss to shatter the contracts we make with our lives (“Distant Sky”), and to the ordinary world one still wakes up to after the worst has come (“Skeleton Tree”). It is, for its aesthetic flaws, a complete artistic product and not simply a curio. But it is not one that I regularly listen to unless I need it.

Ghosteen (2019) – with The Bad Seeds

If Sky evokes the sunset and Skeleton Tree suffers the night, Ghosteen at last is the dawn – weighed heavily by what it has endured in the dark, and yet proud, liberated and gloriously bright. After answering Sky’s questions and weathering Skeleton Tree’s trauma, Ghosteen forlornly confirms that you can never heal into the fresh young self you were, and yet you heal, into something that remains – has to remain – worth being. Ghosteen speaks in the shapeless warmth of analogue synths, and its lyrics are purposefully fragmented into disconnected images, frozen on the page at the moment of inspiration. Yet unlike Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen has a steady hand on the reins: for a borderline-ambient album that runs over an hour in length, it passes quickly and almost thrillingly, with only a few moments of dragging: climaxes on “Sun Forest” and “Waiting For You” are quiet and minimal and yet pay off tension the way a shrug pays off a heavy load. Healing, like grief on Skeleton Tree, is everywhere and yet rarely acknowledged. It is somewhere ahead. We are moving purposefully towards it. We have not seen it. We believe in it. We are not there yet.   

Carnage (2021) – with Warren Ellis

On hearing “White Elephant” – a magnificent, dangerous track, funny and colourful, high-windowed and edifying – one might ask: after three works of minimalism, is the world’s primo nondenominational skelevangelist back? Not exactly, but the wearier, more introspective Nick Cave that has emerged from the remorseless 2010s has inherited his skills – and his rolodex, with long-time lieutenant Warren Ellis now given equal billing. Carnage is a strange, inconsistent album, not as good at ambience as Ghosteen yet keen to get all its anthems out of the way by the end of the first half. Yet its best moments are fascinating, evoking the pop-song-length contemporary-classical-without-an-orchestra work of Kristin Hayter or Scott Walker: there’s no post-punk precedent for the eerie prologue-to-verse slump that opens “Hand of God”. Carnage is perhaps best thought of as Nick Cave’s Kid A, but released at twice the age Thom Yorke was in 2001. I would not blame him for throwing in the towel after this one. But I hope not. Carnage is not Nick Cave’s best album, but no other has left me so curious about what could be coming next.

Big Brave – nature morte

Vocals are to doom metal (and all its dreary brethren – the heaviest drone bands, the most ponderous goth bands) as spices are to bacon: rarely considered the body of the meal, and yet profoundly responsible for how it is experienced. When the riffs are as vast and inhuman as mountainsides, it is the singer that tells is where we stand to behold them: the guttural brays of death-doom and funeral doom cast us as the stoic deities holding them up, while amid the keening wails of gothic and epic doom we are spirits drifting unhomed in the wind overhead. Chelsea Wolfe is unique: plaintive confessionals, tiny amid the scree, suggestive of something clawing for breath at the surface. Big Brave’s Robin Wattie is unique too. Like Chelsea, her voice is the smallest thing in the mix. Unlike Chelsea, she is rager, not a weeper. There’s an old legend that Alexander the Great once had to hold a fort with ten men against an army of thousands. He hid what soldiers he had, threw on the gates, and stood alone on the ramparts. “Come on then!”, he screamed at the horde. Fearing a trap, the enemy generals fled. That’s Big Brave. 

Not that Big Brave were ever going to be a run-of-the-mill noise foundry, mind you. Guitarist Mat Ball owes plenty to Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, but within that weighty idiom his long-suffering Gibson SG speaks with a wide vocabulary, imitating – in surprisingly nimble succession – bullroarers, foghorns and rusty hinges. Ball’s ability to seamlessly blend feedback in with his chording feels at times like an optical illusion: the shriek that announces the climax of “a parable of the trusting” merges into the titanic riff that follows with a macabre elegance. Drummer Tasy Hudson is the most comprehensible musical presence here, but even she is anything but traditional: borderline grooveless and resolutely linear, her sparse but massive sound carves out a visceral niche somewhere between Moe Tucker, timpani and haka.  

It’s an arresting product, and it’s not Big Brave’s first time putting it to record. What’s notable now, though, is a newfound fluency with structure and motif. At times the album feels like a ponderous take on the free jazz of guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who upheld jazz’s traditional head-solo-head structure but whose soloing would often be pure timbre. Likewise, nature morte’s billowing noise jams are strategically weighted by slabs of doomy melody: “carvers, farriers and knaves” washes up against a borderline hummable, hand-over-foot bridge riff, while “the one who bornes a heavy load” opens with a skeletal chugging before sprawling out into an ambient haze. The wind-chime fingerpicking on “the fable of subjugation” hearkens back to Tilt-era Scott Walker, while the vast sonic piston that closes out “a parable of the trusting” evokes To Be Kind-era Swans. Like both those artists, Big Brave have learned that in noise music, a hook need not be an anthem to earn its keep as a point of reference.

There is anguish on nature morte, and there is also defiance and stoicism. But ultimately this is a panorama, not just anecdotes: half the sound stands ironclad and the other half beats itself bloody against it. That, ultimately, is the achievement of nature morte, that its craftmanship is as disciplined and exhaustive as its passion is spontaneous and fractured, and that it makes its statement not by synthesizing the two but by smashing each against the other. It’s rare enough for a heavy band to paint a landscape as oblique and alien as this; that the tone of the thing comes away feeling all the more resolutely human for it is something very special indeed.

Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy

Heavy Heavy is an oddly Sabbathian title for an album as dreamy and riffless as Young Fathers’ fourth. Nevertheless, it feels strangely apt: although clocking in at barely over half an hour in length, this album does not feel like a casual or brief listen. The sound is crisp and sunlit, the vocals lean tender and the grooves are keener to call you to your feet than beat you to your knees, but make no mistake, something weighty is passing overhead.

It’s partially a matter of geography; there’s a lot of distance covered here. Young Fathers find room in their lyrics for Caledonian snark (“sunset gremlin with a snidey wee smile”) and Yoruba chanting; in the albums final moments Texan accents trade lines with Caribbean and transatlantic before amalgamating into a choir-like haze. “Rice” and “Ululation” evoke starry skies, dew-damp fronds and something softer underfoot than asphalt; “I Saw” marches through city streets, while “Geronimo” and “Tell Somebody” are cathedral-worthy hymns.

To be clear, there’s coherence to this record, but it’s in tone, not content. If I had to name the theme tying it all together, it would be shared catharsis, be that in protest (“I Saw”), prayer (“Tell Somebody”) or dance (“Drum”). That sense of a million pounding feet is part of what gives the album its density, but the image isn’t always so cinematic: “Ululation” feature guest vocals from Kayus Bankole’s close friend, offered a place in the studio to crash during an extended marital difficulty, and then given of the mic to wordlessly whoop out the built-up stress. More audible in the track than the heartache is the sense of familial love, and the restorative and empathetic power of creative collaboration.

It’s “I Saw” that steals the show, though. Here the vocals briefly jump from neo-soul mumbling to a hacksaw-rough dancehall rant: “A bad seed! A rot-ten apple! Take out the rubbish buried in between justice!”. It’s the sound of one man emerging from the march, saying his piece and returning to the crowd. The song climaxes with a delightfully unorthodox earworm that feels at once satirical, affirming and primary-school instructive: “Brush your teeth! Wash your face! Brush your teeth, wash your face, run away!”

Heavy Heavy’s free-spirited affability isn’t a uniform positive. Short as the album is, it’s not necessarily the leanest of records, and the softer moments on “Tell Somebody” or “Be Your Lady” feel like they have a bit of fat to trim. Neither is the album perfectly paced, dedicating a bit too much of its final section to furtive up-tempo trip hop that sits a little heavy in the stomach, especially after the billowing parachutes of “I Saw” and “Geronimo”. But even this album’s shortcomings are profoundly well intentioned. If the price for the unpredictability and humanity of this record is a general favouring of verve over discipline, I’d consider that a fair trade.

Tom Verlaine (1949-2023), Television and Marquee Moon – Retrospective and Obituary

Fuck, man.

It sometimes feels like the last half-century of rock music has been the process of figuring out what the hell Tom Verlaine was talking about in the 70s. Underappreciated in his time isn’t quite the right term – his work sold decently and was loved by critics – but he was nonetheless unique and enigmatic. His work with Television was billed as punk, but that band prized musicianship too much more than momentum to really be punk, and too much more than performance art theatrics to really be post-punk (the category to which Television is most commonly assigned in retrospect). In a lot of ways Verlaine was comparable to David Bowie and Neil Young, that rare 70s rocker who foretold the experimental, vulnerable era of alternative rock to come. But Bowie and Young were rooted in the old ways of rock ‘n roll and looked to the future from there. Verlaine moved in the opposite direction, an elephant in a cretaceous fossil bed, taxonomically of a likeness with Annie Clark, Jonny Greenwood and John Frusciante but decades early.

He was the first true alternative rock musician. He was playing a jazzmaster outside surf circles decades before J Mascis, for one. When he played lead lines he didn’t seem to swear by the guitar melody as a full beginning-middle-end story on its own, but as a tool to precisely sculpt the fine details of the piece’s tone and mood. He played with specific textures rather than searching for an ideal, perfected tone. He could improvise, but his melodies were thoughtful rather than ecstatic, and his complex interplay with Television bandmate Richard Lloyd feels more like a choreographed duet than a dialogue. In the alternative rock era, songs are calculated evocations rather than fits of passion pinned down on record. That was the sensibility with which Tom Verlaine performed, and he was doing it in the 1970s.

Yet even then, Tom Verlaine was a beast of his own. There’s a sense in which his allegiance was much to prog as to punk – he was a fearsomely skilful guitarist, and his playing expanded beyond the blues into classical and jazz – but had none of the pomp. And in a post-OK Computer world, where albums abound that strive for the same composed elegance as Marquee Moon, it’s a record that still feels singularly itself. Maybe that’s a matter of timing: the recording, midi and synthesization technologies that would surround Clarke and Greenwood’s guitar playing in esoteric soundscapes were a while away, so Marquee Moon assembling the same thing out of guitars, bass, keys and drums feels like one of those early shooter games that created 3D environments by building optical illusions out of 2D polygons. And it might have something to do with the album’s lack of the angst and misanthropy that has defined rock music post-Nevermind. In the 70s, when stadium rock was cocksure and punk rock was angry, Television had to define their own sort of introspection, which was not bleak at all but instead abstract, literary and consciously oblique.

Ultimately what’s striking about Television, and what carried on throughout Tom Verlaine’s career, is that it reflected sensibilities well beyond its time but did not have the fingerprints left by the intervening years of rock music history. It’s alt rock if it had never lost its respect for musicianship in the years spent as punk, made by a guitar hero who never lost his iconoclasm in the glitz of the 80s and never had to rediscover it in the despondency of the 90s or the neuroticism of the digital age. Verlaine is rock music’s Nikola Tesla, a genius who came bearing a distinct vision of the future that the world didn’t try to build but, through crisis, reaction and necessity, couldn’t help but find its way to. He was that rare creative who was highly influential and completely inimitable; his work is at once crucial missing link in the evolution of rock music and a totally unique statement. It, and its creator, will probably never be household names, but will never be forgotten.

Ten Best Moments in Music 2022

Hello everyone, I’m back! In some capacity. Probably a different one to before, still working it out – fewer contemporary reviews, more retrospectives and opinion pieces. Anyway. 2022 was a great year for film and quite a poor year for music (IMO), so trying to find ten whole albums that I liked was a bit beyond me. Instead I just decided to rank my ten favourite individual little bits of music that I heard.

A few things this leaves out: Yard Act’s The Overload and Bartees Strange’s Farm to Table were both good albums that missed out on this list by being suites of fairly consistent 7/10 songs. Rosalia’s Motomami and Joyfultalk’s Familiar Science were also good albums but were, with love, fucking incomprehensible and subsequently a bit hard to divide into sections. With them out of the way:

Number 10 – Climax of Anais Mitchell’s “Little Big Girl” (1:47 – 2:42)

Of the 21^st century’s great lyricists, Anais Mitchell feels unique in how little legwork she expects from her audience. Her waters are fathomlessly deep but perfectly clear; she does not just make the complex simple, she makes the complex obvious, and the fact that she does not bring that talent to most of her self titled album is what made it one of 2022’s biggest disappointments. But she does bring it to “Little Big Girl”, and the eager, arhythmic flow of her voice in the final verses eagerly, efficiently adds layer upon layer to a story of adulthood, generational trauma, domestic subservience and the cruelty of the makeup industry. Efficiency can be an emotionally stirring thing, it turns out. There’s not a lot of buck, but Mitchell gets plenty of bang for it.

Number 9 – Chorus of The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Burning” (3:02 – song end)

For all the clamour the band can conjure up, there’s no midwestern weirdness to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: their music is cosmopolitan, classy and unmistakably coastal. The knowledge that this band’s scene is set to be underwater in a few decades feels like it informs much of the melancholy on this album, but on “Burning”, the resignation turns to exhilaration. Karen O belts like the Empire State Building is collapsing into floodwaters beneath her feet. The instrumentation crashes like a tide against skyscrapers: the vamp of chanting synths and thrumming guitars is as strong as any this year. You can dance to it, the pace is breakneck enough for that, but the direction in which it’s rushing is unmistakably down.

Number 8 – Verse-into-chorus of Black Country New Roads’ “Snow Globes” (4:42-5:20)

There are few gambits riskier than the out-and-out musical metaphor. Trying to write your song to sound like the thing the song is about can fall apart if said thing, like most things, does not sound musically interesting. “Snow Globes” strikes the balance perfectly. Charlie Wayne is not the first drummer to imitate a thunderstorm with careering fills and murmuring tom crescendos (“thunderous” is about as common an adjective for drums as you get), but the genius here is the way it pairs with the calm, lamplight-soft guitars and low, reverent vocals. It’s an ominous distraction, it’s an elephant in the room, it’s a boorish scene stealer, it’s the sound of huddling somewhere and trying to seal in what warmth you can while a storm tries to beat the walls down, and while the climax is spectacular, it’s those first ominous rumbles that truly send a shiver down my spine.

Number 7 – Chorus of Soul Glo’s “Gold Chain Punk (whogonnabeatmyass?)” (1:11-1:51)

I cannot for the life of me remember the last time a hardcore vocalist came out with a performance like this on track one of a debut album. Pierce Jordan’s screech is every bit as caustic as Jacob Bannon’s or Mark Greenway’s, but the humanity of it makes it perhaps more frightening than either. You could make this noise, perhaps, for a split second, in a moment of true clenching fury or excruciating pain. The thought of someone making it for the length of a full song is artistic masochism up there with the extremes of Oscar-winning method acting. Soul Glo bring plenty of new ideas to the table of punk, but it’s almost surplus to requirements. I’d say that “not since the Sex Pistols has a band directed so much gleeful anger at their listener”, but then the Sex Pistols were pretty much a boy band, really. Never mind the bollocks, Pierce Jordan would scare John Lydon’s tits off.  

Number 6 – Bridge of Black Midi’s “The Race is About to Begin” (2:30 – 4:16)

If Van Halen’s “Eruption” pioneered shred guitar, the bridge of “The Race is about to Begin” pioneers shred-lyricism, a terrifying deluge of unfollowable invocations, evocations, jokes and confessions crammed into two minutes of music that I can’t believe take up less than a gigabyte on my hard drive. This isn’t just ambitious, it’s flatly, ravingly insane, and yet the accompanying instrumentation is confident enough in the spiel’s ability to hold things together that it feels perfectly entitled to slalom from hairbrained funk to prog metal bombast to shrieks that border on musique concrete. I’m almost mad it all works.

Number 5 – Final verse of Kendrick Lamar’s “Auntie Diaries” (4:20 – end of song)

“Auntie Diaries” is sometimes clumsy (“my auntie”) and at other times more flatly disrespectful (“faggot, faggot, faggot”). It’s provocative, and it has, consequently, provoked. I don’t much care for “faggot, faggot, faggot”, but I would be doing the song a disservice to ignore its nuanced and thoughtful conclusion, in which Kendrick, in conversation with a queer relative, examines the f-word in light of his own complex relationship with the n-word. Overall the song feels distasteful, but it’s also that rare provocative song that understands that the courageous part is interrogating the provocation. And it’s a reminder of why, however limited art is as a vehicle for social change, “conscious” music is powerful – politics is there in our relationships, in our self-image, in our moments of growth, and to be honest in the art we make about those things, we must sometimes be conscious of that.  

Number 4 – Outtro to Sudan Archives’s “Selfish Soul” (1:36 – end of song)

The outro to “Selfish Soul” exceeds the sum of its parts by being so different from the sum of its parts. The sawing, helical violins, the mammalian snarl of the bass, the mechanical groove, Brittney Parks’s warmly assertive call-and-response vocals, all feel like they belong in something stark, striking, clamorous. Yet out of all these angular elements, Sudan Archives brews something viscous and steamy, as evenly textured and infinitely multitudinous as a slick of iridescent oil. It’s a triumph of orchestration but also of production: each vocal track gets its time as echo, as backing vocal, and as lead. Bass and bass drum fade into each other imperceptibly. The result is heady and vaporous, intoxicating to listen to once and endlessly fascinating to repeat.

Number 3 – First lines of The Smile’s “You Will Never Work in Television Again” (beginning of song – 0:54)

In the song’s gleefully mixed-metaphorical opening line, “Fear not my love, he’s a fat fucking mist” the mocking note that we’ve occasionally glimpsed in the depths of Thom Yorke’s keening tenor (see also: “god loves his children, god loves his children yeah”) is fully out for blood, while Greenwood’s long-suffering guitar lurches between eerie chatter and an almost post-hardcore furore. There’s always been anger along with the melancholy in Radiohead’s music, and I was hoping that stripping down the lineup for The Smile would help it come out of its shell. Ultimately, the record was in places both more or less than that, but when Thom Yorke grabbed the mic at the start of “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, I briefly got exactly what I was praying for.  

Number 2 – Chorus of Black Country, New Roads’ “Chaos Space Marine” (1:18 – 1:44)

Now-departed BCNR frontman Isaac Woods writes with the unabashed literariness of John Darnielle and the vivid surreality of Isaac Brock; but whereas indie rock frontmen have a proud tradition of performing as though their eyes are full of tears, Woods’s seem ever wide and furtive. That nervy, tremulous musical persona, here, expresses its own interpretation of defiance:  his declaration “so I’m leaving this body and I’m never coming home again” is delivered with the conviction you find only in moments of absolute panic. It’s also a rare moment of groove in an album full of artsy irregularities and melodic hairpin bends, crowned with that simplest of rock and roll pleasures; a sudden cut to silence followed by a hard strum and raucous “oh!”. You can picture the freeze-frame as the band hi-fives. However baffling the album makes itself from here on out, it is clear from this moment that there are people inside.

Number 1 – Outtro of Black Midi’s “Sugar/Tzu” (3:21 – end of song)

The furtive scrape of Geordie Greep’s archtop is as small and purposeful as the first surefooted steps of an MC onto the stage of a vast auditorium. And the applause is thunderous: towering stacks of brass teasing flamenco harmonies apart into Morricone soundtracks, and fraying those still further into a Naked City caterwaul. Morgan Simpson’s agile drumming flits through the swelling chaos like a hummingbird through a barfight, but it’s his ringing loose-snare thwack that finally slams the pan-lid on the oil fire. The ending of “Sugar/Tzu” is pure tension and even purer release, a timelapse of an orchid blooming and a slow-mo of a match being struck. And appropriately for the first great band in a decade sold so heavily on technical skill, what brings it unarguably to number 1 is all nuts and bolts: beneath the noise, these are sophisticated rhythms and beautiful, carefully arranged harmonies. It’d sound remarkable enough played on the speak-and-say. On record, it’s nothing short of transcendent.  

Neneh Cherry – Broken Politics

Broken Politics is a lovely album. Its enjoyability fluctuates with circumstance, yes – it’s an album best enjoyed on an early morning or a late night, when one is seeking to shift a neutral mood positively – but in any context, it’s a charming and intelligent work. Most importantly, it’s arresting, which is no small feat, given that it’s a gentle and unobtrusive work with few hooks or bangers. It’s an album of soft spoken dignity and quiet self-assurance, fully secure that what it’s doing will speak for itself without advertisement.

The lyrics are, absolutely, the strongpoint. There are moments of Erykah Badu-esque wit and Joni Mitchell-esque introspection, but Cherry’s voice as a writer is very much her own. She favours unusual metaphors (Deep Vein Thrombosis is mentioned), which are sometimes cryptically mixed (Cherry is a “Pisces hanging on a vine”) and unpacked with relish when the music gives her a chance to do so. Her sense of kinship with “Fallen Leaves” is in part because she is down, and in part because she is at risk of being stepped on. Moreover, Cherry has taken to heart one of the most overlooked creative writing adages: concrete images are stronger than abstract. There are few references here to love, justice or heartache, but there are mentions of bird shit on sleeves and dramatizations of tense physical struggles.

With the lyrics, then, providing clear narrative and thematic through-lines, Cherry is then freed up to go abstract on the music. Within the basic template of lose beats and arpeggios of synthetic sound, Cherry hides a menagerie of genre-jaunts and indulgences. “Natural Skin Deep” borrows from the softer moments of Ornette Coleman in its third act and mixes up a brew of horns that blends free jazz with Memphis soul ; “Slow Release” plays with layers of minimalistic woodwinds and echoing piano chords. In the hands of another artist, the whole thing might flighty and cluttered, but as singer and lyricist Cherry’s dignified yet confessional persona is consistent enough to tie the whole thing together. This is her story, however she tells it.

The whole thing is strengthened by some gorgeously warm production values, which takes advantage of Cherry’s seeming preference for arpeggios over chorded harmonies to emphasize and experiment with the timbre of each individual note. It works wonderfully with Cherry’s voice, which is a fascinating thing in itself: thin but agile, with just a little bit of roughness that hides in the edges and shows during the more dramatic pitch shifts.

Are there flaws? One or two. “Faster Than The Truth” employs a drumbeat that’s distractingly similar to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”, and while that seems intended as a direct homage, it feels a bit odd in an album that otherwise feels so confidently itself. Once or twice, the spiralling layers of melody feel like they get away from Cherry’s control; “Black Monday” definitely feels like a bit of a ramble at times. But these are minor issues, even on these tracks themselves. Even after listening to it multiple times a day for a week, Broken Politics is still an album I look forward to hearing. It’s sincere, intelligent and strong, and comes highly recommended.

Elvis Costello – Look Now

Look Now bears more resemblance to 1982’s Imperial Bedroom than anything else in Elvis Costello’s career, and even then, it’s not a particularly striking resemblance. Costello’s goal here appears to be to age gracefully: always one of the more punkish of the New Wave cadres, he seems aware that he can’t quite kick up the furore he used to, and now wants to cultivate the wit rather than try and re-capture the zeal. How’d the experiment work? Well… eh. Look Now is a stately and elegant work, but not one that quite lives up to the sum of its parts.

Costello approaches Look Now with the chops of a veteran performer, and the budget to match. Every instrumentalist performs with impeccable precision, and when a track warrants horns or strings, no expense is spared in hiring the session players. The album, as result, is full of lovely little moments: bright baroque flushes and gorgeous bass runs. It feels like a blue-eyed soul record, and while Costello’s always been one of my least favourite household-name vocalists, he sounds particularly charming here, approaching his melodies with the same slightly creaky, aged swank that we heard from Bowie on Blackstar and glimpsed in the background of Scott Walker’s late-career nightmare-scapes. It’s a very pretty, very dignified record, and because of that there’s very little that distracts from the persona that Costello conjures out of his lyrics and delivery; the man’s a fine storyteller, and if you’re a fan of his stories, he allows little to get in the way of them here.

Trouble is, he also doesn’t do an awful lot to elevate them. The lyrics on Look Now are on the darker end, and always feel just a little bit too severe for the mild melancholy of the backing music. There’s also none of the earnestness that marks the difference between a “good story well told” and an honest-to-goodness performance. Problematically, Costello isn’t bringing his A-game on the hooks here, and while the witticisms of the album do stick out – “you can’t put the genius/ back in the bottle” – few melodies do. Drummer Pete Thomas seems to sum up the modus operandi of the whole album. One of the most explosive sticksmen since Keith Moon, he here relegates himself to backbeats and the occasional cymbal flourish, and while music like this isn’t necessarily asking for something more dramatic, it’s worth remembering that Thomas has found ways to weave fascinatingly subtle and complex drumlines around similarly soft music in the past. On Look Now, there’s plenty that’s worth your attention, but also not a lot that seeks to grab it.

High on Fire – Electric Messiah

Electric Messiah is the second album to be released this year by stoner-metal icon Matt Pike, and much like his other release this year – that was The Sciences, with his other band, Sleep – Electric Messiah is a record I had quite a lot of fun with.

While Pike’s guitar tone – and low, screeching vocal delivery – are classic stoner, what’s neat about Electric Messiah is that it isn’t really written like a stoner metal album. It’s a fast, at times sprightly thing. Converge’s Kurt Ballou is on production duties, as he was on High on Fire’s previous album Luminiferous, and you can hear his influence over the songwriting. More than anything else, Electric Messiah feels like a more reliably four-four re-tread of Converge’s All We Love We Leave Behind: buzzsaw riffing that sends atonal solos flying out like sparks only to collide with them at the end of the run, sludgy and pendulous breakdowns, furious flurries of low-end drums. It’s not really an album to get stoned to, in the way The Sciences or even The Art of Self Defense was. Just as Nirvana took the song structures of angry music and used it to communicate magnanimous relatable apathy, so High On Fire take the rudiments of stoner metal and use it for raw, kinetic rage.

What makes Electric Messiah work are the little touches. Pike’s established by now that he’s an original guitar player, but it’s moments like this that remind us that, on top of that, he’s a damn good one too. Rather than rolling along and relying on its heft to carry it, Pike continually claws at the audience’s attention, throwing in lightning-fast runs down the guitar neck when the riffs repeat, and changing direction on a dime from coursing fury to ponderous weight. It’s the same instincts that Mastodon used to turn a similar musical template into the greatest heavy metal discography of all time (don’t @ me), and while Pike is no Brent Hinds, this is definitely the kind of record that reminds you that Mastodon only exist because some guys met up at a High on Fire gig. In that regard, Electric Messiah feels less like a stoner metal album and more like late-career Testament: a stoic, sludgy thrash that rides the same storm as Megadeth and Metallica, but throws its allegiance behind the thunder, not the lightning.

All that being said, it is worth noting that my inability to talk about Electric Messiah without heavily referencing other bands is, on its own, a telling thing. Matt Pike is evidently an open minded musician, but that isn’t quite the same thing as being imaginative, and Electric Messiah doesn’t really have a distinctive personality of its own. Despite the mysticism of the cover art, the album doesn’t feel like it has any particular kind of spirituality; even on “Sanctioned Annihilation”, when the album comes closest to the Lovecraftian weight-of-the-universe dreamscapery that characterizes Pike at his best, the declarative marching riffs and woozy solo never really seem to capture a sense of worship or majesty. It’s slightly bittersweet that Pike describes Electric Messiah as the quintessence of what he wanted to achieve with High on Fire, because it’s not an album that really feels like a bold statement. What it is, ultimately, is just a damn good metal album.

Still, that’s not to say that Electric Messiah is particularly disappointing; rather that it’s one of those albums which is a lot more good than it is memorable. It’s a direct, relentless record, tight in the way metal often fails to be, and, if not the best at waking you up to anything, absolutely excellent at waking you up.

The Joy Formidable – AAARTH

This is a minor detail, but I feel it’s worth saying: AAARTH has really, really, REALLY cool album art. I feel justified in opening with that for two reasons: one, because seriously, the art is really, really, really cool, and second because it’s cool in the same way that the album is: big, bright, shapeless, almost (but not quite) incomprehensible and slightly mystical, in a psychonaut sorta way. It’s an album which, on one level, loses me, but on an other level turns out to be quite fun to get lost in.

AARTH is, fundamentally, an alternative rock record. It sits bang in the middle between the stadium bombast of Muse and the woozy haze of My Bloody Valentine, more melodic than the latter but less anthemic than the former. Tracks are heavy, but not dark or aggressive: rather than working the low end, songwriter and frontwoman Ritzy Bryan creates her furore by layering melody upon melody, rhythm upon rhythm, feedback blast upon feedback blast to create a vast, swirling cacophony. Like the works of My Bloody Valentine, this is an album that succeeds by being loud in an interesting way, but while My Bloody Valentine delivered loudness of an unusual texture and type, AAARTH is about making loudness out of a lot of interesting things.

It’s a schtick that works in part because Bryan reveals herself to be an imaginative and fearless riff-crafter. “The Wrong Side” builds its pendulous staccato wrecking ball with intoxicating, heavily chorded runs up the guitar neck. “Cicada (Land on your Back)”, as one of the album’s atmospheric numbers, runs the risk of pretentiousness, but dodges the pitfall by offering an elegant, Middle Eastern tinged main riff, and setting it against weird harmonies on lead guitars and vocals. “The Better Me” bases itself around angular, unpredictable squeals and harmonics. It’s an understated, in-the-pocket kind of virtuosity, the kind that suggests less time practicing speed and more time teaching one’s fingers to stretch over odd combinations of frets.

Although the album technically has versus and choruses, when you’re not reading the lyrics, you’re not particularly likely to notice them. Songs end not when a structure has gone through its acts, but rather when all variations of a common theme or mood has been explored. Songs feel simply like collections of riffs and melodies which sound good together. On the one hand, that’s kind of a negative point, and is maybe the big thing that holds the album back from greatness: it’s difficult to come away with it with much of a sense of coherent story or emotional journey, and while Bryan’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics are rather beautiful, the music rarely feels chosen to highlight or support the line which it backs.

However, the album’s tone and character feel very much designed to take advantage of that kind of structural looseness. The album was recorded in Utah and The Joy Formidable have discussed the influence that the state’s landscape had on their sound. It sounds primal and shamanic, as though written far away from civilization, full of the kind of surreality that comes from a hot sun, a beautiful landscape and a lack of water. Bryan’s vocal lines are chants, rather than anthems, and each track feels like an invocation, written to summon something, not to describe it. Moments of emotional connection do not invest you in a narrative – they appear, glimmer, and then are swept away in preparation for the next one. I don’t necessarily think that this is the best thing that the album could be doing, but it’s certainly a big part of what gives it its identity.

Do I recommend AAARTH? Yeah, overall. It’s not quite as absorbing as it is intricate, and it’s not quite as emotional as it is honest, but it’s a unique and satisfying record that, in places, really does manage that rare trick of being beautiful in a totally inexplicable way. At the very least, it’s a slice of cathartic loudness of a flavour all its own. At most, it’s a fascinating thing to sit and dissect. Sure, it expect you put the legwork into dissecting it, but there are worse ways to spend an afternoon.