→ September 2, 2016
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Music update, August 2016.

First, some non-music links – my thoughts on the Yoan Moncada promotion for Insiders, and my review of the coop murder-mystery boardgame Mysterium for Paste.

August was pretty fertile for new releases – I ended up cutting a few songs from the list this time around – with a number of singles out previewing albums due to drop in the next six weeks. I feel like overall this is the worst year for strong albums in a while, but it’s at least a solid-average year for great tracks. We still have time for something to grab me as the clear album of the year, though, so I’m trying to keep a positive attitude and take it one playlist at a time. Spotify users can use this direct link to the playlist if the widget doesn’t show up.

Swet Shop Boys – Tiger Hologram. If the voice with the British accent sounds familiar, that’s Riz Ahmed, the actor who played Naz on HBO’s The Night Of, paired here with Heems (ex-Das Racist) over a beat that was the best bit of new music I heard all month. The New Yorker profiled the duo ahead of the release of their debut album, Cashmere, in October.

Dinosaur Jr. – Goin Down. This is my favorite track right now from their new album, Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not, mostly because it just rocks and that’s when I’ve tended to like their music and not find myself bothered by J Mascis’s vocals.

Dawes – When The Tequila Runs Out. This song is just goofy-fun, more upbeat than stuff I’ve heard before from the brothers Goldsmith, who’ve also been working with Van Pierszalowski on his new project under the name Van William.

Atomic Tom – Someone to Love. Atomic Tom is new to me, even though they’ve been around for a decade and released albums in 2010 and 2015, with the latter, ERA, including this incredibly infectious 1980s-style pop gem.

The Naked And Famous – Laid Low. Never has this New Zealand quintet sounded more like CHVRCHES than they do here – and that’s a compliment. Now I’m going to ruin the song for you by pointing out that the two notes in the chorus where she sings “Taaaaake me” are the same two notes of “Tell me” from the chorus of “Always on My Mind.”

Christine and the Queens – Tilted (Live From Spotify London). I don’t think I’ve ever included a live track on one of these playlists, but I didn’t highlight “Tilted” when it came out last year and the song has grown on me, especially with this strong live performance. I still don’t think the French language is well-suited for rapping, though.

Kate Nash – Good Summer. I’ve got mixed feelings on this pop song from Nash, who peaked commercially and critically with her debut album and UK hit “Foundations;” I still love her voice and her ear for melody, but these lyrics are such a step down, as if she’s dumbing it down for the sake of sales.

Tall Heights – Spirit Cold. This song was first released as a single last summer, with a video out over the winter, but there’s a new push behind it with their August release of a new album, Neptune; I’ve seen them called “prog folk” but I think that’s misleading. This song is more atmospheric, driven by the two singers’ harmonies and Paul Wright’s cello, with some influence from the late ’90s quietcore movement evident as well.

Jagwar Ma – Give Me a Reason (Radio Edit). This Australian outfit, now based in the UK, go full-Madchester with this second single from their album Every Now and Then, due out October 14th. I hear Soup Dragons, Charlatans UK, even a little Happy Mondays here, so needless to say it’s my favorite song by Jagwar Ma yet.

Coast Modern – The Way It Was. I’m not a big Cage the Elephant fan, so saying this sounds just like a CtE – boy, that’s an unfortunate acronym – track doesn’t explain its inclusion, but in this case I found the chorus stuck in my head for a while after my first listen.

Midnight Faces – Heavenly Bodies. Another not-new artist I hadn’t heard before, this trio started out in Grand Rapids where one of its members was in a band (Saxon Shore) with Father John Misty. “Heavenly Bodies” is dream-pop with a better tempo and that moaning guitar riff earworm that was enough to land it on my playlist.

American Football – I’ve Been So Lost for So Long. Apparently this is a big deal; I don’t remember American Football from their late-1990s activity, after which they were on hiatus for sixteen years. Nothing says “emo” like “If you find me/Please remind me/Why I woke up today.”

Softer Still – Bliss. A quartet from Surrey whose sound reminds me a ton of Real Estate and a little bit of the Sundays (without Harriet, though, so it’s not quite the same).

The Head And The Heart – Rhythm & Blues. This Seattle folk-rock act’s third album, Signs of Light, drops next Friday. I think “Shake” is still my favorite song of theirs, but this would be a strong second; they’re better when they rock a little more like Okkervil River.

Bloods – Bring My Walls Down. Modern punk with sweet, layered female vocals. It works.

Dinosaur Pile-Up – Nothing Personal. This British rock act put out their third album, Eleven Eleven, last October outside of the U.S., but it’s just appearing here for the first time. I know they don’t call themselves a metal band, but the dropped tuning and riffing here are strongly reminiscent of classic (pre-thrash) metal.

Prophets Of Rage – The Party’s Over. As with their previous single, Prophets of Rage’s riffs are stronger than their rhymes. I get the political motivation behind the group, especially in light of the upcoming election, but I wish we were getting more vintage work from Chuck D and B Real.

Sabaton – Shiroyama. This song is such an unabashed throwback to 1980s thrash that I love it in spite of all of its anachronisms – or perhaps because of them.

Metallica – Hardwired. Obligatory. The lyrics are dumb, the drum work is amateurish, but I do like the early 1980s speed-metal riffing.

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→ April 5, 2016
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March 2016 music update.

Well, March turned out to be a tough month for me to blog much, but it was a great month for new music – I originally had over 30 tracks on this playlist and had to fight just to get it down to 23, including the four metal tracks at the end, which is the most I’ve ever included on one of these updates. We even got surprise (to me, at least) tracks from Broods, Royal Blood, and Corinne Bailey Rae. The April list may be a big shorter because I added some songs here that came out last Friday, but I didn’t want to wait another month to put them on a list.

Bob Mould – The End of Things. The former Husker Du lead singer is back with his best solo effort since Black Sheets of Rain, showing some of the same old ferocity that characterized his best power-pop work from two decades ago.

Royal Blood – Where Are You Now. Royal Blood had my #1 song of 2014, “Out of the Black,” and their sound hasn’t changed at all on this single from the critically-panned HBO series Vinyl.

The Kills – Doing It To Death. My list of the top 100 songs of the first decade of the 2000s missed the Kills’ 2008 song “Sour Cherry,” which I didn’t hear for the first time until about a year ago. Anyway, this is the sultry lead single from their album Ash & Ice, due out June 3rd.

The Struts – Kiss This. So my friend Pete, whom I’ve known since the sixth grade, and I have long had a huge overlap in our musical tastes, and we’ve both stayed into music into our dotage, so when we talk we nearly always end up chatting about what we’ve heard lately. I had dinner with Pete and another friend from high school on Friday night, and I mentioned some of the bands on this month’s playlist. When I mentioned the Struts without a ton of enthusiasm, because I like this song but recognize it’s kind of cliched and familiar, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “yeah.” That’s about right.

Bleached – Sour Candy. Bleached, now a trio, seems like they might be on the verge of a breakout with the first two singles from their sophomore album Welcome the Worms, which just came out on Friday. Their sense of melody is more in the front of things on this record, so it’s less hard-edged although still punk-influenced.

The Last Shadow Puppets – Aviation. I’m a little concerned this LSP album isn’t going to live up to expectations, as Alex Turner’s incredible ability to craft sharp hooks hasn’t been evident enough on the first three singles. “Miracle Aligner,” the third, is probably the worst LSP song I’ve heard. This song is somewhere in the middle; the sound is right, but where’s the big catchy melody?

Jake Bugg – Gimme The Love. This seems more like the Jake Bugg of Shangri-La, with clever, fast-sung lyrics and a solid riff, although it doesn’t quite rock like “What Doesn’t Kill You” or hypnotize like “Lighning Bolt.” His third album drops on June 17th.

Broods – Free. This brother/sister duo had one of my favorite albums of 2014, and they’re incorporating more electronic sounds into their sophomore album, expected later this year. This lead single has the electronic drum beat behind Georgia Nott’s voice, but she’s showcased as well as ever here – and that’s key, since her voice is by far their strongest asset.

Corinne Bailey Rae – Stop Where You Are. Bailey Rae is releasing her first album of new music in six years, The Heart Speaks in Whispers, on May 13th, only her third album overall and second since the overdose of her first husband, Jason Rae, in 2008. (She has since remarried.) The Grammy-winning singer’s voice remains in top form on this lead single, so while I’ve never loved the smooth-jazz style of her music, I could listen to her sing all day.

Ten Fé – Elodie. This British duo has released several singles of meditative, dreamy indie-pop that reminds me a bit of The War on Drugs if you dialed down the Dylan a bit.

The Boxer Rebellion – Big Ideas. I like the Boxer Rebellion’s sound, but their music often seems to lack big hooks, outside of their outstanding 2013 single “Diamonds.” This song isn’t quite as catchy but does offer some early U2 nods in the chorus.

HÆLOS – Separate Lives. This London trio’s sound reminds me of the mid/early 1990s trip-hop scene if you crossed it with some of the vocal styles of more classic R&B; the contrast between the sparseness of the verses and the lush textures of the chorus is the song’s greatest appeal even without a single huge hook.

The War On Drugs – Touch of Grey. Speaking of TWOD, the amazing thing about this cover of the Grateful Dead’s only pop hit is that vocalist/guitarist Adam Granduciel manages to make it sound like it was always a War on Drugs song and not something written by a band with its own distinctive sound.

D.A.R.K. – Curvy. This is a bad band name. Comprising Cranberries lead singer Dolores O’Riordan and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, the group will release its debut album, Science Agrees, in late May, and this lead single sounds less like either of their original acts than it does like a New Order track.

Black Honey – All My Pride. Psychedelic power-pop. I actually know nothing about the group other than this song.

Autolux – Brainwasher. I mean, I knew Autolux was weird, but this song sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs, and the new album is called Pussy’s Dead, so it’s as if they’re trying to prove they’re even weirder than we thought.

Mourn – Storyteller. Hinds get all the indie love right now, but they’re not the only important band coming out of Barcelona, as Mourn – three girls and one guy, as opposed to Hinds’ all-female roster – have a similar dissonant, jangly, post-punk sound, but with better musicianship. I do like Hinds, but there’s almost a sense that they’re still learning to play and write music, whereas Mourn are much further along as musicians.

White Lung – Kiss Me When I Bleed. This Canadian punk quartet also looks primed for a breakout this year, between the strength of this single and the January release “Hungry.” It’s heavy, fast, and very catchy.

Thrice – Blood On The Sand. That is indeed Riley Breckenridge of the Productive Outs podcast on drums; the post-punk icons’ ninth album is due out later this year.

Anup Sastry – Enigma. A progressive-metal drummer who’s part of Monuments and has also been a member Skyharbor and Intervals, Sastry has released a five-track EP of instrumental “groove metal” or djent or whatever you want to call it. I happen to like this style when it’s not ruined by aggro vocals.

Voivod – Post Society. Voivod hasn’t been the same band for me since the 2005 death of founding guitarist Denis “Piggy” d’Amour, given how critical his songwriting was to their peak albums Nothingface and Dimension Hatross, but this six-minute track from the February EP of the same title offers a strong facsimile of their late ’80s transitional sound as they were moving from straight thrash to the progressive metal sound of Nothingface.

Prong – Cut And Dry. Prong’s 1990 major-label debut, Beg to Differ, remains one of the best metal albums I’ve ever heard, an accessible hybrid of thrash and hardcore styles that brings out the best elements of both genres. They went into a steady decline from there, and their output since their 2003 return has been generally disappointing, but as with the Voivod track above, “Cut and Dry” at least brings back some memories of Prong’s early-1990s peak.

Amon Amarth featuring Doro Pesch – A Dream That Cannot Be. This isn’t actually my favorite track from Amon Amarth’s Viking-themed death metal album Jomsviking, but it’s the only track on the album to feature former Warlock vocalist Doro Pesch.

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→ September 30, 2015
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September 2015 music update.

Great month for alternative music album releases, with several more to come before the year is out.

Superhumanoids – Touch Me. Their second album, Do You Feel OK?, came out earlier this month, and I’m floored that it’s not getting any attention. The album has a solid half-dozen songs that are worthy of these lists, and Sarah Chernoff’s voice alone sets them apart from many other indie/electro outfits, some of whom are pretty good in their own right.

Potty Mouth – Cherry Picking. This Massachusetts all-girl punk-pop act would have fit in perfectly in the pre-riot grrl era in the early 1990s – you can hear Lush and L7 and even some Velocity Girl in the sugary chorus and simple power-chord hooks.

CHVRCHES – Clearest Blue. Their second album, Every Open Eye, came out last Friday and is just as good as their debut.

The Libertines – Glasgow Coma Scale Blues. The likely lads’ comeback album, Anthems for Doomed Youth, is a solid listen but couldn’t possibly live up to the level of their first two records. Shockingly, many of the songs are about getting wasted even though the band members are apparently sober.

Wavves – My Head Hurts. I’m hoping to have a review of their new album V up on Friday, its release date; I’ve loved the singles I’ve heard so far, which take their usual slightly obnoxious surf-punk sound and pair it with better production and cleaner guitar lines, so Nathan Williams’ pop hooks come through more clearly.

PLGRMS – Pieces. PLGRMS – not to be confused with the Vermont-based alternative act – is an Australian duo whose lush electronic sound reminds me a little of alt-J.

Wild Beasts – The Limit. These guys are just weird; this song is the final track on their three-song EP Life is a Burn, which features these critical darlings going full retro, referring heavily to ’50s garage rock.

Coasts – Tonight. More Bastille/Coldplay-style pop from this Bristol quintet, whose full-length debut appears due for a 2016 release.

The Paper Kites – Revelator Eyes. Soft-rock with a folky influence from this Australian five-piece who channel some early Cranberries as well as a little bit of the War on Drugs’ version of Bob Dylan.

Shy Technology – High Strung. I’ve seen them called “alt-folk” but Shy Technology sounds a lot to me like the piano-and-guitar pop/rock hits of the 1970s, a little bombastic, a little melodramatic, but driven by a very catchy chorus.

Spires – Nothing More. Spires are from Brooklyn, which is just so unusual. I’m a bit of a sucker for any band with a psychedelic sound, and with Tame Impala in vogue right now it’s a good time for Spires’ similar sound.

Library Voices – Oh Donna. It’s been a rough couple of years for this Saskatchewan band, whose latest single kind of sounds like two different songs mashed together, both of which come from the 1960s or early ’70s.

Big Grams – Lights On. Big Grams is a collaboration between Phantogram and Big Boi, who worked together on a few tracks on Big Boi’s last solo album, but the current project is a colossal disappointment largely because Big Boi’s lyrics appear to have been written by a 12-year-old boy.

The Dead Weather – Cop and Go. Jack White’s guitar work here is just so much better than on either of his solo albums; he’s at his best when he just lets himself jam.

New Order – Plastic. Longtime New Order fan here … and I wouldn’t say I love this song. It’s good, but a little more techno than their classic sound, which was obviously electronic but not so much like something The Cheat would put together. Also, seven minutes long? Really?

All Them Witches – Open Passageways. Heavy, bluesy folk rock that manages to simultaneously sound like something you’d hear on the Mississippi Delta and near closing time at an Irish bar.

Diiv – Dopamine. The Brooklyn outfit, led by former Beach Fossils member Zachary Cole Smith, will put out their second album by the end of the year. This lead single sounds a lot like every other song Diiv has released.

Telekinesis – Sylvia. Michael Benjamin Lerner’s newest album as Telekinesis, Ad Infinitum, came out last month on Merge Records and features a totally different sound, heavily influenced by early ’80s new wave, with several radio-worthy singles.

Disclosure featuring Lorde – Magnets. The whole here isn’t quite as high as the sum of the parts, but I still foresee a huge hit because of the names involved and the incredibly catchy chorus.

Dagny – Backbeat. Dagny hails from Norway and might be the next big thing in smarter pop, having revised her sound from her earlier folk-tinged rock to more overtly pop music. My daughter’s two new favorite songs are this and Ellie Goulding’s “On My Mind,” the latter of which I find really annoying.

Rationale – The Mire. The producer known as Rationale sounds a hell of a lot like The The circa “Uncertain Smile” on this track, which comes from his first EP, Fuel to the Fire.

WATERS – Up Up Up. WATERS’ second album, What’s Real, came out in April, but somehow this little pop gem, which first appeared at the end of 2014 as a single, escaped my notice until a few weeks ago.

SEXWITCH – Ha Howa Ha Howa. Natasha Khan was compelling as Bat for Lashes but she’s hypnotic singing traditional folk songs in various Asian languages with SEXWITCH, her collaboration with the band Toy.

Broken Bells – It’s That Talk Again. Broken Bells is pretty much an automatic add to these lists. It’s also a legitimately good song, built around a great walking bass line in the chorus.

Saltwater Sun – Making Eyes. This West London act keeps the guitars out front and Jenn Stearnes’ Lorde-like delivery works particularly well here over the loose-strummed rhythm lines.

Arcade Fire – Get Right. One of six bonus songs on the new deluxe edition of their 2013 album Reflektor, a sort of sinister groove track that, unlike many of the songs on the album proper, ends before it wears out its welcome.

Iron Maiden – Speed Of Light. Maiden’s comeback album, The Book of Souls, was far better than I expected and perhaps their best since the 1980s. If this is it, they ended on a high note.

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→ September 15, 2015
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The Book of Souls.

My latest piece for Insiders names my 2015 Prospect of the Year, along with a bunch of other “nominees” and the 2015 draftees with the best pro debuts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I assumed Iron Maiden was finished as a band after 2010’s forgettable The Final Frontier, as the band members are mostly in their late 50s and have started to encounter health problems, most notably lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s bout with a cancerous tumor on his tongue earlier this year. The mere existence of their new album, The Book Of Souls, was thus a surprise, as was its length – a 90-minute double album in an era where the entire idea of an album is losing its relevance – but there was no greater shock than the fact that the album, while uneven, is pretty damn good overall.

Most of the eleven songs on the record are prog-rock in length, three clocking in beyond the ten-minute mark, but without most of the masturbatory prog-rock noodling that has forever sworn me off the likes of King Crimson or Marillion; only one track comes in under five minutes and it is by far the worst song on the album. Instead of overly complex solos or time-signature shifts, Maiden – primarily bassist and main songwriter Steve Harris – give us driving guitar riffs highly reminiscent of their peak era from The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, as well as Harris’ signature galloping bass lines. Maiden’s best material combined a strong melodic sense with the heavy major-key riffing that inspired a generation of metal bands, many of whom were overwhelmed by or assimilated into the hair-metal scourge of the late 1980s. (Queensrÿche remains, for me, the strongest of the post-Maiden acts, although they too went off the rails with Empire after Operation: Mindcrime earned far more critical acclaim than commercial success.

Because Harris didn’t write all the material on Book of Souls, there are clear stylistic differences across the various tracks, and the lead single, “Speed of Light,” written by Dickinson and Adrian Smith, is tighter and shorter than Harris’ writings. It’s worthy of comparison to the band’s best singles from the 1980s (“Wasted Years,” “The Number of the Beast,” and “Run to the Hills”), although it’s one of the songs that overtaxes Dickinson’s voice to a distressing degree. Harris keeps things to about six and a half minutes on “The Great Unknown,” providing tremendous contrast with an extended, dark acoustic outro that seems inspired by Black Sabbath and that leads perfectly into the similarly tenebrous intro to the thirteen-minute epic “The Red and the Black,” which quickly gives way to a riff very similar to the main line from “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” (I was a little disappointed that the song isn’t in any way connected to the novel of that name by Stendhal.) That song has a lengthy guitar solo that never devolves into mindless shredding, repeating an outstanding if short melodic lead guitar line, leading into a second instrumental section with two lead guitars playing parallel lines, with its only misstep in the final minute with a too-abrupt shift to the outro. “When the River Runs Deep” returns to somewhat radio-friendly length, an unabashed throwback to the period of Maiden that, in hindsight, appears to have directly influenced the rise of early thrash metal.

The album’s two great weaknesses are Dickinson’s voice, which can no longer hit the higher registers that marked him as one of the great vocalists of early metal, and the lack of ideas at the back of the last quarter or so of the release. The lyrics of “Tears of a Clown,” a tribute to Robin Williams, are embarrassingly mawkish, riddled with platitudes like “Maybe it’s all just for the best/Lay his weary head to rest.” The music sounds as if Harris had been trying to write something that might appear on the singles charts, which Maiden hasn’t pulled off since the bizarre trip to #1 in the UK of Dickinson’s “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter,” an absolute low point in the band’s history.

The 18-minute closer, “Empire of the Clouds,” marks the longest track in Maiden’s history, surpassing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Powerslave, which quoted pieces of Coleridge’s epic poem and has become one of their most enduring hits. The comparisons are inevitable, and inevitably unfavorable, especially as it’s nearly impossible to record a rock song of nearly twenty minutes that doesn’t fall short at multiple points, and “Empire” never seems to get going in the first place; Dickinson’s operatic aspirations don’t translate at all well to the format, and the first truly memorable piece of music in the track is the two-measure guitar riff that pops up after seven-plus minutes have elapsed, by which point I assume most listeners would have abandoned ship.

That criticism may be specious in a double album that runs an hour and a half and provides plenty of music above replacement, including numerous tracks that do work as singles, including “Speed of Light,” “Death or Glory,” “When the River Runs Deep,” and lengthy opener “If Eternity Should Fail,” penned by Smith and Dickinson but more true to the spirit of Harris’ songwriting than even some of his own tracks. When “Shadows of the Valley” opens up with a lick that has to be a nod to the monumental line that starts “Wasted Years,” it’s more than enough of a statement that Harris, Smith, and Dickinson remain capable of producing songs that are worlds ahead of the artists that have long tried to emulate them.

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→ August 31, 2015
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August 2015 music update.

These playlists are getting longer, but there’s just more good music out there – I even cut a few tracks because I can keep raising the bar with so much great independent music coming out. This month’s playlist has a bunch of familiar artists, but also has more pop or at least non-alternative songs than any list I’ve crafted so far. We’re also headed into a two-month span with a ton of promising albums coming out, many of which are foreshadowed here.

Deerhunter – Snakeskin. Deerhunter have been around for over a decade, and while their sound is really all over the map, I haven’t heard anything from them as cohesive or melodic as “Snakeskin,” the tumbling, funk-soaked lead single from Fading Frontier, due out in October.

Superhumanoids – Norwegian Black Metal. The second track from their sophomore album, Do You Feel OK?, due out September 11th, is just as promising as the first single “Anxious in Venice” was. I first heard the trio’s music last year via their fantastic two-sided single “Come Say Hello”/”Hey Big Bang” last year, with Sarah Chernoff’s vocals a real standout in a field of dream-pop and other indie artists who stick a female singer out front without regard to her range or depth.

CHVRCHES – Never Ending Circles. Another stellar single from their sophomore album, Every Open Eye, due out September 25th.

Pure Bathing Culture – Pray For Rain. The lead single from this Portland, Oregon, indie-pop duo is their best song yet, more modern than the ’70s vibe that permeated their debut album.

Beirut – Gibraltar. Zach Condon’s fourth album as Beirut, No No No, is due out September 11th; there’s a delightful weirdness about this song, which starts out like LCD Soundsystem’s “Dance Yrself Clean” before the piano (real) and handclaps (maybe real) come in.

The Colourist – When I’m Away. I loved the Colourist’s first single, 2013’s “Little Games,” but the rest of their debut album (released the following year) fell short of that song’s strong central hook and shifting sounds and tempos. This title track from their latest EP follows a similar formula, slightly less catchy but with a more upbeat tempo throughout.

Civil Twilight – Holy Dove. This South African quartet just put out their first album in three years, since their second album brought the minor hit “Fire Escape” to alternative radio here. “Holy Dove” isn’t quite as intense, exchanging that for a more mid-American shuffle backing up the vocal hook in the chorus.

BØRNS – The Emotion. Garrett Borns’ first full-length album, Dopamine, is due out in October, featuring a couple of the tracks from his previous EP release, but “The Emotion” is his best song to date, a shimmering, hazy song where Borns gets all the feels into his high-register vocals.

Cœur De Pirate – Carry On. Roses, the third album from Quebecois pop singer Béatrice Martin, features her first original compositions in English, although most of the album is in French like her previous work.

Allison Weiss – Golden Coast. Apparently Weiss is a big deal in indie circles, funding her first album in 2009 with a hugely successful Kickstarter (and you thought Kickstarter was just for boardgames) before that was a thing. Weiss’s indie aesthetic doesn’t really stretch to her music, as “Golden Coast” is a pop song like you’d expect to hear on a top 40 station … it’s just better than most other songs of its type, lighter on production and heavier on songcraft.

Low – Lies. I remember Low from the mid-1990s, when I kind of dismissed them as too slow and dull for my then grunge-influenced tastes, and hadn’t realized they were still around until I came across this lead single from their upcoming album, Ones and Sixes, their eleventh to date, also due out September 11th. “Lies” is slow and mournful, just like most of Low’s music; I’ve probably aged into them more than they’ve changed their sound in any way.

Neon Indian – Slumlord. The second single from Alan Palomo’s upcoming album VEGA INTL. Night School, due October 16th, is unapologetic in its devotion to early 1980s New Wave, probably to its detriment when compared to the more progressive lead single “Annie,” even though the lyrics here are quite a bit darker.

Small Black – No One Wants It to Happen to You. It’s synthpop meets shoegaze – I think Carles would call it “chillwave,” although SB themselves apparently disdain the label – with a dissonant, wailing guitar solo that elevates this song from the background to the fore.

Josh Ritter – Getting Ready to Get Down. It’s catchy, but it also makes me laugh, right down to the line “Jesus hates your high school dances;” Ritter seems to be satirizing America’s leading family of degenerates, the Duggars, in a track about a teenaged girl escaping the moral and sexual repression of her evangelical family and judgmental neighbors.

Little May – Seven Hours. The Sydney trio’s first full-length album, For the Company, is due out October 9th, featuring sweet harmonies and more acoustic-to-electric rhythm guitar lines, music rooted in folk but borrowing more from dream-pop for their melodic inspiration.

Lou Barlow – Wave. Founding member of Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and Folk Implosion, Barlow will release his first solo album in six years on Friday, with this track starring him on vocals and ukulele, giving the song an unmistakable beach-music feel. I do wish it didn’t sound like it was recorded in a closet, though.

Passport to Stockholm – All at Once. This young British quartet includes a cellist among its members, and that’s the distinguishing characteristic of their soaring folk-rock sound, reminiscent of Birds of Tokyo and, yes, the earlier work of Mumford & Sons.

Boy & Bear – Walk the Wire. More great independent music from Australia – I’m starting to think every adult on that continent is a member of at least one indie band.

Mutemath – Monument. I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of Mute Math or this particular song – it’s fine, if unremarkable – but I know from past conversations many of you like the band. I’ve found their lyrics to be very disappointing; if you’re going with a name that includes “math” there’s a higher standard in my book.

Palma Violets – Danger in the Club. The title track from this British trio’s latest album sounds like a big drinking song – and like it was actually recorded in the pub where everyone was getting hammered.

Radkey – Evil Doer. I had higher hopes for this punk-pop trio’s debut album Dark Black Makeup, but it’s very safe and overproduced, emphasizing the pop over the punk. I know that not every African-American punk band can be Bad Brains, but these kids had some of that looser, angrier feel in their earlier releases.

Wavves – Heavy Metal Detox. Their fifth album, V, comes out October 2nd, and this third single from the album (not to be confused with their collaborative album with Cloud Nothings from July) is its most promising yet, hook-filled but uncompromising, probably the closest thing to a post-Nirvana act going today.

The Dead Weather – I Feel Love (Every Million Miles). This supergroup, with Jack White its best-known member, will put out its third album, Dodge and Burn, on September 25th; it includes two tracks released as singles in 2014, as well as this rocker, with White doing Jack White things on the guitar, which is what Jack White should probably spend most of his time doing.

SEXWITCH – Helelyos. SEXWITCH is Natasha Khan, a.k.a. Bat for Lashes, along with the English rock band Toy and producer Dan Carey. They’ve recorded covers of a half-dozen psychedelic tracks from around the world, including this Iranian track about “my dark girls” that takes on quite a different meaning when Khan sings it.

Deaf Wish – Sex Witch. This Aussie post-punk act’s half-hour debut album Pain is decidedly anti-commercial, almost grating, until the sudden arrival of this seventh track, a slower song that marries the anti-tonal vocal style of Kim Gordon with the dissonant math-rock of Polvo.

Battles – The Yabba. Is there a better experimental rock act going right now than Battles? I’d have it down to them and These New Puritans, as both acts produce intelligent, unpredictable, technically proficient music that manages to veer over the line into accessibility too.

Ghost B.C. – From The Pinnacle To The Pit. This bizarre Norwegian black metal act (it all ties together on my playlists) is almost shameless in its borrowing of sounds from British Heavy Metal to late-80s thrash to the Crystal Method-inspired guitar line that opens this track, the second from their most recent album, Meliora. Ghost’s members all appear under pseudonyms, and they maintain a facetious Satanic theme in their lyrics and appearance, something that only detracts from the fact that they’re producing some of the most compelling metal in the market today – it’s heavy yet melodic, eschewing death growls and blast beats but retaining the musical sensibilities of the Gothenburg style or even Finnish acts like Children of Bodom. I think the
Pitchfork review of Melioradoes a great job of summing up the album’s strengths and limitations. These guys are going to have to grow up at some point if they want to have any legacy beyond modest record sales, instead of running over the same old ground of tired black-metal tropes and Halloween costumes.

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→ December 11, 2014
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Top 14 albums of 2014.

My Insider content from the last few days:
* The Jimmy Rollins trade
* The Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon trades
* The Matt Kemp trade
* The Rick Porcello/Yoenis Cespedes trade
* The Wade Miley trade
* The Howie Kendrick/Andrew Heaney trade and Brandon McCarthy signing
* The Dee Gordon trade
* The Jon Lester signing
* The Francisco Liriano re-signing
* The Miguel Montero trade
* The Jeff Samardzija trade (and David Robertson signing) and Oakland’s return
* The Jason Hammel signing
* The Brandon Moss trade

My review of the boardgame Concordia is up at Paste, and I did an interview about baseball and metal with Decibel.

–

My ranking of the top 14 albums of the year is below, and reflects my own personal preferences, with a balance between albums that have a few standout songs and ones that worked better as cohesive units. You can see last year’s top 13 albums list for a comparison and to see if something you expected to see here actually made last year’s list (e.g., CHVRCHES, Arctic Monkeys). I heard a lot more than I ranked here, but getting to fourteen albums I truly liked and would recommend wasn’t even easy.

Linked album titles go to full reviews. My ranking of the top 100 songs of the year will follow in a few days.

14. The Kooks – Listen. Goofy British pop-rock songs that didn’t work so well as a collection, especially with a few tracks worth skipping, but featured a number of very strong singles, including “Bad Habit,” “Down,” and “Forgive and Forget.”

13. Animals as Leaders – The Joy of Motion. (amazon• iTunes) An all-instrumental technical/progressive metal-fusion record … or something like that. If you love guitarwork, including jazz-inspired soloing, with unconventional song structures, featuring numerous musicians operating at the far right end of what is possible with their instruments, you’ll love this album. Otherwise, maybe just move on to #12.

12. To Kill a King – Exit, Pursued by a Bear. (amazon• iTunes) It’s an EP, which is kind of cheating since I hadn’t included EP releases on previous lists, but 1) this is my list so I get to make up the rules 2) I love the title and 3) it’s a really fucking good EP. They remind me in particular of Animals that Swim, a British band from the 1990s and early 2000s that made folk-rock songs that often sounded like great drinking songs and made great use of horns as well as guitars. To Kill a King aren’t afraid to work the horns, the acoustic and electric guitar, the piano, unconventional percussion sounds, and backup harmonies that range from the typical to the borderline-annoying. Wikipedia’s entry compares them to The National, but To Kill a King’s lead singer actually sings rather than mumbling his lyrics. Opener “Oh My Love” plays like a dirge with a nod to Andrew Marvell; “Love is Coal” seems like a straight middle finger to Mumford & Sons and all of their clones, saying “this is how you do the slow-fast-slow thing, posers.”

11. Insomnium – Shadows of a Dying Sun. The best metal album of the year for me comes from this Finnish melodic death-metal act previously known for primarily downbeat and often soporific music that wasn’t saved by the technical prowess of its guitarists. Shadows brings them much more firmly into the melodic camp, with the occasional clean vocal, far more ornate song structures (with actual movements in some tracks), and somewhat less dreary lyrics. There aren’t many bands operating in this demilitarized zone between classic thrash, classical metal, and straight-up death metal, but it’s a sweet spot for my particular tastes.

As an aside, my top metal albums of the year: Insomnium, Animals as Leaders, Pallbearer’s Foundations of Burden, Horrendous’ Ecdysis, and At the Gates’ At War With Reality.

10. Band of Skulls – Himalayan. I like to rock, or more specifically, I like to listen to bands that rock, preferably without apology or relent. (I do like to rock a little, though.) Band of Skulls draws deeply on genres from 1970s classic rock to the more commercial part of 1990s grunge, and most of this album is driven by huge guitar riffs, blues shuffles, and bass-heavy grooves. This is music for people who just love hard rock that isn’t metal and still boasts great melodies, from the title track, “Asleep at the Wheel,” “Toreador,” and the psycheledic “Nightmares.”

9. Ex Hex – Rips. It’s good to have Mary Timony, formerly of noise-rock icons Helium and the all-female Wild Flag (with Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, whose 2015 album should appear on my list next year), back with a new band. Ex Hex is punk-pop more than anything else, hook-filled with a slew of short, punchy, fast-paced songs that are a little light lyrically but incredibly fun to listen to, including “Beast,” “Don’t Wanna Lose,” and “New Kid.”

8. Kaiser Chiefs – Education, Education, Education, and War. The big comeback album for the band best known for their 2004 hit “I Predict a Riot” was by far their most mature, measured, balanced effort ever, easing up on the overly clever lyrics just a bit and filling the album with compelling hooks and more nuanced songwriting. Lead single “Coming Home” found them almost serious and pensive, while “Cannons,” “Ruffians on Parade” and opener “The Factory Gates” brought the electricity you’d expect from the Chiefs along with newly thoughtful, sardonic lyrics. This album, with a title mocking a speech once given by Tony Blair, didn’t chart in the U.S., but hit #1 in the UK and went gold, their best showing since their second album came out in 2007.

7. Broods – Evergreen. (amazon• iTunes) This New Zealand brother-and-sister duo first hit with their single “Bridges,” a top 10 song for me this year due to its stunning contrast from the sweet, piano-driven verse to the thumping chorus where singer Georgia Nutt shifts up to a falsetto that almost strains her range. Their full album has great contrasts throughout within that dream-pop/electronic framework, most with strong melodies, showing a lot of range for a very young pair of songwriters on their first album.

6. …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – IX. With their ninth album (duh), the ol’ Trail of Dead are at their most melodic and textured, with tremendous percussion work by their tandem of drummers and hypnotic, swirling guitar lines, without losing the structural complexity that has marked nearly all of their work. It might not have received the insane acclaim of Source Tags and Codes, but it’s a more accessible and thoughtful album, led by “The Doomsday Book,” “Jaded Apostles,” “Lie Without a Liar,” and the closer “Sound of the Silk” that just left me on the floor gasping for air.

5. Spoon – They Want My Soul. Spoon has become, for me, the definitive American rock band, or perhaps rock-and-roll band, drawing as they do on influences from throughout rock history while incorporating folk, country, and more current electronic elements in their songs. They Want My Soul was a bounceback of sorts after a pair of less exciting albums, bringing more experimentation and a wider range of styles with barely any hiccups along the way (other than the single “Inside Out”). You’ve heard and probably liked the straightforward singles “Rent I Pay” and “Do You,” but when Spoon get nostalgic on the cover “You Just Don’t Understand” or start playing around with structure and synths on “Outlier” or “Knock Knock Knock” they manage to expand boundaries without losing their ability to craft compelling hooks.

4. HAERTS – Haerts. Three of the five best songs on here appeared on an EP late last year, but that’s not to say the remaining songs on the band’s full-length debut, produced by St. Lucia (who appeared on last year’s list with his own debut album), which all showcase singer Nini Fabi’s powerful, slightly smoky voice over masterfully crafted strata of keyboards and drum machines. “Giving Up” is the best new song and the only one on my top 100 this year, but “Wings,” “Hemiplegia,” and “All the Days” are standouts from their first EP.

3. alt-J – This is All Yours. It wasn’t as groundbreaking or mindblowing as their debut album, An Awesome Wave, my favorite album not just of 2012 but of the decade so far, so I could call This is All Yours a mild letdown … and yet it’s still a work of great imagination and continues the trio’s refusal to work within the conventions of modern music, even within what’s generally called “alternative” but isn’t quite as radical as the name might indicate. This is All Yours is uneven, with a few songs they could just as easily have omitted (“Choice Kingdom” and “Pusher” in particular), but they soar with the manic complexity of “Every Other Freckle,” the slow expansion of “The Gospel of John Hurt,” the four-vocalist gimmick that actually plays on “Warm Foothills,” and the so-bad-it’s good “Left Hand Free.” It’s not as cleanly produced as their debut, unfortunately, which cuts into the atmosphere it creates and stunts the beauty of tracks like “Warm Foothills” or “Hunger of the Pine.”

2. New Pornographers – Brill Bruisers. I don’t know how a collection of singers and songwriters this broad and diverse could push out an album this cohesive, but Brill Bruisers is an ebullient power-pop masterpiece; what it might lack in invention (compared to, say, Twin Cinema) it more than makes up for via its sheer pop brilliance. The title track is one of the best songs of the year, landing in my top 10, but “Dancehall Domine,” “Fantasy Fools,” and “War on the East Coast” all shimmer with gorgeous pop hooks and note-perfect performances across the board.

1. Hundred Waters – The Moon Rang Like a Bell. (amazon • iTunes) I never reviewed this album because I didn’t quite get it when I first received it a review copy back in May; it was just too weird, too unconventional, almost the way I never quite got the Cocteau Twins. But I kept coming back to certain songs that stuck with me – “Xtalk,” “Innocent,” “Out Alee” – and realized the issue was that I had to get used to the production, which put singer Nicole Miglis’s voice so front and center that you can almost hear her thinking. This is cerebral music, but that doesn’t mean it requires more of the listener than an open mind; think of Hundred Waters’s songs as the pattern on a lake when hit by a raindrop or a skipped stone, with each track within a song rippling outward on its own to create a gorgeous, cohesive whole. I haven’t heard anything quite like it before, which is something I want to say about any album I’m calling the best of its year.

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→ October 29, 2014
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At War with Reality.

At the Gates’ first two albums, both released in the early 1990s, were generic black-metal releases, with the same silly lyrics and abortive stabs at classical influences as many other bands in the nascent genre. By their fourth album, however, the group’s sound changed into a tighter, cleaner, thrash-influenced form of melodic death metal that became a surprise hit in Europe, where death-metal acts have long found more commercial success than in the U.S. That disc, Slaughter of the Soul, turned out to be the band’s last before a nineteen-year hiatus, one which saw some of its members form The Haunted, a harsher, less melodic extreme-metal act. The same lineup from Slaughter of the Soul reunited a few years ago to tour, and their first album since 1995, At War with Reality, dropped on October 28th … and feels just like the band never broke up at all.

At the Gates’ style remains straightforward and, as death-metal goes, relatively accessible. Of the thirteen songs on At War With Reality, only one, the closer “Night Eternal,” goes past four and a half minutes. There’s no blast-beat drumming, no indecipherably fast riffing, and lead vocalist Tomas Lindberg scream-growls the words (as opposed to the Cookie Monster death grunt style) so that you can understand most of what he said. The real appeal of the music for me is that the riffs are so distinct, more reminiscent of the “death-and-roll” sound of Entombed than of other leading lights in the Gothenburg death-metal scene who rely more on machine-gun riffs and higher-gain distortion.

“Heroes and Tombs” begins with a decoy lick, a series of arpeggiated chords that seemed to nod to peak Slayer (Seasons in the Abyss or South of Heaven era) with round, muscular power chords through the verse before the drawn-out lead guitar line separates itself above the chorus – a technique At the Gates uses several times to introduce that melodic element to songs that would otherwise sound like early speed-metal with growled lyrics. Both “The Circular Ruins” and “Death and the Labyrinth” lean toward the same end of the metal spectrum; you’ll think Slayer and Testament but also Wolverine Blues-era Entombed and even hints of Carcass’ Heartwork. “Upon Pillars of Dust” has an opening riff that would make Rust in Peace adherents proud before shifting into the fastest tempo of anything on the disc for the verses – but one that downshifts for the chorus for some real contrast wrapped up in a song that clocks in under two minutes. There’s a similarly quick staccato opening riff to “Conspiracy of the Blind,” a counterpoint to the slow lead guitar line on top of it, although we lose that contrast in the verses because the drums never vary – but as a fan of fast-picked rhythm guitar this was my favorite riff on the album.

Even better death-metal albums tend to wear on the listener if they run too long, as there’s an inherent sameness in a dozen songs that all have the same tempo, the same vocal style, and the same detuned guitars. At the Gates probably could have kept At War with Reality even a little tighter than its 44 minutes, as the album becomes repetitive near the end. The main pedal-point riff in “Eater of Gods” sounded a little familiar, and the best bit of the song is the interlude at 2:30 where we get one undistorted guitar, allowing the second guitar to play the main riff more clearly than at any other point on the track. (Then the third line comes in, borrowing so heavily from Dream Theater’s “Pull Me Under” that I started singing “Thiiiiis world is/spinning around me” in the car.) I imagine the members of At the Gates generated a lot of material after a nineteen-year layoff from working together, so I’ll forgive them some overexuberance on what is still one of the best metal albums of 2014.

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→ September 15, 2014
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Puig Destroyer, FKA Twigs, and other new albums.

Puig Destroyer started out as something of a joke (their name alludes to American grindcore act Pig Destroyer) among a few baseball-loving musicians, including Riley Breckenridge and Ian Miller of the Productive Outs podcast, but they’ve now morphed into a real if virtual hardcore punk band that performs loud, fast, short songs about baseball topics – including one song I can honestly claim to have inspired, “Umpshow.” Their first full-length album, Puig Destroyer, includes twenty songs, none over 2:06, with the best song titles anyone’s produced since Seth Putnam died, including “Three True Outcomes,” “Trumbomb,” and the entirely truthful “No One Cares About Your Fantasy Team.” This kind of post-hardcore isn’t for everyone – I’ve seen them described as grindcore, but Puig Destroyer isn’t in Napalm Death territory – with blast beats, shouted vocals, and heavy bass lines, but it’s tightly produced and you can hear the strong musicianship underlying the jokes about sabermetrics and ligament reconstruction surgery. The album is available for preorder for $7 now through that link, and you get an immediate download of the song “Mike Trout.” (Full disclosure: I’ve met Ian, been on the Productive Outs podcast, and received a digital review copy of the album.)

* Meanwhile, longtime hardcore stalwarts Sick of It All are about to release The Last Act of Defiance, their first album in four years, one that shows a band in steep decline. Not only are the fourteen tracks generic and tired, but the song “2061” sees the group espousing 9/11 conspiracy-theory nonsense, claiming that the U.S. government is hiding the “truth” about the attacks until confidential documents are made public in the year of the song’s title. That kind of “truther” bullshit is an intelligence test, and Sick of It All just failed.

* In Flames’ newest album, Siren Charms, continues in the vein of their more recent work, where they try to straddle the space between their melodic death metal roots and more radio-friendly American metalcore, which produces a very unsatisfying end result. In Flames’ signature twin guitar leads are present all over the album, but aren’t front and center on enough tracks for fans of their work or, in my case, fans of that particular brand of extreme-metal riffing.

* FKA twigs (née Tahliah Debrett Barnett) might suffocate under the weight of all of the positive reviews of her debut album LP1, including a nomination for this year’s Mercury Prize. While Barnett shows beauty in her emotional, restrained style of singing, I can’t add to the effusive plaudits thrown her way because the severely understated trip-hop style where she plies her musical trade strikes me as little more than background music. There’s almost nothing here to praise or critique; it’s barely music, an unstable foundation for Barnett’s impressive vocal acrobatics, unable to hold my attention for even the length of a song. She may very well win the Mercury Prize, which alt-J took home two years ago for An Awesome Wave, given the critical acclaim LP1 has received; I’m just not hearing what everyone else is.

* English hard-rock band Amplifier draws influence from about three decades of rock and metal, from the ’70s (notably Pink Floyd, with hints of Black Sabbath) to the ’90s (Nirvana, Soundgarden), but the result on their forthcoming album Mystoria is surprisingly tame. I certainly expected more experimentation based on their reviews and press clippings, but after the opening pair of tracks, we get some generic album-oriented rock tracks made marginally more interesting with heavy use of effects pedals. The instrumental opener, “Magic Carpet,” and second track, “Black Rainbow,” are the only standouts here, with the off-beat percussion line in the latter track giving it the experimental feel that the guitar riff lacks.

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→ July 26, 2014
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Entombed A.D.’s Back to the Front.

My breakdown of the Peavy trade is up now for Insiders.

Entombed was one of the most important bands in the history of heavy metal, a death metal act that veered hard back toward the mainstream with their epic 1993 album Wolverine Blues, which featured substantially slower tempos, fewer blast beats, and somewhat more comprehensible lyrics. The band didn’t eschew its detuned guitar sounds or heavy riffs, but the newer style drew more from classic dark metal acts like Black Sabbath and Slayer, rather than the straight-on (and in my opinion unlistenable) early Nordic death metal pioneers like Mayhem or Emperor. Their new style earned the moniker “death-and-roll,” although that sounds pejorative to me rather than recognizing that what they were doing was ingenious.

Personnel disagreements splintered the band, however, and founding vocalist LG Petrov has split off with three later members of the band to form Entombed A.D., whose debut album Back to the Front is set to drop on August 5th. It’s not Wolverine Blues, but it’s very much in that vein, with huge, heavy, almost bluesy metal riffs reminiscent of British Steel-era Judas Priest, along with unmistakeable death-metal elements like growled vocals and faster percussion. The album is uneven, but fans of Entombed’s work with its classic lineup should be interested in the new output.

Back to the Front couldn’t start off any better, with the menacing “Kill to Live” driving forward on thick buzzsaw guitar riffs, leaving the rapid-fire drumming just to brief passages that punctuate the heaviness of the verses and chorus rather than overpowering the music. “Second to None” employs a similar mix of elements, like a sludgier, bluesier track left off of Pantera’s A Vulgar Display of Power. (I’m not a Pantera fan, though, as the whole “groove metal” movement left me cold.) The closer, “Soldier of No Fortune,” sees Entombed stretching out into more melodic territory, a nearly seven-minute opus with multiple segments and tempo shifts, but which never loses the force or heaviness of Entombed’s signature sound.

The album veers back and forth from the Entombed death-and-roll sound to some more conventional death-metal numbers, and the quality of the songwriting rises and falls at the same time. “The Underminer” opens with a incredible rapid-fire guitar riff, but the whole thing is, er, undermined by the blast beats that follow and wipe out the guitar sound. “Bait and Bleed” has a similar problem, starting with a pair of overlaid guitar lines that would appear to promise more complexity, but by the chorus we’ve drifted into more cliched death-metal territory and lost the plot of the opener. Even “Bedlam Attack,” which has some tempo shifts later in the song, loses me with the fastball before we get to the changeup because it’s so repetitive.

I said on Twitter last week that this album isn’t as good as Wolverine Blues, but it’s a solid add to the Entombed canon. The more I’ve listened to Back to the Front, however, the less positive I feel about it. There’s too much here that I think I’ve heard before, from Entombed’s early/mid-90s output to the groove metal movement to earlier touchstones like Motorhead, Sabbath, and Slayer. If you’re a longtime Entombed fan, Entombed A.D. won’t disappoint you, but I don’t think it’ll stay in my own rotation for long.

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→ July 11, 2014
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The Dagger & The Monuments’ The Amanuensis.

My Futures Game preview went up this morning, and I did a Klawchat on Thursday. I’ll be at the Futures Game, of course, and will head to the Butcher & Boar stand out by right field after BP, around 3 pm. Hope to see many of you there.

The Dagger’s self-titled debut album (due out July 22) is one of the strangest releases you’ll hear this year – the music itself isn’t odd at all, as the eleven tracks are all very straightforward blues-rock songs, the kind of tracks you’d expect to hear on a classic-rock station. What’s strange is that the trio of death metal musicians in the band have produced a record that, if you didn’t know it was new, you’d assume was written and recorded in the late 1970s. It’s not especially innovative and a little lacking in certain areas, but if The Dagger wanted to bring the New Wave of British Heavy Metal back to life, they’ve succeeded.

Three of The Dagger’s members were once part of the defunct death metal band Dismember, and here they’re joined by Swedish vocalist Jani Kataja, who sang in a pair of stoner-metal acts before joining the Dagger in 2010. (It’s not that strange a transition for Kataja; Bill Steer, co-founder of Carcass and former Napalm Death guitarist, had a blues-metal side project called Firebird before Carcass reunited a few years ago.) Their bio specifically refers to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Rainbow, and Deep Purple as influences, although I also hear a lot of lesser-known acts from that era like Saxon and Quartz, bands that leaned toward the less heavy, more melodic end of the range. You’ll hear that especially on The Dagger‘s best tracks, “1978” and “Inside the Monolithic Dome,” songs driven primarily by brief, pronounced guitar riffs and mid-tempo rhythm sections.

As a whole, however, the album feels far too familiar, as if these are actually songs we all heard in the late ’70s or early ’80s but haven’t heard much since because they were overshadowed by stronger tracks. There aren’t enough memorable hooks, and the lyrics vary from weak to embarrassing (“Nocturnal Triumph” is just cringe-inducing, which is too bad as the guitar lines behind the verses would make it a great driving song). The Dagger appear to be more influenced by bands that drew from blues-rock rather than acts like Maiden or Priest that used faster tempos and, in Maiden’s case, more technical skills that came down from classical roots.

–

The Monuments’ sophomore album, The Amanuensis, melds progressive metal with heavier “groove” elements – I hate the term, but it does fit here – like a blend of early Fates Warning and peak Pantera, with both clean and screamed vocals along with fugal guitar lines. There isn’t enough variety across the entire album, with many of the guitar melodies sounding too similar in structure, but it’s a highly precise, almost severe album, with appropriately serious lyrics. They also get bonus points for naming a song “Horcrux.”

That song and “Origin of Escape” are among the highlights of Amanuensis for the variation within each song – changing tempos, lyrical styles, but still relying on the same staccato-picked guitar riffs that populate the entire disc, so the second half of the album starts to sound too much like background noise. “Atlas” begins with the clichéd death-metal growl but morphs into a jazz-metal track, a little less experimental than Cynic or Atheist might have produced but in a similar vein, with a seamless transition into the very similar “Horcrux,” which makes better use of undistorted passages to break up the monotony of the austere up-and-down lead guitar lines, concluding with the counterpoint pairing that makes the song the strongest on the entire disc. (It doesn’t hurt that the song also includes the highest ratio of clean to growled lyrics of the eleven tracks here.) But by the time we get to track five, “Garden of Sankhara,” the lead guitar riff style, both in meter and technique, has become too familiar already. Using the same motif across an entire album can be clever, providing a measure of artistic unity to a set of disparate songs, but the Monuments take it too far.

The Monuments rose from the ashes of English experimental-metal act Fellsilent, who had a cult following among fans of extreme metal but lacked enough of a melodic component to find a broader audience or to appeal to me. The Amanuensis is a significant step in that direction, even further towards the commercial end of the extreme-metal spectrum than their debut album, Gnosis, although it’s best consumed in small chunks, with a focus on the first four tracks of the disc – which on their own would have made an outstanding EP release. It’s not up to the standard set by Insomnium earlier this year but worth the $6 amazon is asking for the album right now.

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