LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST BY PROFESSOR D. GROVER THE XIIITH

 LISTMANIA 2023  5 Responses »
Dec 202023
 

(Our friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth (ex-The Number of the Blog) has been joining us this time of year for many years to share his diverse year-end lists, and does so again now. There’s a lot here, and it truly is diverse.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. Another year ends, and with that ending comes a barrage of year-end album lists and Spotify Wrapped graphics. Personality, I enjoy writing these lists because it helps me contextualize the past 11 or so months of music listening. As with previous years, this year featured an abundance of really good, entertaining music across a number of genres, and narrowing my list down to 20 was extremely difficult.

Before I get to the list proper, however, here’s a few lists of honorable mentions, divided into a few loose categories. This year, I found myself connecting a number of albums together due to certain similarities, and while I had my struggles in trying to figure out how to represent this in my list, in the end I settled on this method (with a few notable exceptions that made my top 20… more on that later). Anyway, let’s get this started. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NECROTUM — “SHATTERED FLOW OF TIME”

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Dec 202023
 

Gaze upon the fabulously ghastly cover art for Necrotum‘s new album Defleshed Exhumation and you’ll know that death metal will follow.

The writhing and hook-lined tentacles, their shadows stretching into the endless distance, the skeletons immersed in putrefying fluids, all of it overseen by the sunken eyes of a looming death’s head, it all foretells gruesome horrors to come.

But what kind of death metal awaits us? Surely something rancid, surely something influenced by progenitors from the ’90s… and those guesses prove to be correct, but don’t go far enough, as you’ll understand when you hear the track we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s January release by Memento Mori. Continue reading »

NEILL JAMESON CAN’T SHUT THE FUCK UP: 2023 LIST I

 LISTMANIA 2023  3 Responses »
Dec 202023
 

photo by Hillarie Jason

(One of the perennial highlights of our year-end LISTMANIA series are the articles Neill Jameson has contributed, and we’re very happy that he’s doing so again this year. This one is the first of a handful of Parts we’ll be publishing. To be clear, Neill wrote the title of this feature himself. And hey, you should check out Krieg‘s new album Ruiner too.)

I’m getting a later start on these this year, meaning I’ve already seen a lot of year-end lists, mostly due to checking to see if my last album made any of them. And because of this I could easily make the joke that most journalists have Helen Keller’s musical taste. I’d like to think I’m above such low hanging fruit, however.

In years past I’ve sectioned these lists off by demos, albums and dungeon synth. This year I’m ignoring that format in favor of dumping a ton of unrelated genres together outside of the final one, which will be the traditional “best of” list. Why am I doing this? I’m glad you asked and showed sincere curiosity: in the customer service industry we’ve begun using the phrase “surprise and delight the customer” and I’d like to take this wonderful philosophy into my writing. 

Or I’m just lazier than usual this year. Because fuck the customer.  Continue reading »

DGR’S YEAR-END REVIEW ROUNDUP (PART 3): SNAKEMOTHER, ABSOLUTISM, DEVILS REEF

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Dec 202023
 

This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the third Part of his four-Part collection of reviews that we started rolling out yesterday, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before. You’ll find his full explanation for what he’s doing here at the beginning of Part I. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DIPYGUS — “THE DOVER DEMON”

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Dec 192023
 

The last time we premiered a song by Dipygus (here) we resorted to the word “macabre” not once but twice. Feeling somewhat nauseated, we also shared the results of our researches into the meaning of the band’s name and a particularly disgusting bodily infiltration referred to in the title of the song we shared.

We shared other info about this California band’s wide-ranging but thoroughly bizarre thematic interests, but not nearly enough. A more complete listing of those unusual interests would swell to extravagant proportions, but this time we’re going to provide the more complete exegesis… eventually… after we’ve dealt with the meat of the matter today, which is another Dipygus premiere.

But don’t overlook that historical record at the end of this article, because it’s highly entertaining Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST FROM TODD MANNING

 LISTMANIA 2023  2 Responses »
Dec 192023
 

(As we continue rolling out the year-end lists of our writers, today we move to selections from Todd Manning.)

I think I found the formula for my year-end list last year. Every year, once my own list is finished, I pour over every other list I can find and I am reminded I am a fan first, musician and writer after. So I will keep it brief and give you a bunch of records I loved and I hope you find something new and exciting to check out. Continue reading »

DGR’S YEAR-END REVIEW ROUNDUP (PART 2): NIGHT CROWNED, GHOSTS OF ATLANTIS, MORTIS CRUENTAS, SECRET OF DARKNESS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 192023
 

This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the second Part of a four-Part collection of reviews that we started rolling out yesterday, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before. You’ll find his full explanation for what he’s doing here at the beginning of Part I. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MALOKARPATAN

 Interviews  1 Response »
Dec 192023
 

(We’re extremely pleased to present a great discussion between our Comrade Aleks and Malokarpatan‘s Adam Sičák, an interview that delves into the band’s past, present, and possible futures.)

The Slovakian band Malokarpatan is well-known to those who appreciate authentic old-fashioned metal. They combined proto-black and heavy metal with avant-garde themes and told grim stories taken from native folklore and history.

The first nine years of Malokarpatan‘s career were full of recordings and gigs, but now with the release of the fourth album Vertumnus Caesar, they’re going to focus only on the composition of the new material.

We interviewed the band’s mastermind Adam Sičák about two years ago (here) and covered the band’s entire discography which consists of three albums at the moment. Now it’s time to discuss Vertumnus Caesar, and Adam always has a few good ideas to share. Continue reading »

AN NCS TEASER PREMIERE: ABERRATION AND DIABOLIC OATH

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Dec 182023
 

Here, we’re doing something we almost never do — premiering brief excerpts from songs off a forthcoming release. Such things are mere teasers, even more teasing than the premiere of a complete song from an album or EP that you can’t yet hear in full.

So why did we cave in and sweep away our usual reticence to brutally tease our visitors? You’re about to find out. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST FROM WIL CIFER

 LISTMANIA 2023  2 Responses »
Dec 182023
 

(This week we begin presenting year-end lists from NCS writers other than Andy Synn, who finished his NCS list week last Friday. To begin this week, here’s a year-end Top 20 list from Wil Cifer.)

Given the world’s present apocalyptic trajectory this year’s Top 20 Metal Albums list might be the last of these lists I make. The tone of my listening this year shifted in a more nihilistic direction. I listened to more death metal this year, which might have less to do with becoming acclimated to living in Tampa and more to do with celebrating death as an inevitable end to this cycle of life. Metal has always been my therapeutic outlet. Even before I was formally diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, I used Doom metal to lean into my depressive episodes. Now I am more intentional with this ritual, so there might be a decent dose of doom ahead. Continue reading »

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