Handsome B. Wonderful's Fortieth Annual List of the Top Ten Rock Albums of the Year

SATAN LAUGHS AS YOU ETERNALLY ROT.

Weird year, man. Got more shit to say than ever punches fucking tired of circle jerks in the temple of your dreams. Philosophy is naught but destroying eardrums in my own private forest, tossin' scrawls in the can. Poor man's withdrawal, son, 'cause the hard stuff's too much scratch. The rest is crap 'cept Hanneman.

1. Darkthrone, The Underground Resistance.
Fuckin' metal, man.

2. Alice in Chains, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.
Fuckin' reflection, man.

3. Uncle Acid & the deadbeats, Mind Control.
Fuckin' cults, man.

4. Cathedral, The Last Spire.
Fuckin' Hammer, man.

5. Monster Magnet, Last Patrol.
Fuckin' testosterone, man.

6. Cultes Des Ghoules, Henbane.
Fuckin' Satan, man.

7. Rome, Hate Us and See if We Mind.
Fuckin' angst, man.

8. Ranger, Knights of Darkness.
Fuckin' speed, man.

9. SubRosa, More Constant Than the Gods.
Fuckin' doom, man.

10. Bones, Sons of Sleaze.
Fuckin' Helpless, man.

11. Iron Dogs, Free and Wild.
Fuckin' 1982, man.

12. Tribulation, The Formulas of Death.
Fuckin' spooky, man.

13. Fuckin' everyone else, man. The days get later, I get lazier. Bloody Hammers, Spiritual Relics. Ihsahn, Das Seelenbrechen. Windhand, Soma. Hail of Bullets, III: The Rommel Chronicles. Autopsy, The Headless Ritual. Moss, Horrible Nights. Throwing Muses, Purgatory/Paradise. Magic Circle, Magic Circle. Orchid, The Mouths of Madness. Jucifer, За Волгой для нас земли нет. Inquisition, Obscure Verses for the Multiverse.

Midlife, no crisis

Look man, adrenaline junkie shtick's fine for vapid hacks surfing vapor trails to nowhere. Me, I dig a grimy rut slicked with oily mope. It's right there, points the skeletal digit, hand hallucinating over a shaky ticker, ears flapping as yours truly breezes wearily through discarded puns on the band's name and/or the Cretaceous. Eureka, that signifies old, and lo, a couple more greys than yesterday.

So what? As we learned last time out, "maturing" is for musical halfwits, but aging fully graced, a magically different ballad. Once upon an Angus: "I'm sick and tired of people saying that we put out 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we've put out 12 albums that sound exactly the same." Here, a stretch, but it's new Alice, they've been at it since before my kids were born and so know what the fuck they're doing, the unbreakable Motörhead of mood metal.

Don't get naming the entire album after the sole "topical" track, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here for the under-a-rock adjacent, but everyone's brainwaves are different. Song's certainly eerie, though, though Hung on a Hook, whoa, Layne or no, see despondency through a glass, darkly. Funny how Chuck Woolery infernos used to blast open proceedings, but a deep (ten of twelve tracks clocking over five minutes) Hollow has good n' plenty of a sticky, bendy gait, defiantly smacking away one of the album's few flaws, namely that a speedy, let 'er rip once in a full moon would be keen.

Contradicting myself, brick wall drones are wheelhoused, but second single Stone hasn't stuck yet (neither had Lab Monkey, which I already like thrice more than Monday), but the Jar of Flies-worthy Voices, lordy, 'tis No Excuses horizontal harmonizing with a daydream haze, birthing their love child. Opposite, 99 44/100% pure facelifting with the chromatic, rambling, ergo self-titled-ish Phantom Limb, and har ye har ye, new guy getting more turns at the mic this time around beyond righteous and mandatory two-parts.

We all wanna tap our foot, crack open our skulls on the stage, feast on the goo inside. It's why pop craft welded to brontosaurs riffs makes overcast barbs like Low Ceiling soar, whilst Scalpel is cut primarily out of the former, a chorus of pure fucking ear candy. Being either moody or cranky or both, this stomper of a record, peppered with singer-songwriter longhair jams once strung out so lovely in Cantrell's solo oeuvre, perhaps less black and more grey, riffs that once lopped off bloody chunks now grinding gobs of weathered flesh instead, still guards the sound of a cold, rainy day. Like today! (sadly, not that cold) Brings an invisible ink smile to my face.

Paranoia is just a kind of awareness, and awareness is just a form of blotto

No album cuts cuz Metal Blade's gang of Patrick Batemans says nein.

Animals are blissfully ignorant of our gold star acid banging till we leave a pile of garbage on their house 'cause we if we know anything we know shit, and in the sun that motherfucker smells like civilization.

No wonder stray folks hither and tither self-medicate, murder.

The previous platter drunk from grindhouse Hammer teats. This latest treat is rotten Spahn ranch dressing, leaves ripped from mellow yellowing, vomit-pocked copies of Helter Skelter and Mindfuckers stashed under the seat with empty wrappers, undies. Opener Mt. Abraxas, contra the last first strike, climbs molasses slow, sand dune stumbling for a couple of warm beers and pocket change 'fore channeling God, i.e. Sabbath circa 1970-75, hypnosis wielded like a drugged wizard unable to just say nyet. And we've all taken turns as that Mind Crawler hammer, if not convincing someone to go all Tex Watson then certainly to fuck with the psyche of the ones we love, a word redefinable by the happy hour. Celebrate good times come on.

Jonesing for a blood lusty fix, Poison Apple b/w Under the Spell are a pair of Buck Blackmore rockin' holes in the sky metal pin punched by Desert Ceremony's active Iommi octaves oh so mesmer, and dig Uncle's eerie un/intentional Robin Zander Evil Love tribute complete with T.V. Eye submission and name-drop shout-out over Maiden/Priest axework.

The ante's high in Death Valley Blues, Marshall stack psych hiding from piggish sobriety along with the rest of the worded weirdos, anxiously kicking the on sale! today only! bobblehead down the road with the droning, lysergic Follow the Leader. The burnt So Cal concrete and dusty Chevy van monochrome of Valley of the Dolls is at first tab the only (slight) misfire, but patience, grasshopper. At last, at last, our crazy kids land a gig doing the Devil's Work, the knife blade broken garage rock endgame that, like every idea good bad or ugly, stutters to nothing under the bleaching sun.

This stack of oh yeah ain't a carbon copy of their oldies, yet there's blissfully none of the lobotomy promoted by onanist music critics,"maturing" -- c'est-à-dire, agitprop praising the sacrifice of The Holy Riff for "atmosphere" -- just one more thorny hike through one more nuclear-baked shithole. Play that funky music white boy and sing how every wasteland, whether gated Swiss bank silicone, upper lower middle class timebomb, or dumpster diver felony, is run by variations on a nutjob, as it was, is, and always shall be. Amen.

Fuck off and die

Spending spring break at home, the scribbling of my stupid paper and watching stupid footie sandwiching the stupid ham of stupid darkthroning. Sorry, ladies, this hunk of burning excitement's unavailable, though my wife wishes I wasn't. Zing. Thank you thank you, enjoy the veal, because if you saw the kitchen, you'd know it was your last meal. Badoomboom.

Bonus!



Fenriz freaky channels Sean Harris and Bruce Dickinson. 

Dead Early like 1982 early, Cirith Ungol, Diamond Head, Manilla Road. Ain't black, ain't crust, is Heavy Fucking Metal, all the influences us near-, at-, over-forty-somethings scarfed with greasy gusto, The Ones You Left Behind leaving a heaping plate of end rhymes like 22, Acacia Avenue was whoring its rhythm out to every Norwegian hesher.

Six tracks of classic filtered through the warped skulls of Ted and Gylve, but oh so special mention must be made of thirteen-plus minute closer Leave No Cross Unturned, King Diamond Satanic magic carpeting over boundless epic, dynamic speed, and Oxford commafuls of tempos shifting pitch. What the fuck just happened, Darkthrone just fucking happened. If only I could bellow joy like Kim Bendix Petersen and only you could hear.

Handsome B. Wonderful's Thirty-Ninth Annual List of the Top Ten Rock Albums of the Year

Yeah, just used this. Wait and see.

Negative plain [see?]: these things, like everything else, are Mohs and Mohs difficult to scribble with each passing suck. Where once we had to sacrifice a goat to Reagan 'neath an eclipse, a comet, and a dragon after walking ten miles in the snow to & from school whilst barefoot merely to pretend hear windy whispers about new tunes, our ears permanently corked by the alchemick residue of burning pungency [read: existence] itself, The Kids get the fucking interwebs smorgasbord, and some of these clownshoes claim to jam to thirty, forty, a hundred platters over a calendar with justice for all. Ye are charlatans, or wizards, or both, ye are. Fuck, I didn't even know Jerome Fucking Reuter put out a new Rome LP -- that's long player, once upon a vinyl, following 2011's equivalent of three long players -- until after it had been out for a month. Someone get me a new telegraph, or fund Chips & Beer to publish weekly. Luck be a lady tonight & help me churn out my first verse in, yeah, a month. Goddamn, there's so much fucking music nowadays, so much fucking argh in my head.

Groove, get snatchin'.

Oh, instead of album covers, easily findable, samples, also easily findable, but much more useful. I love you like lazy Ozzy.

1. Witch Mountain, Cauldron of the Wild. Motherfucking doom blues. Last year's South of Salem came out of pretend nowhere, a near-decade hiatus triumphantly brushed away like the bones that once held the Sword of Aquilonia. This album's hip-swingers hammer over the enemy's shards like clouds, razor solos feathering over stops & starts, Uta Plotkin's pipes timeshifting between soaring, come-hithering, withering, graceslicking, nwobhming, half the time in every song, four masters having crafted something as rare as a good day, an album grabbing your collar, ordering 'let's rip this gyp joint.' 

The Bloodhound 7" and bringing it live only cements.

Season of the Witch, baby.

2. Katatonia, Dead End Kings. Like the Alcest [see below], this one was a grower, forsaking a batch of instant coffee hooks over textures for a recipe of nearly entirely the latter. Ain't nothing groundbreaking, but so fucking what. Mood music for mopes and I'm a moody mope. No one taps the vein better.

3. Agalloch, Faustian Echoes. The devil's apprentice with the blues dressing his milieu. Venomous & beautiful & epic like only these guys can do, especially since Opeth gave up the ghost for mellotrons & smoking jackets.

4. Worm Ouroboros, Come the Thaw. It ain't heavy, but brother, is it heavy.

5. High on Fire, De Mysteriis Vermis. Call me an old curmudgeon. Rightly so, because modern, desert-dry production, crisp or no, ain't helping. This plate sniper punches on headphones, but live? Everybody's doin' the toxic waltz.

6. Unto Ashes, Burials Foretold. That old gang of mine. Darkness, loss, big-R romanticism, lotta shared aesthetics with the rest of this list. Gravitas doesn't require a stack of Marshalls. Don't tell anyone I typed that.

7. Les Discrets, Ariettes Oubliées.... There's no Song for Mountains, but there are songs mountainous in their craft that lift the gaze from the shoes to the above.

8. Windhand, Windhand. Turn your noodle on, tune in, drop out imagining Electric Wizard fronted by the fairer sex. Slow and murky like a gravestone.

9. Occultation, Three & Seven. So spooky, even the Secret Imam refuses to come back. Negative Plane's Nameless Void hooks up with a couple of chicks, and their ménage à trois thumps as it trumps nearly all the bullshit "occult" metal the cool kids triumph after suddenly discovering their older bro's worn VHS copies of vintage Hammer and Tigon flicks.

10. Alcest, Les Voyages de l'Âme. Started the blurb, stopped, went to sleep help some patrons, read what the Duchess churned, which was pretty much what I was gonna pen, but since she got there first, credit where it's due.

11. Degial, Death's Striking Wings. Death metal these days is either Sominex math-tech or ineffective, borderline grindcore. Once upon a corpse, it was nothing but a vampire circus of fucking morbid riffs that even a hesher's angel could hum. Bless you, Sweden, for your scamps sure are drinking the Kool-Aid.

12. Van Halen, A Different Kind of Truth. I don't give a fuck if it's misty watercolor or not, it's Diamond Fucking Dave and The Maestro, together again. And, some filler aside [this truth is different], the best's pretty vintage.

13. Teitanblood, Woven Black Arteries. Last year's Purging Tongues shorty and a newbie. That's one song each, one long song of filthy fucking riff whorls, just dirty fucking shit, a shift from Seven Chalices to one big cup o' disease & blacked-out alleys, less bestial stomp this time 'round, more a morass of massed sound that'd make Dickens cringe right after he stepped in, what is that, offal, blood, shit? Probably all three and been here for a week. Who knew the Spanish economy had folks this unhinged.

bonus! Deathspell Omega, Drought. Some, not me, expressed disappointment with the last DsO LP, the final panel of a triptych heard less as Dies Irae holy fire and more watered-down, tech-accessible brimstone, & sure, 'twas neither Si Monumentum nor Kénôse, but also wasn't mimicking the incredibly overrated Meshuggah, & yours truly thought the hallucinatory, atonal layers fit the Patmos shroom trip's spiraling denouement. Omega, here's your Alpha, all spit & knuckles, save the legitimately pretty instrumental opener/closer, blasts wedlocking Satanica esoterica to old school, inquisitorial riffing.

bonus! Morbus Chron, A Saunter Through the Shroud. Violent riff blasts that flip the bird to their native NWOSDM melodicism in favor of sweaty American death metal, gleefully aping Obituary before those jerks started to suck.

Shit I neither inhaled nor cuddled with enough. Music, man: Rome, Fester. Rome, Hell Money (BEING PROLIFIC AIN'T COOL, PAL). Neurosis, Honor Found in Decay. Conan, Monnos. Winterfylleth, The Threnody of Triumph. Wodensthrone, Curse. Castle, Blacklands. Asphyx, Deathhammer. Weapon, Embers and Revelations. Overkill, The Electric Age. Graveyard, Lights Out. Orchid, Heretic. Ihsahn, Eremita. My Dying Bride, A Map of All Our Failures. BDR's favorite Blunderbuss, Jack White. Evoken, Atra Mors. Greenleaf, Nest of Vipers. Undersmile, Narwhal. Elder, Spires Burn/Release. Adrian H and the Wounds, Debut. Boss de Nage, III. Om, Advaitic Songs. Witchcraft, Legend. Kadaver, Kadaver. Uzala, Uzala. Pilgrim, Misery Wizard. Napalm Death, Utilitarian. Locrian & Mamiffer, Bless Them That Curse You. Ghost Tower, Head of Night. Anaal Nathrakh, Vanitas. 

The sense of an ending

'tis better to have waited to review than never to have reviewed before, but that's not never not stopped me yet. That's a lot of negativity. Apropos, no? Post-Viva Emptiness, Katatonia began departing from immediacy -- think I Break, For My Demons, Chrome, riffs that clutched with gusto -- distancing instead into the great cold of texture. Oh, I've got a million of 'em. The just inferred album, after a mountain of spins, has nearly ascended to the height of its three predecessors [ed. note: Leaders always kicked the shins], the melancholy trinity. That should probably be capitalized. As for the last full-length, after an introspection allotted only by time: some hits, some misses, & the template followed still, the weakest of the clean vocal era, still. Now, Dead End Kings, the question being, is the title a Freudian slip?

Soft/loud continues to hold pride of place, but the electro-noodling plague wielded on the last LP by unofficial sixth member Frank Default [ed. note: chortle] has thankfully sunk further into the earth, replaced some by loamy keyboard work that harkens back, though sadly not strongly enough, to Last Fair Deal Gone Down, their undisputed meisterwerk.

Now, upon thirteen new tracks, Messrs. Nyström & Renkse open an old bag of tricks: the wispy patina of The Gathering's Silje Wergeland guesting on The One You Are Looking For Is Not Here, an honest-to-Hanneman metal solo swooping before a classic bridge-n-chop on Lethean, the muffled AM-radio fadeout of The Racing Heart, the low-key carnival gait of The Act of Darkening so sap I wonder how these knuckleheads decided to leave it off the standard release. The shuffling Leech recalls but doesn't clone Viva's quietly despondent One Year From Now, whilst Undo You filters select passagework of mid-period Arcturus, even Black Sabbath's atypical Air Dance, through the band's trademark gloom, an October never painted in bombast but fragments of stanzas, measures (oh, 2:23-3:05 of First Prayer, why weren't you an eleven-minute extrapolation before slipping back into sheet metal chords?), passing clouds that blind foolish Reason with the good stuff.



The biggest difficulty in reviewing albums, albums by these guys most notably, is that nearly every past release has corresponded to a specific dilemma/upheaval in a particular point in the four dimensions, i.e. separating the music from personal context is nigh impossible & that cannot but help to color the impression one way or the other. True of any piece of art, but the final arbiter is, again, time. In another three years, who knows, but at this point on the clock, Dead End Kings isn't a dead end, the slow start to too many tracks notwithstanding, but an exploration of endings that, hopefully, will harmonize with the beginning of something better out here. I doubt it, but at least the doubt has sound.

Lunacy, masses smashed by a holy shit, or, almost twenty-five years of DSM-IV no. 295

Not until Halloween eve, officially, but since, A, this is the only sorta-finished draft in the queue, & B, I'm tired of this thus cleaning said queue out, here you go you undemanding non-metallic weenies. Today's socioeconomic lesson courtesy of Kerrang. Or Aardschok, Rip, I can't remember. Ain't gonna get them from a high school textbook, then, or now. Seems that Brazil circa Italia '90 was, sadly to middle class suburban morons like yours truly, more than joga bonito & bikinis, & after reading both a glowing bit on Beneath the Remains [ed. note: hagiography ain't new, kids, but is occasionally spot on], & an ad for the Roadrunner reissue of Schizophrenia -- Now With A Rerecording of Troops of Doom!, I got Perry's Rockpile [ed. note: RIP] to double my ordering pleasure. Jesus H. Cthulhu, all my stories are over twenty years old. Adult Randal is as milquetoast as the Beatles. [ed. note: stuff your vapors, I don't care]
 
Metallica was the template for musical swank in days of yore, so pressing play of course meant being lulled into false security 'fore chromaticism tore the goddamn heads off those within earshot, Psycho shower scene screech backward masked, or in Portuguese, or backward masked Portuguese. The whole platter has a weird, The Who-in-catacomb clarity contra the lo-fi, lo-budget muck of the visceral debut, hammered home via the triptych of From the Past Comes the Storms,

To the Wall (whose scaling runs wink & nod towards Ride the Lightning's colossal House of Hammett title track), Escape to the Void, all nearly as unbreakable as anything the so-called Big Four had yet conjured. Can you believe some folks actually tried to convince me that if I wanted to get my rage on, I should be spinning The Motherfucking Clash? Fuck off.

"Brains of armed lives hidden in pits." Such ESL fuckups are endearing, especially in light of my continued foreign language failures, though there's also the Byronic "the rose's smell corrodes me" of the machine gun R.I.P. (Rest In Pain) that concludes with a few measures of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze crashing through Marshalls.

There's nothing about love &/or bunga bunga on this record but there are cyclones of USDA grade A riffs, the essential ingredient in thrash, a spasmodic reaction to the symptoms of perceived, wish-fulfillment apocalypse: the proliferation of computer gizmos; war transmogrified from smokestacks, cattle cars, & black-and-white human pain to out-of-sight, out-of-mind video game remote controlling; the ubiquitous nuke. See: Nuclear Assault, Napalm Death, Killing Technology, etc.

Bay Area redux: new axman Andreas Kisser playing the Cliff Burton role in elevating the band beyond thrash and thrash alone -- in fairness, the immature Morbid Visions can't hold a candelabra to Kill 'Em All, one of the ten best power chorders ever. Even the cover's dominant color in each case shifts from red to blue, jumping out of the fire & into an eerie, otherworldly undercurrent. To further strain the mock parallelogram, both bands' fifth album was viable, if commercial, though let us temporarily shelve our aspersion casting & pretend 1996 never happened, dwelling instead on the ear-opening Inquisition Symphony,

seven-plus minutes of instrumental fanfare for the common hesher, proving that grime-proboscised punks from crime- & poverty-stricken Belo Horizonte could hold their own with any metal band on the planet. Check the genuine Lovecraftian creep of Screams Behind the Shadows -- or to be precise, the initial riff. Each smorgasbord has a baker's dozen of the goddamn things, so many that I could start pedaling & match local landmarks, such as they were, with each riff change, Dark Side of the Moon holding hands with Wizard of Oz before I had even heard of such dorm room occupations.

Septic Schizo Max was possessed. "Jackhammer" is among the most cliche metal writing adjectives, but the next time there's midday orange barreling, pay attention & spin this, or this. That's the rhythm, only now with the faint dweomer of death metal. So, of course the gentle, Bert Jansch-esque Kisser interlude The Abyss makes perfect sense, the calm before the double-barreled Venom storm.

Maybe Beneath the Remains and Arise are "better," but what the fuck does that even mean? There are a million fine sounding bands in the world, but they don't all bring you riffs at work. Most of them just HM-2 you. Find it at your local record shop then go away.

Man is only air as well

The band's brand new single track, twenty-one minute EP, Faustian Echoes, begins with a sample of Jan Švankmajer’s filmed take on the legend & closes with another. The sound is not as cold as the last LP, though not analog warm, with measures arranged as a hefty bag of Legos upon a board: vicious blasts, placid chord progressions, midpaced tremolo runs, & stretched single-note combinations that, if one were to view the music from the side, & unlike most of their past stabs at extended suites, neither rise to silver mountain height nor delve cavernous pits. After all, this is one mind trapped in a disorder of his own conjuration. To deviate from such a mess under the banner of grasping, or recanting, can only be illusory; the final few minutes' crescendo, the beguiling leitmotif first heard nearly a quarter of an hour ago, teases a crest into illumination, but, of course, never does.

Is it live, or is it Memorex?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gonna suck when we run out of juice & every guitar is acoustic.

Yes, that's the actual setlist, from Aesop.
No, I didn't get it.
Yes, Agalloch proved, again, the existence of magic.

Agalloch @ The Beachland Ballroom: Limbs; Ghosts of the Midwinter Fires; Faustian Echoes; Not Unlike the Waves; Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor; Our Fortress is Burning, Pt. 1; Our Fortress is Burning, Pt. 2: Bloodbirds; As Embers Dress the Sky; Hallways of Enchanted Ebony; You We're But A Ghost In My Arms; In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion; Kneel to the Cross. Encore #1: Dead Winter Days. Encore #2: Falling Snow.

Foresight is 20/20

I hate surprises. Don't be daft asking why, everyone but the terminally spontaneous knows they're hideous blots upon the paper, the ruinous mirror to cherished overthought, the afterimage of people themselves Jake says ewww, or perhaps fate's too successful cloning of such rough beasts. Rules & exceptions, rules & exceptions except when a surprise rules, a royally gnarly proof. Rumor & hearsay, a new platter cometh from those neo/medieval/folk/kitchen sinkers, Unto Ashes. 'tis true, as rumor & hearsay go, Burials Foretold lying in my purple fingers, & surprise, one that doesn't direct me to Plath my Yorick: maestromind Michael Laird is rejoined by Natalia Lincoln (after a one-album absence) & Ericah Hagle, i.e. a nice slice of the temporal lobe trust responsible for the majority of the band's initial triptych, i.e. I'm doin' the Snoopy dance.

Such musicking for the terminally moody spades the first dirt with the guitar & viola da gamba title track, one of those short, intriguing stabs (viz. Interpol's Interlude, Witchcraft's Merlin's Daughter, Sabbath's Embryo, Kyuss' Capsized) you wish the spiders would spin further but are secretly ashamed to be glad they plucked because, like the best horror, the unseen/heard always trumps showing too much. Voices don't enter till they shadow the percussive bagpipe of Pilzentanz, lyrics lifted from the authority-whipping twelfth century Apocalypse of Golias. Then, boom, boom, shroom, Laird's hazy emulsion running over French horn (She Binds Away the Night); his no bullshit willow wisping 'oh it's dark' on glinting teeth & eyes, as the earthy soprano-less chorale enters 'with gloom/Night Is Coming Soon,' reminding why I swooned over this sound in the first place; some are just in our spectral wheelhouse.

A tradition, laying notes below third-party verse: Fire + Ice, a reinterpretation of Empty Into White's wrathful Flayed by Frost, itself originally inspired by Robert's masterpiece in miniature, the circle squared; Bierce's satirical [ed. note: Redundancy Department of Redundancy] Worm's-Meat gnaws on a gentle undulation; & a hurdy-gurdy lilt for illustrator Cicely Mary Barker's Spring Magic.

Piper's Song leads Bart Farar's cover, a single wary, weary eye lodged in washed-out burnt orange flesh, its companion long rubbed out as the world's wont to do, towards the old shuttered rooms of Witches' Rune, Sonnet 87, Estuans Interius. See Hermes T: "I beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature."

Showing they could make a buck or three as one of the world's finest cover bands -- see their original-what-original stab at the Cure's The Drowning Man, & the hauntingly [ed. note: this overused word applies with perfection, trust me] deconstructed (Don't Fear) The Reaper. Now, stripped of Eddie's crunch, Mike & Alex's manic pulse, & Dave's ah yeahs, Van Halen's Runnin' With the Devil, here Running; youthful defiance is now experienced resignation.

Kept short n' bittersweet, only one track pointing above four minutes, polaroids of a broken tongue only able to spill ichor accompanied. I'd relate -- but would still keep quiet, I'm not that strain of fool -- if it wasn't for this keyless, bird-killing warble; I don't even sing in my car. Blood For My Lady's solo-in-spirit coursing & the molded sole-on-industrial-glass that scratched hither & tiptoe through Grave Blessings & Songs for a Widow have vanished, the latter more than the former, exorcised by the vocal entanglement of old (Young Men Leave for Battles Unknown), the British folk of Too Late to Begin, Lincoln's piano from a silent film denouement (Rubine).

A loamy ouroboros of raw-head & bloody bones salted with a decay-fueled rebirth, one reading of Burials Foretold is a reflection on band breaks up/gets back together (yeah, a stretch, given the myriad folks who've picked, hit, crooned), another is that mythic macrocosm, a third, fourth, tenth is the listener's personal. In any, either, all case(s), while there's nothing immediately otherworldly clutching as Widow's The Snow Leopard, & Empty Into White remains (Moon Oppose Moon? Saturn Return? Magic 8-ball says ask again later) their finest, I get the sense that the fifteen songs about love, sex, death [ed. note: every song ever written, once you peel the rank, absurd layers of the human onion, is about either love, sex, &/or death, except that one, you know which] on Burials Foretold relish the chance to go chord to chord.

Going off the rails on a crazy train

Didn't need to be on time, musicians operate on a different clock. That statement's half-true, otherwise we'd have had to have parked on the other side of the next set of tracks.

Some also operate on a different social planet, the drummer -- a weird breed, ain't they -- of these blokes & one ladyfolk instigating the pre-show chitchat. Friendly creatures, one & all. Behold the power of Raspooty.

The Heats rolling, grr, the headliner's neighbors Lord Dying rip late through a six-song set, their Tad Doyle-esque frontman & Co. showering the sparse crowd with back-in-my-day Slaytanic riffs, audible & not just a pot of sludge & endless double bass, but marching with menace. One to keep an eye on, but dudes, how about some CDs to peddle next to the seven inches?

One confontational LeBron fan contra the entire bar. No fisticuffs were thrown, though I did see more than one chick in her summer dress with a flowery ribbon banging along with the head it rested on; a guy post-midlife crisis sporting one too many & a shirt adorned with 50s autos; a post-post-crisis greybeard who probably saw Sabbath on their first American tour & metal geeked out the whole show by pen & papering the setlist, collecting shots, & banging the head that's banged for four decades so quit the chuckles young bro 'cause that's our future, yours & mine, unless you suck; & that worn & old Ian Gillan lookalike from downtown darkthrones. All rocking. That is the riddle of steel fucking metal. Humans begin to spontaneously fill the room, though no time for people watching, Dr. Jones, it's the witching hour, time to rock.

Dude, too clear. Turn off the flash & let's get back to cosmic.

Heavy as a really heavy hundred tons of bricks. Look folks, everyone says our new record's our heaviest yet, so-&-such is heavier live, blah x3. It's true, oh, it's fucking true. & better. Witch Mountain does what every band should do, says they do, but never do, "stretch" & "mature" & "progress" while kicking my fucking ass even more. An inverse evening where a propulsive Nathan Carson & Neal Munson rhythm section kept executioner's time & bees, the bass stinging like a rhythmic blade that allowed the first to throw shapes & runs, Rob Wrong pulling double duty of lead & more rhythm, oft simultaneously like all the best can do, yanking Christmas how-the-fucks out of his ass. The dude can play. Uta Plotkin owns the adjectives inked her way, siren & further, sailing on with range & power that will belt your guilt, whatever it is, for nine eerie, sad, venomous, defiant minutes, six times slow.

Spinning Cauldron of the Wild on the way home, the live did indeed confirm the grooves or bits or whatever the fuck this is. What it is a fucking beautiful punch in the heart.

Witch Mountain @ Now That's Class: The Ballad of Lanky Rae, Beekeeper, Shelter, Veil of the Forgotten, Wing of the Lord, Never Know.

Mystery solved

Pay no attention to the man behind the wheel of the DeLorean. 

Always wanted a bong n' Weird Tales sonic treatment of Jesus' stillborn, time-traveling twin, & thanks to the fanatically fervent High on Fire, here it is, quite the Easter egg. On number six, De Vermis Mysteriis, Kurt Ballou's production, following messrs. Albini, Endino, & Fidelman, is still too Valley of the Kings dry -- O how these lucubrations Lovecraftian Blochian long for The Art of Self Defense's wet smoke inhalation -- but, in correcting the one drawback of the last LP, voice & guitar have been restored to their rightful place in the mix, though whatever acrid adult libation Mr. Pike swills in ritually sacrificing his larynx, 1)sign me up, I'll be a big hit on Halloween, 2)no fucked knob twiddle needed in the face of such stellar howls.

Chaotic opener Serums of Liao doesn't imprint as ruthlessly as past album introductions -- Baghdad, Devilution, & Fury Whip are red giant imposing -- but 'tis early in its life, & the seasick solo sticks like peanut butter on the brain, & here we go, Bloody Knuckles feeds on Slayer's rich, tasty courage, grit between the teeth. Des Kensel's masterful control of whack-a-tom starts the speed & sleep splatter of Fertile Green -- let me pause for a moment & state that within a just world, any minute now this guy would begin to usurp Lombardo's throne in the hesher consciousness. The dude owns, consistently.

The crawl-birthing-a-stomp of Madness of an Architect drones the ears like a rusty cheese grater, & it's beautiful, the other side of the looking glass to the voiceless melodicism of Samsara that renews the psychedelic side trips of Death is This Communion, & being an understated showpiece for too-underrated bassist Jeff Matz, who quickly flips back the switch, the rest also congregating in Spiritual Rites whose stop-start pacing gleefully recalls Rumors of War, an extra gear thrashed for good measure.

King of Days, O, it proceeds like the Weedian, but sandblasted with unexpected Cosmic Requiem-era hues of Cathedral melancholy. The grinding title track is arguably the weakest piece which is surprising, & speaks to the 18/01 strength of the entire album, such as found in the paired final responsorials, the stoned Motörhead cohort march of Romulus and Remus, & the eerie breathing space 'fore the final charge of Warhorn, expert, expanding gradations within the band's specific palette.

Some bands I dig a smidgen more, some albums punch the emotional gut a bit harder, & this isn't their finest hour (too much speed, too little groaning, fucked-up turbulence), but if a stranger asked hey Randal what is metal? I'd probably pass them a High on Fire record, & this is ain't a bad place to start.

I can feel the wheel but I can't steer

The summer before the first video game war, yours truly was browsing at Peaches, later to become Coconuts then FYE then abandoned, ready to blow whatever hole-burning scratch my meager shit job threw in my pocket when the craziest, acid-fuck cover caught my four eyes & I was smitten before I heard a note. Filed in the metal section, so no Bell Biv DeVoe danger, Facelift lifted them; not tearing as thrash, but a creeping, painful rip. Pulling the Band-Aid slow always hurts more. Never getting as much love from the gatekeepers as other acts only added to the fuck you, plus it was & is good brooding & bike-riding music. Cue time travel: blind date success, the U of Akron, Clash of the Titans, far too early domesticity, & a sickly haunting curveball of solace in the form of Sap. 1992 was my K-T Boundary.

I want you to scrape me from the walls

North of the future Via Popearosa, I strolled to then fro from Disc Connection & its proprietor who bore an uncanny resemblance to a brutal Skynyrd or 38 Special roadie but was actually a swell guy beneath the perpetual shades. 55° that late September day the papers say, remember it being warm, was 82° as close as the 17th & hit the high 70s the following week. What's with the heat mapping of doddering memory? 'tis more than its cracked orange cover image. Heat births sweat which in turn births conscious acknowledgment of something awry, at least for me.

Here, i.e. then, I was 19 with no skills save a local Tecmo Bowl mastery & hashish-less heshering & I haven't expanded my repertoire much since, no loot past meager "work"-"study" [ed. note: verily, quote marks are apropos to both] scratch, & a new wife whose oven was bunn'd. Stupid adults aren't ready, so stupid kids sit behind the 8-, 9- & 10-balls. Despite having no first-, second- or third-hand experience with the ravaging stampede of white horses, Dirt became a security blanket.

To the non-idealist drowning in a sea of sorrow stupid with no island in sight though if there were it'd be populated by a cannibal holocaust, all is melodrama. Being predisposed to emotion over reason, like eating ten too many poem-stuffed pizza rolls with a cough syrup chaser & regretting the paralyzing numb when I should know better, Layne was singing my song. Now who's stupid, you query? Contraceptive failure rates exist as numbers on packaging & who hasn't always wanted to feel that special joy of existing as a statistic. What of Roe v. Wade, you inquire? A dozen nanoseconds, & nein. As with everything, until you're wearing the clogs, you ain't dancing. But this isn't about that divide & conquer bone so fuck off, but the whole I feel so alone/gonna end up a big ole pile of them. Like I said, melodrama, much preferable to the Sominex of coolly detached irony, & I haven't even hit on the still-omnipresent shadow: Brother, but not, from the aforementioned EP, chorus, first line.


Got me wrong

This was the original pressing with the proper song order, i.e. Down in a Hole as penultimate track. Such scene cred was important, I imagined, for those carousing & chording in a scene. When Bowling Ball Keith (liked to & looked like) & Rabid Mike whose woman done him wrong like a country music song [ed. note: no joke, crazy attracts crazy I guess] refused the shape of things to come, the former high school scene shrinks to two though feeling more like one, oft darkthroning before I knew what the hell that was. Candles pissed upon, proof of who's a fake. Exaggeration? For a time, just a time, the river was dammed indeed, comfort found in claustrophobic spite spackled over with its sonic expression & a predominantly forest green flannel & USC sweat pants [ed. note: beats me, so don't ask; wish I still had that Marijuana Pickers t-shirt handed down from gramps], the ensemble a walking vomitorium that I of course wore on my first day of student employment inside the Towering Slab.

I wasn't high on that chilly October afternoon, merely gorging on inattention to surroundings & others, a theme recurring to this day. Selfishness or safety? As with all things, a bit of both, & part of the problem.

Shocks to the system make one feel like a fly trapped in a jar, & those ghostly tracks plus the slow-burn death spiral on the self-titled a few years later sealed the hermetic deal. Frogs still pierces without remorse.

So, ten years later give or take, today in fact & the reason for this post, Layne's a syringe masquerading as a corpse, & ten after that, I'm still here, the bun out of the oven & into the frying pan-on-low-heat of misleadingly-labeled higher ed, just like yours truly was when Dirt first spun, a timely coincidence of marking out invented miles along an artificial road.

Looking back on all that, the causes of antisocial behavior, characters tuning in, dropping out as a tree's April buds (some have stood out, still do, & will because they're the rarest of creatures), wondering whose fault(s) was/is this spooling aftermath lip to silent lip, a thousand words for every one, more than one supporting or no, I've my suspicions which are probably less fault & more it is what it is, what shall I do, rooster snuffed yet animate?


If I would, could you?

To mope, to mope, sawed-off shotgun riffs choking dead meadows, fetal in the curling smoke of primal brooding, necks arcing, whipping, bending in the wind of dissolution, never breaking in time, this kind of crumbling takes time, rebuilding even longer. I have never felt such frustration/Or lack of self control. Aural scrawlings on repeat about drug addiction & darkness & the attendant figurative holes left after each step on a mine still harrow twenty years on in their hallowed comfort. There are other kinds of addiction, of that I'm versed well. So, desert island gaming at gunpoint, the works of this band. There can be no other choice, because there's always something to rebuild, preserve, & put off till later both home & abroad & what better fuel for hopeful lungs than an air of destruction?

We humans are storytellers, sure, & most are boring, mine included. But it's the only one I know well. & Down in a Hole is still the most beautiful song ever. Thanks, Layne & Co. Could've done it without you, but it would've sucked a little bit more.

Slow burn

Once upon a time, this began with a seemingly-left-field-though-not-as-much-as-you-think introduction to such serious business, the yeah-right apocalyptic stylings of an in-character Charles Nelson Reilly. But if we, & by we I mean me, don't look for an explanation each time there are symbolic volcanoes in vein, seven-headed dragons landing on, cracking the frame of our gas-guzzling rustbucket hearts, what, then?

Sympathy, in the earliest strain of meaning: A (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other. Obs. exc. Hist. or as merged in other senses. There are two reasons why we don’t talk about something: either it means nothing, or it means everything.

So we let others with that affinity speak, & what the fuck does the above collage have to do with the new Worm Ouroboros album?  

The thing: the letter-of-the-law heavy has mostly vanished. The vast, undulating faux-climax riffs found on Winter, Riverbed, pretty much all of the self-titled debut, are fewer, mythic towns keeping desert highway rumor alive. On Come the Thaw, Jessica Way & Lorraine Rath (with new skinsdude & rarities god Aesop Dekker) drive that horizon-defying road at three a.m. when there's nothing but the sound of constellations & an interior dark continually brought to the fore by the flap of an empty wrapper in the open breeze, the call of a stone flung by a rolling tire, the response of a breath. Or is it through treading the blinking neon grit of sleeping suburbia, a back laced with sweat in the uncomfortable black. Only Withered breaks gravel from nearly front to back with an evident power chord, but to say this album isn't heavy is to confess that you never listened. The spirit is colossus.

Take the opener, Ruined Ground. Expanse built upon the bassline, the mimetic beat of thought, and when the frost on your fields/has claimed its prize/after it's gone/I'll wait for you, alternately sweet & oppressive vocal interplay layer before sparse, plucked guitar drops like a rain that threatens to become a storm, dead as quickly as it was born.

Further Out, the weeds discard broken concrete for the field, the band, as so often, playing with dimension, the notes spaced further apart then returning, the recapitulations never obviously in motion, meandering with the hours because something happened. That undercurrent of grey flows throughout, discernible but out of reach like the mirage of a note you swear you heard. The hypnotic, bass-dominant taciturn throb of Release Your Days nevertheless grasps for a solace in the dark found when alone, among a crowd.

When We Are Gold truly pushes the low high, Rath's bass taking lead the way a pulse does when the only other noise is crickets, a passing car, shuffling feet. Doom jazz for heshers? Perhaps, but the finest moment might be the last, the denouement of the will-o-the-wispy Penumbra when the instruments fall away, all that remains being a vocal whose final measure shifts heavenward in a moment of longed-for hope. Hildegard could have sung this.

Through all six sprawling suites, the sense, not of simple, direct loss, but of distance, more emotional than physical, is palpable, the looking glass abstraction that mirrors the aural physicality of the album. Fingers are nimble, as are voices & the gently pointed lyrics, less Browning, more Dickinson, laced with folk sadness & weeping torch song bravado. Our apocalypses, & we all have them, are little. So sit back, take a drag, a sip of bitter, have a listen, & let the end burn slow. Living lives of quiet desperation, all is well, for here's the required elixir of quiet intensity to get us through the next moment, & the next.

Remember

If I'm being honest with myself, a rarity among rarities, few things (no thing, really, since I self-censor like the charlesdickens & versifying requires you the reader to hold a decoder ring unless there are spoilers) here are more nerve-wracking than reviewing music. It's not the falling back on too-worn tropes, words, phrases. That, I can deal with, as I do each time I jot down new lines in the black notebook, almost full. 99 cents at Marc's. Saying the same thing over & again just is, like the ascension & decline of the sun, people being assholes to one another, the miserable collective failure of Clevelandia sports. The difficulty? Describing sound?

Music equaling memory. No, not as simple as people & places & happenstance grafting themselves onto the notes, tendrils worming their way through the measures from the outside to nestle in a chord, to rupture without premonition Sigourney knows, remember when X said to Y, oh Z, I like root beer floats, too. Never that soundtrack shallow. If only. Nor always that quantifiable. To the mind's ear, sound is roaring ocean, so scream & plead & kick the cold sand all you want, there is only ocean, roaring. Details made imprecise by an emotional imprint. Think a ghost, a painfully bright nebula, a cloud beguiling & poisonous.

New albums mean new ones (or old, not reborn but reshaped, for no one lies to ourselves as much as we) receive their permanence, rooted to a place in the cranial landscape, free will an illusion, & that means both a blessing & a curse, forgive the triteness but naught else applies as the visceral roams the wanderer, possessing, & who can predict the aftermath?

Sounds incredibly dorky, I know, but my innards are neither postmodern nor pragmatic. Sometimes an album-adjacent gut spill is okay since all names have been changed to protect the innocent, statute of limitations, & so forth. This is fresh, thus, whew. Anyway, going song by song on Ariettes Oubliées... which I've listened to nearly nonstop since yester morn save a shade over three for sleep, feels fruitless. Les Discrets is an album band in the finest tradition & given that mastermind Fursy Teyssier is also a skilled artist responsible for band's visual presentation, why waste time with blatherings beyond the album's kernel being the Paul Verlaine poem of the title, the tiny aria re-imagined as a woman, hazy stories of a couple, transmitted mostly through the texts of vocalist/lyricist Audrey Hadorn, spooling away from that conceit.

Yes, there's nothing as immediate as Song for Mountains, & the palette is less busy on the surface, the textures layered more like one of those old topographic globes, richer browns & longer blues spinning sepia slow. It's hard enough unlocking the swirling processes of my own flailing in the dark, let alone those of someone else, so pardon the fluorescent-ruined photography, but observe,

listen,



& understand. What? That's for you. I'm gonna go pretend to headphone, maybe write some bad poems process new periodicals & think about writing some bad poems.

Everybody wants some, I want some too

From one theme to another; whether the weather's ever gonna blow snow? No, whether the new platter's a real go-getter. I consider(ed), & ain't the least bit bitter even if we understand that youthful exuberance doesn't extend to the physical 'cause man, when I got up this morning, Marley's ghost ain't got no creak on me, but then I remembered I've got new old VH to spin again & again, whee, exclamation point goes here.

Ever the Master of Ceremonial Schmaltz/Eddie Haskell/knave, Dave has wisely shifted his range down a tad (replicating the vocal histrionics of, say, On Fire, would draw-&-quarter the man's larynx), the band wisely culled over half the album from a few unused Gazzari's & Gene/WB demo chestnuts (plus 1984's Ripley, now the celebratory Blood and Fire) long known to us hardcores (the rip-n-tearing She's the Woman, the nut-kicking Bullethead), thankfully reworked a few others into more than just new titles (consider: tales of running from your lady friend's mean ole dad may work at 21, less so whilst in your 50s, so Big Trouble becomes the introspective Big River), & mined the same vein on the rest, wisely. Most work better than some undigested apple dumplings sadly missing that crucial slick lick, but fuck, can't win 'em all ask the Pats, & even if junior's grades ain't as great as Mad Anthony's in the harmony department, this is the brownest (if a smidgen too compressed) pop's recorded sound's been since, well, December 31, 1983.

&, oh, in case you wiseguys & gals forgot, the cat can motherfucking play. The songs & solos haven't been this punchy since, oh, guess. Songs, yes. A guitar mag wag once upon a time opined that Hot for Teacher is the double-stop riff Jimmy Page wished he wrote. Anything that good here? No, but then again, no one else has penned anything so unbreakable since. Eddie can rhythm & groove with the best, & Stay Frosty, Zeppelin & Ice Cream Man's beautiful love child, makes this fanboy squee with girlish glee manly man of manliness-nesse for that very reason.

Sodium chloride, eat it & smile. If Van Halen ain't your gig, ain't ever gonna be, & that's cool. Unless you're a mindless Beatlebot, we can still be friends. But if they are, please ignore the fact that I almost tossed off a fucking awful Jump-based pun right here & just go buy the better-than-expected thing right now. 

One would be a fool if he/she/it didn't spend a goodly amount of his/her/its time ingesting the mind-altering substance that is musick. What else you gonna do, Be Serious? You ain't changing jack, & in your aorta of aortas, you know it. So jam on some Bach, indie pop, funeral doom, or this fresh (funny, innit?) batch of brash-n-roll, put down the grim (I kid), try not to kill anyone (except that one guy) & recognize that, for a moment (or forty-five), everything is indeed pretty fuckin' cool.

Nostalgia

My great uncle Ralph once had a boat, which he could afford because he was a fireman for a very long time. Because he was a fireman for a very long time, he couldn't afford a big boat, but wee Randal & siblings (just one, actually) & cousins & their acquaintances various & sundry nevertheless got to oft motor (as passengers in hideous dayglo orange vests, natch) the north coast from perch-laden Catawba to mini-burg Port Clinton & back.

One fine spring day, Joe Carter, Cory Snyder & Chief Wahoo graced Sports Illustrated. They were twenty-three games out of first at the all-star break.

Still makes me chortle.

Staying absorbed in a Van Halen mixtape was just the opportunity one fine summer day needed to help refine my brilliant on-the-fly plan, the cosmic candy Erie whizzing 360°, the wind-whipped clouds & Kelleys' sun-smacked quarries starboard gifting further confident glosses. Come see your children, yeah, they're lighting up the sky/you won't recognize them anymore. So back on shore, my cousin pouring everyone some Cokes, & bolstered with a ballsy yet earnest confidence that came & went like a comet, I attempted to dazzle her two friends (especially the brunette) via performing a couple of card tricks. I'm guessing card tricks still break no deadly iceberg, though being an awkward, fourteen-year-old dork is an albatross heavier than any ill-conceived scheme. Comets are also known portents of doom, so I should have known better.

Mouse Island hermitage was momentarily considered.

But adolescent naivete, rocketing stop-start power chord bravado, & a truly refreshing beverage on a hot noontide prevented such rash decision making. En plus, no electricity meant no this:



Ain't no song sans that.



Catch as catch can't.

Yeah, blah humbug, heard every backhanded dis under the party-time arena rock G-type star from SST cultists to pop slicksters to art freaks. If metal was Satan, serial killers, nuclear war, naught but dear Mr. Fucked-Up Fantasy, a beyond beyond grasp choked with psychotic frost giants, unholy cabals of movers & shakers, the truly screwed-in-the-skull, not protest music but, in mythic terms, the world as is, fallen & most important, irredeemable, then Van Halen was something else, fast-talking three-ring grit, the wise, worldly elder brother who knew about players, prostitutes, & pimps; dealers, divas, & dregs; imbroglios, insouciance, & infidelity. & yes, the occasional boy-meets-girl heureux dénouement. Lastly, the brothers Halen hailed from the Netherlands, home of red light districts, pot, & Cruyff. This was heady stuff to a Parmastan kid.



Played like Johan, technical, sharp, beautiful, ruthless.

Strolling back to the islands (I feel like a poor man's poor Kennedy), let's get a little Spaceballs minus former roommates for a moment. Joined by the granddaughter of my great uncle's cottage ex-neighbor, the two of us partook of kicky footie (no keepie uppie, her control was far greater than mine) in the big field next to the roller skating rink, her blond ponytail swaying in back-to-back-to-back summers behind a face of dark, inscrutable mien, the whip smartest chick I knew for a good long while. Take that + claymation burgers + book geekery at Gem Beach + birdwatching [ed. note: Drop Dead Legs being particularly effective when heron hunting] & darkthroning (before I knew what that was) at Crane Creek, all rolled into a sublime three & a half minutes:



If you, gentle visitor, are noticing a theme, your reading comprehension membership is good for another year. But pigeonholing is for pigeons, & music is the finest of palimpsests, a new memory of an inside joke easily layered upon an accurate pass, a strong trap, a whiff of sand, that everything, for a moment, is pretty fuckin' cool.

There's a new Real Van Halen record next week, first in nearly three decades. Whether it's good or not doesn't really matter. Plus ça change, plus I'm still a dork, et plus those albums are still spun.



Dealers, divas, dregs, & that wistful crap 
we all wanna punch in the face but secretly love anyway. 
Don't worry, the odds are that tomorrow will suck more than today.

Handsome B. Wonderful's Thirty-Eighth Annual List of the Top Ten Rock Albums of the Year

New Muses before Quetzalcoatl returns pretty please with rawk on top.

Standard disclaimers apply. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery.

1. SubRosa, No Help for the Mighty Ones. There is space. In this space, vintage My Dying Bride & sludge, doomed, carry on a torrid love affair, letters written on degaussgoth'd violin from one to the other, the acapella House Carpenter (think Pentangle, who of course furnished a version), the sprawling, hauntingly crushing Attack on Golden Mountain, & everything in between, in that space. The vague desert rock/PJ Harvey punk-grease & spirituals both old & their own found on the demo & the debut have been transmuted into the gold of vastly more assured songwriting, & long, long lines, a collection of signs once bricolage in a yellowing box of difference now a united signifier of a unified disorder. Bleakness never sounded so sweet.

2. Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats, Blood Lust. If I'm a sucker for anything, it's smart chicks & riffs. This platter is missing the former, but the latter, Sweet Ingrid Pitt, a veritable toe-tapping, finger possession of air guitar infection, a confectioner's bloodied sugar straight with a chaser of acid-glazed old school spook. I wanna buy these blokes some cheap circus fare & a beer or ten, the expensive brands. Yeah, you heard me.

3. Rome, Die Aesthetik Der Herrschaftsfreiheit. Haven't had the chance to truly wander through these three volumes of thirty-six, check back in a few years, but I can tell you this: overachiever Jerome Reuter's whole raison d'être is still the confluence of art & people & the state & politics, & searching the bloody aftermath for a new that's always been old inside we just refuse to know whilst civilized by a suffocating plastic wrap, via recent folk aesthetics (The Spanish Drummer, Seeds of Liberation, You Threw It At Me Like Stones), hearkening-back martial reverb (Our Holy Rue, Dawn and the Darkest Hour). This unrepentant cynic will buy this highfalutin' bullshit over the vacuous bullshit of They every day with my last nickel. A fucking meisterwerk still unspooling.

4. Witch Mountain, South of Salem. Wonder no more at the question on everyone's mind: if Hendrix ditched both late-period preponderance of blues & the impediment of the coffin, deciding that his best course of action was to embrace necromancy & doom out whilst ditching the cavalcade of Janis Joplin clones for someone with actual soul in lieu of  histrionic drunken belchings, here's the answer.

5. Negative Plane, Stained Glass Revelations. I'm a little organ, short & stout, here is my pedal, here is my announce DRAMATIC PAUSE of your death, holy awkwardness, Batman, that almost rhymed, & you know this is meaty, beaty, big & Bigby's Crushing Hand but with the V, S, M sharing a tinge more sparkly-torch-dank cosmic tomb singe than the debut flesh-wrecker. Children, you know when & where to spin this, Robert Plant once crooned it.

6. The Wounded Kings, In the Chapel of the Black Hand. Shambling over crumbling early-era Cathedral molten chord flagstones, new voice Sharie Neyland's Marianne Faithfull in Hammer Horror dress though she probably wears jeans on stage like any of us would, no cleavagey slut bomb but classy mad priestess whose hymns flatten, but the claustrophobia breathes, Steve Mills & Alex Kearney exhaling sleepytime dread that gifts a second wind & who doesn't love being scared? Spooky fucking noochies, birds & blokes.

7. 50 Foot Wave, With Love from the Men's Room. Look man & manette, five free Kristin Hersh-led stocking stuffers released throughout the year, I said free, frisky & heavy & dramatic, from the Kyuss-kiss of Grey & Free Fall to the chunky bass-stomp of A Rushing, how the hell someone continues to spit out her best work in the newest half of a three-decade career is due to soul-selling or talent or a third thing.

8. Wolves in the Throne Room, Celestial Lineage. Bells & whistles in other hands are here even more seamless & violent than on Malevolent Grain: the discernible mountains & the mazy, leafy crunch below, isolation & its blasting catharsis, its purifying rituals. White noise about trees? So much more than that, a veritable soundtrack for solo darkthroning, the only communing going on is with everything but homo sapiens. Black metal is beautiful.

9. Loss, Despond. Zero guesses as to how this sounds. Gaze into trauma, & trauma gazes back, how many clocks has it been since we have last spoken, wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker, suicide is slow like existence. One suspends disbelief when facing the fantastic; here, disbelief gives up the ghost of resistance, willingly. Vast swaths of black, broken by unexpected shifts of tempo & even pitch, render time out of time & into an endless state of stasis; clock after clock yet nothing changes, ever.

10. Boss de Nage, II. The Great Frisco Freakout. Hypnocreep riff cycles alternating twixt black & gaze & spattered by howls of vituperative Baudelaire/Bataille homage. Not one of you would like it & I don't all of it since Georges ain't my most favorite of frogs but you should at least some of it because you're often angry at the disturbing parts of your cranium or plain angry at something, for reasons both apparent & not, pointless or not.  

11. Esoteric, Paragon of Dissonance. Variations on a theme, but when the theme is motherfucking arctic molasses hacked-out graveyard earth despair, I don't need to say another thing but I will, c'est-à-dire, you either get sixteen-minute marches funèbres or you don't, & if you don't, there's the dance floor.

NR. Opeth, Heritage. Whatever aspersions have been cast, they carry no weight with me, nor does hindsight exegesis. What does, comes from the band; what was unique has been lost. If Mr. Akerfeldt wishes to recreate a darker 1972 on this well-crafted slab, he's more than welcome to, & therein lies the dilemma: the style is one I've affinity for, thus its mention at all, but even the Opeth of Watershed is dead; it punches the gut much less often than any of their previous works. I shall of course continue to revisit &, perhaps, revise.

Gasp, not thirteen? As I shift from shiftless crypto-middle age into greyhood, I find my preferred aesthetic palette richer [I saw those eye rolls], wizened old sagedom & such, whilst fewer new things have hooked this meat though I don't know if these strains are related, mutually exclusive, or blood enemies, whether I've become pickier within each subsubgenre or it's the usual suspect of lazy or 2011 has simply been full of synaptic pathways drowning in existential dilemma, something I'd prefer not to admit in a public place though I suppose I just did.

I don't care 'cause if I get around to these, cool [see: 2010's self-titled debut from Worm Ouroboros, a monster not heard until the calendar turned], if not, cool [most of the rest], I can't give something a handful of spins & that be the end of it, a list of fifty is bullshit, you can't half-ass zoning out to art, so, sorry for now: Earth, Wild Flag, Blood Ceremony, My Dying Bride, Ulver, Amebix, Hate Eternal, Ulcerate, Old Silver Key, The Gates of Slumber, Hammers of Misfortune, Junius, Grayceon, Helrunar, Fen, Yob, Graveyard, Marduk, Moonsorrow, Nightbringer, Altar of Plagues, Bon Iver (just checking to see if you're paying attention), Finnr's Cane, Enslaved, Aosoth, Orchid, Serpent Venom, The Devil's Blood, & a bunch I found or had recommended but see the preceding.