The first true full length from Japan’s Asunojokei (明日の叙景) translates to Awakening, and it’s a marvel of a record, taking blackgaze, prog, and hardcore elements and injecting it with a kitchen sink approach that is anything but disorderly to create a vibrantly alive album that made my Honorable Mention list last year, but in reality should have been in the overall list. Continue reading “Asunojokei: Awakening (2018)”
It’s probably not a shocking revelation that as I’ve been doing this project I’ve also been buying music. Since it’s still in its infancy, the chances of picking up an album that would have already been reviewed is small. But it does and did happen, so I wanted to take the time to spend a few words on two recent purchases: Highway to Hell from AC/DC and the debut full-length from Alcest, Souvenirs d’un autre monde. Over the short course of writing this, it turned into something else. Continue reading “AC/DC, Alcest, and Music That Hurts”
With Kodama, it feels like Alcest finally merged genre they were influenced by into one fully homogenized style, and to be honest I’m not 100% certain I love it. Which is not to say Kodama isn’t a very good album or that I don’t enjoy it; it is and I do. But there was something so pure about the way the earlier albums would juxtapose black metal, post rock, shoegaze and pop into these amorphous pieces that would sometimes touch and overlap, only to pull away again that I loved; in a way it reflected my own fractured way of looking at the world. Continue reading “Alcest: Kodama (2016)”
Considering how much I love music, the memories I can remember around the first time I heard something are few and far between. Maybe it’s age, my poor addled brain taken up with too many other bits to properly remember where I was the first time I heard a band. Point being, I can’t recall the exact moment I first heard Alcest, but I can recall the exact feeling I had, because it hits every time I put on Écailles de lune. Continue reading “Alcest: Écailles de lune (2010)”
Consuming the Tangible 