2014: The year (some of the people who made some of) the music died :(

Another year gone, lots more people with it, including...

Ronny Jordan

If you were around during the 90s 'Acid Jazz' renaissance (and didn't actively avoid hearing it) then you probably heard some of Ronny Jordan's understatedly cool, George Benson-meets-Grant Green-ish guitar playing. It was good.

Remembered by me for: the great, very Grant Green-esque 'Blues Grinder' from his 1992 debut The Antidote

Bob Casale

As a member of Devo, Bob Casale was secondary to the organism he was part of; but it wouldn't have been the same without his contribution

Remembered by me for: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are DEVO! I love that album


Velma Smith

To this day, female guitar players tend to be overlooked, especially if their gender isn't marketed as part of their appeal. It's all the more impressive then, that Velma Smith was a session player in the very masculine world (singers apart) of the Nashville music scene back in the 50s.


Remembered by me for: I mostly avoid country music, so don't know much of her work, but she played on Skeeter Davis' 'The End of the World', by far the best version of a pretty iconic song.




Frankie Knuckles

I probably disliked far more Frankie Knuckles stuff than I liked, but a cool guy and important figure nonetheless.

Remembered by me for: 'It's a Cold World' Dated enough to be nostalgic about; I don't hate it.


Scott Asheton

As the drummer in The Stooges Scott Asheton will forever have a place in rock history. If you think the band was as primitive as its reputation suggests listen to their debut again; despite the toughness of the sound, Scott Asheton was a proper percussionist.

Remembered by me for: everything the original Stooges lineup recorded but let's say 'No Fun', where the drums and handclaps stop the song from being just a brutal anthem and make it, ironically, fun.


Billy Mundi

If Frank Zappa let you in his band you were probably pretty good; Billy Mundi played the drums on some of the Mothers of Invention's most inventive albums; he was pretty good.

 
Remembered by me for: We're Only In It For The Money. The band's insane adaptability is at its most eclectic on this (still quite hippyish) masterpiece satirising the flower power era. 



Maria Kolokouri

As Tristessa, Maria Kolokouri had been active in the Greek metal scene since the mid 90s, and was pretty much the creative force behind successful black metal band Astarte

Remembered by me for: Astarte's Doomed Dark Years. Classic Greek black metal, they did more good stuff after this, but never as good.



Bobby Womack

Bobby Womack worked with everybody, and has had lots of proper obituaries; he deserved them.

Remembered by me for: Across 110th Street. An obvious one but it is a classic



Horace Silver

A lot of his stuff is a bit swingy/easy for my taste, but Horace Silver was a jazz great, and his body of work is ridiculously big and varied.

Remembered by me for: It's Got To Be Funky more modern and Dave Brubeck-ish than a lot of his earlier work


Tommy Ramone

The last original Ramone gone; SAD.

Remembered by me for: Playing drums on the first three (possibly best three) Ramones albums


Johnny Winter

 

I am not a huge fan of Johnny Winter's music, but he was a great guitar player as well as a pivotal figure in the US rock scene of the 70s and an albino too!

Remembered by me for: 'Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo; Classic 'Dazed and Confused' soundtrack type music.



Dick Wagner

Great guitar player, worked with tons of people including Alice Cooper a lot but best known to me for his stuff with Lou Reed

Remembered by me for: Lou Reed Live. Often overlooked in favour of the live Rock and Roll Animal album, this is GREAT and has the best version of 'Sad Song'  (from Berlin) on it. Dick Wagner is superb throughout



Jean Redpath

Some kinds of folk music will never be cool; Jean Redpath mainly sang that kind of folk music, but her voice was amazingly pure and expressive, best heard unaccompanied.

Remembered by me for: a haunting version of  'Skippin' Barfit Through The Heather' from 1962. Far more similar to the kind of Scandinavian folk music I like than the usual Scottish folk music which I don't like: http://youtu.be/KZqNGfni8TA



Jack Bruce

On the whole, Jack Bruce's music was not for me; but Cream made some great stuff, didn't they?

 
Remembered by me for: actually, playing on 'Strange Brew', by far my favourite Cream song, but he didn't write that, so let's say 'Sunshine of Your Love', which is definitely a classic anyway.


Ian McLagan

Ubiquitous keyboard player among bands/performers of his generation, including the Small Faces, Faces, Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones, plus later people like Billy Bragg etc etc He was on tons of good records.

Remembered by me for: for me you can't beat the first, 1966 Small Faces album, before they became silly music hall hippy nonsense.

RIP

Black Christmas - a little light holiday reading.

Black metal has always been about more than music. Even genre progenitors Venom - despite the crudities of their music and their fundamentally unserious qualities - managed with their first few albums, to create something that not only outraged conservative sensibilities (in the metal scene as well as outside of it), but was presented in a way that looked ideologically significant, whether it really was or not:

Because of its ideological and aesthetic baggage, a lot has been written about black metal over the years (including quite a lot by me; here -

http://punbasedname.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-snow-covered-ashes-of-defeat-metal.html

here -

http://punbasedname.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/black-metal-blues-power-of-formula.html

here -

http://punbasedname.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/live-dead-mayhem-1990.html

and here -

http://punbasedname.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/bad-bad-and-ugly-nsbm.html

as well as 200-ish articles and endless reviews published elsewhere).

But there's something special about a book and now that we are a quarter century into its history, black metal has developed its own bibliography. There are lots of books out there that I have yet to read (including some very interesting-looking ones), but this is an overview of the ones I do have.


Two books are really at the heart of black metal literature, Peter Beste's True Norwegian Black Metal and Michael Moynihan and  Didrik Søderlind's Lords of Chaos; but more about those when we get there.

As a basic starting point, the Rockdetector A-Z of Black Metal by Garry Sharpe-Young isn't great really, but as a general reference is "not bad".

As it sounds, it's basically an encyclopaedia-style book with brief entries on hundreds of bands. Necessarily, it's far from comprehensive, but is fairly good as far as it goes and has a definition of black metal loose enough to include a meat-and-potatoes NWOBHM band like Witchfynde and, even more dubiously, Lamb of God(!) alongside the more predictable Gorgoroths etc. Sparsely written (and even more sparsely illustrated) its strength is in the sheer quantity of bands include.. My edition is severely compromised by being published in 2001, but hopefully updated versions are available.

A far better introduction/overview (and a very 'good read') is Dayal Patterson's Black Metal; Evolution of the Cult, which, as the title suggests follows black metal from the earliest Venom/Bathory/Hellhammer period to the present day. The great strengths of the book are that a) Patterson knows what he's talking about b) he is not hugely preoccupied by the (admittedly interesting) tabloid fodder of burning churches and murder and c) he covers black metal as a worldwide and not just European or Scandinavian phenomenon and d) the book rests on a TON of detailed and revealing interviews. It's extremely detailed but not (and isn't meant to be) exhaustive, so don't count on your favourite band being covered in detail.

For a window into a far more specific scene, Peter Beste - True Norwegian Black Metal (Vice, 2008) is iconic in itself. This large scale hardback book collects photographer Beste's images of the Norwegian black metal scene of the 90s and while it covers the genre's biggest names, it is especially strong on the second tier of bands (Gorgoroth, Enslaved, Carpathian Forest etc), their environment and the whole BM milieu. Just a work of art.  

Performing a similar function but with a lot more reading is Metalion (Jon Kristiansen)'s monolithic hardback The Slayer Mag Diaries, which reproduces the classic years of the grubby photocopied extreme metal zine Slayer, with added context, memoirs and lots of great pictures. As funny as it is enlightening, this captures the carefree (and often smart arsed) spirit of underground fanzines in a more permanent format. Although the focus isn't entirely on black metal, Metalion was part of the scene and wrote about it like few others have. And he wrote a LOT.

Again, not 100% concerned with black metal, Michael Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind's Lords of Chaos has arguably become an influence on the scene itself, for better or worse.
The book has forever crystallised the (admittedly real) connection between black metal and violence, arson, murder and Nazism in the public mind.  Ostensibly following the path of Satanism through popular(ish) music, a lot of the focus is again on the Scandinavian scene but with special attention paid to wherever there is drama, crime, murder, controversy etc (in some cases the music involved is non-BM like the Electric Hellfire Club). The key to the book's popularity is its readability and - despite the apparent tabloid qualities - its intelligence and depth of research. Lords of Chaos has been through several updated and revised editions, but as far as I know has yet to cover things like the bizarre double murder by Smutak of Morak Production in Belarus, so there is still scope for further expansion.

Attempting (successfully) to break away from genre clichés is the excellent anthology Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness, definitely not the place to start for the black metal fan, but it's a great compendium of information for the specialist wanting to know more. This book is a collection of essays by some of the best extreme metal writers, focussed on many aspects of black metal, covering various scenes, the aesthetics of black metal, labels, all kinds of esoteric information. A great chapter covers the central-yet-ephemeral figure Christophe Szpajdel, responsible for many of the genre's most iconic logos.


More when I've read more!

Inevitably; the albums (or just releases) of the year 2014

I don't know how many 'albums of the year' I have so I am just going to write about them until I can't be bothered listing any more.

MY ALBUM OF THE YEAR

Collectress - Mondegreen (Peeler Records)

Experimental string quartet Collectress make music that has many moods but is always interesting. On Mondegreen, the sound ranges from the bustling, Steve Reich-ish 'Spell' to the haunting, tense 'Harmonium' to the wistful, minimalistic and strangely nostalgic-sounding 'Owl'. It's a beautiful album, each song creating its own pervasive mood but somehow becoming an entirely coherent whole; and it sounds absolutely nothing like anything else I heard this year.

My other albums of the year, in no order are;

Sonny Simmons & Moksha Samnyasin - Nomadic (Svart Records)

There's a very Miles Davis-y feel to this album, despite the psychedelic and drone elements. The blend of Simmons' sax with Moksha Samnyasin (Michel Kristoff'; sitar, Thomas Bellier; bass, Sébastien Bismuth (drums, electronics) is what great free jazz is about; not aimless noodling, but intuitive, almost telepathic interplay and the exotic atmospheres and intense moods that result.

 
Absentia Lunae - Vorwarts (ATMF)

Absentia Lunae are often dismissed as just another angry semi-orthodox black metal band, but the intensity of their music is matched by the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic power of their vision in a way that is all too rare in the black metal (or any other) scene.

Mirel Wagner - When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day (Sub Pop)

Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner imbues her low-key, minimalistic music with a palpable sense of darkness and drama, and her first album for Sub-pop records is every but as good as her stunning debut.

Winterfylleth - The Divination of Antiquity (Candlelight)

Winterfylleth's fourth album takes their prescient vision of Anglo-Saxon England to a broader musical canvas; in essence more of the same as always, but bigger, more varied, and even better.

Heikki Hautala - Pyövelin Vaatteet  (Ektro records)

 

Without understanding a word of Finnish, this sparse acoustic album is an intense, haunting and bitter sounding masterpiece.

John Baizley, Nate Hall & Mike Scheidt - Songs of Townes Van Zandt Vol II (My Proud Mountain)

Powerful versions of Townes Van Zandt's earthy folk/blues songs, all the better for the starkness of the recordings.


Empyrium - The Turn of the Tides (Prophecy productions)

The polar opposite of the Townes Van Zandt album, except in mood, this is a rich, lush epic of melancholy atmospheres for which the word 'sonorous' was invented. Absolutely beautiful and almost impossible to categorise.

Le Butcherettes - Cry is for the Flies (Ipecac Recordings)

As reference points like The Birthday Party, PJ Harvey, Babes in Toyland and The Stooges suggest, intensity is the key aspect of this ferociously memorable album.

Scott Walker & Sunn O))) - Soused (4AD)

Somehow just slightly less good than either Scott Walker or Sunn O)))'s usual records, this remains an interesting, brave, surprisingly listenable - if somewhat indigestible - meeting of giants.

Vanhelga - Längtan (Art of Propaganda)

The almost-traditional-metal style sleeve painting on the cover of this album couldn't be much more misleading; anyone expecting a barrage of aggressive riffs will be severely disappointed by this melodic, wistful, yet chaotic album. The music is fragile and mostly light in tone, with acoustic guitars, loose percussion and emotive guitar solos underpinning the general pained, peculiarness of the self-destructive art on display.

Nebelung - Palingenesis (Temple of Torturous records)

 

This instrumental 'dark folk' album is probably one of my most listened-to albums of the year; beautifully atmospheric music that seems imbued with the essence of autumn

 

 

YOB - Clearing the Path to Ascend (Neurot Recordings)

This immense album brings together the monolithic heaviness of earlier YOB releases with the subtlety of Mike Scheidt's horribly underrated acoustic solo album Stay Awake - and does it brilliantly.

Abigor - Leytmotiv Luzifer (Avantgarde Music)

Orthodox, old fashioned Satanic black metal needn't be unambitious; this was an intense, operatic and unnerving gesamtkunstwerk.

Tara Jane O'Neil - Where Shine New Lights (Kranky records)

A lovely, dreamlike but not insubstantial album - fragile and comforting and NICE. The opposite of dynamic (and indeed of Abigor).

and.... nearly made it:
 
Myrkur - great EP, but the hates-attention-but-ponces-about-in-videos and general 'leave me alone but interview me' attention-seeking nonsense around the act leaves a bad taste.
 
Pixies - Indie Cindy - not bad, wanted to love it, but it doesn't live up to Frank Black's solo career, let alone anything the Pixies ever made before

Mayhem - Esoteric Warfare - good - very good even, but whereas Ordo ad Chao demanded repeated listens to even get used to, Esoteric Warfare becomes a bit boring after a while
 
Venusian Death Cell - Abandonned Race and Honey Girl: David Vora is as prolific as always and his home-made, almost free-jazz approach to songwriting is hit and miss but compelling either way
 
Taatsi - Amidst the Trees  -atmospheric black metal done properly

1349 - Massive Cauldron of Chaos (Indie Recordings) - in a different mood this would have made the list

Sólstafir – Ótta (Seasons Of Mist) - a really good album but I just slightly prefer Svartir Sandar

Primordial – Where Greater Men Have Fallen (Metal Blade) - a great album that I need to give a few more listens.

Aphex Twin - Syro - really liked it, then forgot about it, making me doubt its value