THE DEVIL'S MONTH: August 2024
Rounding up some of the finest releases of the previous month - now including Andy's picks too!
Summer is dying fast, but great records keep coming. August was a festival/holiday month for many, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t great slabs of wax to still pick up (and as usual, our brothers in arms Mondo Negro will provide a great many scratch to your record-buying itch, go visit them now!) - in fact, it has surprisingly been one of the strongest months of 2024 in terms of quality. It’s a motley bunch, this one, from Nick Cave to Spectral Wound, not to mention the always unexpected but always delightful rowdy bunch that our beloved Andy Cairns also brings out of his basement every month, but what connects all of this wildly different music is the utmost quality of it all. Expect a few of these to land in the top 20 come the end of the year. Maybe. Or maybe not, because all the other months were awesome and made us think the same thing so we’ll end up with 73 records to fit into the top 20. We’ll see.
Dark Tranquillity
Endtime Signals
(Century Media Records)
A new Dark Tranquillity album might not generate the enthusiasm it once did across the metal world - this is, after all, an absolutely established band, long comfortable with their own sound and personality, which is, on a superficial analysis, basically just adding to their catalogue by now. Those of us who have kept our full attention, however, know that even within their own style, the Swedes have always been a restless, shifting entity, always looking for the nuance that will make each album its own little universe, and that willingness to keep pushing it, to keep caring about what they do like they’ve only just begun doing it, is what has set them apart over the years as one of the very best. Any initial cause for concern over the line-up changes of the last few years, which have left frontman Mikael Stanne as the only founding member and keyboardist Martin Brändström as the only other long-standing musician (since 1999 already) in the band, are easily dispelled after a couple of minutes. Not only do Dark Tranquillity still sound very much like themselves, but they actually sound rejuvenated, energised and hungry like they were in the 90s, when they released immortal landmarks like ‘The Gallery’, ‘The Mind’s I’ or ‘Projector’, whose tunes still very much kick ass in any playlist of today. Much more dynamic and instantly appealing than the sort of average ‘Moment’ - a bit of a let-down after the brilliant ‘Atoma’ and overall perhaps their weakest record alongside 2007’s uninspired ‘Fiction’ -, ‘Endtime Signals’ offers just about anything you’d pick as your favourite Dark Tranquillity staple. The uptempo, heavy hitters, the more Stanne-led anguished slow-burners (‘Wayward Eyes’, ‘Not Nothing’, and above all the outrageously beautiful closer ‘False Reflection‘), and the epics that combine everything such as ‘Our Disconnect’, which despite coming in as the ninth song, ends up as the centrepiece of the album in a way. Mikael Stanne might have other outlets for his talents these days, crooning his heart out in the brilliant Cemetery Skyline and roaring like a death metal maniac in Grand Cadaver, but as this record amply proves, Dark Tranquillity is still very much alive and looking ahead, after all these years. Where death is most alive, even, we’d say if we were feeling punny. Right?
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Wild God
(PIAS)
‘Song Of The Lake’ immediately rings out as a typical Cave opener, expansive and expressive, a ‘Song Of Joy’ / ‘Do You Love Me?’ / ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ / ‘Wonderful Life’ sort of wildcard, running most of the gamut of moods as if to prepare you for everything that’s coming. Much has been made of this being a “happy” album, but even if the centrepiece of it is a fantastic song called ‘Joy’ - funnily enough, bringing to mind only for its title the aforementioned ‘Song Of Joy’ from ‘Murder Ballads’, which is very far from “joyful” in any way, even if Joy is also a person in that one, but I digress - but as Cave himself, who has had his (un)fair share of loss and heartbreak in the past few years, has discussed (for example, here), “joy” is a very complex word. It’s not happiness, and it can be seen as essentially another form of suffering. So don’t expect a feast of immense delight, but do expect a few more contrasting shades than the last couple of offerings from the great man and his Bad Seeds cohorts. While more than just that, of course, both ‘Skeleton Tree’ and ‘Ghosteen’ also partially represented two different stages of mourning, and while loss is still very much a part of ‘Wild God’ (for example, the lovely Casio+autotune ballad, which could have been a ‘The Boatman’s Call’ b-side, ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’, is about Anita Lane and it’s as heartbreaking as it is elatingly beautiful), the spectrum is much wider and in some way a sort of return to the wide-eyed, equally wise and naive, emotionally all-encompassing approach that some of the older records have so brilliantly displayed. From the incandescent energy of the title track, the euphoric gospel of ‘Conversion’, up to the ‘Breathless’-like pastoral wonder of ‘Frogs’ (even if, this time, the frogs are jumping in a very urban gutter, but still), ‘Wild God’ is, with its love and death and loss and joy and freedom and pondering and contemplation and impulse, a little like life itself: exhausting, unexpected and ultimately a thing of wonder.
Ray LaMontagne
Long Way Home
(Liula Records)
I’m all for singer/songwriters to explore and do whatever the hell they feel like - in a way, at the heart of it, they’re genreless musicians, not necessarily tethered to any elusive set of style rules like most bands unfortunately are, so why not take advantage of that? And it was clear from the beginning, with his bone-shakin’, heart-breakin’ 2004 debut 'Trouble’ (twenty years already! Where is time going?), that Ray LaMontagne would not sit tight and keep repeating anything. Having said that, however, after years of excursions into full on folk-with-a-band, Pink Floyd-like psychedelia and other adventures, it was nice to see Ray return to a certain melancholic minimalism with his very raw previous album, ‘Monovision’. It felt like coming back home after years spent abroad, a certain comfort and a certain gained wisdom, and a newfound appreciation for the roots and origins that served as the starting point all those years ago. While not an absolutely direct continuation from ‘Monovision’, ‘Long Way Home’ (which, as a personal note, shares a title with an old blog of mine, named after one of my favourite songs ever, so I have to say it started conquering me even before pressing play) does share that comfort, that contentment, with its predecessor. Which in no way means that it’s a lazy album, or even one that doesn’t try to advance things artistically - it does, but with a natural chill that is very much welcome these days. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome like so many others, with nine songs in 31 minutes leaving you ready to hit play again soon as it’s over. But yeah, not everything has to be wild experimentalism, and even the 70s Memphis soul dude that occasionally comes out of Ray that is obvious in opener ‘Step Into Your Power’ will draw an instant smile out of you. From then on, ‘Long Way Home’ goes its own way, at its mostly languid pace, evoking as much Neil Young as Van Morrison here and there, and it even gets away with a song about California, which the world most definitely doesn’t need one more of, but we’ll open just this one exception for Ray. He deserves it.
Spectral Wound
Songs Of Blood And Mire
(Profound Lore Records)
Steadily, firmly, every three years since their ‘Terra Nullius’ debut in 2015, Spectral Wound emit a stark reminder of why they are one of the most essential black metal bands of this century. Interestingly, they have achieved this post of absolute royalty not by revolutionising the genre with some unseen take on it, without any kind of radically different imagery or need to shock in any way - essentially, to be cynical about it, without a gimmick to catch attention and set them apart. ‘Songs Of Blood And Mire’ is yet another stepping stone in their glorious journey, once again heightening the level from its predecessor, the already pretty amazing ‘A Diabolic Thirst’, simply by being just really, really good at what they do. And when I say good, I mean good - as in, better than anyone else. There’s lots of little details that you’ll pick up with repeated listens (like, that staccato bit around 4:20 on opener ‘Fevers And Suffering’ where the guitars just cease for a few seconds several times, leaving only the drums and screams to carry the song - that part alone will be enough to set any audience on fire), but ultimately it boils down to the fact that they have the coldest, most thickly atmospheric tremolo riffs, the fattest devil-may-care grooves, the most expressive, if not necessarily varied, wild beast of a vocalist, the coolest lyrics (can you imagine anyone else getting away with having a song called ‘Aristocratic Suicidal Black Metal’ and keeping a straight face? “We are lost, profligate and wasted / Ravished and misspent / Against laws human and divine / We rot in hell tonight!”), the most solid, exhilarating songs that will move you, both physically and emotionally, and the utmost sheer intensity in their delivery. Like on all the best black metal classics that you would care to mention, from early Bathory to the best of early 90s Norway to the crispest USBM to the left-fieldness of the Dutch and Icelandic waves, to the rawness of the French and Portuguese hordes, even like everything that got us excited about goddamn Watain in the first place, whatever those people have, Spectral Wound have it too, and in spades. The forcefulness they throw themselves at these songs with shows that they fucking mean it, and there will be no doubt about that in anyone.
VHS
For A Few Riffs More
(Grand Vomit Productions / Crucial Blast)
So we knew that VHS like to have a bit of fun with their music. They had a record called ‘We’re Gonna Need Some Bigger Riffs’ with songs about all the horrors of the sea, they’ve had concept albums about vampires and Conan the Barbarian-like wizards & warriors type of movies. So, you know, good humoured, cool dudes that you’ll never know what they will come up with next for the concept of their next fun death/thrash album. So when they warned us that their next record was going to be a little bit different, we might have imagined many things, but a moving Ennio Morricone-like spaghetti western soundtrack with crazy death metal vocals wasn’t exactly top of the list. But that’s exactly what ‘For A Few Riffs More’ is, nothing more, nothing less, and before you start scrunching up your face trying to imagine what that sounds like, I’ll just leave you with two things: a) it works and b) go listen now. You’ll see. Erm, partner.
Ark Zead - Niptaktuk (Glacial Movements)
I got this after it was recommended online by Kevin Martin. It’s wondrous ambient music that uplifts while having a sense of tectonic plates shifting ever so slowly underneath you. This wouldn’t have been out of place on that Isolationism comp years ago. One of my fave releases of the year so far. Sit back, let go.
Chain Cult - What We Leave Behind (La Vida Es Un Mus)
Great dark post-punk from Athens, Greece. Stark guitar lines, warm gusts of bass and very live sounding drums take this rager along with an epic energy. At times there are almost early At The Drive-In flourishes but it never deviates from its shadow lined course.
Endon - Fall of Spring (Thrill Jockey)
Engulfing, invigorating noise from Tokyo’s Endon. The four tracks clock in at a restless, compelling 34 minutes and all of that time is spent leaning in to the unfolding, collapsing sounds. Gaseous, almost new age choral vistas appear then disappear behind piercing high end and the audio bounces around the stereo field causing much terrific disruption. ‘Time Does Not Heal’ puts me in mind of ‘Freezing Alone’ by Hair Police and ‘Escalation’ ends the set with an invigorating noise work out.
Exiles Of Singularity - Toxic Love (Quantum Flux)
This is pop noir with stunning guitar riffs and unashamed melodies that keep intensity levels throughout the big banger tunes. A lot of young bands are doing this kind of stuff at the moment and it’s easy to switch off but this EP is a smilingly sinister treat.
The Jesus Lizard - Moto(R) (Ipecac)
All four of these outstanding fellows could play and I would listen to anything they did. David Yow is on top form, the guitar of Duane Denison takes riffs and spins them round, rock and roll twang with jazz chops and chord voicings only he could think of. Mac and David keep (and heat) the beat as only they can and the whole euphoric rush is over way too soon. Best play it again.