(Today we’re beginning begin our series of year-end album lists from NCS staff and guest writers. This guest post is from occasional NCS contributor and hard man to please KevinP. The understated title to this post was his idea.)

Like most people I could compile a list of 20 albums that are worthy of praise this year, but I won’t.  This is a Top 10 List and the inclusion of 12 or 15 would just cheapen the rest.  If you don’t make the Top 10, you simply don’t get mentioned.  Heck, I’m listening to an album that just missed the cut, but I won’t even give it the “Honorable Mention” tag, since I’m only giving you 10.  So without further ado, and with massive drumrolls……

10. Master’s Hammer – Vracejte konve na místo

I like my black metal weird.  Ever since 1992 I’ve had a soft spot for Necrocock & Mr. Storm.  Their brand of oddness just resonates with me.  Wasn’t even aware this album was coming until it was (self) released.  Even the term “experimental black metal” doesn’t do justice for those of you who have not experienced this band before. Continue reading »

We’re continuing to re-publish lists of 2012’s best metal as compiled by magazines and “big platform” web sites. As we did last year, today we’re going north of the border and showing you the list revealed today by Canada’s Exclaim!

Exclaim! is a Canadian national print magazine concentrating on music, with a monthly distribution of 100,000 copies to over 2,600 locations across Canada. Exclaim.ca is the business’s web presence, with 300,000 unique visitors per month. Like the other big-platform sites whose lists we’ve re-published, Exclaim! covers a wide range of music, with metal being only one of the genres, and there’s also an emphasis on Canadian talent.

Last year, Exclaim! had a metal-only year-end list (in addition to lists from other music genres). This year they’ve created a Best Albums list that combines metal and hardcore, with 15 entries.

Last year, of all the lists we re-published, Exlaim!’s had the highest percentage of bands whose 2011 albums I hadn’t heard. This year, I’ve heard most of them, but still not all. Here are some observations before we get to the list: Continue reading »

In this piece I’m following up on a discussion that began in the Comment section of one of yesterday’s posts.

We’re in the middle of that time of year when metal sites (and cross-genre sites) publish lists of the year’s best albums. I suspect the initial reaction of most people when they see these lists is to agree or disagree based on whether they liked or disliked albums on the list, or whether the list omitted some of their favorites.  Of course year-end lists can also be really useful as a guide to new music that people might want to check out for the first time.

But let’s take a step back and ask a highly relevant question. In fact, it’s so highly relevant that maybe writers who create lists should be answering it explicitly when they announce their picks:  What makes an album one of the year’s best? The Comments in yesterday’s posts suggested some different ways of answering that question.

Using 2012 old-school death metal releases as an example, one commenter wrote: “They may sound pleasant to our ears, yes, but most of it just ain’t gonna cut it for ‘Best of’ lists, because ‘Best of’ lists ought to honor bands that have at least pleasantly surprised most seasoned extreme metal listeners by pushing the boundaries of their chosen genres or coming up with unique crossovers done thoughtfully and musically coherently.”

To me (and some other commenters), that seems unduly restrictive. The truth is that not many bands in a given year successfully pull off such feats, and even when they do, that doesn’t necessarily mean their albums are going to be among the best of the year. Continue reading »

While awaiting the rollout of our own series of posts devoted to the year’s best metal, I continue to keep an eye out for year-end lists published by what I’ve been calling “big platform” web sites. By “big platform” sites, I mean those that have web traffic which greatly exceeds even the biggest metal-only sites. By definition, these are sites that cover musical genres beyond metal, and usually entertainment interests beyond music.

PopMatters is a popular culture web site with broad coverage of music, film, television, books, comics, software and video games — you name it. Its articles get picked up regularly by the mainstream media, and it claims a readership of more than 1 million unique visitors per month. In other words, it fits the profile of “big platform” web sites whose lists of 2012′s best metal we’ve been re-publishing here at NCS.

Today, PopMatters published its list of “The Best Metal of 2012″, ranking the chosen albums from #20 to #1. The list was compiled by Craig Hayes, Adrien Begrand, Dean Brown, Brice Ezell, and Dane Prokofiev (who is an occasional contributor to NCS). To see the list with accompanying descriptions and explanations of the choices along with sample tracks from most of the listed albums, use this link.

It’s a very interesting list, which we’re re-publishing after the jump. You will see some names that have appeared on other lists we’ve published so far. In fact, those names are appearing so frequently I suspect they would be on some “consensus list” if anyone were to compile such a thing (with Panopticon’s Kentucky turning into a real dark-horse favorite). But you’ll also see some new entries that may be surprising (at least they surprised me — pleasantly): Author & Punisher (coming in at No. 4!),  Atriarch, Krallice, Dragged Into Sunlight, and Ahab. But the biggest surprise is the pick for the No. 1 spot. Continue reading »

At least in my crazy country, Thanksgiving is a pivotal day in the year. Today, people who are lucky eat too much in the company of friends and/or family.  Tomorrow, people begin spending money they don’t have on presents people don’t need. And today also begins the countdown to the end of the year.  From now ’til then, people take stock of the year and begin making lists of the best and worst that the year has brought us.

In the world of metal, that means lists of the best albums (and sometimes the worst).  Back in 2009, when this site was just an ugly, smelly baby 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 the year’s 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. It’s just too damned much work, and I’m allergic to work. Fortunately, we have some other regular contributors who have more energy, and we’ll be publishing their year-end lists in December. We’ll also be publishing the year-end lists that major metal publications and “big platform” web sites are compiling; we started doing that yesterday with DECIBEL magazine’s list of 2012’s Top 40 Albums.

We’re also inviting some other folks to give us their lists in the form of guest posts for this site. And we’ll also have our annual list of the extreme metal songs we thought were the most infectious of the year. Soon, I’ll post an invitation for your song suggestions.

But we ain’t stopping there. If YOU have made your own list of the best metal albums you heard this year, we want to see it. Because we’re fucking nosy like that. (details about this invitation are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »