Splendor & Misery - clipping.
Recommended by: robpettitt.bsky.social
When I asked for album recommendations on Bsky earlier this week I expected that I'd end up listening to a lot of things I didn't like, a few things I enjoyed, and maybe one or two albums I loved. I didn't expect to find an entirely new personality, and I definitely didn't expect that to happen within a couple of days of starting to work through these suggestions.
As I write this I'm on my sixth front-to-back listen if clipping.'s Splendor & Misery. This is very much a life-altering album for me. This has impacted my brain like a penetrating captive bolt on an abattoir floor. Listening to the opening moments of Splendor & Misery - the ominous drones of Long Way Away (Intro) giving way to the rapid-fire bars of The Breach, monotonal aggression vomited over ambient industrial grinding, dropping into harsh noises and weird glitching and shrieking, the beat finally, slowly creeping in on All Black as the noises and drones start to swell into something approaching actual chords - makes me feel the same way I felt when I first saw the opening moments of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. This slow drip-feeding of the best on All Black has immediately become one of my favourite moments on any album I've ever listened to, the slow sound of order forming out of the controlled chaos of the opening tracks.
This is a record that demands attention. My first listen was sitting on a concrete bench in a public square outside a McDonald's, and for the 40 minutes I was sitting there I was entirely transported. My eyes may have been open but my brain was fully focused inward. In trying to write this post, the album still playing as I work, I keep finding myself pulled away from my own words and thoughts to drift in gushing white noise and be crushed under the weight of deep space machinery.
I could go on and on about how much I love this album, about how the slow introduction of field songs and spirituals slowly made me realise what the subject matter of this album actually is, about how Story 5's moment of pure beauty and calm amid the unrelenting ugliness of the rest of the album took my breath away, about how the hammering intro to Baby Don't Sleep hit me like an industrial drill to the face off the back of it. But I won't.
This is my new favourite record. I'm going to go and listen to it again.