One third of 2022 is over. After taking a quick break from brand new music and revisiting some of my old favorites, it made me take a step back and realize how few of this year’s releases are on regular rotation right now. Even the best of the best that 2022 has so far given me feels somewhat disposable these days. Animal Collective’s Time Skiffs, which currently fights only a small handful of others for the top spot of my current list, seems disappointingly stale. Already a product of its time. The beginning of February seems like so, so long ago…

Perhaps I’m fatigued. My new release absorption rate is slowing down. I think I’ll temporarily scooch backward to a biweekly schedule until I can muster up a usual appetite for brand new albums. Let’s hope it’s just the shitty weather bringing me down, and not the democratic backsliding happening in real time right in front of my eyes in the stupid country I live in!

But speaking of needing something to perk me up, the new Drug Church album is fucking excellent and I recommend it heartily! Also, today I feature new albums from Animals as Leaders and Jack White. Those I’m not as excited about!

Drug Church – Hygiene
(March 11, 2022)

I became a congregant of the Drug Church with 2018’s Cheer. It’s a struggle to find some real resonant modern hardcore without the nagging, sinking feeling that you’re listening to a group of insufferable scene kids. Risky gamble, this post-hardcore business. Drug Church is great, though, they mix in a lot of grungy, alt-rock flavor to make it sound not so…soaring and childish. And singer Patrick Kindlon has a voice that reminds me of Steve Albini, or David Yow, or even, dare I say, BILL GRABER from the fantastic ’90s Minneapolis post-hardcore group Arcwelder! Check their stuff out, they rule too.

Hygiene, the band’s fourth album, really ups the ante on melody. It’s like they’re trying to get away with how musical their brand of punk can get before it’s just straight up rock and roll. Occasionally, it almost even reaches The Police levels of new wave sissy punk! And I love every minute of this. When that squealing industrial feedback first hits on the opener “Fun’s Over”, that’s when I knew the fun was beginning! So to speak.

But, man, this thing is just chock full of impossibly catchy hooks and surprising minor key riffs, one strong track after another. “Detective Lieutenant” has a great, swirling melodic lead guitar lines. “Plucked” has these tight, guitar-forward licks that sound in good company with the peak thrash metal heyday of the ’80s. Production is slick, massive, and meaty!

The lyrics! Poetic and abstract, for the most part, and supremely miserable. Here are a couple choice passages! From “Tiresome”: “There’s nothing there but air/A void where ambition ain’t/A damp seat of bad thoughts/A rotted body you came across“. From “Athlete on a Bench”: “Verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and bridge/Writhing within a narrowing niche/Bridge, chorus, coda, and end/I’m living between shrinking margins.” Now imagine Henry Rollins yelling all this instead of yelling about TV rotting your brain in 1981 and you’ve got a fairly accurate picture.

Fantastic album. S-Tier for 2022, certainly.

Early Verdict:

Animals as Leaders – Parrhesia
(March 25, 2022)

Not only is “djent” a bad word in many metal circles, but it’s also such a broad descriptor that it’s essentially useless until you actually hear the band’s sound with your own ears. You can boil it down to “sounds like Meshuggah”, but even then it’s not an entirely rigid frame of reference. PAR EXEMPLE, Animals as Leaders doesn’t sound like Meshuggah, but they are one of the primary groups of the djent scene. Djenters as Leaders.

So after absorbing a wealth of djent for years and years, my personal definition of djent is as follows: futuristic technical mathcore somewhere between metal and metalcore. Glad I could clear that all up for ya! It’s a genre phenomenon that petered out on gaining new recruits by the mid 2010s, but those that established themselves early on are still steadfast in their djenty endeavors. And those that established themselves even earlier aren’t pigeonholed as mere followers of a fad. Lucky for Animals as Leaders, they escape this criticism.

This fifth studio effort sounds like their other four. Instrumental music showcasing metal-adjacent technical virtuosity and collaborative synthesis. The palette of sounds is nothing short of vibrant and immediate. It’s a veritable soundtrack to a sci-fi epic. A futuristic cyberpunk video game. Shimmering liquid guitar tones. Crisp jazz drumming. Tight arrangements. They’re good at what they do.

However, the best criticism I can give this record is that it exhibits a certain amount of warmth that most metal-adjacent progressive music lacks, and for that I can’t praise them enough. That being said, on a completely emotional level, this music does nothing for me. I can appreciate the atmosphere and the musicianship, but there’s nothing here that I will ever grab onto and cherish forever.

It makes good background music for reading East of West, though!

Early Verdict:

Jack White – Fear of the Dawn
(April 4, 2022)

I have always been indifferent about Jack White, and at worst a little contemptuous. A lot of that is due to him being from Detroit, my own neck of the woods, and I’m automatically wary of anyone else from Michigan because they tend to love Michigan so goddamn much. Jack White looks like he likes Michigan a lot. Jack White looks a lot like people I went to high school with. Ugh.

Jack White certainly tries his best here to prove how uncool it is to listen to Jack White in 2022. It appears that he’s going all in with the blue hair, forever christening his fourth solo album with cartoonish cover art depicting, among other things, his AZURE LOCKS. With art like that, one might think they’re about to hear some dark cabaret. But no man, it’s even weirder than that.

It took me a while to let my guard down, but I think I like this! It’s like he’s pulling in White Stripes-era garage rock and fucking it all up with crazy, squonky, distorted electronics, a mish-mesh of not readily mish-meshable genres, and noisy, squealing, wah-wah guitar solos. He’s loud and slightly out of control. And at first I was embarrassed for this 46-year-old manchild, but every time I listen to this I get more and more intrigued at how each track seems to slide into the next all sneaky-like, or how his fusion of hip-hop and blue-eyed soul crooning seems to impossibly work in spite of everything going against a fucking fusion of hip-hop and blue-eyed soul in this day and age. Even the totally lame warped dance beats and obnoxious flourishes of Speak & Spell voice chip modulation sound pretty interesting after you get used to it.

The bottom line here is that Jack White is clearly putting everything into this, and that’s why I think it succeeds. You can hear it in his voice, in his energy, in all his ambitious musical ideas. It’s so earnestly tasteless that I can’t help but enjoy it for the guilty pleasure that it is. Hey, the heart wants what it wants!

Early Verdict: