(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 »

(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 »