New Music Report – January 22, 2021
I’m actually kinda of shocked with how much great new music is coming out already. Usually, January is a bit of a wasteland, but we’ve got some really cool stuff going on already. I think a lot of it is maybe anticipation; bands hoping to work back to some sort of normalcy at some point this year. Fingers crossed on that, but I’m very much enjoying the new music in the meantime.
Ellende EP – I know atmospheric black metal is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It absolutely blew up a handful of years ago thanks to bands like Deafheaven and Alcest, and since then it has spawned and absolutely endless pretenders and half-baked solo projects masquerading around as atmospheric black metal by musicians that can’t write melodies and don’t have proper recording equipment. But every once in a while, a band comes along that complete makes up for all the disappointment out there and raises the bar even higher for the genre as a whole. Ellende have been raising that bar for years, and this new EP is an even greater step forward. They deliver a remarkably complex, deep, and haunting mixture of the brutal and the ethereal, with crushing blast beats and echoey, pained black metal vocals juxtaposed against beautiful clean, post-rock inspired sections while absolutely never losing momentum. This is an incredibly strong, emotional, and gorgeous album that shows exactly what all the hype in the genre is about and what this sound is really capable of.
April Rain – This week is packed full of fairly obscure hits and honestly, I’m pretty happy about that. Post rock in particular is filled with so many hidden gems all over the world. I think one of the coolest things about post rock is that there is no language barrier. Most of it is instrumental, so the language is in the music; the music itself tells a story, conveys emotion, and is able to fluently converse with the listener no matter what language they speak, and I think that’s a fairly unique phenomenon with post rock. April Rain is a perfect example, this is a band from St. Petersburg, Russia, a band that I otherwise likely would have had zero connection with, but now, I can feel everything they felt as they wrote this music, and the result is a really beautiful experience. There’s so much depth and feeling to this fairly laid back yet incredibly gorgeous album. It’s not terribly complex, it isn’t rewriting the book on post rock and it isn’t an entirely unique spin on the genre, but it is a very, very enjoyable listen and an exemplary take on what good post rock sounds like.
Tr1rt3en – I generally don’t take requests for these posts. I write about music that interests me, and that I personally want to write about. That said, there are a few people out there I’ll break that rule for. This was one of those recommendations. Which is always fun cause I really am starting with a blank slate. And man, I’m not sure what my preconceived notions were going to this album, but this was a hell of an experience. Th1rt3en is a project by semi-obscure but long-running rapper, Pharaohe Monch, along with a live band. Pharoahe Monch has had a career spanning three decades, with a sparse but very high quality discography, and this new album is a sharp left-turn yet still relevant elaboration on his musically intelligent and thematically complex back catalog. And what a left turn it is, it’s actually quite ambitious writing a thoughtful rap-rock album and not have it sound like a limp bizkit-esq abomination. But I feel like the point is to create polarizing opinions on this one, but It’s incredibly thought provoking and deep. I was very pleasantly surprised by this album and is just further proof that sometimes it’s nice to step out of your comfort zone and listen to something new.
Everyone Dies in Utah EP – Yeah, ok so, I was kinda looking forward to this one. Everyone Dies in Utah is a semi-classic name in the metalcore scene, and there’s always a bit of a nostalgic wave that I get when one of those 2010 era metalcore bands comes back to the surface to do something again. Lower Definition has new music coming out, I’m super excited about that, Attack Attack! put out new music which is pretty neat, Like Moths to Flames had a great comeback. But man… This isn’t great haha. Maybe the rose tinted glasses didn’t hold up as well as I’d hoped, of many this just isn’t that great. See, it’s got all the pieces of something that could be a good album but it feels… Unfinished. Like, it’s got some cool structuring, great melodies, some of the vocals are pretty good but when you put it all together it still feels like about 60% of it is missing. This sounds like demos or pre-production takes to get ideas down for an album, rather than the finished piece. Oh well, it was worth a listen I suppose. Hopefully the new Lower Definition is way better.
Singles – August Burns Red (THE metalcore), Architects (Used to be ABR-tier metalcore, now dad metal but still good), Panopticon (atmospheric black metal), Bad Religion (punk)