(Clockwise from top left) Turnover - 'Peripheral Vision'; No Devotion - 'Permanence'; Coheed & Cambria - 'The Color Before The Sun'; *sighs* Justin Bieber - 'Purpose'; Employed To Serve - 'Greyer Than You Remember'; Deafheaven - 'New Bermuda'
January. What a shit month. There's a five-week wait for payday because someone thought it'd be a good idea to pay you two days before Christmas after you'd finished your shopping, the only chocolates left in the Quality Street tin are the toffee pennies, and worst of all, there's barely any new music for you to spunk your HMV vouchers on. It's for that last reason (and maybe for the other two) that the first two to three weeks of 2016 are now always reserved for me to check back on some of the albums that I regretfully missed over the past 12 months.
2015 was a particularly rubbish year for me in terms of keeping up with new records, thanks to my dissertation, shift work in a hotel and plenty of life stuff keeping my mind occupied, and while finalising my top 10 records for the year was a toughie, I decided that Baroness, The Wonder Years, Neck Deep, Only Rivals, Milk Teeth, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, Press to MECO, Creeper, Enter Shikari and, of course, Kendrick Lamar had made the best records of 2015.
All of the above's records are still blowing my mind, and I heartily encourage you to check them all out, but in hindsight, there are a few bands who may have just made the final cut were it not for my prior ignorance, and it is those bands that we look at now as I re-introduce a favourite feature from the old blog: The RR Playlist...
First on the list is Turnstile, a band who I initially perceived as part of the next generation of pop-punk, after seeing their name on tour posters alongside New Found Glory and The Story So Far. That was before I pressed play on their debut album, Nonstop Feeling, and BAM! - 'Gravity' swaggers in, and instead I was met with stomping hardcore, old-school metal riffs and snotty nu-metal attitude. It's straight-laced, ballsy and simple, but with roots planted in a wide range of influences, from early Metallica to Pennywise to Rage Against The Machine.
If you think that's an audacious start to the playlist, then Employed To Serve are going to rip your ears clean off your face. From a burgeoning UK hardcore scene comes Greyer Than You Remember, one of the most unrelenting records of the last few years, but at the same time, it's well thought out and never overzealous. The title track is the sound of Employed To Serve at their most furious, led by guttural vocals and many, many beatdowns which are far less one-dimensional than the chug-chug-squeal-chug caricature of mainstream metalcore.
Although it didn't reach me until the very end of 2015, Turnover's Peripheral Vision quickly became one of my favourite albums of the previous year. On the surface, there's dreamy, slow-burning jams that you can get lost in for days on end, none more heart-warming than 'Humming' ("Show me why you're always smiling / Laugh again and make me fall in love"). Dig a little deeper into its emo sensitivities, and you'll hear the transformation of a band whose emotive yet insignificant post-hardcore efforts beforehand are gloriously a thing of the past.
One of the few other bands who had me at 'dreamy' with their hazy-days-at-the-beach sound are Best Coast, whom I fell in love with seconds into hearing their debut, Crazy For You, in a (**MASSIVE HIPSTER CLICHÉ ALERT**) Brighton record shop circa 2010 (don't say I didn't warn you). The next couple of releases didn't have me quite so weak at the knees, and I don't think I was alone in that, but California Nights is a gorgeous reunion with their surf-pop loveliness. 'Feeling Ok' may have more a polished sheen to it than the reverberate twangs and drawls that had me smitten in the first place, but its ambling chorus doesn't fill me with any less joy than on Crazy For You.
Not name-dropping here, but one of my favourite moments of 2015 was getting to interview Frank Iero for my university newspaper, The Galleon. One of the things that really stuck out from that interview was how he, formerly the guitarist of one of the most theatrically brilliant rock bands of our era, really connected with the "human element" in music, whether it's the sound of fingers sliding along a guitar neck between chords or a vocal note not being perfectly hit.
It's that same charming sentiment that sprung to mind when I first heard Tellison, a band who had crossed my ears but never my ears until I recently came across their latest record, Hope Fading Nightly. There aren't so many imperfections here, but even on a polished alt-rock record, Tellison appear to be fully aware of their limitations as humans, and tracks like 'Wrecker' resonate with a humane simplicity, but with plenty of punk rock bite all the same.
Desaparecidos are another band who I feel slightly ashamed to have not checked out until their long-awaited comeback with Payola, but unlike Tellison, their frantic alt-rock is driven by buzzing synth lines and futuristic sensibilities not too dissimilar from early Bloc Party. 'City On The Hill' is a superb example of the socially-minded, angsty garage rock that composes the majority of Payola; it just so happens to have one of the most irresistible sing-along choruses of the year just passed.
No Devotion's Permanence deserves not only to be cherished as one of the most tenacious comebacks in recorded history, but also to be admired in its own right. The influence from new wave's gloomier reaches (Depeche Mode, New Order, etc.) is outstanding, but it's the euphoric choruses that really leads Permanence to its heart-stopping peaks. Not merely brushing off their traumatic pasts so as much as they are embracing the promise of a brighter future, '10,000 Summers' is the sound of a band falling in love with playing music again.
While we're on the subject of euphoric choruses, let's talk about The Color Before The Sun, AKA the album which has sparked my love for Coheed & Cambria. Shaking off any signs of conceptual pretentiousness, it is arguably their most accessible work to date, and the sheer scale of tracks like 'Atlas' is simply stratospheric. Proving themselves as bona fide musicians has never been an issue for Coheed, but the soaring hooks, proggy intelligence and pop barminess of The Color Before The Sun might finally elevate them to the upper echelons of contemporary rock.
Not name-dropping here, but one of my favourite moments of 2015 was getting to interview Frank Iero for my university newspaper, The Galleon. One of the things that really stuck out from that interview was how he, formerly the guitarist of one of the most theatrically brilliant rock bands of our era, really connected with the "human element" in music, whether it's the sound of fingers sliding along a guitar neck between chords or a vocal note not being perfectly hit.
It's that same charming sentiment that sprung to mind when I first heard Tellison, a band who had crossed my ears but never my ears until I recently came across their latest record, Hope Fading Nightly. There aren't so many imperfections here, but even on a polished alt-rock record, Tellison appear to be fully aware of their limitations as humans, and tracks like 'Wrecker' resonate with a humane simplicity, but with plenty of punk rock bite all the same.
(L-R) Tellison - 'Hope Fading Nightly'; Best Coast - 'California Nights'; Desaparecidos - 'Payola'; Turnstile - 'Nonstop Feeling'
Desaparecidos are another band who I feel slightly ashamed to have not checked out until their long-awaited comeback with Payola, but unlike Tellison, their frantic alt-rock is driven by buzzing synth lines and futuristic sensibilities not too dissimilar from early Bloc Party. 'City On The Hill' is a superb example of the socially-minded, angsty garage rock that composes the majority of Payola; it just so happens to have one of the most irresistible sing-along choruses of the year just passed.
No Devotion's Permanence deserves not only to be cherished as one of the most tenacious comebacks in recorded history, but also to be admired in its own right. The influence from new wave's gloomier reaches (Depeche Mode, New Order, etc.) is outstanding, but it's the euphoric choruses that really leads Permanence to its heart-stopping peaks. Not merely brushing off their traumatic pasts so as much as they are embracing the promise of a brighter future, '10,000 Summers' is the sound of a band falling in love with playing music again.
While we're on the subject of euphoric choruses, let's talk about The Color Before The Sun, AKA the album which has sparked my love for Coheed & Cambria. Shaking off any signs of conceptual pretentiousness, it is arguably their most accessible work to date, and the sheer scale of tracks like 'Atlas' is simply stratospheric. Proving themselves as bona fide musicians has never been an issue for Coheed, but the soaring hooks, proggy intelligence and pop barminess of The Color Before The Sun might finally elevate them to the upper echelons of contemporary rock.
*Takes deep breath before discussing the next artist* I'm expecting a lot of flak for even mentioning the next artist on this blog, let alone including one of his tracks on the first RR Playlist since returning... Before I start, however, allow me to throw in my two cents about Justin Bieber: If there is one single person on this planet who best symbolises the neutered nature of contemporary pop music, and one person most likely me off on a Henry Rollins-esque rant ("WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED, YOU GUYS? WHERE'S THE BALLS? ARE THESE PEOPLE BORN WITHOUT TESTOSTERONE?"), it is Justin Bieber. As far as I'm concerned, that ignorant, drip-fed, pampered, insensitive, scummy little worm and everything that he stands for can get in the bin.
I feel like I managed to restrain myself from spiralling into a rage fairly well, considering the fact that the only thing about music and its surrounding culture that I probably hate more than Bieber is small-mindedness. With that in mind, I was recommended his latest record, Purpose, and found myself pleasantly surprised.
Especially on the first two tracks, 'Mark My Words' and 'I'll Show You', there is clearly plenty of influence from the neo-soul scene which I've been a sucker for over the last few years (see: The Weeknd's House Of Balloons, Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE and - dare I say it - The Reverend Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience). In a fashion not dissimilar from Timbaland at his commercial peak, the utilisation of sounds is broad and often impressive.
Anyone who remains apprehensive, take note: Purpose is not a pop record. It would be a tad generous of me to say that I like it, and perhaps even a bit hypocritical, but it is far beyond the mollycoddled shite of 'Baby' and 'Boyfriend'. We shouldn't be so naïve to think that Bieber is anything more than an arrogant fuckboy, and with that in mind, the star performers in Purpose are the producers, of which there are obviously many (I counted 19, according to Wikipedia). Well done guys, you've actually made me appreciate a Justin Bieber record.
I feel like I spoke about that last one more than necessary, and obviously more than any of the other entries, so let's finish Volume I of The RR Playlist in a realm which could not be more different: black metal, or more specifically 'Blackgaze', a black metal/post-rock/shoegaze amalgam of a genre ushered in by the likes of Deafheaven. I'll admit, with the exception of Alcest's 2014 album Shelter and occasionally hearing Wolves In The Throne Room on Hassle Records' office stereo, my experience with black metal is severely limited. I can picture elitist black metal fans smirking at the aforementioned artists, but Deafheaven's latest album, New Bermuda, is so rich in melody and progression, full of soaring guitars and ambient passages that reach their peak on 'Baby Blue'. It's clearly far from Gorgoroth, but New Bermuda is the perfect gateway album for anyone wanting to broaden their horizons into black metal, having found a beautiful balance between crushing brutality and ethereal beauty.
In the hope that I've redeemed myself by putting Deafheaven at the end, that bring the 'first' edition of The RR Playlist to its epic conclusion. Because I'm extra lovely, I've set up a Spotify page for Randon's Reviews (don't get too excited, it looks pretty shite thanks to Spotify tying itself to Facebook's hip) so you can listen to Volume I of the all-new RR Playlist on there. Be sure to subscribe to the RR Spotify for future RR Playlists - believe me, there will be plenty of those to come...
See you next time, and please don't forget: I still fucking hate Justin Bieber.
Danny
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