BEST O' OH-NINE

Severely delayed, yes, I know, but life, as it is, tends to get in the way, so the holidays combined with various personal detours on the road to the grave bumped "blogging" down on my list of priorities just a smidge. But hey, new year, new attitude, GO TEAM.

So let's just get this out of the way:
ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Mount Eerie - Wind's Poem



Thank you, Phil Elverum, for giving me one of the only albums this year to immediately give me that warm, fuzzy feeling right from the outset that says "Calvin, you're going to live this." Wind's Poem had me at its buzzsaw 'hello' with "Wind's Dark Poem", took my hand and dragged me into its dense foggy flaming forest home. An absolutely blissful union of black metal aesthetic with folk sensibility, it's the dirty little crossover that Elverum's been flirting with for a while and finally decided to embrace, with really stunning results.

(Side note: what is it with sensitive folk musicians and their black metal? Owen Pallett rockin' a Mayhem shirt, John Darnielle's oft-mentioned love of metal, and one of my favourite local artists, Wyrd Visions, who is quite literally plays acousitc black metal (and even did a cover of "Freezing Moon".)

So yeah, there it is, my album of the year. You can sleep tight now. Unless you wanted to see something else in the ol' top-slot, in which case, maybe some honourable mentions will sate your lust:

LIGHTNING BOLT - Earthly Delights



"Skull-fuckingly heavy" feels like a bit of an understatment when talking about
Earthly Delights, but severed head gangbang lead-ski biathalon borders on silly. This one really took me by surprise, and could very well be my new favourite Lightning Bolt album. Crushingly focused and engagingly experimental, it's really an exhausting listen, but ridiculously satisfying. I fucking dare you to not bang your head when the drums come in on "Colossus".

Lightning Bolt - Colossus

NATURAL SNOW BUILDINGS - Shadow Kingdom



Yeah, ok, the cover is fairly hideous, and yeah, I'm a complete Natural Snow Buildings fanboy, but fuck, this is good, ok? Ok. Triple LP, double CD, comic-book... this thing is massive (and boy, was it priced accordingly). Maybe even a bit too big for its own good, but when the drones are as completely engulfing as these (see: "The Fall of Shadow Kingdom"), length is a bit of a moot point. Maybe not the best starting point for new fans, maybe not enough new to satisfy the grumpy old ones, but it's still an undeniably solid slab of thoughtful and charming (yeah, charming. Read the back of the comic, or listen to an interview with the band. Charming!) maelstorms.

RICHARD YOUNGS - Beyond the Valley of Ultrahits



I've already talked a length about how swell this album is, and whaddaya know, it survived the year and made it onto this list. Unfortunately released with a total pressing of less than 300, this is Youngs at his most overtly catchy and pop-oriented. Synth-heavy, layer-heavy, but positively skyward melodies. A depature, really, but which new Richard Youngs album isn't one?

LINK REMOVED. (but on the plus side, this is getting re-released!)

Part 2 coming much sooner than this part took to get here.

The hollow mountain

As I'm sure you may have inferred by now, I'm a big proponent of buying records and physically owning music: artwork and packaging is absolutely vital to fully experiencing an album the way it was meant to be heard. And what arrived in my mailbox the other day is, perhaps, the greatest affirmation of that fact: The Hollow Mountain by TwinSisterMoon.



Scans aren't quite going to do this thing justice, but give it a look. In person, the booklet is a huge 8"x8" piece of screen-printed gorgeousness, tucked inside a beautiful hand-screened sleeve with a slab of hand-numbered vinyl (19/105 here.) Let's just say thank goodness it came in a protective record sleeve.



I was almost hesitant to play this thing: what if my hand slips? What if the needle scratches this beyond repair? FUUUUUUCK. But yeah, eventually I found my testicles and played the thing and wow. Like most releases by Natural Snow Buildings and all related projects, this is truly a record to crank to 10 and get lost in.




The structure of this album is a lot like that on his portion of the 3-way split, The Snowbringer Cult: eastern-tinged drones interspersed with acoustic folk. The drone numbers are standard fare for Mehdi Ameziane, which is to say, fucking awesome. All matter of instruments I can barely pronounce ebbing and flowing like a Lightbright melting underwater on acid. Sure, it's pretty same-y to his Natural Snow Buildings stuff which, in turn, is pretty same-y to isengrind (aka Solange Gularte, aka the lady-half of NSB) but when it's all so great I can't really be bothered by it. It's the shorter, simpler folk tunes that make TwinSisterMoon stand out: although technically unremarkable and all following a similar arpeggiated chord pattern, Ameziane's falsetto is gut-wrenching, and to have the lyrics finally printed only adds to the experience, giving grounding to the otherwise indistinct wailings.

I daresay this is the most accessible material from the project, and certainly from the whole NSB collection: the folk songs are beautiful, and the drones are all soothingly psychedelic (as opposed to some of the stuff found on Nigh Coercion...) and in digestible lengths of less than 10 minutes (sorry, no 46-minute "Song for Laurie Bird" here). Probably the perfect gateway to anyone who's had this project. The vinyl sold out immediately, but there is going to be a CD version on Ultra Hard Gel with a bonus track to boot.

In the meantime, you can get your TwinSisterMoon fix with the 3-way split The Snowbringer Cult, still not sold out (?!) which is actually a better introduction to this French psychdronefolkgaze madness, so ignore what I said before.

From The Hollow Mountain:
TwinSisterMoon - Bride of Spirits
Note: Dull Knife, thankfully, made sure this LP was sold only to people who wanted the record, not to the notorious eBayers who re-sell these things at several times their original price. As such, I am respecting their wishes and only giving you the sample MP3 they have on their own site.

From The Snowbringer Cult
TwinSisterMoon - Amantsokan
TwinSisterMoon - Kingdom of the Sea

With Throats As Fine As Needles

Cool recording techniques, to my knowledge, always yield cool albums. Set Fire to Flames set up a bunch of equipment in a condemned house for a week with a whole lot of drugs to see what would happen, and put out the stellar Sings Reign Rebuilder. Sunn O))) set up shop in an old Norwegian cathedral to do Domkirke and churned out some of the best material of their decade-long existence (chiefly "Why Dost Thou Hide Thyself In Clouds?"). With Throats As Fine As Needles formed a four-man drone supergroup (featuring members of Nether Dawn and Birchville Cat Motel), then holed up in an abandoned bunker with portable instruments in a concept that, on paper, pretty much makes my dick explode.



Luckily the dick-explosion pretty much carries though on to record, too. (Wait, "luckily"...?) As one would could guess based on the talents involved in this project and the circumstances they put themselves in, this is abrasive, varied, noisy, and hugely reverbed stuff. It's all very layered and extremely dense, with so much shit going on it can't help but meld together into some blissed-out drone grooooooves, man. Especially the first track, where it feels like all four of them are going full bore and it comes off sounding like a much more evil Vibracathedral Orchestra or Natural Snow Buildings (both of which are terrible comparisons at face value, but imagine each of them were... locked in a bunker with battery-powered instruments.)

The packaging for this thing is swell too, with a hand-dyed rice (?) paper sleeve, so I'm assuming each of these is going to be unique. Less than 999 copies left, so get it while you can.

With Throats As Fine As Needles - I
With Throats As Fine As Needles - II

Ghosts will come and kiss our eyes

If I had a dollar for every band that "features members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor", I'd probably have at least twelve dollars. A Silver Mt Zion is the obvious choice, then we've got Set Fire to Flames, Fly Pan Am, Exhaust, 1-Speed Bike, Black Ox Orkestar, Molasses, etc, etc. Not to say I dislike Godspeed (actually quite the opposite), nor do I dislike many of the side projects, but it just feels like they're goddamn everywhere.

One such project I ignored for far too long was HRSTA (spelled with little dots below the RST, but who has the time to do that?), featuring Mike Moya (ex-Godspeed, lolz) and, perhaps more excitingly, Brooke Crouser (Jackie-O Motherfucker (note to self: do blog on Jackie-O Motherfucker.)



Moving away from the grandeur of the former and the folksy noisefuck of the latter, HRSTA are sort of a middle ground between the two extremes (to underwrite everyone involved in this comparison.) This is a superbly atmospheric record, with all matter of organs and related instruments providing minor-chord drones while the reverb-y/tremeolo'd-to-hell-and-back guitar lines wrap their way around them (or is it the other way around..?); and, of course, Moya's vocals fit perfectly, and whatever little couplets of lyrics you can decipher are wonderfully creepy, too. His voice reminds me of Mehdi Ameziane from Natural Snow Buildings, and, at times, even of Thom Yorke's more restrained moments (a la Kid A, natch.)

As always, support the band whenever you can.

HRSTA - Entre la mer et l'eau douce
HRSTA - The Orchard