2016: Third Quarter Favorites 22 picks from the last three months

KABLAM

Furiosa

[Janus]

Furiosa you are the hero who drives through Hell.
Big rig on the run.
Big booming drums.
Fire fills the air as you swerve around bombs.
Yet still you race on,
a mindless machine,
free, automatically.
Furiosa all over bloody and gleaming.
Fearless and strong.
Furiosa gets a multi-kill,
twisting scrap meta
into metal machine song.
But we know worse is yet to come.
A psychic horror encroaches.
Furiosa get your big gun.
Evil is real and growing near.
Only you know the way out of here.
–Adam Devlin

LILLITH双生

(SEASON_0) Hazard Garden

[Dream Catalogue]

R u on the grid? (SEASON_0) Hazard Garden is the cracked asphalt underfoot in industrial wastelands the world over. The streets burn, the skyline has disintegrated: the holograms can only imitate the rubble and dirt left behind; the vision vanishes. And, still, every dying moment is a new beginning. Death2saiba, the Hazard Garden thrives, long live LILLITH双生. No fake optimism, no consummate gloss, but a gauzy, endlessly transmogrifying projection of the neofuturist self, surveying the wreckage under neon-lit skies. Maggie always said there was no such thing as society, and you can bet your candy-ass that LILLITH双生 is on that same tip right now. The vapors that linger in the air are that hard; you can feel them hit the back of your throat. Impermanence never seemed so reel. –Soe Jherwood

M. Geddes Gengras

Interior Architecture

[Intercoastal Artists]

"Interior Architecture? Is that some kind of euphemism for tuckus noises?”
– my roommate

To be fair, my roommate doesn’t much like the Grateful Dead either; Interior Architecture is the futuristic, super-long “Space” session of Phil Lesh’s dreams, folding poise and precision into a barely-contained whole, like a Möbius band of liquid, steam, and light. Modular god Gengras is as new-age here as he is free-jazz, carving his own uncanny valley between ambience and expression. There’s something blissful and serendipitous about Interior Architecture; the stumbling and squelching attributes of an improvisational moment take their place in the structural mapping of a subterranean, monstrous force. It probably doesn’t help that I’m doing my listening, in lieu of the cash for a decent pair of monitors, on an old pair of Logitech™ computer speakers that emphasize the bubbly and farty parts of these four electroacoustic jammers over the undercurrent of voluminous uncertainty, from which my roommate might otherwise have reeled in the dimensional confusion I felt in moments of headphone intimacy. To steal a page from Kylie Jenner’s book, “2016 is the year of realizing things,” and in time, all of our roommates will come to vibe with the architecture of a different interior. –Will Neibergall

Macula Dog

Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?

[Wharf Cat]

Here, read this. Seriously. Leave this FEATURE and read this (it’s the same link as before, so if you were going to check, you don’t have to since I just now confirmed that they are both the same link). I’m not going to expound near as well as CYNOCEPHALUS on the subject of Macula Dog’s Why Do You Look Like Your Dog?. All I will say on the matter is that this album is a sure-fire slam dunk. And that’s “slam dunk” as in basketball. –Bort

N-Prolenta

A Love Story 4 @deezius, neo, chuk, E, milkleaves, angel, ISIS, + every1else…. and most of all MY DAMN SELF

[PTP]

We live in a hurricane of self-serving intentions, a stormy nexus of Love Stories 4 our OWN DAMN SELVES, every body precariously positioned downwind of somebody else’s screams. Everybody’s joints hurt, predicating a drastic change in pressure. This is a Love Story 4 those who have ever been crushed by it, 4 those born in lightning storms wrapped in metal umbilical cords, 4 those who can drown it all out with electronics and memories, 4 those who’ve ever looked on in silent horror while it all burnt down, 4 those who benefit from staggering fear while being driven by their own, & 4 every1else. We all live in a fucking hurricane. This is what it looks like when there are no more walls, no more basements, no more roofs: bodies turned upward in hope, in despair, in query. Futile bodies subject now only to each other and to nature’s indiscriminating torrent. This is our Love Story. Step outside and be part of it. –Jackson Scott

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

Skeleton Tree

[Bad Seed Ltd.]

“While the bones of our child crumble like chalk,” Cave sings on 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, “O where do we go now but nowhere?” The stakes on Skeleton Tree are fundamentally different, however, and so is the answer to that question, which can only truly be worked out in light of actual tragedy. Cave’s excellent 2016 record traverses the dark and winding valleys of despair, eventually coming to the conclusions to the questions that The Boatman’s Call could only pose. The haunting drones and heavy cadences of “Jesus Alone” establish the album’s gravity, and the songs that follow see Cave working through his alienation as elegantly and as creatively as ever. The subtle, magnificent “I Need You” is one of the most thematically and sonically crushing songs of the year, but ultimately it is “Skeleton Tree’s” concluding mantra (“And it’s alright now”) that lights the way home. –Adam Rothbarth