Noise Pollution #27: Christmas Miracles
A little over a year ago I moved from, what was at the time, a pretty terrible neighborhood. I’d had two homicides on my block within a calendar year of each other, one of which I actually witnessed, plus it felt like I couldn’t look out my window without seeing a stranger’s dick as they were pissing on my trash cans. We only moved because our landlord sold the property to someone who stopped performing maintenance and told us they were going to demolish the building (a pre-Civil War house) to build condos. Twelve months later the neighborhood looks way different, there’s now a bunch of trendy bars, apartments, shops etc. Even the neighborhood crack house burned down. But my old house is still there, with our unit sitting abandoned while our neighbors, for whatever reason, still live in the apartment on the other side of it, stalling the multi-million dollar real estate venture in what I can only say warms my heart. Why do I bring this up? Because Paypal keeps switching my fucking address to my old building, generally when I’m buying shit on Bandcamp, so every so often I have to travel out there to see if anything was sent. It was especially rainy the last week or so, so of course something was sitting on the porch.
You can tell the neighborhood is changing because it had been there for at least a week and I once had a pumpkin stolen off the porch within two hours of fucking putting it there. The fucking box squished it was so saturated. It just fell off the contents like a scene out of a burn ward. Inside this miserable morass of cardboard and sadness was my copy of Somme’s Prussian Blood, a record I had been waiting over a year to come out on vinyl, a record that I set an alarm to order since it’s from fucking England, and a record that, if it was ruined, would be impossible to get another copy without paying a flippers ransom or, frankly, blowing someone. And I don’t like feeling like a whore.
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It was pristine. Not even the corners showed any signs of wear. I’ve listened to the fucking thing at least 5 or 6 times since plucking it off the porch a week or so ago with no noticeable warping or whatever sound tragedy would occur being left in the rain for fuck knows how long. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. I’d already really enjoyed this record since the cassette version’s release in 2021 but now it occupies a special place in my collection, like the little engine that could. Now, if my copy of the most recent Circle of Ouroborus would stop being stuck in customs that would be a Christmas miracle.
I spend a lot of time looking/listening to ambient ASMR scenes, especially at work since I can leave them on as background noise and no one can really strike up a conversation about music with me because of it. Did you know there’s a new Metallica song? The 65 year old at the front of the house thinks I might like it because of my tattoos. I’d rather be caught with Dagon’s hard drive than have those conversations at this point in my life. These types of videos, that generally show some kind of digitized calming scene with some animation and nature sounds/quiet music are really good for anxiety and decompressing as well. Just don’t check into the comments unless you want something innocent and pure to be ruined for you, like your significant other shitting into the bed on the first night of your honeymoon. I have a Christmas livestream going right now and just looked at the comments, which are all bible quotes and porn links, just in case I forgot this was America in 2022. There was also this:
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Jesus Christ, Lauren.
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My favorite of these channels is Calmed By Nature, who put a lot of effort into the animation and design of their work, especially during Halloween and Christmas. I used to think paying as much attention to these things meant that I’d given up some vital piece of my identity and youth but then I realized I’m almost 45 and maybe a few months away from being unfuckable (if I’m being optimistic) so I don’t care.
The early part of December brings me back to 1995 when I first heard Desultory on “The Hours of Desolation” and ordered Bitterness, which was delivered that first week in December. As I wasn’t super intune with the underground history of Swedish death metal at the time I was mostly just familiar with Entombed, Dismember and Grave, so the introduction of Desultory to the fold was really welcome.
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Desultory occupy that weird space that exists in genres, where they’re a killer band who just never seemed to have the break that the more well known “classic” bands had. I don’t want to say it’s the silver medal position on the podium because that’s demeaning to the quality of those bands. Best example I can give would be Mudhoney to Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
Bitterness is a fucking banger of a record, one that’s aged beautifully over the last few decades and is miles ahead of the pack of uninteresting and inspired “OSDM” shit publicists like jamming down our throats. Melodic and catchy, it’s also got enough teeth to it to satisfy the need for aggressive HM2 death metal with honey smooth soloing.
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For the holidays that year one of my friends picked up their first record for Metal Blade, Into Eternity, an equally stellar record, albeit with a little more bite and less polish than Bitterness. If you’re unfamiliar with either record and enjoy old school Swedish death metal with a bit of a melodic bent (without going into In Flames territory) then I recommend both records highly. The one that came after, Swallow the Snake, is dogshit on the face of it being a fellatio joke and just a terrible, terrible album. I know they’ve reformed and done a few records but I’ve never taken the time to check them out. Regardless, these two always remind me of the holidays which I’m sure is a sentiment that only I share.
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I forgot to mention last time but I’ve now been doing this column for a solid year. I’ve gotten a nice amount of positive feedback from it and I wanted to say that I appreciate that people take the time to read whatever horseshit tickled my fancy that week. There’ll be plenty more to come. Next time we’ll talk about childhood, Christmas, and sound design. I’m sure you’re just as excited as I am.
