1 |
Temperance |
"Diamanti" |
Diamanti |
The best rock band in the world, at the moment, is a melodic power-metal quintet from Milan, Italy. |
2 |
Aephanemer |
"Le Radeau de La Méduse - French Version" |
A Dream of Wilderness |
It must be exciting to be them, but then it's exciting to be anybody, |
3 |
The Last Martyr |
"Freaking Out" |
single |
alive to hear the sound of your own voice |
4 |
Roses Unread |
"Creatures" |
single |
among the vibrations that encase your head. |
5 |
Theatres Des Vampires |
"Lady Bathory" |
In Nomine Sanguinis |
We are the descendants of demons |
6 |
Rage Of Light |
"Breaking Infinity" |
single |
and illusions, |
7 |
Beneath The Silence |
"Fear" |
single |
shaped into resonant vessels |
8 |
Dust in Mind |
"Speak For the Voiceless" |
Ctrl |
by our own yearning, |
9 |
MIST |
"SHADOW GAME" |
single |
and then flung into the first available maelstrom |
10 |
Converge |
"Lord of Liars" |
Bloodmoon: I |
or the next. |
11 |
Temperance |
"The Night Before the End" |
Diamanti |
Master one second of the day and you establish recurring joy. |
12 |
Lovebites |
"Nameless Warrior" |
single |
Take a single breath |
13 |
GARNiDELiA |
"Live On!" |
Duality Code |
and you hold one atom of everything: |
14 |
LiSA |
"白銀" |
明け星 / 白銀 6 |
substances of metric value, |
15 |
Fiore |
"BRAVE" |
single |
arguments against surrender |
16 |
BiS |
"スモーキン・ビリー" |
single |
formulated in indecipherable clamouring truths, |
17 |
//ネコプラ// |
"冒険少女" |
single |
indexes of the beginnings of unabandonable stories, |
18 |
NEMOPHILA |
"HYPNOSIS" |
single |
manifestos for and against sleep and |
19 |
AdFicTioN |
"New Awakening" |
single |
memoirs of everything that came after everything. |
20 |
TsuShiMaMiRe |
"わたしワイン" |
酒まみれ |
You have a corpus of ideas you have carried with you |
21 |
AprilBlue |
"臨海鉄道" |
いつかの海 |
about how tall you are, |
22 |
Hikicomoteikoku |
"Asaki-Asamashi" |
single |
and what you are willing to oppose under pressure, |
23 |
MAN WITH A MISSION |
"yoake" |
single |
and what you would show up to stand guard over |
24 |
Novelbright |
"ワンルーム" |
single |
during moments of apparent threatlessness. |
25 |
Rhythmic Toy World |
"ヒトノカケラ" |
EFFECT |
These things comprise your body in a moral dimension |
26 |
UVERworld |
"AVALANCHE" |
single |
projected dimly into this one. |
27 |
Same old Same old |
"Walk slowly" |
Our father 4 |
Movement in the one we see corresponds only erratically |
28 |
Sunrise Skater Kids |
"Dear Maria, Count Me In - Japanese Version" |
single |
to elevations and coordinates in the one where we wished to be judged, |
29 |
Mr.FanTastiC |
"グッドラック" |
single |
and this disconnection is how moral behavior is a choice instead of an impulse, |
30 |
Nergard |
"Blood Red Skies" |
Blood Red Skies +1 |
and its margin of error is how moral systems become calculus instead of algebra. |
31 |
GIANT |
"Let Our Love Win" |
single |
You might imagine that all the chords have been played in all the relevant orders by now, |
32 |
Crashdïet |
"No Man's Land" |
single |
leaving innovation to heresy, |
33 |
The Ferrymen |
"One Word" |
single |
and this is as wrong as any scriptural conviction |
34 |
Fugatta |
"The Dark Land We Belong" |
The Darkest Planet |
about what must be true |
35 |
Arjen Anthony Lucassen's Star One |
"Fate of Man" |
single |
written in the belief that we can arrive at a silent point in the universe |
36 |
Temperance |
"Fairy Tales for the Stars" |
Diamanti |
and then stop. |
37 |
Cynic |
"In a Multiverse Where Atoms Sing" |
single |
But there is no silence. |
38 |
Cosmophobe |
"Distant Discovery" |
single |
All moral and aesthetic reasoning depends on this reality, |
39 |
Persefone |
"Merkabah" |
single |
either directly, in grotesque appeals to beauty, |
40 |
Obscura |
"Forsaken" |
A Valediction |
or implicitly, by constructing elaborately failed attempts |
41 |
Nightrage |
"Nauseating Oblivion" |
single |
to infer its negation. |
42 |
Marillion |
"Be Hard on Yourself (I) The Tear in the Big Picture" |
Be Hard on Yourself 3 |
The moment when someone comes to believe that the best band in the world is you is unmanageable, survivable only because it passes. |
43 |
Varjola |
"Fobia" |
single |
Belief is the most dangerous of the eleven irreducible fears, |
44 |
Celeste |
"Des torrents de coups" |
single |
but also the one that tastes the most like figs and aplomb. |
45 |
Messa |
"Pilgrim" |
single |
Journeys towards the intangible |
46 |
Converge |
"Viscera of Men" |
Bloodmoon: I |
navigate inhabited lands. |
47 |
Swallow The Sun |
"This House Has No Home" |
Moonflowers |
The sentries who ask your destination |
48 |
Dakhma |
"The Rite of Dominion (Shehrevar)" |
Blessings of Amurdad |
are plaintively admitting to you that they don't know |
49 |
Ars Magna Umbrae |
"Metempsychosis (Transmigration of the Soul)" |
Throne Between Worlds |
whether to guard or desert their own. |
50 |
Frostnatt |
"Om Vinteren" |
Vinterens Kaldeste Natt |
Those cities are waystations, |
51 |
Thy Worshiper |
"Straszno Tu" |
Bajki o Staruchu |
occupying interstitial spaces between assembly and disintegration. |
52 |
HÖST |
"Concrete of Mankind" |
1994 5 |
Of course most of what we build is exactly like this, |
53 |
Proscriptor McGovern’s Apsû |
"Prana Therion Akasha" |
single |
hope cantilevered artfully over inevitability. |
54 |
Violet Cold |
"Sahasrara Destruction" |
single |
This is why new cities always smell initially unconvincing, |
55 |
Sierra Leona |
"Oro" |
Oro |
until the pilgrims are diluted by travelers, |
56 |
Kuve |
"Alebrije (Edición Neón)" |
Castillos de Neón |
and allegorical boulevards sprout sidestreets with mercifully specific food stalls. |
57 |
Astropålido |
"Aun Queda para Largo" |
single |
The dimming memories of when this was all empty space |
58 |
Sergio Dalma |
"Gigantes" |
Alegría |
will be replaced by dimming memories of when everything in it was |
59 |
Straatligkinders |
"Dapper" |
Dapper +1 |
declamatorily designated in the same modernist font. |
60 |
Sdala B |
"Phambili" |
Ngiyazifela Ngawe |
The autocrats who write the regulations against the corruption of serifs and their foreign inclinations |
61 |
Moojo |
"Lost Is Lost" |
single |
have a simplicity in their mind that they want to believe describes a possible state of the world, |
62 |
Van Baxy |
"Siratou do" |
single |
the same way you might wish to declare away the time between sleepfall and waking, |
63 |
Bobomfanawepiki |
"Kukude" |
Look at me |
or any other contested space. |
64 |
Tanya Tagaq |
"Colonizer" |
Colonizer +2 |
The colonizer's fallacy is not that they bring civilization, |
65 |
Safree |
"Km de sal" |
single |
but that civilization is a thing that can be carried from one place to another, |
66 |
JVNA |
"Sins" |
Hope In Chaos |
or that forgiveness is a quality of accounting. |
67 |
Loviet |
"Pull Up" |
777 |
A phone rings in the middle of the night, |
68 |
Peakes |
"Fascination" |
Peripheral Figures |
because city gates are guarded with apps now, like anything else, |
69 |
Terror Jr |
"After All" |
Road To Grapeness |
and the sentries tap OK and meet you at the gate. |
70 |
Dessa |
"LYTP" |
single |
Kingdoms come and kingdoms go. |
71 |
Weakened Friends |
"The Last Ten" |
Quitter |
That much we accept as routine. |
72 |
Mattiel |
"Jeff Goldblum" |
single |
But you and I, we overcome inertiae to meet here. |
73 |
Fickle Friends |
"Yeah Yeah Yeah" |
Yeah Yeah Yeah 6 |
I forget whose turn it is to be the sentry, |
74 |
Dead Posey |
"sorry i'm not dead" |
single |
whose to apologize for arriving in the middle of the night or a history. |
75 |
WARGASM (UK) |
"Scratchcard Feeling" |
single |
One of us will try awkwardly to appeal to grace. |
76 |
Bob Vylan |
"GDP" |
GDP +1 |
One of us will start to ask "Where have you come from?", |
77 |
glaive |
"prick" |
single |
and then change our mind to "What brings you here?", |
78 |
RILEY THE MUSICIAN |
"Highway 65" |
Montana |
and then, looking past us into the darkness of the road that must have, wish we had had the courage to say "Where are you going?" |
79 |
James Colt |
"Finding Myself" |
single |
All of these mean "What are you running from?", |
80 |
Smrtdeath |
"sober" |
sober +2 |
but only the last one means "And can we run from it together?" |
81 |
fish narc |
"you saw me on the bus" |
single |
We fall in love with bodies in motion, |
82 |
Sorry X |
"Hit My Line" |
single |
humming and convulsing strings, |
83 |
snow ellet |
"Cannonball" |
single |
the retrospective trajectories of the things that came clanking gleamingly up to our gates in ridiculous destroyers' armor. |
84 |
OWEL |
"So It Goes" |
single |
The definitive characteristic of hope |
85 |
Tomás Urquieta |
"Oblivion" |
El David Muerte |
is that it describes things that have not yet happened to us together. |
86 |
Dahlia's Tear |
"Tomb of Forgotten Times" |
Adrift on the Edge of Infinity |
Loneliness is a line on a map that describes a potential relationship in symbols by becoming them. |
87 |
Swallow The Sun |
"This House Has No Home - Classical Version" |
Moonflowers |
There were cities made of illusions, |
88 |
Converge |
"Daimon" |
Bloodmoon: I |
populated by demons, |
89 |
Temperance |
"Follow Me" |
Diamanti |
and they had this same conversation in the middle of a illusory demonic night, |
90 |
ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION |
"ソラニン - From THE FIRST TAKE" |
single |
in front of a gate we will improvisationally stipulate, in order to understand their reluctances and restlessnesses and lonelinesses as versions of ours. |
91 |
Rioghan |
"Chandelier" |
Covers II 3 |
It matters whether they actually were, but not to us, here at the edge of their city. |
92 |
Violet Orlandi |
"In The Air Tonight - Metal Version" |
single |
We have waited for this moment all our lives, |
93 |
Saint Asonia |
"Blinding Lights" |
single |
or since the last city turned out to be cold and empty. |
94 |
Conquer Divide |
"Bad Habits" |
single |
This city full of flames will at least be neither of those things. |
95 |
The Haxans |
"Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" |
single |
Opening the gates allows the city and the world to seek a new equilibrium between curiosity and fear. |
96 |
First to Eleven |
"Iris" |
single |
We give up safety to find each other. |
97 |
Potty Mouth |
"Flat Top" |
1% Happier 4 |
The saints and the cynics are the same demons in different clothes they stole from whatever city they came from to be here. |
98 |
PG Roxette |
"Nothing Else Matters" |
single |
For a moment we are perfect, facing each other, not yet having chosen our roles, each writing our stories up until this moment when they meet. |