As the divide between internet culture and the rest of culture yawns ever wider into a nearly unbridgeable chasm, it becomes easier and all the more tempting to speak only in ironic phrases, and to move only in market-tested gestures of contrived banality, and to embrace life with a smirk on your lips and fingers crossed behind your back.
Maybe it’s always been like this, but I have a thought. A thought that’s not so much factual as it is aspirational: Heavy metal is not like this.
Aspirational because, well, of course it is. Of course we smirk and smarm and mug and squirm and swath our true feelings in all sorts of masks that reach for utter detachment. But, friends and enemies, lovers and sinners, creatures of the great starry blindness of the cosmic gestalt, I have seen through you, and I have seen through me, and I have seen through it all, and I have come back to report:
It does not have to be this way. Heavy metal is small and stupid and trivial and goofy and entirely without consequence, and yet, heavy metal is huge and intelligent and essential and sincere and… well, shit, it MATTERS. So does everything else. Anything you care about that makes you feel badly for how much you care about it: that matters. And if we can make that happen with heavy metal, well, then that’s a skill we can apply elsewhere, and it’s an attitude worth cultivating.
Let’s turn it around, together. To hell and damnation with your “feels”; let’s have some motherfucking feelings.
This was a year. The next one will be another. I’d like to celebrate that, for life, and for the living and all the dead who still live on.
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10. CODE – AUGUR NOX
Why This Rules: Black metal as a perfect class-act, with the gloomiest of shapeshifting aesthetics on display from these underrated craftsmen. Old members leave, new members join: the song remains untamed.
Why You Might Hate It: More singing than nail-spitting, and more nuance than an ice-clotted volcanic blastfest.
Best Album of 2013 For: Attempting to prove to your parole office that the loud music you spend so much time with isn’t all about penetrating deities and hoisting up hate-flags.
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9. SUMMONING – OLD MORNINGS DAWN
Why This Rules: Austrian O.G.s of dweebdom bring the hobbithammer down nice and smooth, with the keenest cleans and most understated technotronic beats of their career.
Why You Might Hate It: Well, it’s still chintzy, synth-drenched martial ambient music with vestigial touches of black metal that pays homage to a fictional world populated by things such as Ents and dwarves and, er, Tom Bombadil, so the initial buy-in is pretty steep.
Best Album of 2013 For: Soundtracking all your hate mail writing sessions to Peter Jackson for not casting YOU as Thorin Oakenshield on the strength of that totally badass Youtube audition tape you firebombed his production studio’s Twitter feed with.
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8. MAGISTER TEMPLI – LUCIFER LEVIATHAN LOGOS
Why This Rules: Vocalist Abraxas d’Ruckus has — apart from the most killer stage name this side of Benedict Cumberbatch — pipes to fell mountains, and the hip-swinging, Fate-tradding doom fiesta is so much fun it ought to be criminal.
Why You Might Hate It: I don’t know, maybe you’re an asshole?
Best Album of 2013 For: Reading HP Lovecraft while maxing out a souped-up hotrod at 120 MPH down fire-ringed freeways straight into the sphincter of the maudlin river Styx. Let’s show that dour underworld how to have a goddamned party, yeah?
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7. CARCASS – SURGICAL STEEL
Why This Rules: Because of songs number one through eleven.
Why You Might Hate It: Because it’s not as grimy as Necroticism, or because it’s not as devilishly rounded as Heartwork, or because it’s not as bad as Swansong, which you’ve somehow crafted a face-plantingly stupid revisionist narrative for why it’s the crest of death metal’s artistic reach? Honestly, I’m not sure. Some people seem to hate it for no other reason than that almost everyone else loves it, and I am happy to go on record stating that this is S.T.U.P.I.D.
Best Album of 2013 For: Air guitaring your bloody fingers to stumps while pretending you’ve read Friedrich Engels’s “The Condition of the Working Class in England.”
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6. TRIBULATION – THE FORMULAS OF DEATH
Why This Rules: Death metal gone mind-bending psychedelic trip by way of horror films and velvet atmospherics.
Why You Might Hate It: Maybe you think Jungle Rot is a good band.
Best Album of 2013 For: Drinking absinthe and pretending to be in Nine Inch Nails’s “The Perfect Drug” video while replacing Trent’s synth-drums with human femurs.
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5. GORGUTS – COLORED SANDS
Why This Rules: For being within a hair’s hair breadth of being as good as Obscura while having to contend with the insurmountable legacy of being the band that recorded Obscura.
Why You Might Hate It: It is almost impossibly dense. Some of you may legitimately feel this is a shortcoming. Others of us do not.
Best Album of 2013 For: Furrowing your brow harder than it’s ever been furrowed, and running down a Youtube rabbit hole to bone up on some Shostakovich and Penderecki, just in case a winsome lass ever tries to engage you in some light cocktail party banter about “The Battle of Chamdo.”
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4. IN SOLITUDE – SISTER
Why This Rules: To witness a formerly derivative band step so utterly into its own is a thrilling, visceral event.
Why You Might Hate It: The faintest whiff of goth trappings gives you the douche chills.
Best Album of 2013 For: Convincing any closeted metalhead goth friends of yours that it’s okay to listen to something heavy that makes you cry fewer tears than Robert Smith’s annual eyeliner budget. If Fields of the Nephilim can produce Sólstafir, then it’s okay for the Sisters of Mercy to have produce In Solitude ca. 2013. This is a safe place.
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3. CALADAN BROOD – ECHOES OF BATTLE
Why This Rules: Utah duo gatecrashes the scene by out-Summoning Summoning at their own game.
Why You Might Hate It: Well, if you really hate Summoning, you will really hate this. And, if you really love Summoning and have no sense of humor or humility, then you also might really hate this.
Best Album of 2013 For: Wondering just what in the hell is in that water out West. Also: for multitracking your own vocals in the shower in an attempt to recreate the blood-boiling triumphs that are the acapella moments of “Book of the Fallen.”
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2. ALTAR OF PLAGUES – TEETHED GLORY & INJURY
Why This Rules: A soundtrack to catastrophic entropy and technological collapse, these Irish mopers figured out how to make black metal by playing their instruments like faulty telephone wires and malfunctioning modems. Blastbeats sent by facsimile, and existential laments transmitted by Morse code from lighthouses with crumbling foundations. Then, the lights blink out and all the ships crash. All hands lost.
Why You Might Hate It: These are uncomfortable sounds for uncomfortable times. The Euro-Cascadian sweep of the band’s past is entirely jettisoned, so for those seeking more pastoral fronts, this would have been a profoundly jarring letdown.
Best Album of 2013 For: Licking a downed power line and truly going off-grid.
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1. SUBROSA – MORE CONSTANT THAN THE GODS
Why This Rules: The first song addresses itself directly to Death, and greets it as a merciful liberator. And from there, the album only gets darker.
Why You Might Hate It: Even more so than its perfect predecessor, More Constant than the Gods operates on an epochal scale, shifting with tectonic quivers and glacial creep. These songs gather myriad worldly laments and amplify them, turning our vast and disparate sadnesses into a unity of sound that speaks to the fears inside every man, woman, child, beast, and burden. So, yeah… maybe you’re not into that?
Best Album of 2013 For: Drinking too much red wine and feeling parts of your soul vibrate that had long since been left fallow and untended. A field salted by past conquerors sprouts a tender, improbable bloom that frosts and flowers at once. The future beckons, the inevitability of its sorrow only leavened by the uncertainty of its delivery.
TOP 3 EPS:
3. Odem – The Valley of Cut Tongues
From the increasingly impeccable Daemon Worship Productions comes this mercilessly annihilating EP from Russia’s Odem. Blisteringly fast and impossible heavy death metal that reaches to its black-clad cousins for inspiration and atmosphere. Twenty minutes; no escape.
2. Immortal Bird – Akrasia
I just reviewed this tremendous debut release from Chicago’s Immortal Bird a while back, so in summation, let me only reiterate that I STILL break out into involuntary headbanging every single time I hear that absurdly thrashing half-time riff on “The Pseudoscientist.” Smarts like that are a rare gift, and I look forward to sending future chiropractic bills to this promising young band.
1. Vasaeleth – All Uproarious Darkness
You know how Demoncy’s landmark USBM album Joined in Darkness kinda feels like a ringwraith driving a bulldozer underneath a cemetery? Well, Vasaeleth’s All Uproarious Darkness is basically the same thing, but with death metal. Flay yr skin and crush yr head.
