I have twice so far over the last month on internet fora incorrectly estimated my music purchases for the past year. Even if I hadn’t already been looking for content to post here, it was time to sit down and figure it right, just to satiate my own obsesssive and data-driven curiosity.
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So I’ve consulted my Excel sheets and my history at Amazon and at Discogs and at Bandcamp, and I’m now as the hour passes 3 AM pretty sure I can say this is definitive.
I hope to come back to at least some of the stuff from 2024 later, and take a deeper look, but for now here’s a simple list of the new music I bought this year and a list below it plus quick notes on stuff from the past that I purchased in the here and now.
Amyl & the Sniffers - Cartoon Darkness 2024
Beck Bogert Appice - Live 1973 & 1974 2024 box
Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere 2024
Can - Live in Paris 2024
Duster - In Dreams 2024
High on Fire - Cometh the Storm 2024
Nile - The Underworld Awaits Us All 2024
Opeth - The Last Will and Testament 2024
Oranssi Pazuzu - Muuntautuja 2024
Thou - Umbilical 2024
A guy messaged me this year on my Tumblr--where I'm every fifteen minutes posting through wondrous customized php scripts the last song scrobbled at Last.fm through my foobar--and he'd seen where I'd played something by Bailterspace, the “atmospheric noise” band who are to my mind the greatest group the Southern Hemisphere ever fostered.
He was putting together a manuscript on The Gordons, the skronky progenitor band to BS, and did I want to take a look and give him my thoughts? I was honored, of course, and I did what I could for him--which wasn't much. But in jawing with him, I said something typical of me like 'yeah, I've got all the Bailterspace stuff,' or perhaps something even more arrogant than that. And then in reply, he mentioned the band's Bandcamp, where they'd unbeknownst to me over the last several years posted a whole bunch of stuff, including this album. So I couldn't retroactively not be a liar, but I did order several things post-haste.
Used to have this on vinyl, before I get rid of my vinyl. Yeah I'd had it digitally, but when this year I bought the new live box set (and I hope to get to it in more detail later) I topped it off with a CD of their debut, just to you know, have a physical copy.
If you didn’t know Jeff Beck ever covered Stevie Wonder, or was in fact for a while there Stevie Wonder Superfan # 1, well, here’s where you begin to find out.
Purchased this a few months before Absolute Elsewhere, and without an idea that Absolute Elsewhere was even imminent. I just bought it 'cause I thought a death metal band doing an album's worth of 1970’s T-Dream stuff sounded interesting.
This is the first album Can made after Damo Suzuki left, bought around the time I got the Live in Paris thing, which I will definitely get to. They pick up the pace from Future Days, not that I have an issue with Future Days.
"Chain Reaction," especially, chugs along quite nicely.
Duster side-project. Bandname stands for "Everything is all Fucked up and WhatNot," and if you think that's funny, or profound, you should get the album. If not, maybe not.
I've got everything by these progressive black metal titans since 2001's Monumension, and I try to stay current. But I heard about 2023's Heimdal a little late. It's good, as all their records are, and maybe takes a step in the direction of greatness in addition.
I liked Cometh the Storm OK, but six months later, I finally went back and picked up their fourth album, and THIS is the good stuff. Hangs with Blessed Black Wings IMHO, which is no small praise.
The fourth world trumpeter who formed his unique style after studying with Stockhausen and Hindustani raga masters. Some people followed Christgau and considered him "ambient esoteric kitsch," but fuck those guys: Hassell was a genius. Vernal Equinox was his first album, and I'd had quite a few albums digitally, but not this one, so I pulled the trigger. It's not one of the masterworks that he'd later create when he began to use the "Fourth World" nomenclature, but he's working his way to it, you can tell.
A tribute album to Helmet's second, and who doesn't love Helmet’s second? OR a good tribute album? I found Redux records on Bandcamp and ordered the CD ‘cause I could. Evidently that's Redux Records' whole thing, tribute albums; kinda like the CVLT Nation thing, except they actually make physical media, I suppose. I saw they came out with their take on Aqualung this year.
Trigger Cut + 2 and Watery, Domestic are so good, it made me wonder whether some of Pavement’s other lesser known EP's might not be great as well. Not bad thinking, but this and Pacific Trim taught me no, not really.
A cohort on Substack recommended this to me. What do I know from grindcore except Napalm Death? So I tried it, but I had a sense of tremendous unease listening to this. That may wear away and I'll give it a chance to, but for right now I have to say I did not enjoy.
Just a great record I'd never before heard.
Received this on January 5, and it's been 12 months, so I can safely say this has made no impression on me at all. I *loved* …Like Clockwork, but let's be honest: everything since for them has been junk.
A late 2023 hit for me was this progressive death metal band's The Enduring Spirit. So went back and picked this CD up in the first quarter of 2024. I think it's aces, and intersects quite well if you were, let's say, just to be completely hypothetical, a fan of Blood Incantation.
Another Duster side project, a bit more lo-fi if that's possible.
Couch potato space rock for the win.
Wanted to buy this at the show when I saw them in the summer of 2023. But they were out of it, there at the merch table, so I bought a (quite good!) live album instead.
Went back and got the thing off Amazon after a buddy kept bugging me to, but I was a little disappointed to find that all songs but one were re-recordings of earlier classics. That's not a strategy for a forward-thinking band, is it?
I bought this precisely because it is known as a difficult record. It hasn't made an impression as of yet, but, you know, still could happen. Just to say something ridiculous, I didn’t like White Light/White Heat immediately, either . . . .
No apologies given, so don’t ask, and I have been, am, and will be until I die, a fan of orchestral prog. I've been a huge and unabashed Yes fan since my teens. I had every LP up to Drama before Drama was released, then kept up until I realized Big Generator was a piece of shit. Those LPs disappeared when I ditched my vinyl and I replaced them with downloads off the fileshares.
In '23, I sort of concentrated on box sets, and picking up the 2013 Rhino studio albums box set got things back to where they should be, which is that I own physical copies of all the classic Yes studio records, each and every Khatru and Nous Sommes Du Soleil and Würm, all the UFOs and all the whales, the whole nine yards. Plus, that one piece of shit.
But the Rhino set didn't include their two great live records, so I corrected that in 2024. Yesshows isn't up in the pantheon of greatest live records, but what it may be is one of the greatest SECOND live records ever. Even if you're not down with that, give them credit for not repeating even one song from Yessongs.
I had to search on Discogs for a copy that had a booklet with the legendary Roger Dean artwork, but I still mean to buy this on vinyl. Long before I liquidated my hot wax, I took my copy of Yessongs to the county fair so I could have an airbrush artist make me a T-shirt of the starship painting on the back cover. The album was returned to me with a rip through one of the gatefolds. Otherwise I probably would have kept it aside when I got rid. Now in my dotardy, I am thinking that I should pick up a good-looking vinyl copy to display on my walls, like I display that Greenslade Pentateuch of the Comogony thing.
This was me, picking up a box set I hadn't gotten to in '23. One of my seminal albums, bought at K-Mart when I was 15 or something, was Tres Hombres. And I knew "Tush" and "Heard it on the X" and parts of Tejas and Deguello and most of Eliminator plus I had the memory of MTV videos from Afterburner. They had the freakin’ space shuttle, right? But now I can connect the dots with a solid line, and with versions that restore the original mixes from the horrible bastardizations that tried to make everything sound like Eliminator.
My discovery of this is discussed above.
Recorded on September 1, 2022 at
The Mercury Lounge
217 East Houston Street
New York, NY
Had never heard of it, but the venue sounds like it’s probably next door to the Knitting Factory, which sounds about right for Bailterspace.
Same cache. Three songs. Released December 1, 2023, so just missed consideration with the new stuff. “Luna (Heavy Sample)” is one of the biggest rackets they have ever made.
Music played during the magnificent point and click videogame from Amanita Designs. “Electroacoustic ambient,” I’ve seen this music called, but you need to work in “mechanical” in there somewhere, as that’s what the game’s world is, switches and levers, and toggles, and dials that you need to engage. And the music captures that. So, Electromechanical acousto-ambient? Electroambient acoustimechanical?
Wonky genre nomenclature aside, this is wonderful stuff by an electronic artist who calls himself Floex and plays the clarinet too. Long ago, I'd taken Amanita's offer to download a free "Bonus EP" of material, and I pushed that onto my portable mp3 player for commute listening a couple months ago, and reminded how good it was, I was like, why don't I have the actual soundtrack? Well, the reason had been 'cause it wasn't on CD. But if you order the vinyl, they'll give you a download card AND three HQ ingame screencap prints suitable for framing. And if you didn’t grab the fact that I love the display thing while you read my note on Yessongs, let me say it here: I wanna put that shit on my walls. So I did what was called for from there.
File under: Music purchases, sure enough
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