The Syndicate

12th place:

schadd

Eleanor Wallace - Standing by a River

I got a couple of these old time Americana songs, and they're hard because they're so vividly something else that I don't know where to plug them in here. With so many category flops, the difference feels pretty insignificant, but I want to reward the few tracks that nailed it too. This is the material for a category I'll never run out of awareness that most people won't have any material to sub. Unlike neoclassical darkwave dungeon synth. Really now, does everyone here live under a rock? This song feels like it was written specifically to be recorded on the oldest equipment capable of capturing sound. It's beautifully haunting.

Trying to look her up was a bit of a trip. She's an incredibly obscure figure by 2021 internet standards. Someone started asking around about her on a forum in 2012, and the blanks were filled in from some very personal perspectives:

[i[Wow..I thought I would be the only one with memories of Eleanor Wallace. I didn't know she actually released her songs formally. My step-father, George Cominos, managed and promoted her briefly in Carmel. He had a reel-to-reel recording of her songs, many of which I learned when I was 12 years old and just learning to play guitar. . . . My younger siblings grew up listening to me sing her songs, and all these years later, I still do. I'll be watching this site to see if anyone else knows about her and her work. Thanks![/i]

Eleanor Has been found. Actually, I never lost her. Douglas did his homework and tracked her down. Eleanor (mom) does not play much anymore but still has her guitars and Lute. Yup, I'm the "Mike" that was also on the album for a wee bit.

Really makes this recording feel personal and intimate on a lot of levels. She was even from Carmel CA, right around where I was stationed for a year and half. This video was uploaded only a few months after she died.

8.9

11th place:

BLOODYRAIN10001

Idisi - Bad Apple (medieval folk arrangement)

TRVE CVLT RENAISSANCE TOUHOU HYPE. The melody they transition to from 0:45 to 0:55 and repeat a few times later reminds me a lot of the R??L sub I got to cat 3 last year. I don't know if there's any connection, but it seems to be a creative liberty not present in the original tune. The vocals from 1:30 to 1:50 hedge a bit into that grey zone between pure stupidity and transcendent brilliance, but this is great. Top 10 hype. It's going to get a lot more weird and wild and what the fuck were you thinking Shad from here.

9.0

10th place:

tane

Zeitkratzer - Salute to Zivojin Misic

I'm torn between do I actually enjoy listening to this and it might be the most appropriate sub I received. What in God's name did you send me? This has achieved a level of chaotic garble beyond my capacity to parse, but it appears to be doing the entire thing purely with acoustic instruments and frogbirds.

I dunno. I will probably never listen to this again in my life after this walrus, but this a category-perfect trip worthy of being experienced near the top of the pack.

9.1

9th place:

KnightsofCydonia

Days N' Daze - Rockabilly Impending Deathfuture

You grasped the spirit of the category in a way I hadn't even considered. It's as filthy as the scene and conceivably performed there. These guys even look like they belong. I'm told trumpets were almost as common as synthesizers, in the olden days.

9.2

8th place:

Marmot

In Extremo - Herr Mannelig

I remember these guys from waaaay back in the day. I still have some Napster or Audiogalaxy era Sünder ohne Zügel tracks floating around, but it's probably been that long since I've heard them. I was dead convinced when I heard this that it was a Finnish band singing in Swedish, to the point where I wasn't satisfied seeing that they were from Germany and started digging, and they are singing in Swedish, so now I'm feeling even more full of myself than normal, so you'll probably score really high.

So I then proceeded to sample all 117 Korpiklaani songs in my collection to figure out where they covered this, and they apparently never did, but I have to imagine songs like this had a huge influence on Jonne Järvelä's evolution into heavier folk in the early 2000s. I hope you are all stocking up for my yoik category next year.

I absolutely love this stuff. They're too old for Bandcamp, but if I ever get my hands on their discography, they're in for a long hard binge.

9.3

7th place:

Zarathustra

Attallas Music - Drop the Beat Mlord

This is presented like it's meant to be comical, but it doesn't come off that way at all. It's incredibly well done. I'm curious what he used to construct this. The samples feel very nuanced, like the off note on the flute trill at 3:18 feels more pronounced than at 3:20, though that may be the surrounding instrumentation playing tricks on my ears. The guitarish instrument he's using has enough flare that I can pick up on a loop in places like 4:15 vs 4:29, but if this is all programmed in origin rather than based on original recordings, it's a heck of a job recreating the subtlety of a performance. Maybe that's more common than I think and this song's loop-centrism just draws it to my attention, but regardless, I had a lot of fun exploring this while still enjoying it as a whole.

9.4

6th place:

Tangrowth

Coil - Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)

Yeah this is really great. I love the tone of that guitar. It reminds me a lot of... bands that probably copied these guys, because none of them date back to the 80s. There are so many great subtle moments in this. I love the plucked violin at 1:55. I love that against-the-grain string as percussion at 2:39 and how they push the final beat of it up to a chalkboard screech. I love how it starts to warp and devolve at 4:50. The song has an enchanting repetitive flow that makes for great background listening, but when I hone in on it I find it in constant evolution.

9.5

5th place:

Newcomb

Sorten Muld - Mylardatter

This is not how it was supposed to happen.

This was not what I had in mind.

No, no, this can't be happening.

Here I made you a gif:



9.6

4th place:

Adam

Dave Van Ronk - Mack the Knife

I thought for sure this had been subbed to me before, but it looks like I must have just picked up on it once in passing, probably in a reveal. Amazing how much it stuck with me through that limited exposure. This guy's vocal performance is absolutely incredible to me. Digging around through earlier versions of the song and finding its sort of oompah-lite original followed by a long tradition of jazz... really drilled home how much Van Ronk completely owns it here. And given the subject matter, his version feels so much more naturally attuned to it than what came before. That old time country sound is so distinctly American to me that it's hard to fully connect this with the category in spite of utterly appropriate lyrics and sense of times gone by. I'm really torn on the placement here. There wasn't a clear and obvious winner like the first two categories, and I feel this is the sub I enjoyed the most, but it's not a great fit for the category. And when I listen to these down the line, I'm listening to them in the context of the category. It feels... mutually detrimental to my enjoyment of the song and my enjoyment of the playlist to slot this one into first place.

9.7

3rd place:

Aladyyn

Omnia - Teutates

This was the refined approach, pulling no punches and just delivering it superbly. The marching percussion sounds huge under those endlessly droning pipes. The vocals are fabulous. The bagpipes and drums both press in on my head and massage me with their constant motion in such a satisfying way. It's not at all uncommon to this style of music, but it still requires solid execution. I'm not sure how things would have panned out had I received a bunch of songs like it--and I've encountered relatively little music like it despite this feeling so core to European folk--but much like dungeon synth, very few people actually went there, and you shipped a huge one.

9.8

2nd place:

Zack

Exuma - Mama Loi, Papa Loi

This is pretty wild. The zombie sound effects at the beginning are... something! I don't think its Caribbean origin is really an inhibiting factor here, because the feel is all the same in primitivism and a sense of the supernatural always dwelling right around the corner. I love the way this song organically evolves, picking up speed and intensity and layers of seemingly unprompted moments like the guy blowing into the microphone around 2:25. I wish it didn't take a slow fade out, especially as it overlaps with what feels like some of the wildest vocal moments in the closing minute. But this is really inspired stuff. I love it.

9.9

1st place:

soah

Flamen - I

This is it! This is exactly what I was looking for! I love the melody at 1:40 and the way the two guitars mirror each other over a wall of sound. I love that Drudkh-esque chord progression in the break that follows. I love how the song stays busy in every register. The production gives it such a nice full sound that echos into every corner of my head. The vocals are just right to enhance the mood without clashing. It's entirely relevant to the category. It's pretty hard to win a category with metal for me. Looking back, this appears to be the first time it's ever happened. I listen to so much of it that the odds of finding something that sounds original to me or else copycats on a level to par with what I already love just aren't in your favor. But you snuck through the paper-thin gap here. A bit repetitive at times? Maybe. But if this was a 2021 release it would have a guaranteed spot on my year-end list.

10

Scoring through 3

39. 10.1 PunchyTheCat
38. 18.9 LordQuas
37. 19.1 Relm
36. 19.7 Logic
34. 19.8 BoKnows
34. 19.8 gbsfranca
33. 20.1 Made
32. 20.5 Bloobird
31. 20.7 nutella
30. 20.9 Frog
29. 21.1 Moose
27. 21.7 Ace Marvel
27. 21.7 Ampharos
26. 21.9 vanity.
25. 22.0 Kane
24. 22.2 staypositivefriend
23. 22.3 KnightsofCydonia
22. 22.4 ladd
21. 22.7 Cory
20. 22.9 Aladyyn
19. 23.2 soah
17. 24.0 Keldeo
17. 24.0 Visorslash
16. 24.2 Owner
14. 24.3 birdwithteeth11
14. 24.3 roro__b
13. 24.5 Marcher Jovian
12. 24.7 Newcomb
11. 24.9 Zarathustra
9. 25.0 MyNameIsNothing
9. 25.0 shubaka17
7. 25.2 tane
7. 25.2 Zack
6. 25.5 Psycho666Soldier
5. 26.1 Tangrowth
4. 26.7 marmot
3. 26.8 BLOODYRAIN10001
2. 27.3 Adam
1. 27.8 schadd

I retroactively increased cat 2's point total to 10.5 to match it with what I ended up doing in cats 7 and 8. There were too many subs to give out the range of points I'd wanted to on a 0-10 scale. Resulting new leader board:

Scoring through 3

39. 10.1 PunchyTheCat
38. 19.1 Relm
37. 19.2 LordQuas
36. 19.7 Logic
34. 19.8 BoKnows
34. 19.8 gbsfranca
33. 20.1 Made
32. 20.5 Bloobird
31. 20.7 nutella
30. 21.1 Moose
29. 21.3 Frog
27. 21.7 Ace Marvel
27. 21.7 Ampharos
26. 21.9 vanity.
25. 22.3 KnightsofCydonia
23. 22.4 Kane
23. 22.4 ladd
21. 22.7 Cory
21. 22.7 staypositivefriend
20. 22.9 Aladyyn
19. 23.2 soah
18. 24.0 Keldeo
17. 24.2 Owner
16. 24.3 roro__b
15. 24.4 Visorslash
14. 24.5 Marcher Jovian
13. 24.7 Newcomb
12. 24.8 birdwithteeth11
11. 24.9 Zarathustra
10. 25.4 shubaka17
8. 25.2 tane
8. 25.2 Zack
7. 25.5 MyNameIsNothing
6. 25.9 Psycho666Soldier
5. 26.1 Tangrowth
4. 27.1 marmot
3. 27.3 BLOODYRAIN10001
2. 27.7 Adam
1. 28.3 schadd

39th place:

Moose

Smells Like Apple Bottom Jeans

What the $%#! is an apple bottom jean? They must be really funny, because he can't stop laughing in the middle of his gag.

Real talk mate, did you honestly ever think I would get this?

2.0

38th place:

PunchyTheCat

Tame Impala - One More Hour

Tame Impala were on my short list for cat 1 sample songs but got the chop for Chon. Granted my experience has been largely limited to Currents, I don't associate them with a sound that has high potential here. This song does feel different, but not... I'm struggling to feel anything at all with it really. It's bugging me because the minimalistic approach they're taking begs a mood, and I feel like I should be able to connect with it even if it's not the one I'm looking for in this category. But no matter how many times I put this back on, I'm just hearing the individual things he's doing and not pulling it all together in my head. The singing sounds like it always does. The keyboard plays one note endlessly. The bombastic moments like at 0:50 feel very standard early 70s prog. Maybe it could be lonely? But he's singing sweetly. The bass is playful at 2:02. The strings and fluttery sounds that come in at 3:17 before the next 70s throwback are pretty. There's no point of conflict, but the prog is too garish for the song to sustain that peace either. I tire of the prog so quickly. It sounds so much like everything else that, without a core mood I'm connecting to, it's old on first encounter. And the rest of the music kind of crumbles for me around that. The repeating keyboard becomes a nuisance. I want to swat at it in my head. I find the song teetering between dull and frustrating until the drums come in around 5:20, at which point it fills out quickly and I stop noticing its individual parts so much, but it's too little too late.

Maybe I'm listening to it from the wrong perspective. I should be able to let go and experience it more as a single unit. It didn't bother me on initial spins, when I wasn't paying attention. It just kind of existed. But trying to appreciate it made me dislike it.

4.0

37th place:

Visorslash

Blue Öyster Cult - Then Came the Last Days of May

This kicks off to a great start instrumentally, and I never stop vibing the lead guitar. I think the soundspace works well for it and doesn't succumb to feeling too repetitive for a traditionally structured song. The backup vocals--it's hot!, what luck!, all there-- are cringe-worthy highlights on the contrived nature of so much popular music written around that time. I feel like the common approach was to go ok we want a verse here and a guitar lick there and some falsetto vocals over there, and walk into the song-writing experience with all these prerequisites that get forced in whether they really contribute anything of value or not. And it may have been nothing like that in practice, but I definitely sense a tendency to copy what other commercially successful songs were doing without much focus on owning your own creation, and I hold this track guilty.

The lyrics are the real killer for me. He's telling this tragic story that could be really compelling if presented from a humanizing perspective. But think about how this song starts. We're going to describe these three generic cliches--"three good buddies laugin' and smokin'"--and then immediately explicitly foreshadow their deaths, denigrating them to redshirts in a budget horror film. Let's see, we need some character development here... "They all held the money they had, money they hoped would take them very far". Yeah, young lads with hopes and dreams for the future! Element of surprise... hmm... how to make it feel like everything is going smoothly... Ah, no traffic cops! But then "the other guy turned and spilled three boys' blood". Tragic. Damn you, Other Guy.

It's just such comically bad story-telling to me. I don't want to rag on them too hard, because this is supposedly a true story about the fate of a distant acquaintance, but from the outset of the song he is committing to this very direct narration of events that isn't going to be helped along at all through the composition or performance. The guitar's off doing its own thing, and his voice is devoid of emotion. The supporting vocals would be mocking if they were relevant at all. The core of the song rides on his ability to tell a story, and I just could not get invested in what the other guy did to the three good buddies.

5.0

36th place:

Cory

Trophy Scars - Mother

This starts out really chill. I love the country twang and clean production. The initial male singer has a nice light rasp to his voice. The guttural vocals that first come out in the background at 0:18 are ok as a novelty. They sound like the singer just drank a glass of milk. They don't roll out with a natural crispness. But it's a short-lived thing quickly followed up by female vocals that work very nicely in the mix. Up through one minute, we're tracking for a very, very solid tune. But then the milk guzzler returns with a vengeance, and ugh why is he doing this... It really sounds like he's been chugging milk. It's all wet and mucusy. It's not organic at all, chucked into a song that has otherwise defined itself by feeling smooth yet natural.

And I can't get past him. No amount of enjoying the rest of this song--and I really do--redeems his forced attempts to sound abrasive. It clashes so hard with everything else, and the sense that something I felt was working so well got flushed down the drain makes it difficult to dismiss. I hate to think that if it was more mediocre all around it might have done better, but that's probably the case.

5.5

35th place:

Aladyyn

In Vain - As I Wither

This song kicks so hard out the gate and ends up ... really kind of boring me by the end. I got a supergroup vibe out of it, whatever the hell that means, but it inspired me to go look up the members, and sure enough, they're linked to the likes of Solefald, Ihsahn, and Myrkgrav, all artists that I enjoy, eh, more than I enjoyed this. It's a very predictably structured and unvaryingly performed tune with most of its eggs in the captivate through relentlessness basket. But while they do the black metal onslaughts and solos well, I find the rest rather dull. Like I can't imagine what that bridge from 0:29 0:43 is supposed to accomplish beyond doing that thing metal songs do for its own sake. It's the classic filler--those moments where I have a part A I love and a part B I love and need some space between them so I just plug in some mindless garbage. The look at all thse cool things I have; let's glue them together approach that completely dismisses song-writing in favor of loop-writing. I hear it so much in songs I wrote as a kid ...and... totally not songs I wrote a couple of months ago... uh...

And I'm not saying they fell into that trap here. This song doesn't shy away from metal cliches, and there's something to be said for writing a tune you can just bang your head to for seven minutes without caring about deeper artsy fartsy shit. But it really stands out to me here because it happens so early and highlights a persistent wedge between the song and my personal tastes. 2:20 is such an awesome moment. The solo at 5:05 is simple but cool. That single cymbal hit at 6:40 pulling the song out of the same passage I complained about makes the redundancy worth it in that instance. This is a song filled with great moments. It doesn't carry far for me because the getting to those moments is a form of filler I can't embrace in itself. The clean rhythm-driven chuggin' along gig isn't my style naturally. It can still work, but this one's not doing it for me.

5.6

34th place:

ladd

Sweet Trip - Chapters

I could see it in a desert maybe, like some pleasant fantasy incursion. It's certainly sunny, and that slightly distorted synth that comes in around 3:15 has a granulated but smooth flow that easily conjures to mind sand. The outro has a peaceful aquatic hollowness like watching the waves roll ashore. I'm too far removed from cat 1 to say where this would have placed there, but it would have done well. This category isn't for a carefree air conditioned drive though. Think more like how you're feeling after your car's been broken down for five hours and you didn't bring any water. So far Sweet Trip's 2/2 on songs I enjoyed, but this was the biggest cat fail in the mix to me.

5.8

33rd place:

Relm

Susumu Hirasawa - Ghosts

Songs under two minutes need to do a lot more for me than this in a walrus. The distortion in this amounts to opening Windows Sound Recorder and clicking Increase Volume a few times. I could cut it some slack for being from 1997, but a brief amped up cut of standard 90s electronica is going to have to hit on a very compelling aesthetic to carry far with me, and this isn't quite getting there. I did like how that watery sample starts to take over everything at 0:50. Kind of adds a feeling of pressure from an unexpected angle. There wasn't anything I disliked about it. It just gave me very little to work with, and that made it easy to bump other tracks above it. I think I would enjoy it a lot more as a piece in a broader collection. Paprika soundtrack is dope though.

5.9

32nd place:

vanity.

Malady - Bad Life

Suddenly I'm staring down Trophy Scars wondering if I predicted the future. I do not enjoy these vocals for roughly the same reasons, but where that song was otherwise a smooth ride, this is angry emotional post-hardcore where it just doesn't clash anywhere near as much. His voice still sticks out enough to hold back the rest of the song a little bit for me, but the perspectives are swapped. Where Trophy Scars left me going they had such a great song and did THIS to it?, here I'm at a much more passive this could have been really appealing to me if the vocals were different. And that doesn't irritate me as much. It's in the punk attitude, I guess. They are who they are, playing what they want to, and they have no reason to care what people think about it. The other seemed like it was aiming to impress. I guess there's also the fact that Trophy Scars had multiple vocalists and wouldn't have needed to like... fire or hire anybody to improve their sound. Maybe I should be talking more about your sub than someone else's, but my verdict here is I just don't like the vocals that much, and while I enjoy the post-hardcore package, they aren't doing something unique with it to stand out. All the pieces needed to click for me to send this one deep relative to the competition.

6.0

31st place:

Ace Marvel

선미(SUNMI) - Black Pearl

Mmm... Maybe there's material out there that would surprise me, but I thought this was going to be the hardest category in the mix for an all kpop playlist. It's such a lush style, and this was the one category that most demanded anything but that. You picked something mellow, which seems appropriate. Unfortunately it suffers in turn from being the least memorable one so far. I really love the subtle control in her voice in places like 0:38 and 1:35, and I'm continuing to find kpop songs vastly more aesthetically pleasing to me than western pop. Loving the sax too. Such an underutilized instrument in western music. This was pretty nice, but it's not going to make it very deep in this category.

6.5

30th place:

shubaka17

RIOT - Blackwater

Haha, well now... If I gave creativity bonus points, this would certainly earn one. It seems to be quite explicitly wild west cowboys vs robot overlords, and I don't know that you could achieve the category much more directly than that. Unfortunately, I have to like it too, and dubstep is a big miss for me far more often than not. So much of it sounds so similar, and it's usually a part of a very glossy product that just doesn't jive with my tastes at all. I can get into the bold symphonic approach when it's paired with something equally hype to me. I like a fair bit of folk and death metal that takes that approach. Rolling it into the slowed down tempo and somewhat softer-hitting spectrum of dubstep is just so anticlimactic to me. I wanted to like this for it's theme a lot me than I actually enjoyed it in practice, but I was still highly entertained by how it approached the theme here.

6.8

29th place:

Logic

Bad Religion - Los Angeles is Burning



This song was cute, and I got a kick out of the video. I would have to be getting a decent paycheck to stand in front of a crowd and perform music this resistant to nuance, but when pop punk lands on effective light comedy lyrics, the simplicity of everything else snaps into place. It's still a very self-limiting style, and if he's shipping a deeper social message than LA kind of sucks--a prerequisite take for every band to have ever originated there--I'm deaf to it, but I had a lot of fun, and it's been stuck in my head ever since I wrote this.

6.9

28th place:

Frog

Måneskin - Zitti e Buoni

I got a couple of cowboy jams like this, and while they weren't exactly what I had in mind, they seem entirely at home here. The meat and potatoes of this song is very automotive overcompensation commercialcore, but that's benign in itself. The big sell for me was the 25 second rap bit. The trilled sounds don't really exist in English and give it a rather mesmerizing flow, at least from my perspective. In general I think his vocals are very well executed and bail out an otherwise generic tune. I enjoyed it. Lordi is still the only legitimate Eurovision winner, though I'm a little intimidated that these guys managed to get their hands on my grandma's drapes.

7.0

27th place:

Adam

Nurse With Wound - Black Teeth

Hello Tom Waits. I don't know, on the one hand I want to go oh wow they're doing something really unique here that so few other bands try. I love the vocals, which carry the majority of the song without more than that minimalist island beat in support. The falsetto bits are especially great. When the song does tinker around instrumentally, it's functionally eclectic and keeps me interested. But in a song that's so heavily reliant on the words coming out of his mouth... I really can't get into what he's actually saying here. Maybe I'm being overly critical because it's so close to Waits and I find his lyrics brilliant, but I feel like this song relies on a lot of very level 1 humor overcompensated by cussing a bunch. By the time the man's arguing with Satan about getting off the bus I'm at like... I'm sure I'm supposed to be amused by how weird this is, but it comes off forced weird without a spark of real lyrical creativity that roundaboutly steers it into feeling like the most normal thing ever. It's Family Guy humor to me. Random has to be secretly not random, or else it feels contrived!

I say that half in jest, but I think it's more like nothing is truly random and if I just spew the first things that pop into my head there will be a rather dull complacency, whereas if I follow each lead down its own path a bit I can generate a curious sense of continuity amid broader gaps in the articulated chaos.

I dunno maybe I'm just being dense, but the lyrics put me off a bit in an otherwise intriguing song.

7.2

26th place:

gbsfranca

Dogleg - Kawasaki Backflip

This was one of the hedgiest cat fits to me. The emo sound they're pursuing has such a sentimental feel, rooted in the reflecting sadly on the fleeting nature of all things core of the genre. This category was open to an awful lot of moods and mentalities, but I don't think tenderness was really one of them. Maybe if it was one of many. I feel it's the full thrust of this song though. It's less blatantly off the mark than the Sweet Trip sub, and I really liked it, but it's an unfortunately early chop in a field where very few flubbed it.

7.3

25th place:

roro__b

Pogo - redruM

Ok, well played. It's more spooky than bleak, but it works to a point. From 2:46 it picks up a much more positive pulse. I love the axe blows synced up to the beat, but musically speaking it's pretty far removed from the category at that point. Solid for a meme sub though.

7.4

24th place:

Marcher Jovian

Mestis - Gentle Giant

This song was briefly cool as fuck on first encounter, but I started to tire of it by the end of my first listen and never really regained interest. The first 45 seconds, middle 15 seconds, and last full minute of the song are the same phrase repeated over and over with very minimal guitar variance. That leaves one and a half minutes for anything else to happen, and those parts too are very repetitive. The main drums stick to very generic patterns that fill the void but offer no creativity or escalating intensity to the song. There's a second layer of what sounds like some sort of hand drum that first becomes audible to me around 1:35, and it's great, but it's mixed so low that I can barely distinguish it, kind of at odds with the bold pronounced nature of the guitar. I like that kind of explosive sound that brings the main riff back at 2:35. But I feel like this is a track where you're either enthralled by his guitar tone or you aren't, because he's hardly going anywhere with it by noodlejam standards and there's next to nothing happening around him. Maybe if the song was mixed better and the hand drums weren't squelched. Maybe if the traditional rock drumming had a vested interest in enhancing the song. There's just not enough here to satisfy me. It continues to be something I can click play on for 30 seconds and go oh wow neat, did I rob this? But it always trends back down by the end.

7.5

23rd place:

Psycho666Soldier

Acid Mammoth - Tusks of Doom

This started out more promising than I expected for a band named Acid Mammoth. I vouch that you can always correctly judge a doom band by their name. Bongrippers don't fuck around. It takes years of training and focus to become an electric wizard, let alone conjure the sun through ASCII. What the hell do acid mammoths do? Herpederp I'm gonna step on you now. Heehaw.

The problem with most Sabbath worship is a failure to realize that Tony's the only reason anybody ever tolerated Ozzy. It's completely cliche in a forgivably fun way, except God I wish he would stop singing. I don't know why so much of the stoner doom scene is locked into this idea that mid-range nasal vocals compliment a soundscape where all other features are downtuned into the abyss. This would have been highly functional as an instrumental piece--certainly more enjoyable than what they ended up with. Absolutely appropriate for the category and very much in my taste range, it's still likely to struggle here. If a band's going to sound this much like everybody else, they have to absolutely nail it, and the vocals are turning me off.

7.6

22nd place:

Marmot

Tim Hecker - Where Shadows Make Shadows

I felt this was an odd pick. Hecker is a great option to sub to me in general, because I love everything I've ever heard by him and he has a lot of material I'm not familiar with. I'm not sure why this particular one stood out for this category though. I feel like the bass pulse that starts at 1:26 and sustains through the rest of the song gives it a bit of a positive vibe. The wall of strings that slowly emerge out of the noise soup ascend in a way that also feels... perhaps not optimistic, but a bit spiritual. There's a final higher note that joins this procession at 7:05 that gives it a moment too joyous to ignore, but it takes an unexpected bleak turn at 7:29 and shifts down from there.

If I cast it into more of a landscape situation, I suppose I can see mountains towering in the distance across a harsh void. It's not the immediate imagery that comes to me. I find the track more visceral than visual. But I can humor it, and I can't offer alternative Hecker ideas without going through and sampling my collection. It just feels like he probably has some songs that would fit here better? I don't know. I loved it, but maybe not a perfect fit, and a lot of subs got there for me.

7.7

21st place:

soah

Earthshine - When I Die I Shall Return

This was the only other really hard catfail for me besides Sweet Trip, which is a shame because it's quite nice. Entirely appropriate for cat 7, I don't know that a song about living life to the fullest and ascending through death to some eternal ancestral resting place is really compatible with dog eat dog desert slum life. I guess generically an atmospheric blackened slow roll fits the soundspace of a desert. But the guy's vocals are pretty clear, making the actual theme of the song hard to ignore, and even without the lyrics, I feel like this song is on the constant ascent. There are all of these pleasant higher pitched synth melodies playing out in the background that follow a clear progression, lifting the song further and further out of the drudgery of its first minute. There's a glimpse at 1:20, another celestial layer at 2:35, a really optimistic spoken word break in the 4 minute segue, and it just keeps getting more and more uplifting, until at 8:00 it becomes downright euphoric. I guess you could argue that my Krallice sub reaches a euphoric climax, but this is all spiritual ascension where that song is succumbing to the void. This is a beautiful song about finding inner tranquility and embracing both life and death. In my desert category. Psshh.

7.9

20th place:

BLOODYRAIN10001

Igorrr - Downgrade Desert

The original link was taken down a few days after I wrote this and the one that stayed up has some sound effects layed over it at the beginning, I think. Not sure if anything else changed. For whatever that's worth.

I had sort of forgotten what Igorrr sounded like beyond a novel merger of eclectic electronic and traditional. Maybe the classical-based sub I got last category had me misremembering him a bit, or maybe his sound just normally varies this extensively, but this definitely sounds absolutely nothing like the Igorrr I heard in that run. I love how distinctly appropriate this feels for the category. It covers every specific. It's a nomadic world crushed under the machine. The metal contingent is fairly direct in a manner I didn't anticipate working here, but whatever gets the job done. It did feel a bit short. I felt like it was just finishing ramping up to introduce the real meat of the song when it ended. Feels bad not letting this one in the top half, but on a simple raw how much did I enjoy it in category context level, there was just nothing above it I could justify shifting down. Maybe something in the refined well produced metal approach doesn't grip me as much, I dunno.

8.0

19th place:

tane

Sink Manhattan - Farm

Wow, what an abrasive song. The singer conjures to mind some alternate reality Glenn Danzig. My immediate urge is to cop out and say his voice is too relatable for the rest of the music, garishly superfluous, gaudy at odds with the keen eclectic. But over time I came to appreciate that contrast. It gives the song a layer of ugliness. It's bad, but it's in a space where bad can function. Primitive, stupid almost, like this gorilla that's going to fuck you up no matter how smug you are about higher brain capacity. They could have taken a lot of other directions with this vocally, and I think many of those could have resulted in something I liked more, but I've come around on accepting this as it stands.

8.1

18th place:

Bloobird

Subtle - The Crow

My first play note on this was "I'm tanking this, right?", and that amuses me because a part of me knew I wasn't as I typed it. It's deceptively simple. It calls to mind a lot of that turn of the century chilled out trip hop that I'm sure there's a more precise label for by now. It feels relaxing, on the surface. But the lyrical snips I picked up on were dark. The brief diversion into hip hop around 2:20 feels bleak. The wavy woodwinds begin to to feel more like an ambulance siren. Is the downtempo nature of this song actually relaxing? It feels like there's an underlying depression. Like the happiness is a facade for something a lot darker. It's an interesting composition that accomplishes a lot with... subtlety? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And the more times I listen to it thinking of it in that darker perspective, the more it transforms from any semblance of happiness to this soul sucking hopeless affair that makes me quite uncomfortable. I think it's a good cat fit disguised as a bad cat fit. I don't actually enjoy listening to it. It's kind of... authentically depressing once you really get into it, which is a hard thing to create artistically. Something I respect but don't want to experience. This is one of the first tracks I really dove into. It's really hard to judge where I'll place it as I'm writing this, because it's one of those songs I'll be trying to bump up a bit in opposition to my desire to be rid of it.

8.2

17th place:

Keldeo

The Eagle Stone Collective - Feral Horse Rides the Sun

This is certainly relevant, with the lone repeated guitar note standing in isolation amid a vast expanse of flat string. The second guitar introduced at 2:30 doesn't really do anything to alter the scene, and the extreme minimalist side of my tastes kind of wishes they would keep riding what was going on for the first half of the song, but it's a brief and modest addition. The eerie stillness that sets over everything after 4 minutes is delicious, and this time they do satisfy me by keeping it empty. I felt this sub really nailed the category. I felt odd placing it this low, but of the scenic songs that really nailed it, this one grips me the least in the moment. If I had to say, I think it's in how the melody is more pronounced than the drone. I want those sustained notes in the first half to be just a little louder--a little more boisterous in laying claim to my head.

8.3

16th place:

Kane

RZA - Combat

I can live without the opening monologue, but I love the tonal quality of this whole thing. I'm not sure what the proper terms are, but it has an almost vaporwave aesthetic going on, like the bass is amplified on everything and the rest is washed out. The keyboard rhythm is so low key that I barely notice the actual note being played and it just kind of floods everything in this gritty swamp of bad attitude. RZA's voice has this granulated feel to it like he's singing too close to the microphone, but without any of the negative side effects. It's soft and smooth but broken up at the same time. The mood is absolutely perfect for me here. I just wish it was longer. It does get repetitive when I'm pulling an extended play though these, though it regains its appeal a day or two distanced. And I'm very confused by why they both pronounce the w in sword.

8.5

15th place:

Owner

Reignwolf - Are You Satisfied?

This song would be more satisfying if I hadn't heard it at least 50 times in commercials before. It's a grand testament to the impotence of advertisement that I don't have the slightest clue what it was shilling. Google says Bauer Hockey brand apparel. Beats me. The production's pretty flat, but the core of what they're playing is solid. It definitely sounds like something that will be better live than it came off on the album.

I got really curious when I read that the band toured with Black Sabbath in 2014 but never released an album until 2019. They didn't appear to be some supergroup that would default to acclaim. I ended up watching a pretty cool live set from 2012. Jordan Cook is pretty rad. The dude can sing, and he has a hint of Hendrix in his guitar swagger.

It's hard to say how I much more I would have gotten out of it if I wasn't already so familiar with it, but in the end I don't think that hurt it at all. The production's the only thing that held it back a bit.

8.6

14th place:

BoKnows

MF DOOM - Lactose and Lecithin

Yeah, two people subbed sample artists to this category and did just fine for it. I've listened to Operation Doomsday a ton, but I've only ever given his other albums two or three spins. Doom's sound is so core to my vision of this category that it was probably hard to go wrong here. It's dystopian without the machine-gazing gloss. I absolutely love how he stutter-swaps characters at 0:40 here. You should just remain calm. Let's not get--No, slash his windpipe; he had them type of eyes.

8.7

13th place:

birdwithteeth11

Gorguts - Pleiades' Dust

Subbing a 33 minute song featuring one of the sample artists was bold. I've said before that I'm fine with sample artists, and I am, but Colin Marston's a higher risk than most for being in the already too familiar zone. I do own this album, but I've only ever actually listened to it once, so you're safe there. The length is a little harder, because it's not realistically live revealable unless it wins, and the thought of no one else hearing it anyway tempts me to trend it down. I'm not sure this placement is really where my head was at, but it wasn't going to win, and I want to have a reveal, and I know everyone is going to mute this. 13th was the low end of where I could place it without feeling arbitrary.

So yeah, it's a Marston project, but then again, it's hard to be too familiar with his spectrum outside of early Krallice. Even as a supporting role, he always manages to find himself involved in utter chaos. I listen to stuff like this and wonder how they remember their own songs. It really tests the limits of my focus. I might have to hear this a dozen times to be on the cusp of really knowing it even in terms of the basic flow let alone remembering precise sequences, but I'll give it the old monastic try.

There's barely a shred of melodic continuity out the gate, diving head first into a mire of descending disharmony that only draws together periodically to revisit that whole whole half hold hammer blow. The four minute transition teases at bringing it together, generates a desire for it to come together, but refuses to deliver. I'm feeling pretty lost in this mire, right on the brink of abandoning attempts to make sense of it, when at 7:10 they unify to just pound me over the head relentlessly, like haha, you thought you could forget about this hell, but you're still in it.

The next two minutes of the song are its front end highlight for me, because things are making sense now. Brutal, unforgiving sense, but I want the beating. I can wrap my head around it. And then it transitions into this long sequence of quiet movements laced with explosions. There's little rest in it. It only approaches a calm quiet at 11:30, and that lasts a fleeting 30 seconds. After enough of this back and forth I get as numb to the thrashings as I was to the earlier noodling. Somewhere around the 14 minute mark I become cognizant of an emerging structure. A melodic flow. Where they transition from that, I don't know. It feels a bit too redundant, which is an odd thing to say here, but 14:38 to 15:25 drags in a more conscious sense. I found myself thinking ok, alright, I got it already; let's move on, and lost a bit of the immersion. It's hard to form any concrete opinion on my first really full focus listen, and lol no I will not be giving it another completely engaged dive, but I want to say that minute abouts didn't really contribute anything of value for me. The guitar throughout the next two give it a much less eternal meat grinder, more frantic feel. I'm imagining myself running away from that face in the middle of the album cover, getting the fuck out of here. The long scream at 17:00 and swift deescalation is like I finally passed its threshold and left it behind. I made it. And finally, finally the music is calm.

Finally.

That stretch of near silence from 17:30 to 21:10 might be my favorite passage of the song. It's not even just a relief within the context of the artistic journey. My body is physically exhausted from listening to this stuff. The reintroduction of the adversary is odd. I don't want to say it creeps up on me, because the distorted guitar is the only instrument playing and there's no not noticing it, but it's being kind of benign, still distant. The bass and drums return in the same mechanistic fashion. It's like the borg showing up again or something. There's no animosity. No pounce; no a-ha; no gotcha. It's just going about business as usual, and that business happens to include my eternal torment.

In general I find the back half of the song far less grating. Maybe it's more concentrated on the vocals and drums, or maybe I'm just still a bit numb to it, I don't know, but it's not until 25:50 that my head comes to full terms with the fact that this is not a place I want to be. The song becomes frantic again... but that feeling fizzles out a bit. This deep into the song, my head has just normalized it, and they're going to have to pull some fresh punches to really make me experience the rest of this as more than redundancy. The song escalates in its slow meandering way, but it's not until the split second break at 28:55 that I really notice, and by then it's pretty much over and I'm committed to the expectation that we're in outro mode. While that was correct, the song does get a little creepy at 31:10. That clean guitar feels like it's mocking me, reminding me of something more human that I once was, 30 fucking minutes ago God why the hell did you sub this to me.

I have no idea how I would experience that on a second run. I mean, it got four or five background spins that I wasn't paying much attention to, but one hard listen is all I can handle for now. Did I like it? Some parts more than others. It kicks off like I've just been chucked into a rock tumbler, and I wouldn't say I was able to really embrace what was happening, but it served the purpose of conditioning me at least. 7:10 stands out as a memorable moment, and I think I liked the song better from there, with 15:25 to 17:30 really coming to life and generating some imagery in my head. The four minute peace that followed seems of little value in isolation but essential in the flow of the song. The back half of the song did the least for me. And yes, the ear fatigue at that point was off the charts, but the song didn't compensate me for that by taking it to a higher level. Not as I experienced it the first time through, anyway.

It was really cool to sit down and listen to a song this long and complicated from start to finish. These really hostile relentlessly unmelodic avantgarde metal bands are hard to digest, and I doubt I parsed it in line with Lemay's vision, but just trying to make any sense of something this long and chaotic in one sitting is a real trip. I read about the intended narrative to it after the fact, and it's nothing remotely like my blank slate experience, but I'm just some shmuck writing walrus reviews.

I wasn't able to focus on any other subs for the rest of the night after this. You broke me.

For reveal purposes I'll probably cut this off at 18:00.

((If bwt scores lower than this I'm bumping him up to it, for preemptively stating it's the song he would have submitted if I hadn't imposed a maximum length rule that I subsequently forgot about.))

8.8

Yes bwt forgot he subbed this and expressed to me how he'd wished he subbed it and I told him someone else did and we were like wow what a coincidence.

12th place:

KnightsofCydonia

Joe Bonamassa - Black Lung Heartache

One of the first things that struck me about this song was how the bit from 0:11 to 0:22 reminded me of Day Sixteen: Loser from Ayreon's The Human Equation. So of course I checked, and of course there was no artist overlap, but in the process I read that Joe was heavily influenced by British and Irish musicians. That's exactly what's going on at the beginning of this song. It's the Irish influence coming out, and it adds a really awesome flare to his country blues rock sound. This went on to keep reminding me of Loser and Ayreon in general for the silliest reasons, from that deep blown bubbling sound at 1:24 (Loser features a didgeridoo), to the heavy-hanging organ at 1:50, to the generally theatrical presentation. It's a goofy thing to focus on, but I'm just picking up on a lot of creative commonalities between two clearly talented song-writers miles apart in the root genres they're building from, and I think it's neat when that happens. Out of the cowboy ballads this category attracted, this one might not have had the closest affinity to my default tastes, but it certainly wowed me the most. This song ships a really diverse range of instrumentation without making a scene about any of them. He has a real knack for carefully detailed song-writing, lyrics perhaps aside, and the production is outstanding. It achieves its core blues rock and roll glory without ever feeling like a rock song in the negative sense of that thing countless artists default to for lack of inspiration. He's owning it with a robust range of talents for composition and performance and pulling together the finished polished product. I was impressed.

8.9

11th place:

Ampharos

mewithoutYou - Lilac Queen

This guy's lyrics have been a consistent trip. This one first caught my attention at I was the ISIS flag design. I am again left with no clue what he's actually singing about but an ambiguous feeling steering me in the direction of something bleak and self-destructive. This song captivated me just as much as another I heard recently while doing more, and I don't know that that necessarily makes it better, but it makes it more memorable as a stand-alone tune. I love where the vocals go at 3:00 with the build-up to screaming in the background. I love the la-da-da-da-da both in how it fills the space in the music and how it adds this sort of satirical extra meaning to his closing line of there is time. Whether the music has deeper meaning or he's just spewing randomness, I don't know, but the ability to create a feeling of hidden meaning is an artform in itself, and mewithoutYou seems to be exceptionally skilled at it.

9.0

10th place:

nutella

MGMT - Lady Dada's Nightmare

This was instantly one of my favorite subs to the category. I'm beginning to view this band as the modern heirs of Blur. The song doesn't start out like it's going to be a cat fit, but the drums that roll in at 1:35 convert it to an expansive echoing place. The effect in the background that amplifies along with it sounds like a cross between a harsh wind and the howling death knell of the cartoon cat on the album cover. It's perfect for a dark cold desert night and perfect to begin a gradual descent into darkness that seemed to characterize a lot of my top 10. I read that they asked Lou Reed to contribute vocals to this track and he declined, stating that it didn't need any. I think he was right.

9.1