Goldicot's listianity - The top 15 albums from 2024

The ''top'' albums according to him and no one else

15 - Neural Indent / Gorenette Coleman - Neural Indent / Gorenette Coleman

Extreme experimentation yields insane results. Matt Stephens’ split with himself takes two logical affronts to absurd conclusions, each maximally challenging to categorization and palatability alike. Ostensibly goregrind, Neural Indent’s non sequitur technical brutal illogic free jazz defies free improvisation: is it carefully composed extemporaneous nonsense, or aleatoric preprogrammed seizure? Either way, I can imagine Neural Indent opening for Conlon Nancarrow on the Extremely Hard Bop tour. Gorenette Coleman is the lesser; gorenoise ritual abuse of the clarinet; violent Zornography of sheer adrenaline, more fury than form and felt more than heard. The combination is total overwhelming confrontation: embrace devastation.

14 - Truculent Caviling the Facts! and Other Mechanisms of Oppression

Some of the most beautiful music you can hear was penned by John Fahey in the throes of seething anger while he invented American primitive so as to cope with himself. Dan Timlin’s progressive approach is novel, abstract and complex folk etudes, a dialogue of philosophical and metaphysical ideas bottled and shaped by the acoustic guitar. Truculent makes you think, whether the arcane compositions, esoteric vocabulary, bold politicisms, or simply the beauty of a man and his guitar, rendering whole fantastical worlds out of the primitive.

13 - Scumbag - Homicidal Cult

“Perverse enjoyment” is redundant. A good pervert always enjoys it, and relishes in the deviancy, those little sadistic flourishes that take it from sick and twisted to gleefully depraved debauchery. Scumbag’s flair is the microtonal, an extra contortion in the riff onslaught, cementing just how much they’re enjoying this beatdown. And you should too, Scumbag achieves the highly sought-after unholy grail of brutal death metal: the bangers-only non-stop riff-fest. Snap your fingers, bang your head, break your neck.

12 - Akhlys - House of the Black Geminus

You descend into the abyss. From the pitch black nothingness of unwaking horror, the heart races to nowhere, the mind a prisoner of itself, vicious and terrible tension unrelenting, all hideously unflinchingly reflected in the darkened mirror. Akhlys, through terrifying black metal, speaks of the self and its demons, one and the same, in paralytic free fall and inescapable torment. There are works of art that possess real disturbance, the possibility of permanent unsettling, things that once the mind takes in, it cannot take back out. The abyss ascends into you. 

11 - Slimelord - Chytridiomycosis Relinquished

In the same fashion that Carcass revolutionized gore through methodological specificity and terminology, so Slimelord the swamp. With an attention to detail that can only come from joyful exuberance, Slimelord honors the decomposing and diseased with a meticulous and expansive tour of heaving death metal, murky doom, and organic solos like the haunting calls of the animal denizens of the marsh. Each guitar solo has its own name, and this clear devotion to minutiae and purpose extends throughout every riff and lyric, lovingly rendering a model classic of putrid death metal. 

10 - Verberis - The Apophatic Wilderness

Questions are the dissonance of reality. For every answer, in every answer there are infinite questions, the more asked, the less known. Verberis, ever-questioning, returns to the beginning to the first knowledge to begin the negation through dissonance. Verberis answers only one question, (why is theological black metal always dissonant?), all else is only crumbling, denials, horrible twisted knots, a music defined by the inconclusive. In the library of condemned heretical works this is found just after Apocalypticists.

9 - Mitochondrion - Vitriseptome

Imagine an album that does everything at once. It’s no wonder this was eight years in the making. Mitochondrion’s long-awaited return is massive in every way, taking their unique sophisticated brutality to the next unprecedented level. Vitriseptome sounds like brobdingnagian chthonic machinery, the bellowing of ancient leviathan, and labyrinthine evil, all in demonic triumvirate unleashing apocalypse. A true powerhouse.

8 - Gigan - Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus

Amid myriad imitators Gigan stands victorious, honed through battle to maximal achievement in the dissonant death metal arena. This is not pretentious or elaborate, just sheer violence par excellence, grooving and bludgeoning without pause, frighteningly creative and confident by years of experience. This is perhaps the technical virtuoustic wizardry peak of the year, an excursion on technique and its consequences. CONQUESSSTTTT 

7 - Scarcity - The Promise of Rain

Those are the sounds of alarms, the siren call of disaster beckoning to ruin, and they are the howling of wind, the bereft voice of abandon whistling away through desolation’s wake. Doom has befallen Scarcity, where once was music to score Icarus’ plummet from the heavens, now they score the cracked earth and the tectonic shifting of a deceased planet. Already in two albums their defining feature stands proud: a constant slow erosion from one idea to the next, an ever changing sonic landscape like a timelapse of decay, unpredictable in its crumbling yet despairingly inexorable as it leads to a deathly conclusion. 

6 - Man’s Gin - The Reprobate

Across ballads of earnest sarcasm and cynical admission Wunder echoes authors like himself driven to insanity through and by writing. Fleeing from persecution into isolation, The Reprobate has a wistful edge to the sardonic tunes, as if acutely aware that the madness is coming and yet seeing no alternative. Of course, the madness is already here, it’s always been here, and you can hear it dripping from every word and in the mesmerizing swaying of the rhythm, and the allure of that madness persists through the warning, the recantation of the failures and the despairs yet still draw the heart back, in and down…

5 - Bríi - Camaradagem P​ó​stuma

Magical nocturnal intensity like nothing else out there. To describe is to dilute its ethereal brilliance: this mystical concoction’s ingredients range from atmospheric black metal distilled to a shimmering cosmic beauty, loamy drum ‘n’ bass naturalized into the acoustic, folk synth, electronic gamelan, screaming softer than singing, and an altogether indescribable lush and complex romanticism. Dense, fluttering murmurations of the natural and the electronic coalesce, briefly, into clear glades of familiarity before propulsively unfurling into lands unknown, brimming with new discovery. 

4 - Ingurgitating Oblivion - Ontology of Naught - 8/10

A true masterpiece of the avant-garde, Ontology of Naught is a prized object to be pored over, studied, analyzed – you could live in this and still not know every twist and angle. The daedal construction is an endless outpouring of sick riffs, with an unfathomable frenetic pacing, truly overwhelming in intensity and surprise. The impenetrability has its own language, the initial uncomprehension is an inundation of hostility and complexity, and over time gives way to a depth of emotions: majesty, awe, and glory are waiting to be known, just beyond the esoteric, within the enigma. 

3 - Sakna - De Syv D​ø​dssynder - 8/10

No other genre grapples with suicide and death like this one, and rare is the album that represents it so well as De Syv D​ø​dssynder. This is a beautiful and despondent album, with all the grace of pain, the calm of melancholy, and the clarity of grief. Each is represented in a different way: funeral doom bears agony, pastoral acoustic folk bears melancholy, and crisp strident melodic black metal bears clarity, combining and flitting between all three with an ease that belies the heavy heartedness. Neoclassical arpeggios preside over it all for a remarkably vital and varied listen. All this beauty is underscored by eulogy — Solemn died by his own hand and the release was lovingly brought to fruition by his brother. 

2 - Thou - Umbilical - 8/10

Thou has spent decades crafting a philosophical corpus, covering a bevy of topics; ethics, religion, politics, metaphysics, mysticism. This has always been balanced, almost outweighed, by their dedication to mean, bone-breaking sludge, ludicrously physical up against the bookworm text walls. In recent years, they’ve begun to drift, spending more time navelgazing in the library, as if at the peak of the piles of books was an ascension to another place. 

Nope. Moses returns, descending from the mountain, smashing the tablets upon the ground. The wisdom learnt remains, but the messenger is now muscle, fist and knuckle. Thou’s heaviest album ever in twenty years is a swift hammerblow, backing all the years of dialectic with the force to prove it – soundly. 

Yet no awareness is lost. Through the sweat and the blood Thou’s sharp eye is wide open, pained by the necessity of this brutality, lamenting the futility of their own actions. Umbilical is not just a titanic album of its own right, but a stunning conclusion to a lifetime’s work. Unparalleled care and devotion to aesthetic and artistic vision culminates in a veritable magnum opus, not just a maturation, but a realization of groundwork laid into a striking monument, not just seen and known, but felt. 

1 - Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee 8/10

This is a hard album for me to write about. It’s easy when they make me think, and so I gravitate toward albums with something to describe, or to explain. But when they make me feel, I pull back, unsure of what to say, unsure of what I think. Diamond Jubilee makes me feel a lot.

It’s an album I’ve heard before, not in a long time, fondly remembered and nearly forgotten. It’s a song from those strange quiet moments where the world is picturesque and perfect, that brief timelessness when it all makes sense, just for a time, already over. It’s the arrival at an unfamiliar and wondrous place and by providence the radio is playing a welcoming tune, a guiding hand through the airwaves. It’s a love song, not to anyone or anything, instead a feeling, deeply felt, in the small hours of the morning and in the loneliest nights, maybe it’s peace, or just awareness that things are as they are. It’s a rare connection, to what, I don’t know. 

And yet I hesitate to describe it as a conduit to nostalgia. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before when I try to describe it. What should be convention is otherworldly, like sounds from a dream, where it all seems just so, even though the waking mind sees nonsense in hindsight. All music speaks to the unconscious, but Cindy Lee seems to bring the dreams back to life in the daytime, a reminder of the possibilities within.

So I won’t write about it. There is something magical here, a commentary on the familiar and the evocative that approaches the transcendental. It’s my most-listened album of the year, bringing out the beauty in every waking moment whether at work, in nature, or at home, and carries me off to sleep many a night, drifting peacefully to another place.