#melodic this influences that Can we talk about the relationship between the narrator’s story and The Magician and The Fool??

[reynirderolo]

I can’t find a single review of “Tarot” by Æther Realm that talks about how the songs themselves translate to the cards. I Do Not Care about musicianship, drums make brain go brr, I want to talk about how the lyrics are like the darkest possible interpretation of the Fool’s Journey and how “The Sun, The Moon, The Star” is like the climax of the story wrapping up and how “The Magician” and “The Fool” turn the album into a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy and how the narrator is my new blorbo as a result because I’m a sucker for boys in pursuit of their lost honor

[themousai]

Top 10 Albums Of The Decade: Jai Aronsen

Long Live  The Chariot

[2010]

If you’ve listened to them before, you know The Chariot for anguished feedback and droning riffs played almost backwards paired with howling screams in a thick southern accent. If you’ve seen them live before, you can skip the rest of this entry because you know how transcendentally chaotic it is, and that no words I put in a sentence will really explain the experience. A very unique, very noisy, very talented bunch. And in 2010 they released their best album. Long Live is a blizzard of metallic feedback and the screams of abused guitar strings. This album is like being attacked. 

The first track, ‘Evan Perks’ is one of the most immediately establishing demonstrations of a tone and sound you can imagine. It’s a real “get onboard or get off now” wall of sound that sort of beats you over the head, just stabbing slams which don’t follow a time signature. This is what Long Live sounds like. Even the more melodic southern style riffs toyed with are delivered with a grinding crunchy distortion and rumbling bass taking it past grunge and into sludge. The later tracks turn even darker with echoes and drawn out space while Josh Scogin’s always provoking lyrics temper them with poetry.  The album is always an emotional, confronting and beautiful thing caught in the jaws of a monster. The perfect example of this is possibly the best song The Chariot have ever written, ‘The City’. I first heard this song on a family car trip. I then listened to it on repeat for the next four hours, until my head hurt from the droning so much I physically had to stop. It’s almost confusing that such a chaotic band can produce something that builds so much tension, triumphant and cathartic with some of the greatest “whoa-oh-oh’s” used by a band ever. 

If you’ve ever wondered how a wall of sound can hit you in the heart, Long Live is a truly unique album by a band at the peak of their talents, aiming to punch you in the feels while it goes for your throat.

Proper  Into It Over It

[2011]

Emo is an odd thing. Being a byword for “emotional” has a lot of implications. Unbearable sadness is one. But it’s not the only one, and you must present the kaleidoscope of the human heart in all its variation. Usually while crying.

This album is a tricky one to define as “emo” given that it arrived during the early resurgence of mildly sad pop punk. Are we prepared to call “soft grunge” a thing? Is “gentle punk” too far? Regardless, Proper is a bouncy, catchy and easy listen delivered with the infectious hooks of pop punk and the emotional gravity of emo. Evan Weiss’s lyrics and vocal melodies run and run, with playful sentences and gorgeous imagery throughout.  

What sets his arrangement and execution apart from the slew of emo bands of the same era is the impeccably subtle technicality of it all. Like the best of the genre Proper is layered intricacies disguised as simple melodies, where even the most hummable leads and vocal runs are peppered with odd time signatures, stop-start riffs and cheeky metaphors in a way that never harms how cohesive the song is on whole. At all times, the drums, the guitars, the vocals, everyone is doing something impressive that, altogether, is harmonious and so catchy you forget how technically written it is. Hard to recommend a single song, but ‘Fortunate Friends’ is a true favourite of mine, and once learned to a followable degree is one of the most fun to sing along to at the top of one’s lungs. For a more even example of Into It. Over It.’s sound, ‘Midnight : Carrol Street’ is one of the most finely penned breakup songs ever recorded, lyrics puncturing complex emotional turmoil and boiling it down into simple, clear imagery with a cutting comprehensiveness to it.

For me, Proper is the best parts of the genre overall; catchy, deceptively technical, ever honest songs to be sung with a smile on your face and simultaneous tears in your eyes.

Wildlife La Dispute

[2011]

One of the reasons this list took so long to compose is that I knew it would involve La Dispute. Another reason, somewhat related is that I knew I’d have to try and put my emotional connection to their work into words. I know heaps of words, but none for how unique an experience they offer. There’s truly nothing like them. 

I’m aware that there are two main problems with my saying that. First, ninety percent of their fans became fans because of Tumblr so how much of a force for good can they possibly be. The other problem is the like-or-loathe quality of Jordan Dreyer’s vocal delivery. I can understand swinging either way on this, but objectively speaking he DOES sound like Will Ferrell crying in a phone box. That being said, they belong on this list because, objectively speaking, Jordan Dreyer is one of the most talented writers alive today. I mean that with no hint of exaggeration or hyperbole. He is not just a lyricist songwriter, nor a poet nor a storyteller. He is all of these things, and the band’s music reflects this depth of thought as justly as deserved. The album that made me fall in love was the gorgeous Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, an anguished fairy-tale of broken hearts and love lost. The album that I’m choosing to talk about instead is 2011’s Wildlife, where the band took the relationship between narrative storytelling and emotive composition entirely stratospheric, while Dreyer flexed his muscles further with lyrics that are ponderous and measured, shockingly confronting and vivid throughout.

A tangle of loosely connected and disparate stories framed loosely by the narration of a writer coming to terms with the voices in his nightmares, Wildlife flits back and forth between revelations of unfulfilled life to scenes of horrific grief and sadness, all the while extracting an emotional thread that links them all together under a shared experience of life’s myriad cruelties and how people endure them. An old man is attacked and wounded by his mentally ill son, too afraid to recognise his own father. A teacher tells her class about a boy struggling and eventually succumbing to cancer. The fleeing perpetrator of a drive-by shooting holes up on the run and wonders if suicide is his only hope at redemption. These are specific, characterised sufferings explored with such a clarity of emotion that it’s hard to put into these sentences. 

Not a word of a lie, I still to this day cannot listen to ‘King Park’ without my body involuntarily going into a mild panic attack. Between the pain in Dreyer’s voice and the perfect pacing of the instrumentation, it’s one of the most emotionally tense and heart wrenching pieces of music in existence.  A warning; if you haven’t heard it, try it I guess. But just be prepared not to be able to make direct eye contact with people for a bit. If you for some reason would rather not feel like your heart has been kicked in the teeth, I recommend tracks like ‘The Most Beautiful Bitter Fruit’, which perfectly demonstrates the energetic, measured grooves and seizing delivery La Dispute’s reputation is built on. ‘Harder Harmonies’ or ‘Edit Your Hometown’ similarly display the post-hardcore roots tinged with a more post-emo sensibility, all the while with Dreyer’s incredible imagery.

If you ask me in person to tell you every amazing thing that La Dispute have ever done, you may as well move in with me because the conversation is going to take a while. I’m fully aware of how many insufferable hipster bands with tambourines and weeping singers they’ve spawned. But La Dispute is an emotional experience. Their music teaches you about yourself by making you recognise it in other people. Jordan Dreyer will be able to say in one sentence what I could not unpack the weight of in a thousand. As a work of art Wildlife is honest, emotional, horrifically confronting and relentlessly hopeful.

I cannot promise that it will make you feel happy, but it will make you feel.

It will force you to feel.

Wrongdoers Norma Jean

[2013]

If you’re an old fan, Norma Jean are an old band who changed up the metalcore scene with their first album and then could only sustain life by regular human sacrifice, leading to a constantly shifting roster of members. If you’re a new fan, Norma Jean are a band of what I like to call “tone demons”, with the guitars that sound like Satan sighing in frustration and the singer with the crazy powerful voice. They’ve been influencers on the sound pushing metalcore in more chaotic directions while maintaining balanced clean vocals and soaring melodies, gradually becoming darker and darker until their bass strings rattle your back teeth.

As a result, their albums are regularly met with high praise, nectar for audiophiles and noise junkies. But I think that their best album was released in 2013, and it was called Wrongdoers and it was just the best thing ever. 

Just listen to the first track. ‘Hiveminds’ is a doomy, funky boneshaking stomp replete with bluesy riffs delivered with a crunching tone. The chaos is still there on some faster songs demonstrating the grunt behind Brandon’s voice and exactly how far they can bend their strings. It’s pretty far. The title track is another bouncy mid paced jam, soaring and brooding all at once like the sludgiest grunge band to ever write a breakdown. The album closer ‘Sun Dies, Blood Moon’ is one of the most spectacular final flourishes in heavy music, emotionally rich and aurally assaulting, building in tension with orchestral restraint and gentility before the albums slams closed like the actual gates of actual Hell. The tone of this album is the perfect blend of Norma Jean’s melody and staggering heaviness, and while their two more recent albums have been met with pretty unanimous acclaim I think that this is their finest work. However you grade the band’s back catalogue, this is what I choose as Norma Jean’s most effective strike at achieving a mood. 

This is one moody assed album. The riffs are at their most head-nod-inducing, the tone is less unstably thick and bellowing but more groovy and hazy. 

When people said the Blues was music that came from the Devil, these riffs are what they were most afraid of.

Dead Air Aminals

[2014]

One reason I jumped at this list was the opportunity to shout out the amazing albums that nobody has heard of. I jump at any opportunity to ram this album into people’s ears, because it’s a masterpiece buried so deep in bigger names that it’s gone largely unappreciated since it came out. I first discovered Aminals [coincidentally my favourite band name ever] once they’d broken up in 2010. I then sat on their back catalog of sporadic EP’s until 2014, when they suddenly announced they’d been back together and writing an album and it was coming out in two days. Dead Air, the album they released is a beautiful ball of chaotic evil. If The Joker had a hardcore band, this would be it. 

The band occupies the perfect Venn diagram of Every Time I Die and The Dillinger Escape Plan, with technical, almost grindcore blastbeats and breakdowns tempered with an unhinged punk rock feeling to it. It’s insanely technical and unsettlingly dark, yet always tongue-in-cheek and strangely manic. It lends the composition a completely mathy chaos meaning the ebbs and flows of the album as a whole are a little thrilling. The vocals by Matthew Cugini are a high pitched wailing cry that marks a midpoint between anguished howls and maniacal laughter, keeping them magnetically chaotic and characterful across the board, always delivered with phenomenal energy. Every track is a bundle of anarchic energy, prime examples being ‘Rope’ and ‘Dirty Habits’. For a more blistering example of the album’s mathcore chops, ‘War Widows’ is a spectacular hailstorm of twangs and chugs and fury.

Another thing which absolutely must be mentioned about Dead Air is that the band recorded, mixed and mastered the entire thing themselves. A bunch of dudes in a Massachusetts bedroom brought this much sound out of their instruments and made it perfect. You’ve heard bands that produce their own stuff. I’m literally in one. They almost universally do not sound like this. This is genuinely one of the best sounding independent records I’ve heard in alternative music. 

To anyone with a soft spot for the “chaotic punk rock by way of mathcore” thing, I say unto ye: if you like the flippant maniac music of Dillinger and The Number Twelve Looks Like You, if you’re getting into the new wave of sassy scene revival of SeeYouSpaceCowboy, if darker mathcore like Converge or Botch seems too serious and unsmiling for you, if you just want thirteen tracks of purely brooding anarchic essence, Dead Air is something to be treasured.

I mean, the band is called AMINALS.

How can I possibly be wrong on this.

From Parts Unknown Every Time I Die

[2014]

Every Time I Die are one of the best metalcore bands in the world. There, I said it. All their albums are fun, raucous, stomping moshing messes and they deserve the devoted fanbase they boast. Keith Buckley is one of the best vocalists in the game, with a banshee scream and a gravelly growl and some of the best lyrics in music. Some of Keith Buckley’s songs read like sonnets. All of Every Time I Die’s songs sound like barfights.

If you want the best representation, their latest album Low Teens will take you through the band’s repertoire. It’s a phenomenal piece of work, always weird and fun and beautiful. It’s probably their objectively best album, walking the tightrope between chaotic hardcore and mainstream rock with flawless execution. The album I want to talk about instead is my favourite of theirs, the darkest and most snarling of the catalogue: 2014’s From Parts Unknown.

Recorded with Kurt Ballou of Converge, this album is Every Time I Die at their most ferocious. Case in point, the first line of the album is “blow your fucking brains out”. The album runs at a relentless pace, with the groove and catchiness of a well-established ETID signature with the crushing heaviness and tone that Ballou brings out of every band he records. While Keith Buckley reached the peak of his lyrical mastery with Low Teens two years later, From Parts Unknown still sees him ducking and dodging through extended metaphors and wild, profound reflections with a joking slurring cadence and a smile you can hear. Every twang and chug and slide of every riff is brimming with roguish charm, over the top of drums blasted with incredible speed and the signature filthy rumbling drone thanks to Ballou, producer of bands like Code Orange, Trap Them and Nails. The unyielding energy of From Parts Unknown is perfectly demonstrated mid album with the track ‘If There is Room to Move, Things Move’. While the entire album is consistently dark and manically paced, this in particular sticks out as an especially frenzied moment leaping from breakneck pace to punishing breakdown with no moment to catch a breath. All the while Buckley lyrically muses on the nature of purpose, how we create meaning ourselves and the only way to live a meaningless life is to spend it pursuing some unreachable drive instead of creating your own. “Love it as it is, whatever the fuck this is. Or destroy and start again. All we are is in your head”.

From Parts Unknown may not be Every Time I Die’s most commercial work. However the pure aggression and frenzy of delivery makes it my favourite of theirs. It may not have the variation or equal lyrical prowess of Low Teens, but that is far from saying it disappoints in either area. 

For pure fun ferocity, From Parts Unknown is a food fight with a grizzly bear.

Time In Place Artifex Pereo

[2014]

All the albums on this list are close to my heart. But if one has to be my favourite, it’s this one. I’m not going to be able to say everything I want to about it, but this is the album I will take into the bunker as the bombs drop. It’s the one I’ll take with me on the escape shuttles leaving Earth when the atmosphere turns to nothing. It is as close to perfect as I could ask a record to be. If I compare the talent on display, how popular they deserve to be because of it and how popular they actually are, Artifex Pereo square up as one of the most underrated bands on the planet. If you listen to one album off this list, Time In Place should be it.

Written in the vein of post-hardcore-alt-rock established by bands like Circa Survive and Envy On The Coast, Time In Place is a staggeringly rich, luscious and vibrant piece of art from start to finish. No one in this band is lagging behind. Every instrument is constantly building the melody with deceptively intricate contributions until the entire song feels like a living thing. This album is an artwork, arranged in movements, rises and falls and clashes and clamours. For the synesthetics among you this album is a kaleidoscope of summer and autumn leaves in the breeze. It’s beams of light breaking through a forest canopy. There’s a magical gentility to every note, even the heavy ones. 

A special word has to be said about singer Lucas Worley, who displays one of the most deeply textured and impressive voices I have ever heard. The amount of control and range delivered with such a consistent emotion is staggering, paired with lyrics that read coherently and movingly to make clear, concise points with the emotive hit like a gently weeping freight train. Just listen to the opening track, ‘No Stranger to Worry’. If you’re not sold on Time In Place by about halfway then this band might not be for you. But you should stick with it anyway and listen to the whole song, then the whole album that follows, because you’re wrong. And you’ll finish the album and think “damn, Jai was right, that was incredible. I should apologise to him for questioning. And to Artifex Pereo for my dumb, dumb opinion.”

There’s a bunch of albums on this list that you should listen to, but listen to this one first. Time In Place is genuinely the best album of the last decade. 

It changed me as a person. 

It’s a warm blanket of music. Snuggle it. 

Taxonomy Oranges

[2015]

Another gap on this list I should address for anyone who knows me is the distinct lack of Dance Gavin Dance. I kinda force my public appreciation for them on those around me, as terrifying a sentence as that is. They’re not on the list because picking an album of theirs as “best” would be provoking a horde of emos who have no inhibitions when it comes to cutting things. So I’m opting for the most singularly stunning gem of the Swancore movement, Las Vegas post-hardcore nutjobs Oranges.

This band is post-hardcore written like jazz. It’s entire movements of never repeating parts and winding, weaving melodies that carry on and on and never rest. This band does not write choruses or verses, they write rainstorms of notes and blizzards of chords. Their only album Taxonomy was in my ears for a full month before I definitively decided I actually liked it. It’s Dance Gavin Dance and Emarosa and crossed with the upbeat carefree math of Chon. The vocal melodies are so long and unpredictable they’re near impossible to follow, but learning them carries such a sense of satisfaction to sing along with like a genuine accomplishment. Vocalist Parker Hunt’s voice is insanely flexible, calling to mind the question of exactly how one would go about writing vocal melodies this intense and varied. Instrumentally the band strikes a balance between an early Chon with a more post-hardcore attitude to chugs and screaming. It’s impossible to pick a single song to recommend because they’re all just so damn full of stuff. 

Make no mistake; this is not an easy album to listen to. It chops and changes and starts and stops and every time you hear a bit you like it’s over just as it registers. You have to pay attention to it, ride the weird wave with all the bumps and it’ll take you somewhere incredible. Every flittering melody is a joy that comes and goes almost immediately and begs another listen, never hinting at where the song is going. This kind of teasing continues right up until the literal last second of the album. Trust me, the final five seconds of Taxonomy is absolutely flawless.  

The month I spent trying to decide whether I even liked this band was well invested. Oranges have produced one of the most interesting, diverse and well executed albums in the entire umbrella of post-hard-metal-emo-whatever-you-want-to-core-it. If you’re a sucker for vocal gymnastics and jazzy mathy instrumentation your mind will melt. 

Remember the name. Oranges. 

Awful Fruit Burst flavour, incredible band.

Malibu Anderson .Paak

[2016]

It’s time to plug that hip hop gap on the list. Whatever you think about the current state of the genre and its last decade, it’s undeniably changed a whole bunch. Naturally, picking one example to represent the whole genre is impossible, so I’m going to opt for one gem of many. Anderson .Paak is exploding in popularity over the past few years, following a few albums and in my opinion the best of all Tiny Desk Concerts. The reason I think Malibu belongs on a list like this is because it represents my favourite of the many shifts hip hop has taken in recent years, the slight resurgence of funk arrangements, soul vocals, blues instrumentation, the stuff that never really went away but hasn’t had a championing album that better invokes that musical spirit. Listen to it when you’re literally sitting on the dock of the bay watching the tide roll away. It just makes sense.

Paak demonstrates an incredible versatility throughout. He delivers raps with a laconic smiling tone that compliments how clever and cutting his words are, never aggressive but phenomenally confident. A rapper’s voice is their most unique selling point, and Paak’s is so magnetically swaggering you can’t help but let every hit land. He compliments this with an equally impressive singing voice, tone emulating Marvin Gaye and Parliament Funkadelic to create the most ideal blending of hip hop and R&B in years. The genres have always mixed well but Malibu feels like the bullseye previous attempts were aiming for. ‘Come Down’ wouldn’t be out of place on a Kanye West album. ‘Am I Wrong’ is a disco floor filler. ‘Room In Here’ is undeniable top tier baby-making-music. ‘Put Me Thru’ sounds like it’s straight off Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It’s an incredibly diverse platter sampling the best of hip hop’s foundational influences and seamlessly integrating them with a specific West coast tone established in hip hop decades later. Possibly the best song Paak has ever written is ‘Heart Don’t Stand a Chance’, which really demonstrates his entire repertoire. He’s flexing, and he’s ripped. The rhymes are clever and delivered in flurries, the vocal melodies are soothing but mournful, instruments gently integrated to invoke a bluesy heartache and a charming smile.

Who’s the biggest gamechanger  of hip hop’s last decade? Kendrick? Cole? Someone with “Lil” in their name? Its’ probably not Anderson Paak. He’s using tools made before he was born, not to change things up but to demonstrate how things should be done. If I have to pick a gem of the genre then this remains that gem.

It’s a true hazy sunset of an album, every song is bright orange and pale pink and deep red.

Tide’s rolling away. Wasting time.

COUNTERPARTS – YOU’RE NOT YOU ANYMORE

[2017]

I’m not sure how common the knowledge is that I’m in a band called Take Hold and the first thing people know about us is that we want to sound like Counterparts. If you weren’t aware, I am, and we do. I’ve been a fan of this band since their first of six albums and the direction in which they’ve steered the melodic hardcore genre is a direction I love. The album they released this year, Nothing Left to Love was highly praised, but I’m opting for the most distilled essential Counterparts album. In 2017 the band released my favourite of their efforts, You’re Not You Anymore.

Despite the title reminding me of that Snickers You’re Not You When You’re Hungry ad, this album is peak zero time wasted Counterparts bread-and-butter, arranged and delivered with a mastery honed over the four previous releases. As much as I love this band they struggle to keep my attention for entire albums, and usually have a few songs which feel a little filler-ish. Then they released this and my mind was changed. Every track [bar the emo ambient thirty second intro] is the recognisable signature sound Counterparts have stamped and sold for years, but far more consistently balanced.

The reason I put this album on the list is because Counterparts are one of my favourite bands and if someone wants to know what they sound like, I show them this. If someone you know needs to hear this band, you show them ‘No Servant of Mine’, ‘Rope’ and the title track. Between the three alone you have a perfect sampler of the type of band Counterparts have become over time. Those tracks in between are more examples of a solid thread of tone throughout the entire piece, with no song feeling out of place or oddly included. Brandon Murphy’s vocals have always been well delivered, and he’s arguably at his most impressive now. Not You is written at the peak of his lyrical prowess, finding an excellent balance between gorgeously rich metaphors without sacrificing a massively satisfying rhythm to his cadences. Basically the words are pretty and the timing is perfect. This is the sound which they continued on Nothing Left to Love earlier in 2019, but I choose Not You over it because of its high energy refusal to indulge. This is the essential Counterparts album, solidly representing all their other releases, resulting in a wonderfully unpredictable record made with familiar parts. The breakdowns are always satisfyingly rhythmic and leads sweepingly anthemic and brooding. The lyrics are among the most poetic on the subject of suicide I’ve read in many years. 

This is Counterparts at the peak of their powers. 

And that’s my ten. Please don’t be mad.

Listen to our decade wrapped over on Spotify!

Written by Jai Aronsen / Take Hold

[more decade round ups here]