Favorite Albums of May 2022
Metal reigned king in a month of sunshine and flowers
May was a tale of two halves. The first two weeks of the month were among the best in music this year. May 13th in particular brought more highlight-worthy albums than any week so far, but then none appeared during the final three weeks of the month. Sometimes it happens, maybe it’s just the summertime lull. Luckily, the feast was large enough that we survived the famine. Here are your dishes.
METAL ALBUMS
Te Ruki - Marako Te Ruki
Artists that innovate run the risk of being known solely for their innovation. Take for example, Deafheaven. After they were lauded by Pitchfork for their mixture of black metal and shoegaze (a combination that was not invented, but was indeed popularized by Deafheaven) they found themselves flattened down into a single note, a one word description. Te Ruki risk the same fate. They sing exclusively in Tuamotuan, a Polynesian language with only a few thousand speakers worldwide, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s all most people ever say about them. But having a trick isn’t enough to get on this list, and Te Ruki’s hook is more than just window dressing. They affect the whole album with their choice of language, infusing it with greater force, propulsion, and energy than a vast majority of by the numbers black metal. It delivers chest thumping, head-banging goodness at every turn, and never lapses into the pitfalls of dull, one-note bands.
Ufomammut - Fenice
If Te Ruki exemplifies the merits of reinventing the wheel, Ufomammut’s Fenice showcases the merits of leaving it to turn. This is a by the book stoner doom metal record in every possible sense and I couldn’t be happier about it. Like many early stoner bands, Ufomammut takes the gnarliest bits of psych rock and chucks them into their trusty, keef-crusted grinder. Disto;rtion crackles throughout the record with such force that calling it fuzz hardly seems an ample description. You can practically hear the minutes-long bong pull bubbling and frothing behind the thousand pound guitar chugs and woozy, drawn out notes. And for as much as they stick to the best parts of the stoner metal formula, they infuse just enough hard rock gumption that the songs never drag, despite their typically stoner-y runtimes.
Nechochwen - Kanawha Black
As the situation regarding the planet’s health continues to get darker, so too does the music of Nechochwen. Kanawha Black brings a ferocity and directness to the band’s once meandering sound. Drums batter you from side to side while garrote wire guitar strings shred the skin around the neck. Even through all this brutality, the band finds time to stand in awe at the world they love, tripping into an almost fantastical power metal space in those moments. But like our future, these moments are often fleeting. They are not the hope of a brighter future, they are paintings of what we once had, drenched in kerosene and burned before our eyes.
Primitive Man - Insurmountable
Primitive Man wants to harm you. In a genre full of edgy, abrasive, experimental and downright nasty music, they stand out. They use their instruments as weapons of war, their voices as battlecries, their drums as a hail of bullets. They describe themselves as death sludge, which, while it fits the bill, does little to describe how visceral the experience sounds. Each track bristles with a roiling static that increases the volume floor of everything around it. Instead of instruments sharply leaping out from the silence, they clamber out of a vast sonic ocean. Every instrument and voice is fighting not to drown, and the minute they leap out of the ocean, they pull you right down in with them. It’s some of the harshest, most violent and, ultimately, fantastic metal that I’ve ever heard.
Aara - Triade II: Hemera
These days, any black metal that actually does something interesting catches my attention. Triade II: Hemera stands out by employing some of the most horrific screaming ever captured in a digital form. I truly could not say where their vocalist holds the mic, but it has to be somewhere in their esophagus. Thankfully, a nifty vocal performance isn’t all they have in their corner. The instrumentation refuses to fall into the boring, endless circle that black metal artists love so dearly. Instead, it ebbs and flows at the upper edges of intensity, holding your attention at every possible turn.
Misery Index - Complete Control
Metal rules, but communist metal rules even harder. Misery Index delivers a roaring group of songs with maximum force, volume, and hate for Nazis. I can think of no higher purpose for a metal band to serve than actually fighting against established systems of power. Even within the extreme corner of metal, Misery Index takes their directness to a new level. The guitars practically shout, the drums pound like bullets against a riot shield and the vocals are a brick lobbed through the windshield of a cop car. Complete Control is willing to scare the hell out of those who would trample on your rights, and demands that you take the boot and place it on their neck for once.
Blood & Nunslaughter - Blood/Nunslaughter
How do you go back to the basics without sounding like a retread? Blood and Nunslaughter actually manage to answer this question with their fantastic split. Pulling from the depths of death metal and the aggressive satanism that can come alongside it, they deliver furious tirades against the church and any other semblance of established religion. The lyrics remain the most stable element of death metal from the album, because the rest of the instrumentation, particularly the parts from Blood, bring the house down in a way that few death metal bands are able to. Even in the quieter parts of songs it sounds like 60 guitars playing at once. Possessed and all the other founders of death metal should be proud that their innovations led to something this fantastic.
Ox en Mayo Alto - Corona di Cervo
After their first EP, I pegged Ox en Mayo Alto as a post rock band that actually understood how attention spans work. The description holds, but it turns out they have a lot more than that up their sleeve. Corona di Cervo adds greater post-hardcore and shoegaze influence, making it somehow dreamier and more pressing at the same time. This EP is apparently part of a series of four, meaning there’s one more EP yet to come. I’m hoping that four EPs isn’t the extent of what Ox en Mayo Alto gives us, because they know how to do the damn thing.
RLYR - RLYR
A relative newcomer to the music world, RLYR exhibits a flair for the dramatic, which makes sense with their post-metal/post-rock tendencies. However, being a decent post-rock band doesn’t really make you worthy of attention in today’s crowded world. RLYR chooses to be more, they break the mold. In a completely unexpected twist, RLYR adds the joyfully upbeat tones of pop-punk to their instrumental journeys. It seems like it shouldn’t work, but ultimately it does. If you need something instrumental to brighten your spirits, but you can’t live without that heavy gut punch that metal always delivers, then RLYR might be the only balm capable of soothing you.
NON-METAL ALBUMS
Kendrick Lamar - Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
Talking about this record feels strange. Despite having been out nearly a month, and centering itself in countless debates about good music, taste and every other topic under the sun, I remain unable to wrap my arms around it. The basics come first. Kendrick Lamar remains one of the most technically skilled rappers on the planet, though his desire to prove that occasionally grates on me. His lyrical density is at an all-time high across the record, it demands several listens before opening up, and some of the more (intentionally) abrasive portions of the record make those repeated listens difficult. Others describe the album as messy, the descriptor fits well. It refuses easy interpretation, and while people are already taking hardline stances on the record, it’s better suited to a fluid experience that molts every time you look at it for too long. I personally find the mess effective. A person choosing to tell the parts of their story that aren’t self-serving will always compel me, even when the medium is imperfect. It’s an album to be wrestled, not consumed, and sometimes that means coming out of it with bruises and bent limbs.
The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention
I find it difficult to talk about this record or this band in any meaningful way. What am I supposed to say beyond “we are getting more Radiohead without the name Radiohead attached to the album?” But who cares? Breaking free from the name that has dominated music criticism for more than two decades lets the band cut loose as well. They take the opportunity to lavish us with brisk, tightly composed rock songs that leave nuggets of strangeness in as an indulgence. Each song brings all the punch and quality of a Radiohead track and remains free from the expectations and decorum that their primary band demands. It’s a lovely reminder that before Radiohead was an institution, they just made really good music.
Ethel Cain - Preacher’s Daughter
Maybe this album hits different for people who grew up going to church, or at least grew up around people who went to church. It hit me differently. Ethel Cain has a remarkable ear for compositions and a killer voice to go along with that talent. She sounds a bit like Phoebe Bridgers with an even more intensive love of pop music. Unlike a lot of indie pop of the past decade (though this is starting to change) Ethel Cain loves to burst free of the standard guitar strum and into the upper ranges of intensity. The record does overstay its welcome with a near 90-minute runtime, but the moments of excellence are more than worth the journey.