#gravesend

Gel—Only Constant (Convulse Records)

What’s better than those first 50 seconds of “Honed Blade”? To my ears, this year, nothing.

BIG|BRAVE—nature morte (Thrill Jockey)

Noisy, beautiful and idiosyncratic songs of love, desperation and death. The band finds new ways to create shapes with sound, and tunes out of those shapes.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy—Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You (Drag City)

Simultaneously spare and lush, poetical and direct, wooden and fleshed. It’s the best record he’s made in some years.

Gravesend—Gowanus Death Stomp (20 Buck Spin)

Like a dip in the Gowanus Canal, this record is cold, corrosive and really, really bad for you. Not all of Brooklyn is for hipsters.

Home Front—Games of Power (La Vida Es un Mus)

Synth-rich postpunk meets the macho multi-voiced choruses of Oi! and the unthinkable happens: the songs are really, really good.

Lucifixion—Trisect Joys of Pierced Hearts (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Icy, satanic black metal that’ll strip you down to the bones, and it’ll grin while doing so. Weirdly, you may grin, too.

Retirement—Buyer’s Remorse (Iron Lung Records)

Overly adventurous consumers might have some buyer’s remorse if this record slips impulsively into their carts on a Bandcamp Friday, but smart punks sure won’t. Fast, nasty, hammering, anti-capitalist hardcore.

Sleaford Mods—UK Grim (Rough Trade)

More songs slagging Idles, Brexit, Tories and Labour, but as ever, the Mods make it all sound fresh. Angry, exhausted and jaded, but still fresh. Neat trick. Good record.

Spectral Lore—11 Days (I, Voidhanger)

Originally released as a straight-to-digital charity fundraiser, 11 Days has been packaged as a CD by I, Voidhanger and put back into circulation. Unusually political for Spectral Lore, the record sonically represents the journey thousands of migrants have taken across the Mediterranean, only to face the current racism and ethno-nationalisms proliferating through Europe. It’s harrowing stuff.

Spirit Possession—…Of the Sign (Profound Lore)

Utterly nutty, memorably antic, acid-drenched black metal. Like a bad trip, but you’ll be sort of disappointed when it ends.

Special shout-out to Mitski for “My Love Mine All Mine,” a great song that is, as a friend pointed out to me, both pop and the real thing—in spite of which the broader culture has embraced it. And also this:

They’re both gone now, but we still have their songs, and memories of them like this one. O’Connor’s weird, inbent charisma is hugely effective here, and she is so, so lovely. But it’s MacGowan’s song, and while he wrote it a bit earlier (when he and Cait O’Riordan were both still in the Pogues; she sings on the excellent version of the tune that made it onto Sid and Nancy’s soundtrack), it’s bittersweet that the last great song he ever recorded and released was a love song. A song in which the power of love is registered by the extent to which one is “haunted” by its “ghost,” and hence also by its death—that’s MacGowan to the core, and we’ll never get another songwriter like him.

Down with fascism, smash all nationalisms, turn the music up.