Dark Juan’s Top 20 of 2023
Dark Juan’s Top 20 of 2023.
(It Should Have Been a Top 10, But I Don’t Like Rules!)
By Dark Juan
The nights have closed in, and the Seasonal Affective Disorder has Dark Juan in its steely, cold grip and I am bored of drinking to numb the horror inside my head, so I thought I might take a moment to share with the glorious readership of Ever Metal my thoughts about some outstanding sounds that Dark Juan has been privileged to hear. New friends have been made and much excited frothing has been done. Dark Juan has made repeated and gratuitous references to goth girls and their underwear and has drunk his own body weight in fine single malt whisky this year. And Mrs Dark Juan still tolerates me after all this time too. Truly I am blessed. This was mitigated, though. by the deaths of the Dread Lord Igor Egbert Bryan Clown-Shoe Cleavage-Hoover, the Smellhound who was small but mighty and absolute dictator of all he surveyed, and of course my (and Mrs Dark Juan’s) very dear friend and incredibly talented artist Rowan Wildash. It has been a shit year for deaths and misery. I will be raising more than one glass to the memory of them both. It would please me if you did too.
To cast a rather more positive light over this retrospective, 2023 was also the year I had the pleasure of meeting in person the wonderful Toby Poser and John Adams (and their daughter Lulu) of The Adams Family and H6LLB6ND6R – horror filmmakers and musicians of quite egregious talents, and whose friendship with myself and Mrs Dark Juan has grown through mutual appreciation of each other’s arts. Thankfully, they were just as charming as they were when conversing with them over the internet, and Mrs Dark Juan and I will be visiting them in the Catskills at our earliest mutual convenience.
This year marks the first year since I started scribing for Ever Metal where the quality of records has varied. The previous two years had been high water marks in the world of Extreme music and there was a chilling sense of single-minded purpose and a machine-like perfection to releases and there were no real duds on my list. This year, however, there have been a few. Dunwich Dreams (https://www.ever-metal.com/2023/03/10/dunwich-dreams-rise-of-the-seventh-sun/) immediately springs to mind as a particular runt of the year…
However, 2023 also brought Dark Juan a whole new set of problems, insofar as it also produced some truly classic records – more than normal. Dark Juan is normally fairly incisive when selecting his Top 10 of the year, but this year it has proved absolutely fucking impossible to narrow down my favourite releases to just 10. Therefore, I have been given special dispensation by Ever Metal Mum Beth “If It Shuts You Up I’m Rolling With It” Morait to write a Top 20. If you are not bored yet, read on below and I’ll talk about music for a bit:
20. Duskwood – “The Last Voyage”
This album is played by some fine young British gentlemen and represents the third part of a trilogy of records detailing the adventures of a space cowboy. Rather surprisingly, considering the beer and Marlboro Red-soaked, Kyuss-like Desert Rock of this fine long player, the band hail from the blasted sandy wastelands of Somerset, somewhere just outside of Yeovil. Marred only by a slightly lifeless drum sound, this album was a highlight of the year and no mistake, not least because vocalist Liam Tinsley has a fucking amazing set of pipes.
19. Nouveau Arcade – “Dead Hearts”
Seattle, that city of Grunge and Mancunian weather (it being frequently cold and raining) brought us a peach of a Synthwave album in “Dead Hearts” (in July) which instantly translated Dark Juan into dark, otherworldly Miami where exquisitely dressed, incredibly beautiful lady vampires prowled the casinos and the strip at night, and the beach and the piers were stalked by impossibly handsome vamp bikers tearing up the sand on dirt bikes. Its so 80’s-tastic it made Dark Juan nearly weep and it is fucking magnificent.
18. Wolves In Winter – “The Calling Quiet”
February brought us some Yorkshire-based Sludge/Doom in the debut platter from Wolves In Winter, composed basically of Yorkshire Metal royalty being as the band boasts members and ex-members of the likes of Lazarus Blackstar, Slammer, Solstice, Monolith Cult and Chorus Of Ruin. It is a rare and precious thing, being an album that is absolutely fucking perfect from start to finish, and composed of several people who Dark Juan used to go drinking with before he knew they were in some fucking massive bands. If you’re into seriously sexual Sludge and primordial Doom, Wolves In Winter have you very luxuriously covered.
17. Hippie Death Cult – “Helichrysum”
Oregon has given us Hippie Death Cult, and Hippie Death Cult have provided Dark Juan with a fucking diamond of an album in “Helichrysum”. Absolutely jaw dropping shredding meets a smoky alto vocal and the image of a room filled with a fug of perfumed hash while Hippie Death Cult play their otherworldly Psychedelic Stoner Rock to a room full of seriously stoned, gently swaying long haired people, all gazing in wonder at the three piece on the stage rocking their metaphorical socks off to the prehistoric grooves. Essential listening if you dig grooviness and power at the same time.
16. Naut – “Hunt”
Sad Old Goffs™ [not your trade mark though O Dark One – Goth Label Nightbreed had that as a T-Shirt in the 90’s, and I had one – ED] across the UK rejoiced when Naut released “Hunt”. These Bristolian Post-Punkers had already released a fine record in “Hit The Lights” some time ago and Dark Juan leapt upon the opportunity to review their latest album in February of this year. Dark Juan was not disappointed as the growling, bass-led, predatory music of Naut proceeded to seduce just before sinking its fangs into my throat. Dark Juan is still ready to fight anyone who denies the brilliance of this British Neo-Goff band.
15. King Kraken – “MCLXXX”
We go all the way back to January for this one, and this unholy bunch of Welsh sonic terrorists brought the noise in a frighteningly committed fashion. Eye-bulgingly and staringly on point, with an absolute peach of a frontman in Mark Donoghue, “MCLXXX” is a scarily focused and absolutely unmissable debut album that does not beguile. It bludgeons, but it does so in a worryingly friendly fashion. Heavy, melodic and chock full of superb tunes, King Kraken opened the account for 2023 in rather splendid fashion.
14. Lotus Thrones – “The Heretic Souvenir”
Dissonance. Despair. Dystopia. Disapprobation. Drone. Drizzle. Disgust. These are the themes of “The Heretic Souvenir”, being an album by one-man Industrial Post-Punk project Lotus Thrones. A deeply misanthropic and alienating record, there is a curious humanity that throbs wetly beneath the Industrial banging and clattering. It is the soundtrack to the slavery of humanity to their devices and machinery and the dehumanisation of people in government and care settings. People reduced to numbered components in a machine that inputs talent and joy and creativity and individuality and dreams and crushes them, and forcibly combines them in order to excrete money and nothing else. An album that is murderous in intent and really nasty and still makes Dark Juan want to fight the entire world.
13. Mega Drive – “200XAD”
If William Gibson novels were music, Mega Drive is what they would sound like. “200XAD” is the literal musical translation of the mind of John Carpenter films and imminent nuclear immolation. Scary, scratchy and a deep dive into the seedy back alleys of near-futuristic, brightly lit yet horribly crowded and polluted cities. Mega Drive’s music is disturbingly, superficially shiny and bright, but closer examination reveals the rust and decay beneath the bright paint and streamlined appearance. An absolutely superb album from start to finish and one well worth having a punt at.
12. Twin Temple – “God Is Dead”
Not Metal in any way shape or form, musically speaking, but this Satanic Doo-Wop duo are simply Metal as fuck in their lyrics and lifestyle, doing it as they do all because they worship the One That Walks Backwards, and doing it in such wonderful style that you can’t help but be seduced by the 1950s Bubblegum Pop sound and the Doo-Wop harmonies and the album being recorded in Mono, even though we are praising the might and prowess of Lucifer. This is done with such bonhomie and good-naturedness that the listener becomes worryingly close to joining the Church Of Satan, and for that reason Twin Temple are Metal as fuck and Dark Juan will always be a fan of their time-warp music.
11. Spider Kitten – “A Pound For The Peacebringer”
Few bands have such a hold on the imagination of Dark Juan as the super-prolific Country / Doom / Sludge / Drone Welsh band Spider Kitten, who combine these remarkably disparate elements into a deeply unique and massively heavy whole. Vocalist Chi Lameo is the driver of the band and its singular sound, and he is able to emote on a level equal to the tortured genius of the likes of Swans’ Michael Gira. The music is a grinding, inexorable assault on the senses interspersed with moments of gentleness which become shocking after the mountain-like heaviness. Indispensable.
10. Gunship – “Unicorn”
Gunship are the godfathers of Synthwave. The daddies of Electronic-based 80’s retro-futurism. The doyens of saxophone-fuelled sexiness melded with the impersonality of technology. Not as immediate as “Dark All Day”, their breakthrough album, “Unicorn” nevertheless manages to charm and beguile the listener on waves of warm, swooping Electronics, 80s rock guitars and fucking massive choruses designed specifically for Enormo-Domes. Oh, and they collaborate with Tim Capello. A lot. Squawky sex horn, oiled up and vigorous torsos and tight purple spandex for the win, especially when it is fused with the sounds of 80s Electropop and a knowing wink towards the audience, and it is a sure-fire winner.
I did not review this so there is no review link. I bought it because I am a fan.
9. Atrocious Filth – “OVV”
Absolutely bone-powderingly heavy Industrial Metal from Poland. Don’t let that description fool you though, Atrocious Filth are massively more than the sum of their parts and have attained some special kind of transcendental genius that fully encompasses the complexity of Prog and Math Metal, and welds it seamlessly to pistoning, punishing Industrial harshness that could strip flesh from faces at a clear half-mile range. Avant-garde and staggeringly inventive, Atrocious Filth are the soundtrack to a captive-bolt pistol being discharged on humans in a nightmarish meat-packing plant. Can’t really say anything better than that if you want your music to be impersonal and deeply horrifying. Dark Juan does.
8. Grave Pleasures – “Plagueboys”
Finnish Post-Punk band Grave Pleasures dropped something approaching perfection for this Sad Old Goff™ back in April, when “Plagueboys” was released and immediately transformed Dark Juan’s world back into the glorious days of the early 1990’s when he was just discovering the dark joys of the underground, Extreme music, and Gothic Rock. Equal parts classic Sisters Of Mercy and the Jesus and Mary Chain fused with the cold alienation of Joy Division and the Pop hooks of The Cure, Grave Pleasures grabs old-school Goth by its frilly collar and drags it screaming and kicking into the light of the 21st century and gives it a fucking good kicking. And it’s wonderful.
7. Occams Laser – “New Blood III”
This one is special because it represents the first time Dark Juan ever had an exclusive listen to an album and you saw it on Ever Metal first and before anyone else got their grubby little mitts on it and it represents the zenith so far of Occams Laser’s work. It is a Synthwave album, but possessed of a rawer, more serrated edge than the sounds of say, Gunship or Carpenter Brut, and it is that edge of savagery and barely contained rage that makes “New Blood III” so special and unique. One to play at night when driving on an empty motorway, when you can lose yourself in fantasies of being a fugitive mnemonic courier fleeing zaibatsu assassins. Until the Bedfordshire Constabulary pull you over for speeding anyway.
6. Fange – “Privation”
France has given us some classic bands in the likes of Gojira and the Industrial powerhouse that is P.H.O.B.O.S. but Brittany has not been quite so generous. However, Rennes-based Fange are the exception to that rule and served a slice of “Bretange Industrielle” to Dark Juan that he is still digesting, several months later. Operating from a combined Sludge / Industrial blueprint with added alienation from a strong undercurrent of Post-Punk, Fange do not beguile. They bludgeon. Then when you are prostrate and helpless on the floor, they stamp on you in big, fuck-off paratrooper boots. And then they kick you in the guts. In short, Fange have cornered the market in out and out aggression and yet there are still moments of beauty within the blood spraying murder that is their music.
5. Omnibadger – “Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III”
Dark Juan has been a fan of Omnibadger for a while now, even when they were Omnibael, and Stoke-On-Trent’s most famous export after Saul Hudson and pottery gave us a very special disc of death indeed in “Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III”. They dialled down the misanthropy and the alienation of previous recordings in favour of subtlety. I was not expecting that, and adding layers of introspection and interest instead of ever-increasing noise made for a record that was even more of a visceral listening experience than their previous releases of noise. Don’t get me wrong, Omnibadger still sound like a sack full of scrap iron being chucked down an echoey, concrete staircase with added screaming with no discernible syllabification, but reducing the madness has made for an even more Extreme experience.
4. Pound Land – “Violence”
Yet another entry from Cruel Nature Records on this retrospective, Pound Land are a VERY British Industrial group concerning themselves with the rampant corruption of British politics, how one person is a criminal when they sell some drugs, but a man in a suit gambling with other people’s money and losing millions on the stock market is someone who is supposed to be respected, they rage and scream and roar at an uncaring, vacuous population glued to their devices, drooling at two Geordie chumps mugging desperately at a camera while Z-List celebrities eat kangaroo gonads and the elite cream off ever increasing amounts of taxpayer’s money into Cayman Islands bank accounts and look down their noses at the swine who make their wealth for them… Pound Land are the antithesis of the bread and circuses that keep the masses cowed and distracted and are the voice of the little people, a clarion call for revolution, red in tooth and claw and Pound Land’s “Violence” is the spasmodic, clattering, clanging, jack-hammering soundtrack to the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Suella Braverman being stripped and strung up as traitors by the baying mob of a populace who have finally had enough of their fucking bullshit.
3. Torpor – “Abscission”
Another British band, but this time one who came to me completely by accident, Bristol-based Torpor have given us what is possibly the absolute apogee of Sludge. Dark Juan cannot possibly imagine anything even heavier or blacker than “Abscission”. It is not an album, it is an event horizon in which all joy and hope is crushed and spat out in the form of a cruel, horrendous, super-dense hopelessness. Torpor represents heaviness elevated to something beyond art. They are the mountains; the bones of the Earth and they are absolutely fucking colossal. The incredible wall of sound that this three-piece employ is simply the musical equivalent of being on the wrong end of a huge artillery barrage. “Abscission” is a Mogadon-slow, hyper-aggressive descent into madness and Dark Juan cannot recommend it enough.
2. Owdwyr – “Receptor”
Simply the most incredible debut album Dark Juan has ever heard. Hyper-complexity and prodigious power crash into each other and prove exactly what might happen when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Polyrhythms and microtones and syncopation and layered levels of incredibly complicated music combine to deliver something that (to Dark Juan, anyway) is akin to transcendence and personally meeting God. Mere words cannot adequately describe the virtuosity of the band and the songs and the whole fucking unholy melange of Mega-Tech Death, Prog and Grind that reduced Dark Juan to a dribbling, jerky, broken wreck of a man who needed several hours to recover his mental equilibrium (such as it is) and has been too scared to put it on again for fear of creating a schism in time and space. I will never recover from “Receptor”. Ever.
1. They Watch Us From The Moon – “Cosmic Chronicles Act I: The Ascension”
This is it, dear friends. The big tamale. The record I enjoyed above all others in 2023. TWUFTM hail from Kansas in the USA and they play a stupendously heavy form of Psychedelic Doom they describe as “Sci-Fi space opera”. All well and good so far – but the weapons in their (already capacious) arsenals that mark their difference from the rest of the Doom bands out there (besides their concept – Dark Juan hopes to read the accompanying graphic novel soon) are their vocalists, Luna Nemesis and Nova 1001001. These two ladies harmonise just heartbreakingly perfectly, and Dark Juan fell hopelessly in love instantly as their clean, soaring vocal harmonies introduced an almost Fleetwood Mac-like musicality and charm to the lead-heavy Doom that the band play. You’d think it wouldn’t work but listen to “On The Fields Of The Moon” and tell Dark Juan that the vocals didn’t do something unspeakably pleasurable to your spine while you were being crushed by the guitar work of The General Shane Thirteen.
They Watch Us From The Moon have everything that Dark Juan desires in music. They have artistry and theatricality and a sense of humour and concepts and ideas and the chops to make all this happen absolutely perfectly. And they have Luna Nemesis and Nova 1001001, so Dark Juan is lost to them forever. I am now a Lunar Acolyte. My Agent ID is 701. You will be too.
So, there you have it. These are the twenty finest records Dark Juan has heard this year. As usual, there’s some bands who are still noteworthy but didn’t make the cut for the reason that the bar is ridiculously high right now and you really have to be beyond special to make this list.
Dark Juan wishes to acknowledge The Machinist, whose last single, “Cathedrals’ Fall” was a staggeringly complex work of genius from this Manchester-based Blackened Industrial Death band, but as they didn’t release an album, they didn’t make the Top 20, but they can rest assured that Dark Juan is one of their greatest fans and that Dark Juan would have tried to fudge the rules just so they could get on to the list but was forbidden… Albums that were close to the Top 20 were The Mobile Homes’s “Tristesse”, for fans of melancholic Synthpop, Slovenian Stoner Fuzz band Omega Sun’s “Roadkill”, “Rzeczpospolita” by Belarusian Melodic Metal band Synaxaria, which was a really surprisingly excellent… surprise, as was the existentialist angst of Canadians KEN Mode and the supremely primal Black Metal of Catalonians Barbarian Swords.
Devilsome, from Newry, Northern Ireland, have promised Dark Juan that they will play a cover of Peter Andre’s “Mysterious Girl” when they tour and Dark Juan attends some of their shows and Dark Juan intends on holding them to this promise, no matter how fucking RIPPED and dangerous front man Garth Kidd is (as he is a martial arts master and his little daughter could probably hand Dark Juan his own arse, let alone the man himself) and is not above violence or bribery to make this happen. Also from Ireland, and of note, is Post-Punk artist pMad, who is a gentleman beyond compare, and of whom Dark Juan has a deep and abiding appreciation.
There you go. May I wish you all, wherever you are around the world including Russia (it’s not the people that’s the problem, it is the politics) a most blessed Yule. May all your dreams come true in 2024.
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of said party. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
