Month: December 2020

2020 Year End

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

For all of the personal, political, and global calamity of the hellacious year that was 2020, there was a lot of great music that came out. Like…a LOT. 

It makes sense: with tours, festivals, and live shows canceled, most bands turned to the studio instead. The result is perhaps the most challenging year to quantify into a nice, neat list.

But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.

And while I often cop out and just make a list of all the music I’ve purchased, this year is difficult because I’ve purchased all of this music this year, on one format or another.

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Record #728: Marriages – Kitsune (2012)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Speaking of Emma Ruth Rundle…among the long list of projects in her genre-spanning CV, one of my favorite releases is Salome, to date the only full-length project of the experimental group Marriages, featuring fellow Red Sparowes member Greg Burns.

Salome has entranced me since I was introduced to its chameleonic, at times eldritch, blend of post rock, alternative, and metal sensibilities. But that chimeric quality is perhaps even more prominent on Kitsune, the EP that preceded their full length by three years.

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Record #727: Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 2 Comments

Emma Ruth Rundle has spent most of her career on the fringes of the metal scene. Besides playing guitar in prog/post-metal band Red Sparowes, the gothic folk of her solo work and Nocturnes and the spacey ambience of Marriages has always had a darkness that can’t totally be called metal, but it doesn’t quite fit outside of it.

Similarly, the thick, tar-throated sludge of Baton Rouge’s Thou has always coated over a tender melodic heart that would escape most listeners, buried as it was beneath layers of molten guitar.

On paper, there’s little in common between the two. But the collaborative album May Our Chambers Be Full proves that the two entities have much more in common than you might think.

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Record #726: Manchester Orchestra – A Black Mile to the Surface (2017)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I recently wrote about how surprised I was to discover that Manchester Orchestra had a thick layer of folksiness on top of what I was expecting to be an emo-leaning catalog.

The most jarring part of that realization came as a result of seeing a number of tracks from A Black Mile to the Surface in their top tracks on Spotify and deciding to start there. And boy, was the stripped down, Gospel tinged “The Maze” a huge wake-up call. In fact, I’m pretty sure that song has played on my Fleet Foxes Pandora station…

After I got over the shattering of my expectations of what Manchester Orchestra was, I found myself listening to an incredibly rewarding album. While not every track is quite as subdued or rustic, that sensibility covers even the most aggressive songs on this disc.

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