Aealo lives and breathes in a constant tension between achingly sad melodies and harrowing intensity, buttressed by a keening women’s choir. Rotting Christ have been on a peerless trajectory since Sanctus Diavolos, now even topping Theogonia by writing an album for the people. Get yourself out on a great desert highway in a convertible with the top down and play this album fucking loud.įuck your folk metal: this ain’t no back-slapping ale-fest, but a clear gaze fixed on a world found wanting. This band has got chops for days, memorable songs, and a vocalist whose smoky pipes were born to front this kind of metal classicism. Still, if you need more convincing, tell me that you haven’t had “Desert Rose” stuck in your head for days after hearing it the first time. The thing is, once Agony & Opium hits your ears, all it sounds like is brilliant heavy metal. You can tick off your preferred traditional metal and NWOBHM influences all you like in describing Christian Mistress – your early Priest and Maiden and even Metallica, your Motörhead and Girlschool and Angel Witch and whatever else. A thoroughly contemporary album, then, and one which fans of artistic realism should not sleep on. Averill is clearly man of the match, though, deploying an array of diverse vocal styles to tell the tale of a religious zealot growing more stridently confident the further he alienates himself from society. The instrumental attack is razor-sharp, with each insane tom fill echoing the report of machine gun fire, and each maniacal guitar contortion splaying across the fretboard like white-hot shrapnel. What on paper seems like an ill-considered marriage – Primordial’s Alan Averill doing vocals for the black/death barbarians from Axis of Advance and Revenge – turns out to be the year’s most dangerous record. The fact that “Truth Won’t Set You Free” is one of the greatest songs of the year doesn’t hurt, either. Equal parts furious and deliberate, melodic and desperately aggressive, The Tenant is Ludicra’s finest album in a string of already excellent albums. It’s like they’ve mapped all the synapses of the thinking metalhead’s brain, grabbed hold of the choicest few, and then used them as guitar strings to present these epic hymns to the grim realities of modern urban life. Ludicra has an uncanny ability to write songs that twist and contort themselves in all manner of new directions but nevertheless make perfect sense. The ascending melody of “Lightening” would sound fey and forced in the hands of another band capping this brilliant album, though, Enslaved has earned it. Swirling keys and clean vocals paint artful flourishes on the rock-solid canvas of unconventional riffing and straight-up ballsy heaviness. Without shaking the Floydian atmospherics of recent albums, Axioma Ethica Odini regains the more driving aggression of Isa, or even Eld. By the time you reach the gorgeous crescendo of album closer “To Drown,” when those screeching guitars echo a line that sounds lived-in, comfortable, and familiar, backed by a majestic timpani-esque rhythm – will you know where you have heard this before?Īs one of the greatest shape-shifting bands in heavy metal, from their torrid black beginnings through their increasingly psychedelic progressive meanderings, Enslaved has gone down the rabbit hole and come out the other side. It’s easy to pick outstanding moments on this album, but what makes it album-of-the-year worthy is that individual moments are completely superfluous the album pulls the listener smoothly, insistently, unavoidably along an unbroken unity of texture and sound. When the epic tremolo blast-fest of “Into the Painted Grey” breaks down into a torrent of interlocking guitar lines, even the most ardent cynics should be convinced. Cheers!įriends, it really is as good as you’ve heard. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to banging my head with you, in the future, over the internet. These top twenty have been winnowed down from probably sixty or seventy albums that I enjoyed heartily this year, and I am wracked and panged by guilt at having left off so many beautiful children, but such is the way of the music critic. I don’t usually put much stock in the “Oh, this year was pretty shitty, but ‘member, back in them old days, how the sweet stuff used to flow like honeyed water?” routine, and this year’s tremendous output doesn’t look set to change my opinion. Intros out the way, then: Damn, was this a fine year for metal. Nonetheless, I am pleased to have joined the ranks of such an august organization, and just tickled as shit to continue being a part of the broader metal community. As a very recent addition to the writing staff here, I feel a bit like I’m crashing everyone’s party.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |