Review Of The Year 2012, Part 1: 12 Albums

It’s that time of year again, the nights drawing in, the pointless over-consumption going into overdrive, and the music bloggers arranging releases into spurious hierarchies of how hip they think they make them look. Well, let me issue the same caveats I always do: I don’t claim that these are the best albums of the year, simply that they are the ones I like the most out of the ones I happen to have heard. There are lots of famous records I happen not to have heard, some of which I might think were fantastic if I did hear them, but quite honestly I haven’t had time in the past year to hear any more music than I have, and I consider it infinitely preferable to stumble across music organically than to be guided to it just because it’s famous …

Goya – Demo (stoner metal)

Drugs. Weed, hash, blow, smoke, tea, skunk, green, charas, gear, pollen, bud, sensemilla, kif, oil, dope, black, pot, marijuana, cannabis. I don’t wish to imply that Goya’s music is one-dimensional, but this is very clearly the central inspiration for their creative activities. So much so, that their Bandcamp page is simply addressed with the name ‘marijuana’; I imagine that there are a fair few musicians with similar enthusiasms spitting blood that Goya beat them to it. I wonder if there’s a band called Marijuana whose main inspiration is the last painter to be classed an Old Master? I must remember to form one, if my enthusiasm for making music gets rekindled at any point. Cannabis is a term we’ll return to; let’s turn now to another one. Demo.

Church Of Riff 2 at Colchester Arts Centre (metal)

What a lineup. Any casual punter could readily be forgiven for being carried out in a box. Not that the sounds on offer were remotely toxic; on the contrary, they were entirely wholesome nut cutlets of crunchthudriffery, but seriously, heavy things can crush you, and things as heavy as this can crush you flat. Perhaps that’s why Colchester Arts Centre is ‘never knowingly understood’: stand under this sort of malarkey and you can wave goodbye to three-dimensionality.

Meadows – Meadows (sludge metal)

Meadows play some pretty extreme music. You could make all sorts of comparisons: The Melvins are an obvious point of reference; they also put me in mind of Bongzilla, although they have some fast thrashy passages to go with the slow stoner doom, and a turgidly saturated bass distortion that makes everything as thick as treacle. Although this is full of riff and incident, there’s something about it that almost crosses over into ambient