Written by:	RaduP, musclassia, nikarg
Published:	January 14, 2024

Wait A Minute! This Isn't Metal! - December 2023
Metal Storm's outlet for nonmetal album reviews





We here at Metal Storm pride ourselves on our thousands of metal reviews and interviews and article; metal is our collective soul and passion, which is why we bother with this junk. That being said, we'd be lying if we stuck to our trve-kvlt guns and claimed that metal is the only thing we ever listen to. Whether we want to admit it or not, we do check out some other stuff from time to time; some of us are more poptimistic than others, but there's a whole world out there aside from Satan-worshiping black metal and dragon-slaying power metal. We do already feature some nonmetal artists on our website and have a few reviews to back them up, but we prefer to limit that aspect of the site to those artists who have been a strong influence on the metal scene or who are in some way connected to it. This article series is the place for those artists who don't matter to metal in the slightest but still warrant some conversation - after all, good music, is good music, and we all know metal isn't the only thing on this planet for any of us.

Down below, you might find some obscure Bandcamp bedroom projects or some Billboard-topping superstar; as long as it ain't metal and the album itself isn't a best-of compilation, it fits. Obviously, we're certain that not everything will be for everybody (you guys can be viciously territorial even when metal is the only thing on the menu, and we're all supposed to like the same things), but we do hope you find at least one thing that you can enjoy, instead of just pointing and screaming in horror "Not metal!" as if that would be an insult.

Here are our previous features:

November 2023
October 2023
September 2023

And now to the music...

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Peter Gabriel hadn’t put out an album of original material for more than twenty years (since 2002’s Up), and he chose a pretty unconventional approach to promote and release i/o. Beginning in January 2023, one song was being revealed every full moon, with its alternative mix released on the following new moon. A range of visual artists was invited to contribute a piece of art to accompany each track. Quite an intricate presentation, don’t you think? i/o had been in the works for nearly three decades, with its initial production dating back to 1995, but it was eventually completed in December 2022.

The album's title, serves as a fitting metaphor for Gabriel's creative process, reflecting the constant interplay between input and output, inspiration and expression. This sort of duality is present throughout the album, with the bright-side mix and the dark-side mix of each track providing further depth and nuance, and offering alternative perspectives and interpretations. Gabriel blends elements of electronica, world music, art pop, and prog, creating a sonically rich and diverse tapestry. There are some joyous and very upbeat songs, like the title track, “Road To Joy”, and “Olive Tree”, as well as some beautiful introspective ones, such as “Playing For Time” “So Much” and “Love Can Heal”. My favourite one is “Four Kinds Of Horses”, featuring Brian Eno on synths, but i/o as a whole is a work of art that is both sonically innovative and emotionally resonant. It is not perfect, with the lyrics often coming across as a bit simple (for lack of a better word) and with some songs stretching longer than they should, but Gabriel’s voice sounds great after all these years, the production is stellar, and there are some brilliant melodies here. What more can you ask for?

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by nikarg





Minimalism in music has often been associated with ambient or drone music; Ensemble 1 take inspiration from minimalist composition, but Delay Works is anything but an ambient record. The opening noisy guitar and convoluted drumwork on opening song “Distorted Fades” has more than a smidge of Tool to it, and the band’s self-description on Bandcamp of ‘eschewing traditional narratives in favour of geometrical principles, rhythmic complexity and auditory hallucinations’ absolutely seems designed to appeal to the notoriously elitist portion of Tool’s fanbase, but what makes the song, and ultimately the album, into a compelling experience is how Ensemble 1 persist across the runtime in evolving gradually, subtly playing around with the percussion and instrumental layers to create hypnotic effect. One factor that plays into this gradual evolution is the use (as the album name implies) of delay effects, which result in feelings of cascading as the music progresses.

At a paltry 10 minutes, “Distorted Fades” is comfortably the shortest song on Delay Works. The bluntly titled “Drums & Delay Loops”, built upon a range of persistent oscillating motifs, kicks off with a similarly hectic drum performance to the opening track, but drummer Tom Way occasionally lets up as the song shifts onto the next motif, allowing for brief pauses of breath before Ensemble continue to induce dizziness. Curiously enough, both Way and guitarist Joe Potts are only credited with their primary instruments on songs 1 and 2; 23-minute closer “Submerged Harmonics” features only Way and on bass, and this song does see Ensemble 1 bear a greater resemblance to more typically minimalist music. This closer, again as the name suggests, features muffled harmonics, sounding as if submerged, warbling and shifting beneath the waves, gradually growing and evolving, at times almost imperceptibly, until ultimately building into a swell of noise. Frankly, given how intense the first two tracks are, this final song does perhaps overdo the length and curtail some of the momentum, but it’s still quite the hypnotizing release.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by musclassia





Névoa have already established themselves as a fairly adventurous band; 2016’s sophomore effort Re Un was already a distinctive effort in the post-black subgenre, but their subsequent release Towards Belief shook things up in favour of an Oranssi Pazuzu-esque psychedelic sound. For their next recording, they’ve moved away from not just metal but electronic sounds altogether, as Rudimental Harmony is an oddball acoustic folk EP. It's a bold jump, but it’s one that they’re equipped for; specifically, they’re equipped with a nyckelharpa and percussion.

Opener “Heave” demonstrates their approach to this new sound, as subdued natural percussion provides a muted, steady beat upon which stringed instruments first lay a tense, pizzicato foundation before gradually introducing layer upon layer of full-stringed motifs. “Heave” does feel like a preamble, and on “Crude Boundaries”, Névoa do let loose with some more full-blooded traditional-sounding folk melodies, but just as it feels like the track has come to life, suddenly it all falls away, to be replaced by some jazzy drumming. That mid-song peak of “Crude Boundaries” is ultimately the climax of the record, as the remaining songs are stripped-down, as if the calm after a very brief storm. Rudimental Harmony is frankly a bit of an odd release, but it’s an intriguing interpretation of the Nordic-sounding European folk style that many metal musicians have dipped their toes into in the past couple of decades.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by musclassia





Jazz and classical music work together more often than I initially thought, especially considering how much instrumentation they can have in common. There's a reason why some of the biggest jazz musicians had their backing being called an "orchestra". But even in the more avant-garde fields, a term called "modern creative" was coined for blends of modern classical and avant-garde jazz, both among the more experimental edges of the two genres. I'm still a bit reticent to use that term because I lack the familiarity with this side of the music world, but it makes complete sense why these two worlds would collide the way they do, so let's see how they collide on Ex Machina.

To cement my "jazz musician backed by an orchestra" point, that's exactly what Ex Machina is, and also one can clearly tell the experimental approach from both of the two sides. There's a subversion of the usual "big band" approach with a lot more in term of uncommon time signatures and microtones, but while also being more moody and restrained in its textures. A lot of this kind of experimental music tends to be overwhelming and suffocating, but Ex Machina relishes in its oddity in a way that feels more welcoming, even with its 70 minutes of runtime being longer but not daunting. Bringing brass, strings, Lehman's saxophones, and a dash of electronica creates a pretty thrilling sound here.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





Jazz and classical music mixing has led to a bunch of terms being coined, and one of them is called "third stream", which seems to be a somewhat less avant-garde version of "modern creative", although still having a dash of experimentation and improvisation. I'm way too unfamiliar to really tell them apart, as well as figuring out which subgenre of classical and jazz take shape in each album without consulting what someone else already said about it. So in the case of Vidrio, that would seem to be post-minimalism from the classical side and chamber jazz from the jazz side.

Titanic is a duo of celloist/vocalist Mabe Fratti (who has a solo career of her own) and pianist/guitarist/arranger Hector Tosta, with some contributions by saxophonist Jarrett Gilgore and drummer Gibran Andrade. That should already create some idea about what the soundscapes of Vidrio would be like, but it's quite a surprising sound regardless. The very soft vocals have a bit of an art pop / vocal jazz feel that feels a bit at odds with the post-minimalist instrumentation, creating a very interesting contrast. The instrumentation, minimalist and repetitive as it is, can range from more straight-forward jazz cuts to more post-rock sounding and somehow cover a lot of moods and sounds with very little.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP







My discovery of Globular & Geoglyph’s Messages From The Resonator did a great job of making sure I perk up every time I see something tagged as ‘psybient’, and the likes of Ott and Shongle have only entrenched that mindset. So when Shiro recently posted a song from new album Haven on Reddit, I found myself having one of the rare instances where I saw a post on r/listentothis and decided that I would indeed listen to this. As it turns out, I was rewarded for this decision, as Boxing Day release Haven was a delightful late Christmas present, one replete with slick rhythms and tantalizing soundscapes.

It's quite the long album, as of 8 tracks there’s not a single one below 6 minutes, but it doesn’t test your patience. The understated dub-influenced opener “Weird Dreams Corp.” is a pleasant lead into the album, before “Mirage” delivers a more complex, elaborate arrangement of melodies, beats and effects that makes a real impression. ‘Psybient’ doesn’t feel fully applicable to Haven, although there are similarities to other acts I’ve heard in that subgenre; techno/IDM also play their part hear, most notably on “Robots And Rituals” and “Supermond”, but whatever flavour of electronica that Shiro serves up, it tends to satisfy. Personal favourites include the bouncy, bass-heavy “Rat Pack” and the relaxed yet subtly alien “Androids In Eden”.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by musclassia





Sure, concept albums are nice, like having a narrative and a sound to focus on, but even with the scale of something like a rock opera or a band doing a detour into a new sound, there's little that gets close to how conceptual Matmos get on their albums. Getting to know them from the one album where they sampled a washing machine's washing cycle and made that musical, there's even wilder and more impressive experiments in the band's larger catalog, so it's no surprise that out of all the artists out there, they'd be the ones to be welcomed by the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings into their archives.

The story starts in 1948, when "Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a self-proclaimed mandate to record the sounds of the entire world". Now Matmos get to pull all that quite non-musical collection of various world sounds, to try and create something musical out of it. Like a lot of their works, it's something that feels like only they could pull off, even if the end result is more impressive in a "wow they did that" rather than for the actual enjoyability of the music on it. There's definitely plenty of enjoyability to be found regardless in a very odd and psychedelic way, but there's a reason why those initial sounds are not musical.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





Neon Odin is billed as a fusion of synthwave and European folk; Vvildr, the man behind the project, has a bit more pre-existing experience with the latter, through his folk-influenced blackgaze project Vvilderness. Still, while Neon Odin features folk instruments such as talharpa and nyckelharpa (both of which he built himself, according to the album’s Bandcamp listing), Allfather is primarily and synthwave album. Yet, as it becomes increasingly hard to find interesting new things to say about new synthwave albums given the prevalence and invariance of them in recent years, Vvildr has managed to produce a debut synthwave album that doesn’t feel like a retread of worn ground.

Part of that is through the folk influences, which are at times infrequent but noteworthy, but part of it is also from Vvildr integrating other aspects of Vvilderness into Neon Odin, namely metal-tinged guitars. In between the throbbing beats, catchy synth melodies and talharpa string sounds on album highlight “Wield The Hammer”, there’s electric guitar solo parts, and even occasional hints of distortion. As all these elements come together on songs such as “Giantess” and “9 Days And Nights”, they work synergistically; the overlapping melodies from different instruments coalesce nicely on the former, while the latter pushes the folk side harder than the other songs in terms of traditional instrument presence (including some pounding percussion), but elevates it with some tastefully incorporated synth parts and ethereal vocals. Vvildr has been onto a good thing with Vvilderness, and with Neon Odin, he’s laid some promising groundwork for making this second project successful going forwards as well.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by musclassia







This brand of internet-y pop-ish rock can be a bit hard to get used to even as someone that tried to keep up with newer sounds. Underscores isn't exactly that new, with April Harper Grey's project dating back as far back as 2016, but it's some of the most creative and polished sounding albums in this style, and I think a lot of the appeal comes down to just how snappy and zany it sounds without sounding like it's trying to overwhelm you with how out there it is. It's out of the box, both in terms of electronica, pop, and rock, finding an interesting balance between straight-forwardness and outlandishness in all of these sounds it mixes together, enough to feel both familiar and challenging.

What's even more surprising about Wallsocket is how much effort was put not only in the actual music part, as in the textures and production and songwriting, but the world of the record is conceptual to a very high degree, to the point of being almost like an ARG, enough to warrant a Reddit post gathering all the resources and lore about the album's world, taking place in a fictional town filled with characters, which them being referenced in between songs. It's entirely possible to completely ignore that side of the album and even with diving into the lyrics and the stories within each song, but that greatly enhances the experience.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP







To tie this up with another album featured here, not only does Jane Remover appear on that Underscores record, what sealed the deal to me covering both records in the same edition was seeing this video essay detailing the concept album dichotomy between the two records, with one being incredibly detailed with its worldbuilding, and the other, namely Jane's Remover's Census Designated being more conceptual on a thematic, emotional, and sonic level. I had a sense of familiarity with the music here already before figuring out that I've covered Jane Remover's previous album, Frailty, but couldn't connect the dots because that was originally released under the dltzk name.

There's obviously a lot that Census Designated and Frailty have in common, mostly still having the same internet emo ballad aesthetic, but with Census Designated having less of an overwhelmingly alert vibe, instead replacing that with a lot more shoegaze and slowcore this time around. That and its lyrical content does create quite an emotionally moving and vulnerable album, and that's something that the walls of guitars and noise can really enhance or overdo in various moments. It is a much more focused record and one that improves on a lot of fronts, especially on the vocal front, and I'm curious to see how that's built upon next.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





It's weird covering an album that not only was released more than a couple of months ago, but it's also one that's only on Bandcamp, which means that people who only engage with the Spotify embed below won't get to experience it (you know who you are, but you're also probably not reading this either). Still, I had so much time with it, and it's also an album made by someone who released another album in this edition (Leroy is Jane Remover, so pairing the two of them in the same edition felt natural. That out of the way, because of the seamless transition between the tracks, it might be better to use YouTube rather than Bandcamp for listening to this one.

So now as to what Grave Robbing is, and why it can't be on streaming platforms, it's basically a mashup album where a lot of it is sampled from 2000s pop songs (hence why clearing those samples is close to impossible), and turned into a hard dance album. Leroy originally coined a niche genre called "Dariacore" that used more meme-y samples, so this being the first project that moves past that it makes sense why it would be called like that, and the pop songs chosen aren't necessarily my favorites, but the way they're mixed here does both fill me with a lot of nostalgia for a simpler time and also melts my mind as to how chaotic the quite heavy production can be and still not lose any of its bouncy groove.

Bandcamp

by RaduP





There are two words I'd use to describe Year Of The Newt first and foremost: fun and warm. It's album that is so pleasant to listen to and so groovy without biting more than it can chew while also not half-assing what it already does. Bobbing is the project of one Robert Ross, who has also been a guitarist and celloist in a math pop outfit called Feed Me Jack, so I guess some of that experience is betrayed by Year Of The Newt's most intricate moments, but the way that intricacy is integrated really just adds to its jovial and quirky nature more than it being an exercise in technicality, something that might also come from his previous band being math pop not math rock.

To understand what really goes on in the album, this is a neo-psychedelia album being molded into an indietronica one, with a lot of its indie sensibilities being shaped through funky synths and psychedelic grooves with some textures and song structures that showcase the math pop side that preceded this project. The result is very bite-sized at 26 minutes of runtime and it's such an easy pill to swallow, not really wasting any minute of it, and just being chockfull of bouncy grooves and playful melodies and a certain warm energy of its own.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





I like slowcore a lot. There's something so warm and welcoming about just being swallowed by a lot of slow guitar distortion while soft gentle vocals lull you. It's the sonic equivalent of a warm blanket. Even if a lot of it is quite depressive in tone, it's still depressing in a very comforting way in the way only sad music can be. That's what I like about Midwife and that's what I liked about Low. I'm using those two as examples specifically because that's how I got to know Vyva Melinkolya, because she's gonna appear on a The Flenser commissioned tribute album to Low and also collaborated with Midwife on the Orbweaving album.

Unbecoming pretty much hits the mark that I expect slowcore to hit, being an incredibly comforting listen, and letting the walls of guitar sound get close to shoegaze and the soft vocals get close to ethereal wave. Angel Diaz has a pretty specific vocal tone that's not completely soft and lethargic in just the right ways, and there's even a bit of tongue-in-cheekness to the entire thing that's most evident in the one song here that Midwife also appears on, "Doomer GF Song". There's still something missing to really set the project apart, but for what it does, it's good at it.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP







This has been a really good year for celtic folk music, with Lankum and Øxn releasing some of the most harrowing folk of the year, and it's also a celtic folk, more specifically an Irish folk, artist that's gonna have the one album I go back the most months to cover for this last edition of the year. All Of This Is Chance was released all the way back in February, but for this one album I'll make an exception for my last opportunity to cover it because of how magical this one sounds and it would be a crime to let it rest among the albums that didn't make it. I wasn't familiar with Lisa before so this was as much of a surprise for me as well.

As is usual for folk music, a lot of the appeal lies in the lyricism and in the singer's voice. Lisa has a very very specific voice, one that might take some getting used to because of how unapologetically strong her accent is, but once the getting used to is out of the way, her timbre really makes the entire thing sound even more magical than it does. There's something that's both very humane and very mystical about the vibe of the record, with the production around the voice also feeling ethereally droning. There's still a bit of something harrowing within it, but it lives alongside something a bit more whimsical, all within a very otherworldly package.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





There may not have been any Vulgaris releases in 2023, but we’ve been fairly busy as individual members; I debuted Chullachaqui in November, while guitarist Jess O’Toole brought out Nights 2 under his Slither moniker... and then he also squeezed out Threads before year end. An EP this time around, Threads continues the exploration of different electronic and instrumental hip-hop sounds that Slither dabbled with on Nights 2, including a stirring opening track in the form of “New Starter”, whose orchestral arrangements initially give off a soundtrack vibe before layers and elements turn it twisted and eerie in its latter stages.

The first half of the EP features some of the more distorted and twisted sounds on Threads, including the groovy synth blasts on “Full Dead” and synthetic vocals midway into “It’s Been A Long Time Coming”. After this point, the release goes in a bit more of a subdued and contemplative direction; there’s dainty synth melodies beneath the main recurring oscillating motif on “A Blank Slate”, while “Something Final” mixes trip-hop rhythms with moody dystopian soundscapes. Rounded off with a creepy horror movie soundtrack-style outro piece in “Eyes Which Follow”, this late-year Slither release further expands the range as a producer that O’Toole already demonstrated with Nights 2.

Apple Music | Spotify

by musclassia





There's a lot of hip-hop and R&B that I missed on this year, generally sticking to the artists I was already familiar with, so catching up to some of the releases that I missed on to find something I could cover, even from the group name and album title I could tell that this was gonna be one pretty intriguing, but even so the album kept surprising me from one track to the next. On one hand a lot of this album is pretty accessible, with the R&B and pop rap side of it clearly having an ear for what works in the charts, but while it is very accessible most of the time, it's also very clever with the way it does that.

Maybe because of the way the lineup of this group goes, I'm reminded a lot of The Fugues, which also blended hip-hop and R&B, but with a more modern alt direction more akin to something like Brockhampton, and that would be just the core of it. On top of that, there's a lot of fun versatility of sounds that are at play here, from something quite post-punky in "Funkland" to very soulful on "How I'm Feeling", to really aggressive on "American Psycho", to a gospel turn on the closing track. But what really makes the album gel together is how that's kept together by clever and heartfelt lyricism and a sense of authentic appreciation for the sounds they're clearly pulling from.

Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





In the last edition I do something I rarely do, I covered an R&B record, which is a genre I don't get into very often, especially not in this feature on a metal website. But that was an album I didn't really by an artist I liked so it felt weird to leave my R&B contributions at that, so I'm making up for it by covering some R&B from this year that I actually did like. Ghanaian-American Amaarae is not someone I was familiar with before Fountain Baby so I went in blind expecting some run-on-the-mill sensual R&B but I got way more than that. For one, the vocals are much softer, higher, and dare I say even goofier than I expected them to be.

While getting used to the vocals did take a little bit of time, the instrumentation really did its job of lulling me in with a lot of it clearly owing to various afrobeat sounds, including an offshoot of it coined "Alté", but also a lot of sounds from the diaspora like dancehall or funk brasileiro among others making the sounds here feel very interesting. But the production and a lot of the soundscapes here are very modern and unexpected, with the most unexpected moment being the punk explosion of "Sex, Violence, Suicide" that made me think that autoplay has taken me to some other artist.

Bandcamp | Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP





I'm not really in the loop in regards to what's popular on specific social media or in the charts, so whenever an artist does pop into the music circles I'm more into after first making it big on stuff like Tik Tok I'm kinda reticent. Usually it's with an actual complete project that I can finally get into such artists, so Heaven Knows marks my first interaction with PinkPantheress. Given how much I shy away from more mainstream sounds in this feature, I did figure at least in the last edition I should include some of those that I actually had a fun time with, and that's one of them.

The sound here is a somewhat nostalgic kind of R&B, but one that has its backing done by various EDM sounds that are more in the breakbeat or "liquid" drum & bass styles, so something that's a lot more airy and groovy than most of the R&B I'm used to listening to, but the sensibilities it has do have something that's clearly aimed at the internet generation, a kind of lo-fi alt pop appeal. With how each of the track is short and instantly gratifying while also being mood-, or rather vibe-focused, I can see why this is so appealing and pleasant to listen to. I'm particularly fond of the Kelala feature, and there's not much about this that grated me or didn't get my head bopping in some way.

Apple Music | Spotify

by RaduP

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And that was it. You've made it through still alive. Congrats. See ya next month. Here's a Spotify playlist we compiled out of stuff featured here: