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dustedmagazine · 2 years ago

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Slept Ons: 2022

Sleeping on a Shovel Dance Collective sounds uncomfortable.

Every year about this time, soon after filing our definitive, absolutely comprehensive best of the year lists, we writers discover that we missed one...or two...or 12. It’s not our fault. We listen to a lot of music. But we can’t listen to all of it, and often we find albums that we love after the fact, often on the best of lists of our friends and contemporaries. Every year, we try to remedy this problem with a list of slepts ons, the best albums that we should have been paying attention to, but weren’t. We hope you’ll find something you missed as well. Writers this time include Ian Mathers, Jonathan Shaw, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Andrew Forell, Chris Liberato, Bryon Hayes, Bill Meyer, Christian Carey and Justin Cober-Lake.

Apparitions — Eyes Like Predatory Wealth (The Garrote)

Eyes Like Predatory Wealth by Apparitions

It does not matter how frantically I try and keep listening to things as year-end deadlines approach, there are always things not just missed but barely missed. I think it was a little after I turned my Dusted year-end piece in that I finally saw my friend Erik’s really good 2022 roundup, which includes among other records I hadn’t even heard of (and a few records I did already love) including this debut from the trio of Andrew Dugas (guitar), Igor Imbu (modular synth) and Grant Martin (drums). As soon as I read “If you like the idea of indeterminant collisions of drone metal guitar, free jazz drumming and modular synthesis this is a must hear” I suspected this was going to be one of the ones I regretted not having heard of earlier, and sure enough… On Eyes Like Predatory Wealth the trio, working in three separate cities, set out to make their parts for the three tracks here (the first 10 minutes long, the second 20 minutes, the last 30 minutes) without hearing the others’ parts (although conversation, conceptualizing and a shared framework was established). You wouldn’t necessarily guess at that level of remove from the results; instead, it’s sometimes almost scarily cohesive.

Ian Mathers

Ashenspire — Hostile Architecture (Aural Music)

Hostile Architecture by Ashenspire

No excuse for my not tuning into this excellent record earlier. The debut LP from Glasgow-based Ashenspire had been blipping on and off my radar for any number of reasons: the subgenre identification with RABM, the collaborative presence of Otrebor from Botanist and the smart record title, for which the band offers “anti-homeless spikes” as an example of late capital’s utter contempt for the suffering people on its margins. The band is serious about that stuff. There are plenty of sharp intellectual interventions articulated by the record’s lyrics; I like these, from “The Law of Asbestos”: “Always three months to the gutter, never three months to the peak / Another day to grind your fingers for the simple right to eat / Always three months to the gutter, never three months to the crown / Another deep breath of asbestos in a godforsaken town.” Even more exciting is Ashenspire’s ability to create rollicking, hurtling metal intensities out of some decidedly highbrow instruments (saxophone, violin, prepared piano) and arrangements. Hostile Architecture bristles, slices and crushes much in the way of the brutal urban design elements named by its title. But the band also manages to imbue its songs with an inspiring leading edge. It’s a musical dialectic, enacting the incisive critique of the record’s ideas. Remarkable.

Jonathan Shaw

Bluetile Lounge — Lowercase / Half Cut (Hobbledehoy)

Lowercase by Bluetile Lounge

Though Numero Group has been the de facto resource in recent years for slowcore reissue campaigns thanks to its work repackaging Codeine, Duster and Rex for a new generation, the label was beaten at its own game (for once) in 2022 by Adelaide’s Tom Majerczak and his Hobbledehoy Records’ repressing of a band who were hardly written about even this second time around. It figures: Bluetile Lounge were always going to have an uphill battle coming out of Perth on Australia’s far western coast away from the more visible scenes of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Though they managed Sub Pop distribution for 1995’s Lowercase and Steve Shelley put out 1998’s Half Cut on his own Smells Like imprint after the quartet opened for Sonic Youth on an Australian leg of their 1996 tour, the balkanized enthusiasm remained just that and they broke up after Half Cut’s release. There followed the fallow years before the surprise of new demo “Last Men” in April 2021 and the “Easterly” single this past June as a presage to these two reissues, both of which reiterate what a mostly unaware indie-rock world was missing. Recording live with overdubs to wonderfully pensive effect, one listen to “The Weight (and the Sea)” or “Ltd” should seal the deal for anyone interested in slowcore’s less heralded corners. You don’t have an excuse to miss out twice.

Patrick Masterson

Eric Chenaux — Say Laura (Constellation)

Say Laura by Eric Chenaux

Eric Chenaux haunts the interstices between pop and jazz, minimalism and lush romance. An experimenter by nature, but an exceptionally accessible one, he threads wandering spectral melodies through bare pulses of bass and kudzu growths of wah wah’d guitar. The opener “Hello, How? And Hey” feels like a private reverie, nudging up to epiphany, then backing softly away. “Say Laura” builds electronics into its glancing, elliptical contours but that’s a framing device. Chenaux’s voice is almost too human, too vulnerable, too coolly cerebral. This music slips out of your grasp, but gently. It shifts gears—and keys—effortlessly, and smooths over disruptions in rhythm, so that it seems to flow in an organic way that erases all of its interior difficulties. “There They Were” balances between ease and complication, its warm drift of a vocal chorus all soulful pop, but knocked off kilter by an irregular scrawl of guitar. I’ve been putting this one off since early 2022, but there was nothing to be afraid of after all.

Jennifer Kelly

Morgana — Contemporaneità (Low Ambition Records)

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When Tuscan quartet Morgana released Contemporaneità in August, they made an immediate impression with a brand of cold wave influenced politically sophisticated post punk which on first listen sounds very much like Xmal Deutschland. After initially it filing away as well made but derivative, I found myself drawn back, and it’s become a favorite. The singer Bri proclaims loudly Debordian social critiques in Italian and French, Valeria enthusiastically bashes away at the drums, Ivan’s bass takes the melodic lead and guitarist Sola reels out lines straight from the McGeoch playbook. At 17 minutes, Morgana get in and out of songs with a minimum of fuss and a stylistic variety revealed with repeated listens. There are echoes of many of their influences but Morgana live by the words of “Provare Ancora” (Try Again): “Try fail/try again/try fail/fail better/Believe what we feel/act accordingly/persist, attack, build/perhaps win” A band to keep an ear out for and I’ll be fascinated to see where they go next.

Andrew Forell

The Orchids — Dreaming Kind (Skep Wax)

DREAMING KIND by The Orchids

“This boy is a mess,” The Orchids' soft-singing frontman James Hackett confesses on the single of the same name, a contender for 2022’s best pure pop song. From a lyrical standpoint at least, he certainly seems like one. In the first three songs alone on Dreaming Kind — the fourth album from the Sarah Records stalwarts since reuniting in the late aughts — Hackett swings between extremes: spitefully kissing someone off one minute, joyfully enamored with a lover the next, and then down on his knees begging for love. Musically, however, Dreaming Kind is about as even-keeled and elegant as indie pop gets. Elevated by longtime producer Ian Carmichael’s glistening touch, the band glides through the chorus of “This Boy Is a Mess” like a top-down sedan headed for the horizon. They slip into swooning, loungey electronica on “I Should Have Thought,” recalling Mark Eitzel circa The Invisible Man. And on “I Don’t Mean to Stare,” they float funkily along using voice sampling, programmed drums, even touches of vocoder. The dubbed-out dramatic pause on “Limitless #1 (Joy)” says it all: At this point, The Orchids could do this in their sleep.

Chris Liberato

Outliers — The Top Tent (Outlier Communications)

The Top Tent by Outliers

Outliers is the house band of the fledgling Outlier Communications label; both involve the husband-and-wife duo of Kevin Hainey and Sarah Tracy. Hainey’s roots reach deep into Toronto’s fecund and fetid noise-rock sub-underground: he was a founding member of Disguises and ran the Inyrdisk imprint, hand-making a daunting number of CD-Rs for 11 years before calling it quits in 2016. With this new venture, practicality tempers Hainey’s previously fierce DIY ethic. Most of the Outlier Communications releases are professionally duplicated. Sonically, Outliers situate themselves in an unlikely liminal zone, stretching between thick proto-industrial murk and buoyant Berlin School kosmische. Tracy and Hainey trace the formlessness of fluid matter with their sound-making gear, dappling their soundscapes with a naivete akin to that of R. Stevie Moore. The Top Tent is the most fully realized artifact in the Outliers canon, shaping the duo’s primordial ooze in fantastical ways. The pair are in symbiosis with their gear, coaxing weird and wonderful phantasms out of sheer electricity. Based on the arc that Tracy and Hainey have traced thus far, it’s exciting to imagine where they’ll take this project in 2023 and beyond.

Bryon Hayes

Zabelle Panosian — I Am Servant of Your Voice: March 1917-June 1918 (Canary)

I Am Servant of Your Voice: March 1917 - June 1918 by Zabelle Panosian

Zabelle Panosian first came to my ears in 2011, when I heard her performance of “Groung” on the compilation To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora (1916-1929). Accompanied solely by a piano and a ghostly backdrop of 78 rpm noise, her soprano voice concentrated generations of inherited grief and the individual experience of exile into a performance so sublime that you don’t need to know a word of Armenian to feel its pain. I Am Servant Of Your Voice: March 1917-June 1918 collects her discography, which comprises just 21 takes, onto one CD. An accompanying 80-page book puts a life to the voice. Panosian was born near Istanbul in 1891, and moved to the US as a teen to marry an Armenian-American photographer. She was never a big star of the stage, but she wasn’t obscure, either. She was a real draw as a coloratura opera singer performing at Armenian aid events during the 1910s and early 1920s, and she performed on both sides of the Atlantic into the 1930s. The book also discusses the career of her daughter, who represented herself as Spanish and sustained a career as a dancer and entertainer into the 1950s. It’s this very American tale of necessarily elastic identity, as well as Panosian’s music, that make I Am Servant Of Your Voice a real treasure.

Bill Meyer

Shovel Dance Collective— The Water is the Shovel of the Shore (Memorials of Distinction and Double Dare)

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I only learned about this right before the New Year and didn’t have a chance to listen until the first week of 2023. My immediate reaction: this music and the performances on the recording speaks to my soul and ancestry like few others. A collective of musicians from a variety of backgrounds joining together to sing English, Irish, Scottish ballads dating all the way back to the 1600s (and perhaps even earlier). Sometimes folk instruments, often of an esoteric variety, are used. Just as often the whole group sings medleys of ancient songs into the surf, accompanying gulls’ cries and the lapping of the waves.

Christian Carey

Suede — Autofiction (BMG)

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With their ninth album, Suede don't radically rewrite their sound, but they lean into the most powerful elements of it. Autofiction relies more on the band's post-punk tendency rather than their glam expressions, and with a rawer production to match, the band's reached a new high. The big, aggressive sound doesn't sound like a return to adolescence (despite a track titled “15 Again”), as the group focuses on mature subject matter. The album opens with “She Still Leads Me On,” a track about the continuing influence of singer Brett Anderson's late mother. The Fall-like “Personality Disorder” considers the fleeting nature of life. These topics might not sound fit for anthemic concert singalongs, but the record closes with “Turn off Your Brain and Yell,” a cut that pretty much suggests the group's approach to the album. With Autofiction, Suede move into a new era, maintaining their core sensibilities. The writing remains sharp and focused even as the band lets loose, combining for an album as strong as any they've released over their 30 years together.

Justin Cober-Lake

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