Yesterday, as a sort of early Christmas 'gift' to myself, I did something I had only done once before in my life. Then, as now, it completely broke my heart, it left me in a sea of tears. I've cried so much, my tears are becoming a sea. Every single word hurt, every line came straight from my heart, and left me feeling empty and mangled. But it had to be done, it's part of the process of saying goodbye. It's also a guarantee that nothing similar will never happen to me ever again. But look, it's Christmas, after all, and though I do not celebrate these days, today I come bearing gifts.
These gifts come in two forms : for me, from me; and from me, to you. For me, it's always for you.
The first gift - for me : I gift unto me the act of fading away, and now, I am becoming increasingly harder to find. This I gift to me. This is how I begin to disappear, this is how I start to become a memory, one that will grow dimmer with each passing heartbeat. Maybe it's already been noticed, maybe it hadn't, but the first steps are already taken.
The second gift - for you : I gift you my choices for my two favourite albums of the year. They have a number of things in common : they are both from Japanese bands, they are both from (roughly) the same genre, though they accomplish their goals in wildly different ways, they are both from the same label (Pelagic Records) and last, but never the least, they are the only two albums that came out in 2024 that I actually listened to, so the odds of one, if not both of them, being my favourites were always pretty high.
Let's look at the first : The band is called Envy, and the album is called 'Eunoia'. It's a really hard band to describe, their sound ranging from the hardcore and heavy metal worlds while also touching on post-rock, shoegaze, post-hardcore, screamo, and god knows what else. This being their eighth studio record, it's an indredibly tight, melodic, emotional journey, a whole that's made from individual slices of art, each episode a venture into climatic bursts of joy and sadness. It's very nearly a 10/10 for me, and I'm looking forward to finally getting it on vinyl sometime next year.
The second - and my undisputed favourite - is by a band called Mono, and the album is called 'Oath'. True story, they are the only band in existence that I'd buy an album by them without listening to a single song from it, because I know it will be trasncendental. Which makes it all the more confounding the fact that I do not, in fact, have this record... yet. I missed out on the initial pressing, and I'm waiting for Pelagic to release a new one, they always do with this band. But that didn't, obviously, keep me from listening to this record as soon as it came out, and in typical Mono fashion, they delve into the post-rock, contemporary classical soundscapes, though they themselves eschew such terms when it comes to describing their music. But Mono isn't just music, it's beauty, it's poetry, it's peace, it's catharsis. Though I knew of the band for a long while, and listened to a song of theirs here and there, I've been a dedicated fan of the band for a fairly short amount of time only - it was the the release of the 10th anniversary edition of their majestic that finally convinced me to get to know them better. And what a payoff it's been, they keep getting better and better, their music more poignant, more laden with beauty, more emotionally charged. I highly doubt there'll ever be a year when one of their releases isn't my favourite from that year.
That's it then, six days to go, six more entries, then the inevitable comes.
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