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User
Reviews 8
Approval 98%
Soundoffs 9
Album Ratings 459
Objectivity 74%
Last Active 09-18-21 7:02 pm
Joined 03-19-12
Review Comments 947
| SgtShock's Decade
One more for the pile. | | 10 |  | Periphery
Periphery II: This Time It's Personal
When this came out the whole djent craze was finally taking off from its humble roots of lone weird dudes playing seven strings in their basements through their laptops to… well, actual full bands of those same guys playing to crowds at sold out shows.
The video gamey synths and track names had this nerdy charm, and holy mother of god... the drumming... Matt Halpern's playing still blows my mind every time I pop on Make Total Destroy or his solo on Erised. I remember listening to those tracks on repeat, hoping some shred of skill or understanding would flake off and osmosis its way into my stupefied brain.
Listening back to it now, it has some obvious flaws. At nearly 70 minutes, the record feels bloated and Spencer’s vocals often times feel tacked on top of the tracks after the fact — rather than fully integrated, like in their more recent stuff. Still, this record oozes heart all the way through and it’s just so damn eager I can’t help but smile every time I hear it. | | 9 |  | Converge
All We Love We Leave Behind
Converge is STRESSFUL. It sounds like being strapped into the world’s most dangerous car chase with an open bag of razor blades in your lap. For me, putting on their acclaimed Jane Doe or You Fail Me always felt like an exercise in masochism. “Okay, you made it three tracks in last time, can you tough it out through more?”
That all changed when AWLWLB's opening track, Aimless Arrow, sprinted out of the gates. Somewhere during its frenetic 2 minute runtime everything clicked. I just… got it. Sometimes what ails you can be so inscrutable — so damn difficult to comprehend, that putting it into words feels utterly hopeless.
I distinctly remember reluctantly driving to sessions with my third therapist in two years. Healing felt impossibly far away, but in that moment I realized I was choosing to abandon my familiar, comfortable patterns of self-sabotage and had taken one step closer on the path to getting better. All We Love We Leave Behind was the soundtrack to those drives. | | 8 |  | A Lot Like Birds
Conversation Piece
In wake of their 2018 breakup, A Lot Like Birds had built themselves a peculiar legacy. They never managed to channel the multi-hued insanity of their genre’s predecessors— nor did they they ever pull off the infectious, saccharine pop hooks of their “swancore” successors (Dance Gavin Dance, we’re looking at you). Instead, they managed to carve out their own niche as the moodiest sibling of the bunch.
Conversation Piece has this addicting, eager quality to it. Yes, it’s obvious that everyone involved is trying their very, very hardest to really impress you. Yes, the lyrics sometimes uncannily resemble the bathroom stall scribbles at your local slam poetry club. Yet, under it all, the bare naked honesty radiating from this record adds a certain charm that just makes it all work. I'm sure others have written Conversation Piece off as a juvenile affair, but for me it embodies all the bravery (and occasional embarrassment) that comes with wearing your heart on your sleeve. | | 7 |  | The Contortionist
Clairvoyant
After several minutes of instrumentally laying down the album’s motif, the music breaks. From the silence, a lone piano chord rings out — just for a brief second. Then the rest of the band crashes in for their first full track, Godspeed. Over weeping, aching guitar leads, Lessard croons in his signature monotone delivery:
“I made it up
It's complicated
I gave up
On giving it a name
Things are implied
Nothing's the same
Worried I won't remember where to begin"
Something about this thirty seconds of music strikes such a deep chord in me that every time — EVERY time I hear it, time just stops and numbing waves of ambiguous sadness rise up in me. There are rough spots in this record; little whorls of experimentation and clashing ideas in the grain. However, when it works, it works SO damn well. I can confidently say there isn’t any other band making music like The Contortionist is right now, and that’s exactly what keeps bringing me back. | | 6 |  | Meshuggah
Koloss
Have you ever seen one of those creepy animatronics in malls or theme parks? Yes? Okay, now picture THAT ONE. You know the one. Putting on Koloss is like being transported directly inside the bowels of that rusted, infernal machine. Heavy slabs of riffs unpredictably crash all around you — like an alien Morse code that shifts every time you think you’ve figured it out. Permeating the air are Kidman’s relentless bellows, adding to the claustrophobia with each battery-acid syllable.
It’s all very oppressive, but let the chaos wash over you long enough and the method beneath the madness becomes clear. You start to drink it in. Next, you have your headphones on and are stomping around the house like a giant, mechanical stay-puft marshmallow man, eliciting concerned looks from your household pets.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyways, Koloss rules. Go check it out. | | 5 |  | Deafheaven
Sunbather
I think the primary element that makes this record work so well is that it takes the usual elements of black metal (tempestuous drumming, angular/tremolo-picked riffs, howled vocals) and always uses them in a way that serves the song. Nothing is here for the hell of it, and it shows. There are moments that feel unstable — too vicious to bear. But every dark passageway they lead you down is eventually rewarded by an equally glimmering triumph, made all the more cathartic by the chaos leading up to it. Even better, the tracks flow masterfully into one another, connected by tasteful interludes and harrowing samples.
Sunbather made waves in the black metal community, drawing immense amounts of praise and criticism. Some of these critiques were fair (their style wasn’t THAT original considering lantlos did it years earlier) but others just came off like your typical elitist crap that scares potential fans away. Gatekeeping is lame. | | 4 |  | Igorrr
Savage Sinusoid
What do you get when you mix breakcore, baroque music, tremolo riffs, blast beats, opera singing, and sitars together? I haven’t the slightest, but the fact that Gautier takes these seemingly disparate elements and combines them into something so fun is really just inspiring to me on so many levels. When I felt paralyzed by my anxiety and depression that year, the sheer amount of authenticity and creativity on this record helped me break out of that rut. This is so cheesy that I’m saying this about a metal album of all things, but it honestly helped me realize that getting the most of what you want out of life sometimes means giving a middle finger to the sky and letting that creative side of you take over.
Also, music needs more chicken noises and Super Nintendo chiptune in it. | | 3 |  | Saor
Aura
Aura is a white-knuckle ride through the mists of the Scottish highlands. The album has a spiky black metal backbone, but the real stars here are Andy Marshall’s evocative use of folk instruments (fiddle, bagpipe, tin whistle) and Austin Lunn’s (of Panopticon) absolutely unhinged drumming. Lunn is the fuel injector for the jet engine that is Saor’s Aura, furiously blasting and daringly cramming ludicrous fills into the end of bars. It gets messy at times, but the audible lack of any restraint ends up only advancing the album’s thesis of freedom and untamed splendor.
The production is, by most standards, pretty bad. Crowded guitars angrily buzz in the mix, the already indecipherable vocals get swallowed, and the snare sound sounds like someone taking a Scottish claymore to a trash can (which imo is totally fucking rad but the point still stands).
Anyways, crank the volume, awaken your inner fantasy nerd, and run into the woods yelling FREEDOM or something. | | 2 |  | Cult of Luna and Julie Christmas
Mariner
Tempos are plodding, tracks hover around ten minutes in length, and the opener sits on the launch pad for almost the entire length of a radio pop song before it gets going. Songs don’t follow typical AABA structures -- they drift beneath a yawning void of downtuned riffs and cold, distant synths. All the while, Kristian Karlsson’s voice is shouting into the ether about lost spacecraft, chest-bursting aliens, or his favorite parts from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If Karlsson’s harsh roars seems like a little much, just wait until collaborating artist Julie Christmas joins in on the fun. It STILL startles me to this day the way she morphs into the stuff nightmares are made of.
If you havent, check the end of Cygnus. It starts with your typical chonky-boi sludge riff and then proceeds to pile on layer after layer until it feels like the entire weight of the universe is about to collapse directly into your earholes. | | 1 |  | Rosetta
A Determinism of Morality
2010-2019 encompasses all of my 20s — a time for growing up and deciding what kind of adult we want to be. I stand at the end of a ten-year journey of victories, failures, love, heartbreak, creativity, confusion, and change... yet... I don’t think I’ve managed to accomplish either of those things.
And that’s okay.
Because even though I really don’t know what to make of it all, I’m excited for another ten years on this wild ride.
Perhaps it’s funny then that I’ve rewritten these paragraphs nearly a dozen times but to no avail. No blurb really does this record justice in terms of why it still makes me smile the same way it did back when I first heard it in 2010. Words are overrated.
And that’s okay.
Happy New Years, and thanks for following along with my over-indulgent list. Be merry and drive safe, ya’ll. | |
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