Skip to main content

Good Shit I Missed in 2020 - Part 3 - Even More Depressed Italians

 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.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Coffin Lurker - Foul and Defiled

  Industrial sludge death doom funeral noise from Oakland. Maurice De Jong is the most prolific dude in music, I am certain. Gnaw Their Tongues , Cloak of Altering , De Magia Veterum , Dodenbezweerder are just a few of his projects. Apparently Rene Aquarius from Imperial Cult decided that he would challenge Maurice to a doom-off, and the loser would have to sweep up after the planet was destroyed. This is the sonic record of that planetary destruction. It is also one of the best doom records I've ever heard. Thankfully free of Sabbath worship and lazy rehashing of every boring stoner riff imaginable, this is actually a brand new thing. Suffocatingly vile and planetarily heavy, this is the answer to the unasked question "what would happen if Sunn 0))) were from New Orleans. Foul and Defiled by Coffin Lurker

SPECTRAL WOUND - A Diabolic Thirst

  TRVE KVLT BLEK METAL. Black Metal Without Adjectives. However you want to signal that a band or an album is orthodox, foundational, traditional, what have you - this is it. 100% blast beats, tremolo picking, and wraith-rasp shrieks. This is crudeness as an art form. Spectral Wound are now the keepers of the black flame. There is zero nostalgia here. This is true modern black metal, but also exactly what 90's black metal was.  I'm going to go ahead and predict that this will be my black metal AotY. It would take truly herculean effort to make better black metal than this. A Diabolic Thirst by SPECTRAL WOUND

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

  This album answers an incredibly important question: What if Rick Deckard was a goth? A goth replicant that could pass the Voight-Kampff test easily. More importantly, it provides a stunning backdrop to the writing I am supposed to be doing, but keep avoiding. French composer James Kent has always been something of a polarizing figure. Much of his earlier work has been very HOTLINE MIAMI style synthwave. This is most definitely NOT THAT. Instead you a weird robot sex soundtrack - a post-punk mood piece cloaked in goth rock nihilism and sexual malevolence. Gritty, misanthropic, but still atmospheric and ambient, this is some nice stuff! Lustful Sacraments by PERTURBATOR