TOP 50 ALBUMS OF 2022: Part VI (#05-#01)
WE HAVE ARRIVED!
05.
Unyielding Love
’Flesh Of The Furnace’
[Self-released]
For brutal, extreme music, there was no better 2022 record to sink your teeth in than this. It’s that simple. And as a little cool validation that my ears and brain and heart are still in the right place when it comes to these things, two of the people whose music taste I most respect, my fellow writer and former Terrorizer colleague Kez Whelan and Starkweather frontman Rennie Resmini (check out the podcast episode where he guested for more awesome band recommendations), have both recently praised ‘Flesh Of The Furnace’ as well - the former on his “best heavy metal of 2022” list at The Quietus (which you should totally read all the way through) and the latter on the most recent post on his Substack (another undeniable reading recommendation), recommending them for a weekend listen. Both of them stress how incredible this albums mix of extreme styles his, Kez mentioning the “genuinely sinister and otherworldly aura lurking beneath their caustic sonic assault” and likening them to “a more aggressive, grinding Portal,” while Rennie also makes the Portal connection and calls them “A Cattlepress Portal Leeched into a Brighter Death Now.”
I know when I’ve been outclassed, and nothing I can add to that can reinforce the recommendation that you get on this album right now with any more urgency, but I just have to say how happy I am that this band is at this unreal level right now. It’s been a long wait since ‘The Sweat Of Augury’ came out, the (originally) Northern Irish band’s debut EP from 2016, but whereas most small bands with one great EP eventually fall off the radar if they don’t keep it up somehow, the fact is that I kept spinning those amazing twenty minutes all this time, and expectations for a proper album were ridiculously and seemingly unattainably high. It shows lots of maturity that they didn’t do a straight up follow-up - the EP was a more easily labelable kind of noisy, chaotic grindcore, comparisons to Full Of Hell or Discordance Axis were established (to which I would add a healthy Trap Them influence, especially the denser, more grind-like tracks they had), whereas this album, as you might have gathered from the Portal comparison (to which I add my own support as well), goes further into the cave of extremity, getting into maddening, otherworldly black/death territory in the same way that people like Hissing or Teitanblood, or of course Portal themselves, are doing with such great results nowadays. Which is not to say they’ve totally abandoned their earlier style, and much of the impact and punch that these songs still have, while not as immediate as before, is due to them still having that grit and that intensity.
Now the only thing left is for all you guys to also get into Unyielding Love, so they can start getting the worldwide, unanimous recognition they so deserve. And hopefully it won’t take another six years for the next lesson in violence and darkness.
04.
40 Watt Sun
’Perfect Light’
[Svart Records]
One of the greatest experiences of 2022 has been to show ‘Perfect Light’s opening song, ‘Reveal’, to people who hadn’t heart it yet. From musicians to people in record labels to promoters to just any kind of music fan, the reaction is always the same - a sort of stunned silence, an ever-so-slight reddening of the eyes, and a necessary clearing of the throat before they’re able to speak again after a couple of minutes. That song alone would justify this album’s presence in this or any other list, in any position, its emotional impact, its melancholy, its honesty, the uncluttered clarity of its delivery - every part of these almost nine minutes is the best and more obvious reason of why you should always listen to Patrick Walker whenever he decides to write and record a song. I’m individualising because, no offence at all to the other people involved on the album, but 40 Watt Sun has evolved to a point where it mostly means Patrick with a cast of collaborators more than an actual fixed band, and many of the live shows he’s had this year have been under his own name, standing alone on stage with his acoustic guitar performing songs from this and the past albums too.
Speaking of ‘The Inside Room’ and ‘Wider than the Sky’, it has to be said that despite some differences in approach, it’s been a very smooth transition to the 40 Watt Sun sound of today, so much that the entire trajectory feels part of a continuous whole, something that Patrick fully confirms in the few interviews he gives - in fact, during our last “public” conversation, which ended up on the pages of Zero Tolerance Magazine (issue 105), he told me that “I don’t feel like I’ve ever changed direction.” In that conversation, he also helped clear up a few misunderstandings that always pop up when his music is being discussed. About one of them in particular, regarding the apparent declutter of the sound from album to album, he said that “people said that it felt a lot more stripped back than The Inside Room, and it was actually the opposite. There was more guitar on Wider than the Sky, it’s a much more layered record. People are saying the same thing now, and again I’m thinking, this is more layered, more textured, there are deeper arrangements. I understand why people say that, but they’re thinking purely in terms of heaviness, of guitars. It’s a perspective from someone that’s used to hearing heavy, distorted music. That’s not necessarily the way I hear music. I don’t think of records in those respects. I like songs.” And that’s the thing, which also leads into the other common misunderstanding - that this music is somehow crushingly “sad”. Of course ‘Perfect Light’ is not a party album, and it’s okay to interpret it like that if your own personal filter associates the music to that particular emotion, but it’s also very reductive to just describe this music as such. There is so much going on during the richer moments of this record, like ‘The Spaces In Between’ or closer, erm, ‘Closure’, for instance, that the whole emotional range of what they’re conveying either can’t be summed up, or can only be summed up by likening it to love itself. The love of music in particular. “I like songs” is perhaps one of the most unintentionally poignant things Patrick has said in interviews - by writing songs as honest and as heartfelt (whether they’re about him or not, which they don’t have to be - yet another common misconception) as these, he’s honouring the art of the song at a level that most of us can only dream about. The light may be perfect, but you know what, with this little album here playing, so is the music.
03.
Buñuel
’Killers Like Us’
[Profound Lore Records]
It seems that every five minutes a new idiot needs to get on his soapbox to lofty proclaim the death of rock. Seriously, it seems there is this compulsive need, in every country, even artists themselves, and most often the ones who are still making rock music on top of it (I presume everything’s dead but your band, then?), to single-handedly state the entire demise of an umbrella-genre that is infinitely vast in subgenre branching out and whose origins trace back to more than a century ago. Anyway, the discourse is always a very serious rationalisation to justify the clickbait of the claim, typically presenting sales numbers, Billboard facts, matter-of-fact opinions on what “the kids” want and some half-baked collection of stats about streaming, all of it wrapped up in comparisons with those big bad bogeymen that are pop and hip-hop. These people are most likely dead inside already, but for the ones with just a little flicker of artistic life inside them, I firmly believe that one spin of a Buñuel album would be enough to wake them up and forget that Kanye West sells more records than Scorpions, or whatever.
Some bands are just born with that spark, aren’t they? I mean, with this one in particular, their basic DNA constituents sort of ensured that they would be awesome. I remembered when I saw there was this new band, called BUÑUEL of all things! (I mean, come on, can you think of something cooler to name your band? I’d have taken it further and just plastered Luis’ face on all album covers, no titles or anything), with some of the Italian musicians I admire the most in the line-up - guitar wizard Xabier Iriondo at the head, mentor of many a great band/project, including Afterhours -, and featuring Eugene fucking Robinson on vocals? I mean, yeah, a lot of great sounding “supergroups” (yeah, I hate the term too, but let’s be simple about this and move on) have shat the bed before and profoundly disappointed us - and I know you want me to have that be a hyperlink to some band page that fits the description, but for once I’ll abstain from naming names -, but as soon as their first single hit me, the incendiary three-minute-perfection of ‘This Is Love’, it became clear that this would not just hold up to name expectations, but it would become something bigger than the sum of its parts.
It’s not like it’s been anything else than a struggle. In my head, a band with these people would shoot straight to the top of any list anywhere, but probably because rock is dead (sigh), it seemed that Buñuel were slipping under the radar of many for a couple of years there, even if some of us were shouting from the rooftops that they needed to be heard. They’re one of the very few bands from which I’ve had two people on my podcast, for instance (Eugene and Xabier had fantastic chats on there and really showed the depth of their music knowledge and taste), and when I finally got to see them live at Amplifest this year, it’s like these songs that I already knew and loved gained yet another dimension when processed through the grinding filter of a rough, sweaty band riding the highs and lows of being on tour giving it their all on stage. Of course, master Eugene is a fellow Substack writer too and he’s shared plenty of great stories about this past year on the road that I heartily recommend you go read right now, but yeah, from an outsider’s perspective, as a fan, basically, it seems that this year was the decisive turn for them. No, they’ll never be a #1 Billboard band (because rock is fucking dead, you see), but at least in my experience now you won’t be met so often with “what, the filmmaker? There’s a band?”, or “oh, Eugene’s side project or whatever?”, or most often “huh?” when trying to recommend them to someone. And though 2016’s ‘A Resting Place For Strangers’ and 2018’s ‘The Easy Way Out’ were blisteringly awesome records, everything seems to have happened on the back of this new one, ‘Killers Like Us’. I can’t really pick a favourite between the three, but some weird dark alchemy seems to have taken place with this album - seven years as a band might have helped, yeah - and the boiling point that they have reached is higher than ever.
They’ve never been an easy band to describe, even if what they do isnt’ that complicated to assimilate, and much like Oxbow in that way, while noise rock still is the closest way to describe what they do, there’s so much more to it. In the end it doesn’t matter what you call it, what’s real is just the sweat or blood or any other fluid running down your brow as ‘When God Used A Rope’ pounds you into submission, or the chills when the strangely creepy breauty of ‘Crack Shot’ envelops you, or the unavoidable will to punch someone repeatedly as ‘Roll Call’ grinds over you like a steamroller, or the creeping dread that builds in your chest with the ‘When We Talk’ slow burn, just to mention a couple of examples. Everything makes you feel something on this album, everything is vital, urgent, visceral, alive. If that’s a manifestation of a dead genre, I’ll gladly call myself a zombie right now.
02.
Madrugada
’Chimes At Midnight’
[Warner Music Norway]
I have to tell you, I did toy with the idea of a shared #1 spot in the list for a while there. It didn’t happen because I thought it was a little lame to have a list like this end on an anti-climax of a tie. I know none of this matters, I said so myself at the beginning of the list, as I usually do, that the whole point of this was to shine a light on a lot of awesome music from this year, support all this amount of talented people that keep fighting the old “new music sucks” chestnut that keeps being thrown about, and hopefully have all you guys reading this discover a couple of new favourite bands or albums, because I know that’s one of the best feelings in the world. But still, as I also mentioned, these higher positions have warranted some deal of thought behind them and some tough decision-making, and the fight for “album of the year” was a very difficult one. Both these albums mean the world to me and they helped me through very difficult times in these twelve not-always-happy months, and I genuinely believe this is the kind of music that I and other fans of these bands will gladly put on in 25 or 30 years, if we (and the whole planet, too) happen to still be around, and feel exactly the same feelings they give us right now.
So, Madrugada. I know a lot of you probably have some neutral feelings about these guys, I’ve found that mostly to be the case with people who’ve heard a song or two but never really investigated much, and they seem to fall in that category of “some rock band or whatever”, but I’ve fortunately also noticed that whenever someone takes the plunge, the usual reaction when coming up for air is “dude!”. The depth and reach of their discography really takes a lot of people aback. The amount of genre epithets thrown at them over the years, from art rock to noise rock to alternative to blues, really underlines the fact that, just like most of the best artists, they’ve always been very restless creatively, and yet, there’s always that typical Madrugada blanket over everything, a slow, almost gentle melancholy and genuine emotion.
Could they recapture that? This wasn’t a given, of course. Madrugada ceased activity shortly after the sudden, unexpected death of guitarist Robert Burås, who was found dead in his apartment, still holding his guitar. Burås was a singular player, performer and songwriter, and after finishing the album they were working on as an homage to him (their 2008 self-titled album), they had a short farewell tour, and walked into the sunset as a band. Since then, vocalist Sivert Høyem has focused on his solo career (he already had one album out during Madrugada’s first existence, and he released four more between 2009 and 2016, all of which I would strongly recommend), and all of us rabid fans learned to see Madrugada as a dearly departed friend, one that left a sizeable amount of wonderful memories we can relive time and time again. That was until June 15th 2018, when the band surprisingly announced they had joined up with original drummer Jon Lauvland Pettersen (who had left in 2002) and were going to tour Europe the following year. Of course when something means so much to you as one of your favourite bands, you have doubts and you question things at first. The main thing was, of course, will it feel the same? Not necessarily be the same, but will it feel like real Madrugada? Having had the opportunity to be present at one of those comeback shows, I can tell you that the tears I wept during some of the most significant songs really removed all doubts on that front for me. This was, unmistakably, Madrugada, and Robert would surely be proud of the guys for being able to recapture the unique spirit of this band.
Enter ‘Chimes At Midnight’ then, the last hurdle to be cleared, the last question to be answered - will they be able to write new music, and will it be as good as before? After that show, honestly, I didn’t worry too much about that, because after a few years of obsessively listening to music and living with all these artists inside your head, you get a feel for things, as I’m sure you guys also do. And I was right - this album is Madrugada through and through, even if it also is, in typical Madrugada fashion, a little bit of a sidestep when compared to the previous ones. But even though it’s been fourteen years, it does feel as a natural successor to ‘Madrugada’. Sivert is naturally a strong presence in the songwriting department, and there are more restrained, quietly dark moments here that hark back to his solo work - it’s a very nocturnal album, something you can imagine yourself listening while you stare out the window at 3am with a cigarette, watching the smoke swirl out into the quiet air, but not entirely, because when there’s a rush, a louder voice, a particularly piercing guitar riff, or a slightly more bluesy number (like the sublime ‘Empire Blues’), it really has an enormous impact. In terms of that masterful use of dynamics, it reminds me of one of my favourite rock albums of this century, Elbow’s ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, and it also exudes the same kind of gloomy yet somehow euphoric sadness.
Robert is still in there, too. And not in a way that allows you to draw any conclusions, either, which is cool. He gets writing credits for ‘Slowly Turns The Wheel’, one of the most guitar-oriented, louder tracks, and for ‘The World Could Be Falling Down’, one of the most sparse, sombre numbers on offer, which then ends on a rousing climax for its final 40 seconds. It’s truly an album of songs. From the sweetest, most devotional kind (‘Nobody Loves You Like I Do’, ‘Help Yourself To Me’), to the more brokenhearted and melancholic (‘Imagination’, ‘You Promised To Wait For Me’), to the downright bitter (‘Stabat Mater’, where Sivert howls “whatever you hated, I hated more”), they fit together like perfect puzzle pieces but they’re able to hold their own as single self-contained worlds of emotion too. Sivert’s words, more important than ever before, rise to the heights of the music around them, too. Personal-sounding and intimate, but never specific enough that you’re not able to relate, they often sound like wise remarks about existence after, well, spending too many nights smoking cigarettes out of the window while staring at the night sky. “So much you could do for love,” he croons on that song, ‘The World Could Be Falling Down’. Well, one good thing would be to get this album and listen to it. It is a labour of love in itself, and it will slowly but surely make you fall deeply in love with it.
ALBUM OF THE YEAR
The Mars Volta
’The Mars Volta’
[Clouds Hill]
So here we are, and a fucking pop album it is, then, I can hear the most cynical of you sneer at the back there. It’s okay, I did that too when I got the promo for this album a few months ago. Unlike what happened with Madrugada up there in the list, I wasn’t super fussed about the return of The Mars Volta. I do love and admire the wild and apparently limitless creativity Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala have always employed in everything they’ve done, don’t get me wrong - they are groundbreaking, envelope-pushing artists and I own every record they’ve put out, but with The Mars Volta, though I’m partial to a couple of albums in particular (the debut and 2008’s ‘The Bedlam In Goliath’ most of all), I never really went super crazy about it, to be perfectly honest. Maybe the old fan in me was a bit too harsh and couldn’t shake the “it’s nice, but it’s not At The Drive-In” nagging thought, which unfair as it might be, does help put a bit of a damper on things. Having said that, their own return album ‘in•ter a•li•a’ kinda made me feel the same way, a sort of even worse “it’s nice, it’s At The Drive-In, but it’s not really At The Drive-In.” So, when the press release on the promo made the claim that this album “bravely challenges everything you thought you knew about them, delivering their most exciting, most accessible, most sophisticated music yet,” it was the “accessible” that stuck out of there for me, especially as the word “pop” was banded about a few times in the rest of that text. I’m a metalhead at heart, okay? I grew up in the underground, and hell, I’m still there, even if I pop my head out now and then to look at the bigger buildings. So a return after a whole decade of a band I never entirely got to grips with, with an album that’s supposedly “sophisticated” and “accessible” and “pop”? Yeah, sure. You guys go on and cash in your checks, and I’ll go back to listening to Autopsy.
But then I played the damn thing. On a stream page, which I hate (we don’t get to download every album we’re sent in advance), on my desk, at my computer where I am right now, while I was working on something else. Just because I love these guys and I’ll give them a chance with anything they’ll do, no matter how it seems beforehand that it won’t be for me. I played the damn thing and I listened to it in stunned silence until the very last seconds of ‘The Requisition’, until Cedric voices the terrifying line “while you were sleeping I was setting the fires / carrion beetles that I fill inside of your coffin” and the song basically stops suddenly and brings these 46:18 minutes to a close. This was on August 16th, so a good four months ago, and I still have no idea how to accurately define the overwhelming appeal of this album. I’ve been writing these 50+ little reviews for this whole list with a subconscious sense of dread hanging over me, because I knew all the time that this would be at the end, waiting for me. Fourteen infuriatingly catchy songs, full of weird and sometimes scary and sometimes super poignant and beautiful lyrics, half of which I barely understand the meaning of but somehow feel them, from a reunited band that I wasn’t even particularly looking forward to have active again, that somehow have managed to fuse into my very existence during the last few months of this year. These songs have been the soundtrack to both very good and very bad things, to work, to travel, to leisure, to loneliness (because most people close to me, hilariously, quite dislike it, so listening to it has been a mostly solitary experience), to everything. How to explain the appeal of that, and how to extract it from my own relationship with it, to encourage you to try it too so you’ll also connect with it in your own way?
As I said, no idea. There’s the initial temptation to say things like “forget all you think you know about The Mars Volta,” but don’t, really don’t. The songs may be shorter, you will raise eyebrows when you hear the Caribbean rhythms, the gentle electronics, you will wonder when the crazy breakdown will come and bring the chaos and the fury and that feeling of three bands playing at once The Mars Volta often had - and it won’t come. But listen to it, and you’ll recognise everything. A lot of stuff is still happening, only quieter. A lot of chaos is unfolding, only in a more measured and uncluttered kind of way. And hey, pop and funky rhythms don’t mean mindless happiness. Take ‘Qué Dios Te Maldiga Mí Corazon’, that starts with a jumpy, percussive walk through the beach in a colourful shirt, musically speaking, but through which Cedric is singing (with a marvellous vocal hook too, mind you) stuff like “so many crosses she could nail you to / but I think that this one will do / dripping initials from rotting fruit”. I mean, what? These are the details that will make you listen to it again, more closely, and discover the still dark, still rebellious beating heart underneath the apparently breezy “pop” exterior. The “free-jazz entropy” they used to describe themselves as is still very much here, but with so many other layers around it. Sure, call it pop, but I’d call it maturity, above all.
Clarity, that’s the thing. ‘The Mars Volta’ feels like lifting a veil that you’ve unwittingly had in front of you for all the time you’ve been listening to this band, and finally seeing them as they truly are. I have no shame in admitting that I’ve gone back to a couple of their past records that I wasn’t a huge fan of, and though they haven’t become my favourites overnight, I do feel I’m listening to them with fresh ears and with a different kind of understanding. Could be some weird form of bias, whatever. I don’t know, or care. I just like how it feels. “The past has a way of coming clean,” Cedric sings on the surreally affecting ‘Vigil’. Very true. More honest and seemingly personal than ever, with a couple of very concrete meanings here and there (the moving ‘Palm Full Of Crux‘ is “a lighthouse to him, wherever he is”, dedicated to Jeremy Michael Ward, The Mars Volta founding member who passed away in 2003, shortly before the release of the debut album), the vocalist can now utter lines like “one day you’re going to see that everybody who claimed that you were loved, have left,” a far cry from the cryptic ramblings of before, and the music fits with that raw honesty too. Veil lifted.
Yeah, speaking of rambling, I know I am too. I feel like I’m walking around a balloon trying to describe what it is I’m seeing that’s floating inside it, fascinated by it, but without ever managing to pop it and grab the thing to show it to you. Maybe that’s how it has to be for some of the music that touches us the most. It will hit you in ways that you will only be able to realise and describe later, much later. Ultimately, that’s what pushed this album to #1. It was the one that made me feel the most things, no matter what they were or what they meant.
What was yours?