LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY NEILL JAMESON (PART 1)

 LISTMANIA 2019  2 Responses »
Dec 232019
 

 

(For the sixth year in a row, we’re grateful that Neill Jameson (Krieg, Poison Blood) accepted our invitation to share with us and you a list releases from the past year that made an impact on him. His lists always provide welcome discoveries, and the one this year which is divided into two parts — is no different. Look for Part 2 tomorrow.)

Going over my year-end thing from last year I’m struck with how dour of a tone it takes and I’m reminded of how difficult I found putting that list together. Not that the choices I made were bad, far from it, but those were the only records I could pull out of last year that I felt anything for. Only two of them remain in rotation, maybe three. Kind of self-fulfilling since nearly every time I’ve been given the honor to thrust my tastes at you I always warn of how people don’t actually pay attention to the records on these lists a few weeks after the new year starts. I guess this means I’m not better than any of you since I’m guilty of the same thing, and now my entire world is crumbling. Also I quit smoking a week ago.

Any of this only matters because I’ve had a much more difficult and, honestly, awful year than I have in… well… years, and yet the only reason this list is a lot tougher than 2018 is because this has been an incredible year for music and I’ve only scratched the surface with this list. Much like 2017, I have to do two pieces for shit I think you should give a listen to. Hope you get something out of them. This first part will focus on the full-lengths while the second part will be the fucking myriad odds and ends this year that kept dropping like a rat shitting in a hoarder’s dining room. Continue reading »

2019 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE EPs

 LISTMANIA 2019  2 Responses »
Dec 232019
 

 

(In some past years Andy Synn has launched his roll-out of personal year-end lists with one devoted to EPs and other shorter releases, but this year it comes after all the others — and you’ll find the others linked below.)

As you may have noticed, since the publication of my Disappointing/Good/Great/Critical/Personal lists I’ve been easing back a little bit, giving myself room to rest and relax as well as allowing other writers (both regulars and guests) a chance to step into the spotlight instead.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been entirely clocked out, however, and over the next week or two I have another couple of articles planned (including, due to popular demand, a “Best” of the decade list), beginning today with a round-up of the many different EPs and short releases which I’ve enjoyed over the last twelve months. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY DGR (PART 5)

 LISTMANIA 2019  4 Responses »
Dec 202019
 

 

(We have reached the end of DGR’s week-long roll-out of his Top 50 year-end list, with this segment devoted to the Top 10. All the preceding installments can be found behind this link.)

The final ten of this year’s year-end list is special to me. That coud be easily stated for every year, but 2019 is one of those years that just went absolutely crazy — in fits and starts of course, there’s a lot of April and September representation here — and it brought on a massive torrent of metal that not only pushed out the boundaries of the genre but also twisted, mutated, and contorted it into all-new forms. You also had fantastic releases from groups who are already working within well-established blueprints and finding ways to keep things interesting.

While I could go on an endless screed about 2019 as a whole, keep in mind that although I have fifty releases on the list that I particularly enjoyed — an admittedly ridiculous number —  I listened to and generally got a kick out of so many more. A lot of those are popping up at NCS, on other writers’ lists and on users’ lists, and even on the occasional big website list when they’re not seeing just how much prose they can dedicate to Blood Incantation or showing off that they’re hip with the kids by nominating every teenager’s favorite new and hip band Tool (and I love Tool). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY DGR (PART 4)

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Dec 192019
 

 

(We continue a week-long rollout of a 2019 Top 50 list by NCS scribe DGR, counting down in groups of 10 each day. In this fourth installment we’ve got Nos. 20 through 11.)

When you reach the final twenty or so of your year-end list – as ridiculous as it may have gotten *cough* – you start to develop some sort of a mission statement. I can’t really say that I’ve accomplished that this time around, I’ve just continued to notice really small trends within each grouping. Last time I noticed that I wound up bookending the list with black metal and this time I found that the groups at top and bottom were deathgrind bands. In between there was a smattering of all sorts of different genres, including two albums that I can’t quite pin down to any one specific style, other than what could politely be described as “complete madness”.

2019 was an adventure musically, and I think part of that is reflected in some of the longer running times of the albums present on here as well. I discovered I was really open to the idea of exploring a whole bunch of massive soundscapes – which again is hilarious, given that the records at positions 20 and 11 are the punchiest of the no-bullshit style deathgrind bands out there. We’ve also got some of the earliest and some of the latest 2019 releases packed in here, as well as September continuing its hot streak for having been a fantastic month for music.

We’re only one day away now from the super-shiny, absolutely-unfuckwithable, proof that DGR has his finger on the pulse of the world of heavy metal, final ten of the year. So let’s enjoy this latest smattering of bands and see how many of you can still walk after being put through the wringer by this group. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY DGR (PART 3)

 LISTMANIA 2019  5 Responses »
Dec 182019
 

 

(We continue a week-long rollout of a 2019 Top 50 list by NCS scribe DGR, counting down in groups of 10 each day. In this third installment we’ve got Nos. 30 through 21.)

Absent for a little while in this collective, what passes for black metal in my realm makes a return in part three of this year-end adventure. I think that I actually bookended this collection with that very thing this time around, because now is when rankings actually start to crystalize a little bit.

It still applies here, but usually when I do these it isn’t until I hit the final fifteen or so that you actually have a meaningful empirical ranking of shit that I’ve enjoyed this year. Everything else tends to be in flux, with some movements more drastic than others. Like the creation of a planetary system, all of these albums acrete around a solid gravitational pull, but the materials knock into each other all the time and either force each other into new orbits or they merge into new beings. Thus, when you reach thirty or so is when you really start coming across the albums that got a shit-ton of play from me this year.

Some were very late-in-the-year entries and others were so constant that they were the subject of the ‘oh shit did that actually come out this year or has it always been with me‘ existential panic that happens every year with this list. At the very least I haven’t revealed any of the 2020 promos we’ve gotten yet, so I’m going to take my small victories where I can get them.

There’s some fun ones in this collection next to the moodier black metal kids, and I think this one also has the start of a small subset of bands that I think contributed to the feeling that heavy metal lost its goddamned mind in 2019. Or it’s always been in the midst of a manic episode and this is the first year when I really noticed. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY DGR (PART 2)

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Dec 172019
 

 

(We continue a week-long rollout of a 2019 Top 50 list by NCS scribe DGR, counting down in groups of 10 each day, and in this installment we’ve got Nos. 40 through 31.)

By day two it is fun seeing what patterns start to form in these lists. Barring the predictable decay of my writing ability over the course of fifty albums — because seriously, who actually does these at a reasonable pace and doesn’t just procrastinate and do it all at once? — this edition of my year-end archive starts to see the appearances of the hyperblasting death metal crews from Italy, a whole block of tech-death, and even some bands whom I’m normally used to posting much higher by year’s end.

2019 was a wild year for metal. It seemed to move in fits and starts, but each transmission in the heavy metal release schedule seemed to be a massive one. For instance: I started to notice that I have a surprising amount of albums that hit in September on here (this collection includes a small handful of them). Earlier on, there were huge blocks of releases in the last few weeks of January and the opening of February.

On top of all that, I found that this specific subset is also very Europe-oriented. That’s pretty predictable, given Metal’s long-lasting appeal over on that continent, but usually I find they’re spread out more across my list. Maybe it’s because I have two of the death metal blasting crews here? Either way, the rest of these aren’t going to write themselves, and I’m still looking forward to shouting at you about underrated deathgrind discs at some point — as is my custom — so let’s continue this death march through this 2019 collection together. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: BANDCAMP DAILY’S “THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2019”

 LISTMANIA 2019  7 Responses »
Dec 172019
 

 

Our year-end LISTMANIA series usually consists of a mix of lists compiled by cross-genre sites and zines much larger than our own, and year-end favorites assembled by our own staff and guests. This next list, however, doesn’t really fall into either category, but I thought it was worth including last year, and I’m doing it again this year.

Bandcamp, of course, has become a vital platform for the digital release of music of all stripes (and physical merchandise as well) since its founding in 2007. Bandcamp used to release an annual compilation of performance statistics, but I haven’t found a similar report since the one they released for 2017. However, the main Bandcamp page today reports that “[f]ans have paid artists $441 million using Bandcamp, and $9.2 million in the last 30 days alone.”

In the summer of 2016, the company launched Bandcamp Daily, “an online music publication which expanded its editorial content and offers articles about artists on the platform” (to quote The Font of All Human Knowledge). Bandcamp Daily regularly publishes articles of relevance to metalheads, though metal is of course only one of hundreds of music genres represented on Bandcamp. Yesterday Bandcamp Daily published its list of “The Best Metal Albums of 2019“. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: A YEAR-END LIST BY DGR (PART 1)

 LISTMANIA 2019  2 Responses »
Dec 162019
 

 

(Today we begin a week-long rollout of a 2019 Top 50 list by NCS scribe DGR, counting down in groups of 10 each day this week — or at least that’s the plan.)

These year-end archives — I’ve ceased any pretense of them being a list other than by the most basic description until the final ’10’ — are always a blast to write. They provide me an opportunity to be my most verbose while also touching base with everyhting that I enjoyed this year, including the many others I wound up bubbling out in my quest to finally have a ‘neat’ top 50 without a bunch of qualifiers.

This year was especially difficult on a personal front — which I’ve made small mention of, but there’s no need to have me dump that upon you in detail — and it resulted in a about a three-month period this year during which I wound up having to check out of heavy metal entirely. Turns out a musical genre that prides itself on being a sort of explosive catharsis isn’t exactly what one might need when going through massive life changes. So, part of 2019 has been me playing a very fucked-up and bizarre form of catch-up while also keeping in mind that I was going to do one of these before the year wrapped up and desperately wanted to dance around any sort of recency bias. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: ROLLING STONE’S LIST OF THE 10 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2019

 LISTMANIA 2019  9 Responses »
Dec 122019
 

 

Here’s another entry in the part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy where we re-post lists of metal from “big platform” web sites and print zines — the kind of places that get a lot more eyeballs on them than festering little metal-only hovels like ours.

Rolling Stone magazine should need no introduction, so I’m not going to provide one. Not long ago they published their list of The 50 Best Albums of 2019. The sub-headline for the article reads as follows:  “From ‘Lover’ to ‘Cuz I Love You,’ ‘Death Race to Love,’ and beyond, here are the records that defined the year”. The list didn’t exactly define the year for metal. In fact, I didn’t spot even one metal album on that list. Not one.

However, more recently Rolling Stone published a separate list of The 10 Best Metal Albums of 2019 (presented by Mercedes-Benz, because of course that’s the brand preferred by most metal bands when they’re throwing around their big piles of cash). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2019

 LISTMANIA 2019  8 Responses »
Dec 092019
 

 

Stereogum easily qualifies as one of the “big platform” web sites whose year-end lists of metal we perennially include in our LISTMANIA series. Of course, the site appeals to an audience of music fans much larger than devoted metalheads (they have, for example, a list of the “50 Best Albums of 2019“ across many musical genres — which includes only two albums that I think would qualify as metal), but its staff includes a talented and tasteful group of metal writers who among other things are responsible for the site’s monthly “The Black Market” column, which has been a great source of discovery for extreme music for seven years running now.

It follows that Stereogum‘s annual metal list is one I especially look forward to seeing every year, and the 2019 edition appeared last Friday. It consists of only 10 entries, collectively assembled by Ian Chainey, Aaron Lariviere, and Wyatt Marshall (and perhaps the ghost of Michael Nelson). Continue reading »

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