2019 Albums of the Year; 40–31

40. Gideon — Out of Control
Five Finger Death Core

The enjoyment of the style of this music comes directly from my love of what used to be called numetal. There were middle aged dudes who were still trying to be in bands, most of them tuning their guitars down, and some of them with things to say about SoCiEy and their own personal MaDnEsS, but who couldn’t really sing, so instead they rapped and screamed their way through the pain. It grew up and evolved over time, and whether bands will admit it or not, it definitely influenced a lot of the heavier bands that came up through the metal and anything-core scenes years down the line. This record takes what those bands laid down in the groundwork along with some of metalcore bands that came out in the late part of last and early part of this decade. This kind of stuff is so pleasing in its familiarity on so many levels. There is some guitar play that takes me directly back to hearing some of the stuff that Korn was doing on Follow the Leader alongside some of the more nuanced and ambient parts that Misery Signals employed on Mirrors. If the time and place is right, I’m all about this album. Harmonics LEFT AND RIGHT. Even turntablism, bro!

Check Out: Take Me

39. Big Brave — A Gaze Among Them
Fatal Apocrypha Hymns

I love the tribal nature of this record. The vocals are on the same level of some kind of chant. There is a possession in place, as if the words are being summoned out of her by some ritual. Musically, you can close your eyes and be transported to a different plane, some kind of seance between the living and the dead. I can envision the eyes rolled back into lead singer Robin Wattie’s skull, bridging her between a place of ether, calling the multilayered voice of beings and shapes we’ve never known, sending us a message of urgency and portent. I sense an evil here, one that’s easy to get lost in, to let a simmering vibration become your vehicle, to become loosened by it all and detach, to disassemble yourself and hum within this pulsing cylinder. Fantastic record to get lost in.

Check Out: Sibling

38. State Faults — Clairvoyant
Screamo From the Edge of Civilization

The urgency on this record is a thickly rising water line, one that laps up at the dock while the tide rushes, one that tosses the boats that are tied to the ballasts and leaves them torn and wrecked on the nearby shore. With the opening track having a rad blend of tightly wound screamo which leads into some almost post-rock inspired dreamy guitars, this album high line revs and sends you spinning and careening into a china shop. These songs aren’t for anyone. They don’t feel like they’re here to fit into a niche or appeal to any particular set of kids. They feel like they begged to be written, begged to be released. The same quiet and roiling demand of the One Ring to Rule Them All: voiceless and omnipotent. A sense of wildling knowledge shines behind the savagery here. Screams are belted at the velocity of rogue debris raining from space, and there’s something truly awe inspiring about the rawness of it, the sheer godlessness there. It feels untameable. In a lot of ways, this album reminds me a lot of the same energy that The Fall of Troy was tapping into, but without the schizophrenic guitars.

Check Out: Sleeplessness

37. Daughter of Swords — Dawnbreaker
Warm Like the Garden State Soundtrack

‘Sunbeams’ is the first word that comes to mind when thinking about how to convey how this album feels. It’s folky and smells like the outside air during the month of June, slowly creeping up on summer and soaked in the easy heat of spring. I see mountains and the coast and rolling wheels down an interstate free from traffic or finite destination. Alexandra Sauser-Monnig’s gentle and breezy voice are liberating and fresh as water from a spring. The guitar floats almost supernaturally along in the distance, and when it needs to make itself known, it does so in the shape of nostalgia and home, like the smell of used books and the joy of getting mail from an old friend.

Check Out: Gem

36. Slauson Malone — A Quiet Farewell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen
Lean Dreams

This is a record that taps deeply into the imagination state, one that creates horizonless open spaces filled with television communication as digestible airwaves, vocal repetitions that replace the hum of traffic in an inhabited city of your mindscape. Somewhere between audio street poetry and lucid coma vibe, the production of the record brings you extremely close to the recording equipment, to the analog sounds, to the whirring tape of VHS and cassette to the point where these tracks feel less like songs and more like different planes of an altered reality, a hip-hop influenced voice calling you back from the brink. In a way, this reminds me of all of the great elements of Kanye West’s introspective interludes spread out across time and space.

Check Out: (Fred Hampton’s Door Into Farewell Sassy) Na

35. Hildur Guðnadóttir — Chernobyl
Nuclear Internal

The inclusion of this record has a lot to do with just how much I absolutely loved the HBO series. It’s hard to separate the two, especially when one so deeply resonated with me. The sounds here resonate with images, not only from the miniseries, but also from images from the aftermath itself. These tracks each feel more like haunted highways than they do songs, each of them sprawling out widely before you like insufferable nuclear vistas. There is a lot of Reznor here, and a lot of industrial darkness. Lots of factory dread and harrowing uncertainty. A phenomenal atmospheric listen, one that has its own skeleton, deep and disintegrating.

Check Out: Corridors

34. Tool — Fear Inoculum
Grandfathers of Alternative Metal

It was hard not to get into both levels of excitement for this record. On one hand, this was the band that I discovered through a lifelong best friend, whose first three albums are tattooed forever on my mind and changed the way that I knew music could be written and explored. This is the band that helped me understand that tracks aren’t just songs. However, there was also the ironic excitement as well, the kind that almost grinningly dared the band to release new stuff after a Chinese Democracy level hiatus, with a wild amount of pretention from their front man along with silence and mystery from the rest of the band as well. As new songs started to come out from them by way of leaked live footage, it was becoming more and more clear that this was going to be a legitimate return to BOTH what we expect from the band, the same soul and spirit that Tool had always been known for, but also with a more mystic and trance-like approach to the music. If I wasn’t aware that this band was for stoners in my naive past, I am tenfold more aware of it after listening to this record and going back through their more recent library. Some of the builds are utterly remarkable, towering massively into a helter skelter sky, brilliantly bringing back some of the most confounding emotions, much reminiscent of what made them brilliant in my past lives, simply without the aggression. This is a fantastic album to zone into, to let yourself jump into a cockpit and ride through, mind’s eye completely open. I found that trying to make it this a background record simply did not translate to the greatness that it’s capable of. But when I let it become the entirety of my reality, absolutely stunning.

Check Out: 7empest

33. Minors — Abject Bodies
Stockholm Syndrome

The deep and throbbing roll of Minors’ dark work is intimidating. It comes on you like a tsunami, swelling over minutes and minutes and it simply will not stop. It consumes what it touches, and it covers the complete horizon. It’s claustrophobic. The songs make you feel like you’re clawing for shelter in a whirling darkness. Only sound can aim you, and it’s the same sound that’s holding you down. There’s something to be said for how the album allows all but one of its songs to build over time from two minutes to almost seven minutes. It takes a while for this one to come together as a cohesive sound, but as its captive you begin to feel out the pace and its routines. Its sounds begin to form language. Its grip begins to form embrace.

Check Out: Erode

32. 3TEETH — Metawar
The Crow Makeup Industrial Metal

This album is a direct manifestation of the type of music I remember appearing on the soundtrack for Spawn. Same time period as well. It’s got a little bit of that Marilyn Manson snarl in the vocals, a little bit of that gravelly delivery a la Dope, a little bit of the overdramatic glam sound like Orgy. I can’t believe this came out in 2019. While the vocals are a little bit melodramatic for me, the real shine on this record is the industrial numetal style of the music itself. It’s heavy, it’s staccato and aggressively post-produced. Lots of influence from Mick Gordon a la the Doom soundtrack and lots of Fear Factory influence.

Check Out: President X

31. Red Hearse — Red Hearse
The Jack Antonoff Hook Machine Continues

No better way to put it than this: this is the record that Justin Timberlake should have written next. The hooks, the vocal passages, the crunchy electronic R&B beats, all of it points to a record that JT would have done in his absolute prime as a musical artist. Now the mantle has officially been passed. Antonoff continues to write absolutely brilliant pop music, and the voice of Sam Dew is a dream. Like Nate Ruess, but with fathoms more soul. And while this may sound a little bit like it’s trying to make it sound vapid and meaningless, I actually mean quite the opposite: many of these songs sound like some of the most timeless, eternal commercial jingles. Great record.

Check Out: Born to Bleed