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 enter my orbit until late in the year once my year-end wrap up list was finished. I promise this will be the last post until December 2021 that is specifically about music of a certain period.
Exsanguinated Shade - A Story About The Body
Blackgaze leaning atmospheric black metal with gothic overtones, cinematic pacing, and vampirism as a lens for examining body horror and gender dysphoria? Sounds like a TRVE KVLT nightmare.
This is a moody, creepy, wholly dark and sinister piece of music. Each track has a distinct identity, but successfully work together like the chapters of a story (which the titles make abundantly clear was the intention).
Autumn Nostalgie - Esse Est Percipi
Epistemological idealism (the view that the contents of human knowledge are ineluctably determined by the structure of human thought) and ontological idealism (the view that epistemological idealism delivers truth because reality itself is a form of thought and human thought participates in it, were topics of great importance to eighteenth and nineteenth century European philosophers. George Berkeley claimed that “the existence of an idea consists in being perceived”, which in his original phrasing is the title of this album.
From that starting point, and slyly comparing Nietzsche's flirtations with ontological idealism (4. Eternal Joy On The Mountain Of Loneliness), the album weaves in and out of raw harshness and back and forth into gothic etherealness before a coda whose only lyrics are a fragment from Goethe's Werther. Aside from the music being right up my alley, the philosophical angle here really makes me happy.
Had I known about this album slightly sooner, it would have probably been my top atmospheric black metal pick for the year.
Feminazgûl - No Dawn For Men
2020 was full of black metal releases trying to outdo each other in veneration of the early 1990s grim aesthetic or the mid 1990s blast-beats-all-the-time orthodoxy, or both at the same time. That is to say, there was a lot of boring lazy black metal released this year, and a lot of that boring lazy black metal got accolades for being the tiniest bit different from the three thousand other Second-Wave-Worship bands that have come before, or for being clustered in some specific sort-of national scene.
I suspect that the recent wave of 90's worship is something of a reaction to the pending eclipse of macho metal culture by a much more diverse (both sonically and personally) scene. Plenty of people start getting all fired up to declare and defend what black metal can and cannot be as soon as the wrong (gender, sexuality, color) people start "infesting" their scene. Fortunately, one of the best releases of the year is out to slit the throats of the reactionary gatekeepers. Listen and weep, creeps. Asheville coming for that ass. Knives out.
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