This time every year, there’s an obligatory wave of “best of” lists. 99% of them apologize for even existing and take great effort to communicate that they realize that lists are bad and stupid and that they’re only one asshole’s opinion and that they don’t really mean anything and that they’re beneath the author’s journalistic integrity but for some reason they’ve still got to make one or many and that it’s probably not anything that anyone asks for or even wants and that they’re mostly about ego and groupthink anyway and there’s probably no reason for you to spend any of your precious time reading them, versus, I dunno, scrolling through the endless cesspool of social media or whatever that has way more importance than some asshole’s opinion about what the best ________ of the year were.
(Yawn)
Whatevs. I love year-end best of lists because I love to hear what art actually gets people excited enough to blurt out some actual fucking praise in this age of thumbs up icons. I also find that auditing the artistic output of a given time period is an excellent way to actually appreciate how much great work spews out into the world, pressure-cooked and bubbling up from beneath the superficial surface of mainstream marketing, entertainment, and commerce. So, here ya go: One more asshole’s opinion about what great albums came out in 2022…
Come to Grief – When The World Dies (Translation Loss)
For decades, the sludgecore band Grief encapsulated the definition of the genre, and was a touchstone for an aesthetic that was always bubbling at the edges of the metal, punk and hardcore scenes alongside 16, Acid Bath, Buzzov•en, Corrupted, Eyehategod and others. In the time since the ’90s when their numerous split 7″ releases with other sludgy bands and peak Pessimiser albums (Miserably Ever After was always a solid go-to) could be mailordered from distros all over the country, a sludge/doom/stoner metal wave began to swell and Grief’s style-defining sound was buried in a tidal wave of other sludgy metal groups with slicker logos, cover art, and more tuneful, retro Black Sabbath influences, all of which were much easier to peddle than the 100% pure strain of negativity that Grief’s output perfected. Fast forward to 2022 and a new iteration of the band led by members Terry Savastano and Chuck Conlon, named after Grief’s sophomore Come to Grief album, releases a debut album that totally levels everything that’s come before it with the weight of its savage, lumbering riffs and throat-shredding vocals by newcomer Jonathan Herbert. Negativity intact, When The World Dies is an epically harsh sludge record that could only emerge after the global pandemic of the last two years. It probably won’t gain the group a lot of new fans or overdue respect from the doom metal legions of 2022, but it does set a new watermark for heavy music as the focus on glacially-paced, rumbling riffage and full-throttle attack mode vocals don’t leave a lot of room for songwriting flourishes or dynamics. Save for a few sorrowful guitar solos, it’s all slow, all heavy and all gigantically ugly in its devastating totality. It’s exactly what Come to Grief is all about, expressed and captured perfectly on this album.
Crisis Man – Asleep In America (Digital Regress / Erste Theke Tonträger)
Following a 2017 demo and a roaring debut 7″ EP in 2018, Santa Rosa’s Crisis Man delivers an overdue LP that lives up to all expectations, slaying with an unstoppable, seasick guitar tone and tightly played, solidly engineered hardcore. Jabbing riffs over snarling bass lines start and stop on a dime, yet also stretch with the elasticity of Ginn-style guitar strangling, while clever breakdowns and tempo shifts keep you guessing where a song is going next. This unsettling and highly effective technique Crisis Man has mastered makes for some rousing listening. Just take for example the droning riff that abruptly takes over towards the final seconds “Blue & Red States” which takes a detour to terminate the song. It’s one of many instances where the band suddenly pulls in a new direction and keeps the listener on their toes. Compared to their previous releases, which were looser and more straightforward hardcore punk, it’s obvious that the band has been pushing themselves and the art form, crafting something next level and essential. On Asleep in America, Crisis Man play songs that are complex and chopped up like mathcore, except played with more heart, not hands.
Dan Melchior – C.B. Odyssey (Feeding Tube / Sophomore Lounge)
You’ll see the name Dan Melchior here frequently and there’s good reason for that. Whether belting out gold-standard garage fuzz punk with Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue, Dan Melchior und das Menace, or the Dan Melchior Band, or pushing into more experimental blues, indie and pop territory with his solo releases and collaborations, there is a seal of quality implied with his name that makes any Melchior release worth a listen if not fixation. This year’s offerings were no different and C.B. Odyssey earned the honorable distinction of spending more time on the NFZ turntable than any other release in 2022 with hardscrabble scrapyard blues that cuts ribbons through all the pompous dreck pressed to vinyl by wannabe sages with acoustic guitars. Melchior’s lyrical dynamo is in full effect here, skewering the gentrifying slummers of Carrboro, sanctimonious millennials, hipsters, religious zealots and those helplessly stuck in the past and more, all with his uniquely earnest snark. Musically, the journey through these 14 tracks never gets dull either, as reverbed piano haunts the track “Mr Linus” (name dropping Keiji Haino for extra points!) or tonal bells and accents float beneath the warbling guitar of “A Genius Has Died” or the rollicking churl of album closer “Cool Dad’s Pool Party” keeps your ears pricked up and hungry for new surprises. The recording and vinyl mastering also deserve a mention, as many of the releases in the Melchior catalog fall within the hissing lo-fi confines of the indie/garage rock . Here, the spaciousness of C.B. Odyssey‘s austere instrumentation is perfectly captured with remarkable fidelity, as each element is represented with full presence and clarity.
Fret – Because of the Weak (L.I.E.S.)
While I was still busy absorbing the sonic bludgeoning of Mick Harris’ 2021 Scorn release, The Only Place, and re-examining that project’s formative classic Evanescence after its Decibel Magazine Hall of Fame designation, Harris’ martial low-end pummeling project Fret unleashed this double LP worth of punishing percussion that levels any other electronic music released in 2022. While the aural palette is similar to Scorn, Fret focuses less on hip-hop beats and atmospherics and goes head first into powerful rhythmic bliss with bass frequencies at the forefront. A boundary-pusher since his teenage years, helping invent grindcore with Napalm Death, usher in the age of drum and bass with Scorn, dark ambient music with his Lull project, or illbient dub solo releases, Harris continues to push against the edges of the genres that try to confine him.
Green / Blue – Paper Thin (Feel It)
Following their excellent sophomore LP, Offering, released by Hozac earlier in the year, Paper Thin finds the band in a moodier shade of Green / Blue with Jim Blaha’s (The Blind Shake, Shadow in the Cracks) clangy guitar enveloped in a frosty minor key postpunk mode, accentuated by the ring of Annie Sparrow’s (The Soviettes) harmonizing vocals. As much as I loved Offering, Paper Thin definitely spent more time on the turntable in 2022, mainly because it contains an album’s worth of songs as choice as the very best tracks from the Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground compilation that came out a couple years ago. In addition to the quality of the songs, this recording sounds fantastic, mastered perfectly on vinyl with crisp guitar tones that float over a hearty and full rhythm section. It’s instantly playable and sounds even better with each spin.
Lady Aicha & Pisko Crane’s Original Fulu Miziki of Kinshasa – N’Djila Wa Mudujimu (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
The old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover has some merit, but in record store bins sometimes you absolutely can judge a record by its cover. I simply had to see what N’Djila Wa Mudujimu was all about based on the cover alone and I figured that whatever my ears found inside would be as mysterious and interesting as the multi-limbed, leather and duct tape clad warrior on its cover. After recently being blown away by labelmates Duma and their insane version of grindcore, I guessed that this could be anything from extreme metal to Sounds of Pumoja Tanzanian Singeli, and either way I would be up for a stimulating ride. I was correct. This is a collective of musicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who go by the name Fulu Miziki, which translates from Lingala to “music from garbage”, and who literally craft their instruments out of found materials from the garbage heaps of Kinshasa. The result is a polyrhythmic afrofuturist thrill ride that’s as scrappy and brilliant as the amazing cover photo, bouncing with ritualistic chanted rhythms and hooks that will appeal to fans of the Swedish band Goat as well as those of more experimental percussive projects like William Bennett’s (Whitehouse) Cut Hands. The side A closer, “Sebe” (“Sin”) even sounds like something from 2000s-era Einstürzende Neubauten, with more conspicuous nods towards the junkyard material the sounds are made with. Definitely one of the best things I’ve stumbled upon recently and very glad that I took a chance to give it a listen.
Non Plus Temps – Desire Choir (Self-Released)
Gotta admit that I wasn’t ready for another top-shelf Andy Human project to hit ye olde earholes, as I’m still feeling 2021’s Famous Mammals tape and craving more Mammals. But, of course, a few tracks in and I’m totally up for this brilliant postpunk dub ride. It’s as solid as any other Human project, and, in fact recruits three members of Famous Mammals and other Oakland gold star groups like The World, Naked Roommate, Rays, Preening, Beatniks, and others. The sound is a sonic pastiche of spacious ESG/Pop Group/A Certain Ratio postpunk percussion augmented with dub dropouts and charmed vocal harmonies to add some bittersweetness that’s often tempered with a postpunk chilliness. The broad instrumentation utilized (including melodica, of course!) gives each track a unique vibe, yet they all work together cohesively across the album as they all clearly come from the cavernous, heady, echoing space. Lead track “Continuous Hinge” melds seamlessly into the next track “Terminal Affect” which nicely sets up “Facts Sound Like Myths” after a beat of silence. The sequencing of tracks continues to flow effortlessly through the haunting echo of album closer “Laika the Mongrel”, highlighting just how unified and mighty this faction of Oakland all stars is.
Pitva – Pitva (Static Age Music)
A year ago I mentioned Hologram’s No Longer Human as evidence that there’s still plenty of new ideas to be applied to hardcore punk, which many see as a creatively-limited genre. Well fuckers, here’s yet another example of how limits and rules can be broken in endlessly creative ways. The sound on this debut album from Vienna’s Pitva is unlike any hardcore punk I’ve ever heard, and yes, I have heard a shit ton of hardcore punk. In fact, the production is really unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered. It’s confounding initially but reveals itself to be a very compelling version of the species after a few tracks. Trebly guitars with shimmering underwater effects swirl into a persistent sickly glaze, marching along to 1-2-1-2 hardcore beats with vocals being shouted over the din until squealing feedback or feral fuzz overtake them or recede. While the sound is relative to classic lo-fi black metal production, as some have noted, there’s just something wonderfully weird and off here, as the guitars don’t sound black metal muddy as much as blurred around the edges, and in fact they even come into and out of focus throughout the record to really keep things interesting. Plus, the drums, although trebly and thin, still put some boom in the room, which isn’t something you get in most lo-fi black metal. The vibe is solidly hardcore punk, but the execution makes this a real outlier from that rather regimented genre. There are definitely many hardcore punk bands out there that deserve to be ignored, but Pitva have nine tracks here to demonstrate why you shouldn’t dismiss the genre as a whole.
Osees – A Foul Form (Castle Face)
As explained in further detail here, John Dwyer and crew shot some pure outsider punk rock through their psychosonic punk cannon and accidentally created a new variant of hardcore punk that’s more virulent and catchy than nearly anything else you’ll find in your local record store’s ransom note labeled punk section. In a nutshell, it’s loud, it’s fast, it’s hard, and it also is really weird and fun, in true Osees style. It’s one that stands out in the ever-expanding discography of the group and well worth a listen.
Science Man – Nines Mecca (Feral Kid / Swimming Faith)
With this third LP, it’s finally occurred to me that Science Man could be described as head injury hardcore. Featuring a disorienting array of relentless hardcore punk riffs served up with a woozy snarl that makes your head spin before the floor drops and you find yourself blinking back into consciousness. Sometimes you wake up, eyes blinking, to a freshly combusting lab-enhanced guitar attack, while others drop you off into a freaky industrial sideshow like the track “Adventure Spit”, with its carnivalesque Twilight Zone-style head trip. After being the energetic frontman for Buffalo’s great Radiation Risks, Science Man has gone on to perfect an aberrant, brain damaging version of hardcore punk that’s the aural equivalent to what excellent hardcore punk sounds like after being clocked in the noggin’ by an overzealous windmiller in the pit. The guitar riffs here have been engineered to come fast and furious and sustain the energy, even if your brain isn’t able to keep up. But you don’t have to keep up. Just believe in science, man.
Smirk – Material (Feel It)
Nick Vicario follows up 2021’s impressive batch of top-shelf releases under his Smirk moniker with a sophomore LP of crisp, coldhearted punk. Material inches slightly toward convention for the Smirk sound, swapping out the bits of the oddball warble and lo-fi scrappiness of earlier releases for more precisely tooled but equally charming songs that ring with the chilly clarity of Television’s early protopunk and the alluring pop hooks of The Buzzcocks. “Hopeless” might be the most accessible track from Smirk so far, stylistically speaking, with a classic song structure, a guitar solo, and ringing acoustic guitar layered in clean production full of pop hooks, but it’s still got all the Smirk charm and that wink of bleakness behind the grin. Other standouts are “Living In Hell”, brightened up from the version on the split cassette with Zhoop and the near-cowpunk roil of “God’s Light” complete with tastefully applied slide guitar that echoes The Gun Club’s finer moments. The album ends too soon with “Into the Pantomime”, a trebly snap crackling punk earworm that ends with a chilling laugh track locked groove. 2022 delivered more solid material from Smirk.
Valborg – Der Alte (Lupus Lounge / Prophecy Productions)
Within the oversaturated strain of already oversaturated metal genres, it’s rare to discover a doom metal band that truly perks up your ear. Like many well-established genres, there are codified expectations that when expressed hundreds of thousands (if not hundreds of millions) of times, dull the creative spirit that drives someone to pick up a distorted guitar and let it rip. Because of these codified stylistic expectations, typically, a band’s early efforts reflect their most inspired work before they’ve smoothed out any imperfections or quirks that make their sound stand out from the pack. Munich’s Valborg, however, have figured out how to emphasize these quirks into an even more iconoclastic sound; one that seems to be all but ignored by most metalheads, which is a pity because this album really stands heads and shoulders above their rather timesome doom metal peers. In addition to the requisite doom metal riffs, Valborg’s minimalist drumming is the most immediate distinction that makes Der Alte such a compelling listen. Where most metal drummers can’t help but throw out drum fills left and right on their 96-piece kits, Valborg keeps things restrained to a very steady, very heavy march, kinda like early Swans records sped up to a modest trot. This oppressive adherence to simplicity would almost be frustrating if it weren’t for the vocals, which ride the edge of being totally unhinged.
Vision 3D – Hypenose (Belly Button / Rockerill Records / Six Tonnes De Chair)
Okay, let’s do some number crunching: The power of the number 3 is evident here, as the band is Vision 3D, there are 3 members (OK, mebbe 4 if Lo Spider is a person), and this is their third release. Now I don’t buy into any flavor or numerology or any other new age nonsense, but I do think the number 3 looks pretty dang cool and, in some instances, kicks hella more ass than 4. Still with me? Yeah, me neither, but the point is that this trio (again, assuming that Lo Spider isn’t a person and the group’s photo on Discogs ain’t cropping out a fourth member) and the 3 instruments each member plays holds it’s own sonic space in a way that evokes my evergreen love of The Minutemen. While there are some 4D elements snuck in here like the synth hum below lead track “18 Avril” or the theremin-like squiggles at the end of “Je Vais Te Dire” or the organ on closer “Les Ardennes”, the Hypnose vortex mostly pulls you in with big, bouncing basslines, rock steady sturdy drumming, and a wild, trebly guitar tone that sounds like it’s been touched by the almighty hand of Saint D. Boon. This does not mean that they sound like The Minutemen, it only means that the qualities of The Minutemen sound can be found here. With a crisp Mikey Young mastering job, this LP sounds like it belongs in 2022, not 1982, and if there were a more contemporary comparison to make it’d be to the Kansas City trio Nature Boys, who also have a male/male/female lineup and also play a distinct version of rollicking punk rock in a guitar/drums/bass sonic space. Got all that? OK, one more 3 to cover with this release: three quality labels wanted to have their logo stamped on it, which in my book is a pretty good indicator of the quality of this LP.
VR Sex – Rough Dimension (Dais)
While the band’s name certainly deserves the eyeroll it gets when I try to declare the greatness of this LP, Los Angeles’ VR Sex deliver smoky, seedy synth-driven death rock that’s one of the most seductive looks at the dystopian tech trap we’re all living in since Pop. 1280’s The Grid. Led by Drab Majesty leader Andrew Clinco and including Ex-Heroin/Antioch Arrow drummer Aaron Montaigne, VR Sex inhabit a bleak shell of a world that’s horrific and alluring at the same time. If the first 3 tracks don’t pull you in, the haunting minor key chorus of “Live (In a Dream)” likely will, or if you’re a Killing Joke fan, you will probably appreciate the swirling guitar hook on “Crisis Stage” or the ghost of KJ’s “The Hum” living inside the lead track “Victim or Vixen”. Though mostly synth driven, there’s actually a fair bit of enchanting guitar to be found here. The guitar tones on “Snake Water” are especially killer and keep Rough Dimension from being a dull, one-dimensional affair. So yeah, roll eyes, groan, puke or do whatever you’ve got to do to get past the name and be sure to take a step into the Rough Dimension.
Wormrot – Hiss (Earache)
Gotta admit that I hate to be scooped by Rolling Stone, who put this on their best metal of 2022 list, but fuck it, I still distinctly recall my first listen of this dizzying display of grindcore virtuosity and won’t let that prevent me from singing its praises too. In fact, I remember my first encounter with this monster as it stopped me dead in my tracks and made me exclaim “DANG!” and “HOLY WTF IS THIS?” What makes Hiss so noteworthy is how masterfully it colors standard grindcore fare with dashes of hardcore punk, mathcore, death metal, tech metal, black metal, noise rock and whatever other wildass influences you can pick out. It’s a flavorful sonic stew that reveals new traces of aggressive music’s history while also being something completely fresh and new. Plus, it’s played with the musical precision of game-changing groups like the Dazzling Killmen, Dillinger Escape Plan, Origin, and Pig Destroyer. Vocal styles vary from Cookie Monster death metal blurping to Chris Spencer yelps and there’s even an epic drums/vocals-only track “All Will Wither” that’s a surprising touch for a grindcore band. Other musical surprises occur on Hiss as well, like the whirling electronic dropouts on “Vicious Circle” or the inclusion of shredding and shrieking violin on two tracks, “Grieve” and “Weeping Willow”. So while I cringe seeing this lumped alongside Slipknot’s latest in Rolling Stone, I am also going to sing its praises here as well, on my own dime, as it certainly warrants it.
ALSO NOTEWORTHY:
Altar of Eden – Chimeras (Drunken Sailor)
Bronze – Absolute Compliance (Castle Face)
The Cool Greenhouse – Sod’s Toastie (Melodic)
Crime of Passing – Crime of Passing (Feel It)
Daeva – Through Sheer Will and Black Magic (20 Buck Spin)
Glaas – Qualm (Static Shock)
Green / Blue – Offering (Hozac)
The Intelligence – ‘Lil Peril (Mt. St. Mtn.)
KEN mode – NULL (Artoffact)
Klazo – Demik Dimentia (No Front Teeth/Big Neck)
Metal Preyers – Shadow Swamps (Nyege Nyege)
Mitraille – Mitraille (Belly Button)
Origin – Chaosmos (Nuclear Blast)
Satan – Earth Infernal (Metal Blade)
Spread Joy – II (Feel It)