RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol IV: Trivium - Ascendancy

I'm not making the boat rudder joke
 

I've recently learned about the theory that the kind of music you hate the most tends to actually be superficially similar to the kind you love the most.  Your natural assumption would be that somebody's least favorite style of music is the one the most opposite to their favorite, but ask any outlaw country fan what they think of Florida Georgia Line, or any jazz fan what they think of Kenny G's schlock.  Most pertinent to this series, ask any underground metalhead in 2005 what the worst genre was and they'd probably say metalcore.  The idea is that this is due to a sort of "musical uncanny valley", where you hate what you hate the most because it's almost something you love, but something about it is just too off, too artificial, too wrong to truly be what it is you love, and that gives us a sort of fight-or-flight reaction of visceral disgust.  I've been thinking about this a lot as I explore these metalcore bands for this series, and I think Trivium here is the poster child for metal's uncanny valley.  I know I spend a lot of time harping on how metalloids are obsessed with aesthetics and reflexively reject bands that don't look the part, and I still think that's true to an extent, but this way of thinking has really helped me to understand why this entire scene got shat on by the underground for so long, and Trivium in particular got it real bad.  They were an internet punching bag for years and I didn't even really question it.  Of course they sucked, I mean come on, have you listened to them?

 

I didn't start this series with the intention of pointing at maligned releases and just saying "Thing Good, Actually", but it was inevitable that it would happen at least once and I'm just as surprised as you are that Trivium wound up being the lucky winner.

The reason I think Trivium hit that musical uncanny valley more than any of their peers is because holy shit I never realized how 80s these songs are.  Seriously!  There are loads of things for classic metal fans to enjoy here, mostly in the absolute heaps of influence they took from Metallica and Iron Maiden.  The Crusade is obviously their "We're thrash now for real please respect us" album, but Ascendancy is the one I remember being their breakthrough and the one that started all the backlash, and I can see why people had that reaction to it.  Sure there are tons of dueling solos and harmonized melodies and bona fide thrash riffs, but there is enough that's just left-of-center enough to feel inauthentic.  Something simple is the fact that the album is played in Drop D tuning.  For the non musicians, all you really need to know is that dropped tunings simply aren't the approach that most bands take if they're aiming for the sound Trivium was aiming for here.  That's more the domain of grunge, nu metal, and, well, metalcore.  It's very easy to get huge sounding powerchords that jump around the neck with that top string down a step and it's conducive to writing big fuckin' breakdowns and really fast chug riffs (both of which this album doesn't necessarily shy away from, in fairness).  Hearing somebody take that tuning and basically rewrite "Trapped Under Ice" with it just feels different, and even if you don't know or understand all that, your brain picks up on it.  The tuning isn't the be-all-end-all wrong part, but it's one element of several that divorces Ascendancy from its roots just enough to feel like some sort of forgery.

But honestly, it's not really an impostor because the music is surprisingly legit.  That opening attack of "Rain" is absolutely devastating, "Drowned and Torn Asunder" is genuinely just thrash metal with a beefier low end, "Declaration" sounds like a squadron of machine guns, "A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation" has a main riff that sports an incredibly infectious hook and transitions into some of the most Maiden melodies that Maiden never wrote.  Everywhere I look there's something else I enjoy.  My memory told me this had very pedestrian drumming but it's actually mega energetic, and the solos are some of the best the genre ever produced.  The sound is great, the songs generally smash (though of course the more melodic ballady songs like "Departure" and "Dying in Your Arms" are incredibly boring and throw a monkey wrench in the album's momentum), hell even the common problem of bands strictly adhering to pop song structures isn't as obvious or irritating this time, even though they pump out a lot of standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus songs regardless.  There's enough variety in approach that it doesn't get nearly as tiring as it did with Killswitch.  The cliches are still here of course, the choruses are almost uniformly cleanly sung and the most intense part of any given song is the first fifteen seconds, but it feels less dogmatic and more loose here.

However there's an elephant in the room here.  I haven't brought up the vocals yet, and that's because "Beefy" Matt Heafy has the absolute worst scream in the scene.  His harsh vocals are unbearably inept, to the point where they genuinely hinder my enjoyment to a surprising degree.  His cleans are fine, unremarkable but serviceable, but his harsh vocals are leagues below anybody else I've heard so far.  They're very hoarse and scratchy, like somebody running their nails down drywall.  He sounds like he was moderately thirsty but decided to track every single song in one long take before getting a glass of water.  I like to imagine his clean voice is his only real voice, and the screams are just the result of something like that Finnish cough drop commercial where the black metal guy takes a lozenge and then starts singing like Pavarotti.  That bit at the end of the second verse of "Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr" where he goes "I'LL BURN YOUR WOLLL" sounds drier than Ben Shapiro's wife.  More than anything, Trivium needed to tell Heafy to just stick to guitar while they hired a real vocalist, because he's pretty good at guitar and unbelievably bad at vocals.  I know Trivium is still releasing new albums to this day and I hope to god he's either improved or dropped them entirely to focus on clean singing, because god damn I can not stress enough how awful they are.  Imagine starting a thrash band and then letting some kid who has never screamed before but was into Terror last summer handle the vocals, because that's not too far off from what we got here.

It's such a shame that the vocals are as bad as they are, because they're really the only element of the album that I actually think sucks.  On an instrumental level Ascendancy sits somewhere in the high 70s/low 80s range; not great but it's consistently quite good.  But those screams are so prominent and so bad that they seriously shave off like twenty fuckin' percent off the final score for me.  Running classic non-extreme metal through a filter of modern melodeath that makes it both heavier and catchier should be easy as hell to do, but the vocal choices they made here just amount to a stake through the heart.

RATING: 62%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. III: Atreyu - The Curse

I am not sober enough to think of a title
 

I'm going to preemptively dock ten points off this score because listening to it several times across the span of a few days is likely going to irreparably fuck up my Spotify recommendations.

 

Like most bands in this series, I'm mostly totally unfamiliar with Atreyu.   I know I hated them before I ever listened to them just because I knew they weren't "true metal" (and correcting that is the whole point of this series) and I remember "Right Side of the Bed" very vaguely from the soundtrack to Burnout 3, but that's all I got.  This is likely the blindest blind listen I'm going to cover, because even though I wouldn't call myself all that familiar with Killswitch, I'm almost positive I've heard "A Bid Farewell" more than a handful of times throughout my life.  Not so with this one.  So because of that, I actually did some research into the band's history before starting this one.  And in doing so I came across this hilarious quote from frontman "Howlin'" Alex Varkatzas:

"This is going to sound a little cocky but I’m a singer in a band. I don’t think we fit into any genre. I think we are hard to pin down. When we first started it was a little easier. We were a metallic hardcore band with singing parts. There wasn’t any else like that when we were doing it. People get confused and say ‘you’re a metalcore band’, but we invented metalcore. That may sound cocky but I don’t care. We pre-date Poison The Well and Killswitch Engage and all those bands. I’ve been doing this since I was literally 12 years old."

 

What kind of coconuts shit is this?  For my metal readers, this is like Dark Angel saying they invented thrash metal despite very obviously not doing so while also claiming they didn't fit into any genre despite being the musical lovechild of Kreator and Slayer.  For Sobek's sake I started this series with fuckin' Shadows Fall, who formed three years before Atreyu did and released their third album the same year Atreyu released their debut.  Yeah it's not apples to apples to compare the two bands but they unquestionably had some fan overlap and there's absolutely no way this pinhead didn't know he was spewing bullshit.  Though, in his defense, if any genre was invented by twelve year olds, it's metalcore.

Extramusical nonsense aside, does The Curse hold up, and did I do myself a disservice by ignoring it when it was culturally relevant?

Well that's a hard fuckin' no this time.

Of the entire batch of bands I checked out for this series, Atreyu is by far the worst one.  I hate to blow my wad early but here we are.  My issue with Killswitch is amplified here to the bazillionth degree.  Not only do they constantly reuse songwriting cliches and cause the tracks to bleed together into a totally unmemorable goulash of paint-by-numbers metalcore, but even the good bits of Killswitch are entirely absent.  The drummer, "Salty" Brandon Saller, handles the clean vocals with this band, and I want to give them props for that because I simply find singing drummers to be a cool thing on a personal level, but his voice is god damned annoying.  "Annoying" is a shitty descriptor, but that's really the purest distillation of what he sounds like.  He utilizes the same amateur theater inflection that Killswitch's cleans tend to use, where they sound like they're aiming for something really grand but just end up sounding unbearably corny.  He sounds like he delivers every line with his eyes closed and his bottom lip curled like a crying baby, and it comes out sounding very forcefully goofy, like the deepest falsetto in history.  Varkatzas's screams somehow come out sounding worse.  You know how grunge singers had that weird inflection that made it sound like they always had a soft "r" noise permeating every syllable?  (REEEVERN FRLOOOWWWR)  Well this guy's screams do the same thing except with a "w" sound.  They're this completely monotone mid range scream with every vowel sound replaced with some indistinct "wuh" noise and it's unintentionally hilarious.  "Right Side of the Bed" has a quick line around the 1:20 mark that says "all the memories of", and it's delivered like "BWUH BUH BUH BWUH BWAZOWF" and it's absolutely kills me every time.  That's what my dad sounds like when making fun of the music I like.  Both vocalists seem to have trouble enunciating with any clarity, which seems like an odd thing for a death metal fan to point out but when the cleanly sung line "Have you ever cried so hard?" comes out sounding like "Will you have a pretzel horn?" it becomes a really funny problem.  It's like they both have enormous tongues.  Or they're Seth Green's brother in Rat Race.

I spent so much time on the vocals because that's really all there is to offer on this album, because if the instrumental part wasn't an afterthought, it definitely feels like one.  "Right Side of the Bed" has a standout riff in the beginning, but even I immediately recognized it as damn near plagiarism of In Flames's "The Hive".  I don't even fuckin' like In Flames and I still immediately thought I recognized that riff from a better song.  This is some of the most inoffensive cookie cutter metalcore I've heard, and I've done deep dives into Christian metalcore where the music is a distinct and intentional second behind the lyrics.  Even For Today's worst albums have more effort put into the music than The Curse does.  If they're going for emotional intensity, they fail to elicit any emotion beyond total boredom.  The vocals are so front-and-center and so rarely shut the fuck up for more than a few seconds at a whack that it's pretty clear what the intended focal point of the band is.  I can't intensely hate something that isn't there, ya know?  I'll give them some credit for precisely one song buried in the back half.  "My Sanity on the Funeral Pyre" sounds like they hired a completely different backing band, because while it isn't necessarily great or anything, there is so much more effort put into this one it's genuinely shocking.  The verses ride on this punishing chug riff while the bass does a whole bunch of dwiddly doodles before they come crashing into lockstep in the pre-chorus for a genuinely good galloping melodeath riff.  It took them eleven fucking tracks to prove it but there are actual musicians in this band as opposed to it being the project of two mediocre vocalists trying and failing to punch above their weight so hard that they're getting KO'd by Glass Joe.  

I have no ending to this review.  Atreyu is bad.

RATING: 14%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. II: Killswitch Engage - The End of Heartache

The End of Fartache

 

I always namedrop Killswitch as the prototypical metalcore band by the definition that caught fire around this time in America, but in all honesty As I Lay Dying was always right there with them and I've always seen them as sister bands to each other.  I came around to AILD years ago, but KSE has no such love from me, almost entirely because I'm only familiar with with their 2013 album that nobody listened to and have a vague memory of them being one of the wimpier bands in the style when I was a teenager.  In giving The End of Heartache a full, good faith listen well over a decade after the fact, I think I lucked out with my assumption being more or less right on the money.  At least when compared to AILD, as they so often were back then, Killswitch is definitely the less threatening band by a pretty wide margin.

So when I say they're one of the earliest examples of metalcore to break through, I'm obviously not talking about the Converge style where manic hardcore got dashed against metal.  I'm talking about this very specific substyle with an identical name that spawned an inescapable scene in the early to mid aughts.  This style (and so by extension, this album) is basically just Swedish melodeath as popularized by In Flames (which I sometimes deconstruct into "Iron Maiden with growls") blended with a vaguely hardcore proclivity for big knuckle-breaking breakdowns and a more explicitly post-hardcore love of emotive lyrics about inner struggles and relationships delivered with sugary sweet vocals in the invariably cleanly sung chorus of every single song.  So what you get when you hit play here is a sequence of predictable songs that start with double bass and screaming over aggressive Slaughter of the Soul b-sides before transitioning into expressive cleans over a half-time melodic chorus.  Repeat once, do a big heavy breakdown, bring the chorus back with harsh vocals layering in the background.  Rinse and repeat twelve times for a guaranteed success.

From what I understand, The End of Heartache was a major moment for Killswitch Engage, since judging by what I've picked up in my research, this was a bit of a hard melodic turn for them.  This could well be due to the introduction of vocalist Howard "Bones" Jones.  According to people I asked who like this band, the original (and now current again) vocalist, Jesse "The Body" Leach, is a better screamer, while Jones is a better singer.  So in theory it was the correct move to pivot to a more melodic approach in order to play to his strength.  And I won't deny it, Jones has a fucking beautiful voice.  His screams are nothing to write home about but his cleans are these booming injections of tender mid-range smoothness into the music that I can't help but admire unironically.  "Smooth" really is the operative word here, because once he switches to his cleans he doesn't have an ounce of grit in him, but they work marvelously in the context of what the music is trying to do with these grand melodic choruses.

The issue is that he works with what the music is trying to do.  In practice, the actual instrumental component of this record is so uninteresting and dull that he winds up being a wonderful singer miscast in a really average metal band.  Going straight from Shadows Fall to Killswitch has shown a positively canyonesque gulf in riff writing ability.  The End of Heartache is just as formulaic as anything in the niche tended to be, but apart from the crazy intense intro of "When Darkness Falls" and an awesome straight-to-the-point riff about thirty seconds into "Wasted Sacrifice" they fail to squeak out something that's even accidentally exciting.  "Simple" is not a dirty word for me, but god damn half of this album feels like first draft riffs that sorta fit into whatever song they were working on at the time that they failed to workshop even a little bit.  This feels lazy because that's such a hard criticism to back up, but it's really the best I've got.  I imagine a scene where "Mad" Adam Dutkiewicz sits down in his bedroom with his guitar.  He's already done his warmup exercises and jammed through some classic tunes he likes, so now it's songwriting time.  He closes his eyes and says "Okay, let's just play a metal riff", so he opens his eyes and plays the very first generic melodeath-y pattern that pops into his head before proudly saying "Done!" and emailing Jones to let him know the eighth track is ready.  I know they're professionals so I'm sure they worked really hard on all of these songs but man that's the vibe I get and it's hard to elucidate further.  Listen to that first riff on "Rose of Sharyn" and tell me with a straight face that that wasn't the first god damned idea he had before laying it to tape.  Hell it even sounds remarkably similar to the first riff on "Breathe Life"!  Same tempo playing similar patterns with the only substantial difference being a few more trilling bits on the latter track.

Even though I'm 100% sure these aren't literal first drafts, that's really the approach that makes the album make the most sense to me.  Structures are reused and so many sections are similar to one another throughout the album, from the tempos to the drum beats to the interplay between the guitars in the most melodic sections, The End of Heartache sounds like three songwriting tricks being flogged to the point of tedium and that's really the overarching problem with the whole album.  I can dig simplicity and pop song structuring, not everything needs to showcase some sort of avant-garde wizardry, but this goes too far in the other direction and plays everything so safe that it's actively un-fun to listen to.  At the end of the day, I'm walking away from this experience feeling like I just listened to a royalty-free audio pack labeled "metal-1.midi" with an inexplicably good vocalist crooning over the top.  It's a weak final thought but it's a weak album and I don't have much to work with, capice?

RATING: 38%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. I: Shadows Fall - The War Within

If you've been around here for a while, you may remember my aborted Preteen Wasteland series from a few years ago, where I planned to revisit the nu metal albums I loved as a tween with the added gimmick of my mom writing a paragraph for each review since we listened to this albums together all the time.  It petered out because that gimmick was a gamble that didn't pay off, since she's a much more busy person than I am and just never found the time to revisit all of these old albums her dumbass son liked twenty years ago (if you're curious, the only albums that held up for me were Wisconsin Death Trip and Iowa, and Linkin Park, despite not being very enjoyable, at least stood out for their vocalists being one of the only good singers and the only rapper who clearly actually rapped for a living in the entire genre).  The secret part of all that is that I had a sequel series also planned, and now three years later I'm finally gonna take a break from playing Dragon Quest to get started on it.

 

I mentioned that I grew out of nu metal because as I got older, I got more interested in classic 80s metal and started to reject new, modern movements out of hand.  Because of this, the entire "NWOAHM" scene completely passed me by as it was happening.  Metal fans at school would see my Metallica shirt and try to start a conversation, and I'd snottily dismiss them based on their Killswitch Engage shirt and stupid haircut.  I'm sorry, does your shit thrash?  Then I don't fuckin' care, Kyle.  So help me god if I hear one god damned breakdown or one lyric about being sad then I'm going to screech like King Diamond at you until you leave me the hell alone.  It's no surprise that the few friends I had were also lame nerds.  

But now that I'm in my thirties and much less needlessly aggressive in every interaction, I think it's time I took a walk down memory lane, back into the halls of my high school, and take a look at the alternate timeline where I actually gave Kyle the time of day and gave his bands a shot.  The criteria here is fairly broad.  I'm going to be looking at the bands that had a foothold in the mainstream between ~2003-2006 that were netting good slots at Ozzfest, getting rotation on WZZN, and basically contributing to the musical zeitgeist of my generation that I stubbornly refused to even listen to because they probably didn't sound enough like Overkill and I desperately wanted the approval of the Elder Metalheads online.  From the initial boom of metalcore facilitated by As I Lay Dying, to the easier listening alternative emo metalcore or whatever the fuck Bullet for My Valentine was, to the nebulous blend of melodeath, thrash, and groove metal that Lamb of God made cool.  I'm not going in order of chronological release date this time, I'm just gonna sit here and think of a half dozen or so bands and albums from this era that I snobbily dismissed and go look at them with fresh senses.  You with me?  Let's go!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Light that Blands
 

Shadows Fall apparently has a pretty storied history within this niche, being one of the earlier bands to form (way back in 1995) and pulling an In Flames by having "Land" Phil Labonte (the meathead dipshit from All That Remains) sing on their first album before landing their iconic vocalist in "Flyin'" Brian Fair, and also accomplishing the rare feat of keeping a stable lineup for a solid 15 years and releasing several influential albums in a row with the same group of dudes in the studio.  That's why I'm choosing to start this series with them as opposed to bigger bands that broke out earlier.  Shadows Fall just kinda passes the smell test a bit better in terms of being a statuesque institution in the scene almost entirely due to their stability and, if fans are to be believed, consistency.  We're going to be looking at 2004's The War Within purely because a quick skim of the tracklist reveals some names that I vaguely remember hearing on the radio, so I'm not starting completely blind.

Let me tell you, I feel like a door in some deeply buried temple in my mind unlocked when I heard the main riff of "What Drives the Weak" that starts around the eleven second mark.  That fuckin' octave-slide-to-gallop-chug-to-pinch-harmonic brought back so many memories.  Hearing that was like unlocking the overworld map in Zelda.  It turns out that not only do I remember that riff, I also remember every note and lyric to not only "What Drives the Weak", but also "Inspiration on Demand" and "The Light that Blinds", the three I passively heard on the radio as a teenager.  This might seem like personal fluff to pad out the review but really I think it speaks to how finely tuned Shadows Fall's songwriting is.  These hooks never left my brain after picking them up via audial osmosis a decade and a half earlier.  The aggression inherent in most metal is definitely there in the speedy double bass and harsh vocals, but these guys have a very keen ear for melody and hooks, absolutely nailing that nexus between simplicity and complexity by crafting catchy riffs and In Flames style melodies that are different enough to be instantly recognizable and simple enough to be easily remembered.  The abundance of squealing guitar solos keeps The War Within recognizably metallic in its theatricality and the equal abundance of simplistic chugs and breakdowns interspersed between the high tempo melodeath riffing keeps it recognizably emblematic of the time in which it was made.  This is As I Lay Dying for thrash kids, and I absolutely should've loved this as a teen.

The problem arises when you listen beyond those three singles, because Shadows Fall definitely suffers from the same problem Lamb of God frequently fell victim to.  The War Within has a few obvious highlights and then a bunch of filler.  They're excellent at crafting these memorable hooks, but they're very reliant on a small handful of tricks to achieve this effect, and it doesn't take long for the simplified pop song verse-chorus structure to reveal itself to be a very workmanlike project.  Apart from the closest thing the scene probably had to a power ballad in "Inspiration on Demand" and the sweet guitar lick that opens "The Light that Blinds", the remaining eight tracks are all more or less interchangeable.  "What Drives the Weak" is clearly the best one thanks to that tasty main riff, memorable chorus, bass licks in the pre-chorus, and soaring leads, but everything else sounds like previous drafts of that song before the screws were fully tightened.  I've listened to this like four or five times in preparation for this review and I still can't remember what "Act of Contrition" or "Ghosts of Past Failures" sounds like.  "The Power of I and I" really should stand out for the first thirty seconds being honest to god Cannibal Corpse worship, but it very quickly shifts gears back into that nebulous monogenre that took America by storm in the mid aughts.  

 

It really doesn't help that Fair is uh... more "recognizable" as a vocalist than he is "good".  That's not to say he's bad necessarily, but his gruff monotone quasi-scream is basically musical wallpaper and it gets to be distracting when you pay attention to it.  It sounds like Fair knows that you can avoid damage to your vocal chords by screaming more from your diaphragm than from your throat, but he never really nailed the technique in such a way that would allow him to sound as menacing as he's likely trying to sound.  As a result they're very breathy and clearly layered over themselves a few times throughout the whole album, so they come off more like talk-level yells with a volume boost.  That legitimate death metal influence does shine through occasionally with random deep roars, but they're depressingly uncommon.  Shadows Fall is very much a guitar band, all of their best elements revolve around the riffs and solos, so it's bizarre to me that the vocals often take center stage considering how mediocre they are compared to the rest of the band.  If my memory is correct, the guitarists are the ones who handle the clean vocals that invariably carry every chorus, and they're fine I guess, but it just sorta adds to the plug-and-play nature of the songwriting.  The individual elements are occasionally fantastic, but the old dichotomy of "harsh aggressive verses - clean melodic choruses" never breaks, and it gets old very quickly.

The instrumental element of the band is surprisingly great, but the vocals are an obvious weak link and the songwriting is very formulaic.  As a result, The War Within is basically a blur of faceless aggression with a handful of spikes in quality every three tracks or so.  As much as I'd love to hear more of those death metal roots poking through, I feel like leaning into them any more than they have would fundamentally change what the band was going for, so that feels like an unfair way to critique the album, especially when all the best parts are clearly rooted in American melodeath instead of orthodox death metal anyway.  The overall color of the album is "grey".  Any splashes of vibrance to be found are pretty neatly sequestered into the handful of great songs and the rest of the album feels like a tedious sidequest before getting back to the good songs.  I'm still gonna give it a positive score because god dammit I really like the three songs I highlighted early on and the rest of the album is fundamentally very similar to them, but on the whole it loses its lustre pretty quickly.  If nothing else, I feel like this is a great primer to this scene because everything that made it what it is is here to some extent, and I feel confident in saying that everything I check out from this point on will focus on one element found here more than the rest.

RATING: 66%

10 YEAR REUNION: Vader - Litany

Furious Blasting Death

This is actually a fairly difficult album to write about.  Not because it's bland or uninteresting (far from it), but because Vader is a pretty simple and direct band on their best days and I'd argue that Litany is also their most simple and direct album.  That's a pretty weighty charge on a band that also released Black to the Blind, The Beast, and The Empire, but as of this particular moment I think I'll stand by it.  Litany is a front to back banger but boy howdy is it exactly what it says on the fuckin' tin.

Vader has basically been coasting on attitude since the beginning, because even at their best (which is top tier) they don't do a whole lot of super creative things with their template.  They start with Furious Blasting Death and then just keep doing it for varying amounts of time.  Every once in a while there are more superficially epic things thrown in like some swelling strings or choral ooohs but even then it's happening over the top of more Furious Blasting Death.  And all that is said with the caveat that none of it appears on Litany.  No, this is just Furious Blasting Death for barely a half hour and there isn't anything else I'd rather it be.  Vader is on a whole other level when it comes to packing as much fury and aggression into everything they do, and something like the title track is basically the perfect representation of this.  It's called "Litany", the lyrics are literally a litany, it cycles through the same two or three riffs for three minutes and then fucks off to let the rest of the album shine, and that's Vader in a nutshell.  They never seemed like the type of band that elbows their way to the forefront as much as they just sit back and do what they do best and people can't help but take notice.  Vader's greatest strength as a band is carrying a hefty set of testicles and then never tripping over them, instead using them as a blunt weapon to beat you into submission.

Vader was my gateway into extreme metal, and I suspect the reason they were so good for this is because they are absolute masters of the hook.  Twenty one years later I can still only think of maybe a handful of albums that toe the line between chaotic violence and fine-tuned hookiness as well as this does.  A track like "Wings" doesn't happen on its own.  The upside-down windmill-punches of the riffs and percussion complement the simple hooks in a way that had to have been achieved with black magic.  The breakdown of that particular track is quite possibly the most devastating twenty seconds ever laid to tape and somehow manages to be a rousing anthem that crowd can't help but hoarsely shout along with.  "Xeper" achieves a similar effect by dropping the guitars for a few bars in the verses, allowing the propulsive double bass to continue the momentum during catchy syncopated vocal lines.  That's a fucking pop trope, Sabaton has basically made a living off of that, and here we have Polish death metal legends pulling it off so flawlessly in a context where it absolutely has no right being effective.  I think it brilliantly showcases Vader's phenomenal handling of their instrumental talent.  These guys came up in the early days of the genre, to the point where the thrash flavorings of Kreator and Slayer are never all that far away from what they're doing, and they frequently push the tempo to absurd levels of hyperspeed, but they know when to rein it in and swap the minigun for a jackhammer.  Nobody has ever been able to truly fill Doc's shoes behind the kit, and he shows off with absolutely dizzying fills and a bass drum tone so obnoxiously boomy that my wife referred to "Wings" as "death metal techno" once.  It concusses the god damned atmosphere.  He's front and center on Litany and his percussion is absolutely the JATO unit on the back of these riffs that make the album so god damned powerful.  The laws of physics absolutely should not allow something this heavy to move this fast, it's like if Brock Lesnar was a drumstick.  You know how in Grand Theft Auto games you can achieve absolutely bonkers speed by driving a tank and constantly shooting the turret behind you? That's Litany.

Litany is not without its flaws though.  I'll frequently put this at the top of the pecking order when it comes to Vader's discography but there's really no way around the fact that the A side absolutely obliterates the B side.  "Wings", "Xeper", "Litany", and "Cold Demons" are four of Vader's all time best songs, but they're positioned as tracks 1, 3, 4, and 5.  The back half of the album is the exact kind of faceless blur that their worst albums exemplify.  I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the best songs are more mid length, and that's actually kind of bizarre considering how blistering and destructive the music is.  You'd figure lightspeed maimings would be the order of the day but they're really at their best when they're giving these tracks some time to breathe and stretch out.  There are three tracks in a row in the back half that barely break 90 seconds, and I can't help but feel like the album would've been better off if they had just been cut and the band waited an extra year to write the best songs from Revelations instead.  These songs are by no means bad but they're definitely lesser than the utter behemoths that get the album started.  They pick up enough momentum early on for those weaker songs to not really matter all that much but if you were the type to score albums via some sort of math equation then this stretch would definitely throw a wrench in things.

Thankfully, I'm not that kind of critic, and I think the weaker back end of Litany can be more or less ignored since it keeps the pace up well enough to not really hinder anything, and the rerecording of "The Final Massacre" that closes the album out is so fucking monstrous that you can easily be tricked into forgetting that "North" was even here.  This album is greater than the sum of its parts and that's mindblowing considering how great the parts are to begin with.  Blastbeats and single note tremolo riffs have never sounded so superlative.

RATING: 90%

NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: Lamb of God - Lamb of God

VIII: Bag of Mold

lol it was so fuckin' predictable that they'd announce a new album only a few months after I finished my discography retrospective.

There are two huge elephants and one burning question in the room right now, so I'm gonna just tackle all three of them right off the bat, Lawrence Taylor style. 

ELEPHANT #1: Chris Adler has been replaced by Art Cruz.  This was actually the impetus of the previous seven reviews.  It felt like the end of an era so I figured it was high time to revisit that era.  Lamb of God was notable for having a rock solid lineup for over twenty years, something basically unheard of in metal, so Chris's departure was a huge shock to people who weren't paying attention.  I say this because if you've paid attention to any interviews or behind-the-scenes material over the years you could tell he was clearly miserable and really felt constrained.  I've been prophesying a breakup ever since Sacrament.  It's been common knowledge for eons that Chris was the most talented member of the band as it was (like I've said before it's pretty rare in metal to find a drummer with an instantly recognizable style) and his frustration with the band's ever-safening songwriting was thinly veiled at best.  So last year, he finally had enough and walked away before being replaced by Cruz (who I swore was previously the drummer in All Shall Perish until this very sentence when I double checked and realized it was actually my perennial punching bag Winds of Plague).  So with all the background aside, the big question here is whether or not he holds up to Adler's dominant kit mastery.  The answer is... yeah, actually.  He was either playing way the fuck below his level in Winds of Plague or he's the Bruno Mars of metal and has a superhuman knack for replicating other peoples' signatures.  If I hadn't known beforehand that Chris had left, I never would've known he wasn't on this album.  His laser precision and ineffable groove is replicated with 100% authenticity here and I'm much more impressed than I expected to be.

ELEPHANT #2: They're on their eighth album and just now decided to roll with a self titled album.  A lot of people feel the need to point this out it seems, simply because it's odd for a band to do this at any point after their debut, but to me this was actually a fucking huge red flag.  Again reaching back to behind-the-scenes footage that I used to gobble up in high school, I distinctly remember that there was a disagreement between band members about what to name their upcoming album, and they were down to two choices: Sacrament or self titled.  I could be misremembering because this is like a fifteen year old memory at this point but I recall Chris being the most vocally against a self titled album because he felt like it was a cop out and a sign that a band had run out of ideas.  Considering the fact that I heard this exact same story for basically every following album, it's really not a surprise that they finally went and did it once he was unable to veto it.  They've been rewriting Ashes of the Wake for ages now, even when the external circumstance of Randy's stint in prison gave them the perfect inspiration to branch out, so yeah I absolutely feel Chris's apprehension that the band feels like they've run out of ideas at this point.  I know most bands who do this do it to either signal a reinvention of their sound or to declare that this is their definitive statement, but this simply isn't the band to be doing either of those things since pattern recognition tells me this next album might as well be Ashes of the Wake 4: Ash Free or Wake Hard. 

THE BURNING QUESTION: Is Lamb of God any good?  Do those two elephants stink up the joint as much as I and many fans expect them to?

...No?  I think?  I'm still kinda reeling because everything signaled yet another mediocre snorefest and then somehow they spat out their best album since Wrath.

The weird thing is that this absolutely feels like yet another rehash of Ashes, but the majority of the songs just fuckin' bang this time around.  I mentioned Cruz wound up being the perfect replacement for Adler, and honestly that makes me wonder if his mere presence reignited the rest of the guys' imagination.  It's not like this drum performance would be any different with Adler.  I've seen a lot of fans and reviews mention how Cruz is much more loose with his playing, but honestly I'm gonna make a sweeping claim and say that nearly everybody who says that is just taking Mark Morton at his word and aren't analyzing for themselves too closely.  Yeah Mark told the media that he's a refreshing change because Chris played to a click track while Art doesn't so they feel more free on stage, but this has somehow morphed into "Art is creative while Chris was a metronome", which is both flatly untrue and totally irrelevant since he replicates his predecessor's style so perfectly.  This is exactly as dialed-in and fully torqued as it always has been. 

The reason Lamb of God succeeds while the last handful of albums failed despite essentially being the exact same idea is simply because most of these tracks take have the fire and energy of "Laid to Rest" and "Desolation" instead of their usual shtick of constantly rewriting "11th Hour" at varying speeds with increasingly diminishing returns.  For the first time in a long while, they maintain whatever new ideas they have for the duration of the album instead of cramming them all into one song.  "Reality Bath" opens with the first prominent bass part in their career, "Routes" is basically pure thrash metal (something they've always flirted with for a riff or two each album but never really went whole hog with it), "Resurrection Man" is basically a misplaced Slipknot song featuring Randy's best Architects impression with the opening BLEGH, throughout the entire runtime there are more solos and overt melody than they've ever really done, there are just tons of little touches of the creativity I thought they'd been fresh out of for a decade.  Not all of these ideas hit bullseye ("Resurrection Man" is actually one of the worst tracks of the bunch) but it's nice to hear them branching out for a change.

However, their previously crippling filler problem is still here to some extent.  Lamb of God has always been a "hit single" type of band with only a couple of albums featuring any real deep cuts beyond the ones they play live constantly, and the self titled is the first to really break from that mold by having the singles be some of the weakest.  "Checkmate" is exactly what I was afraid this album would be full of.  It's a very LoG-by-numbers track that elicits exactly zero excitement in somebody like me who has been following them for almost their entire career and has grown very tired of them rehashing the same ideas over and over again.  "Gears" suffers mostly the same problem, and it's hard to really describe because its biggest problem is simply that it's the type of song they've already written like fifty times.  The breakdown riff would've been awesome if they didn't already use it in "Contractor", ya know?  The lone outlier in this regard is the opener, "Memento Mori".  I actually kinda hate the clean/spoken intro, but once the song picks up into familiar territory it plays out like any generic Lamb of God song would play out, but they... I dunno man they feel it this time.  That's basically how I can describe any track here.  They're still rewriting Ashes of the Wake over and over again but for the first time they've managed to do it in a way where it sounds lethal instead of focus tested.  "Reality Bath" is basically "The Faded Line" by way of Slipknot but it sounds like they're really putting their hearts into it.  "On the Hook" is "Beating on Death's Door" again but "Beating on Death's Door" is probably their most underappreciated track so hearing that type of high octane brutality again is a massive breath of fresh air.  I mentioned that the previous album's guest vocalists felt like pointless gimmicks, and somehow the two this time are paradoxically more transparently gimmicky but also work a hell of a lot better.  Jamey Jasta and Chuck Billy show up on "Poison Dream" and "Routes" respectively, and the former song morphs into a Hatebreed track when Jasta shows up and the latter sounds like late-career Testament.  Come on that should be cynical to so blatantly cater to these guys' original bands, but it turns out Lamb of God is surprisingly really good at ripping them off.  It takes what should be lazy and turns it into everybody simply playing to their strengths.

This is hard to write about, honestly.  This series was fun at the start because their first five albums are all actually very different from each other but this current era of the band is generally much less creative.  Basically all I can say is "read my reviews for the last album but pretend they're good."  I know how cheap and unhelpful that is, but it's true.  If Resolution maintained the momentum of "Desolation" the entire time it'd probably sound fairly similar to Lamb of God.  It's got all the fire and energy of that track with some pronounced influence from nu metal in spots and a renewed love of breakdowns that have been absent since 2006, which I'm sure is a turnoff for most of you but I maintain that the breakdowns were never the problem and if you're going to spike the nu metal influence, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Slipknot when it comes to inspiration.  The biggest flaw of the album is simply the track ordering, because putting the three most generic songs right at the start is a big fuckin' thonk.  The album picks up a ton of steam after "Gears" and it's refreshing to hear this much propulsion out of these old bones.

RATING: 73%

10 YEAR REUNION: Blood Stain Child - Epsilon

It's a thing alright

Okay so it's less than ten years old, fight me.  I'm choosing to jump way ahead and redo something outside the purview of this series less because the original review was written poorly (though I definitely did that "lol japan so wacky" thing that I've grown to despise), but because while homophobia wasn't my intent when writing it, I definitely leaned on some insensitive tropes when trying to describe how sugary and poppy this album is.  I didn't really want to do the performative self flagellation thing, but I just know some smartass is going to bring it up so I'm getting ahead of it.  Eat my balls.

Epsilon is a weird album, though I suppose that was obvious from just a passing glance.  Take a look at that Waifu Fantasy XIII aesthetic and whatever music popped into your head probably wasn't too far from the truth.  This is the dumbest shit in the world, with effort-free pop melodies and exuberant dance beats taking up the lion's share of the runtime, usually slathered liberally over the top of punchy melodeath.  The dudes from Disarmonia Mundi contribute guest vocals on a few tracks, and man that just makes so much sense since what I remember of that shitty band was basically this exact kind of not-metalcore-but-the-exact-niche-of-melodeath-that-metalcore-always-rips-off.  That describes most of the heavy elements at play within Epsilon.  The drums are louder than the guitars by a pretty huge magnitude and it's produced to be weirdly trebly, and it does create a neat effect with the electronic elements by never being beefy enough to truly clash, it does tend to cause the cymbals to sound like a neverending fog of white noise in the background.  It winds up being more of a bap than a boom, punching through the sonic center with gusto whenever the percussion picks up.  People smarter than I am tell me that the non-metal elements at play here belong to a subgenre known as "trance", but that's way out of my wheelhouse as a guy who listened to an Infected Mushroom album once before going back to my Slayer records so I'll just take their word for it.

But despite the overwhelming amount of sugar and pop sensibility on top of aggressive melodeath, the actual weirdest part about this album is the fact that it actually wound up being solidly decent.  In fact I think it's enjoyable despite the gimmicky genre clashing, because the songs that are the clearest attempt at blending the two sides of the band's coin 50/50 wind up pretty awkward.  "Eternal" is a great example, with this cute animu girl cooing sweetly over blastbeats just sounding confused and odd for the sake of it.  There are four songs here I genuinely think are great that I've gone back to listen to plenty over the years, and they're split pretty cleanly between the light and heavy sides of the band.  "Sirius IV" and "LA+" focus much more on punchy and aggressive metal, while "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" are basically pure electronic dance pop with guitars vaguely gesturing at distortion in the background.  That's not to say that they're only good when they're picking a side, "Dedicated to Violator" is a very un-metal track and it does absolutely nothing for me, but the hooks on the two aforementioned happy dance songs are phenomenal.  I've never really bothered listening to the rest of Blood Stain Child's catalog but a part of me really hopes they kinda just ditched metal altogether because "Stargazer" is far and away the best track on here and it's the one that flirts with metal the least awkwardly. 

Oddly enough there isn't much to say about this, really.  It's melodeath + trance and that's pretty much the beginning and end of it.  Some of it is surprisingly great and even the lame songs have some pretty infectious hooks, but there's no denying that the styles are pretty abrasive when it comes to actually comingling with one another.  It's a novel oddity that spits out a few surprisingly good tracks with "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" but most of it is honestly just transparent filler.  The good songs are good enough to keep me coming back throughout the years but never for much longer than a quick sightseeing tour before going back to other bands that at least blended their disparate ideas more cohesively.

RATING: 59%

10 YEAR REUNION: Gojira - From Mars to Sirius

Zakk Wylde in a tweed blazer

Gojira is one of the most random heavy bands to completely catch fire and take off in the mainstream metal press.  On one hand I kinda get it since they sound like a conglomeration of three other huge bands in that same sphere, sounding like a mix between a slow Meshuggah, prog-era Mastodon, and Devin Townsend's heavier solo works like Terria.  The problem for me is that they sound like a worse version of all three of those bands, since Meshuggah works best when they kick the tempo up, Mastodon was infinitely superior as a kinda-sludgy outfit with a fuckload of hooks, and Devin is at his best when he's leaning fully into chaotic metal or calming ambient/prog while his more blended work tends to be hit or miss.  Gojira is the perfect trifecta in that regard, created in a lab to appeal to bearded metal journalists in coffee shops while maintaining an undeniable weight to their riffs.

The problem is that these riffs suck.  At least on From Mars to Sirius (admittedly I haven't bothered listening to their more recent albums simply because this one is such a turnoff) they tend to stick to simplistic chugs and squealy harmonics and not much else.  They tend to shy away from cliche power chords I suppose but they replace them almost exclusively with dissonant clangs and drawn out ringing chords that I think are supposed to sound ethereal but ultimately just sound confused.  This hyper specific "dumb guy gets a smart job" style of riff writing winds up turning every song into a midpaced slog that feels like it never ends, which is only exacerbated by the hour long runtime.  I don't want to harp on them too hard simply for their music not being particularly complex but holy shit really pay attention to "Ocean Planet".  It's like five and a half minutes long and features a whopping three riffs, two of which are more or less purely made up of unchanging quarter note chugs.  The closest thing to a hook they have is the verse riff, which repeats so many times that my eyes seriously glazed over when I tried giving it my full attention.  That pinch harmonic gets repeated thirty fucking times throughout the song, which doesn't sound like a big deal since who cares it's only one note, but trust me when I say it's the central feature of the song, the only thing that gives it some sort of identity, and it's just one fucking squealy bend that sits in the middle of the same riff in the same place with the same lead in palm mutes every fucking time.  It is absolutely agonizing.  Also keep your ears open for that pick scrape/rake thing they do in this song.  It shows up in like six other tracks and just sounds like when you mess up in Guitar Hero.  Maybe it feels unfair to rag on a band for reusing techniques throughout an album, especially since metal as a whole is so heavily dominated by bands that never graduated beyond palm mutes and power chords, but at least those cliche bands are playing different notes with those basic techniques.  This is more akin to putting the "Master of Puppets" riff in every single song.  Not as a leitmotif, but because the song needs a thrash riff at that particular point and it happens to be the only one you know.

The rest of the album really doesn't fare much better.  Their only saving grace is the absolutely undeniable heaviness they carry.  "From the Sky" switches things up by focusing on a tremolo riff instead of a chug, and it's ultimately just as boring as the rest of the album but I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel like getting brained with a bag of hammers.  "Flying Whales" seems to be the most iconic song on the album, and honestly I think that's pretty well deserved since it's the only one that moves forward in any capacity and switches things up as it goes, deftly weaving between Leviathan era Mastodon and soaring Townsend splendor.  It's the only song that justifies its runtime and winds up being pretty good in spite of itself.  That smothering weight can't save the rest of the album though, and it winds up being a brief respite in the middle of the album that showcases the correct way to make all of these elements work.  Everything else is just neverending chugs and drums that somehow follow the guitars almost perfectly.  I don't think it's exactly fair to blame an album simply for not being something, but the fact that this is seen as an important album in modern prog metal is absolutely baffling to me because these riffs are as simple as fucking Pantera.  You can't fool me by making the actual chords jangly when the meat of what you're doing is just "5 Minutes Alone" but lamer.  The only other exception is the closer, "Global Warming", but I'm not even kidding when I say it has the exact same tapping melody playing over the top for a solid seven and a half minutes without breaking. Come on guys even when you do something different you do it for way too fucking long.

I don't even want to talk about this anymore.  From Mars to Sirius is just boring as fuck and that's about all there is to say about it.  It slogs on and on through the same handful of tricks for a torturous amount of time and genuinely gives me a headache to listen to.  I can dig simple shit, I think Amon Amarth used to be absolute titans when it came to making the most basic beginner level riffs sound like the coolest shit in the world, but Gojira absolutely misses the mark.


RATING: 30%

Ulcerate - Stare Into Death and Be Still

Double Doink!

My relationship with Ulcerate is somewhat similar to the relationship Charlie Brown has with Lucy's football.  Every few years, they release another album to widespread acclaim, so I take the snap and then whiff the kick as they pull my football-shaped enjoyment away at the last second.  I want to like Ulcerate.  They're one of the most important metal bands in recent memory, their discography is very consistent, they've influenced a multiplicity of young death metal bands, they're chaotic and unrelenting, on paper they are just everything I want in a metal band nowadays.  And for whatever reason they've just never vibed with me.

Stare into Death and Be Still is different while being exactly the same.  This time I actually made contact with the ball and even managed to avoid a ridiculous Scott Norwood shank.  It's not pretty, and I hit the post, but dammit I put three points on the board!

What makes this different from other seminal works of theirs that I never managed to care about like Everything is Fire or Shrines of Paralysis is pretty difficult to pinpoint, because this really isn't all that different.  It's still an unrelenting deluge of cataclysmic percussion and dissonant guitars that don't really riff as much as they whir and clang.  Maybe the guitar tone is a bit beefier and less scratchy?  Maybe the songs themselves are simply more well constructed?  Their approach to songwriting is just as non-euclidian as ever but the flow feels a bit more natural to me this time around.  Ulcerate always had a strange Uncanny Valley feel to them, where their songs always yawned and swayed like organic creations but felt lifeless and stiff at the same time, like saltwater frying a fish's nerves and causing it to flop and spasm long after it dies.  Stare into Death and Be Still simply managed to catch a live one, I think.  Like always, this is much more about overarching atmosphere than riffs or hooks, and as a result the whole experience tends to feel like one long song instead of a collection of them.

And if you'll allow me to mix my sports metaphors, I think the reason this isn't quite a home run despite some solid contact is exactly this.  There are tons of twists and surprises within the riffs themselves, but rarely within the wider context of a song or the album.  58 solid minutes of this suffocating atmosphere is just that, suffocating.  That absolutely works at times but around the second act of this behemoth it goes from exhilarating to tedious.  It's like the coaster I built in Rollercoaster Tycoon when I was 9 that had like fifty inversions and took twelve minutes to finish.  Sure there are subtle variations in tempo and approach on Stare into Death and Be Still, but ultimately you're just doing the same loop-de-loops over and over again on the same track for an uncomfortably long time.  Each successive Ulcerate album has been a few minutes longer than the one preceding it, and that trend continues here, and I really think it's to the album's detriment.  Despite all eight tracks basically feeling like the same long song, it's still quite noticeable that only two of them run for less than seven minutes.  This wouldn't be a problem if it felt like the songs were actually leading somewhere, but after repeated listens the only time I can truly pick out a song with a climax is "Drawn into the Next Void".  The rest of it sounds like sonic flash rust, standing still and deteriorating before my eyes despite the immaculate craftsmanship put into the initial product.  Every Ulcerate album tends to spin its wheels to some degree, and admittedly Stare into Death and Be Still manages to get a good amount of traction and actually move forward, but a lesser degree of the same problem is still the same problem.

When Everything is Fire dropped in 2009, I recall the buzz around it at the time being something akin to "It's Deathspell Omega but death metal", and I see where that statement is coming from.  But the key difference to me is that for as anarchic and chaotic as DsO can be, they always have a point to make and more often than not they do it very well.  Some of this boils down to my own personal preference, since I notably tend to prefer my death metal to be a bit more pugilistic than textural, but the fact that I like Portal well enough tells me that Ulcerate simply struggles to reach their destination at times.  I would definitely say I have a positive impression of Stare into Death and Be Still overall, but the problems that have always plagued the band haven't really been ironed out here.  They made it work more than usual, but at the end of the day I can't help but think this heavily atmospheric style of dissonance simply fits more naturally in a black metal context and a shorter package, and that's why Serpent Column absolutely wrecks my shit while Ulcerate merely manages a brisk foot tapping.

RATING: 56%

THE TOP 50 ALBUMS OF THE 10s: Part V

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends.  We finally made it to the top ten, which will likely hold zero surprises if you've been following this blog over the last decade and will surely be the most BH of all the segments here.  As always, after the #1 slot is covered, there will be a short list of honorable mentions for all the great stuff that I had to cut (and showcase the bands that missed it due to double-dipping discographies) plus a sample packet so you can listen to anything that may have piqued your interest.  I usually just do youtube links for these but I'll be doing a Spotify playlist as well this year since joining the modern age is good sometimes and I'm sure these bands appreciate the .00000003 cents this traffic will earn them.  Anyway, let's get to the point!

AND NOW FOR THE HOME STRETCH

10: 1914 - The Blind Leading the Blind (2018)
I almost feel bad ranking this one, even though it obviously fucking smokes, purely because the reasons I love it so much are so similar to Black Kirin a few spots ago.  1914 is phenomenal when it comes to faithfully recreating the hopeless futility of war.  As the band name should telegraph, 1914 focuses specifically on The Great War, WWI.  This guttural, visceral, nihilistic representation of the conflict that plunged basically all of Europe into bloody chaos is otherworldly.  The atmosphere never deviates from the desperate panic and despondent helplessness that encapsulated the conflict, and the way it ebbs and flows between chaotic battle and pleading for mercy and forgiveness is heartbreaking.  The Blind Leading the Blind is a monster of black metal rage deftly weaving between blasts of aggression and downtrodden dirges.  I know I keep repeating words like "panic", "despair", "futility", and "hopelessness" but they really do sum up the album as succinctly as possible.  This is bleak and depressing, and most of all furious that it all happened in the first place.  I think what pushes this over Black Kirin, despite their similarities, is that this beautifully marries the overarching emotional atmosphere with the nitty gritty details.  You know how in The Sum of All Fears there's an infamous moment where Tom Clancy devotes an entire chapter to painstakingly describing every tiny thing that happens inside a nuclear bomb in the brief window between the detonator being activated and the actual explosion?  Nearly every song on The Blind Leading the Blind is lyrically similar to that.  It's all about the details, numbers, and specs of what's going on.  What that chapter in The Sum of All Fears is to military tech nerds, The Blind Leading the Blind is to whatever specific type of nerd I am.

9: Tengger Cavalry - Ancient Call (2014)
This album pisses me off nowadays simply because it's the only one on this list that essentially doesn't exist anymore.  Before his tragic passing, Nature Ganganbaigal had a terrible habit of constantly redoing old music, sometimes re-recording the same track seemingly dozens of times on dozens of releases, constantly tweaking his creations until they fit whatever whims he was feeling at any given time, and as a result almost the entire run of music he created while living in China has been more or less whitewashed out of existence unless you can find an original copy or get lucky during a pirate run.  So I'll still include a few tracks here on the Spotify playlist, but it's with the caveat that they're going to sound a little different than the album I'm actually ranking here.  The redone version is fine, but the original release of Ancient Call is what I'd consider to be the last truly great folk metal album (outside of the pagan/viking black/folk niche that never dies of course).  Tengger's brand of melodic death metal with oodles of galloping riffs, resplendent Mongolian folk instrumentation (the melodies of those horsey fiddles are still one of the greatest sounds mankind ever created), and his absolutely visceral harsh vocals combined with his shamanistic throat singing were absolutely out of this world and as a result there was a good five year stretch where they could be argued to be one of the best metal bands in the world.  The re-recording you'll hear here redoes the production to be a little more muddied and confusing and replaces those caustic screams with more normal death growls (at least during the tracks/versions where they weren't excised completely in order to replace every single vocal moment with deep throat singing), so please, take my word for it (or seek out an old version) when I say that the original incarnation of Ancient Call was already magnificently unique and in hindsight really should've been my Album of the Year for 2014.  This sound was already totally unheard of at the time outside of battle music in the Dynasty Warriors games, and even then that little cultural primer was far more Chinese than Mongolian like it is here.  This is the perfect ode to those nomadic cavalrymen from the steppes, and it breaks my heart to know that Nature felt the need to constantly fix what wasn't broken.  UPDATE: A wonderful anonymous commenter pointed out to me that the original mix does indeed still exist on youtube.  Listen to the good version (the one I'm basing this ranking on) here.

8: Maximum the Hormone - Yoshu Fukushu (2013)
I foresee this being the entry that grants the heaviest eyerolls.  The band name alone should turn off most people since they seem like such a joke, and most casual listeners who recognize the name probably recognize them as the band that played the nu metal tracks during the credits of Death Note.  Despite that, I actually discovered them the third way most of the English speaking world was, which was via the music video for "A L I E N" going viral on reddit a few years ago.  Most of the rubbernecking was from Americans doing their usual "lol japan so wacky" thing, but I found myself enraptured by how mercilessly heavy most of that song was.  I totally get why this band doesn't resonate with most of the people in the scenes I usually hang around.  They're goofy, with one of the few English words that comes through clearly during the album being "vagina", the drummer's vocals sound exactly like what most Americans imagine when they think "anime girl", they lean into punk and nu-metal influences, one of the four members' only job is scream-rapping, they're just a really bizarre confetti explosion that can be hard to take seriously.  But if you take the tiny leap of faith required to accept the band on their own terms, they quickly reveal themselves to be secret geniuses who basically picked up exactly where System of a Down left off.  Yoshu Fukushu is an album that's just... I dunno man fuckin' pure.  There's no pretense of intellectualism, no mysticism, I'd even argue that the Japanese Weirdness that amuses so many gaijin isn't even a crutch or mask of any sort.  This is just a very honest expression of juvenile rage and scat humor put to a soundtrack that melds the catchiness of punk with the aggression of metal.  Honestly, learning that the album was written by guitarist Ryo with the intent of mostly expressing how he felt when he was 13 years old made the whole thing make so much more sense, because half of the album is about depression and having no place to belong while the other half is about Dragonball Z and masturbating.  It's all the same reasons Descendents are so much fun.  The immediacy of the frantic, off kilter riffage is only a thin gossamer over a wealth of cultural in-jokes and surprisingly intricate wordplay.  Tracks like "F", "Mesubuta no Ketsu ni Binta (Kick Mo)", and "A L I E N" can completely pummel you into the ground while "Koi no Sperm" plasters a big stupid smile on your face.  This is the exact blend of punk infectiousness and melody with sheer furious aggression that appeals specifically to me and I don't think a universe exists where I don't fall hopelessly in love with Maximum the Hormone.

7: Gotsu Totsu Kotsu - The Final Stand (2018)
Speaking of bands created specifically to appeal to me, regular readers of mine simply had to know that GTK was coming up eventually.  As good as Legend of Shadow was, it ultimately wound up ranking in the low 50s and missed the final cut.  I loved how warm and organic that album was, feeling like a death metal jam session that got recorded.  But after that album, when two of the three members were replaced with instrumentalists just as insane as the bassist, they reached an echelon of intensity I didn't think possible.  I don't want to go into too much detail for reasons that should be obvious, but the short version of why GTK kicks so much ass is that they sound like four bands playing at the same time and never take their foot off the gas.  The addition of slap bass sounds like a dumb gimmick but I dare you to listen to the last minute or so of "Nadegiri" and say it sounds like anything other than the most natural thing a band this fucking bonkers could've done at that point in the song.  The Final Stand is probably the most relentless of GTK's catalog (pretty sure I likened it to getting slapped with a bundle of stop signs in my review for this album and that's still apt) and there isn't one single moment I could ever fathom changing.

6: Enforcer - From Beyond (2015)
I wasn't kidding when I said Enforcer damn near ruled this decade with an iron fist.  During this time, their prime, they didn't offer anything truly new, but god dammit they never needed to.  From Beyond is pure molten speed metal straight from the heart.  One of the most important distinctions when talking about these throwback acts is the difference between "sounding like an old sound" and "sounding like a lost relic from a different era", but Enforcer bucked that dichotomy by being one of the only bands in the genre that sounded like the latter while still being distinctly a product of their time.  From Beyond is the kind of album that could only happen by transporting your brain back to 1985 and returning to the modern day with the expressed intent of taking only the elements of that old sound that worked and amping them up to 11 while discarding the unnecessary elements.  There is no fat here, this is lean and tough and ready to rumble without one wasted second.  You can't even accuse this of lacking variety since "Below the Slumber" does a great job of expressing numerous peaks and valleys, while "Hungry They Will Come" is entirely instrumental.  Enforcer just hit bullseye with every idea they threw at the board.  It's basically required that I discuss their always latent glam influence since Zenith made it impossible to ignore, but I think From Beyond is actually the furthest they ever distanced themselves from it, and it's great despite that, not because of it.  I mentioned in the Death by Fire entry that they had reached a point of nearly inventing thrash a second time, and this is that point.  It's still distinctly rough-and-tumble speed metal that gorgeously toes the line between the European and North American camps, but the aggression and attitude is off the charts on this one.  The fact that they became the Minnesota Vikings of this blog and never took home the Album of the Year is purely because they always happened to release something in a really strong year where at least one more band would best them.  Don't let that take away from their supremacy during the first half of the decade.

5: Avantasia - Ghostlights (2016)
Tobias Sammet's neverending metal opera is the exact thing I should hate wholeheartedly, and for years I did.  The placement of Ghostlights here obviously means that I think it's a phenomenal album, but upon having my bias shattered by how much I loved it I actually went and binged the rest of the project's catalog and discovered that the rest of it actually does suck as much as I remembered.  Ghostlights stands as some weird, brilliant fluke where all of the stupid elements of Avantasia coalesce into something astounding.  So much of this is clearly inspired by Meat Loaf and that usually ends up terrible, but somehow overwrought schlock like "Mystery of a Blood Red Rose" hits bullseye.  This is the only album in the top ten here that actually has weak spots, particularly the awful ballad "Isle of Evermore" and the sluggish and overlong "Seduction of Decay", but everything else is so good that they wind up not even really mattering.  Every vocalist shines, Jorn Lande and Marco Heitala especially.  Hell even my personal punching bag Michael Kiske turns in a good performance.  The more traditionally power metal tracks easily stand out as the best of the best here.  I don't know if you can find a single person that doesn't place "Unchain the Light", "Babylon Vampyres", or especially "Master of the Pendulum" as the strongest tracks on display.  Despite Tobi's insistence on crafting these sprawling rock operas, I think it clearly shows that his strength is still in the high octane power metal he used to pump out in Edguy's prime.  That may have been Ghostlights's secret weapon, simply having more "normal" power metal songs than the rest of Avantasia's discography.  You don't have to sit through ten awful tracks just to hear "Devil in the Belfry" this time, and there are like six or seven iterations of it this time around.  I'm not sure I can ever adequately explain why Ghostlights is such a knockout when it's constructed so similarly to the rest of the shitty Avantasia albums I still hate, but somehow all of these dumb, pompous, overblown ideas congeal into something magical this one time.

4: Crypt Sermon - The Ruins of Fading Light (2019)
I'm obviously not all that big into doom metal, since you have probably noticed that only Khemmis and Tyranny wound up ranking here in the low 40s, and neither of them are really traditional doom, but Crypt Sermon nailed it in a way that cut straight to my heart.  It really boils down to wishing less bands ripped off Sabbath and more ripped off Candlemass, and Crypt Sermon does that close enough for me to take notice.  Luckily they stand on their own, and holy shit do they do it with aplomb.  I saw a surprising amount of lukewarm enthusiasm for this when it first dropped, mostly from people preferring the debut (which was also great), but this is such an obvious improvement in every way I can't even fathom that line of thinking.  Brooks's voice takes on a more trebly timbre this time around, sounding pradoxically confident and desperate.  His more hoarse screams sound like a man at the end of the blade who just discovered all of his beliefs are lies  The rough production fits so well with the tumbling percussion and oooo choirs, and the bass presence is absolutely devastating.  They rarely rise above a brisk gallop (though "The Ninth Templar" opens the album with one hell of a bang and is far and away the fastest song), usually opting to just knuckle down and pummel you with a sledgehammer.  I'd be lying if I said the best song was anything other than "Christ is Dead", which distills every single thing I love about this band (and genre as a whole) into six concise minutes that seem to fly by in under two.  All of the emotion, the grandeur, the pounding riffage, the searing leads, everything is thrown into this one and given the most passionate performance these guys could possibly muster.  The Ruins of Fading Light nails what I mentioned earlier, sounding like a lost relic from a classic age instead of simply imitating one, and as a result they're pretty easily my favorite band on Dark Descent's roster at this moment, possibly because they're one of the few bands that breaks from the label's usual formula of chaotic black/death and instead aims for sweeping epic doom and nails it with focus and intensity.

3: Gotsu Totsu Kotsu - Retributive Justice (2015)
And here's the obvious reason I didn't want to spend too much time on The Final Battle a few spots ago, because I knew GTK would be reappearing just a few slots later.  I can't understate their indomitable supremacy of death metal during this decade.  I even mentioned Legend of Shadow just barely missed the cut as well, and even then there's a part of me that feels like I underrated it a tad simply to keep all four of their releases from this decade crowding the list.  They are just that fucking good.  As mentioned, they are a band that was invented specifically to appeal to me, because I don't think too many death freaks are clamoring for colorful hypermaximalist death metal with raucous slap bass.  This particular album was such a revelation for me because even though my mind was thoroughly blown with their 2013 classic, I noted that one of their big appeals to me was how basic the drummer and guitarist were in comparison to the absolutely fucking wild bass and vocals, completely inverting the usual dynamic of death metal.  So when both members were replaced, I was worried that the band would lose some of that character.  "Insane Battlefield" opens the album and starts a 58 minute long streak of virtuosity that left me a pile of ash in my seat.  It turns out that adding a drummer who can actually play super fast and a guitarist who can effortlessly solo with his feet made them even better.  Even the nearly hour-long length isn't a deterrent despite the band never slowing down or entertaining too many different ideas.  This is an anarchic whizbang avalanche of tumbling lunacy that punches you in the face from the word go and proceeds to take your lunch money and fuck your mom in front of you.  There is so much muscle-bound superiority to be found here, with frantic tempos and swirling leads, often letting the rhythm section take total control and lead the songs through a completely chaotic path.  Regional sounds aren't really a thing like they were in previous decades since the internet came along and gave everybody a global reach, but I feel like there's still an intangible character specific to Japan, and GTK exemplifies it in a way unlike the more melodic styles the island is known for.  Japan simply does not do restraint.  Everything is as fast, loud, and over the top as possible, and Retributive Justice personifies this during the ten billion somersaults it does during its runtime.

2: Visigoth - Conqueror's Oath (2018)
I know The Revenant King is commonly seen as the superior album, but Conqueror's Oath has rapidly entered the halls of "super popular and self-evidently great albums I find myself needing to defend for some reason".  I obviously fucking love the debut, but the followup here irons out every tiny little issue I might've had with it and adds sequins and spiked gauntlets on top of it.  This is everything I ever wanted in a throwback metal album.  It's a massive, veiny, throbbing rod of riffs and choruses straight out of 1982.  Even with an order as tall as topping the mountain that was the debut, Conqueror's Oath blew it away like it was fuckin' Krakatoa.  Everything that was great about the debut is greater here, and it's done with the added benefit of a veritable cornucopia of new ideas.  Visigoth didn't rest on their laurels here, only reusing the template that carried the previous album on a handful of songs and filling out the rest of the tracklist with epic odes and furious barnburners.  The sheer speed of "Outlive Them All", the massive chorus of "Warrior Queen", the pounding march of "Steel and Silver", the entirety of "Traitor's Gate", I'm getting chills without even listening to the album as I write this.  If nothing else, they deserve a trophy for making motherfucking Utah sound like the most exciting place on earth with "Salt City".   It simply boils down to the distinction between the two albums for me being that Conqueror's Oath is a much more exciting album.  It's exactly as muscular as The Revenant King, but with more tempo shifts, improved bellowing baritone vocals, stronger hooks, and more ideas all crammed into an even more focused and succinct passage.  I don't think it's exactly helpful to pontificate on what makes a "perfect" metal album, but considering the fact that I've only given like five throughout my reviewing career (three of which are 12 years old from the time when I scored albums differently and likely wouldn't score the perfect three digit 100% nowadays if I bothered to rewrite them) it's something I don't take lately.  Conqueror's Oath is a 100% album.  Not one single second is wasted, from the starting gun this tramples over listeners like a bloodlusted cavalryman.  The fact that this is something I'd consider a perfect album yet still sits at #2 should tell you how much I adore the last entry here.  So let's not waste any more time.

AND THE WINNER IS...

1: Sigh - In Somniphobia (2012)

Mirai seems to have absolutely lost his mind in recent years, but before the unceremonious ousting of long-time guitarist Shinichi, there was one triumphant swansong in 2012 known as In Somniphobia.  Part of the reason I love this so much is that I should logically hate it thanks to the heaps of jazz influence (notably one of the few genres of music I just can't fucking stand) and the 40 minute suite made up almost entirely of trippy noises.  I can't fully describe why this was preemptively penciled into this slot eight years ago without descending into extreme pretension, but it's really the only way to make sense of it for me.  "Somniphobia" is the fear of sleep, and all sixty four minutes of this masterpiece feel like exactly this, a crippling anxiety that takes over the minute you lay down.  It's an extended nightmare that tumbles through so many different sounds, themes, and ideas, all of which are haunting and horrifying.  In Somniphobia is art, full stop.  What this album is to me, is being on your deathbed, mere minutes left in your existence, everything you'd done in your life is about to be rendered moot and nobody is there to share in your sorrow in your last moments.  What you experience in your last conscious moments awake are a series of twisted hallucinatory fever dreams and nightmares from your past, all flooding back to remind you that no person is perfect, and no matter what good you've accomplished in your life, you've caused and equal amount of harm and suffering and heartbreak.  In your last moments, you aren't who you used to be, you are instead broken down into fragments of what used to be a whole consciousness, now splintered and scattered across landscapes adorned with horrible, shameful memories and twisted, deplorable monsters.  In Somniphobia is a journey through those last moments to me, as evidenced by the occasional punctuation of what sounds like a flatlining heart monitor, and the closing lines of "I'm sorry, but I must go now...".  Was this Sigh's intent?  Most likely not, but that's why it's so gorgeous.  I'm not having my hand held through a linear narrative, Sigh doesn't paint picture for me to marvel at.  Instead they give me a gigantic canvas and all the materials they have and say "Now paint me a picture".  The sheer imagination is given vicariously to the listener, and is then allowed to project whatever twisted nightmares one can imagine on to your own psyche.  This is an album that you, the listener, write as you listen to it.  By experiencing and embarking on this journey, you have become the creator of your own nightmare, and In Somniphobia merely supplied you the tools.  The pacing, atmosphere, and sheer breadth of weird twisted ideas that all hit bullseye cemented this as a modern classic and time has done nothing to soften it.  Despite the sheer length of this entry, I didn't even talk about "The Transfiguration Fear", but take my word for it when I say it's the greatest metal song written since 1984.  This album is untouchable, and long before I even began truly working on this list, a part of me knew this would take home the BH Award for Album of the Decade.


And that's it!  Holy shit, thank you all so much for undertaking this journey through the recent past with me.  The scariest part of this, for me, is the mere knowledge that I know I missed a ton of great albums that deserved placement.  This was such a jam packed and busy decade, with the proliferation of global internet distribution like Bandcamp opening the floodgates to so much new music for me that I could never keep up with everything.  So please, let me know what unforgivable snubs I'm responsible for!  I genuinely want to know what amazing things I've forgotten.

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HONORABLE MENTIONS

Of course, the honorable mentions.  As usual there were some repeats, though I did manage to avoid a situation like my 90s list where the same six bands dominated 30% of the list.  As such there were much less than usual, with only Hour of Penance, Gargoyle, Gotsu Totsu Kotsu, The Black Dahlia Murder, and Visigoth landing on the list twice.  My usual shtick for honorable mentions is to list the albums that would've made it had I instituted a "one album per band" rule, but that'd only give us five this time around, which is much less than usual.  So instead, here's an arbitrary number of them in no particular order.

Foxy Shazam - Foxy Shazam (2010): I mostly just want to make it clear that if I had expanded the list to include obviously non-metal stuff instead of cutting myself off at the borderline, this very likely would've been #1.  Foxy was/is without a doubt one of the greatest modern bands and their self titled is flawless from start to finish.  Very few bands bother trying to sound like Queen and even less of them are any good, but Foxy just shits all over everybody from a monumental height.

Craven Idol - The Shackles of Mammon (2017): I've mentioned before that Dark Descent's roster is fucking incredible when you look for bands that don't sound like their usual niche, and Craven Idol is an amazing example.  This is black/thrash to the fucking bone and rips faces like they were old mail.

Dynazty - Titanic Mass (2016): Before these guys turned into Amaranthe for Dudes, they were one of the strongest and hookiest trad/power bands on the planet.  As disappointing as Firesign was, Titanic Mass was basically everything I wanted from a modern take on throwback arena metal.

Malokarpatan - Nordkarpatenland (2017): I still don't really know what this is exactly, it's some sort of black-metal-by-way-of-trad-metal thing and I feel like there's probably a huge scene of bands who kick ass in the exact same way, but I never really bothered exploring further despite falling instantly in love with this modern classic.

Kostnateni - Hruza zvitezi (2019): This sat in the #50 slot for a very long time before the final reordering finally nudged it off.  Don't let that sound like a condemnation, because this chaotic black metal release is basically everything I want as a DSO fan and this was by far the most painful release to snub in the end.

Striker - City of Gold (2014): I mentioned that Enforcer ruled their niche with an iron fist despite a few incredible contemporaries.  Striker is the most obvious of those contemporaries and this is their best album despite me ranking Eyes in the Night as AOTY in 2010.

Wombripper - From the Depths of Flesh (2018): This is one of the nastiest albums ever fucking recorded and that's all I have to say about that.

Smoulder - Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring (2019): I'm always kind of wavering on whether or not the vocals are weak enough to prevent this from being a truly great album, and right now I don't think they are.  Despite having an obvious weak link in the band's sound, this was one of the more painful snubs in the end.

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SAMPLE PACKET

This is usually where the mass of youtube links to two songs each goes, but frankly I don't want to grab a hundred fucking youtube links.  So instead, y'all're gonna get the Spotify playlist, which includes everything except Gargoyle and Satan's Hallow, which aren't on the service.  So you'll get those six links, the rest of it is in here.  It's the exact same as usual (two songs per album, with the exception of False because the album is only three fifteen minute tracks, so you only get one there), but hopefully much less cumbersome.  If for some reason you can't access the playlist or simply hate Spotify and want to shit in its mouth, let me know and I'll put in the labor to grab all of these songs separately.

And the three albums not on the service:

Gargoyle - Niji Yuugou: "Niji Yuugou", "Shi Ni Itaru Kizu"

Gargoyle - Geshiki: "Mankai Oratio", "Gordion Knot"

Satan's Hallow - Satan's Hallow: "Reaching for the Night", "Beyond the Bells"

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A DUMBASS BAR GRAPH

And lastly, let's have a look at how each year did by my count.  The green bar represents the raw number of albums chosen per year, while the purple bar represents a weighted score for how well that year did (I assigned a point value 1-5, with one point for appearing in Part I and so on).

Well that was far less interesting than I would've hoped.  The only real disparity between the two bars is 2019 landing with four albums but a higher weighted value than 2012 and 2014, the only two years with the same or more albums chosen.  Otherwise the two scores correlate almost exactly.  I guess this is useful for proving a recency bias but that's about it.  I'm including it anyway because I spent the ten minutes tallying and entering the data and I value my fucking time.

And that's it!  Once again thank you so much for sticking through this endeavor and seeing it through to the end with me.  The last decade was absolutely fucking loaded with belters, and I see no sign of our preferred scene dying any time soon.