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 meantime, here's a bunch of black metal bands who are decidedly not crypto-fascists, and who released outstanding albums in 2020.
Old Growth - Mossweaver
I am 100% forest wanker, so I got a little hyped about the teaser track earlier this year. I somehow completely missed the full album release on December 4, so it didn't make it onto my year-end list this year. This pushes all the right "people are trash, let's be trees" buttons in my Edward Abbey primitivist brain. A perfect soundtrack to a weekend of tree spiking.
Yovel - Forthcoming Humanity
Yovel themselves explain:
“Tasos Leivaditis lived and wrote for the hopes, struggles and losses of the Greek people and Greek left movement. We found in his writing mourning; but also radiant hope, rooted in our own history but also in touch with the history of the peoples of this world and their struggles up to date. Hιs work stands as a tribute to that history, but also as a statement for our present and our future.” They quote these words of Leivaditis himself (from Confession, The Manuscripts of Autumn):
“One day I want them to write on my grave: He lived on the border of an indefinite age and died for things far away that he once saw in an un-certain dream.”Azziard - Liber Secondus - Exégèse
Jungian analysis doesn't seem like a very fertile realm for musical inspiration. However, I am a sucker for a nicely designed sigil, so I had to give this album a spin. Knowing nothing about the band prior to this week, I was pleasantly surprised. I suspect I will be spending quite a few pleasant hours becoming acquainted with their back catalog.
This is some solid, I mean dense, music. The atmosphere is unsettling and creepy, just the way I like it. The vocals are not sung or screamed, but instead are reminiscent of the great polemical speeches of history. I love any use of the voice as an instrument itself, and this delivery is perfect for the genre.
Speaking of genre, this is that more black than blackened death metal that I have taken to calling Ritual Occult Black Metal. Like their compatriots Svart Crown, they lean more towards the blackened than the death in their metal.
Odoacer - There the Vultures Will Gather
A self-described "Dismal, Minimalist, Anti-Fascist one man Black Metal" band, Odoacer seems like a perfect fit for me, no? Starting out with a nearly inaudible funeral dirge of a first track, the entire album builds to a cacophonous dissonant climax in “Left Only with Your Grief Amongst Carrion” before the properly epic “Cyclops” as a closer. This is shockingly good for a debut album.
No Sun Rises - Dominium Terrae
Following up on lat year's Ascent/Decay on Alerta Antifascista Records, Münster atmospheric black post gaze anti-nazi warriors venture further into post-post- territory and in the process make an album that is as beautiful as it is confrontational. At just shy of 30 minutes, the two tracks presents two different aspects.Dominium Terrae is a more traditional blackgaze construction, but with some nice vocal harmony work that is not standard. Drowning in Silence flies much closer to dark folk territory; all acoustic dissonance and soaring vocals.
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