A Certain Taste

I think we've got this weird duality with pop culture where we see it as both an art and a commodity. We (sometimes) appreciate the creative talent put in to make our favourite tv shows, movies and music, but we also expect some aspect of re-use from them. It's a rare movie where you'll see the end credits roll and think "fuck that was incredible" and know you won't ever watch it again. We have this with music the most. Replayability will play a big part in how we rate an album or even a song. I think we should re-normalise appreciating music as a singular experience. A good place to start is this absolutely punishing 3 track, 44 minutes of funeral doom from Atramentus. It tells the story both of the lead guitarist and vocalist's seasonal depression and a fantasy epic about a man who steals a sword from the sun god to gain immortality, but inadvertantly drops his world into a perpetual winter and has to thus walk endlessly through a dead world on his own f

Tl;dr? This month's playlist is here. Oh, I've been away for a while. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was the plague. Maybe it was other endeavours. Maybe it was the 30 hours of podcasts queued up. Or maybe I just lost focus and concentration. Whatever it was, only Loki knows. Either way, the old trickster God has led me full circle back to new releases from the land of heavy metal. But what's the best way to catch up on four months' worth of new music? My process is simple. I'll look at a few different lists of new releases every Friday and check my Bandcamp wishlist for things I've been waiting on and copy and paste any that sound interesting - could be name, album art, impression from a short sound clip or whatever catches me. I'm obviously looking at genre, but not solely. I joined a few different Facebook groups and Discords, and I've developed a taste for the slower stuff. It's a different kind of heavy. At the start of the year I wouldn't h