A Certain Taste

July was a bit of a shit month for new music. Well, new music that I like anyway. But it was a bit of a shit month overall. Who am I kidding, are any months in 2020 "good"? If I'm being honest, 2020 has been a big kick in the dick for me. I started the year getting fired on my first day back to work. It was nice of them to give me Christmas and New Year with the imagined security of a job. I soon got another job, one that hasn't seen me reduced to tears with stress. But no sooner had I got my new seat warm (metaphorically speaking, it's predominantly remote) than we saw a global pandemic that put us into the lockdown that we've all been trying to adapt to and cope with. July has given us more political incompetence than you can wave a shitty stick at, and the crazy thing is that this probably applies to whatever country you are in right now! It's given us American wildfires and a continuation of conflict between India and China. It's given us riots and...

June was a very tasty month for new heavy stuff being thrown our way. I could easily have switched out the majority of this list for other, equally worthy releases. But it's a top 5, so I have to pick. I spent a lot of my time over the past week or so listening to new releases from June and July in the only time I could grab - either running or lying in bed with headphones on. The environment in which you experience music definitely changes your perception of that music. I learned that mid-tempo death metal has a kind of chug that's perfect for cardio work, and doom is a lot better when you are lying in the dark with headphones on. I've gone on long walks with the blackest of metal playing and found it compliments the slow pace, despite sometimes being faster than some of the technical death metal I enjoy. I tried to listen to my pick of the bunch from June, Creature's Ex-Cathedra, in a few different settings to see what worked. A long drive in heavy rain cemented it as...