Showing posts with label Run the Jewels. Show all posts

Sunday, June 07, 2020

HEAVY TUNES: Records I Listened to Over the Past Week or So, As Of June 7, 2020

last week had ... a lot.

June 2: you can probably guess this theme

Vince Staples, Hell Can Wait (2014, Def Jam)
Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell (1980, Warner Bros.)
Iced Earth, Days of Purgatory (1997, Century Media)
Christ it's embarrassing to like this record.
Helium, The Dirt of Luck, (1995, Matador)

June 3: flailing

Charles Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956, Atlantic)
Molly Nilsson (Top Tracks)
Makthaverskan, Makthaverskan (2009)
James Gang, Live In Concert, (1971, ABC)
My uncle had this, but it was scratched to shit, so I haven't heard it since the late 80s. "Tend My Garden" and "Ashes the Rain and I" both rule. Everything else...
Operators, Radiant Dawn (2019, Last Gang)
Russian Circles, Memorial (2013, Sargent House)
Jeff Beck, Wired (1976, Epic)
This was one of the first tapes I bought when I started buying music. Some days it holds up. This day ... it really did not. But I can still whistle fairly long parts of "Led Boots".
Future of the Left, Curses (2007, Too Pure)

June 5: long days, long weeks

Oozing Wound, Earth Suck, (2015, Thrill Jockey)
Can, Ege Bamyasi (1972, United Artists)
Question of the day: Hey, so, do I still like Can? Answer? Not today, no.
Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 4
Well, they can't all be winners.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969, Reprise)
Roxy Music, Manifesto (1979, Polydor)
The Magnetic Fields, Quickies (2020, Nonesuch)
Screaming Females, Live at the Hideout (2014, Don Giovanni)
It had been a really long time since I had played this. That was a big mistake.
Joy Division, Substance (1988, Factory)
A cassette that changed my life.
Soul Asylum, And the Horse they Rode in On (1990, A&M)
I remember liking this a lot in high school. Apparently I was wrong about at least one thing in high school.

Sunday, January 04, 2015

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2014

0. TL;DR List + Links Only

I. Meandering Introductionalizing

Looking back at the year in the light of the full list, I realize that 2014 was a musical year of...a bit of a rut, honestly. "Retrenchment" is probably the nicest word to use, but what I spent my year listening to was pretty much loud guitars and male voices and that was it.

I will have to make a point of greater variety next year.

II. The Long Version, the Real Relationships

My 2014 began much as 2013 ended—with Shooting Guns' rolling-truck rumblings, loud, heavy, and moving hard, if not fast. Almost all of what I liked best this year was what the great Erik Highter called "low-altitude space rock", the kind of music that remembers that rocket ships are just hot rods in another dimension. Which brings us to:

Solar Halos

Probably 2014's most common "just listened to this, I'll just listen to it again right now" experience. The four-song demo was outstanding, the six-song record is basically perfect, and I listened to both again and again and again. No record I listened to this year was sequenced as well as Solar Halos—the build to the final song, "Resonance", essentially eight minutes of continual pummeling explosions, or a strong crashing surf pulling you under, was unmatched and made for enormously satisfying listening.

Check out their twitter: the band was really good in January about aggregating all their reviews—numerous and rapturous—but the album now seems forgotten here at the end of the year. Which is bullshit: by a wide margin one of the best records of the year. Buy it and introduce yourself to them. Every song is great and the album as a whole is even better.

Earthless

My pal Abe the Professor recommended these guys a few times before it sunk in—but finally they popped up enough on one of my Pandora stations for me to fall completely in love with them. Very good swaggering rhythms around which spectacular guitar solos solo and solo and solo—these are side-long songs mostly with solos the entire time. Much of the year's best getting-work-done music. I like Sonic Prayer best, but Rhythms from a Cosmic Sky is, as Pete Beatty pointed out to me, also super.

Holy Mount

A late-in-the-year discovery (again from the rad-as-hell Erik Higher) this Canadian hard psych outfit scratched the hell out of my Hawkwind itch, with John Carpenter synths and long guitar odysseys that never got boring. Absolutely terrific. I listened to everything they had on Bandcamp and picked Alpic, but recent days' listenings have suggested strongly that the newer Vol might be one of 2014's finest and loveliest releases. I'll investigate further and report back.

Hawkwind!

Why so much Hawkwind? Well, three reasons. First, I've been there before. Second, they're great. Third, I saw them (or anyway a version of them) this summer with my dude Abe, and it was as good a show as I've ever seen. Old dudes trying, and succeeding, to blow the roof off the venue so that the levitating crowd can transcend. Band of my year, in that what they did was what I spent the year looking and listening for.

Jesu

Speaking of transcending, I finally discovered Jesu this year. (Thanks to David Raposa!) Very emo metallic shoegaze, or something, this Godflesh spinoff is exceptionally sensitive and powerful music for lone bodies trying for anything more. "We All Falter" is the entire album conveniently distilled into one longish track, a trek encompassing what I once saw called "tragedy ecstasy doom and so on" but with crushing guitars and beautiful textures that envelop without smothering. Sounds so loud, even when you play it quiet, that it always verges on the sublime. Always makes me a little weepy, to be honest.

MC5

This year I finally picked up a copy of Back in the USA, which is the worst-produced important album ever: you can barely hear the (nearly perfect) songs through the clock-radio-speaker production values. Basically all you can hear on this record is just snare drums, vocals, and trebly guitars, but that works well when the vocals are as piercingly wonderful as Robin Tyner's "I'm sooooooory, I'm soooooooooooooory" in "human being lawnmower". This record is hard to listen to, but easy to love. And I do love it: it's the (perfect) pop exponent of a normally noisy band's attempts to make everything okay through purely sonic means. Or, as Greil Marcus said, to:

create a young community of spirit, affection, excitement, and self-consciousness

Fuckin' A, brothers.

Comes legitimately close to working, too.

Bongripper

But you can't always be trying to create a community of spirit, affection, excitement, and self-consciousness. Sometimes you just want to get down into the king-hell bummerism that pervades: it is, after all, the 70s. That's where Bongripper comes in. Bongripper's barely relieved grim / grind / semi-sleaze works more thoroughly for me than I'm stoked about, on records like Satan Worshipping Doom, Hippie Killer, and Hate Ashbury. But the puns do suggest a tiny glimmer of humor, which lets in a little light, as do the song titles, as on Miserable, where they run "Endless", "Descent" and "Into Ruin". But nothing I've heard matches their 80-minute single-song "great barrier reefer", which matches its drug-humor title with occasional grunge chords that lighten up the proceedings a bit and keep things from just being one detuned sludge chord for an hour or so. Not that there's anything wrong with one detuned sludge chord for an hour or so: if you'd prefer that vibe, I can definitely vouch for Miserable, and it's not at all unlikely that I'll buy everything else on their Bandcamp this year.

Parliament

Oh, man, Mothership Connection. This record is so god damned good. Irrepressible. I listened to its bubbling, throbbing humanity dozens of times this year, but only ever in one circumstance: bummed the fuck out, exhausted, maybe hungover, and at my desk at work. And, every single time, it helped, at least a little. It's not hard to feel better when you're hearing unstoppable funk grooves under odes to interstellar escape. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I bet.

Captain Beyond

My pal Ian turned me onto the band, and this song-cycle album was one of the year's most versatile. From bike rides to writing to trying to crash, this one spun under it all. It was a foursquare reminder that, even sodden and miserable under an overwhelming onslaught of bummer vibes, there's still good times to be had, experiments to be made, and boundary lines to ignore the fuck out of. Whether that reminder makes you scream HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT or scatter parts of a song across an entire album side, it's a good lesson. And this is a good record!

I'm just sad that the flaccid mopes at 33 1/3 turned down his book pitch: I'd love to read what he had to say about the roiling "Raging River of Fear" and "Frozen Over", where you can hear half of the next 40 (!) years of heavy metal, or his can-actually-play-his-fucking-instrument insights into the proto-technical "Dancing Madly Backwards (on a Sea of Air") and the bullet-spraying breakdown towards the end of "I Can't Feel Nothin' (Part 1)"—to say nothing of how much I'd like to hear him come up with an explanation for the relationship between song parts, lyrics, and titles here. Why does the phrase "dancing madly backwards" appear in "Myopic Void" but not in "Dancing Madly Backwards", one wonders. Where exactly is the divide between "I Can't Feel Nothin'" and "As the Moon Speaks"? Why are there two listed two-part songs when other songs seem to share as much or more while being listed as distinct? No matter, probably: just slurp down another sugar cube and turn the fucker up and lie down and close your eyes, a person, on this planet, loved. When "Armworth" turns into "Myopic Void", going from post-Berry choked guitar chirps under pre-Priest dual lead melodies straight (in) to space, all reverb and "aaaaaaaaaah"s you smile, and you think about possibility, and you smile more. And the spoken-word pieces in "As the Moon Speaks (To the Waves of the Sea)" will work for me forever. Even if I won't listen to it in public, so nobody will catch me grooving on what could very easily be mistaken for the second-best Jethro Tull jams ever. (Note: if you ever liked that one Beta Band song in High Fidelity—I did—, you will 100% dig "Myopic Void", as it's a straight rip job.)

Side two is definitely just one long multi-part song. Fuck the haters: I know I'm right.

Dead Moon

The positive side of my year's familiarity/retrenchment is that I spent so much of my time with lifers. No lifers are purer, more committed and inspiring, or better than Fred and Toody Cole, and no band is better than Dead Moon and no songs are better than their songs.

If you can listen to "in the waiting" or "I won't be the one" and not want somebody to sing you a song that loving, or if you can listen to "diamonds in the rough" or "running out of time" and not find your entire life, hope and age and weakness and doom and resistance in there, then you can just get the fuck away from me. Probably the best American band ever.

Bad Daddies

Speaking of couples, and of lifers. One of the most important things I learned this year was that I could learn a lot from some vegan homeowners who started their band as a hobby. Because not only did Bad Daddies have a hell of a lot of interesting—even wise—things to say when I interviewed them for Negative Fun Records, they put out a couple of the year's undisputed best songs: "You Ain't Right", their Negative Fun Singles Club release will, I think, have a long life on comps, and in the bedrooms of miserable rebels: it's one of those evergreen punk songs that fits into you the first time you hear it like you've always known it but satisfies you like you've only just now stopped being incomplete. (The song is love, in other words.)

Their other big release this year, a split with Hard Left, shows a band moving—fast! "War" is a traditional Bad Daddies song: 22 seconds long, with noisy, dissonant guitar blankets over a wrestling match backbeat, Camylle's unmatched scratchy scream, and a feedback outro. It's a great song. "Festering Brine" stacks huge guitar hooks and a classic Matt solo with some of the band's most dynamic loud/soft—or maybe loud/slightly-less-loud—changes yet, and it's also a great song. And "We Never Will" is a lost New Wave hit, with Camylle's keening, poppy vocals carrying an unforgettable melody and Matt's guitar mostly cleaned up but occasionally splattering noise-magma all over the song structure: it's an absolutely thrilling song by anybody. In the context of this band's established louder/faster/shorter/noisier aesthetic, it's revolutionary. They're extending and deepening their approach farther and faster than seems possible. (The Captain Beefheart effect: there's so much noise, and it's so well-chosen and -inflicted, that everything fits.)

The core of the band is the power of no: the characteristic Bad Daddies song lyric is a negation (I don't, you ain't right, we never will). But the melodies, whether in Camylle's torn vocals or Matt's surging spatters of guitar, build something else up against that negation. The songs aren't an opposition, but a knot, made of threads of passion, negativity, beauty, the whole thing. These may seem like big claims for barely-three-minute snot-punk screeds—unless you've heard the songs, anyway.

What 2014 requires you to believe, because it's self-evidently true, is that a late-starting band of suburban teachers can make some of the year's most powerful punk records, can make vital, necessary art. That alone makes it a better year than a lot of us thought it was.

Shellac

More lifers! New Shellac! Finally I got authentic fucking information about the song titles of the songs I heard like three years ago. This record is inconsistent, but great, just like Shellac themselves, and the title song is perfect and contains one of the year's most bizarrely saddening lyrics:

some of us are tired
of where we are
in this cul-de-sac
fuck that, let's go, we can always eat along the way

Screaming Females

This New Jersey trio was by far my year's most breathtaking discovery. Guitarist / frontwoman Marissa Paternoster is probably the best guitar player on the planet—or at least the most consistently thrilling. Sylvia Juncosa's lead-like rhythm playing, Bill Carter's lunatic spasms, J. Mascis' throat-closing, heart-gripping solos. The songs are wonderful, and even the lyrics hold up. I got hooked by "leave it all up to me" off of the live record, and spent most of the year having my blood well and truly whipped by the series of tunes from "crow's nest" to "doom 84". Listen to everything Screaming Females does. Buy everything they put out. Buy them fizzy water and fruit when they come to your town and let them crash at your pad.

Mark Lanegan

I started the year listening a lot to the very-stripped-down and incredibly rad Black Pudding LP. Mostly just Lanegan's vocals with English fingerstyle acoustic guitar, this record really did it for me, especially late at night when the rains wouldn't come and the mezcaleros' work was done.

Black Pudding was particularly pleasing at the time as against the one before that, Blues Funeral, which I'd picked up in the summer of 2012. That year, I found Blues Funeral alienating and half-assed: the electronic drums seemed to be playing boring and meaningless beats, and the cold synth textures were jarring and out of place around Lanegan's unrelentingly organic vocals, lyrics, and worldview—at least that's how it felt when I bought the record. Even in February, when I made my pal a Lanegan primer, I was still even calling Blues Funeral "the only one I don't like". But after I saw his intense and excellent November set, I went back to revisit that record in the light of what I'd seen and heard.

Originally I had heard the new Phantom Radio and especially its accompanying preorder EP No Bells on Sunday as huge leaps forward for Lanegan's interest in integrating electronics. The ticking noises like devices breaking in "dry iced" worked perfectly under Lanegan's understated "I'm sorry" refrain, and the quiet little-kid-picks-out-a-melody under synth washes of "no bells on Sunday" worked like good New Order with a better singer. And my introduction to the whole thing, "sad lover", couldn't've been better fit for me: a Thin White Rope lyric over (what Mojo tells me is called) a Krautrock-style motorik beat? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP. And they did sign me up, and took my credit card number, and sent me some records. It was awesome.

Later, I revisited Blues Funeral after spending significant time with No Bells on Sunday and a little time with Phantom Radio. That time around, I found the execution great, the songs wonderful and varied, and the production immediate and engaging. I don't know what my fucking problem was: Blues Funeral, Phantom Radio and No Bells on Sunday are all great. So is Black Pudding. Lanegan rules okay.

Bonus self-promotional material: I got to interview Lanegan and he was a hell of a nice guy. Super-fun to talk to about basketball.

Charles Mingus

Every year, I make an attempt at the beginning of the year to learn about jazz. This year, I was lucky, and what I ended up with was Charles Mingus' epochal Pithecanthropus Erectus and some fantastic emails explaining it and other jazz from the great J. D. Hatings.

I didn't get much farther than this record this year, but this was one of 2014's's most revelatory and consistent pieces of work: heavy without being loud, consistent without being monotonous, and exciting without being rock. With the new year coming, I look forward to another attempt to learn about the genre.

Courtney Barnett

As 2014 slumped toward its grave, I happened to hear the song "avant gardener" on KALX and fell instantly under its spell. Apparently it's already well exposed: it's been on TV and whatnot, Pitchfork was all over it a couple years ago, etc. But it was new to me and I found it inspiring, heartening, and refreshing beyond belief, probably partly because it's so good, and partly because my year had had so much bassy guitar and howling men. After so much oppressive weight, it did me great good to hear uptempo if not upbeat bouncing songs with major lyrical variation and cool, rising melodies bubbling everywhere. Within an hour of hearing the song on the radio, I'd listened to a couple of her EPs and bought "how to carve a carrot into a rose", and it's basically been on repeat ever since. Particular favorites include "don't apply compression gently" and "history eraser". This is great shit. I really like the weird curls of Australian accent and the conversational, colloquial, witty lyrics that somehow always still fit the tune and the music. It's kind of like a likeable, charismatic, competent Craig Finn, but with a better backing band and a lot more to say.

No Other

Best song-about-work of the year, "Option C". Angry and bitterly observed, this is a song for anybody who ever had to punch a clock and keep themselves from punching a boss.

III. The Quickies

Russian Circles

Took me a while, but @jefcanuk finally wore me down and convinced me that these guys had (a lot of) (great) moments. It continually catches me off-guard that this drony, amiable outfit shares a nervous system with previous HEAVY TUNE fave-purveyors Botch. Anyway, this is instrumental metal with lots of sprinkly emo/chimey-sparkle parts, and it's extremely my shit, especially if Red Sparowes are going to continue to not exist.

Russian Circles have a ton of records. I ended up with Memorial, which is pretty good, but which passes by mostly forgettably for long stretches, until the dependably pretty/sad "Ethel" towards the end.

Run the Jewels

This one didn't do it for me quite like last year's did: the beats were slower, for one, and I didn't hear quite as many completely great long lines like El-P's "With the pull of a pin a grenade / Get a crowd to they feet and a soul to its options / I'm a fool for the win I been made" and it keeps going like that for a while. Also this record sounded like shit through my el cheapo earbuds, which is, sadly, one of my primary listening vectors. All that ~~negativity~~ nuance aside, the good songs here are superb, and no lyrics meant more to me in this season of Ferguson than Killer Mike's:

Where my thuggers and my cripples and my blooders and my brothers?
When you niggas gon' unite and kill the police, mothafuckas?
And take over a jail, give them COs hell
The burnin' of the sulfur, goddamn I love the smell
Now get to pillow torchin', where the fuck the warden?
And when you find him, we don't kill him, we just waterboard him
We killin' them for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom
And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em

El-P

In the aftermath of Abe selling me on Run the Jewels, he managed to hook me up with El-P's previous solo album, which spent a solid month on repeat in my ears. I loved almost all of it, but I couldn't possibly love anything more than the sad Metroid noises that closed the album. If I'd known one record could have both samples from Metroid and the line "fuck your droid noise, void boys / 'nnoyed ploy / oi oi! / I'll fuckin kick the shit outcha groin, boy / oy vey!" I would have bought this on release day.

Big Business

Kind of the flipside of the Parliament record, I turned to this one mostly when I was down and wanted to stay there: the songs on this record didn't get into me like so many of the earlier ones did, but "lonely Lyle" nailed me instantly, smiling-sad barbs that won't come out without ruining what they hit. A melancholy slow burn, perfect for a decade in full retreat. This record had plenty of other highlights, too, even if it wasn't a year-defining release like Here Come the Waterworks or Mind the Drift. "Chump Chance" had the year's most urgent vocal melody, and "Doomsday, Today!" was one of 2014's best pummelings. It's good shit: you should buy it.

The Men

It's been all downhill for these guys since 2011, but I did spent easily three weeks listening to this on heavy repeat. Odd that I can't now conjure up a note of it to memory. I suspect the problem is that they were, like the historians they are, trying to ape the MC5's triumph-over-bad-production move—because this is one incredibly badly produced album, with everything sounding like it was recorded in different circumstances—but the songs weren't world-defining. The best example is "Another Night" which was audibly shooting for Early Bruce Springsteen and instead ended up at Second-Tier Eddie Money, totally exhausted on the album. But the band did work these tunes beautifully when I saw them last: one of the year's best dance parties by a mile. So I'm chalking this up to a great band trying to pull off a degree-of-difficulty move and failing, slightly, and I'm looking forward to the next record and I'm really looking forward to the next time they come to town. Let's go see 'em!

IV. Past Loads of Fat's HEAVY TUNES OF THE YEAR

V. Disclaimers

Relationship Disclaimers

I get paid to write catalog copy and similar stuff for Negative Fun Records, and I probably wouldn't've heard any Negative Fun bands unless I did so: that said, I paid for every note of Bad Daddies I heard this year, including a couple of shows I saw, and the dough I made writing about them had nothing to do with the esteem I hold them, and their music, in. Same goes for No Other! Except I would inevitably have heard them through the great Paul Bruno's great Unblinking Ear podcast, and on his new label's indispensable Serious Rockers mixtape.

Financial Disclaimers

I bought everything on this list, with the exception of the El-P record, which Abe gave me.

Thursday, January 02, 2014

Fat's Best HEAVY TUNES of 2013

0. TL;DR List + Links Only

the low flags - Alpha Cop, split 7" with Carton
arming Eritrea - Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another
future child embarrassment matrix / the male gaze - Future of the Left, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident
stand and encounter - Gowns
gopher guts - Aesop Rock, Skelethon
pendulum swing - Blank Realm, Go Easy
my time - Golden Dawn, Power Plant
the waist and the knees - Game Theory, Lolita Nation
Ragnaraak - Verma, EXU
the Catholic Channel - Carton, Sunburst EP
Today Might Be Our Day - Wormburner
Mt. Abraxas + Follow the Leader - Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats
Winter Prevails / Moose on Rice / Winter Prevails II - Snailface
Workshop of the Telescopes - Blue Öyster Cult
St. Cecilia - Stalk-Forrest Group
Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind - Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
7" - The Whip (alternate link)
greed is your horse - Lord Dying, Summon the Faithless
Manifest Decimation - Power Trip, Manifest Decimation
Banana Clipper - Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels
Motherfuckers Never Learn - Shooting Guns, Brotherhood of the Ram

I. Meandering Introductionalizing

Good year this year! For music, anyway; the rest of consensus reality continued its momentum-gaining slide into nightmares of inhumanity and inevitable environmental collapse into catastrophe. This year, I did a better year than in a couple other recent years of hearing and enjoying new music, rather than just exploring the depths of my archives. Much of this newness came from the ~~endlessly shit-spewing sewer hose that is~~ Twitter, and a lot of it is available on Bandcamp, which bids fair to absolutely revolutionize my relationship with music—or at least with new bands.

If nothing else, Bandcamp is making it much harder for me to want to go the record store. This is a bad thing, in my estimation, and I am currently trying to figure out how balance my desperation for convenience (read: laziness) with the necessity that I contribute to the small business economy of the place I live. The answer might be as simple as something Pink Eyes said from the stage of a Fucked Up show a couple months ago:

Buy one record a month at your local record store.

It's a thought: we'll see if I can make it happen.

Anyway. The year in music was more than just angst and the internet, though. Most of the best new stuff I heard was this year came from the old ways—my friends told me about them. Also a cool thing about this year in music is that I got to write about music for some other venues. Two of the things I wrote could be considered companion pieces to this list:

A similar list on my podcast, No Headline Audiozine
A year-end list, focussing exclusively on this year's new music, which will be appearing over at Up the Pucks

II. The Long Version

the low flags - Alpha Cop, split 7" with Carton

I also got to write some catalog copy for Negative Fun Records—but it wasn't payola that made a Negative Fun release my favorite song of the year. It was just that the song scratched itches I didn't know I had. As I said on the podcast, the song is a wide-screen epic, one that moves from part to part to part, loudly, like a storm surging over a montage of, well...all of human history. Or anyway, everything that feels like it can go into a life feels like it has a home somewhere in this song.

arming Eritrea - Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another
suddenly it's a folk song / land of my formers - Future of the Left, Curses
future child embarrassment matrix / the male gaze - Future of the Left, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident

As promised in last year's list, Future of Left spent a lot of time in my ears this year. These were my favorite of their songs, spread out over a pair of albums and another pair of EPs that I bought, and the copy of Travels with Myself and Another that my buddy gave me. "arming Eritrea" is maybe their best song overall, with harsh barks lasting a long time and eventually not yielding to, but being subsumed by, overwhelming melodies. The hooks in this one are irresistible, and the elliptical lyrics are just elliptical enough to keep the whole thing mysterious and captivating. "suddenly it's a folk song" and "land of my formers" are two more scrape-pop numbers that kept my blood frothy and my neighbors awake. Off the excellent debut record Curses. "future child embarrassment matrix" and "the male gaze" were the best-sounding things I've heard from the band, so perfect in sequence that it makes the songs that follow them on the album sound like deliberate experiments—as though having added jaw-smashing brickbat stomps to the usual repertoire of brilliantly abrasive anthems, they felt the need to focus entirely on other new tricks. Less perfect, but still great, with different context on the EPs. (Worth noting that XtraMile completely fucked up the metadata on the .mp3 files for the Man vs. Melody EP, making it kind of a less worthwhile purchase.)

stand and encounter - Gowns

Speaking of brilliantly abrasive, I've had this lying around for a few years, and I pull it out regularly, usually when I need a good aural scouring to flense away the cruft, self-pity and fatigue that...life gives me. This one's free to download, and will wring you out, leave you stripped of a lot of the daily toxins. It's the Neurosis effect, in other words. I haven't heard anything from EMA—half of Gowns, gone solo, evidently—that I have liked nearly as well, alas.

gopher guts - Aesop Rock, Skelethon

Not the first song that grabbed me off the album—Skelethon, which may have spent more time in rotation than any other in 2013—but the one that might mean the most to me, after my two hundredth listen. "gopher guts" has the best-executed devastating closing verse on an album that's full of them*, and boasts a perfect downer of a chorus-closing hook:

...and then I let him go
...oh.

*To wit, the following, which is almost chanted:

I have been completely unable to maintain any semblance of relationship on any level
I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril
I have been acutely undeserving of the ear that listened or the lips that kissed me on the temple
I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wishes its history disassembled
I have been a hypocrite in semonizing tolerance while skimming for a ministry to pretzel
I have been unfairly resentful of those I wish had acted different when the bidding was essential
I have been a terrible communicator, prone to isolation over sympathy for devils
I have been my own worst enemy since the very genesis of rebels

The other world-class closing verse came from "cycles to Gehenna". I talked about this on the podcast a little bit, but not particularly well, and I honestly have yet to articulate successfully to myself just why the phrase pins me so, but I flinch, and think about my life a little bit, every time I hear:

this is the product of a D.I.Y. inadequate home

From @holy_mountain came the following rad HEAVY TUNES:

pendulum swing - Blank Realm, Go Easy
miles from nowhere - The Only Ones, Even Serpents Shine
my time - Golden Dawn, Power Plant

Blank Realm's best song is near-perfect drone-groove action with a long lope and enough room to roam to get spacy, but enough tightness to avoid getting old in a hurry. The Only Ones are like the Kinks, but worth listening to. And Golden Dawn sounds almost offensively like Roky Erickson, but apparently came by it honestly, as actual, factual contemporaries of the 13th Floor Elevators who got not just overshadowed, but seemingly actually suppressed, if the Wikipedia is to be believed. And anyway, sounding incredibly like the 13th Floor Elevators is a good thing to do, if you can pull it off. Psychedelia from the garage: nothing wrong with that. Thanks, @Holy_Mountain! I owe you some much better tweets that I have so far sent your way.

the waist and the knees - Game Theory, Lolita Nation

More white pop came to the fore when Scott Miller died and I reacquainted myself with an ancient favorite, the insane double album Lolita Nation. This album was probably the richest influence on my taste for highly arranged studio melodies. I have no idea how I came to buy this tape, somewhen in high school, but it always stood another play, and my only regret with respect to it is that Scott Miller had to die to get me to revisit it. "the waist and the knees" stands in for pretty much the whole album, even the weirdo noise-collage of side 3, which only makes the sweet pop go down even more satisfyingly and interestingly. And it's a nearly perfect song and it mentions the only Beach Boys song I will ever love.

Ragnaraak - Verma, EXU

Can't remember where I found this good krauty drone-metal. Probably somebody on Twitter. Probably somebody on Twitter who's into HEAVY TUNES and lives in Chicago. In the back half of 2013, whenever I couldn't decide what to listen to, I defaulted to this. Equally suited for soothing at sleep time, propelling-but-not-distracting at writing time, and inspiring pushups at pushup time. I don't know one song from another on this album: but as an album it's dense, solid, and rewarding all the way through. One of these days I've got to check out what else they've put out.

the Catholic Channel - Carton, Sunburst EP
(runner-ups: on that hill, fingertips)

The entire EP shreds and skips in a scything way that I originally thought was kind of post-grunge, but on the 30th of December, listening to it on my bike, I realized that "the Catholic channel" has a very best-song-by-Squirrel-Bait sound and feel. So maybe it's less post-grunge and more...good-band. Whatever label it earns, it's some of the best back-to-basics guitar rock I've heard in forever—sort of what I wish Milk Music had been able to provide. Honorable mentions go to another great tune on that great EP and to the other side of the Alpha Cop's "the low flags".

Today Might Be Our Day - Wormburner

Even more back-to-basics, this is just a great song. As somebody who uses music like a drug, it's intensely welcome to find something that has as a side effect the creation of...hope.

Mt. Abraxas + Follow the Leader - Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats

A band that had been recommended to me a lot, Uncle Acid took me a while to warm up to. I think it's mainly because this is not a headphones record—this a loud-ass-speakers record. And a damn good one. In 2013, no songs better blended familiar approaches and influences without resorting to outright appropriations and imitations.

Winter Prevails / Moose on Rice / Winter Prevails II - Snailface

Similarly old-and-new, the lifer-rock side project Snailface brought the year's best—and best-natured—record-collector-band music, with Snailface IV, a concept album about...camping. Treading roughly, and treading roughly over the same ground as Into Thin Air and Grizzly Man, I think, the album blends an awful lot of classic-rock-radio moves into a very satisfying and infinitely listenable landslide. Humor never gets its due artistically, and certainly doesn't in the realm of heavy music, but this record managed to be funny and tongue-in-cheek without ever being half-assed. And in "Winter Prevails", things even got emotional, with big stomping beats under sad strings and a story about fleeing civilization (and dying alone).

Workshop of the Telescopes - Blue Öyster Cult

I'm writing a book about Blue Öyster Cult, and part of my preparation (research?) for the book is listening to BÖC records in order. I'm still digging into the early stuff, and finding hooks everywhere, revelatory little moments that light up the overall project. And then there's this, off the first record, which is thus far entirely impenetrable: over unsettled chiming chords, Eric Bloom chirps:

My silverfish imperatrix, and incorrupted eye

and shit just actually starts making less sense from there. Maybe I should just start off with a live version.

St. Cecilia - Stalk-Forrest Group

Another part of the work I'm doing for the book is listening to the band BÖC were before they were BÖC. The Stalk-Forrest Group is as explicitly an attempt to be New York City's Grateful Dead as BÖC was to be the American Black Sabbath; oddly, I adore it. Moodly jangle-rock with quiet harmonies all over the place and long, long, noodly guitar solos, this was my go-to chill-out record for much of the year.

Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind - Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Because I love guitar squalls over rock-solid drone-grooves, as provided by Blank Realm, above, I love this song and have been listening to it several times a day for the past month or so. A great combination of energy-inducing and mood-settling. The rest of the record doesn't do much for me until the chill closer, "the Story of Yo La Tengo"* brings its nearly 12 minutes of heartening swells and quiet crashes.

*Or, if you believe the shitty metadata that Matador provides, "the Story of Yo La Tango".

7" - The Whip

Can't say enough about this record. I avoided it for years—in a story I told briefly on the podcast—because it reeked of death to me, as the definitive record that came out in a grief-clotted summer a decade ago. But an object is not exhaustively defined by its context, only informed by it, and this is a boiling, thrashing record absolutely screaming with life. Buy the fucking thing; I don't want to hear any bullshit about this.

greed is your horse - Lord Dying, Summon the Faithless

From @nocoastoffense, my pal in HEAVY TUNES, came this, possibly the year's best song of riff. I'm not fully sold on the band, nor fully checked out on the rest of the record, but this will bear looking into in the coming year.

Manifest Decimation - Power Trip, Manifest Decimation

Similarly, Power Trip blew me away whenever I listened to them this year, even if I didn't listen to them nearly, nearly enough. This incredible assemblage of riffs and energy will probably fuel the bulk of my pushups and sour, impacted bike rides to work in the coming year. Speaking of work, I wasn't able to see Power Trip open up for Fucked Up in October because of work. Fucked up, right?

Banana Clipper - Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels

Took me forever to get around to loving this, but my dudes Abe (of the podcast) and @teen_archer finally wore me down enough to give it a shot, and the excellence of the record did the rest. Huge fun, and a never-ending source of amazing one-liners. This song stands in for the record mainly for the following line, but "I fuck in my church shoes" is maybe even better:

I sent they mom a little cash and a sympathy letter
Told her she raised a bunch of fuckboys—next time do better
...BITCH.

Best record to wash dishes to of the year.

Motherfuckers Never Learn - Shooting Guns, Brotherhood of the Ram

A very late arrival, this space-metal outfit from Canada (!) absolutely owned my late December. Brotherhood of the Ram is flaw-free entirely, and "Motherfuckers Never Learn" is there (only [not only]) because (a) I structure these lists mainly song by song, and (b) it's an unquestionably perfect song title. Their demo—which is free, by the way—might even be a couple percentage points better than Brotherhood of the Ram. It's called Born to Deal in Magic, and it is exceptionally good. Who are these guys? I don't know. But they make excellent HEAVY TUNES. And they are so good that they can do what apparently is impossible, according to the now-unfollowed whining imbeciles on my Twitter: release an album in December that ends up on a best-of-the-year list.

UPDATE:
So, it seems I got most of the facts wrong about Shooting Guns. They're from Saskatchewan, not Calgary. Their album came out in October, not December. And their demo is no longer available for free. I regret the errors! However, I got the important part(s) right: they are a superb band with two magnificent releases, and you should buy them and listen to them without delay.

—Fat, rocking out & keeping his ears open