TOP 75 ALBUMS OF 2023: Part I (#75-#61)
List madness begins again.
Here we are again! Time for looking back over the past year in music and make lists. I know, I know, we’ve had this conversation a million times. Some people love this list stuff, some hate it, and everything is fine. Personally I love it and that’s why I keep doing it. It’s a different way to recommend stuff, to shine an extra light on lots of different music that can be overlooked by people who will love it, which is something I like to do, and above all because it feels good to remember the good things that happened over a generally horrible year for humanity overall - and few things are better than a good record that hits you in the feels just right. Before we begin, just a few notes:
Only full-length albums count. No demos, live albums, reissues, EPs, splits or anything else like that. Sometimes I do specific lists of these things after the big one, and you can count on at least the EP list this year.
Last year I did a top 50 list but there were more than 50 records on it (64, to be precise), as I frequently placed two (or more) albums in the same position, something I’ve almost always done in my year-end lists. This time, I decided to go for a strictly one-album-per-position list, hence the slightly bigger number. It’s just a question of form, whatever. Music is music.
As I said last year too, something you might have noticed if you follow The Devil’s Mouth, there’s no real genre boundaries, even if I naturally tend towards the heavier stuff. But overall, a quiet folk album, a shrieky blackened noise album, a pop album and a power electronics album might come at you in successive positions. The only common theme to all this is “shit I like”. Oh, and I’d love it if you’d comment with shit you like too. Because, most of all…
…lists are silly, okay? Don’t take this stuff too seriously. I could order this again tomorrow and you’d probably get a vastly different list, apart from the very topmost positions that have had a bigger deal of thought behind them. Also, I’m sure I left out a ton of records that would merit inclusion that I will only remember, or even discover, months from now. Or maybe I might have disregarded the inclusion of a particular album intentionally because I’m really not into it. I might think your album of the year sucks, as you might do mine, and that’s no biggie. In short, let’s by all means all argue about our lists in the comments, but bearing in mind that the whole point of this is spreading the word about awesome music and hopefully that you’ll get some cool new favourites out of it. Onwards!
75.
Cirith Ungol
Dark Parade
(Metal Blade Records)
That 80s legends Cirith Ungol are active at all after three decades of absence is already cause enough to celebrate, but the fact that their return has placed them squarely into the relevant field of traditional heavy metal is almost too good to be true. With ‘Dark Parade’ they continue to confirm that status, an album every bit as good as 2020’s ‘Forever Black’ comeback already was, and what’s more, there isn’t a whiff of nostalgia autopilot or resting on their laurels. A typically unusual approach to heavy metal punctuated as always by Tim Baker’s undescribable vocal performance, ‘Dark Parade’ has a sort of a bigger organic, 70s-like vibe and adds a few more rousing mid-paced bangers to the band’s golden catalogue like ‘Looking Glass’ or ‘Sacrifice’ among others.
74.
Cadaver Shrine
Benighted Desecration
(Chaos Records)
One of the benefits of me dropping the several-albums-per-position thing I used to do is that some albums/projects/artists can be given their due individual value. No more grouping all of Maurice De Jong’s releases in a bunch, for example, and this new vehicle of his, Cadaver Shrine, does deserve the distinction to stand on its own. A remarkably decrepit-sounding feast of slow, lurching riffs, it’s an exercise in fairly traditional death/doom but with the typical Maurice twist that we have come to expect from just about every act in his ever-fertile output. Somewhat closer to the Finnish school of death/doom, the Lasse Pyykkö stuff in particular (Hooded Menace, the more creeping Claws material), on ‘Benighted Desecration’ the Dutch musician even leaves us the best for last, as the two closing songs ‘Faceless Abomination’ and ‘The Shattered Corpse’ are clearly the foulest, heaviest tracks and the real highlights of a very solid record.
73.
Nuclear Dudes
Boss Blades
(Modern Grievance Records)
Don’t even try to guess what this sounds like if you don’t know it. Even if you have some info about it, like if I tell you that Nuclear Dudes is a solo project from Jon Weisnewski (frontman for the awesome Sandrider and the much missed Akimbo), or that it features guests such as Botch’s Dave Verellen or Dust Moth’s Irene Barber, trust me, you’ll still won’t really be closer to imagining what’ll hit you once you press play. Jon himself has described the project as “a wild-eyed response to the question, ‘What if Carcass and Gary Numan were locked in a studio and had to figure out how to make a record together?’,” and hey, that’s a better description that I’ll ever come up with for this truly disorienting mix of extreme metal, grindcore, industrial, synthwave and, I don’t know, prog I guess. Tongue in cheek, face-melting and surprisingly catchy, it’ll be one of the surprises of the year if you let its utter unhinged insanity take over you.
72.
Snorlax
The Necrotrophic Abyss
(Avant Guard Music)
Even now that the novelty of having a one-man blackened death/grind band named after a Pokémon as a bit of a joke that is actually awesome has worn off a bit, the fact still remains quite clear that yeah, Snorlax indeed continue to be awesome. As the artwork for this new album kinda suggests, sole member Brendan Auld (who has/is in a whole bunch of other great bands, check out his metallic CV and go explore) has expanded his thematic reach a bit since 2020’s ‘II’, reinforcing that “blackened” bit, adding some dynamics and even some occasional dissonance to the already impressively intrincate songwriting, basically “evolving” the project’s sound overall. Not that it needed all that much evolution, as he does what he does fairly better than most, but it’s still refreshing to feel like he’s trying not to stagnate.
71.
Beware Wolves
Beware Wolves, Vol. 1
(Aqualamb Records)
Apparently, according to the press release, this is the first of ten (!) full-length albums Beware Wolves, an Austin-based singer/songwriter who is only know by this stage name, will put out throughout the next year, totalling 101 songs. This came out in October and Volume 2 has been announced for January 19th, but hopefully the following volumes will give these songs time to settle with listeners and to breathe properly, as they deserve. Though very simple music that could even be called minimalist, there is real emotional depth at work here. BW’s fragile, heartfelt falsetto is wonderfully adaptable to the melodies, and for once the usually terrible “for fans of” bunch of names thrown by PRs on press releases doesn’t read like a pretentious list of comparisons, so even if they use people such as Bill Callahan, Loudon Wainwright III, Nick Drake, Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley or Will Oldham for this, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to imagine this guy on his way to getting close to those legends. Yeah, it’s that promising.
70.
Pylar
Límyte
(Cyclic Law / Cavsas)
Featuring a member of the better-known drone/doom/experimental Spanish act Orthodox (guitarist Ricardo Jimenez Gómez, here known as Bar-Gal), Pylar have been exceptionally fertile with eight albums released in the last decade, but they’re creative enough to keep things fresh even if you have kept up with their discography. In fact, ‘Límyte’ might be the highest point of their career as a band so far, with one short interlude and two long and varied tracks (one of them a kaleidoscopic, proggy freakout and the other a pitch-black bad trip that even scrapes the outer edges of the black metal barrel) making up a hell of a sonic journey, worthy of being listened to no matter what your genre poison of choice might be, and particularly if you happen to be a fan of Oranssi Pazuzu and that whole Finnish dark psych scene. Even if it might make us seasick again, once it’s done we feel like we can’t wait to see where Pylar will try to take us next.
69.
Pynuka
Not In The Sense That We Did Something Wrong
(Translation Loss)
I recently spoke at length about Pynuka, so maybe go here instead of having me repeat all the reasons why they rule, okay? If you need the tl;dr version, it’s Anda Szilagyi, Christian McKenna and Justin Broadrick doing unpredictable, all-over-the-place moody electronic weird-pop. Or as they put it themselves, “broken music made by broken people,” which has to be one of the best self-descriptions ever by any band.
68.
Poison Ruïn
Härvest
(Relapse)
Imagine a raw punk band trying to make a soundtrack for ‘Skyrim’ and you’re kinda in the right ballpark to get the appeal os Poison Ruïn. It’s easy to see why Relapse picked these guys up, as they’ve managed, straight from the bat, the rarest of goals - to make music that is not by any means innovative, but to dress - both soundwise and in terms of image and concept - it in a way that it only sounds like themselves anyway. This awesome Pitchfork review of it hilariously describes the title-track, indeed the highlight of the album as they also consider it, as “a propulsive punk anthem, part Legend of Zelda and part Ramones,” and once again, that really nails what these guys are doing with surprisingly amazing results.
67.
Outer Heaven
Infinite Psychic Depths
(Relapse Records)
If Blood Incantation and Tomb Mold, just to pick the most currently popular bands of the movement, have helped prove something to the masses, is that it’s possible to still make “technical death metal”, that most soporific of descriptions, without sending you into a tedium-induced coma after ten seconds. Of course, as with any exciting musical tendency, underneath the more visible surface (which is this case, as exemplified by those two examples, is still pretty awesome, don’t get me wrong) lies a lot of the tasty meat to be chewed, and Outer Heaven are one such deliciously rare steak. Indeed “technical” and complex enough to break your brain if you try to follow closely all the twists they pull in each song, they nevertheless maintain an impression of straighforward, engaging and addictive (I’ll stop short of calling it “catchy”) death metal savagery, even while they pull you down into the abyss more and more with little psychedeathlic (think that’ll stick?) labyrinths unfolding on every song, making this, their second album, a precious gem worthy of many repeated listens.
66.
Memoriam
Rise To Power
(Reaper Entertainment)
Our perception of time is all skewed, we all feel it, or at least we’ve all seen the many memes, but even admitting that, seriously, how the fuck have Memoriam released five albums already since their formation in 2017? They’re only three away from the entire Bolt Thrower career, to use an appropriate example (they were formed as a tribute to late Bolt Thrower drummer Martin "Kiddie" Kearns, and feature their old vocalist Karl Willets, if you’re new to all this), and what’s even more incredible is that none of them suck. On the contrary, even with all this unnatural productivity, Memoriam just seem to get better from album to album, fully nailing that pleasingly old-school Benediction/Bolt Thrower chug and rumble without ever coming across like a rehashing nostalgia machine. It’s a delicate balance, but yeah, Memoriam do sound like a 2023 death metal band, which for once is used as a compliment. Groovy, heavy, memorable and lyrically intelligent to boot, ‘Rise To Power’ is an irreproachable effort. An example of how to grow old in extreme music with class.
65.
Besta
Terra Em Desapego
(Lifeforce)
As mentioned when they were selected for the August 2023 edition of our The Devil’s Month feature, ‘Terra Em Desapego’ sees Besta keep doing what they do best, which is to violently grind away brutal songs of protest and revolt, but in a much more mature and focused way. While still very much a grindcore band, their songs are now more elaborate, longer and therefore much more memorable. As I wrote back then, “Though most of these 41 minutes can still be classified, musically speaking, as grindcore, the pace variations and the added depth to the songwriting make everything much more perceptible and allow them a greater field of expression. They’ve always had great riffs, even if they lasted for mere seconds never to return again on some 00:49 song, but now it’s like a veil has been lifted for everyone to realise the intrinsic value of these songs, not just grindheads. And hey, even most black metal bands would kill for some of that angular creepiness that pops up sometimes during ‘Veias Em Catarse’, for instance.”
64.
Kruelty
Untopia
(Profound Lore)
It’s no surprise to any real fans of the style, but as it turns out, yeah, death metal really is a very adaptable, evolution-friendly subgenre of extreme music. There are already good examples of this on this very list (Outer Heaven up there, and even Snorlax in a way), and Kruelty are yet another name for the list that proves cross-pollination and invention will keep driving death metal forward for a very long time without any crisis of innovation ever looming its head. In Kruelty’s specific case, the extra merit lies in the fact that it’s the extremely specific death metal subsection of slam that they tackle, and by adding a sprinkle of Japanese (where they are from) and East Coast 90s hardcore and some good old Swedish death metal to it, they’re able to come out with something fresh-sounding and exciting on the other side. Guitarist and songwriter Zuma even threw bands like Purtenance, Rippikoulu, Corrupted, Crowbar and Electric Wizard at me as influences when I interviewed him for a Decibel feature at the time, so it seems like Kruelty won’t run out of inspiration to keep making their slimy, filthy and fascinating version of post-slam (remember where you heard it first) anytime soon.
63.
Industrial Puke
Born Into The Twisting Rope
(Suicide Records)
I won’t torture them any more with the unfortunate band name, as I think I’ve mentioned it every time I’ve talked about them on this site, but it really is the only thing to pick on when it comes to these guys, a band that came together based on “a common love for Dismember and Disrupt.” Especially after seeing them live for the first time, I remain a huge fan of their ruthless mix of crusty punk, hardcore and death metal with an industrial tinge. Agile and effortless, yet hard-hitting enough that you’ll feel a migraine coming just by looking at the album cover, I’m really looking forward to seeing how they develop.
62.
Albert Witchfinder & Läjä Äijälä
Ordeal And Triumph
(Svart Records)
Albert Witchfinder’s post-Revered Bizarre career has been a joy to behold, really. Aside from his own projects that he keeps steering with feverish creativity, the Finnish musician has been able to expand his artistic reach significantly through beautifully well-chosen and not at all obvious collaborations which have yielded fantastic results. Just last year I had his hallucinatory ‘Chambers’ collaboration album with hip-hop maverick Olli Hänninen well placed in my top 50 list, and now yet another one of those collabs reaches the list through a completely different kind of oblique, ultimately weird music. Läjä Äijälä, as you might/should know, is a legend in his own right, a musician/poet/comics artist who is the frontman for Finnish punk greats Terveet Kädet, but the second volume - after their ‘Centuries Of Youth’ debut in 2021 - of this meeting of two unique minds sounds nothing like you might expect given their own musical past. An ominous, menacing tower of darkness is what you can expect, a lot of harrowing spoken word being laid over a terrifying background of dark ambient/power electronics. Though sometimes it sounds more like some kind of warped warning message for a doomed civilization being played through the speakers on a post-apocalyptic fallout landscape, ‘Ordeal And Triumph’ ends up coming across as surprisingly musical too, a huge leap of quality over the mentioned debut and a hard and intimidating yet highly replayable listen.
61.
BIG|BRAVE
nature morte
(Thrill Jockey)
When I had featured this record on the February edition of The Devil’s Month, some of my words of choice to describe it were “fucking bleak”, and after a few more months of living with this elegantly depressive bummer of a record (and having seen them play a bit of it live too), I can say that I really nailed it back there. In fact, and not just because I’ve already written about fifteen records and I just want to post this damn thing already, I’ll quote myself again, as all of what I said back there still makes absolute sense when listening to ‘nature morte’. “‘The folly of hope’ and ‘the consequences of trauma’ are two of the subjects the band reveal are tackled, and in the same declaration, they use the word ‘unease’ at one point, which just might be, this time, the shortest and most to-the-point description of what’s going on here. Even Robbin Wattie’s famously unhinged vocals seem to be stretched here to a point of ultimate desperation and anguish. Opener ‘carvers, farriers and knaves’, to give you a specific example, might be the most terrifyingly ominous piece of music you’ll hear this year and only brings to mind absolutely apocalyptic stuff that still haunts us like that one Neurosis & Jarboe track, for instance.” That’s right, approach at your own risk, but do approach it.