Sunday, December 8, 2019

The best ten metal albums of the decade, so sayeth me.

Just seeing the end of the decade approach us, as I approach the beginning of my 4th decade on this spinning rock myself, is kind of eye opening. It's always fun to look back on where I was ten years ago; newly married to M, broke as fuck, just transferring from community college to McState University to earn my BA. Hadn't been west of the Mississippi River yet, nor even owned a passport. Also legitimately about 90lbs lighter than I am today, with fewer grey hairs, so I guess some things were better ten years ago. Then again, since then I've roadtripped nearly the entire continental United States, completed that BA, as well as one post-grad degree and began a second one, did a pair of prestigious internships at DC Think Tanks, tripled my income, accumulated some shiny toys, managed to remain married to M (who also accomplished amazing things!) and relative to this blog, continue to and perhaps even to a greater degree maintained my connection to and love of this ridiculous obscure noise that is underground heavy metal.

Nothing can ever capture you the way it does when you're young and unfamiliar. That high school breakup hurt more than perhaps a failed relationship in your mid-20's would. The second time you visit a restaurant where you had an amazing meal...it never quite lives up to that first time, even if it still was perfectly fine. It's the same with music; so much of what you listen to as you get older, if you were truly passionate about a genre of music to begin with, will just never capture you the same way as it did the first time you heard those sounds. That's why all of these fucking dinosaur bands keep touring until they're 70; they're collecting bank off of the nostalgia people feel for when I guess their lives were fresh, exciting, and for many of them at their peak. Slayer can suddenly announce they're "retiring", and the rush of nostalgia means that instead of playing 1500 seat rooms, they're playing to 10,000 or more at amphitheaters.

I guess for me that wasn't a problem; high school and being a teenager in a smaller, southern college town was a fucking shit experience. The last ten years, weight gain aside, have truly been my best ten on this planet. So here's to being the old guy in the room, who still goes to shows solo sometimes just to check out who the young up and coming bands are, because maybe someday when I'm at retirement age this current era of metal will make me feel nostalgic.

With that, here's my top ten albums for the decade (2010-2019.) My criteria was pretty simple:

- Did I listen to this album a whole fucking lot? Basically, did I connect with it personally?
- Did the album have a huge impact, or will it have an impact on the music to come?
- Did the album represent something different or like a shift in the sounds being produced by the scene in general?

Not every album is going to cleanly check each of those categories beyond the first one, but as the author offering his subjective thoughts on the last decade of underground metal, here's what I came up with.

10.) Anaal Nathrahk Vanitas (2012)


My reasoning for this album is that, personally, it is my entry point to the band. It also represented a summation of so many styles that in the previous decade may have been distinct from one another; this album isn't Anaal Nathrahk's first stab at merging black metal with industrial samples and treatments, epic cleanly sung choruses, and some tasty At The Gates riffage, but it was probably their most mature, cohesive take on it. I think that this cross pollination of subgenre styles in 2019 is basically expected, as I can listen to an up and coming band like Vitriol and hear elements of that chaotic but memorable style that Anaal Nathrahk was doing at the beginning of the decade.


9.) Hamferd Tamsins Iikam (2018)

Is there such a thing as "post-funeral doom"? Hamferd plays at those slow ethereal tempos, with those massive monolithic riffs. But there's also a certain beautiful serenity about this album, in between the massive riffs and growls, and the tortured operatic singing; I don't speak Faroese but this album reeks of despair. I feel like this album was a shift away from so many of the bands who, with great success, borrowed from Katatonia, Swallow The Sun, and Rapture prior to this release. This is very likely the most obscure choice on my list, but as I heard it then, I remain convinced that doom fans are going to visit this album in the next few years and buy into it big time.


8.) Wormed Exodromos (2013)

So much of the criticism about brutal or technical death metal is that the subgenres are limited by self imposed constraints; artwork and album art have to look a certain way, other than playing faster or playing with more notes and arpeggios or triggering those blasts to go even faster, there's nothing innovative or creative that can be done anymore. The response to that is Wormed, who defy that with their combination of ferocity, jagged rhythms, incomprehensible vocals, and atmosphere that actually sounds like being sucked into a black hole; this wasn't just caveman slam metal. Sure there were other bands, notably Origin, who delved into the cosmic themes before Wormed did, but Wormed managed to create a distinct sound which really reached its maturity with Exodromos; technical, brutal, groovy...Wormed did it all. When I heard bands like Disentomb in 2019 try to write "intellectual slam", I feel that's the impact that Wormed brought to the table.


7.) Trypticon Melana Chasema (2014)

This is the fully evolved version of what Celtic Frost was aspiring to for years; definitely after CF reformed and released Monotheist in 2005. Dark, ominous, foreboding, reeking of sludge and mood. Probably the best record Thomas Gabriel Fischer ever participated on. I still listen to this often. Enough reason to go on the list.


6.) Blood Incantation Hidden History of the Human Race (2019)

This might be recency bias that I rate this at all, or possibly my desire to avoid said bias that keeps me from rating this higher. Blood Incantation represent where death metal is in 2019; sure there's the tech-death olympics to see who can play the most notes the fastest with the most pristine production, and there's certainly a healthy amount of slam bands, and deathcore bands who are evolving into one of those niches, but at the sunken depths of the underground it's bands like Blood Incantation, who emphasize mood and atmosphere above all. Murkier production values meet Immolation vibes, and in certain spots visits Nile-sounding Middle Eastern influences. The songs themselves, of which there's just 4, and only 3 of those have vocals, are grimy death metal but clearly have underpinnings elsewhere; I've read reviews throwing out names like Yes and King Crimson. I'm not a prog rock guy so I don't know one way or another to agree with that, but I wouldn't dispute for a moment that Blood Incantation aren't top notch musicians; there's plenty of guitar theatrics abound here. That said, what I think is going to be the lasting impact of this album might not even be the material on it, which is outstanding, but the fact the album was recorded to tape rather than digitally. The result was that Blood Incantation largely recaptured the best aspects of the 1990's productions that make people so warmly remember how good all of those death metal records by seminal artists like Obituary and Morbid Angel sounded. I think this style of recording, and the warmth it adds to the recorded sound of death metal, is going to come back in a big way.



5.) Full of Hell Trumpeting Esctasy (2017)

I think Full of Hell's ambitiousness in collaborating with noise artists like Merzbow and The Body is what gets the nerds at Pitchfork and Rolling Stone willing to pay attention to them, but Full of Hell is at their best when they keep the samples and nerding to a minimum and just viscerally go for the jugular. Trumpeting Esctasy is probably Full of Hell's peak at indulging their rage monsters within, as for most of this album's 11 tracks and 23 minutes they are peak deathgrind, with blastbeats and roars and razor sharp guitars punishing the listener. Combined with an impressive live show, I think they hit the 2010's in much the same way as Pig Destroyer did in the decade before. The fact Full of Hell are a bit deathier in their grind makes me like them better.


4.) Panopticon Kentucky (2012)

The lineage of this nature focused black metal feels like it obviously traces its roots back to Agalloch, but also even further back, like towards Ulver's Bergtatt album as a spiritual ancestor. Panopticon began as, and really still is, a low-fi one man project by Austin Lunn which encompasses the totality of his musical influences. Kentucky was, and remains, a very bold album as Lunn, who plays basically everything in Panopticon, alternated between Kentucky bluegrass and blistering folk-inspired black metal. It's held together with with a dark enough theme, the struggles of the working class in rural Kentucky; some of the tracks are literally calls to unionize coal miners. This sort of left wing politics in black metal also is a paradigm shift in a genre notorious for pro-fascist NSBM artists and the (at times) suffocating conservatism of many black metal "elite" fans. For me personally, it's been a rabbit hole into Nordvis and Bindrune Recordings and similar sounding artists like Falls of Rauros and Nechochwen. I think there's also been a boom in similar sounding bands, especially from America (the "Cascadian sound") and the UK (Saor, Fen, Winterfellyth), since this band kinda "broke out." Panopticon has continued to release great albums throughout the decade, but Kentucky, with it's most blatant bluegrass influences, remains their peak, IMO.


3.) Pallbearer Heartless (2017)

I think most fans would pick Pallbearer's debut, Sorrow and Extinction as their album of choice, but for me it's their third album, Heartless. Pallbearer pretty much immediately emerged in 2011 as challengers to the throne for best doom band. Hipster and Pitchfork/Noisey approved, nevertheless Pallbearer borrowed from a variety of influences ranging from classic rock to Rwake and New Orleans sludge to write oppressively slow, heavy, yet deeply soulful doom. The reason I give Heartless the nod is because on this effort, they ever so slightly embraced their prog rock and classic rock sensibilities and picked up the pace ever so slightly, crafting a much more listenable record. When Pallbearer releases an album now, it feels like a big deal, and that's more than I can say for many bands who I do enjoy.


2.) Gorguts Colored Sands (2013)

Death metal, now long in the tooth from it's thrash-based origins in the late 80's, has undergone several "movements" as bands have tried to distinguish themselves. Gorguts, in their own history, certainly reinvented themselves from the meaty death metal of Considered Dead to the hyper-technical and admittedly almost unlistenably discordant Obscura album. After a hiatus following the suicide of their drummer, Luc Lemay reactivated the band but instead of retreading their past, went in another direction altogether. Borrowing a bit from bands like Ulcerate, Gorguts used those discordant sounds to create something that, instead of dark and ominous, was still furious but also bombastic and majestic at times...at least as much as a death metal band can be. Colored Sands is both challenging and engaging and demonstrated that death metal doesn't have to be blood splatter and gore, but that it also engage as, dare I say, "high art" if there is such a thing. Much like Wormed, I feel that some of their influence has rubbed on other bands within the death metal scene.


1.) Behemoth The Satanist (2014)

In 2019, it seems to be cool to shit on Adam "Nergal" Darski because he really has made it clear he doesn't give 2 fucks about the metal scene's nebulous "code." Success makes you uncool; having other ventures like barber shops or dating fashion models is apparently against the "code" as determined by the groupthink and memes of the metal underground. Darski obviously doesn't give a shit and why should he? He released an album that not just myself, but it seems much of the "metal press" agrees was the best album of the 2010's.

By the late 2000's, Behemoth was an established metal institution of sorts, having morphed from a mediocre kvlt black metal band into a Polish death metal powerhouse. Albums like Evangelion and Demigod were full of ragers that held up against any of the undergound's Polish darlings (Yattering, Lost Soul, etc.) They were touring world wide, including the United States, and drawing. They could have stayed the course and probably did pretty decent for themselves.

Then Darski was diagnosed with Leukemia and had to fight for his life. Normally, faced with one's impending mortality, people have a funny way of discovering religion and trying to make amends for all of the shit things they've done. Darski? Not a chance. He beats the disease, then records the defiant album The Satanist, a manifest that offers no apologies for his life philosophy. Musically, many of the traits from Behemoth's death metal era remain present; the vocal delivery remains raw throated as ever and the blasts are still quite present. But some of the elements from their black metal era crept forward again, as did a variety of outside musical influences to craft a distinct sound and more haunting mood; this was Behemoth, but more. Angrier, darker, more aggressive, moodier.

The hype this record had to overcome was enormous; "metal media" basically talked this up like it was the second coming of Reign in Blood and to say that it was comparable to reunification of Dissection would be accurate. The front man of this band literally came back from facing death to record this album. Anything less than a masterpiece would have been completely shit on. Instead, Behemoth 100% delivered, and to dispute that is probably rooted in motivations that have nothing to do with the music contained within The Satanist's 45 minutes. What one thinks of Adam "Nergal" Darski in 2019 (honestly, he does some corny and mildly cringe things sometimes, but nothing that represents a crime against the metal scene, stop taking yourselves so goddamn serious, folks) has no impact on the fact that Behemoth did succeed in delivering their Reign in Blood.



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