A.A. Williams - As the Moon Rests (post-metal)
Call this a ‘pitch black night’ and you’d be in the wrong with all 3 of those words. The colors here aren’t ‘pitch black’, they’re the dull and lonesome gray that typifies a fallen city on a Thursday at 6 PM on a rainy day; right at the time where nothing meaningful could happen, and the movements can’t be noticed. As for the ‘night’ aspect, that one’s closer to describing this, but it’s not ambiguous enough; the night deserves better than As the Moon Rests has to offer. This is a collection of pitiful tracks, barely hanging on the inside but being a towering unit on the outside, that aim for that feeling where the outside world doesn’t matter, and the weighing down of depression reaches that brutal lack of pulse, lack of drive and lack of aspirations. The music here is basically the same on all 11 songs – same type of instrumentation, similar tempos, same soft-loud dynamics, same control of space – that it feels like a blurry image, or different echos stacked on top of one another. But that’s part of the point.
A.A. Williams, thankfully, considering the material she’s writing, doesn’t perform her loaded, self-pitying lyrics with any kind of ambition towards the grand or the magnificent, or the deranged and bitter. In other words, her singing is never either beautiful or ugly. It’s all a matter of fact. She’s one to tragically, sometimes wrongfully, take things as they come. On the third song, she goes “All I knew was tainted by the things you said / That I will never change / And that’s enough for me today”. She means that. She accepts that outcome of abandonment from others as well as underestimating herself and her worth, as something natural and obvious. This was a bit obvious when her really good debut from 2 years ago was called Forever Blue, but now it’s inescapable.
What Forever Blue had that drew a fair amount of people in was taking the crescendo-cliché-ridden post-rock ways and having it support proper songs; instead of vague ideas, there were specific lyrical passages as well as melodies sung without the kind of pompousness that plagues the genre. As the Moon Rests leans further into her metal influences (which were always there; Forever Blue featured two different members of Cult of Luna) but you take these songs without the sonic attachments, and they’re basic verse-chorus pop structures. Williams doesn’t tiptoe around the fact that many of her melodies are immensely singable, albeit never anthemic – they never gain that kind of strength, and end up leaving each other and everyone else alone. The crescendos are effective, but ultimately a conclusion that happens through inertia, because this music doesn’t think it deserves even that.
Real dire existence, above anything else. She tries to take compassion for herself and acknowledge her failure (not her failures, but her own inherent being as a failure), and proceeds to shut off all encouragement from others, because she’ll never have use for it again – that’s the opening track (“Hollow Heart”). Her view of love is one where one comes out victorious and the other one is left behind, and even in the times that she admits she wins (“Golden”), her takeaway is “I’m alone, and there’s nothing you can do”, because she had it coming (“The Echo”). The moments where she tries to be “better than before” come at the expense of giving up other fights, with the way the song ends going, “And I’ll never know all that I need to stay whole” (“Pristine”). If she feels she’s falling into the cracks, others should leave her be “if I ever find myself in darkness and decay” (“Alone in the Deep”). Williams withdraws from everything and everyone at every turn.
The effect that rises from all of this has a couple of intriguing, and fulfilling, implications. First, obviously, there’s the sonic one. The music searches for beauty, and seek and ye shall find. But it’s beauty that’s awfully compromised by how little it thinks it should be there in the first place. The production takes the standard rock accompaniment as well as a humble string section in nearly every song. The fact that this doesn’t sound all that good (because there’s a lot of space for things to happen, but they’re not allowed to move) means that the pictures these songs are wide and total, forcing you to stare at the bigger picture all at once all the time – you can take your time with it, but eventually you have to. The piano touches matched with gothic guitars on “Evaporate”, the dry drumming of “Golden”, the acoustic touches of “Ruin” with rainy synths coming at the end to set the final piece of the puzzle, the actually-crushing groove of “Murmurs” that tenses up the performance. These are all incredible moments that you can’t outright ignore, because it’s all right there.
The other implication is a lot broader, and not exactly revolutionary, but worth highlighting: the fact that this album exists at all. Nothing new for people to be making sad music, or detailing defeat. But As the Moon Rests details those particularly acute moments where nothing can be realized, and it looks as though nothing proper can be done. It’s one thing to put out those thoughts in an unplanned rage fit, spontaneously, as an outlet. This, however, isn’t spontaneous – anything but. This is a labored piece of work, one that had been in the works for at least a year and a half. Accurately sustaining those lingering and annoying feelings of inadequacy for this long, and portraying them the way they are here, that requires an understanding of those feelings that can often turn quite slippery. A.A. Williams was able to make this much about not being able to make anything, and the music never questions that train of thought, or deviates from it, but rather confirms it over and over. Part of me wants to call it inspirational, but this world certainly would rather not be noticed at all.
Special Interest - Endure (dance punk)
A shot in and at the empty, blistering dark. Might be one of the most musically unfocused projects worth talking about this year, and it’s entirely by design. The sound of Special Interest’s new album is blatantly misshapen, defyingly disconnected where no element gets to merge with any other. The sonic core is empty, every voice and every instrument gets to shine from the margins, and even the edges don’t penetrate. Not even claustrophobic, it’s outright trapped and caged, lost. It cares about that – itself, and the people it’s surrounded by – but it’s not paying any attention to those on the inside, those who don’t have to struggle for people to pay attention to. For an album this politically charged, that proposition is as powerful as the so-called main attractions.
Any kind of project with this kind of aggressive empathy towards those who aren’t as used to it is already heavily notorious, especially when the aggression comes from a shared frustration. The sharp, watered-eyes criteria of disempowering those above, who don’t feel the need to listen to those down in the mud, is what drives Endure. Differentiating itself from the synth-heavy earlier projects, the band does a lot more to augment Alli Logout’s voice. Props to the sharp nails of guitars, as well as the miles away bass that never caves, galloping the whole way through – as well as drums more openly programmed than before, cribbing from no wave as well as post-punk, never leaving those early stages of development after the original punk disillusionment, because the thought here is primitive, addressing those with unmet basic human needs. Alli herself, not the forever war-ready powerhouse of the past, now delves into more soulful touches that make the moments of rising up more urgent than before. This is an album that ditches the basic liberal notions of peace and embraces violence as a method for survival, but it’s highly aware that violence needs to have a motive and be organized beforehand; thus, Special Interest lurk before attacking.
That aforementioned disconnect between all the main elements gives the music a rather distinct tension, where it’s pointing at you from all angles, and you have to choose which way to go. At times, good things can come from that, especially when there are different influences leading the way: the sneaky drum machines on “Love Scene”, the house pianos on “Midnight Legend”, the spoken word snippets and alarms on “Concerning Peace”, the industrial synth work of “Impulse Control”, the noisier-than-usual guitars of “LA Blues”. Those things just don’t happen as often as others because the path is always brutally unclear. There’s an art to sounding sloppy to make a point.
The point here is that of shying against complacency, in the middle of the eerie night where brawls spur out, the drinks aren’t enough, and those who have to stay sane for their sake need to end up on the floor as much as everyone else. Alli never relies on mantras like before, but a lot more on proper ideals: “Fuck what they think, I like how it hurts”, “The war is here, the war is there”, “The terror of my displeasure is all I’ll let haunt me”, “We are not concerned with peace, peace is none of our concern” (first few times, I heard the latter bit as “peace is not about concern”, which I thought made a stronger impression). These aren’t pump-your-fists phrases, they’re scary assessments.
Alli herself is afraid all the time here. No reveling here, it’s all about purely about survival. The way she enters the doomed “Impulse Control”, belting an accelerated yell that ends up with her looking at the floor (and the song doesn’t build up on it). The way she sings “And if you don’t like it, you can fuck right off” on “LA Blues” and she can’t sell the words’ dominance because she’s trembling. The way she rolls her eyes at “GodIneedacigarette” on “Foul”, but she can’t hold that stare because another echo’s about to respond.
We can pretend to feel that sort of lighthearted escapism that translates to roughness for the sake of roughness, which the great opener “Cherry Blue Intention” showcases, but that can only last for so long before people are left behind. Hearing the debased hook of “Kurdish Radio”, with the muted bass and the mitigated guitars that Alli erases all her color from with the description of others’ malices, provokes that scary rush of blood that erases all the promises the sound waits for. “Impulse Control” stands out as a piece of acidic shit talking at the ones who act above the poor and can ‘intellectualize’ them by way of their detached readings; it’s the most outwardly muddy thematic moment here, but it’s necessary as a sort of respite. Because when they have to confront the decay of systems and beliefs, like the ones on “Love Scene” and “(Herman’s) House”, and they try to blow off that anger on the dancefloor or in some bedroom (where “the air sits thick much like how betrayal wades in the shadows”), and proceed to fail because they’re aware that thrill isn’t lasting, those with none of those effects won’t be there.
Because the ones that will be there are the ones that, reasonably, have no other place to go. The ensuing connections of “Midnight Legend”, detailing all those walking down a night they couldn’t avoid, are treated with gentleness and tender melodies, never passing judgement and even rooting for them, because it’s not entirely their fault (the morning after is “a concrete runway just for you”). Extending that same arm to the ones actually living the “LA Blues”, searching for ways to make a proper living or just outright trying to survive with whatever they can find – and if you don’t like it, you can fuck right off, but ‘you’ don’t care, as Alli showcases in her heartwrenching bridge where she gets overpowered by everything else, by that nighttime shadow.
So you can dance to this. You can try to love to this. You can also very much not like it and walk away, because Special Interest, Endure and every character on it know that they can’t hold everyone’s attention just because they want to, and I’m not sure they think highly of themselves enough to think they deserve it. But that’s a problem – and they know it. The way to revolution here is, among many other things, to uphold that community worth of black and queer people, to not bring each other down, to serve as a unified front. Looking up, but still aiming for more.
Endure collapses, but it hopes that others will pick up in its stead, and hopefully even help it on its way up. 2 years ago, they asked if we would bat an eye waiting for war machines to pass us by. Now, they can’t afford that, and they won’t wait.
black midi - Hellfire (avant-prog)
The trick here is learning a particular balance between musical expression(/flexing) and accessibility. black midi are a very rare example of a band that, with each project, kept twisting their sound to different realms of complexity on the structural, harmonic, instrumental, vocal, and lyrical; and every time was an easier and more entertaining listen than the previous. Part of it is, admittedly, being used to this sound and mutation, and it helps if you know a bunch of this is based on the fantasy prog-rock classics – but that accustoming doesn’t happen on its own.
They’ve been training us for Hellfire, from the broader aspects to the more intricate ones. On the visual side, the striking cover art is a continuation of the cover art to Cavalcade, and the music video for “Welcome to Hell” has the same animation style as Cavalcade’s “Slow”. But there’s also the dynamics between the Geordie Greep-led songs and the Cameron Picton ones: the constant punishing paired up with the angrier but eventually more romantic aspects. There’s the characters coming out equal parts from Broadway and music hall that flow in and out of songs with no previous introduction. There’s the conservatoire jazz playing with noisy delays and filters that were always there. Nothing’s shocking here if you’ve been listening, it’s just that practice makes perfect, and they’ve pinned down what they’re doing in order to do it even harder.
For an album all about revolting protagonists, or antagonists, or anti-protagonists, showing us the ways around the different kinds of manmade hell that all lead us to the same doomed conclusion, black midi sure like to play up the goofy sides of themselves. They already know they can dominate these compositions, so they figured they might as well not do everything with a straight face; let their (rather juvenile) humor shine a little brighter. That mainly comes in Greep’s delivery, who can deliver pastiche dramatic gravitas and sound both earnest and self-aware, and sharpen up his voice to sound like his vocals are being sped up. At his most intense, the writing has the verbal maelstrom of early 70s Peter Gabriel delivered with a broad foreign tone, but with far less vocal control and a higher inclination towards the ridiculous without the sake of a half-conceptual point (in many stages here, he even sounds like the complete opposite: Phil Collins in his ridiculous “Illegal Alien” accent).
This utter loss of control does lead to certain problems, at times. Both Greep and Picton can forget their early mission, and the whole band can get caught up in the frenzy of their sound, that any lyrical message or coding gets instantly lost, because you simply can’t understand what they’re saying, and you instantly need a lyric sheet; the danger of getting swept up and forgetting the ground floor. Moments like the breakdown of “The Race Is About To Begin” or the titular “27 Questions” don’t need to be followed that closely, because their point is the overwhelming final effect of saying that much. But the gay desertors of “Eat Men Eat”, or the farmer-turned-murderer of “Dangerous Liaisons”, or the tragic boxing match of “Sugar/Tzu”, are all near impossible to pin down, and all the alleged commentary of the dangers of excess and self-indulgence resonate far less when black midi themselves fall victims of them, seemingly unaware.
To counteract that, they’ve massively improved on something that was insanely difficult for them in the past, which is understanding how to make songs flow without needing to stop them. For as ridiculous as they can often be, their brand of drama needs to be sustained, the grins followed up on, because without that, there’s nothing there. Lead single “Welcome To Hell” had many abrupt endings, but none of them flinched as Morgan Simpson’s arid drums carried through shapeshifting guitars that led to a massive horn section. Morgan even paused at the off beat for Greep to go “DON’T TELL YOUR NAME / Don’t ask for hers”, which in any other song would have been the climax, but with this band, there’s 3 minutes left – the second entry of the horns, sharper and more dramatic, it’s riveting. Next to it, the cuter “Still” flirts with Picton’s deep vocals and adds in a Hawaiian lap steel guitar for that specific beachlike feeling, although nothing is what it seems like, of course – and the song never lets up the faraway country tempo, and part of me wishes the piano stabs weren’t there, because the idyllic vibe presented that slowly rots would’ve happened without outside interference.
That’s what it comes down to, for the most part. Moments of thrill that leave with a bitter aftertaste. I’m not wild about the storytelling of “Sugar/Tzu” – the big climax is one of the boxers being shot and the moral is “No doctor on the scene, the audience won!” which is a rushed ending delivered with no stakes – but the main guitar/wind riff revolves around the vague idea of hell like nothing else on this album does, and Greep’s mid-song howling narrates better than most of his words. The most outwardly beautiful song on here, “The Defence”, makes the brothel-owning protagonist a secondary attraction, when Marta Salogni’s production is blushingly serene, dignifying everyone with proper swell, as if the moments spent in that hidden place were worth it for the sepia strings.
For all of this to be consequential – for the moments of beauty to really hit – they also have to surround themselves with the usual loud, overbearing moments that they’re used to giving, now aided by not being as stilted as before. “The Race Is About To Begin” can often be a lot, winding up less grotesque and more outright gross – but it’s an intriguing touch that the narration of the ‘race’ isn’t about horses at all, but the narration of wasted life. And if, again, you manage to get swept up by Geordie’s whirling melodies and then-barricading meltdown, it’s like being inside beat up raw flesh! A similar ugly ending is “Eat Men Eat”, with its flamenco influences being used to disrupt the tempo, and the romantic leads escape with their “chests burning, burning”, but the main feeling (the one song on Hellfire that accomplishes this) is the feeling of overcoming, of managing to leave that hell and finding something else, even if that means a different version of hell.
NNAMDÏ - Please Have A Seat (art pop)
No, because the kind of burnout that NNAMDÏ goes through on Please Have A Seat is the kind that’s awful to admit: when it feels as though every possible lane has turned against you, and every potentially good idea gets discarded because the self-trust isn’t there anymore. Please Have A Seat sees NNAMDÏ two years after the incredible Brat, which took the idea of a spoiled kid being the rightful path to becoming an artist, and made him realize how his dreams aren’t guaranteed or necessarily fulfilling, and how hiding can be a potential way out to hide the same (“Turned into somethin’ I can’t fix! YEAH!”). It being quirky and humorous at nearly every turn, even during the most incessant bits, added up to that loss feel, and only escalated NNAMDÏ’s increasing anxiety.
The first 6 tracks of Please Have A Seat are all under 2 and half minutes long, before the tracks start being the average, longer length. What happens here is sheer procrastination: the early songs play around with different snippets of ideas, with not much clarity, because facing what’s really going on up there is something the album would rather avoid for as long as possible. It would be wrong to call these ‘softballs’ – they do a lot to alleviate, for not long, the underlying frustration that’s carried on this project. They’re the songs with the nerdy humor edge: “they sour like kraut” on “Armoire”, the commercial airplane interlude on “Grounded”, all of “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous” which is the follow-up to “Gimme Gimme” that’s a lot more self-aware and serves as the childishly malicious pop cut.
But, like with the goofier elements of Brat as well, those miniatures still surround themselves with doubt and lingering ideas that invite yearning and a bit of suffering. “Armoire” is amusing, with the corny puns and the triplet flow delivery, but it’s also armed with a lot of beauty: shiny keys that reveal a cloudy nighttime, NNAMDÏ’s voice that can adapt to being the life of the party but also the voice clearing up that sky. The hook of the math rock-adjacent “Dibs” goes, “Just how much longer? How much more”, which is followed by the panic attack that kicks off “Touchdown”. And “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous” is funny , but it comes with an admission of how much the new attention isn’t suiting NNAMDÏ at all (“Used to say that I was too weird and shit / Now they wanna take me serious??”), which turns the soft pink synths at the start of the song into rolled out waves, and his elastic performance keeps the easy hooks but takes away the lighthearted feel. Either being famous or not being famous are an inevitability, and he can’t tell which one’s going to happen next.
All self-produced and self-performed, NNAMDÏ’s way of sound mixing separates most of the instrumental tracks into two audio channels, not panning them but duplicating them and cloying their way into being the main attraction: the sound here is grotesque, and most of the organic instruments detach themselves from their playing by sounding so baseless and flimsy. The fun trick here is, every instrument sounds baseless and flimsy in different ways than every other instrument, so they help complement each other for the sound to be robust. But it also means you can’t count on any one particular thing – the instruments don’t even feel they can trust themselves.
All of this means that once the second half starts, around “ANXIOUS EATER”, the vibe of the album begins to change. Establishing the forefront melodies and the eclectic voice and the bitter near-passive-aggressive-leaning-towards-outright-aggressive tone with the earlier songs so that, once everything starts going on and on, it feels a lot heavier. It’s an easy sequencing trick, but it’s hard to fulfill it without falling into cliché territory. The content becomes a lot more explicit, and the burdens don’t have enough room to hide. The slurry of words on “ANXIOUS EATER”, getting stood up on “Benched”, the paranoid impatience of “Anti”, the resentment of others on “Smart Ass”. All of it reaching the naked honesty of “Lifted”, which makes it impossible to hide what’s going on: “I worked too hard for regrets”.
The driving point of NNAMDÏ’s current output is that of a mind too stubborn and proud to admit to failure and mistakes. Not because of a lack of belief in his own art, or his own mind, or what he has to say; but through feeling sidelined so often, maybe to the point of sidelining himself to spare everyone else the trouble, that now, it’s all he knows, and seeing any different outcome, even positive ones, doesn’t sit well with him, but also being at a particular point where the recurrent failures also don’t feel like the obvious conclusion because he’s seen different paths come to his aid. Now, he’s in the middle of that, and he can’t work it out. A smart ass, probably in the right quite often, but also temperamental and funny to avoid his burning red bitterness.
What he can make out of this stagnant outlook is make a lot of beauty out of those grotesque sounds and backwards thoughts. The songs are hefty and odd, even the ones with an aired out production, but their masquerading touches feel upon that potential search for good. His calling out of pedantics on “Smart Ass” is backed up by a midsummer emo guitar, but with a jangly tempo, and builds to a subdued climax, alongside an ace melody. “Anti” and “Careful” serve as fusions of ambient-like pianos with off-kilter harmonies and rotting vocal timbres, and the latter even adds a distilled guitar that taints NNAMDÏ’s performance with a tone of proper sorrow, without any filters (“Who chipped the paint on it… / Who ripped the drapes? Honest…”).
NNAMDÏ as an instrumentalist is the one who makes the more powerful moments rise up. “ANXIOUS EATER” goes through many sections to reach a hard MIDI-like outro that autotunes his voice while playing with very clean guitars, and the automated process of agitating his way through a tense moment stops, and the harsh catastrophized reality kicks in. “Benched” takes the awful instinct to detach from a situation like getting slowly ignored by a potential partner, and starts off awfully digital, before the one-man ensemble joins in to bring NNAMDÏ back to Earth, because you can’t just escape from your thoughts on a whim, and all the ‘ghosts’ in the room start surrounding him as the guitars cover him up – there’s a tossed off riff before the “Nothin’s there at all” refrain that feels like a prog-rock funeral march.
To combine all of these elements, “Dedication” is one of the simplest compositions of the album – it’s mainly a warm up to the main melody in the shape of a sole verse, then the main melody being repeated twice or thrice with more vocals being added up. But it finds not only an ace melody, but a hard realization that forces NNAMDÏ to come to terms with what he’s been facing, and why he should face it. In his head, an underachiever who has to “fight-fight-fight-fight through the pain” (sung like an anime theme song), maybe sometimes refusing to move forward and stay there can be a healthy option, when you just don’t want to fight anymore, and you settle. That’s not the defeat it’s claimed to be. But it just doesn’t work for him. The conclusion? “It’s dedication”. It’s not sung like a reality check, or an admission – it’s resignation. Sucks, but without dedication, might as well do nothing. After a glitchy instrumental section that strengthens the track up, other voices join in for that long refrain, and the track gains a bit of a musical theater flair; like they were all singing to each other to give each other strength, but they all come off hostile and unhelpful. Aesthetically, triumphant; in practice, a dour reminder.
There’s no underlying mantra on this album like there was on Brat, what with the “I need you, need something new”. The closest you get to that is on the album’s bookends, “Some days I wake up ready to run”. A world of ambiguity there: is running a good thing? Running from what? Please Have A Seat doesn’t particularly know, and stumbles upon the sad realization that the sheer act of keeping on for the sake of doing so is infinitely better than stopping out of cowardice or anger. It doesn’t want to do it, but the sounds are just wired to do that; it’s not really up to them. It’s an album for the creatives, those who are (or feel) on the margins, but also don’t exactly feel that the spotlight is where they should be. So, what’s the right spot?