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 plains of post-rock. I like the musical equivalent of being in a snowy forest at night under a million stars alone, slightly drunk and while not happy per se not completely unhappy either.
That means that these days I listen to a lot of Italian atmospheric black metal and post-black bands. Majestic serenity seems to be the watchword of the scene there, and a heck of a lot of good albums have come from my neighbors across the sea. Lune and Morgurth both made it onto my year-end list, but there were a number of other releases in 2020 that could easily have been included. Here are a few of them
Morwinyon - Pristine
Morwinyon is Matteo Guarnello and Lorenzo Pompili who normally record as Falaise, as whom they put out one of my favorite albums of 2019.
I'll admit right away that this is not going to be to most people's tastes, but they can (and have) complain about that on their own blogs. Here in the forest wanker stronghold we like uplifting atmo-black symphonies. There are synths galore, tremolo picked melodies for days, and ethereal Mesarthrim-esque choral passages to ease you into the snowy winter in an alpine mountain vibe.
Vardan - Dark and Desolated March
It is very hard to talk about DSBM or Italian atmospheric black metal at all without talking about Vardan. Notoriously prolific, the most noteworthy thing about his 2020 output is that he only released a single album, making this the first year since 2016 that he didn't release four or more albums a year.
This single release here in the Plague Year is, as one might expect from Italy, bleak. Dark and Desolated March is miles darker than anything Vardan has put out before, and is the most honestly named album released this year. This is "I should listen to some dungeon synth to cheer me up" dark. This is not peak Vardan, not by a long shot, but as a record of watching people die left, right, and center from a global pandemic, it is a timely and resonant album.
Chiral - Hope
Tagging the project "music for the loners", this is sad boi noizes to the extreme. Also this is only technically a 2020 release, being a collection of previously recorded music from 2017-2019 that has circulated on tapes for a bit. But this is the first official release of these songs, so it counts in my book.
Wading deep into the screamo end of the atmospheric / depressive suicidal black metal pool, Chiral then takes us on a journey into both restrained acoustic work with whispered/barely sung vocals and off into the dreamlike chanting at the end of the album.
Vast - A House in the Distance
One-person instrumental ambient metal-ish foggy winter mountain music? I'll take two please!
This is ambient post-black metal at its logical layered conclusion. Repeatedly lulls you into letting your attention wander elsewhere and then bam! a slap of atmo-black guitar upside the head. The tape loop work creates a dense, lush sound, moody and sweeping.
Staurophagia - Dark Energy
Blackened Harsh Ambient is how Staurophagia describe themselves, and in all honesty, I own everything they've ever put out, including both albums released this year, so it's not exactly like I discovered this after making my own list. I just didn't have room to cover every single thing I like in 2020, which is awesome if you think about it. An embarrassment of riches really.
Get down on some alien melodies, wonder at the bizarre microtonal synth work, and fly your spaceship into a black hole with this cranked all the way up.
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