Trumpet of Amdusias

  Another day, another Italian DSBM band. Such is life at the Forest Wanker Compound. After 10 years, Solitude Project changed names, and direction, becoming Kintsukoroi . Literally meaning "golden repair", it is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer, gold or silver; as a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, creating something more resistant and beautiful from wounds and breaks.  Beginning 2020 with the full-length Calling of Razors / About Emotions , B.G. and R.F. Sinister staked out their ground on the border between depressive black metal and post-metal. A solid performance, but nothing earth-shattering. Then in December, they dropped a single called 25 Years Worth Waiting For , and now it is clear they have found their stride. As they said on their bandcamp page: It is dedicated to everyone who suffers from mental issues and to everyone who doesn't suffer but tries to understand and respects people li...

 This is one of those albums I didn't want to like. Have you ever felt that way? Like an album was not so much your kind of thing as it was pandering to you? That's how I felt about this when I heard the teaser track a while back. It felt, I don't know, focus grouped maybe, to be the sort of album I would like. Fortunately, I got over my pretension and gave it another listen when it was released. Yes, it is still almost eerily the perfect sort of album for me: nature obsessed, human hating atmospheric black metal with post-rock influences and unabashedly emotional. However, I have lost the feeling that it was assembled cynically. This is truly a great album, and destined to become a classic here at the Forest Wanker Compound. Old Growth have done something really special here. Mossweaver by Old Growth

I have a confession to make. I like music that isn't metal. There, I said it. Now this little blog isn't just about metal music. Which is good, because Dan Barrett just dropped a new album, and it's awesome. Black Wing is the electronic counterpart to Giles Corey , the acoustic-only project of the Have A Nice Life frontman. No Moon is the second album as Black Wing, and it is an excellent document of the Plague Year 2020. Okay, so Vulnerable sounds like a circa 2003 Dutch gabber track, but the rest of the album is decidedly chill. No Moon by Black Wing

 Have you recently been seduced by blackened industrial? Are you Industrial-Metal-Curious? Francophilic? Well, have I got a bargain for you! Brittany's (France) Fange ostensibly plays sludge metal, but their most recent full-length, Pudeur , sees them in full-on Industrial assault mode, and it is glorious. Somewhere between Hexis and Alec Empire , where digital hardcore and "harsh sludge" meet, you find Fange, smashing your face in with am Entombed riff and a Godflesh flourish. If you are olde like me, and miss the overdrive-driven industrial noise metal of the 1990s, this is a Fudge Tunnel colored nostalgia machine. Pudeur by Fange

 So a couple of days ago I found this video by a band I'd never heard of; Thy Last .  Definitely right up my alley. It immediately made me think of Cold Body Radiation and Mesarthim . Well, as of today, the EP is out on Bandcamp. I've only had one solid listen to it so far, but I am really enjoying it. The Storm by Thy Last

  So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate. What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band. These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished.  Part 4 - The Best of the Rest (See part 1 , part 2, and part 3 for the whole story) And here, finally, we come to the end of the retrospective. Here we have a selection of truly unique albums that sadly didn't...

 So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate. What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band. These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished.  Part 3 - Even More Depressed Italians  I like my atmospheric black metal as slow, melancholy, and depressive as possible. I like it teetering on the edge of shoegaze territory, looking longingly at the Elysian plai...

  So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate. What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band. These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished.  Part 2 - Angry European Anarchists (see part 1 here) Black metal has a Nazi problem, this is no secret. It also has a more general reactionary problem, about which I plan to write sooner rather than later. In the ...

 So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate. What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band. These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished.  Part 1 - The Entire City of Denver Colorado Somehow I have been neglecting to dig deeper into the music scene in Denver. How I failed to realize that a city with a TRVE KVLT brewery making beers I liked would also...

 So, this is the thing that finally pushed me over the edge into putting my music fan thoughts out here a little more publically. Every year I make a list of the albums I enjoyed most in the year. Mostly this is based on playlist statistics from my local music player and my ListenBrainz account, and then some simple mental calculations of how late in the year an album came out, so it's not just some mechanical list of the things I bought between January and March every year. This year's list is heavy on Italian bands, one-person bands, sad boi noizes, and hatred for all mankind. Best Atmospheric Black Metal album Winner: Lune - Wild Lands of the North Runner-Up: Altars of Grief - Iris   Wild Lands Of The North by Lune Best Blackened Folk Metal album Winner: Twilight Fauna - Foundations Runner Up: Dark Watcher - self-titled Foundations by Twilight Fauna Best "TRVE KVLT" black metal album Winner: …And Oceans - Cosmic World Mother Runner-Up: Af...

What is this about?  It's about music I like.  This is not a place for objective critical reviews. I am not an expert, a music journalist, or a scene maven. I'm just a person who listens to a lot of music, and likes to share the things I find that are cool to me . That last bit is important. I don't care what you listen to or enjoy, and I really don't have anything bad to say about whatever thing it is that brings you joy. However, that doesn't mean that I am obligated to take seriously, care about, or even listen to once, a band, album, or song that I don't have an interest in. Feel free to send me links to things to listen to, I might even listen to them. If I don't write about it, well, I don't write about it. No judgement; just not my thing. Sometimes I write scathing, cathartic things about bands, genres, movements, and ideas in music that I really don't like. I won't publish those here, because it doesn't matter, and it would just be mo...

 Well, I run my mouth about music a lot, and as of the end of this year, my Albums of the Year list ended up being a PDF passed out to those who cared, and for the first time, it was more than one or two people, so I thought it might be nice to have a little place to put my thoughts on music where they were a bit more public than a telegram group and an occasional PDF of favorites. That's why this exists . Amdusias (also Amduscias, Amdukias or Ambduscias) has 29 legions of demons and spirits under his command and has the rank of Great King. He is depicted as a human with claws instead of hands and feet, the head of a unicorn, and a trumpet to symbolize his powerful voice. Amdusias is associated with thunder and it has been said that his voice is heard during storms. In other sources, he is accompanied by the sound of trumpets when he comes and will give concerts if commanded, but while all his types of musical instruments can be heard they cannot be seen. He is regarded as...

 There is a undercurrent (sub genre? movement?) of ostensible black metal bands doing weird things with their music. Avant-garde things, experimental things. In my head, there is this cluster of bands like Oranssi Pazuzu , Krallice , Liturgy , and Thy Catafalque . I would put Sweven solidly in that category, and this album is at the top of a lot of people's end of year lists for a reason. Could it be true? Could I actually like a prog-metal album? An arguably tech-death prog-metal album? It's a Christmas miracle. The Eternal Resonance by Sweven