2012 has not been a vintage year for albums. Many of the bands I like spent the year touring the massive releases of 2011 and there was precious little new material to catch my ear. Fortunately a few bands did come up trumps.
Therapy? continued on their eclectic and individualistic path. We’re a long way on from their massively successful days centred on the Troublegum album, and having followed that breakthrough with the wilfully difficult Infernal Love album it’s no surprise that they’ve continued to buck the mainstream. This year’s A Brief Crack of Light is sparse but powerful, with Andy Cairns continuing to draw on themes of alienation and distance in his lyrics while not forgetting the importance of melody in the choruses. This is spiky and occasionally uncomfortable listening, but well worth it.
dEUS surprised us all at the beginning of June by releasing a new album without any fanfare or warning, only eight months after the excellent Keep You Close collection. The band explained this as a desire to return a little to their old ways of working, favouring spontaneity and songs arising from jams ahead of spending three years in the studio analysing every detail of their songs. Previous dEUS albums have been carefully calculated sets of songs that work together, while Following Sea is a far more varied collection, starting with the atmospheric Quatre Mains, their first venture into French lyrics and inevitably suggesting a Gainsbourg kind of vibe, ending with the epic and thoughtful One Thing About Waves, a rolling rumination on the lifecycle of waves, while passing through the Spanish-beat-tinged Sirens, a kind of sequel to Ghosts from the previous album, the PTSD-referencing Hidden Wounds, and the light and poppy Crazy About You on the way. There is a sense of freedom about the album and it merits repeated listening, preferably while driving along a coast road.
Storm Corrosion is a collaboration between two giants of the progressive hard rock scene, Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth and Steven Wilson of the Porcupine Tree. Although they’ve worked together frequently on each others’ albums, in particular with Wilson producing Opeth’s monumental and epoch-making Blackwater Park album in 2001, this was their first proper joint venture. And it was quite a surprise. No death metal guitars or growls, no lengthy guitar solos, no pounding double bass drums… instead, we got a collection of soundscapes something in the mould of the space that Radiohead chose to occupy when writing hits started to bore them. It’s not music for every occasion, and certainly not for late-night driving, but it’s good.
Rush have never made a bad album – or even anything less than very good – and they weren’t going to spoil their unblemished record with Clockwork Angels. It’s hard to find anything new to say about a band this good who have been around for this long, except perhaps to note that they are not afraid to go very, very heavy indeed. For a band who made their reputations more than thirty years ago as a bunch of studious progmeisters, they can riff if up when they want to. Now I just want them to play somewhere near me on their European tour next year.
Muse are back with The 2nd Law, and much as I love them – and I already have concert tickets for next year – for the second album running they’ve left me a little… not really disappointed, that would be too harsh, but slightly frustrated with some of their musical choices. Matt Bellamy is never afraid to follow his instincts and show off his influences, but I feel his talents would be better served not drifting off into pastiches of Queen if he could avoid it. Clearly bands have to evolve, and repeated remakes of, say, the glorious Origin of Symmetry would be tedious retreading of old ground, but I wonder if he wouldn’t make me happier by stopping aping Freddie Mercury and choosing to channel Rachmaninov instead. And I’m also vaguely troubled – although this could well be a problem with my understanding of his lyrics – by the underlying premise (thermodynamics and entropy) of the whole album.
So, what then for my favourite album of the year?
People aren’t going to believe it, but it’s (whisper this) French metal.
Long a subject of gentle – and not so gentle – mockery in hard rock circles, the French metal scene is thriving and at the vanguard is a four-piece from Bayonne in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Gojira released their fifth album L’Enfant Sauvage in June 2012 and it is an impressive piece of work. Including their trademark features of precision drumming, complicated rhythms and stop-start riffs, Gojira make full use of the soundscapes they are able to create, finding texture and colour and depth, melody and harmony, while underpinning everything with a ferocious, systematic, occasionally suffocating blend of drumming and riffing. Listening to it I am irresistibly reminded of Mastodon, creators of my favourite album of 2011, who are also able to come up with melodies and arrangements that stick in the mind while delivering some overwhelming brutality underneath the harmonies.