Natural Snow Buildings - Daughter of Darkness (2009)
Official | RYM
Eerie, heavy droning folk. Sounds like it was made by ghosts of medieval plagues. I can't say I'm intimately familiar with it since it's seven hours long, but every time I've listened to it in installments it's left a massive impression on me.
Official | RYM
Nina Simone is my favorite singer. Her voice is so strange and strong and beautiful and is perfect for this bluesy vocal jazz. Simone's performance of "Strange Fruit" is the most powerful I know of. It being in an otherwise fun album is like war/genocide photographs being published in a newspaper alongside the sports and comics pages.
Official | RYM
Religious/classical Sufi music from Pakistan. I'm definitely not well-versed in this type of music but Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's performance here is amazing and the music is so incredibly energetic and infectious.
Official | RYM
Opeth's unique brand of progressive death metal mixed with gothic folk/rock hit its apex here. Some of the best songwriting and performances across the entire metal landscape.
Official | RYM
Pat Schneeweis has been making drug-fueled anarchist folk-punk under a bunch of different names since he was a teenager. A lot of it is pretty awful, some of it is brilliant, and it's all near to my heart. His post-rehab songs about sobriety are incredibly uplifting but his post-rehab songs about the futility and naivety of anarchism are bittersweet at best. Still, there's an overarching positivity in his later music that consistently shines through. This is a big compilation of some of his later songs.
Official | RYM
Perfect modern pop-punk/emo with mature songwriting. Taps into the zeitgeist of economic pessimism most American millenials and gen-z folks are feeling.
