Electric Wizard – Dopethrone 2000
The night streets find you in a mean funk – Electric Wizard just injected 14 kilotonnes of slow motion hate through your ears. It sets like lead in your bloodstream - threatening to pull your veins clean out your fingertips. The back of your throat burns, you spit in the gutter. Some thug looks at you in disgust and you snarl. He punches your mouth and you lie back on the pavement, sucking disappointedly on a broken tooth. What a bore. Looking at the sky, you notice the earth is drifting towards a black hole. You stare at the event horizon with the grim dignity of a jawless sphinx. You giggle at your own melancholie bullshit. Holy shit! Did someone just fill concrete? You can’t stop smiling.
Godspeedyou!blackemporer – Slow Riot for a New Zero Kanada 1999
I’ve never coped well with orchestral music - the swelling of strings tends to send my mind into automatic lockdown. ‘Classical’ is pumped out at train stations to stop you from tearing out your neighbor’s throat, to add ironic pathos to a household cleaning adverts, or to remind you to ‘feel’ something during a Hollywood film’s climax. Consequently, classical makes my emotional faculties to shut down in self defense.
Godspeed have managed to disconnect this psychological trap, by impregnating the voluptuous and climatic landscape of orchestral music with the vulgar clamor of rock and it’s perverse fixation with the ‘hook’. And as if this wasn’t genius enough, they have the audacity to make this music flagrantly beautiful and unrelentingly sad. They push depression so far in this album, it cascades into elation. Good food for hungry tear ducts.
Sigur Ros – () 2002
Sigur Ros are the new measure of mental health. I’m deadly serious- Anyone who doesn't like this album needs to be taken the fuck off our streets, then systematically humiliated, sexually, until they have the emotional depth to appreciate it. Seriously, what kind of tacky psychopath doesn’t like Sigur Ros? Fuck you.
Annal Nathrakh – The Codex Necro 2000
In terms of sheer ferocity, extreme metal has been won. Genre over. There is no possible escalation in brutality from The Codex Necro. Ever wondered what it would be like to shove your head in a jet turbine packed with scalpels? Of course you haven’t. That’s how unprecedentedly savage this album is. Worth a listen, purely to be safe in the knowledge, that whatever illegible band logo might be scrawled across that metalhead’s hoodie, you’ve heard something heavier.
Joanna Newsome – Ys 2006
Someone packed the genius of Joyce, the entire aesthetic palate of Elizabethan England, and Bjork’s charm into the body of a sexy harp player. Enchanting as fuck.
Boris – Flood 2000 (Winner – Best Album Ever.)
Infinite variation within senseless repetition – Flood begins by studying the unique beauty and structure of endless crushed stones trapped in asphalt. Philosophers could write about this shit for years, if their music tastes were good enough. Two identical guitar loops (consisting of 7 notes) are played overtop of eachother, one infinitesimally slower than the other. First they perfectly match, then, like indicators slightly out of kilter then roar out with thousands of different rhythms. Untold legions of experimental artists have tried to create polyrhythm’s as perverse as these. Boris lay them all in the dust with an extremely simple maneuver. A kaleidoscope of different tunes emerge, bleed into eachother, shimmer like a mirage, gnarling themselves into something impossibly bent and beautiful before melting away. The genius of it lies in extending this exercise over 15 minutes, showing you how much chaos can be squeezed out of 7 sequential notes, and giving you just enough time to chew your mind clean off.
Just as Boris catch you crawling head over heels into your naval (slicing time into ever finer increments & wondering what the hell the distinguishes difference from repetition) they hurl a meteor, straight into the back of your head. WHUMP. Time to stop playing with quarks, the whole cosmos is at stake. The next lands in your temple. Before you know it, your microcosm’s been smashed by an asteroid shitstorm.
Turns out, them meteors were actually snare hits from a charming folk song, slowed down to perverse booms. Now they tap gentle beat as lilly’s dangle over you like wet skyscrapers. And that senselessly repeating guitar loop you were recently obsessing over - now drifts by in a melody, barley noticed. A dragonfly passes in the fog. In the distance, a Shinto priest croons a lullaby.
Then, A roar of human energy - Like a tidal wave blowing out your chest. BOOOM! You spill out over the horizons, charging down canyons, bursting over mountaintops. You ram into the center of the earth and bite down on it’s core; spit lightening back at the clouds for kicks. Dancing, howling a simple tune - the stars fall like ash on your blazing body.
Thanks Boris.
Current 93 – Birth Canal Blues 2008
God is trapped in the misty windowpane of a crumbling country manor. The only way to reach him is by turning the spines of all the library books to the wall; tearing out the 87th page of The Cloud of Unknowing and nailing it to the inside of a chimney (under which must blaze the timber of a deconsecrated church). Having buried certain idols of Giza strategically around the surrounding moor, you must drink mercury from the palm of your left hand; swallowing a starling’s heart. All the while, in the attic, a maid must weep furiously for a daughter she never bore. Finally, with geometric precision, you must face Jupiter from the room you’re standing in and scream your childhood sobriquet. Even if all these criteria are met, you will never be sure you’ve seen God, or were tricked by the mercury destroying your mind.
Staring out over the cold moor, lap covered in specious alchemical scribblings, cigarette to burning your shaking fingers - you begin making the necessary plans.
Thumlock – Rockin’ Course 2001
What the hell happened to these guys? Don’t they realize they wrote the best rock song ever? Guess the news never reached Wollongong.
About half of the total damage done to my cochlea is attributable to crazed re-listenings of the track ‘star quake’. The chorus manages to simultaneously convey apathy, passion, mania and poignancy- all on the back of an overcharged death machine, roaring through the desert.
Re: – Alms 2004
The perfect foil to senseless amplifier worship. Re: actually sets about repairing your ears – sending out a fleet of cold-cut nanobots to open up channels in your ears you forgot existed. The fresh-frozen bouquet of squeals, croons, purrs and splashes thrums, seem to invent entirely new frequencies ~ forcing your little hearing fibers into newer, more robust shapes to cope with the sound. And your ears aren’t the only thing that get a makeover; your imagination is also given a thorough workout. Re: understands that when you can make poetic associations between - the sound of a rubber duck being squeezed underwater, a screen door opening, a march across a swing bridge, a dishwasher being emptied, a groaning floorboard chuckling, one of those hilarious and upsetting ‘lamb sound’ tubes, a well being drawn, dinner party laughter, ping pong and a child’s hum – you pretty much have the ability to twist everyday life into a exquisitely bizarre foreign landscape. Good food.
Death in June – Operation Hummingbird 2000
The aesthetic machinery of the Third Reich, delivered in the cozy familiarity of folk. It’d be easy to dismiss as mere cultural terrorism, if it weren’t so unnervingly seductive. The holocaust is a wound in history that screams the question: “How could this happen?”. Death in June answers by calmly rolling laurel-wreathed panzers into your head; sending you on a flight of self-aggrandizing mania, masterfully rationilsed into military marches, intoxicated imperial roman iconography and humanized by Teutonic paganism. Death in June have essentially created a Nazi lullaby, as charming as it is harrowing.
Compared to the Vaudevillian jokes of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the unfathomable monsters of the history books, Death in June’s Nazism is palletable, yet infinitely more terrifying ~ for it shows how the Reich is not as alien to our psyche’s as we like to think.
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