On a day when Paul McCartney wants to go to Tyga's party but gets turned away, when Kanye gets mad about Pitchfork giving his new album a 9, to say nothing of Trump and other absurdities in the world at large, I just don't think Dadaism now packs quite the same punch as it did 97 years ago.
Seriously.
Coldplay played their crappy recent material that I can only assume is targeting the boundless East Asian market for sappy soft rock (aka Air Supply of the 21st century), Bruno Mars performed his crappy Minneapolis ca. 1981 funk jag that was tired before the NFL preseason began and Beyonce and her ladies danced around like Sparkle Motion only to lesser music than Notorious by Duran Duran.
No one got out unscathed by suckitude.
It's the goddamn Super Bowl! That run was the only era when the halftime entertainment was even remotely appropriate.
Even BS big-time Nashville country would at least make sense. But an English pop/rock band 10 years past their prime that no one really cares about anymore? On the heels of year after year of music that skews heavily female? WTF?
It all makes about as much sense as having Mastodon be the house band for the Victoria's Secret primetime special.
If Def Leppard broke up in 1982, I think both "High and Dry" and "On Through The Night" would be up there with "Lighting To The Nations" by Diamond Head in the pantheon of lost NWOBHM classics.
Since there seems to be a growing gulf between the music that is covered here and the music that most of the posters here actually seem to be interested in, then why not?
New Ihsahn, Krallice, Lycus, Oranssi Pazuzu, Obscura, plus some other very promising sounding bands all in one month? I think metal might be the only genre of music that IS healthy at this point.
It's funny how "poptimism" will indulge every tacky idea that sells with a "good job" except for certain kinds of "rock" music for which the vestigial knives will still come out.
Seriously. This band may suck but it's not as if the endless stream of booties 'n' brags that gets trumpeted around here is chock full of tasteful artistic triumphs.
Was half an essay about PC culture really necessary as a preamble to this list (one that I, personally, look forward to every year)? Was anyone really thinking about these matters in terms of the best metal albums of this year? This is such a tired subject that is everywhere else on the inter webs and such handwringing was a lot more applicable to metal a few years ago when Burzum's post-prison albums were garnering high praise everywhere. That there are unsavory characters in metal ought to surprise no one and I hardly think that it does surprise anyone.
Nonetheless, I will relish digging deep into this list over the next couple of weeks.
My few cents:
1. Midnight Odyssey - Shards of Silver Fade (maybe the most epic atmospheric black metal album evah!)
2. Trial - Vessel - Outstanding Mercyful Fate/NWOBHM- influenced band that carries the sound forward beyond 1984 in a way few others have.
3. Krallice - Ygg huur - total departure; they've cross-bred their previous sound w/ Gorguts to great results.
4. Horrendous - Anareta - These guys are just fantastic riffmeisters; interestingly this album starts off very coincidentally similar to the Krallice before veering off somewhere else (more consonant) entirely.
5. Faith No More - Sol Invictus - A fantastic comeback and metal enough for me.
6. Lychgate - An Antidote for the Glass Pill - organ-driven black metal with the organ played by Kevin Bowyer, who is one of the world's foremost virtuosos of the instrument.
7. Khemmis - Absolution - excellent doom metal with more involved guitar work than most.
8. Mastery - Valis - Not for the faint of heart!
Change Sung Tongs to MPP and I agree 100%. This is so aggressively awful, as was Centipede Hz, that I cannot even enjoy listening to what I previously liked by them without hearing the seeds of this pastel crayon dog vomit.
Nah, I'm cool with it.
I saw the GnR lineup in late-2011 with Dizzy on keys being only other link to anything close to the "glory days" and they were still fantastic. Even the Chinese Democracy songs were awesome. Maybe Axl has put on a few pounds and has disappeared for years at a time, but the guy really gives a fuck about what he does which is a lot more than you could say about a lot of other big-time "legacy" bands at this point.
Music criticism (and maybe music, too) would be a lot better if people spoke their minds like Noel and Father John Misty instead of acting like a bunch of suckups to the highest grosser.
Both the nod to Death in the preamble and the outstanding Apparatus both got me thinking more about this.
Whether or not Chuck Schuldiner was the first death metal vocalist aside, he was clearly there around the beginning and was clearly restless about its limitations toward the end. His delivery changed from album to album and Control Denied demonstrates that he was done with death metal vocals and wanted something else.
On the other hand, something like this awesome Apparatus album, where the vocals are clearly carefully considered, could not exist any other way.
For a lot of other recent stuff that is less dissonant, even with bands I really like, the vocals just seem perfunctory; as if they aren't a choice the band is making but rather is something done that is ceded to the aesthetic choices made in Tampa/Gothenburg/Oslo/etc. 20-30 years ago.
For instance, I love that Horrendous album, and like the previous one, but I think I'd like their awesomely melodic guitar work even more with some melodic-but-rough vocals on top of it.
I guess I'm saying, maybe if the default setting was early HetfieldArraya/Anselmo-type vox for a lot of erstwhile death metal bands on the more melodic end of the spectrum, things might be better.
I think we all get the conceit that the blind praising of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, etc. is what keeps the lights on around here, but what exactly was the point of dragging all of that into the Mellon Collie 20th Anniversary writeup?
There is/was a great essay to be written about that beautiful yet fraught monstrosity but instead those of us interested in THAT get the bait and switch and have to sift through claptrap about Drake and some requisite Taylor shilling. I really don't think there is much cross-registration there. Might as well do a 30th for Janet Jackson's Control and track how her legacy is carried on by the lead singers of Windhand and The Band Perry. It would make about as much sense.
On the one hand, I know what you mean, but it is sort of like a Doug Stanhope's line about reacting to people describing cities that are 20 years behind the times: "that sounds good to me. I had a lot of fun 20 years ago."
On the other hand, I think some albums, Bleach, In Utero, Dirt and Siamese Dream in particular which have aged very well, while others not quite as much, but I'd put some of the Pixies in that latter category as well (some of it comes off a bit "schtick-y to me now).
And I'm sure some largely forgotten mid-1990s Batman sequel made more money than Pulp Fiction.
Siamese Dream enabled Pisces Iscariot and Mellon Collie to happen and the former looms a lot larger as something that was a real touchstone at least in my mind and despite a lot more competition from more anticipated albums released right at the same time (In Utero, Vs.) whereas by fall 1995, other than AiC, the other big guns of the "Alt Nation" had mostly fallen silent and all this had to outshine was a lot of copies of copies (Bush, 7Mary3, etc.).
Yeah, kinda checked out after that. Is there some sort of cultural amnesia about the fact that there also were rappers, R & B singers and tween idols 20 years ago?
Yeah, Kanye this Beyonce that, Taylor Swift, etc. Do you know that people like Tupac, Janet Jackson and Alanis Morrisette were around in 1995?
Great album. Truly great band. I would put Broadcast up there with Radiohead, Bjork and Sigur Ros as the greatest bands in and around the year 2000. I thank the WNYU New Afternoon Show's playing the f*ck out of Echo's Answer in the fall of '99 for the introduction!
I can deal with that. Other than a few Lennon songs (No Reply, I'm A Loser and some others), I don't think pre-Rubber Soul Beatles really holds up all that well.
While Blur may have had far more range, far more staying power and way more clever ideas, Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, front-to-back ,are way better than any Blur album on the whole.
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