5 Albums Worth Your Time & Money

Forgotten Sunrise, Muriel Grossmann, Aaron Parks, Restraining Order, Sublation

Cecil Taylor & Min Tanaka at the Whitney Museum, April 2016

First things first: The Book is done! (Kinda.) I finished the first draft of In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor at 11:30 PM on Sunday night, and on Monday morning I emailed it to Michaelangelo Matos (whose newsletter

Beat Connection

you should be reading), who will tell me everything that’s wrong with it. It’s quite a story and I’m looking forward to getting it out into the world next year. The final chapter, which deals with his death and the legal aftermath…all I can say is, whoof!

And another thing: So here’s an article (which I admit I have not read in full, because it’s paywalled and I will not give this particular print institution my money). The headline is “Substack has a Nazi problem.” After being on Substack for more than a year, I have some thoughts about this subject.

First of all, I don’t think I need to hear about a platform giving aid and comfort to unsavory political actors from the motherfucking Atlantic, thanks. But my real response boils down to this: I’m not conceding this space to anyone. Are there Nazis using Substack? Yeah. Are there buffoons of every stripe using Substack? Yeah. But no one forces you to read their shit. I don’t read Nazi newsletters, just like I don’t read newsletters by Matt Yglesias, Freddie DeBoer, Ted Gioia, or lots of other people I think are idiots and with whom I disagree. Why would I? Why would you?

Substack is a tool. I use it for my purposes. And it has proved to be a very valuable tool — I’m not paying my rent with subscription revenue, but I’m absolutely getting paid for what I write here. And Substack has actively promoted my newsletter in the past, something that neither Blogger nor Wordpress has ever done for me. So no, I’m not going to stop using a very good tool just because people I disagree with are using the same tool. I have created a community — if you’re reading this, you’re part of it — and those people are not welcome, just as I would not be welcome in their spots. But we’re not being published under the same banner. That’s what happens at the Atlantic, when they publish some hard-right scumbag and expect their more left-leaning contributors to just suck it up. Again, Substack is a tool. What you do with it is up to you.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be publishing my Year-End Roundup, listing the 50 best CDs I’ve heard that came out between July 1 and December 2023. (The Half-Year Roundup, covering albums released between January and June, is here.) I’m not gonna tell you whether any of the five albums I’m about to tell you about will be on it. But they’re good records and you should check them out no matter what.

Forgotten Sunrise are an Estonian group who’ve been around for 30 years, mutating over that time from death metal to industrial/darkwave. On their latest album, elu, they’re making a kind of heavy industrial with grim, ritualistic, even liturgical overtones, but they still use death metal vocals, which is an interesting twist. “Orthotoxic Waste” and “Deep Emoceans” are the perfect music for a movie scene where people are dancing in a deconsecrated church and occasionally being preyed upon by vampires. I found out about these guys because my friend Kurt Glück-Aeg’s label Ohm Resistance put elu out, and it threw me right back to 25 years ago when I was listening to KMFDM, Front Line Assembly, et al. But if you’re a fan of the recent work of Rotting Christ, you might like it, too.

Muriel Grossmann is a saxophonist whose work I’ve been following for some time. I even had her on the Burning Ambulance podcast a couple of years ago. Over the last 15 years or so, she’s put out a dozen albums with a core group of collaborators that includes guitarist Radomir Milojkovic and drummer Uros Stamenkovic, accompanied by various bassists and keyboardists. Her music started out post-bop, but she’s gradually moved into a realm of what I’d call “spiritual soul jazz” — she’s clearly indebted to both Coltranes, John and Alice, but there’s a lot of Grant Green and Larry Young in her work as well. She’s been independent her whole career, occasionally licensing a title to a label, but her 13th album, Devotion, is her debut for Jack White’s Third Man imprint. It’s a 90-minute double LP that kicks off with a side-long, nearly 22-minute track, “Absolute Truth,” on which she absolutely wails, with Milojkovic, Stamenkovic, and new Hammond organ player Abel Boquera tearing it up behind her. If you’re new to her work, welcome; if you’re a longtime fan like me, you’ll be pleased to have her back again.

I’ve known pianist Aaron Parks since 2008, when I wrote a story on him for Jazziz. At the time, he was a young prodigy (not, like, Joey Alexander young, though he’d self-released a few albums as an actual kid) signed to Blue Note. His sole album for that label, Invisible Cinema, is really good and still well worth checking out. A few years ago, he formed a great band called Little Big with guitarist Greg Tuohey, bassist David Ginyard Jr., and drummer Tommy Crane. I saw them play at Rockwood Music Hall in New York, co-billed with John Raymond’s flugelhorn/guitar/drums trio Real Feels. Both groups specialize in very melodic jazz that owes a lot to indie rock — their compositions have big, memorable hooks that come back around several times like the choruses of rock songs. (Raymond released Shadowlands, a collaboration with singer-songwriter S. Carey, in September, and Parks plays on it.) Anyway, Parks has just self-released a live Little Big album, Live in Berlin, which doubles as an introduction of new drummer Jongkuk Kim. The music was recorded using the Voice Memo function on his iPhone, but it sounds very clear and powerful, and hearing these guys play to a genuinely enthusiastic crowd is great. Proceeds from this record will go toward the production of the third Little Big studio album, which is something the world needs, so buy it!

I was too young for first-wave punk, but man did I love late ’80s hardcore (pronounced “hawd-koah”) in high school. Sick Of It All, Gorilla Biscuits, and Judge at City Gardens in Trenton, NJ is still one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. I don’t listen to hardcore much anymore, but a really great band can still knock me on my ass, and Restraining Order are fucking great. They’re from Massachusetts, but we’ll forgive that for the moment, because their second studio album, Locked in Time, absolutely rips. It hurls 12 tracks at you in under 22 minutes, every one a floor-punching, face-through-the-wall assault that combines mosh-friendly hardcore with full-speed-ahead, chant-along punk rock that even makes room for squalling guitar solos. All those elements and more are present on the 87-second “Left Unsaid,” which is a perfect encapsulation of this thunderbolt of an album.

Sublation are a Philadelphia-based death metal duo — Max Svalgard on guitars, bass, and vocals, and Danny Piselli on drums, vocals, and programming — with some very interesting ideas. On the Advancement of Decay is their second album; their debut, The Path to Bedlam, came out last year. Their fast songs, like opener “Congenital Putrescence,” have the melodic urgency of The Black Dahlia Murder, infused with the technical intricacy of Obscura, but their slower passages have a hypnotic power and drama that leans toward the sludgy doom of Crowbar before leaping right at your face. They even incorporate elements of black metal on “This Little Death,” but the album’s biggest surprise is the eight-minute guitar noise composition, “‘We were never meant to live this long,’” that closes the album. It’s a shimmering cloud of overtones like a gentle ambient remix of Metal Machine Music, the perfect way to rinse your brain clean after all the chugging, snarling brutality of the previous 25 minutes.

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One more thing: I would love it if you would consider buying some Burning Ambulance Music releases. We have eight CDs out (Senyawa; two by Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley; Matthew Shipp and Whit Dickey; Graham Haynes and Submerged; Breath of Air; José Lencastre; and Diego Caicedo), and they’re all excellent. Go to burningambulancemusic.com to check them out and order directly from there, and I’ll throw in a bonus mystery CD — not one of our releases, but something sitting on my personal shelf that I think you’ll like — with every order. And I promise to ship before Christmas!

That’s it for now. See you next week!