That up there is Scene from a Deluge by Anne-Louis Girodet. I saw it in the Louvre when I was 13, and something about it must have really captured my little imagination, because for years afterwards, I called it my favorite painting. This was before the internet, and my parents didn't buy the art book, so I didn't lay eyes on it again for literally about 2 decades, when I took an art class and something we were learning about it made me remember it.
That has nothing to with this post; I just thought I'd mention it. Here are 10 records that I could not, in good conscience, leave out of the 2024 conversation. My tastes have always been on the dark/morose side, but looking at it, Christ, even by my own standards, this is a pretty bleak top 10. That's where I'm at, clearly. As some of you commented on my previous list: here's hoping that 2025 is at least a little better than 2024. Thanks to y'all, I keep getting "A Long December" by Counting Crows stuck in my head because of that line about "maybe this year will be better than the last."
Also, I know how this all might look -- the intro to my black metal top 20 kinda reads like a suicide note -- but I swear, I'm gonna be fine. A lot of things have gone/stayed right for me this year. My job, as busy as it keeps me, is great; I still have a wonderful, hilarious wife who loves and supports me; I have great friends and family in my corner; and music, even the bleakest of it, continues to bring me joy. Life is an endless parade of chaos and grotesqueries, but that's nothing new, right?
So now that I've been neurotic a bit more, and mentioned Counting Crows, let's get on with the list!
#10
Total Blue
Total Blue
Total Blue sounds like a lost ECM ambient-jazz gem from the early 80s. From top to bottom, at no point does Total Blue break the enchanting, time capsule-like vibe -- just soft, echoing synths, fretless bass, sporadic percussion, gentle saxophone, and the like, all melting into a nice, warm musical bath.
#9
Keeley Forsyth
The Hollow
The second coming of Tilt-era Scott Walker. Haunting, sparse compositions made up of organ, strings, horns/woodwinds, and sputtering percussion, with Forsyth's entrancing vocals at the center, offering comforting affirmations like, "Shake my life out of my mouth" and "Let the body lay down and die." Not an easy listen.
#8
Cabinet
Hydrolysated Ordination
Disgusting, muddy, experimental death metal encased in hovering, ghostly, atmospheric guitar figures. Kinda feels like the album itself is decomposing in real time as you listen to it.
#7
bnny
One Million Love Songs
"I'm hanging on to the good stuff / I'm hanging on to my big love."
An indie rock breakup record that I willfully misinterpret as a grief record. For instance, the first track, "Missing", plays as a sweet, dreamy reverie, until the final gut-punch: "When I'm with you, I almost forget / That he's missing." I understand the intention, but it's so easy to hear it as describing grief's tendency to stick around in the peripherals, even in our most joyful moments.
#6
Cosmic Putrefaction
Emerald Fires Atop the Farewell Mountains
Lysergic death metal -- in space! Honestly, the band name pretty much has it covered. Brutal and gross, with cool, angular solos and reverb-y death growl, plus a bunch of dissonant clean guitars and even some synth to flesh out the cosmic atmospheres. If this record hadn't come out this year, maybe I would've liked the new Blood Incantation more, because I wouldn't have had such a perfect counterpoint locked and loaded. Whoops!
#5
Grandaddy
Blu Wav
Grandaddy goes country -- in space! Nothing but slow-to-midtempo sadboi ballads, with a glimmering sheen of pedal steel and bright, gauzy synths. The vibe is there, but what really matters is that these are truly phenomenal, interesting songs with unorthodox subjects, like doomed inter-office romance and torturing an ex-lover with remote jukebox selections. Easily the most I have enjoyed a Grandaddy record since The Sophtware Slump.
#4
Lætitia Sadier
Rooting for Love
I have a friend who lives in another city and, bless him, listens to a lot of what I consider to be pretty boring music. It's not terrible, just not my thing: faceless neo-garage rock and polite, vibe-y, Spotify-approved R&B/pop. And earlier this year, he sent me a link to Billie Eilish's then-new album, which I'd already heard, and sure, it's fine. If you like it, I'm not trying to yuck your yum. But for me, it felt emblematic of many of the things that turn me off about pop music circa 2024 -- it's glum, musically bland, and you have to actually care about the artist's personal story to engage with it. And I do not care about Billie Eilish's personal story. She is rich beyond my wildest dreams, her life looks nothing like mine, and I couldn't give less of a shit about whether or not fame is hard for her, or she just figured out that she likes to eat pussy. (This is true of all pop stars btw, Billie Eilish just happens to be the one I'm talking about right now. I still like "Bad Guy".)
So I essentially say all that to my friend, because I know he can take it because he's secure in his own tastes -- an admirable trait -- and he's like, "Fine, dickhead, what are you listening to that's so great?" And what's the first album that pops into my head? Rooting for Love by Lætitia Sadier, which is now officially my favorite of Sadier's solo records. Like everything she does, it's bittersweet and subtle, with an undercurrent of unease. It pulls from jazz, fusion, chanson, post-rock, trip-hop, and bachelor pad music -- difficult, knotty music that is somehow all very easy on the ears. And it has one of my all-time favorite album closers.
What did my friend think? He said, "damn, this is really good," then we never talked about it again. I'm guessing he listened for about 30 seconds then put something else on. Probably thought, "huh, not terrible, just not my thing." He still sends me links to "grown folks music" pretty regularly, despite my telling him that all I listen to is "morose bullshit for cranky nerds", and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Previously:
#3
meth.
Shame
Unrelentingly ugly noise-rock-sludge-metal. Very reminiscent of early Swans, but with high and low-register growls, blast beats, and the kind of crushing heaviness that can only come from the realms of extreme metal. I was still in the depths of acute mourning for my friend the first time I heard this -- according to metadata, it was a week and one day after he passed -- and I played it so fucking loud I'm pretty sure I damaged my hearing. This record is a 43-minute-long panic attack, and it's been extremely cathartic to repeatedly almost level my house by blasting it while I do pushups.
#2
Itasca
Imitation of War
It's honestly going to be hard for me to talk about this record as a collection of music, as it has meant a great deal more to me than that since my friend Danny's passing. But I'll try. The watery, wandering guitars suggest to me a more meditative take on Meat Puppets circa Up on the Sun (one of my all-time favorite records, don't think it's ever come up on here), with just a touch of the icy shimmer of Joni Mitchell circa Night Ride Home. Vocally, Itasca (actual name: Kayla Cohen) is gentle, warm, and borderline conversational -- in places, the line between singing and speaking becomes blurred. Her lyrics are naturalistic, psychedelic, impressionistic, even fantastical, but grounded in very real emotion that often, to me, feels like grief; in fact, the last lines of the opening track, "Milk", go: "With my walking stick / I check the depths of my grief / Standing as water / I must dive down."
I had a whole story I was planning to tell about the first time I listened to it, but ultimately it's not that interesting: I was walking to meet my friends, still really going through the grieving process, it was sunny, I put this on, it touched my soul. I wish I could describe that feeling better, but words fail me. Itasca, play me out:
"Misguided wish for fire’s song
Chaos in the veil that we’re walking upon
My prayer is tired but my rosary is long
That’s the effigy I’ll hold 'til the shadow’s gone."
#1
Ingurgitating Oblivion
Ontology of Nought
Jazz and technical death metal have a lot in common. Both require considerable chops; favor angular, dissonant themes; and thrive in a near-constant state of barely controlled chaos. On paper, it's as intuitive a mix as black metal and shoegaze. However, unlike shoegaze, which is about 95% buying the right pedals and tweaking the vocal reverb, jazz requires a ton of training and practice to get right. And there is one key core difference: jazz is inherently loose in both composition and execution, and technical death metal is, conversely, extremely rigid in both areas.
Ingurgitating Oblivion is not the first band to merge the two (shout out Cephalic Carnage, who kinda sucked at it but bless them for trying, and who are somehow now coming up in my year-end content for the second time -- see #5) but they are by far the most successful. Ontology of Nought is an absolute mammoth of a record. It consists of five massive, amorphous pieces of experimental technical death metal played with the loose, explorative feel of avant-garde jazz, rich with non-metal flourishes -- vibraphone, sample manipulation, choral vocals, singing bowls -- and free-floating in pitch-black atmosphere. I've never heard anything like it.
At full-tilt, it's utterly disorienting. There's no obvious time signature or structure, no light or point on the horizon on which to affix your gaze; you're alone, treading water in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night, with no sense of space or time, getting pummeled by waves that you can't see or brace yourself for. And these moments are not brief -- the shortest song is just over 10 minutes long, and two songs top 18 minutes. However, the listener is offered respite in the form of extended denouements at the end of every track, wherein dark ambient and neoclassical elements are pushed to the forefront. I'm particularly fond of the end of "The Blossoms of Your Tomorrow Shall Unfold in My Heart", in which a choir of demonic angels repeatedly insists: "It does not have an essence / It will cease and be no more" as the music fades, until it's just a single speaking voice, repeating "no more" against a minimal, pulsing drone.
Just imagine that happening at the end of this list. That way, I don't have to come up with a proper ending.
