Listening Trends for August 2022

Prologue⌗

In a time, when dinosaurs walked the earth… A young man, known simply as Grumpy, stumbles across something in his home town called a “record store”. In it, many large flat packages are displayed, colourful pictures adorning the front facing card. Enticed by the imagery and the strange sounds coming from boxes mounted to the walls, Grumpy saves his money and begins buying these round black discs, often produced by new and upcoming groups of bards, some local, some from over the waves.

Years later, Grumpy leaves his home to travel overseas. Taking with him just a bag of clothes and computer science textbooks¹, his music is left behind, cared for by his family. Many years pass…

August 2022⌗

So, after many epochs of living overseas, I finally got a lot of my things sent from $HOME to $CWD. Amongst a mötley crüe of old action figures, university assignment papers, and some truly embarrassing photos, I was surprised to find several of the old vinyl albums I bought when I was younger. Needless to say, these were immediately thrown onto the turntable to make up a portion of August’s listening…

Shihad - Devolve⌗

Shihad! Local heroes from my home city, proving that we were capable of producing great music from a small country. Devolve was their debut EP, a slickly produced thrash recording that bore little resemblance to what they went on to produce. It’s still a great release today, and the cover of Sabbath’s The Wizard gets the toes tapping to round it all off.

Pseudo Echo - Funky Town⌗

OK, let’s file this one under T for Things You Didn’t See Coming. Funky Town was number one Down Under for a terrifyingly long time, and although they didn’t write it, Pseudo Echo stamped enough funky guitar layering over it to make a pretty good claim to it. The rest of the album is also ridiculously catchy. Probably hasn’t aged as well as I’d have liked, so I’m probably enjoying this more for the blast from the past. Still, worth a spin for something a bit different.

Gutvoid - Astral Bestiary⌗

Back to modern times, and more metallic fare. Astral Bestiary is a heavy slab of atmospheric Lovecraftian death, with some surprising melodic moments popping out from time to time. Extremely atmospheric, and re-listening to this makes me very excited for their forthcoming release (Durance of Lightless Horizons).

Candlemass - Tales of Creation⌗

The album that got me into Candlemass, Tales of Creation is a fantastic doom album from start to finish. Bar the slightly odd speed-metal detour of Into the Unfathomed Tower (which, BTW, I fucking love), the Sabbath riffage flows freely, with Messiah’s voice soaring over it all. IMO, they’ve never been better than this, although for my money, King of the Grey Islands comes pretty close.

Shylmagoghnar - Transience⌗

I am unsure how I missed this. A Grumpy Metal Friend has been telling me forever to listen to this, and I finally got around to it. My thoughts upon listening were “Bugger me, this is amazing!” and “How the hell did I not listen to this earlier?”. So many great influences, plenty of hints of (earlier) Dimmu mixed in with some phenomenal melodic black metal guitaring. The listening time absolutely flies by, making it easy to just spin again and bang your head. If you like your second wave of black metal, this one is served particularly cold.