Seth Manchester’s 2023

Aw man, it has not been easy to keep up with Seth Manchester this year. It’s been more than five years since Seth’s otherworldly production on ‘Goodness‘ convinced me to buy every single album that Mr Manchester produced from that point onward. This has lead to around 15 further entries on this list. And a lot of death metal. Well, it stops here.

Well, kinda stops. I use Discogs to keep up with Seth, and going off that they’ve been involved in a total of forty records in 2023 (!), though that is including some rereleases and a handful of albums I can just find no other information on anywhere else. This is obviously unsustainable, especially when you consider that Manchester works on quite a few records that I do not enjoy listening to at all. But there is also some very interesting stuff that I missed out on this year that might have made the list. were I not wasting money on more instrumental noise rock.

So the Seth Manchester run will continue. I still think they’re the greatest rock producer working and they introduce me to music that I’d overwise have no chance of coming into contact with. Already on NE2023 we’ve seen the Manchester produced Lingua Ignota project, who I only know in the first place because of the Seth ties. Only, in the future I’m going to listen to an album first and then decide if it’s likely to be worth me spending money on and adding it to the Necessary Evil rotation. Yeah, I know, you probably thought I did as much already, right? Nope. I’m a fucking idiot. Anyway, I’m going to run down some of the more notable 2023 Seth credits.

And because of my delayed reaction in catching up with Seth Manchester (as you’ll experience later on in this post) we actually start in February 2022 with the release of ‘Vulnerable’ by the Chicago band Stander.

I’ve listened to this album for more than a year, it’s instrumental noise rock, why on Earth would I ever do that to myself? It’s fine, I guess. Maybe people whose brains are more hard wired to their thick rimmed glasses and skin more correctly massaged by their faded ‘1995 Vans Warped’ tour shirt will be more receptive. I really can not be so understanding of the next 2022 record:

‘Without Human Permission’ was released in April 2022 by (sigh) Equipment Pointed Ankh and – lordy-loo – it is dreadful. Unique, I’ll give them that, and maybe this is what all music will sound like to me when I’m a few years older, but an intensely obnoxious album that gives me headaches just thinking about. Seth would keep returning to Equipment Pointed Ankh throughout 2023 and that was honestly the thing that convinced me to vet all Mr Manchester releases more stringently in the future.

Finally, 2022 at least ended back on a more sensible path with the much appreciated guttural squeal of High Command (who had previously placed #80 in 2020) and their ‘Eclipse of the Dual Moons‘ record being released in November 2022. As before, this is great, fun, silly death metal. Is it something I would ever usually listen to? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

We finally enter 2023 with the January 9th release of the the pithily titled ‘Rainbow Leaving the Mollusc’ by the Rhode Island duo Reversible Light. Not on Spotify, because these are an act that makes albums consisting of two 15 minutes Kraut rock breakdowns, they are not interested in sacrificing their morals to facilitate your ease of listening. ‘Rainbow…’ is actually pretty brilliant, and would have the #58 spot on the list or something nailed this year if it existed. On January 18th there was another Equipment Pointed Ankh album, but I seriously just can’t right now.

Oh but then, but then on January 27th there was ‘Lockstep Bloodwar’, the absolutely Godlike new record by Sightless Pit (The Body’s Lee Buford and Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker). Sightless Pit’s last album reached #43 in 2020, and can we just say that this record was at #41 this year?? I think that’s my best chance of saving face, as this album should probably be a top 20 record at least. Seriously? I started wondering if there was a top 10 album I could just ‘forget’ about and put Sightless Pit in instead. An unbelievably ingenious tale on dubstep with noise metal sensibilities. Or an unbelievably ingenious take on noise metal with dubstep sensibilities. Whatever, we get to enjoy the alternative reality of The Body being fronted by Lane Shi Otayonii or freaking Gangsta Boo (who passed away just weeks before the album was released). An absolute triumph. Then, on February 9th Manchester produced the newest album by Bella Technika! I didn’t even know that existed! OK, that’s being entered into Necessary Evil 2024 (do you see how I fall behind?).

February 24th may have been Seth’s hottest day of the year. For one, it saw the incredible release by BIG|BRAVE, ‘nature morte‘, a further journey into the vast but chilling beauty that they had previously scaled on their 2022 album ‘Vital’ (#71). Bracing, euphoric, intimidating, perversely sensual – if we’ve decided that Sightless Pit are #41 can BIG|BRAVE be #42??

That same day saw the release of Seth Manchester’s most critically well received work of 2023: ‘Dogsbody’, the debut album from Brooklyn’s Model/Actriz (ranked the 42nd best album of the year by list aggregator besteveralbums.com at time of writing). This is one I did pick up (hence the album cover). It’s good – really good even – but compared to the incredible directions that BIG|BRAVE or Sightless Pit are dragging the very medium into, Model/Actriz’s slight metalification of LCD Soundsystem simply moves my bones significantly less. March 3rd saw the release of ‘Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow’, which Seth apparently recorded with babybaby_explores over the course of two days. It definitely sounds that way, which everyone involved will definitely take as a compliment. I missed it when it was released, and though it doesn’t sound like my kind of jam, I could imagine many people finding great worth in it. I also missed ‘93696’ by Liturgy, released on March 24th. On one hand, it’s 86 minutes of sort of black sort of metal, so your (and my) tolerance for that may vary wildly, but it seems to play around with the form a lot more than you might worry, and the insanity is at least beguiling. However, I am less regretful about missing the trad jazz stylings of Goldbloom. Their debut album ‘Peaked in High School’ was released on March 24th, mixed and engineered by Seth, and will never be revisited by me in the future. Maybe you’re a freak and you’ll love it? Who am I to say? April 22nd saw the belated release of the Brown Bird performance ‘Live at Machines With Magnets 3​/​24​/​2011‘, engineered by Manchester more than a decade ago.

Lot of really interesting records that I missed there, no? So obviously I just happened to pick up ‘Wrong Dream’ by Tunic (released April 28th) and got… more shouty noise rock! It’s pretty good though, and I imagine were we in a parallel universe where I wasn’t already well verse in Protomartyr doing all of this much better, I might have been wooed. It was the last Manchester album I picked up for a while, so I missed a lot of weird and wonderful stuff over the next few months. The South Hill Experiment released ‘MOONSHOTS’ on May 12th and to be honest I’m not sure what that band actually is but they seem to release new music every three minutes so I can’t keep up with that shit. Now, May 26th saw the fascinating album ‘New Excellent Woman’ by the fascinating 22 year old artist Asher White. Produced by Asher themselves, but mixed by Manchester and quite unlike anything they’ve been involved with these past few years. Boom, paid for, boom, into Necessary Evil 2024. Seth seemed to go further out of their comfort zone on May 25th when they recorded the pretty lovely retro Americana of The Pines of Rome album ‘The Unstruck Bell‘. Then, holy shit, the Big Beat impact of ‘Aki’ by The Bronzed Chorus on June 9th?? I love that shit, it’s also on NE2024. And ‘Don’t Let Your Love Get You Down’ by Jaye Jayle, released July 14th?? That was pay what you want, so that’ll be considered for next year’s list as well. Then Seth engineered ‘Love’s Holiday’ by Oxbow on July 21st and (drumroll) that’ll also be considered for next year’s list. They’re like Limmy fronting early U2, I gotta investigate that shit. ‘Covered in Dust’ by Kapitur though, released July 21st, is more standard Manchester doom fare, only with added cello. Then on July 28th there was the self-titled album by Sore Dream & Hisham Akira Bharoocha, which seriously I don’t even have time to read the name of. ‘A Life Diagrammatic’ by JOHN (TIMESTWO) followed on September 22nd and – honesty? – pretty sure I’ve heard this album a dozen times just writing this post.

I actually forgot that I bought the self-titled debut from Dead Times, possibly because it came out on October 20th and was kinda overshadowed by the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter record released the same day. After that, there was just the EP ‘Shelf Life’ by Animal Hospital on November 3rd and finally another fucking Equipment Pointed Ankh album on November 8th!!

And we’re in December! So here’s to another twelve months of Seth Manchester subjecting me to ridiculous redefinitions of what ‘music’ entails!

Don’t ever tell me this job is easy.

I need to lie down…