Here's stuff I listened to in 2022!
These are nine albums and an EP I want to talk about because I like them to the point of recommending them to you. Yes, you! Most of these were not released in 2022.
Here's a link to the Shoving Music Down Your Throat 2022 playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Xk15F6CEYfu40Xe2LXWyV?si=eac28e88220e4604&pt=f1ddd3e3a70073b4fa8da92934e5ab43
This playlist has a song from each album on the list. Not the best song, not my favorite song, though maybe both of those. The point is that it's a song that I think illustrates how I feel about the album and/or will cast a wider net to more audience members.
Lovelife by Lush [1996]
genre: Britpop
Lush is a 90s British pop-rock band. I always wanted to check them out. I liked their overall sound but wasn't a huge fan of the couple of songs I heard prior. Turns out Lovelife fucking rules front-to-back. It's still what you would expect from a pop album in the sense that it can easily be shuffled. The songs on there are really fucking good though. The guitars are punk-ish without being wracky, the drum mix is pretty good for its time, and the vocals are full of great harmonies. One of the trademark selling points of Lush back when they were famous was that they had two vocalists hitting really high notes in a really soft tone.
Kid A by Radiohead [2000]
genre: experimental rock / electronica
Kid A is one of Radiohead's most acclaimed albums. Radiohead was one of the bands that pulled me out of my adolescent metalhead funk but I had just been spinning OK Computer, In Rainbows, and The Bends for years since then. Kid A is one of the most interesting albums in Radiohead's discography to look into the history of and listen to. This album's creation almost ended the band due to Thom Yorke's creative differences with the band and his reluctance to make purely melody-focused rock songs. A lot of the lyrics are just sayings and general notions cobbled together over synths and loops mixed with occasional elements of their previous albums. This should be terrible. It's awesome. It's easily in my top-three Radiohead albums now.
Altered State by Tesseract [2013]
genre: prog metal / djent
Tesseract is one of the most popular prog metal bands ever and largely influential to the following generation of what a lot of people consider "bedroom rock". For those unfamiliar, it's what it sounds like from the subgenre's name. Altered State is the only album in Tesseract's discography with Ashe O'Hara, who fucking nails the vocals on this album. It's baroque with vocal harmony layering and the instruments are well-layered and organized without being too busy while still using creative and complicated time signature teases. It's prog metal that fans of more melodic and straightforward forms of metal can enjoy for the same reasons.
Intellectual Hooliganism by Flummox [2018]
genre: avant-garde doom metal
Intellectual Hooliganism is a band heavily inspired by old stuff like The Misfits, Dio, and Black Sabbath but with the recording fidelity of a 2018 album and with intentionally silly lyrics. Even if you're not crazy about the kind of music that this band took notes from (I'm not crazy about it), this is still worth a spin. The whole album has a very fun air about it. It's pretty clear that the band enjoyed making this and reminded me that not every collection of music released by an artist or group of artists has to be the most serious and thought-provoking album in the world to be memorable and worth recommending.
Любий друг by Khrystyna Soloviy [2018]
genre: folk
I was going to listen to a bunch of albums from around the world and didn't even make it a tenth of the way through the list. I started with Ukraine and found a lot of songs I liked from various artists. In terms of a full album to put on this list, I decided to go with this one. Khrystyna Soloviy is kind of like the pop stars we have over here that got their fame from American Idol or America's Got Talent. She got popular on TV and then continued a successful career in modern folk. This album is very calming. I'd talk more about it and how rad its guitar tones are but I don't speak Ukrainian. I love the vocals but have no idea what the themes of this album are. I encourage you to enjoy it anyway. I did.
The Process of Dissension by Animal Jam [2020]
genre: swancore, alternative metal
My friend showed me this EP and I was surprised by how good it is. It's kind of like metalcore but with almost no scream vocals and more clean guitars than one might expect. The opening track in particular is really good. There is a lot of thematic cohesion in the lyrics and in the composition. I'm not a huge shill for metal but these songs are catchy enough for me to recommend to people who aren't that into metal either.
Eternal Blue by Spiritbox [2021]
genre: metalcore, djent, prog-metal
This really isn't the "proggiest" prog-metal album. It leans a lot more toward a poppier side of djent. It's still really good though. If nothing else, listen to "Constance", which is on the "Shoving Music Down Your Throat - 2022 Edition" playlist I linked above. For those unfamiliar with Spiritbox, they are a metal band with aggressive tones but with serene vocals. There are screams but they are tasteful and fitting to the songs they are paired with. They never feel like they are just there to show off.
Turbo by Dirty Loops with Cory Wong [2022]
genre: jazz fusion
Dirty Loops is a three-piece pop/jazz fusion that got famous from doing covers of famous pop songs. They do more original work now and it's rad. Cory Wong is a jazz guy on YouTube who is good at guitar. Turbo is a collaborative album that swings way more toward the modern jazz side. The first track, "Follow the Light" is more in line with what Dirty Loops is known for. The last track is a cover of Thriller. The other songs are actually primarily instrumental. I feel like this would be a good introduction to pop fans unfamiliar with jazz structure. There is a lot of really good brass accompaniment on the pop and jazz parts. If you're going to get into Dirty Loops for the first time, I recommend Phoenix over this but Turbo was still a pleasant surprise for me personally. I was really excited for a new Dirty Loops release. I watched the video they made for "Follow the Light" expecting a Cory-Wong-flavored Phoenix-like experience. I definitely don't like Turbo as much as Phoenix or Loopified but I can't say I'm disappointed either. For a while, I had been curious what Dirty Loops might sound like going full jazz and now I extensively know. Honestly, out of all the albums on here, this is probably one of the ones I would generally recommend the least but it's worth noting that I listened to more than ten albums this year and still chose to keep this one on the list.
Pharalis by Dir En Grey [2022]
genre: alternative metal
I have talked about Dir En Grey in almost every single "Shoving Music Down Your Throat" installment. They are metal with freaky throat noises and shrieks. Most of it is pretty melodic. It's kind of hard to explain why I like Pharalis so much without describing a short history of their discography. I'm not going to do that to you. Suffice it to say that all their albums sound a bit different from each other. Noticeably different. However, they went through this phase of being a lot more death metal. Dum Spiro Spero is my least favorite album by them because it is where they leaned into this the hardest. I'm not inherently against death metal. One of my favorite bands is Finnish melodic death metal band Children of Bodom. When it's death metal and everything has the same tone and timbre for 50 minutes, I rapidly lose interest. Pharalis sounds like the audio fidelity of those albums with more of the attitude of Withering to Death and Arche with a bit of the album they released before Pharalis. The vocal performances and melody lines are stronger on this one than on their previous album, The Insulated World. The mix is good. The guitar layering rules. It kind of reminded me that sometimes a band making the same old, same old is fine if the "same old" is really good. I rarely feel that way but I feel that way about Pharalis. If you're just now interested in Dir En Grey, I would recommend Arche or Withering to Death to start out with. Pharalis is honestly not bad to listen to afterward.
Systems Music for Home Defence by Bis [2022]
genre: indie, alternative punk, disco
I started listening to Bis recently and did not expect a full-length album to come out in 2022. Systems Music for Home Defence surprised me. It's definitely more melodic than their really early punkier stuff but they've always been kind of electronic punk. There are still a lot of elements from their old stuff on this one. It definitely sounds like a modern version of Bis. Not sure what else someone would expect from a 2022 Bis album. The lyrical content is just as punchy as their older songs, they just aren't shouted as much. Between this, The Gazette's new album last year, and Dir En Grey's new album this year, I guess I just lucked out with bands I really like still being passionate about what they do. They're still passionate enough to put out stuff that sounds like a new version of where they are at as musicians. I like what comes out of it. I guess being raised on mostly rock and metal put me into this mentality that bands just get "worse". Albums like Systems Music for Home Defence have proved me wrong.
