Record #730: Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

After spending much of my life believing Black Sabbath to be wholly evil (as a child in the Evangelical Church) or wholly outdated (as a self-serious hipster), I’ve spent the last couple years slowly working my way through their catalogue—and learning just how wrong I was.

Throughout the early records, the band gets progressively heavier with each release. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath certainly doesn’t stop that trajectory at all, but neither does it rely on heaviness alone as a compositional device. The result is some of the most cathartic and gorgeous music ever written.

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Record #728: Marriages – Kitsune (2012)

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

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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Record #725: Manchester Orchestra – Cope (2014)

A few months ago, I realized that despite years of guest features, tours with bands I love, and general cultural osmosis, I had never actually knowingly listened to Manchester Orchestra.

A shocking omission, I know. And I’m not totally sure how I managed to pull it off. But upon the realization, I set off to correct it as soon as I could. Which proved to be a daunting task—with five full lengths, several EPs, and a number of collaborative projects, Andy Hull & Co. has made a massive impact on the indiesphere (massive enough for me to feel like I was already a fan, in fact).

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Record #724: Jónsi – Shiver (2020)

For the last twenty-three years, Sigur Rós frontman Jón Þór Birgisson, better known as simply Jónsi, has traversed the deepest nearly every span of the human experience, from the glacial joy of Agaetis Byrjun to the isolated chill of Valtari to the dense grief of Kveikur to the bounding, pastoral joy of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. And that’s all without mentioning Sigur Rós’ more abstract works or the work of Jónsi & Alex, his ambient collaboration with his partner.

And while his first solo outing, Go, shared a lot of the acoustic, rambling mischievousness of his band’s Með suð while shying away from the amorphous, rolling ambiance of their earlier works, Shiver finds him indulging in his every instinct. He does not restrain himself from any of his tendencies toward atmosphere, preciousness, electronic weirdness, or joyful dance music. The result is an album that feels the most varied and comprehensive of anything he’s ever done.

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Record #723: Johnny Cash – American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002)

There are precious few figures in pop music history who can truly be called Icons: singular performers who are without peer. Artists like David Bowie, The Beatles, or Miles Davis, whose legacies overshadow all contemporaries and transcend generations.

There is no mistaking that Johnny Cash is one of these artists. But one of the biggest reasons his legacy survived as well as it did was his late-career partnership with producer Rick Rubin, who cut his teeth working with hip hop and metal acts like the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and Slayer. On paper, the two seem like the strangest bedfellows you could put together. But throughout the American Recordings series, Rubin demonstrated a keen instinct for bringing Cash’s ragged performances to life.

While all of the albums released in the series are littered with gems, none are quite as packed as The Man Comes Around, the final album Cash would release before his death.

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Record #722: HUM – Inlet (2020)

In the twenty-five years since the release of You’d Prefer an Astronaut, the musical landscape has been filled with bands that exist at the altar of HUM. The combination of doom metal heaviness, laid back vocal delivery, and major key melodies that HUM delivered on that breakthrough has inspired everyone from Deftones to Cave In to Quicksand to Cloakroom to Spotlights to The Life & Times to True Widow…I could go on.

But now, two decades after going on hiatus, HUM has released a new record that proves that they’re still the kings of space rock. And it might just be their best ever.

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Record #721: The All-American Rejects – The All-American Rejects (2002)

In 2002-2003, I was a sixteen-year-old emo kid who discovered all my music through scouring message boards, cross-referencing the thank yous in CD liner notes, or watching hours of Fuse TV. I was ingesting a healthy diet of Thrice, Sunny Day Real Estate, Fugazi, pre-hiatus Weezer, Zao, and the like.

And when the Fuse airwaves started being infested with at three All-American Rejects videos on heavy rotation (was it only three? I could have sworn it was at least five), I had an almost visceral reaction. It was the cheesiest, most cliche, overproduced schlocky pop punk I had ever heard. It was so pop punk it was almost devoid of any punk ethos at all. It felt like the exact embodiment of copycats who heard Dashboard Confessional and learned the exact wrong lesson.

And for years, I endured it angrily.

But after I graduated, I was driving around with a friend and flipping through their CDs when I found this and threw it in as a joke. And to my utter surprise—and the disappointment of my punk cred—I realized that this album totally bangs.

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