Kadhja Bonet has a soulful singing voice that sounds like it’s from the distant past. The rest of her debut album, The Visitor, is like from a semi-utopian future, with a vast array of instruments (many of them played by Bonet herself) forming colorful, psychedelic musical landscapes. The Visitor‘s retro-futuristic vibe reminds me of parts of Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid with its combination of classical soul and legitimate weirdness.
The Visitor doesn’t quite match that album’s ambition and sprawl; it clocks in at a short 27 minutes and mostly sticks to the same style of song, with cinematic orchestral productions backing Bonet’s unique voice. It’s all very smooth and pleasant to listen to, while also being inscrutable and strange — a small, intriguing work that feels like it’s setting the stage for something larger.
This year, I came to the realization that writing about music is a giant waste of time. No one is interested in finding or appreciating new music; people only want to be told that the thing they like is good, or the thing they hate is bad. And trying to describe why you love music often feels like speaking some alien language that has too many adjectives. As far as I can tell, the only people who read music writing are other music writers, who do it to check in and make sure they’re better at writing than the author.
That might be why in 2016 I finally stopped looking at music websites, which I had read somewhat frequently and used to keep up to date on new releases. (Another likely cause: the fact that most album reviews just read like advertising copy.) This made me need to find a new method for discovering music, ideally something that was separate from all the hype and noise. I came up with a nice solution: scouring the hell out of Bandcamp.
Bandcamp is mostly praised for offering a way for musicians to release music straight to their audience without dealing with record labels. More importantly, it offers a way for music to be available that isn’t curated by music websites and aggregation like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, which have taken the joy out of discovering music by spoon-feeding it to listeners and coldly evaluating it with star or number ratings. On Bandcamp, there is just music, with only a few easily avoided distractions.
Most pieces that praise Bandcamp compare it to the old style of shopping at a record store, where you browse through the bins and try to find something that catches your eye. This feels close, but it’s an imperfect analogy, because Bandcamp has some staggeringly bad music that would never have seen the light of day in a record store. My preferred analogy is that it’s like a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean from Harry Potter. One taste might be a complete gem, the next might be something impossible to listen to by a person who has no business even thinking about music, much less recording and releasing it for the world to hear.
That ended up being one of my biggest takeaways of my time on Bandcamp: the sheer volume of music that people are putting out there, which I find oddly inspiring even if I can’t comprehend why some of them do it. I have heard some truly horrible music and read some really long, pretentious band profiles. It makes judging some books by their cover a necessity. I skip really bad band names — especially any that is just a woman’s first name, since it inevitably ends up being a bunch of untalented dudes. And I pass over albums with bad, generic cover art — apparently I care about album art much more than I realized.
This needle-in-a-haystack approach might turn some off of Bandcamp, but I think it’s why the site is great. It makes finding good music fun again by requiring a certain amount of effort, with all the bad music providing a context in which good music feels special and not like something that should be taken for granted. And, I should add, the music itself is often every bit as good — if not better — than what is being released by bigger labels and talked about by everyone else. I found myself enjoying music a lot more this year (even though I think the overall quality of releases wasn’t as good as 2015) because I rediscovered that initial thrill I had of finding music that was totally new to me.
As the year comes to an end, I’m back in the mode of making a meaningless year-end list, which is all over the place thanks to this Bandcamp fixation. There are tons of different genres, a few different countries, and a couple releases that aren’t even in English. I’ll probably be sharing those albums in a few days, assuming I have some time I feel like wasting.
One of the words most ruined by the internet is “epic,” which went from describing massive works of art like Beowulf to GIFs of people falling off their skateboards. In music, the word is similarly misused, attached to bands who offer bombast but don’t actually provide substance while they pummel their listeners with noise that ultimately becomes meaningless.
Salt Lake City’s SubRosa distinguish themselves by being legitimately epic. Their songs resemble those ancient tales that the word once described, with weighty, allegorical stories, eerie landscapes, and powerful climaxes. Their latest album, For This We Fought the Battle of Ages, continues to establish them as one of the most original and compelling bands in rock music today — a group that can sound as huge as anyone, but also isn’t afraid to be quiet when the time calls for it.
It’s easy to focus on the massiveness of SubRosa, who can create an avalanche of sound with layers of doomy guitars and their trademark pair of otherworldly electric violins, a combination that makes them sound like no one else. With songs that stretch past the 10 minute mark (with a couple going for 15), they work on a scale that few bands can equal. But what most impresses me about them on this album is their commitment to the littler things: the melodies and harmonies, and the quieter portions that help make their larger sound more impactful.
The opening track, “Despair is a Siren,” starts with one of these quiet folk-influenced parts, and it’s the most overtly pretty portion of music the band has created yet. Like most Subrosa songs, it has distinct loud and quiet sections (almost like there are two different bands playing), and the way both styles are accentuated by the other shows how powerful a simple use of dynamics can be. When the band does go into metal mode after a couple minutes of softness, it feels earned, because they took the time to build to that crescendo and made it matter. The band makes these shifts feel organic in large part due to Rebecca Vernon, who sings convincingly in a full range of styles, from roaring and growling to practically a lullaby, sometimes in the span of a single song.
Vernon’s voice is part of the band’s primary contrast, which is the feminine vocals from her and the two violin players, Rebecca Pendleton and Kim Pack, with the band’s crushing guitars. Their presence is how the band subverts traditional metal, a genre often defined by its masculinity, and infuses it with emotion and beauty instead of being a one-dimensional blast of noise. At times, the band feels like a progression from shoegaze groups like My Bloody Valentine, who combined more indie rock influenced guitar noise with lighter vocals to make music that was simultaneously chaotic and beautiful.
Over the last few years, SubRosa have refined their sound, emphasizing these contrasts in their music, and For This We Fought the Battle of Ages sees them pushing themselves to new highs and new lows. It’s their most towering, monumental achievement yet — as well as their most intimate — and it’s one of the best rock albums of 2016.
The Noise Made By People 