The Tomo Awards 2022 — Midway Review
July is here yet again and I’m as always surprised at how fast another hell year has gone by. Continuing off my tradition started last year, I want to highlight 5 albums that I’ve loved from the first half of the year in no particular order. Were tonight New Years Eve, these would be my five favorite albums of the year, although it isn’t New Years Eve and we still have another half year jam-packed with exciting releases like my hopeful AOTY winner, PLASMA by Perfume, releasing July 27th.
Before getting into what I’ve loved this year, let me take a moment to reflect on my picks from 2021 and see if they’re still holding up. I’m still extremely confident in my pick for the AOTY award with Porter Robinson’s nurture. It’s honestly such an incredible album with a very spring/summertime feel to it with brilliant songwriting and production to boot. I also frequently revisit Origami Angel’s GAMI GANG as well as Tyler, The Creator’s CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST.
On the other hand, I’d actually place a few albums higher as they fall in my listening rotation a lot more frequently than a few of my higher picks. Take for instance TWICE’s Formula Of Love O+T=<3 and most surprisingly Trippie Redd’s Trip At Knight. Shamefully, I put Silk Sonic’s debut album as a runnerup rather than real entry on the list.
So with my reflections out of the way, here’s what I’m feeling really strongly about this year so far. Gonna keep things short and sweet so-as not to retread the same ground when they inevitably make my final list at the end of December.
THE SPELLBOUND — THE SPELLBOUND
At the end of 2021, I listed THE SPELLBOUND’s debut single ‘HAJIMARI’ as my favorite song of the year, tied with Noname’s ‘Rainforest’, and placed a bet on my hopes for their self-titled debut album to be one of my favorites of the coming year. Well, it’s finally out and boy was it worth the wait. With Masayuki Nakano’s track record for making incredible and dense mixes of electronic rock from his tenure with the late Michiyuki Kawashima in the legendary duo BOOM BOOM SATELLITES and Yusuke Kobayashi now on the mic, best known for his own experimental approaches at rock music with his band The Novembers, it was destiny for THE SPELLBOUND to release an album as good as this. All the better, they posted pictures of them back in the studio once again just this week. Here’s hoping for a sequel sooner than later.
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The Weeknd — Dawn FM
I wasn’t kind to The Weeknd’s After Hours when it first released in March 2020. It would eventually work its way to #4 on my 2020 list, a spot I don’t necessarily agree with anymore but regardless deserved at the time. Despite After Hours’ terrible album rollout, it fragmentarily hinted at what would eventually become Dawn FM, though not quite to the grand extent that this album encapsulates. Dawn FM picks up exactly where the hypothetical “true version” of After Hours left off. I say this because these two albums are the first two parts of a second Weeknd Trilogy according to the man himself.
The Weeknd unfortunately released the final After Hours song via an NFT auction (though due to the less-than-zero flimsy nature of the “medium”, it obviously leaked…like before it even sold), known as ‘The Source’, which ends with the lyrics “I said I’ll never leave you alone, but this part you do on your own”. Despite never being properly released as a song, it leads directly into Dawn FM’s own intro which begins with “This part I do on my own”. My biggest hope is that like the original Trilogy compilation album filled the gaps between each mixtape with the bonus tracks ‘Twenty Eight’, ‘Valerie’, and ‘Until Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)’, the Trilogy 2 compilation will fill the gaps with ‘The Source’ as an officially released bonus track between After Hours and Dawn FM and hopefully with either a new song or ‘Moth To A Flame’ to fill the gap between Dawn FM and the third part.
But what about Dawn FM itself? It’s the highest in concept that The Weeknd has been since Kiss Land (his best album, fuck you). Dawn FM takes the form of a radio broadcast in some sort of purgatory, as the protagonist from After Hours makes his journey into the afterlife, having seemingly bled to death at the very end of After Hours. While After Hours’ inconsistent sound left a lot to be desired for me, especially given Abel’s consistency on previous albums, Dawn FM is a front-to-back synthwave and house-influence album. Similarly to what I said about its lead single ‘Take My Breath’ at the end of last year, I wouldn’t be wholly surprised if the now-defunct Daft Punk had some kind of hand in this. If you liked Random Access Memories, you’ll love Dawn FM.
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DIR EN GREY — PHALARIS
Japanese alt/metal/prog/experimental ex-visual-kei legends DIR EN GREY return with their 11th album to date, PHALARIS, and boy is this one a treat. I’ve seen a few people say this already, but I can’t help but regurgitate the same point: DIR EN GREY have been a wildly experimental band on all of their albums up to this point, however on PHALARIS, we find the band at their most comfortable rather than most experimental; the result of over two decades of experimentation rather than another push into the unknown limits of heavy music.
While 2019’s The Insulated World found DIR EN GREY at possibly the heaviest they’ve ever been, PHALARIS continues in the lane of brutally heavy while taking a lot more bits and pieces from previous albums all the way back to UROBOROS. It’s their first album since the 2008 fan-favorite to feature such a long and progressive intro in Schadenfreude. Despite UROBOROS’ status as one of the band’s most beloved albums, many of their original western fanbase had fallen off at that point due either due to growing out of their goth phases (let’s be honest, we’ve learned by now that we never grow out of it, so come on back to the DIR EN GREY hype train, they’ve only gotten better since The Marrow Of A Bone, babes) or disliking the prior album. It’s a shame because I truly think that this is where the band began to get truly special, more than they already were with their legendary stint from the early-mid 2000s.
PHALARIS’ strongest moments are in its subtly and callbacks to elements of these post-2007 albums. The progressiveness of UROBOROS, the unrelenting brutality of DUM SPIRO SPERO, the Kyo’s insane Freddie Mercury-surpassing vocal range and experimental horror of ARCHE, even some of the poppy hook writing of said pre-2007 albums on tracks like ‘13’, one of the best tracks in their entire catalogue if you ask me. If you weren’t familiar with the band, “Greatest Hits” wouldn’t even feel out of place here. PHALARIS feels like a celebration of the sounds and styles that make DIR EN GREY one of the most beloved bands in the history of Japanese music and heavy metal worldwide.
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Bladee & Ecco2k — Crest
There are few artists with as unrelenting of a work ethic as Bladee, and while I wish I could say the same about Ecco2k, I think it’s equally worth the praise as his appearances are always worthy of celebration. In a way I would almost consider them like a Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean type duo; while Tyler (Bladee) releases frequently, Frank (Ecco2k) instead takes his time and drops more sporadically. Their first true collaboration album of just the two of them (previous records like D&G and Trash Island also featured Thaiboy Digital in the mix), Crest also happens to be one of the highest points in their collective discographies.
Crest is nuanced and subtle at almost all times, though still features many pleasant surprises like the nearly 9-minute multi-part second track ‘5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)’ and blissful closer ‘Heaven Sings’. It features the same sugary sweet vocal deliveries from both, with Bladee’s lower auto-tuney register overlapping frequently with Ecco’s own higher falsettos, coming together often for the exact kind of hooks we’ve all come to love from everyone in Drain Gang.
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Vince Staples — RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART
While I was still a huge fan of Vince’s previous self-titled album from last year, its direct sequel RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART is on another level completely. You could almost think of it as a spiritual successor to Vince’s seminal album Summertime ’06, also taking on a double LP format despite a cozy 41-minute length, a far cry from the bloated 30-something single disc albums many of rap’s contemporary mainstream have been releasing these past two years.
I almost feel bad for Kendrick Lamar at this point. Every year he drops an album, Vince drops too and always surpasses. Granted, if this was my top 6 albums of the year so far, Kendrick’s own 2xLP album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers would certainly be the extra pick, but Vince always impresses with his simplicity in ways that Kendrick’s maximalism always overshoots the nuance with. But I don’t want to keep comparing them like that as they’re both their own incredible beasts and easily fill 2/3 of the top 3 rappers alive spots.
Perhaps an example from RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART would be a better explanation as to why I prefer Vince’s output. Taking a look at the lyrics for the album highlight ‘WHEN SPARKS FLY’, it comes off as a standard love song at first. But maybe by the end of reading through you’ve probably realized: all of these lyrics, every single one, is a double or triple-entendre. It’s not just a love song; it’s about a gun. Even the songs title ‘WHEN SPARKS FLY’, a standard colloquialism for falling in love, is also read as a double-entendre for the sight of a gunfire. Accentuated by its moody lo-fi production, this brilliant delivery of multi-meaning lyrics continues to cement Vince’s legacy as one of the best to ever do it.
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