I believe this is the first meme anyone has tried to sic on me:
“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”
Righto.
1. Sargeist - Black Fucking Murder
There’s really no improving on Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger. All you can do is do it again. Sargeist’s Satanic Black Devotion came out in 2003, which chronologically ought to make them what I call “late” black metal, except that they don’t sound at all “belated” with regard to the early 90s Norwegian scene but rather completely contemporary with it. “Black Fucking Murder” is one of the genre’s rare anthems, a seriously evil piece of music.
2. Sun Kil Moon - Moorestown
Mark Kozelek has always struck me as one of those musicians who’s constantly refining the same song, like Geoffrey Hill’s Sebastian Arrurruz:
Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for youFor the rest of my life with slightly
Varying cadence, oh my dear one.
His habit of performing his old songs with completely different melody, accompaniment and (in the case of Grace Cathedral Park) time signature points to what’s really essential in those songs: a particular keening vocal cadence, the voice moving about among old things, touching and retouching them.
3. American Music Club - All the lost souls welcome you to San Francisco
Probably the cheeriest thing on this list; which is worrying, given that it’s American Music Club.
4. Current 93 - Black Ships Ate The Sky
See below for YouTube clip. I’ve decided that on balance I like this.
5. Portal - Vessel of Balon
Portal have the best thought-out aesthetic of any extreme metal band playing at the moment. Also, they totally shred, but in a totally sick way.
6. Burial - Archangel
Pretty bold to kick off Untrue with the strongest track, but logical in retrospect: the rest of the album derives the consequences - “if I trust you, if I trust you…”.
While Untrue was accessible and aurally pleasing enough to attract the charge of being “coffee-table” music (Enya + urban edginess = stuff white people like), there’s a really strong emotional core which emerges in the progression from “Archangel“‘s annunciation through to “Raver“‘s yearning for ecstatic collective anonymity. It’s an album about being nobody, becoming somebody and then becoming nobody again.
7. John Martyn - Easy Blues
Easy my arse. I still can’t play this one properly.