Veil of Sound vs. The Devil's Mouth vol. V: Revisiting 2003

You thought 2003 wasn't a cool year for music, didn't you? You were also wrong.

Our collaboration with our beloved partners Veil of Sound rages on! We started with a bunch of short outbursts for the initial presentation and a whole pile of nasty hatred on the second volume, went a little quiet and intimate on the third one, and turned our attention to the extreme metal of Southern Europe on the fourth volume. For the fifth volume, I thought we’d do a little celebration. I confess my first thought went to albums reaching the 30 year old mark, but does the world really need to be reminded yet again about great stuff released in 1993? Nah, the musical 90s have by now redeemed themselves through the sheer weight of their historical importance in the eyes of just about everyone, so how about we tackle something that is still waiting for their turn? How about 20 year old albums, or to put it another way, music released in 2003? Let’s be honest, you think about bad nu-metal and sports caps and the-beginning-of-the-end-of-everything-cool-because-internet when you think of 2003 in music, don’t you? As if to further reaffirm my claim that there’s awesome music in every year - and every era, logically, too - if you just look in the right places, a closer look revealed a whole bunch of great, great albums, songs and bands, over a lot of different genres too. So much that I built my playlist - hence ths title - starting with the premise of alternating between noisy and quieter songs. Of course, nothing is more fun that ruining your own ideas, so by the end of the list I intentionally muddied that whole concept. You’re welcome. Here’s the chat me and Thorsten from Veil of Sound had about all this, it was a fun one:

As it turns out, 2003 was even better than that. Thorsten’s reply to my playlist not only mopped up a few forgotten remnants that I omitted in the genres that I most deal with, but also added a ton of awesome beat-driven music, within alternative hip-hop and similar styles, so get on it right now. As always, my playlist is up at Veil of Sound, go check it out now. And here is Veil of Sound’s ‘2003 - Beating, Pumping and Riffing’ masterpiece. See you next month!

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