My Top Albums of 2021

2021 is coming to a close. The Pandemic is still happening, but some of the restrictions have loosened, allowing musicians to tour again. Musicians who were stuck in lockdown in 2020 and unable to tour used this downtime to produce more music, and we got to see the spectacular results this year. We also saw a lot of new bands starting out in 2020/2021, and heard from some old favorites. This list is but a small sampling of them. I was inundated with new music all year long. As I said last year, I’ll probably be discovering music that was released in 2021 for years to come. It’s near impossible to get to them all. But, here are just a few of the albums that shaped my year, in no particular order. I hope that, if you find that you like any if these albums, you’ll support the artist on Bandcamp and purchase them. Especially on a Bandcamp Friday when they get the full payments. 

Slow Danse With the Dead - Babble of Despair

Release Date: October 1

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Babble of Despair, Crucifix, Cold Caress

 

I first heard of Slow Danse With the Dead late summer 2020, and it has remained one of my favorite current bands ever since, hardly missing a month of having a song featured on my Top Songs of the Month. They even made last year’s Albums of the Year blog. The dismal, droning vocals of Johnny Montoya just resonate with me, and I feel like if I were ever to make music myself it would probably sound something like this. Again with this album the singer has returned to his characteristic, over-the-top, almost humorously miserable lyrics which was what first made me fall in love with this band’s sound last year. The title track turns the gloomily redundant line “Such a tragic tragedy” into a catchy, danceable beat. The song “Cold Caress” is about someone or something with a cold grip, dragging the singer down by the throat into an “endless realm”. It’s probably metaphorical, I’m guessing for depression or some other mental illness. 

I got this album on CD when it came out.

https://slowdansewiththedead.bandcamp.com/album/babble-of-despair

No Man Cry - Disappeared Men 

Release Date: July 24

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: A Calm Evening, Forgive Me, Teardown

No Man Cry is the post-punk solo project of Tigran Davtyan out of Yerevan, Armenia, founded in 2020. There is a story behind this album. This was their fourth album in about a year, and it was released just two days before Tigran Davtyan began his mandatory two-year military service for Armenia. The western media isn’t talking about it, but this is a scary time to be serving in the army in Armenia, given their hostile neighbors at the borders in the aftermath of a vicious war late last year. The title of the album may be an allusion to the soldiers who keep disappearing at the border, taken as prisoners of war by Azerbaijan to be used as political bargaining chips. I hope Tigran stays safe, and I look forward to hearing from No Man Cry again after this two-year hiatus. 

In many of the songs you can feel the angst and anxiety of someone about to enter the military service in a wartime environment. For example the song “A Calm Evening”, gives the feel of the calm before a storm.  The lyrics, in Armenian, tell how the singer will miss their hometown while he will gone for years but will try to keep the image of it in his mind. Probably has an autobiographical element to it.

As far as I know the album is still a YouTube exclusive, and is not on Bandcamp, nor do I know of a way to actually pay for it, but you can listen to it here:

https://youtu.be/gyEwNfKPCnc

Vestron Vulture - Heretic

Release Date: June 30

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Crippling Death, Cemetery Cowboy, Darkest Road

Vestron Vulture is a band out of Monterrey, Mexico released three albums at once on June 30th, Hexen, Heretic and Hecatomb. Heretic is my favorite of the three, the most post-punk and gloomy of them, while the other two albums are good as well they have more shades of synthwave. Vestron Vulture has switched genres several times over their career, but it was when they turned to post-punk that I finally discovered them. Many of their songs deal with themes of the negative effects of drug abuse. For example, the song Cemetery Cowboy.  also just a great post-punk track, with its gloomy bass guitar and macabre subject matter. I don’t know why the word “cowboy” is in the title, but at least this sounds nothing like a country song. Another song I like from Vestron Vulture is “Crippling Death”, off this same album, which I also recommend listening to. The singer Vestron Vulture, the namesake of the band, has been very prolific since 2010 when he left a thrash metal band to go solo, with almost forty albums, and in that time he has hopped through several different genres if you look into his back catalog, from more electronically influenced styles like synthwave and EBM, to this sort of music, which he’s been making since 2019. 

https://vestronvulture.bandcamp.com/album/heretic

Glaare - Your Hellbound Heart

Release Date: April 30

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Your Hellbound Heart, Buyer’s Remorse, Mirrors

Glaare’s 2017 debut album To Death and a Day is still a favorite of mine, I even got it on cassette. The song “My Love Grows in Darkness”, first song on the album, is one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, and I don’t say that lightly. So I was thrilled when I learned that Glaare was going to have a new album out this year. The new album, Your Hellbound Heart, takes their sound in a bit of a new direction, with synthwave tones thrown into their usual shoegaze/post-punk. The theme of the album is sci-fi action movies of the 1980s, such as Hellraiser and They Live. One of the songs is even called “Terminator 2” and is told from the perspective of Sarah Connor, a character in the film. It’s very much a concept album, which are getting rare these days. Like their previous album, listening to it from beginning to end is like listening to one single work rather than a collection of unrelated songs, and that’s the mark of a good mix. There’s a lost science to placing songs on an album (or mixtape) in a way that they flow into each other and you kind of forget that you’re listening to more than one song at times. Glaare is good at this.

“Buyer’s Remorse” and the title track “Your Hellbound Heart” are a bit slower and sound closer to Glaare’s initial sound, although I do like all the songs. Admittedly nothing is quite like “My Love Grows in Darkness”, but perhaps that song is like lightning in a bottle. I do wonder if this album signals a permanent change of musical direction for the band, or if the next release will be different still.

https://glaare.bandcamp.com/album/your-hellbound-heart

Pretty Addicted - Soul for Sale

Release Date: April 8

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Phobia, Soul for Sale, ‘Tones and Whiskey

“Suffering is what makes me create.”

Pretty Addicted’s music is very aggressive, loud, in-your-face, and the singer doesn’t sound like anyone else I’ve heard. The music videos are fun too, and Vicious always has the best makeup jobs. On their Bandcamp page they deem themselves dance-punk, which is a new genre to me but I like it. I found several of the songs off this album  both catchy and relatable. After months of listens “Phobia” rose to the top as my overall favorite song on the album. A song about dreaded phobias, especially of the dentist office, with its cringe-inducing sounds of drills in the background. I hate going to the dentist too, and had a very traumatic root canal done to me, so I can relate to this song. The line “I don’t want to be brave, I don’t want to overcome anything” stands out to me. Everyone looks at phobias as something you need to face and overcome, but what if you just don’t want to? There’s too much of a problem-solving mentality in psychology. Then again, you do have to go to the dentist sometime, so learning to at least cope is something you kind of have to do, if overcoming the fear is impossible.

It’s about craving for human interaction, and getting it by having a one night stand with someone you meet at a bar. I can relate to the loneliness aspect at least, if not the solution she takes.

https://prettyaddicted.bandcamp.com/album/soul-for-sale

Jrimurmur - Lur Mur

Release Date: June 21

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Es Kendani Em, Anharmar a im Mej, Averak

Jrimurmur, or alternatively Jrimurmurner (the “ner” is a plural suffix) translates to seaweed; understandably since Armenia is a landlocked country I had never come across that word. Jrimurmur is a duo from Yerevan, Armenia, who describe themselves as “two crazy girls making noise”. They’ve been active from at least 2015, and just released their first full length LP this year, Lur Mur. 

Some highlights of the album include “Averak”,which translates to “Ruins”. It’s a breakup song; the singer claims that their lover left them in ruins, comparing themselves to the ruined medieval Armenian capital of Ani, which is now on the Turkish side of the border, while the lover went on to flourish like Yerevan, the current capital. It’s a cover actually. The original song was by Elvina Markaryan, a very famous jazz singer in Armenia and the former Soviet Union. Another favorite of mine is the very Lebanon Hanover-esque “Anharmar a im Mej”; the title translates to “Uncomfortable in Myself”, and the lyrics carry with them themes of body dysmorphia, and not liking to look at yourself in the mirror. The finale of the album is also noteworthy, “Es Kendani Em!”. While most of their songs are downbeat, dark and atmospheric, this song screams with passion. “Es Kendani Em” translates to “I am alive” (Ես կենդանի եմ in Armenian script; I wrote it in English transliteration because that is how the band lists it). The first word is pronounced more like “Yes” than “Es”, but that’s how transliteration goes sometimes. The climax of the song has this phrase repeated like a mantra. The wolf howl in the background of the final screams is a particularly nice touch, gives the song a really carnal adrenaline rush. It reminds me of the cry of a nation surrounded by enemies, declaring that they still live in spite of their enemy’s attempts to destroy them. I am not sure this is the intended interpretation, but it’s what comes to my mind. It isn’t a proud or happy shout, but one of desperation. The entire song has kind of a feeling of despiration. It screams “I’m still alive in spite of everything!”

Some of the tracks, like “Anharmar a im Mej”, have one or two other versions that don’t appear on the album, and as far as I know are only on YouTube. The ones that appear on the album itself are a bit more polished, but you might also like the somewhat more raw and gritty versions on YouTube.

https://jrimurmur.bandcamp.com/album/lur-mur-2

Altar of Eden - Chimeras

Release Date: February 11

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Existence, Sacrilege, Genesis

Altar of Eden truly sounds like it came right out of the early 1980s, echoing the sound of classic deathrock. It’s got a heaviness to it that a lot of modern bands in the genre lack. Zero synths to be heard anywhere. I found an interview with the singer of the band, and from what I can gather they’re not trying to chase any modern trends with their music, they mainly just listen to classic punk and post-punk and go from there. I can respect that, as an artist I don’t like chasing trends either. Just stick to what you want to make.

https://soundgrotesca.bandcamp.com/album/altar-of-eden-chimeras

The Tears of Ozymandias

Release Date:

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: 683280 Hours, Zero Point, Slow Death

A solid debut album for this band which makes me excited for what they might put out next, this rose to the list late in the year for me, almost exclusively due to the song “683280 Hours”, the most thought-provoking and poignant song I’ve heard in a long time, but the album has other strengths as well. This is a song about life; its finite nature. I relate to it deeply as its lyrics examine many of the existential questions I’ve often dealt with in recent years. The song could only be the end result of a similar journey to find meaning in life. The title made me curious as to how much 683280 hours adds up to. It’s 78 years. Roughly a typical human lifetime. Even though it’s a bigger number it hits differently than counting it in years. Makes it seem much shorter. No one even makes it to a million hours. And you’re lucky if you make it to 683280 hours, most people don’t. Perhaps it’s because I can fully grasp how long an hour is, while a year is a longer time and thus harder to conceptualize. It’s more abstract. I’m going to be halfway to 683280 hours in less than four years. Every day your number of hours goes up by 24. How many of those hours do you spend doing what you want to do? How many of those hours do we waste sleeping? Or doing a grueling 40 hour a week job? Add them all up and subtract them from 683280. It really changes your perspective on everything when you consider how finite life is. And yet we still dream, as the song says. 

https://thetearsofozymandias.bandcamp.com/album/the-tears-of-ozymandias

Manticore Kiss ~ Intertwined

Release Date: July 4

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Aboulia, Intertwined, Endless Whisper

“Aboulia” was my very first hit of 2021, having debuted New Years Day. And the duo had plenty more where that came from. Their music is very melodic, not only due to the captivating vocals from both members but the accompaniment of a cello in many of their songs. “Aboulia” in particular has an almost “Phantom of the Opera” quality to it, and I would consider that the strongest track on the EP. “Intertwined” is a bittersweet love song about a couple deciding to face death together. A lot of their songs sound like something you would have to have experienced in some way to write.The band has really taken their pain and made art out of it. That’s always the best sort of art in my opinion.

https://manticorekiss.bandcamp.com/album/intertwined-full-ep

Скубут ~ Меланхоличен

Release Date: January 2

Top 3 Favorite Tracks: Акт Самоубийства, Устал, Художник

Similarly to how December releases often get the short end of the stick, January releases always seem to be forgotten when people do “best of the year” lists, because they were too long ago and get overshadowed by albums from later months. Well I’m not going to forget this album, released the second day if the year. This album has kept me entertained all year long. Скубут is a solo project by Mikhail Shlepin out of Vienna, Austria. Скубут deserves to be up there with Molchat Doma and Ploho as one of the best modern Russian-language post-punk bands. 

They released another album this year in June, Сгублен, which was just as good as this album and deserves a mention as well. I decided to go with the first album I heard but they’re both just as good.

https://skubut.bandcamp.com/album/--3

Top Singles of 2021

Not every great song that came out this year was part of an album compilation, so I thought I would give a special shoutout to some of the singles of 2021 I greatly enjoyed. 

New Cross ~ Fist of the Hanged Man

Release Date: June 3

This song still gets stuck in my head all these months later. It’s a song with staying power. New Cross is a band out of London, England, which emerged last year. This extremely catchy tune left me hungry for a full album, here’s hoping there will be one soon. 

Mortiis ~ Methuselah 

Release Date: June 15

It’s the long lost song from The Smell of Rain. It was apparently made available to Mortiis’ patrons in 2019 before it was made public in Spring of this year, so it almost doesn’t count as a 2021 single, but that’s when I first heard it. I almost never thought I would hear a new Mortiis song in this style again. I’ve liked all of Mortiis’ genre shifts over the years, but in my opinion darkwave Mortiis is best Mortiis. And he was only darkwave for that one album. I wonder if he has any other songs like this lying around. If so, take my money Mortiis. 

https://mortiis.bandcamp.com/album/methuselah

Top 8 Songs of December 2021/Քաղոց 4514 ~ Tears of Ozymandias, IC2, Obsidian

 It’s the end of the Gregorian year. Soon I’ll be writing my Top Albums of 2021 blog, but unlike a lot of other writers who do such blogs as early as late November sometimes, I want to give bands who are releasing albums in December a chance to make my list and not get lost in the shuffle. So don’t expect it until sometime after Winter Solstice. I haven’t gotten into any releases quite that new at the moment, although several of the tracks listed here are from November, but I’m staying on the lookout. Anyway, here are my favorite songs of the past 30 days. Or the past 720 hours, if you will.

The Tears of Ozymandias ~ 683280 Hours

The Tears of Ozymandias of Munich, Germany released their self-titled debut album last October, and on November’s Bandcamp Friday I snatched it up after hearing this track. This is a song about life; its finite nature. I relate to it deeply as its lyrics examine many of the existential questions I’ve often dealt with in recent years. The song could only be the end result of a similar journey to find meaning in life. The title made me curious as to how much 683280 hours adds up to. It’s 78 years. Roughly a typical human lifetime. Even though it’s a bigger number it hits differently than counting it in years. Makes it seem much shorter. No one even makes it to a million hours. And you’re lucky if you make it to 683280 hours, most people don’t. Perhaps it’s because I can fully grasp how long an hour is, while a year is a longer time and thus harder to conceptualize. It’s more abstract. I’m going to be halfway to 683280 hours in less than four years. Every day your number of hours goes up by 24. How many of those hours do you spend doing what you want to do? How many of those hours do we waste sleeping? Or doing a grueling 40 hour a week job? Add them all up and subtract them from 683280. It really changes your perspective on everything when you consider how finite life is. And yet we still dream, as the song says. 

A very thought-provoking song. I can’t imagine a pop song ever delving into this subject matter. The lyrics are very befitting to the music genre.

You can find the album here:

https://thetearsofozymandias.bandcamp.com/album/the-tears-of-ozymandias

IC2 ~ Falling Down

IC2 is a post-punk solo project headed by Ivan Coppola (the “IC” in the band name) from Villa Latina, Italy. The 4-track album that this song appears on, VERV66, was just released on November 27th (see, late November is too early to start doing your albums of the year lists), but from what I can see IC2 has been quite prolific since last year, releasing a new track every couple months or so. This song, “Falling Down”, has a danceable, darkwave element to it while remaining a bit melancholy in a way. It’s a song that I’ve kept coming back to ever since I first heard it.

Check the album out here:

https://ic2music.bandcamp.com/

Obsidian ~ Vultures

Obsidian is a Florida band I saw live just recently with Twin Tribes and She Past Away in Tampa. While there I greatly enjoyed their performance, and picked up their cassette Living Dead, their 2019 release. It seems that the band has evolved a lot in a short amount of time from what I’ve heard, as the album was very heavy, almost pure punk rather than post. But I think each of their releases has a subtly different sound to it. My favorite tracks from them have been from their most recent release, Vultures from October 2020. It feels to me that they really honed their sound by this release. What caught my attention most was the music video to this track. It comes with a trigger warning for its suicidal themes, just to forewarn you. I found more information on this track and the band from an article on post-punk.com, which dug deeper into the meaning behind the song and the band name itself (I had assumed the name came about because obsidian, being black, is a goth rock, and the genre they play in is goth rock. See what I did there? But no.) Anyway, the song is about ones mental state after being institutionalized for self-harm. 

You can pick it up here:

https://officialobsidian.bandcamp.com/album/vultures

Leonora Post Punk ~ Eternos

Leonora Post Punk is a band out of Los Mochis, Mexico. And I knew this was a promising band because it has one of my favorite music genres in its name. I’ve always liked Mexico’s gothic music scene too. It never disappoints. This song, the title track off their album (another October 2020 release), is short and sweet, but it gives you a good sampling of what their music sounds like. 

You can find their latest album Eternos here:

https://leonorapostpunk.bandcamp.com/album/eternos

Node ~ Brain Fog

Another song by the Armenian coldwave/synthwave group Node, based out of Yerevan. As you may know by now I’ve been trying my best to cover the emerging dark alternative music scene in the country. This song has a dreamlike quality that suits the subject matter, being lost in a daydream and somewhat oblivious to your surroundings. It’s a calm, soothing song that takes you out of the moment and loses you in thought. As with Node’s other songs, the lyrics aren’t really written in proper English, but of course that adds to the charm. This song is a YouTube exclusive for the moment. 

You can have a look at their Bandcamp page here:

https://nodeofficial.bandcamp.com/

iamnoone ~ My Own Flesh

Iamnoone (I am no one) is a coldwave duo from Italy. Lots of good music from Italy this past month. This track is off their newest album Dead Season, released on November 26 of this year, so still very new. They recorded the music from this album during the pandemic (the titular dead season), and it is about that time and how it changed people’s perception of what was important and what was actually trivial. They illustrate this very well on their Bandcamp page for the album. I always like it when an artist has a unifying theme or concept on their albums. It’s a really good album too, my second favorite is the track “Labyrinth”, which I heard before hearing this one. 

Check it out here:

https://iamnoone1.bandcamp.com/album/dead-season

Dead Cool ~ Until Death

This song really is dead cool. We have an overarching memento mori theme on the list this month (probably not even close to the first time that’s happened). The synths are upbeat and danceable, but the lyrics are darker than the music might suggest. “You’ll never be alone until death. Your body will stay warm until death.” On one hand that’s comforting, I suppose. At least you won’t be alone before death. The music video has some 80s horror movie inspirations and is certainly worth a watch as well. 

Dead Cool are a duo from Wilmington, North Carolina. You can buy the track as a single here:

https://deadcool.bandcamp.com/track/until-death

Bloody/Bath ~ Witch Hunt

Bloody/Bath is a post-punk/shoegaze band out of Northampton, UK. This particular track showcases their post-punk side. Something about the British accent just lends authenticity to the music, since that’s how all of the early post-punk sounded. Bloody/Bath emerged last year, as it seems a lot of bands did during the lockdown, and have had a lot of releases since, much of it either available for free or name-your-price on Bandcamp. Definitely a band I plan on checking out more, having only recently discovered them through this track that caught my attention. 

The 3 track album this appears on, Unholy Sonnets, can be found here:

https://bloodybath.bandcamp.com/album/unholy-sonnets

Travelogue ~ Return to Tampa Bay

My wife likes it when I write these, so I’m going to. The last time I had traveled to St. Petersburg, Florida (where I lived from 2015-2019) was sometime around May or June 2020. Covid of course prevented us from traveling as much as we could have done. My wife had been back October of that year, but I was in California at the time. So it would be interesting to see how things had changed, thanks to the rampant gentrification that had overtaken the city before I left. 

The trip there was mostly smoothly; I like to ride shotgun and take on the DJ duties, that is until my son dropped his favorite puppets and I had to reach back to the back seat to grab them and my drink spilled all over my pants and seat, and had to spend the rest of the trip with soggy pants and underwear. So it goes, parenthood. 

We got to our hotel, and my favorite thing about it was the TV wasn’t bolted to the wall like it is in some hotels so I could reach the hdmi output and hook up my Nintendo Switch…so the little one could watch his kiddie shows. 

 

He loves the British puppet show Sooty, who his grandmother introduced him to. Kids shows in England have a bit more edge to them I think. That’s probably a whole other blog entry. 

Our first outing after we got settled as to Nocturnal. Nocturnal, in the nearby town of Gulf Port, is an art studio operated by two of my good friends, Rachel and Ande. There’s not many establishments you can go to that play black metal over the speakers. Quite a lot of amazing art here. 

Jareth was asleep, so we unhooked the car seat and brought him in. Rachel wasn’t in so Deborah went to go pick her up, leaving me to sit around and work on my webcomic in the meantime. But after a while, of course, little Jare Bear began to awaken, and found himself in a horrifying and unfamiliar place. By the time Deborah returned, he was beginning to freak out and scream, so sadly, we had to leave. Fun times trying to socialize when you have a toddler. I don’t know how he came to fear skeletons and such, it’s not like anyone taught him to associate them with death. But I did admire the art while I was there. And the Red Hot Riding Hood mural on the outside was a surprising treat too. 

After that we went to one of our favorite old kava bars, Muddy Waters, for some delicious vanilla kratom frappes. That was one thing we really missed about the Tampa Bay area, the kava bars. There have been more springing up near us, but none of them seem to brew their kratom drinks as strongly as around here, where competition has driven them to try to outdo one another. Little Jareth of course wanted to mess with their Christmas tree, and then go outside for an aimless walk in the cold. I wasn’t in the mood for this, so we got in the car and went back to the hotel, calling it a night. 

The next day was the funnest of the trip. 

After we picked up more kratom (you’ll notice a pattern), we dropped by one of our old favorite thrift stores for some cheap toys to keep Jareth happy. A few days ago my VCR finally stopped working after 23 years (it randomly powers off after playing a tape for about five seconds). I would like to get it repaired, but buying a spare wouldn’t be a bad idea either. I didn’t find one here, but I picked up a couple blank tapes. I’m likely going to record some music videos off YouTube. I like the aesthetic, and they aren’t going to get taken down randomly.

We took Jareth to an indoor playground next. I wrote about this place in my last travelogue where we made this trip (wow, almost two years ago); it’s fun for kids but also full of unfortunate corporate propaganda, where Publix tried to indoctrinate toddlers into lifelong customers and such. I took this time to work on the next page of my webcomic, which will be up this Tuesday. 

Next up, I had some video games to trade in at M & M Video Games. You know, in that last travelogue I picked up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Well I played the game a couple times. And it may be pretty, and have a large world, but that kinda doesn’t make up for repetitive gameplay, a mediocre story, and several frustrating challenges that aren’t really worth it. So I exchanged it, among some other games I was ready to get rid of, including Super Mario Bros. Wii and Shadow the Hedgehog. Games I just didn’t think I was going to play again. I got $90 in store credit, which I still haven’t completely spent because their pickings for Nintendo Switch games are pretty slim. If they’d had an Ever Drive I would have gotten it, but they said they didn’t carry them due to their questionable legality (you do have to pirate the games you put on them). Since they mainly sell old video games I imagine they don’t want Ever Drives eating up their business too. I ended up getting a new 6-button controller for my Sega Genesis, a sensory toy for my son, and South Park: Fractured but Whole. I don’t doubt that I may end up exchanging that game once I’m done with it too. I don’t really cling to my video games anymore. Most of them anyway. 

Not long afterwards we went back to the hotel, and Jareth got babysat by his grandparents while Deborah and I went to the Twin Tribes concert, which I wrote about last time. We got back and went to bed almost straight away. 

Our time was more limited the next day, as we had to pack up all our things and check out of the hotel before 11am. Never the most fun process. I woke up early, as I did the day before, for breakfast. I forgot to mention how sub-par the breakfasts were. You got bagels or English muffins, with sausage patties and overcooked fried eggs. You could make your own pancakes or waffles, but I didn’t feel like it. It was just Comfort Inn, not a super fancy place. But like I said before, if it were fancy they would probably have their TVs bolted against the wall so you couldn’t hook anything up to it. So there are advantages and disadvantages. 

After we left, we went to downtown St. Petersburg to a kratom dispensary to take some home with us (it’s a terrible addiction), and while we walked downtown we stopped at another of our old haunts, Johnny Vapors, for more kratom (yes), and a sushi bar called Pacific Counter where we ordered a sushi bowl. It was interesting how much things had changed in the short time we had been gone. This was a process we had witnessed while we lived there, the process of gentrification. This is the same thing that happened in San Francisco. First a neighborhood that was once poor starts an arts district that attracts all the young hipsters. You get art galleries, kava bars, bars with stages for live bands, hookah lounges, indie record stores, stuff of that nature. Then you get the coffee shops, the organic and vegan restaurants, the parking meters, the clothes and jewelry stores, soon all the artsy places get kicked out, and it becomes a richie rich area for snooty people. I was now able to see the final stage of this process. I was surprised Johnny Vapors was still around, probably the last vestige left from the artsy stage.

The dispensary was the cheapest place to get powdered kratom that you brew yourself. They were highly appreciative of Google reviews too and Deborah and I got some free ounces for doing so. Of course my positive reviews were still honest. 

From there we did a quick stop at Trader Joe’s because for some reason they still haven’t put one in our area yet, and we left for Tampa. Deborah had heard of a children’s museum there that she wanted to take Jareth to, but when we went, the traffic was unusually awful even for Tampa. Once we finally found parking somewhere we discovered why. They were doing some sort of Christmas parade. I could care less for parades really, and this just meant the museum wouldn’t be busy. There was plenty of fun stuff for Jareth to do there, and unlike the indoor playground in St. Petersburg it wasn’t completely upfront about its corporate sponsorship. Afterwards he got to play at the splash pad outside, while I did my best to hide from the too-warm-for-December Florida sun. 

Having had a full day, after this we hit the road and went home. Unfortunately that sushi bowl we bought earlier didn’t have its lid securely tightened, so when Deborah picked it up the car got covered in fish eggs and corn. My surprise came from the fact that it wasn’t me this happened to this time. That’s usually the sort of bad luck I get. This necessitated giving the car a good cleaning the next day. 

First Concert in nearly Two Years! Obsidian, Twin Tribes and She Past Away.

On December 3rd I got to attend my first concert in almost two years! Amazing and sad it’s been that long. The last one I went to was Mortiis in January 2020. But if it wasn’t for the pandemic I definitely would have gone to more. The concert was She Past Away, Twin Tribes and Obsidian, at the Crowbar in Ybor City. I didn’t get to stay for the whole thing unfortunately, but I did stay long enough to see Twin Tribes. When the concert was first announced I was stoked to see Twin Tribes live. It felt like returning a favor, in a way. You see a couple years ago I ordered a cassette from Twin Tribes, and when I got it, the cassette was empty. As in there was no magnetic tape inside the case. Weirdest thing ever. But I contacted them, and they were super nice about it and sent me another one. I assured them next time they played in Florida I would be there. 

I wonder if the one on the right will be a collector’s item one day. 

Then the pandemic happened and I didn’t get to go to any concerts for a long time. And the first concert that finally did come along that was a band I liked was Twin Tribes! With She Past Away. I’ve written a blog about my conflicted feelings with this band before, but in that blog I came to the conclusion that it was silly to judge them just by the country they’re from. And they do make good music. So I bought the tickets. 

So my wife and I made it to the venue sometime after 8pm, just in time to see the opening act, Obsidian. And I was very impressed with them! I had heard of them before this but I hadn’t done a deep dive into their discography. After listening to them play I was impressed enough to pick up one of their cassettes, as well as a Twin Tribes CD. I always like to bring back souvenirs from concerts, as well as help support the bands. It was a top notch opening act, for sure.

A little bit about the venue. Now I am appreciative of any venue that agrees to host the kinds of underground gothic bands I am into. I had previously been there a couple years ago for a Boy Harsher concert. But, it gets quite cramped when it’s crowded in there, and it’s hard to see the band playing, especially if you’re a shorty like me. Now at the nearby venue The Orpheum, I feel like you can see the band pretty much no matter where you’re standing in the place. But I didn’t really get to see much of the bands playing at the Crowbar. I guess you have to get there early enough to push your way to the front near the stage. So I do prefer The Orpheum, just a personal opinion. Like I said it’s cool of them to at least host the bands that they do. They do have a nice little back area, I’ll say that. And a food vendor who cooks an amazing jerk chicken sandwich. 

Yep, this was about as much as I could see of them, and that’s holding my phone up. 

The Crowbar began to get even more crowded once Twin Tribes took the stage. They sounded great live, almost just like on the album. I find it impressive when a band with fewer than three members is able to put together a complete sound like they do. They played almost all my favorites for the hour or so they were on stage, but I kept thinking it was “just a matter of time” before they played perhaps one of their most popular tracks, “Still in Still”. I say that because I don’t think I’ve been to a single goth event in the last three years where that song wasn’t played. But they skipped it. It wasn’t just a matter of time. I know some bands get tired of playing their hit songs. Maybe it was for that reason? I don’t know. Maybe it’s not as popular as I think it is. At least they played “Fantasma”, my second favorite song by them. I enjoyed the set greatly, overall. And I even ran into my good friend DJ Maus! The rest of the Communion After Dark crew was present as well. I hadn’t seen them since the Mortiis concert. 

The venue was quite packed by the end of Twin Tribes set. My wife and I decided to step out for some fresh air and try another kava bar nearby called Hot Wax. They brew a very strong cup of kratom there. I missed going to Spookeasy, a gothic-themed kava bar that was near The Orpheum and the place my wife and I would usually go to between acts at a concert, but from what I hear they’ve been having trouble staying open due to the fire marshall guidelines. And we were going to make it back to the Crowbar to see She Past Away, as I had actually resolved to see them, but my in-laws who were watching my son needed us back because he was getting sleepy and needed his mum. Sooo it just didn’t happen. A bit disappointing, but that’s parenthood; I love it, but there are sacrifices you must make. I was lucky I got to go, and I enjoyed what I did get to see.

I wonder what concerts await me in 2022. I know that The Midnight is coming to Orlando in April, I would love to go, it’s just a matter of having the funds and arranging for a babysitter. I’m going to do a travelogue about the rest of this little trip very soon, I just wanted a separate blog entry for the concert itself. 

Edit: Someone put Twin Tribe’s whole set from the show on YouTube, so if you want to have a listen, enjoy. It’s a much better view than I got. 

The Doom Scroll - November 2021

 

Doing another of these again. I didn’t do it last month because my tablet got run over by cars (yes, plural) and by the time I got a replacement I had much bigger fish to fry. 

You might have noticed I changed the name of the blog. I suppose I’m just in a different headspace now than I was when I started the blog. To be a bard in today’s society is to dwell in obscurity unless you’re lucky enough to win the publishing lottery and be chosen by the ruling class if they think they can profit off your work. To create anything is to scream into the abyss. Eventually our voices will be silenced one by one, and eventually we will be forgotten no matter how famous we become. I care not for fame anymore, because I’ve realized this. I’m just going to keep writing and drawing whatever I feel like. The audience for my webcomic is growing, though. Ultimately, the thought of being famous, of being heard by a large number of others, kind of scares me, and yet I keep screaming because I can’t stop. It’s what keeps me alive. 

Anyway, yes, online rubbish from November. I have a nice selection of it to go over this time. 

Black Friday Blackout and Reddit Drama

I made sure not to spend a dime on Black Friday, did you? To not consume is an act of rebellion against our wealthy overlords. I’ve worked through a couple Black Fridays in my day, and they are hellish for people in retail or in call centers. People are forced to work overtime, unable to call in sick without being fired, and trampled over by customers either figuratively or literally. The whole machine would come to a screeching halt if everyone stopped spending money on Black Friday. Not that I hold much hope for enough people participating in Buy Nothing Day for that to happen. Then again, sales were down this year. Maybe it worked? If it turns out to be a trend, maybe. 

The online push for Black Out Black Friday came loudest from Reddit this year. And this sadly came around the same time that the capitalist class discovered the Antiwork subreddit, and moved to extinguish their dangerous ideas, which to be clear aren’t necessarily against all forms of work, just the exploitative kind where you’re giving up years of your life to make someone else richer. Yes, in the midst of the Great Resignation, with more people quitting their crappy jobs than ever, the subreddit hit a million subscribers, and then the media took notice.  Even Goldman Sachs started shaking in their breeches because the subreddit was getting too big. My beloved little club of like-minded individuals who see the truth of the situation of workers in the US was then quickly subverted and compromised. Flooded with posts from suspicious brand new accounts gradually changing the conversation of the subreddit from discussing the reality of the exploitation of the working class, to discussing wage inequality between races and genders, how they quit their jobs, the ethics of tipping waiters, or blaming everyone’s woes on Boomers instead of the rich. Things that either pit the working class against itself or otherwise don’t threaten the system as a whole. It was being brigaded by fake accounts started by corporate shills. The bots haven’t been enough to completely derail the subreddit, but they’re clearly trying. The people who were serious about Antiwork fled and created their own smaller subreddits. The post I’m about to share below might well have been the final nail in the coffin:

When Reddit Inc. posts something like this, it’s over. “Aww see, not all business owners are bad. We got them to listen to us, mission accomplished. Now stop complaining and get back to work.” If anything in this post really happened, it wasn’t in America that’s for sure. But I think it’s fake. “I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $500, Alex.” Something similar happened a few months ago when the media discovered the Herman Cain Award subreddit, and it was subsequently forced to block out the names and pictures of idiotic antivaxxers who chronicle their ironic demise to Covid on their public Facebook pages. This practically neutered the subreddit, it’s not nearly as effective anymore if you can’t see the names and faces behind the posts. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements took some time for the capitalist class to subvert and extinguish, but they’ve really been on top of nipping the antiwork movement in the bud before it caught on. Probably because that’s an even bigger threat to them.

So yes, back to Black Friday. A new subreddit called Black Friday Blackout was started as kind of a sister subreddit to Antiwork, in hopes of spreading the word to boycott Black Friday. Then the media caught wind of Antiwork. Shortly after, one of the moderators on Antiwork did a post trying to call off the Black Friday Blackout, calling it unrealistic, and instead encouraged only boycotting Amazon and nothing else (which wouldn’t actually hurt them much, since they do Cyber Monday). It was obvious that the mods had either been bribed, threatened, or had guns pointed to their heads. This resulted in a messy divorce between the two subreddits, and a splintering of the community. Now Antiwork has been largely de-fanged. Maybe it’s not completely hopeless, not every post seems to be from a mysterious bot and you still see some traditional antiwork discourse on the subreddit. Even if the mods have sold out or been replaced by corporate shills, it’s not like they can go around deleting posts for no good reason without people getting suspicious. But it’s clear that the subreddit has been compromised. It is now under the microscope and subject to the Psychological Operations of the ruling class. I’m just sad that it got discovered, I miss the days when it was more niche. It definitely changed my perception. But, the fact that the subreddit blew up the way it did means enough people are waking up. It’s bigger than Reddit. Can the idea be subverted forever?

The most depressing job recruitment ad ever.

So you’re 65 years old, you’ve been working since you were about 18, and finally after almost 50 years, you can live your life again as you choose, for the years you have left. But why retire when you could be flipping burgers while being yelled at by customers and managers? All the younger employees got fed up with the abuse and left, but that just spells opportunities for you! You can even relive your youth by getting uncontrollable facial acne! 

Don’t the people in the picture just look like they’re laughing at you? Oh haha, look at that old geezer who needs to go back to flipping burgers for poverty wages to get by, what a loser. Are these just corporate executives dressed in normal people clothes? I can’t imagine reaching old age and being forced to work fast food. It used to be that the elderly lived with their families and were taken care of and treated with respect. Nowadays they’re just thrown to the wolves. They have to keep working until they literally can’t work anymore, at which point they’re thrown into retirement homes that take them for every penny they’re worth, and forgotten. If they don’t end up homeless. Everyone in the US is too individualistic to care. 

Fast food jobs are best done by people who are still in denial that they’re going to die one day and they’re giving up their best years to a greedy CEO. By the time you’re of retirement age it’s a little harder to live in denial about impending death. I know some elderly people get bored after retirement and actually choose to work (likely due to a lifetime of brainwashing and basing their self-worth on their employment status), but you really want to spend the last years of your life where you still have your wits and your motor skills doing this kind of a job? Would anyone ever actually choose that? Not to mention the job is a lot harder if you have arthritis, back pain, a bad hip, etc. Managers don’t let you sit down and rest, and they’re not going to like it if you need a lot of bathroom breaks, as elderly people often do. I remember at the call center I worked at, there was this elderly guy who had to work there for the insurance. He had a weak bladder, and he still got chewed out by his supervisor all the time for taking bathroom breaks too frequently. He shouldn’t have been working, he should have been on disability. It’s like the rich are trying to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, getting as much work out of the poor as they can, even at the end of their lives. How sad that anyone has to do this. If I got to this age and had to work fast food in order to survive, I would probably consider just ending it all on my own terms because by then life’s not going to get any better. At least if you’re doing this kind of job when you’re young there’s still some sort of hope that you’re eventually going to get a better job. By 65 and older it’s a little too late to climb the corporate ladder.

Cartoons then and now

This is at least a couple years old, but it’s been making its rounds on Facebook again. It mocks the homogeneous so-called CalArts style of animation that was popular for most of the 2010s. In some ways I agree with it, but it is being a bit disingenuous and unfair. Firstly, you really can’t use anything by Hanna-Barbara that isn’t 1940s Tom and Jerry as an example of good character design and animation. Only someone with their nostalgia goggles on would forget about the cheap, thick-lined, jerky animation of the dozens of Scooby Doo clones they produced. Animation really reached a nadir in the 1970s, and hasn’t been that bad since. The 1950s through the early 1980s is known as The Dark Age of Animation for a reason. I’m sure none of the cartoons below are quite as bad as that.

But yeah, other than that, the character designs in a lot of modern cartoons might be the same, but character design and animation are two different things. The characters can be much more expressive than this meme suggests. Another thing that was rather new to television animation in the 2010s was the storytelling. American cartoons almost never had ongoing storylines before then. They were always episodic, each episode was standalone so someone who was new to the series could jump right in without missing anything. The most you might see was a two-part episode. Anime always did storylines though, and that’s probably what influenced American animation. The only one out of the new ones I’ve watched is Steven Universe, but that had a very intriguing story that kept me watching the whole series. There were a few standalone episodes, but not many.

I do miss hand drawn animation, and I think it can still do things digital animation cannot. Nothing today quite captures the animation style of the 1930s and 1940s, when the art form was at its peak. But, this meme is cherry-picking. I’d much rather watch Steven Universe than Woody Woodpecker, who I find to be one of the most annoying classic cartoon characters, even if the animation was better (although I don’t think it was, from what I’ve seen it really wasn’t the best of the 1940s cartoons, Universal’s animation really couldn’t hold a candle to Warner Bros., MGM or Disney). That just goes to show, there were crappy cartoons back then too. Every era of animation is a mixed bag. 

Are Right Wing Libertarians even Real?

Oh Chris Farley, how I miss you. Adam Sandler, not so much. Anyway, when I take those political compass tests, I come out as a left libertarian. There’s also left authoritarian (people who believe Stalin did nothing wrong, and would probably call my grandfather’s memoir about his time in the Soviet gulags CIA propaganda), right authoritarian (fascists), and right libertarian (republicans with bongs). But the more I think about it, I don’t think it’s possible to be both conservative and libertarian. Conservatives love authority. The self-professed conservative libertarians say they’re are all about no government, but really they just want to cut out the middleman and be ruled directly by corporations, without the pretenses. They believe in anarcho-capitalism; they want to get rid of government but still keep capitalism. Who needs health regulations and antitrust laws? Why shouldn’t five year olds be sent to work in factories and coal mines?  Let’s just allow all the corporations to merge into one mega conglomerate and declare Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk the overlords of Earth and be done with it. Of course without government who’s going to bail out the corporations with our misappropriated tax money every time they tank the economy? That’s probably the only reason we still have a government at this point. That and paying for the military.

But anyway, wanting to give all the power to the rich and have nothing to regulate them is still authoritarian. In fact it’s even more authoritarian than a traditional dictatorship or a theocracy. These are the type of people who fly both the “Don’t Tread on Me” and the “Blue Lives Matter” flags in the back of their rusty old pickup truck, oblivious to how those two flags actually contradict one another. I’ve seen them compared to indoor house cats; they believe themselves to be independent, but their lives are dependent on systems they don’t know exist. They think they want freedom, but when they escape the house and have to face nature and the elements they don’t know what to do and they starve. They have no idea how horrible it would be if they actually got their way. And in the US the word “libertarian” is always equated to these self-deluding fools. I think it was done on purpose to whitewash actual libertarianism, which is a leftist political position. It’s all about muddying the waters, that’s how the wealthy stay in power. Those political compass tests are bollocks. 

See this? Racist Karen and Facebook Conspiracy Theorist Karen are almost always the same person. What we call conservative libertarianism is really just a different brand of conservative authoritarianism. That’s why the political compass fails, and it was probably invented for the sole purpose of granting legitimacy to this actually nonexistent political ideology. 

The Horrors of Fire Emblem Heroes Addiction 

This blog post is getting too political, let’s talk about video games for a change. In February I started playing a mobile game called Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s the first mobile game I’ve ever really gotten into, since I’m a bit old school and prefer playing video games on the TV with a controller. I’ve been a fan of the Fire Emblem games for more than a decade now. It’s a series of strategy role playing games that play like a more complicated version of chess, or like Dungeons and Dragons but it does all the math for you. In 2017 Nintendo came out with this mobile game, which crosses over all of the Fire Emblem games and lets you collect characters from every game to use as your own little army. It’s very fun, it has a good story, and it’s very addicting. 

The luckiest I’ve ever been on this game. Three 5-stars.

The game is actually free to download and play. But…there’s a catch. You’ll constantly be tempted throughout the game to spend real money, in order to buy “orbs” which you need to summon new characters. Summoning new characters is kind of like playing a slot machine. You spend orbs on each summoning (the first pull is free) and usually get crappy, weak characters but every now and then you get a good one. You can slowly and gradually earn orbs for free by just playing the game and completing different challenges, which is what I do, but spending money to get them would be so much quicker and easier. The lucky pull you see above is incredibly rare, especially for someone like me who never spends any money on it. But then you get people like the unfortunate fool in the first screenshot above who get hopelessly addicted and spend thousands on it. At least they’re helping to pay for the game’s high quality cutscenes and such, which oddly are far superior to the cutscenes in any of the console Fire Emblem games, even the most recent one, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. They’re the people who always beat my ass in the game with their absurdly strong characters that they’ve been building up since the game first came out. Gives me a bit of shadenfreude to read about stuff like this. But at the same time it’s kind of sad too. This is the devious undertone of the game. Sure it’s a fun game, but its purpose is to drain the wallets of suckers. Not to mention what could happen if an impressionable kid who didn’t know any better started playing it and decided to steal mommy’s credit card.

But what a dopamine rush it is when you claim your waifu. Isn’t she beautiful?

By the way, the Fire Emblem fandom is full of a lot of weirdos and pervs that love to drool over fan art, and you’ll see them on full display in the Fire Emblem Heroes Hell Facebook group in the comments. I follow it out of morbid fascination. Yeah, ahem…just research purposes. Hey don’t give me that look, at least I only lurk there and I’m just quietly appreciating the fan art. Some of these people love to openly and publicly announce their weird fetishes. Anyway, be warned if you decide to tread there.

The Rewards of the Veteran

Isn’t severe PTSD, possibly losing limbs, and watching your friends die all worth it if you get a free donut on Veteran’s Day? Poor fools. Veteran’s Day is known as Armistice Day in every other country, marking the end of World War One. But that was too anti-war for America, so they started this propaganda holiday. It’s all about fooling enough people to fight their pointless wars and bully other countries. Don’t you want to be held in as high regard as our veterans? You even get free donuts! If you really want to honor the veterans, you’d be antiwar. But the US pushes this twisted idea that to honor veterans you should be in favor of more wars so that more veterans will be created. It also helps to have a boogeyman to fight, like “terrorists”. I wonder if the Department of Defense (more like Offense) paid for this promotion, just like they pay Hollywood to make pro-war movies. 

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

This is something I think about a lot, if you haven’t noticed. I don’t want to die with regrets. It started when I had a potentially life-threatening condition in 2018, and I didn’t have health insurance at the time, so it could have been a possibility that I would have died. I’ll to ahead and admit it was meatal stenosis. You can look it up. Luckily I was able to get it taken care of in an emergency room (in an incredibly painful manner). Still got the medical debt from the whole thing. Another thing that changed my whole outlook on life was when I started getting bouts of depersonalization and derealization (DPDR), late 2019. It’s hard to explain to someone who’s never had it, but you just start becoming hyper-fixated on reality and existence. Like how strange plants are, how weird that the sky is blue, and especially with me, in awe of astronomy and the universe. You start thinking about stuff most people just take for granted. You start feeling like a puppet that’s become self aware and realized it is a puppet. Life is bizarre, and nonsensical. Some people who get DPDR snap. It makes them miserable. They want to be cured and go back to their ignorance. Some people manage it. But I actually kind of like having DPDR. I like being able to think outside the box. Once you have it, it changes you. You’re no longer immersed in reality.  

Anyway, I’m going to go down this list of common regrets of the dying and see how I’m doing.

1. I think I’m doing well in this regard. Especially lately. I’m doing my comic, my blog, I’m writing what I want to write, I no longer care about money or fame. I’m pretty content, all things considered. 

2. This one is important to me. I want to watch my son grow up, I don’t want to miss out on his childhood. And I haven’t, so far. 

3. You know when I look back on my school years, I do wish I’d talked back more and stood up for myself. I already feel this regret. If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t have taken all the shit I took from teachers and bullies back then. I could be doing better at this from now on. I’m rather shy and timid though, so it is difficult.

4. This one has been hard too ever since I moved to Florida. Facebook is pretty much the only way I keep in touch with friends. If I had more money I would be flying back to California for visits more often. This is one I don’t have much control over, sadly. 

5. Thanks, I’m cured! I feel like this one is ableist. When you have actual chronic depression you can’t just decide to be happy. Brain chemistry doesn’t work that way. But just because someone is dying doesn’t mean they’re suddenly all-knowing, I guess. I do my best with what I can.