10 YEAR REUNION: Arsis - We Are the Nightmare

GET THE TABLES

Arsis frustrates the fuck out of me.  On one hand they released one of the hands down greatest albums in both tech death and melodeath simultaneously.  A Celebration of Guilt bridged the gap between The Black Dahlia Murder and Necrophagist, and along the way it managed to craft some of the most enduring tracks in the genre.  "The Face of My Innocence" alone justifies the band's existence all the way to the present day.  They could've released that song as a single before replicating every Six Feet Under album in full and I'd still give them a shot whenever a new album came out.  On the other hand, that's really the only time they managed to nail it.  A Diamond for Disease is a great EP but it's basically the same idea as the debut, and it feels like it's coasting on that album's momentum.  United in Regret was the point when the band began to stumble, with muddy production and a few bad ideas clogging up an otherwise good album.  And in 2008 we met We Are the Nightmare, which signaled the moment they lost their balance completely and started tumbling down a mountainside. 

The main problems with this album are both totally out of left field and completely logical.  The previous album saw the beautiful cohesion of the band, despite their frantic technical ability, start to come apart at the seams.  They held on for about half of the album, but there were more than a handful of moments where every instrument broke away from the meat of the song and orbited the emotional core while constantly colliding with each other.  We Are the Nightmare is an album full to the brim with these moments.  "Shattering the Spell" is a great example of this phenomenon, because nearly every second of that track sounds like four different guys trying to play four different solos at the same time, and instead of being chaotic in the good way, it's chaotic in the same way a room filled with four years olds on a collective sugar rush is.  Comparing this particular song to Brain Drill is barely an exaggeration.  I love flashy performances and I try to shy away from claiming that a band is doing a genre incorrectly, because it's presumptuous and stupid to assume that the band wants in their hearts to be Entombed but has so far failed to do so, but generally bands understand that you don't treat the drums like a lead instrument for the same reason you don't build a NASCAR with rear-axle steering.  I should've seen this coming at the time because the band was definitely trending in the direction of total tech-metal overload, but it's still shocking because the precise reason Arsis was so good in the first place was specifically because they never did that.

The drumming is a huge problem here, and I think a lot of the blame can be laid at Darren Cesca's feet for this.  Arsis has always been the brainchild of James Malone, but Mike Van Dyne was the secret genius behind the figurehead, and his spastic yet subdued drumming was a big reason why the songs where as catchy and memorable as they were during his tenure.  I don't think it's a coincidence that as soon as the dude from Pillory took over, that backbone was snapped like Johnny Knox and suddenly the band's trademark infectiousness flew straight the fuck out the window.  It's also worth noting that this was a weird era in metal criticism when nobody seemed to understand what drum triggers were and assumed it just meant the drums were programmed, and honestly I can't blame them for not knowing the distinction on this album since the performance is so robotically nonsensical and the triggers they used were so fucking unnatural sounding.  Let's be real, death metal drums are rarely truly dynamic but here they are just constantly rattling around in the foreground louder than everything else by a sizable magnitude.  Cesca treats his performance like a forty minute drum fill and it winds up being super distracting and aggravating. 

We Are the Nightmare sports precisely three catchy choruses, which sounds like an odd complaint for a tech death album, but imagine a world where Dying Fetus pumps out an album with only three brain-squeezing slam-mosh riffs.  This is what Arsis does, it's very much their thing.  It's the entire reason that brilliant debut stuck with me as much as it did.  Nobody else can craft songs where the riffs and solos are being played at the same time by the same guy and still have catchy sing-song choruses that are impossible to resist rasping along with.  Tracks like "The Cold Resistance" and "The Sadistic Motives Behind Bereavement Letters" have vocal lines lifted straight out of a fucking Green Day record while still ripping faces off with molten fury.  That simply doesn't happen here apart from the title track, "Servants to the Night", and "Failure's Conquest".  The rest of the album is emblematic of everything the anti-tech death crowd claimed tech death was at the time.

It can be easy to forget since 2008 was twelve years ago now, but at the time tech death was really bundled with deathcore as the Bubba Ray and D-Von heel tag team of metal's Moral Panic Du Jour.  Tech death in particular was seen by a lot of genre purists as a total bastardization of what made death metal so good in the first place because it completely erased the base riffing style of the parent genre and replaced everything with endless "wanking".  Arsis, for a time, transcended that criticism because they were so cohesive and well put together, but We Are the Nightmare signaled them giving up on that and just joining the Deeds of Fleshes of the world by focusing on hyperfast technicality for the entire runtime.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because that era of tech death is great on its own merits and it's silly to compare it to Atheist or whatever for the same reason it's dumb to compare Hatebreed to Bad Brains, but it was a notable shift away from something unique and towards something trendy.  Moments like the chorus of "Servants to the Night" are shining beacons of classic Arsis in a sea of nonsensical instrumental masturbation.  It isn't bad because it's different, it's bad because it's really plain, which is something you could never accuse Arsis of being regardless of whether you liked them or not.

I'm contractually obligated to comment on the lyrics since I've made such a big stink about the hopeless Nice Guyisms that peppered Malone's lyrics on their previous work, but I honestly don't know how true it is this time.  I'm thoroughly Brain Poisoned at this point so I can definitely make a case for how We Are the Nightmare continues the band's legacy of being the biggest Musical Madonna/Whore Complex in metal, but if that's true then it's at least more draped in metaphor than before.  There are at least a couple of references to "three words" that either bind people or drive them to madness, which seems obvious enough since "three words" reference "I love you" in every instance of fiction ever written.  Constant references to "silence" and people gladly watching somebody ruin their life can easily be interpreted as the narrator being bitter about his crush moving on with somebody else while everybody seems happy about it and only he notices the guy is a jerk, but I dunno.  The endless callbacks to "shame" and "denial" and "sins" that happen "at night" are, if nothing else, a hell of a lot better than his whining about "your indifference" and a "wound" he desperately wants to "be inside", but if he's still on his friendzone bullshit I'll at least give him an A for effort in trying to obfuscate it this time.  He only really drops the ball on "Progressive Entrapment" which is about as subtle as a kick in the taint but hey, he's trying.

I feel like it's no longer a hot take to call We Are the Nightmare the low point in Arsis's career.  The muscianship is absolutely dazzling but at the end of the day, this one has the least amount of truly memorable songs, which is something at which the band was always stellar.  The title track and "Servants to the Night" are great songs and I'll still go to bat for them, but they're the only worthwhile tracks among eight other chaotic blasts of meaningless spazzery.  When they're on their game, Arsis can be one of the absolute best bands in their little niche, but when they're off, well, they release bland blasty sweepy nonsense like this.  We know they can do better than this, and Malone's incredible strength of writing hooks is more or less squandered this time.


RATING: 48%

10 YEAR REUNION: Children of Bodom - Are You Dead Yet?

YOU SHOULD GIVE A FLYING FUCK MOTHERFUCKER

I've touched on it before, but I just want to reiterate something I like to call "Roy's Law", which states "The quality of any given Bodom album is inversely proportional to how violent the Grim Reaper on the cover is acting."  On the great albums (the first three, Halo of Blood) he stands beckoning or remorseful, a mysterious figure symbolizing the inevitable end that awaits us all.  On the awful albums (Blooddrunk, Relentless Reckless Forever) he's violently murdering somebody.  Bodom was never a particularly deep band, they are famous for Alexi making up half the lyrics on the spot in the studio and he drops more f-bombs per minute than a shitty Rob Zombie flick after all, but there's a certain meta-poetry in the fact that how stupid and brainless their mascot is acting at any given time tends to mirror how stupid and brainless the music contained inside will be.  The only real hitch in this theory is their fifth album, Are You Dead Yet?  This one features Roy menacingly glaring at you from behind some screen, clearly inspired by The Ring, so like... does this one count as mid-murder?  Is this merely ominous?

The music contained wherein this time tends to confirm both interpretations, and unsurprisingly this album winds up being something of a mess.  Hate Crew Deathroll was, at the time, clearly a transition album, moving from the hyperactive "Nightwish with yowling" style they pioneered into a style more outwardly heavy and rooted in actual melodeath, so Are You Dead Yet? was, initially at least, seen as the logical endpoint of what they were aiming towards in 2003.  In a post Blooddrunk world, however, this is more clearly a second phase to the transition, retaining some of the high flying acrobatics of the classic era while further pushing their sound into the realm of downtuned chug riffs and bare-knuckled brutality.  This style wasn't Bodom's strength necessarily, but tracks like "Sixpounder" fucking ruled so logically there's no reason they wouldn't be good at this as well.  And honestly?  For about thirteen minutes they absolutely do showcase some serious talent in more simplified songs.

The opening trio of "Living Dead Beat", "Are You Dead Yet?", and "If You Want Peace... Prepare for War" are every bit as good as the heavier songs on the previous album and even could have made it a near flawless album if they had replaced the few weaker tracks.  Laiho and Wirman's trademark dueling solos are a tad less head-spinningly insane this time around, but their ear for hooks is as sharp as ever, with the title track and "If You Want Peace..." sporting two of the catchiest choruses the band will ever write.  And while riffs were never the band's strength (always instead shining via the aforementioned hooks, solos, and memorable melodies), I am to this day stunned that they managed to rip out a riff as fucking perfect as the pre-verse riff in "Living Dead Beat" after the intro.  Total fucking shame that it only shows up for a few bars here and there. 

It's the following two thirds of the album that shit the bed so mightily that it managed to sour those three belters and give this album the reputation as the first bad Bodom album.  "Punch Me I Bleed" is the token slow song that shows up on every fucking record because they're desperate to recreate the success of "Angels Don't Kill", and apart from the monolithic verse riff (that I realize now sounds an awful lot like Cannibal Corpse's "Scourge of Iron" seven years early) it's just as plodding and lame as its predecessor.  "In Your Face" also stands out as the song with the most wasted potential, since the initial feeling is one akin to that of "Sixpounder" with a shot of adrenaline, and the music itself borders on great from time to time, but... just holy shit this is the lyrical nadir.  Alexi was never a good lyricist, but they also never really mattered or took center stage.  Hell some of their best tracks include gems like "Well I'm an asshole and I really always will be" and "Kill, kill, kill, go fuck another one" so it's not like this is a new problem.  But "OH MY GOOOOD HERE'S A FIIIIGHT" and a repeated refrain of "I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK MOTHERFUCKER" is just somehow so much stupider than anything he's barfed out before.  The rest of the album just flounders as the drunken Finns suddenly forgot how to write a song and everything just kinda flops around with lame chugs, weak leads, and no clear direction.  "Trashed, Lost and Strungout" is the lone good song in the back half, sounding like another lost Hate Crew jawn, but after four spectacular bed-wetters in a row it's a task bordering on herculean to get excited about it.

I have a theory on why the album falls apart so quickly after the first few tracks, though I admit it's purely speculation.  I feel like those three great songs were among the first written, and after a while Alexi realized that this new simplified direction is way the fuck easier to write than the complex pyrotechnics showcased on classics like "Kissing the Shadows" so he just stopped trying so hard.  The songs feel like they came together on their own and I suspect they probably did, because the level of effort involved is abysmal here.  Tracks 4 thru 9 sound like a stream of consciousness first drafts that were all in desperate need of tweaking and rewrites.  Like come on, "We're Not Gonna Fall" sounds like a filler track that plays during the character select screen in Dynasty Warriors.  There is no way "Next in Line" is the best he could do.  I know he was absolutely losing his grip on the first half of "high functioning alcoholic" at the time and it shows.  Even Janne Wirman's keyboard work takes a back seat for the majority of the album, which is a fucking crime considering how he was always the co-headliner in the band and arguably the most talented member to begin with.  He doesn't play background atmosphere, that's not what he does, he's a front and center melody carrier and solo wizard.  Putting him in the background to do twinkling bullshit is like signing Wayne Gretzky and making him play goalie.  They make his reduced role work on the title track and precisely nowhere else.

Are You Dead Yet? is a house of cards that scatters the minute a stiff breeze blows its way.  I wish with all of my heart that they could've kept up the level of quality showcased on the opening triad, because it's definitely different for them, but it's still excellent.  Let it never be said that I hate change on principle.  My main concern is whether or not the changes are good, and at first they absolutely are.  This album really signaled the beginning of the end for a band that was once completely unique, more or less inventing an entire microgenre wholesale while reigning at the top of the pack on a macro scale.  They would have a few minor rebounds here and there in the 2010s, but at the end of the day, Hate Crew Deathroll was a tantalizing peek at what Bodom could do if they streamlined their songwriting a bit, while Are You Dead Yet? is the depressing reality of what happens when they decide to go whole hog and stop giving a shit.


RATING: 44%

Testament - Titans of Creation

Final Fatassy

Bear with me, I need to compare something to Final Fantasy again.  I know, I know, it's kinda my thing.  Blame the fact that Vivi was the closest thing I had to a real friend growing up.

Once upon a time, Final Fantasy became the videogame institution that it became because the series used to pump out excellence at an alarming rate.  Over the years, Squeenix has completely lost the ability to tell a great story (once their greatest strength).  The games were and still are absolutely fucking gorgeous, with every release pushing the hardware of its home console to the limit, with slick presentation and heartbreakingly beautiful cinematics.  But the actual heart, the stories they tell, the white hot burning core of the entire role playing genre, has been utter fucking trash for decades, and despite how different they all are they somehow manage to have similar problems.  Very often, the stories devolve into incoherent multiverse nonsense (also very prevalent in Kingdom Hearts, because some Brain Genius decided Tetsuya Nomura's only skill of drawing tiny torsos and a fuckload of belts would somehow translate to a creative role and for some utterly unfathomable fucking reason they keep letting him direct shit) with annoying characters and nearly identical villains.  There are elements that succeed here and there by what I can only assume is divine flukery, but the overall trajectory has been safely rehashing the same ideas that barely worked the first time for years now.

That's what modern Testament is to me.  There is absolutely no denying that their presentation is on point.  Ever since their resurgence on Nuclear Blast with The Formation of Damnation in 2008, each album has been graced with a stunning piece of Eliran Kantor artwork, the production on every album has had instantly recognizable combo of sheen and punch that Andy Sneap always delivers, Chuck Billy's gruff, howling holler remains one of the most iconic voices in thrash metal, I maintain that to this day they are still worth catching live because their energy is unreal at their currently advanced age, and the lineup is basically the stuff of dreams nowadays since Alex Skolnick returned and the rhythm section has been stocked with the twin Jeff Garcias of the metal world in Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan (the two best journeymen support players in the whole damn macrogenre).

And yet, when the fuck is the last time Testament wrote a truly phenomenal song?  When is the last time they delivered a riff that truly blew your socks off?  When is the last time they crafted something as instantly catchy as "Souls of Black" or "Over the Wall"?  Hell I actually like The Formation of Damnation but there's no denying that nothing on there holds a candle to what they pumped out on The New Order.  Every single album in the Nuclear Blast era has had unbelievably slick presentation but no matter what new thing they try, they completely fail to deliver on the most important component, genuinely great riffs and songs.  Titans of Creation only follows this pattern, with another breathtaking Kantor piece, another pristine Sneap knobjob, another great Billy performance, and another way-too-long album with precisely zero great riffs.  Who the fuck heard "Symptoms" or "The Healers" and decided they absolutely needed to be included?

The soul-deflating hour long runtime is an unsurprising problem, since albums dragging on for too long is a common complaint of mine, but it really hurts here because so little of interest happens despite the consistently high tempo.  Hoglan's drumming seems to have lost all creativity, never once showing off his famous speed or lightning fast fills, instead falling into a comfortable metronomic performance that could have been (and probably was) recorded in his sleep, and DiGiorgio's famous fretless bass wizardry is a completely misused waste of talent on par with Jeff Loomis joining Arch Enemy.  Peterson and Skolnick's guitar mastery is relegated to stock thrash riffs pulled out of a dusty trunk and their once phenomenal leadwork sounds like nothing but meaningless noise.  Testament's classic era was never as extreme as their contemporaries but they still stood out on the strength of excellent songwriting and a knack for maddeningly good hooks, but they seemed to have lost this ability somewhere around six or seven songs into 2008.  The only truly catchy song this time around is "Dream Deceiver", and the intensity is at least worthwhile on "Night of the Witch" and "Curse of Osiris", but those are three minor successes on an otherwise uninteresting album at the tail end of a career that has been unimpressive for years now.

I know it's kind of a meaningless critique to just call something uninteresting since it's hard to put mediocrity into words, but that's really the main problem here.  Titans of Creation is less than the sum of its parts by a pretty wide margin.  The few moments when Peterson gets to inject his love of the more extreme fringes of metal are pretty solid ("Curse of Osiris" is far and away the best track on the album for this exact reason), but meandering riff salads like "WWIII", "Code of Hammurabi", and "City of Angels" make up the lion's share of the album and I can't recommend listening to it in good faith.  Like, it's cool that the band's vocals have diversified so much in recent years (Peterson's more extreme snarl is showcased well in "Night of the Witch") but they don't amount to anything meaningful when surrounded by more pedestrian riffs than a musical crosswalk.  This is a step up from the insulting lameness of Brotherhood of the Snake but not by much.  Titans of Creation is another safe and mediocre entry into Testament's late-career resurgence, and just like the hamfisted comparison from the intro, even the new ideas are wrong in the same way as the old ideas and the actual heart of the band has been diminished to a shriveled lump of barely-beating nothing.

There's really no place to put this, but I have to give a round of applause to "Catacombs" for being so clearly intended as an instrumental intro track but somehow winding up lost in the caboose as the last song on the album.


RATING: 40%

Serpent Column - Endless Detainment

Wars Waged in My Privates lol gottem

Look man I'm just gonna make this a short one.  I'm not reinvigorated by the Covid like most of you are, I'm alternating between pointlessly going to work anyway and spending a week at home being fidgety and annoyed at my housemates for simply existing.  I thought I was gonna review during this downtime to help keep myself sane, but it turns out I hate doing that too but dammit I'm gonna try FUCK

Serpent Column has been something of an underground sensation over the past few years, with Ornuthi Thalassa coming out of nowhere in 2017 to destroy listeners with the main dude whose name I can neither spell nor be bothered to look up's signature brand of spiraling black/death intensity.  Since that debut their profile has only grown, with last year's Mirror in Darkness managing to rank in the Top 30 across all genres on RYM, and the subject of this review, Endless Detainment, currently sitting at the pole position in the EP category for this year.

Each release has gotten more and more chaotic, and the current result of that ever-unfurling sonic degloving is an album so twisted that it eats nails and shits corkscrews.  There isn't even really a thematic thruline I can use within the context of this review to help it make sense, because around every new turn in the music is a new ghoul, a new trap door, a new falling rock.  Everything is a trap and it's a confusing and violent nightmare.  Take a look at "Arachnain", likely the best example of this album's utter distaste for the safe and familiar.  It starts off with the closest thing to a "normal" riff you're going to find across the entire twentyish minutes of Endless Detainment, with a quick trill and a few chugs, you can't help but feel like this is an illusion.  Nothing up to this point has been so simple and groovy.  After the whirlwind of broken glass that was "Violence Aesthete", there's no way Mr. Column even has the impulse control necessary to stick to something catchy.  And he doesn't, because before you know it, that simple riff is accompanied by bass and percussion that feel juuuuust a bit wrong, and by the time you can likely comprehend what the interplay between al the instruments is supposed to be well surprise now you're careening down Willy Wonka's Boat Ride to Hell.

A lot of people around the 'net (as the kids say) have been citing a huge uptick in influence from mathcore, particularly Dillinger Escape Plan.  I'm unprofessional as fuck and only have a surface level knowledge of what mathcore even is, so I'm just going to parrot that citation and hope it's correct.  I can understand it from what little knowledge I have though, as "Pantheoclasm" sounds dangerously close to what genre purists accused Deathspell Omega of being when Circumspice first dropped.  That influence is definitely there, and the first handful of songs in a row all exemplify that sort of dutch-angled firing-squad of riffage, "Manure in Pearls" specifically being the one that crushes my brain the hardest.

I've forgotten how to review and I'm going to abuse my reputation to post this rambling bullshit anyway.  The point of all this is that Serpent Column is extremely good, and if you look outside of MA you can tell that it's really catching on elsewhere.  Hopefully someday the largest and most historically important website for metal culture catches up, because this fucking rules. 


RATING: 88%

Lovebites - Battle Against Damnation

Just gimme a 1/3rd of an album pls

The first draft of this review opened with a lengthy thinking-aloud segment where I opined on how exploitative the idol industry treats women in the Far East, and how desperately I hoped that this wasn't the case with the current wave of all-girl J-metal bands that have been sweeping the nation in recent years.  But before publishing, I (for once in my life) had the good sense to hold off on spouting Epstein Brain bullshit and actually just talk to some people who actually understand the culture in which these bands spawn and thrive.  The good news is that it isn't nearly as cynical as I was dreading, with basically every one of these bands being a genuine creative effort from talented women who are seizing a cultural shift that sees the women of Japan no longer being demure and submissive, and using this newfound power to express themselves in ways they previously never really did.  The important one here, obviously, is forming metal bands.  Early progenitors of this specific wave like Aldious and Destrose helped pave the way for the Mary's Blood's of the world to break from their cultural chains to dress like cute anime girls while simultaneously ripping listeners to shreds with honest-to-god future metal classics without playing into dumbass pop stereotypes, which helps differentiate this scene from the more cynical marketing moves like Babymetal.  Of those early examples, my clear favorite is Destrose.  Not just because I had mostly found them on accident when doing a shallow dive into Touhou bands and actually reviewed their sole full length years ago before I really knew how much this scene was going to blow up, but because three of the best current bands in the style were all formed by former members.  We've got the steampunk fever dream of Fate Gear, the powerhouse of Mary's Blood, and the deceptively dangerous power metal maniacs hiding behind a saccharine image (and the subject of this review), Lovebites.

The reason I so badly wanted the dystopian hellscape of idol culture to not hold sway over Lovebites is because they absolutely fucking rule.  I could've guessed that this band contained members of Destrose (the bassist and drummer, if you were curious) based entirely on the fact that the rhythm section here is equally as menacing and powerful as their previous band.  Lovebites tends to be, as a rule, less traditional and more power metal with regards to their songwriting when compared to their origins (apart from Clockwork Immortality, which (smartly) leans a bit more into AOR at parts, but this was (unfortunately) abandoned with Electric Pentagram), and as a result everything they write tends to be a fuckload faster.  Their sense of melody is completely awe inspiring, with breathtaking choruses peppering every song they've ever written and never shying away from an extended dueling guitar solo.

I've been speaking in generalities and not really focusing on the release at hand, so I suppose the question needs to be asked why I'm choosing to review their second EP, Battle Against Damnation, instead of any of their other myriad releases.  The reason is simple: this is basically the only release I ever really go back to and listen from front to back.  Lovebites is an incredible power metal band with a bewildering skill to weave between high speed rippers and melodic singalongs without ever delving into pop influence the way stereotypes would have you expect, but their three full length albums have enough material to fill out like four and a half LPs.  There is no reason for their albums to be as long as they are, especially when their songwriting so rarely deviates from their winning formula.  They don't really fuck around with ballads or interludes, so their albums tend to be completely overwhelming due to the constant barrage of double bass and shredding.  Don't get me wrong, I love double bass and shredding, but Battle Against Damnation is their strongest release entirely because they only assault me for 20 minutes instead of 70.

The EP kicks off with "The Crusade", which I'd say often jockeys for the pole when it comes to deciding my favorite song they've written, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it's basically just a rewrite of Iron Maiden's "Aces High" but even faster.  The other three tracks more or less stick to their "Galneryus meets Stratovarius with an injection of Megadeth" formula, but the fact that there's only three of them is a huge boon to the release's enjoyment.  That... really is the secret to Lovebites's success I think, they just need to trim the fuckin' fat and deliver their best cuts instead of bloating everything to absurd proportions.  "Break the Wall" and "Above the Black Sea" are completely dominating power/speed metal typhoons with balls-forward thrash gallops that could even make Persuader blush, and I'd say I want a full album of this but I already know what a full album would be like (totally overwhelming).

I know I keep harping on the length of their LPs and using that as a reason to say their EPs like this one are significantly better, but that's honestly the truth.  Lovebites writes some absolutely thundering power metal with an impossibly meaty riffset underneath, complemented by powerful, soaring, and crystal clear vocals and absolutely fucking feral guitar solos, and they're at their best here when they're restricted and unable to do the same thing too many times in a row.  Just give me a quick, bite-sized morsel of your genius and then take a break.  To the Western Hemisphere folks who see the band of cute girls in white dresses with the word "love" in their name, absolutely do not sleep on Lovebites.  They will absolutely fuckin' wreck your neck.


RATING: 89%

Sutrah - Aletheia

Bali of the Beast

I seem to recall a few years ago, Sutrah were one of the names tossed around the death metal scene as one of the big up-and-comers to look out for.  Dunes was a pretty big hit in the proggy tech death scene, allowing the band to be mentioned in the same breath as genre heavyweights like Beyond Creation and other newcomers invariably linked to Phil Tougas like Cheth'ilist, Zealotry, and First Fragment.  Now, in all honesty, I've never listened to Dunes so I don't really know if Aletheia is a big departure or not, but whatever it is, it's pretty solidly good.

Aletheia is just a short, four track EP that clocks in under 30 minutes, which it turns out is a pretty perfect length for this style.  Sutrah play tech death, sure, but they take a slightly more proggy and experimental approach than most of their peers.  They're more in line with the jazzy prog of Cynic or Atheist than the neoclassical shred of Necrophagist or Origin or something, with a dash of the intentionally weird and dissonant style Gorguts has been pushing for decades at this point.  You're probably surprised considering my noted dislike of Cynic and Gorguts, but I dunno, something about Sutrah just works.  Most of the time.

Y'see, this EP is structured in a pretty deliberate way, with the first two tracks being subtitled "Variations I.i" and "Variations I.ii", and the second two tracks following the same pattern except being "II.i" and "II.ii", so clearly this is meant to be a more flowing experience with both "songs" being broken up into two tracks each.  The problem with this as that both ".i" tracks tend to act as overtures/intros, and the actual metallic meat of both songs resides in the ".ii" segments.  And then with that, "II.ii" (from this point on I'll be using the tracks' given names, so in this instance: "Genèse") is over fifteen minutes long, taking up more than half of the record by itself.  Obviously it doesn't run on one theme or idea the whole time, it's a twisting journey that crawls all over the place with tons of different moods and melodies, even opening on a very creative two minutes where distorted guitars are played like violins, what with the swelling harmonies akin to a full orchestra and all.  So like... why not break this one up further since it clearly ends in a place so different to where it starts?  It's not like it would've broken the flow of the song at all since its to kinetic and interesting.  Otherwise why bother with the subtitling gimmick in the first place?  It's such a minor thing but it utterly confounds me.  Because of this I can't help but kinda brush the instrumental tracks off to the side because they feel like a needless runup to the more interesting tracks they precede.  "Lethe" and "Genèse" are both fantastic exercises in proggy brutality, but they feel hindered by tacked on appendages that add very little to the main meal itself.  Even more confusing is that "Genèse" works extremely well on its own while the first three tracks all flow into one another.  This is just a bewildering choice, and while it doesn't really affect the music itself, it just seems totally nonsensical to me.

But when they're on, they're on.  The buildups seem tacked on and superfluous, but I'd be lying if I said "Umwelt" doesn't build itself extremely well, and the explosion when "Lethe" finally starts is quite satisfactory.  "Lethe" and "Genèse" are clearly the stars of the show here, pulling a lot of influence from Lykathea Aflame.  It's not a perfect 1:1 comparison since the melodies aren't nearly as happy and major key here, but Sutrah flourishes with a very shiny production job and busily triumphant melodies interspersed with spiritual chants and flat out brutality.  The vocals are deep and monstrous while the riffs and drums pummel you with manic ferocity.  All the while the tracks twist and dive into new territory with relative (but not overwhelming) frequency, helping to mitigate the two problems this style frequently deals with (that being the songs being too samey to differentiate or jumping around so often that the beginning and ending of each track doesn't really matter).  When they give their songs a little room to breathe, they can craft some genuine magic, and I'm pretty enthralled by what they create on a track like "Genèse".  There's apparently a lot of influence from Balinese music, including instruments I've never heard of like the reyong and gangsa, but they aren't weird enough for me to really pick out in the music.  So I'll have to just accept that I'm a dummy and reduce the album down to "really good but kinda weird death metal with tons of melody".

So yeah, I'm on the Sutrah train now.  They play a style I don't usually go googoo over but I can't help but enjoy this quite a lot, the closing track in particular.  Aletheia is very proggy and highly melodic, but unlike Beyond Creation they create some wonderous soundscapes with the tools they're given, and turn what could've easily been overbusy progdeath into something very focused while also encompassing a pretty wide scope.  I dunno man, I like it a lot.


RATING: 84%

10 YEAR REUNION: Hibria - Defying the Rules

BE THE WIENER

I initially wanted to make it a point to not really reference my old reviews as I rewrote them beyond a quick mention in the title, but I do have to admit that this is probably the one I wanted to do the most.  It's one of the very few I couldn't even glance at without cringing my face into a shape akin to a balloon knot.  I did the early-internet FLAME SHIELD UP thing, I felt the need to put my real name in the title because I was getting popular on MA at the time and arrogantly wanted to be "a thing" there, and I was fucking terrified of the potential blowback for giving the album a mediocre score simply because it was super popular at the time and hadn't scored below a 90%, so even though I was pretty critical of it I tempered my problems a lot and played up the bits I liked and still "only" gave it an 85% (and still acted like a free thinking martyr at the same time).  It was awful.  Be glad I'm killing it.

So... why was Hibria considered the next big thing in the mid aughties anyway?  The answer is simple.  Defying the Rules here is one of the more complete albums in terms of power metal debuts and it fucking ruled.  It's a thundering powerhorse from a group of newbies that sounded 100% fully formed in terms of identity, and it was so showy and immediate that it blew everybody off their chairs.  Power metal was doing pretty well anyway, and Brazil has always been on the map anyway thanks to Angra, but something about these guys just worked.  They had that X factor that so many of their peers lacked.

So why am I so lukewarm on it?  Because I only agree with everything I said up there when it comes to four songs.  The opening triad of "Steelord on wHeels", "Change Your Life Line", and "Meelenyum Quast" are fucking phenomenal, as is the title track a bit later in the runtime.  Everything else just fucking bores me.  They bored me back then and they bore me now, and I wish I had the spine to admit it back in 2008.  "Leeving Under Ice" is just plodding and goes nowhere, "A Kingdom to Share" has an amazing bass run in the intro but totally loses my interest afterwards, "The Faceless in Chahge" is fine I guess but probably needed to be three minutes shorter, et cetera.  The lion's share of this album is just really basic power/speed metal but with extra showy musicianship and a wildly shrieking vocalist.  Those things push Hibria over the edge when they're occupying songs that are written as wild and frantically as their playing requires, but most of this album sounds like five extremely talented dudes thrashing futilely against their chains, desperately trying to break out of the cliches of their chosen genre but utterly failing to do so thanks to their misappropriation of said talents.  The batfuck insane bass runs are always entertaining but they work so much better in a track like "Steelord on wHeels" where the rest of the band is losing their shit and the song itself is flying off the rails than on a track like "Hispeed Breakout" where the tempo is dialed back and the hooks are super basic.

That said, when it works, it works.  One thing that I absolutely adore about the band is how showy and flashy they are.  The good songs work so well because they're flashy in the sense that they're surrounded by dozens of popping flashbulbs from a horde of screaming paparazzi while Marco Panichi does fifteen backwards handsprings down the red carpet while simultaneously playing Yngwie Malmsteen arpeggios on his bass with his teeth.  The opening trinity do this amazingly well, even on "Change Your Life Line" where the song itself isn't quite as insane as the other two.  They sound like they're having the time of their lives, heads spinning like a top while they jump around like chimpanzees.  That's the real distinction between the good and lame songs to me.  There's so much more life in any of the four good tracks than the other five combined.  I realize it's kind of a cop out to just say "I like these songs more" when they're fundamentally not all that different, but that's the magic of songwriting for ya.  Sometimes you assemble the same parts in a slightly different way and create something magical.  Sometimes you write Running Wild with half the charisma replaced with a ton of bass notes like "A Kingdom to Share", sometimes you write Running Wild mainlining adrenaline and meth and lighting your feet on fire like "Meelenyum Quast". Special shoutout goes to the cymbal hits that sound like a fucking sleigh bell in the verses of "Change Your Life Line".

Overall I'd say I still enjoy Defying the Rules, but it's with a huge fuckin' asterisk next to that statement.  The less good songs aren't bad as much as they're just not fully realized.  I've heard the good songs, I know how good they can be, so I know with just a bit of tweaking this could've been one of the best albums of the decade.  There are flaws all over the place, and whether or not they overcome them depends entirely on which song it is.  Iuri Sanson has a huge high ceiling on his range and sometimes he can belt out amazing high notes, other times it sounds like "The Faceless in Chahge" and he just sounds like he's struggling to maintain any power.  The solos fluctuate from exceedingly impressive to excessive and unnecessary, the songs range from maddeningly catchy to frustratingly dull, it's just all over the place despite the pieces always being there. 

Also, side note, one time I was listening and singing along to this while driving and absolutely nailed the climactic high note in "Steelord on wHeels" and have never replicated it since.  My friends still give me shit fifteen years later about that high note I toooootally hit that one time when nobody was there to verify it.  The world is unfair.


RATING: 63%

Thoren - Gwarth II

I love the cover art at least

I've been bragging about how my musical dowsing rod has gotten pretty good over the years and I don't often find myself bothering with things that wind up sucking just because I can usually predict with reasonable accuracy if something is going to appeal to me or not.  Thoren kinda bucks that, because I took a gamble and rolled the dice on an instrumental progressive death metal band purely because their promo packet compared them to Blotted Science, basically the one and only band in that super specific subniche that I care for in any way.  Well, it turns out that neither Alex Webster nor Ron Jarzombek play in Thoren.  Instead we get a dude from Coma Cluster Void programming the drums with two randos on the strings.

The Coma Cluster Void comparison should probably tip the band's hand a bit when it comes to what they actually sound like.  Gwarth II reminds me of Gorguts more than anything else.  It's very dissonant and extremely chaotic, with cohesive riffs only appearing for mere seconds at a time and repeating maybe once or twice before the band flies off the rails again into total anarchy.  It works for what it is, but this sort of thing struggles mightily to hold my attention.  It's a whizbang backdraft that flares up super hot for a few seconds and blows you backwards but then it's pretty much over.  It's punchy, I'll give it that, and the pugilistic backbone of what would otherwise be pure chaos helps keep it from being completely forgettable, but it's not bulletproof.  There still aren't many sections at all that stick with you once it's all over.  Moments of "Raun Raeg" and "Thaw Gur" do I guess, but that's probably because they're two of the three songs that break the three minute mark and ergo have a bit more time to adhere to the surface.  Every song is made up of cacophonous riffery but the fact that most tracks are pretty short definitely means that it's all over before you even realize it began.  I still can't tell you a single thing that happens in "Vex" or "Lithui", but I remember the groovy riff in "Raun Raeg" at least.

There isn't much else to say, this is a very Gorguts-y approach to brutal technical wizardry in the sense that it's very dissonant and doesn't adhere to many conventional structures, but unlike Gorguts they don't have any real hooks to keep it interesting.  So it's more like Behold... the Arctopus I guess.  Either way, it's hard to write, hard to play, and hard to listen to.


RATING: 30%

Svarttjern - Shame Is Just a Word

I almost scrapped this review because I couldn't think of a title for it

I didn't want to start the year off on mediocrity because that just seems like a bad omen, but I already reviewed the new Jordablod for a different site (this is the real reason my productivity slowed down around September, if nobody noticed) so I guess we're stuck with Svarttjern.

That's being a bit unfair, in all honesty, because Shame Is Just a Word is pretty solidly good, if unremarkable.  Svarttjern has been toiling around for a while, as this is their fifth album and more than half of the band also plays in Carpathian Forest (in fairness they are all the three shmucks who aren't Nattefrost or Vrangsinn, though they are original members here who have been around for fifteenish years).  This certainly sounds like a band that's been around for that long, but my problem with them is that they're about as middle-of-the-road as I can imagine.  Norwegian black metal seems to have been the easy king of the genre in the early days of the 2nd wave, but ever since the turn of the millennium I've found this particular scene to be one of the least interesting, and Svarttjern is a good example of why.  There's nothing wrong with Shame Is Just a Word, but it brings precisely nothing new to the table and seems pretty proud of itself for doing so.  You could argue they're just sticking to their guns/strengths, but on a personal level I guess it just doesn't interest me to play by the rules unless you've got some X factor like 1349's absurd level of intensity or Taake's impeccable songwriting skill. 

Svarttjern reminds me of Keep of Kalessin, and that's probably a weird comparison simply because I have no idea what Keep of Kalessin sounds like nowadays.  I don't think I've listened to them since 2008 or whatever but this is pretty much exactly what I remember them sounding like.  Very polished production and very slick presentation but riffs that feel like they were written via algorithm and raspy vocals that are very good for the style but unfortunately lack charisma.  There's value in a good throwback every now and then for sure, but I also don't begrudge myself or anybody else for wanting a bit more out of art.  This pushes no boundaries and breaks no rules, and the only thing about it that helps it stand out in any way is that there's a bit more of a heightened influence from thrash than would be usual for a band of this style, but even then that may just be my brain playing tricks on me due to the (frankly awesome) cover of "Bonded By Blood". 

So Shame Is Just a Word is a decent album full of decent songs with decent riffs but utterly lacking in atmosphere or mystery.  The best song on here is the one that A) isn't black metal and B) was written by a totally different band 35+ years ago.  I'm probably sending mixed messages here because I'm honestly walking away with a positive impression of a solid throwback of a classic style, but it doesn't elicit any real emotion out of me and completely evaporates from my memory as soon as the album is over.  Check out "Melodies of Lust" if you're curious.  It's the best original song here and it's probably simply because it's the longest and has the most time to develop, but it's a good representative of the album in a microcosm.


RATING: 66%

BH AWARDS 2019 AND ASSORTED FESTIVITES

Well everybody, it's time.  I've been reviewing for a long time now, and I've been congregating all of my assorted writings here on Lair of the Bastard for a lip-flapping insane ten years now.  Or maybe nine full ones, and I'm in my tenth now, I dunno, I don't care.  I just know that the first public post I made here was the first of my many Album of the Year countdowns for 2010, and now here I am, older, fatter, and far more disillusioned with the culture I surround myself with posting my tenth entry in this series.  Ten god damned times now I've gone through the trouble of figuring out everything I listened to and decided which albums I liked the most and told the rest to bugger off forever.  This, of course, means you can also probably guess that I already have the framework down for the inevitable Top 50 of the Decade whenever that is, but it's not coming quite so quick since I have a lot of relistening to do and many things have risen and fallen in the intervening years.  But that's the future, we're talking about the now.  And now I present to you, for the tenth year in a row:

THE TOP 13 ALBUMS OF 2019

You know the rule: full lengths only.  Beyond that it's all fair game, but I'll spoil it right away and say that the list wound up being all metal again.  What can I say?  It's what I listen to the most.  There is one non-metal album I really expected to crack the top thirteen, but it feel just a hair short by the time I was done ordering and reordering the list.  In the words of the immortal Captain Tenneal, "llllLET'S GO"

13: Abnormality - Sociopathic Constructs
Three times now, Abnormality and Unfathomable Ruination have released albums in the same year, and for the second time now, the superior band has changed.  I can't help but see these two as sister bands to one another by sheer coincidence, but the pattern held true this year, and just like in 2012, when Abnormality is the victor, they wind up on the list.  In many ways, they're the band I wish Suffocation still was.  That's not to say Suffo's last album wasn't great (it did win AOTY in 2017 after all), but I still see it as something of a fluke until a followup proves me wrong.  Abnormality sounds straight out of the Cerrito era, with big heaps of modern tech death thrown into the savage hacksaw riffs of their obvious influence like Hour of Penance and Cattle Decapitation.  This is brutality nearly perfected.

12: Sunn O))) - Life Metal
Sunn had two incredible albums this year, with Life Metal only ever so slightly edging out Pyroclasts for the purposes of this list.  This is the first drone album to ever rank as a finalist on these lists of mine, but Stephen and Greg really went above and beyond with this one.  This obviously isn't my usual genre but the way they blend ethereal soundscapes with overwhelming heaviness seems to hit the sweet spot for me.  This percussion-less fuzz just washes over the listener and transports them to whatever incorporeal hellbliss in on the cover.  I think one tiny change that really wound up helping was simply not including Attila on vocals.  He's not always around, obviously, but on three of the albums I liked before, he was on two of them, and he's been their live guy for eons.  Swapping him out for the breathy coos of Hildur Guðnadóttir was sheer brilliance.

11: False - Portent  
If Bell Witch can be credited for anything, it can be introducing the world to Mariusz Lewandowski, apparently the only human being in the universe who can passably emulate the legendary Zdzislaw Beksinski's art style, and as a result this nearly 60 year old painter is suddenly the most in-demand artist in the entire metal world.  Minnesota's False won the art lottery this year and were able to get his art to grace Portent, which, frankly, happens to be one of the best black metal releases of the year.  For reasons I can't adequately explain, I could (accurately) sense that this was a band that would get random shit thrown at them, maybe for the overwhelming melody and meteoric rise in the scene displacing artists seen as more "deserving" or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that the three lengthy songs here are basically a forty minute long cumshot.

10: Xoth - Interdimensional Invocations
I've given these guys a review already this year, but Seattle's greatest secret held on to make the top ten here.  Xoth's brand of death metal is more of the Mithras variety than anybody else, and I seem to be the only one saying such a thing.  Maybe I need to listen to Mithras again, but this is exactly the kind of wild screaming I remember the lead guitars doing there, and it's just as good here as it is there.  This is basically the musical equivalent of a cartoony but ultraviolent comic book, just wreaking havoc with reckless abandon at every turn, and those lead melodies I love so much keep this exceptionally stylish.  Interdimensional Invocations is everything I ever wanted and more, and in a lesser year this would've been an easy top five finish.  2019 just happened to be particularly stacked.

9: Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race
Can I get a new color scheme finally?  Thank you.  I wanted to hate this album out of spite.  I hate how Blood Incantation swims in hype and praise for basically doing the same thing hundreds of other bands are doing right now (though with more Morbid Angel influence than most, which helps) and I've gone on record many times saying Dark Descent Records is really fucking boring when it comes to death metal.  But here we are, making the list again.  I don't think this is perfect, I don't like how it only has four tracks, one of which is instrumental and a different one of which is nearly twenty minutes long.  It's both lacking in material while being excessive.  But despite my prejudices and despite the fact that I think Starspawn is their superior album, this is still in the top ten.  Because it is seriously that fucking good.

8: Venom Prison - Samsara
This will probably surprise most of you, but this is actually the last death metal album on the list!  It's true, my favorite genre just really didn't hit me as hard this year, but that didn't stop several stunners from landing on my radar regardless, and Venom Prison found themselves the best of the bunch.  Venom Prison finds themselves among the front of the pack when it comes to the burgeoning scene of explicitly leftist/anti-capitalist/feminist extreme metal, and holy shit did they earn their place.  My usual complaint with lefty metal is simply that it's never angry enough, but I'm not sure I've heard anything as caustic and visceral as Samsara this year.   That grotesque blend of punishing groove and downhill-running adrenaline hasn't sounded this fucking dangerous in a long time.  This is what I was hoping the new Misery Index would be.

7: Batushka - Panihida
I can't talk about Batushka anymore.  I've put more words to (metaphorical) paper about the drama surrounding the schism in the band than I ever expected, but I can't deny just how much I fucking adore The True Batushka's entry this year.  It's painfully clear that Krzysztof wrote Litourgiya back in 2015, because Bart's Hospodi was a boring trainwreck and Panihida here sounds like a spiritual successor in every sense of the word.  The overwhelming melody, the deep chants, the perverted sense of worship, everything that made the previous album a modern classic is here in spades, and while it may not surpass its predecessor, it's an extremely worthy followup that I've been spinning fairly regularly for more than half the year now.  This is melodic black metal at its near-finest.

6: Seer - Vol. 6
I'm not really a sludge guy, but Seer has smashed the door down and cemented themselves as modern titans to me with this album.  Vol. 6 is, for the style, a pretty short album, and I think that works in its favor.  There were very, very few albums I found myself finishing and immediately restarting this year, but this was one of them.  The interplay between the wavering atmosphere and gargantuan riffs, against the backdrop of largely distant vocals, both clean and harsh, with a few rattling falsetto screeches (which you think would clash but only add to the madness) make this nothing short of a home run.  My favorite part may actually be the short outro track, believe it or not.  The way it ends on that cascading swell feels like a huge inhale, followed by silence.  Seer managed to make a minor volume swell sound like a religious experience.

5: White Ward - Love Exchange Failure
These Ukrainians wound up producing the metal album I never knew I wanted.  Like Deafheaven before them, they've eschewed nearly every aesthetic hallmark of black metal and veered their headspace off somewhere no corpsepainted goat-hailers dare to tread.  The small addition of something as simple as a saxophone, even (especially) during the loud parts, fills an open space that I didn't even realize most black metal had.  There is so much emotion packed so densely into every second of Love Exchange Failure.  The quiet darkjazz moments are somehow unobtrusive and unpretentious, and the screaming black metal that takes up the majority of the runtime is some of the most agonizing and soulful I've ever heard.  Traditionalists be damned, the true future of black metal that was theorized on Sunbather is fully realized here.

4: Kostnateni - Hruza Zvitezi
The other future of black metal can be found here, in a small time one-man project from Midwestern America.  This is more of the style that Deathspell Omega helped pioneer, with unabashed dissonance and mindblending technicality.  Kostnateni is an absolute masterclass in the art of drowning you in walls of riffs so huge that they make even the most beefy of Tone Worship Stoner bands sound like 80s Destruction.  The guitars sound like they have thirteen strings, everything feels just slightly out of tune, the drums sound like six dudes playing seven kits at once, everything about this is just... uncomfortable and wrong.  The end result is a chaotic nightmare of twisting ghouls that never back off, and it feels like the musical manifestation of an anxiety attack.  I mean that in the best possible way.

3: No One Knows What the Dead Think - self titled
For all the intricate and emotional albums to be found on this roundup, I think it's actually pretty funny that a stupid grindcore album with one singular goal in mind wound up whipping my ass so fuckin' hard.  No One Knows What the Dead Think is essentially a reboot of Discordance Axis, and anybody who knows them (or sister band Grindlink) knows exactly what to expect here.  This is wild and uncompromising and features one of the most caustic vocal performances this decade.  This release is barely 19 minutes long, but it feels like the scene in Robocop when ED-209 malfunctions and lights up an OCP executive in a hail of ultraviolent gunfire.  It's a 19 minute gag reel of destructive violence and there's nothing more I want from my grind.

2: Mgla - Age of Excuse
Mgla's train of excellence just keeps chugging along, rolling in with their fourth excellent album in a row, and the third that could easily be considered among the best of its respective year.  At their core, Mgla is "just" black metal with loads of melody, but their knack for infectious riffs and Darkside's astounding drumming is nothing short of breathtaking.  The interplay between these two elements helps keep everything just barely held together and creates an experience of total, overwhelming psychosis.  Truly unique and instantly recognizable drummers seem to be a rare breed in metal, particularly in more extreme circles where it can be easy to simply dazzle with unearthly speed, and Darkside is a premier example of one.  "III", "IV", and "VI" alone helped make this Mgla's best, and considering their pedigree that's really saying something.

1: Crypt Sermon - The Ruins of Fading Light
I can't stress enough how much better Dark Descent Records is when they're not pushing their usual brand of death metal on listeners, and Crypt Sermon's sophomore album here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.  That pummeling morbidity and swirling mass of non-riffs that plagues so much of their roster is nowhere to be found here, instead showcasing an exercise in soaring epic doom.  For the second year in a row now, after Visigoth last year, I've found myself absolutely blown away by a sophomore followup to a debut that, while I liked plenty, had taken the metal world completely by storm and as such has found itself facing the inevitable critique of a "sophomore slump".  I didn't hear it with Conqueror's Oath and I certainly don't hear it with The Ruins of Fading Light either.  Everything that made Out of the Garden great has returned here, but with so much more splendor and grandeur.  Everything about this is simply bigger, and I adore that.  The riffs are stronger, the hooks are more powerful, the vocals are more passionate, everything about this is such a clear step up that I'm frankly baffled at the general reception of this album being anything less than uncritical worship from the underground.  Their review scores on MA are only 1% apart and this did land really high on Decibel's famous yearly list, but if you spend any time toiled in the filth-ridden underground of metal forums and chatrooms you'll find the response is much more lukewarm on the whole.  I shouldn't spend so much time defending an album as nakedly phenomenal as this, but here we are.  "The Ninth Templar" is one of the best openers in recent memory, "The Snake Handler" and "Our Reverend's Grave" are loaded with flawless riffage, and "Christ is Dead" is so good that I'd be willing to speculate that this would be album of the decade if every song was as good as that one.  I can't ramble forever but here we are, and I'm proud to present Crypt Sermon with the fabled (valueless) BH Award for Album of the Year 2019.



And now for something completely the same!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

The Neptune Power Federation - Memoirs of a Rat Queen: This one took me completely by surprise and made me a believer in these strange old-time rockers from Australia.   The Neptune Power Federation has been quietly toiling around for years, honing their immense theatricality into tighter and tighter songs, and with Memoirs of a Rat Queen I think they finally nailed it.  This is just damn good dirty rock and roll with a vocalist who is a dead ringer for Ann Wilson, and when you couple their over-the-top theatrics with such tight and concise rock, you’ve got a winner on your hands.

Paladin - Ascension: Though power metal didn't hit me as hard this year as it has in years previous, I’d be lying through my teeth if I said that Paladin’s debut here was anything short of a gargantuan downburst of fresh air.  Main man Taylor Washington sports an impressive pedigree of technically proficient bands that usually fall flat on a songwriting level like Arsis, Theocracy, and ShadowStrike, but when he finds himself with more control, he’s shown how much of a stud he can truly be.  Power metal usually doesn’t mix well with more extreme variants, but Paladin figured it out by simply separating their Gamma Ray-isms and their Skeletonwitch-isms wholesale, creating an album that’s admittedly cut-and-paste but also completely unpredictable, and I love it.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg - New Organon: You have no idea how happy I am to report that Slough Feg is back to making incredible albums again, something they used to do with startling regularity up until 2007, after which they’ve been struggling in a world that seemingly left them behind.  New Organon sees them just getting back to basics and doing what they do best, presenting sleazy Thin Lizzy-isms coupled with raucous Brocas Helm-isms and creating something instantly recognizable as something only Mike Scalzi could have created.  Nearly every track here sounds like a lost track from the early era (“Headhunter” literally was written over twenty years ago), and man sometimes I can’t help but adore a stellar throwback.

The Meads of Asphodel - Running Out of Time Doing Nothing:  There's a real chance this could have made it onto the final list if I had only bothered to check it out prior to last week.  Meads is a name I've always been sorta familiar with but never really felt the need to explore, but after falling in love with their newest album I feel like I really snubbed a potential future classic here.  This is highly eclectic weirdo-black metal that is basically everything I wished the last two Sigh albums were.

Blut aus Nord - Hallucinogen: Ditto on the "probably snubbed this one" with BaN here.  I'm not really familiar with most of their work, if I'm being honest with you, but I can tell based on my vague memory of what I've skimmed that Hallucinogen here is yet another wild experiment for the band, with heightened psychedelic influences that make the entire experience a mindbending cavalcade of fuckery.

There are many, many, many more, but I'm gonna cut myself off here.  2019 was absolutely fucking stacked.

DISAPPOINTMENTS

Enforcer - Zenith:  I mean, what else could it have possibly been?  Enforcer has landed in the top four with each new album this decade, so this was penciled in near the top the day it was announced.  And now here it is in the disappointments section.  Enforcer were the best in the world when it came to this resurgence of wild-out 80s speed metal revival, and their ear for catchy glam hooks helped them stand out as far and away the best of the bunch.  Then Zenith happened, and they leaned into the hooks so hard that they completely forgot the speed and adrenaline that acted as the base ingredient of their genius.  They're great at hooks, and there are some great songs here no doubt ("Die for the Devil" is a fucking banger), but trading the best band in the speed metal scene in return for a decent Def Leppard clone is the exact opposite of what I wanted to happen.  The album following this one in this section is significantly worse, but in terms of personal-hype-to-letdown ratio, nothing this year even came close to being as disappointing as Enforcer this year.  

Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings:  After years and years of sticking up for Battle Beast, they finally fucked off and made an album exactly as terrible as their detractors claim they always have been.  Their last album was shaky and uneven, but it did seem like surviving the (awful) decision to fire the sole songwriter was a real possibility.  Yeah that didn't pan out at all.  Anton has gone on to do... well, decently okay things sometimes with Beast in Black, but his former brainchild has lost everything that made them so special.  There is no bite whatsoever in this album, it's just fluffy pop metal with weak hooks and no personality, which is something I never thought I'd say about Battle Beast.  I can sum up everything I don't like about this album by simply asking you to listen to Endless Summer and leaving you to bask in the awfulness that is a One Direction b-side on what is ostensibly supposed to be a metal album.  Pop metal is one thing, corsetcore is another, and Battle Beast was always very good about never crossing into the latter, but holy shit did they lean into the bullshit this time.

Idle Hands - Mana: I just recently spelled everything out in a pretty lengthy review, but the short version is that this current trend of heavy metal cum goth rock isn't a bad thing, but it does seem pretty easy to do and garner fuckloads of praise in the process.  Idle Hands has a couple of very good songs on here, but overall it's a huge waste of time that delivers mediocre hooks via mediocre vocals and completely inconsequential instrumentals.  This is a huge nothing-burger of an album, which is a shame because you can tell they have grand aspirations and it seems like a huge contingent of metal fans agree that they hit it, but it just doesn't work for me.

Unfathomable Ruination - Enraged & Unbound:  I say this every time either one of these bands come up, but Unfathomable Ruination and Abnormality are sister bands to me, and with their third album they've flip flopped as to who the superior band it yet again.  Ruination crushed skulls with Finitude, but this new one falls super flat.  Awful production (as opposed to raw), uninteresting tracks, everything just feels like a step back from their previous stunner.

Mayhem - Daemon:  I'm already stretching pretty hard to fill this section out, because frankly I didn't expect this to be any better than it wound up being. Mayhem hasn't been spectacular in nearly two decades, and this is a really safe regular old BM album after a few that flirted with interesting ideas that didn't really connect and if there's one word I never thought I'd use to describe a Mayhem album, it's "safe".

I dunno - The new Ripper EP I guess?:  I think the combination of my musical dowsing rod getting better, 2019 being such an overwhelmingly strong year, and me finally learning to temper my expectations has led to the second year in a row where I really don't have much to say here.  The disappointments section is growing more and more obsolete and I may just do away with it entirely next year.

We are gonna do something slightly different here though.  I always make the main list exclusive to full length releases, mostly because that's just what I usually listen to and what people mostly care about anyway, but y'all may have noticed that my productivity spiked last year as a result of me taking promos seriously for the first time in a decade.  As a result, I've heard way more demos and splits and EPs than I usually do.  So with that in mind, we're gonna indulge in a little side section this year and talk about:

THE TOP 5 DEMOS/EPS OF 2019

5: Blacksoul Seraphim - Profane Devotions
Blacksoul has apparently had a pretty tempestuous history in terms of evolution.  Everybody I've spoken to who is familiar with the band pegs this as a pretty notable departure from their usual sound.  The gothic influences are here in spades of course, particularly in the deep and theatrical male vocals and their interplay with the clean strength of the female vocals, but the riffs are almost 100% bluesy, Sabbathy doom.  There's a lot of bounce as the riffs dance around your ears, and it keeps it relatively light hearted despite the aesthetic darkness.  It's by no means a home run, but it's a lot of fun and I found myself replaying it more often than I expected to as the year ran on.

4: Third Chamber - Harvesting Our Decay
This is another short EP that, on the surface, doesn't really introduce too many new ideas, but I found myself replaying rather often.  This is just damn solid and mean old school death metal with no frills and an excess of excellent riffs.  This is probably an odd comparison, but nearly a decade ago, back when I was writing for Metal Crypt, I was assigned an album by an Italian deathgrind band named Natron, and not much stuck out about them other than a few fantastic riffs amid a bunch of mediocre ones, but Third Chamber here sounds like an entire release based exclusively on the handful of great riffs Natron spat out.  "Mind Rot" in particular makes me want to find the nearest living thing and punch it to death.

3: Cathartic Demise - Cathartic Demise
All riffs all the time.  Cathartic Demise is a very young band but they're already showcasing an understanding of how to deftly intertwine thrash metal with many other families of extreme metal (most prominent being death metal) on par with the greats.  This is a very specific subniche of thrash that I don't really have a name for, but the overwhelming melody and proclivity for progressive noodling that never gets out of hand puts them in a class next to Satyrasis and maybe even Skeletonwitch at their best.  This is just a neverending onslaught and I love every second of it.  It's densely packed with so many riffs and solos that I swear there are two or three of each playing at every single time, and I can't get enough of it.

2: Hellripper - Black Arts & Alchemy
This Midnight-esque "Motorbastard" (as it is sometimes called) style of metal is steadily growing into a pretty formidable subniche, not exactly overflowing with new ideas but the best bands in the style are fucking phenomenal.  Obviously Midnight is arguably the biggest, and Toxic Holocaust could be seen as kickstarting this wave, plus Whipstriker, Deathwish, Bewitcher, Wasteland Riders, and many others, and right near the top of the pack is Hellripper.  Venom + Motorhead + Discharge is such a lethal combination and it honestly astounds me that it took so god damned long for a unified scene to crop up in this age of nostalgia.  Hellripper is one of the best for the reason, and this is just four tracks (five if you count the excellent Running Wild cover) of unending speed and blasphemy.

1: Putrescine - The One Reborn
There's just something about a band that can modernize a classic sound without shamelessly ripping it off that I can't help but fall in love with.  Putrescine is very much in the vein of Altars era Morbid Angel with huge heaps of Suffocation influence, and any death metal freak worth their salt should understand why that's a fantastic base to work with.  I checked this out not because of the promoshit like I did with the rest of these, but entirely because they caught some heat for posting something on Twitter about how misogyny is bad and it's disappointing that it's so prevalent in death metal still, and because the world is ridiculous that wound up being a controversial statement.  I figured I'd give them a listen just because I've been dying to hear some good lefty metal, and we finally got some with Putrescine.


And lastly, a segment I swore to only bring back when something truly exceptional came along:

THE WORST ALBUM OF THE YEAR

Aftermath - There is Something Wrong
What the fuck are you doing, Chicago?  That's two god damned years in a row where my hometown has produced the worst metal album of the year by a gargantuan margin.  I don't even want to talk about this, it's transcendental how inept this album is.  Aftermath is proof positive that I've been correct all along that the current age of nostalgia is a recipe for fucking disaster.  Apparently their early work is excellently unique prog/tech thrash, but I don't want to listen to even see if that's accurate because There is Something Wrong is my first impression and I will never be able to shake this association from my head.  I want to go in depth with this but I just can't.  This is like, Star Wars Prequels level bad-at-everything.  Every single thing about this is wrong.  What can I point out?  The whispered (madafakka....) in "False Flag Flying"?  The hilarious bit in the same song where the vocalist shouts HOLLYWOOD! VATICAN! FBI! CIA! and manages to completely fall out of time despite each bit being a simple three syllable word?  The rapid fire nonsense lyrics of "Diethanasia" followed by the chorus where the gang shouts are completely off time from the riffs?  The entire band constantly falling out of time is a baffling problem that never stops.  You guys are in a studio!  You have infinity tries to get it right!  The back half of the album is largely just weird clippings of news segments and documentaries, and it isn't assembled in a way that's clever or subversive, it's just weird and noisy and incoherent.  This truly needs to be heard to be believed, this is The Room of metal and that isn't an exaggeration.  Imagine the incoherent Infowars ancap ranting of Conformicide era Havok but played by a bunch of fifty-somethings who haven't touched their instruments in decades.  There is a moment about three and a half minutes into "False Flag Flying" where the song is so clearly ending, and then the band just... I dunno, remembers that they wanted to do more with it so they just repeat the first two minutes again, nearly verbatim, awful off-time vocals and all.  This whole thing is bewildering.  Please kill me.


And that's all folks!  I hope you've had a great year and an incredible decade!  It's been a wild ride running this blog for nearly ten years and I hope I stop only when I die.  Here's to the roaring 20s, everybody!