Metal

Record #761: Gojira – Fortitude (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you’re going to name a band after the greatest monster in cinema mythology, you better deliver. Luckily, long-running French metal outfit Gojira hasn’t built their reputation by not living up to their name. Throughout their twenty-plus-year history, they have delivered punishing groove metal that is both destructive and awe-inspiring.

Originally establishing their reputation as a highly technical death metal band,  2016’s Magma saw a seismic shift that saw them leaning into more melodic and progressive elements without losing any of their technical edge. With that album as my introduction, I was already primed for this year’s Fortitude, a sonic tour-de-force that shows what the French foursome is still so highly regarded.

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Record #755: BIG|BRAVE – A Gaze Among Them (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Anybody who has even the most passing familiarity with this blog can tell that there are a few musical tropes that I cannot resist. Among them are crushing walls of sound, ominous, glacial tempos, lush atmospheres, and emotional female voices.

And Big Brave from Montreal delivers all these in spades, combining each of my favorite colors into a stunning landscape that is at once sonically crushing and achingly gorgeous.

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Record #747: Jesu – Terminus (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few members of the music scene are as prolific as Justin Broadrick. Since the first Jesu release in 2004, he has had more than twenty releases through that project, including a number of studio albums, EPs, splits, and collaborative albums.

Of those albums, I fell deeply in love with 2007’s Conqueror several years ago, but haven’t found anything else in his extensive catalogue that has captured me quite as tightly.

That is, until last year’s Terminus, which showcases his brand of sparkling bedroom doomgaze in an understated yet compelling way.

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Record #741: Alcest – Le Secret EP (2005/2011)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Even legends have to start somewhere. Through years of bouncing around the European black metal scene, Neige was dissatisfied with the ability of the kvlt to properly express what he had to say. Between other projects, he spent his time crafting otherworldly overtures that transcended the narrow confines of traditional black metal. In 2005, he released a pair of tracks under the name Alcest, a name he had used for another project as a teenager.

But Le Secret, that first EP, sounded nothing like the scorched-earth, burnt-church trad-black of his previous band. In fact, it didn’t sound much like anything else that had been released up to that point. The 2011 rerelease, reissued upon the success of the incredible Écailles de Lune, features rerecorded versions of each track with more resources to fulfill his original vision. But even in the face of the clearer versions, this EP demonstrates that Neige’s idea of what he meant Alcest to be has been unchanged from the beginning.

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Record #737: Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked For Death (2016)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the last few months, my awareness of Emma Ruth Rundle has absolutely exploded. I was introduced to her most recent solo record On Dark Horses when I was assigned it while writing for a Belgium-based review site, and even then she was only introduced to me as the guitarist from Red Sparowes.

After almost a year and a half of knowing and loving just that album, I started to dig deeper, falling in love with her alternative/post-rock/psychedelic outfit Marriages, psych-folk outfit Nocturnes (someone sell me their vinyl copy plz), and her recent collaboration with doom metallurgists Thou.

But it’s taken me until a few weeks ago to listen to any of her other solo work, and once I did, the obsession continued. Marked For Death, her second song-based solo album—and regarded by many to be her best—is a crushing work of dark, brooding Southern gothic that showcases her stunning talent as both a songwriter and an ambient architect.

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

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

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)

/ 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 #717: Deftones – Ohms (2020)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

It took me a while to get into the Deftones. The ebbs and flow of my opinion of them are well-documented on my social media: a few years ago, I took it upon myself to figure out how I felt about them once and for all, and dove headlong into their discography, taking detailed track by track notes of each album, which shift between aggressive alternative metal and dreamy shoegaze. Their discography sometimes feels like a fight between these extremes, heavy riffs sitting uneasily against the more billowing songs on the tracklist.

But here, Deftones frontman and admitted The Cure fanboy Chino Moreno opens the record singing, “I’ve finally achieved balance.” And then the band spends an entire album proving that they’ve one just that. Over thirty years into their career, Ohms might be the most cohesive and consistent record in their catalog.

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Record #699: ISIS – Oceanic (2002)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

For the last six years, post metal heroes ISIS have been one of my favorite bands. From the first time I heard the crushing, glacial riffs of Panopticon, I was smitten. As I became more familiar with their other works, I regarded that album as a watershed moment: a turning point that would set the direction for the rest of their career, as well as direction for an entire direction of metallurigists.

A few weeks ago, I found that album’s predecessor, Oceanic, for the lowest price I’d ever seen it, so I ordered it without being totally familiar with it. And now, I must recant the narrative I’ve drawn around their discography. While Panopticon may have perfected the post-rock tinged sludge metal that they are celebrated for, Oceanic pioneered it. Continue reading →

Record #695: Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force – Marching Out (1985)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

After mentioning that only one person has ever taken me up on my offer to donate records that they want me to review, my friend Bill handed me a stack for the Cause.

Included was this disk from Swedish guitar virtuoso Ywngwie Malmsteen, who has long occupied space in my mind as the type of highly technical soloist who was more concerned with showing off his own chops than creating enjoyable compositions (see also: Joe Satriani).

Luckily, though there may be no shortage of sweeps and taps and blistering solos, Malmsteen is too much of a Classical music fanboy to let composition sit at the wayside.

Read more at ayearofvinyl.com #yngwiemalmsteen #heavymetal #metal #vinyl

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