#raspberry bulbs

SUMAC — May You Be Held (Thrill Jockey) 

May You Be Held by SUMAC

A prayer. The record’s integration of improvisation and rigorously heavy song forms has an unusual power, both meditative and propulsive. The players are uncannily in tune with one another’s talents and vibes. They’re all talented musicians—don’t sleep on Brian Cook’s bass playing on this record. The band makes and stays in a tight pocket. You listen to their performances, and to this record from end to end, and you feel like you’ve come through something. Exhausted, thrilled and transformed.

 Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou — May Our Chambers Be Full (Sacred Bones)  

May Our Chambers Be Full by Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou

A collaborative record that issues in gloriously intense and beautifully excoriating music. Rundle’s voice in full song with Bryan Funck’s is something to hear, and the players’ musical sensibilities prove complementary in any number of interesting, aesthetically effective ways. It’s been kind of fun watching the metal blogs and press attempt to label the music: “atmospheric sludge”? “Post sludge?” What’s next? Melo-sludge? In this case, the inevitable label-wrangling seems especially irrelevant. The songs and the sound demand your attention. They’re really good. The record never neglects the heaviness of life’s gloomy difficulties, but the songs still find ways to soar.

 Decoherence — Unitary (Sentient Ruin Laboratories) 

Unitarity by Decoherence

There were a number of really good black metal records released this year (see Botanist’s and Shaidar Logoth’s recent sides for some evidence of the music’s underappreciated diversity). Unitary is clearly a black metal record, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything else. It hisses, hums and crackles with industrial atmosphere, and sometimes there’s a lot of dissonance to listen through, in order to discover the band’s powerful gifts for riffs and propulsive rhythm. And while the tones and textures are transfixing, the songs are really strong as songs. Twisting, extruding, hammering: is this the black metal of physics?

 Fuck the Facts — Pleine Noirceur (Noise Salvation)

Pleine Noirceur by Fuck The Facts

Okay, okay — so I’m cheating a bit. This record was released way late in 2020, so technically I have played some other records a bit more often. But this one is too good not to get a shout here. Fuck the Facts is classed as a grindcore band, and they can rage and sprint along with the best of them. But their music is a lot more than speed and fury. Melodic invention and emotional atmosphere are crucial components, maybe on this record especially. I’ve only played it about a hundred or so times so far. I’ll let you know.

 Mamaleek — Come & See (The Flenser) 

Come and See by Mamaleek

This record was released in late winter, but its fury and themes made it a strangely prescient soundtrack for the summer months of protest. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Many more whose names we don’t know. The grinding misery of life in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects provides the socio-cultural focus of Come & See, and the record’s righteous indignation is in tune with the sounds of voices raised, and cops buckling on riot gear. Mamaleek is frequently tagged as a black metal band, but their questing sensibility always exceeds the genre. There’s some noise rock, some punk and even some blues in the music’s volatile mix. It’s deeply angry.

 Primitive Man — Immersion (Relapse Records) 

Immersion by Primitive Man

Less massive and noisy than their previous LP Caustic (2017), Primitive Man’s Immersion is a focused gut punch—or more properly, a deliberate battery of them, delivered with the patience and precision of a trained fighter. Primitive Man’s sludgy doom (doomy sludge?) lends fresh credence to terms too often trotted out in writing about this sort of music: “crushing,” “punishing,” “pulverizing.” Applied to this record, those words regain their relevance. And Ethan McCarthy’s vocals may be the heaviest sound in contemporary metal. Yikes.

 Raspberry Bulbs — Before the Age of Mirrors (Relapse Records) 

Before The Age Of Mirrors by Raspberry Bulbs

The phrase “blackened punk” really bugs me: blackened as opposed to what? Taupe? Raspberry Bulbs give the phrase some meaningful bite with this terrific record—the latest in a string of them from the band, which started as a solo project for Marco del Rio. He may be more familiar to some Dusted readers as “He Who Crushes Teeth,” longtime member of Bone Awl. For Raspberry Bulbs, he moves to guitar, and slashes and tears at these songs, now with a consistent full band behind him. The songs have a punky tunefulness, even as they burn with black metal’s cold fire.

 Special Interest — The Passion of (Thrilling Living)

The Passion Of by Special Interest

 I got to this one way too late. Special Interest’s first record Spiraling (2018) seemed to me overly enamored of its own casual nihilism, and all the hype accompanying the release of The Passion of put me off. Then I listened to the record (always a productive practice for the music critic…). Holy shit, it’s good. There’s still a lot of creepy sexual violence and druggy dissipation. But the songs’ socio-economic critique is incisive and never preachy, and it contextualizes the rest of the grimness and gruesomeness with sharp and a coherent politics. An excellent punk record.

 The Stooges — Live at Goose Lake, August 8th, 1970 (Third Man Records)

For listeners deeply engaged with the Stooges — a game-changing band and a total mess — it’s hard to overstate the importance of this record. It’s a recording of a Stooges live set that actually sounds great; and because the recording is so clear, you can hear Dave Alexander’s bass, a crucial piece of sonic evidence that counters the long-established story of the band’s set at Goose Lake and Alexander’s subsequent firing from the Stooges. History is revised, right there in your ears. Mostly, though, it’s a good live set by the band. Ron Asheton’s scorching guitar and, eventually, Steve Mackay’s sax stylings fire up the pyrotechnic intensity. Punk? Free jazz? Why choose?

 Sun City Girls — Live at Sky Church, September 3, 2004 (2182 Recording Company)

The Girls were always way, way out ahead. Post-everything, pranksomely funny and deadly serious, their wit existed in tremulous balance with their inexhaustible curiosity about music’s arcane power and their equally inexhaustible rage. Their 2004 set at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival focused largely on the rage. 2182 Recording Company’s release includes a DVD of the performance, and it’s essential. The Bishop brothers and Charles Gaucher, Jr., fill the stage with politically charged images and props: a Saddam Hussein mask, a portrait of Osama Bin Laden, copies of Mein Kampf and Brother Number One. They pour and hurl various forms of invective on and at the festival audience, and the band plays with passionate ugliness, seizing the opportunity to draw connections between art, entertainment and ideology. A vital document of a uniquely American event.  

Thanks for the tunes, y’all, and smell you later, 2020.