TOP 75 ALBUMS OF 2023: Part V (#10-#01)
Phew.
Here it is, the reason you waded through all the other posts for, probably. Enjoy, disagree, comment, share, have fun.
The rest of the list is here:
Part I (#75-#61)
Part II (#60-#41)
Part III (#40-#21)
Part IV (#20-#11)
10.
Oxbow
Love’s Holiday
(Ipecac Recordings)
Aw, a love album. Are Eugene, Niko, Greg and Dan becoming big softies in their, erm, less young age? I’m naturally joking, mostly, as it’s Oxbow we’re talking about, and even if Eugene has stated in regards to this album that “I've always been chagrined that no one understood that our songs were love songs, but now listening to a record of exclusively love songs I can see how no one saw that," there is indeed more than one way to write a “love song”. Of course hate, sorrow, grief and scorn often come from a place of love, or began as such, so when he was churning out poetry such as “Crawling / Beneath Hеaven / On a long skid of hate / And hate / Turns sour and against us / And it’s my eye / For your eye / When the worms / Get the best of / What’s left / Of our pie in the sky” the imposing frontman can technically argue that it was a sort of a love song too. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. More than being love songs or not, the real take away of this record is realising the supreme elegance that Oxbow have developed in their songwriting over the years. Even the first two songs, a couple of hard noise rock rough’n’tumblers, are delivered wrapped a velvety, smoky lounge kind of vibe, somehow heightening their impact even more. And when the music does turn itself into the more crooning, haunting ambiance, with a few illustrious guests helping out, Oxbow do reach previously unknown heights, like on the truly heart-wrenching ‘1000 Hours’, for instance. Speaking of crooning, among the myriad of voices Eugene provides us, it’s curiously when he approaches something like “normal” singing that he becomes a true vocal revelation once again. It’s as if the man is able to reinvent himself with each record, which is actually something that actually should be said about Oxbow themselves as a whole - this is already a long blurb for something that’s not meant to be a review at all, but we haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the gloriously agonizing closer drone of ‘Gunwale’, or many of the other unique gems that are scattered across a brilliant, restless, constantly surprising album.
09.
Swans
The Beggar
(Young God Records)
This text will go on for miles if I’m going to start picking apart all the reasons why this gargantuan two-hour effort is among the best things Swans have ever done (a hotly contested category in itself, as I’m sure you’ll find), so let’s just trace, in very broad terms, the appeal of ‘The Beggar’ - first of all, it’s a fucking new Swans album, okay? If after four decades this isn’t enough of a reason for you, you might be missing a few records in your collection. But it’s also a Swans album written during lockdown, so the habitually chipper and sunny (ahem) Michael Gira is in a darker, broodier mood than usual, and it doesn’t even take a 44 minute hallucinatory nightmare like second-to-last song ‘The Beggar Lover (Three)’ to realise that. No, it’s actually in some of the sparser, cleaner moments, closer to solo Gira, that you realise most of this album is actually about facing your own mortality, and on a bigger scale, everyone else’s, through the end of the world as we know it. Thoughts that surely assaulted most of us during the period that these pieces were written, but that the Swans main man has a unique way of purging out and dragging you along for the ride. I too wish that repeating relatively straightforward questions such as “Is there really a mind?” and “Am I ready to die?”, like he does during the breathtaking ‘Paradise Is Mine’, would elicit the same kind of harrowing catharsis as this, but hey, I’m no genius. Michael is. So go listen to him, because, hey, it’s a fucking new Swans album. Okay?
08.
Dødheimsgard
Black Medium Current
(Peaceville)
In a way (there are many, and I hasted to add, none of them are right or wrong, better or worse), the epitome of experimentation is when the stuff you do doesn’t really feel “experimental” as such. When complexity, depth and innovation are performed and presented in such a way that the listener assimilates it emotionally, even internalises it, and only really understands how outside the box the piece is when, for instance, they are forced to explain it in more detail. Such is the case with this unbelievably stunning new Dødheimsgard record. That this is a top-10 album and that it was going to be awesome is no surprise at all, anyone who’s followed them or even related projects (such as the remarkable Dold Vorde Ens Navn) knows how consistently amazing they are, even in their current one-album-per-decade steady pace. That ‘Black Medium Current’ would feature gentle choruses (try to resist swooning to the various Vicotnik proclamations of “beneath your shadow / I’m under your skin” during ‘Interstellar Nexus’, at least until you’re rudely interrupted by a harsh electronic part right after!), a sort of outer space lounge music vibe (‘It Does Not Follow’) or, generally speaking, some of the mellower and most misleadingly accessible music of their discography. It’s only when you start to piece together the whole thing in your mind after a few listens that the real dimension of it starts to assault you. The cohabitation of dissonance, clarity, piano, electronics, blastbeats, crooning, growls, beauty, sadness… none of it makes sense in theory, and yet the flow of the entire record is entirely seamless, as if you are listening to three-minute pop songs. It’s like even the disruption and the tension usually caused by Dødheimsgard’s music has gone to the next step, and they are now feelings of a more subversive, subtle but deeper lasting kind. Less screaming at you and making themselves known right now, but whispering perniciously in your ear all the time until you wake up one day and can’t think of anything else.
07.
Hexvessel
Polar Veil
(Svart Records)
“It’s black metal, but it’s still Hexvessel,” and then holding up the artwork and saying “and it feels like this.” There, that’s ‘Polar Veil’ described perfectly if anyone asks you. Mind you, the easiness that it can be described with doesn’t mean that there isn’t an untold amount of depth to ‘Polar Veil’. My love for not only Hexvessel but for pretty much anything Mat McNerney finds himself involved in is well documented over the years, but I can safely say this incredible record is way up there among the best things the man has ever done. No ham-fisted attempts to “return to roots” or any such nonsense like that here - Mat has found a way to completely reinvent Hexvessel, when we didn’t even realise it really needed a reinvention, incorporating elements from his illustrious black metal past, yes, but creating something completely new along the way. It doesn’t really sound like ‘Under A Funeral Moon’, it more feels like it, but that’s just a part of it, because it also feels like, at the same time, things like Richard Thompson, or Current 93, or Hexvessel themselves, which is probably the greatest compliment one can use. I think the greatest question right now is what will the next album sound like. It does feel like there is still an entire mine of riches to be explored with this style Hexvessel have hit upon, but at the same time doing a ‘Polar Veil 2’ would be a sort of disservice to its brilliance. Surely Mat and his cohorts will find a way, as they usually do. Until then, the wintery genius of ‘Polar Veil’ will see us through.
06.
Great Falls
Objects Without Pain
(Neurot Recordings)
If, like me, you have been desperately looking for something to adequately fill the gargantuan void left by Trap Them, then I have good news. We’re on to something here. To the point that I even feel bad to use that comparison to open this little blurb, because Great Falls are so much more than “the next Trap Them” or whatever journospeak bullshit we writers like to come up with sometimes. The comparison is simply because, even during the moody, ominous first few minutes of ‘Objects Without Pain’, you immediately know, deep in your gut, this is going to be special. Around the two and a half minute mark of ‘Dragged Home Alive’, when the filthy bass rumble kicks in, your body will tense up all by itself. It knows. It’s coming. And it comes, sort of, though not in that instant moshpit-awakening kick like “can I scream?” on ‘New Noise’ or something of that sort. Always escaping the obvious. Great Falls still cook you a bit further in their faster-but-still-slow-burning anguish for a while, but as vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston howls a few times during that period, “there is no escape”. The song will torture you with a few more wild mood swings until its feedback-drenched conclusion around the nine-minute mark (I remind you this is the opening song), at which point the trio decides it’s time to show they can do the Converge-y three-minute head-kicker too, but not, once again, in the way that you expect. Even for the shortest track on the album, ‘Trap Feeding’ is impressively dynamic, twisting rhythms and expectations so that you inevitably end up feeling lost, not knowing whether to headbang furiously or scream along or just fuckin’ curl up on the floor and wait for the pain to be over. It’s funny to realise Great Falls have been around for, objectively, quite a long time. About fifteen years. Demian played in the legendary Kiss It Goodbye, he and bassist Shane Mehling were in Playing Enemy together, and new drummer Nickolis Parks is in Gaytheist, so yeah, of course Great Falls are awesome, how wouldn’t they be? But this record is so great that it even transcends all those references, and in a way, their entire trajectory. It feels like a debut, it has all the hunger, inventiveness, swagger and confidence of three dudes who just got together last week and realised some weird magic happens when they lock themselves in a basement to make noise. Even soundwise, where once again Scott Evans proves himself, as if more proof was needed, as one of the most talented knob-twiddlers in heavy music right now, ‘Objects Without Pain’ rubs and scratches you in all the right ways, it has claws and fangs and it’s holding a sledgehammer, and it will use all of them. Oh, and they were Band Of The Week here on TDM back when the album came out, of course, there was even a really cool interview with Shane so go check it out if you haven’t. As you know, I’ve been using those past features as a cheeky excuse to not have to write much about other records on this list, but with this one, I can write about it all day and still find different ways to praise it. Make of that what you will.
05.
Therapy?
Hard Cold Fire
(Marshall Records)
The whole vibe and appeal of this record is all there in the title, really. Andy Cairns once wrote (on ‘Never Apologize Never Explain’s ‘Long Distance’) that “I like cold mornings, they keep me sharp”, and all of these short and completely fucking to-the-point songs will have that effect on you. You know, when you leave the house in the morning in the peak of winter, maybe still half-asleep, and the cold just seems to slap you and make you alert immediately as soon as you step outside and feel it sting your face. And you can interpret this in any way too, be it sonically or thematically, where Therapy?, as usual, pull no punches either. Free of any kind of unnecessary fat or useless meanderings, these are ten lean, mean, hard songs that encapsulate the true spirit of rock’n’roll. From dismantling colonialist false myths with disarming simplicity (“Your narrative is built on blood and death / And your legacy chokes on its last breath / It’s not Jerusalem / Jerusalem’s a city in the Middle East / Your Jerusalem / Is just another myth”, Andy sings on ‘Poundland Of Hope And Glory’) to the anthemic wake-up call of ‘Joy’ (which also features an awesome line in “Tethered to the pantomime of Western ennui”), it’s an incandescently rebellious listen from start to finish, and while that tone does reflect in the music itself, that doesn’t mean it’s not full of earworms that you’ll hum to yourself all day anyway. Preferably in front of your boss, who will surely love hearing you hum “I’m leaving / Not saying goodbye”. Also, as with all the best Therapy? albums, there’s one particular song that jumps straight to contention for best T? tune ever, and in this case it’s the profoundly moving closer ‘Days Kollaps’. “All the days collapse as one / I need to find a place / Where bridges build not burn”. So do we, Andy. So do we.
04.
Khanate
To Be Cruel
(Sacred Bones)
Dude, Khanate are back, and they’re better than ever too. If that’s not enough for you, then I don’t know what to tell you. Go read the Band Of The Week feature+interview I did, or listen to the podcast episode with Alan, or buy a ticket to Roadburn to see their live comeback, or something.
03.
Royal Thunder
Rebuilding The Mountain
(Spinefarm Records)
It was tough for a while back there, to think that Royal Thunder were really done. Beyond the obvious, simple fact that they are a great band doing great records, they are also the quintessential rock band. I had a great conversation with Sivert from Madrugada on the podcast the other day where at one point we discussed that, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since - when was the last time you really described a new band as “rock”? It sounds silly to some of us of a certain age who were brought up on “rock”, but the fact is that rock bands have been a rare breed, in general terms, in the past couple of decades. Don’t worry, I haven’t joined the “rock is dead!” team, and I don’t even think that’s a result of 100% bad things - the fact that a lot of bands who would have been “rock bands” back in the day are now more niche, more specific and perhaps even more adventurous in the type of sound they explore is a good thing. But especially in the realms of music with a larger, more universal appeal, it is a fact that I kinda miss that sort of band. And that’s the main reason why Royal Thunder are often said to have a “70s vibe”. They don’t really sound 70s in any real way, but the way they approach their songwriting and its actual result sounds like the bands that were on top of the world in the 70s would if they would have started to play in this century. They’re not, by any means, a “retro” band, but musically speaking, Mlny Parsonz and Josh Weaver and whatever drummer happens to be with them at the time (it was the returned Evan Diprima on this recording, but he has unfortunately left the band again in the meantime) do indeed feel like old sould channeling something that has been progressively lost. The fact that they do it with tools that are absolutely unique to them, like Josh’s uncanny ear for guitar melodies and smooth yet chunky riffs, Mlny’s raw, from-the-heart voice and her unflinching lyrical honesty (seriously, have you heard this?) is the reason they sound so vital, so unique and so necessary. Nothing from 2023 will ravage your heart like closer ‘Dead Star’, and few other choruses will rile you up as much as the one on ‘The Knife’, and I could go on because all songs have some killer element to them that makes them crucial to the flow of the album. Mlny and Josh seem to be in a really good place right now, the band is getting a whole bunch of attention from their recent live dates, they’ll even return to Roadburn in April, so it seems like we won’t have to imagine a world without Royal Thunder again anytime soon. That alone makes 2023 musically worth it already for me. One last thing - if you need to patch up your knowledge of Royal Thunder’s career they were the first band I chose for the series of Discography Deep Dive articles I do here on TDM - read it here.
02.
JAAW
Supercluster
(Svart Records)
As you can imagine if you’ve read my stuff for a while and you have a basic idea of the stuff I like most, as soon as I saw there was going to be a band featuring Andy Cairns (Therapy?), Jason Stoll (Mugstar, KLÄMP, Sex Swing), Wayne Adams (Death Pedals, Big Lad, Petbrick) and Adam Betts (Three Trapped Tigers, Goldie, Squarepusher), I was just a tiny little bit excited. And yet, squeeing like a hyperactive ten year old as I was then, I really couldn’t fathom the enormity of the music that was about to fall on me. You see, ‘Supercluster’, JAAW’s first (hopefully, of many!) album, is a colossal, often disorienting, unpredictable uncaged rabid beast. Sure, you can find shreds of most of their members’ other acts if you listen to it enough times and start to pick up little details among the mayhem, but it’s like all of them were swept up by this bigger, uncontrollable music tornado and are just that, little shreds of paper flapping about in the wind. It’s even hard to classify it neatly, which is usually a good sign. There’s an hard industrial side of it, and people like Godflesh or even Killing Joke could be mentioned, but also the noisier, scrappier side of noise rock like Cop Shoot Cop or Unsane could be thrown into that clangy pile, as could the psychedelic cavalcades of recent Deafkids or even the darker, more sinister void that Oranssi Pazuzu usually throw us into. Now gather up all of the names I’ve dropped since the beginning and try to imagine a twisted, hulking hybrid of all of them, delivered with a very punk nonchalance. You’re still not there, but you might be a little closer. That on top of it all they manage to make this noise both catchy and also lyrically meaningful (even if you’ll have to strain a little bit to make out some of Andy’s distorted, distant-sounding howls and proclamations) is just the last cherry of a whole pile of them already scattered on top of the horrid cake. I don’t know the real impact this album has had, and to be honest I haven’t seen it on many lists or getting anything close to the praise it should have had, but I’m sure a lot of people will come to terms with it. Truly ahead of its time.
01.
夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker)
Skopofoboexoskelett
(Sentient Ruin Laboratories)
…and the only reason a record as ahead of its time and as envelope-pushing as JAAW’s didn’t make it to the top of the list is because of this little thing here, which actually did many of the things JAAW stand accused of in my text, but burrowing even deeper into the void and coming up with something even stranger and on the verge of incomprehension. If you’re the kind of music listener that is constantly on The Search, as I call it, constantly on the lookout for the next thing that will wow you, that will once again reset everything you thought you had figured out about music, always looking ahead to the next piece that will make you feel like you’re discovering an entirely new thing as all your favourite bands felt like when you were a teenager, sometimes, when you hear something special, you just know. When something throws you off, when something sounds like nothing else you’ve heard. You knew it when you heard ‘Kollaps’, you knew it when you heard ‘Filth’, you knew it when you heard ‘Dimension Hatröss’, you knew it when you heard ‘Through Silver In Blood’, you knew it when you heard ‘Written In Waters’, you knew it when you heard ‘Teethed Glory & Injury’, you knew it when you heard ‘Mestarin kynsi’, just to pick an absolutely random bunch that covers the last few decades of weird and experimental heavy/extreme music. And you’ll sure know it when ‘Skopofoboexoskelett’ starts to slither under your skin. I don’t usually like listening to advance songs of albums I’m looking forward to, but in this case, I couldn’t resist when ‘Silesian Fur Coat’ was first unleashed, and just from those almost six minutes, I could tell what was coming, and I even had them on as Band Of The Week just based on that song.
I mean, it’s not like this is a huge surprise. 夢遊病者 (“Muyūbyō-sha”, which does mean “sleepwalker” in Japanese, and that’s why you usually see the word in parenthesis in the band name, in case you were wondering) have been around for a while and they’ve pulled shit like this before. Their music has always felt way “out there”. 2016’s ‘5772’ is an incredible album of otherworldly, broken-and-reassembled black metal(ish) and has turned into something of a cult classic in certain sections of the extreme/experimental underground, and the band has just been evolving since then with each release, morphing before our eyes and ears into several other not always identifiable entities, while always maintaining a sort of semi-anonymity that I really admire, a shadowy existence that entirely fits this sort of mysterious, aloof, probably-came-from-aliens kind of music. You know a few basics, like there are three dudes from Japan/Russia/US, and that’s pretty much it. It was in fact The Devil’s Mouth, bless those people, who might have gotten deeper behind the veil and actually talked to an existing human being, with a name and a personality, on a podcast episode, who plays in the band. But yeah, no matter how brilliant their records are (and they all are, splits included), however, there has always been a hanging feeling that the motherlode was yet to drop. And that, dear friends, at least until evidence in contrary (and right now I cannot imagine the next album being even more alien and extraordinary, hopefully I’ll get to eat these words), is this.
Funnily enough, they achieve these unprecedented heights with what is also their most human album ever. Some of the parts, at least in comparison, might be called downright “accessible” - again, relatively speaking -, being fairly clean, with discernible melodies, sometimes veering into the rhythm and tonality of Middle-Eastern music. In that sense, we have to once again bring up Deafkids, as we did on the #2 record of this list (there are several parallels between my two top picks of 2023, it has to be said), as this wild mix of psych, prog, punk, metal and “world music”, for lack of a better term, is something within the same mindspace as what the Brazilians have helped spread in the last few years. If not an influence, they are surely responsible for helping spread out thought waves that create the conditions for music like this to come into existence.
Sometimes it’s said about a piece of music that you can take it on several levels - some works are so layered, so loaded, that you can just focus on the music and ignore the message, or use the message with the music just being there as a vehicle, or any other kind of combination. It’s tempting to say the same thing about ‘Skopofoboexoskelett’ - a title which, incidentally, is described by the band member we interviewed back then when the album was announced like this: “at the turn of the century there was a lot of German and Polish ophthalmologists and psychologists trying to uncover scientific and medical explanations to the notion of The Evil Eye; the name is simply an extrapolation of that notion as an amulet; the self-destructive nature of phobia, the embracing of failure, an uplifting revelling in a certain damnation” -, but the fact is that you will end up immersed in all of the aspects of it almost regardless of what you want to do. These four pieces are so enveloping, so emotionally savage, so thought-provoking, that you won’t be able to ignore anything. What instrument is this, what did he mean by that word, where does that title come from, what’s that thing on the cover. “A journey of discovery”, is another typical journalistic bullshit we like to throw at things we like, but in this case, this album really is that.
Very human, very organic, very profound, but also aloof and even provocatively alien, as if it’s been crafted by strange men in lab coats and thick glasses who meet in futuristic grubby alleyways exchanging vials of unknown substances and furiously scribble in weathered notebooks they don’t allow anyone else to read. For a piece of music to feel like this in 2023, when everything feels like it has been done before and when “shock value”, “danger” and “innovation” are mostly tired, meaningless words of the past, is a feat worthy of the highest praise. Congratulations, guys.