As physical releases become less and less relevant to a project's conceptual rollout (how many records pressed onto two vinyl 12"s get marketed as 'double albums' these days?), the lines between LPs and EPs are blurred beyond recognition. Kanye West can put out a 24 minute project and demand it be received with the seriousness of an 'album'; Sufjan Stevens can drop an hour long EP bigger than several of his 'proper' albums and it gets swept under the canonical rug.
My solution isn't any less arbitrary but it's more consistent: anything than runs for more than half an hour qualifies as a 'full-length release'; anything under ends up here, in the land of musical journeys cut intentionally short. Anyways, that's enough rambling – somebody's written a thinkpiece on this already. There were a load of great short releases this year (though that may just be my obsessively listening habits talking); some of those that just missed the cut were the Denzel Curry/Kenny Beats collab, Soakie's self-titled debut and Shygirl's ALIAS. Out of the 30 I listened to, these are my five favourite.
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5
Backxwash
STIGMATA EP
(n/a, 13:47) [CA/ZM]
horrorcore • industrial hip hop
"The nightmares seem tame
Compared to the pigs I've met"
2020 was a huge year for Ashanti Mutinta, though it’d feel a little tone-deaf to call it a great one. Better known by her stage name Backxwash, the Zambian-born artist relocated to Montréal as a teenager, spending years grinding in its experimental music scene. And in many ways, the hard work has paid off: high profile nods from Exclaim! and The Needle Drop were added to in October when her breakout album (the brilliantly-titled God Has Nothing to Do With This, Leave Him Out of It) won Canada's Polaris Music Prize.
Listen to her music however, and it’s clear the newfound success will do little to dismantle the kind of existential threats Mutinta is faced with as a trans woman of colour. “Shit is bleak / But it feels like it is harder for me”, she puts it plainly on “Psalm 23”.
God Has Nothing. . . will see a lot of deserved praise in the coming weeks (Exclaim! have already named it their album of the year), and clocking in at 22 minutes it would have qualified for this list. But I think it’s her similarly religious-themed STIGMATA EP that’s the real gem. At just three killer tracks and an instrumental outro, there’s not a second to waste as Mutinta relays the inner discord from her conservative upbringing and her non-conformist gender: “Exiled by my own people / Where’s my mark of the beast?”.
In repossessing female subjectivity in a male-dominated genre, her work reminds me of Kristin Hayter’s. Hayter reframes gory misogynistic imagery common in extreme metal lyrics by instead recounting the “very dark shit [that] has actually been visited” on her and other women; Mutinta meanwhile replaces horrorcore’s overblown violence with a legitimate fear of both far-right zealots and the law enforcement officers meant to protect her. It might make for grim listening, but there’s no denying STIGMATA’s uncompromising clarity.
4
Serpent Column
Endless Detainment
(Mystíkaos, 21:58) [US]
black metal • mathcore
Tighten the area to increase the pressure. This is the guiding principle to Serpent Column’s Endless Detainment. Its nine song tracklist is only one fewer than last year’s Mirror in Darkness, but here the total runtime is sliced in half. Not even the longest cut reaches the four minute mark; guitarist James Hamzey and drummer M. Holloway refuse to afford these snarling, muscular outbursts the luxury of outstaying their welcome.
Even as each writhing mass desperately vies to extend its short lifespan, these songs are hardly malformed afterthoughts. Following the assault of opener “Pantheoclasm”, “Violence Aesthete” integrates into its own rhythm the lurching death throes of its predecessor, before it buries them under relentless blast beats and tremolo-picked guitar no less moving than the most anguished atmospheric black metal. All that, in barely two minutes.
Calling this EP ‘not for the faint of heart’ is enough of an understatement it verges on being facetious. Like the most rewarding tough listens, this isn’t a beast to be tamed, it’s a majesty to be awed. Come to terms with your own insignificance and you’ll find you can’t look away.
3
Jadasea & MIKE
Old Earth
(n/a, 11:41) [GB/US]
experimental hip hop • abstract hip hop
"I ain't buying time, it was sold out"
On his 2018 cut “Rottweiler”, Michael Jordan Bonema is so chilled out, he can’t even bring himself to finish letting you know: “You can tell just by my name that I don’t give a…”
Under the no-frills pen-name MIKE, Bonema has spent the last half decade curating a signature blend of lo-fi hip hop and hypnagogic pop (hipnagogia? hypnagogic hop?), turning heads all over the East Coast in the process. Don’t let this carefree attitude distract you; Bonema’s instrumentals are invariably meticulous, often honing in on some momentary waver in a 60s soul vocal line to the point you can’t unhear its underlying melancholy. Aside from collaborations with New York sound art collective Standing on the Corner, Bonema’s production style has caught the ear of Earl Sweatshirt, earning him a name drop on “The Mint” and a support slot on Earl’s 2019 FIRE IT UP tour.
“Rottweilers”’s music video pits the New Jersey rapper on the opposite side of the Atlantic. The entire first minute is a single excruciating panning shot that refuses to glance up from the dirt and grit of London’s pavements. I'm so accustomed to the city’s drab streets, it’s only when the camera eventually pulls up that I realise there’s a greyscale colour gradient over the footage.
Much like everything else in his eyeline, Bonema’s view of the UK has never been romantic, and so the blunt pragmatism in his lyrics is never at odds with London native Jadasea. The two have appeared on a handful of tracks together (along with Earl, Jadasea was the only guest to appear on Bonema’s 2020 LP Weight of the World), but Old Earth sees the duo trade back-to-back bars for nearly eleven and a half minutes straight. Weight of the World might have failed to live up to Bonema’s previous two mixtapes, and his other EP this year (as dj blackpower) no doubt impressed, but the production on Old Earth is a career high. None of the project’s six untitled tracks fail to evoke a nostalgia that’s at once haunted and starry-eyed, but it’s the pained strings from closer “track F” that live on in my waking dreams.
2
Slauson Malone
Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak)
(n/a, 24:14) [US]
neo-soul • sound collage
"Lower esteem, all on my knees
Praying for weeks, but He never speaks"
The Germans are often ridiculed for their habit of constructing obscenely long compound words. As Mark Twain once quipped: “Some German words are so long that they have a perspective”. Theirs might not be the most elegant solution, yet I’ve always been envious of how their individual words can convey complex emotion where English has to scrabble for a concessive clause or conjunction. The closest my mother tongue can compare, is when it artificially constructs them from other languages. ‘Nostalgia’ – from the Greek words nostos (a homecoming) and algos (pain) – is a good example; originally coined by a 17th century Swiss doctor to describe traumatised homesick soldiers, it now evokes all the nuance we associate with memory, comfort, longing, regret.
The title of Jasper Marsalis’ second EP as Slauson Malone encompasses all this and more. The collision of two German words ‘die Vergangenheit’ (the past) and ‘die Bewältigung’ (coping with) first came into use as a post-WWII theoretical term to describe the nation’s reckoning with its immediate history, though it has since been used to describe similar cultural processes elsewhere.
Marsalis’ use here isn’t monumental, it’s personal. Having split from sound art collective Standing on the Corner (see above entry), last year he released his solo debut A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018, a feverish half hour of experimental hip hop and ambient plunderphonics marked by a brooding air of apocalypse plain even in its opening line: “The world is coming to an end”.
On the artwork for Vergangen…, the fiery black sun from A Quiet…’s cover has been shrunk down to a tattoo on Marsalis’ forearm. Vergangen… isn’t interested in cataclysm, it examines how each of us are shaped by our own immediate pasts, our individual traumas. It’s a motif made literal by the samples and lyrics from A Quiet… reopened here like old wounds, by the nagging question that refuses to stay forgotten: “Are you scared?”. To someone in the eye of their own storm, the devastation might as well be world-ending.
1
Mach-Hommy
Mach's Hard Lemonade
(n/a, 22:07) [US]
hip hop
"'That boy hell
And that's what everybody been saying since the seventh grade
I think that boy twelve'
Don't shoot!
I turned eleven years old twice!"
Behind all the posturing, the callouts, the shifting rivalries and mounting bravado, hip hop’s unsung heroes have always carved out a space for themselves beyond the spotlight’s glare. Turning his back on the planet-sized personality cults he felt were clogging up the airwaves in the 90s, the late great Daniel Dumile started wearing a metal mask to obscure his identity in the style of comic book supervillain Doctor Doom. “The villain represents anybody”, he told an audience in one of his rare in-person interviews, “anybody in here could wear the mask and be the villain”. Ironically, by donning a metal mask in all media and public appearances for more than twenty years, Dumile ended up creating the most unique visage in hip hop history.
Mach-Hommy is taking these ideas of rap ego death to their extreme. The Haitian-American artist is loosely associated with the collective and record label Griselda, but any finer details about his private life are a mystery. His face in pictures (if you can find any) isn’t covered by an imposing metal mask but by a nondescript bandana. His real name is said to have been briefly added to an entry made for him on a fan wiki for Earl Sweatshirt; now the entry sits ominously void of any information whatsoever.
Bar a few exceptions, almost all of his catalogue is unavailable to stream online. To even listen to Mach’s Hard Lemonade on release day I had to download a free trial of TIDAL (fortunately, both this record and the excellent Earl Sweatshirt-produced EP Fêtes des Morts aka Día de las Muertos have since been added to Spotify and YouTube). I’d buy myself a copy if physical Mach-Hommy releases weren’t so far out of my price range; a CD of the album sets you back $111.11, the vinyl $222.22, and the deluxe edition double that again. To confirm, those figures are not typos. Unsurprisingly, Mach-Hommy is not attached to any label, and it should seem improbable that an independent, anonymous artist with almost no music online and physical copies levelled at extortionate prices might gain any kind of following.
Yet Mach-Hommy has managed to make material that is so beloved by his fans, they will fork out literally thousands to get their hands on it. Vinyl copies of his cult-classic The G.A.T... (Gospel According To…) were on sale for an eye-watering $3,000. I say “were” because every one of those three grand copies sold out. It’s not just his quality that’s exceptional either; The G.A.T... was the seventh of seven albums he released in 2017, alongside another four EPs. With Mach’s Hard Lemonade being his only release this year, 2020 was relatively quiet for the rapper; the previous two years had seen him add no less than six albums and three EPs to his prolific discography.
Judging by the novelty prices most of these releases are set at ($111.11, $222.22, $333.33 etc.), it’s unclear whether he actually expects people to buy them, especially when it’s so easy for those curious to download them online for free (not that I’d know anything about that). But in the context of Dumile rejecting corporate ideas of how hip hop ‘should’ be marketed, Mach-Hommy’s radical anti-commercialism makes total sense. “What’s pocket change? What’s house money? / What’s stock exchange? All I know is clout, dummy” he tells us in the opening lines to “Squeaky Hinge”, before flipping the boast in the titles to Clipse’s twin mixtapes (We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 1 & 2) into something intangible: “Mach-Hommy must’ve saw something inside of his core / Everybody got it for the cheap, he got it for more”. Elsewhere he similarly pits the immediacy of commercial success against the longevity of critical acclaim. On “Marshmallow Test”, Mach-Hommy compares the Stanford University experiment – in which children left alone with a marshmallow were told if they didn’t eat it after 15 minutes, they’d get another one – to the exploitative contracts dangled by major labels in front of naïve young rappers, reeled in by the promise of a quick buck. “One for you, One-two for me / What’s fun for you, is just goof to me”, he notes dryly over the chorus’ heart-stopping chipmunk soul sample.
Mach’s Hard Lemonade doesn’t need to be on Spotify for me to know it was my most listened project this year. The short runtime landing it on this list doesn’t hurt, but its the seamless pacing that keeps me locked in. Whenever I am forced to interrupt a listening session, without fail I’m left with the same hollow feeling as knocking over a house of cards. Where the absence of frequent collaborator AugustFanon for several different producers might’ve yielded a record full of competing personalities, instead it’s as if each track is aware of its individual function as a part of a greater whole. Before we’re allowed to wallow too long in “Marshmallow Test”’s dejected cynicism, we’re swept up onto our feet by boom bap banger “Smoked Maldon”, then given a chance to catch our breath with the spoken word interlude “Photocopy Sloppy (Dump Gawd)”, the only track to fade into a total silence coming at almost exactly the album’s halfway mark.
As long as Mach-Hommy’s older releases remain off streaming services, their mystique will likely keep them on a pedestal. But don’t believe the hype: Mach’s Hard Lemonade is quite simply his best work yet.
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