#30 The Bronzed Chorus: Aki

OK, reality nerds, I admit: this album was actually released first released in June 2023. I was first introduced to this art rock masterwork when rounding up Seth Manchester’s 2023 records, and was so blown away that I cheekily decided to consider it for the 2024 list. Or, to quote: “holy shit, the Big Beat impact of ‘Aki’ by The Bronzed Chorus on June 9th?? I love that shit, it’s also on NE2024″. I also decided to consider records by Asher White, Jaye Jayle, and Oxbow, which were all pretty great records but didn’t quite make this increasingly elite list. One other album… maybe did… No spoilers.

But The Bronzed Chorus, man, they made a 2023 album so good that it’s the scientifically proven, objective thirtieth best album of 2024. That’s quite a flex.

The problem is… I have next to no idea who this band are…

They are made up of Adam Joyce on the guitar, and Brennen O’Brien on the keyboards and drums. They’re from Greensboro, North Carolina and have, in their own words, been “writing complicated music since 2006”. I think that 18 year career has birthed four albums and one EP, but I’ve read conflicting reports , and obviously Spotify is never to be trusted. I learned from a 2016 piece that “Joyce loves using octave pedals throughout nearly all of his tracks“. In 2017, Circuit Sweet described them as “Greensboro, NC’s favorite instrumental duo”. Their MySpace page is pretty barren. I found one review of this album online, by a fellow WordPress blogger/weirdo. I gave the post its second ever ‘like’*. In fact, if you Google ‘the bronzed chorus aki’, you only need to get to third page before…

(*I’m actually being intellectually dishonest there: I make a point of claiming the article only ever getting two ‘likes’ somehow means that it’s rarely been read. But actually, I know from experience how rare anyone ever bothering to ‘like’ a WordPress post is. You might also need to have a WordPress account, so fuck that, right? I honestly think this blog has got less than ten likes in total, ever. And I’ve feuded with Pusha T!)

There’s some alien language, a completely different album on Bandcamp, there’s my one sentence mention of the album last year. Lads, I appreciate the reps, but whenever this blog is highlighted your search engine optimisation is dogshit.

I’m not even 100% sure that photo I’ve used to illustrate this post is even of the actual band. I’m, like, 90% sure, but no more than that.

OK, so that’s not actually Azealia Banks’s review of The Bronze Chorus’s fourth album. It’s possibly about Matt Healy…? Who knows? I’m not sure there is a literal meaning behind the piece, and I find that the greatest art often defies easy categorisation.

Whomever these magicians are though, they have crafted something truly spectacular with ‘Aki’. The second of NE2024’s trilogy of mind expanding, gall bladder enlarging math/art/mart noise rock, ‘Aki’ is an absolute steamroller of a record. It’s a mammoth shitting boulders heavy enough to break through the ice age. It’s an album the Greeks used to play to scare the Gods back up Mount Olympus. It’s an album that will strip the bricks from the walls of your house, but you won’t mind because the music here is a substance stronger than anything previously known to man. It will keep you safe. Ain’t no burglar touching your shit. This album blew all their fucking faces off. It’s not subtle, perhaps, but subtly is for cowards who aren’t prepared for the almighty truth that this album presents

That this gorgeous cacophony of noise is made by human beings at all is unbelievable enough, but the fact that it’s just two standard blokes that I basically have just been able to find the names of makes it all the more incredible. It rises above the similarly veined latest by And So I Watch You From Afar with its wider use of keyboard sonics and electronic music to buttress the frequently mindblowing guitar and drum interplay

And, yeah, OK, I can imagine how it might be deemed a bit much in places, and perhaps sonic jagged lightning bolts scratching the walls of Zeus’s urethra as it slaps you across the cheeks might not be for everyone. It is exhilarating, and yet it is also exhausting. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not for every time. But it hits often, and it hits hard.

Good luck, you Bronzed Choruses you, whoever you are…

But naming the album after Purple Aki was a bit odd, don’t you think?

Metacritic:

lol, yeah right, come on

The Album Title As AI Image

Is… Is that The Bronzed Chorus?? Or at least roughly three fifths of them?? Do they actually just exist in AI??