Music I Liked – Chthonic, Phosphorescent, Adwaith, Ylja

I’ve missed a few Monday music posts, but not for lack of listening. I’ve got quite a backlog of music I liked and was too busy to write up. But now I’m going to start catching up. Some of the things I liked lately are Chthonic, Phosphorescent, Adwaith, and Ylja.

Chthonic

Chthonic offer so many of my catnips: Asian history and mythology, badass female bassist, political awareness and action, incorporation of traditional instruments – not to mention the music is good. I’m fairly new to Chthonic, though, so Bu-Tik is the only album I’m really familiar with. So I was stoked to see that serving in Taiwan’s legislature was not an obstacle to release of a new album this October, Battlefields of Asura. For the video below, the always-visionary Chthonic worked with frequent collaborator, director Chuang Chi-wen. It’s a mostly animated homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, filtered through a lens of Buddhist heaven and hell. The rest of the album rips, too.

Phosphorescent

Like just about everybody else, I came in on Phosphorescent at Muchacho, but even then, it was one of those albums that I heard a lot but never really listened to. Then I saw them play twice at Pickathon this summer and they completely converted me. Thanks to Pickathon, I was already familiar with several of the songs on the new album, C’est La Vie, but that didn’t make me any less excited for the album’s release last month.

Adwaith

Speaking of catnip – it’s not just Icelandic, folks. Any pop music in foreign languages, especially dying/ endangered languages from cultures that hold my fascination will hook me every time. So when I saw Adwaith on Brooklyn Vegan? I had to check out this Welsh trio that with a bit of a ’90s aesthetic that performs in Welsh. That wasn’t very easy, since they aren’t on Bandcamp. I finally tracked down their album Melyn on their label website. I love how on some songs, like “Y Diweddaraf,” it feels like English but you can’t make out the words; on others, like “Fel I Fod,” I could swear they’re singing in Icelandic.

Ylja

When I was in Iceland for the first time, at Airwaves 2012, nearly every band I interviewed, be they indie folk or blackened death metal, recommended I see Ylja. I tried to, but their off-venue set was so packed I couldn’t get in.

Icelanders are powerfully connected to their heritage. A couple years ago, an album of chanted traditional rhymur landed in the top 20 list in Iceland. The first time I actually heard Ylja, I put them in that category of “old stuff Icelanders are attached to that aren’t particularly interesting to others.” Maybe I’ve just spent too much time submersed in those sorts of things in the intervening years, but I liked Ylja’s latest traditional folk release, Dætur, especially the creepy track Móðir mín í kví, kví .