After the excellent 2020, I had no expectations for this year. And indeed, it wasn't as good a year, but it still had plenty of good music.
Grumpy Old Men
The best of 2020 included quite a few old time rockers (Ozzy, Deep Purple, BÖC) and 2021 continued that trend with two of my favourite albums of the year. First one comes from Pretty Maids vocalist Ronnie Atkins, although I actually know him from his excellent part in Avantasia. I gave his band's last album a few "spins", but it didn't stick. His solo album, One Shot, however, was love at first hearing.
Ronnie was diagnosed with cancer last year and, instead of giving up, instead of despairing, he put all his energy into this wonderful album. Straightforward hard-rock tunes, aptly gliding from powerful riffs to melodic ones, tied together with a bow of lyrics full of wisdom, that speak of love, of hope in face of despair, of the meaning of life, of the state of the world in general.
We find kind of the same themes in Thunder's All The Right Noises. I have not heard of this band before, even though it's active since 1989. (Or perhaps I have, but Thunder is not really the kind of name that sticks with you) But now that I have, I could listen to any song on this album on repeat and enjoy it. This really sounds like any classic album from a band in the good old decades of rock'n'roll. Rock solid, it's got everything you want: an energizing opener, the one about living life to the fullest, the one about the place where people live their lives to the fullest, a magnificent ballad, and even one complaining about young people, all packaged in a solid package of delightful music and witty lyrics.
Old men - gotta love them! Oh, and Deep Purple were bored in lockdown and they released an album of cover songs. It's a lot of fun, but not really the songs I grew up with.
The New Crimson Kings
It's been a few years since I've been completely blown away by a band on the first listen. But this outrageous performance at some annual British music awards did it. Reminded me of when the MTV awards were cool and fun. Black Midi look like high school kids, but they're excellent musicians, with arts school backgrounds. Their attitude reminds me of King Crimson: playing with music, techniques, ways of combining instruments, and songwriting. At times the amalgam of cacophonous sounds should not work, but it totally does. Cavalcade is the band's second album, which brings the addition of wind instruments to their already rich sound. The cover perfectly portrays the music: a splattering of sounds that open's up your mind's eye.
In the same vein as Black Midi are two other fresh bands: Squid and Black Country, New Road. The latter, not as daring, but just as intriguing, are actually friends with Black Midi and have toured together. Squid has a different sound, seemingly more digestible and uplifting, like a weird colourful dream.
Weezer
Weezer have released two albums this year: the all-acoustic OK Human and the (as the name suggests) '80s heavy metal inspired Van Weezer. I like both, but the first one is one of my favourites of the year. Some fun tunes, some witty reflections on life, some uplifting songs, some full of melancholy, all in all a collection of moods perfectly evoked through music.
Van Weezer is also cool in the way that it pays homage to the aforementioned period, but also criticizing its vices, while doing it in the style of the period and sounding like Weezer at the same time.
Pop
Ever since the pandemic started, the Internet has been constantly entertained by British singer Toyah Willcox, who's found plenty of ways to keep her husband, legendary guitarist Robert Fripp, busy. Most of these ways involve her dancing in outrageous erotic outfits (often very revealing), singing covers of well known songs, while Fripp plays the guitar (and struggles to keep his composure; doesn't always succeed). It's fun, although a tad weird.
But what also happened in the meantime is that Toyah recorded Posh Pop, featuring Simon Darlow as co-creator and producer, and Fripp helping out on the guitar. I have not listened to anything from Toyah until now, but the album exudes her charm: a soft voice with a slight lisp and English accent. It's mostly high-spirited and with the musical talent behind the instruments you can bet it's a delight to the ears. They don't write'em like this anymore. Joyful old women - gotta love them!
Twenty One Pilots have also released Scaled And Icy this year, but I haven't listened to it as much as I should. It didn't enthrall me as much as Trench, but it's a fun listen, some good tunes in there and they still fascinate me by the way they express different feelings through words and music.
I guess you could also include The Metallica Blacklist in this section, a whole lot of covers of the "black" album's tracklist, in a wide range of genres. Of course, I just went once through the whole 50+ song selection. It was a fun experience, some really cool takes and interesting artists. Too bad most of the big shots crowded to cover Nothing Else Matters - yawn.
Prog Metal
I'm quite picky about prog metal, as it tends to be overly technical and becomes boring. Soen's Imperial is not boring. It's quite good, actually. It has a lot going for it, a great voice, catchy tunes, but it's very irritating in its lyrics, prophesizing or actually believing that there is an immediate social threat to the whole world. I just can't take that seriously, so I simply put the album aside for the rest of the year, just how you would ignore a hobo with a "The end is nigh" sign.
I gave a few listens to Gojira, but that also didn't pique my interest much. One album that did, however, is VOLA's Witness. Mastodon's Hushed & Grim also sounds good, and has some captivating moments, but it's quite long and didn't get to dig into it.
Background Music
Liquid Tension Experiment is a supergroup formed by Portnoy, Petrucci, Rudess and Tony Levin. Despite my dislike of Dream Theater (of which the first three are or have been a major part of), this is just them jamming out, trying different things, different themes. It's a lot of fun, but not the kind of album I would listen through from start to finish. Same goes for Methadone Skies and their fifth album, Retrofuture Caveman. It's nice to have in the background, but I have not been as excited about their music ever since Colosseus. It just seems they've lost their playfulness.
The Romanian Scene
It's been a good year for the Romanian scene. Negură Bunget have released their final album, but I have not had a chance to listen to it. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed Dordeduh's Har. It's a well crafted spiritual journey as the music builds atmosphere and tingles all the senses. Reminded me of Negură Bunget's last release under the original lineup, OM.
There were also not one, but two documentary works dedicated to Timișoara's modern musical history. The first one is Swamp City, a film that features multiple interviews with various people that shaped the post-revolution underground scene in Timisoara. Not only are the interviews fun and the stories informative, but the documentary is excellently crafted, weaving them to form a cohesive single thread. Being too young to understand the nineties, this material is gold to me from an archival perspective, but it also fills me with optimism that the kind of "let's just do something, something new" will once again spark in this great city.
The other is a podcast created by Arhiva de Sunet, which dedicated a full eight episodes to Timisoara, covering not only the last 30 years, but also the communist period. Same as Swamp City, it has tons of people interviewed, not only from the rock scene, but also writers and academics. Unfortunately, the material is at most times a hodgepodge of trivia and lacks the cohesiveness of the former. Also, the people behind the podcast seem to not have really understood the local scene. They had some preconceived theories behind the socio-political influences, and were just looking for evidence to support them, ignoring the rest. Fortunately, these are just fragments and don't take up much of the audio time. The real value is in having so many people offering their own perspective on all theses decades of history, be it for archival purposes, just some fun tidbits, or socio-political insights into how the scene was shaped. The biggest surprise for me was when Pacha Man explained how reggae has some similarities with the singing style in the Romanian Banat region, and how he realised this while being detained as a juvenile delinquent in Canada. And there are much more stories like that.
Looking forward, Cargo's singer, Adrian Igrișan teamed up with singer Ovidiu Anton (who was robbed of a performance at Eurovision a few years ago!) and guitarist Toni Dijmărescu for a studio-only project. They signed up with Frontiers Music and the result can be seen below. One of their first singles sounds truly excellent, perhaps the best sounding Romanian Metal song up to date. Hoping the rest of the record is like that, but we'll see that in 2022.
Iron Maiden
Not only have Iron Maiden released a new album, but so has Blaze, and Adrian Smith together with Ritchie Kotzen. Blaze sounds mostly good, but often too ridiculous. Smith/Kotzen are great, but at that time I had other grumpy old men to listen to.
And with that out of the way, I have to say I was excited about Senjutsu, because Bruce sounds really well live after he dealt with throat cancer. But Senjustsu sounds really bad. I don't understand the production choices on this record. It just makes me cringe too much to really enjoy the good parts.
Others
Neonfly caught my attention in 2019 with the single for The World is Burning, but for some reason the album didn't come out until this year. I like The Future, Tonight, it has a good vibe, tackles important topics, but nothing as instantly captivating as that single.
The biggest surprise of the year was Limp Bizkit. Their last album was released in 2011 and they've announced the new one something like 7 years ago, called Stampede of the Disco Elephants. Since then sporadic news left the impression that it's never going to come out. At one point Wes Borland said they had something like 30 songs recorded but Fred Durst was just not happy with them and that they would only release something when he would be pleased with what they have. But then Fred said that the album is actually somewhere on the Internet, people just have to find it. Basically they buried it and moved on. So the release of Still Sucks came as a big surprise. And it's awesome! It's just half an hour long, and has plenty of stupid jokes, but the songs just keep kicking it, fully embracing the self-deprecating attitude. My only disappointment is that it doesn't include the excellent Ready to Go, which I think is the best Limp Bizkit song ever. I think they should stick to this randomly putting out some music strategy on a more frequent basis.
Powerwolf have released another album that sounds like all the rest, adding some more hits to their ever-growing catalog. Beast of Gevaudan is exceptionally thrilling.
