I said I would write the top 10 games of 2021 list after my first post back, so I started writing a post for just that. But then I decided to write this instead. It is what it is. Anyways, 2021 was fantastic for video games, but holy cow, it was even better for music. When I left Fartsight Studios, I decided to stop watching podcasts while working. It was just way too distracting, and I wanted to take my new job much more seriously. I would be solely listening to music when at work. That’s 4-6 hours more of music a day than I was getting in before. To help aid this, I got rid of my premium Napster account (jeez I sound like an old loser), for a Spotify account. I only did this as a result of having added a smart TV to our house. There was no damn Napster app, so I got Spotify on it. It worked like a breeze, and after several years of Napster, I switched everything over. This was for the better as Spotify really helped turn me onto some of the best and my favorite music as of late.
I’ve found so much new music that coming up with this list and ranking its contents is gonna be tough. I’m gonna have to actually critically think to cut shit out of this list. My video game top 10 actually worked out pretty smoothly. I didn’t mind cutting out a couple things as towards the end of my list I was going from games I loved to games that were really good, and in a “Top n List”, you really just want stuff that you loved But here, there’s so many albums that I loved this year. I made an initial list of some great albums, and I got a stupid amount: 27. Sure, I could make it so it’s only albums that were released from this year, but then I would only have 3 albums left. And that would missing the best ones I found this year. Screw that shit. I’m taking the hard route.
Take a deep breath Tom. You got this. You can slash this list. Channel your inner Michael Meyers and cut this list like it’s your hot sister that you spy on like a little creep from the inside of her closet in that Rob Zombie film.
When my wife was pregnant with my daughter, I wanted her sweet little fetus ears and little body to feel the vibrations of nice music, which was unlike a lot of the stuff I would normally play. I know, I should’ve been preparing her to be a little metalhead and play advanced shit like Converge, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Code Orange. That way when she’s in elementary school, and there’s a couple edgy kids that like Slipknot and Disturbed, she could just pull up some hell sounding tunes for her friends. But I just didn’t feel like listening to much of that. I felt content and happy, and I didn’t need a huge outlet for anger. I listened to a lot of softer prog like Covet, Voyager, Leprous, and Thank You Scientist. Well, last year I went somewhere in the middle of those two ends: back to lots of screaming but slightly different. Instead of an angry fuck you *ROAAWWWWW*, the 2021 screams I was enjoying had a much deeper tint of despair, angst, and sorrow (all varying combinations of those three ingredients for this cocktail).
Ranging from the ever so crescendoing climaxes of post-metal to the somewhat midwesty-emo post-hardcore, it was the year where I changed up the style of music I listened to drastically. Not drastic enough to be super noticeable to people not familiar. And not drastic enough where I started listening to the popular garbage that most people are listening to on Spotify. But wildly different in my eyes.
10) Illusory Walls
by The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die
You bet your goddamn ass I’ll be abbreviating this band’s name instead of typing out that damn name. Hell, even the abbreviated version is a pain in the ass to type: TWIABP&IAMNLTD. Goddamn. Maybe I’ll just settle on TWIABP. Ah, that’s better on my eyes and my fingers (disregard the fact that I’ll be copy pasting that crap from here on). Hey, sometimes names just strike a band though, and they can’t settle or compromise on their art at all for anyone, even at the expense of everyone’s pencils, inks, and fingers. But regardless of the pretentious name, which I unironically like at this point, this is a band that has put out a few damn good singles before. But the rest of their songs didn’t really catch me.
One day last year, I’m listening to Spotify, and I hear this absolutely incredible mathy, tap heavy melodic guitar riff with some angsty punk like vocals going over it. I knew I had to heart that shit immediately, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when it was from TWIABP. The song’s name was “Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance” or “ITWOTGAASOV” by TWIABP&IAMNLTD to be short. They sounded a lot more mature? They sounded like they evolved?
They managed to combine a lot of the things I loved about the songs I liked—a grandeur, epic sound with great punky vocals—and then completely reinvigorate their sound while keeping all those elements I liked in tact. The female vocals are excellent and really help carry this album, almost bringing an indie rock sound at times. The vocalist helps bring the emo punk out of the band with his incredible voice. The musicianship is just all around impressive as hell. The songs oftentimes have this incredible upbeatiness, due to the great melodies from the guitars. But they manage to do this without sounding as corny as the Boone County State Fair corn booth I worked at for a day when I was a teenager. They just manage to ground it all somehow. Sure, the second to last song is 15 minutes and 39 seconds long. But it’s really damn good. And sure the last song is somehow 4 minutes and 5 seconds longer than that song, but it’s also pretty damn good. Sure, maybe they should’ve just ended on only one of those. And yeah, there was an awful amount of dead space in the beginning of that last song. But that can’t take away from how damn good this album is.
9) Resonate/Desperate
by State Faults
Whereas post-metal’s average song length will be six minutes or so, Resonate/Desperate is right around that three minute mark. And for good reason. They gotta give ourselves (and themselves) a break from the pure onslaught of hardcore punk being crammed down our ear canals to our ear drums and beyond. The guitars are constantly whaling and the drums are constantly being beaten. The vocalist is in a perennial state of having a hoarse voice from screaming too much—that or smoking a couple cartons of cigarettes a day. Honestly, this band at first sounded a bit too hardcore to me—that didn’t last too long as it would be the first thing I would listen to in the morning to get me warmed up for the day. But it reminded me more of Birds in Row, a band I love, than something truly angry like Code Orange.
There’s a lot of pain and hurt going on through the screams that comes through vividly. During this band’s breakdowns, the dude’s voice sounds like it’s literally breaking down. During the more vulnerable, screamo-y parts like in “Wildfires”, you can hear his voice really strain from the longer drawn out screams. It’s awesome to hear someone’s voice so close to snapping.
That’s the level the band is so comfortable at. They constantly have their foot heavy on the pedal. But they know when to take it off at times and go into another gear. This album is a mere 37 minutes long, but that’s perfect for something this intense. It allows you to feel like you’re indulging in a truly angsty, hardcore punk sensation without being completely drowned in it for too long.
8) Viva Belgrado
by Bellavista
Amigos, I love burritos. Give me some verde on the side mamacita because I’ll be dolloping that crap on there. Screw roja, am I right? Wait, why am I talking about burritos right now? Hmm, guess I’m just hungry. Anyways, this is album is a spicy treat—on a scale from bell pepper to a reaper pepper, it’s biting into the seeds on a jalapeno. I really got into post-hardcore this year, and this band holds its damn own. In a sea of navy beans, it’s a pinto bean. They distinguish themselves from all the other bands by simply having Spanish vocals. This is probably the first Mexican/Spanish rock/metal band I’ve ever heard, and I absolutely love it.
Language is a super interesting thing when it comes to music. Rammestein is an incredibly famous German metal band, and their music works so well because there’s something really guttural and aggressive about the German language that just lends itself so well to metal. Would Rammestein be good if they were English? Probably. Would they be as famous or as good? Hell no. It’s so cool hearing stuff in different languages. And that’s something that really benefits Viva Belgrado. The Spanish makes the post-hardcore sound so much sexier. The verses are just so smooth when done in Spanish. It sounds awesome. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to hearing it like I am with English singing that I think it’s so cool. But I really do think that the differences about the Spanish language and its nuances that I can’t begin to understand really make this album special.
That’s not to say though that if this were in English it’d be bad or generic. Or that it would be a cookie cutter version of some bigger post-hardcore bands. This band holds its own on its own merits as a very talented band regardless of the language. But I can’t get over how unique the post-hardcore burrito tastes when you throw some Tapatio hot sauce on it.
7) Oceanic
by ISIS
ISIS named themselves after one of the greatest groups ever. They asked themselves, “What’s more metal than the Islamic State?” If I had never heard of this band, I would have had to answer, “Nothing.” But I can clearly answer that question now, “ISIS is more metal than ISIS.”
Alright, alright. Of course I’m joking; they named themselves after the damn god alright. Anyways, now that I got the obligatory joke out of the way, I can talk more about the best ISIS.
ISIS is the first post-metal band I fell in love with. I heard the sirens of their harsh screams, and I was mesmerized. I knew I had to join their movement. I first heard their collaboration album, In The Fishtank 14, which has one of their best songs ever, “Low Tide”. It’s a song that when it comes one, I pull up the album and play the whole thing. But I never checked out the rest of the band’s albums for several months. That changed in 2021 when and Spotify threw on “In Fiction” from their album Panopticon. This is an absolute beast of a song. The big theme this band had going for it with Oceanic and even “In Fiction” is this sensation of being stranded in the middle of the ocean. The ocean is a beautiful thing, but it’s also one of the scariest things on this planet. It’s so isolating. And this song managed to make me feel like I was in the middle of ocean, just in pure isolation. The reverb on the incredible bass melody in the beginning is so reminiscent of a water drop or a body of still water. After a while of floating, while the bassline drones on, it’s interrupted by a wave of absolutely visceral, guttural screams coming from the guitarist/vocalist. It’s hard to describe why this song sounds so ocean like, but it just does. And this isn’t even on the album titled after the damn ocean.
Oceanic managed to capture some of the same stuff, and also managed to add this deep sense of eeriness. In some of the my favorite moments on Oceanic, there are some incredible female vocals that sound so haunting, and it counters the harsh screams really well. I can’t tell if they remind me more of the sirens trying to lure the sailors into the water to drown them, or if it sounds like a woman wailing because her husband didn’t make it back from the boating expedition.
I really had a hard time picking between the two albums, as you can probably tell as I wrote more about Panopticon than Oceanic. If you asked me earlier last year, I would’ve easily chosen Panopticon. It was the first album of theirs I heard, and I think it has some of their best songs on it. But after listening to Oceanic a bunch more, I feel like it might have more going on in it. Post-metal can have a LOT of empty space where they’re just building this incredible tension. And it can be boring at times waiting to get to that sweet climax. And I kind of feel that this album does a better job managing that. And I just love that sweet Jimmy Buffet beach vibe.
It’s a genius idea for a metal band to focus on the ocean. It’s oftentimes thought of as beautiful, but when you look at it in a different light, you realize how haunting and scary it is. And writing all of this has made me realize, that yes there is something more metal than ISIS: the ocean. The ocean has been waterboarding people since the dawn of time.
6) The Observer
by Artificial Language
After a year of having a huge change in what I listened to, I still managed to sneak a prog-metal band onto the list. Granted, it was the early part of the year when things were only starting to change. But that shows you how good this damn album is that it made it this high, and I started listening to it in January. Recency bias is a real thing, and it is hard to combat. It’s easy to forget about an album from a year ago, but it’s not easy to forget about some of the moments I had listening to this band.
The single “Unself Portrait” would always hit hard when I was first listening to this album. I loved when the song would come on because I knew I was in for a treat. The song shows you why this band is so good. Sweeping piano melodies. Incredible vocalist belting through his verses. Insane musicianship on the guitars. Bass well mixed into the mix. But the best part was the breakdown. The rest of the band dies down as the singer takes front and center of the stage. He builds and builds until a beautiful, slow breakdown kicks in. And the best part about this all is that once the song ends, the next song, “The Silver Cord”, picks up right where this one ended. It calls back immediately to the previous song’s tearworthy climax, and runs off with it. It’s unexpected to see a callback so immediately, but it’s welcome as the previous song kicked ass.
Side note: I see on Spotify that “Unself Portrait” has 1,007,626 listens, but “The Silver Cord” only has 151,908 listens. And that should be a crime because that shit goes together like mac and cheese baby.
At the end of the day, this band is a lot like the other fish in the sea of prog metal bands, where everyone is just incredibly virtuous. But this band’s guitarists are even better than a lot of those talented musicians. And there are some incredible string and piano sections (could be a Casio keyboard for all I know, who am I to profile) that lead to some really beautiful, classical music sounding sections. And even though there are some incredible vocalists in prog that can really let their voices go, there is something really special about how good this vocalist is. He puts so much of his heart into his singing as much as he does wind. They just do a really good job here at showing off their chops while also doing the most important thing: making you feel something.
5) Catch Without Arms
by Dredg
Dredg holds a special place in my heart. El Cielo is one of the first albums I really fell in love that was recommended on SputnikMusic, a website I still go to for recommendations. It’s a soft-rock album that is dreamier than Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. Sleepier than Hypnos, the god of sleep. I listened to that album a lot as a teenager. It was really beautiful and stands out for a lot of reasons, maybe the biggest being how different it was from a lot of the music I would normally listen. I just remember driving around Illinois at night, going back to Belvidere, and I would have this on. I remember driving past all the trees in the dark and having to manage my high lights while other cars drove by while this was playing. It was just a thing of beauty listening to that album while driving at night.
That was a long time ago. But even though it was so long ago, I still listen to the album every once in a while. I thought I seen that their next albums weren’t that great, so I was never interested. But relistening to El Cielo last year, I couldn’t help but wonder how good their other albums might be if El Cielo was such a classic. So I checked Catch Without Arms out. And I’m very happy I did.
They keep a lot of the awesome qualities from El Cielo in this album, but they come at it with a much more rock approach. In El Cielo, the singer is trying to put your ass to sleep with that soothing, gentle voice. It’s like he knows you’re driving at night, and he has villainous intentions of making you cave your car’s hood into a tree at 45 mph. In Catch Without Arms, he retains some of those sleepy, hushed qualities still, but nowhere near as much as he did in El Cielo. It’s basically the best thing Dredg could’ve done: take their success with El Cielo and just add a generous pinch of rock. But even though it’s not as soothing or sleepy, it doesn’t mean it’s not that. It’s an incredibly relaxing and beautiful album.
When the singer sings in “Catch Without Arms”:
And that’s what happens. When you play catch without arms
there’s this melancholy that just passes over me. It makes no sense, yet it makes so much sense when he sings it in that sad, remorseful voice of his. That melancholy feeling pops up a bunch when listening to this album. And that’s what happens. When you listen to this album with ears.
4) When I Die, Will I Get Better
by Svalbard
DO YOU LIKE ANGST? If you screamed yes at the top of your FUCKING lungs, then you’re in luck! If you said no, you’re a goddamn liar, and you’re gonna get double portions just because of that. Papa don’t play when it comes to getting your daily dose of angst. I better not see any angst left on that plate, or you gonna get an ass whooping. And if, Lord help me, I see Lucky walking away with any angst around his mouth, I’ll make you regret it because you know that dog can’t have any angst.
If you’re a real Sherlock Holmes, you didn’t need me to tell you this album would contain angst, you could deduce that just from the name of the album. “When I die, will I forget about all the pain and sorrow that comes from all the first world problems I have in my life?” Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, it’s an awesome title for an album (pretentious or not).
It’s always special to have a female fronted metal band, especially when she screams. They’re incredibly rare, especially the more hardcore you go into metal. When it happens, it’s incredibly special because that deep harshness from their screams can be countered with some truly beautiful, angelic cleans that truly only a female could deliver. And that’s what Svalbard does here.
The singer screams all of her emotions at you like you’re an ex that did her dirty, but then she’ll counter this with some truly heavenly cleans. It’s like she’s trying to get past all the problems and rise above them. And while she’s doing this, we get some of the airiest metal ever. The guitars are so light and airy, almost always playing high end notes that sound heavenly, which works so well as the singer viciously screams about her problems. Now, I can’t act like I know what problems she is talking about as I can barely understand a goddamn word she’s saying. But I’ve seen some of the lyrics and gotten glances of what she’s saying through the fog of her screams. And I can tell from the song names and the title of the album. But more importantly, I can tell from just the way she lays into those screams. And that’s the most important part: that regardless of what a singer is singing about, that we feel the weight of the emotion through their voice and instruments. And this band does that beautifully.
3) Ten Stories
by mewithoutYou
2020 was owned by mewithoutYou and Interpol. Those bands made my ears their groupies. mewithoutYou is without a doubt one of my favorite bands of all time. They delivered some game changing albums that I listened to a bunch in 2020. But they have a few albums that I didn’t get to in 2020, and I had the chance to listen to two of those this last year. And they are badass. This one in particular is noteworthy because of how different it is from their other ones. As you can tell from the cover art, it’s a quirky album. I seen someone call this band incredibly pretentious, and I don’t know if I can argue with that. I mean look at how quriky and hipstery this damn album looks. But pretention is a lot different in music than with other forms of art. There is so much honest emotion in music that pretention transforms itself into beauty. Someone laying their heart on the line is hard to be seen as pretentious when the music surrounding it, and the emotion in their voice is sincere. That’s something mewithoutYou has done so incredibly well for themselves, and they continued to do it in this album, but just weirder.
The second album I listened to was Pale Horses, which was a pretty by the books mewithoutYou album. It was great, especially given it was a return to form after the previous two albums, this and another, were a lot softer and quirkier than first couple albums. Pale Horses had a lot of the hallmarks of a mewithoutYou album. The big one being chock full of moments where the singer slowly starts building up his powerful spoken word until he’s screaming his chant so loud that he is about to burst a blood vessel bulging from his noggin. Anyone who is a fan knows what I’m talking about.
Ten Stories is much more subdued though than Pale Horses. They bring that goofy circus vibe like the album cover depicts to a few of their songs, and it manages to work out so well. You can’t help but smile from some of the corniness going on here. This is a band that would never shy away from being sincere even if it could be seen as corny, and it works so well with the whimsical songs going on here. It really is an uplifting beautiful album with some awesome moments.
They even get a ft. from Paramore’s singer of all people, and it’s on one of the more mewithoutYou sounding song on this album, “Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume”. And it really helps break up the basic sounding structure to create this really great indie rock sounding song. And boy the closer: “All Circles”.
All circles presuppose they’ll end where they begin
But only in their leaving can they ever come back around
That phrase is just continually circled around the majority of the song, which could be boring, but the way he ends up in a different position the next loop is genius. You can’t help but smile more and more when you hear those words chanted in a loop, and you notice him ending up on different points of the circle. You see alliteration might be a pretentious thing to do and would easily backfire for most bands, but the heart and genuine talents of this band always pulls them through. It’s not pretentious if it’s genius.
2) Panorama
by La Dispute
It’s funny how things work. One year you love one thing, the next that love of yours brings you to your new love, which sadly replaces that old love. That former love doesn’t realize that by bringing a third in to the bedroom, because they want you to be happy, they might be pushing you further away. Another reason to love Spotify: they’re content to matchmake any random whore to you just when you start to itch for something else in your life. They don’t try and therapize your relationship back to its former shape, they just fill that hole with some other holes. And I’m glad of it.
When listening to mewithoutYou, Spotify started playing La Dispute. I think the first song I heard was “The Most Beautiful Bitter Fruit”, off of their album Wildlife. It sounded a lot like the stuff I would’ve hated as a teenager. It sounded eerily reminiscent of the shitty screamo music emo kids in high school liked. But while it’s reminiscent, it felt much different. I couldn’t help but liking it a lot. A lot of the specialness here is due to the vocalist who delivers his lines in angry spoken word, similar to mewithoutYou’s, but with less whimsy and more youthful anger.
I’ve written those words “spoken word” twice so far to describe two of my favorite bands, and I have to defend myself: spoken word poetry is stupid. But when it’s in music, it can work so damn well. Being vulnerable and showing your heart with no music to back you up sounds sad and pathetic. When you have guitars, bass, and drums to back up your despair, it’s so much easier to get riveted by it. And that’s the thing with this band. We get an incredibly vulnerable vocalist, telling all these stories in this weird spoken word delivery that I haven’t heard anyone do before. And at the same time, we have an incredibly talented band supporting all those words with beautiful music.
I listened to four albums by La Dispute last year. And I loved 3 of them. I think Somewhere at the Bottom of the River between Vega and Altair (yep, the longer the name the more pretention I know) is really good but not as good as their other albums. If you had asked me early into last year, I would’ve told you Panorama was the worst of them all though. When I first listened to it, I was not interested. Why does it sound so uneventful? It sounds pretty similar to their other stuff, but it’s just way quieter? So I stopped listening to it, and I went back to their other albums and enjoyed the hell out of them. But this album made it back into my queue, and I couldn’t help but fall for it. It’s so much quieter at times compared to their other stuff, but it’s absolutely not uneventful. This quietness is absolutely needed. This album contrasts their other ones so much because it does allow itself to be gentler on the listener. And with this newfound gentleness, it makes it feel like the band have matured quite a bit from their super angsty young adult years to just regular, angsty adults.
I threw on this album to write this, and I immediately got transferred to playing board games with my wife. I played this during so many of our gaming sessions because it is nice and calming at times, which works well as background music, but then it hits you with these incredibly impactful sections. I think I initially just played it as background music, not really interested in it. But after playing it over and over again, I got sucked into its web. It’s a really awesome thing when you can listen to something and be reminded of a time in your life. It makes that album that much more special because when I hear Panorama, I think of Patchworks. And when I play Patchworks, I think of Panorama.
1) Wake/Lift
by Rosetta
I’ve been a fan of post-rock for a while. I just remember riding my bike around Belvidere, IL listening to Mono. The formula in the two albums that I loved worked like this: start off soft and slow, and slowly add more and more layers and add more tempo until the most epic, climatic crescendo you’ve ever heard happens. The layers take the form of many different types of instruments, whether that be any assortment of strings, guitars, trumpet, sax, bass, drums, and piano, etc. It all combines to create this epic rock orchestra straight out of a film.
Rosetta follows this format to a tee. They do it in all of the albums that I’ve heard. And even though I’ve been familiar with this formula from listening to Mono in the past, it sounded so fresh and different and incredible when I first heard it in The Galilean Satelites. Taking that aspect from post-rock and just making it metal made this formula sound better than ever. The opening bassline on “Departe” on TSG is so slick, and I love that it grounds that first song the whole entire time by being the only constant the whole entire 8 minutes. When more layers are being added, that elegant bassline is consistently grounding the whole thing while it cascades into chaos. The Galilean Satelites is an incredible album, and it’s the first from Rosetta I heard. But Wake/Lift I have listened to so much more. It’s telling that the first song off of Wake/Lift, “Red in Tooth and Claw”, was my most listened to song on Spotfiy last year, and it’s a fucking 12 minute song. I’ve listened to that song more than I’ve listened to some great albums from last year.
I love that TGS has its vocals much higher and in front of the mix. Post-metal really tends to have it more in the back because it really wants to lessen the screams. It doesn’t want to shotgun you in the face with the screams, it just wants to show you the torture in its voice. And Wake/Lift does just that. Its aggressiveness is dialed down a couple notches. The build ups leading up to the epic climaxes are hauntingly beautiful. There’s a truly lovely aura surrounding this album, which is surprising because it is a brutal album. Sure, there are these torturous whaling screams going on, but there is beauty in the pain. It’s all necessary to reach the climax. The climax is what all of this was for. And the climax is beautiful. It took a lot of time to get to the climax. On the way, there was anguish. There was anger. There was despair. But it all led to this climax. The despair and sorrow doesn’t end when the climax is reached, but it weirdly feels gratifying regardless. Like you reached a top of the mountain and just started screaming and bawling. The struggle wasn’t for not. You get to see at the top of the mountain and look around you and see that beautiful, yet complicated, world around you. You get to reflect on the journey now as you see it from a new vantage point. It’s a tough journey, but it’s one I love going on.