Top Albums 2022 Part II 40 – 31

 40. Prurient – Creationist (The Ultimate Evil)

Creationist is a stark addition to the style of noise compositions Prurient excelled at in 2017’s Rainbow Mirror. The idea of doom electronics as music drenched in noise without sacrificing listenability for alienation nor musicality is something that sets apart Prurient from many other noise artists. Conceptual strength and treating his fans with hand-crafted packages full of ephemera and goodies is what makes these sounds of horror and disgust even more enticing. Somewhere between the connection of the creation myth of the bible and references to the New York serial killer dubbed Son of Sam, the different ephemera, for instance in form of an anti-record, become a form of research into a subject expressed in sound by Fernow. In recent years Fernow has begun to split up his three main projects into more distinct wholes. In the case of Prurient this entails largely eschewing any beats or techno-esque structure for long hisses of noise and guttural shrieks and flushes of utterance buried in the mix. This may, for some, exempt this new phase of work from the easier digestibility and spoken word frenzies of Frozen Niagara Falls or Bermuda Drain, but serves the ability to live in these soundscapes undisturbed of leading references. Much like the real-life case of Berkowitz, an alleged satanic killer edged on by a demon dog to commit his murders and later revealed to be a hoax to gain notoriety and comprehend his own bestial tendencies, Creationist works by the degrees of charity and wanting to believe. At times the tracks will abhor, but when listening to the full Ultimate Evil edition which clocks in at three hours, the blinding fidelities of noise will fall into place. At this point, every new Prurient album is a thesis on the abject.

39. Blood Incantation – Timewave Zero

Reading the first reactions by some fans of Blood Incantation who bought the vinyl blind may serve as the best review for a band that has proven their unwillingness to bend their creativity and vision. As metal band close to making shape-shifting death variations, Timewave Zero sees the collective taking a perspectival shift of cosmic proportions. This forty minute saga negotiates physical laws mangled in the wake of discovering a black hole. Beyond referencing kosmische music as popularized by Tangerine Dream, Blood Incantation use their analog synth setup as sweeping ode to their darker fantasies of a colder and more unforgiving space. True to their vision, Blood Incantation blend sweeps of synth not with different blissful and forward-facing arpeggios, but slowly unfolding guitars and the gentlest of keys on rare occasions. This is a version of space closer to Interstellar and a new wave of science-fiction unimpressed by the wonders of space, drawn to the perils of sub-zero non-environments. The clarity the band reaches in their proposition makes the alien qualities of their harsher sounds shine in a new ghastly light.

 38. Quavo & Takeoff – Only Built For Infinity Links

An album originally marking the perceived end of Migos inadvertently turned into the last living statement of music by Takeoff. On November 1, a few weeks after releasing Only Built for Inifinity Links with uncle and band member Quavo, Takeoff was killed by a stray bullet in Houston after an altercation broke out. Esteemed as the quiet and understated heart of Migos, Takeoff was also considered the best rapper of the group. With all this, he stood as the creative binding piece between Quavo and Offset and is credited with creating the trademark triplet flow of the group. While both Culture II and Culture III were loaded albums meant to stream-troll with their extreme length, every album yielded undeniable hits and furthered the incredible catchiness of the three rappers spinning words into rhymes – even if they may have relied on elementary school complexities at times. Only Built for Infinity Links is a more melodic LP with fewer hits, but growth in the chemistry between Quavo and Takeoff. Just as in their first outing after gaining international recognition, with Offset imprisoned in 2015, here both rappers trade verse in their signature voices, free flowing between hooks and heavy doses of autotune. With Migos triplet flow as the natural progression of Bone-Thugs-and Harmony as well as a unique selling point of Atlanta’s rap scene, the group and Takeoff will be remembered as rappers allowing pop stardom without changing their signatures. Apart from drugs as a favorite theme, it was the lavish lifestyle and a certain kind of love for beauty that remains as the invention of Takeoff, never quite bling-era, a showcase of hip hop breaching into the mainstream in the best way possible.

 

37. DJ Scriby / DJ Mariio / DJ Skothan - The Gqom Trilogy

Hakuna Kulala provided a massive, two-hour triple LP of pure gqom bliss. Combining three artists of different ranges and ages for this compilation, this trilogy captures a style of music as a method of destructive beat making. With the first third helmed by DJ Scriby, the usual dragging pace of the genre is thrown into an upheaval by kudoro rhythms and glacial, trance-like progressions. The youngest artist, DJ Mariio uses his side for a deeper and dirtier take that showcases transgression more akin to the recent output by Nyege Nyege and Hakuna Kulala. As the artist reports himself, he didn’t learn the genre or makes music in the straight jacket thereof, and the result allows for flourishes and a digital nonchalance befitting a laser focus mind. DJ Skothan closes the trilogy as a veteran producer and pushes the boundaries of a tried and true formula in different ways. His tracks glide between abstract soundscapes and sample heavy beats but straddle the line with a deep bassline and earth-shattering low-end. The beauty of gqom and this trilogy lies in the capability to tether the danceability of bass music and sound as futuristic and dystopian without sacrificing the drive of club-oriented music. While some producers and elements have found their way into the western mainstream, this trilogy will serve as a blueprint for electronic music production to come, especially in iterations of hip hop and noise pop in the vein of PC Music or whatever Kanye West will be selling as Donda 3.

 

36. Saba – Few Good Things

Few Good Things solidifies Saba as a capable rapper grounded in his neighborhood and the struggles of class beyond any version of success him and his peers have experienced. While Chance The Rapper chose to alienate his audience with cheesy raps and spirituality, on his third LP, Saba retains his sunnier raps but adds more introspection and a narrative based on the struggle of financial security beyond the pleas of becoming a rapper. Especially “Come My Way” plays like an old school money hymn but captures a self-awareness of how youth and poverty mangle the relationship to money. Embedding the album with narratives of his grandfather and biographies of his Chicago upbringing, Saba joins the ranks of Kendrick Lamar in terms of storytelling, but never lets the points he is trying to make take away from the soulfulness of his delivery or reaches to experiment with his sound too much. It is fitting for him to feature Black Thought of the massive self-titled closing tracks. His genuine words on how making money is based on the fear of a life in poverty and how financial success won’t safe you or your peers from power structures in place remind me of the message heavy music of The Roots.

 

35. Phase Fatale – Burning The Rural District

About a month into the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, Phase Fatale presented his second LP steeped in the importance of underground club music in Georgia. Another country wherein a region is deemed “independent” and occupied by Russian troops, Georgia has become internationally known as a breeding ground for a rave scene. With even the BBC catching on in 2018 and plenty of articles and documentaries tracking the fight for survival under the siege of raids and homophobic law-making, this album by New York transplant Phase Fatale tracks these tensions in a slew of bass heavy, drum and bass breaks and industrial aggression. Burning the Rural District is an attempt in instigating political change as a bodily transformation through pumping rhythms. As many other releases on Fernow’s label Hospital Productions, these eight tracks could soundtrack going to war as well as dreary bunker raves, and this is where Burning the Rural District becomes more than just techno. The hypertension caused by the cacophony of noise paired with hard hitting drums and what a times sounds like radio transmissions leaves no moment of rest, an immediacy only created by dance music in places where the indulgences of beats and breaks lend themselves to more than just a hedonism of moment to moment living – stakes to be felt in every bar of music.

 

34. Abul Mogard – In a Few Places Along the River / COH meets Abul Mogard

After dropping the long-running narrative of Abul Mogard’s origins as a Serbian factory worker turned synth musician, Guido Zen revealed himself as the creative center of the project. Without this far-fetched narrative of an elderly person helming a Buchla 200 synthesizer as well as a Farfisa Organ to create wide vistas of forlorn environments, Abul Mogard still stands as a project steeped in the sweet melancholia of contemplation resting on a wealth of experience. In A Few Places Along the River continued the line of LP sized EP’s of abstract expressionist soundscapes seamlessly. Like other overarching compositions, “Along The River” is a definite Abul Mogard piece of sweeping deluges of aural existentialism. On the first major collaborative album with COH, Mogard revisits nosier territories not heard since his self-titled debut cassette for VCO Tapes. Much rather, it is Ivan Pavlov as COH driving Mogard to leave the miniscule soundscapes for a lower fidelity of buzzes and metallic clanks. These trajectories show the wider reaching emotionality of both musicians command of their gear and ability to work in the grayscales of each other. Even if “Find and Hold” delivers on the contemplative stillness known to fans of Mogard’s usual output, the three tracks before that allow for a vaster array of growth. For me, Mogard’s music has always been thought-provoking and relentlessly incentivizing to experience beyond reason, but on this collaborative album these movements are met with a sense of discomfort largely absent in his solo work. With Guido Zen as Abul leaving anonymity behind for more concerts and exposure, the projects this year promise both spaces unexplored as well as the renewed haven created by known investigations of sky and land.

 

33. Brian Eno – FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE

Brian Eno’s return as a vocalist was a surprise. I had engaged in every ambient album and experimental offering by Eno but had never heard him sing. On ForeverNoMore, Eno taps his voice as a monotone vessel of devastating lyrics centering on the destruction caused by climate change. While some tracks could be read as comments on the displacement of war, for instance the incredible “These Were The Bells”, this must largely be read as a secondary effect of fighting for resources and land in a near-future scenario of scarcity and unlivable conditions. Still, this impending doom Eno sings about is caused by the inability to properly address climate change as a pressing question of life, an aspect he converts in the simplicity of expressing his feelings and aiming to make us feel for nature again. Many Tracks literally embody the experiences of beauty in demise, “We Let it In” in the blissful heating of the earth and the sun as the aesthetic Kickstarter of nature and through climate change the catalyst for burning fields as well. Overall, the albums aim to make us feel for nature again is one that is reached and entrenched in the bodily experience of ourselves as nature, a point German philosopher Gernot Boehme stressed in his work on nature, ecology, and the experience of the world as atmosphere. Eno with his work takes this exact sentiment and dresses it in the coldest of melodies and drastic vocals. The aesthetic as a criterion not of art but of experience has rarely been captured more thoroughly for the sake of change.

 

32. Broken English Club - The Artificial Animal

Following his White Rats trilogy, Broken English Club takes a looser approach to his doom gazing club sounds on The Artificial Animal. With a focus on technologies, the amount of distortion and rhythmic noise is upped to a teeth-grinding degree. Many tracks on the album invite the feeling of surrealist sound collages whilst retaining a sense of dread that I can only describe as political awareness. More than just delivering on the well-known artillery fire of disturbing bangers such as “Snub”, Oliver Ho decidedly lowers the bpm for spatial plays on acid, industrial soundscapes and black metal inspired trudges through the abyss (“World on Fire” and “Blood on Fire”). With a focus on an overtly digitized age and data growing to an overarching noise of betraying our sense of self, the currency of The Artificial Animal lies not only in overwhelming the senses through sheer heft of bass and drum, but in the eerier slow burn, a deluge of constant connectedness so to speak, that Oliver Ho captures more in the futuristic than the tribalistic of his previous work. Apart from constant allusions via TV and other recordings, the ghost of Brexit and the UK has ceded for a global perspective, the album yelling social media suicide without speaking a single word that is even close to today’s jargon.

 

31. Long Distance Calling – Eraser

Following in the lane of the last albums, Long Distance Calling enhanced their last offering How Do We Want To Live? with an album tackling the paradigm of extinction triggered through human interference. The dynamic of the band lends itself towards channeling both the experience of solemn nature through drawn out passaged and melodies as well as human violences through stark riffages. Here Long Distance Calling reach back into their repertoire of heavy metal inspired riffs paired with post-metal excess of low tunings and yearning guitars. For all the known elements, “Sloth” plays like jazzy lament taking on operatic scale – a saxophone appearing as a driving part in a post-metal album is as novel as it gets but it works as an incredible downer in all its bluesy affectionalism. As with all their purely instrumental album, Long Distance Calling prove their command of a craft that many bands have left for hooks, vocals or classical arrangements. Eraser reinforces the immediacy they can conjure up with a few chords, in rushing speeds or contemplative vistas. Working in tandem with their last album, the band presses the question of environmental decay and human agency in this process in heart-wrenching clarity.