inastationofthemetro

Resolutions: My Top 10 Albums of 2015

Posted on January 21, 2016 by mattamery

During the last few months everything has been a bit up in the air. Finished University, went away travelling, contemplated dreadlocks and beaded bracelets, immediately regretted considering it, got a job, ate some pizza… y’know, the kind of things that stop a guy writing to a blog. Not had much time to get writing like I should and not had much inspiration so to get the creative juices flowing I’m going to make some lists and share them with people just in case my estimate of 0% interest in my favourite things of the year are a little bit pessimistic.

To start off my creative brainstorm of lists I’m going to offer up the albums I had the most fun listening to this year. To throw a major curve ball in the mix I’m filling the list with albums I have only got round to this year. So the albums can be from any year at all because I’m too lazy to listen to new albums… Also, I waited a little bit after the end of the year just in case anything came out that I might include.

CRYSTAL CASTLES – III

Crystal Castles are a group which I just can’t help but love. Their really odd mix of a punk-ish aesthetic with dark and unsettling rave-style production is definitely a bit polarising but I can’t tear myself away from it. I’m still having trouble getting over their split after this album because in my opinion it’s definitely the best they’ve released. The atmosphere is dark and crushing but somehow also manages to be really catchy in parts and is never so abrasive that it becomes a drag to listen to.

It’s definitely an album that you just chuck on the headphones and listen from start to finish, there are stand out songs, particularly in the first half of the album with my favourites being ‘Kerosene’ and ‘Wrath of God’. For anyone who wants to listen to it there’s a brilliant video on youtube which combines the album with the early 80’s cult classic film ‘Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’. A film about the youth drug scene in 70’s Berlin it just fits the feel of the album perfectly, a trip, but a really artsy, pretty trip that grows on you the further you dive in.

MANCHESTER ORCHESTRA – HOPE

HOPE by Manchester Orchestra, is an exact copy of the band’s previous album COPE, but the instrumentation is completely changed. I didn’t mind COPE as an album but thought it was just… okay, nothing special but not bad. HOPE however, somehow manages to play almost the exact same songs in the same order and be so much better. I should explain that HOPE is almost entirely acoustic and a lot of the songs have had parts re-arranged to create a different kind of feel and it just brings what were already really well written songs an extra dimension.

The band themselves are one of my favourite modern indie bands, but I kind of drop in and out of listening to them because although their songs are always well-written they sometimes feel a bit bland. This is one of the albums that keeps me coming back to them. It’s expertly written, amazingly played and the voice and lyrics of the vocalist Andy Hull are totally perfect for the emotional, reflective style of the revamped instrumentals.

GRANDVIEW – EVERYTHING BETWEEN PAINT AND WALL

I love music that make me feel upset. That might be a weird thing to say, I mean who enjoys being sad? The answer to that is no one really, but I do love a full on train-wreck of an emotional album and this one ticks all the greetin’ faced boxes. I find the whole emo revival scene going on at the moment a bit hit and miss, with some bands straying a bit too far into the whiny white kid realm for my liking. However, when an album like this comes along and gets the emotional roller-coaster going in the best possible way, my faith is restored.

The album isn’t the most musically complex or genre-redefining that you’re going to find out there, but it doesn’t need to be. A good album in this genre just needs to get the tone right, and this gets it so right. The atmosphere is constantly desperate and forlorn but also hopeful in parts and even the short opener ‘Paint’ brings a tear to the eye. It’s the kind of album you sing at the top of your voice in the car on the way home from a break-up. Can’t recommend highly enough and I’m so excited to see what these guys do next.

PANOPTICON – AUTUMN ETERNAL

Black Metal is great. This most recent period for Black Metal is amazing, you have quality new bands out there changing the face of the genre, bands like Deafheaven, An Autumn for Crippled Children, Agalloch and more but also genre stalwarts cranking out some really great albums like Behemoth’s ‘The Satanist’ and Leviathan’s ‘Scar Sighted’. Panopticon are doing a really good job of being just different enough to be interesting and traditional enough that they don’t distance themselves from the familiar sources of black metal listeners.

The album itself is gold. Just the right mix of bluegrass melodies and suffocating black metal atmosphere. When Autumn Eternal kicks off with songs like ‘Into the North Woods’ you know you’re in for a treat. Black Metal is almost synonymous with links to Scandinavian folk music it’s really not too surprising to see the American branch of the genre use some folk that’s a bit more familiar to them.

DESSA – PARTS OF SPEECH

So from Bluegrass Black Metal the next logical step is Minnesota Rapper/Singer Dessa… right? I am a huge fan of Doomtree and pretty much everything that the individual members do. So I’ll start off by recommending every member of the group as each one has something different to offer. Now Dessa herself has always been one of the musicians from Doomtree I come back to all the time. Mainly because I’m a total hip hop amateur so Dessa is one of the only female rap artists I’ve heard that I really enjoy. She just knows how to tell a story with each song and manages to be vulnerable and powerful in every single verse.

Parts of speech is probably Dessa’s most ‘singy’ album to date with some seriously good vocals mixed in with her trademark word-play and flow. Every song hits hard with more classic hip hop tracks like ‘Warsaw’ and ‘Fighting Fish’ sharing a run-time with more soulful singing numbers like ‘Call off your Ghost’. Even if you don’t like rap yet, get this one listened to, it’s not too far away from a lot of modern pop but different enough to challenge you and make you think about every word this lady speaks.

CLIPPING – CLPPNG

The second half of the mid-point in my list is the newest album from Los Angeles hip hop group, Clipping. Again, this has been the year where I’ve been getting deeper into rap and hip hop and this album is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It’s harsh and abrasive and hard as hell to listen to at some points but it’s nothing short of great. The subject matter is at times gruesome e.g. ‘Body and Blood’ where Daveed Digs is rapping for a solid four and a half minutes about a girl who goes to clubs, picks up guys and dismembers them. It can also be pretty standard fare for hip hop with a few songs like ‘Work Work’ sounding like they would go down okay on your average radio station.

It’s in the really experimental side that I love this thing. In addition to songs like ‘Body and Blood’ we’ve got ‘Get Up’ a song in which pretty much the only instrumentation is the sound of an alarm clock going off repeatedly behind some really abrasive verses. All in all its more than just experimentation though, CLPPNG is an experience I would not recommend missing.

PIANOS BECOME THE TEETH – KEEP YOU

Another album that gets the water works going. I’ve enjoyed Pianos Become the Teeth for a while, they’ve always been a pretty hard-hitting post-hardcore band with albums like Old Pride standing out for all the right reasons. So when they released this newest album last year I was pretty excited for it, but I was nowhere near prepared for what I would hear on ‘Keep You’. It’s a big departure from their earlier music but doesn’t feel so different that it’s jarring, you’re definitely still listening to the same band. The difference is the maturity of the sound, the mellower, reflective way the album is presented lets the best parts of earlier albums shine out a little brighter and gives the emotional moments in the album (there are loads) a huge boost.

There are so many highlights, the sounds, the lyrics, the atmosphere, it all just clicks really well into one of the most wide-reaching and accomplished albums from this genre in a long while. When you hear the vocalist’s voice break up singing “I’ve been so touch and go” in the third song ‘Lesions’ I defy you not to get just a little bit of a lump in the throat. I can’t praise the album enough all of the influences this band have come together into something I’ll keep coming back to for years.

CHELSEA WOLFE – ABYSS

I had to sit myself down and have a serious think over whether this spot should go to ‘This Will Destroy You’ or not but I just couldn’t get away from Chelsea Wolfe’s new album. Probably because it makes me feel like if I didn’t have it somewhere in here she is entirely capable of killing me in my sleep. Chelsea Wolfe is just one of those singers who can do no wrong in my eyes. I’ve been totally in love with her mix of folk, metal, gothic rock and nearly everything you can think of that’s dark and broody, ever since her ‘Apokalypsis’ album and this is no different.

From the very start, the first word I would use to describe this album is crushing. Everything feels so dark and claustrophobic that you just can’t escape listening to the whole album from start to finish. It’s definitely the most doom-influenced album she’s released to date with massive walls of distortion and noise crashing about in nearly every song. ‘Iron Moon’ is a personal favourite and Chelsea’s amazingly versatile vocals knock this album out of the park, her singing just fits with the atmosphere of the album so well and lends an completely new dimension to every song. Even if darker stuff is not your cup of tea, listen to this one just for her voice, the whole album is just amazing.

DOOMTREE – ALL HANDS

The final runner up is a doozy. Doomtree are a Minnesota-based hip hop collective formed by rappers P.O.S., Mike Mictlan, Cecil Otter, Dessa and Sims and producers Lazerbeak and Paper Tiger. All of the individuals in the group have their own solo projects which are equally brilliant in their own way and all well worth a listen, it’s when they get together though that they really get going. This album is pure genius from start to finish, every bar, every line and every killer hook is as close to perfect as you can get. They sound great together but every member’s individual style and personality manages to shine through as well. The production is brilliant, with the instrumentals in every song being fresh and experimental but also managing to be accessible enough that it’s not difficult to listen to the whole album in one sitting.

The lyrics are the real draw for this album with every song referencing anything from history, mythology, literature, politics and economics through to things like clubs and films. One of my favourite lines comes in ‘Gray Duck’ when Sims gives us a gem of a bar “Call me David Lynch / I make them act funny”. This whole album is layered and dense as well as accessible and fun. The production, vocal performances and lyrics all have so many levels to them it does take a good few listens to get everything in a certain song and every one is more fun than the last.

THE TWILIGHT SAD – NOBODY WANTS TO BE HERE AND NOBODY WANTS TO LEAVE

And finally, the moment no one has been waiting for! A dour Scottish band brought out a dour Scottish man’s number one album of the year… Stop the presses everyone! I have been a massive fan of The Twilight Sad for years, seen them four times and bought (that’s right bought!) every album they’ve released so far. So when this new album came out I needed to get my talons into it. The Twilight Sad have always changed slightly with every new release, from their more drone-like early stage through to the Joy Division-ish post-punk sound they now offer and every step along the way has been killer in my eyes.

The new album is probably their most accessible effort to date with very apparent influences from Joy Division and The Cure, ultimately resulting in a tour in support of the latter band and their lead singer Robert Smith covering one of the new songs. As such it’s even more apparent just how good a singer James Graham is. They do deliver their signature ‘down-in-the-dumps’ style and that’s what I love about them, their music is Scottish through and through. It’s dour it’s grey and it’s great to sing after a few drinks, but also complicated and nuanced enough that you don’t just sound like your chanting football songs when you sing it in your best Kilsythian accent. Treads that balance between being accessible and being hugely introspective and emotional perfectly from start to finish.

So there we go, 10 albums I’d massively recommend you listen to if you get the time. Not saying they are the best albums of the year, just the ones I had the most fun listening to. Expect more from my blog in the next few weeks as my free time quota is pretty big right now. Watch this space!

If none of these tickle your fancy, here’s a few more I liked but just missed out on the list.

London Philharmonic Orchestra – 50 greatest pieces of classical music.

Jeremy Soule – Skyrim Soundtrack

TesseracT – Polaris

Low Roar – Self Titled

Protest the Hero – Volition

Madvillain – Madvillainy

Czarface – Every Hero Needs a Villain

Howlin’ Wolf – His Best

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly

The Contortionist – Language

This Will Destroy You – Self Titled

I Promise I’ll Write More Often

Posted on June 22, 2015 by mattamery

I haven’t written for a few weeks now, been busy with this thing and that thing and I’m graduating on Wednesday which means I now have no excuse for inactivity. As a taster of things to come here’s a taster for a story I’m thinking of rolling with. Any criticism, trolling, praise or other internet proclamation is welcome and if there are any ideas for where I can take it feel free to share!

Time can fuck off.

I’ve been reading up about the idea of ‘fake antiques’ recently and it’s a good wee laugh. These are basically things that have been placed on the earth to convince you it’s older than it really is and are mainly used by crackpot bible-thumpers and people trying to look clever. I am undoubtedly the latter. It all stems from a question that asks whether it would make any sort of a difference if the world only began last Tuesday and all the memories, trinkets and connections we’ve made have been planted there as some sort of great cosmic joke. Great little theory, no one would be any the wiser, except the grand old universe which is constantly pissing its wee frilly pants at how unaware we are of the world around us. If that’s the case, and Last-Tuesdayism is to be believed, I must be the punchline of the whole routine.

“Y’know what? We’re on to a trick with this whole fake antique idea, let’s do the cosmic equivalent of a kick-ass mic drop and convince the world’s biggest cunt he’s made himself immortal.”

At last count, I’m four-hundred and forty-eight years old.

Time likes to play tricks on us, and the greatest of all is convincing us of how much we have left. The amount of people I’ve seen blink their last blink, not knowing that a bus was rounding the corner ready to make friends with them Lennie Small style. So in a similar way I’m ready to go at a moment’s notice, I’ve just got this feeling that one day someone’s going to unveil a portrait of a dashingly handsome corpse and I’m going to turn into a dashingly handsome puddle.

The brevity of it all leads to some go-getters wanting to spend all of their time as close to the end of it as possible, jumping off things, swimming under things, going to places where everything in nature is actively trying to get you to fuck off, you know the type. I’ve always seen these people as the same bunch who take out a loan to save their skin, spend it all on a yacht and then wander around scratching their balls when the bailiff comes to tie you to a cinder block and take you swimming. I spent my first forty-and-a-bit years buried in books, trying to work on a way to kneecap the debt collector and send him away in matchboxes.

I succeeded.

It might be that the universe was created last Tuesday and they just got a bit pissed off and bored when it got round to coming up with my memories, which is perfectly justifiable considering the planning stage must have been a Monday. It seems a hell of a lot longer to me, I am perpetually forty-eight years old, which means I’ve spent the last four hundred years in a never-ending midlife crisis. Imagine waking up every morning for four fucking centuries and forgetting who the fuck you are. Imagine forty decades of feeling like you’ve done nothing with your life. Every immortal fucker in the books and films I’ve come to loathe, donders around casually popping in on Albert Einstein, Gandhi, MLK, Julius Caesar and then tootling along for tea with Winston Churchill. I find these assumptions crass and offensive to those of an extended lifespan. The problem with living in tandem with all of these important people is that you don’t usually find out how important they are until after they’ve buggered off. I’m coming up for the big four-four-nine and the best I’ve got is possibly fake nunchucks signed by Bruce Lee.

Entirely unrealistic, I tend to spend more time with a triumphant middle finger up to clocks because however bad things seem I know it’s massively unlikely to be the end of my world. I do like the way language has come on, it’s much easier to be a grumpy bastard with a modern vocabulary, you wouldn’t believe the party I had when people stopped saying ‘Thou’, I wondered around my house saying ‘you’ like it was going out of fashion.

As I said before the piece I’m intending to be a bit more regular and work out a schedule for posts to provide more content that nobody asked for or needed but that I’m going to make a fist of anyway.

Flipping the Coin

Posted on May 14, 2015 by mattamery

After waxing lyrical about the value of what’s unsaid in my last post I’m about to do a tiny wee 180 and explain how dangerous being vague can be.

The article I’m using as my point of reference can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32714802

It begins with David Cameron’s assertion that the UK has been a “passively tolerant society” for too long. As if tolerance should be anything other than an ingrained, passive value. What’s really being suggested is that we should instead be pursuing a course of intolerance towards extreme fringe groups (emphasis on fringe) within British society. So to combat an ideology which feels extreme disenfranchisement and grievance towards the British government, we are going to go down the route of an Orwellian dismantling of their basic human rights. This is sure to get these ‘extremists’ to buy into good ol’ British democracy in no time!

This bill will include

“new immigration rules” limiting the freedom of movement into Britain, “powers to close down premises used by extremists, and “extremism disruption orders””.

This is already sounding like Orwell’s newspeak. In essence what is being said here is that if you are espousing an ideology which the government deems “hate-speech” then they have the power to close down your workplace or other premises and dismantle your right to freedom of assembly. The government will be able to

“silence any group or individual they believe is undermining democracy or the British values of tolerance and mutual respect.”

In the wake of the recent election result there were mass protests in London against an elected conservative government. Is this undermining democracy? Could these people be ‘silenced’ under these new proposals? The danger of what is being left to the imagination here is worrying. We are seeing logic here which suggests that to encourage the values of democracy, tolerance and mutual respect we should silence groups which the government sees as undermining it.

It is to be understood at the moment that this bill is being drafted to target the recruitment of young Muslims to fundamentalist religious groups. If young British people in this country feel so at odds with their government, that they are drawn to violent and misguided paramilitary groups half-way around the world, then I think that there is something inherently wrong with our system. What is equally worrying is that the intent is to silence and remove groups which threaten ‘fundamental British values’. The idea that a country has fundamental or innate values is frankly laughable considering the shifts in the British political landscape which have occurred over the last two years alone. Disregarding that point though, many of the current Conservative cabinet members have a history of voting against LGBTQ rights and gender equality issues. What if feminist rhetoric became perceived by the government as ‘opposed to fundamental British values’? Or campaigning for the equality of all forms of love became seen as ‘undermining democracy’? or if the Tories decided that Scottish Nationalists were ‘seeking to divide our society’? This is a cabinet of intolerant, hate-speaking, warmongering bigots incapable of mutual respect for different ideologies. Excuse me if I laugh a little when their plans to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and replace it with their own charter coincides with this Big Brother-esque decree limiting the right to assembly, movement, speech, protection from discrimination, belief and punishment without law.

Cameron’s words are as follows

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone’,”

So now they intend not to leave alone people who obey the law. Fantastic. Well, we’re almost a week into this new Conservative government and we have a man who called for the re-introduction of hanging in charge of ‘Justice’, a woman who voted against gay marriage in charge of Equality and a man who wants to dismantle the license fee for the BBC in charge of culture and media. In addition to this we are now seeing an attack on human rights and civil liberties and talk of leaving the European Union which we should be proud to be a part of. If you, like me are even a little bit turned off by this I urge you to get in contact with your local MP, join an opposing party, demonstrate, write an essentially pointless ranty blog, hell, do anything to make your voice heard before they silence your ‘extreme views’.

What it says on the tin.

Posted on May 12, 2015 by mattamery

The first poem I’d like to share is a bit of a gem. I even decided to name the blog after it! Written by modernist poet Ezra Pound and released in 1913 in the magazine Poetry.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is one of my favourite poems of all time. The first time I read it I was a little taken aback. I think most people would look and say “is that it?” but that’s what I think makes it so cool (yes I used cool). So much modern entertainment and in particular music seems to assume the people listening are a bit dense, so leaves absolutely nothing to interpretation. This isn’t an entirely bad thing if you’re trying to tell a story, it can be difficult to avoid blatantly stating what happens, especially if you’re trying to ensure that it hits the widest audience possible. People don’t generally like the feeling of “I don’t get it” so it makes sense to be very direct about what you’re saying to ensure nobody’s left scratching their heads. I personally think that people are a bit smarter than that and enjoy something that’s a bit of a challenge every now and again and this poem does exactly that.

The majority of the meaning in the poem is entirely left to the reader, the only piece of concrete detail we get is that the poem takes place in a station of the Paris Metro system. Anything else is decidedly up to us as the consumer of the poem. We are left to pour over each word, why the use of ‘apparition’ to describe these people’s faces? The punctuation between the two lines is open to what we might think as well. In the spirit of the poem itself I’m not going to say what I think it means as I don’t want to colour anyone’s reading of it. I would just say, if anyone reads this and enjoys it or has read Haiku and thinks it’d be nice to see if there’s a western equivalent, read up on Pound and other Imagist poets. The poems are essentially short on words but dense in meaning so it won’t take long to read many of them but you might want to take a while to unpack what you read! On a really simple level, it’s a great image if nothing else and instead of using a thousand words to paint a picture, uses twenty words (including the title) to paint as many pictures as the reader can imagine when reading.

If you liked this, check out: Richard Aldington – Images, H.D. – Oread, T.E. Hulme – Above the Dock, D.H. Lawrence – Green.

Book Recommendation: Bob Blaisdell – Imagist Poetry: An Anthology (a book chock-full of these kind of poems.

What comes next.

Posted on May 11, 2015 by mattamery

Finishing an English literature degree comes with plenty of challenges, one of which is how to use essentially artistic skills in a very practical employment market. So in almost the most cliche move I could possibly pull, I’m starting a blog to keep myself busy. In an even more cliche move, I have no idea what to write in it, so I’m going to write everything I can. The plan is to write as much as I possibly can, so there isn’t really a schedule, just whenever possible. I’ll be writing about events and ideas which I find interesting and putting a totally ill-conceived and slightly researched spin on it, sharing poems and sections of books I enjoy, writing unprofessional reviews on films, books and music and submitting any short stories, poems and other scribblings for ridicule. Enjoy!