As you undoubtedly know by now, part of our year-end Listmania series consists of re-publishing lists of the year’s best metal that appear on what I’ve been calling “big platform” web sites. We didn’t include a year-end list from Stereogum in previous years, but I think it’s worth doing now.

Stereogum was one of the web’s first blogs to offer mp3 downloads, and it has evolved into a high-traffic portal with a focus on independent and alternative music news, downloads, videos, and gossip. Today Stereogum published its list of The Top 40 Metal Albums of 2012. I paid attention to the list, as I have for other “big platform” sites, because I’m curious to see what metal albums are being recommended by sites whose audiences probably consume a lot more non-metal than metal. But I also paid attention to the list because some writers with taste were involved in compiling it:

The extended introduction to the list was written by Stereogum’s news editor Michael Nelson, and the list itself list was compiled by Nelson plus Stereogum contributors Aaron Lariviere, Wyatt Marshall, and Doug Moore, all of whom also write for Invisible Oranges.

Interestingly, unlike other “big platform” lists we’ve published so far this year, the Stereogum list consciously excluded some albums that other cross-genre sites have included, in part because of doubts about whether the albums are really metal — and I’m talking about the 2012 releases by Baroness, Swans, Torche, and Converge. As you might predict from these exclusions, the albums on the list are also more consistently extreme than what we’ve seen from other big sites. 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 »