LIST: TOP 50 METAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

It’s that time of year, where I face a legitimate heavy metal Sophie’s Choice and somehow narrow all of the releases I’ve enjoyed this year down to 50. A lot of truly solid albums are not listed here, and honestly, my rankings have fluctuated nearly every day for the past two months, when I handed in my initial Top 40 list to the editors at Decibel Magazine. I have no doubt that if I look at this list in another year or decade, hell, even another week, the rankings could shift and shuffle depending on my mood, the cereal I eat, how crowded the subway is that morning, etc. Feel free to inform me of how lousy my selections are, how overrated band A is, how album B is obviously the top selection of the year, and how I’ve terribly under-represented genre C.

2013 Top 50 Metal Albums of the Year

1.       Church of Misery – Thy Kingdom Scum

2.       Carcass – Surgical Steel

3.       Gorguts – Colored Sands

4.       Inquisition - Obscure Verses for the Multiverse

5.       Ramming Speed – Doomed to Destroy, Destined to Die

6.       Anciients – Heart of Oak

7.       Nails – Abandon All Life

8.       Baptists – Bushcraft

9.       Shroud Eater – Dead Ends

10.   Lesbian – ForesTeleVision

11.   Serpent Eater – Hyena

12.   Tribulation - The Formulas of Death

13.   Obelyskkh - Hymn to Pan

14.   I Exist – From Darkness

15.   Noisem – Agony Defined

16.   KEN Mode – Entrench

17.   Usnea – Usnea

18.   Skeletonwitch – Serpents Unleashed

19.   Naam – Vow

20.   Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Mind Control  

21.   Deafheaven – Sunbather

22.   Olde Growth – Owl EP

23.   Mammoth Grinder – Underworlds

24.   Exhumed – Necrocracy

25.   Koresh – Chump

26.   Serpent Throne – Brother Lucifer

27.   No Fealty – In the Shadow of the Monolith

28.   Toxic Holocaust - Chemistry of Consciousness

29.   Full of Hell – Rudiments of Mutilation

30.   Lycus - Tempest

31.   In Solitude – Sister

32.   Mount Salem – Endless

33.   Bone Sickness – Alone in the Grave

34.   Noctum – Final Sacrifice

35.   Weekend Nachos - Still

36.   Blood Red Throne - Blood Red Throne

37.   Red Fang – Whales and Leeches

38.   King of Pigs - Drown Out the Sound of Widows Grief

39.   Cokegoat – Vessel

40.   Obliteration – Black Death Horizon

41.   Revocation – Revocation

42.   Lumbar – The First and Last Days of Unwelcome

43.   Suffocation - Pinnacle of Bedlam

44.   Autopsy - The Headless Ritual

45.   Watain - The Wild Hunt

46.   Pyrexia - Feast of Iniquity

47.   Deeds of Flesh - Portals to Canaan

48.   Occultist – Death Sigils

49.   Great Falls – Accidents Grotesque

50.   Deuil – Acceptance/Rebuild

If you haven’t checked it out yet, go buy the new issue of Decibel Magazine, where the whole staff helps to select the Top 40 Extreme Albums of the Year. Check out all the other lists popping up around this time also and feel free to send Tweets about my questionable metal taste over to @MisterGrowl.

LIST: 10 MOST ANTICIPATED BANDS of MARYLAND DEATHFEST

I love making lists. In fact, that probably why I was offered the role of Oskar Schindler, in Schindler’s List. I said, “Steven [Spielberg], I make lists all the time.” And he said, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.” (My next list will be HBO shows that I quote from too often, starting with this quip from Liam Neeson in Life’s Too Short.)

Before I let the rabbit out of the hat or the cat out of the bag or whatever other animal cliche fits here with my TOP 50 EXTREME ALBUMS OF THE YEAR, I wanted to start with a list of the bands I’m looking forward to seeing most at Maryland Deathfest. It’s my first year attending, so I’ll be targeting international bands who don’t tour often, and a few North American bands who have evaded me thus far:

10) Noothgrush. Recently missed them playing in Brooklyn, and you never know how long it will be before these West Coast sludge-slingers visit the borough again. If there was a split album you enjoyed over the last 17 years they were probably involved.

9) Bongripper. I love the Chicago doom scene, and there’s nobody in the Midwest who can touch the bleakness of Hate Ashbury and Satan Worshipping Doom.

8) Crowbar. I traded Monster Magnet’s Powertrip album for Crowbar’s Obedience Thru Suffering back in junior high school, and it went down as one of the best trades of all time.

7) Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats. With so much screaming and growling, this UK band’s brand of macabre doom rock will be a reprieve from extremity. Great songs that avoid that lazy “retro” tag people love and just provide great hooks and a sense of mystery.

6) The Secret. I still think Solve et Coagula is one of the more underrated albums out there, and I’ve missed my chance at seeing this Italian band several times in Brooklyn. NOT THIS TIME.

5) Coffins. Blurring that line between death metal and sludge, their music seems like the perfect soundtrack for swimming through a pond of entrails. With the government holding up work/travel VISAs to the point where Church of Misery cancelled their NYC show earlier this year, any time a band I dig from Japan heads this way I make sure to attend.

4) My Dying Bride. I always loved the sense of sophistication and drama they brought to doom, and Turn Loose the Swans was one of the first albums that persuaded me to embrace slower-tempo genres back when I was a grindcore maniac in high school.

3) Gorguts. Unfortunately I’ll be missing their show at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn in December, so MDF offers me a chance to see a band whose comeback has given us Colored Sands, an album I feel even surpasses the legendary Obscura in terms of vision, focus, and grandiosity.

2) At the Gates. Since the first time I heard an old Earache records sampler, I was infatuated with Tomas Lindberg’s bark and the melodic savagery of Slaughter of the Soul.

1) The Church of Pungent Stench. Not only does the Been Caught Buttering album art adorn my battle vest, but Martin Schirenc is the culprit for igniting my adoration for death metal. I love his Hollenthon project as well, but it obviously starts with the gruesome excess of Pungent Stench.

Check out the full list of bands over at the Maryland Deathfest website, and tell me how wrong I am about this list:  https://www.marylanddeathfest.com/

REVIEW: GORGUTS - COLORED SANDS

Sometimes there’s music that just isn’t made for the 13 year old mind, the age I bought my first Gorguts album, the now-legendary Obscura. At that that I couldn’t appreciate the artistry involved, and I wanted, above all else, more breakdowns. It’s like expecting a teenager to get totally pumped about Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Go live a little, then revisit.

Gorguts have never been an easy listen, and Colored Sands (their first studio album since 2001’s From Wisdom to Hate) certainly doesn’t deviate from their reputation as a challenging band that demands patience and full attention from their audience. That being said, there are moments here where they sound almost traditionally heavy, with head-banging momentum and groove amidst the chaos and cacophony. When they’re at their best, Gorguts sound like death metal an alien species might make when trying to replicate earthling heavy metal, trying to slowly worm their way into our population. Starting with “Le Toit du Monde,” band founder Luc Lemay and company dazzle with technicality that lures you into its confounding labyrinth of sound. The title track is simply one of the best metal songs of this young century, with clean guitar building like an escalating warning call that builds to a fanged burst of crawling death. It’s a song that will hunt and haunt you to the end of human existence.

The only thing predictable about Gorguts is their unpredictability. Just when you think you’ve figured out their discordant brand of planet-melting metal you hear “The Battle of Chamdo,” a piece performed by a string quartet that feels like Danny Elfman composing music for a long-lost Hitchcock film. Throw in the John Zorn freak-out of “Enemies of Compassion” and the intoxicated, kaleidoscopic sludge of “Absconders” and there’s no shortage of standout performances on display here. Anyone familiar with Coneheads knows that extra-terrestrials claim to come from France. Judging by the alien sounds of Colored Sands, however, they may actually say they’re French Canadian.

Colored Sands released TODAY in North America, so order it from Season of Mist over here:  http://e-shop.season-of-mist.com/en/bands/gorguts/913