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Year End Blah 2009. Pt2

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 December 21 2009 at 08:11:55 PM




“Now Bo-ding.” Travelling the Chinese highway to the airport in Shanghai and then aboard the blood-clot inducing flight across the North Pole, I finally landed at JFK nearly a full 24 hours since stepping outside my apartment. The first time back in America in three years. It felt good to hear Spanish again, see blue skies from morning till night, taste real liquor and ogle waitresses with huge racks serving equally matched young patrons in Slayer t-shirts. (Which would you notice first?)

Crowding my parent’s house were boxes upon boxes of mailorder stuff, more than enough to plough through for the month. Where, late at night, after the talking, the drinking, the eating - hot and sweet sausages, Sabrettes, Lasagna and gravy, meatloaf and broccoli rabe - had finally ceased, sitting alone with a set of LPs still felt like home.

The Best:

The Chasm, Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm

The Rest:

Asphyx , Death…The Brutal Way
Bobby BeauSoleil with: The Freedom Orchestra & The Magick Powerhouse of Oz, The Lucifer Rising Suite
Excoriate, On Pestilent Winds
Funebrarum, The Sleep of Morbid Dreams
Iron Man, I Have Returned
Martyrdöd, Sekt
Slough Feg, Ape Uprising
Superchrist, Defenders of the Filth
Villains, Lifecode of Decadence

Not all of it is missed. And what I haven’t heard I’m happy to let pass by. With an ever growing disparity between the quantity and quality of new music, there were as many older releases, some of which I heard for the first time, which brought as much comfort and astonishment this year. Bands like Finland’s Sarcofagus, Italy’s Dark Quarterer and a much-needed re-acquaintance with old standards from Ozzy, ACDC and Scorpions, made up the bulk of my listening habits.

Of all music actually released this year, AJNA’s massive 4LP boxset of BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL’S Lucifer Rising soundtrack still towers over all. The occasion marked and fully celebrated by repeat listening from midnight till sunrise, and into the following weekend as the douche and I stood inside Villain’s practice space with an old CD reissue playing on and on over the discourse. The same awestruck comments followed. He didn’t just write it, he practically fucking built most of it. When next we wandered through a Kenneth Anger exhibit the following afternoon, the coincidence was finally overshadowed by the awesome contrasts that gave birth to both film and soundtrack and the significance of creating art not for profit, or fame or even merely for fun, but because one MUST.

SLAYER doesn’t need to make music anymore. Not as Slayer. The formula repeated and formed into routine performances on World Painted Blood. An album whose lone, hopeful single cannot undo the embarrassment wrought by tracks like “Americon” and “Playing With Dolls”; where nothing said could ever be said better than in their formative years, whose style is today appropriated to higher degree in normally inferior groups like Necrophobic.

The same can be said for any number of Black metal groups still laboring under the delusion that they’re part of some tradition which wasn’t completely killed by 23 stab wounds. While some bands wear makeup, others, like VILLAINS, who finally won me over following lukewarm feelings over their first outing, write songs and bleed pure showmanship in a T-shirt. Still, others proved more reliable. Engram was an overhyped, but otherwise stable return for Finnish beast BEHERIT. KATHARSIS provided admirable pastiche of Darkthrone since they refuse and TEITANBLOOD’S heedless ascension marked uneasy divide between conceptual and careless, but I never would have bought it if not for the artwork.

Lesser known and more frequently played than each of them is Sweden’s MARTYRDÖD and their album Sekt, a Scandinavian version of Bolt Thrower with vocals more than slightly resembling Martin Van Drunen, whose work with ASPHYX, together with new albums by THE CHASM, EXCORIATE, PROCLAMATION and FUNEBRARUM, paint the year, in my mind, a Triumph of Death.

[Todd DePalma]

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