#depressor

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Another Year of Pissed-off and (Mostly) Charged-up Music: Jonathan Shaw’s 2019 in review

Cloudrat (photo by Adam De Grosse)

Impeachment as media spectacle? Drone strikes and U.S. boots on the ground in Yemen and Somalia (and lots of other beautiful, exotic locales)? White nationalism ascendant? Soul-crushing economic exploitation and rapacious disregard for the health of the Earthball? 2019 had it all! And things ain’t gettin’ any better!  

For some folks, music is balm or an escape route into aesthetically transcendent spaces of wonder. I understand both of those notions, and have made use of those musical functions during this difficult, upsetting, infuriating, exhausting year. But precisely because I have found this year to be so very, very difficult, upsetting, infuriating and exhausting, I have more often tuned in to music that matches my grim moods. Hence this list.  

As ever, I make no claims for the “greatness” or “best-ness” of the music. These are the records that I spun most often this year, the ones that fought for rotation with all of the other records I should have been listening to (always another six or seven reviews I should have been writing and dozens of records I should have given more attention to…), and won. If pressed, I would call Venom Prison’s Samsara and Cloud Rat’s Pollinator the records of the year. But that’s just one listener’s opinion. You figure it out. Aside from those two, the records on the list below appear in alphabetical order. I’d say “enjoy,” but that’s not really the point.

Cloud Rat—Pollinator (Artoffact)

Pollinator by Cloud Rat

They call their music “grindpunk,” which is sort of useful as a framing device. But there’s so much more going on throughout Pollinator: crusty passages, feral noiserock, post-whatever. Somehow, Cloud Rat’s synthesis of all of those elements feels completely seamless. And the songs are terrific. 

 Venom Prison—Samsara (Prosthetic)

Samsara by Venom Prison

Relentless, remorseless deathgrind from Wales. Political, militantly feminist, sonically and psychologically violent. Nuff said.

 Acrylics—Sinking In (Iron Lung)

Sinking In LP (LUNGS-145) by ACRYLICS

I can’t stop listening to this one. A bit of hardcore burl, a bunch of post-punk angularity and some crazy good guitar tone. These Santa Rosa punks have only been at it for a few years, but youth is a real attribute here. Their snottiness—tempered just enough by a canny musical sensibility—feels authentically lived in, rather than posed. Best punk record I’ve heard all year.

 Depressor—Hell Storms over Earth (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)  

Hell Storms Over Earth by Depressor

A much-needed archival release that collects hyper-obscure tapes and 7-inches and a few previously unavailable tunes from this thoroughly underappreciated industrial-crust band. It sounds like shit. It’s supposed to. It’s really, really good.

 Epectase—Astres (I, Voidhanger)

Astres by EPECTASE

If Cloud Rat synthesizes, Epectase gives you whiplash as their songs shift from one mode of metal music to another: from black metal to emo (I know…) to stadium-rock soloing to atmospheric, mannerly prog. The confounding thing is that it works. Adventurous stuff.

 Lightning Bolt—Sonic Citadel (Thrill Jockey)

Sonic Citadel by Lightning Bolt

Twenty-five years? Seriously? And the Brians still find ways to make their singular variety of noise-punk interesting and exciting. A couple songs do more than flirt with tunefulness this time around: they strut with it, finding the rock’n’roll that curls its lip somewhere in the midst of all the band’s brightly hued chaos.

 Moor Mother—Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes (Don Giovanni) 

Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes by Moor Mother

Camae Ayewa, who records as Moor Mother, is a poet, and she fuses her powerful vocal performances with an ambivalent futurist embrace of the machine, a primitivist engagement with the body and a twisted hip hop sensibility. The most harrowing record you will hear this year.

 Sheer Mag—A Distant Call (Wilsuns RC)

A Distant Call by SHEER MAG

The Philly band continues its unrestrained (and winning) worship of radio-friendly hard rock, circa 1979. But the record is a lot more than a pleasantly polished surface or nostalgia act. Listen close. You’ll hear a coherent lefty politics and a dose of hopeful working-class soul. Music for stained denim and a soft-pack of smokes.

 Uniform & the Body—Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back (Sacred Bones)

Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back by Uniform & The Body

Unpleasant and endlessly listenable—trust the Body, collaborating here for the second time with noise act Uniform, to figure out how to make that work. Electronics spark from Clubland’s druggy depths through the lizard brain’s neural pathways to your nightmare’s brightly flickering fluorescent tubing. Yikes. Play it again.  

Special shout-out to I, Voidhanger Records for continuously pushing the boundaries of metal music with their brazenly nutso and unflaggingly interesting releases throughout the year.  

And fuck you, Stephen Miller.  

Jonathan Shaw

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Depressor - Filth/Grace (2014)

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Depressor — Hell Storms over Earth (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Hell Storms Over Earth by Depressor

Depressor’s music sounds like shit. It’s amazing. Hell Storms over Earth collects a bunch of tracks released on splits, demos and hyper-obscure 7” records between 1998 and 2003, as well as three previously unreleased songs. By 1998, Depressor had abandoned the industrial crunch that dominated their mid-1990s cassette releases, moving in the direction of the stenchcore and death metal that band members Dave Benson and Gabe Gavriloff would go on to make with Acephalix. Benson and Gavriloff were crucial elements of the band’s sound, but Depressor was guided by Chris Oxford’s vision and idiosyncratic sensibility. During the period in which the songs on Hell Storms over Earth were written and captured, Depressor worked exclusively with a crap 4-track, recording their stuff themselves — maybe in someone’s laundry room, if the muffled, vaguely damp sound is any indication. Check out the insane breakdown in “Mold/Subsystem,” which somehow manages to sound both syrupy and gritty. The music is falling to pieces even as you listen, riven to bits by its own violence.

Neurosis and Dystopia are often credited with catalyzing the Bay Area’s fecund crust punk scene, which has endured since the end of the 1980s. Records like The Word as Law (1989) and Human=Garbage (1994) make pretty convincing arguments. Depressor’s songs are both entirely of that time and remarkably forward-looking. In tracks like “Flesh World War” and “Largactyl,” you can hear an especially urgent combination of the death-metal burl and the punk anti-aesthetic that are now virtually synonymous with crust. Contrasted with Depressor’s stuff, songs like “Double Edged Sword” sound positively professional. There’s no need to debate which band has the most cred or authenticity. But there’s a strong sense of commitment — a self-abnegating ethos — emanating from Depressor’s songs. You can smell the sweat, you can feel the grime. The songs are somehow simultaneously exciting and exhausting.  

Those musical and thematic logics reach an apotheosis on tracks like “Mob Justice” and “It Feeds on Children,” which aren’t songs so much as they are hulking, stomping, chugging mechanisms that purposefully grind themselves into the dirt. The sounds are spawned by low-budget pop nightmares like Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Street Trash, by he consequences of the “New World Order” for global capital and by the more local order then being propagated by Clinton’s Crime Bill (thanks, Joe Biden). Is it possible for nihilism to constitute an ethos? Perhaps in the late 1990s, with neoliberalism ascendant, there didn’t seem to be much alternative. That’s sort of quaint now, as capital and institutionalized cynicism reach increasingly perverse and cruel intensities. Maybe that’s why Depressor’s music still resonates. It’s shitty and bleak and offers no viable solutions, a soundtrack for history’s bad side.  

Jonathan Shaw