Showing posts with label Sleaford Mods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sleaford Mods. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

My Top Albums of 2021

2021 was a weird year for music. I spent A LOT of time on albums that came out in previous years. So much so, I wasn't entirely certain I could pick ten records that had a huge impact on me. Some of these have ended up here despite my having not fully ingested them yet. That's okay, I always know the special ones the moment I hear them (for the most part).

Here then, are my ten favorite records released this year:


Jerry Cantrell - Brighten: This is the album I've been waiting for Jerry Cantrell to make for years, and its arrival serves as the beginning of a new role for him in relation to popular music. Cantrell has always been a sage, but previously he's been reluctant about it. Brighten shows him aging into this new position in a way so as to best take advantage of the role as a songwriter and musician. Brighten is big and filled with living reflections, a man looking behind him to better inform his path into the future. The songs hit hard, because, despite a decade between us, I can completely relate. Aging is rough, but you have to take what you can from it, use your mistakes and triumphs to make the future better. 

Also, bringing Greg Puciato into the fold earns JC enormous goodwill in my book. 
 

Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs: Spare Ribs hit at exactly the right time, in my opinion, to make it both extremely poignant socially and serve as the most idealized presentation of Sleaford Mods' sound to date (I say that at the risk of having Williamson dismiss my assessment as 'cuntish'). These guys have a social perspective that previously made their minimalist approach to songwriting feel a lot bigger than it might have seemed at first glance. With Spare Ribs, the music has caught up. 


Ministry: Moral Hygiene: I'm not entirely sure when the last time a Ministry album made it onto one of my year-end lists. Maybe 2007's The Last Sucker, because, while I've liked most of the band's releases, I haven't loved any since Sucker. Moral Hygiene, however, is a return to form for Uncle Al and his cohorts. This makes perfect sense, as who else could you expect to chronicle the shitstorm of the last two years into pulse-pounding, cynical Industrial Metal that perfectly represents where we are in relation to our planet and technology? 


Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments: How so many fans turned their backs on James Kent for this album blows my mind because to me, Lustful Sacraments is an evolution for him as an artist that makes 100% perfect sense. It's deep, layered with nuance and knows when to take huge swings - all of which land. Incorporating more traditional "band" elements is no doubt a turn-off to some old-school fans who want another Dangerous Days. For myself, I'm happy to go wherever Kent's artistic wanderlust takes him.


Mastodon - Hushed and Grim: Double albums almost never work, yet they remain a rite of passage for bands. Hushed and Grim is probably the most solid of the like to come out in three decades. There's no excess here, nothing is superfluous. Each of the songs helps to expand Mastodon's sound, while as an overall cycle, all fifteen tracks form a solid, coherent whole. Not a feat easily mastered, but then, Mastodon has become one of the best bands around. 


Odonis Odonis - Spectrums: After 2016's Post Plague ranked as my number one album that year, I've not even really liked anything Odonis Odonis has done since. Spectrums is a return to form for the group, running the line between industrial and electro in a way that feels unique to this particular band, thrilling and a little crazy.


Adam Egypt Mortimer - The Obelisk: Filmmaker Adam Egypt Mortimer conjures another dimension with The Obelisk. This is unlike anything else I've ever heard, and for that reason alone, it garners my praise. But moving beyond the stunning adventure of the album's occult soundscapes, everything about the textures AEM uses to construct this fit into my favorite types of music. Sparse beats, analog synth, brooding overtones and flitting, ghostly flourishes of voices and who knows what the hell else. This is another one of those records that opens a door I feel as though I've been waiting my entire life to step through.


Eldovar: A Story of Darkness and Light: I stumbled across this record by the combined talents of Elder and Kadavar with no previous knowledge of either band's work. I think I may have listened to an Elder album at some point, but I remember nothing about that previous engagement with them. This then was a complete surprise. From the opening notes of the record, an immediate comparison to Led Zeppelin came to me. Not because of the sound of the music, per se, but because of the timeless aesthetic applied here. I believe this is what some folks took to calling "Proto Metal" back in the 2010s, and despite a certain lack of clarity in that as a descriptor, I get it. There's also a healthy dose of Acid Rock. But the emphasis on melody, specifically intertwining vocal melodies, gives this one an ephemeral quality that is not nearly as important to rock musicians today as it was in the afterglow of the 60s. Eldovar seems to have learned the lesson of that far-gone era and transported it to the present day with this album.


King Woman - Celestial Blues: King Woman has always been about balancing Doom aesthetics with a certain Post-Metal reserve, and on Celestial Blues, they perfect it. As brutal as it is reflective, this one drones, beats, cuts, and soars in a way that I defy anyone to put a definitive genre tag on. The haunting overtures that ebb and flow throughout the course of the album's nine tracks show songwriting on a level that bodes great things from this band in the future.


Nun Gun - Mondo Decay: A last-minute HOLY FUCK moment thanks to Heaven is an Incubator's 2021 list, it makes perfect sense this would hit me as hard as it did seeing as Algiers owned both my 2015 and 2017 with their first two albums. Mondo Decay is a strange, sick record that's filled with sonic homage while still playing as an extremely new, unique sound. When I listen to this, I feel like I'm honing in on it from between white noise transmissions, like Harlan and Maxx finding the pirate transmissions in Video Drome. This is clandestine and important, and a little scary in the best possible ways.

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Sleaford Mods - Nudge it!


This is shaping up to be an early contender for album of the year just based on the strength of the three songs to drop so far! Pre-order HERE.




Watch:

Currently watching a Scandanavian show on Netflix called Equinox, another of what I've seen referred to as an 'Into the Woods' subgenre that originates with Twin Peaks and was perhaps defined/popularized most recently by Netflix's Dark. So far, Equinox is derivative, although it would appear to owe more to Black Spot than any other show. Maybe this genre is simply comfort food to me at this point, but K and I are hooked. Here's a trailer:





Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Paranoid
Faith No More - The Real Thing
Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs (the pre-released stuff)
Sleaford Mods - English Tapas
Howard Jones - Best Of
The Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Alice in Chains - Eponymous 

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

New Sleaford Mods!

 
From the forthcoming album Spare Ribs, out January 15th on Rough Trade. Pre-order HERE. Thanks to Mr. Brown for reminding me about this, as the Mods are always one of those bands that slide right off my radar when I'm not actively listening to them. 



'Cast

My perpetual co-host Chris Saunders and I recently started an all Horror comics and literature spin-off show under The Horror Vision umbrella. The first episode of A Most Horrible Library went up early Monday morning, with more to follow on a somewhat regular basis.

 
This show is kind of our way of going back to substituting a new show for where Drinking with Comics left off; I'm still hoping to resurrect that after things go "back to normal," as it is primarily a live show, however, I'm not really one who believes things will go back to normal anytime soon, so in the interim, we have this as an outlet to talk about all the great Horror-centric reading out there. A Most Horrible Library will release under the same stream as the regular Horror Vision show, so no need for a new subscription.



Watch:

After working our way a little over halfway through the fourth, apparently final "part" of Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina over the last two nights, K and I rounded out our Monday night with the first of two episodes HBO dropped yesterday of Alex de la Inglesia's 30 Coins.

Holy smokes - this episode had the best monster I've seen since The Ritual a few years back. Mind-boggling and totally terrifying. I'm really looking forward to watching this one weekly.


Currently watching 1993's Body Melt on Amazon Prime. I've been feeling run down and a back-ache/stomach pain combination's reduced my sleep to less than I need to function, so I took a re-set day from work and plan on doing pretty much nothing. I actually started trying to rewatch Adam Simon's Brain Dead, which is also on Prime, however, the transfer to digital looks like it came off a deteriorated, second-hand VHS, with that dreary old 4:3 aspect ratio that doesn't work on anything not filmed to specifically have that effect. In looking it up, I see that Shout/Scream Factory transferred Brain Dead a few years back, so I'm hoping that pops up somewhere; I've never seen Brain Dead in its entirety, and it's been on my list for a while.

So far, Body Melt's doing the trick, though, and while I'm rarely interested in what Vinegar Syndrome releases, there are exceptions, and this would be one of them, and they did a pretty good job cleaning this one up for the digital age.





Playlist:

Massive Attack - Mezzanine
Orville Peck - Pony
Soundgarden - SOMMS
Them are Us Too - Remain
Thou - Rhea Sylvia
Mrs. Piss - Self Surgery
The Blues Brothers - Briefcase Full of Blues
Muddy Waters - Electric Mud
Turquoise Moon - The Sunset City
Goatsnake - Black Age Blues
Goatsnake - Trampled Under Hoof
MF Doom - Operation: Doomsday
Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris
Van Halen - 1984
Iress - Prey
The Plimsouls - Everywhere at Once
Belong - October Language
David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Freaks)




Card:

First spread of 2021:


The Queen of Swords is definitely a defining force in my life, or at least has been over the last year or two. One of the reasons I do all this logging is so I can look back through the blog and track influences and the like, and when I search Queen of Swords, I see it came up five times in 2020. Thus, reading in the conventional Past-Present-Future positions, we see the Queen of Swords or the Airy Part of Intellect, ie sharpened perception as the Present and the Idea as a concise statement fortified by Knowledge (Past; 6 of Cups) and the balancing of the many tiers of that Intellect/Idea as a challenge to be overcome (Future; 10 of Wands) in the near future.