At the risk of stating the embarrassingly obvious: There’s a lot of music out there, out in the dim distant land just outside our individual reckoning. And well, really, that’s a comfort. If you’re a dour marketing type, I suppose you might call it an oversaturated consumer environment, but hell, I call it great – there are literally tens of thousands of your fellow men and women and heroes and perverts and weirdoes and neighbors and earthlings and intergalactic hobos who feel compelled, for some inexpressible, unshakable reason, and in the face of all evidence and testimony to the economic futility and general foolishness of it all, to create.
A corollary to that fact is this: Given the untamable multitudes of music happening everywhere and all around you, I find it increasingly hard to believe those grumblers and moaners out there with the annual refrain, “It was a lousy year for metal [or polka, or spoongaze, or What-the-shit-ever-subgenre x].” Friends, if you didn’t find plenty to tickle your most ghettoized fancy, I’m going to suggest you just weren’t quite rooting around enough. And that’s okay! The year-end list-making / feeding-frenzy / orgy of supercilious scoffing certainly has the air of finality, but that’s only a convenient artifact. These lists are just as much about presenting a summation as they are about reflecting on the way forward; just as much a way of saying “This is what it was” as a way of asking “What was it not that it should have been?”
Everything old is new again. The year slinks out. There’s Vaseline on the lens and a raft of warm, fading cut-shots. Life is all about taking things in and putting things out. I think I spent more time this year being happy than being unhappy, and, not coincidentally, more time listening to good music than to bad. (I think.) Ultimately, that’s the meaning of all this tallying and ordering, and all these timorous assertions: making an accounting of oneself.
We’re here until we’re not. I’m pleased as ever to be here with you, now.
The Top 10 Metal Albums of 2012:
1. Christian Mistress – Possession
Possession crams as many modes of rock movement as you can imagine into its endlessly replayable 41 minutes: it shimmies and boogies, shuffles and swings, swaggers and grooves. It exhausts an entire universe of action verbs, all in the service of Heavy Metal. You can feel the sweat and thrum of five people: they’re off in a room somewhere – maybe it’s late, or maybe so late it’s early again – and they’re playing the song again, riding it out over and over, gathering in every right and honest contour. Music – like life – as an endless highway. Ride with them.
2. The Devin Townsend Project – Epicloud
That a new Devin Townsend album would be polarizing is unsurprising. That the most fitfully productive man in heavy metal would churn out a brand new album barely a year after completing a quadrilogy of albums is also, miraculously, rather blasé. That Epicloud is a towering monument to the boundless human yearning for unfettered joy makes it a shimmering diadem of warmth and decency. Epicloud is audacious, spirited, brash, playful, generous, vulnerable, and, ultimately, perfect because of its flaws. That this heavy metal record has no greater ambition than to put a foolish grin on one’s face is testament to its inalienable humanism.
3. Dodecahedron – Dodecahedron
Dodecahedron’s revelatory debut album sounds for all the wide world like a cybernetic organism experiencing a mental breakdown. There is order here, and there is form, but it all radiates from a diseased center. Free jazz collides with industrial black metal collides with dark ambient collides with the densest and most sinister-minded headtrip this side of a mercury-coated peyote cocktail. Perhaps most impressive is this Dutch band’s ability to marry a wide-ranging experimentalism with a ferocious extreme metal attack that compromises neither in the pursuit of the other. Count the sides; join in the pursuit of the Other, or rather, pure Otherness.
4. Mgla – With Hearts Toward None
The classics never go out of style. These Polish orthodox black metallers yield no quarter to progression or post-anything, and instead fixate with grim, devout purpose on honing these bleak black catechisms down to their finest point. The tremolo melodies developed and exulted in throughout With Hearts Toward None are consistently rapturous in their dark melodicism and inspiring in their intrinsically narrative quality. Song after song rides an ever-gathering wave of righteous, unblinking certitude. Black metal wandered far afield in 2012, but when it needed to come home, there were fewer entities burning the welcome torches brighter than Mgla.
5. Anaal Nathrakh – Vanitas
Though I never trucked with the doubters, one heard the whispers on the fringes as a gathering chorus: “Has Anaal Nathrakh run out of ideas? Where are the new frontiers for a band that, more than most others in recent memory, thrives on total extremity?” As if in rhetorical answer to the clamoring skeptics, Vanitas is an album-long exercise in pure more-ness. More speed, more blasting, more polyglot song titles, more diabolically twisted riffs from Mick Kenney’s fleet fingers, more incalculably deranged noises from Dave Hunt’s long-suffering lungs, and more reasons to praise endlessly whatever foul deity coughed up this whole racket. None more vicious, this year or any.
6. Panopticon – Kentucky
Whether or not the specific locale and historical context of Panopticon’s masterful fourth album resonates with you is almost beside the point. Kentucky is an absolute triumph, an alchemy that gently turns its bitter grief to better purposes. These are hollering songs for mountain people, and if this music can do that for this place, then what can you do with your place? People are not rootless. Feel your roots in the soil you’re stood on, then turn them in on themselves and outward. Upward. Kentucky is raw with passion and roiled by outrage; witness the real folk blues.
7. Evoken – Atra Mors
By all rights, music this lumbering and soul-blightingly crushing shouldn’t be so simultaneously graceful, but even among similar titans of tectonic doom/death, Evoken is a band for the ages. Atra Mors is a faithful transmission from a dead distant planet; we receive it in the hope of sending help, but our ears only catch the leading edge of a calamity now centuries old. Star becomes nova becomes gas and dust and void. Nevertheless, Evoken’s magisterial fifth album balances despondence against the faintest flicker of defiance. The universe, unmoved, moves us all, but hope gutters in the liminal periphery.
8. Ihsahn – Eremita
Eremita is a difficult album, turning the majestic sweep of After not only inward, but also a hundred directions sideways. The cinematic pull of the album’s luminous arc is unavoidable, and beneath this craggy topsoil lies a wealth of insights, tangents, revelations, and downright triumphs of wrenchingly emotive songwriting. Ihsahn remains a peerless talent, and the fact that masterpieces like Eremita roll off his fingers like dew off so many supplicating blades of grass means that the real danger might be taking him for granted. Maybe being spoken to as if hope was real is all the more reality hope needs. This song-cycle lives in that crepuscular uncertainty, and thrives.
9. Pallbearer – Sorrow and Extinction
The riffs of Pallbearer’s landmark debut display an intuitive (if not damn near mystical) ability to wrap the listener in the coziest, most comfortable sort of existential despair. That’s no paradox, either. The slow, patient, almost reverential tone of Sorrow and Extinction’s five songs demands one’s emotional engagement, but it doesn’t dictate the terms of that engagement. Brett Campbell’s voice – as the human spirit, writ small – wavers, and clings to a resonant indeterminacy. These songs come to you where you are, and offer of themselves that which you can use. Carry them with you, and they might just return the favor.
10. Enslaved – Riitiir
Does it really matter, in the end, if Enslaved is a prog band making black metal or a black metal band making prog? To hell with all that: Enslaved are astronauts of interior vastnesses. Having long since ground the strictures of genre boundaries to silt, increasingly the only place for Enslaved to go is deeper. Each song is a byzantine blueprint drawn up in a language you do not speak, but which teaches itself to you as it unfolds. “Roots of the Mountain” contains a lyric that in fact perfectly summarizes this iconoclastic band’s greatest attribute: “Seek and find, but do not try to understand.”
11. Wodensthrone – Curse
12. Witch Mountain – Cauldron of the Wild
13. Krallice – Years Past Matter
14. Dordeduh – Dar de Duh
15. Stagnant Waters – Stagnant Waters
16. Royal Thunder – CVI
17. Satanic Bloodspraying – At the Mercy of Satan
18. Neurosis – Honor Found in Decay
19. Pharaoh – Bury the Light
20. Revenge – Scum.Collapse.Intolerance
More Awesome Shit: Albums 21-50:
21. Meshuggah – Koloss
22. Woods Of Ypres – Woods 5: Grey Skies & Electric Light
23. Ignivomous – Contragenesis
24. Wildernessking – The Writing of Gods in the Sand
25. Binah – Hallucinating in Resurrecture
26. Degial – Death’s Striking Wings
27. High On Fire – De Vermis Mysteriis
28. Gorod – A Perfect Absolution
29. Dawnbringer – Into the Lair of the Sun God
30. Nekromantheon – Rise, Vulcan Spectre
31. Author & Punisher – Ursus Americanus
32. Weapon – Embers & Revelations
33. Aura Noir – Out to Die
34. Essenz – Mundus Numen
35. Ash Borer – Cold of Ages
36. Napalm Death – Utilitarian
37. The Howling Wind – Of Babalon
38. Early Graves – Red Horse
39. Liberteer – Better to Die on Your Feet than Live on Your Knees
40. Wild Hunt – Before the Plane of Angles
41. Árstíðir Lífsins – Vápna Lækjar Eldr
42. Pseudogod – Deathwomb Catechesis
43. Deus Ignotus – Chrismation
44. Faustcoven – Hellfire & Funeral Bells
45. Wreck & Reference – Youth
46. God Seed – I Begin
47. Blut Aus Nord – 777: Cosmosophy
48. Converge – All We Love We Leave Behind
49. Furze – Psych Minus Space Control
50. Wrathblade – Into the Netherworld’s Realm
Biggest Disappointments (once more, in haiku):
Five albums which proved
that life is not always sweet
and honeyed. Crests fall.
1. Nile – At the Gate of Sethu
A production so
lightweight it made these limp riffs
feel almost leaden.
2. Ahab – The Giant
Dejection is the
name of the game, of course, but
damn this monochrome.
3. Fear Factory – The Industrialist
Mechanize ruled, but
“This machine is obsolete” –
punch-line, self-written.
4. Blacklodge – MachinatioN
Such promise, and then
turgid programming saps all
nuance and surprise.
5. Baroness – Yellow and Green
Arena rock made
by decent folks who can’t find
their way around hooks.
Top 30 Non-Metal Albums of 2012:
1. Swans – The Seer
2. Menace Ruine – Alight in Ashes
3. Goat – World Music
4. Flying Lotus – Until the Quiet Comes
5. Max Richter – Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons
6. Vijay Iyer Trio – Accelerando
7. The Gathering – Disclosure
8. Godspeed You Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!
9. Squarepusher – Ufabulum
10. Robert Hood – Motor: Nighttime World 3
11. Anathema – Weather Systems
12. Cloudkicker – Fade
13. The Bad Plus – Made Possible
14. Burial – Kindred EP
15. First Aid Kit – The Lion’s Roar
16. Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music
17. Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel…
18. Y La Bamba – Court the Storm
19. Ellie Goulding – Halcyon
20. Mouse On Mars – Parastrophics
21. Cold Specks – I Predict a Graceful Expulsion
22. Minotaur Shock – Orchard
23. John Talabot – Fin
24. Ruby My Dear – Ruby My Dear
25. Sigur Ros – Valtari
26. El-P – Cancer 4 Cure
27. Venetian Snares – Fool the Detector EP / Affectionate EP
28. Beach House – Bloom
29. Tenhi – Saivo
30. James Blackshaw – Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
Top 10 EPs of 2012:
1. Deathspell Omega – Drought
2. Agalloch – Faustian Echoes
3. Blut Aus Nord – What Once Was… Liber II
4. Vattnet Viskar – Vattnet Viskar
5. Inter Arma – Destroyer
6. Necroblaspheme – XXVI: The Deeper – The Better
7. Inverloch – Dusk Subside
8. Cara Neir – Sublimation Therapy
9. Manipulator – Voidbound
10. Elder – Spires Burn/Release
Top 10 Reissues/Compilations of 2012:
1. Odz Manouk – Odz Manouk
2. Urfaust – Ritual Music for the True Clochard
3. Witch Cross – Fit for Fight
4. Pagan Altar – Judgement of the Dead
5. Sleep – Dopesmoker
6. Tukaaria – Raw to the Rapine
7. Morgion – God of Death & Disease
8. Porter Ricks – Biokinetics
9. High On Fire – The Art of Self-Defense
10. Four Tet – Pink
That’s a wrap, friends. Thanks for sticking with us, this year and every year. Now: onward & upward.
