Records of the Year, 2023; Honorable Mentions II.
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Indigo de Souza — All of This Will End
A Scrapbook of Panoramic Ideas
This is a great blend of confessional and raw songs, each its own color of gem. There is a lot to be bared on each record, but some of them lean closer to the fire than others. Songs like ‘Not My Body’ hold your hand, they make eye contact, they guide you through the process, while tracks like ‘Always’ leave all the blood on the tracks with messy and disjointed verses being matted together with heavily distorted guitar strumming. It’s a whole different attempt at bringing you into the divulgences of a woman still trudging her way through the process of sorting out exactly what she wants from this planet. You’ll find a little bit of everything here which is such an exciting thing to see an artist reckon with. Not trying to find their voice, but instead letting every color of it shine through the prism.
Check Out: Parking Lot
Pupil Slicer — Blossom
For Whom the Flower Weeps
I had the pleasure of seeing Between the Buried and Me live this year. It was the first time in over a decade that I’d even thought about them (outside of ‘Selkies: the Endless Obsession’) and even longer since I’d thought about listening to them. They were performing their record The Parallax II: Future Sequence front to back. I didn’t know what to expect, really, but I expected some wild tech metal. The thing I did not expect was a singular vision of an artist who had constructed not only an aural presentation, but also a visual to go alongside it, a composition so taut and finely constructed that I quickly forgot that this was aggressive music, instead seeing it as a style entirely its own. On Blossom, Pupil Slicer feels like they’re making that same kind of stride in creating an entire work, including the finish on the frame. It’s a dark and aggressive record filled with ambient and shimmering background work, thrashing guitars, and guttural vocal pounding. Within those centerpieces, they take the time to emote as musicians. Bass solos flack away amidst a tenuous atmosphere. Seraphic vocals haunt the buried channels. As with any operatic creation, some portions stand on their own while others feel better sewn into a broader tapestry. Again, this record was written to be a big piece as opposed to a band collecting a dozen songs that they worked on over a couple of years, so it was meant to be taken as a whole. I think this is the record that will prove that Pupil Slicer is ready for a bigger budget and more time in the studio and with some polish and some shine in the studio is primed to make a brutal classic akin to the bands that came before them.
Check Out: Terminal Lucidity
ANOHNI — My Back Was a Bridge For You to Cross
Contemplation
Anohni’s voice seems to come from some pocket of nowhere. Like it isn’t coming from within their body, but instead is being controlled like some external entity. It emanates. It wields its own gravity. There’s a pure woodwind tone about it, something so clean and raspless. This record pulls from a lot of different genres musically, never quite being able to be labeled within one genre, and a lot of that comes from the versatility of Anohni’s energy. This record is raw, dirty, sometimes evoking the same spirit of the underground delta blues. There’s something about the guitars that snarl as if pawed with gnarly fingers. This is honest. This is haunted. The entire piece sounds like a lament. A track from this record was one of my favorites of the year (‘Why Am I Alive Now?’) but there are so many moments in this record that captivate.
Check Out: Rest
Allegra Krieger — I Keep My Feet On the Fragile Plane
A Singular Light
I originally wanted to say that there’s a dreamlike quality to this record. I think, though, it feels more like a sleeplike quality, one where reality hasn’t quite passed under the veil to a different place. These songs are raw life portraits in HD, but snapshots of the things just past the subject. Over their shoulder. Tucked in the corner. Smeared or blurred in the foreground. The specifics of Krieger’s lyrics wedge themselves into the folds of my brain, magnifying her experiences into these ornate slices of Real Existence. It’s a solitary sound that comes from this record, just a voice and an instrument, rarely if ever going beyond just the two, and that makes it all the more tangible, all the more personal.
Check Out: I Wanted to Be
Covet — Catharsis
The Enormity of Escapism
This record will take you somewhere. It feels soaring and ethereal. It can sound like the guitar work itself is a spacecraft that’s leaving the ground and propelling you elsewhere. I got lost in this record a couple of times, allowing the music to swell and roll around me. While guitar solos are typically not my thing, there are ways that this record uses expansive, cerebral, and highly colorful use of the instrument to change a lot of the perception of that for me. It’s watercolor. It’s animated. It’s effluvient. It takes you. And where that place is rests entirely on the listener. There are times when I see the outer galaxies, times when I see the inner depths of our oceans, times when I see the Earth itself in wide-angle panoramic shots. There are many times that this record becomes an external experience, lifting you beyond it, collecting you in its hover. As with any great composer, the vision here is complete from the onset. It was a work that floated in the air until the band was able to find it, channel it, to give it form. But the transmission was sent far before.
Check Out: bronco
Judiciary — Flesh + Blood
Shred, Baby.
Bro, this is just dumb and fun as fuck. It’s a metallic hardcore record that sticks itself in the breakdown gear, lines the transmission with metal leads and churns and pistons away. I had this record initially weighted super high on the list, and the main reason above all else is that it was just such a satisfying experience. It had This Is Hell style riffs influenced by thrash metal bands, it had Champion style straightforward chugging and dance parts, and it had Hatebreed style vocals that wanted to scream into my face as loud as I wanted to scream into theirs. These dudes want to beat the fucking wheels off of a live set, and this record is just to get the boys ready to shadowbox their way through the prelims until the band shows up at a VFW Hall near them. Mean as fuck, stripped down and uncompromising, this is such a barebones, rudimentary knucklefest. Something about the production, about the pure metal solos make it feel like it comes from the dead heat of the 90s, which is not a complaint. God, this record just tears you apart, from the head down. This is one of those albums that you put on in your car, turn it up, and drive 9THOUSAND mph down the freeway. This one is over before you know it, and to be honest, even while trying to focus on the record’s merits, I found it hard to know when one song jumped from one to the next. It was one blistering, stapling tremor without pause, without refrain. This one drinks you alive. An album you stand back and watch it burn, feel the heat.
Check Out: Stare Into the Sun
Feist — Multitudes
Refractions
To start: I don’t know if it’s right to say that certain albums are only good if you can listen to them on headphones. I’m sure this is the case sometimes with super high-fidelity artists whose entire production and mixing labors have been spent tucking little nuggets of aural delights behind the very large and very intricate sounds they’re making. Ultimately though, there are records that don’t truly allow you to see what the artist’s vision is without getting right up to the bars, face mashed up against the cage, so that you can experience and feel the feedback from the thing that they’ve made. I believe Feist’s record is just that. On its surface, it’s a delicate, melancholic album that highlights a lot of really beautiful vocal work, very clear that harmonies and the ways that she knows the multifaceted aspects of her voice can work as a piano to bring chords in gorgeous marriages of sound. But with this record, when you get closer, when you get into the small spaces, it exposes chemical reactions. There are branch-chain effects you can hear from the sparse instrumentation that funnel outward into infinite space. There are echoes and auditory caverns that present themselves as endless tunnels through the sonar. Notes exhibit ghosts. When I first heard this record, it grew on me slowly, but as I listened more and more it became almost like an exhibit I could revisit, a virtual location I could span and explore. It reminded me of an album that almost felt more like an art project in 2006 by a band called Anathallo. The record is called Floating World and while there are elements of ‘song’ involved, much like this, the more interesting aspect of the piece is the depth of it and the fact that within these structures, there are dimensions yet uncovered. Feist’s work here feels like she acts as a beacon, a way to break through a glassed dome into colors, sounds, and things that we’ve yet to come across. Within this record are, indeed, multitudes.
Check Out: I Took All My Rings Off
The Acacia Strain — Failure Will Follow
The Nothing
The Acacia Strain made two records this year, both with the same general heft, weight and grit. In some ways, the two couldn’t coexist on the same canvas. Step Into the Light is a bit more of their traditional metalcore style and still holds on to some of the heaviest and most miserable sounds you’ll hear this year. But it was this one, Failure Will Follow, which held my gaze for far longer. Three tracks and nearly forty minutes long, this one celebrates the band’s ability to sludge out utterly taxing riffs, to weaponize sloppy breakdowns, and then captivate the listener with slime and muck. It’s so heavy, so slow, so gnarly. If I’m being honest, this one requires a little bit more focus to get through, a little bit more ‘commitment to the bit’ wherein you need to use this record as a way to enter the fog, to let your mind detach into the darkness and mire in the wicked soup of how black and heavy this music can be. It passes through many portals, shifts through many forms, prophesies many ends. The guests across the record are interesting as well, summoning vocals from Dylan Walker, iRis.exe and Ethan McCarthy, all of which feel like they’re bringing in spirits from some kind of dark seance. This is a different kind of ‘concept album’, instead of Telling a Story, doing more work in terms of Creating a Setting. I can picture places that sound like this record far easier than I can imagine the people whom it represents. I think if the Swamps of Sadness from The Neverending Story had a backdrop, this would be the music. I do understand that on some level, the barrier to entry is the sheer endurance you have to have to ‘enjoy’ a record like this, as it’s not as easy just to toss on a track and sit back to engage with it. The way the dark light starts to rise and shimmer towards the end of the album as the vocals dirge and reprise is such an excellent set piece for the sinister mood they’re trying to create, an obsidian glow taking over the entire vibration until nothing is left but the fading hum.
Check Out: Basin of Vows
Harms Way — Common Suffering
Dumb Shit
It’s no secret that a properly written album that showcases a pummeling collection of riffs, double bass and breakdowns is going to frack its way into my gamey heart. Harms Way tunes their guitars down, straps on the mean mug and beats down their instruments for a little over a half hour and when the dust is cleared, I take off the headphones and say, “fuck yeah.” It really is just that simple. It’s a little shitty to let them burn their candle with all of their heart, and then for me to mold the wax in my hands into a mound the size of a softball which I simply wail at a brick wall and call it a day. But I have to say, trying to overcomplicate this is exactly the type of thing that makes a mean, nasty little record like this get spread too thin and turns it into something else. This is a violent act of brute force with the widely spreading collateral damage leaving a gnarled path in its wake. You will know within seconds of starting this record if it’s for you or not, as most of the record dons the same coat of arms. There are a couple of exceptions that peak out, still cloaked in the characteristic darkness, but adjusting the voice, adjusting the angle. ‘Undertow’ welcomes King Woman into the throng, and the final track ‘Wanderer’ is a little bit more of a dizzying comedown from the aggression, sounding a little something like peak Alice in Chains. A brutal, primal record. Love it.
Check Out: Heaven’s Call
