Isn’t it strange how every natural phenomenon can be scientifically explained but our inner edgy-selves only find solace by relating everything to a theory where it’s all inevitably broken and universally doomed
Necroticism – Descanting the Insalubrious was released in 1991 on October 21 by extreme metal band Carcass. …many of the tracks describe ways to dispose of dead bodies…☠️ …
I wrote a full-length review of this disaster of an album earlier in the month, and yeah, wow. Between the phoned-in performances from the instrumentalists who have proven themselves far above this joke of a band and the half-assed production this would have been a pretty crappy album even without Chris Barnes’ milk-aged vocals. But he’s here, and he’s managed to actually get worse too, gasping his way through the whole album and littering it with these ludicrous “high” squeals that would make Smeagol sound like a more competent death metal vocalist. It’s the worst thing I’ve heard all year, and what’s worse, I don’t think Six Feet Under is stopping.
1/10
With that out of the way, let’s cleanse the pallet right away with some really good shit.
Greg Puciato-Child Soldier: Creator of God
Ever reliable in his artistically integrity, explosive former Dillinger Escape Plan frontman, Greg Puciato, has been pretty sonically and artistically adventurous since the honorable dissolution of the iconic mathcore outfit, his most notable music project being the ethereal, synth-heavy The Black Queen. This year, however, Puciato has gone fully solo for a full-length project, and something told me to get ready for a wild ride, and boy was I right on that hunch. Borne out of an exponentiated process of songwriting that produced songs Puciato deemed unfitting for any of his current projects, what was planned as a small release to ship these songs out of the writing room eventually spiraled into a full-blown debut solo album clocking in at over an hour. A lot of solo projects play like clearly indulgent amateur hour sessions from an artist whose ego has been boosted pretty well from significant success from their main project, leading them to overconfidently try their hand at music they have no business trying it at. And it’s often approached under the understanding that it is a victory lap, more or less, and a satisfaction of creative impulses for the sake of it. Sometimes the resultant material is clearly inspired and showcases a side of an artist that certainly deserves some spotlight. Other times it feels like being trapped in an awkward situation with an acquaintance where they just show you all their newest pedals and production software and you’re just stuck there watching them fiddle around while you nod along and offer the occasional “wow, that’s pretty crazy” every now and then while they don’t pick up on the obvious cues that you are just waiting for them to finish playing with their toys. While Puciato was open about this album being borne from the very creatively borderless mindset that so often damns solo projects, Child Soldier: Creator of God is an actual realization of the type of grand, genre-spanning album that so many solo artists envision themselves making and set out to create, and it’s hardly a whimsical, amateurish crack at the styles within either. Puciato’s foray into sludge metal, industrial rock, harsh noise, darkwave, synthwave, and shoegaze, (1) makes for a hell of a dynamic and exciting track list, and (2) shows a much deeper than average respect for and relationship with the styles being played here. This isn’t some frontman thinking his charisma can carry him through a whole rap solo album; this is a well-rounded artist (also a hell of a frontman, no denying that) giving the most comprehensive look yet into his creative mind. The album leaps around in patches of different styles, strung together mostly by ambient connective tissue of various types, all with a great attention to detail paid to both texture and progression. We get early patches of smooth ambiance, but also aggressive industrial and sludge metal, eventually moving to more soothing and meditative synthy stuff around the middle, finishing with some serene, Have a Nice Life-esque shoegaze. But really there’s no way to sum up this album stylistically without breaking down every single song on here, and that would just ruin the fun and the experience. You really just have to experience it for yourself.
9/10
DevilDriver-Dealing with Demons I
Embarking on a conceptual double-album, Dez Fafara and DevilDriver’s first installment in the pair is a scoop of the, indeed, slightly above average, but unfortunately still plain and predictable modern groove metal they always offer up. I’ll give the band credit for keeping the pace up and clearly putting substantial energy into the performances on this album, while also trying to squeeze in a few shake-ups to their sound, like the clear Gojira-inspired riffage on the opening track. The album loses steam, unfortunately, as its punches lose their impact as it goes on.
6/10
Anaal Nathrakh-Endarkenment
While certainly cultivating a unique sound, Anaal Nathrakh’s unholy fusion of nasty modern blackened grindcore with sweeter metalcore and melodic death metal elements has its mixed results. And while that might at first sound like a relatively critical assessment of the Brits’ eleventh album, I’d say that there is actually a lot to enjoy and take in for at least the interesting mix of styles, most of which are hits rather than misses as well.
7/10
Enslaved-Utgard
Having been a fan of a good amount of their recent output, especially 2015’s In Times, I came out of Utgard moderately disappointed with how infrequently Enslaved galvanized their potent brand of Viking folky, progressive black metal effectively; the few moments the band do channel their strengths cohesively and purposefully left me wanting more rather than savoring those moments.
6/10
In Cauda Venenum-G.O.H.E.
It’s hard to, and indeed seems kind of in just to, sum up a heaping prog metal serving like G.O.H.E., comprised of two 22-minute halves, in a capsule review, but that is kind of the format my current busy circumstances have forced me into. French outfit In Cauda Venenum made a self-titled debut in similar two-long-track fashion back in 2015, and the band’s gothic and somewhat theatrical brand of atmospheric post-black-metal is continued on their sophomore effort here, drawing the obvious comparisons to Opeth and Katatonia, as well as Der Weg Einer Freiheit, Numenorean, and Sólstafir, and apart from the more frequent sample usage and extra drawn-out songs, there really isn’t that much to differentiate In Cauda Venenum stylistically. The band’s second album, unfortunately, resembles so many others in the field with big aspirations and the same inadequate means of getting there.
5/10
Apparition-Granular Transformation
A much more bite-sized early two-track offering, Apparition’s debut EP offers a more promising glimpse into a heady, atmospheric, yet still visceral manipulation of modern death metal that I would be curious to hear in a more long-form format. In a genre as extreme as death metal in recent years has been, finding artists effective at working with negative space can be difficult, but the two songs on Granular Transformation showcase a formidable dexterity from Apparition that I think can take them places.
6/10
Molasses-Through the Hollow
While indeed marred by some rough performances on songs with sometimes more desert to cross than water to make it there, there’s an undeniable occult hypnotism about the Dio-era-esque doom metal hollow that Molasses ritualize their way through.
7/10
Death Angel-Under Pressure
While certainly an odd choice on the surface, Death Angel’s acoustic EP and cover of the famous Queen song actually comes out pretty alright. The acoustic version of Act III’s “A Room with a View” comes off with the energy of something like Rush whenever they went acoustic, and the original acoustic cut, “Faded Remains” isn’t too bad either. The acoustic format did not, however, mask the drabness of “Revelation Song” from last year’s overall disappointment, Humanicide.
6/10
Necrophobic-Dawn of the Damned
The Swedes’ melodic brand of blackened death metal is nothing if not thorough on the quintet’s ninth full-length, Dawn of the Damned, covering all the ground that their fans expect their style to cover and doing so with more compositional and performative stamina than their average contemporary. While the band’s broader compositional approach is akin to the beating of a dead horse, I can’t deny it produces some tasty motifs in the process.
7/10
Bloodbather-Silence
After coming onto the blossoming metallic hardcore scene in 2018 with a standard, but potent enough 14-minute EP, Pressure, Bloodbather are back with another 14 minutes of similar, yet less promising material, doing little to set themselves apart from or on the same level of the likes of Jesus Piece, Vein, Knocked Loose, or Harm’s Way.
5/10
Infera Bruo-Rites of the Nameless
The Bostonians’ fourth full-length is, at the very least, a rather well-executed forty minutes of modern black metal a la Craft or Watain, but beneath the seams the band’s progressive tendencies twist what would otherwise be a fresh, but standard, slab of black metal into a more head-turning offering of the usual shrieks and blast beats.
7/10
Touché Amoré-Lament
While somewhat shaky in their compositional exploration in their fifth LP, the firmness of their emotive post-hardcore foundation allows for Touché Amoré to build upwards relatively steadily without losing that raw vulnerability that has made them so captivating to begin with.
7/10
Gargoyl-Gargoyl
This is the self-titled debut from Bostonian four-piece Gargoyl; a novel blend of dirty nineties grunge and gothic prog metal, Gargoyl come through with one of the more impressive genre fusions of the year, meeting the lofty sufficiency for dexterity with excessive vocal harmonies in a manner so uncanny that would make habe to Layne Stayley proud. While there is the expected room for improvement on the compositional end that many debut projects come with, Gargoyl have laid the groundwork for themselves fantastically and started off on a good foot.
7/10
Crippled Black Phoenix-Ellengæst
Through creative gothic flair and full-bodied guest vocal contributions that bolster the somber atmosphere beyond the typical post-metal album, the UK band’s most recent offering of “endtime ballads”, despite its few low points that undo its otherwise immersive atmosphere, serves as one of the more engaging releases under the broader post-metal umbrella of the past year.
7/10
Wayfarer-A Romance with Violence
The Denver-based quartet follow up 2018’s strong emotive case for the potential for evoking cathartic power of the atmospheric black metal which has so saturated the American scene to the point of numbness, their Americana-tinged third LP, World’s Blood, unfortunately, with a fourth LP whose compositional homogeneity and mere few intermittent bursts of enthralling atmospheric instrumentation more represent, rather than advocate the merit of, the saturation of the American atmospheric black metal scene.
6/10
Armored Saint-Punching the Sky
Though I think the structural homogeneity and John Bush’s similarly limited vocal delivery holds it back, with crunchy bangers like “Do Wrong to None” and “My Jurisdiction” alongside more tempered tracks the clearly grunge-influenced “Lone Wolf”, Bush and company provide a relatively stylistically diverse traditional heavy metal album for an age that could use more contemporary representation of classic styles (beyond the entire stoner metal genre LARPing as Black Sabbath too).
7/10
Spirit Adrift-Enlightened in Eternity
But it’s not just the old guard representing their era of classic heavy metal robustly; a year and a half after their energetically melodic third album, Divided by Darkness, which took a triumphant melodic approach to classic heavy metal and doom metal similar to that of Khemmis on their excellent third album, Spirit Adrift ease up a bit on the hyper-soulful approach to guitar melody that had led me (and others I’m sure) to draw the comparison to Khemmis, and instead dive deeper into the headspace of the genre’s earliest progenitors to achieve that unabashedly glorious rallying cry that is evoked by the very front cover of Enlightened in Eternity. While I am personally pretty partial to the very vulnerable and heartfelt melodic approach that characterized Divided by Darkness, the effectiveness with which Spirit Adrift are able to wield the sometimes Maiden-esque, sometimes Testament-esque sounds of the 80’s on this album is undeniably impressive.
8/10
Fever 333-Wrong Generation
Providing the correction to this generation’s answer to Rage Against the Machine (after Prophets of Rage’s insufficient attempted revival) Fever 333 follow up last year’s debut of heavy, fired-up and modern take on rapcore with another 14 minutes of righteous anti-racist hardcore anger that’s attuned to the issues to a level that I wish more artists would at least express in their art. While the EP is 18 minutes long, the last two songs, “The Last Time” and “Supremacy”, don’t match the sonic energy of the first six tracks. The somber piano-led snippet-length ballad, “The Last Time”, should have been the conclusion of the album, but the closing track, “Supremacy”, while as conscious as the tracks before it, is basically a late-stage formulaic Linkin Park track that flatters neither of the two bands. Despite botching the landing though, Wrong Generation is a ripping batch of songs that well represent the current unrest and provide a positive hypothetical idea of what it might be like if Rage Against the Machine were in their prime and active today.
7/10
Mörk Gryning-Hinsides Vrede
The Swedes return from their 15-year disillusioned absence from the studio with a concise and clearly renewed enthusiasm for the energetic black metal that they put forth on Hinsides Vrede. Dynamically bolstered by folk-metal compositional tendencies and more than a dash of that famed Gothenburg melodicism (I know they’re from Stockholm and in fact their melodic approach often does heaven to that of their close neighbors from Uppsala, Watain), Mörk Gryning’s seamless return to music finds them jumping into the modern black metal scene’s advanced compositional rubric with relative ease.
7/10
Zeal & Ardor-Wake of a Nation
Having covered their output since their debut and being a big fan of Manuel Gagneux’ project, it pains me to say, especially given the noble pretext and occasional momentary flashes of sobering messaging, that this six-song mini release really doesn’t capture the unique sonic pallet that has made Zeal & Ardor such an interesting act to listen to for the past few years in the most flattering light. The title track is possibly the least of the offenders here, but all the songs here function by taking a little snippet of sound that samples Zeal & Ardor’s broader stylistic range, and drawing it out across these short, but all too minimally composed tracks in such a way that they lose their momentum very quickly. Like I said, I wholeheartedly appreciate, sympathize with, and support what Manuel Gagneux is doing to lend his band’s platform to the addressing of the dire issue of today’s racism through musical means with this project, and when its social motivation is at the forefront, it’s at its most potent, but musically, unfortunately, it’s just desperately underwritten in a way that doesn’t fairly represent how accomplished Zeal & Ardor really are with their sound.
5/10
Sevendust-Blood & Stone
The flashes of crushing grooves reminiscent of their earlier work on Blood & Stone that highlight how well Sevendust can harness nu/alternative metal to execute pummeling attacks with the right crunchy guitar tone, unfortunately, don’t come frequently enough on their twelfth LP to mirage the exhaustion that has come of the band’s writing process after such frequent, unrelenting output and the all too apparent desperate need for a recalibrating, refreshing break, which they certainly deserve for their tenacity.
5/10
Undeath-Lesions of a Different Kind
In one of those cases where the ridiculously gratuitous album cover actually represents the album’s sound quite well, Rochester, New York five-piece, Undeath mince neither words nor sounds on their debut LP in their 100% upfront, no-nonsense, and wonderfully nasty delivery of death metal. Eschewing even the slightest sense of snobbery or pretense for aimless ambition, the band simply compile the genre’s tried and true elements of bellowing growls, filthy riffs, mean-ass down-tuned chugging, and blood-pumping double-bass with blast beats into an addictive slab of raw, uncured death metal that serves as a testament to the merit of not overthinking shit.
8/10
Griffon-Ὸ Θεός Ὸ Βασιλεύς
On their sophomore LP, Parisian quintet Griffon channel the world innovative ethos that has become rather prominent in their scene into a somewhat short, but definitely sweet offering of modestly ambitious black metal that captures much more effectively than most albums of similar style and lesser imagination, the divine grandeur that the genre so often tries and fails to embody.
8/10
Bring Me the Horizon-Post-Human: Survival Horror
After taking the hard left into current pop music trends very transparently on their controversial, which was at least partially intentional on their part, and ultimately really patchy, but not wholly awful, 2019 album, amo, Oli Sykes and co. walk it back substantially for this smaller release here, back to That’s the Spirit, even Sempiternal, a prospect that might get a lot of the band’s more long-time, metalcore-centric fans excited, but I would suggest those fans temper their expectations of Post-Human: Survival Horror. The band reunite with the anthemic metalcore/deathcore that put them on the map for a good chunk of this album, and the intro track, “Dear Diary,”, might even give some false hope of the prodigal sons returning home. But songs like the cookie-cutter single, “Teardrops”, provide strong evidence that, while the band have re-embraced their old aesthetic, they have not kicked the pop vocal or compositional habits. And the project really does run out of energy in its final third because of this compositional homogeneity. I do want to highlight the song, “Kingslayer”, which features a very in-form Babymetal (I loved their album last year), because their fun, not-so-serious approach to the crossing of J-pop and metal music in their feature on this track among the other songs around it provides a contrast to the more formulaic, disinterested radio pop swagger that Bring Me the Horizon have been trying to jam into their sound that could perhaps inform Bring Me the Horizon’s artistic approach to integrating pop music if they really are so hellbent on doing so. Ultimately though, as much as they want to move into newer territory, this trajectory-revising release shows just how much more solid Bring Me the Horizon are in their metalcore territory than they were on amo. It had its predictable hiccups, but this thing wasn’t too bad.
7/10
Pallbearer-Forgotten Days
With the slow, sludgy, down-tuned riffing of the menacing opening title track and the similar chug of “Vengeance & Ruination” being the sole exceptions, the remainder of Pallbearer’s fouth full-length largely sees them operating in the same niche they have in their three previous albums. And while this could invoke accusations of playing it safe, the brimming heartfelt sorrow and resistance to succumbing to despair across Forgotten Days is enough to wave that away, as Pallbearer showcase just how emotive doom metal can be.
8/10
Bleeding Out-Lifelong Death Fantasy
The very new act and fresh Profound Lore signing, Bleeding Out, certainly display more dynamic capability than your average local grindcore scene’s biggest names here on their 18-minute debut for the label, but as of now it is still just a glimpse of potential for more effective future implementation. It’s a good start, though, and I’ll be looking forward to a more long-form project from these guys.
6/10
Evildead-United States of Anarchy
Every year we get the resurrection of some long-inactive old-school band who seem to have found that missing spark at last; we’ve seen the return of smaller bands to the studio like Angel Witch or Sorcerer and long-awaited revivals of iconic acts like Possessed. This year, Los Angeles’ Evildead has seen fit to make their commentary on the massive ongoing sociopolitical upheaval. Despite my love for the 80’s thrash scene they were born out of, the combination of the utterly lame band name, logo, and covers for either their ‘89 or ‘91 albums never really made me want to check them out, but seeing the horridly cheesy and incoherent cover of United States of Anarchy (I mean how much more on-the-nose can you get), my morbid curiosity got the best of me. Maybe I’d be wrong to have judged them by their cover, plenty of my favorite 80’s albums have particularly goofy cover art. So what do we get from Evildead in 2020 with this fucking album? Well, it’s not as poorly performed as the past few Anvil albums I’ve had to review have been, but Jesus the lyricism is similarly cheesy 5th-grade-level stuff and smacks of silly political incoherence that essentially boils down to “enlightened centrism” with mix of that good ol’ Illuminati-conspiracy-theory belief that no political thrash album is apparently complete without. I mean there’s just basic acknowledgment of the prominent problems of the day and the fact that both major political parties are bad and that corruption is rampant all throughout DC, but Evildead not only barely scratch the surface, they apply the same level cynicism to the “both sides” they criticize with no substantiation to their criticism despite that mindset being a big reason for our being where we are right now, mixed in with the occasional conspiracy-paranoia about the shadowy underworld running everything, so no real solutions or even proper addressing of these problems. Like, the same level of criticism is levied at right-wingers and communists, like communists are at all why this country has gone to shit. And the generic Anthrax/Megadeth type of thrash instrumentation, while rumbly and mixed well to highlight its bass heaviness, doesn’t exactly make it easy to get past the commentary deficiencies on here.
4/10
Emma Ruth Rundle&Thou-May Our Chambers Be Full
Rounding off their year (at least I think), with a long-teased collaboration with Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou finally present their massive sludge-doom sound in a much more flattering light than the previous cover albums this year did. Thou’s original material continues to highlight just why their relatively stiff sound is much more cut out for that, original material, than for trying to bend beyond its flexibility to tribute grunge songs. And while Thou being back in their more effective department, Emma Ruth Rundle’s contributions, beyond just her gorgeous and ethereally haunting vocals, to the album’s atmosphere, dynamic, and structuring really take the collaboration to the next level. Not to say that Thou are completely overshadowed and relegated to the background on this record or that they don’t contribute to a fair share of the legwork here; the workload is shared pretty equally, and both collaborators have their moments of prominence, but Emma Ruth Rundle’s ever-present gothic/folky influence really directs the music in a way that plays to Thou’s strengths in a way I’m not sure they would have been able to on their own. It’s great work from both of them, and I’d be eager to hear Thou find more collaborations like this in the future that push them into doing more interesting things with their crushing doom sound, as opposed to the rather tepid collaborations with The Body.
8/10
Auðn-Vökudraumsins Fangi
Sadly, three albums in, Auðn have only barely exceeded the bare minimum for naturalistic atmospheric black metal, with no signs of significant improvement to be found. The Icelandic band earn points for their earnest delivery, but they never seem to fully make it out of the rut that the genre’s many contemporary acts have dug.
5/10
Botanist-Photosynthesis
The black metal traditionalists might have had to accept that the floodgates to bright ambience and serene shoegaze in the genre have been opened and that there’s no going back now, but even as an avid Deafheaven fan, I’m sometimes momentarily surprised at just how heavenly some black metal has gotten lately, and this new album from Botanist is one of those albums. And while it sometimes slips into some of the current wave’s typical ruts, the sheer blindingly illuminating aura of this album when it reaches those high points (and it does so frequently) is enough to pull it out from those gutters and high into the cosmos. Yeah, another splendid offering of nature worship from Botanist.
8/10
Mr. Bungle-The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo
Making their return after over a decade, Mike Patton recruits both Dave Lombardo and Scott Ian for the long-awaited fourth Mr. Bungle album, which is titled in homage to the first Mr. Bungle demo which it is comprised largely of much clearer re-recordings of. Ever impressive, Mike Patton balances aggression and eccentricity like a tightrope walker on this project too, while his bandmates do the same with thrash metal’s natural adrenaline rush while pushing the genre into new compositional and stylistic territory without sacrificing that crucial whiplash. It’s a great time, and definitely one of the year’s best thrash albums.
8/10
Carcass-Despicable
While they’ve been much less prolific since their reboot than they were prior, Liverpool’s melodic death metal pioneers simply continue to demonstrate their excellence in this seemingly effortless four-track appetizer to next year’s Torn Arteries. Anyone familiar with the band’s brutal form of melodic death metal will certainly be pleased with the four quite sufficiently pulverizing cuts here; those who may only be familiar with some of the band’s many less muscular imitators might be surprised, and pleasantly so, with the Englanders’ ability to lay on the infectious guitar melody without sacrificing an ounce of force.
Holy shit! It’s been awhile and the year is almost over and there’s so much to say so I better make this quick.
The new Bullet for my Valentine album is okay.
The new Oceans EP is nøt okay.
Deathcore is alive and well in 2021.
Fortitude pretty great but I still prefer Magma just slightly.
Washing machine noises!
What the hell was that EP, Serj?
I think Frontierer might have beat Car Bomb at their own game.
What the fuck, Marilyn Manson?
The new Full of Hell is like a spar with a ferocious fighter whose movements you’ve figured out and now know how to sufficiently defend; was hoping to get my ass kicked.
Oh yay, Porcupine Tree is back :|
Cryptosis filling the metal ecosystem’s Vektor-shaped hole with the debut of the year.
Obviously I’m psyched for Khemmis this week.
A tour was not the announcement I was hoping for, Meshuggah :/
Corey’s best mask yet.
You’re telling me that took you guys ten years, Fred. It’s not like Tool who just took their sweet time the get around to making their album, you were in production hell and label disputes for this unfinished mess for the better part of last decade. Amazing. I love it.
Best Cradle of Filth album in at least a decade.
Support Cane Hill on their independence.
This Converge / Chelsea Wolfe collab better be as good as it damn well should be.
They did not need to make school this hard.
Kin is the album The Valley should have been.
Idk if I want Deafheaven to give pure shoegaze another try; I know they can do better, just not sure if they will.
None of you should listen to me after I gave Endarkenment a 7/10 last year, I clearly can’t be trusted. (9/10 at least)
Bad Wolves, Asking Alexandria, Black Veil Brides still addicted to making absolute trash.
Knocked fucking Loose!
Trivium powering through what should be a stagnant phase of their career through sheer tenacity, absolutely respect the dedication.
King Woman or Hiss Spun, I still can’t decide.
I DO NOT get the hype around Spiritbox’s decent djent riffs and gutless top 40 choruses.
Donda was kinda lame.
Idk what’s going on with Fear Factory, but they could probably still be making legendary albums if not for it.
Beast in Black is the cheesiest shit ever and I love it.
Billie Eilish with another solid album.
I discovered that it is indeed possible to implode due to the sheer magnitude of cringe.
Jim Breuer was never funny, he just knew how to do Brian Johnson’s voice, but now his “comedy” is physically painful to watch.
Holy shit, Altarage!
2021 has not been the best year for Profound Lore.
Come on Dream Theater..
You could’ve picked a much better act to tour with, Korn, than the washed up whiny racist uncle Aaron Lewis clown show experience.
Cannibal Corpse keep on Cannibal Corpsing :)
Why has god abandoned us?
So Brent Hinds is still a piece of shit.
Plasmodium’sTowers of Silence is like taking too much of an edible in outer space.
That’s more like it, Godspeed.
They did not need to make life this hard.
I’d like a refund.
Doom metal on Bandcamp needs a serious rejuvenation.
Archspire are not human.
For the most part I don’t think metal has a huge problem with it, but I hope artists across the board (but much more importantly, bookers and promoters) take note of what went down at Astroworld.
Any day now, Wrest
Any day now, Gorguts
Any day now, Neurosis
Any day now, Necrophagist (hahahahahahaha lolololol)
Any day now, rogue asteroid.
For some reason is didn’t expect Sinner Get Ready to be all that great, but it’s the best album I’ve heard since starting this blog.
I know it’s a good week into 2021 now, but I had too much fun on Excel to not post these STATS!
2020 was a wild year for everyone, and I had plenty of life changes going on amidst the pandemic, the economic collapse, the social unrest to make it an even crazier year. Despite being busier than ever, 2020 (potentially due to shelter in in place) ended up being my most prolific year ever, reviewing 301 METAL ALBUMS that came out just this past year.
And that’s not counting the 10 non-metal albums I also reviewed, the albums from 2019 that I had missed that I went back to shout out, or the other 55 non-metal albums I enjoyed and various metal albums I heard but didn’t get around to reviewing. It felt apt to put a few graphs together, which are below.
The resolution is high enough on my end, so I think they should be nice and discernible. But I graphed the genres I listened to and the ratings I gave.
I’ll make sure to explain the process well enough to make the numbers make sense.
First up are these genre tables which should be viewable. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but I did also account for albums that extended into multiple genres. In the “Subgenres & Blended Genres” graph are genres like blackened death metal, ambient black metal, deathgrind, etc. Each of those I factored in to parent genres proportionally (i.e., 1 blackened death metal = 0.5 death metal & 0.5 black metal). Its not perfect, given that those proportions aren’t the same for every blackened death metal album, but it worked well enough. Naturally this got pretty tricky with albums that combined several genres or just ran the gamut of genres like Greg Puciato’s solo album. So I went through ALL 301 ALBUMS THAT I REVIEWED, and added up their proportional genre components. It was messy and I did end up with a lot of decimals, so I smoothed it out a bit by doing some rounding that I don’t think affected the data all too significantly, which is why there are all whole numbers of albums per each genre.
The results really weren’t too surprising; death metal and black metal at the top, with a good focus on progressive metal, metalcore, doom, sludge, and thrash. If anything, it shows me where I can turn some more of my my focus: folk metal, power metal, industrial metal, etc.
In a world where I had time, I might see about doing separate charts to see where I rated albums of a certain genre, but I don’t have that time and I think this overall rating histogram is pretty good on its own.
The right skew was not surprising, with most of the albums I reviewed being positively so. 7 was the mode, with 8 being pretty close. Naturally, I wasn’t looking for shit music, but if I was, maybe this graph would shape up a little more normally. Even so, the right skew is probably also indicative of just how much I naturally gravitate to and enjoy metal music as a whole.
Well, cheers to 2020, good riddance to all of it except for the music, and here’s to 2021, which will come with some changes that I’ll make a different post about.
2020 was a pretty fucked year, but we got some good shit in spite of the world trying to kill itself and the music industry. A lot of people speculated a huge slowdown in production and release pushbacks since artists wouldn’t be able to tour, yet while artists’ being stuck at home and unable to tour their studio material has been not just a downer but a huge financial stressor on smaller blossoming artists especially, the continuation of creative output has shown just how inspiration-driven, rather than market-driven, the music world is. Music has become less and less of a cash cow for artists as the years go on, but this abrupt halt of all touring was probably one of the biggest blows artists have had to deal with, and it really has done a number on the music industry as a whole. There’s not much money to be made here right now, but goddamn it if that hasn’t held back anyone inspired to offer their musical voice to our aching world, and I’m thankful as hell for it. So here’s to the best metal music of the year, and all the (not piece-of-shit) artists out there weathering the COVID storm and adapting to the suddenly altered climate.
It tends to go without saying, but I’ll just clarify that I construct this list based on what I reviewed this year, which is primarily metal music, yes, but it also sometimes gets into music that is more metal-adjacent. It might not be bonafide metal music, but it does somehow find itself in the broad metal sphere culturally or even stylistically. So when I include albums in this kind of list like Lingua Ignota’s Caligula or Uboa’s The Origin of My Depression, while those albums aren’t exactly metal per se and rather noisy industrial neoclassical post-modern neo-Marxist darkwave (lol), that’s why. When I include Me and That Man even though it’s a gothic acoustic country/folk project, it’s because it’s spearheaded by the frontman of Behemoth. And of course, my opinion, blah blah blah. These always end up being massive and take tons of time, so enough formalities, you know what it is.
70.Vile Creature-Glory! Glory! Apathy Took Helm
The Ontario duo come through with a massive record that seems too thick and sludgy to be just two people. And yet it is, and the band make quite the expressive statement with the style with just the two of them on their third album here, mainly by injecting much more than the usual emotive performance and vulnerability into the mix.
69.Thrown into Exile-II: Illusion of Control
On their sophomore LP, the L.A. band take a step back from the Trivium comparisons that characterized their first album and focus on making vibrant, energetic metalcore with conviction, however familiar and potentially dated it might be.
68.Eternal Champion-Ravening Iron
With one infectious melody after another, Eternal Champion really do evoke their namesake on this infectious batch of the most old-school, power-metal-adjacent 80’s heavy metal, refurbished just enough to make it fitting for the modern era.
67.Blood from the Soul-DSM-5
Another shared brainchild of the prolific Jacob Bannon, along with former Napalm Death guitarist Shane Embury, Blood from the Soul has shifted to become a rather familiarly hardcore project that feels very in line with the Converge frontman’s main project.DSM-5captures that raw, vibrant energy that the style requires, and runs elegantly with it.
66.Havok-V
I’ll grant that I was kind of expecting a little bit more from Havok after my loving of their 2017 thrash revival album, Conformicide, which was quite possibly the thrash album of that decade. Although it didn’t really emerge much from behind the shadow of its predecessor,Vis still another fiery, opinionated outing of Megadeth-inspired thrash that further establishes Havok as one of this new decade’s foremost names in thrash.
65.Inter Arma-Garbers Days Revisited
Undoubtedly the best cover album I heard all year, the Richmond band’s boisterous tributes from the likes of Venom and Ministry to Tom Petty and Prince (and Metallica with the album’s title) showcase their southern rock roots while still letting their sludgy sonic identity shine through it. It’s one of the most mindfully approached cover albums I’ve heard, and one that I’m not at all surprised to hear Inter Arma excelling at.
64.Sumac-May You Be Held
While it’s not as out-there and sludgily expressive as 2018’s post-metal masterpiece, Love in Shadow, this year’s more traditionally ambient May You Be Held still comes with a good deal of ambitious song structuring that allows the band’s eccentricity to come through.
63.Sodom-Genesis XIX
With another solid thrash metal offering on this list, the German thrash metal pioneers seem the pull from a bottomless well of enthusiasm as energy for the genre as they blast and riff their way through their 16th album, and you can feel the love the band still have for the style and you can’t help but join them.
62.Voidsphere-To Sense | To Perceive
I was prepared for the worst when the super lo-fi black metal tremolo picking kicked in, but Voidsphere’s fourth LP kept the dark celestial acid trip exciting and the sonic spiral into the unknown unceasing to make for an album that throws you to the void and really captures that “void metal” moniker in wholy engulfing atmospheric black metal fashion.
61.Sinira-The Everlorn
With some of the most consistently engaging Swedish melodeath of the year, this debut full-length from the Texan band was one of the most promising and already accomplished debuts I heard all year, and I hope that Sinira can keep the vitally soulful melodies and performative energy going on their future endeavors because The Everlorn is a real treat already.
60.Völur-Death Cult
Though it does get off to a bit of a slow start with the more standard doom metal of the first two of the album’s four tracks, Völur’s Death Cult eventually does make good on its promise of freakish folk metal that makes you feel like you’ve wandered off into the woods and run into a cult that wants to rope you up and hang you over a fire to slow roast your legs.
59.Thou&Emma Ruth Rundle-May Our Chambers Be Full
After a pair of ill-conceived and resultingly lackluster cover albums, Thou come through with a win with their latest offering original material, which their collaboration with Emma Ruth Rundle certainly bolstered significantly. Her haunting vocals add a unique element of hypnotism to the band’s brash atmospheric blackened sludge that really makes the album the success that it is.
58.Suicide Silence -Become the Hunter
Probably one of the most significant turnarounds I’ve covered since starting this blog: I wasn’t as harsh on it as most critics (and fans especially), but the band’s widely panned self-titled album still ended up on my first list of worst albums of the year back in 2017. And here in 2020 they’re on my best-of list with their follow-up. It’s no surprise really; the self-titled album was really just a weird misguided blip on the deathcore icons’ timeline, and with Become the Hunter, Suicide Silence (who clearly heard fans’ message loud and clear) drop the tee-hee and resume their mantle of tasty, groovy deathcore with the best album they’ve made since losing Mitch Lucker.
57.Aseitas-False Peace
With their second album, False Peace, Aseitas establish at the very least a respectably ambitious and experimental ethos that produces both fascinating results in the present and exciting prospects for the band’s future of warping death metal, industrial metal, and metalcore into twisted forms.
56.Psychotic Waltz-The God-Shaped Void
One of the year’s most impressive comebacks comes from the San Diego prog metal pioneers of Psychotic Waltz, whose fifth album finally materialized a decade after their 2010 reunion. And it makes sense, given that context, that the band’s comeback album sounds so fluid and well-balanced. They’ve been rebuilding that chemistry for a decade now, and have had plenty of time to groom this long-awaited release, which serves as a prime guiding example of both a return from the grave and of classic progressive metal.
55.Obsidian Kingdom-Meat Machine
Perhaps the most overtly eccentric and attention-grabbing album on this list, like a dude in a rainbow tuxedo at a death metal show, Obsidian Kingdom first and foremost put on a dazzling show that keeps you engaged and interested, experimenting freely with modern progressive and sludge metal elements, but also showcasing an aptitude with the styles they contort that gives them the capability to do so intentionally rather than amateurishly.
54.Hatebreed-Weight of the False Self
Jamey Jasta and company came through with one of the most energizing and motivational hardcore/metalcore albums of the year. After the raging political commentary of 2016’s The Concrete Confessional,Weight of the False Self directs Hatebreed’s hardcore energy toward individual encouragement and betterment, and it’s a lyrical approach that I think fits them well and directs them to make some of their most slamming and effective hardcore music. Its songs have all already received a good few plays in my workout playlist.
53.ACxDC-Satan Is King
And speaking of vibrant hardcore, ACxDC come through with a quick, but wickedly biting offering of thoroughly aggitated and fired-up powerviolence that seems perfectly tailored to the broad social unrest of the year, channeling it more than capturing it. It’s a sharp, vicious album that feels fit to represent a lot of people’s feelings about the prominence of governmental failures in responding to the economic distress of the pandemic, the rise of fascism, and police brutality.
52.Regarde Les Hommes Tomber-Ascension
The French five-piece’s third album was one of few vibrant post-black-metal records I heard this year in the vein of Numenorean, and Ascension certainly struck for me a similarly emotive chord that kept me coming back to it all year long despite my listening to so much other music.
51.Afterbirth-Four Dimensional Flesh
One of my favorite brutal technical death metal extravaganzas of the year, Four Dimensional Flesh is a treat in both departments without sacrificing one for the other, and it’s a fucking blast the whole way through.
50.Scour-Black
It really says a lot for an EP to make it here, but Scour (despite indeed being a supergroup) have really outdone themselves with their high-octane, grindcore-informed black metal on their third, and best, EP so far, Black. The band of seasoned players packs more into 16 minutes than most bands in their proximity do in 3-4 times that length.
49.Moloken-Unveilance of Dark Matter
Moloken go mad and experimental on their sludgy and tormented atmospheric fourth full-length, Unveilance of Dark Matter, affirming their status’s one of the style’s foremost innovators alongside the likes of Amenra and The Atlas Moth.
48.Lorna Shore-Immortal
On their third LP, Lorna Shore showed that deathcore at its most gratuitous and sickening is a force to be reckoned with, with nastily inhuman vocals and ripping instrumental shows of physicality.
47.Avatar-Hunter Gatherer
The melodeath showmen silence their doubters with a gloriously anthemic and theatrical performance on Hunter Gatherer that never blinks or flinches in embarrassment, and it has no reason to. The album is more conceptually cohesive and intriguing than a lot of the prog I heard this year, and more life-affirmatinf and inspirational than pretty much all the power metal I heard too. This one was a big, definitive win for Avatar.
46.Spirit Adrift-Enlightened in Eternity
Just a year after the beloved Divided by Darkness, Spirit Adrift go even more retro on Enlightened in Eternity, bringing (albeit less than last time) a vital melodic beauty with them that few other acts in their vicinity are doing to the degree they are.
45.The Black Dahlia Murder-Verminous
I had a bit of a change of heart on The Black Dahlia Murder this year, and a big part of that was the undeniable death metal power of the band’s ninth album, Verminous, whose slick melodies and punishing brutality work exquisitely together without one dulling the other. I’ve been harsh on the band’s work in the past, but the infectious brutality of Verminous has really made me rethink my views on them, and by repeated returns to the album throughout the year have been the sufficient indication that I might have had it all wrong about them.
44.Alestorm-Curse of the Crystal Coconut
How this band are able to keep going is beyond me, but I’m here to applaud it, not argue with it. The Scottish pirate metal masters came through with a strong return-to-form album back in 2017, with No Grave but the Sea recalibrating the band to their unique brand of folk metal that they established on Captain Morgan’s Revenge after going off into the stylistic weeds on Sunset on the Golden Age in 2014. But that Curse of the Crystal Coconut embodies that carefree pirate life attitude that makes Alestorm so fun, venturing again into weird stylistic seas, this time with more success than last.
43.Xibalba-Años en Infierno
As fiery as their album’s title implies, Xibalba bring a simple, but welcome, hardcore flavor to slow-beating death metal that frames the genre’s naturally crushing attributes in a flattering light.
42.Tombs-Under Sullen Skies
After a less-enticing appetizer EP earlier in the year, Tombs unleashed their full power and mastery of the arts of death, doom, and black metal on Under Sullen Skies, a record whose consistently solid compositions kept me hooked into it and rather impressed after the taster the band offered earlier in the year.
41.Autonoesis-Autonoesis
Riding a melodic steed into the fray of progressive black metal and thrash metal out of fucking nowhere, this was hands down one of the best independent debut albums of the year that I feel very lucky to have caught wind of before year’s end. I’m eager as hell to see what’s next, if there is indeed something next, for Autonoesis.
40.Dark Buddha Rising-Mathreyata
Coming hot off their collaboration with Oranssi Pazuzu last year, the Finnish psychedelists clearly sharpened their approach to their spacey, atmospheric sludge drones through their collaboration with one of the best acts to train alongside. Mathreyata is significantly more layered and engaging than past Dark Buddha Rising albums, and I have loved basking in the band’s progress since it came out.
39.Sylosis-Cycle of Suffering
Maybe a little too metalcore-influenced and melodic to be considered a straight-up thrash album, but if we let thrash be a diverse field, this was my thrash album of the year. And it’s just a simple recipe of delicious riffs, soaring melodies, and performances with conviction that carry Cycle of Suffering over the line.
38.Carach Angren-Frankensteina Strataemontanus
And speaking of big performances, the theatrical Dutchmen’s sixth album is as conceptual and immersive as ever for them as they take freakish artistic liberties with the 18th century science experiments that were supposed to have inspired Frankenstein (the novel). The symphonic elements are bigger than ever and the band are committed to the act, which makes for an intensely captivating show.
37.Executioner’s Mask-Despair Anthems
A goth melancholic waltz equal parts White Light from the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans and Type O Negative, Despair Anthems is a bleak, meditative set of entrancing songs that certainly felt all too fitting during much of this year.
36.Red-Declaration
Completing basically back-to-back bouncebacks with the release of Declaration, Red redeem themselves after the release of what I think is their worst album (Gone), which followed immediately after a very welcome return to form on Of Beauty and Rage. And like their previous return to form, the band drop the contrived overproduction from Gone and bring back the bombastic, cathartic orchestral elements that have given their brand of inspirational alternative metal its muscle, serving as a reminder of what made this style so resonant in its mid-2000’s peak.
35.Code Orange-Underneath
Probably one of the most big-hyped follow-ups of the year, I saw a lot of reviewers and publishers calling this thing perfection almost reflexively immediately after it was released, but for me, I don’t think it quite reached the lofty bar the band set in 2017 with Forever. But even though I wasn’t as floored by it as so much of the music writing world was, what Code Orange do on Underneath to push metallic hardcore deeper into the more glitchy industrial territory they helped open up is a thrill and much more exciting than the vast majority of the metalcore and hardcore out there.
34.Pharmacist-Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition
Well we didn’t get any Pissgrave or old school Carcass this year, so Pharmacist came through to fill the void with some of the most surprisingly accomplished and compositionally astute goregrind albums I’ve heard in a long time. The band are able to make the absolutely nasty into something weirdly inviting through their keen sense of groove.
33.The Acacia Strain-Slow Decay
The Acacia Strain are another band who I warmed up to this year after being kind of overly critical of them in the past, and their roaring back into form with Slow Decay definitely helped that along. The band found again in this album the hardcore mojo that they’ve used to set themselves apart from the rest of the deathcore crop.
32.Ulver-Flowers of Evil
I was surprised at Ulver’s continuation of the new wave synth rock worship that they engaged in on 2017’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar, but not at all surprised, given how well the band fared on their previous foray into the style on that 2017 album, at how smoothly and effortlessly the group once again embodied the style’s best characteristics.
31.Ghostemane-ANTI-ICON
I don’t know if the verdict is out on this album among critics, but something tells me Ghostemane probably isn’t the darling of most people writing for Pitchfork or Rolling Stone. And while I get the sense that its shouty, tormented, edgy industrial metal take on rapcore didn’t make ANTI-ICON a high-minded enough of album to place in most publications’ year-end lists, I couldn’t help returning to it repeatedly this year and loving its raw honesty and addictive expressive realness.
30.Tortuga-Deities
This was one of the most happenstance of my Bandcamp findings this year, but I was so thankful to have heard this debut. After dealing with a lot of uncreative or just tired stoner doom Sabbath-worship, Tortuga’s progressive brand of stoner metal that they showcase on their debut here is full of life, dynamic, and creativity and is refreshingly far removed from the Master of RealityandVol. 4.
29.Cryptic Shift-Visitations from Enceladus
I’m definitely riding alongside quite a hype train with this debut album here, which was quite lavishly adorned with praise and exultations within the Bandcamp world. Deservedly so, Visitations from Enceladus is quite the bold debut into the technical death and thrash metal void that Vektor have left behind. And it’s far from being a meandering wanktest; the band go super-big-brained on the sprawling progressive compositions, especially the 26-minute centerpiece of the album, “Moonbelt Immolator”. It’s an adventure of an album for anyone eager for that techy sci-fi thrash; the hype on this one is legit.
28.Caustic Wound-Death Posture
Out of all the grindcore I went through on my big grindcore binge earlier in the year, Caustic Wound’s thick, quick, nasty, no-nonsense Death Posture was the album I kept coming back to the most for its totally engulfing storm of deathly musical shrapnel. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but the way it’s sure spinning the shit out of the wheel is something you don’t see that often.
27.Myrkur-Folksange
And on a very different note, the Danish singer’s return to her folky roots on Folksange is without a drop of metal in it, only here on this list because Myrkur is what people would consider a “metal band”, but god do I love this album a lot. Amelie Brunn’s long-standing love for and experience with Scandinavian folk music shines magnificently on this album and its ethereal beauty really transports you to some quiet pre-industrial Scandinavian village in the snow-topped mountains and makes you feel like you could stay there.
26.Aversions Crown-Hell Will Come for Us All
Aversions Crown bring a good dose of passionate melody to the high-octane techdeath they play and they integrate it in a rather constructive manner on Hell Will Come for Us All that only bolsters and takes nothing away from the grandiosity of their sound.
25.Terminal Nation-Holocene Extinction
The doomer energy is strong with this one, and for good reason; I can’t blame Terminal Nation for their bleak outlook. But alongside the band’s apocalyptic prophecies on Holocene Extinction is a well-balanced cocktail of doom, grind, and death metal generating plenty of justified ire and directing it at the deserving institutions.
24.Within the Ruins-Black Heart
At the intersection between techdeath and deathcore, Within the Ruins provide a desperately needed creativity and instrumental freshness to the style that makes Black Heart such a fun and exciting listen.
23.Neptunian Maximalism-Éons
At 123 minutes in length, this thing is a monster of an album. Yet it speaks to the album’s effectiveness that its two-hour length really doesn’t feel like much of a factor while listening to it. Time doesn’t really seem to mean anything in the throes of the massive whirlpool of chaotic percussion, disconcerting jazz arrangements, and monolithic metallic drones that pull you in and envelope you in completely. It sure is a time commitment in the real world, but in the alternate dimension the album constructs, time doesn’t matter, and you’re too busy being sucked through the sonic vortex to care about it.
22.Thy Catafalque-Naiv
Thy Catafalque is a well-loved and well-respected band for their consistent ambition and avant-garde approach to metal music. And maybe it’s because pushing boundaries and crafting odd, unique progressive metal experiences is the norm for them that Naiv seemed to fly under the radar as an early-year release. Regardless, it’s an album whose brilliant experiments in progressive metal and jazz fusion deserve to be appreciated and applauded.
21.Spirit Possesion-Spirit Possesion
One of the year’s freshest and most invigorating black metal albums was this eponymous debut from the Oregonian duo. Sticking to the gritty and rebellious attitude that metal built its roots in and which black metal developed its own corpse-painted spin on, the band reject modernity and embrace tradition, and the fiery performances of all the tasty licks and riffs they sprinkle over the album really makes it hard to argue with their choice in doing so.
20.Inexorum-Moonlit Navigation
Inexorum really put the “melodic” in melodic death metal on the beautifully soulful melodies of Moonlit Navigation, whose harmonious, Khemmis-esque guitar leads give the Viking battle cries behind them a deeper sense of purpose than just surviving and beating whatever challenges lie ahead.
19.Emmure-Hindsight
Now here’s an album that I don’t think any of the critics are getting wet for. Frankie Palmeri and Emmure were always kind of the pariah of the metalcore world, and Frankie’s hunger for controversy, however tasteless, outshining the band’s generic try-hard tough guy metalcore music made them a pretty easy target to pick on. But after the Palmeri reset in 2017 with a new band and the mission statement of Look at Yourself, Emmure are starting to hit back, and the strength they’ve trained up is simple. Bangers. That’s it. Hindsight is a sharp, punchy, and to-the-point, no fat to trim, nothing but agile, dirty-fighting djenty metalcore. With only a few songs cracking even the two-and-half-minute mark, the band pack only the densest, most hard-hitting shit into the tight boxes they have, handing the baton to the next song before the first gets even a little fatigued and loses even a little bit of pace.
18.Countless Skies-Glow
With big prog metal ambitions and a real drive to shoot for the stars, Countless Skies hit their celestial target on the absolutely gorgeous progressive melodeath of Glow, whose operatic glory and symphonic majesty would make Devin Townsend smile in awe. Feel free to judge this one by its beautifully painted cover, because it really is beautiful.
17.AbysmalDawn-Phylogenesis
I was relieved that this band had not hung up their capes after the six-year wait for this album, and once again, Abysmal Dawn’s compositional focus produces some of the most crisp and infectious death metal songs of the year. Phylogenesis is a representative of modern death metal in its most photogenic, highlighting the benefits of the genre’s technical evolution.
16.Expander-Neuropunk Boostergang
I suppose this is my thrash album of the year. Having listened to the band’s previous and rough experiments with thrash in preparation for their debut on Profound Lore, I wasn’t really expecting much, but the band did really get their grip on the experimental steering wheel with this album. Crystalizing their sound on their sophomore LP, Neuropunk Boostergang is a fascinating and eye-catching blackened disfigurement of the genre in the best way possible. The harrowing sounds give the futuristic apocalyptic outlook of the album its fear factor, and this is a kind of technical, experimental, blackened form of thrash that I certainly don’t hear anyone else doing.
15.Carnation-Where Death Lies
Another breathtaking sophomore effort, Carnation follow up the bulgingly muscular old-school death metal of 2018’s Chapel of Abhorrence with another punishing offering of the same ass-kicking on Where Death Lies. It’s another of the year’s many monuments to the natural power of the unadultered death metal delivery. Thick, ground-shaking distortion. Fast double-bass. Mean fucking low-tuned grooves. Fierce growls. Carnation don’t need much else to pound your skull into the ground.
14.Undeath-Lesions of a Different Kind
And an even more deathly debut album, Undeath come out of nowhere with the stupidest, nastiest death metal riffs of the year. Even more old-school, even more down-tuned, even deeper gurgly death growls than Carnation, Lesions of a Different Kind is an indulgent exercise in Morbid Angel worship that I can’t help but keep coming back for repeated helpings of. The nasty, stupid caveman riffs, the delectable bass lines, I can’t keep myself away from it.
13.Gazpacho-Fireworker
The Norwegian prog-rockers go big on the layered and choir-bolstered arrangements of Fireworker, which transforms their ordinarily tempered and unassuming prog rock into a cinematic statement piece of instrumental grandeur, and god what a fun time it is. It’s great to hear them take this leap and put more instrumental weight on the bar to see how much more they can lift by playing with all these new elements, and I do hope this isn’t the last of it.
12.End-Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face
This meeting of brilliant minds, to me, was the metalcore album of the year, and the various contributors’ pedigrees show through the smart arrangements, tight performances, and raw energy in every nook and cranny of the album. Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face is less industrially supplement than Code Orange’s or Vein’s recent work, and less openly angsty than Nails or Knocked Loose, but in its raw and violent form, it’s a great showcase of the natural mosh-inducing aggression of metallic hardcore.
11.Haunt-Mind Freeze
In seeking to emulate the glory of the glory days of heavy metal in the 1990’s, the Fresno-based traditionalists have also matched the prolific output of their heroes in their early years. After putting out an album last year and the year before, Mind Freeze was the first of two albums the band put out this year, and what a tribute to the genre’s melodic forefathers. Advantaged by hindsight and informed by the styles of melodies of today that the band show to fit well with the older style, Haunt would undoubtedly hold their ground in the landscape it time-travels to, and Mind Freeze is my favorite 80’s metal album of 2020.
10.Neaera-Neaera
The German quintet’s inspired comeback after their brief disbandment produced the most committed, unflinching offering of melodic death metal the year had to offer, made all the more impactful by the band’s invested performances and metalcore-influenced punch. It’s an album deserving of its eponymous status that the band certainly should feel proud of, proving whatever they needed to prove to come back after their break-up.
9.Pyrrhon-Abcess Time
No album I have ever heard captures quite so vividly the real-life nightmare world of the late-stage capitalist state through such productively experimental means as Pyrrhon here on Abscess Time. Stringing together these off-kilter rhythms, disorienting progressions of dissonant chords, and migraine-tormented screams about the horrors of alienated labor with thematically relevant film samples that help give the album a cinematic sort of immersiveness, Abscess Time is a freakish monster so hideous it’s impossible to look away, because all its ugliness is already a part of you.
8.Humavoid-Lidless
The album that scratched my Meshuggah-loving itch the best this year, Lidless is a blast of a prog metal album and a hell of a mission statement from the up-and-coming Finnish band. Stirring smoothly the proggy grandiosity of Devin Townsend, the synth-play of Dream Theater, and the hypertense jazz piano that Imperial Triumphant are known for into their Meshuggah-inspired sense of groove, Humavoid have made something entirely their own in spite of the identifiable sources of the ingredients, and it’s a whirlwind of an experience in a very positive manner.
7.Gaerea-Limbo
The mass that Gaerea sit us through on Limbo is hardly like any boring-ass religious ritual you’ve ever had to actually sit through. Though the experience the masked Portuguese liturgists create on their second full-length is a pretty religious one, holding back nothing as they bleed out an utterly transfixing and petrifying opus of expressively raw and emotional shaking blackened death metal and post-metal. It’s an album that doesn’t hold back and it’s heavy more than just in its distorted guitars and titanic growls; I highly recommend it and can vouch for the hype it got.
6.Mamaleek-Come and See
The anonymous San Francisco-based duo really outdid themselves on this one; Come and See was by far the weirdest and most artistically experimental album (to succeed to such a degree) that I heard all year. Twisting dizzying swells of jazz and blues instrumentation into hypnotizing, yet unsettling figures of noise and metal. Even though I don’t think I would ruin it by doing so, it’s one of those albums that I feel like I couldn’t possibly describe well enough to do it justice. It’s a one-of-kind album for which “interesting” is a gross understatement. And I highly suggest you join me in figuring out what the hell this thing is if you haven’t already.
5.Greg Puciato-Child Soldier: Creator of God
But speaking of albums I don’t want to spoil by going over every detail about them, Greg Puciato’s debut solo album, Child Soldier: Creator of God, is the solo album every artist dreaming of a solo career dreams of making. Puciato admitted the album came about through his accumulating of songs that felt unfit for any of his other projects, and it’s an album that seems to be born out of a lot of the same wide-variety ambitions that makes so many other solo albums like it fall flat on their faces. For every style from sludge metal to shoegaze to synthwave on here, Puciato shows a deep familiarity with it that makes the songs here feel so genuine. I have been absolutely in love with this album and only falling deeper with it. It is absolutely beautiful and stunningly impressive in what it’s able to accomplish. I can’t say enough good things about this album; Greg Puciato has quite possibly outdone himself with this one here.
4.Ulcerate-Stare into Death and Be Still
Somehow simultaneously atmospheric, emotionally gripping, and crushingly heavy, the sixth album from the forward-thinking New Zealanders is their most accomplished. The way the band strip away the artificial layers to pull the fast-pumping heart of death metal to the surface of the music and present it in a very human light is something else, something that I hear much more of in the black metal world, yet Ulcerate have made death metal atmospheric and meditative, strengthening rather than sacrificing the core heaviness of death metal. Those the band’s supposed pretentiousness has already pushed away might even see more clearly in the band’s reaching of an aspired sound on this album what they have been going for all this time and might be reeled back in by the crushing emotional heaviness and the crushing death metal heaviness in the gorgeous, somber, yet fire-throwing guitar work and the stoic humanism of the monstrous death growls. Ulcerate really landed on something here, striking the gold they’ve been steady tracing their way too, and while it definitely has its barriers to entry, I can’t recommend this album enough.
3.Deadspace-A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars
This album sadly is the Australian band’s last, which they announced their disbandment with the release of back in March. And while it’s a farewell as bittersweet as any, if it’s a high note the band wanted to end on, so can’t blame them for stepping away now because they certainly did so here. The band revitalized their sound in a big, and ultra-drepressive, way with the ample output of last year, and A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars is the indeed grand culmination of their work toward this more full-bodied, and terrifyingly existential form of DSBM. Adding tastefully the haunting singing of backing choirs to their arsenal of depressive black metal weaponry, Deadspace go out in as much of a blaze of glory as a band in their field can, with pure emotional realness and a despondent sound so black, heavy, dense, and crushing it starts to swallow the light from the soul into the black hole of despair the supernova of a band has collapsed into. And like any big celestial event, this album is a fucking thing to behold and be swept in awe into. I don’t think there will be another album like it for a long time. Thank you Deadspace, not just for your final work, but for all of it. I’ll miss you a lot.
2.Imperial Triumphant -Alphaville
This fucking album! Launching into a second similarly styled avant-garde album about the ugly corporate underbelly of their home city, the New Yorkers double down on the harrowing integration of nightmarish jazz instrumentation from 2018’s Vile Luxury, proving with Alphaville that their enigmatic genius was no fluke. And now the band are even more fluent in this unworldly language they’ve created, capturing the hell of the urban sprawl in horror trip hallucinations set to death metal that scares you off the ledge of the skyline and cockeyed jazzy piano lines that smile creepily as you fall through a bottomless pit of skyscraper lights sprinting past you. It is a hell of an album in a very literal sense of the phrase!
1.Oranssi Pazuzu-Mestarin Kynsi
At last, my favorite album of the year, one I could not stop playing over and over again like a drug, and very much like a drug-induced experience, is Oranssi Pazuzu’s psychedelic black metal magnum opus, Mestarin Kynsi. Like Ulcerate this year, Oranssi Pazuzu found on this album an optimized sonic formula that they had been tweaking meticulously toward perfection since the beginning of their career, and what a crystallizing point Mestarin Kynsi is! I wrote a lot about it already this year, and I feel like I am probably just going to repeat myself if I go on about its intense cerebral experience and how layered and evolved the band’s psychedelic black metal sound has become; this album is an experience unlike any other that at this point I just want to slather more praise onto. This album is a huge achievement for Oranssi Pazuzu and psychedelic black metal, which is realized to its fullest form yet (as far as what I’ve heard goes) on Mestarin Kynsi; if the prospect of psychedelic black metal ever sounded ludicrous or if previous products of that genre or other albums slapped with that label didn’t sound convincingly deserving of being called psychedelic, Mestarin Kynsi changes that. The band’s brilliant sense of dynamic and atmospheric build is on full display here as the effects-drenched walls of guitar sound and other-worldly swells of synthesizer psychedelia they employ create this colorful, hypnotic wormhole that swallows you whole and spits you out, after a time too unimportant to comprehend during such an experience, wide-eyed and sweating on the ground, stunned and speechless. Without a doubt my favorite album of the year.
There are always a lot of songs worth appreciating at the end of the year, way more than 25, and I have done like 90-song lists before, which is nuts. But I’m trying to not go utterly insane this year; it’s been insane enough on its own. I’m keeping this one kind of on the short side so that I can put more energy not the top albums I want to highlight. As with each list, the weird, picky compulsive side of me has a weird selection process that basically tries to exclude stand-alone singles that could be featured more fully as part of an album in the future, like Gojira’s “Another World”. It’s not perfect, but it feels weird to include songs like that here when they could make a future list as part of an album too. So here they are, my 25 favorite metal songs of the year:
25.An Autumn for Crippled Children - “Silver”
One of the most ethereal and human moments on an ambient black metal album this year, “Silver” in all its fuzzily produced glory captures the genre at its most vulnerable in a rather succinct package and I can only love and respect it.
24.Sylosis - “Arms Like a Noose”
Another standout among many, “Arms Like a Noose” finds the UK act bringing a metalcore influence to modern melodic thrash, and a retro-flavored breakdown that, in better times, would undoubtedly make the pit explode into a frenzy and the rest of the crowd headbang in full unified swing.
Meshing a marching palm-muted chugging rhythm with unhinged, anxiety-inducing piano chords, the title track to the ever-theatrical Dutchmen’s sixth album is an much of a bop as a menacing symphonic black metal track can be.
22.The Acacia Strain - “Crippling Poison”
With a sick, stomp-dancing riff at its core, this song is a furious deathcore chugger that captures the hardcore ethos that makes The Acacia Strain such a powerful force in deathcore when they’re at their best the way they were on this past album.
21.Trivium - “The Defiant”
This one seemed to be the under-the-radar hit for the band this year, in a few of the same ways “Caustic Are the Ties That Bind” was on In Waves. Indeed the two sound kind of like sister songs in their emotive guitar-powered melodies (the harmonious solo here seemingly taking a bit of a cue from Khemmis) and anthemic catharsis. It ends on a pretty bright and hopeful note, that I was a little cold on at first, but have really come to appreciate now. It’s a bold, beautiful track that captures Trivium at their best.
20.Suicide Silence - “Two Steps”
After the embarrassment of their self-titled album in 2017, Suicide Silence came back hard with the lead single to this year’s redemptive Become the Hunter, which reinvested in the band’s knack for combining tasty grooves and scary breakdowns that made them such a force to be feared in the deathcore world.
19.Undeath - “Entranced by the Pendulum”
It was hard to pick a favorite from the uniformly filthy and delicious Lesions of a Different Kind, but I really liked the vocal hooks, the drum accents, and variety of riffs (especially the low-string-bending at the bridge) of “Entranced by the Pendulum”, which made a consistent standout as I came back to the album over and over again after it came out.
18.Alestorm - “Tortuga”
The way the true Scottish pirate metal outfit expanded their sound to involve trap, electronic music elements, and a rap feature on this absolute party of a song give me hope that there is plenty of treasure left in Alestorm’s chest and that the band will defy all the expectations of those who thought they would run out of ways to make music about the pirate’s life.
17.Lamb of God - “Resurrection Man”
Lamb of God’s self-titled effort this year was a pretty low-risk affair, but “Resurrection Man” was stark exception in the middle of the track list, its more scowling first half exploring a variety of unusual guitar styles for the band to build the tension that breaks into a more quick-paced headbang-fest and an absolutely slamming breakdown that makes it hands down the highlight of the album.
16.Carnation - “Iron Discipline”
The Belgians kicked off their practically illegally heavy sophomore release with an energetic, infectious, growl-along banger that certainly captures their emphatic no-bullshit approach to death metal at its most diplomatic, offering a chance to join in the vicious death metal attack before it blasts every in front of it to death.
15.Humavoid - “Aluminum Rain”
Stirring together off-kilter rhythms, jazzy piano chords, a tasty central Meshuggah-esque eight-string groove into a wicked, and a groovy synth-driven bridge into a dizzying prog banger maybe even too mad scientist for Devin Townsend, “Aluminum Rain” stands out as a bolstering highlight in the Finnish outfit’s breakout LP among several tracks of ambitious modern progressive metal.
14.Nearea - “Carriers”
Another solid cut on an album of gems, I found myself coming back to “Carriers” the most out of any track on Nearea’s self-titled album this year for how it kind of just has it all in terms of what made the band’s comeback album this year so exciting. Combining melodic death metal at its most furious with metalcore at its punchiest, it is a sharp, deadly ripper of a track.
13.Avatar - “A Secret Door”
The highlight anthem from the band’s most recent theatrical musical release, Avatar go big and high-soaring on “A Secret Door”, with a pretty palpable power metal influence that absolutely blows the house down.
12.Khemmis - “Down in a Hole”
The thriving Denver doom optimists released a little compilation EP this year whose lead single was a glorious and synthless cover of Dio’s iconic inspirational synth metal anthem, “Rainbow in the Dark”. But the band put out three cover versions this year, and that was not the cover that blew me away the most. Khemmis took part in a multi-artist tribute to Alice in Chains’ grunge cornerstone, Dirt, and they got to cover the albums depressive acoustic ballad, “Down in a Hole”. While Code Orange were getting props for going acoustic for their live cover of the song earlier this year and doing a pretty good job, Khemmis kept the amps on and the results were stunning. The band make the song come to them and the grungy depression that Alice in Chain poured into the writing of the song pairs so unbelievably with Khemmis’ solemn, but hopeful doom metal; it’s an utterly goosebumps-inducing cover, and I can’t urge everyone enough to check it out.
11.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Oikeamielisten sali”
After its lengthy, but warped string intro’s serving as a breather from all the psychedelic mayhem preceding it, “Oikeamielisten sali” plunges Oranssi Pazuzu’s psychedelic black metal magnum opus into a spinning, spiraling world of flashing lights and disorienting sounds that feel like an unreal, but vivid nightmare’s plunge into a tunnel to hell.
10.End - “Pariah”
The pit-karate-inducing highlight of what I think has to be the metallic hardcore album of the year, End show just why their no-bells-and-whistles approach to the sound is so potent on the fiery and crushing “Pariah”, whose concluding breakdown brings the already chaotic and technically impressive track to a deservedly violent climax.
9.Ulcerate - “Inversion”
Similarly to how the self-titled Nearea album was hard to choose from, picking a favorite off Stare into Death and Be Still was a wonderfully difficult task because the band hit the mark with each song in kind of the same way. The guitar playing across the album is incredibly creative and emotional for such thick, titanium-clad death metal, and the band indeed surrenders not a shred of what makes the genre so great to listen to in its more simplistic forms, which I think the particularly heart-wrenching guitar work on “Inversion” demonstrates the most. It’s a good taster for anyone who might be skeptical that death metal can manage to resonate with your innermost melancholic ponderings on death while still firing on all cylinders.
8.August Burns Red - “Three Fountains”
The grand, gorgeous, and heartfelt metalcore closer to the band’s ninth full-length builds up through already-emotional guitar melodies to a glorious sing-along climax that rounds the album off on such an inspiring note.
7.Emmure - “(F)inally (U)nderstanding (N)othing”
Frankie Palmeri and company went hard this year, and I think the opening track from Hindsight best captures the band’s singular directive of making concussion-inducing, furious bangers from front to back and making everything as aggressive and punchy as possible. There’s no one to push around here at home, but that central riff, that verse beat, and that groovy bridge rhythm all make me go fucking stupid wherever I am. Absolute unit of a song.
6.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Ilmestys”
The slow-building and spooky intro track to Oranssi Pazuzu’s masterpiece, “Ilmestys” captures the band’s impeccable form and creative evolution in its subtle, understated opening passage that ultimately opens up like a blooming kaleidoscopic flower into the colorful climax that sees the track out. It’s a stunning, hypnotizing track that manages to encapsulate everything that the Finnish visionaries have been working toward with their psychedelic black metal sound in one seven-minute bite. Crazy to think that that’s just the first song on the album too.
5.Red - “The War We Made”
2000’s alternative metal often gets a bit of a bad rep and is treated like it’s not welcome here anymore in the metal world, at least among the critic class. Well I’m not in that class so I get to enjoy the open-hearted catharsis of alternative metal anthems like “The War We Made”. And it really is one of the band’s best songs and a great example of the genre in general. I dare anyone to honestly stand in front of those strings, those power chords, and that soaring vocal delivery and not feel something resonating in the core of what makes them human. It’s a beautiful song in such simple ways that don’t really beckon much contemporary critical dissection, but that simple openness has been the style’s biggest strength, which Red show wholeheartedly on this song.
4.Code Orange - “Underneath”
The album it came from may have found the Pittsburgh metalcore visionaries in a bit of a phase of growing pains as they try to enhance the industrial aspect of their metallic hardcore sound, but the closing title track of Underneath showed none of it, finishing the album off on a confident, swaggering, and effectively heavy note that packs the hardcore punch they’ve built their reputation on into an infectious alt metal structure without losing any potency. They may not have nabbed album of the year again or even the metalcore album of the year this year, but Code Orange definitely come away with the year’s best standalone metalcore song.
3.Imperial Triumphant - “Atomic Age”
Capturing perhaps the best on the album the deliriously foreboding forest of towers of the big apple, “Atomic Age” spirals down and around through experimentally jazz-infused and nightmarish angular guitar leads in the back of terrifying screams and growls that only add to the psychosis. It feels like being dropped from the top of the Empire State Building over and over and over again and scrambling for safety as the windows of the countless stories rush by.
2.Oranssi Pazuzu - “Uusi teknokratia”
Not that any song on Mestarin Kynsi is particularly lacking for its length or anything, they’re all incredible acid trips of dizzying black metal, but the album’s longest and most dynamic song has to be the most freakish, deceptively welcoming, and other-worldly of the bunch. This song really does take you to another world and entangle your senses there.
1.Deadspace - “A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars” (parts 1 and 2)
Deadspace hit an incredible new high with their sole full-length this year, and the title track in its two phases perhaps best captures the shivering, transfixing power of their more unshackled depressive sound. Everything about it, the drawn-out screams and bellows; the somber clean guitar passages; the depressive distorted chords; the heavenly choir, all sounds like the chilling but undeniably compelling farewell of a long-suffering soul finally seeing the glimpse of peace and release in its welcoming of an afterlife. It’s a song that confronts the heavy concept that DSBM deals with in the kind of candid and forthright manner that makes it so compelling when done well. The song’s abstract lyrics deal with the general sorrow that has surrounded the band’s music and the way the band as a whole has made use of their scars for their art. Deadspace announced their disbandment with the release of this album back in March, and the lyrics portray this act as one of bowing out through suicide (as a band, by disbanding, not literal suicide) to represent the finality of what they have sung about so much throughout their career. While not pairing with a literal death, this album, and this song serve as part of the departing act the way Blackstar served as David Bowie’s farewell and the way Purple Mountains served as David Berman’s suicide note. A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars and its title track is Deadspace’s suicide note as an art project, and one that comes fittingly after a gradual refinement of their sound that mirrored the depressed mind’s spiral from melancholic sorrow to malignant despair, ending their career on a chillingly glorious high note. Being that I’m giving an incredibly dark, DSBM song my top spot, I’d just like to clarify that I’m not suicidal in any way right now, nor advocating it. My top song in 2018 was Andrew W.K.’s “Music Is Worth Living For”, and all the music this year, despite its crushing atmosphere on all of us, and as dark as much of that music is, still is. It’s just, 2020, you know.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so eager and excited, yet also hitting myself so much, to write about music I didn’t write about last year. Weirdly, I knew about the vast majority of these projects at the very least and for whatever reason, I just didn’t get around to hearing them until this year, some of which I am very disappointed in myself for missing last year and even for not getting the chance to include them in my best-of list, but that’s what this is for, eh. Anyway, here are the albums I wish I talked about last year.
Lice-Woe Betide You
Nikolas Kvarforth and Teitanblood linked up last year for an album of unstable character. Shifting from soothing ambient black metal to more self-loathing varieties within the genre, Lice only really establish a liquidy planting in black metal, but do alright in surveying the genre through Kvarforth’s ever-committed vocal performances.
Northlane-Alien
Northlane broke through the djenty metalcore ceiling on this album with a combination of tastefully enhanced electronic production, more cleans to balance the screams, and the evolved knack for the sick riffs and calculated breakdowns that any band needs to thrive in the genre. While not every song is a banger, Alien’s is an overwhelmingly stacked track list, and I recommend it enthusiastically.
Humanity’s Last Breath-Abyssal
This is the album that would’ve made my year-end honor list. Humanity’s Last Breath have carved out an interesting little niche for themselves within deathcore and made quite the improvement upon it even without much selective pressure. The band takes a pretty gratuitously turned-up and up-to-date techdeathy approach to deathcore, but their industrial effects-laden grooves and pedalboard-dancing breakdowns have given them a unique identity within deathcore, and on Abyssal, the Swedes put all their chips in the middle and hone in on what makes them difficult. And it’s a winning hand; Abyssal is packed with angular, groovy bangers and creative breakdowns that show that the band are clearly up to date with the fresh rhythm styles of both deathcore and metallic hardcore. Honestly, it’s just an addictive, delicious crop of bangers, and I wish I got to it last year. It’s made quite the addition to my workout playlist though.
Diocletian-Amongst the Flames of a Bvrning God
Apocalyptically war-minded New Zealanders Diocletian made an unfortunately pretty underwhelming return from their brief hiatus, but somewhat lengthy, studio absence through Profound Lore with the chaotic, but aimless blackened grindcore. Aesthetically and productionally it has a lot going for it, but the completely one-note, everything-at-the-wall approach leaves the album with few standout moments and feeling like a vague recollection.
Uniform & The Body-Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back
Uniform & The Body linked up again for another underwhelming collaboration of halfway-committed material last year. I enjoyed both artists’ most recent albums, but after the disappointing diminishing returns of the pair’s Mental Wounds Not Healing the previous year, I wasn’t exactly thirsty for another jam session between the two just a year later. And the second joint effort once again earns the term “effort” rather generously.
Mesarthim-Ghost Condensate
The sole release of the ordinarily far more prolific Australia-based solo studio project Mesarthim, Ghost Condensate’s moderate forty-minute offering split only into two twenty-minute pieces follows the same format of ambient black metal that draws its atmosphere from a very gradual and synthy push and pull. I reviewed the project’s two releases this year and found the spacy sound quite to my liking actually. Ghost Condensate, though, with its much more predictable compositional plot, simply doesn’t reach the same highs as Planet NineorThe Degenerate Era did this year.
This Gift Is a Curse-A Throne of Ash
Honestly, the generic title and generically occult imagery of the album cover kind of put me off and kept me from giving this album a listen until this year. Despite its superficially orthodox look, A Throne of Ash combines a lot of unorthodox sounds and compositional choices to make for a pretty thrilling, unique, and vibrant blackened death metal album.
Dawn Ray’d-Behold Sedition Plainsong
Ireland’s anti-fascist black metal stalwarts, Dawn Ray’d, have always delivered their message through rather subtle means on face value, but through the kind of second-wave-influenced atmospheric black metal that should reach the fans of the scenes they intend to combat. Though perhaps a little too evolved and “Deafheaven-y” for the average chud to get into (though it’s closer to something like Wolves in the Throne Room), Behold Sedition Plainsong is a fine example of the genre and a noble project that deserves support and respect at the very least for helping black metal not be as uniformly of a hotbed of shitty music and even shittier ideology.
The Deathtrip-Demon Solar Totem
Definitely one of the more dynamic black metal albums of last year, Demon Solar Totem takes the dark ethereal sounds of the second wave and today’s sprawling naturalistic atmospheric black metal on a progressive trip. The album does fall into a few typical ruts here and there, but at least it’s a variety of them, making for an interesting enough black metal voyage.
Haunt-If Icarus Could Fly
While the band’s second album felt like a bit of a step down from their beautifully melodic debut, I wish I had covered it last year when it came out, and covered Haunt in general earlier, given that they started up basically when I started this blog up and I’ve enjoyed their output pretty enthusiastically since hearing them. The old-school revivalists burst onto the scene with their full-length debut, Burst into Flames, in 2018 after a few splits and an EPs. I loved the refined melodic approach to the old guard style that the band made on that album. It captures the aesthetic of the time with the informed influence of the modern metal musician’s expanded melodic arsenal. And while “sophomore slump” might be a harsh term for an album that still accomplishes rather well what it set out to do, there’s a clear dialing back of the types of modern influences that the debut had on If Icarus Could Fly in an attempt to more deeply emulate the sound of old, which I don’t really think was necessary to boost the band’s aesthetic. Thankfully they rebounded pretty well this year with the one-two punch of Mind FreezeandFlashback.
Year of the Knife-Ultimate Aggression
This was the quick, but effective 25-minute debut hardcore slugfest from the Delaware-based quintet whose hastily followed-up sophomore album this August I found disappointingly less thrilling. Even in a Code Orange world of metallic hardcore taking charge and stealing the spotlight through industrial means, Year of the Knife follow more closely in the footsteps of bands like Harm’s Way and Knocked Loose, who may not be toying with electronic elements too much but who have taken keen note of the effectiveness of livening up the approach to hardcore’s groove. And Year of the Knife captures that ethos and that approach rather well on Ultimate Aggression, making me wish not just I had covered it in February, but that I had its energy in my workout playlist all year.
Cloudkicker-Unending
Another full-length from the prolific studio project, Cloudkicker, Unending is a pretty unsurprising, but fulfilling the soothing instrumental prog/post-metal album for the purpose it serves. There are few lovely little licks here and there and the album carries a general air of relief very well, so it does work very well for what it is.
Mortiferum-Disgorged from Psychotic Depths
The Washington band’s debut full-length is a decent contribution to the ultra growly, glacially heavy death/doom genre, but unfortunately without a lot of imaginative composition or stylistic shake-up, Disgorged from Psychotic Depths only just checks a bunch of boxes on the rubric. That being said, the album does offer a few glimpses of potential creativity that I do hope to hear more of in this band’s future.
Kmac2021-IMPOSTER
Internet funnyman Kmac2021 is more well known for his home-production tips and tricks to help bedroom djent kids get that savory Misha tone everyone wants and for his comprehensive countdown list of the top ten numbers of all time. But last year Kmac directed some of his talents away from his YouTube memelording and into a candid EP of the djenty deathcore he lovingly goofs on in his videos. The results were pretty standard melodic proggy djentcore, but quite respectable enough to earn Kmac some applause for his juggling of instrumental responsibilities and vocal techniques. I do want to highlight and shout out the title track though, which deals with the specific emotional distress of imposter syndrome, a very personally relevant phenomenon for me this year, and it’s been encouraging to hear a djenty anthem about overcoming that specific form of self-doubt.
The Acacia Strain-It Comes in Waves
The Acacia Strain rather quietly and abruptly released this quick batch of songs just before the end of last year, and it didn’t really flinch anyone. Thankfully the band’s follow-up this year was much more revitalized and got them back on track, but It Comes in Waves was concerningly unexciting for a band actively putting so much hardcore energy into their music.
Fever 333-Strength in Numb333rs
In their externally ascribed quest to be this generation’s Rage Against the Machine, Fever 333 on their debut album hit all the contemporary political notes and issues that they need to, but musically slip a bit too often into becoming a new version of Linkin Park. “Prey for Me/3” and “The Innocent” are absolutely fist-raising anthems for a fight for a more just world, and the rest of the album’s lyrical content, while rather simple and straightforward, is very in touch and aware of what lies at the root of so many problems these days. And while I hope the band kind of weed out those compositional tendencies that make some songs sound more peppy than they should, the concentrated fire they pack into their performances makes me excited to hear where they go from here.
Worm-Gloomlord
This came out just at the tail end of last year, but I wish I had heard it then because I think I would have liked to shout out its nasty, slimy, slow-dripping death sludge, which seems to be pretty in vogue at the moment with prominent acts like Undergang, Primitive Man, and Warp Chamber getting a lot of love lately. Gloomlord is the Floridian band’s second album, and for as ambiguous as its one-word title is, I feel like it lives up to it. The slowly trudging distorted riffs that allow the percussive highlights to feel like they knock you around in a despressed trance that the ominous atmospheric guitar work lays down capture that first part of the compound word, while the punchy, monolithic death metal core gives the music its lordship. Definitely worth a listen for any fan of slow, doomy death metal that hasn’t heard it yet.
The Hu-The Gereg
The Hu’s brooding and unique form of folk metal made The Gereg arguably the breakout debut album of last year. I’ve personally always loved traditional Mongolian folk music (if it’s not a misnomer to call it folk music), and I’ve always thought that the low-register string arrangements and chants and throat singing would sound really good in a metallic setting. Unlike most European or American folk metal, The Gereg is generally more shadowy and gradual, not that it is entirely without its unifying fun moments. But it’s generally more atmospheric in the ways that most listeners of European and American metal would be familiar with. And it does stay generally within these more meditative atmospheric bounds, never getting too heavy or overbearing, using subtle metallic textures to enhance its traditional instrumentation. It’s definitely an interesting listen at the very least and worthwhile for all to check out for its uniqueness.
Okay, get ready because this one’s a doozy (however that word is spelled).
December is usually a pretty slow month for releases as the year comes to a close and publications start doing their year-end lists and whatnot. And I’m getting to mine, which I like doing at the very end of the year to make sure I don’t miss any December gems. And I’m glad I did that because I did indeed find a lot that’s going on my year-end lists, the bad one too. Indeed, I took December as an opportunity to give a try to a lot of the music I had missed or intentionally avoided in 2020, and a lot of it validated my initial inclinations to steer clear. On the bright side though, my continued digging for gold that I passed by earlier indeed produced some results, and I found me some great albums that I’m excited to be covering right now. Like I said, this is a big one, so I’ll just get in with it.
Lingua Ignota-The Caligula Demos
After offering up harrowing covers of “Jolene”, “Wicked Game”, and the infamous Eminem song, “Kim”, on Bandcamp throughout the year, for the last Bandcamp Friday of this goddamned year, Lingua Ignota mastermind and Cheezit connoisseur Kristin Hayter has released a batch of demos from the sessions from the recording of her noisy, neoclassical industrial darkwave, reverse horrorcore, poetic hellwave masterpiece from last year, Caligula. We get a lot of rough noise precursors to the frightful cacophony that eventually made it onto the album proper, as well as some more stripped back piano demos that highlight Hayter’s classical singing chops, but also a few songs that don’t resemble anything on Caligula and maybe just got cut from the album, like the song “KYRIE”, which features Hayter singing soulfully and relatively softly over a minimally Sunn O))) kind of metallic amplifier drone. While it is indeed a demo album and the roughness that typically characterizes demo scraps does come through in a few of the less put-together pieces here, the demos here offer a great few snapshots of the creative process of one of the most transfixingly terrifying and emotionally raw albums of the past few years for fans of Lingua Ignota.
7/10
Dines X Heafy-Dines X Heafy
The friendship between Trivium frontman Matt Heafy and YouTuber Jared Dines has finally materialized in a 20-minute EP of, disappointingly, some of the most generic and unnecessary metalcore of the year.
5/10
Godthrymm-The Vastness Silent
The band are supplementing the debut album they dropped earlier this year with a couple of new songs to keep their name hot. And I can see why the band wanted to get these two songs out there because these songs do straddle the epic, fantastical side and the more somber side of doom metal with pretty respectable tact.
6/10
Insubria-Harvest Moon
This is the sophomore EP from Italy’s Insubria, an as-of-yet independent act. While it gets off it a slow start with the opening “Heritage”, the ripping blast beats, crunchy riffing, and folky strings of the song “Soil” lead into a pretty promising folky take on melodic death metal that I think the band could build upon and carve out a little niche for themselves in.
6/10
Soilwork-A Whisp of the Atlantic
Don’t let its classification as an EP fool you, Soilwork go big on this release, on the epic opening title track particularly, whose grand proggy voyage would make a band like Between the Buried and Me wet. Out of a lack of feeling a necessity to do so, I haven’t really returned to last year’s Verkligheten, which I remember for its being such a relatively standard melodeath outing. A Whisp of the Atlantic is a much more ambitious affair, and yes, mainly for its sprawling title track, which does deserve the attentiveness one would afford a track from the aforementioned progressive death metal nerds, or Opeth. But the four shorter tracks that follow serve as their own theatrically adventurous act of proggy, groovy melodeath that plays more to the genre’s strengths than their previous full-length did. It’s definitely worth a chance for anyone disappointed by the band’s last album.
7/10
Undergang-Aldrig i livet
I genuinely love Undergang’s general modus operandi of caking death metal in as much mud as possible and slowing it down to its nastiest and most swamp-monster-ish, and the band continue the mission here with aesthetic precision, the only thing lacking on Aldrig i livet being the compositional creativity that would make it a more compelling listen beneath the surface.
6/10
GamaBomb-Sea Savage
You know, having grown up on Metallica, loving thrash in general all my metalhead life, and appreciating its pretty drunken origins, I’d like to think I’m not much of a snob about my thrash. Albums like United States of Anarchy by Evildead, this most recent Anvil album with its song about the chemtrail conspiracy theory (as well as just about 90% of the rest of their catalog), and this new album from Gama Bomb, however, make me question otherwise by reminding me just how stupid a lot of the music was that came out of the earliest waves and challenging me on how much stupid I can take. In my ever-active search for good fresh thrash metal, I have stumbled across what is probably the worst thrash album I’ve heard all year. I’ve never been much of a fan of Gama Bomb’s toddler-sugar-high take on high-soaring thrash metal a la Anthrax, and the seemingly uncontrolled drunken punctuation of operatic tenor screams and uncomfortable coked out hysteria of Sea Savage is not making me any more eager to become one. No fucking thank you!
3/10
Cro-Mags-2020
Topping off their comeback year with another handful of topical songs, Cro-Mags don’t really do anything beyond their usual hardcore punk, save for a more groove-focused approach on the dissonant title track. Otherwise it’s basically just a continuation of what the band were doing on In the Beginning earlier this year.
6/10
Cadaver-Edder & Bile
With a much more thrilling synthesis of thrash and blackened crust punk, Cadaver give us at least one more 31-minute shot of nasty, snarling death metal with no frills around the edges before we peace this year out. The stylistic homogeneity can get a bit tiresome, but I’d say there is enough riff dynamic and performative energy to keep the album lively for as long as it needs to before it heads backstage to puke into and pass out hugging the toilet.
7/10
Eraser-A Deal with the Devil
With a healthy dose of 90’s groove metal influences (as well as some of the industrial and electronic elements their homeland has become famous for, which includes an at least curious dubstep bridge breakdown) to vary up their At the Gates-esque melodic death metal, German six-piece Eraser have burst out of the gate with a brilliantly balanced and head-turning independent debut album that I’m sure will land them on a label in no time. Boasting that sharp, fire-blackened death metal melody that both hooks you in and ties you to the alter it’s about to sacrifice you upon, A Deal with the Devil grooves so infectiously that you’ll find yourself nodding your head in rhythm as it sets the wood you’re strapped to ablaze. I think the band have some ironing out to do when it comes to a sound they want to cultivate, but they’ve laid a fine groundwork in what they’re capable of on this debut here, which is certainly an enthusiastic one that will catch you off your guard, well done.
7/10
Oroborus-A December Dawn
This is a demo album from newly emerged UK act, Oroborus, and it certainly is rough. There’s a foundation there to work with, but it is going to take a lot of work if this band wants to get into the prog metal stratosphere they’re shooting for, in composition and performance, as well as some aesthetic ironing out. The vocal leads especially need some technical practice to sound less nasal-y and amateurish, and they’re not helped by the repetitive parts of the song-writing nor the cheesier, on-the-nose power metal and classical heavy metal the band try to emulate on “Fortress of the Brave” and “Wings of Wax”. Meanwhile, the more brooding “Morphine Queen” features what sounds like an odd date set up by friends of Jonathan Davis and Train of Thought-era Dream Theater and the title track a very clear try at something similar to Opeth’s work on My Arms, Your Hearse. Ultimately, I think the band are biting off more than they can chew, and I think they need to grow some of the teeth necessary to do so as well, but that should not discourage them, hopefully the feedback they get on this demo points them in the right direction.
Revise-and-resubmit/10
Grayceon-Mothers Weavers Vultures
What an album to wait until the end of the year to release! The San Francisco trio’s fifth LP, Mothers Weavers Vultures, is a gorgeously tragic and utterly heart-clutching outing of progressive post-metal. Backed by Jackie Perez Gratz’ ever-present cello playing, Grayceon never let their hands off your shoulders as they stare you down and urge you to find the best of yourself within. My only criticisms of the album would be of when it does occasionally feel a bit understated when the band are building up to something more unrestrained and no-holds-barred expressive. Gratz’ vocals are a bit rough in some places, and possibly an acquired taste for some listeners too, but I think the type of grungy clean (and occasionally operatic or screamed) style she employs contributes to the album’s openness and emotional realness. It’s definitely worth a listen, definitely the kind of album that captures the toll of year’s turmoil on the heart.
8/10
Pharmacist-Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition&Thanatological Reflections on Necrotism
SoMedical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition was the Japanese band’s debut record that came out back in August, but for as unrestricted and brutal as that album was, they still had some left in the tank to drop on our asses before the year’s end, with a five-track EP, Thanatological Reflections on Necrotism. I didn’t cover the band’s debut LP, but I’m up to the task now! Better late than never. Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition, as any remotely astute listener of the genre would probably suspect, is a disgusting, odious goregrind album, and what a goregrind record it is! Clearly inspired by the early works of Carcass, and perhaps the work of the 90’s Czech band Pathologist, Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition is a filthy and unforgiving exercise in savagery, fixated on making the riffs as sick as possible, the bass grooves as nasty as all hell, and the vocals as gargled and unintelligible as any Pissgrave recording. And that’s all fine and dandy aesthetically, but the band have the compositional chops to back it up, a good taste for metallic structural flair and a firm handle on the dynamic instincts necessary to integrate it all without sounding erratic. After hearing a lot of good grindcore earlier in the year, I’m glad I got to hear another great offering (one of the year’s best) before the end of the year.
8/10
And another! The band released another five tracks to supplement their debut album in the form of the Thanatological Reflections on Necrotism EP just on the 19th, which is basically a solid continuation of the groove-filled deathly goregrind that the band exhibited their prowess with in August. Once again it’s no bullshit, no brakes, and no complaints as Pharmacist ooze and grind destructively through another 17 minutes of sickening old-school grindcore with impressive ease and acrobatic versatility.
7/10
Hollywood Undead-New Empire, Vol. 1&New Empire, Vol. 2
Hollywood Undead’s 2017 album, Five, was my least favorite album of that first year when I started this blog, it’s wild to think it’s been four years since then, but the rapcore pack is back again, with two albums this time. The first one came out in February, and I was just not in the mood for it then. But this month, since they had another one coming down the pipe, I figured what the hell, so I gave it a listen. Right out of the gate it really had me worried with that first song, “Time Bomb”, that I was going to be in for another unbearable album’s worth of lame-ass radio pop choruses and butt rock hooks, which this album still is in part. But thankfully, New Empire, Vol. 1 is an improvement compared to its predecessor, with more fiery energy that actually connects more often. There’s still the dumb juxtaposition between the sugary arena rock anthemism and the Eminem-imitating chest-puffing (the two of which I would rather have more of than the other), but the band keep it short and make fewer slip-ups this time, which, perhaps only by chance, makes this one a more bearable experience. The way the album ends with the line “I just spit 32 and I didn’t say shit” isn’t the ironic meta commentary the band probably think it is though, and its foreshadowing did not age well…
4/10
As for the second installment of the series, imagine a lot of distressed preparatory sighing taking place right here instead of this part of the sentence because… fucking Christ. The band start off on a horrible foot again with the absolutely nauseating singalong arena pop anthem, “Medicate”, whose refrain of “meda- meda- medicate!” is both cheesy as fuck and just astoundingly lazy. The difference between this volume and the first is that there are even fewer redeeming moments to tip the scales the other way. Whereas the first installment had some bangers to at least be on the scale to be outweighed by the Eminem rip-offs and stupid fucking pop choruses, on volume two the only breather we get from this auditory water-boarding comes from the consecutive features from Killstation and Tech N9ne on “Monsters” (which even still mimics Em a little too much to be ignorable, this time one of his token pop-feature crossover ballads that this track even practically shares a name with) and the sole heavy banger, “Idol”, which Tech N9ne’s standard feature counts as the most invigorating performance across the entire two volumes. Apart from those two songs, part two is mind-numbingly untasteful and packed with an onslaught of poorly curated combos of expired trendy styles that even Linkin Park on One More Light might have had the tact to avoid. Goddamn it, the first volume had me thinking that this was just going to be mildly, tolerably bad and that we were gonna be okay. I’m rubbing my squinted shut eyelids medially as I write this damn thing, as I did pretty much though my entire time listening to this damn album. I knew I should have avoided this. This might actually be worse than Five, which I know is longer, and I know that might be my angry recency bias talking, but I’m not about to go back and side-by-side these two shit piles. Corporate King 810, Hollywood Undead, came off the bench in the last minute to snatch, undoubtedly, one of the coveted top spots on the year’s worst-of list.
2/10
Well being that that last one was from this past month and from February, I suppose now is a good time to move into the stuff from earlier in the year that I missed, but I’m excited to be covering now. How about a pallet cleanser after that trash album, something good:
Sinira-The Everlorn
With its eight tracks covering an hour of impressively progressive and technical ability even for the style, The Everlorn is one of the year’s most elegant displays of black metal and melodic death metal, and not through gratuitous technical wankery, but through carefully crafted songs that present the style the band plays in such enveloping and glorious fashion.
8/10
Thrown into Exile-II: Illusion of Control
After aping Trivium’s approach to thrashy metalcore a bit heavily on their 2016 debut album, Safe Inside, which still produced tremendously fun and head-banging results, Thrown into Exile ease off those melodic elements that showed their influential cards on their sophomore effort here, and while it is indeed a little more homogeneous than its predecessor, the band’s second full-length keeps the pit circling and the heads banging rather consistently.
8/10
Killswitch Engage-Atonement II: B-Sides for Charity
I wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about Atonement when it came out last year, and I wasn’t super eager to jump on a new EP of B-sides from that unmotivating album, but I can’t go too hard on the band for their good-hearted intentions here, and the songs here actually aren’t too bad; if anything, they’re a step up from the album they came from, at least as a whole for the diversity they present. It does come with the over-reliance on the clean-scream trade-off and style of guitar melodies that has characterized their music and became the only feature of last year’s LP, but with just six songs, released for COVID-19 charity, it’s hard to get upset about it.
6/10
Mark Morton-Ether
After his over-collaborative debut solo trainwreck last year being what I named the worst album I heard all year, I was intentionally avoiding this new release here, despite it being just an EP. Well I bit the bullet and came out, not impressed at all, but relieved. Maybe if it went on for another 20 or 30 minutes I might have gotten more irritated by it, but Ether is just a really meek alternative rock album that stays in a safe acoustic zone for most of its time, which is good because there’s nothing really worth amplifying too much here. The country track in the middle with Lzzy Hale gets pretty obnoxious, but it does stay pretty stripped back still, so not too unbearable. Morton kept it safe this time around, and thank god for that. I just hope he settles on a sound he’s more fluent in and can be more authentic and take his time with on whatever solo project comes next.
5/10
Ded-Mannequin Eyes
Wow we’re getting the return of quite a few of my old least faves since I started this blog in this segment here, Ded doing the best job of changing my mind. While the Tempe band’s 2017 debut album felt like it represented too vibrantly so much of what tanked alternative metal in the 2000’s, the two songs Ded offer here are a breath of fresh air in that they are much more up to date, more tightly composed, and less like a caricature of the mistakes of the past. Meshing the alternative nu metal and metalcore of bands like Red and Motionless in White, Ded make a stronger case for themselves with these two songs than their debut did.
7/10
Nightwish-Human. :II: Nature.
I appreciate the Finnish symphonic giants’ always thinking big, but they have such a tendency to bite off way more than they can chew in terms of material. They certainly have the chops and basic arrangement skills to produce the style of music that they do competently, but they tend to have a hard time generating enough in the way of novel musical ideas to span the lengths of their increasingly bloated projects, and that is certainly the case with their first break of the 80-minute mark on this year’s Human. :II: Nature., which is a standard amalgamation of theatrical, folky, symphonic metal that the band has become so well known for, but possibly in its most dilute concentration to date.
5/10
Fates Warning-Long Day Good Night
In a case of maintained consistency, Fates Warning continue trucking along with an album that serves as a tacit reminder of the band’s veteran status that will keep the prog icons’ fans happy for the time being. The band don’t really spice up their sound too drastically or take too many risks, which probably will leave this album somewhat forgettable to passers by, but make no mistake, Long Day Good Night is still an exercise in prog metal fundamentals that most bands would be proud of. Fates Warning are just making it look easy, like a long-time surgeon just doing that shit routinely.
7/10
Benediction-Scriptures
As far as blunt death metal goes, Benediction’s return to the fold after another lengthy break with Scriptures is about as meat-‘n’-taters as it gets, respectable technicality and decent enough energy, which I think is basically all the band was going for, but nothing really beyond the most snack-like appetite satiation.
6/10
Amaranthe-Manifest
Being that I’ve only been exposed to their dance-pop-influenced brand of power metal in small doses (and not being enticed to have more), this was my first full-length experience with Amaranthe, of which I just have to say, “thanks, I hate it”. I have nothing principally against power metal, electronica, dance pop or any if the other styles implemented here on their own, and on paper the synthesis of these styles (united by high potential for unabashed fun) seems theoretically enticing, and there is a sparse handful of moments on Manifest that do manifest that potential. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the album is hampered down by its incredibly formulaic implementations of the styles here that really need that creative energy to thrive and end up with the party sucked out of the room like the arrival of a purposely uninvited guest.
3/10
Elder-Omens
For their follow-up to the psychedelic and progressively winding Reflections of a Floating World, Elder take a much more chill approach that focuses on the other aspects of their sound. While a lot of bands in the field struggle to solidify an identity and exhibit their nuance through overwhelming layers of sludge and might benefit from a more measured tactic, this was never really a problem for Elder, and their dialing back of the heavier elements of their sound to nearly zero leaves the psychedelic prog rock, doom, and stoner rock feeling a little bit incomplete without the sludgy wall of sound powering it all, resulting in an album whose decreased heaviness only spotlights otherwise standard psychedelic rock elements.
6/10
Saul-Rise as Equals
This is the debut full-length album from the Iowan project Saul, which was formed by Blake and Zach Bedsaul all the way back in 2007, and the quartet’s debut sure sounds like it’s struggling to get one of its feet out of the mud of that era and into the present. There’s a good set of bones holding the djenty melodic alternative metal of Rise as Equals upright, but the band are really going to have to vent their songs a bit more thoroughly and break out of the formulaic writing that makes the album tire quickly if they’re to make any meaningful mark on today’s metal landscape (and, for my sake, ditch the Hot Topic pop punk melodic stylings that drag down the songs that they show up on).
4/10
Contrarian-Only Time Will Tell
My earlier tastes of Contrarian’s very Cynic-influenced brand of modern techdeath didn’t really entice me to explore them further despite their being engined by Nile’s percussive speedmaster George Kollias, and as they continue their prolific streak with their fourth album in five years (now without Kollias), my first full serving of their music really hasn’t exposed any novelty they’re bringing to the scene that needs it so desperately. I’ll say, the album does at least end on its best note with the pairing of the two closing tracks, but otherwise, the techdeath here is just too uninspired.
5/10
Voidsphere-To Sense | To Percerive
Voidsphere is an online studio project that has been active as long as I have been active with this blog, releasing an album every year for me to review, and yet, I have missed them all until this year’s because I am an inadequate loser and clearly just a giant poser who can’t find any good underground shit. The fourth installment of the project follows the same “void metal” style (just extra spacy atmospheric black metal that intentionally invokes the feelings of vastness and celestial darkness) that has been making waves on Bandcamp lately and that the previous three have also channelled. Despite the grittily lo-fi mixing of the album, the full-bodied and indeed fittingly atmospheric instrumentation that spans the entire length of the album is powerful in its effect and successful in its intended application. Once acclimated to the mix, the album takes you on a harrowing, trip spiraling uncontrolled through cerebral void in such an immersive fashion. I wish I found this sooner, but I’m glad I get to highlight before year’s end.
8/10
Intervals - Circadian
While guitarist Aaron Marshall’s studio creative brainchild may not incorporate the same subtle hip hop and electronic elements that instrumental math rock cool kids Polyphia do, Intervals manages to find a certain swagger of its own on Circadian through similarly forward-thinking implementation of prog rock’s core traditional elements that make the very stylistically roots-y music lively and not feel so stylistically homogeneous. It’s a fun time and I’m here for it.
7/10
Puscifer-Existential Reckoning
After a big year with Tool last year, Maynard James Keenan returns to his “creative subconscious” project for an hour of spacy, stream-of-consciousness, ambient electronic rock even sleepier than the more soothingly instrumentally minimalist moments on A Perfect Circle’s Eat the Elephant.Existential Reckoning does function well enough as a relaxing electronic space rock album for fans of the softer side of Maynard’s voice, but anyone expecting any kind of super immersive or meticulously planned out album won’t be getting what they want. This album is, again, functional enough and interesting enough in its sonic pallet, but it’s also pretty stream-of-thought and (with a few exceptions) much more about expressive fulfillment for Maynard than songcrafting.
6/10
Necrowretch-The Ones from Hell
As opposed to the more modern and evolved form of death metal that most bands like Behemoth and the contemporaries around them, it’s the thrashier, Morbid Angel-esque old-school death metal that France’s Necrowretch choose to blacken, and given the closeness of black metal and death metal to thrash in their earlier, less divergent forms, the sound feels rather natural and seems to flow smoothly like a babbling brook of vintage melodicism. While I think the band do sometimes coast compositionally on the innate qualities of the concoction of styles, The Ones from Hell is still one of the better and most unique blackened death metal albums I’ve heard all year.
7/10
Dark Tranquillity-Moment
I’ve been hearing a lot of rather convincing melodic death metal lately, and I was hopping that Dark Tranquillity could keep the trend going and get themselves more fully out of their compositional funk with their twelfth album. Fulfilling those dual purposes about halfway, Moment is still a relatively mixed effort from the Gothenburg giants, with some chest-clutching and melodically emotive songs sprinkled in with about as many minor twists of the ankle as the band land right back in the pitfalls that have dotted the ground they’ve travelled further down their career’s road. While it may not be the kind of late-career rejuvenation that Construct was, Moment at least avoid kneecapping Dark Tranquility’s progress and keeps the Swedes’ momentum relatively steady.
6/10
British Lion-The Burning
Led by Steve Harris’ signature galloping bass lines, British Lion takes on a more classic hard rock flavor than the Iron Maiden bassist’s main band, but bears a similarly bombastic approach despite the superficial instrumental tone-down that give the project the feel of a band that might have otherwise been hypothetically active around the time Iron Maiden was gaining early traction and took inspiration from them or vice versa. While on paper the project has a lot going for it gunning its performative engine, unfortunately, the band’s second LP fails to launch its second compositional engine into drive and the album ends of stuck, jetting around, bright as they may be, in circles.
5/10
Turmion Kätilöt-Global Warning
WhileGlobal Warning certainly does a rather generic job of embodying it, the energy with which the Finnish group carry the Rammstein-esque electro-industrial metal of the 90’s into the 20’s deserves at least a modicum of respect, though I don’t think Turmion Kätilöt can carry the torch on their own. I’d be thrilled for them to feed me my words though.
6/10
Havukruunu-Uinuos Syömein Sota
There’s been a lot of good stuff coming out of the Scandinavian country that metalheads tend to forget about, but the third LP from the Finnish pagan black metal ritualists is one of the more middle-of-the-road albums of its style that I heard this year. There are some sweet solos here and there’s and some blizzards of frosty black metal melodicism that do bite a little more sharply than the average black metal album, but I did find myself thirsting for a bit more variety as the album went on, which the longest two tracks on the album close it out with pretty well thankfully.
6/10
Annihilator-Ballistic, Sadistic
With the headbanging party energy of Anthrax and demo-era Metallica and the snarling grit of early Testament, Annihilator have been flying the maple leaf thrash flag from the north with infectious fervor for seventeen full-length albums now, and although it’s not perfect and it has its entirety stoppable corny tracks, Ballistic, Sadistic is an impressively energizing and enthusiastic album for a band that’s been at it for so long, and a genuinely good thrashing time in a tasty variety platter of ways.
7/10
Dark Quarterer-Pompei
I will give give credit to Pompei for at least being the only album of its kind that I heard all year as far as any superficial genre descriptors would be able to set albums apart of from one another. In fact, I’ll give it credit for its pretty fair handling of the lofty sound that band set out to achieve with the album. The Italian group indeed go big and conceptual on Pompei, narrating the cataclysmic tragedy of the titular Roman city’s apocalyptic destruction in the wake of the eruption of the neighboring Mt. Vesuvius. The prog metal opera draws from the intricate instrumentation of Yes, the theatric presence of Led Zeppelin, and the heavier elements of bands like Iron Maiden or even Rush, and it all goes well enough… in the drawing room. Once rubber meets the road, the album is not the heavy prog rock opera masterpiece it set out to be. While not as dilute and lifeless as the unnecessarily massive Therion rock opera I reviewed awhile ago, Pompei is critically short on those vital compositional ideas that keep albums relying on a narrative afloat. So the band charge up a big sound but they ultimately end of blasting it off mark, maybe just grazing their intended target, not doing enough meaningful with it. But the vocals for me are where this album lost me the fastest. After the infamy that characterized the reviewers who mocked Geddy Lee’s voice when Rush was trying to establish themselves, I tend to give a second thought to any vocal style I might just not be accustomed to so as not to embarrass myself down the line in similar fashion. The vocals on Pompei aren’t particularly unfamiliar or boundary-pushing though, they’re just really unappetizing, to me at least. The album is already kinda cheesy on the face of it, and I can appreciate some self-aware cheese, but the vocals here just come off as dorky in a way that was clearly meant more to be bombastic and biblical, with a marring gutlessness behind the wild operatic style that makes it sound like a kid who just learned how to reach those upper notes but doesn’t have the power yet to sing them comfortably. And if it were possible to focus on the other aspects of the music more easily, that would be okay; if there were captivating hooks or anthemic sections to convince me, it’d be a different story. But the ineffectual instrumentation leaves the album sounding, unfortunately, unintentionally goofy.
4/10
The Spirit Cabinet-Bloodlines
And here we have another campy one, made so mainly by the vocals as well: the sophomore album from the Dutch four-piece, The Spirit Cabinet. The band’s 47-minute effort takes a bit of a trip into the older days of classical doom metal similar to that which Candlemass have made their name off of that’s pretty balanced in new and old familiarity, some more modern black metal influences shoveling coal into the instrumental furnace. It takes some getting used to with the semi-clownishly operatic vocal style, but once that’s been acclimated to, there’s a very lively and epic form of doom metal on Bloodlines that I think, with further honing on the part of the band’s craft, could eventually spawn a bonafide doom metal epic.
6/10
Afterbirth-Four Dimensional Flesh
Gurgling and growling through their sophomore effort, the Long Island band bring a fresh sense of technicality and prog-mindedness to the gory grind of brutal death metal that isn’t typically associated with the genre. Sure, it’s recognized for the physicality required to maintain the speeds it’s played at, but the compositional dynamic that Afterbirth showcase and the types of angular solos that they incorporate on Four Dimensional Flesh really sets it apart from other slamming death metal albums in its vein, and I hope there more to come from these guys because this was a wonderfully fresh take on the genre.
8/10
Haunt-Mind Freeze
I’d thought that I had covered their album earlier this year when it came out because I was so frazzled for my having missed out on covering the band’s sophomore release just last March (If Icarus Could Fly), but at least I caught myself before the end of the year for a chance to highlight the old-school revivalists. And when I say old-school, I mean really old school; Haunt reach back in time for a similar melodic version of classic heavy metal in its most primordial form to what Spirit Adrift call back to, though I’d say Haunt rely on even less of today’s advancements (save except for the unavoidable melodic influences that inform the solos that are perhaps the only aspect of the music that would stick out if this album traveled back in time). The solos on “Saviors of Man” and the title track, for example, feel way more emotive than what any band was doing back in the early 80’s, which the speed metal and early thrash influence on songs like “Divide and Conquer” would most reasonably limit the bands time travel to. As far as songwriting goes compared to the material from that era that’s stood the test of time, Mind Freeze holds up pretty damn well, feeling like it really would have succeeded even in the more competitive landscape of the germinating heavy metal scene. Granted, Haunted has the advantage of decades of hindsight, but fuck me if this doesn’t rival the best of that era. If Icarus Could Fly felt somewhat overly reliant on its nostalgic novelty factor as a crutch and lethargic in many spots as a result. But on Mind Freeze ironically, Haunt sprout their winds and soar majestically through catchy and gorgeous traditionally styled guitar and synthesizer melodies with just the right amount of retrospective wisdom from the current epoch. Absolutely brilliant!
9/10
Haunt-Flashback
That’s right, the Fresno band put out two albums this year, two full-size LPs, you know, to really capture the essence of those super prolific old-school bands who had an album out (sometimes two) every year or two for the first few years of their careers. And after the incredible album they started the year with, I can’t blame Haunt for wanting to strike again while the iron is both hot and stuck inside. Frequency aside, Flashback is perhaps the most aptly named Haunt album for the band’s musically rewinding mission. Whereas Mind Freeze felt a little bit more informed by modern doom melodicism, Flashback is much more riff-focused and hook-focused in a way that Iron Maiden, Ozzy, or Dio might have been in the mid-80’s, which the slightly more muffled guitar mix, sure, stays true to, but which I think didn’t need to be altered from what the band had worked with so well on Mind Freeze. The band do employ some more melodic guitar work on “Figure in a Painting” that seems more akin to their previous album and stands out more on Flashback, but I’m not complaining about it. With a second LP, Haunt notch themselves a second critical hit and a big win that they deserve to feel on top of the world for (as it crumbles) this year.
8/10
Eternal Champion -Ravening Iron
Oh the nostalgia trip doesn’t end there. Haunt dropping two stellar trips down memory lane was not the only push in this “new wave of traditional heavy metal”. Enter Eternal Champion, whose sophomore full-length this year goes all in on the fantastical comic book grandiosity in spirit and lyricism, while letting very naturally flowing riffs and committed clean vocal performances do the talking musically with the ballsy move being the minimal modern supplementation. There is a taste of some Sabaton-esque power metal in there, but it’s not nearly distracting enough to take away from the tightness of the songwriting and the consistency of the old-school vibe the Texan band gives off. While I might personally gravitate more toward the Spirit Adrift/Khemmis-informed classic heavy metal of Haunt, I sure don’t deny the truly raw steely power of the clean-cut trad-metal on display here.
8/10
Paradise Lost-Obsidian
This is the sixteenth studio album from the British death-doom pioneers, and sixteen albums into their gothic metal career Paradise Lost are beginning to sound a bit fatigued. Now when it comes to death-doom, a lethargic, melancholic sound is kind of a feature rather than a bug, which means discerning whether Obsidian’s sluggish gothic death-doom sound embodies an artistic melancholy that the artists were intentionally amplifying or if it rather more embodies an artistic fatigue on the part of the band. While the album has some moments that do shine pretty bright (the gorgeous “Fall from Grace” in particular), Obsidian does find the band frequently dirging in circular ruts that do mar the experience of the album as whole by disrupting the formation of any kind of cohesive feel or atmosphere beyond the basic downtrodden head-hang of the genre.
6/10
Sons of Apollo-MMXX
The second album from the A-list prog metal supergroup finds the collective focusing primarily on the hard rock and groove aspects of the music: heavy metal first, progressive metal second. Still, the winding prog waltzing of Dream Theater from Mike Portnoy’s and Derek Sherinian’s times in the band can’t help but leak into MMXX, but they never lead the music too far for Billy Sheehan’s rumbly bass lines and Jeff Scott Soto’s full-bodied soaring vocals to reel everybody back in. Balancing the technical exhibitionism of prog metal and the heavy instrumentals at the core rather well, Sons of Apollo certainly have the potential for more longevity than the usual supergroup.
7/10
Kaoteon-Kaoteon
Sporting a strong enough performance energy but little in the way of stylistic or compositional creativity, the Lebanese band’s eponymous third album is a pretty forgettable blackened death metal affair.
5/10
Glorious Depravity-Ageless Violence
This is the debut album from Glorious Depravity, a Brooklyn supergroup formed from the death metal underground seemingly to help satiate a gargantuan appetite for death metal of these guys. I’m being a little facetious; the album only constitutes a half hour of crisp, nasty death metal. But that’s plenty of time for Glorious Depravity to rail against incel sexism, wage slavery, and drone warfare in familiar deathly fashion. Incredibly straightforward in its instrumentation, Ageless Violence isn’t going to be turning any heads, but it’s a pretty tight half hour of no-nonsense death metal for anyone in the mood for it with only so much time on their hands.
6/10
Countless Skies-Glow
Countless Skies may have gravitated to many of the same ingredients that their contemporaries have in the quest to maximize the impact of their melodic death metal and take it to a more epic height in the stratosphere. Not just for the uncannily similar operatic vocals, Glow takes on an adventurous prog ethos that feels strange to not be coming from Devin Townsend. I’m supposed to believe Devin Townsend isn’t bankrolling this with his big Canadian bucks? It’s not possible. It’s definitely a conspiracy by big coffee to establish a colony in the UK under Ziltoid’s control. My biggest complaint of the band’s sophomore effort here would probably be the jumbled structure of a good few songs on here that lead to parts of the album flowing less logically than they should. And I get that with the wide pallet of Iron Maiden-esque melodic guitar lines, grand choirs and symphonic elements a la Dimmu Borgir, and a lot of progressive stylings to balance, there are bound to be a few compositionally sloppy moments from a band only two albums into their craft, but not adjusting for the band’s rookie status, Glow is an incredibly accomplished and enticing album with so much gorgeous and cathartic instrumentation (and singing) to enjoy and appreciate, even if it’s arranged oddly sometimes.
8/10
Hallas-Conundrum
The sophomore LP from the Swedish quintet falls more in line with the prog rock of the 70’s that bands like Kansas, Rush, and Yes, but the sheer energy it has should surely be enough to win over metal heads the same way the band’s prog rock grandfathers did. Boasting gorgeous swelling synths and ambitious song structures with shimmering guitar passages acoustic and electric, complete with big prog solos to match, Conundrum is in many ways the answer to the creative staleness of Yes, as it not only builds this fantastical world of naturalistic prog rock sound, but it does something worthwhile with it.
7/10
Within the Ruins -Black Heart
Injecting quite a fair dose of creative instrumentation into their sixth LP, Within the Ruins come through with a deliciously refreshing technical deathcore album. With actually moving guitar melodies and chest-beating grooves, Black Heart is quite possibly the best technical death metal album I’ve heard this year. The instrumental track, “Eighty Sixed”, perhaps best captures the band’s musical imaginativeness with its many twists and turns through such novel sounds for the genre, but there is so much here to groove to, headbang to, and air-sweep-pick to.
8/10
Convulse-Deathstar
Though definitely one of the more stylistically daring and dynamic progressive metal albums of the year, Convulse’s incomplete melding of death metal with the various other out-there elements and occasional riff-borrowing (Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” on the opening track and Sepultura’s “Roots Bloody Roots” uncannily on the title track) on Deathstar holds it back from being a more sure-fire experimental success.
6/10
Hexecutor-Beyond Any Human Conception of Knowledge…
If Quarthon were to pull a Jesus on us and come back from the dead, his musical ventures would probably sound something like this second Hexecutor album here. The French band offer a well-modernized and remastered take on the thrashy first wave of black metal that Bathory kicked off in the 80’s, blending with some of the intricate instrumentation that it led to less than a decade later in the 90’s death metal scene, though the mood of the album avoids the brutal darkness and harshness of the early death metal it draws influence from, staying pretty upbeat and occult in a way that first brought to my mind the work of Tribulation. Indeed, the instrumental work on here is dazzling and elaborate to a point where my earlier hypothetical situation about Quarthon creating this in a world where he was still alive kind of falls apart. Beyond Any Human Conception of Knowledge… is as meticulously written and compositionally impressive as its title suggests. I think a little more dynamic in the album’s mood would have been beneficial, but there’s not a whole lot to complain about for an album of its type, and even though I don’t gravitate toward this type of black metal as heavily as latter forms of the genre, I still found myself thoroughly enjoying this one.
7/10
Sea-Impermanence
After a promisingly soulful self-titled debut EP back in 2015, the Bostonian band made their full-length debut way back in January of this year, Impermanence being a forlorn, but empathetically human take on the doomgaze sound the band birthed from. It may not have hit the same melodic gold that the EP did, but what Sea offer on Impermanence is more than just gloom. There’s a much-needed sense of hope and solidarity too, and I do hope the band keep it up.
7/10
Wake-Devouring Ruin
The fifth album from the steadily improving Wake finds them getting a little more compositionally confident and bold enough to branch into some more atmospheric territory as the Alberta band continue hone their blackened death metal chops. There’s a little taste of the kinds of atmospheric elements that made Numenorean’s album last year such an open-hearted affair, though Devouring Ruin remains rooted in its more traditionally deathly motives. Make no mistake though, there is a good serving of interesting guitar work on this album, especially for an album of its type, and it all feeds pretty well into the uniquely elegant blackened death monstrosity of the band’s sound.
7/10
Psychotic Waltz-The God-Shaped Void
Well damn, show this album at a seminar for old-school bands trying to make a comeback, and at a prog metal conference too because Psychotic Waltz have made the prospect of a progressive heavy metal comeback look easy with The God-Shaped Void! The album doesn’t have to go crazy with technical wankery or even excessively long and meandering songs to hit its prog quota; rather, the album lets the prog come naturally into the classically inspired 90’s heavy metal the band play as they let the grandiosity come naturally, without artificial flavors or shortcuts. And the result is indeed a well-balanced and immersively addictive prog metal record that lets its very organically glorious composition speak for itself, one of the year’s very best in fact.
8/10
Neptunian Maximalism-Éons
I was so on the fence with this one, not about if I liked it or not (I quite love it), but with regards to how I covered it on here, as a “metal album” or an “outside album”, because it’s certainly got enough there to justify invoking metal in a review of its aircraft-carrier-sized slab of material, but so much else and lots of everything. Ultimately, with how much it’s been making its way through metal circles and getting appreciation long the likes of Lingua Ignota and Oranssi Pazuzu, I figured it’s enough to justify me giving it a “metal review”. If I have time, I might give this thing a more long-form review later because trying to capsule review a more-than-two-hour-long mammoth that I really really like feels unjust. That being said, I should probably get on with the review. To give Éons a predominant genre feels a little weird, but I don’t think anyone would have any objections to classifying it first and foremost as a jazz album, being that jazz is the solvent that the majority of the other musical elements are swimming around in on this record. Not your grandpa’s jazz: wild, disorienting, unsettling big band jazz that contributes greatly to the otherworldly atmosphere throughout the 2-hour odyssey, supporting by plenty of manic percussion that keeps you on you toes, but not so much that the hyponotic underlying rhythms and entrancing atmospheres don’t lure you like a siren into the colorful void it all creates. And a substantial part of that void is the big wall of sound the metallic drones help create, similar to the amplifier drone of Sunn O))), but it’s not always just accomplished with ultra-sustained distorted guitars. Sometimes the swell of sax and tuba create the mounting wave of sound that towers over you and consumes you effortlessly. Either way, you’ll completely lose track of space and time as this album sucks you into another weird dimension that never really lets up on the gas, and that’s totally fine.
8/10
Völur-Death Cult
Regardless of the somewhat slow start it gets off to with the shyer doom of the first track, Death Cult is one of the year’s most creative post-metal albums, whipping up a frenzy of unnervingly jazzy string arrangements and well-paired blast beats to make for a very dark, nightmare-world folky experience. It indeed feels like being lost in the woods and stumbling upon a deranged dystopian cult whose put-together exterior veils its ritualistic sacrificial practices or something. All you know is you have to run, but you’re already lost. Yeah, really interesting blend of styles on this album.
8/10
Uada-Djinn
I realized with this album that for my writing about it, I’m going to be doing something that I have unusually not done much of this year, and that is going against the grain, as the rain on the parade. Djinn is the third album from Portland’s Uada, who have been gradually solidifying what I can acknowledge to be a rather uniquely melodic sound within black metal that pulls from funeral doom as well as the kinds of shoegazy ambient black metal melancholy that Deafheaven and their contemporaries pedal, but I what I’m having a hard time with on Djinn is the melodic approach. The combination of the less overtly sinister stylings of black metal with the often more dragging aspect of doom, with a big focus on the melodic product of the synthesis of the two, to me makes for a very counterproductive team-up. And the band can get away from this when they do amp the speed and energy of the music up, but when they’re going for the slow-burn doom metal approach on most of the record, it just highlights these really meandering and emotionless guitar melodies that are strewn all across the record that just do nothing for me. I really do not get what fans heaping praise onto this album hear in these guitar lines that evokes any kind of strong feelings whatsoever. They’re not particularly somber, or heartfelt, or psychedelic, or ethereal, or anything that adds to an atmosphere or vibe that the album is building around; they’re just tremolo-picked (or worse, just metronomic quarter notes the whole way through) chord progressions that seem selected for no reason in particular. I don’t particularly like being the sourpuss in the room, but I’ve listened to this album over and over again to see if something clicks for me and it’s only redundantly highlighted the moments and aspects of the album I do find somewhat enjoyable, but nothing about the vast majority of mindless, demo-level Pallbearer doomgazing with some pretty much negligible black metal flair is at all appealing to me. Like I said, a lot of it comes down to how spotlighted the guitars are in the sluggish bulk of the album and how seemingly little was put into the melodies they have to carry. Maybe the next one will be more convincing, but the presentation of the band’s style that Djinn gives is really not selling it well, and I think they have to do a lot of work on that melodic approach that’s so central to their sound.
4/10
Cirith Ungol-Forever Black
Awakening in 2015 after almost a quarter century of slumber, the Californian heavy metal occultists have really come down the stairs to quite the Hell’s Kitchen to cook up their breakfast album in, and if I had made a bet on how well I though my Forever Black would turn out from the groggy, bed-headed Cirith Ungol, I would have lost some money because the band’s shrieking, soaring comeback album is fiercely energetic, tightly composed, and way better than I would have expected it to be, and I’m glad I got to hear it before year’s end.
7/10
Aseitas-False Peace
After the independent release of their debut album in 2018, Portland, Oregon quintet Aseitas find themselves up to bat for Translation Loss Records in 2020 with their massive sophomore effort, False Peace, an album of death metal and hardcore muscularity steeped in cerebrally tormented experimentation. Indeed, hardly anything on False Peace goes normally or by the books, and that’s the intent, which sometimes leads the album into territory where it gets a little bit lost in the weeds, but never too long to find itself back on something intriguing that you’re glad you came along on the ride for: weird style experiments that you don’t usually associate with metalcore and death metal, weird rhythms and dynamic shifts. It’s a wild ride to say the least, and at 72 minutes it’s definitely a long ride too, but the commitment definitely pays off and proves more than worthwhile as it is an album to digest with concentration.
8/10
Autonoesis-Autonoesis
This debut album from the Toronto-based act has been getting a lot of hype since its release back in August for the tightness and engaging writing of its deliciously lick-filled melodic thrash/death metal sound, and for good reason. The solos are majestic and the riffs indeed abundant on the self-titled debut; I’ll add that the band seem to take a good bit of progressive ambition and inspiration (as well as compositional influence) from the likes of Death and Orchid-era Opeth, to make for a well-above average debut for an act in this field.
8/10
Pyrrhon-Abscess Time
Last on my long list of albums I tackled for the end of the year is the fourth album from the Brooklyn-based four-piece, Pyrrhon. The band have been relentlessly pushing death metal into new territories since 2008, but Abscess Time is my introduction to their work, and what an introduction it is. The band’s aim is to expand the definition of what metal can be, and they make that no secret. Right out of the gate, the title track careens seemingly drunkenly, but enraged and dangerous, through punchy bursts of bassy strides in off-kilter rhythms that feel reminiscent of Swan’s early work in the no-wave scene. The track feels as much like noise rock as it does avant-garde death metal, and not far off from a song like “Stay Strong” from Swans’ Filth record. The music across the album is familiarly heavy and rooted in the core elements of death, but the disfigurement the band puts it through really makes the adequate term “experimental death metal” quite the understatement. The album takes on a hectic and tormented quality rather similar to what Imperial Triumphant do in their most high-energy moments, and it draws a lot of its vertigo-inducing immersion from completely unconventionally harrowingly jazzy dissonant guitar work, as well as wild rhythms and percussive accents out of nowhere that embody the dystopian plethora of anxieties it highlights lyrically. Indeed, the lyrics on Abscess Time, and the thematically relevant film audio samples, peel off the inadequate bandages covering the social rot, alienation from labor, and dehumanization in the infected wound of late-stage capitalism. The album feels like the claustrophobic nightmare world of a Darren Aronofsky film, and its utterly sensorily discombobulated reaction to the hell of capitalist wage slavery and the demons in charge of it is fucking terrifying to witness because it just amplifies the reality of everyday anxieties that one’s catastrophizing under the implicit threats of violence under capitalism keeps them trapped within. The deep, stressful panic that the album portrays is so real; it’s the fear we all operate under that ceasing to participate in alienated labor will incur the consequential violence of the loss or seizure of basic human needs, and that’s what’s so horrifying about this album’s experience. Well done Pyrrhon! Truly the embodiment of the COVID-19-ridden hell world of 2020 where the profit-generating machine refuses to cease even momentrily and burns what it treats as disposable human capital in the furnace of a pandemic to keep the engine turning.
System of a Down - Protect the Land / Genocidal Humanoids
The Armenian-American nu metal revolutionaries reconvene after 15 years of studio silence for a quick two-song punch to raise funds for their war-steeped homeland. The songs are a good warm-up-sounding appetizer of two very distinct sides of System of a Down that certainly do not on their own set up the precedent for any further new material. For now though, I’ll take whatever positives I can get out of this year, and a couple of new System of a Down songs are certainly that.
Celebrity Sex Scandal - The Fundamental
I don’t want to be too hard on this album because I genuinely don’t think it’s particularly ill-conceived or transparently lazy; it just kinda didn’t work out. Celebrity Sex Scandal are a pretty hefty eight-member ensemble from San Antonio, Texas who got their start partially through an online crowdfunding campaign. The band dazzled eager fans with their odd, cockeyed approach to the gratuitous genre layering of progressive metal and experimental rock, and the band’s third album unfortunately just goes to show that experimental doesn’t always equate with good, of course, because not every experiment is a success. In fact it’s kind of suggestive in the name that most of it isn’t. The thing that makes The Fundamental not such a hit as an experiment is that it’s really more messy than experimental. While it tosses together the disparate likes of funk rock, sludge metal, southern rock, and swing into a blender with a bunch of unusual instrumental components, at the core of it all and most prevalent in the mix of styles is this stale post-grunge alternative rock/metal that also dictates the direction the music goes in, which ultimately leads to the individual compositions being surprisingly predictable for an eccentric experimental album (and not in a flattering way). There are a few pretty rough performances throughout the album too. I get that this album is obviously pretty tongue-in-cheek and that some of its forced oddity is meant to serve the purpose of parody, but it doesn’t exactly salvage the mostly unappealing compositions and performances throughout, not that there aren’t a few relative bright spots. Overall though, I’m just not feeling the band’s superficially wacky genre-orgy style on this album. Still, I will be eager to hear whatever the band have in store for us next; hopefully this was just a hiccup in the grander scheme of things. And I hope they keep at it with their experimental ambition.
4/10
Blood from the Soul - DSM-5
If not outright masterful, nearly everything Jacob Bannon touches is at least vibrant as the sun itself. The prolific Converge frontman teamed up with Napalm Death bassist Shane Embery to revive the latter’s long-defunct moniker from the early 90’s, Blood from the Soul, which had but one industrial metal to its name before its resurrection through Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. Embery had originally paired with Lou Koller of Sick of It All for the first album’s industrial hardcore leanings, and with Bannon in the other chair in the cockpit two and a half decades later, Blood from the Soul takes on a much different life with DSM-5. It’s rather predictable and holistic blend of the types of aggression of both members’ main bands isn’t necessarily a bad thing on the principle of it being foreseeable, and the album does cross-breed pretty well the death-metal-leaning grindcore of modern Napalm Death with the fiery chaos of first-wave metalcore of Converge, two genres that marry quite well to the surprise of no one watching.
8/10
Surma - The Light Within
Making their debut for Metal Blade Records after making some pretty noticeable noise from the tiny Faroe Islands, Surma go big and theatric with their take on symphonic neoclassical metal on The Light Within. And I can see why their label saw Surma as a promising prospect (though Metal Blade also shamelessly milk Six Feet Under and the hotly disputed “fake” Batushka for whatever cash is in those udders, so make of that what you will), but Surma’s writing chops with the huge pallet they choose to paint with are clearly still maturing, their appeal coming largely from the natural grandiosity of the medium they work with. A few exceptionally compositionally accomplished songs like “The City of Winds” and “The Selkie (Kópakonan)” do suggest that this band can indeed live up to their expectations; it’s gonna take a lot of work though.
6/10
Ghostemane - ANTI-ICON
As much as it may get metal’s puritans’ panties in a bunch, yes, musicians who create largely outside the realm of metal can also have some metal cred up their sleeve that we just don’t see too much. And Floridian rapper Ghostemane has plenty of prerequisites in metal to justify his presence in the scene and his wielding of the genre. The 29-year-old got his start in the music world in local hardcore bands and has taken a ton of influence from nu metal and industrial metal, and that comes through in no uncertain manner on ANTI-ICON. Bristling with an unregulated darkness, Ghostemane traverses ANTI-ICON with brooding, Manson-like, low-register moaning as well as amped up hardcore quick-spit rap verses about the most self-loathing depths of depression and the depravity of the most aggressive and sinister intrusive thoughts. And sure, the edginess is pretty over-the-top across the whole album to the point of including an extended and rather isolated sample of someone choking severely that slightly repulse even a death metal fan, but there’s something so fresh, honest, and addicting about the unabashedly masochistic mesh of sounds here. The consistency of the gritty industrial center and the punchy metallic hardcore accents across the album are mountainous evidence that this isn’t some quirky side quest for Ghostemane. He knows his shit and he’s not messing around. With no high-brow filter over the cup, Ghostemane’s pitch black brew on ANTI-ICON is an upfront and captivating illustration of a disturbed mind in its lowest of lows that puts brutal emotional honesty before poetic eloquence, and it makes you appreciate it for its willingness to be unattractive and unembarrassed.
8/10
Of Feather and Bone - Sulfuric Disintegration
After an explosive sophomore release in 2018 (Bestial Hymns of Perversion) Of Feather and Bone suffer only a mild third-album slump in their pivot toward the more hazy, cerebral tendencies of other bands on the Profound Lore label. The more cerebral Sulfuric Disintegration points the band in a more cavernous, more compositionally abstract, and potentially more promising direction within death metal’s foggier waters for future releases. While I do prefer the band’s debut for their current label, I think this album sets them on a course for things ahead that will soon outshine what they have released so far. That being said, there are plenty of nasty riffs and filthy bass lines to salivate over on this, so enjoy the present too.
7/10
Sólstafir - Endless Twilight of Codependent Love
Apart from the heart-wrenching character that the sometimes strained vocal performances across it give it, Sólstafir’s seventh album isn’t all too stylistically different from most albums in their catalog or their post-rock/metal field. Yet the band make quite the case for why they are indeed one of the most vital participants in the echo-soaked genre after its peak, and with a variety of styles. “Dionysus” recalls the band’s earlier black metal era, while “Úlfur” recalls White Pony-era Deftones. The stoic folksy post-rock closing track, “Hann For Sjalfur”, ends on a fitting, somber note, but the top prize has to go to the heart-crushing “Her Fall from Grace”, whose standard post-rock guitar melodies serve as a stark reminder of just how powerful the saturated genre can be. Endless Twilight of Codependent Love captures well all the themes its title implies in a raw, cathartic, and open-hearted stream of emotive post-metal sorrow and blackgaze languish.
8/10
Dark Buddha Rising - Mathreyata
Dark Buddha Rising, who paired up with Oranssi Pazuzu last year for the mind-warping Syntheosis under the name Waste of Space Orchestra, return to their own solo ventures, just as their fellow psychedelic black metal collaborators did earlier this year, in injecting a little bit of magic mushroom hallucinosis into black metal through spacy, freakish synth work. While not quite as psychedelically wild as Oranssi Pazuzu’s transforming of more traditional black metal Mestarin Kynsi,Mathreyata follows a similar pattern of progression through heavy, dizzying atmospheres that build to fulfilling climaxes with a more ambient, droning, and meditative form of blackened post-metal that the band of course give a little dose of LSD to. And the results are intriguing at the very least. I would highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys atmospheric black metal at its most meditative or Sunn O))) for thee enveloping atmospheres their music can create.
8/10
Jesu - Terminus
Embodying the creative rot of the genre as a whole on this album, Jesu are back with another offering of forgettable, unconvincing indie-post-rock-influenced post-metal.
5/10
Live Without-Mannequin
Colliding filthy guitar tones a la Bloodbath or Cannibal Corpse with the visceral rage of hardcore and lyricism even more blunt and less poetic than what is usually associated with the genre, it’s good to hear Live Without still sounding lively and fucking shit up while swearing gratuitously and emphatically. This quick, 5-track EP isn’t doing anything innovative or particularly interesting, but goddamn can you feel the commitment to the metallicization of hardcore and the hardcorification of groove metal. I do hope they keep at it because they have quite an energy that can be deadly if they harness it to its fullest.
6/10
Ghøstkid-Ghøstkid
Jumbling together the bristling melodic metalcore of Architects with the focus on cool of amo-era Bring Me the Horizon with a writing style that hearkens to being in a Hot Topic in the mid-2000’s, Ghøstkid’s debut album has a lot that just doesn’t appeal to me without a lot of convincing, and Ghøstkid’s unspecial, average performances aren’t doing any of that necessary convincing.
4/10
Killer Be Killed - Reluctant Hero
The, possibly, most high-profile metal supergroup, Killer Be Killed, are back after a lengthy break following their self-titled 2014 debut with a rather similarly well-rounded sophomore effort. Sepultura founder and current Soulfly leader Max Cavalera, dynamic frontman of the late Dillinger Escape Plan and The Black Queen Greg Puciato (who just put out a fantastic solo album a month ago), Troy Sanders of Mastodon, and Converge drummer Ben Koller make for a rather promising and lineup. Though it takes some time to break into its shoes, a few songs in to build some momentum, Reluctant Hero is a pretty boisterous display from the star-studded alliance, who really have no excuse to fail with their combined pedigrees in the album’s thorough combination of relatively straightforward thrash, groove metal, and sludge metal. The multi-vocal attack serves some of the more dynamic trade-offs well, but with three of them singing, I think they could have gone a little harder on layered vocal harmonies and dizzying trade-offs. Indeed, the album’s greatest weakness is perhaps how unambitious it feels for a project made by the joining of four metal giants, especially in comparison to their works with their respective main bands. Despite feeling largely like a less-proggy, safe version of an early Mastodon album, Reluctant Hero delivers the no-nonsense thrashers and groovy bangers it needs to, and any complaints about it are mild and largely overshadowed by the exciting dynamic exchanged among the four superstars here.
7/10
Tombs - Under Sullen Skies
After whetting our pallets with their EP, Monarchy of Shadows, back in February, Tombs are back with their main course of the year, Under Sullen Skies. I was a little lukewarm toward the Brooklyn band’s first release this year, but this LP really steps it up for them not just in terms of its more comprehensive look into their sound and their ability as a band, but also in the performances. The band virtuosically juggle black metal, death metal, and doom metal on Under Sullen Skies with impressive fluidity across the album without the track listing coming across disjointed. There’s also a greater sense of conviction and emotional potency on the performances here compared to this year’s earlier EP. Tombs more than delivered after what they teased earlier this year suggested they would come through with, showcasing an expansive range of stylistic talents through dazzling and constantly engaging performances, and I’m glad the longer format of this LP lent itself to a better showcasing of their abilities.
8/10
Liturgy-Origin of the Anomalies
Just a year after the surprise release of H.A.Q.Q., the polarizingly bright and philosophical Liturgy are back with another offering, albeit somewhat shorter, of heavenly, awe-inspiring transcendental black metal. Though the first few songs in the album traverse an odd array of neo-classical ambient styles, the album does eventually settle in to the sound Hunter Hunt-Hendrix formed on Aesthethica. Origin of the Alimonies is almost entirely instrumental though, and it’s jumbled flow and composition make it feel a lot like an afterthought from H.A.Q.Q. and its creative process.
6/10
My Dying Bride - Macabre Cabaret
After a satisfactory, but hardly thrilling thirteenth LP after a five-year gap, My Dying Bride bounce back quickly with a bit more potent and raw of an EP, capturing the sorrow that surrounded the band for the past half decade more fully than their LP did.
6/10
Sodom - Genesis XIX
We’ve long known what to expect from Germany’s blackened thrash pioneers basically ever since M-16, but album after album Sodom keep the riffs coming and the pit circling with ample energy, Genesis XIX being wonderfully no different. Lobbing one riff-laden screamer after another drizzled with a the war-themed commentary that they and thrash in general have come to be known for and a tasteful amount of aged cheese, Genesis XIX makes up for its predictability with a forceful demonstration of confidence in what continues to motivate the Teutonic thrash titans to stick to their Gatling guns on the metallic battlefield, and the reward for their undying dedication is victory in securing one of the year’s best thrash albums.
8/10
MSW-Obliviosus
While the majority its slow, somber dirge plays more like a stream-of-consciousness therapeutic processing of the tragic loss its creator experienced through the medium of doom and ambient black metal, Obliviosus has its flourishes of beautifully solemn instrumentation (particularly the build in the middle of the closing title track), and an open-hearted listen easily lends tangible insight into the sorrow that inspired it. What it lacks in structural cohesion and musical wealth it supplements well enough with candid expression.
6/10
King 810-AK Concerto No. 47, 11th Movement in G Major
Flint, Michigan’s rapcore representatives have had a hard time connecting their intentionally controversially violent lyricism and live presentation to the systemic ills that have plagued their tragically notorious hometown, but the band did tone down the machismo a bit on last year’s oddity-laden Suicide King in favor of a more solely musically ear-catching strategy. While I wasn’t particularly into that album, it might have been just the reset that King 810 needed to recalibrate on this year’s more meat-and-potatoes rapcore album, AK Concerto No. 47, 11th Movement in G Major. It might not have been a super sudden or even conscious decision to ease off the edginess this time around, which might be a tough choice to make for a band basing so much of their identity on their bravado, but the result of the band’s turning the spotlight away from their theatrics and more fully onto the music is an album that feels more honest and more focused. The brutal truths of their environment aren’t smoothed out or whitewashed, and honestly, if this is what their independent journey is going to look like, I’m here for it.
7/10
Psycroptic - The Watcher of All
Teasing with a little two-song taster, Psycroptic flex their techdeath muscles indeed, but they’re doing the bare minimum when it comes to refreshing the hype that built around their name after 2018’s As the Kingdom Drowns. The songs here are solid enough in the basics of technical death metal, but they provide just an inkling of the keen compositional instinct that bolstered their prominence in 2018. I’d say I slightly prefer the greater intricacy of “A Fragile Existence” to the speedy, but more predictable, title track.
6/10
Lie in Ruins-Floating in Timeless Streams
Lie in Ruins have failed to really dazzle me with their early output so far, after two full-size albums, despite their now-extensive experience in the field. But bubbling with a whole lot more energy and a more palpable sense of confidence in their direct approach to (slightly blackened) old-school death metal the Finnish band’s third LP here might be change in tides for them, a potential start of a new era in their career. Floating in Timeless Streams finally captures the raw, gritty sound of 90’s death metal in a more flattering light, hopefully giving the band some momentum heading forward.
7/10
Scour-Black
Another prominent supergroup (if we count Phil Anselmo’s many musical projects as such), Scour, which started back in 2015 and only put out two EPs and a Bathory cover barely eclipsing a half hour of material total until this month, is the Pantera frontman’s intended venture into black metal. I say “intended” because it’s not as pure of a black metal venture as the genre’s finicky purists might grant it; for my money, there’s no point really deliberating it pedantically. It’s black metal. But the various members’ pedigrees with grindcore and death metal from experience with bands like Misery Index and Cattle Decapitation do show through here, and while that would lead naturally to the suggestion that what Scour produce would be under the banner of blackened death metal, I don’t think that label really captures it. Epecially on Black, whose sound is intensely focused on sinister darkness and evil, just whose players can’t help themselves from breakneck speed and nasty growls, Scour are clearly playing black metal. Black plays much like a Watain album just with even faster elements and more death growls influenced by Cattle Decapitation’s semi-blackened deathgrind. There’s also the occasional groove-focused section like the rhythmic riff of “Propaganda” and the delicious palm-muted groove of “Flames”, but it never feels unlike black metal. Regarding Anselmo and potential valid concerns about his (hopefully just drunken) racist shenanigans (to put it generously) potentially coming through in the lyrics, there’s nothing to really worry about here. The guy has clearly been loving him some Portal lately (as shown by his wearing their t-shirt in the bands promo photos), and the lyrics here mainly just mimic the heady, ultra-abstract (kinda nonsensical) surrealism that that band employs. I think this project’s brevity is a clever move on the band’s part, leaving a thirsting for more, making me really hopeful for a full-length sometime in the future, because this extremely grindcore-influenced, and rather fresh, approach to black metal is so savory and addictive.
8/10
Hatebreed - Weight of the False Self
While Jamey Jasta might have become more well-known as a podcast host than hardcore frontman for the past few years, that hasn’t lessened the impact of Hatebreed’s blood-pumping, grind-motivating, weight-slamming, room-cleaning metalcore. In a way, perhaps his visible juggling of his label-owning business ventures and his career with Hatebreed alongside his newfound role as the Joe Rogan of the metal world is what gives his life-coaching lyricism weight and Hatebreed’s individualist motivational ethos its life, or at least its cred. Weight of the False Self is a familiar half-hour motivational speech through hardcore for anyone who’s come into contact with Hatebreed or the scene they emerged from, and that’s not a bad thing here. The band continue to get their reps in on their metallically muscular sound and on the rhythmic grooves and hardcore breakdowns they need to maintain their technique and musical physique. While still being just another day pumping iron, gym analogies aside, this album is a great representation of how invigorating standard, but committed hardcore can be, and I’m sure I’ll be lifting to it a lot in the coming future.
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