50 Unheralded Albums from 2011

50 Unheralded Albums from 2011

In just one more trip around the sun, another swarm of immensely talented but under-recognized musicians has harnessed its collective talents and discharged its creations into the void. This list is but one fraction of those dedicated individuals who caught our ears with some serious jams.

Morrow vs. Hajduch

Morrow vs. Hajduch: Ash Black Bufflo’s Andasol

Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.

Ash Black Bufflo: AndasolAsh Black Bufflo: Andasol (Knitting Factory, 5/23/11)

Ash Black Bufflo: “Buho”

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Morrow: Ash Black Bufflo (note the missing A) is the recording moniker of Grails keyboardist Jay Clarke, and his debut release, Andasol, is the culmination of five years of solo composition.  Like Grails, the music here is extremely eclectic and skillful, but the styles found within Andasol are more segregated from track to track, not stirred in the melting pot like his group endeavor.

Hajduch: The music is mostly understated, minimal, and minor.  It’s very cinematic and seems designed to be unobtrusive, with occasional snippets of dialogue to fill the gaps.  With the soft nature of the music and the truncated length of the tracks, it’s an album that flies by.

Morrow: The 18 tracks do go quickly, and they’re sort of built like musical vignettes — which makes sense, because Clarke’s other material as Ash Black Bufflo has been used for movie soundtracks, theater productions, and dance recitals.  Even though some of the tracks are a medium length, nothing overstays its welcome.

Also, even though certain tracks are minimal or start out as such, many build into much more, with intricacy after intricacy added to the mix.  The album’s second track, “Misery is the Pilgrim’s Pasture,” is a perfect example, and it strikes a very Steve Reich vibe as flute, piano, harpsichord, and percussion work on top of the repeated foundation.

Grails

Guest Playlist: Grails picks the 11 best songs for OD-ing

Grails: Deep PoliticsGrails: Deep Politics (Temporary Residence, 3/8/11)

Grails: “I Led Three Lives”

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The newest album from Portland, Oregon-based instrumental-rock band Grails, Deep Politics, got a nod in a recent installment of This Week’s Best Albums. Mixing cinematic compositions with worldly sounds and a little ’60s psychedelia, it encapsulates, perhaps better than any of its other releases, what Grails is capable of as a band.

For its guest playlist, Grails made 11 picks based on a new, tongue-in-cheek method of determining a song’s quality.

The 11 Best Songs for OD-ing
by Grails

Emil Amos: At a shitty party some years ago, a man was heard to have said in a drunken defense of the Eagles, “More people have shot up and died to this band than will ever hear ours!”

That man was me. After this rip in the logical fabric of the universe was torn, a new yardstick was introduced to the high-record-collector culture around the concept of “Can you OD to it, though?” And then the inevitable schools of thought naturally followed: “Is it a harsh track to OD to, or more mellow/inviting?”

See what you can get out of these, enjoy yourself, and don’t die!

Tangerine Dream: “Ricochet”

100 Unheralded Albums from 2010

Among the thousands of under-appreciated or under-publicized albums that were released in 2010, hundreds became our favorites and were presented in ALARM and on AlarmPress.com. Of those, we pared down to 100 outstanding releases, leaving no genre unexplored in our list of this year’s overlooked gems.

Om: Spiritual Work and Colossal Vibrations

When Om’s Al Cisneros isn’t playing bass guitar, he’s been known to teach chess. “They are complementary to each other and say the same thing in my heart,” he says. “They uncover the same things to me. In a lot of ways, practicing one is practicing the other. I’ve never really thought about it before, but I don’t usually pick up the bass until I have something, the same way you wouldn’t pick up a chess piece until you have a move.”

Cisneros has been a prominent figure in underground metal for years, but his gentle, unassuming demeanor is a far cry from what many would expect from a musician associated with what is typified as an aggressive, macho genre.

Om, the intense, hypnotic bass-and-drum duo that he founded with drummer Chris Haikus in 2003, has been reinventing the way that many people perceive heavy music. Its songs are cerebral but accessible, spiritual but unreligious. Om’s music could be used to excite the apathetic as much as it could serve as a meditative soundtrack for the hyperactive.

In a live setting, Om takes on another dimension. The walls rattle under the colossal vibrations from Cisneros’ bass cabinets, fuelled by his carefully selected custom amps; the huge, warm sounds that come out of them seem to enter the body, resulting in a feel that is like being caught in the eye of a storm.

“I feel really safe sometimes, if that’s the right word, when the speakers [fuzz out] like that,” Cisneros says. “Descriptions [of music] can be stereotypes. It’s very peaceful.”

When Haikus amicably left the band in the spring of 2008, Cisneros sought out Grails drummer and Holy Sons mastermind Emil Amos to take his place. Things have been good ever since, as the title of Om’s fourth studio album and first featuring Amos on drums, God is Good (Drag City), suggests.

“It’s just true,” Cisneros says of the title, which, true to form, decontextualizes religious iconography from its traditional meanings. “We’re in the journey right now, and we wanted to sing about it. It’s the word symbol we came up with. You can’t explain it. The more you try with words, the more you try to explain what it means.” As each word passes, Cisneros sounds vaguely frustrated at trying to communicate such esoteric thoughts out loud. “You can feel it,” he continues. “Everyone can feel it.”

Amos is more direct about the title. “It makes me think of a really hellish LSD trip,” he says, “where at the end of the whole thing, you meet this sobbing resolution that things actually are okay—the fact that you know, in some Jungian sense or in a Carl Sagan book, [that] the creation of this universe came from the first moment of good winning over evil.”

Cisneros began exploring the depths of heavy metal as a teenager in the late ’80s, when he and Haikus formed punk/metal hybrid Asbestosdeath. The band added second guitarist Matt Pike (now guitarist/frontman of High on Fire) and by the early 1990s morphed into Sleep—a riff-brandishing psychedelic power trio, a band that owed more to the bluesy grooves of Black Sabbath and Pentagram yet whose sound was filtered through a set of musicians that had also been exposed to Bay Area hardcore and thrash.

“We all dropped out of high school—I think every one of us,” Cisneros recalls. “We were all having hard times, and we were friends through music.” For the young friends, music became more than just a hobby. “[It was] our lifeline,” he corrects. “I wouldn’t have made it through those times without it.”

Sleep grew a following, and with the release of its second album, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, many believed that it had the potential to cross into the mainstream. The band signed with London Records to release its third album, tentatively titled Dopesmoker, a single, hour-long epic song that had taken the band years to perfect.

The label, rather than appreciating what it had, saw it as “noncommercial” and toyed with remixing it and dividing the song into pieces. The band was horrified and eventually broke up under the strain, but the album later surfaced as the segmented Jerusalem on Rise Above Records, and eventually, an unabridged version of Dopesmoker was released on Tee Pee.

Sleep left a legacy not only because of its primal, heavy sounds that have influenced others, but also because of its unwavering commitment to its vision of its art, no matter what the stakes.

Weekly Music News Roundup

Over the past week, we caught news of a mini Soundgarden/TAD live jam, a new Kayo Dot album, a new/streaming Trash Talk EP, another Mars Volta album, another Zach Hill project, and a release date for the new Tortoise album.  Read about this and more after the jump.

Weekly Music News Roundup

Details emerge about new albums from Isis, Tortoise, Akron/Family, and Stinking Lizaveta; Zu announces some dates for a world tour (a pair of which are with Mike Patton); Dark Meat will go on tour with its 17 members; the Scion Rock Fest hosts a spate of crushing metal bands in Atlanta on February 28.

Keep readin’…

AlarmPress.com’s 12 Favorite Posts of 2008

As we enter 2009, here is a look back at our favorite posts from last year — including Q&As and interviews with Tuareg freedom singers, Japanese-infused prog metallists, and a regretful folk rapper as well as columns, top-ten lists, Lollapalooza coverage, and our DIY venue spotlight.