LOW-FIVE 2024
The 5 best listens of 2024 according to Bassa Fedeltà
Let's start from the premise that a newsletter whose title is a clear homage to that masterpiece that is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby simply must have a ranking. That said, to be precise, it is the very painful ranking of my best listens of 2024, which does not mean the best albums released this year but rather the most beautiful records I discovered over the course of these twelve months.
ORANSSI PAZUZU - Muuntautujia
Oranssi Pazuzu aren't exactly an underground band, in fact they are very well-known and appreciated in the black-metal scene, but this latest album is too beautiful not to talk about.
If Hell were really as Dante imagined it, Muuntautuja would be its sacred music. A wicked psalmody, a demonic avant-garde oratorio experimenting with sonic violence through distortion and dissonance, piercing screams and guttural anathemas.
A listening experience that constantly mutates and transforms in homage to the title (in fact, muuntautuja translates more or less as "shapeshifter") without giving you time to acclimatize. Oranssi Pazuzu have given life to a metallic Tartarus, as black and red as a coal fire that devours everything.
SHITNOISE - I Chocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend
The album by the Monegasque duo, pressed in a “cult” format (40 cassettes worldwide of which I own no. 28) and distributed by the excellent Cruel Nature Records, offers the rather particular experience of being centrifuged for forty minutes in a paradox where noise becomes poetry and dissonance becomes melody.
In a turbulent era, in which noise has often become so normal as to be overlooked, this album is a refuge for those who still refuse silence.
I Choked My Gun and Shot My Best Friend cannot be ignored.
ELLiS•D - Hullo, reality
Born and raised in Brighton, Ellis Dickson initially made a name for himself as a drummer, collaborating with various bands on the English underground scene, such as Strange Cages and Jealous Nostril. But it's when he decided to step out from behind the drums that he revealed his true nature as an eclectic musician whose flamboyant vision of music, finally free from the constraints of a character he himself defines as quiet and introverted, is realized in extravagant songs, as nervous as the flame of a candle threatened by a breeze.
And yet that faint and trembling light, indomitable, resists the shadows that are Ellis' element and the ideal environment for his convulsive and melodramatic voice, whose frenetic register, an amplified version of David Byrne's Psycho Killer (from which we hear a bass interlude in I Am Here, ed.), moves with a rhythm all its own between art-rock contortions and psychedelic mirages.
This EP is a metaphysical place where man (Ellis), music, the listener and the character (ELLiS-D) - who is the connector of all - intertwine endlessly in the threads of a darkly decadent post-punk.
THE CURE - Songs Of A Lost World
Peter Hoeg. Halfway through the album, still fully immersed in the music and words of the world lost by the Cure, I thought of the great Danish writer and his book The Silent Girl (as beautiful as Smilla's Sense of Snow, I recommend it en passant). At one point, the character of an old mime arranges a glass, turning it upside down. His young assistant, curious, asks him why he did that seemingly pointless gesture. The mime replies that he had done so because of the dust, "la poussière". The assistant then points out that they would just come back the next day, but the old man retorts, closing the discussion: "we can hope so, but can we make plans in that direction?". So, the reason why an imaginary mime turns a glass upside down is the same that moves the music and words of this wonderful return of Robert Smith and company. They both remind us that the shadow of death (perhaps for the first time explicitly present in Smith's lyrics) hovers over every moment. In this confrontation with our finitude, however, we also find comfort, in the fullness of every moment lived and listened to. Beautiful.
PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS - Do You Still Love Me
I've been following Planes Mistaken For Stars for a few years now, precisely since 2006 when I happened to listen to a beautiful Mercy fresh off the press. Not even a year later, Planes announced their breakup, only to reunite exactly ten years later and release Prey, a great album in which the Americans' characteristic sludge-hardcore sounds even more sinister, like a rusty, toxic-sharpened blade. Then nothing until November 1st of this year, when I find a new release on my Bandcamp feed, which of course I listen to right away. And there's something different. The gravitational heaviness that nailed you to the ground mixes with melancholic, at times compassionate atmospheres, as if the Planes had added a few grams of delicacy, sacrificing some of the rust that covered the blade. While, captivated, I listen to The calming (which I was beginning to consider the manifesto of change), where Gared O'Donnel's hoarse voice is little more than a whisper, I discover by reading the info that Do You Still Love Me is a posthumous album, at least as far as O'Donnel himself is concerned, who died back in 2021 before managing to finish (but not to listen to) what he had started. And so those faint and incredulous "Is my calling" are once again charged with meaning and tension again, similar to cries of resigned courage that are even able to subordinate, in my mind, those angry and painful ones that close with the crash of glasses Mathew is dead, the opening track. This is an incendiary and beautiful record, and since emotions are ultimately the true recipients of music and consequently the heart counts more than reason, for this year the Planes win.