Hello children! Once again, it's time for another LADDER MATCH! The feature where I take two completely unrelated bands and stack their discographies up against each other and mathematically decide who is better, usually to the chagrin of both myself and people who know what they're talking about more than I do.
The rules are simple: I rank the albums of the two bands against each other and assign points
down the line. So for example, if there are 15 albums for each band,
the best record of the bunch will get 30 points, the next will get 29,
after that will get 28, and so on down to 1. The winner will obviously
be determined by whoever has more points, so in this arbitrary system
it's better to have a more consistent career on the whole. Say Band A
has the five best albums and also the bottom ten, they'll end with 195
points, while the band that sweeps spots six thru twenty will end with
270. And also, since I like to make shit contradictory and complicated,
if the bands do not have an equal number of records, the band with more
albums will have their
middlemost album excluded from ranking, because if I do a list with Morbid Angel, you bet your ass I'll want
Illud Divinum Insanus to count for the same reason I'd want
Abigail
to count if I was doing King Diamond. You don't get to sweep your
mistakes under the rug here on Ladder Match. This is how I balance
consistency with spikes in quality, deal with it, chumps.
Our matchup today (in patented "two minutes in Microsoft Paint" fashion) is:
Ooooh this will be a fun one for me. A modern titan that proudly carries the flag woven by earlier institutions of death metal versus an individualist classic that released some of my all time favorites 10-20 years ago and fell off sharply afterwards in my eyes. I'm genuinely excited to do this one, since I honestly don't tally the points up before I write this up so I have no idea which will come out on top, though I'm sure I'll wind up disappointing myself somehow regardless of who comes out on top. Since Slough Feg has the album advantage by one, I'm going to exclude my middlemost favorite, which happens to be their 2010 rocker,
The Animal Spirits. It took a really long time for that album to grow on me, initially sounding like another watered down half-riff filled snoozer like most of the two worst albums in their career, but over time the layers really peeled back and I can't think of a whole lot of bad things to say about it nowadays. It's a fun, primal, earthy, hard rocking good time with great hooks and tons of Thin Lizzy-isms. Anyway, enough dilly dally, let's get down to it!
16: Slough Feg - Digital Resistance
Slough Feg's (currently) newest album really was an easy choice for me to take the bottom spot, as it's one of the only albums from either band that I flat out dislike. It's a bummer, because I
want to like
Digital Resistance. It's a very unique and interesting album, but Mike Scalzi, for all of his ineffable wisdom, really has just tanked as a songwriter in recent years. There are tons of experimental and forward thinking songs that aren't afraid to break as many rules as they can think of, toying with many wacky ideas (like the spaghetti western overtones of "Habeas Corpsus", the massively funky main riff of "The Price is Nice", or the 70s prog rock carnival doinkiness of "Analogue Avenger - Bertrand Russel's Sex Dungeon"), but none of them really sound fully fleshed out. It sounds like these songs wrote themselves, which isn't a complement. Scalzi used to put so much love and effort into his craft in the glory years of the 90s and 00s, but ever since 2009 I swear he's just been lazily chucking ideas around in the practice space and recording every half-baked jam he has and released a collection of them every couple of years. So all these neat ideas sound like unfinished jams that don't really go anywhere or have anything exciting happen within them. So as a result, the only tracks that stand out in such a way that I want to listen to them again are the solid title track, the excellent "Laser Enforcer", and I guess like half of "Magic Hooligan"? And wouldn't you know it? The one thing all of those songs have in common is that they sound like they could've fit nicely on one of their better albums. I've warmed up to the album a bit since my scathing review from a few years ago just for the sheer experimental boldness, but it still stands as their weakest album by a country mile.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 0 - SLOUGH FEG 1
15: Slough Feg - Ape Uprising!
Man, jumping from "The Luddite" from the previous album to "Simian Manifesto" while writing this is like night and day. I fucking
hated this album when it came out. Slough Feg painfully ended a nearly fifteen year long streak of excellence with this one, and I couldn't help but resent every second of the album as a result. In hindsight, it's not awful, though seriously flawed regardless. There are some excellent moments to be found, like most of the much-longer-than-it-feels title track, the pure Diosabbath "Shakedown at the 6", and the entirety of the frankly incredible "Simian Manifesto", but it's still plagued with mostly unmemorable tracks like "White Cousin" and "Overborn". The real knock against this album though is easily the opener, "The Hunchback of Notre Doom". Despite having one of the greatest song titles ever conceived, it stands as the absolute worst thing Slough Feg has ever penned, without a doubt. The idea of the band trying their hand at oppressive doom sounds super awesome, but the execution is so excruciating and bafflingly terrible that it really hangs over the rest of the album. You see, they nailed the tempo of doom and pretty much nothing else. It's like Scalzi, one of the most uniquely talented riff writers in metal at the time, somehow completely forgot that good doom bands couple the downtrodden tempo with excellent riffs, and instead just rang out lazy sustained chords at 80bpm for five minutes and called it a day. I will never understand how this passed the smell test for the band, it's so confoundingly effortless and lame that I would have never guessed it was a Slough Feg song if the vocals weren't so easily recognizable. I seriously put it in the same category as that awful half hour long Manowar track that sounds like the scene from Spinal Tap where Nigel plays a guitar with a violin in the category of "Opening tracks so awful that the rest of the album is rendered shittier because I can't stop thinking about how bad the first track was", it's
that bad. I probably shouldn't let it bug me as much as it does but it's really,
really shitty and frankly inexcusable for a band of this caliber.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 0 - SLOUGH FEG 3
14: The Black Dahlia Murder - Miasma
Now, I can't say in good conscience that this is a
bad album, because there's nothing really wrong with it from a performance or songwriting standpoint. It's fine, but that's all it is. TBDM is a great band with a lot of great albums, but
Miasma has always gotten sort of lost in the white noise for me. At this point, their identity was still just "At the Gates but really fast and in the new millennium" with nothing else going for them, and it shows. Even the debut from two years prior had a lot more going for it, and that mostly consisted of redone songs from the demo era. It's just not a very inspired album for them, which was thankfully rectified in the future when they started adding some outside elements and pushing themselves further and further with their craft. But here? It's... eh, just there. Even after all these years of being a fan and gushing with each new release since 2007, I've still only managed to listen to
Miasma in full a handful of times. I maintain that Trevor Strnad is one of the most underrated lyricists in metal and is the true successor to Chris Barnes' accomplishments with Cannibal Corpse, and that's in effect here as well, but there's nothing as shocking and depraved as "The Window" or "Climactic Degradation" here, and this is the only time the band tried to put their famous goofiness on record with song titles like "Statutory Ape" and "Dave Goes to Hollywood". It doesn't work, this band is at their best when they're playing it straight. I guess the best way to sum up how I'm just so lukewarm about this album is to say that if Metal Blade approached me and asked me to compile a greatest hits album for the band, the only song from
Miasma that would even be considered would be "A Vulgar Picture", and even then it would unquestionably be the first song cut after I inevitably choose fifty others and need to trim it down.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 3 - SLOUGH FEG 3
13: The Black Dahlia Murder - Unhallowed
The Black Dahlia Murder's debut album is a good album, and it has a phenomenal song in "Funeral Thirst". The only problem with it is that "Funeral Thirst" is basically the only song on here. "Elder Misanthropy" starts with nearly the same riff, as does "When the Last Grave has Emptied", as does "Apex", as does "The Blackest Incarnation", as does "Closed Casket Requiem", as does
do you get it yet? As mentioned in the previous entry, about half of this album consists of songs from their oft-forgotten demo era, and it shows. At this point, the band was definitely young and hungry, but they really hadn't gotten the whole songwriting thing mastered yet.
Unhallowed is essentially
Slaughter of the Soul for Dummies, which can be totally awesome, because
Slaughter of the Soul is awesome and so is
Unhallowed, but the latter is obviously weaker. I'll admit that "Thy Horror Cosmic" is pretty excellent as well, as is "Contagion" (the only other
Unhallowed track they played (other than the obvious "Funeral Thirst") when I saw them recently), but overall it's a pretty samey and forgettable album when looked at critically. It's also worth mentioning that Trevor's vocals at this point in time were notably different than where they'd eventually end up. Those screechy highs the band became known for were more scratchy and rugged at this point, and frankly they're just weird sounding. They're very dry and cracked sounding and they're honestly pretty distracting. It's not a huge knock against the album or anything, because his lows are probably at their best early on so it sort of balances out, but it's notable regardless.
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12: The Black Dahlia Murder - Abysmal
Much like
Miasma, there really isn't much wrong with
Abysmal, it's just not as particularly memorable as their better albums. Where the debut's biggest flaw was the lack of distinguishing riffs and melodies,
Abysmal suffers the same fate as their sophomore album in that it's just a plateau of solid songs with few that actually stand out. All but the final track are within the three minute range (with two being a few seconds over or under) and that's usually indicative of a band being on songwriting autopilot, and I feel like that's applicable here as well. Don't get me wrong, there are a few absolute scorchers here, "Receipt" kicks things off with a bang, "Threat Level no. 3" is insane, and "Vlad, Son of Dragon" easily stands as the highlight with its high octane aggression and occasional gang vocals, but those are really the only tracks I ever go back to, and even then it's a rarity. This is going to be a short entry because there just simply isn't a whole lot to say about it, it comes and goes and it's fine but it never stuck with me. It ranks above
Miasma because even though it suffers the same issue, it's a noticeably higher plateau. Black Dahlia really kicked shit into overdrive after their first two and even the least great of their current streak is still pretty damn reckless.
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11: Slough Feg - Atavism
This was Scalzi's first true stumbling block, the first time the band didn't improve upon a previous release. I've mentioned before that Mike mentioned that he was constantly trying to one up himself in the band's Lord Weird days, and once he felt like he finally reached his pinnacle and proved he could be counted among the best, he sorta settled down and started reigning in the ambition in favor of some more simple, good time rocking fun. This was a mistake in my eyes, because those lofty heights of the earlier days were often reached specifically because he was reaching so high and deftly navigating the waters he deliberately put himself in despite being way over his head.
Atavism is the first release that feels somewhat "safe". It's got a couple great moments (an excellent main riff on "Starport Blues", a nice conclusion to the "High Season" series he'd been toying with since the band's inception, "I Will Kill You/You Will Die" is a fantastic blast of energy, "Atavism II" is one of their most underappreciated tracks, he showcases his excellent sense of theming by reusing a few motifs throughout the runtime, etc.) but on the whole it feels underdeveloped and unambitious. There are a lot of really short songs that just kinda show up without consequence. Overall though it's still a great album, because this was Slough Feg from 99-07 so of course it was, but it's definitely the weakest of their streak of excellence.
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10: Slough Feg - The Lord Weird Slough Feg
Knowing my taste, it's probably not much of a surprise that I see every single "Lord Weird" album to be better than their era with the truncated name (barring
The Animal Spirits of course, which I've already briefly touched on). The version of this self titled bizarro-masterpiece that I've always been familiar with has been the 2002 re-release on Metal Supremacy and The Miskatonic Foundation, so I've always known this as basically two short full lengths smashed together, since that release has like seven bonus tracks from the demo era tacked on to the end, so that's the version I'm counting. This is an odd little album, supremely sloppy and unpolished. I love this about early Slough Feg though, there is so much inimitable charm on these drunken rehearsal tapes that I'm pretty sure were accidentally released as official full lengths. The problem I mentioned with
Atavism is actually present here on the surface (a lot of the songs are really short and zip by quickly), but it works to this album's benefit rather than its detriment. Yes, they're short and simple, but they're honed to perfection, with riffs crafted with laser precision and performed by a band of inebriated cavemen. The self titled is brimming with pure energy, with enough pomp and vigor to last them several more albums even if they never wrote another good riff (though thankfully, they did). "Highway Corsair" and "High Season III" are two of the best songs they'd ever write, showcasing immediately how to make this whacked out style work marvelously. It's just really god damned cool, and that's all there really is to say about it.
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9: The Black Dahlia Murder - Deflorate
This one was a grower for me. I initially had a knee jerk revulsion towards it thanks to the unbelievably stupid cover art, and on first listen it just kinda breezed past me like
Abysmal up there. Then after another listen I thought "I Will Return" was pretty good. Then on the next it was "Well, 'Black Valor' and 'Necropolis' are pretty rad too", then it was "Jesus okay 'That Which Erodes the Most Tender of Things' kicks ass too, and holy shit 'I Will Return' is actually the best song they ever wrote", then it was "Death Panorama is so fucking good too", then eventually I had to just throw my hands up and admit that the entire album rocks.
Deflorate is probably their most to-the-point album at this point in time, and unlike the previous 2015 album up there, it's loaded with fantastic riffs and memorable songs that help it stand out above the pack. There isn't one wasted minute here, it just puts the pedal to the metal from the word "go" and never lets up until that iconic closing track.
Deflorate in general seems to be fairly neglected in the live sphere nowadays, but "I Will Return" has found itself cemented as their go-to closing track. It's their "Hallowed Be Thy Name", their "Mirror Mirror", it's endured nearly a decade as the guaranteed closer and there really aren't any signs of that changing. It's by a long shot the most epic song they've ever recorded, with these huge sweeping riffs that just feel larger than life. The whole album is good, no doubt about it, but I'd be lying if I said "I Will Return" alone didn't knock it up a few spots.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 20 - SLOUGH FEG 16
8: Slough Feg - Twilight of the Idols
Man, I'll probably never truly fall out of love with Slough Feg's "Lord Weird" era.
Twilight of the Idols takes the sloppy, unrefined salvos of the self titled debut and... well basically just does the same thing again. You'd think they'd start refining their sound and tightening things up, but that really didn't happen until later. Slough Feg reveled in this sort of drunken swagger that permeated nearly every song on this album. "Sloppy" is really the word that makes the most sense here, because the vision and scope of the songs themselves clearly
did open up (the most obvious example is "The Great Ice Wars"), but listen to how care free and spazzed out the riffs on songs like "The Pangs of Ulster", "Bi-Polar Disorder", and "Warpspasm" are. Scalzi was young and pissed off at this point in time, and he just lashed out in the only way that weird fucker could muster. The album is just all over the place, even lyrically flopping between Celtic myth, science fiction, and particularly on "Life in the Dark Age", Scalzi's personal frustration with the state of the music industry. It's hard to even describe this much further than "drunken", because seriously. Imagine your dad was into Thin Lizzy and Rainbow in the 70s and got together with his friends from the local hole-in-the-wall pub where he goes to ignore you and decided to just pound brews and jam out in the garage.
Twilight of the Idols has a very antiquated, time capsule feel to it like a bunch of hoary old men trying to remember how "Jailbreak" goes in between shifts of working on the old 67' Camaro. The sci-fi elements feel more seedy, like out of a 1960s Harry Harrison/Harlan Ellison story, as opposed to any slick sheen. The album is grody and sticky and old, but that's kind of exactly why it's such a fun throwback. If nothing else, check out "Brave Connor Mac" for perfectly exemplifying this bar band aura I'm talking about. Also give their title song, "Slough Feg" a listen, if only because it's so electric that you could set a slice of bread next to the speaker and have toast in fifteen seconds.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 20 - SLOUGH FEG 25
7: The Black Dahlia Murder - Ritual
I'm going to be totally honest, it's been years since I've given
Ritual a listen. When I was first formulating this list, I put this one where it was based on the memory of it being consistently very good while also being "The Experimental One". Upon relistening for this project, I realize that's not entirely true. There
are touches of outside influence here and there, there are orchestral sections, acoustic intros, drum and bass breaks, and even a misplaced Misery Index song with "Den of the Picquerist", but for the most part this is just more of what we already know they're great at, just tighter and more laser focused than before. I've gone this far without really touching on their numerous lineup changes (mostly because it's kind of pointless since Brian Eschbach has written every song since the beginning of the band to my knowledge so really each album is gonna go according to his whims), but I think part of why this album stands out so much is because of Ryan Knight's influence. It doesn't take an untrained ear to hear that
Ritual widens the scope of the band's ambition in a way (in fact it's the most notable thing about the album apparently), and I can't help but think that the wild new ideas and heightened technicality has a lot to do with poaching somebody who could keep up with James Malone in Arsis. You can definitely hear it on tracks like "Conspiring with the Damned" and "A Grave Robber's Work". Those two wouldn't've been out of place on
A Celebration of Guilt or
A Diamond for Disease. I know he actually joined one album earlier but his influence is felt much stronger here. In some ways,
Ritual is something of a best of both worlds, because their more "generic" throwbacks to the first three albums are fucking incredible ("Moonlight Equilibrium" is one of their best songs, period) while the new ideas that surface in "Blood in the Ink" are also total home runs. Even the lyrical depravity has reached an all time high with "The Window", which is a reference to the period of time a child's head would remain alive after decapitation in which Gilles de Rais would use to try to ejaculate into its mouth. Wholesome!
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 30 - SLOUGH FEG 25
6: The Black Dahlia Murder - Nightbringers
For those keeping score at home, you'll probably realize that this album is barely a year old and yet there are only two other Black Dahlia albums ranked above it. I stand by that assessment, and I originally formulated this matchup and sorted out the ranking over a year ago (Ladder Matches take fucking forever to write (more importantly I'm lazy and slow)).
Nightbringers is an absolutely stunning entry into their discography, despite a surface glance implying that it would suffer from the same issues as
Abysmal since all of the song lengths are pretty much identical. It doesn't matter this time, there are a lot of ideas in here and they're all executed as well as pretty much anything else they've ever put out. What makes this one stand out is simply how fucking ferocious it is. I'd argue that this is their most intense and aggressive album amongst their oeuvre, and that's no small feat. Everything here is presented as the most cartoonish version of Black Dahlia that could possibly exist. The tempo is higher, the hooks are hookier, the riffs are riffer, the melodies are melodier, everything is cranked up to 22 and shreds face from the opening seconds to the almost merciful end. I mentioned in the last entry that they had welcomed Arsis's Ryan Knight into their ranks prior to this, and here we learned that they've turned the act of poaching Arsis guitarists into an artform by replacing him with Brandon Ellis. He may not have caused as much of a shift in Brian's writing as Ryan did, but his guitar skills are absolutely out of this world so it really doesn't matter at all. His fresh blood lends some youthful vigor to songs that could've easily turned out ho-hum without the shot in the arm that the new youngblood provides. Pretty much every single song is a knockout, but special mention has to go to the entire B-side, starting with the stellar "Kings of the Nightworld" until the climactic end of "The Lonely Deceased". That's not to say that "Widowmaker" and "Matriarch" are no good or anything, but the heightened thrashiness and pure fucking venom that the home stretch provides is incredible. There's pretty much nothing I don't like about this album. It's their shortest, fastest, and meanest album and I wouldn't have it any other way.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 41 - SLOUGH FEG 25
5: The Black Dahlia Murder - Everblack
This is often considered to be their best album, and honestly I won't fight against that too hard.
Everblack is probably their most immediately distinctive album, facetiously known to my friends and I as "The Black Metal One". Of course, that's not true, this is still furious melodic death metal to the bone, but that frostbitten meloblack influence is certainly shoved to the forefront in parts. It's sort of paradoxical at times, because while this album sacrifices some of their signature melodies and technicality, it makes up for it with heaps more brutality and atmosphere.
Everblack is by far their darkest album, emanating an aura of sheer demonic malice. "Goat of Departure" is bone crunching in its heaviness and "Phantom Limb Masturbation" sees the band at arguably their most brutal. And because Black Dahlia are kings of all spades, they also deliver one of their catchiest songs yet ("Raped in Hatred by Vines of Thorn"), a stunning blend of hooks and black metal wretchedness ("Every Rope a Noose"), another opening barburner on par with "Black Valor" and "Everything Went Black" ("In Hell Is Where She Waits for Me"),
and the closest thing to a successor to the monumental "I Will Return" with their best epic closer outside of it ("Map of Scars"). Every single song excels at something different and the variety within
Everblack is so distinct that it almost defies comprehension for a band that so frequently catches the criticism of writing the same song over and over again. Sometimes that's certainly true (like on
Unhallowed and
Abysmal), but oftentimes it's not, and this is a prime example of such a phenomenon. Black Dahlia cast a wide net here and managed to ensnare every passing songwriting trick and dominate it with almost effortless alacrity.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 53 - SLOUGH FEG 25
4: Slough Feg - Down Among the Deadmen
Black Dahlia may have just caught their second vaunted three-in-a-row, but the reason for that is because the best Slough Feg albums are nearly unmatched and very deservedly belong at the top of any list like this.
Down Among the Deadmen is an album that I tend to forget about at times, at least where quality is concerned. I know that roughly a decade ago it was one of my most favorite albums ever, but nowadays I almost never reach for it when on a Slough Feg kick. Blame it on 18 year old BH burning it out so hard. But when formulating this list, just like when I did my Top 50 of the Decade a few years ago, I once again found myself revisiting it and finding myself astounded at how brilliant it is at every turn. It is everything I loved about
Twilight of the Idols but cleaner and tighter. The drunken swagger is still here, but now they sound like true professionals instead of sloppy amateurs getting by on charisma and raw talent alone. A majority of this album sits in a comfortable mid-paced gallop, done in a way that feels both tight and professional
and loose and easygoing, and it's one hell of a romp as a result. There are a few high tempo cookers here, but the speed usually comes in bursts, like "Marauder", "Traders and Gunboats", "Death Machine", and quite possibly their most well known song (thanks, Brutal Legend), "Warrior's Dawn". That last one is truly one of the greatest songs they ever penned, as it encapsulates every aspect of their sound that makes them so entertaining. From the driving gallops to the pumping staccato mid paced pounds to the epic atmosphere to the finger-dissolving solo battle, everything about it is incredible. I could pick out something great in every song if left unchecked.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 53 - SLOUGH FEG 38
3: Slough Feg - Traveller
I've written a lot about this album over the years, to the point where I stalled this feature for months just because I couldn't bring myself to talk about it again. The weird part is that I'm not fatigued because it's a frustrating album to talk about or anything, it's obviously one of the best albums Slough Feg ever released, the climax and swansong of their "Lord Weird" era, arguably their heaviest album ever, and overall just one of the most enjoyable concept albums in all of metal.
Traveller is a very overwhelming album despite how spacious and adventurous it is, it just throws
so much at you and since all of it works it just leaves you drained at the end, laying on the bed, legs weak, blankly staring at the ceiling as you try to make sense of the complete and utter domination of your various orifices just happened. I like to contrast this to Blind Guardian's
Nightfall in Middle-Earth, and I know that's weird so let me explain.
Nightfall contains like six of Blind Guardian's best songs, but it's a total chore to listen to since it pretty much acts as the blueprint for how exactly NOT to pace a concept album.
Traveller instead showcases the exact opposite way to present a full narrative in the context of a metal album, and as a result it's fucking perfect. The story of Space Errol Flynn's manipulation and disfiguration at the hands Werewolf Dr. Wily is an incredible romp through high speed Brocas Helmisms and signature Slough Feg exuberance. It reminds me of
The Crimson Idol in the sense of how perfectly paced it is and how listening to the album in one sitting isn't necessarily integral to your enjoyment. You can pick pretty much any song to listen to in a vacuum and it'll still floor you, though listening in one sitting will reveal all of the repeating motifs that tie the whole experience together.. From the somber reflection of "Baltech's Lament", the terror of "Vargr Moon", the blood-pumping excitement of "Asteroid Belts", the climactic showdowns of "Vargr Theme" and "The Final Gambit", everything just reaches the apex of enthrallment. The Celtic mythology that carried
Twilight of the Idols and
Down Among the Deadmen is entirely excised here, instead expanding on the sci-fi elements that both albums carried beneath the surface, and it shows how well Scalzi's flagrant disregard for rules works in so many different theaters. I still think that after all these years, the nearly 30 years I've spent listening to heavy metal, the 12 or so of which I spent enraptured with Slough Feg, that "Vargr Theme" is still probably one of my top ten favorite metal songs ever written. I mentioned in the entry for
Atavism that Scalzi said he was always trying to one-up himself and prove that he was as good as anybody else in the scene, and once he felt he reached that apex, he pulled back a bit and started having more fun with his music.
Traveller is the apex he was referring to.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 53 - SLOUGH FEG 52
2: The Black Dahlia Murder - Nocturnal
Every time I bring this album up I wind up liking it more and more, to the point where it's now #2 overall on this Ladder Match and ranking as the top TBDM album. I can't help it,
Nocturnal has been steadily growing on me for over a decade now, constantly burrowing deeper and deeper into my consciousness, eroding away whatever sense of optimism I still retain and replacing it with bleak nihilism and extravagant tales of gory murder.
Nocturnal stands above the rest not for any sort of outside-the-box creativity or far reaching whackjob ideas like
Everblack, but instead it just sticks to one thing and executes it so incredibly well and at such an astoundingly high plateau that I just can't fucking kill it. I've said before that Black Dahlia's main influence has always just been At the Gates with extra melody and twice the speed, and this album showcases that the best. This was their zenith, the perfect nexus between their primitive beginnings and ambitious exploration of their later works. Everything solidified here, everything they were going for on the debut finally crystalized into something truly special in 2007. One of the problems of doing features like this is that I just flat out run out of ways to describe what's going on by the time I'm on the eighth album of a band, and by the very nature of the countdown format I'm going to sell the best album short simply by not having anything new to say about it simply because it's the best example of a style the band has been excelling at for seven albums previous. The two "hit singles" this album spawned ("Everything Went Black" and "What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse") are two of the best songs the band ever wrote, and even the deeper cuts like "Climactic Degradation", "Deathmask Divine", and "I Worship Only What You Bleed" are exactly as good. It's just ten tracks of endless dark savagery and I don't even know what else I can say about it. This is when their songwriting peaked, and the scary part is that it never really diminished all that much afterwards.
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1: Slough Feg - Hardworlder
I lied a little bit like ten entries ago when I said that every single album from the band's "Lord Weird" era (from the formation of the band up until 2005) was better than what came afterwards, because their 2007 opus,
Hardworlder decimates the rest of their albums pretty handily, which is terrifying because I'd rank
Down Among the Deadmen and
Traveller in the 95th percentile of all metal albums ever written. Scalzi may have chilled out and stopped pushing himself so hard by this point in history, but he
still managed to put out one of the most exciting and satisfying albums of all time. Slough Feg is a very strange band, to the point where I can ever really think to compare them to two bands, those being Brocas Helm and Thin Lizzy. This album leans much heavier on the influence from the latter, which less barnburning metal monsters and more laid back bluesy flourishes. This is a very groovy and funky yet riff-driven and propulsive album, likely best exemplified in the three track mini-suite of "Hardworlder", "The Spoils", and "Frankfurt-Hann Airport Blues". Each track showcases a different songwriting talent, with the conclusion being a very hard hitting metal track with smathering of Lizzy-esque groove, while "The Spoils" is a very bluesy and emotional cry to the heavens. "Poisoned Treasures" is an exciting high octane metal song while "The Sea Wolf" is very sober folky acoustic track. I could do that for the whole album really, just list how one song is a fun metal song and another song is a down-to-earth murder ballad, but the important thing to note is that each and every track on display takes me to another world. What I really want you to do is listen to "Tiger! Tiger!", which is another one of my favorite songs of all time. It's actually not the sublime riffs or the instantly memorable chorus that makes this so iconic to me, it's the dueling solos that make up the second half of the song. It's just... so
beautiful. That whole segment is pure art, pure emotion, pure, unadulterated
scenery. It's the musical manifestation of a starry sky, masking the empty void of deep space with gorgeous lights in every direction, each note a new sign of life, another affirmation of soul. I can't get enough of this section, this track, this album, this band. It might seem strange considering my love of their more aggressive, molten metal, but
Hardworlder is easily the softest and least threatening Slough Feg album, but it's also the most musical, most enrapturing, and without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite album of theirs, and one of my favorite albums ever.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 68 - SLOUGH FEG 66
AND SO! With another tight score of 68-66, we have the winners of the second Ladder Match. And they are...
The Black Dahlia Murder! I love Slough Feg to pieces, I really do. This feature was a good excuse for me to run through their discography a few (dozen) times and just remind myself why I fell so in love with them 10+ years ago, but at the end of the day their astounding peaks just weren't enough to topple Black Dahlia's stunning consistency. The quirky, folky Maiden/Lizzy mastery just couldn't match up to endless death metal savagery in the long run. I maintain that Black Dahlia gets too much crap from older folks, because if there's anybody who is waving the flag of death metal with as much fervor as the classics in the 90s nowadays, it's them. I had a hunch that they would ultimately take this match, but the matchup was still close enough for me to not really know who was going to win until the last few entries made it easier to calculate on the fly. Congrats to The Black Dahlia Murder for their completely meaningless victory!
So now that's over. Maybe the next one will take me far less time to actually get around to doing. Who should it be? You decide! If you want! It doesn't matter! Your favorite band will lose anyway!
HUGE UPDATE!!!
It's been brought to my attention that I'm a gigantic fucking idiot, because I
did the math wrong. Turns out, I shorted Slough Feg two points on
Hardworlder because I don't know how to count. So the final score is actually A TIE! 68-68. Well
now what the fuck do I do? I guess I have to have a tiebreaker, and the reason that's going to be difficult is because the two bands have an uneven amount of albums. Slough Feg has a full one more full length than Black Dahlia, and I don't want to wait until later this year when they surely release another album (since they haven't missed an odd-numbered year since 2003 I'm sure the pattern will hold). So what will I do? Well, I guess the only thing I can do is pit the Slough Feg album I omitted (
The Animal Spirits) up against Black Dahlia's early demos that got them noticed and signed before releasing
Unhallowed, since they haven't even released so much as a canon EP since their LP run started apart from one that contains naught but a whopping three covers. So what I'm going to do is bundle
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse with
A Cold Blooded Epitaph and treat them as one release. Lesser album gets a half point. Greater album gets a full point. Understood? Okay LET'S TRY AGAIN!
The Black Dahlia Murder Tiebreaker: What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse / A Cold Blooded Epitaph
I've only sort of mentioned this in this article, but I've been saying for years that TBDM always got a bad rap from genre purists. For
years after they broke onto the scene, they've been pegged as "metalcore" and dismissed. One listen to any of their albums would immediately dispel that notion, but aesthetically they were just all wrong. Everybody in the band had short hair, some of them had gauged earlobes and thick rimmed glasses, their name was a sentence fragment, their merch was always brightly colored and busy, they just set themselves up for immediate dismissal by long haired and bearded hobos who refuse to listen to anything newer than Dismember despite playing the exact kind of music that would appeal to fans of old school death metal and melodeath back when it was actually death metal with melody instead of "Iron Maiden with growls" like In Flames. Honestly though, I began to quickly suspect that all of those aesthetic missteps were mere holdovers from their demo era, because once I finally got my hands on
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse, it all
started making sense. Yeah, that first demo is metalcore to the bone, cut from exactly the same cloth that As I Lay Dying was championing at the time. Even the song titles just scream early 2000s ("To You, Contortionist", "This Ain't No Fuckin' Love Song", "All My Best Friends are Bullets", etc) this was just a very different Black Dahlia at this time. Most songs carried a big breakdown and one of them even features (godawful) clean vocals, staples in metalcore that they always avoided once 2003 rolled along. They rose to prominence by playing "metalcore without the -core parts", which, to the uninitiated,
is called metal. But on this first demo? Nope, they were as metalcore as they come. Granted, they were still better than most of their contemporaries, with cliche riddled songs like "The Middle Comes Down" absolutely smoking 90% of metalcore that had come before and after, and "The Hive" was pure At the Gates worship that would've fit on any of their full lengths.
A Cold Blooded Epitaph is a bit different, being more in line with what they'd later become. This much should've been obvious when you realize the first two songs ("Closed Casket Requiem" and "The Blackest Incarnation") appear on
Unhallowed completely unchanged, the third track, "Burning the Hive", being a rerecording of "The Hive" (the least metalcore song on display) from the previous demo, and a cover of "Paint it Black". So really everything I said about
Unhallowed applies here. The one real takeaway here is that I wish "Burning the Hive" would've showed up on one of their albums, because that's a great song.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 68.5 - SLOUGH FEG 68
Slough Feg Tiebreaker - The Animal Spirits
I left this one out specifically because it was my middlemost favorite album from Slough Feg, and considering that even their kinda lesser ones like the self titled are fucking great, that should tell you which of these two tiebreakers I'm going to favor. This is probably their purest mixture of rollicking hard rock and full steam heavy metal. The Thin Lizzy-isms are at an all time high and there's a huge dose of Manilla Road's more down to earth stuff here as well. That's a good description of this album actually, it's very "earthy", in every possible way that could imply. It's a force of nature, from pounding rockslides to rolling meadows,
The Animal Spirits is very organic and just plain fuckin' fun to listen to. I feel like this is what they were going for on
Ape Uprising! but just missed the mark on. I'd continue to talk about this but I'm already exhausted with this feature and need to take another break from both of these bands before I completely overdose and start to resent them. Take my word for it,
The Animal Spirits is great and easily the better album when compared against TBDM's demos. Maybe it's unfair, but once this matchup wound up in a tie there was really no way to do this fairly. Blame me for sucking at math, or blame Slough Feg for simply being better when it came down to the wire.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER 68.5 - SLOUGH FEG 69
SO NOW with the score
actually correct, I'm forced to take the crown away and award it to our new champions!
Slough Feg! So whoda thunkit? Turns out having the highest peaks actually
did matter more than Black Dahlia's consistency. Oh well, at least I'm done with this one now. Big thanks to the anonymous poster who pointed out that I'm a fucking dolt who can't count. I feel like such a moron. Doesn't matter, all fixed, Slough Feg wins!
