Best of 2023

 2) Saturnus - The Storm Within

Nostalgia should be able to bring you just so far toward happiness or contentment. The reminder of a past beautiful moment is not a new beautiful moment, it's the awareness of a reverberating echo that fades over time. This reality gets complicated when a band who's been silent for 10+ years reignites a genre of music that has largely been forgotten. This record could have easily been written, recorded, and stored away in a time capsule around the year 2000. It sounds authentically death/doom from that era, an era I loved deeply.

Of course, just sounding like a record lost in time wouldn't be enough to make the list, especially this high. The Storm Within is also a deeply emotional album full of authentically fragile moments. Death/doom always faces the risk of sounding melodramatic, as if the emotions aren't quite real, that they've been dramatized for aesthetic effect. I never felt that in response to this album. As these musicians grow older they aren't forgetting the rawness of emotions of loss and the resulting confusion and discontent. In saying that I immediately feel a sense of concern for these gentlemen. I hope they simply tap into these emotions for musical inspiration and haven't been spending the last 30 years wallowing in despair. Of course I spend quite a bit of my adult life wallowing in despair, so I'm not in a position to weigh in on others' mental health.