The Best Noise-Rock of 2012

In 2012, the worlds of noise-rock and pop weren’t so far apart. This was the year the Black Keys debuted at number two on the Billboard charts — and ended up suing Pizza Hut and Home Depot for using their in commercials without permission. Meanwhile, the Keys’ most immediate blues-rock grandfathers, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, rose from the dead — hiatus, if there’s a distinction — to release their first proper album since 2004.

This was the year Neil Young rallied together Crazy Horse to liven up “Oh Susannah” and “Clementine”, the year Cloud Nothings recruited Steve Albini for an indie-pop-goes-catharsis makeover, and the year Japandroids cracked the Billboard Top 50, ending up minor indie-rock royalty in the process.

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, rock isn’t dead. It just smells funny.

Honorable mentions go out to Lee Ranaldo’s Between the Times and the Tides, which finds the Sonic Youth sidekick aging gracefully into elder statesmanhood (though a bit too gracefully for this list); Liars’ WIXIW, whose most anxious cuts (“A Ring on Every Finger”, “Brats”) bring the trio full circle to its dance-punk roots; and the Soft Moon’s Zeros, a seedy nostalgia trip through the 1980s’ gloomiest post-punk and industrial pathways. If I had unlimited room — and unlimited freedom with regard to genre classifications — these records would all find a place. Zach Schonfeld

 

Artist: Lightning Bolt

Album: Oblivion Hunter

Label: Load

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List Number: 10

Lightning Bolt
Oblivion Hunter

Recorded in 2008 — in between 2005’s Hypermagic Mountain and 2009’s Earthly DelightsOblivion Hunter is business as usual for the virtuosic Rhode Island duo, who are lucky enough to live in a world where “business as usual” means noisemaking to the most fiercely, unabashedly gleeful degree. It’s labeled an EP but long enough for a full-length, and its 38 minutes highlight the sort of hypercompressed dynamics, frenetic drumming, and finger-tapping speed-riffing trademarked by the band since 2003’s Wonderful Rainbow. There’s also room for a sing-songy guitar interlude (“The Soft Spoken Spectre”), as well as “World Wobbly Wide”, a screechingly unforgiving 13-minute assault that far outstays its welcome while cementing Lightning Bolt’s most timeless truth: they’re really just in this for the love of the noise.

 

Artist: Oren Ambarchi/Keiji Haino/Jim O’Rourke

Album: Imikuzushi

Label: Black Truffle

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Oren Ambarchi/Keiji Haino/Jim O’Rourke
Imikuzushi

A follow-up to 2011’s In a Flash Everything Comes Together as One There Is No Need for a Subject, Imikuzushi was similarly recorded live in Tokyo, where O’Rourke now lives, by three icons of avant-noise experimentalism. But here the objects of the trio’s fascination are not the prepared piano or oscillating electronics — tools of the post-rock and experimentalist tradition. Imikuzushi is a shattering freakout of a rock record, a mission that is clear from the opening onslaught of “still unable to throw off that teaching a heart left abandoned unable to get inside that empty space nerves freezing that unconcealed sadness.” Between O’Rourke’s roaring bass and Haino’s maniacal shrieks, the most recognizable reference point may be the Stooges’ “L.A. Blues” — but apocalyptic fury here is not the thunderous climax. It is simply the point.

 

Artist: Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Album: Meat and Bone

Label: Mom+Pop

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List Number: 8

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Meat and Bone

I won’t bullshit you. Meat and Bone, the first album from the raucous blues-rock heroes since their 2004 hiatus, isn’t a “mature” or “reflective” take from the aging boozy punks. Nor is it a half-hearted attempt to reclaim the lo-fi hiss-and-chatter of their early records, or a continuation of Acme’s flirtation with hip-hop guest spots (DJ Shadow and Chuck D, among others). Comfortingly straightforward, Meat and Bone finds a snarling, invigorated Jon Spencer just being Jon Spencer — serving up scuzzed out, chop-and-paste blues rock to the screeching max. “I remember the 1990s,” growls Spencer in Meat and Bone’s second track, and by the time you’ve gotten that far in the album, so do you.

 

Artist: A Place to Bury Strangers

Album: Worship

Label: Dead Oceans

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List Number: 7

A Place to Bury Strangers
Worship

Shame the album title World of Noise was already taken (flashback: that’s Everclear’s first album), but Worship makes a good second choice: the Brooklyn trio wear their influences on their sleeve, and their third full-length is full of openhearted reverence for those idols. As usual, the band borrows most liberally from the Jesus & Mary Chain, merging earsplitting shoegaze textures with gloomy post-punk. This time around, though, there’s a bit less Psychocandy and a bit more Automatic bleeding through — especially in the controlled industrial-punk of “You Are the One” and the shattering scuzz assault of “Revenge”. APTBS is known as the “Loudest Band in New York” for a reason, and Worship’s deafening roars pays off well in the live department. Between the flashing strobe lights and the hurling amps, no other 2012 show made me fear for my life quite like this one.

 

Artist: Odonis Odonis

Album: Hollandaze

Label: Fat Cat

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List Number: 6

Odonis Odonis
Hollandaze

Odonis Odonis is the project of DIY Toronto punks Jarod Gibson, Denholm Whale, and frontman Dean Tzenos. They describe their mission as a “gum-splattered ménage of surf-gaze, industrial and lo-fi,” which is to say that the surf-tinged guitar chord and spring-reverb slide riff that begins the album isn’t some ironic joke — it’s a literal descent into Hollandaze’s thick, sun-splattered sludge, where surf-rock impulses war with an ugly industrial sheen. The centerpiece of sorts is “Seedgazer”, a six-minute drone-rock whir of guitar machinations, vocal mumbles, and an eerily looped low vocal moan.

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Artist: The Men

Album: Open Your Heart

Label: Sacred Bones

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List Number: 5

The Men
Open Your Heart

I imagine the Men would feel awkward popping up on this list, surrounded by acts as stylistically distinctive as Lightning Bolt and White Suns. By comparison, the frustratingly ungoogleable Brooklyn band is something of a chameleon, shuffling between ‘90s-era indie-rock disguises with fitful abandon; they claim to have listened to everything from John Fahey to Cheap Trick while making the record. On “Please Don’t Go Away” they are masterful Loveless revivalists; the title track that follows sounds more like a Dinosaur Jr. reunion than the Dinosaur Jr. reunion; and “Candy” is slacker country to the fuzzy-eyed max. It goes on, and Open Your Heart is far from perfect, but it’s imperfect in the spirit of the best college cover bands: sloppy, impassioned, and with reverence for their influences even while thumbing their nose in the same direction.

 

Artist: White Suns

Album: Sinews

Label: Load

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List Number: 4

White Suns
Sinews

Inspiring descriptors like “Jesus-Lizard-on-rabies” (Spin) and “peaks of punishing discord” (Olive Music), White Suns are a burst of candy-coated joy from Brooklyn’s pigfuck scene. The trio’s latest, Sinews, is a blistering, punishingly dense squall of a follow-up to 2011’s Waking in the Reservoir. If I’m going to use rock critic buzzwords as hackneyed as “blistering” and “squall”, I may as well reserve it for a record with track titles like “Flesh Vault” and “Fire Sermon”, but Sinews lives up to the talk with its rousing 33 minutes of hellish dissonance (“Temple”), unnerving monologues (“Flesh Vault”), and what sounds like a dead cat being dragged across a guitar neck while an amp is lit on fire (“Oath”).

 

Artist: METZ

Album: METZ

Label: Sub Pop

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METZ
METZ

Metz opens with the aptly titled “Headache”, a pulverizing shock of thrashing drums, full-bodied noise guitar, and frontman Alex Edkins’ wail. It’s equal parts Drive Like Jehu, Jesus Lizard, and No Age — a sweat-stained love letter to the influences that pervade this Toronto band’s brief but intensely urgent debut. Metz has been performing together for five years to produce these 29 minutes, and it shows. There’s a startling degree of energy and noise throughout; it’s compressed into tight, yelping blasts of post-hardcore (highlights: “Knife in the Water”, “Sad Pricks”) that’s full of boomingly distorted drums (think Steven Drozd sped up) and searing guitar, and it all sounds positively huge. Overheard at the band’s CMJ set: “I don’t want to be able to hear anything when I leave here.” Cue up “Headache” enough times and you’ll feel the same.

 

Artist: Cloud Nothings

Album: Attack on Memory

Label: Carpark

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Cloud Nothings
Attack on Memory

Dylan Baldi likes to joke that Steve Albini doesn’t remember what his record even sounds like (Baldi: “he played Scrabble on Facebook almost the entire time; I learned some Scrabble tricks”), but Cloud Nothings fans won’t soon forget what Steve Albini sounds like. Attack on Memory was recorded in the room where Albini has worked for 20 years, and it contains all the hallmarks: the thumping, bone-dry drums, the unforgiving dynamics, the stripped down instrumentation, even the screaming; maybe that’s just inspired by Albini’s presence, but it must mean something that both epic album openers end with Baldi shrieking his lungs out. Like Albini’s best work before it, it’s harsh, forceful, and immediately grabbing.

But not all the credit belongs to Albini. Baldi and co. focused their songwriting and tightened their instrumental attack tenfold, resulting in pummeling noise-rock (“No Sentiment”, “No Future/No Past”), driving pop-punk (“Stay Useless”), and a furious instrumental buildup (“Wasted Days”). No future, no past indeed — Attack on Memory obliterates the band’s 2011 self-titled debut to bits. As Baldi smartly put it, “The album is an attack on the memory of what people thought the band was.”

 

Artist: Swans

Album: The Seer

Label: Young God

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Swans
The Seer

The Seer is a leviathan magnum opus of a record, but describing it seems pointless. Frontman Michael Gira already nailed it — with more precision, eloquence, and authority than any of us could muster. “The Seer took 30 years to make,” Gira wrote, capturing the record’s tremendous, two-hour scope. “It’s the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I’ve ever made, been involved in or imagined. But it’s unfinished, like the songs themselves. . . . The frames blur, blend and will eventually fade.” Who can top that?

I’ll add this. For decades, much of the critical discourse surrounding Swans’ work has focused on the clattering gloom and doom pervading their records. It’s not cheery, and if you follow them back to their ‘80s heyday, it’s often downright punishing. But between the half-hour drone pieces (the colossal title track) and obliterating feedback lurches (“93 Ave. Blues” is a stunner), The Seer is remarkable for how much Gira’s brightness shines through its staggering length. It’s particularly evident on the album’s second disc. There’s Karen O’s startlingly gorgeous guest spot, “Song for a Warrior”, with its stirring piano twinkles and weary hopefulness. There’s “Avatar”, a dramatic battle cry of galloping percussion and bells and piano. And — in the album’s finest moment — there’s “A Piece of the Sky”, a 19-minute epic of clamorous drone soundscapes that erupt into perhaps the most ringingly triumphant guitar climax of Swans’ rich career.

“My light pours out of my mouth,” Gira sings in “The Seer Returns”. “My life pours into your mouth.” There’s light in The Seer, even while the mountains are crumbling and the canyons thundering.