2. Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

How can pummelling drums, disorienting guitar blasts and a guy shrieking and howling like he's seen the devil himself give birth to a troll sound so breathtakingly beautiful? Contrast, it's all about the contrasts. Life is about contrasts, man. On Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, Deafheaven pair beautiful post-rocky, shoegazey, flowery indie guitar jams with balls to the wall black metal, to stunning effect.

Gut feeling says this is awful. Repeated trials say the same, although there are
some brief outliers saying it's kinda cool.

Deafheaven's third album is their quietest album yet - if you measure it in averages. The black metal parts aren't quieter than on Sunbather or New Bermuda, but there's more of the quiet parts. It's getting close to 50:50. Which some think is way too quiet, but Deafheaven have never been ones to bother with what other people think, especially not the metalheads with whom you might think they identify. No, Deafheaven have been completely denounced by quite a lot of the black metal scene, for their shameless flirting with indie rock or their pink floral album covers or whatnot. Instead they've amassed not only a considerable following of converts from those groups, but also reached out to a big new circle of fans: those who didn't think black metal was for them. I'm certainly in the latter group. I've definitely started venturing more in to black metal after playing New Bermuda quite a lot back in 2015, which is cool I guess, but it's not so much that it's opened my eyes to this new scene, it's more that I can't find anything I like anywhere near as much. Deafheaven do their own thing, and it's black metal done right. Black metal made beautiful.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love breathes in and out. The loud and the quiet, the aggressive and the peaceful, they complement each other - after too much of one you yearn for some of the other. Yes, the quiet bits aren't amazing or groundbreaking in and of themselves. Taken in isolation, "Near" is a pretty darn boring song, but I've never once skipped it. It's that the relief is just that much bigger when the first full death metal attack hits two and a half minutes in to "Glint". I've been craving it so badly, it's like I've been holding my breath under water, finally surfacing ecstatically, like I actually would have died if I had to stay under any longer. Incredible. Similarly, "Honeycomb" and "Canary yellow" are intense, exhilarating, like amazing high-speed rollercoasters, with dizzying heights, terrifying loops and drops, jerks and yanks that threaten to through you off. I'm loving the ride, but I'm also intensely glad when it's over. "Honeycomb"'s beautiful outro arrives just at the right time.

Deafheaven have a pretty cool relationship with fans.

Besides the quiet indie rock stuff, what really puts metalheads off Deafheaven is that they mix the vocals ultra low. What, you mean the growling? Yup, sometimes you barely notice it. Wait, what?! Yup, that's right, those disgusting, super dark vocals that most black metal bands like to parade front and center to show off how tough and badass they are, Deafheaven just puts them as a layer of texture, completely secondary to the epic guitar riffage going down on top. On Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, they're lower than ever. It's like a middle finger to metal tropes. So there's that, for those of you who might think you're "into some metal, but not if it's growling", I totally urge you to give this a try. These are hardly vocals, it's basically instrumental music.

Deafheaven are also damn good live. I saw them at Pstereo a couple years ago, an it was amazing. I endured seeing maybe a quarter song by The Lumineers I think it was (some Mumford&Sons-y folk pop nightmare) which was where my friends were, but then I fucked that shit and went to the neighboring stage, where these guys were playing. And it was so delightful. The real deal. Brutally honest. Really, the blacker the black metal the better, as long as you've got ear plugs. Bring it on. Having that shit blast all over you is quite an experience. And singer George Clarke is actually pretty charismatic, I mean, for sounding like nails scraping on a wall (c.f. the devil's trollspawn thing). He, like, dances and gets people excited. But the best part was maybe afterwards. They all came down to the fence and shook fans' hands and hugged and signed and chatted for like ages. Goddamn.

Best tracks: "Honeycomb", "Worthless animal", "Glint", and "Canary yellow" too but I've played that one so damn much.

3. Amen Dunes - Freedom

What a thrill it is when music stops you in your tracks. When it just goes 'put down what you're doing and pay attention'. I can't remember how I first came across the music of Damon McMahon aka. Amen Dunes, where I was or what I was doing, but I do remember the reaction I had: A pleasant, gentle guitar-based intro slid into the background of whatever I was concentrating on, but when he started singing I became aware of how high my eyebrows were. They just stuck at that elevated position. When I caught myself it would kind of turn into a self-questioning frown, like 'what am I actually hearing?', but then he would sing another line and the frown would disappear and I would go back to that disbelieving surprised look. I still don't know which song this was I first heard, it could have been just about any one of them. Now I've been listening to Freedom for almost a year, and it's only grown on me.

That voice is amazing. He does that intense ultra-vibrato thing that I only know from a handful of other singers, such as Anohni, or my friend Jenny. And it's probably not coincidental that those two had this same effect on me. Please, if you know of any singers in this cross-section of voices that you get if you combine Amen Dunes, Anohni and Jenny Marlene Nettum, let me know.

Not much to say about this cover. The little stuff up on top is part of it.
The most important is the portrait, though. The long curls are gone

With Amen Dunes' Freedom, I came for the voice but I stayed for the songs. McMahon isn't just an incredible singer, he also writes hella good songs. What's more, Freedom sounds tremendously beautiful. It's guitar based, but with an endless variety of guitar tones, some tasteful piano and harmonica and, and plenty of atmospherics and loose song structures sending the thoughts in the direction of The War on Drugs. The production is perfect, it's timeless and lovely, and it captures all the sentiments that the songs do and amplifying them. It's both soothing and cathartic. (I'm not sure that those are opposites.) And I'm not sure what the songs are supposed to be about a lot of the time, but I have a pretty strong feeling that writing (and performing) them is both soothing and cathartic for Mr. McMahon. Going through the lyrics, the album reads as a life-reckoning. From his skipping school and growing up with a disapproving father, to dealing with Jewish heritage, and a mother who is diagnosed with cancer, McMahon does a lot of thinking, some figuring out, via more than a bit of pain, as he repeatedly sings.

OK, let's just go straight to the highlights. And they're all vocal performances. He gets so intense. He uses his voice to build up even the gentlest melody as if it was going through countless modulations, even the quietest song as if there was a symphony orchestra behind him. "Blue rose" is quite astounding all the way through, but like the phrase from 1:30 is pretty unique. How does he do those "now"s? "Skipping school"'s meandering second half sounds free-styled, but like at 3:25, when he goes from a deep croon on "yeah I've been goOoOoOoOod" to howling "See them go! Get out and go!", that's not random. Neither are the "I-I-I-I" stutters a few phrases later. It's all painstakingly, lovingly crafted. Another through and through stunner is "Miki Dora". About a famous surfer whose career and fame fell after he was convicted for financial fraud, McMahon's ruthless take on men's proud psyche is one of my favorites on the album. Again the melody starts deep, but when he reaches for those high notes from 1:50, singing "Sipping on my beer", I think that fragile vibrato is the least masculine way I've ever heard the word "beer" sung. And then there's "Believe", a six-minute piece of timeless classic rock where I think the instrumental is almost as impressive as the vocals.

 

There's been a lot of weird shit on this year's list. So if you've fallen off the wagon - I don't blame you. Hell, I would have fallen off this mess of a wagon. But if you did, jump back on it for this one, because I can basically guarantee that each and every one of you beautiful people are going to fall for this album. It's the In Rainbows of this list - so pretty, so solid, so good it's completely un-unlikable.

Best tracks: "Blue rose", "Believe", "Miki Dora", "Freedom"

4. Gåte - Svevn

Some people think folk music is uninteresting. In the one negative review I've read of folk-rockers Gåte's new album Svevn (for more on that, stay tuned), VG's journalist criticized the songwriting, claiming that the reliance on old folk tunes is "unimaginative", and that "Norwegian cultural heritage is not necessarily a good thing", that "while searching for their fairy tales, many of the stories Asbjørnsen & Moe came across were rude stories for men's magazines" and that "many of our songs are just melodies for drunken parties". It's a surprising read, but reflects the longstanding attitude helds towards folk music by the cultural "elites". But it's also a giant misstep, placing these songs in the past. They may not be what we consider high culture today, but on average, a song that has been passed down for hundreds of years will obviously have more staying power than whatever is popular at the moment. So criticizing Gåte for using boring source material is... well, I'm not surprised his voice is a lonely one.

When they started up in the early 2000's Gåte's hard-hitting combination of traditional Norwegian folk music and modern rock quickly won over fans of both genres and those that lieth betwixt. After releasing the now classic albums Jygri in 2002 and Iselilja in 2004, they went on a hiatus. Singer Gunnhild Sundli was only 14 when they started, and by age 19 she needed a break from leading a wildly popular rock band. I was a bit young to be on board the Gåte train the first time around, so I've always grown up just knowing about them, that they were popular and probably quite good. But they returned last year, first with the promising comeback EP Attersyn, and next with the album in question here, Svevn. It's a triumph, to say the least.

Not an amazing cover, but this is basically their aesthetic these days. She wears
that crown and a white dress at concerts. The logo has grown on me.

For longtime fans, the most pressing question is obviously whether the 'magic' is intact, 14 years later. As a first-time listener that's hard for me to judge, but maybe that's a good thing. What I can tell you is that this album is the absolute shit. They do what I suspected they've always been doing - combining Norwegian folk songs full of violin shredding and near-yodeled vocals, with the rock from branches such as prog, heavy, goth and emo. There's some Nightwish here, there's some Jesus Christ Superstar, and only some growling is missing before they touch on Enslaved. All of it sounds killer. Much of it is thanks to Gunnhild Sundli's stunning vocals. Listening to the old Gåte-albums, though, the first thing I realize is how much she's progressed as a vocalist. Her pipes have always been amazing, but now there's rock solid technique as well. She does the archaic language justice throughout - always taking care to pronounce every messy old-nynorsk consonant.

It's also fun to notice how 2018 Svevn actually sounds, despite its traditional folk tunes and its early 2000s roots. Where Jygri and Iselilja are strongly colored by the nu-metal wave of the turn of the millenium, Svevn only revives this is in a fun, mildly retro way, and a much broader pallette is heard instead, with both beats and electronic effects that sound subtly modern. The stripped-down ballad "Tonen" builds up with masterful production and strange industrial embellishments that highlight Gunnhild's beautiful vocals. "Tonen" leads straight in to the 8-minute epic "Åsmund Frægdegjæva", a medieval poem given the grandest of grand rock makeovers, complete with mirror-shattering modulations and prog breakdowns that have grown on me considerably since the first time around, where it was admittedly a bit exhausting. The other of the two longer songs on the album is the title track, an equally epic affair but in a much more subdued way, trading grandiosity for an ominous 7/8 ostinato and super cool drumming, making it a late-album highlight.

Gåte's Sveinung Sundli, Gunnhild Sundli and Magnus Børmark live in Oslo 2018.

Gåte are a great band with a great concept, but there was never any doubt that Gunnhild Sundli was their ace card - and now even more so than before. Seeing them live in November, guitarist Magnus Børmark jumped around wildly on stage despite doing his best to imitate Jonny Greenwood's guitar playing, and Sveinung Sundli provided plenty of exhilarating violin shredding, but Gunnhild completely stole the show even when she isn't singing. Highly pregnant and dressed in ice queen white, her sheer presence builds up the songs more than the entire rest of the band. The show on their home turf in Trondheim was a victory lap and a concert I will remember for a long time, combining the old and new in their catalogue seamlessly, chilling and thrilling with every song. Gåte returned just in time: When Gunnhild was ready.

Best tracks: "Kom no Disjka", "Tonen", "Svevn", "Bannlyst"

5. Jeremy Dutcher - Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa

Cultural extinction is pretty hard to deal with. Cultures evolve. They gather mutations as they are passed down over generations, some parts morph, become something new, good parts stay and become reinforced. Over centuries and millenia an endless diversity of human cultures have arisen and disappeared. But similarly to the ongoing mass-extinction of the globe's biological diversity, traditional cultures are also currently experiencing extinction at about a billion times the natural background rate (I haven't got the exact numbers). Modern culture spreads, tempts, engulfs the traditional ones quicker than the village elder can say "what's a TV?". People urbanize, centralize, depopulate. Some cultures actively oppress, forbid, censor other cultures. Inevitably, any or all these forces can eventually lead to the extinction of a culture. A language is never spoken again. Traditions are forgotten. And a body of music is lost forever.

I almost put The Lost Songs of St. Kilda on my 2016 list. It's a gentle, haunting album based on songs that were recorded on a £3 microphone at a Scottish old folk's home. Trevor Morrison sat at the piano and played some tunes he had learned as a kid from his aging piano teacher during the war. His piano teacher was one of the last people who lived on St. Kilda, a small archipelago in the Outer Hebrides, which was depopulated in 1930. So these centuries old songs hadn't been heard anywhere outside of Mr. Morrison's head for about 60 years, when they by a bonkers stroke of luck were committed to tape by a quick-thinking nursing home volunteer. The story really resonates with me. They say you can hear the mist, the isolation, the rugged cliffs in the tunes. I don't know if it's just that I have the narrative in my head, but I hear it anyway.

Well, if you think that's a tear-jerker, try Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. This is an album of contemporary classical rearrangements of Wolastoqiyik indian traditional songs. Jeremy Dutcher is an operatic tenor, and for his debut album he chose to record a fading piece of his cultural heritage. A language with less than 100 remaining speakers, Wolastoqey has a rich body of songs that was dying out with the current generation. So when Jeremy, a young Wolastoq indian, went to the Canadian Museum of History and came across a collection of wax cylinder recordings of tribe members singing, playing and dancing to traditional tunes, he couldn't stand the thought of the recordings fading away in the museum cellar, and spent hours listening to and transcribing the songs. Despite many damaged recordings of songs now lost forever, Dutcher found a handful of still-audible recordings, and used his classical training (and some creative freedom) to create a collection of Wolastoqiyik songs for the twentieth century and beyond.

This is one amazing album cover. Probably the only album cover of this millenium to feature
wax cylinders. Check out Brightly Off-Colored Discophile's analysis, too. 

The fate of the wolastoqiyik echoes struggles faced by indigenous peoples all across America (and the rest of the world), and Dutcher provides a voice for all of them. For centuries following colonialization, practicing their culture and speaking their language was punishable by law. For Dutcher's mother growing up as well. Although the legal situation is less hideous today, it's a meager solace considering that so little of these cultures remains that they're perfectly capable of dying out on their own. Unless something extraordinary happens. Which is why it's pretty badass that Dutcher opens his album with "Mehcinut", which I've come to understand means "death chant". Wolastoqiyik culture has long been dying, but "Mehcinut"'s triumphant climax may be its rebirth.

I love how Dutcher incorporates the original recordings throughout the album, both at the beginning, middle and end of songs. Not only does it illustrate how tricky his creative journey has been - the songs sound rough, atonal, not at all fitting smoothly into a 4/4 time signature or the modern 12-tone scale of Dutcher's piano - but we also hear how scratchy and fragile they are, literally vanishing before our ears. There's even a segment where we hear damaged, inaudible recordings, and Dutcher or a museum technician saying "number 14, broken". When we in the next second hear "number 15", followed by the song that Dutcher turns into the majestic "Sakomawit", it illustrates just how enormous the difference between existence and non-existence is for this culture.

Besides the emotional punch, this album is really a unique musical journey as well. It's amazing to hear all the elements of classical music (ignoring the slightly off-putting modern drumkit) supporting vocals sung in such a different language. Italian, French and English opera all have different sounds to them, but they ain't got nothin on Wolastoqey. I'm not sure how well it works with the crazy diphthongs and phrases ending in awkward q's and k's, but if it weren't for this album I would never even have pondered the question. And Dutcher's vocal performance is, almost in spite, wonderfully confident and convincing. (For some insane language porn, check out how effortlessly he pronounces the album title - do it repeatedly, while reading the title. It's almost as satisfying as this gem.) His voice is spine-chillingly good, whether it's lifting songs like "Essuwonike" and "Sakomawit" to stunning climaxes, or capturing rhythmic chanting on "Nipuwoltin" and "Ultestakon". This album won the Polaris Music Prize - a big fucking deal - and it's for its contents, not its cover.

I think I've gone on westernsplaining this thing long enough. I don't even understand this shit, so why am I even talking about it? As Brightly Off-Colored Discophile puts it, this ain't my party. It's completely irrelevant to the Wolastoqiyik how I rank their songs on my albums of the year list, and this album is for them, not for me. But still, I'm loving it. If extinction is hard to deal with, witnessing a rebirth of such a scope warms my soul to the core. It's like watching those near-extinct Arctic foxes raise excited young pups in the Scandinavian mountains. Here's hoping for less extinction and more rebirths in the future

Best tracks: "Mehcinut", "Essuwonike" and "Sakomawit", because of those huge, Disney widescreen feels. If that's your jam, head that-a-way.