5) The Vision Bleak - Weird Tales
On first spin of Weird Tales all I could hear were egregious missteps in composition, tracks that seemed incomplete, but in the search for my favorite doom album this year I kept returning to this for seconds, thirds, and after a couple months, it wound up becoming my inexplicable sleeper album of the year.
The songs are so disappointing at first, sometimes arriving at their chorus too early, sometimes never at all, some tracks don't even have a chorus instead relying on a single quiet acoustic interlude verse without repetition. After a while the expectations I was projecting on this album started to fade and I started seeing beyond the abrupt starts and stops of the arbitrary track delimiters. This is an album that's meant to be consumed from start to finish and picking a "favorite track" or radio single would be an entirely fruitless effort.
Given this reorientation, Weird Tales is a deeply mature collection of doom metal ideas entirely eschewing the traditional LP format in favor of a unique narrative journey. Think of this as an artfully cropped novella, a picture book even, trimmed of all fat, showcasing the purity of its images and atmospheres. The ability to make a musical idea feel like home, to make it feel comforting and familiar in this context is exactly the sort of skill that lands you in the top 5 of my list. Well done indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment