2015 POLL RESULTS COUNTDOWN - ILM Metal(ish) Albums of the Year

I just listened to this yesterday. I like the shitty lo-fi blackgaze sound alright, but lost interest halfway through.

there's always surprises (like Disturbed got a vote this year)

Hm, I think I wanted Khemmis to stick with clean vocals but am listening.

― EveningStar (Sund4r)

For sure. Also I was expecting some doomy NWOBHM throwback stuff, but its not and what it is is kinda boring.

I didn't know Disturbed were still a thing.

it's disturbing

I don't know #100 but the description sounds interesting, so I'll grab it from bandcamp.

for free i bet

#99 has amazing artwork that will blow you all away and it reminds me of the ilxor saer

99 Black Cilice - Mysteries 158 Points, 4 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/YWblWPl.jpg

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20267-mysteries/

Black Cilice
Mysteries
Iron Bonehead; 2015
By Grayson Haver Currin; March 10, 2015

8.0

Even if a band includes specific instructions on how to listen to its music, is there ever a "correct" way to hear anything? Of course, there are better methods for listening to certain music. You’d hate to experience the majesty of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, for instance, by playing scuffed records on a Crosley Cruiser turntable, and it would be a waste to dump a fortune into an ostentatious hi-fi system if all you really want to do is blast Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. But most music and music players fall somewhere in between, so that the differences we experience are rather incremental. Maybe a good record sounds great with a certain setup, but it should still have some payoff even through a pair of tiny white earbuds.

Mysteries—the third album by the elusive, prolific Portuguese one-man black metal band Black Cilice—highlights the question of how best to hear by suggesting that there are at least two distinct and acceptable answers. Given the subgenre, you might think that it would be best to simply turn it up, and let it roar. And, yes, at high volumes, where the guitars can shriek and the agitated drums can pound, Mysteries is a monster.

But you can also turn Mysteries way down, until those barreling drums recede into a heavy patter and the guitars blur into the record’s presiding distortion and feedback. It becomes a patterned sheet of sound then, where bits and pieces protrude from a singular din. Because they were so poorly recorded, early black metal records sometimes sounded like drone music: The instruments overwhelmed the devices meant to capture them. But Black Cilice take that aesthetic a step further, deploying the technique selectively so that strident guitars, bruised drums and yowled vocals move under and above that matrix, as if they’re alternating between floating and drowning.

Black Cilice don’t reinvent quarter-century-old black metal structures; they just lash at them, playing hard, fast, loud and mean. "Ceremonial Energy" bursts forward, a rising-and-falling blast beat and back-and-forth riff suggesting vintage Darkthrone. "Into Morbid Trance" bounds between primitive thrash and menacing black metal, where every instrument seems to be attempting to force its counterparts out of the picture. The vocals suggest gale-force winds passing though a room of live microphones and amplifiers, creating feedback only to harmonize with it.

There’s finesse to this mess, as though Black Cilice were trying to tease the border between heavy metal and experimental music. Turned up, for instance, "The Truth" is a pugnacious stomp-along; turned down, it feels strangely warm and beautiful. It suggests Rhys Chatham’s music for massed guitars, where so many instruments were played at once that it became impossible to tell where one ended and another began, or a reprise of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, where the first-person subject is actually a roughshod recording of a black metal band.

This conceit may seem ridiculous, both for the suggestion that you should lower the volume on a black metal record in order to enjoy it more and for the implication that Black Cilice is some avant-garde wizard with grander intentions than badly recorded bedlam. But to date, each Black Cilice record has gotten more controlled and nuanced; the metal tantrums beneath the noise are more complicated and compelling, and the hiss and squall above it all are more engrossing and interesting. There is an arc of progress to trace in Black Cilice’s output, suggesting that the diametric results of putting Mysteries in the background or foreground are more than mere coincidence.

The cover of each Black Cilice full-length has been all black, save for a centered, shrouded figure wearing corpsepaint and doing something wicked. On 2011’s A Corpse, A Temple, he reached skyward, holding a volume bearing an inverted crucifix. On Mysteries, he grimaces as he again looks upward and touches his stomach. For the last three months, I’ve tried to figure out if he’s clutching a rosary to his chest or if he’s pressing against a gushing abdomen wound. The high-contrast image makes it impossible to tell, at least to me and everyone I’ve asked. However willful or accidental, such ambiguity epitomizes the aesthetic of Black Cilice, a strange transmission responsible for one of the most intriguing intersections of black metal and sound art I’ve ever heard.

my last-minute votes helped both Nameless Coyote and Black CIlice into the top 100. superb sound-worlds, both of them, left an instant impression

I can't say that I love Black Cilice so far but it has a really strange atmosphere so yeah this is good.

For the last three months, I’ve tried to figure out if he’s clutching a rosary to his chest or if he’s pressing against a gushing abdomen wound.

This time it's a dildo.

98 Lucifer - Lucifer I 161 Points, 5 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/nr6YW43.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/6LjXKvpAaOHCghj4AGssQn
spotify:album:6LjXKvpAaOHCghj4AGssQn

http://www.metalinjection.net/reviews/album-review-lucifer-lucifer-i

I loved The Oath’s self-titled release last year. So it was with a deep sense of shock and confusion that I heard they broke up shortly after its release. Why would a band, with so much talent on its side and great songs to play, call it quits so soon? From what I can tell from interviews, the specific reasons are deeply personal and not open to public discussion. And that’s fine. It would be nice if more post-breakup musicians could exercise some discretion.

So in the shadow of 2014, what does Johanna Sedonis’ new band, Lucifer, bring us in 2015? I’ll admit that when I first saw the logo, I was kind of terrified. There’s a lot of boring counterculture-nostalgia out there in the world of doom-metal, and I worried that Sedonis was going to lean too hard on her admiration for 70s rock, thus leaving metal to a side role. Luckily for all of us, I was wrong.

So wrong, in fact, that I found myself enjoying parts of this album more than last year’s release from The Oath. The riffs hit harder, the songwriting is better and more consistent, and there’s less of an obvious reliance on hard rock. In its place is a clear reverence for Candlemass and Ozzy-era Black Sabbath. It’s funny that I should write these words however, since Sedonis herself actually describes the opposite in a recent interview:

" I want it to be a different band and concept. The Oath had much more of a heavy metal, old school, doom, and hard rock influence with that NWOBHM influence very present. With Lucifer you won’t hear so much of the heavy metal side that The Oath had. It’s much more of a heavy rock sound than a metal sound."

Perhaps I’m missing something. There is at least a more effective sense of rise and crash with Lucifer, one that creates a different atmosphere that The Oath and that feels significantly heavier. One thing that is very consistent of course is Johanna Sedonis’ excellent voice and use of melody, engaging the listener and leading him or her through each track.

And it’s not just that her voice sounds good, that’s merely her birthright. But it has more to do with how she expresses each note, and the individual spirit she’s able to embody through her vocals. The doom vocalists in Candlemass, My Dying Bride and Electric Wizard stand out because they use their own sense of creativity to express themselves. This is what separates them from those who simply ape early-Ozzy or try to sound like some folksy “wizard/witch” or whatever. The same applies here, as Sedonis' vocal style is undeniably her own.

But some words should be reserved for the rest of the band as well. Apparently the guitarist goes by the name of “The Wizard,” which is wonderfully fitting for the current popularity of “magical” and “occult” themes- though to his credit, he uses Marshall amps instead of the Orange ones you’d expect him to use. Anyway, The Wizard certainly does work some magic with the strings and is well-supported by the rhythm section of Dino Gollnick and Andrew Prestdige,

So what we have in 2015 is a solid, satisfying heavy rock/doom metal release. There are moments where the atmosphere begins to drag on you, particularly once you get five or six songs in, but this may be up to how much you enjoy Lucifer’s nostalgic approach. Regardless, let’s hope this act is able to keep the magic flowing for more than one album this time.

Favorite Songs: “Abracadabra,” “Izrael,” “Sabbath," and "Morning Star"

9/10

despite by general allergy to black metal i kinda wanna try out that absconditus

obv i haaaate the black cilice record

my general allergy*

Imperial Triumphant - Abyssal Gods 163 Points, 4 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/k0P859L.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/5fCkfRhzo3I70DiKrik4Q6
spotify:album:5fCkfRhzo3I70DiKrik4Q6

https://auralmusic.bandcamp.com/album/abyssal-gods

IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT has been orchestrating vanguard black metal since 2005. Citing an eclectic palette of influences that includes everything from Deathspell Omega to Polish post-serialism composer Krzysztof Penderecki, the band features members of investigational death metal contortionists, Pyrrhon as well as instrumental rock collective Secret Chiefs 3 and New York death metal legion Malignancy

Focused on urban decay and the imminent extinction of mankind, IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT’s Abyssal Gods serves as the follow-up to the band’s critically applauded, 2013-released Goliath EP and contains ten punishingly traumatic odes of strategically composed black-addled mayhem bedecked in angular riff incursions, bestial vocal tirades and an overall air of disease, dread and looming disaster as well as a guest appearance by Bloody Panda’s Yoshiko Ohara and more.

Elaborates founder/main composer, Ilya Ezrin, “Although we are proud to be born in such a renown place, Abyssal Gods as a whole addresses New York City as a cancer of the world and the absolute fist of the universe. ‘Dead Heaven’ is the psalm of the end of the world. It deals with the universal deconstruction and celestial collapse. The lyrics were actually inspired by the observatory space lecture scene in Rebel Without A Cause.”
credits
released March 1, 2015

http://www.angrymetalguy.com/imperial-triumphant-abyssal-gods-review/

New York City is the new home of French black metal. No, I’m not entirely fucking with you. Hear me out… back in 2013, Madam X reviewed Goliath, Imperial Triumphant‘s two-song EP, and it impressed quite a number of us here at the offices of Angry Metal Guy. The mix of savvy technical death metal and viscous, oozy black metal was well-played and well-produced, creating a rather unsettling, but incredibly awesome, listening experience. All of that is a moot point, for as promising as Goliath was, nobody was prepared for the ingenuity, the murkiness, and the sheer WTF Factor that their sophomore full-length, Abyssal Gods, would bestow onto our jaded ears.

Wasting absolutely zero time, “From Palaces of the Hive” stampedes and blasts with the fervor of Deathspell Omega meeting up with Today is the Day for a nice stroll through the murky depths of Hell. Ripe with atonality provided by vocalist Ilya “Goddessraper” Ezrin’s guitar acrobatics, as well as bludgeoning drumming by Alex Cohen (Pyrrhon). And then, two mintues later… silence and atmosphere, horns, twangy Gorguts-esque melodies and thick Voivodian bass by Erik Malave, before it all stomps, lurches, and pukes its way out the door, leaving ichor and entrails in its wake. It’s chaotic, ugly, eerie, uncomfortable, and I loved every second of it.

“Unsettling” is easily the secret password of the day, as very rarely do you hear a passage and think to yourself, “Hey, that made sense!” And yet, when you hear these moments, they’re so jaw-droppingly bizarre and awesome that you go back to hear them again and again. Thankfully, Abyssal Gods is full of these moments. “Dead Heaven” (“Dead,” not “Deaf”) evokes more Gorguts lunacy and even a bit of a Domination-era Morbid Angel crawl before going full-on blackened tech-death. “Krokodil” sees Cohen sharing drumming duties with Kenny Grohowski (ex-Hung, Secret Chiefs 3) on the album’s longest (over eight mintes) track, with Ezrin’s guitars bending and warping, putting you in a state of complete unrest and discomfort with RK Halvørson and Yoshiko Ohara (Bloody Panda) singing and moaning over the blasts and chaos. But the award for “Did That Just Really Happen?” goes to standout track “Opposing Holiness,” for its expert use of a two-second happy, almost Cajun ragtime breakdown at the :51 mark, complete with unholy ukulele! Yes, Imperial Triumphant took a page out of Rob Scallon’s book and incorporated ukulele into black metal, and quite successfully, I may add!

Imperial Triumphant - Abyssal Gods 02

Proving once again that something unbroken doesn’t require further tinkering, Colin Marston (Krallice, Gorguts, Behold… The Arctopus) once again helmed the production at Menegroth the Thousand Caves, and did a damn fine job of making sure the chaos was overwhelming, but not at the cost of the instruments suffering. The bass is good and thick, guitars cut and slice, and the drums pummel with reckless abandon. The artwork by Andrew Tremblay is also stellar. Really, I’m having a hell of a time trying to find a flaw with this album, as even the interludes are quite tastefully done, though the album could be a little more dynamic. Still, it’s been a damn long time since a record made me feel happily uncomfortable, pleasantly scared, and absolutely enamored by its insanity and performance.

So I’m not joking around when I say that Imperial Triumphant put out the best French black metal album of recent history. For as good as Goliath was (and it still is incredible, don’t get me wrong), it just looks dwarfed and downright adorable compared to the sheer lunacy and onslaught that Abyssal Gods delivered. The bar has been elevated. Folks, meet your new masters.

Yeah! It's a complete mess but that kind of works in it's favour

oh wow i love everybody involved in that imperial triumphant record, is this lj's doing

"Post-serialis[t]" seems like a very wrong description of Penderecki. Does sound like an interesting album, though.

I'm liking Nameless Coyote so far.

i love how short the songs are

96 Nile - What Should Not Be Unearthed 163 Points, 5 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/9uvKcQN.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/3nAhv9fHO46dCEe7Xa0l3c
spotify:album:3nAhv9fHO46dCEe7Xa0l3c

http://www.angrymetalguy.com/nile-not-unearthed/

Angry Metal Guy hates this album. He hates it so much that he won’t even deign to put to paper how much he hates it; and thus has commanded me to do so in his stead. Given how bad At The Gate of Sethu was, I was sure it wouldn’t be difficult to do so but was nonetheless displeased. I was all for skipping What Should not be Unearthed, and going on my merry way pretending Nile broke up four years ago, but sometimes you bite ass, and sometimes your ass gets bit. After spending a few days in the crypts with this album, a few things have become clear: it’s still the Nile you know and probably have some sort of strong feeling for. The chromatic riffing, incessant double bass pounding, and ham-fistedly (or perhaps mouthedly) delivered lyrics about gods and pyramids and the afterlife and what have you all align; What Should not be Unearthed is anything but groundbreaking. But the band have cut back on the self-plagiarism and boring brutality that undermined the previous album and paid more attention to elements of their sound that set them apart from other bands.

This is the part of the review where I’d go about discussing the first few or strongest songs of the album. Sadly, I instead get to tell you that, much like the last Nile album, Unearthed is pretty barren of highs and lows. There’s really no killer single or flaming bag in the mix, just fifty minutes of guitar picks and George Kollias’ feet moving really fast, though rarely in unison.

What set Nile apart from their contemporaries (and the countless bands that somehow want to swipe their riffs) are their unmetered passages. Since Kollias can keep 64th notes coming with little punctuation for quite some time, the rest of the band, and by that I mean mostly Karl Sanders, are free to tremolo and riff abstractly for a while. At best, these are brief and work like an extended, full-band drum fill; they reels and pitch for a moment before locking back into a groove. There are a few of these full-band passages scattered across Unearthed and they’re actually pulled off pretty well, but far more frequent are moments when the guitars, drums, or most often, vocals slip past the others. The fluid feeling of this slip pairs excellently with Nile‘s style of riffing and drumming, and it’s well-capitalized on in songs like “Age of Famine” and “To Walk Forth From Flames Unscathed.”

Nile - What Should not be Unearthed 02

The problems arise when the songs aren’t spilling over themselves; the best days of Nile riffing seem to be behind us, and though there are a few good cuts in the album – like on “Evil To Cast Out Evil,” after a minute or so even that song loses its way, and even its cool bridge is too little, too late for the album. What Should Not Be Unearthed feels like a supercut of the mid-quality parts of previous Nile albums interspersed with the occasional tumbling, uncoordinated moment of intrigue. Add that to its typical production – little to no bass presence, shitty-sounding cymbals, and vocals that have never been top of the class, and you get an underwhelming piece of music.

I’d really love to hear another Nile album as good as Ithyphallic or Those Whom the Gods Detest or even a song half as good as “Lashed to the Slave Stick,” but between this and George Kollias‘ equally average release earlier this year, it looks like fans will have to sit through this uninspired, natron-stiffened version of Nile for a few more years. While I’m sure the band needed to write new material to make sure they weren’t dead, I’d have preferred this album stayed in the ground.

I had a Nile album once but got bored of it pretty quickly. Can't even remember which one, but it barely matters

did people really hate this album or just these guys?

I thought they were universally loved

I don't they're bad just a bit one-dimensional. There might be stuff out there that'd change my mind about them but probably not on this new one. I got the feeling it was a letdown for a lot of their fans.

i liked imperial triumphant but i felt like i wasn't in the right life-place to really dig it

maybe i just need some bigass speakers again

omg the twin guitar runs on "black psychedelia"

this album is perverse and wonderful

three-way-tie
93 Vastum - Hole Below 163 Points, 6 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/fzGRwxy.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/1TUhE6KUL6DPjlGbJU5jig
spotify:album:1TUhE6KUL6DPjlGbJU5jig

https://vastum.bandcamp.com/album/hole-below
Through the verbose horror of their first two LPs “Carnal Law” and “Patricidal Lust”, San Francisco’s Vastum sadistically carved a jagged dripping wound into an increasingly reductive American Death Metal scene. Arising again for their third full length album Vastum plumb the depths of internalized agony and degradation farther than ever on “Hole Below”.

Characterized by a deeply cavernous trudge through gut churning heaviness, “Hole Below” both bluntly crushes and rigorously shreds to conceive fully formed grotesqueries of debased brutality. Guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf (along with Shelby Lermo) wields her axe with the experienced slice of masked executioner quartering savage riffs and twisting leads. The abhorrent vocal (and lyrical) morbidity traded by imposing frontman Daniel Butler and Abdul-Rauf continues to be the most formidable combination in Death Metal. The intimidating rhythm section of Luca Indrio and Adam Perry steer the war machine through the pooled blood and skull fragments scattered amidst the debauched iniquity of this peculiar hell.

Three albums in Vastum have honed their disturbed masochism into a sound manifestly their own and true to the core of the purest darkest Death Metal.

93 Locrian - Infinite Dissolution 163 Points, 6 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/2ovjtBH.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/7sJzVKKgyTfdhwpLLJuv0A

spotify:album:7sJzVKKgyTfdhwpLLJuv0A

https://locrian.bandcamp.com/album/infinite-dissolution

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20724-infinite-dissolution/
Locrian
Infinite Dissolution
Relapse; 2015
By Grayson Haver Currin; July 22, 2015

8.2

The more music Locrian create, the less sense the metallurgists seem to make: That is the implicit lesson of Infinite Dissolution, the most adventurous and accessible album the once-prohibitively esoteric band have ever made. During these nine tracks, they buoy black metal with kaleidoscopic guitar solos and punctuate cinematic three-piece suites with transfixing synthesizer serenades. Screamed anthems find and then finesse an unexpected threshold between post-metal and post-punk, while some of the band’s most grim vocals ever provide the friction against their most gorgeous and warm musical setting to date. With Infinite Dissolution, Locrian continue a series of impressionistic explorations devoted to apocalyptic apprehension—or "hymn[s] to the deluge," as they put it at one point here. Somehow, though, these soundtracks to oblivion come to feel redemptive and even empowering, like torches made only to work in the most extreme dark.

For half of their career, Locrian were a duo whose hard-shelled hybrids of harsh noise textures and heavy metal structures felt compelling but often stable. Terrence Hannum and André Foisy built bleak expanses of brutal sound, where considerations about technical and cultural obsolescence fought through sheets of dissonance and walls of distortion. Their recordings were aggressive and ruminative, less concerned with acute crescendos than cumulative atmosphere. But in 2010, for the album Crystal World, Locrian enlisted Steven Hess, a Chicago improviser with a long and impressive résumé of collaborative electronic abstraction. The moment was an oxbow: Locrian’s ideas crystallized around the skeleton of Hess’ drums, and their music began to take new shapes and gather sudden speed. Urgency and bravado entered their vocabulary. By the time Locrian issued their full-length Relapse debut, 2013’s Return to Annihilation, the trio were able to talk about the influence of Genesis and make music that offered up evidence.

Despite Locrian’s doomsday obsessions, Infinite Dissolution—much like the last five years of Locrian at large—depends upon a wide-eyed sense of musical wonder. Locrian’s evolution has hinged less on a refinement of their style and more on an expansion of it, so that new influences and impulses operate inside of their general roar. This spirit is obvious from the start of Infinite Dissolution, which exposes facets and folds of Locrian that never before seemed to exist. The brilliant opener "Arc of Extinction" begins like a Locrian creeper of not so long ago, with piercing noise and saturating tones shaping a broad drone. Powered by Hess, though, the song steadily escalates, moving from a slow-motion march into a sustained sprint of blast beats. Locrian have touched on black metal before, but here, they perfectly tuck it into their past. The speed animates the animosity. The tumult counters a guitar solo so bright it seems excised from a Rainbow record. The effect is both beautiful and frightening, much like the lyrics of death and rebirth that Hannum sends into the squall.

The brief poem at the center of "Arc of Extinction" highlights another crucial element of Locrian’s evolution, because you can barely hear Hannum. Instead, his words are massaged deep into the mix, so that they are part of a whole and not its obvious leading edge. Likewise, during the strangely triumphant "The Great Dying", the obvious vocal hook yields the foreground to the band, the chant becoming the de facto bass for a band without one. After a decade together, Hannum and Foisy have erased many of the boundaries between their electronics and electric guitars, their synthesizers and their manipulated shouts. During the dénouement of "KXL I", for instance, the strangled riff, static-caked vocals, and screeching circuits congeal into one righteous din, a single symphony of terror. Hess has not only learned their logic but also enhanced it. In the past, "Heavy Water" might have been a formless cloud of hazy effects and echoing glissandos, but he gives the record’s cold comedown a pulse and purpose. During Infinite Dissolution, Locrian make very involved music seem effortless, allowing the sound to support the emotion rather than overpower it. That’s what they’ve tried to do for a decade.

In their salad days, Locrian seemed to issue new music constantly. A stream of seven-inches, CD-Rs and cassettes arrived one after another, as though Hannum and Foisy had nowhere else to be for five years. But Hess joined the band, and Hannum split Chicago for Baltimore. The complicated schedule and the precipitously slower pace have been boons for Locrian. They have had time to incorporate new touchstones without letting them overrun the band, and they have had time to approach each additional layer with diligence. There is so much pressure to speed up as a band these days, to not give any bit of online notoriety an instant to disappear. But Locrian chose to slow down and create consecutive meticulous albums. They are isolated and involved worlds of sound—safe, as one song suggests, from our own "wreckage of a mighty dream."

http://thequietus.com/articles/18378-locrian-infinite-dissolution-review

Before hearing a single second of Infinite Dissolution, Locrian's incoming full-length and their second proper for Relapse, the record's striking cover art hints at the aesthetic permutations of a band that is no stranger to rigorous experimentation. The repurposed image of David Altmejd's 2008 work 'The Eye' renders the sculpture colossal, unnerving – an architecture of myriad surfaces and impossible angles that is both imposing and unnervingly alien. For a group who have, even during their most ecstatic moments, so intently peered into the subterranean void (visually evinced in the queasy landscapes of past releases like The Crystal World and Territories), it's a sign that their gaze has shifted skywards, to an emphatically more celestial one.

That's not to say Locrian have become less dour – Infinite Dissolution is, they state, a concept record about the 'inevitability of extinction', a sentiment that runs throughout the spare, hopeless lyrics – but the record's crystalline textures and dizzying sonic nuances are here dragged from smothering darkness into brilliant light. It's an excellent record, even if this shift arrives at the expense of certain aspects of their sound – the sprawling slow-builds and claustrophobic grimness – that has made them such a vital underground force for over a decade.

The Baltimore/Chicago three piece was formed by guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Andre Foisy and keyboardist/vocalist Terence Hannum in 2005 – drummer Steven Hess made his first appearance in 2010. They've always been more of a tonal noise/drone band than the black metal one they're often pinned as; that latter element manifesting itself most effectively as measured releases from the Swans-esque tension building and power electronics workouts that managed to be both harrowing and electrifying in their compositional detail. (And, unlike the head-razing BM/noise work of bands like Wold and Vegas Martyrs, frequently beautiful).

With Infinite Dissolution they build on the framework of 2013's Return To Annihilation, successfully melding those genres with prog, industrial and post-rock into a consistent and muscular whole (helped in no small part by Greg Norman's sterling production job). It's a work that, while being their most accessible to date, is still dense enough to reward patience and repeated listens.

Opener 'Arc Of Extinction' immediately lurches into a solid three minutes of noise, the guitar and synth merging as a refulgent wall of distortion undercut by Hess' spare, martial tom thuds. Hannum's eventual harrowed shrieking sounds as distant as ever (as if recorded from the opposite end of a chasmic oubliette); a brief precursor to the sudden tip into furious blasting, a simplistic descending chord structure and a harmonic lead spiralling off overhead. It's the most conventional black metal moment on the record, and one of its most thrilling.

'Dark Shales' is initially closer in sound to the 2011 cover of Popol Vuh's 'Dort Ist Der Weg' before seguing in to a melodic five minutes of Cascadian-tinted post-rock; while 'KXL I''s industrial shower and seething banks of sheet noise comprise Infinite Dissolution's most abject arc, an aesthetic emphasised by the near-poppyness of the track immediately proceeding it.

I was slightly taken aback by 'The Future Of Death' on first listens, with its mix of simplistic coldwave synths and a middle section not a million miles away from the cosmic post-hardcore of At The Drive In. Along with Erica Burgner-Hannum's jarring guest vocals in the closing passages of 'An Index Of Air', it's the album's only near misstep, a track uncomfortably close to conventional given Locrian's conceptual nous (albeit one that that I find myself warming to with each subsequent listen).

The forlorn string loop of 'KXL II' – wavering over a heady static crackle – is highly affecting for a glorified interlude, making way for the pensive fuzz of 'The Great Dying' and the eventual album peak of 'Heavy Water'. The latter builds on a glacial, oscillating wash of synth, overlaying a clean, circular guitar figure and more of Hannum's haunted shrieking. There's not much more to it – an insistent kick drum leading to a peak of modest volume before letting the track fade into itself again – but it's gorgeous, haunting stuff, further evoking a freezing astral plane in place of the sodden netherworld and urban wastelands that Locrian have inhabited until now. It's a lonely, exhilarating place to be.

93 KEN Mode - Success 163 Points, 6 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/rI4KFEm.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/4ASQ4v6gKIZkaNi9p4xdG1
spotify:album:4ASQ4v6gKIZkaNi9p4xdG1

https://kenmodesom.bandcamp.com/album/success

http://www.metalsucks.net/2015/06/04/ken-modes-success-a-good-record-if-not-a-good-metal-record/

f you’re looking for a good metal record, stop reading here.

There is nothing death/djent/stoner/thrash/metalcore about Success, the sixth album from the brotherly-led KEN Mode.

What Success does sound like is the strain of noisy post-punk and grunge that bubbled up in the late 80s. Loud bands with analog angst, little melody, and a bit of artistic pretension… and the kind of guys who probably fucking hated metal.

It’s an unusual but interesting turn for Mode, whose past offerings have veered more metallic hardcore than Touch & Go/AmRep. Engineered by Steve Albini (Nirvana, The Pixies, and, uh, Bush), Success is often tuneless, especially vocally. But if the warbles of David Yow or PiL-era John Lyndon entice you, you’re in for a treat.

In a way, the whole album is a series of outliers, small variations on a noisy, sarcastic dirge. “I would like to learn how to kill the nicest man in the world,” vocalist Jesse Matthewson spews in “These Tight Jeans,” getting a female callback in the album’s lone instance of melody. Violins prop up “The Owl,” while a fat bass line dominates “I Just Liked Fire.”

Then again, maybe it’s all a joke. Matthewson spews a line like “A day in southern Manitoba could not be more sublime” and you can almost hear the eye roll… except, in context, he might be serious. Hard to tell.

Kidding or not, Success uh, succeeds because it embraces its musical ambitions. It’s a lo-fi, imperfect album at odds with its metal neighbors, but one that invites more than a cursory listen. And props to the recent tide of bands, including Title Fight and Liturgy, who feel comfortable pivoting when their audience may not.

Don’t like it? Joke’s on you.

ok i think i'm gonna like all of these

All three are very good. Locrian I found overwhelming, but I enjoyed it if I took it in a couple of tracks at a time. KEN Mode's Success is the best album they've made to date.

Locrian just keep getting better in my view. Never got round to KENmode though I liked what I heard of their previous stuff.

Locrian is good, I can't really *love* this stuff but it's pretty impressive.

Ok Ken Mode sounds cool. I must check it out. Love the cover too.

Just don't read the Pitchfork review.

Not that I was going to but why not?

The writer makes a bunch of assumptions about their noise rock roots (as in he says Albini brought the roots with him) and then completely misses the humor of the record.

92 Kylesa - Exhausting Fire 164 Points, 5 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/RoBhUka.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/0KwYRP0sZMzRqBMpnwGEPE
spotify:album:0KwYRP0sZMzRqBMpnwGEPE

https://kylesasom.bandcamp.com/album/exhausting-fire

http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/09/album-review-kylesa-exhausting-fire/

Over the past decade, Kylesa has been one of the most consistent and visible bands on the stoner metal circuit. They rose from the same Georgia scene that spawned Mastodon, playing a brand of metallic hardcore punk before mellowing out in recent years. Shouted vocals, fast tempos, and angry, misanthropic lyrics have given way to melodic heavy psych and calmer vibes, and though Kylesa has jettisoned its old sound and lost favor in the crowd that once championed it, the band’s development into a stoner powerhouse always felt natural and organic. As artists, their clarity of vision took over, and with each album, the songs slowed and the structures tightened, effectively accentuating Kylesa’s finer assets: the spooky dual vocals of Laura Pleasants and Phillip Cope, the affected guitars, and the trippy atmospherics. A Kylesa album always sounds like a Kylesa album. It’s just a matter of where the band wants to take the recordings.

In this way, experimentation is encouraged. There are some bands we never want to change. We come to rely on the comfort of their consistency and the fulfillment of our expectations. But Kylesa is invincible. When they leave that comfort zone — like they did on their landmark records Static Tensions and Spiral Shadow, back when they moved away from punk — it’s still effective, if not more so. They’re on their A-game when exploring new territories.

That’s why Exhausting Fire works. On the outfit’s seventh album, Kylesa again reinvent themselves as a music box of stoner psych and alt metal dabbling. 2013’s Ultraviolet was a hesitant test run, a toe in the pool as opposed to the total submergence found here, as Kylesa surrender themselves to weirder songwriting tics, prismatic genre-blending, and spiritual concession. Opener “Crusher” does good on its name with dense blasts of sluggish feedback and a thick riff, but it’s the song’s second half that brings it home. The fuzz drops out, a polyrhythmic beat kicks in, and Pleasants’ vocals turn sensual, sounding more Mazzy Star than metal. These twists and turns work. On “Moving Day”, Cope sings in a goth croon while synths swell up and down, and it’s Cure as fuck. “Night Drive” is pure heavy pop with disarmingly earnest lyrics and passionate screams from Cope: “I don’t want to be on this night drive/ I would rather be anywhere else.”

Exhausting Fire is the band’s most experimental work to date, but that’s not to say it doesn’t riff out on occasion. “Shaping the Southern Sky”, while a little misleading toward the majority of the album’s content, is Kylesa’s most metal track since Spiral Shadow, guided by a chugging riff that would sound at home on a High on Fire album. Another highlight, “Blood Moon”, tries on a black metal aesthetic that works surprisingly well. The only weak tracks are the ones that are the most obviously Kylesa — straightforward, heavy — and the least imaginative (“Inward Debate”, “Lost and Confused”).

Kylesa doesn’t seem interested in being a big, bad Southern metal band, just like they never wanted to be a flashpoint for anger after getting over their early punk phase. Exhausting Fire has heart, both sonically and lyrically. It moves with confidence, content with its explorations, and it’s engaging because of it. Such an amorphous approach to heaviness is becoming more common in metal, an often rigidly traditional genre, and Kylesa continues to push those boundaries as forerunners of the post-metal movement.

Essential Tracks: “Crusher”, “Night Drive”, and “Blood Moon”

oh yeah the locrian record is impressive but takes so long to get where it's going

like i veer from thinking it's boring to thinking it's amazing every few minutes

7.4 from pitchfork
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21186-exhausting-fire/?

Kylesa have been experimenting with and expanding their sound for almost 15 years. They've kept moving, which is admirable, but when the Savannah, Ga., band started out, they were already unique: a crusty sludge-punk juggernaut that mixed shout-along male-female vocals into anthems that got your adrenaline going even if you weren't paying attention to what they were saying. As time went on, they added a second drummer, and replaced some of the sludge with pop. They mentioned Built to Spill as an influence, as well as early '90s alt rock and riot grrrl. Vocalist/guitarist Phillip Cope included Beach House and Sleepy Sun on a year-end list. The thing is, as much as they tweaked the metal formula, and copped to quieter listening habits, they still basically sounded the same: even on 2013’s chillier, darker, atmospherically expansive Ultraviolet, Kylesa barreled along like Kylesa, but in a slightly less interesting way.

Which is what makes their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, unique to the trio’s catalogue: On these 10 songs, Cope, guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants, and drummer Carl McGinley often sound like a different band entirely. The Cope-fronted “Moving Day” is a mid-tempo death rock song that fits nicely between Killing Joke and Christian Death on a mix tape, and stands out as one of my favorite individual songs of the year. Previously, when Kylesa weren't speeding along, they'd stall. When they got too ambitious, you'd wish they'd get back to packing basements. It's not that anything was offensive or embarrassing—it was just bland.

Here, they’ve sharpened their songwriting on tracks that don’t immediately sound like Kylesa, so you get a nice mix of the familiar fist-pumpers along with curious diversions that work. "Lost and Confused" goes from spaced-out mellow to fist-pumping shout-along, then elegantly keeps the pedal pressed to the floor until an atmospheric coda. It's a geat song, one that's inspired a lot of air drumming at my desk this week. Or the amped-up, smeary "Inward Debate", which shows them subtly working deeper psychedelia into the double-drumming. On the longest track, "Shaping the Southern Sky", the band drifts from rock 'n' roll boogie into a cavernous desert of Meat Puppets tumble weeds that builds, over 2 minutes, to a massive rock punch that's worth the wait. Importantly, on the previously mentioned “Moving Day”, you hear Kylesa crafting a legitimate hook, one that could close a John Hughes movie.

There's a lot that echoes the Pixies here, perhaps because on Exhausting, there’s more of a mix between the vocalists: Pleasants handled most of the singing on Ultraviolet, or at least Cope took a backseat, shouting choruses now and then. She has more range than Cope in a traditional sense, but her voice isn’t that compelling alone—you ultimately need his chanted intonations against her spacier tones to keep things interesting. When they both shout, it's golden; they do that a lot here. And, often when you think a song's boring (see: "Growing Roots"), the other singer joins in and saves the day.

Some can't be saved, which happens when you keep expanding. The first movement of opener "Crusher" feels like a hangover from Ultraviolet, and the nighttime psychedelia of “Falling” limps along for 4 minutes. More often than not, though, the center holds, and it makes Ultraviolet look like a scratchpad for what they ended up doing here: radically shaking up their formula—from the inside out—and coming back with compelling results.

91 Sigh - Graveward 164 Points, 7 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/LCwAetd.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/5HB5UIP3lFhhspoa8eRLVR
spotify:album:5HB5UIP3lFhhspoa8eRLVR

https://candlelightrecordsusa.bandcamp.com/album/graveward

The tenth studio album from Japanese noise/extreme metal merchants is an ambitious endeavor. Taking over two and a half years to write/record, each song had over 100 recording tracks exceeding 100GB of audio to select from in the final mixes. Features guest perfrmances from Matthew Heafy (Trivium), Fred Leclercq (Dragonforce), Niklas Kvarforth (Shining Sweden), Sakis Tolis (Rotting Christ), and Metatron (The Meads of Asphodel).

http://www.angrymetalguy.com/sigh-graveward-review/

There’s only one word that can encompass this specific cocktail of madness: Japan. Sigh are on their tenth trip around the turntable and still spin at 45, since there isn’t a faster option. Graveward is their attempt to penetrate the monolithic shadow cast by In Somniphobia, an album so fantastically strange that it was a sidestep even by the standards of a band that defines the term “avant-garde”. Will Graveward see them pulling an Opeth and venturing even further from their black metal roots, or is this going to be more of a Cryptopsy style return?

Did you like Scenes from Hell? If not, that’s ok, there are plenty of other shitty people in the world for you to hang out with. If you did, then I suggest that you open a new tab now and exchange some of your favorite type of currency for your very own Graveward. The symphonics and aggression of Scenes From Hell make their return here, but appear in concert with the moody strangeness of In Somniphobia, bubbling up in Sigh‘s churning glass, jagged, dangerous and as always, unabashedly bizarre. Unlike its predecessor, Graveward is metal through and through, each song a cancerous vertebra in the twisting spinal column of a black metal album that’s been through hell and come out stranger.

Sigh Graveward 03“Kaedit Nos Pestis” marks Sigh‘s territory right away, gushing out a stream of fetid liquid that steams when it hits the freshly turned soil. Deeply rooted in old-school black metal and power metal, the song snaps Graveward open with incredibly fun lyrics and bizarre singing that’s so cheesy it would stick out on a [Luca Turilli’s] Rhapsody [of Fire] album. “The Forlorn” is the album’s first mid-paced song, but it’s no less intense or weird than the three that precede it – just try not to sob out the line ‘I am not dead…’ with Mirai Kawashima. You can’t.

The first half of Graveward closes with “Molesters of My Soul,” which is best simulated by compressing a brass section into a two-by-four, sticking a bunch of nails into the wood and subsequently being smacked with that board at a steady 92 bpm. As stomping and mad as it is, the song also features one of the most interesting intros on the album, a twinkling music-box-like melody that I’m about half sure was stolen from the studio as In Flames was recording A Sense of Purpose. “The Casketburner” is another standout on the last half of the album, fun enough to go toe-to-toe with some of Revocation‘s latest material. There’s really not a bad song to be had here, which is what we’ve all come to expect from Sigh.

Despite this, Graveward dose have one big problem, and it’s a surprising one. The album often feels a little, well, predictable. The songs aren’t nearly as varied as those on In Somniphobia, but that wouldn’t be such a problem if Graveward didn’t feel like it was still running on its predecessor’s chassis. The same gags and sounds pop up in the same places that they did on In Somniphobia; “Kaedit Nos Pestis” features a hand-clapping track that’s quite similar to one from “The Transfiguration Fear Lucid Nightmare;” they bring out the saxophone in the same places as the album progresses, and there’s a definite U-shaped curve in speed across the length of the LP. On top of this, the choice to put “Dwellers in a Dream” after the seven-minute epic “A Messenger from Tomorrow” – which sounds like the S&M version of “One” if it was rewritten by madmen – is pretty questionable. I don’t think Graveward is too long (49 minutes is a great length and Sigh can get away with much more), “Dwellers in a Dream” isn’t the best way to close the album.

While it’s not quite the masterpiece that was In Somniphobia, Graveward is far from a blemish on Sigh‘s discography. It’s a great album despite its flaws, but it is a little bit worrying. There’s the lingering suggestion that Sigh are running out of ideas, and while one could hardly blame them, seeing as they’ve never hesitated to shove everything possible into their art, it makes me weary for the future of Japan’s most revered extreme metal export. Only time will tell whether they can make the turnaround, but even if we have to wait another three years, there’s always the back catalog to keep us company.

there was a new sigh record this year? jesus christ i was not paying attention

Kylesa are great live, but I have trouble getting into the albums. Rooting for them, maybe they'll nail it next time.

man this vastum record is my kind of gross

yay Locrian

(yay Vastum too but I still haven't heard this one, I'm sure it rules though)

Locrian is the one I've been enjoying the most so far. I kept meaning to check out the album this year.

90 Ahab - The Boats of the Glen Carrig 168 Points, 6 Votes
http://i.imgur.com/4mmyNcx.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/1qAXKudAta2w1BQQ3XOovA
spotify:album:1qAXKudAta2w1BQQ3XOovA

http://www.angrymetalguy.com/ahab-boats-glen-carrig-review/

Ahab has been the proud flag-bearer for funeral doom during the last ten years, with three full-length releases fleshing out a decade which has seen them achieve great popularity for such a niche genre. The AMG ranks are infested with attention-impaired sodomites who don’t understand the genre, but Steel Druhm deservedly credited their third album, The Giant, with a strong 3.5. The German whale-meisters maintain their trend towards nautical literature, this time drawing on William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” a survival-horror turned adventure tale. The creeping tension and monstrous beings provide fitting inspiration for the oppressive doom presented here, and Glen Carrig continues the musical developments made on The Giant.

As was the case with its predecessor, Glen Carrig is funeral doom but less dirgy and at a marginally less glacial pace. Indeed, “Like Red Foam (The Great Storm)” is the fastest song Ahab has written. They expand on the post-rock and progressive influences integrated into The Giant, with ambient passages and greater diversity from their core doom style. This dynamism is demonstrated as the album’s moves through phases of heaviness and subtlety uncharacteristic of an often-overpowering genre. There’s a greater mixture of instrumental and vocal textures in the Glen Carrig repertoire than ever previously, and it’s certainly an interesting listen which avoids the typical funeral doom caveat of musical homogeneity. All this is evident on the four long songs, omitting the comparatively short “ Like Red Foam.” A variety of guitar tones are used, as is the case with Christian Hector’s vocals. His growls are typically excellent but he exercises his cleaner tonsils here, accompanying the atmospheric quiet moments with somber and emotional chants.

Ahab The Boats of the Glen Carrig 02bUpholding the vocals are the riffs. Considering the relative pace of this album among its peers, the guitar work largely impresses in and of itself rather than just contributing to a wider atmosphere. They make a strong impact such as that at 3:37 of “The Thing that Made Search” and the opening lead on “Like Red Foam.” However, these riffs are strung quite thin when most tracks exceed ten minutes. There is a lack of melodic and technical development on the guitars as the songs progress, grinding promising work into banality. This isn’t a slight against the guitarists’ abilities, rather the song-writing. I enjoy a long song wherein a core lead is retained but evolves: this feels more progressive and cohesive than artificially extending a song by stitching together multiple riffs. However, only the highlight, “The Isle,” consistently demonstrates such development. “Like Red Foam” also updates an earlier riff at the 4:20 mark with an additional melody which heightens the mood.

If I’m harsh on this aspect of the song-writing it’s because Ahab has improved in another: these guys are increasingly utilizing more complex and compelling compositions. Each track has sections in which the harmonies pull together brvtality with melody, offering pleasing milestones as the listener advances through the length. The layering of guitar tracks providing rhythm, leads and shredding is great at the aforementioned moment in “Like Red Foam” and in the last four minutes of “The Weedmen,” to name two examples.

Ahab The Boats of the Glen Carrig 03

Referencing this layering of guitars, Ahab favors a large production job. Despite the huge sound intrinsic to the genre, the audio quality is quite clear, bypassing dirty or fuzzy productions preferred by others. The quiet moments almost glisten. I don’t mean this as a negative however, as the instrumentation is clear and strong in the heavy moments and delicate in the subtle ones. It may not be cvlt with such studio work but it’s powerful. My only complaint on this front is that guitar solos could be mixed better. I get that the clean shredding tone isn’t typically a part of funeral doom, but they’re almost superfluous since they’re so far back in the mix.

Overall, Glen Carrig is a strong marker of progression in Ahab‘s career. It continues from The Giant but has improved in the harmonies constructed and production utilized. The issue I take with the riffs does let it down, but this is a solid choice for doom aficionados. Journey into the unknown with these seafarers.

This is not metal at all, but Leila Abdul-Rauf of Vastum made one of my favorite late-night records of 2015:

https://leilaabdulrauf.bandcamp.com/album/insomnia

Yeah, an EP, Calibros/So Fucking Tired is new, I thought?, and takes over half of the album, so I figured it would count

(I swear imago that this was not a veiled attempt to get you to answer my post on the other thread though lol)

yes it was

You never said anything on the nominations thread did you, CS?

I don't believe so