LISTAMNIA 2017: ROLLING STONE’S 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2017

 LISTMANIA 2017  27 Responses »
Dec 072017
 


 

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: THIS IS ROLLING STONE’S LIST. IT IS NOT OUR LIST. THIS IS ROLLING STONE’S LIST. IT IS NOT OUR LIST.

If you thought that was already so obvious that only an idiot would need to be told, well, you obviously don’t remember the famous/infamous Comment No. 7 to our re-post of Rolling Stone’s list in 2013. Though you may have seen how that has been transformed into a running joke every fucking year since then. The only uncertainty now is who will be the first person to do it on this post. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: REVOLVER’S LIST OF THE 20 BEST ALBUMS OF 2017

 LISTMANIA 2017  12 Responses »
Dec 062017
 

photograph by Fred Pessaro

 

If you happen to be stumbling in here for the first time, I’ll repeat that as part of our LISTMANIA 2017 series, we re-post lists of the year’s best metal that appear in a few selected print zines and on web sites with large cross-genre music audiences.  Today, as in previous years, we’re sharing a list of the “20 Best Albums of 2017” that Revolver magazine published yesterday.

Revolver has undergone a change of ownership since last year’s list, and is now owned by Project M Group LLC. Revolver bills itself as the “Biggest hard-rock and metal magazine in North America”, with a “3x larger subscriber base than next U.S. metal print publication”, and a substantial social media presence  “with over 1B impressions per month across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter”. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: THE POPMATTERS LIST OF “THE BEST METAL OF 2017”

 LISTMANIA 2017  21 Responses »
Dec 012017
 

 

As part of our annual NCS LISTMANIA extravaganza we re-publish lists of the year’s best metal that appear on web sites that appeal to vastly larger numbers of readers than we do — not because those readers or the writers have better taste in metal than our community does, but more from a morbid curiosity about what the great unwashed masses are being told is best for them. It’s like opening a window that affords an insight into the way the rest of the world outside our own disease-ridden nooks and crannies perceives the music that is our daily sustenance.

One of those sites is PopMatters. It has been in existence since 1999. In its own words the site “is an international magazine of cultural criticism and analysis” with a scope that “is broadly cast on all things pop culture”, including “music, television, films, books, video games, sports, theatre, the visual arts, travel, and the Internet”. PopMatters claims that it is “the largest site that bridges academic and popular writing in the world”.

As in past years, today PopMatters published a list of “The Best Metal of 2017” under the by-lines of Dean Brown and Spyros Stasis (in previous years the list was compiled by Adrien Begrand), although Dean Brown explains in his introduction that the “list is a collaborative effort by writers with different tastes”, whose names are identified in the commentary accompanying each selection. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: AN INVITATION FOR READERS’ LISTS OF THE YEAR’S BEST METAL

 LISTMANIA 2017  136 Responses »
Dec 012017
 

 

We’re now beginning the final month of 2017, and you know what that means: Now begins the final countdown to the end of the year (and the strengthening onslaught of the annual holiday season). In the world of metal, this month we’ll also start seeing more and more lists of the year’s best releases.

Back in 2009, when this site was just a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end “best albums” list. However, we publish the picks of each of our regular staff writers as well as a large group of guest writers (which we’ll start doing later this month).

Every year we also invite our readers to share their lists and we’re doing that again right here, right now. If you’ve been pondering what you’ve heard this year and have made your own list of the albums, EPs, or splits released in 2017 that you think are the best of what you’ve heard, we invite you to share it with us in the Comments section to this post. And if you haven’t made a list yet but want to, there’s still plenty of time (read below). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA BEGINS: THE DECIBEL TOP 40 FOR 2017

 LISTMANIA 2017, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  42 Responses »
Nov 202017
 

 

Every year our LISTMANIA series of posts includes not only lists of the year’s best releases as compiled by our staff, invited guests, and our esteemed readers, but also lists assembled by what we call “big platform” web sites and selected print magazines. And every year, it seems that DECIBEL magazine provides the launch for LISTMANIA by coming out with the first of the lists we see from that category of web sites and print zines — and they’ve done it again this year.

I’m a long-time DECIBEL subscriber, but my hard copy of the January edition, which features Steve Tucker on the cover and includes the YE list, hasn’t hit my mailbox yet. However, today DECIBEL provided an on-line teaser for the issue that included their full ranking of the year’s Top 40 albums.

This is the second year in a row that DECIBEL has scooped their own list rather than letting leeches like me do it, and so I can now again re-publish their list without too much guilt. There is of course a lot more content in the January issue, including commentary about each of these 40 albums and why they were selected (you can read everything else DECIBEL has previewed about the January issue here). Continue reading »

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