Novak's 2013 favorites. Because you care...?

2013 was not all that fruitful a year for me when it comes to new albums, it was more about live music. I saw metric fuck-ton of badass shows this year, but 2012 had a larger crop of exciting albums to offer.
This is just a quick little roundup because I've already discussed each of these albums, but I feel oblige to do a "best of" post. Because that's what bloggers do. Right? I guess.

Alter Of Plagues - Teethed Glory and Injury
The river of weird metal continues to flow onward, but this is some particularly weird and particularly scary shit right here. It'll rip your face off and additionally, it's much prettier than your face. Which isn't saying much, really...

Author & Punisher - Women & Children
By a long shot, the most frightening, aggressive things to happen this year and naturally that leaves it very near and dear to my shriveled, ashen heart. I love knowing that industrial music is not completely dead, and this is about as industrial as it gets, in a literal sense.

Jesu - Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came
Damn that's a pain in the ass to type. But I'm so pleased to hear Jesu coming back around. I liked this album right off the bat, but it continues to grow on me. It's good to hear Broadrick progressing forward with this project and getting out of that hole of imitation he was stuck in for a little while.

Man's Gin - Rebellion Hymns
This could so easily be just another quaint old-timey load of costumey shite, but no. It's 100% legit, honest and real.

Subrosa - More Constant Than The Gods
Dude. DUDE. (incoherent screaming)

Honorable mentions:

Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks
This album was weirdly under the radar. All of a sudden... NEW NIN HOLY SHIT WOW. I was pretty skeptical because I was so impressed with Year Zero and wholly underwhelmed by... uhh... the one that came after it. Trent keeps saying he's done with the project, yet he keeps on truckin'. Hesitation Marks is not great, but it's rather good and it's SUPER poppy. I still feel pretty muddled about it and I can't properly express my feelings on it. It has some killer tracks, but it also some some real bonerkillers and a tendency to build up and not pay off. However, I really like the idea of including 2 different mixes, one that panders to the loudness wars and one for audiophiles. I don't have the most sensitive ears thanks to years of bad volume/earplug habits, but I can hear the difference and it's enlightening about sound in general to listen to them back to back.

Palms - Self-titled
I was really excited for this because I'm a gigantic Isis fan and this is basically Isis with Chino Moreno on vocals. I was quite taken with it when I finally heard it, but it didn't really hold up to my play-it-into-the-ground regimen that I apply to every album I get super freaked out for. It's a shame because there's so much potential here. I hope they do another album because I don't believe that this is the best this group of people can do.

In which your your not so humble narrator takes a step toward legitimacy!

Hey! Guess what!
I'm a guest on this week's episode of Faces on The Radio, which is a weekly podcast hosted by a few of my friends.
This week's episode is the Festivus episode, therefore it is dedicated to complaining and generally tearing a new asshole in 2013.

Give it a listen here: Episode 62 - Grievances

Thanks for having me, people!

Man's Gin - Rebellion Hymns (2013 , Profound Lore)

I used to be really heavy into americana, but my interest began waning as it got kind of trendy and a metric fuck-ton of utterly mediocre and derivative acts started popping up. It didn't put me off because it became "cool", I just don't have the patience to sift through it all. So I just stuck with my Munly and David Eugene Edwards albums and called it quits.

The a few years later, a friend turned me onto the music of Erik Wunder. Man's Gin and Cobalt. Cobalt are rad, but this is what really grabbed me because it's americana and it sounds absolutely genuine. there's no hint of irony here, and that's usually the great downfall of modern music that sounds old timey. This album and the previous one, Smiling Dogs,  are full of A+ songwriting and performance. They're affecting, heartfelt and almost exist in a bubble which goes back to what I said about lacking irony.  It seems completely natural for Wunder to be writing music like this, it's not forced at all.

Once again, I find myself at a loss for what to say. My only complaint is that Jarboe makes a little guest appearance to moan a little in the background of one of the songs. This is a trick a lot of artists are employing, getting Jarboe to do this on their albums. To me it seems like a grab for street cred. "Hey guys, I got Jarboe on my record!" That said, it doesn't detract from the overall high quality of the music and I just happen to find Jarboe to be pretty annoying outside the context of pre-reunion Swans. The running joke is that I'm going to have "Shut up, Jarboe" engraved on my tombstone. So nevermind.  It's tough to write about a lot of the music i want to write about because most of it speaks for itself and it's more a matter of convincing the reader to just listen to the damn album instead of elaborating on the fine points of the music and so forth and so on.  I feel like I need to figure out the internet version of holding a gun to people's heads while I force them to sit through whatever album I'm trying to pimp out.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mans-Gin/163217557044788
http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/

Subrosa - More Constant Than the Gods (2013, Profound Lore)

This made it's way onto my hard drive, and I'm still not sure how it got there. Nobody has fessed up. Thinking it was something else I hadn't listened to yet, I gave it a listen and I was totally stunned by what I was hearing and I haven't listened to anything else in the last 3 days.

This album is like a metal score to a Cormac McCarthy novel, blundering half blind through the mossy, wet, blue backwoods. One of the tracks is called Cosey Mo, after a character from Nick Cave's 'And The Ass Saw The Angel', and I'm convinced that it's not the only song that references that book, which I've read countless times in the decade I've owned it and have reduced it to a crumbling mass of tape and hi-lighter ink. The lyrical content is reflective of everything I love in literature: isolated rejects eking out a harassed existence in hidden parts of the world.

I'm pretty sure that Profound Lore is the new Hydra Head Records. I know HH has been revived, but Profound Lore has not let me down yet and seem to be hoarding all the really interesting acts. Subrosa is 75% female act which to me, is crazy because they play like dudes. This is probably a sexist thing to say, but it's hard to deny that one is surprised when a bandload of women deliver such crushing, frightening music. It's just not a common thing. The vocals are fantastic, powerful and confident. Even whey they drop down to a gentle, ladylike volume, they never fall into that cringeworthy weak breathiness that has been really hip with the singer/songwriter crew in recent years. it's hardly comparable, but it's a trend in female vocals across the board  and one that i loathe.
I also love the use of the violin. It took me a while to even realize it was a violin. I don't know what I thought it was, i was so taken by the music as a whole, really. It sounds like swarming birds, like underwater sonar gone awry, it sounds like all kinds of crazy shit and the whole effect is otherworldly and extremely unsettling.

Another aspect I want to mention before I wrap this shoddy and poorly thought out review up is how melodic and clear this is for a doom metal album. There's lots of variation and while it's pretty damn crushing, there's a lot of delicacy going on here. It's never boring, it never stagnates in one spot for too long and when it does get repetitive, it has enough sound happening to keep the listener intent on absorbing every last bit of information. Doom Metal is a pretty broad term these days and I'm not into over-categorizing music,. Subrosa are pretty tough to pin down anyway. They're very gothic, they've got post- coming out of every orifice, they're heavy as balls and up to said balls in americana. The americana bent is not as readily apparent on this album as it is on their previous ones, but it's there, simmering away. And there's nothing I love more than a metal band successfully hauling totally disparate influences into their music and making it seem like they were never intended to be apart. This band could play with Neurosis or Slim Cessna's Auto Club and nobody would complain. There's a lot of "weird metal" going on right now, riding on the coattails of Isis and the post-metal explosion. Most are pretty mediocre, but some like Subrosa and Altar of Plagues are blowing a hole in the roof of many people's expectations. I'm pleased to that that I feel like this is an exciting time to be a metal fan. I'm not sifting through music from 10, 15, 20 years ago to find stuff I can get off to because new music is being made that's desensitizing me to whole new kinds of shit. I love it.

I have been slacking on reviews, and have been kinda running out of albums i want to write about, but I had to swing by and drop a few words about this album. I'm also going to be a guest on next week's Festivus episode of Faces of The Radio podcast, to which I will post a link when it's uploaded. Some recent content might be nice for any viewers who might make a visit to this blog as a result.

http://subrosausa.bandcamp.com/
http://subrosa.cc/