This week I have new releases from Esoctrilihum, Arab Strap, and Snapped Ankles! I’ve decided to keep it manic and positive this week and only go over albums that I’m GUNG-HO about. Three happy faces in a row here, check them all out if you like colorful black metal, or depressingly dreamy pseudo-spoken word, or oddball post-punk. What do you mean you don’t?? Ok, fine!

Hey, John Mayer just came out with a new album last Friday! But, guess what, I have never listened to a fucking John Mayer album and I’m not going to start now.

Esoctrilihum – Dy’th Requiem For The Serpent Telepath
(May 21, 2021)

The extremely prolific and satisfyingly consistent black metal project from France released their sixth studio album this year. That makes six since 2017. That’s more than one per year on average since the project’s inception. And they’re all, like, long albums too.

I say “project” because it all seems to be the brainchild of a single individual, like a lot of black metal projects are. A mysterious mononymous entity known only as Asthâghul does everything: he writes, he composes, he plays, he produces, he sings, he dances, he entertains! 76 minutes of black metal is a dense, challenging listen by anyone’s standards, but I’m digging this a lot. I wish it were shorter, though. No album in this day and age should be this long anymore, especially a metal album. Especially an extreme metal album, come on. How much more of this stuff could the world possibly need??

But yeah, I’m digging this a lot! Fuck it! Atmospherics, symphonic instrumentation, heavy synths, powerful blast beats, smooth and crisp production, twisty and bendy compositions, complimentary “smooth guttural” vocals, I really like how everything melds together into something that hooks me in the moment instead of relegating most of everything to harsh background noise. I love the cool-ass organ in tracks like “Tyurh” and “Xuiotg”, it brings to mind John Carpenter and ’80s horror movies. I should’ve waited until Halloween to listen to this! Good stuff, and I consider it a standout for 2021 in a genre plagued by a sense of indistinguishability.

Early Verdict:

Arab Strap – As Days Get Dark
(March 5, 2021)

Aha, another band from Great Britain featuring a singer rambling nonsense over music. Arab Strap have been around a long time, technically, but I haven’t dipped into their catalog at all in the past. The band had split up in 2006 under seemingly agreeable terms, and were pretty confident that the Arab Strap project was over forever. Now, 15 years later, they drop their latest studio album As Days Get Dark. And let me tell you, if the rest of their work is similar then I gotta check it all out soon. Soon soon soon!

I’m used to the post-punk version of this stream-of-consciousness talk-singing over music, and even some of the tense and morose Nick Cave version of talk-singing over music, but I’m not too well-versed with the pleasant, indie rock version of talk-singing over music. Aidan Moffat’s soothing voice and his thick Scottish accent are hypnotic over the marvelously lush and warm sonic landscapes. But, this is me we’re talking about! So that combination in of itself isn’t quite enough, oh no. The subject matter of the storytelling is dour and/or unwholesome, and that’s the way I like it! “Another Clockwork Day”, for example, I’d love to just copy and paste the whole thing here. Let’s just say it takes the daily mundanity of modern porn-viewing technology and gets really specific and literal with the computer terminology side of things while remaining poetic and charming with the, you know, porn-viewing side of things (and is likely related to the album cover image of a piece of high art open in a browser window). Then you learn at the end that he was looking at old iPhone photos of his wife! What a twist! But ahh, why is he jacking off to them instead of actually having sex with her? Now we’re digging deeper!

And the album is full of this stuff. Pretty melodies with smooth vocals and elegant poetry covering depressive and/or slightly seedy subject matter. It’s like you’re getting a glimpse into that which you shouldn’t be glimpsing. Shouldn’t be glimpsing at all! Maybe that’s what makes it all the more enthralling? I’m going to check out more Arab Strap albums, hell yes I am.

Early Verdict:

Snapped Ankles – Forest of Your Problems
(July 2, 2021)

I’ve been very happy with Snapped Ankles’ output since I first laid ears on their 2017 debut Come Play the Trees. They produce an always-exciting mix of tribal krautrock, angular dance-punk, synthy rhythms, and cynical social commentary, slathered in an unnerving sauce of lo-fi psychedelia and finished with the cherry-on-top of creepy woods/forest-themed performance art. Simply wonderful stuff. Their third effort Forest of Your Problems does not disappoint.

More than even the good melodies and the fun shake-your-ass rhythms, it’s the surprises that really make it for me. There’s no predicting these guys, the way they twist the synths and meld them into the beats, the occasional plentitude of varied instruments that phase in and phase out through song progressions (a great example of this is on “The Evidence”, which keeps piling on layers of instrumentation during the final minute), the tribal drumming paired with the snare drumming. I cracked up at the dying Pac-Man sound effect they used in the last half of “Shifting Basslines Of The Cornucopians”. I mean, it’s not exactly that, but it’s pretty close.

Smatterings of influence from Devo, Kraftwerk, and especially the Fall are everywhere. “Rhythm is Our Business” and “The Prince is Back” especially sound like Mark E. Smith came back from the dead to record more addictive nonsense. And yet, Snapped Ankles sounds like Snapped Ankles. Except when they sound like the Fall, then they just sound like the Fall. Never a bad thing to have more Fall I always say.

Early Verdict: