LISTMANIA 2016: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE BEST 50 ALBUMS OF 2016

 LISTMANIA 2016  17 Responses »
Dec 032016
 

stereogum-50-best-albums-2016

 

As you probably know, part of our year-end LISTMANIA series involves re-posting year-end lists of the best metal releases as selected by what I call “big platform” web sites and print zines, i.e., publications that reach numbers of readers vastly in excess of those reached by sites like ours that are more exclusively focused on metal, and in our case the more extreme variants of the genre.

In recent days Stereogum posted its list of “The Best 50 Albums of 2016“. This isn’t a “metal only” list. It’s an impossible comparison of apples to oranges, identifying and ranking albums across a wide range of musical genres. I suppose in that respect it’s like the musical equivalent of the Westminster Dog Show. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE 50 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2015

 LISTMANIA 2015  42 Responses »
Dec 102015
 

STEREOGUM 50 BEST METAL ALBUMS

 

Of all the year-end lists we re-post from “big platform” web sites as part of our LISTMANIA extravaganza, this is the one I most look forward to seeing. It’s Stereogum’s list of “The 50 Best Metal Albums of 2015“, which was published today. I look forward to it because it’s assembled by a team of people whose opinions I respect a lot — the five guys responsible for Stereogum’s excellent Black Market column this year: Michael Nelson, Doug Moore, Ian Chainey, Aaron Lariviere, and Wyatt Marshall.

This year’s Stereogum list is preceded by a long opinion piece — prompted in part by Disma’s removal from some metal festival line-ups — that raises the thorny and always-controversial issue of whether there are lines crossed by musicians that warrant “excommunication” of their music from our lives. Regardless of what you think about that issue, this is a good and interesting list. It includes some of whom we can safely anoint as “the usual suspects” this year, but some deep cuts as well. And I’m especially happy to see the pick at the top of the list. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: METAL NAMES ON LISTS OF THE 50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2015 FROM STEREOGUM, ROLLING STONE, AND SPIN

 LISTMANIA 2015  16 Responses »
Dec 072015
 

Stereogum 50 Best

 

As part of our year-end LISTMANIA series, we bring you lists of the year’s best metal from a few print zines with wide circulation and from some cross-genre web platforms that get orders-of-magnitude more eyeballs than we do. In the case of most of these other lists, we do this as a way of peaking at what the wider world sees, since our world is very narrow and subterranean. In this post, we’re looking at Stereogum, Rolling Stone, and SPIN. It won’t take you long to read the metal names on these lists.

STEREOGUM

Stereogum is a music web site founded in 2002. It’s part of the same SPINMusic network that includes the SPIN webzine (featured at the end of this post) and Brooklyn Vegan, among other music-oriented sites. SpinMusic says that Stereogum reaches more than 700,000 music fans a month.

In past years, Stereogum has published a list of the year’s best metal albums, and I assume that will happen again this year — and we’ll pay attention to that, because their staff of metal writers is a good one. But last week Stereogum rolled out its list of The 50 Best Albums of 2015 — not limited to metal. I perused the list in an effort to spot metal names, and below I’m listing what I found, along with their placement in the overall list. Continue reading »

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