Portal – Vexovoid
It took me a fair few listens of this album to get even the slightest understanding of anything that was going on, but now it probably rates as one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. Inaccessible is a gross understatement. Portal play impenetrable, brutal, fucking crazy music that commonly gets referred to as death metal but sounds absolutely nothing like most death metal I’ve ever heard. Waaaay down-tuned guitars spew just unrecognisable streams of noisy murk that is actually impossibly technical (once you start to realise what is actually going on, after about listen six), drums hammer and blast like armies of mammoths using jackhammers and wrecking balls to fight each another, and the vocals sound like the battle cries of some fucking alien beast that lives deep underwater. This whole album sounds like it came from the ocean floor, or a world made entirely of concrete, or two massive spaceships colliding. Clearly I can come up with no shortage of hyperbole when it comes to this album and it all gets nowhere near conveying the indescribably heavy reality of this colossus.
Afterwalker – Afterwalker
I won’t say much about this release here, because I already praised the fuck out of it in my previous review (see October’s Record Of The Month) so you should know how good it is. In short, one-man black metal with way more depth than most, with hints of shoegaze, lo-fi, post-rock and a million other things. An ethereal, sublime piece of melancholic music with moments of triumphant hope.
Grave Upheaval – (No title)
Admittedly, when I look around at Australia’s generally sun-bleached climate and domineering beach culture, brutal death and black metal aren’t the first things that come to mind, and I generally have to satisfy my morbid needs with imports and internet streams from some mystical Scandinavia of my mind. But it seems like this incessant instilling of sun, surf and sports and folksy pop overload has inadvertently spawned some of the most punishing, unforgiving metal to be released anywhere in the world. Queensland, the sunniest, surfiest state there is, is home to three of the bands on this list, Portal, Afterwalker and Grave Upheaval. Grave Upheaval, whose untitled seven-track monster came out this year on Nuclear War Now! Productions, features members of Portal and Impetuous Ritual, and that’s a good indication of what you’re in for. While I don’t want to rely too much on that connection, because this band is an entirely different beast from those guys, it is safe to say that Grave Upheaval hail from the same absolutely extreme, inaccessible, almost indiscernible corner of the heavy music spectrum. This is like the already murky brutality of Portal’s death metal mutation taken to its absolute extreme, absolutely deconstructed to its raw ingredients. The songs are slowed down, the guitars are even murkier and more unrecognizable, and the drums and vocals are stripped back to the barest of essentials, scattered crashes and screams to break up the hammering constancy that is the wash of guitar distortion. To paraphrase Lou Reed in reference to Yeezus, this is minimalist music, but the parts are MAXIMALIST.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push The Sky Away
Nick Cave has had many birthday parties since he first started making music, and he’s come a long way from the spastic post punk volatility of Junkyard and Release The Bats. Over the decades he’s worked in at least five different projects, scored Hollywood films, and written novels and screenplays. The influence of his varied projects is definitely noticeable on this latest album, one of his best from any project. The raucous back-to-basics garage rock of Grinderman is noticeable in that it seems to have excised, for now, his heavier tendencies, resulting in one of his more subdued, meditative works, but something altogether removed from his past piano balladry. Vocals aside, Push The Sky Away has an almost post-rock sound with hypnotic and chiming guitar arpeggios and gradual layering of many elements. His time spent composing film scores with violin-wielding bandmate Warren Ellis (see The Proposition, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and The Road) has had arguably the largest impact on this album, with all its grand sweeping strings, cinematic flourishes and orchestral beauty. Over music this affecting, Cave can wrench a tear from a stone while rambling about Hannah Montana or reciting star distances and scientific figures, both of which he does.
Altars – Paramnesia
More unbelievably harsh metal, this time from South Australia. While Altars’ brand of metal is a bit less inaccessible (I’m not gonna say ‘more accessible’) than Portal or Grave Upheaval, Paramnesia still takes the genre of death metal in a whole new, progressive, direction. There is so much going on in each of these eight tracks. Altars are undeniable masters of their instruments and craft, able to drop everything and veer in an entirely different direction at the drop of a hat, which they do, again and again and again throughout this entire record. These songs have completely schizophrenic song structures, but they never feel forced or unnatural. These guys are just overflowing with creativity and ideas and they jam an amazing amount of such into every second of every song. While it sounds nothing like them, this album actually calls to my mind the first four Metallica albums, where every single song contained about five hundred fucking unreal riffs, each of which could have sustained its own song. Altars play some stunningly technical shit but are also masters of groove, of rock, of atmosphere, of headbanging-ness, of a ceaseless sense of adventurousness and a determination to explore new grounds. Every section of every song will make you wanna pick up an instrument and write an entire record. This album is just plain inspiring, and humbling, without being dispiriting.
Ossining – Company Men
I’m cheating a bit with this one. Ossining are actually an American duo, but this tape was put out by an awesome Australian cassette label, Rocket Machine Tapes, run by Melbourne-ian Luke Morris, so I’m sneaking it in. If that rankles you and you need six all Australian releases, go check out Kigo’s shoegaze masterwork So Lost Now instead (D.P. Pearce, the Australian behind that band and release is also the man behind Afterwalker, who already got on this list and got Record Of The Month back in October so I don’t feel too guilty robbing him of a second spot).
Ossining are a synth duo and Company Men is a stunning dreamworld of an album that sounds like the soundtrack to a sci-fi movie playing out in your head. Soaring, uplifting keys, otherworldly rumbles and sounds, meditative and at times ominous ambience – this album traverses the span of instrumental synthesizer/electronic music and interstellar experience. Put it on, close your eyes and let yourself fall through the cosmos, through black holes and gas clouds, past alien worlds and galaxy clusters, through the shadows of monolithic starships and meteors. Drugs not needed. Listen with headphones.
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