2022 is over with. I survived another year. The years continue to pass with increasing speed. I’m still in my mid 30s, but I feel that, the older I get, I can almost sense the rhythm of the Earth as it tilts toward and away from the sun, on an endless carousel ride that we cannot escape. If the Gregorian calendar made any sense, we would celebrate the New Year on Winter Solstice, or the day after. Or was that too pagan for Pope Gregory? Anyway, the rest of society follows this calendar, at least in the country I’m in, so I cannot avoid it. New Years Eve is like just another day to me, really. Just like Christmas is mostly just another day. I only barely acknowledge it because everyone else is. I’ll still have some sparkling apple cider and stay up past midnight tonight as my one tradition I still keep, nearly devoid of real meaning. I’m not going out anywhere though.
To the point, here are my Top 10 favorite albums of the past year. Nine goth picks and one acoustic rock album that is still very dark because it’s Type O Negative covers. As I’ve said in previous years where I did this blog, this is only based around what I heard during the year. I’m sure I’ll be discovering music from 2022 that I missed out on for years to come. Included is my favorite song from each album embedded from YouTube (except in the case of Скубут, which had an official upload of the full album). We have bands from the US, Canada, Australia, Armenia, Austria, Croatia and Mexico. In no particular order:
It pays to be nice to to your neighbors. Because a few weeks ago, the neighbors across the street from me (who I had spoken to on a couple different occasions) were moving, and looking to unload some of their stuff. They knew that my wife and I like to sell used stuff that people throw away, as we had done when their next door neighbor moved away early this year, so we were their candidates. And they had some treasure! Stuff that would have been way out of my meager price range.
I felt like I since talk about music so much on this blog I might as well show off my new setup. Here’s my man cave:
I’m primarily going to discuss my new dual cassette deck, stereo receiver and turntable, but I can talk about my new CD shelves too, another free curbside pickup. This is my first ever stereo system and turntable, I’ve always been too poor to have them, but finally they’ve fallen into my lap like a gift from the Gods. Here’s a closeup of the stereo system.
The Tower of Babel! My room isn’t big, so I have to stack everything up. In order to use the turntable I have to move the cassette deck and speakers. This isn’t ideal of course. But, I use cassettes way more than records. This is my very first record player, a Victrola combo unit which also has a CD and cassette player, as well as AM/FM radio (which I have no reason to ever use, but it makes it look more vintage). I can’t say how it stacks up to other record players, but I love how it looks like something from the 1930s. The speakers aren’t the best, but it’s good for listening to old jazz. I had a few classical records laying around from my other neighbor who moved which I was unable to sell, and I went ahead and bought a Nirvana record at Target just to have something else to play on it.
“Things have never been so swell, I have never failed to fail. Paaaiiiinnnn”
The CD player, sadly, is very wonky, and only plays certain CDs. I haven’t figured out why it prefers some CDs over others. It will even play some of my burned CDs but not others. And the cassette player, while functional, is the weirdest one I’ve ever seen.
It kind of works like a car cassette deck I suppose. You slide the tape in like a VHS tape to a VCR, but from the side, and push a button to eject the tape. It makes a weird clicking noise when you get to the end of the tape until you eject it and flip it over. I have no idea yet how to clean it if I need to, but suffice to say I won’t really be using it often as long as I have that dual cassette deck. I have a few 1930s jazz tapes I can play on it. The turntable itself is nice though, I think. Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about turntables, I can’t really tell how high the quality is. I can say that it works though. I think combo units like these get a bad rap among vinyl purists. But hey, I’m poor, it was free and it works, I’ll take what I can get. I’ve always wanted a record player, but it was such a low priority it was like a distant dream. Now, I will slowly build a record collection. Records are usually pricy though, so it’s never going to be as huge as my cassette and CD collection. You can get records for cheap at thrift stores, but it’s mostly “thrift store music” ; or classical, country, Christmas and Christian music. Maybe jazz if you’re lucky. Granted I’ve found some 90s rock before, but on CD, not vinyl.
Anyway, onto the cassette deck.
This is my precious. People talk crap about cassettes for having bad sound quality, but that’s because most people never get to hear them on one of these. It sounds amazing. The sound is rich, you don’t hear the background hiss. And it does some neat tricks. I don’t have to flip the tape when it comes to the end of Side A, it can play both sides of the tape. And the fast forward feature can skip tracks like you would with a CD; it somehow detects quiet parts of the tape and stops there. I don’t want to put too much strain on the belts so it’s not something I’m going to do often. It also has a timer, which is nifty. And you can record from one tape to another.
I scavenged the speakers off another stereo that was broken. They sound great. It took me a while to figure out how to set it all up because I’ve never in my life had anything fancier than a boom box. I needed to get audio AV cords to plug in through the stereo receiver to get it to work. It was a learning experience. Here’s the stereo receiver.
And what a fun little toy this is. I like to play around with the bass sometimes but it makes the whole house vibrate so I can’t get too crazy with it, unless I’m alone. This thing can make my mixtapes sound downright majestic. Things like this cost $300 on eBay. And yet here I am, with a free one. It took 36 years for it to happen, but I have a stereo system.
There is still a place, however, for my boombox. For you see this stereo system is from the 1990s, so it doesn’t have an aux port. I use aux ports to record music onto blank cassettes straight from the internet these days. I also don’t have a CD player for the stereo system. That’s the one thing it’s still missing. One of these days I’ll have to get my hands on one of those high end CD players from the 90s that I can plug into my stereo receiver. Anyway, while it’s really hard to find a good newly-made cassette player these days, this modern boombox gets the job done pretty well. It’s a Panasonic.
And last but not least, let’s have a closer look at my CD/cassette shelf. It’s always subject to change as my collection grows.
On the top here we have my electronic music; my Kraftwerk albums, Das Ich, Ministry, SYZYGYX, Ayria, and some others. On the bottom are my metal albums; Covenant/The Kovenant, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Stratovarius, Type O Negative, Alice in Chains and Nirvana.
Got some of my favorite cassettes on bottom, including recent Bandcamp and concert acquisitions from goth bands, my bootleg of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, a few good mixtapes including my very first two from 1999 (the yellow Memorex ones).
And what the hell, here are those DVDs and VHS tapes you might have seen in some of the pictures here. I cover up the logos because I got sick of staring at them. I like to enjoy a movie as an individual work of art, not part of some corporate catalog. The two tapes on the top left are bootlegs I made by printing out the covers. One is disguised as a “Good Guys” tape from the Child’s Play series, and houses a VHS mixtape of horror movies and shows. The one next to it is a copy of the short film Kung Fury.
Damn, I’m not ready for it to be the end of the year yet, it all went by so fast. You sure it’s not still 2020? This decade is probably going to feel like one long year. It doesn’t feel like December either, probably because Florida doesn’t have a winter, it has a wet season and a dry season, with maybe a cold snap here and there if we’re lucky. The days are shorter though, and I’ve come to find especially in recent years that I have a very love-hate relationship with the Sun. Seasonal Affective Disorder will do that. In fact the entire holiday season which exists across cultures in the northern hemisphere probably exists because Seasonal Affective Disorder is way more widespread than people think. I’m reminded of a Mark Twain quote: “From the cradle up I’ve always been much like the rest of the human race; never quite sane at night.”
Time is short these days, and I dedicate a lot of my free time to my webcomic, but I would still like to round up my top albums of 2022 and do a blog entry about it if I can. I’m also slowly working on two other blogs, one about a series of mixtapes I made and another about my new music setup in my room. Let’s see what I can get done. The other two blog entries can wait if need be.
Anyway, my music tastes over the past month have reflected my moods as the days darken.
Leiv Reed ~ A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh (acoustic cover)
Acoustic covers of black metal songs is a subgenre I never thought about seeking out until recently. But I’ve been really into acoustic music for the past year or so, especially dark acoustic music which is kind of rare, and it finally came up after having very limited success in finding acoustic covers of goth songs. Leiv Reed is the foremost artist in this YouTube-based subgenre. I used to be really into black metal as a teen but my tastes simmered down over the years, now a lot of it sounds like noise to me unless I heard it as a teen. But bringing it down to an acoustic level makes it easier for me to enjoy.
This is a cover, the original is by a band called Celtic Frost. The original song doesn’t sound too dissimilar to this, it’s mostly acoustic except for the electric guitars and growling vocals over the chorus. But I like Leiv Reed’s voice the best. This song has been kind of an ode to my chronic back pain as of late, as I feel like a conscious being trapped in a slowly aging body.
Another song from Slow Danse with the Dead this month. “Doom and Gloom” could be used to describe their entire discography really. But I felt like this song hit close to home for me, as many songs by this band do. I’m sure many people are familiar with the feeling of waking up, and immediately regretting it because you know that today is going to suck and there’s something you’re really not looking forward to doing that day, or you’re just not happy with your life in general at that moment. It’s weird how sometimes when you wake up, especially if you’ve just been having vivid dreams, it takes a few seconds to remember who you are, where you are and what you’re going to be doing that day. Sometimes that reality setting in is painful.
Devoted Sinners ~ Everything I’ve Ever Loved is Dead
Now here’s a happy-go-lucky song that will get the party jumping! A song about how the singer’s favorite musicians and actors are all dead, as well as everything else they have ever loved. It belongs on a playlist with Type O Negative’s “Everyone I Love is Dead”, “Everything Dies”, and Mortiis’ “Everyone Leaves”. The mention of Vincent Price hits the hardest for me. Imagine what he could have done with just one more decade. The singer keeps it mainly limited to goth icons. If I were writing this song perhaps I’d have also mentioned Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, Florian Schneider, David Bowie, Peter Steele, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges. Well you could go on all day about great deceased musicians and actors.
The singer only states that these people are dead, he leaves it to the listener to interpret how they feel about it. These great artists wanted to be remembered after their deaths, and they’ve succeeded. They may not be around to enjoy being remembered, unless ghosts are real, but they did what they set out to do in life, whether or not they got to live as long as they could have, they still succeeded. It’s interesting how we mourn people we’ve never met. But often times, you know more about your favorite singers and actors than you do your next door neighbor or even some of your relatives. They may as well be family.
Here it is, off their EP The Dangerous Obsession, released Halloween 2022:
This is a song that I first heard when it came out in June 2021, forgot about for a long time, but heard it again and liked it a lot. One of those songs that I needed to be ready for I suppose. I needed to be in a grim enough mood. I have had a pesky illness for over a week now actually, and while I’m not “violently ill” it’s just enough to affect me and make me extra gloomy and grumpy. This is a great song to put on when you’re sick, it catches that feeling perfectly. To be honest I thought that it might be a Slow Danse with the Dead song I had forgotten about, they sound very similar. The fact that it features backing vocals from Queen of Daggers was the first tipoff that it wasn’t them.
I was captivated by this music video. I don’t speak Spanish so I could only interpret what I saw. I know that Tenochitlan was the capital of the Aztec Empire, modern Mexico City, and the woman’s outfit looked like Aztec attire. She steps into a bathtub in the middle of the forest and washes her fact paint off, and then the tub fills with blood, as some huntsmen in war paint find her and carry her off. My guess was that perhaps it was a metaphor for colonization, and after finding the song on Bandcamp and looking at the lyrics in English it appears that I was right, it is a song dedicated to the destruction and colonization of the Aztecs. As an Armenian, I deeply empathize with the pain of colonized peoples, and I hope for Mexico that one day they can throw off the last vestiges of colonialism.
