Tag: anaal nathrakh

You survived 2020 and all you got was this Spotify playlist

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

This may have been the Worst Year EverTM, but holy mince pies, Batman, was there some great music.

To try and help cheer you up (and to drown out the bloody awful festive music you must be sick of by now), I’ve assembled what I think is the finest 52 songs (one for each week of this 129 month-long year) I heard in 2020. There’s a convenient Spotify playlist with them all in at the end too. (And yes, of course it includes Unreqvited.)

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What you get out of an album isn’t just about how good it is – it’s also about your relationship with the band’s back catalogue

~ Tom ~ 3 Comments

There’s a Melvyn Bragg line that Mark Kermode has brought up in his film reviews: that how you react to something is affected in part on where you are in your life when you encounter it. And obviously, that’s true in music too.

But it in music, it’s even more complicated than that. What you feel about a particular album can be hugely dependent on the relationship you have with what the artist has done before – even in cases where you already liked them, and where you think the album is good – not necessarily how good the album itself is. Naturally, the best way to demonstrate this is with examples, so I’ve dug some out from 2020: Code Orange’s Underneath, Oceans Of Slumber’s self-titled album, Anaal Nathrakh’s Endarkenment, and Unreqvited’s Empathica.

Continue reading “What you get out of an album isn’t just about how good it is – it’s also about your relationship with the band’s back catalogue” →