Seeing as I got a bit carried away with ranting about musical morsels of awesomeness, my post will be divided into two parts:
PART 1:
Wow, it definitely feels like a long time between posts in my neck of the woods. Between the last time I posted and now I’ve participated in two group shows (my first two too!), turned 21, travelled to the Hunter Valley with my girlfriend, and finished the Fine Arts component of my double degree. As well as that, I’ve discovered, rediscovered, purchased and fawned over a tonne of new music ranging from jazz and hip hop to black metal and grindcore.
Charles Mingus’ ‘Mingus Ah Um’ has been a particular favourite of mine in recent months. That I’ve lived so long without listening to the soulful, sublime innovations of Mingus’ work is beyond me. Cuts like ‘Better Git It In Your Soul’ and ‘Boogie Stop Shuffle’ resonate with both a cerebral complexity and sultry vigour, and are essential listens. Having only previously had a passing interest in jazz (funnily enough stemming from metal bands such as The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ephel Duath and Meshuggah), I can’t wait to immerse myself further in Mingus and other jazz greats such as Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Coltrane and Thelonius Monk.
HUM has been another recent musical obsession of mine. Being a fan of spacey hardcore bands such as Misery Signals and ‘The Satellite Years’ era Hopesfall, I had stumbled across the band through the track ‘Escape Pod for Intangibles’ from the ‘Satellite Years’, which featured lead singer Matt Talbot on guest vocals. A HUGELY underrated space-rock outfit from the early to mid-90s, HUM’s music can be described as an ethereal convergence of crushing, monolithic distortion and melodic tenderness; part planet-shattering heaviness, part blissful cosmological expansiveness. Although showing promise (and gaining reasonable success) with their 1996 single ‘Stars’, it was with their final opus, ‘Downward is Heavenward’, that HUM’s astronomical soundscapes really took flight. Bridging the gap between the angsty bombast of ‘Siamese Dream’ era Smashing Pumpkins with the fuzz-drenched, wall-of-sound warmth of shoegaze, the album is a (mind the pun) heavenly exploration of dynamics and atmosphere. Cuts like ‘The Scientists’ and ‘Green to Me’ (my favourites on the album) explode with immersive, heavier-than-thou riffs and a hulking, propulsive rhythm section that is equally devastating and overwhelmingly joyous. Monumental opener ‘Isle of the Cheetah’ captures the band at its most majestic, whilst elegiac closer ‘Apollo’ eschews distortion for plaintive minimalism to reveal HUM at its most subdued and vulnerable. I could go honestly go on forever about how glorious I think this album is, but all you need to know is that YOU FUCKING NEED HUM! Mmmm kay?!
Finally, Deathspell Omega’s ‘Paracletus’ was released this week, and what a awesome doozie of an album it is! Capping off an already great year for black metal, with releases from the likes of Sigh, Enslaved, Twilight, Agalloch, Watain, and Woe, ‘Paracletus’ may very well take the cake as my black metal album of 2010. At a compact 42 minutes, these Gallic purveyors of deeply philosophical black metal provide a finely honed and haunting’. Eschewing the more minimal, meandering soundscapes of their previous albums, there is a greater sense of focus and immediacy to Deathspell’s signature brand of oft-kilter technicality and diabolical atmospherics. Tracks like ‘Dearth’ and ‘Apokatastasis Pantôn’ represent a finessed engagement with melody and the melancholic lumbering of doom metal, whilst ‘Have You Beheld the Fevers?’ and ‘Wings of Predation’ bristle with a unbridled ferocity that is at once pulverising and exhilarating. Album highlight ‘Abscission’ merges the two extremes together; a truly menacing masterpiece which veers betweens passages of chilling ambience and blitzkrieg black metal blasphemy. Highly recommended!
