Tag: Auralayer Thousand Petals

Top 25 albums of 2023: #’s 15 – 11

We’ve reached my top 15 albums of the previous year, so let’s get to it.

#15: Skull Practitioners – Negative Stars

This one came to me fairly early in the year and was an immediate favorite. It’s full of jagged guitar lines, weird drum fills, and plenty of power equal to the cosmic cover imagery.

#14: Auralayer – Thousand Petals

Speaking of heavy cosmic riffs, this album from Auralayer is full of them and plenty of Buddhist philosophy to boot. This trio about floored me when I first heard this album and were one of my favorite discoveries of the year.

#13: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – The Silver Cord

Would it be a “best of” list without a King Gizz album? I mean, they release at least two albums a year, and this year they released an electro / krautrock album full of synths and drum pads that turned out to be a fun time. You can tell they enjoyed stretching muscles they don’t often use, and they filled it with references to Egyptian mythology, which just made it weirder and cooler.

12: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – The Silver Cord extended version

Yes, that’s the same cover image, and it’s almost the same album, but KGATLW decided to release two versions of the same record, with the extended version having long mixes with additional lyrics for each song – the short of which is just under eleven minutes long. It’s even better than the regular edition of the album and lets them do lengthy synth-jams that often move into rave territory.

#11: Ki Oni – A Leisurely Swim to Everlasting Life

Speaking of long synth-jams, Ki Oni‘s tribute to his deceased grandmother and his meditation on peace and death has tracks with minimum lengths of seventeen minutes, and all of them are beautiful. This is the kind of record that takes you away from anything you’re doing and drops you into a warm pool of peace and presence.

Who’s in the top ten? Come back soon and find out!

Keep your mind open.

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Review: Auralayer – Thousand Petals

Part-doom, part-post-punk, part-prog rock, part-Buddhist mantra, Auralayer‘s (Vladimir Doodle – drums, Thomas Powell – guitar and vocals, Jake Williams – bass) debut album, Thousand Petals, is a wild ride and one of the catchiest metal albums of the year.

“The Lake” opens the album with powerful double kick drums from Doodle and enough guitar fuzz from Powell and Williams to knock down a castle wall. It and the following track, “All My Time,” remind me of some of The Sword‘s early tracks with heavy riffs sometimes purposefully overwhelming the vocals. Powell’s solo on “All My Time” soars like a bird of prey swooping down on an unsuspecting mouse. “Christ Antler” roars all the way through, and “Faith to Reason” fakes you out for a moment with a short, soft intro before it unloads with cosmic rock fury. It becomes difficult to determine which of the band members is hitting their instrument the hardest during the chorus. Powell’s vocals sound like he’s shouting them from the top of a wizard’s tower.

“Shelf Black” reveals some of the band’s prog-rock influences and the vocals bring classic Agent Orange records to my mind. They ask us to give peace a chance on “Peacemonger,” but the song is anything but peaceful. It’s more like John Cena-as-the-Peacemaker kind of peace which might involve knocking you through a wall with the power of rock.

You’ll probably want to mosh during “You Walk,” a stomping, romping track that has Doodle clanging cymbals and thumping his kick drums like a happy kid as the song moves out of orbit and straight for the sun. You’ll definitely want to mosh to “Dance to Thrash” from the title alone, and Williams’ heavy bass will turn the floor to lava if you don’t get your ass moving soon. “Monstrum” closes the album with funky, fuzzy bass, a bunch of wild drum fills, and guitar work that sounds like it would be on the playlist of that weird guitar-playing dude in Mad Max: Fury Road.

This is a helluva debut, and I love how their name could be taken two different ways: “Aura Layer,” as in a layer of someone’s aura, or one of the seven chakras (and the album’s title is a reference to the crown chakra after all), or “Aural Layer,” as in a layer of sound – of which there are plenty.

Keep your mind and your chakras open.

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[Thanks to Dave at US / THEM Group.]