Top Albums 2022 Part I 50 – 41

50. Vacant Gardens – Under The Bloom / Obscene

Re-released in 2022 after flying under my radar in both 2020 and 2021, Vacant Garden’s provided two albums of delightful shoegaze / dream pop. The last time a band sounded this ethereal as the greats such as Cocteau Twins or Slowdive, must have been Asobi Seksu. Vacant Gardens pull together the sweet mixtures of fuzz, gloom, and vocal transcendence. There is rainy melancholy in the guitar hazes, counteracted by flourishes of powerful chords, arpeggios, and gentle strumming, all coming together in the float of Jem Fanvu’s ethereal vocals. Atmospheric density does not need to be inventive as such, it just needs to be well made and full of intricacy. Seldom do albums capture the yearnings of youth I encountered when first making contact with shoegaze. While nowadays most find the best conflation of dream pop and shoegaze in Beach House and their synthetic rhythms and uplifting haze, Vacant Gardens deliver a proof of concept in striking greys and in being vigorously opaque.

 

49. Muslimgauze – Muhammadunize / Veiled Sisters / Shekel of The Israeli Occupation

The anarchive that is Muslimgauze continues to create an ever-expanding universe of releases, re-releases and reissues in which track titles, order and artwork become malleable in the hands of curators mounting the task of the output of one musician who’s death appears no hinderance to his project. All three releases saw their first-time vinyl release in 2022 in remastered forms, with Shekel and Muhammadunize marking newer curatorial rediscoveries or reordering’s of previous releases. Especially Shekel marks the remastering of a previously thought-to-be-lost album. Like many of the best releases, it features the menacing combination of samples, tribalistic drumming and atmospherics drones that can only be described as a genre of its own. With Vatican Shadow serving as Muslimgauze’s inheritor of aural politics between claustrophobic and expansive, the latter’s channeling of themes, intentions and motivations into his music remain untouched the deeper you dive into the different releases. Bryn Jones as Muslimgauze made the political struggles in the Middle East into music and has left a powerful and disturbing memorial for today’s world as well. The push and pull experienced in the long form compositions of both Shekel and the whole of Veiled Sisters immerse the listener in a world of disarray, misdeeds and struggles for power. As postcolonial theories and antisemitism are played against each other in recent utilizations of the Middle East for western discourses of control and racial categorization, listening, re-listening and discovering Muslimgauze’s discography embodies all of these trajectories in its own hauntology of a political thinker with a musical gift. As if one man working in a pre-9/11 world anticipated the political landscape of the world to come with every modular re-edit, resample and overwritten master tape.

 

48. Björk – Fossora

Another album that reads as a statement of constant evolution and experimental prowess, Fossora sees Bjork taking on the metaphor of soil and the earth in quite literal and musical terms. The combination of clarinet sounds with hard stabs of gabber strangely deliver images of fungal enterprises deep below the earth, the lightness of spores, the woven playfulness of growth and the relentless labor of decay. I see the influence of Gabber Modus Operandi as a great plus, with one half of the duo, Kasimyn credited on two songs. The aspect of life and death develop in songs centering very much not on the abstract mother earth, but her own mother and the relationship embodied in motherhood. Fossora revel in the operatic modes many of Bjork’s albums and her vocal delivery encompass, but this album is markedly straight forward in her wording and addressing the listeners as such. At times, this could be the conceptual soundtrack of Hollow Knight, a game centering on rebirth and fate in a dystopian insect world, steeped in the melancholia of a lonely protagonist. Yet, apart from the fantastical leaning qualities, Fossora is a bassy and springy song of life for an environment long past saving.

 

47. Gammelsæter & Marhaug – Higgs Boson

The power of Higgs Boson lies in the combination of vocal prowess courtesy of Runhild Gammelsaeter and the noise grinds and flickers created by Lasse Marhaug. Like the album title suggests, both artists strive to find a mutual backing to the very structure of their musical expressions, a bit like the aural hunt for the “god particle” that makes noise and metal music meet in the vast fields of experimental soundscapes, angelic vocal patterns and bone shattering shrieks. From my understanding of sound, this is an essential listening for scholars of metal music, not for its perceived harshness when Gammelsaeter uses her blackened shrieks, but rather for the creation of depth and heaviness through the shared atmosphere of both artists. The instrumental repetition present in most pieces, the dronescapes and visceral subsonic frequencies dwell as slowed riffage and brutal vestiges of violence. This is pretty much the particle collider at CERN as an album, only that the magic lies not only in the process itself but rises in eerie haunts track after track.

 

46. Maria W Horn and Sara Parkman – Funeral Folk

Blending long-form harmonic compositions with the distinct tinge of folk music, Funeral Folk offers an essential entry into the sound of grief and mourning. Build around the artists channelling their background in traditional and experimental electronic music, the album is tied together by themes of grieving as a performance and individual act. The resulting drones, arched by melodies or grounded cello carry a reverence for passing and mourning that is reminiscent of how Terrence Malick would construct the experience of death by a rising, rather than a setting sun. Both Horn and Parkman meld into a one entity throughout the record, no track rests on either site of their musical capabilities or even retains a swell or glare of melody for too long. While many vision of Nordic beauty always harken back to vision of Valhalla or now the world of Midsommar, the one feat of Funeral Folk is to be steeped in the present in the entirety of its delivery, no worship of a long forgotten natural paradise or ritualistic fiction, just monumental contemplation of time.

45. Landlords – Codeine

Not much is known about New Zealand band Landlords. Judging from the few words that have been written about the band, this project seems to be the conglomeration of similar taste of members of different hardcore and post-punk bands, with the slow core and reverb-laden charm of their music attaining an almost incidental quality of heavier expressions. In a way, this vision of failing heaviness turning into shoegaze and then into success is befitting of the introspective moodiness of Codeine. Landlords shine not only in adding to the genre as contemporaries such as Nothing but in recalling bands like Gregor Samsa in their restrain and vocal harmonization.

 

44. Sumac & Keiji Haino – Into This Juvenile Apocalypse Our Golden Blood to Pour Let Us Never

Following the improvisation records by Sumac and Keijo Haino as waypoints in the musical progression of the bands solo work, the third release of high intensity unpredictability marks the difference between a metal band working on the outskirts of the genre and a unique voice making heavy music beyond any markers of genre or type. Into This Juvenile Apocalypse Our Golden Blood to Pour Let Us Never plays as the most volatile of improvisation records between Sumac and Haino and while the recording may or may not predate the recording of May You Be Held, heralds the growing mastery of a sound in which riffs and noise bloom in slashes of drums and sporadic bass. Most strikingly, this doesn’t feel like a band encountering an experimental heavyweight in Haino but equals following each others leads and feeding each others’ energies. Especially the second and latter two tracks exemplify this in their faster and more rhythmic moments, allowing for glimpses of Sumac at their most visceral and chaotic. If anything, Haino passes the torch in full confidence to a trio of similar vision in the power of the incidental.

 

43. Rolo Tomassi – Where Myth Becomes Memory

While considered an ending to a trilogy that encompassed both 2015’s Grievances and 2018 Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It, Where Myth Becomes Memory is decidedly harsher and more aggressive. Time Will Die lived in the moments of clarity and almost electro-pop like hymns sung by Eva Spence. Here the breaks of solemn reflection give way to powerful attacks of double bass drum reminiscent of Slipknot on tracks like “Cloaked” or remain entrenched in tension on “Labyrinthe”. This may speak for a resurgence of nu-metal as a valid genre of expression and space for experimentation, a movement where Rolo Tomassi will shine in their creativity for new fans of harsher sounds to come. What could likely have become a mellower and more operatic outing, has morphed into the further semblance of heaviness and gaze. The band has not cannibalized their formula for mass appeal but doubled down on refining the gut-wrenching qualities of the loud and the soft.

42. It Only Gets Worse – Summer Bled Out

The amount of Matt Finney’s output in various projects is breathtaking not only for the number of poetic gut-punches he can procure without sacrificing the genuine tone of voice and despair they carry, but also for the different tonalities his words lend towards different artist and soundscapes. This year, the It Only Gets Worse moniker with musician Maurice (De Jong) takes Finney’s bleary-eyed poetry and brushes it between an eerie mixture of angelic soundscapes, oscillating bass and flute like melodies. What starts off as a cinematic haunting, blooms on the first tracks, morphs to forgotten lullabies on “Move Forward” only for the title track to become a sweeping showcase of burned out trap tethering on the industrial. At times, Maurice’s sound design channels the reconciliatory sides of Sigur Ros, the angelic and ethereal vocals of Jonsi simmering in reverb nothingness. That is when Finney’s words ring out as prayers in nothingness, transforming blissful noise into husks of atonement and unrequited yearning. Just from following Finney’s words over the years, it is hard to tell if his blend of transcendentalism allows for an eternity or even moments of hope, the music of It Only Gets Worse counteracts his demeanor to allow for such moment, even if only meant as afterthoughts to inner hell.

 

41. Sabla & DK – Totem Society

On the spectrum of dub leaning towards mysticism and a meditative edge, the collaboration of Sabla and D.K. marks a masterful enterprise into new territories without breaching anything close to a cliché. Especially D.K. more strictly rhythmic and percussive elements seem to be broken up and allowed more space to breathe and convey a vibe on Totem Society. This is other than traditional club music, indebted to Gamelan as it is to the prowess of drum processing. Every sound is drenched in reverb and delay, resulting in a spacious headroom and excellent resonance with the drums at their display. Rarely does the tempo go beyond anything danceable, both artists find pockets of trip-hop and even subvert some known flourishes of the genre into contemplative bangers. Apart from all the chill vibes, Totem Society is a showcase of atmospheric design, binding together genres in their shared ambiance and cavernous existence. While not the point at all, it is a delight to zone out the more driving aspects and to catch the drones and traces of reverb as an exercise in what makes vibes stick and creates the often-sought allusion of religious experiences in music.