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!

BH AWARDS 2021 YADDA YADDA

Reports of my death have been somewhat exaggerated.  I only wrote five reviews all year, the lowest I've ever somehow managed since basically half my life ago.  The reasons why I've been offline are numerous and ultimately irrelevant (basically a nice combo of real life + FFXIV + realizing I've been terminally online since 2004 and desperately needed to remind myself what sunshine looked like), but I'm back in time for the year end list because hell yeah of course I am.  I love lists, I love making them, I love reading them, I love everything about what is essentially journalistic clerical work but this dumb clickbait shit is where I thrive.  2021 was a weird year for the music I listen to because up until the start of the month I had been calling it "The year of the 7/10", because a vast majority of new releases I checked out were good, competent, totally fine, but almost never really magical in any way.  Then when it came time to actually organize this list, I surprised myself by really struggling to narrow it down to only 13 to highlight.  I dunno man, this year just snuck up on me and wound up kicking way more ass than I had realized at the time.

Anyway I know what you're here for, so let's just get to it.  This is!

THE TOP 13 ALBUMS OF 2021

Rules are the same as always: Full lengths only (one of these entries is disputed on whether it's an EP or LP, but the band goes with the latter so I'm counting it) and that's it.  The list tends to stay metal since that's just where my listening focuses but ya never know.  Fuckin' Foxy won last year so ya gotta stay on your toes.  Let's get on with it:

13: Fimir - Tomb of God  

Ya know, for a guy who has always counted doom as one of his least favorite of the major metal subgenres, there really was something about this ultra basic classic doom record from Fimir this year that grabbed me and refused to let go since the day I came across it.  I have no history with four of the five members' previous band, Church of Void, but I had a feeling upon first listen that these guys were scene veterans already.  There's a confidence in Tomb of God that can only come with experience.  "One Eyed Beast" is such an incredible earworm but has massive balls for riding on basically one riff for nine and a half minutes while the vocalist devolves into tuneless moaning by track's end.  The fact that they could pull off such a terrible idea so well speaks to the level of artistry on display here.

12: Yoth Iria - As the Flame Withers  

For all my admitted ageism when it comes to metal bands, I find it darkly ironic that the first two entries here are debut albums by "new" bands comprised mostly of scene veterans.  Yoth Iria sports a much healthier lineage, with the two founding members having played on the first two Rotting Christ albums, and even though I never really got into the Greek black metal scene all that much, I know damn well the clout that brings the band.  As the Flame Withers fantastically channels that warm atmosphere of their homeland.  The album art is actually a pretty good metaphor for the sound on display.  It's massive, smooth, dark, and colorful all at the same time.  That may seem like a strange combo for a genre as traditionally icy and inaccessible as black metal but I promise you it kicks ass.

11: Inoculation - Celestial Putridity  

I initially had Archspire bringing up the tail on this list, but as the months rolled on I found myself more and more let down by it.  I think the reason Inoculation find themselves here instead is because this sounds like Archspire if every other note was removed.  The Canadians' signature blend of total sensory overload used to augment some sharp hooks, but they've regressed back to being all sizzle and no steak.  I'm spending half of this entry talking about a different album but that's because Inoculation is such a phenomenal respec of one of the most popular tech death bands in the world.  It turns out that by taking 20 points out of Speed and putting them into Songwriting instead you can wind up with the same basic idea but much better.  Inoculation is modern tech death with a Nocturnus sensibility and that's a surprisingly delicate line to thread.

10: Demiser - Through the Gate Eternal

This is just so god damned stupid and I can't get enough of it.  Through the Gate Eternal is basically just regular old piss-n'-vinegar black/thrash and if you've heard Desaster, Aura Noir, or D666 before then you aren't going to find too many surprises, but what they lack in forward-thinking creativity they make up for in sheer fuckin' testicular fortitude.  This is over the top debauchery that is so on the nose that it rockets past farce and lands squarely on "pure fun".  I mean come on, the members gave themselves names like "Gravepisser", "Phalomancer", and the creme de la creme, "Demiser the Demiser", which also adorns the name of an appropriately silly track.  There's so much energy in a track like "Deathstrike" that I could never not adore this, even if I genuinely can't tell where the sincerity and irony actually end.

9: Hooded Menace - The Tritonous Bell  

Hooded Menace is a band I've seen as kinda cursed to always be "quite good" but never managed to break the glass ceiling.  Turns out sixth time is the charm I guess.  I've always appreciated how they approach death/doom the same way as Runemagick, where the "doom" half of the equation comes from honest to god doom metal riffs instead of just slow death metal.  I don't know what they've really done differently here compared to their previous five albums, but they finally got over the hump with this one.  I really think it just boils down to them dialing in the grooves to an almost scientifically lethal degree this time.  They were always there but they were never as fully torqued as "Corpus Asunder" or "Blood Ornaments", the latter of which would almost certainly be my favorite song of the year if it wasn't for an upcoming entry.

8: 1914 - Where Fear and Weapons Meet  

I think it speaks to how phenomenal the songwriting normally is with 1914 that they can close this album on an agonizingly long rendition of "The Green Fields of France" (which is thematically appropriate but meh in execution) and still manage to land in the top ten based on the previous 52 minutes.  I've beaten the drum enough when it comes to how much I hate themes of real life war being treated like a Disney movie and 1914 continues to be the poster child of making their music just as grimy and unpleasant as their themes.  This type of deathified black metal is so fucking bleak and nihilistic, it just punches me in the heartstrings every single time.  Where Fear and Weapons Meet is another triumph in their career and I'm glad they're finally starting to build the popularity they so obviously deserve.

7: Eternity's End - Embers of War  

Man do you have any idea how awesome it is to hear Iuri Sanson singing on a good album for the first time in like a decade?  I recall their earlier albums being a less catchy old-school Dragonforce, but Embers of War has much more classic metal influence and holy shit is that the secret sauce they needed.  There are so many shades of classic power metal bands and here that it borders on being plagiarism but I don't give a shit because dammit Iron Savior and Running Wild are classic bands for a reason and their signature tropes just fucking work.  Honestly, if every song was as good as "Hounds of Tindalos" then this would be #1 without a second thought.  It is primo early 90s Running Wild put through a shreddier filter and I could listen to it a billion times in a row.  That's the song of the year without a fucking doubt.

6: Green Lung - Black Harvest  

The most concise review of this album is three words long: "Ghost but good".  This is stoner doom at its core but there is such a massive injection of 70s rock in here that the comparison is unavoidable (especially since the vocals are equally thin and goofy).  The way "The Harrowing" leads into "Old Gods" is pure Boston and it works exactly as well as the classic rock staple it's obviously ripping off.  Black Harvest proceeds to be a salvo of Sabbathian riffage and Deep Purple organ shredding and it never stops being entertaining.  I'm almost certain this is the first album that could be described as "stoner" to ever land on this list and I don't know if that's because I'm finally warming up to the style or this is seriously head and shoulders above everything else.  Either way it owns.

5: Dream Troll - Realm of the Tormentor  

This is actually kind of a weird one since it seems to be debatable whether this is an LP or EP, and long time fans tell me that this is a bit of a step down and the new vocalist isn't as good as their old one.  However, this is the first release of theirs that I've actually heard, so all this tells me is that I have an amazing backlog to explore, because I love every single second of this banger.  There are obviously four albums I like more than this one, but this is without a doubt the catchiest release of 2021.  This is hook after hook after hook and I can't get enough of it.  It should be clear by now that I like throwback metal when it feels like a lost classic instead of a deliberate homage, and this fulfills that criteria easily.  I could time travel to 1984 and put this on record store shelves and nobody would notice that it's from 35 years in the future.

4: Tower - Shock to the System  

I only managed to write like five reviews this year, and Tower was one of the few album that motivated me enough to shout about how awesome it is.  Everything I loved about Satan's Hallow is showcased here in exactly as much glory as that tragically short-lived project.  Sporting possibly the most unhinged vocal performance of the year and some of the most ear catching throwback metal I've heard in a long while.  All the youth and fire that made those classic releases so good burns fuckin' hot on Shock to the System.  There's very little I can say that I haven't already said about this stunner, so I'll just reiterate how fucking awesome "Blood Moon" is.  I don't think I've heard a better opening track since Scanner's "Warp 7" way back in 1988.

3: Craven Idol - Forked Tongues  

Say it with me now, "Dark Descent is a massively important label but the further away from death metal their releases are, the better they tend to be".  I've been saying this for a long while based on fantastic releases from Crypt Sermon and Tyranny and such, and Craven Idol here brings some of the most scorching black/thrash metal recorded in years to further solidify my belief that DDR should just give death metal a break at this point.  This is, without a doubt, Craven Idol's masterpiece.  All of the intensity, venom, hooks, and razor sharp riffage that made Towards Eschaton and The Shackles of Mammon instant hits for me has been amped up to a nearly unbelievable degree on Forked Tongues.  This is one of the few times that a metal record has not only lived up to, but easily surpassed the hype for me.

2: Spectral Wound - A Diabolic Thirst  

I've never really dipped my toes into QCBM beyond a handful of releases, but I've always been aware of the little microscene and have enjoyed most of what I'd heard.  The reason Spectral Wound's homeland was such a surprise to me is because I was absolutely positive this band was either Finnish or French on first blush.  A Diabolic Thirst so exquisitely nails that dripping melodic edge that's so inherent to those scenes.  The entire album is fine-tuned and razor sharp, and brimming with so much caustic malice that it almost physically hurts to listen to.  I often say that I prefer my black metal to be a bit more fiery than icy, but Spectral Wound here is ice fucking cold and never once takes their foot off the gas.  I've singled out a lot of "best songs of the year" so far but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how utterly fucking flawless "Frigid and Spellbound" is.

AND THE WINNER IS...

1: Bewitcher - Cursed Be Thy Kingdom

On first listen way back in April, I thought this was kinda fun and then shelved it without much thought.  As the year went on, I found myself constantly coming back to it.  Over and over and over again I found myself humming quietly at work before realizing the tune coming out of my throat was the chorus of "Electric Phantoms".  Like an oil spill this just kept creeping back into my bloodstream and before I knew it, Cursed Be Thy Kingdom was my most listened to album on the year by a pretty wide margin.  This niche of blackened speed/heavy metal or whatever it's called nowadays (I've been calling it "Motorbastard" for a while) is consistently pretty good but rarely breaks above that for me.  I like Midnight and Hellripper as much as any self respecting metalhead, but Bewitcher's third album here just blows the entire fucking scene out of the water as far as I'm concerned.  I pegged Dream Troll as the catchiest release of the year but this is only behind by like a damn molecule.  All of the raucous filth and debauchery that made Venom so amazing in the early 80s is on display here and arguably even surpasses those early classics.  Yes, I'm willing to go that far for anybody who could write modern gems like "Satanic Magick Attack" or "Valley of the Ravens".  It's pretty weird for how much I crow about how too many metalheads are stuck on old sounds and refuse to truly explore the new bands that are genuinely innovating the style we all love for me to have three of my top five here sound like they could've been written nearly 40 years ago, but in the case of Bewitcher it has less to do with them doing anything new and more to do with them doing everything better.  Almost every album on this list was an instant hit for me, and historically like 70% of albums I put on these lists that immediately wowed me wind up fading from my memory after a few years, but Cursed Be Thy Kingdom was a slow burn that grew on me more and more as the year went on until I was fully in its clutches by year's end, and historically that bodes much better for how well this album is going to age along with me.  The entire top three here was really tough for me to suss out, but ultimately my gut (and my heart) tells me the only true winner of the BH Award for Album of the Year 2021 could only be Bewitcher.

And now for something completely the same!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Stormkeep - Tales of Othertime:  Honestly this is good enough to be like #8 or so, but I first heard it on the day I started writing this post.  Maybe I'm being overly cautious and I'll regret not putting it on the list proper if it winds up holding up and becoming a modern favorite of mine, but due to a quirk of timing I just flat out don't feel comfortable putting it on the list.  Phenomenal meloblack with some cool dungeon synth passages that I'd recommend any fan of classic Emperor or Dissection to check out, I just wish I would've heard it before December 26th.

Kanonenfieber - Menschenmühle: This is basically the exact same album as 1914's representative on the list and I'm being completely honest when I say that's the main reason I chose to exclude it.  It's weird that both bands aim for this exact same microniche and wind up executing identical ideas in almost identical ways and logically I should be annoyed by that (and I am to an extent), but Kanonenfieber is very good on their own and this album could've wound up ranking in an alternate universe where 1914 didn't put out a slightly better album that I chose to listen to more often.

Ningen-Isu - Kuraku: In a year with more doom-adjacent bands on my list than ever before, Ningen Isu still tragically misses the list proper despite putting out a great album for basically the tenth time in a row because they are pathologically incapable of releasing an album that isn't excruciatingly long.

Noctambulist - The Barren Form: This actually fought with Inoculation and Inferi as my favorite overly technical death metal album of the year, and I like how it's much grimier and more chaotic than the album that wound up making the list, but it's held back by having way too many lengthy passages of near silence on every damn track.  If they had mitigated (but retained) that effect then the final list would look different.

Kyning - Ān: I've heard literally nobody else talk about this excellent doom record this year, and I want to highlight it for two reasons.  1) The vocalist sometimes devolves into this odd fry-whine that sounds exactly like the dude from The Vines, and 2) Despite "only" being 55 minutes long, it still feels like cutting a track or two would've done this album a world of good.  At times I really feel like we're re-entering the CD era and bands are just cramming as much content as possible into every release when almost everything I heard this year would've been better with ten minutes shaved off.  Kyning is simply a great example of what I mean when I say that sort of thing.

Eye of Purgatory - The Lighthouse: This album had no chance of making the final ranking and I'd probably rate it a 7/10 or so, I just want to highlight it because I am utterly astounded that I stumbled across a Rogga project that isn't belligerently mediocre.  

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Archspire - Bleed the Future: I touched on it in the Inoculation entry, but Archspire really let me down this year.  I noted at the time that The Lucid Collective could technically be classified as pornography since it was the type of thing you'd completely lose interest in once you finished masturbating, but Relentless Mutation just utterly trounced every expectation I could've possibly had for any modern tech death album in 2017 and to this day I still regret snubbing it on that year end list.  In 2017 they put out a modern masterpiece that stands against and even at times surpasses the undisputed classics of their genre, and in 2021 they seemed to revert right back to making porn.  I dunno, maybe their viral fame has shifted their priorities too much and now Dean is too busy focusing on memes and streaming to focus on writing a song as good as "Involuntary Doppelganger" again, but the end result here is that Archspire went from being kings that proved a dying genre still had some life left in it to just reminding me why I stopped listening to tech death so much in the first place.  What a bummer.

Cannibal Corpse - Violence Unimagined: This album isn't actually bad really, but I do think it signals a future that I'm really not interested in for the band.  Obviously, Pat is out of the band after his mental break a few years ago, and to the surprise of nobody he wound up replaced by Erik Rutan, who is a perfect fit based on chemistry alone.  The problem I have is that Erik's writing is just far less interesting than Pat's, despite being a perfectly capable guitarist.  Pat's songs had a more manic and technical edge that nobody really brings to the band anymore, so now their fifteenth album here is one of the very few where I really have no counter to the "it all sounds the same" criticism they normally get.  It's not a bad album, but they've homogenized their sound even more and I think it's time to admit they'll never be truly great again.

Running Wild - Blood on Blood: Normally, since it hasn't been the early 90s for nearly thirty years now, I wouldn't have any expectations to dash in the first place when it comes to Running Wild.  But I do admit, there was a part of me that was genuinely excited to hear this after Rapid Foray was so surprisingly decent.  Neither I nor any other self respecting metalhead was expecting them to crank out another Death or Glory or Pile of Skulls after 40+ years, but after surprising everybody last time, Rolf put on his best songwriting cap and instead cranked out the most boring and inconsequential album in Running Wild history, which is no small feat considering that history contains shit like Resilient.  Guess it was a fluke after all.

Grave Miasma - Abyss of Wrathful Deities: I only managed like five or six reviews all year as it is, one of them was for Grave Miasma, and at the end of the year I still forgot that I had even listened to this in the first place.  Just very, very, very dull for a band that carries a ton of clout.

Chainsword - Blightmarch: At this point I'm just convinced that whatever intangible chemistry that made Bolt Thrower work so well is completely impossible to recapture, because every single band I've listened to that has tried to replicate their formula has wound up being mind-drainingly uninteresting and Chainsword is no exception.

Enforced - Kill Grid:  This was hyped as the undisputed thrash king of the year and the worthy successor to Power Trip's throne after Riley Gale's untimely death.  It wound up being the okayest album of the year.

Iron Maiden - Senjutsu: Is it really a disappointment if I knew it was going to be the same album they've been rewriting since 2000 with the exact same problems they've had since 2000 with the seventh-power diminished returns since 2000?  I get that Maiden is one of the most legendary bands in the genre but fuckin' hell metal media has really been keeping their heads above water by desperately clinging onto bloated, waterlogged corpses like this one.  They need to move the fuck on and cut the dinosaur show already.  In no universe can I comprehend somebody listening to this shambling shadow of an album and thinking "Yo this fuckin SLAPS" while eagerly voting it as AOTY.  Guys, it is completely okay to revere the classics while admitting that the band hasn't truly been great in decades.

And that's all for 2021!  I've been trying to temper how much I personify years in recent months because it's very frustrating how instead of class consciousness we all get mad at abstract shit like years instead of lighting our bosses on fire, but regardless I hope this last cycle was good for you.  There's a blizzard heading towards my hometown right now so I'm gonna just hole up for the next few days and catch y'all on the flipside.  I promise I'll write more in 2022.  Toodles!

BH AWARDS 2020 AND MISCELLANEOUS NONSENSE

Hey guys, you know what time it is!  I've been doing this for too long now, as this is the 11th AOTY list I've posted to this blog (and they started as "unofficial" forum posts on a long-dead board back in 2005 or so so really I've been doing this for half my life now) and I just want to say thank you all for sticking with me as long as y'all have.  I put zero effort into promoting myself either here or at MA (where I started writing and where most of you know me from) so the fact that I have people willing to listen to whatever bullshit I have to say warms my cockles.  Thank you all.  I know it'd be the obvious cliche to talk about how much 2020 sucked as a year, but I'm only going to mention it in passing to explain that due to how awful the year was, I actually spent way less time listening to music at work (where I tend to do it) and instead focused mostly on podcasts and audiobooks for most of the year.  As a result, sometime around mid November I had realized I only heard like seven or eight albums that I even liked, so most of the last six weeks has seen me blitzing to check out everything I missed and get my list ready.  As a result, this is probably my least solid AOTY list in a long time, based purely on the fact that many albums haven't had time to grow on me and many of the ones that had a strong first impression didn't have time to fall off if they were going to.  So when 2030 rolls around and the next Album of the Decade list goes up, you can expect a lot of these to not return.  Sorry I dropped the ball for y'all this year, but I'm only human.  Either way, it's time for!

 

THE TOP 13 ALBUMS OF 2020

Y'all know the rule: full lengths only.  I dropped the "metal only" requirement years ago but the list tends to stay 100% metal anyway just by virtue of my listening habits.  Anyway lets get on with it!

13: Gaerea - Limbo  

I briefly rememberGaerea being promising a few years ago with Unsettling Whispers in 2018.  That debut took black metal and mixed it with the nasty heaviness of sludge, and while it's initially kind of disappointing that they've become much more "normal" BM on Limbo, it's pretty quickly washed away simply by the virtue of how much better the songs themselves are this time around.  This is a very caustic and overwhelming album with an incongruent atmosphere of catharsis.  Every track here feels like taking the wakizashi to your gut and letting your demons spill out on the floor.  I'm hearing a lot of similarities to Mgla here but with a lot less malice involved.  It tends to hit the same mood over and over for the entire runtime but this is a case where that works marvelously because it's overwhelming in a good, artistic way.

12: Orbit Culture - Nija  

I can't explain this album for the life of me.  On one hand it kinda sucks.  It feels much longer than it is, it focuses very heavily on groove elements in conjunction with melodeath, perfectly playing one of the least exciting and most entry-level styles of metal on the surface, the production is very punchy but is so mechanized and inhuman that it lacks any real sense of danger, et cetera.  On the other hand, I can't stop fucking listening to it and have come back to it like a dozen times since the summer so it must be doing something right.  Nija sounds like what I thought Fear Factory sounded like based on description alone, or alternatively like Scar Symmetry if they had more going for them besides a great vocalist.  Any album with tracks as devastating as "At the Front" or "Open Eye" is going to be a hit with me, full stop.

11: Jordablod - The Cabinet of Numinous Song  

While it didn't rank at the time, I really enjoyed Jordablod's debut, Upon My Cremation Pyre.  It took the discordant, DSO styled-jangleblack and played it with both feet firmly planted on the ground, with much less incomprehensible experimentation and ultimately sounded like one of the few albums in the niche created by humans.  The Cabinet of Numinous Song completely throws that out the window and spends the lion's share of the runtime experimenting with noisy ambient soundscapes.  It's by no means an "ambient" or "noise" album, but both of those influences are definitely here, intertwined beautifully with both chaotic and downbeat dissonant black metal straight from the void. "The Two Wings of Becoming" is great black metal, while the title track is mostly noise accompanied by a guitar that sounds like a screaming baby.

10: Vader - Solitude in Madness  

I so badly want Vader to stop appearing on these lists so I can stick to my ageist bullshit about classic bands needing to move on so new blood can keep the genre alive and exciting, but fuck man, Vader just can't physically stop themselves from kicking ass.  This is more Tibi et Igni than The Empire, basically meaning that this is full steam ahead from the word go and stays consistently wicked.  You'd think that after 30+ years they'd've slowed down at least a little bit, but no.  Vader sounds just as hungry and vicious as they did in 1995 and that's unbelievable to me.  Piotr is in his mid 50s how the fuck is he still this fast and angry?  To still routinely pump out songs as wild and nasty as "Shock and Awe" is nearly criminal.  As long as Vader lives, classic death metal will never truly die.

9: High Spirits - Hard to Stop  

And now for the total opposite, my hometown heroes strike once again with yet another totally underappreciated delight of classic metal.  I've once heard High Spirits described as "as light as you can get while still being undeniably metal", and while that's less true in a post-Tanith/Wytch Hazel world, they still reign supreme to me in this niche of "light metal" or whatever you want to call it.  Their sound is so uplifting, unthreatening, and easy to listen to that they manage to strike a crossover into basically every other fandom within metal, and somehow they still haven't broken out as one of the "big names" in the scene.  Hard to Stop is something that both a bearded extreme metal freak like myself and my dad who liked AC/DC in the 70s can rock out to together, and dammit isn't metal supposed to be all about bringing people together?

 

8: Vengeful Spectre - Vengeful Spectre  

I am eternally thankful for Pest Productions for all the work they do signal boosting Chinese bands.  I've always had a fascination with bands from there since it's weird to see the most populous country so wildly underrepresented in the world of metal.  It's thanks to them I've been able to hear great bands like Black Kirin, Holyarrow, Skeletal Augury, and now, Vengeful Spectre.  These guys have a flavor of Chinese folk in here thanks to the cool howly/whistly instruments, but the real appeal to me is how suffocatingly dense this record is.  You could just flippantly describe this self titled as "just" meloblack, but the fact that every song has like two hundred riffs in them and the intensity stays so high, even during the slow parts, is out of this world.  "Rainy Night Carnage" and "Wailing Wrath" are legitimately two of my favorite songs on the year.

7: Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin kynsi  

Oranssi Pazuzu is one of the bigger names in black metal right now and for whatever reason I just never really gave them the time of day until this year.  Most people I've talked to have pegged this as their least good album but really that just tells me that I have one hell of an incredible backlog to sift through.  Mestarin kynsi scratches the exact same itch for me that Sigh scratched in their weird middle era.  The occasional blasts of intensity that cut through the downbeat electronics and psychedelic soundscapes is exactly what I've been missing out of one of my old favorites since In Somniphobia.  Sigh likely isn't the best point of comparison, but the muted trip hop elements can't help but bring them to the fore of my mind, and OP is fucking great at replicating that feeling I've been missing.  Maybe this is more for me than y'all, but I adore this.

6: Sweven - The Eternal Resonance  

I couldn't get into Horrendous's Ecdysis when it dropped several years ago, so as a result I ignored every band that got compared to it, which is why I missed out on Morbus Chron when they were a thing.  Now that they're "back" as Sweven, I'm really starting to think that this whole psychedelic death metal thing was actually right up my alley all along (see also my 2018 list where Chapel of Disease landed a spot).  There's something about this vaguely extreme prog metal with low distortion, haunting melodies, and rollicking 70s rock grooves that I just can't get enough of right now, and The Eternal Resonance delivers that in spades.  I think I lack the language to explain exactly why this touches me so perfectly, but tracks like "By Virtue of a Promise" and "Mycelia" just tickle an erogenous zone I didn't even know I had.

5: Cult of Lilith - Mara  

Iceland has become a surprising hotspot for metal in recent years, mostly thanks to the jangleblack scene (though I'm convinced most of those bands are decent at best and tend to get subconscious extra credit simply for being from Mystikal Volcano Island), but here we are finally giving the tiny nation some recognition and it turns out to be for incredibly precise, pristinely produced death metal.  Mara reminds me of a less technical version of early Fleshgod Apocalypse with odd Devin Townsend style vocals barging in every once in a while, and it's such a strange experience that I just can't kill it.  The first time I heard the quick two seconds of clean vocals in "Cosmic Maelstrom" I knew I was in for some weird shit that really shouldn't work but god dammit it works for me and this is probably the metal album I've spent the most time with this year.

4: Anaal Nathrakh - Endarkenment  

Speaking of extreme metal with random operatic cleans!  Anaal Nathrakh is losing their shine for a lot of people it seems, as they've been sticking with the same style more or less exclusively for like six or seven albums in a row now, but god damn it works for me.  I know damn well they're gonna do that thing where they build up and then stop dead silent for half a beat before exploding with a blast beat and YAAAAAAAH scream.  I don't care, that shit gets me hyped every fucking time.  Despite me loving their style, they've been pretty hit or miss since Constellation but I can't deny that Endarkenment is definitely one of the good ones.  This is exactly as violent and unhinged as I like AN to sound, and the fact that Hunt's clean vocals keep getting worse over the years only makes the clean vocals sound more desperate and apocalyptic.  I love it.

3: Persuader - Necromancy  

I've probably made it clear already, but Persuader's second and third albums are two of my all time favorites and their frustratingly slow release schedule since then has been a heavy pain on my heart.  The Fiction Maze had one or two incredible songs but was kind of underwhelming, so imagine my shock when Necromancy finally dropped six years later and wound up being nothing but absolute heaters and the true successor to When Eden Burns.  This is everything I want out of a Persuader album, blisteringly heavy power metal with anthemic choruses that consist of three hooks at once.  I've said for a long while that they picked up where Blind Guardian left off when they abandoned the rough speed metal of their early sound, and Necromancy continues to prove that.  "Scars" alone should illustrate why this is peak BH metal.

 

2: Protest the Hero - Palimpsest  

The real surprise on this list is that Persuader is actually my metal album of the year.  It's true!  The final two are, for the first time in LOTB history, not metal albums!  That's not to say metal was weak this year, it's just that Protest the Hero somehow kept their streak alive and released another stunner.  Somehow each new album is their new best album, and every time I'm initially disappointed before slowly realizing every track is brilliant.  Rody irreparably damaged his vocal chords on the Fortress Anniversary tour, and as such the music had to change to accomodate his new voice and lack of ability to scream as much, and god fuck did they nail it.  This more overtly melodic style with added synths is life affirming.  "Little Snakes", "The Migrant Mother", and especially "All Hands" only further their legacy as one of the all time greats. 

 

 

AND THE WINNER IS...

 

1: Foxy Shazam - Burn 

I mentioned before that my actual #1 album of the last decade wasn't actually Sigh and they took the prize entirely because I made the big list metal exclusive.  My actual favorite album of the 2010s was Foxy Shazam's self titled album, and their dissolution in 2014 was pretty much my musical 9/11.  Basically no other band on the planet has ever really managed to replicate Queen's classic 70s sound, but Foxy fuckin' did it back then.  Burn, their first since their surprise reformation early this year, on the other hand, is a stylistic whirlwind with a serious tonal consistency problem and a lot of bizarre experimentation that fans have seemed to largely balk at.  However, I think anybody familiar with them outside of their two most famous albums (the self titled and The Church of Rock and Roll) should be aware that they've never been afraid to experiment and have always been fearless in playing with expectations.  Burn is such an incomprehensible mess of weird ideas that all come together beautifully that even though it only came out a few weeks ago, it was basically the only album all year that I heard and immediately said "YES!  THIS IS IT!"  I think what makes this work so much for me is that this is the first one to find a way to accurately portray how much of a cocaine nightmare their legendary live performances are.  They are notoriously high energy and theatrical, despite the total lack of actual props or massive stages.  They perform like a group of ravenous madmen from the 70s on the budget of a coffeehouse indie band, pure punk energy with the sound of old school arena glam.  I saw them in 2014 on the Gonzo tour, and near the end of the show, Eric Nally took a pack of cigarettes from a fan in the crowd, lit four of them at once, ate them, and then sat cross legged on the floor and sang the chorus of "Dragula" a capella.  I've seen live footage of Sky White playing keyboards while crowdsurfing while Nally does a color guard routine with the mic stand using only his feet.  Even during their soulful ballads they act like a bunch of space cases that took a shitload of drugs that turned their brains into Jack Nicholson's face.  Burn is the first album that matches that kaleidoscopic apocalypse they invoke onstage.  The new bassist is a dude who wears a mask and calls himself Trigger Warning, there are two tracks that consist of nothing but swelling ambient strings and Nally and new drummer Teddy Aitkins singing Kevin Hart jokes with heavy autotune, "Dreamer" is a wonderful power ballad that starts off like something off Kesha's Rainbow and ends invoking Queen's more climactic moments, at one point the title track throws in a random death metal roar in the background before playing the breakdown from "Raining Blood" on the trumpet, "Suffering" is the most straight ahead driving rock song on the album and gets like one word away from referencing a Sublime song for the sake of a pun, "S.Y.A.A.F." contains the line "erection of the holy wood" before a jaw harp starts boinging away, there's just... a whole lot going on.  I'm probably making this sound like some r/iamveryrandom shit, and maybe it is, I dunno, but for me it perfectly showcases the steadfast defiance against stupid things like "rules" that Foxy has always proudly stood for.  This is everything I ever wanted out of a Foxy album, every single track is a banger, even the bizarre cloud rap ones, and at the end of the day, this album is like seeing an old friend for the first time in years and immediately reverting to all of your old inside jokes and catching up as though you haven't missed a day.  This is the exact sepia-toned warm-and-fuzzy that I think we all needed to close out the screaming rollercoaster ride down Fuck Everything Avenue that was 2020.  Likely the most controversial winner of the BH Award for Album of the Year we've had yet, but if I look in my heart and ask what my favorite album that came out in 2020 was, the answer is Burn.  Hands down.

And now for something completely the same!

 

 

 HONORABLE MENTIONS

 

Expander - Neuropunk Boostergang:  I love it when a band completely bucks the accepted aesthetics of their chosen genre, and Expander does that phenomenally with their Dan Terminus style album covers giving way to meaty thrash instead of busy synthwave, and even then it's not the hypertechnical excess that you'd expect from sci-fi themed thrash like Vektor or Watchtower, instead beefing up their sound with a ton of crusty grime and landing somewhere closer to Power Trip or Black Breath.  Neuropunk Boostergang makes this sonic mismatch work even better than the debut, simply being both tighter and more epic in scope.  The term "metalpunk" is often used with these guys but I need to stress that it's less the Motorbastard style and instead strikes a much more literal definition of crossover that sees them throwing in big heaps of noisy hardcore, and it rules.

Nyktophobia - What Lasts Forever: It's been nearly fifteen years since the last truly great Amon Amarth album, and I think a lot of fans like me have been yearning for a return to their more driving and pummeling early sound.  Nyktophobia finally delivers the spiritual sequel to The Crusher that I've been wanting for decades.

Temperance - Viridian: On the whole, I could take or leave most of the bands from this 3rd wave of power metal that has been mixing the classic genre with arena rock hooks and danceable beats.  Y'all know how I feel about Sabaton, Battle Beast and Dynazty have been steadily getting worse and worse, et cetera.  Temperance finally made the jump to this style with this album and it was a beacon of genuinely stupid fun in a sea of albums that are offensively stupid and unfun.

Atramentus - Stygian:  There's usually one funeral doom representative on these lists, either in the main thing or in the dooblydoo down here, and here it is for 2020.  Any band Phil Tougas shows up in is going to get some positive press by default, but the difference between him and other known mega-prolific guys in metal is that most of the albums he touches are really good, and Stygian is no different.

Stalker - Black Majik Terror:  Most throwback speed metal fans this year seemed to gravitate towards Solicitor or Traveler, but man Stalker is the exact kind of brainless energy that I just lap up.  It's unabashedly corny and I love that about it.

 

 

DISAPPOINTMENTS

 

Dynazty - The Dark Delight:  Maybe this is my fault for simply wanting this album to be something that it never tried to be, but god damn do I miss when Dynazty was cranking out chest beating arena anthems on speed.  Firesign may have signaled the shift to this 3rd wave style but it still had some great songs like the title track and "Follow Me".  The Dark Delight has absolutely nothing.  I don't fault the band for simply changing their style to better suit where they are as songwriters, but it's a damn shame that we traded the band that wrote monsters like Renatus and Titanic Mass in order to get a second rate Amaranthe knockoff.  It's not the worst album of the year or anything, but it definitely has the least amount of good in it.

Enslaved - Utgard:  I never really talk about them, but I like Enslaved a good amount.  It took me a while to warm up to their new direction since I'm just not much of a prog fan, but Below the Lights and Axioma Ethica Odini are both great albums, and I don't have too many bad things to say about In Times either despite not thinking it's particularly phenomenal.  Utgard on the other hand feels like pure autopilot.  All of that creativity I like so much seems to have finally dried up, because this is just bland as hell from a band that usually does much better.

Sodom - Genesis XIX:  This one barely qualifies since I think Sodom hasn't been truly good in a decade at this point, but I had several people I trust insist that this is a worthy addition to their discography and proof that they still have some left in the tank.  Yeah sorry, I still don't hear it.  They haven't had a new idea in eons and Angelripper is really showing his age.

Seven Spires - Emerald Seas:  This wasn't even a bad album really, just much less exciting than Solveig and I'm kinda bummed that Adrienne Cowan is following the Jorn Lande path of being an incredible vocalist constantly stuck in kinda underwhelming bands.  She needs to front something with some fuckin' power behind it, please, her voice is begging for that energy.

Wytch Hazel - III: Pentecost:  Again, not even a bad album necessarily!  This is just an example of an album that had a lot of hype behind it that just didn't connect with me.  This "soft metal" niche is pretty cool and all but it just doesn't hit me like the more aggressive styles do and I was really hoping this one would change my mind.

Uhhhh - Ehhhh?:  Every year I talk about how I plan on getting rid of the disappointments section because I get disappointed less and less each year, and that's how I feel again.  I only kept it in this year because I didn't listen to enough demos to do that section again and nothing sucked nearly as much as the Aftermath and Ministry albums from the previous years so I felt no need to highlight anything as the worst.  Yes I know I gave Imperial Triumphant a 0% review this year but it wasn't necessarily a disappointment and unlike the aforementioned albums I don't think it was an artistic failure.  I get the appeal, I just hate it.  And now I'm dragging this out because I have nothing else to say and I feel like this was a very short post this year, and George Soros pays me by the word so I've gotta stretch this shit like goatse.  Screw Flanders.

And that's it for 2020!  I always end on a note of hoping you all had a great year but let's be real here, unless you're a hermit crab you probably had an awful year.  To everybody who made it, I'm proud of you and I'm glad you're here.  If you're about to be evicted around the time you read this then you would be morally correct to beat your landlord to death.  To everybody who didn't make it, I'm sorry the people in power failed you and I hope we can make the world better in your memory.  To everybody who voted for Mitch McConnell, promptly fuck yourself with a railroad spike.