I woke up this morning and chose the beauty of combat.
Well, that would be the beauty and majesty of traditional Mongolian throat-singing and instrumentation combined with the modern styling of metal and you get The Hu.
The Hu is the popular, at least with metal and folk music fans, Mongolian folk metal band created in 2016 by members Gala, Jaya, Enkush and Temka. In addition to the requisite electric guitars and drums we find with rock and metal bands, The HU also incorporates traditional Mongolion instruments such as the Morin khuur (a two-stringed, horsehead fiddle with strings made from horsehair), Tovshuur (a three-stringed Mongolian guitar), Tsuur (Mongolian flute) and the Tumur khuur (a jaw harp) just to name a few.
Throat-singing is at the forefront of most of The HU’s songs. While The Hu is not the first Mongolian band to find success with music fans (I was first introdcued to Mongolian rock scene with the Mongolian folk rock band Altan Urag), they have been the most successful in crossing over to a somewhat mainstream success in the West.
There are other songs that are probably better musically structured, but I always go back to the song that introduced me to the band: Wolf Totem.
Liu Zhenyang hit the ground running in his first year, and I have to admit I didn’t get the hype at all at first. His debut album felt a fair bit overcooked to me, and the second didn’t evolve enough to keep me listening when the third started to really make waves. I decided to give his 2024 album a fair shot when it came out though, and I was impressed by how far he’d come. At this point the initial bias has faded away and I’m very interested to see what’s next. The woodwind incorporation, if predictable for the scene, is a welcome expansion (that might have shown up by the previous album, I am unsure) and applied in more interesting ways than most. The ratio of weird experimental things to repetition has been ramped up quite a bit. It still has more filler space than I care for. I am still disproportionately interested in what he’s doing vs the way it makes me feel. The ambience doesn’t seem quite there yet. But this album has advanced Hoplite from a state of disinterest to definite curiosity. I enjoyed exploring this more than most despite limited replay value. His next album will go in the sample bin without hesitation.
To All Trains doesn’t achieve as much as Dude Incredible, but no Albini project has. The last Shellac album was simply higher level stuff few bands can muster in my estimate. This one is more humble–shorter and to the point. I listened to enough music this year that a simple “I enjoyed and remembered it” didn’t always guarantee a spot on the list. Maybe Steve dying made me sentimental, but I want to believe To All Trains got here because it’s fun. Steve’s social awareness evolved a lot over the years, but his underlying attitude was core to his being and continues to resonate here. It’s well-dressed punk. It’s tightly held together but oozes snark along the seams. It’s anti-music, and that always puts a smile on my face. I doubt Steve expected “I Don’t Fear Hell” to be the last song of his career, but it’s as fitting an end as any. Rip you were a legend.
Muuntautuja offers a clear progression from Mestarin kynsi into more industrial and electronic territories. The continuity is there, but the styles have certainly evolved. It’s a stretch to call this a metal album, and that’s fine. It ships really chill and dark vibes I have found no struggle enjoying. It doesn’t have the epic progressions and dire climaxes of its predecessor that saw that album near the top of my 2020 list. It’s a more mood-oriented work, and it offers a persistently dark one.
It’s easy for me to undersell this album because it’s not God’s Country, but rarely has a band transitioned from my #1 aoty to not placing at all, and Chat Pile are no exception. Instrumentally, the album picks right up where they left off and offers some really imaginative and bleak progressions that hit off a sort of anti-pop aesthetic I can easily embrace. Raygun Busch’s unique vocals wear on me in a way they didn’t last time, such that by the closing track, No Way Out, I’m distinctly wanting something more from him. The compositions often grant that–No Way Out even unexpectedly rips into blast beats–but shouting “no escape” over and over doesn’t hit home on a remotely proximate plane of existence to grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’s world-ending caterwauls. He just doesn’t feel as consistently engaged with what he’s saying. But I don’t think it’s overly fair to double down on a comparison to literally my favorite album of 2022. Cool World is still a highly rewarding if somewhat front-loaded product. And I swear I will finally watch that movie one day. I still remember the mystique of a PG-13-rated cartoon in the early 90s lol
I was pretty late to the ballgame with Dirty Three. Warren Ellis is fairly well known for his role in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but I first discovering Dirty Three in 2021, close to two decades since they were releasing material on a regular basis. Ocean Songs has since found a home among my all-time favorite albums, and Whatever You Love You Are and She Has No Strings Apollo are way up there. I was pretty surprised to get the bandcamp notice that they had a new album coming this year, their first in a dozen. Love Changes Everything has been slow to grow on me, but it’s been a steady process that, by December, had earned it a spot. It’s not an album I enjoy paying attention to. It’s something I want on in the background to form my mood. It’s chaotic but peaceful. It’s a happy place I easily forget but don’t want to leave once I enter; something I’m prone to put on repeat once I’ve clicked play.
If I am being the old guy who won’t let go of his youthful favorites, I am ok with that. Cometh the Storm offers absolutely nothing new and is ideal because of that. I am never going to complain about more Matt Pike doing his thing, and he does his thing completely true to form on this album. I listened to it quite a lot and it became my go-to workout album for a while. It’s just fun and I will never grow tired of their sound.
I picked up Kurokuma’s debut album, Born of Obsidian, sampling new metal releases on bandcamp without any rhyme or reason, and it just barely missed out on the top 35 chart I posted end of 2022. I actually forgot all about them and, probably with some algorithmic prioritization, also stumbled into Of Amber and Sand randomly sampling new metal releases on bandcamp. Pleased to say this album feels like an improvement on every level. I keep seeing doom and sludge applied as their style, but I dunno, to me the Sepultura vibes are unmistakable. It certainly does embrace sludge textures. I don’t think those labels are necessarily wrong. Kurokuma just uniquely appeal to me for their rhythms more than their melodies. There’s something deeply tribal to it.
Three years of keeping up with Asthâghul’s music hasn’t managed to make it any less weird. Or maybe he’s making it more weird with each release, I don’t know and don’t have much desire to look back. It’s a bizarre and moody package I’ve come to expect and look forward to. His vocals are a litmus test for the capacity to enjoy people doing weird things with their mouths, especially lately as he’s shifted the rest of his sound from harsh abrasiveness to somewhat soothing atmospheres. When I first heard Consecration of the Spiritüs Flesh I took it to be some sort of rebellion against convention, but I’ve grown increasingly more convinced that it’s just how he likes to sing. I don’t think this album will appeal to most, but I’ve been enjoying his cosmic vibes as a flavorful background piece quite a bit and the vocals are… certainly an unmistakable watermark.
I went on a big catch-up-on-what-I-missed binge in April that didn’t yield terribly much, but it did yield Witch Vomit, and I’ve been going back to this album pretty regularly all year long. It’s just solid, tastefully produced death metal, encompassing but not overbearing. The songs are never quite too catchy to feel redundant or too abstract to feel like songs. A Scream from the Tomb Below didn’t quite make it onto my 2016 chart and I missed out on Buried Deep in a Bottomless Grave entirely, but Funeral Sanctum rises to the occasion. I mean, my tastes have gravitated a lot more towards death metal in recent years too, so I don’t want to say A Scream was sub-par. Might not have been quite my vibe in the moment. Funeral Sanctum clicked with me immediately.
The latest-discovered addition to my list. I didn’t actually run into this until December, but I’ve listened to it a hell of a lot since so I don’t feel biased placing it. If anything it should be higher. To be blunt, this gave me what I wanted and couldn’t find on the new Akhlys album. It’s the same sort of haunt and horror but delivered in a raw and direct way that permits the instruments to carry. Where that album is so overproduced I just hear soup and lament that something appealing might be lurking below, every instrument shines throughout Weaver of the Black Moon and the quality song-crafting can’t be missed. The bass is especially noteworthy, a rare thing to say about a black metal album.
Every year I need one album to put on when I could not possibly give a fuck about anything. Thank you for providing me with that album this year, Korrosive. Thrash usually turns me off because it’s not heavy enough but this uh lol this is heavy enough.
This album is strange. I do not know what to call it. Instruments are played. People make noises with mouths and other objects. He likes to scream a lot. Electronic things happen too. It’s a neurotic clusterfuck that puts on the outward appearance of containing songs with structure but I’m pretty sure they’re just hitting things and pressing buttons to see what happens. I loved it.
A Diabolical Thirst won me over full force in 2021 and remains one of my most frequently revisited albums from that year. Needless to say, I had this on pre-order the moment it was announced. Not quite so many tracks on Songs of Blood and Mire sear sick hooks in my brain. I didn’t end the year remembering one start to finish to the extent of Frigid and Spellbound. But Spectral Wound didn’t deviate in the slightest from the standard they set, and that’s about as good as straight forward black metal gets.
I picked this up on pre-order based on sample tracks before I even knew they were kind of a big deal. In the vast compendium of bands trying to go hard, these guys just get it done better than most. Rich full textures smash brick walls in robust and flavorful ways. It filled a need for endless pummeling brutality that never grew old throughout the year.
Notes notes notes notes notes notes notes notes notes. This album contains many of them. Two hands on the fret board all day here. (Ok, maybe not for a bit in the sample track I used, but the point withstands!) It hedges on silly, but what metal doesn’t one way or another? I try to keep up with I, Voidhanger releases and hit it off with this one right away. Just kind of landed a sweet spot between fun and ferocious.
Tune in here if you enjoy Krallice at their noodliest or dial-up modem aesthetics transposed for guitar. This album packs a ton of eclectic licks and endless dissonant tremolo. Where Aveilut offered a distinct journey through a soundscape, The Promise of Rain stays put. I don’t get the sense of the album progressing somewhere. It is perhaps not as grimly inspiring for that, but it certainly tickles my love for chaotically sequenced note soup. This band’s 2/2 now on top quality albums. If you like this, definitely check out Aveilut as well.
Yep! I don’t think I’ve ever included Nightwish on a year end list before… I expected to be wrong on that claim, but yeah my lists goes back to 2002 and I never did it. Well, this is really good. Maybe some of their other albums were too and I just wasn’t in the mood at the time, but I think they nailed this one in a way old bands rarely manage. It’s punchy and well paced. The orchestration is big and bold in that classic 00s way I don’t hear bands pull off nearly as often these days, and that definitely carries the show. I’m always the most leery of vocals in this style of music. Floor Jansen kinda nails it too though, never getting in the way and deliciously complimenting the soundscape rather than trying to steal the spotlight. She certainly has spotlight moments, but they’re catchy melodies and don’t wear out their welcome. It’s been a minute since I gave a Nightwish album a fair shot and now I’m very curious to see if their last few trended in this direction as well. Might turn into a January binge.
A meandering jazzy metal glob that probably won’t sound how you expect that description to. This album breaks from recent trends of jazz in metal. It’s dissonant, certainly, but it feels so alive. I’ve never heard anything quite like it, and it didn’t wear out its welcome when the novelty passed. Some overlap with Botanist in production and instrumentation perhaps, but applied towards a very different sensation. Highly recommend checking this one out even if metal isn’t your thing.
Some black metal band doing standard black metal things is inevitably going to make my charts just on the massive quantity of this sort of stuff I listen to. Aldheorte appealed to me more than most. Really nice song-writing here if you’re into the melancholy, forlorn side of things. It sometimes had me thinking of Spectral Wound in terms of capacity to ship memorable melodies over relentless pummeling bm standard techniques. Not to say it sounds anything like A Diabolic Thirst or even appealed to me in the same way, but similar elements stood out to me. In a year where for reasons I can’t comprehend I found like a dozen new black metal bands starting with the letter A, Aldheorte overcame their name and cemented a spot among my favorites.
A complex, rich, vastly ranging album that I think could readily appeal to fans of maudlin of the Well. There’s so much to absorb here, in the complexity of things going on in the moment for sure but even more so in the abstract, unorthodox stylistic transitions and song progressions that leave my head spinning and wondering what I just listened to. Pleroma has more to yield than I have time to listen to. It’s a treasure. A curious, uncharted territory waiting to be explored. That I didn’t drop everything I was doing to become deeply and intimately acquainted with every moment is a reality I have to accommodate. Its mood doesn’t resonate with my personal tastes quite enough for me to compulsively put it on over and over again. This is a list of my favorites, not of what I think was “best”, but it’s hard to deny this album’s viability for the latter title.
Man, this album grooves. Fantastic tempo-dynamic roll that bleeds confidence and touches a sweet spot between the bonecrusher catwalk and a furious pulp machine. Sometimes I’m being eviscerated with a chainsaw and sometimes an ogre is sitting on my face. What’s not to love?
I love Thou. I mean, above and beyond the music. They feel like a crew I could just immediately get along with if life chanced me into their midst. They have such a personable stage presence. They like the shit I do. They covered Soundgarden’s 4th of July and Born Against’s Well Fed Fuck on the same album how fucking cool is that. I want to see Thou succeed. They’ve got that fan base connection only a few artists manage. But that hasn’t compelled me to put all of their albums high on my charts. Umbilical is here because it’s really, really good. It goes a lot heavier than 2018’s Magus and ramps up the personality along the way. This is a weird comparison, but I get similar vibes to Boris in terms of like, an extremely extroverted song-writing process that absorbs everything around it and passes it through a core sound filter. It feels so human despite being ridiculously heavy.
I haven’t enjoyed eating shit this much since Dave Brockie died. The album immediately ostracizes anyone with a shred of respectability by way of super-cheesy space alien vocals, and they ride that gimmick the full 33 minute duration. It’s corny as hell in the best possible way, because the guitars absolutely slay throughout and I’m grinning ear to ear listening to them. She’s walkin’ down the alley of the shadow of death, but she’s got nothin’ to fear CAUSE SHE’S EVIL.
12. modest by default – South Cougars Jazz Ensemble
I don’t actually highlight vaporwave nearly as much as I listen to it, and I really, really need to fix that, because in the decade since I stumbled into a 100 album Dream Catalogue dump this genre has evolved and expanded with impressive results in every possible direction. modest by default is my current golden standard, and I think if you give it a sample you’ll quickly understand why. I have absolutely no idea to what extent he’s manipulating the source material in these, but be it a ton or just barely, my ears do not care they know that they are hearing gold. Holy hell I listened to this artist 330 times and counting this year. There’s so much material. If you like what you’re hearing you’re in for one hell of an archive. I’m letting this album represent all six of his 2024 releases because it’s the one that I remember the most individually. Having listened to all 36 of his releases this year, I’m not going to even try to figure out which was which.
By the way, wtf is up with zoomers being all fired up for deaths dynamic shroud.wmv? That feels so random lol where’s the 식료품groceries and Hong Kong Express love if we’re fishing through that can of worms.
11. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD”
How is it that post-rock is turning 30 but these guys still do it best? Not many artists are as consistently outstanding as Efrim Menuck. Obviously a lot of other musicians are in play for Godspeed creations, but everything he touches is gold. Except All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling I guess, but the lost recording rediscovery adventure in 2022 made that album just as worthwhile in its unique way as the rest. I am an old and I have been listening to Godspeed since f#a#oo was a hot new internet file trading sensation at the turn of the century. I think they just keep getting better. I’ve taken to calling Luciferian Towers their best album, and damn this one comes close. (Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything by A Silver Mt. Zion is still #1 though; go listen to it immediately if you have not.) I didn’t get invested in God’s Pee and I don’t know why, but No Title took no effort whatsoever. It has been an absolute joy throughout its three months of existence and I am nowhere near done listening to it as I write this. Every moment of this album is a blessing. The progressions are absolute bliss. The climaxes never amass anticipation because the journey to them is always just as good. They’re just peaks you never asked for. A nice view along the ride. It does assume a darker tone beginning with the Broken Spires at Dead Kapital interlude, but by then I’m always so high on what I’ve heard that it doesn’t really shift my mood, just expands the palette.
Shockingly, this is the only Trha album on my list this year. Don’t worry, I didn’t stop being a sucker for everything Damian releases under the name. He just only released one full length and spent most of his time doing Sadness albums instead. Everything you could want in a Trhä album showed up on demand though. It’s raw lofi bm emo’d to the pit of my sadboi heart. I can’t distinguish his releases in my head anymore, but I want to say this one ships classic black metal more aggressively than most. That’s fine by me.
9. Theurgy – Emanations of Unconscious Luminescence
Really masterful tech bdm. The vocals put most of the genre to shame, and I can’t emphasize that enough. I can’t think of anything that sounds this consistently satisfying in pursuit of pig stuck in an unflushed toilet aesthetic. The songs aren’t just interesting in a wtf are they doing sort of way. There are compelling melodic progressions in this package. This is an album that taps so many interests at once for me. It’s brutal and ridiculous, but it’s introspective and kind of thoughtful too.
I’ve listened to most Winterfylleth albums at least once over the years, but the stars never quite aligned to get me engaged with them on the level this album spoke to me. I sense a strong stylistic overlap with Drudkh, one of my all time favorites. But the emotional leverage these songs carry keeps making me think of screamo-black metal hybrid Bosse-de-Nage, maybe an obscure reference but certainly a complimentary one. I feel like a lot of the album is building up around In Silent Grace, a sort of black metal ballad near the later middle of the mix featuring Nemtheanga on guest vox. It’s a break from the other songs, so my comparisons are going to look really silly if it’s the only track you listen to, but it’s definitely my favorite and the highlight cementing this as a top year-end contender.
Depending on where you’re reading this you might not have gotten the memo, but over the past two years Everything Everything have grown to compete with The Drones as my favorite radio-friendly unit shifter since Radiohead. Mountainhead feels like a weak album at a glance when I distance myself from it very specifically because the opening track Wild Guess is easily one of my least favorite songs they’ve ever written. But the rest is bliss and as soon as I put it on I remember that again. Mountainhead doesn’t quite encroach on my holy trinity of Raw Data Feel, Get to Heaven, and Man Alive, but damn do I adore this.
If a lyric of the year award exists, the growling of your stomach’s eldritch heart is spilling into waking life deserves it in every universe.
Ulcerate’s ceiling is through the roof. Stare Into Death and Be Still would have taken my 2020 album of the year crown if I’d known about it before it won MA’s album of the year poll. This is the first album they’ve released since they’ve been on my radar, and while Stare Into Death and Be Still remains my golden standard (good lord, this band has accumulated 1200 plays in a span of four years, and their songs aren’t exactly short), I listened to this the most of anything released in 2024 without even trying. They have mastered what I want. This is everything my ears crave. Maybe I’m not as deeply engaged in the things that are happening around me as I was in the heyday of Krallice and Liturgy, but the sustainability of it all is unprecedented. They ship an eternal mood. So full, so rich, so comprehensive. I remember seeing “voidgaze” pop up on fmbot tags and barely going wtf does that mean before understanding it means Ulcerate. Stare into death and be still.
It’s black metal in French of course it’s good. I mean, I gobble up anything I see with a medieval bm tag, and this was the one I found that held my attention. It’s rather Agalloch-attuned on the folk side and maybe appreciates a bit of Amesoeurs-styled post-punk too, but it isn’t afraid to black ‘n’ roll along the way. Really that’s this album’s greatest strength. It fucking rocks, despite never quite holistically vibing like it will. Like, three and a half into Le Grand Hyver we’re full throttle heavy metal soloing, and it fits but I never hear it coming until I get there. Every track exceeds expectations on attentive listens, and it’s quite satisfying as a background piece as well.
The opening track on this album is so good I don’t even have to remember the rest exists to want it high on my charts. Wait, no, I didn’t forget the other songs. It’s just flows like one continuous masterpiece. Progressive and atmospheric conjure very different things to my mind in a metal context. One suggests a lot of twists and turns, the other a highly consistent ride. This is kinda both. Think later day Enslaved if they listened to a lot of Oranssi Pazuzu and also liked prog rock and jazz.
I chose to sample this because I was feeling an itch for power metal this year and it had awesome cover art. It turned out to be one of my most played albums of the year. They’ve got a fantastic range of instrumental and song-writing talent. Every song hits like it matters, whether it’s a power metal ballad or a fast-pumping Ensifereverent folk metal shredder. This album is a collection of anthems. It makes me think of the 00s golden age of folk metal, when a lot of power metal bands were also tapping into that scene’s energy. I don’t remember any Japanese bands fully capitalizing on that potential before and I love hearing it now. I’ll be keeping up with this relatively young band in years to come for sure.
Every year I run a game where like 50+ people submit 8 songs to me, and it is the source of most of my non-metal awareness of new music. I received two Eunuchs submissions this year and the rest is history. This album isn’t metal, but it certainly goes hard. The lyrics are insanely dark. Everything is dark and horrible and wonderful and just listen to it.
From Austin Lunn, to Ayloss, to Damián Antón Ojeda, a lot of solo musicians have claimed my favorite artist of the moment crown over the past decade and a half. If Erech Leleth continues to release music on a regular basis, he’s next. I absolutely fell in love with Chapter Two: The Resistance by Ancient Mastery last year. Unfortunately, it was released in 2022, a bit late to contend for my #1 album of that year. I had Akt III by Narzissus on pre-order, and despite dropping on January 12th, not many albums challenged it. The song-writing is so good aaaaaaaaaaa. It’s like everything I love about folk metal reskinned in black metal a la Falkenbach but with all of the vision of a prog or power metal concept album epic. It’s so filled with creativity and vibrance and life. This album deeply influenced my entire 2023 listening trajectory, compelling me to seek out a lot of more melody-driven artists and giving power metal a new lease on life in my exploratory repertoire. Make no mistake; this isn’t a power metal album. It’s just got that narrative grandeur fully locked down.
Happy New Year! It’s time for my annual check-in to confirm that we’re still alive and well, and that I still have terrible taste in music.
Sample size: 71 albums
Quality: This was a pretty damn good year for music. I feel like my list is significantly stronger than 2017 and competitive with some of the best years I can remember. My top 7 could have all finished first in lesser years.
It’s a trip. If you can swallow the vocals, which hit me as a bit too classically tortured to match the lush soundscape the band’s presenting, you’re going to be treated to one of those albums that packs so much subtle flavor that I think I could spin it 100 times and still find something new. It doesn’t hit the aesthetic zone of infinite repeatability for me that I think I would need to fully embrace its nuances, but it’s admirable.
Half of this album actually sounds like it was lifted out of a classic 80s video game and modernized. I guess that’s the point, and he’s not exactly the only person doing it, but this album stood out to me for some especially powerful cuts, most notably Inferno Galore. I don’t think this is an album that will stick with me terribly long. I’m not a fan of the vocals, granted they’re limited to Cheerleader Effect and Beware the Beast. The whole thing is way too abrasive for me to enjoy at length passively. But yeah, I enjoyed it more than the average album this year. Fun spin and my misgivings are trivial, not game-breaking.
18. Panopticon – The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness
I had the pleasure this summer of seeing Austin Lunn headline the grand finale of a three day music festival, and that pretty well confirmed his status as my favorite personality in music. He’s also one of the only two artists to steal my number 1 slot twice. That… won’t be happening this year. The Scars of Man has a few drawbacks for me beyond its unwieldy name. Despite clocking in just shy of 120 minutes, it’s less stylistically innovative than his last three albums. The folk and metal come in distinct packages with little overlap. The lyrics are repetitive and don’t reach far beyond a basic motif of winter wilderness and mortality. The melodies aren’t particularly gripping on the whole. The vocal delivery is kind of muted. Like a lot of my favorite musicians, Lunn has an aura of heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity about him that transforms many of his flaws into points of endearment. (It’s not a coincidence that I gave Mark Kozelek first place last year.) I think, in this case, that’s more of a salvaging factor than the catapult that propels it above the competition. It comes across to me as a really spontaneous work, like he sat down and just played whatever came to him without much concern about refining it. That’s cool. I enjoyed it. Just not on par with say, Roads to the North or Autumn Eternal.
A few of these guys were members of an internet forum I frequent before they gained decent success on the post-bm scene touring with the likes of Deafheaven, so I’ll concede a bit of bias. I loved their last album, All Fours, but it took me a while to reasonably conclude that I loved it regardless of having a (to be fair, very small) personal connection to the band. Further Still hasn’t had as much of an opportunity to grow on me as All Fours did. It was released later in the year, I haven’t been in as much of a mood for that genre, and it’s stylistically very similar to their last release. Without devoting too much completely undistracted time to it, I do want to say this album brings very little new to the table, but their matured sound was great where it stood coming in. I would hardly say that more of the same is a bad thing. Basically, I like this album a lot on its surface but haven’t had much of an opportunity to fall in love with it. I think I potentially could. 17th with plenty of room to move up.
I feel like Sumac is on the brink of becoming my favorite Aaron Turner project. The potential is certainly there. It’s never going to roll out something on the magnitude of Isis’s Oceanic, but Sumac is definitely drifting down a path I can get excited about. I feel like large chunks of this album were the product spontaneous experimentation in the studio, and improv noodling with a metal aesthetic is emerging as a core part of his sound. It reminded me at times of one of the best non-2018 releases I discovered this year–James Plotkin & Paal Nilssen-Love’s Death Rattle. On a kind of small world aside, as I’m writing this I pulled James Plotkin’s Wikipedia page, and apparently he’s done mixing work with Isis before. At any rate, I definitely enjoyed the eclectic ride of chucking this album on in the background a few times, but more than anything I’m curious about where he goes from here.
Every once in a blue moon I stumble on that elusive death metal album that brings absolutely nothing new to the table and completely beats the shit out of me anyway, and Tomb Mold hit the nail on the head. I don’t even listen to death metal very often for all I meme about it, but I’ve been putting this one back on all year. It just gets everything right for my aesthetic tastes, I guess. The vocals nail a sound that feels brutal without being cheesy or grating on me. All of the tones blend together really well to form a tight package without competing against each other. It’s got a kind of groovy mid-tempo pace I can’t help but bob my head to. Guilty pleasure or not, it’s been a frequent fun ride.
I managed to not discover Death Grips until late 2016, and they’ve still forced their way into the mix of my most listened-to artists ever. I think there’s a lot of really weird experimentation going on here even by their standards. It’s a pretty meaty album to try to sit down and embrace, and I can’t say I’ve ever gotten through it attentively from start to finish. Maybe not their most passively pleasing work, but there’s a lot of weird experimentation going on here that’s kept me curious throughout the year.
Everyone I’ve sent this to has basically just told me “yeah, that sounds like the 80s alright.” Maybe if I was more familiar with the genre, it wouldn’t sound that special to me. I can’t say for certain; I’m not an avid pursuer of new trends in electronic music the way I am with metal. But I have definitely heard a lot of music in a similar vein to this, and none of it impresses me quite as much. I guess if you’re listening to it as “lol 80s” they might all sound alike? I think the album is packed with compelling loops and manages to plod forward with a really heavy beat while never becoming abrasive enough to shift me from that mindset of a cyberpunk dystopia. So yeah, there’s definitely a lack of extensive genre exposure on my end, but this has been my default go-to when I want to engage this sort of aesthetic for most of 2018.
Summoning have been one of my favorite bands for going on 15 years, and I’ve only been treated to three new albums in that span. So yeah, I was pretty hyped for this, and it would have been hard to screw up. I frequently queue up their entire discography and just let it roll for ten hours straight. I have never heard another band that sounds anything like them, and their sound pings every fantasy nerd pleasure point in my body. Much like it took Old Mornings Dawn a couple years to settle in as a rock in their anthology and not just epic by default, With Doom We Come doesn’t yet stand out distinct to me as something other than more Summoning. It’s hard to say if and when it will get there; at nearly 50 plays through, I know every track by heart but couldn’t tell you from a 30 second session which album they hail from. Maybe that’s a sign that none of them are particularly stand-out cuts. Is it as independently enticing as Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame or Dol Guldur to me? Nah, but the band that can do no wrong for me did no wrong in 2018.
11. A Forest of Stars – Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes
At this point, 2015’s Beware the Sword You Cannot See has pretty firmly cemented its slot among my all-time favorite albums. I didn’t expect Grave Mounds and Grave Mistakes to compete with that, and it doesn’t, and that’s fine. If Dan Eyre’s lyrics have tipped over from dancing on the fringes of nonsense to completely incoherent rants, there’s still no lack of awkwardly well-spoken venom. If the compositions are a little more direct, they’re just as immense and driving. I’m not sure what I would think of this album if I experienced it with a blank slate regarding the band, but I would probably like it even more. They have one of the most unique and compelling sounds of the 2010s. I don’t think this is their best work, or even particularly close to it, but in terms of enjoyment, I’m just thrilled to have some new material to spin by them that doesn’t significantly deviate from the sound I’ve grown to love. I guess if I have one complaint, the album tends to meander a bit too long on some post-rocky vibes that never build up into the climaxes they’ve mustered in the past. Kind of torn on [i”>I really really like it[/i”> but want it to be more, and that’s what landed it just shy of my top 10.
If you like to hear 45 minutes of the same thing repeated in deep distorted tones, this album might be for you. For better or worse, it’s for me. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before. There’s not enough here for me to really point and go “now that was something”. They just landed on some killer riffs and grinded them into oblivion. I got to hear them play the full album live this year, and I was totally in the zone for it just rocking back and forth. I think the album experience is about the same, and half the time I click play on it I catch myself staring off into space 20 minutes later. A hell of a lot of bands play this style. Most of them don’t actually suck me in to the point of distraction. I’m not sure what’s particularly different about this one to pull it off, but here we are.
I never much cared for Kanye outside of a small handful of tracks dominated by guest artists. His lyrics and the arrogant attitude that resonates in his vocal style just rub me the wrong way. I actually had a sort of epiphany when I was compiling my year end list and this album kept popping up as a contender. It hadn’t yet registered that, for once, I just kept listening to him. I guess Kanye the rapper is a little less prevalent here–I won’t miss 4th Dimension if I never hear it again. Maybe it’s Kid Cudi’s influence, maybe it’s a general shift in focus, I don’t know, but this is the first time where I really found myself not merely conceding that Kanye is a talented producer but actually personally loving his songs. Feel the Love, Freeee, and Reborn are all fantastic, and the vast majority of the album keeps me engaged on a level I am not used to associating with Kanye West at all.
I guess the basic idea behind this album is pretty straight forward, albeit unconventional. It’s j-pop except she’s rapping. The song writing verges off in a lot of novel directions that I have no baseline to really qualify in terms of originality, but they keep the album interesting from start to finish. The thing I like most though is her vocal expressiveness. The passion and tension and angst is impressively tangible for foreign language spoken word. I didn’t think I would have much to say about this, and I don’t. It’s great. Listen to it.
This has been one of my favorite background pieces of the year. It’s hard to describe what makes one drone-centric album more appealing than the next. I think this presents a very full wall of sound that at times approaches a state I could only describe as noise, but thick bass tones still drive the album, and it’s peppered with bluesy riffs that suck you into direct engagement just long enough to consciously remind you that you’re enjoying this without becoming a distraction. The fullness of it is definitely a distinction from the more classic doom/drone hybrids I dabbled in but could never really embrace in the early 2000s. Khanate but huge is definitely a comparison that comes to mind. At any rate, this is a style that appeals to me more and more as I get older, and The House Primordial absolutely nails it for me. It’s kind of crazy that this misses my top 5, for all I’ve enjoyed it. 2018 was a competitive year.
Zeal & Ardor is a project that began with the novelty game of trying to mash up atypical genres of music. Black metal and African American spirituals worked out pretty tight, and here you go. This is a pretty exciting album for me, personally, because it’s not something I’ve ever heard done before and it approaches an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time. Don’t let the “metal” tag deter you; I think this is an album that should be pretty accessible to people unaccustomed to heavier music. The gospel, soul, and African American folk traditions get the spotlight. The metal’s primary function is to present it in a more intense and pressing light. I think there might be some Tom Waits influence going on here too. At least, Row Row very distinctly reminded me of Clap Hands. It’s a really interesting project, and the song writing is solid on the whole. I feel like the lyrics could have dug deeper, and the studio gloss did start to wear on me after what must have been at least three dozen plays, but Stranger Fruit was a pretty integral part of my 2018 music experience.
Picking up where the cover art leaves off, this album sets an unmistakable western American atmosphere within the opening seconds. A brooding, atmospheric journey that calls to mind elements of Altar of Plagues and Spectral Lore, their song-writing is impeccable, but it’s the thematic niche that really sets this apart as more than a valiant rehashing of what’s been done before. So much of the black metal listening experience is a passive journey. I think the reason it’s my favorite genre is because you can thoroughly enjoy an album on repeat 100 times without zoning in attentively enough to pick up on half of its subtleties. It’s the art that keeps on giving. Wayfarer’s unique aural imagery of a bleak Great Plains landscape haunted by the ghosts of its butchered inhabitants sets the meditative focal point for immersion, and the rest exhumes itself ever more over time. This will be an album I’m still spinning regularly half way into 2019.
I’m not sure how I fell out of touch with Primordial, but I have no recollection of their last album. Exile Amongst the Ruins didn’t blow me away out the gate quite on par with the raw energy of the 2011 work that really made me fall in love with them, but Nemtheanga’s voice can carry just about anything, and this release might be just as compelling in a much more subtle way. I guess it’s kind of easy to dismiss because Primordial have been playing pretty much the exact same sound forever, but I feel like they landed on a really robust vibe for this album that sustains throughout. It’s morbid, but it’s all so pretty at the same time. It’s really kind of soothing to listen to, in a roundabout way. Relative to a lot of other bands I love that have put out decent-but-not-their-distinctly-best works in 2018, I think this has the most potential to stick around and continue to grow on me. Maybe a few years from now it will be my default Primordial go-to album. I think it’s possible. Nine months is a short time to form conclusive opinions about a band that’s been pumping out solid material for 25 years. I feel an endearing bond with this one that’s hard to put my finger on.
3. Tropical Fuck Storm – A Laughing Death in Meatspace
A couple of months ago someone sent me The Drones’ Shark Fin Blues, and that was the first time I’d ever encountered Australia’s reasonably well-known frontman Gareth Liddiard. I still haven’t actually gotten my hands on any Drones albums, but I scooped up his side project, Tropical Fuck Storm, the minute their first release hit the shelves. God I’m in love with this guy’s style. He feels completely unhinged and free rolling through his songs, in both his vocal performance and his chaotic brink-of-collapse guitar execution. A Laughing Death in Meatspace blasts that in your face out the gate with my favorite track on the album, You Let My Tyres Down, but this project offers a lot more on the edge beyond Liddiard’s guitar. The second track introduces an often revisited electronic side that’s just a eclectic. The lyrics tap a political frustration that appeals to me. All-around outstanding effort that pings a lot my personal tastes. This is the first time in a while I remember feeling this strongly about an album that is fundamentally rock in origin.
When I linked this album to one of my few acquaintances who actually enjoys metal, the first response I got was “Gustav Holst”. I dig it. Perhaps a trifle influenced by French black metalers in the vein of Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega, New York City’s Imperial Triumphant are largely forging their own uncharted path. The album’s portrait of “vile luxury” twists high art instrumentation into demented vomit, injecting bombastic convulsions of classical brass and jazz piano into a soundscape of highly disharmonic and technical black metal. It’s a really brilliant vision, I think, derailing the traditionally sophisticated arts into pure hedonism. The theme of the album is apparent on its aural face, and they’ve got a jazz aesthetic to their performance that makes it limitlessly repeatable for me despite a level of abrasiveness that outmatches just about anything I can think of that brings a vision beyond inaccessibility for its own sake to the field.
In the broader picture of the band, 2018 might be remembered as the year when Thou lost their minds and pumped out four new albums and two splits, but Rhea Sylvia stands, for me, leagues above their feature release Magus, or anything else they’ve ever recorded, for that matter. The raw melody crafting on this album is mindboggling. Thou have never been shy about their love for the 90s grunge classics–one of their splits this year was a Nirvana cover album–but I feel like on this run they went all in for trying to actually write grunge music without changing any of their established doomy sludge tones. The result is Alice in Chains pressed under a ten ton weight, enhanced with the modern trappings of post-rock’s all-encompassing influence on metal over the past 20 years. I am blown away from start to finish.
If there is one artist I have consistently returned to every October for the 15 or so years that I’ve had a clue what I’m talking about, it’s Vratyas Vakyas. I first discovered Falkenbach via Audiogalaxy–a long forgotten site that stood out back in the Napster days for a design which allowed users to easily explore non-mainstream genres. I had never heard anything remotely similar to Falkenbach at the time, and I fell in love with the plodding hymns that seemed to turn black metal on its head and generate a spirit of reverence rather than darkness.
Of course, in hindsight Falkenbach fits into a broader historical progression, but his sound is still entirely unmistakable. Vratyas Vakyas was one of the earliest artists to really latch on to the ‘viking metal’ ideal that Bathory began in the late 80s, before too many stylistic norms were standardized, and the sound he landed on has never ceased to captivate me. “Heathen Foray” is the opening track to his fourth studio album, Heralding – The Fireblade (2005), and it also makes an appearance in somewhat grimmer form on his second album, …Magni blandinn ok megintiri… (1998). How far back the basic idea of the song dates is hard to say; there is a ton of earlier demo material available going as far back as 1989. I could have chosen any of dozens of stand-out songs to showcase here without any reservations, but this one has been speaking to me lately. Enjoy!
Lars Jensen has been working on his solo project, Myrkgrav, since 2003, but his discography is pretty brief. Trollskau, skrømt og kølabrenning (2006) is his only full-length album, and it’s a pretty solid entry into the annals of pagan metal. The album is a bit brooding overall, with a lot of slower tempo black metal-infused hymns, but the optimistic closing track has always stood out to me the most.
“Endetoner” feels like a victory anthem–a celebration of Norse history and tradition that honors those old gods who always seem to make a brief return to Midgard around this time of the year.
If I asked a random metal fan to name ten folk/viking metal bands, chances are they wouldn’t drop Sweden’s Månegarm among the contenders. It’s a bit odd, considering they’ve been around since 1995. But besides having a name that isn’t entirely easy to reproduce on a standard keyboard, there’s no reason to leave “Månegarm” off the list. Their ability to fly under the radar is something I don’t really understand; this band has definitely drawn less attention than they deserve over the years.
I am guilty to an extent, with nothing prior to Vargstenen–their 2007 release–in my collection, but I was still a little surprised to realize I had never featured this band before let alone this song. Following a brief intro track, “Ur själslig död” kicks off Vargstenen with epic bombast and a creative progression that avoids the easy temptation to repeat the track’s catchy main melody in excess. One thing that always stood out to me on this song was the vocals. Erik Grawsiö demonstrates a level of diversity I’m more accustomed to out of Slavic metal bands than their Germanic counterparts, and I absolutely love how he transitions back and forth between guttural singing and atonal growls. I couldn’t resist the urge to belt out a death metal roar of my own at the 40 second mark when I was listening to this in my car earlier today. So much for not scaring the new neighbors. <_<
Throughout the 2000s, Agalloch unleashed a series of albums that have influenced countless bands across the metal spectrum. Not only did Ashes Against the Grain (2006) play an enormous role in ushering in the era of post-black metal, but Pale Folklore (1999) pioneered the folk metal aesthetic for a nation whose traditional genres stood leagues apart from the metal scene. (It would be another decade before Austin Lunn nailed a metal interpritation of bluegrass.) Most American folk metal bands carry Agalloch’s stamp of influence with them, and why not? Pale Folklore perfectly captures a sense of melancholy mystery that reflects a land whose native sons were slaughtered, leaving their secrets only a faint whisper in the air.
If there’s one thing that will draw me back out of obscurity no matter how much work I’m bogged down with, it’s Horror season here on Shattered Lens. As a de facto film blog’s one author who pretty much never watches movies, I like to do my part by digging out a mix of tunes appropriate for the season.
This is always the time of year when I stop focusing on new releases and revisit a lot of my metal and folk favorites of old. From b-side Satanic cheese to authentic pagan anthems to the truly deranged, all the music I love most seems to find a home when that oppressive summer sun gives way to pleasant temperatures and dimming lights. It’s my favorite time of year, and my music collection rises to the occasion.
Opeth is pretty common fair in the textbooks of heavy metal these days, but Mikael Akerfeldt’s finest works came before the fame, in my opinion. Their 1995 debut, Orchid, ranks highest for me. While Akerfeldt’s trademark progressive rock experimentation was present from the get-go, those early albums had a sort of hollow, natural tone to them that lent the band a distinctly folk vibe. Orchid (and Morningrise) seem to drift through the crisp, foggy air surrounding a lake on the edge of a forest, the sun just beginning to rise over the horizon. I don’t wake up early when I can help it, but if a morning commute is necessary, Opeth always sees a spike in my play count. The vision that songs like “The Twilight is My Robe” paint is stunningly vivid, and surprisingly peaceful in contrast to Akerfeldt’s harsh vocals.
Korpiklaani have been pretty heavily criticized over the years for what has been perceived as a highly “gimmicky” sound. That view has a faint shred of legitimacy, but it gets blown way out of proportion. With bands like Alestorm and Nekrogoblikon managing to pump out really impressive albums without the slightest hint that they take any of their music seriously, it is easy to falsely impose on the genre a spectrum ranging from hoax to serious. You’re either writing brutal pagan metal homages to Odin or you’re dressing up as a mutant snork and dancing a jig, right?
It doesn’t really work like that. Bands like Kalevala (Калевала) and Troll Bends Fir (Тролль Гнёт Ель) can come off as fun-loving boozers, but you can’t escape the impression that they have a deep respect for their cultural heritage. Finntroll sing about dim-witted fantasy monsters eating people, and they’re heavy as hell. Being light-hearted and fun certainly does not make a folk metal band “gimmicky”, as if all folk traditions are inherently morbid. Doing it for nine albums without showing much inclination towards anything but fun and relegating your only English language songs to tantrums about not having enough beer–well, that can tarnish an image. I do understand why people might see Korpiklaani as a having a one-track mind.
But it really shouldn’t, and they really don’t. Not if sounding the same means maintaining the quality that turned people to them in the first place while honing their musical talents along the way. Not when for every track devoid of lyrical content the listener writes off eight others as the same because they don’t speak Finnish. Korpiklaani were very well received when they first appeared with Spirit of the Forest back in 2003. Folk metal was still fairly new then, and Jonne Järvelä was a frontrunner, not a bandwagoner. He had contributed to Finntroll’s Jaktens Tid in 2001, and prior to changing his band’s name to Korpiklaani he had released folk metal under the monicker “Shaman” beginning in 1999. He was recording non-metal Finnish folk music earlier than that. As folk metal picked up steam, Korpiklaani’s pop-centric, lighter brand–characterized by very simplistic metal riffs underscoring catchy yolk vocals, accordion, violin, and an occasional whistle–came under fire. Why?
That’s an open question. I really don’t get it. My best guess is that people experienced Spirit of the Forest and Voice of Wilderness when folk metal was still a novelty. They didn’t really love the band; they just loved the direction that metal was heading in, and Korpiklaani were a prominent example of that. As the scene broadened and more variety became available, some people were quick to throw Korpiklaani under the bus because the band’s pop tendencies made them feel a little insecure in their metal manliness. Korven Kuningas (2008), Karkelo (2009), and Ukon Wacka (2011) got a lot of negative reviews. But to me, the band just kept getting better. Spirit of the Forest gave us “Pellonpeikko”, and “Wooden Pints” is certainly nostalgic, but the album had a lot of half-formed filler tracks too. It has all the feel of an early, less developed work in a band’s discography. They really started to nail the folk on Voice of Wilderness in 2005, and Jonne Järvelä’s distinctive yolk-style vocals–the band’s most unique traditional feature–really didn’t fully mature until Tales Along This Road (2006) and Tervaskanto (2007). Their next three albums took all the heat, but they were only guilty of not offering further development. They didn’t really need to. The band was in their prime.
Manala (2012) was the first and only Korpiklaani album that I had misgivings about. It was distinctly heavier, with folk instrumentation feeling subservient to metal guitar riffs rather than the other way around. For that, it actually got some positive feedback. Korpiklaani were abandoning that “folk gimmick” and getting back to their “metal roots”, or some nonsense like that, as if the band even had metal roots. My speculation was, I think, a bit more realistic: Long-tenured violinist Jaakko “Hittavainen” Lemmetty retired after Ukon Wacka. Short of digging the jewel case out from my basement, I can’t even find a clear answer as to who played violin when Manala was recorded in 2011. Teemu Eerola replaced Hittavainen on tour that year, and Tuomas Rounakari stepped in as the band’s permanent violinist shortly after. I have to believe that there is a direct correlation between Manala‘s lack of a strong folk component and the transitional state of the band’s lineup at the time.
Korpiklaani did not record another album for three years. That’s a long stretch by their standards, and in the meantime Juho Kauppinen, their accordionist since Tales Along This Road, left as well. Was the band doomed to drift ever further from their unique poppy folk sound into the cesspool of generic derivative heavy metal?
Not at all, as it turns out. Noita sounds strikingly successive, but in a way that works wonderfully. It takes Manala and drives it back into where the folk left off on Ukon Wacka. The first track, “Viinamäen Mies”, opens powerfully with a driving violin and a nice accordion accompaniment. Where the folk drifts out, the passages are brief enough to feel like a showcase of Jonne Järvelä’s vocals rather than a void in the content. The song is a total return to Korpiklaani’s poppy folk roots, and that feeling persists through the first two tracks.
Track: Lempo
The third song, “Lempo”, slows down the pace and stretches things out in a turn that is, for them at least, a bit on the heavy side. Unlike Manala though, the guitar is hardly alone in giving it an edge. The vocals are great, as always, and the folk instrumentation blends in and out of playing harmony to the plodding verses and busting out solos in really fluid form.
The rest of the album is a mix of these two approaches, and it is surprisingly the latter that comes out strongest. “Sahti” and “Luontoni” give us two more upbeat, fun songs that don’t feel remotely contrived, and then the album slows back down for the long haul. The violin on “Minä Näin Vedessä Neidon” is about as heavy metal as that instrument gets, and I was especially impressed on the closing track–“Sen Verran Minäkin Noita”–by how Tuomas Rounakari and Sami Perttula seem to have mastered improvisation over long, drawn out metal chords. Moreover, the rhythms on that song are way more diverse than we’re used to from Korpiklaani, tipping a hat to prog and viking metal. It’s one of the few songs in their catalog that don’t follow a standard verse-chorus-verse pattern. I can’t help but think “this is way too awesome to be Korpiklaani” when I listen to it. And I’m one of the people that never lost faith in the band.
It’s hard to imagine, listening to Noita, that Sami Perttula and Tuomas Rounakari were new to this band. Perttula totally gets their sound, and he brings a fiery spirit that wants to imbue anything and everything with rambling accordion harmonies. Rounakari offers much the same on violin, and also a great deal of thoughtfulness. In an English-language interview released by Nuclear Blast to promote the album, he explains each song quite articulately. He even points out cultural relevance in “Sahti”, a song that turns out to be about (surprise!) drinking. (It’s kind of funny, because Järvelä and Perttula’s bad English cater to every negative stereotype surrounding them. I write this song because I like get drunk!) If you didn’t know any better, you would think Korpiklaani had been Rounakari’s baby all along. Hittavainen was a hard man to replace, but I’m not complaining about who they found.
The album does have one very unfortunate, glaring flaw, and it’s called “Jouni Jouni”. “Jouni Jouni” is a cover of Billy Idol’s cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ mind-numbingly stupid hit classic “Mony Mony”, and it appears right smack in the middle of the damn album. You know what makes even less sense? Noita has a “hidden” bonus track, “Antaja”, and that song sounds totally normal. Instead of putting “Antaja” in the main mix and relegating “Jouni Jouni” to the end of the line after a few minutes silence (or better yet, deleting all record of its existence), they cram it smack in the middle between “Minä Näin Vedessä Neidon” and “Kylästä Keväinen Kehto”. Bad Korpiklaani! Bad!
(Nuclear Blast is being a bit douchey about youtube samples, but if you want to check out some of the better tracks before you buy and can find them, I recommend “Kylästä Keväinen Kehto” and “Sen Verran Minäkin Noita”.)
I don’t think a New Years rolls by that I don’t say something amounting to “odd-numbered years produce better music”. The trend inexplicably holds true once again. I actually listened to a good bit of new music this year–far more than I did last year at least–but when it came time to recap, my options felt… a bit lacking. The best of the best are still grand indeed, but the quality drifts away rapidly if I dig beyond a top 10. I’m pretty happy with the list I ended up with though, and I hope you’ll find something new and inspiring in the tracks I’ve sampled below:
10. Agalloch – The Serpent & the Sphere (track: The Astral Dialogue)
Marrow of the Spirit was a pretty bold divorce from everything we’ve come to expect out of Agalloch over the years, for better or worse. On The Serpent & the Sphere, the band make a return to a more direct evolution of their regular sound. The album offers a nice mix of vintage Agalloch and further dabblings into the post-rock/metal sphere. It didn’t grab me by the balls and thrash me upside the head like say, Pale Folklore or Ashes Against the Grain, but it’s definitely a solid entry in the band’s formidable discography.
9. Cormorant – Earth Diver (track: Daughter of Void)
I was a bit more critical than complementary of Earth Diver when I reviewed it a few months ago, but that mostly boiled down to the feeling that it could have done with better production. Honestly, if I don’t own the cd proper I have no business speaking of such things, because for all I know my copy is just a bit lossy. The raw songwriting on this album is stellar, and I hope to hear more out of this band in years to come.
8. Bast – Spectres (track: Outside the Circles of Time)
I am not sure where Spectres would have placed on my year-end list had I had a bit more time to listen to it, but it could only have moved up from here. I’ve only had about two weeks to check this out and make a call, but I was dead convinced that it belonged somewhere in my top 10. The freshman album by this dirty doom trio does it all, and better than your band. With ease they develop a post-rock build-up into a bassy doom dirge, bust into a stoner metal rockout, and then fuse it into some pretty sinister black metal sounds. When black metal leaks its way into headbanging rock, really awesome things happen. Case in point: “Outside the Circles of Time”.
7. Blut Aus Nord – Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry (track: Clarissima Mundi Lumina)
A bit more down to whatever planet these guys hail from than the 777 trilogy, Saturnian Poetry is still a bizarre journey into another dimension that only Blut Aus Nord can seem to access. Its constant whirlwind of motion blasts us into a haze of celestial chaos, wherein the band’s synth chords and clean vocals command us to stare in awe and reverence. Few black metal bands on the market can claim to have forged as unique a sound within the genre as Blut Aus Nord, and they’re still breaking my brain in 2014.
6. Saor – Aura (track: The Awakening)
I tend to think of Aura as a straight-forward album that serves its purpose beautifully. Top-notch woodwinds and string paint a majestic Scottish landscape where the old gods still tread in all their glory, at one with the earth and its people. Without ever really breaching any new territory beyond the tried and true boundaries of pagan metal, Andy Marshall has managed to craft what is probably the most grand Gaelic/Celtic variant of the genre I have ever heard.
5. Boris – Noise (track: Melody)
I fucking love Boris. You know that. They could literally shit on an LP and I’d claim it shear brilliance. But thankfully, they keep pumping out one masterpiece after another instead. Noise is so layered in the band’s two decades of perpetual evolution that I don’t think you could begin to grasp what the hell is going on here if you didn’t already know half their discography by heart. It’s a little bit of everything they’ve done before all crammed together in yet another novel new way. No other band in existence sounds anything like this, and at the same time few bands have borrowed more liberally and diversely from other musical scenes than the bastion of badass that is Boris. Boris Boris. Boris! God damn, this is awesome.
4. Woods of Desolation – As the Stars (track: Unfold)
As the Stars is 2014’s Aesthethica, albeit of more modest proportions. If the obscure Welshman known simply as “D.” could append to his public image anything approaching the epic douchiness of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, it might even be popular. (Ok, I’m one of the few people who’ve actually read Hunter’s writings and think he makes some valid points, but whatever.) This album is a bloody mess in the least figurative of ways, and it’s exactly the sort of raw sincerity that I love about post-black metal. In a new scene that divorces black metal’s brink-of-the-abyss soundscape from its machismo closet-bound harbingers, the bands that play with their hearts on their sleeves tend to touch closest to home. As the Stars offers neither the epic intensity of Liturgy nor the refined sound quality of Deafheaven, and the metal world is sure to forget it in time, but my brief love affair with Woods of Desolation will be remembered fondly. Its humble reach is part of what makes it endearing.
3. Harakiri for the Sky – Aokigihara (track: Jhator)
I hold my top three choices for 2014 in a league far above the rest. Aokigihara is an absolutely enormous bastion of sound that presses the weight of its world on your shoulders from start to finish. And that world is heavy indeed, because it is firmly rooted in reality. Harakiri for the Sky doesn’t play that tried and true metal game of glorifying violence. It shoves some real modern nightmares in your face and says “this is really, really terrible, and there’s nothing we can honestly do about it.” I can see this album attracting a “DSBM” label, which is typically shorthand for “wallowing in self pity”, but Aokigihara is the real deal. If it doesn’t leave you feeling a little sick inside, you aren’t paying enough attention.
2. Spectral Lore – III (track: The Cold March Towards Eternal Brightness)
At more than a dozen listens through this album, I am still not sure what to make of it. 87 minutes of music crammed into seven tracks is pretty hard to swallow, and to make matters worse, the first two tracks are its weakest by far. I find it next to impossible to commit myself to a full attentive listen from start to finish, and it’s not an album that offers much on the surface. Yet, I can’t escape the feeling that something really special is going on here. My mind may drift away for three or four minutes at a pop, but I am always drawn back into some beautiful synergy that dances on the brink of euphoria. 2014 might be at an end, but I haven’t finished listening to III by a long shot. I am going to keep plugging away until I’ve got it fully within my grasp, and when I do I think I might regret passing it by for the #1 spot.
1. Panopticon – Roads to the North (track: The Long Road Part 3: The Sigh of Summer)
The first time I heard Roads to the North, I was routing a rather lossy early leak through my Droid into the particularly horrendous sound system of my wife’s Mazda 6. (My 2006ish Nissan Sentra has godlike audio and the car was half the price. What’s up with that?) I definitely did not think on that initial listen that it would end up my favorite album of the year. With a properly purchased copy through my headphones, it’s easy to tell why an album as subtly mixed as this would translate to crap when pushed through crap. I am absolutely captivated by the melding of sounds on this album. It’s simply beautiful, and you couldn’t ask for a more conscientious artist to craft its folk, post-rock, black metal, and melodic death metal melodies than Austin Lunn. The lyrical and thematic content of Kentucky showed him to be one of the most honest musicians in the metal scene. On Roads to the North, he translated the spirit of Kentucky into sound. Kentucky is the album I think about. This is the one I actually listen to, over and over and over again.
Through the Shattered Lens 