HYLI Vol. LXXIV - Blackened Death Metal and Post-Punk Playlists
We're doing Playlists again but this time it's genres: Andy sends Patrick a few Blackened Death Metal bands and Patrick sends Andy some of the recent crop of Post-Punk bands
Ain’t got too much to spill here this week. It was a fairly normal week since we last talked, I guess. My (Patrick, of course) baby has started to sit with her head up with only minimal help and we’ll officially start solid foods in probably the next week. We are officially exiting the Slug Phase of being a baby and turning into an Infant. So so sick. My (again, Patrick here) wife is returning to work so we will be sending the little one to a nanny because there isn’t a daycare in the whole Charlotte Metro Area that wants to accept my in-state college tuition annual payments to clean up her piss and shit, for some reason. Luckily this nanny seems a) tight, b) experienced and, most importantly, c) relatively cheap so fingers crossed. Pee-wee Herman and the drug dealer from Euphoria died. That fucking blows. Paul Reubens was a fixture in my household during childhood and I thought Angus Cloud was one of the best parts of a show I didn’t particularly like. Sad stuff. Hope the next week is less sad and my child does good with the nanny or whatever and, of course, Hope You Like It You Little Creeps.
Playlist - Blackened Death Metal
Andy: Blackened Death Metal is just Black Metal + Death Metal. Shocking, right? Both are great genres that make up an excellent subgenre. Blast beats, tremolo picking, growls, lots of corpse paint - it's good stuff. Patrick loved Behemoth and asked for more, so this seemed like as good a chance as any to introduce the genre as a whole rather than more specific bands. I'm not going to waste my time being pedantic and discussing if each of these bands is actually 'Blackened Death' or not. I don't care. The real prompt is, "Bands that you would probably like if you liked the band Behemoth," but that doesn't poll as well. (Patrick: Is this where you admit that you and Ron DeSantis use the same pollsters?) (Andy: Keep that dork loser's name off my newsletter.)
We already covered A Hill To Die Upon, but they're so much like Behemoth that you have to include them. "A Jester Arrayed in Burning Gold" is a fun track. It really sounds like it could be straight from a Behemoth album. I love the clean sections during the "First we eat / Then we drink" chorus. Fun stuff. Patrick won't like the drums in the Belphegor song and it's a shame because it rules. The Azarath track is also very Behemoth-y, especially in the ending. Sulphur Aeon is the most 'unique' out of these, but they're too fun not to include. Hey, if you like black and/or death, you will probably like most of these songs! Try them out! Or don't!
Seven songs at 36 minutes. In and out. Blackened and Death. Hope You Like.
Patrick: I enjoyed this a lot. While in my leisure, non-HYLI music listening time I almost exclusively listen to full albums (Andy: Same, I believe we are a dying breed in that sense), a playlist is perfect for something like this where you’re trying to introduce someone to a full genre or, in Andy’s case here, a subgenre for freaks. All of these bands kinda have a base sound that they expand on in their own unique ways. I maybe didn’t fully know what “Blackened Death Metal” meant before this (I could have probably stumbled my way into it but whatever) (Andy: I’d hope so) but this playlist really boiled it down for me. Sick tremolo picking and blast beats from black metal with the vocals and general aesthetic of death metal. For someone who appreciates black metal’s instrumentation but doesn’t always love dudes doing Gollum vocals with lyrics about, like, the wind blowing through the trees or some shit (Andy: most of these songs are about satan or some sort of demon so…), this really worked for me.
Necrophobic’s “Mark of the Necrogram” and Azarath’s “The Slain God,” in particular, were great. The former Just Rips with some sick guitar and incredible drumming and the latter has vocals that reminded me the most of Behemoth, one of my favorites from Season 1 of HYLI. I don’t really know how to describe these vocals. “Triumphant” maybe? It sounds like a general shouting out all his homies on the battlefield after they slayed a bunch of orcs or some shit (Andy will either love or hate that I said this) (Andy: more like slaying a bunch of religious zealots, Power Metal has the orcs). I also really liked Sulphur Aeon’s “Devotion to the Cosmic Chaos,” which seemed to be the most experimental and weird of the bunch, while also having a lot of shared DNA with the others. The guitars are just doing wacky shit and I’m into it, alright? I didn’t love everything here. Belphegor can fuck right off with those drums (Andy: omg grow UP) and A Hill to Die Upon, while not bad, just didn’t really excite me much. But all in all, I really enjoyed this and love that this now gives me four or five bands to go back to and fully check out, as opposed to one extra album to throw into the rotation like usual HYLI. Thank you Andy I enjoyed my crash course into Blackened Death Metal, have a nice week my bud.
Playlist - Post-Punk of the 2020s
Patrick: So, this isn’t necessarily a full “Post-Punk Crash Course,” as the oldest song here is from 2017 and every other song on the playlist is from either 2021 or 2022. Honestly, I’m not super interested in doing that. Guess what, Joy Division and Bauhaus are cool. I like them. I’m not going to pretend to care about … the Fall and a bunch of bands that stopped putting out music before I, a middle-aged man, was born. But, in the last handful of years, there have almost been Too Many bands sort of mixing post-punk with prog rock and krautrock and art-rock and about a dozen other things that appear to have sort of crafted their own little revival/scene, primarily in the UK/Ireland but also in the States, albeit somewhat less successfully. I don’t fully love every band here (the last Black Country, New Road album is still embarrassing), but it is at least a “scene,” or whatever you wanna call it, where I will check out pretty much every album at least once. It’s also classic Andy shit: vocals that aren’t traditionally good (Andy: yes papa), very weird instrumentation (Andy: yes!), but also still kind of an inherent catchiness.
My favorites of these bands are probably Protomartyr - one of the two American bands here and the longest-running band, Dry Cleaning - Florence Shaw is one of the most fun vocalists around imo, and Fontaines DC - basically just The Stone Roses but Irish Zoomers. I wouldn’t call these the three most experimental bands on the list, as they all seem to focus more on actually making songs than just a vibe, but I fully love pretty much everything all of them have put out. Bro from Fontaines DC wants to be Ian Brown so badly, which is refreshing given so many of the dudes from these bands wish they could be Thom Yorke. Honestly, Ollie from Squid is basically doing Thom Yorke cosplay, but it’s also kind of sick? I don’t know what the fuck anyone from Black Midi is on about, but I love how weird it is. And, as I alluded to earlier, Black Country, New Road fully lost me on the last album, but the debut is still great and a little less theater-kid energy. I love this shit a lot. I love a weird time signature. I love deadpan vocals. I love guitars that are going bonkers crazy. I hope you do too.
Andy: Patrick, is Post-Punk the genre that I've enjoyed the most on this newsletter? Do you know? Can you run the numbers quickly (Patrick: my calculations show we’ve done two loosely post-punk bands, Iceage last year and Wet Leg a few weeks ago, and you seemed to like but not love Iceage and really like Wet Leg, so maybe? small sample size though)? I feel like I enjoy a good bit of the Post-Punk he has introduced me to. Is 'Post-' the best genre? Post-Metal rules. Post-Rock is fun. Post-Hardcore holds a special place for me. Perhaps it's the MVP (Most Valuable Prefix) (Patrick: fine joke). I know Patrick is going to hate that entire paragraph. I had a great time writing it. Anyway, I enjoyed this playlist of Post-Punk music he curated just for me!
The riff in "Athens, France" by Black Country, New Road is incredibly catchy. I could listen to it on a loop all day. I believe it's probably the most enjoyable song on this playlist for me (Patrick: man maybe Andy will love the last BCNR album and i’ll quit this newsletter). It has it all. "2010" was entertaining and certainly a song that would have made it onto RockBand had it been released in 2010. "Nothing To Write Home About" was a solid song, but I feel like it was somewhat overshadowed by some of the other tracks (Patrick: i agree). It seemed a little too clean and put together compared to what the other songs had going on. It's a compliment, but it just didn't fit the vibe for me at the time.
The biggest outliers on this playlist are the 'Johns.' I feel like I should enjoy "John Wick" (the song, not the movie - I like the movie), but I really don't (Patrick: love Dry Cleaning but this isn’t surprising). The same goes for "John L." Both songs, on paper, are something I'd enjoy, but in execution, I couldn't wait for them to be over. I'm not sure why Patrick picked a song from a Protomartyr album we already covered (Patrick: lmao shit sorry), but I can attest that your brain turns to mush when you have a kid (Patrick: so so true). Regardless, it was a good song.
Wet Leg immediately came on when I finished this playlist multiple times so it seems Patrick nailed the tone. I Liked It.