Tastes of straight up rock music from heavy metal through psychedelic to hard rock. A band with two records that sounds like an old classic that could be around for decades. Logo and cover arts also support this feeling.
Freeways – True Bearings
Christoph de Babalon – 044 (Hilf Dir Selbst!)
Starts with a dark ambient note but most of it is actually jungle beats and breakcore over some atmospheric sounds. Most of the time I imagined a cyberpunk heist movie rolling with this soundtrack. This could also be a spiritual successor of the Splinter Cell soundrack by Amon Tobin, but with less sophistication and a darker tone. Oh btw, I loved this record a lot, I could easily listen to it five times in a row.
Dark Nights: Death Metal Soundtrack
This is a soundtrack album to a pretty dark and grim comic book series, consisting of all original songs. I just want to taste this sentence for a little while and think about how awesome that is. And then start listing that collaborators include Mastodon, Rise Against, HEALTH, Chino Moreno, Greg Puciato, Chelsea Wolfe, just to name those closest to me. This is pretty rad.
F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm – 2X1=4
It’s been a long long time since I last listened to a pure dub record. Not dubstep, not dub techno, but simply dub. And I came across this one and it delivers just that. Moody, wandering, lost in thoughts and walks in the rain.
Machinedrum – Psyconia
Broken beat, drum and bass, hiphop, IDM, the common denominator is smoothness and a light heart. Like if it’s drum and bass then it’s liquid, if it’s hiphop then it’s soulful. These 26 minutes contain a whole summer’s many flavors in six tracks. It’s not a consistent record at all, more like a promo sampler for a festival, but there’s fun in all those tracks.
Space Afrika – Honest Labour
So cinematic, so nostalgic. It’s like listening to the moody, calming score of something on a VHS tape. Ambient with some IDM noises and occasional voices. I make some loose spiritual connection between this one and Sound of the City vol. 3 – Berlin.
The Bug – Fire
That dubstep thing, like ten years never happened.
Derek Carr – Pursuit
My favorite type of focus music. Minimal techno, sometimes house, mid-tempo, some dub aesthetics, some tight beats, sunset moods. Respectfully sits in the background and enhances my attention when I need that extra kick for work. Also good for cruising around in a night city and some dinner conversations.
DARKSIDE – Spiral
First half of the record is amazing downtempo glitchy electronics with beautiful melodies and ethereal vocals. It shows both band members at their best, Dave Harrington and Nicolas Jarr sound like mixing up Apparat and Bonobo, especially on the more hook-heavy primary single track, The Limit. Then the second half of the record gradually goes into more indie influences, ambient jammings, and audibly auto-tuned vocals that I don’t appreciate. It’s a bummer but overall the album delivers some strong singles still.
Power Glove – 2043: Volume 1
Such cyberpunk. I love that it doesn’t sound retro in any way, it’s modern synthwave with some glitch flavor.