BH AWARDS 2022 SANS APOLOGIES FOR NOT WRITING ANYTHING ALL YEAR

Fun fact: I actually did die this year and that's why I only reviewed one album in a not-fully-sober state all year.  This is The Ghost of BH Past, here to tell you all what albums were Pretty Good in 2022.  

Nah the truth is that the drive/desire/will/whatever to write just hasn't been there for a while now.  Blame the economy, blame FFXIV, blame the cooler mental illnesses you can think of, every culprit is likely responsible to some degree.  I'm not all that worried because I've gone on extended breaks before (though granted never this long) and I've always said I would never "retire" because reviewing is something I've always done in my free time anyway.  So who knows, maybe I'll have an explosion of productivity next year.  Maybe Lamb of God is the last band I ever review in full.  Who knows?  I'm not fussed about it and neither should you.  So even though whatever following I had has likely evaporated entirely, we're still gonna be COUNTING DOWN!

THE TOP 13 ALBUMS OF 2022

Rules are as usual: Full lengths only and that's it.  The metal only qualifier has been gone for years but I remind y'all anyway just in case.  LESSGO

13: Tómarúm - Ash in Realms of Stone Icons  

I so, so badly wanted to hate this.  I couldn't possibly think of anything more immediately cliche and/or creatively bankrupt and/or tailor made for the least interesting metal equivalent to film nerds who use words like "kino" unironically than some kids from Atlanta grabbing an Icelandic word for a band name and shelling out the money to have Mariusz Lewandowski do the artwork for their debut album where every song is a million years long, inexplicably released on a "major" (for metal) label.  But fuck dude I must love assembly line kino because this absolutely does it for me.  Similar to False a few years ago, this is drawn out black metal where everything happens all the time, including bloodlydoo fretless bass and that shit is catnip for me apparently.  Few albums this year feel even half as huge as this one and I adore it.

12: Voidthrone - Metaphysical Degradation  

I'll admit, there's a solid chance this album could've landed well off the list entirely if I didn't first come across it while stoned and paranoid, because holy fuck that album cover will not help in that situation.  I've been kinda over dissonant black/death for years now because I've just come to terms with the fact that I prefer my death metal to be more pugilistic than textural, and I think that's why Voidthrone has ultimately stuck with me.  This is just as non-euclidian as any band to take influence from Ulcerate or Krallice or whoever in recent years but there is so much dam-bursting fucking power behind it that it becomes unavoidably confrontational.  I haven't heard a vocalist completely deplete his lungs with every syllable like this in forever, nor have I heard such deliberately violent and chaotic music land so memorably in equally as long.

11: Mirror - The Day Bastard Leaders Die  

Throwbacks to traditional metal styles are, ironically, becoming so trendy that the metal populace as a whole has no idea what to do with 'em anymore.  I find that Mirror is the perfect flocculating agent that helps the cream rise to the top in this weird slurry of uninspired knockoffs, because what these Cypriots have that the Riot Citys of the world can only fecklessly gesture towards is pure fuckin' gonzo energy.  Mirror just kicks ass with no remorse or apologies and does it in a way that is somehow just as fresh in 2022 as it would have been in 1984.  The world needs more vocalists as batshit weird as Marvommatis.  Metal is ironically full of bands that follow all the rules that were laid out 40 years ago, and Mirror fucks those rules under the bleachers.

10: Spiter - Bathe the Babe in Bats' Blood  

If you gave me unlimited time and a promised reward of Henry Kissinger's head on a pike, I don't think I could possibly think of a stupider album I've heard all year.  I know "caveman riffs" are a popular thing in death metal right now but I promise you there is nothing on this earth more primitive than Spiter's debut here.  This sounds like the end result of lobotomizing every member of Venom.  It is pure, and I can not stress enough precisely how pure I'm talking about here, absolutely fucking pure, unfiltered, raw-dogged violent id shot out of a cock-shaped mausoleum.  Absolute speed, absolute disgust, absolute lack of music theory combined with absolute mastery of what makes metal so fucking endearing despite its advanced age at this point.  You don't need a new idea if you can do the old ideas this much gusto.

9: Wormrot - Hiss  

Say what you will about legends like Napalm Death and Nasum, I don't think there is any grindcore band with quite as much universal appeal as Wormrot.  Can I explain why?  Absolutely not.  I just know that whenever they deign to crawl out of whatever Singaporean insect colony they sleep in and release something new, I hear it and go fucking nuts.  They just... I dunno man.  I'm stretching the words out for this entry because I've always sucked at describing grind and that hasn't changed here.  It's good.  It's great!  It does the grind thing where it's hardcore punk played extraordinarily fast with knuckle-shattering death metal blended in.  I dunno dudes this is why I always secretly hope I don't love any grind albums so much that I corner myself into talking about 'em.  Because I suck at it.

8: A Pale December - Death Panacea  

I've deleted this entry like five times because I'm struggling to find the words to describe why I fell so in love with Death Panacea.  I've said a hundred times that atmoblack is an incredibly hit or miss genre because it's so easy in theory, and yet this is the second one to pop up on this list so far so it must be doing something interesting, right?  I think what does it for me is the absolutely smothering sense of despondent melancholy intertwined with fierce determination to never lose the album's momentum.  The "atmo" half of their genre comes more from the build-and-release structures of post metal than the hypnotic repetition of shoegaze, and I think that may be the X factor that made this such a hit for me.  When you feel like life isn't worth living but you push forwards anyway, the contrasting feelings become something triumphant.

7: Hallas - Isle of Wisdom  

It's funny how many albums on this list were initially approached with the idea that I wanted to hate it.  Oh wow spacey prog rock that for some reason is super popular with metalheads?  Yeah okay snore, I don't give a shit.  But I mean, fuckin', here I am eating crow again.  Due to this just being a genre I know jack nothing about, I'm mostly just filling space here because I don't know why I like it, I just do.  I love the grooves, I love the hooks, I love the dorky synths, I love the harmless vocals, I love how "Earl's Theme" sounds like what the Keep On Truckin' guys are probably actually listening to, I love how silky smooth it is.  I dunno I just love it bunches.

6: Ghost - Impera  

I'm just as surprised as you are.  I came around on Ghost a few years ago but even then that was with the caveat that their best album (Meliora) was merely pretty solid to me.  I didn't expect them to suddenly rock my shit five albums deep but here we are.  Obviously you're not coming to Ghost to hear anything particularly heavy or intense, and I think this is simply their strongest collection of hooks to date and that's the long and short of it.  They are pop metal titans for a reason and tracks like "Spillways", "Griftwood", and "Watcher in the Sky" spell that out better than any collection of words on the internet from some hairy dweeb could ever hope to do.  I like five albums more than this, of course, but this is without a doubt the catchiest release I've heard all year from any genre.

5: Devil Master - Ecstasies of Never Ending Night  

I see this as sort of a sister record to Spiter from a few entries ago.  This is partially because they're both products of the notoriously incestuous Philadelphia metal scene so of course they share some members, but it's mostly because they take the same basic idea (black metal + punk) and come out with very different answers.  Ecstasies... is a very direct album, don't get me wrong, but the directness is much more unpredictable than it is straight-ahead.  One of the most dominant features are the flittery gothic melodies that ebb and flow back into the thrash-flavored riffs in cycles so natural that they feel almost alive.  Combine those with whatever the fuck is in the water in Philly to make everybody so violent regardless of emotion and you end up with something absolutely singular.

4: Blind Guardian - The God Machine  

I'm fully aware that I've placed the last two BG albums on their respective year-end lists and used roundabout reasoning to explain why they sound like the old days despite being obviously "of the time" so to speak.  So feel free to not believe me if you'd like, but The God Machine is 10000% the throwback that I so desperately tried to make the last few albums.  It's indisputable this time, you don't need me waxing poetic about how they're using modern elements to reignite some abstract 90s creativity.  Nah, all you've gotta do is listen to any given track and you'll immediately understand that this album could've been released between Imaginations and Nightfall with no editing at all.  This is a warm blanket in a tempestuous time and maybe it means more to old school fans than new ones, but this one just FEELS like it was made specifically for me.

3: Autonoesis - Moon of Foul Magics  

I almost never put albums I only heard for the first time in December on these lists because it just feels unfair and shortsighted (ya never know if a flash'll fade).  But sometimes you get a late-year rec that was simply tailored to be exactly what you'd been hoping to find all year.  This kind of nebulous "every subgenre at once" approach always struggles to find an identity as a result, and the fact that Autonoesis takes this approach and hones in so sharply on Big Riff Moments is precisely what helps it stand so monumentally above the rest of extreme metal this year.  Those Big Riff Moments are the anchor point that the Kitestring of Imagination is tethered to, allowing the music to float around anywhere it pleases, teasing the clouds and tickling the blackened sun, while never once losing the importance of Big Riff Moments.  And I fucking love Big Riff Moments.

2: Chat Pile - God's Country  

If you're on the internet and interested in heavy/weird music, you've heard this already.  Every hipster on the planet loves this.  Everybody loves how bleak, raw, confrontational, uncomfortable, frantic, scary, and straight fucking furious this album is.  There's nothing I can say that you haven't heard already.  I have no hot takes.  I am, apparently, the metal equivalent to the kino dweeb I described at the start, because I love this album for all of the exact same reasons that Pitchfork and Anthony Fantano and all the rest of the bespectacled "falses" in the world love this album.  "Why" is one of the most devastatingly important songs written in years.  The band apparently tweeted (I dunno I never had a twitter) that their greatest accomplishment this year was forcing critics to namedrop Swans and Korn in the same sentence and yeah sure that works.

AND THE WINNER IS...

  

1: White Ward - False Light  

With Autonoesis, I mentioned not wanting to put albums up too high on the list if I only just recently heard them for the first time.  A similar thing happened in 2019 with White Ward's sophomore album, Love Exchange Failure.  It happened both in 2019 for the AOTY list and it happened six months later when I did the Top 50 of the decade and got dangerously close to putting it in the top ten despite hearing it for the first time a few months prior at that point.  In the years since, it hasn't faded.  I'm still in awe of that album and I think I must've known at the time that I'd discovered something truly magical that was going to stick with me for years.  I bring that up because False Light was the exact opposite of a surprise for me.  I was waiting with bated breath for this, it was penciled in as a potential contender before I even heard a note of it, all I knew was that White Ward did something that punched me directly in the dopamine twice before and I couldn't wait for it to happen a third time.  I can not even begin to explain how delighted I am to be giving White Ward the extended writeup here because that means that it did, indeed, ultimately land as my favorite album on the year.  Whenever I try recommending this band to people I inevitably have to make them sound like a stupid gimmick by mentioning the prominent full-time saxophone, but I can't stress enough how much it doesn't clutter the space as much as it fills in a space that I never knew was empty before.  You can't really separate the sax from the rest, but if you did anyway, you'd be met with a barrage of shockingly fucking heavy atmoblack (people with better ears than I tell me this is largely tuned to C standard, which is more of a death metal tuning and it shows), with passages of neofolk and goth rock and basically every metal-approved-non-metal influence you can think of and somehow every single second of this maintains either mood or momentum or both.  The esoteric touches are, despite being the most immediately notable things about False Light, mere accoutrements to the main attraction, and the lengthy dirges of "Phoenix", "Leviathan", and the title track are so simultaneously despondent and furious that it nails an emotion that's hard to pin down with words.  I'm so happy that an album I was anticipating didn't let me down for once, and White Ward managed to snag the title and the BH Award for Album of the Year 2022.

And now for something completely the same!

The Antichrist Imperium - Volume III: Satan in His Original Glory: This would be like #7 if I wasn't hearing it for the first time around noon on the 31st.  Learning that this band featured members of Akercocke made immediate sense to me because the push and pull between raucously filthy death metal and disquietingly eerie clean prog sections hasn't sounded this fucking good since the first time I heard Akercocke.

Fer de Lance - The Hyperborean: And this is another that would have landed on the list without a second thought if I had heard it prior to the day before this post gets published.  I guess this is good motivation to be more involved again next year because this sort of EPIC pounding traditional doom metal that sounds mountainously tall is exactly what I had been wanting without even realizing it.  This is how I assumed Grand Magus sounded when they were first described to me, and boy do they live up to my incorrect imagination.

Venator - Echoes from the Gutter: Mirror obviously took the crown for me in the realm of throwback classic metal, but Venator was less than a noselength behind.  Mirror won out for their singular uniqueness, but despite Venator being a much more "normal" 80s metal wannabe, they were far and away the most fun and sincere of the bunch.  "The Seventh Seal" has been stuck in my head all year.

Kostnatění - Oheň hoří tam, kde padl: If I wasn't lazy and trying to finish this post in the 11th hour like the numbskull I am, this would have been the easy #1 entry in the "EPs/Demos of the Year" side feature I considered doing.  Kost's debut was a dissonant and evocative nightmare, and the followup EP, essentially a collection of Turkish folk songs thrown through a giblet-jammed woodchipper, is exactly that but with much more color in the periphery.  The melodies are all so immediate and so wrong somehow that even the more triumphant and proud moments feel like they're being delivered by a chattering skeleton.  I'm not sure if that makes sense but the point is that this record carries a layer of dust on it and I mean that in the best and least clear way possible.

Grenadier - Trumpets Blare in Blazing Glory: I will never, ever, ever stop being pissed off at Arghoslent for creating an incredibly specific style of Mercyful Fate riffs run through death metal intensities that I adore and absolutely believe is worth exploring and expanding on.  Because the band are such obvious, proud, abhorrent pieces of racist shit, nobody wants to touch their sound and anybody who does is immediately met with suspicion.  I just want somebody to do their style without wanting my wife dead, ya know?  So for now, Grenadier is the closest thing I've got until Mi'gauss decides to reunite.

There's usually more here but I ran out of time, whoops!  Enjoy!