New Wednesday, new reviews! We got Mitski! We got Celeste! We got Zeal & Ardor! You’ve heard of at least one of those, right? Excellent start! Keep reading.

Mitski – Laurel Hell
(February 4, 2022)

Mitski makes it sound like she doesn’t want to make music. Notoriously, she condemns her fanbase, which she describes as creepily ravenous and cultish. Her inclination to stay private is always been at odds with the necessity to tour and promote in order to be successful. You can’t find her on social media, and if you do, the accounts are not run by her personally. But, she tours and promotes anyway so that she can earn her keep in the music business.

Laurel Hell is less of an album and more of a contractual obligation fulfillment with Dead Oceans. It’s a weird situation. Does she want to make music? Does she want to stop? Does being beholden to a label stifle and suffocate her artistic visions? This nebulous tension can be heard in the new direction Mitski takes with this album, wherein she channels her admittedly humble and hopelessly adrift position into powerful expressions of pulsing, synth-driven choral uncertainty, regret, and relational turmoil. Lines like “Sometimes I think I am free/Until I’m back in line again” and “But I think for as long as we’re together/I’ll be the only heartbreaker” show a directionless thirtysomething woman who just keeps going because, sometimes, it seems like the only thing to do. It resonates deeply with her generation—my generation—who are stuck in a societal no-man’s land of arrested development. Indie rockers like Phoebe Bridgers and Snail Mail and Faye Webster may be carrying the torch now, but Mitski was the OG sadgirl.

As for Laurel Hell as a musical presentation…personal preferences aside, it does its job and it does its job well. Even if a particular musical style isn’t my bag, I’m not here to fault any artist who makes a coherent album as a personal expression of confused feelings, shifting definitions of self-identities, and bared, sincere vulnerabilities as long as the artist is mature enough to avoid infantilizing these complex emotions. You can’t do much better than Mitski there, honestly. She always consistent, and she’s always worth checking out. Just don’t love her too much, ok? She doesn’t like that.

Early Verdict:

Celeste – Assassine(s)
(January 28, 2022)

When you consider yourself not a true metalhead, just a dedicated metal fan who observes and perceives the metalhead perspective as an outsider looking in, so to speak, you often wonder to yourself why the fuck all this metal needs to exist in the first place. It’s got to be the world’s most represented genre by a huge margin; connecting people from Peru to Iraq to Japan to Moldova to Namibia and literally everywhere in between, unifying the globe with a singular musical culture.

What’s my point? There are a trillion bands that sound like Celeste, but that’s not even the kicker. The kicker is that bands like Celeste divide people on whether or not the music the band makes can even be considered metal. So there are a trillion bands that sound like Celeste AND people right now arguing whether all of them can be considered metal. Just think about that for a minute.

What’s my real point? I have no idea! I guess my stance is that, yes, Celeste is a metal band, and I’m confused as to why even something like Assassin(e)s gets thrown in the ambiguity pile. Sure, the industrial fringes that line the guitar and drum tones sound a little bit, MAYBE, like metalcore codifiers such as Converge or Botch (the “-core” part being the sticking point for many people), but the blackened growls and the smoky atmosphere of the downtuned chords tells me that this is metal, baby. It’s like aggressive blackened thrashy post-metal. Come on.

This is produced by Chris Edrich, who has done some work for Gojira, Leprous, and the Ocean. All fantastic bands, all have a distinct “sparse crispness” added to the mix that elevates the stark atmosphere, which you can also hear all over Assassin(e)s as well. It makes grooves like the opening minutes of “De tes yeux bleus perlés” sound like military marches into dark, abyssal hollows, with the persistent rat-a-tat-tat of the drums akin to a machine gun going off. That is to say, I like that kind of thing! Not too murky and gory like brutal death metal, not too clean and robotic like technical death metal. Just right.

Early Verdict:

Zeal & Ardor – Zeal & Ardor
(February 11, 2022)

Yeah buddy, this is my shit. Zeal & Ardor’s second full-length was in my top 10 for 2018. Where it fell in that top 10 I don’t remember, because I posted my Top 10 as a list on Facebook and only two people were like “haha, yeah” and I can’t be arsed to look for it! But Stranger Fruit was unlike anything I’d really heard before, and that kind of thing always stays on my radar for a while.

Enter 2022. Up until now Zeal & Ardor was essentially a one-man band; the brainchild of African-American/Swiss multi-instrumentalist and eclectic music fanatic Manuel Gagneux, whose early interests in grindcore and death metal coupled with his early involvement in chamber pop projects led to a Bandcamp experiment where he’d take suggestions, mash two genres together and submit a song within half an hour. Now he has a whole team of visual artists, producers, mixers and masterers, although Gagneux appears to still handle most of the instrumentation. The self-titled third album feels like new beginnings, new ventures into previously uncharted territories, and a slick, fully-realized vision of the project.

I love this whole album. It’s unusual, interesting, passionate, acerbic, and insanely catchy. Highlights are “Death to the Holy”, a brilliant fusion of apocalyptic gospel and industrial soul with layered vocals and unnerving piano arpeggios, and “Golden Liar”, a baleful blues/outlaw country hybrid that sounds like Nick Cave and Ennio Morricone dropping acid in the middle of the California desert. Above all else, it’s Gagneux’s impressive range as a vocalist that really sells it for me. Don’t even try to keep up with him, he’ll scream and growl and then croon and howl before you even say “boo!”

Early Verdict: