Top Albums 2018 Part IV 20 – 11
20. Rolo Tomassi – Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It
This is the definite album grappling with the dynamics of hard/soft this year. Rolo Tomassi have been growing and subtly shifting a sound that was close to prog-rock to another beast altogether. It is in the ambient moments, the uncertainty of the drifting glaciers bursting into flame that Time Will Die shines, as a vocal pair and a sonic outfit, Rolo Tomassi are able to live in both worlds an be completely centered when doing so. Songs like “Risen” or “Aftermath” live by Eva Spence and her ability to toe the line of electropop and performances by Björk or Imogen Heap. Here the band converts their huge amount of energy into delicate bursts of hope and reconciliation, well knowing they could plunge into chaos by moments notice. For when they go metal, harshly shouting by way of James Spence, they sound like nu-metal kids that never learned anything but shredding. While this dynamic might sound as dated as the idea of nu-metal, Rolo Tomassi could as well stand their ground as ambient artists, their longest tracks “A Flood Of Light”, “The Hollow Hour” and especially “Contretemps” bear no hesitation to tone it down to the most basic elements, a few keys ringing through the silence or the vast negative space that precedes the lullaby-like ending of latter track. Sometimes the comparison to King Crimson is brought up and while the bands do share an experimental edge, their strength does not lie in going into total improvisation or lose their mind in their ability to awe with instruments, it lies in their ability to allow for moments of respite, to tone down and allow introspection in their slaughter.
As one of the producers of last years revolutionary Sounds of Sisso compilation, Nyege Nyege gave Bamba Pana the possibility to point his musical buck shots at us and represents singeli for a wider audience. Pana has brought me to recognize and get giddy at his production signature as much as “if young metro don't trust you…” does. Poaa plays like the high spirited continuation of Sounds Of Sisso, the MCs have done their part but the crowd still wants to be moving and Bamba Pana takes the stage to satisfy their craving. I´ve talked about the moment when Makaveli does join him to keep up with his instrumental assaults, but apart from this superb track, the album is jock full of twist and turns on the singeli signature. The bpm never drop and Pana gives us eight different texture that let the hardcore freakouts syncopate with traditional drums, clicks and clashes and some eerie tunes. As Nyege Nyege did a mock-up video of a track to a crowd of white hardcore kids losing their minds too, there is no difference to be had here. What works in Dar Es Salaam works in the UK and any other place as well. What Pana and his peer do however is bring a feeling that is unique to East Africa and the African continent and update it for the youth of the world to dance to. Nyege Nyege and the Sisso imprint do the same for African music as Chinabot for the Asian continent, they relentlessly highlight the experimental prowess of countries that seem to be lacking behind the west, while in reality, they are the cultural titans that are able to create new sounds and incorporate their own identities into them before mainstream listeners and markets catch on. While this may lead to some moments of cultural exploitation, there are enough gatekeepers in place to keep these developments in check, people that will cherish and try to give power to these creatives without simply making money or robbing them of their expression.
Think about this simple fact: TDE put out a two-year-old project under their name, didn´t record new cuts with the higher production value or let Reason work on different songs with huge features before venerating his achievement that brought him the sign. This is not just a move of confidence or flex, but a promise of trust in Reason and us as fans. The rapper proclaimed as “The Soul” to Kendricks' heart is the perfect addition to a stellar roster, especially from the rap side and the core Black Hippy group. There You Have It carries a do or die attitude you wouldn't hear in the music of an already signed artist, Reason is still fully entrenched in his life, talking about Del Amo and his peers as if he is still one of them. While he is certainly able to reflect from the standpoint of a rapper on the come up, throwing his name into the race, his expression is always concerned about talking to his audience as his friends and neighbors. His songs can flip a Gambino sample into tenderly speaking from the heart or go into the mindset of a killer that is repented and conscious about his life being a failure where only suicide seems to be an option. Thinking about the brand of TDE and Reason in context thereof, he will complement the special kind of consciousness of the TDE street rap and might become closer to Kendrick and his way of speaking about the problems of the hood than any of their peers. In this, Reasons and There You Have It point towards a certain kind of hope that discerns his music from Kendricks artistry before content. While Kenny might go the long way and blow your mind in code and conceptual and musical twists, Reason might be the one that will simply come out and say it, things like “fuck these colored dreams” or “praying for better day”.
There is the old metaphor of the painter trying to disappear into his painting, the mimesis of a life-world becoming real, or real enough for its creator to tap into, turn his back on the world and become a part of his art. The author denouncing his role and artistic intentionality and only his art remaining. Above All Dreams bears a resemblance with this movement away from stark contrast of art and actuality, Abul Mogard practicing his own disappearance as the man behind the boards, pulling intention from his sounds and building ambient pieces that are distinct from their non-ambient counterparts. Going with the title of the album and the concept of sky music that seems to be the best term to describe Mogard´s blend of ambience and reality that never shifts into complete fiction or evokes worlds beyond our lives experience altogether, these tracks move even slower than before, their most striking moments tether on becoming indistinguishable from the static of night and these moments of listening that let a heater, a refrigerator or even your own breath become musical instances that breach the sensation of muteness. When Mogard settles in, let his organ sounds disappear, the electronics diminish and readies his feeling of magnetic decay, Above All Dreams becomes a test of lucidity and translucence, inquiring on your sense of distinguishing between the state of existence and non-existence, sound, silence, and noise in the experience of music and the times when there is nothing playing. Every single release by Mogard has me wondering where he will take his sound next and the answer to that question is unexpected and fresh every time. Now the question is, if Mogard will complete his disappearing act and hit us with pure field recordings instead.
Nothing are the band that you could hear and think: “man, they sound like they are rocking out and having a good time”. They are in some shape or form, but their content and sonic ideas stem from places of strict despair and feelings of the world slowly dying. Dance On The Blacktop carries the mantle of youth dying, coming to a close and worse things lying in your wake. When Nothing reach high for moments that sound like Oasis on even more drugs, their sound transforming into pop excellence and radio-friendly melodies lighting up their reverb-soaked selves, the feelings of inadequacy never lift. Few bands are able to sing despair, going down lost and bleeding in such comforting tones and with such soothing voices. This is at best exemplified in “The Carpenter's Son”, the tale of Dominic Palermo´s father, his philosophy of life and the harsh upbringing Palermo faced at his hand. A tender piece on a violent man that drowned in the rain transforming the band into the choir of a Greek tragedy, letting us come to terms with the knowledge of life´s unforgiving forwardness and resounding a plea to not know, push away the insight and the need to rest and be before asking the great questions and concerning yourself with actions and reactions of living.
Sumac tackling the universal emotion of love in all its hues brings me closer to thinking about the trio's music in the term of affect and pure life force. In Aaron Turner´s words, Love In Shadow grapples with love in a fashion, unlike usual musical interpretations. Not the simple ways of loving someone, Hollywood like and straightforward. The album plays like Turner using the language the band build on their last albums and is still constantly expanding to talk about the highs and lows of human relation and connection. They do this by purposefully turning the dynamic of loud music or metal music sounding anger and hate on its head and going for the perceived opposite emotion of love. Following the constant progressions of their instrumental, constructing itself, falling apart in shattering breakdowns, coming back through a solo that evolves again to a conversation of three creative forces that want to share, take control and push each other, Sumac exemplify the rawness and fragility of relationships in a mind-boggling way. As their music stands as a meticulously crafted, but at the end free-flowing and uncontainable life force of constant flux, their shifts and Turner´s variant doom metal vocal styles achieve the state of being a corpus to warp in and out of rationality and affect. As the band stresses openness for improvisation on this record and their live shows especially (or in their much talked about collaboration with Keiji Haino that was completely improvised) they constantly reinvent ways of sounding off each other and relating with the crowd and their listeners. The fragility of human connection could be expressed in more ambient ways, but in its harshness and complexity, Love In Shadow grows closer to capturing this trade of powers and the bodily state of relating to each other in a truthful and uncompromised way. Busting your understanding of energy and hearing in these four tracks to rebuild them in short instances of melody and harmony, Sumac embody love, they give life to this abstract state of being and action in their creation that feels like venturing into a philosophy of constant betterment and an empathy that aims at blending your sensations of pain and suffering with the person you are relating to.
The body might be the one band that truly qualify as their own genre. A genre build by a keen distaste for genre conventions and the simplistic tropes of harsh and heavy music that perforate metal music and make it to a disliked genre, one associated with sweaty white men, misogyny and stupid antics of being masculine and hard. In their dislike, the body fall closer to bands like Sumac or Deafheaven but defy genre in their own ways. After going fully electronic on their last album, I Have Fought Against It follows in this lane but builds on the body sampling and adding more orchestral elements to their palette. Assisted by Kristin Hayter of Lingua Ignota, Michael Berdan of Uniform and other vocal elements like a reggae track or a synthetic voice reading the suicide letter of Virginia Woolf, the body approach their sonic reverie with an orchestral mindset. Every single track here changes up their formula, goes from abrasive noise to mournful operatic piece and even pop sensibilities and ideas of dnb find their way. In this, the body do not reflect only an experimental mindset that is unfaced by genre, but their understanding of sound creation, tweaking things like the marching band drums of “An Urn” to their means of putting weight on your stomach in a catchy hip hop kind of way. The shierks, shouts, and Hayters contrast or accordances ties this vast array of sound together and create a uniform statement that is unmistakably the body´s bleak universe of self-searching, self-hating and misanthropy. The only sides that seem untapped now is the body going singularly acoustic or trading off clean vocals themselves, whatever might come, the duo will continue to stand as the most metal, hit-you-over-the-head band there is.
Idles answer the age old question of “can you entertain yourself and become smarter at the same time” with Joy As An Act of Resistance. For a band that is hyper-conscious in every song they write, turning any iteration to inquiries on religion, politicals, social spheres or even highly personal testaments of John Talbot and his life, they never write a track that is bogged down by its content. Rather then going down a moody road of telling us we are fucked beyond belief, they pack song and dance into their music, make you move and think at the same time – the realest punk rock can get without being a nihilist mess of simply being against normative culture. From immigration, the loss of a child, Brexit or toxic masculinity, IDLES turn punk into anthropology, shout their hooks as if they rephrase a complex thesis in simpler terms. Under these tracks and the theme of the album lies the act of resistance in enjoyment, bringing the core value of political engagement and musical creativity into the same realm, not making political songs for the sake of being political, but being political in their song-making, bringing home the point by entertaining you and banging out loud, shout-along song one after another. Listening to songs like “Danny Nedelko”, the immigration anthem or “June”, Talbot speaking about his child being stillborn, you will take as much personal affection in the humanity of Talbot´s voice, ridden with loss or happily singing praise, Idles weave narrative and find angles like “baby shoes never worn” or “my blood brother is Malala” that strike your in their musicality, make you cry and giggle in under 45 minutes. And if one theme deserves the spotlight, it is watching Talbot tackle toxic masculinity throughout many songs, may it be implicit in the Brexit doomsday hymn “Great” or with greater focus on “Samaritans”, “Cry To Me” or “Never Fight A Man With A Perm”. In these song, Talbot wrestles with a culture of masculinity and tries to bring about change in allowing tears or going military in all the stupid shit men hear in their lifetime about who to be and how to act. In all these moments you won't be beaten over the head with the message, much rather headbang with it, questioning yourself, at least after the fact, why you did what you did.
Mourn delivered the perfect freak-out of piercing post-punk peppered with more tender moments of haunt and introspection. Beginning with the group vocals of “Barcelona City Tour” of “what a shame / you're not ashamed” and tackling their label dispute that let them almost vanish as a band, Mourn quickly turn for a noisy quickshot that toes the line between folk moment of spite and band jam session. These dynamics span over the course of Sorpresa Familia, going psyche on “Strange Ones”, bursting with energy on “Fun At The Geysers” or de-accelerating a bit for “Candel Man”. For an album lasting slightly under 30 minutes, Mourn push out songs with confidence and little hesitation instead of going for big complex moments. As some of this year's hip-hop counterparts, Mourn deliver a spur of the moment attack on your listening, sounding unrehearsed and energetic as if they are trying to capture a live show or more fittingly spit in the face of those that wanted to marginalize and destroy their craft through legal means and executive violence. With Sorpresa Familia the band reaffirms their creative drive again, delivering twelve tracks of youthful energy that cannot be utilized or sapped for the sake of business reasoning.
This is the definite album grappling with the dynamics of hard/soft this year. Rolo Tomassi have been growing and subtly shifting a sound that was close to prog-rock to another beast altogether. It is in the ambient moments, the uncertainty of the drifting glaciers bursting into flame that Time Will Die shines, as a vocal pair and a sonic outfit, Rolo Tomassi are able to live in both worlds an be completely centered when doing so. Songs like “Risen” or “Aftermath” live by Eva Spence and her ability to toe the line of electropop and performances by Björk or Imogen Heap. Here the band converts their huge amount of energy into delicate bursts of hope and reconciliation, well knowing they could plunge into chaos by moments notice. For when they go metal, harshly shouting by way of James Spence, they sound like nu-metal kids that never learned anything but shredding. While this dynamic might sound as dated as the idea of nu-metal, Rolo Tomassi could as well stand their ground as ambient artists, their longest tracks “A Flood Of Light”, “The Hollow Hour” and especially “Contretemps” bear no hesitation to tone it down to the most basic elements, a few keys ringing through the silence or the vast negative space that precedes the lullaby-like ending of latter track. Sometimes the comparison to King Crimson is brought up and while the bands do share an experimental edge, their strength does not lie in going into total improvisation or lose their mind in their ability to awe with instruments, it lies in their ability to allow for moments of respite, to tone down and allow introspection in their slaughter.
19. Bamba Pana – Poaa
As one of the producers of last years revolutionary Sounds of Sisso compilation, Nyege Nyege gave Bamba Pana the possibility to point his musical buck shots at us and represents singeli for a wider audience. Pana has brought me to recognize and get giddy at his production signature as much as “if young metro don't trust you…” does. Poaa plays like the high spirited continuation of Sounds Of Sisso, the MCs have done their part but the crowd still wants to be moving and Bamba Pana takes the stage to satisfy their craving. I´ve talked about the moment when Makaveli does join him to keep up with his instrumental assaults, but apart from this superb track, the album is jock full of twist and turns on the singeli signature. The bpm never drop and Pana gives us eight different texture that let the hardcore freakouts syncopate with traditional drums, clicks and clashes and some eerie tunes. As Nyege Nyege did a mock-up video of a track to a crowd of white hardcore kids losing their minds too, there is no difference to be had here. What works in Dar Es Salaam works in the UK and any other place as well. What Pana and his peer do however is bring a feeling that is unique to East Africa and the African continent and update it for the youth of the world to dance to. Nyege Nyege and the Sisso imprint do the same for African music as Chinabot for the Asian continent, they relentlessly highlight the experimental prowess of countries that seem to be lacking behind the west, while in reality, they are the cultural titans that are able to create new sounds and incorporate their own identities into them before mainstream listeners and markets catch on. While this may lead to some moments of cultural exploitation, there are enough gatekeepers in place to keep these developments in check, people that will cherish and try to give power to these creatives without simply making money or robbing them of their expression.
18. Reason – There You Have It
Think about this simple fact: TDE put out a two-year-old project under their name, didn´t record new cuts with the higher production value or let Reason work on different songs with huge features before venerating his achievement that brought him the sign. This is not just a move of confidence or flex, but a promise of trust in Reason and us as fans. The rapper proclaimed as “The Soul” to Kendricks' heart is the perfect addition to a stellar roster, especially from the rap side and the core Black Hippy group. There You Have It carries a do or die attitude you wouldn't hear in the music of an already signed artist, Reason is still fully entrenched in his life, talking about Del Amo and his peers as if he is still one of them. While he is certainly able to reflect from the standpoint of a rapper on the come up, throwing his name into the race, his expression is always concerned about talking to his audience as his friends and neighbors. His songs can flip a Gambino sample into tenderly speaking from the heart or go into the mindset of a killer that is repented and conscious about his life being a failure where only suicide seems to be an option. Thinking about the brand of TDE and Reason in context thereof, he will complement the special kind of consciousness of the TDE street rap and might become closer to Kendrick and his way of speaking about the problems of the hood than any of their peers. In this, Reasons and There You Have It point towards a certain kind of hope that discerns his music from Kendricks artistry before content. While Kenny might go the long way and blow your mind in code and conceptual and musical twists, Reason might be the one that will simply come out and say it, things like “fuck these colored dreams” or “praying for better day”.
17. Abul Mogard – Above All Dreams
There is the old metaphor of the painter trying to disappear into his painting, the mimesis of a life-world becoming real, or real enough for its creator to tap into, turn his back on the world and become a part of his art. The author denouncing his role and artistic intentionality and only his art remaining. Above All Dreams bears a resemblance with this movement away from stark contrast of art and actuality, Abul Mogard practicing his own disappearance as the man behind the boards, pulling intention from his sounds and building ambient pieces that are distinct from their non-ambient counterparts. Going with the title of the album and the concept of sky music that seems to be the best term to describe Mogard´s blend of ambience and reality that never shifts into complete fiction or evokes worlds beyond our lives experience altogether, these tracks move even slower than before, their most striking moments tether on becoming indistinguishable from the static of night and these moments of listening that let a heater, a refrigerator or even your own breath become musical instances that breach the sensation of muteness. When Mogard settles in, let his organ sounds disappear, the electronics diminish and readies his feeling of magnetic decay, Above All Dreams becomes a test of lucidity and translucence, inquiring on your sense of distinguishing between the state of existence and non-existence, sound, silence, and noise in the experience of music and the times when there is nothing playing. Every single release by Mogard has me wondering where he will take his sound next and the answer to that question is unexpected and fresh every time. Now the question is, if Mogard will complete his disappearing act and hit us with pure field recordings instead.
16. Nothing – Dance On The Blacktop
Nothing are the band that you could hear and think: “man, they sound like they are rocking out and having a good time”. They are in some shape or form, but their content and sonic ideas stem from places of strict despair and feelings of the world slowly dying. Dance On The Blacktop carries the mantle of youth dying, coming to a close and worse things lying in your wake. When Nothing reach high for moments that sound like Oasis on even more drugs, their sound transforming into pop excellence and radio-friendly melodies lighting up their reverb-soaked selves, the feelings of inadequacy never lift. Few bands are able to sing despair, going down lost and bleeding in such comforting tones and with such soothing voices. This is at best exemplified in “The Carpenter's Son”, the tale of Dominic Palermo´s father, his philosophy of life and the harsh upbringing Palermo faced at his hand. A tender piece on a violent man that drowned in the rain transforming the band into the choir of a Greek tragedy, letting us come to terms with the knowledge of life´s unforgiving forwardness and resounding a plea to not know, push away the insight and the need to rest and be before asking the great questions and concerning yourself with actions and reactions of living.
15. Sumac – Love In Shadow
Sumac tackling the universal emotion of love in all its hues brings me closer to thinking about the trio's music in the term of affect and pure life force. In Aaron Turner´s words, Love In Shadow grapples with love in a fashion, unlike usual musical interpretations. Not the simple ways of loving someone, Hollywood like and straightforward. The album plays like Turner using the language the band build on their last albums and is still constantly expanding to talk about the highs and lows of human relation and connection. They do this by purposefully turning the dynamic of loud music or metal music sounding anger and hate on its head and going for the perceived opposite emotion of love. Following the constant progressions of their instrumental, constructing itself, falling apart in shattering breakdowns, coming back through a solo that evolves again to a conversation of three creative forces that want to share, take control and push each other, Sumac exemplify the rawness and fragility of relationships in a mind-boggling way. As their music stands as a meticulously crafted, but at the end free-flowing and uncontainable life force of constant flux, their shifts and Turner´s variant doom metal vocal styles achieve the state of being a corpus to warp in and out of rationality and affect. As the band stresses openness for improvisation on this record and their live shows especially (or in their much talked about collaboration with Keiji Haino that was completely improvised) they constantly reinvent ways of sounding off each other and relating with the crowd and their listeners. The fragility of human connection could be expressed in more ambient ways, but in its harshness and complexity, Love In Shadow grows closer to capturing this trade of powers and the bodily state of relating to each other in a truthful and uncompromised way. Busting your understanding of energy and hearing in these four tracks to rebuild them in short instances of melody and harmony, Sumac embody love, they give life to this abstract state of being and action in their creation that feels like venturing into a philosophy of constant betterment and an empathy that aims at blending your sensations of pain and suffering with the person you are relating to.
14. Vince Staples – FM!
Vince Staples has been building his Summertime Universe with every release. With FM! he went the literal route of using a radio show set up to bring us his nocturnal gangbanging anthems that turn sour in dealing with death, addiction, and hopelessness. These short burst of energy feel like sketches or a short glimpse of the do's and don'ts of street life, tales that can sometimes be boiled down to their title alone, but carry the weight of Staples giving gloomy insight. “Don´t Get Chipped”, “Run The Bands”, “Relay” or “Tweakin” are explicit nudges towards Staples thematic matter. For instance, “Don´t Get Chipped” or “Relay” carry the hooky mark of both expressions, with the former being sung by Jay Rock in a smooth gangster style inspired by Nate Dog. Vince interrupts these elements of hood life for the radio-esque shout outs by the “Big Boy's Neighborhood” show and interludes previewing new music by Earl Sweatshirt and Tyga. This mix alone feeds the feeling of Staples being in the mindset of soundtracking a whole radio show in different voices and moods while staying local and theme centered in a way. Imagine the result of listening to this album riding through Staples hood, the entertainment factor of listening to the radio turning to a narrative tool of gang activity, deaths and drug deals. The window and the frame blend into one here, looking out becomes listening in and Staples becomes a spiteful Moses struggling and narrating in his wordiness and swagger the ordered chaos, the bravado and fragility of this life. “Party to the sun or the guns come out…”
13. the body – I Have Fought Against It, But I Can't Any Longer
The body might be the one band that truly qualify as their own genre. A genre build by a keen distaste for genre conventions and the simplistic tropes of harsh and heavy music that perforate metal music and make it to a disliked genre, one associated with sweaty white men, misogyny and stupid antics of being masculine and hard. In their dislike, the body fall closer to bands like Sumac or Deafheaven but defy genre in their own ways. After going fully electronic on their last album, I Have Fought Against It follows in this lane but builds on the body sampling and adding more orchestral elements to their palette. Assisted by Kristin Hayter of Lingua Ignota, Michael Berdan of Uniform and other vocal elements like a reggae track or a synthetic voice reading the suicide letter of Virginia Woolf, the body approach their sonic reverie with an orchestral mindset. Every single track here changes up their formula, goes from abrasive noise to mournful operatic piece and even pop sensibilities and ideas of dnb find their way. In this, the body do not reflect only an experimental mindset that is unfaced by genre, but their understanding of sound creation, tweaking things like the marching band drums of “An Urn” to their means of putting weight on your stomach in a catchy hip hop kind of way. The shierks, shouts, and Hayters contrast or accordances ties this vast array of sound together and create a uniform statement that is unmistakably the body´s bleak universe of self-searching, self-hating and misanthropy. The only sides that seem untapped now is the body going singularly acoustic or trading off clean vocals themselves, whatever might come, the duo will continue to stand as the most metal, hit-you-over-the-head band there is.
12. IDLES – Joy As An Act Of Resistance
Idles answer the age old question of “can you entertain yourself and become smarter at the same time” with Joy As An Act of Resistance. For a band that is hyper-conscious in every song they write, turning any iteration to inquiries on religion, politicals, social spheres or even highly personal testaments of John Talbot and his life, they never write a track that is bogged down by its content. Rather then going down a moody road of telling us we are fucked beyond belief, they pack song and dance into their music, make you move and think at the same time – the realest punk rock can get without being a nihilist mess of simply being against normative culture. From immigration, the loss of a child, Brexit or toxic masculinity, IDLES turn punk into anthropology, shout their hooks as if they rephrase a complex thesis in simpler terms. Under these tracks and the theme of the album lies the act of resistance in enjoyment, bringing the core value of political engagement and musical creativity into the same realm, not making political songs for the sake of being political, but being political in their song-making, bringing home the point by entertaining you and banging out loud, shout-along song one after another. Listening to songs like “Danny Nedelko”, the immigration anthem or “June”, Talbot speaking about his child being stillborn, you will take as much personal affection in the humanity of Talbot´s voice, ridden with loss or happily singing praise, Idles weave narrative and find angles like “baby shoes never worn” or “my blood brother is Malala” that strike your in their musicality, make you cry and giggle in under 45 minutes. And if one theme deserves the spotlight, it is watching Talbot tackle toxic masculinity throughout many songs, may it be implicit in the Brexit doomsday hymn “Great” or with greater focus on “Samaritans”, “Cry To Me” or “Never Fight A Man With A Perm”. In these song, Talbot wrestles with a culture of masculinity and tries to bring about change in allowing tears or going military in all the stupid shit men hear in their lifetime about who to be and how to act. In all these moments you won't be beaten over the head with the message, much rather headbang with it, questioning yourself, at least after the fact, why you did what you did.
11. Mourn – Sorpresa Familia
Mourn delivered the perfect freak-out of piercing post-punk peppered with more tender moments of haunt and introspection. Beginning with the group vocals of “Barcelona City Tour” of “what a shame / you're not ashamed” and tackling their label dispute that let them almost vanish as a band, Mourn quickly turn for a noisy quickshot that toes the line between folk moment of spite and band jam session. These dynamics span over the course of Sorpresa Familia, going psyche on “Strange Ones”, bursting with energy on “Fun At The Geysers” or de-accelerating a bit for “Candel Man”. For an album lasting slightly under 30 minutes, Mourn push out songs with confidence and little hesitation instead of going for big complex moments. As some of this year's hip-hop counterparts, Mourn deliver a spur of the moment attack on your listening, sounding unrehearsed and energetic as if they are trying to capture a live show or more fittingly spit in the face of those that wanted to marginalize and destroy their craft through legal means and executive violence. With Sorpresa Familia the band reaffirms their creative drive again, delivering twelve tracks of youthful energy that cannot be utilized or sapped for the sake of business reasoning.
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