Used to be January was a bit of a dumping ground for music; smaller bands and releases living in the shadow of everyone’s year end lists and folks checking out all the stuff they may have missed. So I wasn’t expecting much, thinking I would just nestle down with some cozy 70s prog and 80s metal, hibernating until the “good stuff” starting poking out. Welp, that’s already started to happen, so we’re going to keep this trend of what’s been coming in the house and I’ve been listening to for the last week, and we’re kicking it off with an album I’ve fallen hard for, a surefire bet for my own end of year list. Or albums, I should say, because wouldn’t you know it? Yesterday Ty Segall had to go and release his third album in one 12-month cycle…

• Century – “Sorceress”
• Freckle – “Paranoid”
• Elton John – “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy”
• Painted Doll – “Together Alone”
• Shooting Guns – “French Safe”
• Grandmaster – “Castle Door”

I grabbed the promo for Sign of the Storm by Century on a whim, needing some filler for Nine Circles’s end of month round-up. I was not expecting early Iron Maiden worship handled expertly by a duo out of Sweden who just nail everything I love about the venerable UK institution. I picked the closing instrumental because, as the kids say, it whips…What can I say about Freckle besides the fact it hit me from nowhere, a quick note from Ty Segall on Instagram saying he had a new album coming out that was a collaboration with Corey Madden of the band Color Green. If you like Ty Segall, you’ll like this. If you don’t, it probably won’t change your mind, but I love its soft, easy going acoustic indie rock…Elton John, on the other hand, is on the complete other side of the spectrum. I think the man – especially in his 70s heyday – was just as progressive as many prog bands, taking his torch singer-songwriting flamboyance to incredible heights and the opening title track from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy is one of his best…

Until very recently I only knew Dave Hill as a comedian, that guy on Instagram who had hilarious shorts (Reels? I have no idea) where he’d start with “hey, it’s Dave from before” and then ramble about soup or something that always made me laugh. I knew he played guitar, was good, and loved metal. What I didn’t know was Hill got a band together with Chris Reifert from Autopsy called Painted Doll….and it’s unbelievably fun and catchy psychedelic rock without a hint of metal. So fun…I’m a shut-in grouch who hates making friends, but the friends I have are friends with very cool musicians and bands, so when one of those friends turned me onto Saskatoon’s Shooting Guns I was immediately hooked. Sadly defunct, I remembered they did a live score for Nosferatu and after listening to that along with Murnau’s 1922 classic I went on a tear of their discography…I talked about Grandmaster, the slinky funk nonet out of Austin making my best of 2024 list. Well, the vinyl arrived and I’ve been playing the song “Castle Door” on repeat forever, so now you can hear its marriage of Zappa solos and Steely Dan chords, too.

• The Lurkers – “Pills (BBC Radio Sessions)”
• Godzillionaire – “Drowning All Night”
• Mastodon – Teardrinker”
• Underoath – “Breathing In A New Mentality”
• Van Der Graaf Generator – “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers”

We don’t talk about The Lurkers and their incredible album Fulham Fallout enough when we talk about the great UK punk scene. This week a short EP of BBC sessions was released, and it brought me back to that debut, reminding me – hard as it is to say – Bono was right: sometimes you just need three chords and the truth…Another recent discovery rummaging through the 9C promo pile was Godzillionaire, a dark and murky rock band featuring Mark Hennessey from Paw on vocals. This one is growing on me a lot, so maybe I found three albums for end of year…Speaking of end of year, rumor has it Mastodon will release their new album late this year. Their last one, Hushed and Grim, was my #1 album of 2021, and I needed some cathartic singing this week, and “Tearadrinker” hits me hard in the feels every time it gets to that chorus…

There was a period of time around 2005-2009 where I was just getting back into extreme music in a deep way, and I kept coming across Christian metalcore bands – they seemed to propagate like flies on shit. Norma Jean, Symphony in Peril…and Underoath who seemed to be the biggest at the time. I grabbed a few CDs and tried, and never was able to get through them. I still can’t, but there are moments that work, like this opening track from 2008’s Lost In The Sound of Separation…Finally, I mentioned that the plan was to just bury my body under a thick duvet of prog rock, and I decided that I needed to explore Van Der Graaf Generator, a band many praise and I could never quite parse. I’m getting there, and can now readily admit Pawn Hearts is a great album, anchored by this massive 23-minute prog epic.

Be safe, be good to each other. See you next week.