Goldicot Culls The Week - X

by Goldicot

Thu, 27 Mar 2025

Read in 4 minutes

Goldicot weakly dumps

weekly

Instead of listening to as many metal albums as I could find and picking three to lavish with praise, I spent the entire week listening to every single release featured on Can This Even Be Called Music’s essential roundup resource Weekly Release Dump on February 28th. CTEBCM reflects my eternal desire to listen to ever-weirder experimentation, yet habitually I skip over the vast majority of the roundup, paradoxically dubbing it all “not my thing”. I tend to believe I can cull ‘em as I see ‘em, but at the behest of our favorite resident flatlander I stick my neck out to the sword of empiricism, and listen to them all. This was about 112 albums in total – 83 that I hadn’t already heard due to my aforementioned voracious metal appetite. The first takeaway? It is much easier for me to listen to high quantities of metal than high quantities of anything else. It’s much harder to slog through ambient vapidities, pseudo-scholarly contemporary classical confabulations, and post-wave neo-core. Despite that, the best things I heard that weren’t metal were jazz (or otherwise listed further on.) I had hoped to be challenged and satiated by some foreign worlds project, or surprised at myself in enjoying minimalistic folktronica or something, instead it was mostly depressingly familiar. The worst two things I heard were suspiciously artificial sounding prog rock Lifting Line Theory and appalling synth-funk by Reggie Watts. In the end, only one album went from Dump to Cull. Was it worth it? No. Would I do it again? Also no. Is the Weekly Release Dump still one of the best roundups out there? Yes. 

3

And this is the one. I wasn’t expecting much from a post-rock album, not for any stylistic reason, but for an aesthetic one: I don’t usually enjoy music based around “yearning” or similar emotional wishfulness. You, Infinite sidesteps any tedious excursion on the longings of the heart by focusing on the details, through ambient sublimity a calm center is found, and we stay there in introspective suspension, reflecting on the experience. We have a tough relationship with infinity; as Douglas Adams describes:  “infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting […] looking into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.” The response of You, Infinite is quite elegant: a creation of distance, a separation and stretching of moments, and coming to infinity by retreating from it. In doing so, it very literally comes alive, just as much rock as post, and by that fluidity becomes much bigger than itself. In listening this approach is subtly profound: the infinity of the night sky cannot be seen above, it is found within yourself.

2

Fools rush in where angels fear to trend, thus I am found there, in the polygonal forest without a bitmap, ingesting psychedigital mushrooms as guidance through haunted vectors. Freaky Forest Phenomena is a rollercoaster of bewitching dance beats, disorienting strobe-like synth arpeggios, impenetrable fogs of black MIDI, and the distant screams of those trapped in ancient primitive simulations, straining at the confines of their outdated existence, insisting, begging that they have more to offer, something to give that the world that left them behind doesn’t have. Apparently dubbed “tänzelcore”, this music is an homage to the archaic worlds of the retrotechnological era, conjuring back up the forests, goblins, skeletons and potions, and locking them away in digital dungeon simulacra, revived through cybernecromancy and then sealed away again, interred in nostalgic remembrance, gone but not forgotten.

1

Deathcore is all about how unapologetically you can disregard any other consideration in favor of being absurdly heavy. Whitechapel, after a couple years of trying, and failing, to bring some kind of artificial legitimacy to their sound, has wisely become stupid again, and thereby achieves some kind of anti-nirvana of big dumb heavy bash. It’s not brainy music, it’s cardiovascular music, not so much muscle as pure adrenaline viscera. Bozeman reclaims his rightful place atop the throat throne, ensuring quite literally every single verse and chorus is the maximal diaphragm cannon blast, rabid, spitflecked, and nasty. Everything else is crafted around letting him do his thing, and it works every time, never failing to surpass the limits of cliche and convention through sheer fucking willpower. Their best since the self-titled. No grooving bounces, no nodalong choruses, no clean singing — just heavy.