Music Roundup 11/30/22

I’m not going to write about how I was busy again this week because who cares.

This was one of those weeks where I was trying to listen to a lot of metal and it really wasn’t clicking, it happens like once every two months. It’s weird, I’ve been listening to metal since I was in high school, but I still have these moments and have this gut fear that maybe I’m not a real fan or maybe I don’t like it any more. Which would be kind of a bummer, 3/4s of my clothes are metal T-shirts. But it was one of those weeks and I decided instead of forcing myself to listen to death metal and make myself like it I would just listen to jazz instead. And it was really nice. And then I sort of naturally fell back into listening to metal and found some new music that I’m really enjoying. It seems obvious, but try something different every now and then, even if you don’t like it, it might make you like what you already like even better.

Anyways.

I LIKE TO SLEEP - Sleeping Beauty

I’m going to be honest, the more I think about this album the more I think that there isn’t anything particularly special, its just really fun and enjoyable. It’s in this vein of squawky and funky Norwegian jazz that has produced some of my other favourites, namely Elephant9 and Krokofant. It’s fairly easy listening, but also takes some cool twists and turns, I really enjoy the zany and unhinged feeling the organ brings into it. Songs like Broken Record even go kinda off the rails in a way that oddly reminds me of that Effluence record we were talking about last time.

Robert Diack - Small Bridges

This is just really pleasant. Sort of mathy jazz rock-y stuff, this album kinda goes everywhere and does everything. It can be driving and energetic, but it can also really stretch out and create this glittering sense of space. Great drumming and funky lead guitar.

Frank Bretschneider and Giorgio Li Calzi - Zero Mambo

While I quite enjoyed the previous two entries, this was the first one that really made me go oh shit that’s really cool, that’s something I haven’t heard before. This is a collab between electronic artist Frank Bretschneider and trumpeter Giorgio Li Calzi and it is really quite exciting. Bretschneider does a really interesting job of sort of stretching and warping Calzi’s trumpet around these soundscapes he’s made, with glitchy beats or ethereal textures, to great effect. The title track is crazy and bouncy, In the Dark feels like a jazzy take on a song from System Shock 2 and the closer, How I’m Feeling Now is serene and graceful. Just a cool mix of sounds and ideas, I only wish there was more music. One of those releases that makes you excited about music again, reminding you of the possibilities that there are, just waiting to be explored and put together and experimented with.

Ulcerate - The Coming of Genocide

In general its cool to go back through the discography of a band you like and listen to them in their infancy through demos, but with a band like Ulcerate it feels even cooler. If you know Ulcerate you’ll know that they are known for their bombastic and bleak death metal, awash with dissonance. They excel at this blisteringly fast pace where drummer Jamie St. Merat switches effortlessly between blast beats and double bass at the exact same tempo. They aren’t bludgeoning, they’re almost soothing, there is a very smooth ebb and flow to their music that they were still working on when this was released. This a compilation of demos from 2003-2004, and it’s very cool to hear them playing more like a contemporary death metal band, sounding a lot like early Hate Eternal or Deeds of Flesh, but with a clear flair for the dissonant. Very cool listening for someone who enjoys this band as much as I do.

The Senseless - The Floating World

This album is maybe my biggest find so far, when I said that the Bretschneider album made me feel like there was so much exciting art waiting to be made, this is like a bastardization of what I meant. I’ve thought about it, and my initial impulse was to sort of laugh at the album and how weird it is, but now I have to admit that I have a grudging respect for it. I feel like before I can get into how odd this album is I have to first say that this album features Leon Macey on the drums, who is like the guy who plays guitars and drums in Mithras. If you don’t know, Mithras released what might be like the greatest death metal album ever made in 2016 called On Strange Loops, which probably deserves it’s own write-up. Suffice to say that Leon Macey is a genius of death metal, which is why his appearance here is so odd, yet so fitting. This album is a unique expression of late 2000’s and early 2010’s cultural weirdness, it’s about how work sucks and society feels cold and dispassionate, which, yeah fair enough I guess. Setting this message to the regal and immense performance of Leon Macey, which is trying to both be overpowering technical death metal with some alt rock sensibilities is genuinely bizarre. It’s really hard to put in to words, it just feels like these guys should be wearing jeans and Muse shirts, then playing like Vitek Kiełtyka drum parts. Just listen to the beginning of Amazing Pain, what on earth is happening. I genuinely don’t have the vocabulary to describe what is going on, all I can do is shake my head in awe of the cultural signifiers that are colliding here, and try to point other people towards it.

I’m going to leave you all with a choice cut from this week, I had no idea that Decapitated released a live album from back when Vitek was still in the band, so you know I had to check out Spheres of Madness live. It’s as fucking insane as you would hope.