THE DEVIL'S MONTH: January 2024
Rounding up some of the finest releases of the previous month
And away we go, setting off into a whole new year of music with our monthly installments of The Devil’s Month, as always powered and finely partnered by the ever-lovely Mondo Negro record store. As you might have noticed last year, a lot of these picks end up on the big best-of list at the end of the year, so they are a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of the best things that are being done within heavy/alternative/weird/adventurous/whatever music we choose to cover here at TDM. As always, no boundaries.
January, even more so than December, isn’t typically a month for big releases, but if 2024 is starting as it means to go on, this will be a very atypical year, as a bunch of amazing artists, not to mention a few personal favourites of mine, have seen fit to start throwing awesomeness at us right when we’re still shaking off our holiday hangovers.
So without further ado, here are our first picks for 2024.
Ancient VVisdom
Master Of The Stone
(Argonauta Records)
It’s been very interesting to witness the evolution of AVV’s sound throughout their already very respectable fifteen year trajectory. Starting out with a nearly fully acoustic rock/neofolk approach on their first two albums, ‘A Godlike Inferno’ and ‘Deathlike’, it seemed that their had appeared with their own particular style already defined and set in stone, but as it turned out, the gods of rock’n’roll had other ideas, and the Jochum brothers - that you get to know better with the episodes of the podcast where they guested, here (Nathan) and here (Michael) - started to seriously inject some electricity into their music. Without losing their acoustic and darkly melodic side, ‘Sacrifical’, ‘33’ and ‘Mundus’ all explored the best way to balance their different sides - and they’re all excellent records in their own right -, but it’s with ‘Master Of The Stone’ that they seem to have hit the nail straight on the head. Most of the songs rely on thick, meaty riffs but without ever losing the band’s typical richness and supreme catchiness - one listen to lead single ‘Sold My Soul To Satan’ should be enough for it to entrench itself in your brain never to come out again, for example, while ‘The Adversary’ becomes a sort of anthemic declaration, the electric-equivalent to ‘The Opposition’ off the first album. Nathan’s vocals are better and more confident-sounding than ever and he delivers sombre melodies, not to mention an occasional guttural bit, surprising but very tasteful and appropriate to the songs in which they’re used, with masterful conviction. For fans of the earlier acoustic tunes, there are still two of the finest they’ve ever written very Death In June-ian and emotionally potent, in the form of ‘World’s Demise’ and terrifying closer ‘The Devil’s Sermon’. If “occult rock” was ever an expression meant to describe something good, then it’s for a record like this.
Lord Dying
Clandestine Transcendence
(MNRK Heavy)
Remember Lord Dying? Once a Relapse band delivering punishingly heavy sludge, they seemed poised to join that sort of circuit forever, as their first two records, ‘Summon The Faithless’ and ‘Poisoned Altars’, were sort of perfect crowd-pleasers for that specific crowd, not too inventive or breaking any norms, but competent and strong enough to base a solid career on. Well, a four year discographic break then ensued, and something seems to have shook loose in their inspirations during that period, as the band returned almost unrecognizable, with a surprisingly out-there psych-prog-sludge album, for want of a better term combination, in the form of 2019’s ‘Mysterium Tremendum’, which somehow paid its title some justice. While full of good ideas and with more than a few truly brilliant songs and parts of songs, the overall feeling was of a tremendous mystery, something that showed glimpses of genius but never really managed to settle in its new clothes, as it were. Most of all, it seemed to be a bit too much of a jump, a bit too early for the band. Fortunately they kept that approach, and ‘Clandestine Transcendence’ is a remarkable refinement of their new style, or should we say styles - it’s one of those records that sounds all over the place if you describe it. The temptation is even to go song by song, as each seems to shoot in a separate direction, like the complex, martial-sounding death metal outburst of ‘I AM NOTHING I AM EVERYTHING’, the grungy, sun-baked melodies of ‘Unto Becoming’ or the sort of ambient doom that exhales out of ‘Dancing On The Emptiness’. The genius bit is in tying this all together in one cohesive whole, and this time Lord Dying totally nail that. Think of them, if you will, as the band Mastodon could have turned into if they had never become a mainstream act, for instance, a fantastic example of rule-breaking, expectation-shattering, genres-be-damned variation on a theme that started out as common as they come. It’s worth it to think outside the box, children.
Sivert Høyem
On An Island
(Warner Music International)
With the massive touring cycle for Madrugada’s sublime ‘Chimes At Midnight’ (one of our absolute favourite records of recent years) winding to a close, their frontman Sivert Høyem apparently didn’t want to let that iron grow cold, so here is his next potent strike on it, in the form of his sixth solo album, the first since 2016’s ‘Lioness’ (with a live album in between too, in 2017). If you’re a fan of either Madrugada or Sivert’s solo career, this is obviously a no-brainer, as the man seems to continue on the same kind of deliriously amazing songwriting form that helped make the Norwegian band’s return to activity such a rousing success, but even if you’re not, it’s hard to resist music as perfectly formed as this. His songs flow seamlessly, a big mashup of melancholy, beauty, sadness, elation, delicate poetry and a velvety rock’n’roll stomp. Sivert and Madrugada’s output are a little bit closer to each other than they have been before these days, something the singer admitted himself that he cares less about than he used to, when we had a great chat on the podcast recently, but there’s still different, sparser vibes at work here. Even the whole album itself isn’t fully consistent with just one approach - for each radio-perfect catchy single like ‘Aim For The Heart’, there’s a moodier, more atmospheric piece like ‘The Rust’ or heartbreaking closer ‘Not Enough Light’ to sort of balance everything out in the end. The anchor that helps pull them all together is, naturally, Sivert’s voice and performance. Retaining that sort of grit (no album title pun intended, but hey) and outsider aura that was so perfect for Madrugada’s earlier material (and beyond) but with the added weight and poignance of experience, I believe the man could captivate a whole audience by singing toilet paper ad jingles. That we get this voice and this performer writing and singing songs this meaningful and this deep is nothing short of miraculous. Hey, singer/songwriters everywhere, the 2024 gauntlet has been thrown down. Try to beat this one if you can.
Slift
Ilion
(Sub Pop Records)
Fuck all your 21st century attention spans, here’s a 79 minute weird rock album that you’ll damn well love every minute of. Hailing from Toulouse, this trio has been perfecting their unrelenting, mind-expanding mix of psych, post-metal and even post-hardcore for a few years now, but even if 2020’s ‘Ummon’ made some serious waves already, ‘Ilion’ feels clearly like their true “arrival”, a veritable sonic mountain for true explorers to climb. Thought naturally it feels a little overwhelming and too dense at first, the rewards are immense and they don’t even take that long to present themselves. The restless shuffle of lead single ‘Nimh’s main riff, for example, is kinda like what Converge would sound like if they were an indie rock band, and I swear I thought of this comparison before they mentioned, precisely, Converge when talking about the very same track. There’s bits of GY!BE, Neurosis, Magma, Dirge, Ufomammut or even King Crimson in there, sure, but mostly the limbs used by Slift to Frankenstein the hell out of this enormous album seem to be mostly taken from their own bodies, and the resulting monster is one that sounds like precious few others.
William Elliott Whitmore
Silently, The Mind Breaks
(Whitmore Records)
There isn’t all that much to say about this, especially if you’ve had the pleasure and privilege of having Will along as a companion on this ride, because it’s just a ride, for over twenty years now. Where does time go, man? It was just the other day that I looked at an album cover at the record store and thought it looked cool, so I took it to the listening post to check it out and Will’s solitary voice erupted on ‘Cold And Dead’ when I pressed play. It took about five seconds to decide that record was coming home with me, and ever since then, even if we’ve never even talked (which might change soon, wink wink), this man and his banjo or guitar have pretty much been there all along. Facing the worst life has to offer head on, taking it on the chin, as it were, not necessarily with a smile, but with the strength that comes from knowing pain and sorrow are unavoidable and dealing with them as they come. And fuck them too, as we’ll make a joke out of them afterwards. ‘Silently, The Mind Breaks’ is like a catalogue of reasons why it’s important to have Will’s music in your life. A rawer, simpler than usual (than lately, I should say), more focused on voice+guitar/banjo without too many frills once again, it has everything that’s always been good and important about it. Pain and longing and death and facing it all with the same dignity as ever, but always with the light seeping in through the Cohenesque crack in everything. Speaking of the great master, can’t you just imagine him reciting a line like “Death is not my friend but we've always kept in touch / We both know about the end but we don't talk about it much”? That’s from ‘Has To Be That Way’, and that verse concludes, in typical Will form, with “And that's alright.” That seems to always be the point. “There’s a light that I can’t see / And I hope you do better than me”, he tells his son, on ‘Darkness Comes’, a similar message to “You will overcome I promise you
/ And be whatever it is that you want to be / There is hope for you / But it’s much to late for me” on ‘There Is Hope For You’ from the ‘Animals In The Dark’ album. Family’s always there, like on the moving ‘Adaptation And Survival’ where motherly memories come up (“Don’t worry mama, it’s only pain / It’ll work out by and by / I’ve been thinking about you / I hope you’re okay”). Even on the more tongue-in-cheek tracks, like the delightfully jaunty ‘Bunker Built For Two’, that’s always the point: shit happens, but it’s okay. And even if it’s not, that’s okay too.
It’s just a ride.