[Riffs] #BSAS2024: Brady’s 2024 AOTY List, Part 3.
Beset by the collapse of our previous website on NYE 2024, it’s taken a long time to get back to a number of projects and features that were waylaid by the whole process of resurrecting everything right here.
Now that this endeavour is finally finished, I’ve got breathing room to re-explore some ideas that could well have been laid to rest right on the cusp of the new year.
One initiative I had planned to wrap up in the early days of January 2025, was the 2024 round-up episodes & blog posts given the moniker Behind Screen and Speaker. For a primer/introduction to the series (which will be likely a semi-annual/yearly affair), check out this initial post, which originally resided in the now-dead prior website.
For an introduction to my personal Albums of The Year for 2024, including the first 5 mentioned in the below chart, head over to ‘Part 1’ which is located over here, and ‘Part 2’ right here.
And here’s the list in a nice, visual form (I love me some good album covers):
Brady’s Top 20 Albums Of The Year 2024, #11-16:
Before we begin I’ll restate my original emphasis, i.e. that my Top Albums and Honourable Mentions aren’t necessarily order-ranked. These albums are on a microdose fraction-of-a-hair difference in terms of overall quality that you’d need a microscope, mathematician and/or physicist to discern the tiny magnitude between them,
With that mind, let’s launch straight into a bunch of synopses - links to each album as well as relevant artists/labels are included, of course. If you’re intrigued by the digital version, consider heading to some artist websites/Bandcamp pages etc to see what’s on offer in physical format!
In the words of a certain esteemed Italian plumber, damsel-rescuer and kart-racing enthusiast - LET’S-A-GO.
Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere
Label: Century Media Records
Released: Oct 4th, 2024
Album Stream:
Synopsis:
I mean, damn - I honestly would expect anyone cruising through to the third installation of my AOTY lists would likely have checked this one out. It was everywhere on release, and with good cause. Not just for the on-brand hype that a new BI release naturally entails, but for the dynamicism, adventurous experimentation and gnarly otherworldliness the most recent LP provides us.
Melding the pure-electronic ambient demonstrated in electronica LP Timewave Zero with the weird-prog death metal of Hidden History of The Human Race, Elsewhere feels like a natural secretion between these two seemingly-disparate musical elements. The lengthier passages through ‘Stargate’, the sense of crushing weight when the psychedelic elements are stripped to the bands’ organic death metal roots. There’s no way to talk about this band without sounding pretentious, but that doesn’t mean it’s an album purely for chin-stroking pseudo-intellectuals.
I’m glad to see this band reaching further into esoteric depths and cosmic heights, but keeping the extreme metal foundations intact.
Synopsis:
Broadening their lyrical/songwriting scope, Oklahama City’s best real-world manifestation of generation-wide catharsis and melancholy returned late 2024 with an album moving from the localised concerns of God’s Country onto the world stage.
Mired musically in no particular direction but with that decidedly-delicious blend of 90’s noise-rock, industrial, modern sludge, doom and more, the din and muck of this album nevertheless shines like greasy oil in your cochlea. An increased focus on pivoting huge breakdowns and almost thrashy segments into the distortion-soaked, gnarly atmosphere provides a sense of both hook and anchoring that makes those riffs feel like R I F F S.
If you’re like myself and find comfort, relatedness and even joyfulness amidst grim musical overtones, Cool World is an essential listen and a stellar addition to a high-quality canon from these guys. I cannot wait to see them live again, either - Chat Pile are something else onstage and bring an added dimension of heaviness to their dark material. (Australia? Please?)
Synopsis
I couldn’t think of a more appropriate album title depiction, with Muuntautuja translating to ‘shapeshifter’. Exemplary of all their work but especially so on this, their most recent LP, it’s a continuation of their otherworldly, cosmic blend of nauseating dissonance, psychedelia, black metal and all other manner of uneasy, powerful undertones. There’s at times a dynamic blend between trip-hop styled electronica up against walls of distortion, fuzz and cavernous shrieks.
Overall, the album feels like a refinement of their structural compositions, with more traditional songwriting acting as a brace for the swirling mass of avant-garde experimentation. This expansive 45-minute journey is like a black metal Faraday Cage, containing a level of mystery and implied horror few bands can equate to musically. Weird, powerful, beautiful stuff.
Gigan - Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus
Label: Willowtip Records
Released: Oct 24th, 2024
Album Stream:
Synopsis:
Much like the previous album, Anomalous Abstractigate Infinitessimus is one of many masterworks in melding the deep, far peripheries of heavy music with a more solidified extreme metal chassis on their latest efforts.
Bracing a spinly exoskeleton of odd time signatures, narky and warped bends, arpeggios and tumultuous rhythmic passages, an ‘easy’ summation of this mind-bending album could be something like ‘space Dillinger Escape Plan meets Behold The Arctopus in an extrasolar collision’. It’s gargantuan, doomy and lumbering at times, others more mathcore-goes-grindier, focused and savage. With song titles like ‘Ultra-Violet Shimmer and Permeating Infra-Sound’, there’s a clear thematic focus aligning the warped dark-matter physics so skilfully employed by a band both technically proficient, decidedly death metal and envelope-pushing all at once.
Lauded and at times criticised for its’ at times atonal and head-scratching atmosphere, I’d personally argue Gigan’s latest is where we see them riff harder and with more mindfulness than ever. Which ultimately aims for devastatingly head-wrenching grooviness amongst the strange.
Synopsis:
Had to save the gnarliest until last! While I won’t complain about the raft of fantastic concerts I was able to attend across the year in 2024, missing out on Viscera Infest’s Australian tour felt almost painful. Why? I mean, shit, just check the album out. A new level of upscaling their goregrind barbarism from previous LP Verrucous Carcinoma, Teratoma sees the band engage in a brutal death-metal marriage to the grindcore format to fantastic effect. Japan is internationally renowned for producing extreme meal with its’ own flavour of savagery, and this non-stop head-crusher of an album is perfect testament to that fact.
If you like it fast and nasty, this is up there as one of the gnarliest efforts from the year just passed.
And there you go - another five massive luminaries from the heavy/alternative music scene in 2024! I’m aware of the lateness; heck, very self-conscious at the fact. But I’m nothing if not persistent, so stay tuned as I’ll be releasing the remainder of 2024’ albums of the year, continue the Honourable Mentions, and then we’ll finally get an opportunity to discuss the year in music so far for 2025, talk hype about upcoming releases and more!
Peace, Love and Homage to Sick Riffs xoxo - Brady.