METAL: Skagos - "Ast". NON-METAL: Wardruna - "gap var Ginnunga"

Today I decided to make my first foray into neofolk, a very strange and difficult genre to access. It is folk music with an industrial, experimental feel. It's often dark, ambient, and paganistic. It can also make for some truly beautiful and haunting music.

Wardruna's 2009 album gap var Ginnunga might have been just the album to introduce me to the neofolk sound. It combines all of the neofolk elements, acoustic instruments, vocal chanting, ambient sounds, into a cohesive, epic whole. They also throw in some creepy spoken word and throat singing passages that I sadly cannot understand, as they are in Norwegian.
The album has twelve tracks, but the music creates such a trance-like experience that it is hard to tell when one track ends and the next begins. It's almost like one insanely long and hauntingly beautiful song.

I will definitely be exploring neofolk more thoroughly, as of now.

9.2/10


Today has been a good day for consuming media.
Ast by Skagos. (2009)
Wow. What a fucking record.

This is black metal at its best. The greatest metal album of the year, and probably the greatest one I've heard from this decade. (Although I've only been listening to metal for a couple of months, I have been on a rampage. I've heard a good many metal records.)

This Canadian duo has created a record raw and intense, without sacrificing any of the emotive content energy. They transition seamlessly from long, beautiful acoustic passages to powerful, loud blast beats. Nothing feels out of place or forced, like in many lesser albums of similar genre.

I know that metal is not an easy thing to like, but this album transcends genre. It is absolutely beautiful. Please give it a listen.

10/10

I thank Damien van Vroenhoven at therockblogger.com for reviewing Ast. His music blog is constantly updated with insightful album reviews of many genres. He is much more eloquent than I when it comes to expressing his opinions. Go read his stuff.

Summer Hours

I finally sat down to watch some IFC on demand and realized my chance to see Olivier Assayas' criticically lauded Summer Hours was passing me by at an alarming rate. So, I watched it.

It was fantastic.

An artist matriarch dies, leaving her beautiful estate, a gorgeous summer mansion full of rare and coveted art pieces, to her three grown children, all of whom are living very different lives. The film is mostly about them deciding what to do with said estate, and how they deal with letting it go.
I've only seen a couple of other Assayas movies (Demonlover and Boarding Gate, both greatly underloved), but to me Summer Hours felt like a film by the same man even though the tone and content were radically different.
All of my favorite moments took place at the summer estate. Assayas creates a beautiful paradise that is completely separate from the real world. Even when the next generation, previously shown as almost apathetic to the house, have a big sleazy teenager party there, it retains its magical atmosphere. And you can tell they feel it.

I can't recommend this film enough. It is a wonderful character piece about dealing with the past that is so moving and engaging all the way through.

(And should I do the number rating thing? I'm not sure. We shall experiment.)

9/10

(Maybe next time I'll do the decimal thing as well?)

The Beginning is Here

So it's been almost exactly six months since I decided to start and create a blog. I will now actually write in this blog in however frequent a fashion I damn well see fit.

Initially, this was to be an exclusively film-based blog where I would talk about the things i read on other, better, more educated film blogs, and write up thoughts on movies I watched. The problem now is that I'm in a bit of a slump with my film viewing. I don't really know what is going on as I've always watched as many movies as I possibly could.

This brings us to music. I am loving a whole lotta shit this year. I've heard great albums from many different genres, and I've really been itching for a place to talk about them. None of my friends share my particular taste, so writing into the black void of internet will be my substitute.

I'm a list man. Be ready. Music and movies.

Here we go:
To give a basic idea of my tastes recently i have my top five albums and films from the first half of 2009.

The films are:

5. Away We Go dir. Sam Mendes (I don't care what anybody says)
4. The Brothers Bloom dir. Rian Johnson (See above. This movie is great.)
3. Coraline dir. Henry Selick
2.Everlasting Moments dir. Jan Troell
1. Adventureland dir. Greg Mottola

I know I'm playing it mainstream, but I haven't had much of a chance to see most things, and most of the films I have seen this year haven't really wowed me. (Except for Revanche and the first 10 minutes of Up)

The albums are:

5. Black Cascade by Wolves in the Throneroom
4. White Tomb by Altar of Plagues
3. More Heart than Brains by Bike for Three!
2. Bad Luck by Trophy Scars
1. Post-Nothing by Japandroids

Bike for Three! have crafted the hands-down best song so far this year with "Lazarus Phenomenon." Japandroids are in close second with the hopeless "I Quit Girls."

Interestingly, I've loved two metal albums enough to put them in the top 5 of about 70. This is because I've recently, and for the first time, thrown myself into the giant, extremely diverse and overwhelming genre with positive results.

This is exciting. I can't wait to keep telling no one in particular about movies I love, and picking apart Pitchfork reviews I don't agree with.