No, We Aren't Making These Bands Up: ILM Metal Poll 2010 Results Thread

Where are all the Sigh fans?

discussing gun control probably...

Metal >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Guns

diminishing returns from sigh since (the fantastic) imaginary sonicscape but that's been on my list of 2010 records to check out since it was released. of course, I still haven't gotten around to it but dog latin had some interesting things to say about it somewhere on ilx and really should give it a listen sometime soon.

I was wondering where dog latin was actually

found the quote. it's from a thread for sigh.

Alan N, as with most albums after Imaginary Sonicscape, this is Sigh trying a slightly different tack. This time they've brought in a female growler (oo-er!) who doesn't sound all that different from the regular guy. There's no more country-n-western pastiches or cod-reggae middle-eighths on this one, but it is pure medieval machine music. The employment of evil-dextrous orchestration thankfully enforces the blow rather than softens it. It manages to be grindingly violent, horrifyingly majestic but still genuinely retaining the fun factor.

― village idiot (dog latin), Tuesday, June 15, 2010 3:47 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

does sound pretty cool.

great cover too:

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/reviewpics/sighnew.jpg

I'm listening to it on spotify. It's as sufficiently as weird as you would expect it to be.

may listen tonight...

Next one is a tie so I'll post them together

These records are getting lots of votes but none of the voters are talking about them (me included, which I'll now rectify).

I voted for Les Discrets, as I found it the most impressive of the pretty shoegazey stuff I heard this year. I really love the mix; the drums are punchy, the cymbals pierce the fog of the guitars, and though I have no idea what he's singing about I like his voice. It isn't particularly heavy, but uses some of the tropes of the genre (like blast beats) to great effect. I think it effectively built on the sound of Amesoeurs and Souvenirs d'un autre Monde better than Neige did on the newest Alcest (which I like, though not as much as Septembre).

TIE
84
Menace Ruine - Union of Irreconcilables (232 Points, 11 Votes)
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_-zOD9_8LSFc/TAPvNhQuOkI/AAAAAAAAAtk/K5CWzCJ59tA/s320/1275317604_menace-ruine.jpg
http://www.last.fm/music/Menace+Ruine

Menace Ruine came together in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in autumn 2006, when they began composing the songs that would form their debut recording, In Vulva Infernum.

While the debut album Cult Of Ruins, took its starting point in fast black metal and noise, the follow-up, The Die is Cast stays true to the metal sound. The tempo has been slowed down, and could be described as heavy down-tempo drone with martial rhythms.

The original lineup:

Geneviève - vocals, instruments, lyrics;
S. de La Moth - vocals, instruments.

http://boomkat.com/cds/305649-menace-ruine-union-of-irreconcilables
http://www.myspace.com/menaceruine

84
Boris - Variations (232 Points, 11 Votes)
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_npAibJ29jYc/TB63hwEdheI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/wd4_t6Bk550/s1600/14o7vyf%5B1%5D.jpg
http://www.last.fm/music/Boris

Quite a few bands with female musicians have made it so far. Something metal is usually accused of not enough of (perfectly true) but glad ILMis embracing it.

These records are getting lots of votes but none of the voters are talking about them (me included, which I'll now rectify).

Thanks!
but sadly that is par for the course for poll threads until the final stages. Would love to see more discussion though, so everyone feel free to pile in with thoughts!

The only one I've heard thus far is the Black Tusk record, which sounded very much like Georgia peers Kylesa to me. That post-hardcore sound is very popular at the moment, isn't it.

^^ voted for Boris (my first to appear). kinda serves as a greatest hits-style compilation w/ a handful of newly recorded parts (the new Kurihara guitar stuff is blistering) and pretty much everything on it is unfuckwithable.

It's interesting how many groups have made this list that weren't really discussed on the metal thread. Although probably the stuff that was discussed at length will be appearing further up. Crazy how good a year this was for metal.

Anyway, Black Tusk and Howl are both similar-sounding, quite good, and on Relapse. I suspect, however, that they've only gotten this much attention because the genre hasn't become glutted yet. There's a good chance that this particular style is going to become as strip mined as post-metal, though, and when that happens they'll probably fall through the cracks.

Listening to the Menace Ruin tracks on myspace and they're interesting. Worth further exploration, at least.

I listened to the Black Tusk but it didn't click with me like the Kylesa record. There is definitely something in the water down Georgia way.

Or Menace Ruine, even.

I haven't heard hardly any of this shit so far. My listening is much more mainstream, I guess...that, plus my tolerance for artsy crap has really diminished over the last couple of years. Gimme BROOTAL DEATH METAL or fuck off.

It's interesting how many groups have made this list that weren't really discussed on the metal thread.

Although probably the stuff that was discussed at length will be appearing further up.

Probably no point in saying that wont be the case because, to a high extent its true, but there are some surprises with high/low placings for known & not so well known albums.

Crazy how good a year this was for metal.

Damn right, maybe mainstream metal is creatively redundant and not selling that well but the underground with it's many subgenres is thriving! Maybe one will crossover?

The sigh was my #2, and although it def isn't the weirdest thing on my list, it's about as odd as would be expected from them. I think this time around there us def less weird for weirds sake going on, the whole album seems a little more gelled than many of the other ones to my ears, kind of a band hitting it's stride thing IMO. Would be more effusive but I am posting from iPhone so even being this longwinded is annoying as hell.

Kinda sounds like if a bunch of the good paganfest folkmetal dudes did a collab w/peste noire and recorded in a high $$$ studio instead of some dudes toolshed.

Henry wouldn't like it if it had high $$$ production though.

Henry ate a bunch of my mail this afternoon so his posting privs have been temporarily revoked.

You not been feeding him enough steak?

83
Hellbeard - Scarecrow (234 Points, 10 Votes)
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__RB2VVb7ph4/TRS-JrMcJyI/AAAAAAAABHk/OOxBlYaG7ho/s320/51uXhV%252BorkL.jpg
http://www.last.fm/music/Hellbeard

When the scum rock band 66seven decided to take their sound in a darker, droning, more powerful new direction after a line-up change, a new name was needed…

Hellbeard brings musicality, vision, spirit and reason, to create disturbing, crushing sonic walls of destruction, comforting ambient textures, and hypnotic drones.

http://www.myspace.com/hellbeardband

OMG that Hellbeard cover! Must hear that!

I tried to listen to as much of the nominated albums as I could over the past month and that one was pretty good.

Seriously, where are all these bands coming from? Are you just making stuff up at this point?

*sigh*

(he's joking btw, just trying to stir shit up)

He just has a journalists sense of "humor"

Seriously, where the hell are the voters? 10 people voted for that Hellbeard, yet it seems none of the regular posters have even heard of it, let alone heard the record itself. C'mon lurkers, rep your votes!

And I agree with jon - great cover. Oh crap, listening to Hellbeard on myspace and screamy dude ruining what started off so well. Bollocks to them.

yeah voters post away!!!

I think everyones on that gun thread though as viceroy says

The music's great on the Hellbeard - even like the switch to crusty punk and back on the second track - but the "lead throat" is killing me.

With the name hellbeard I totally expected trad doom metal with clean vox

I'm not saying you made up the results, I just thought I had heard/of most of the stuff that came out this year. Seems like I missed a lot. Would it be too much to ask to post labels?

It would be a bit much, i already added genres and countries to needle and that took a day each practically,with my complete lack of concentration & motivation it was a bit much.
But I suppose I could add it to the end of it with the recap tonight then try posting it along with each result

also so much stuff comes out that its impossible to hear of everything never mind hear it!

Tell you what, I'll post a metal archives link if there is one, ok?

haha except hellbeard dont have one

I bet they are an ilxors band and their mates voted for it!

82
Horseback - The Invisible Mountain (234 Points, 12 Votes)

http://www.rocksound.tv/images/uploads/theinvisiblemountain300.jpg

http://open.spotify.com/album/7EmcwSzoujDmObReKUVK3c

http://www.last.fm/music/Horseback

Jenks Miller’s psychedelic / drone project, Horseback, produced an avant-garde sleeper-hit with 2007’s Impale Golden Horn (Burly Time Records/Holidays for Quince Records). That record, which Aquarius Records’ review staff tentatively described as “the best drone record of the year” upon its release, boasted four lengthy tracks, each one a vibrant, kaleidoscopic journey toward a manic, inevitable nirvana. More melodic and accessible than most noise records and noisier than most dream pop records, Horseback’s debut carved itself a niche somewhere between Merzbow and Stars of the Lid, offering a refreshing sound to fans across many sub-genres of psychedelic music.

Horseback began its story in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2006.

Horseback toured in the fall of 2007 with Meisha / Arco Flute Foundation / New American Folk Hero visionary Mike Tamburo, including a stop at the fourth-annual Arthur Magazine-curated Million Tongues Festival in Chicago.

With an almost dialectical precision, Jenks Miller’s Approaching the Invisible Mountain turns Horseback’s sound inside-out. Where guitars previously fuzzed and whirred, they are clean; where instrumentation was meticulously balanced against itself, playing is now searching, slowly unraveling, reveling in its quiet momentum. Where Impale Golden Horn found inspiration in 20th-century American avant-garde composers, Approaching the Invisible Mountain digs further back into the annals of American music, generating a sound that is as much derived from the blues-guitar tradition as it is from modern composition’s sense of (s)pace. Over the course of six solo-guitar improvisations, Miller reinvents the process of tonal meditation that was present in Horseback’s debut.

2009 saw the release of Horseback’s MILH IHVH, a 7” record (Turgid Animal) and The Invisible Mountain, a full-length CD (Utech Records), both of which explore a darker, noisier, and more agressive side of drone music that explicitly references harsh noise, black metal and doom. Though divergent composition and recording processes yield very different textures in the two recordings, both records are intended to open portals into a kind of mythic imagination or meditative self-awareness.

http://www.myspace.com/horsebacknoise

It was reissued on Relapse this year I think. The 2009 release was ltd cdr i think.

Anyway there was plenty of chat about it on ILM

There was? I guess I missed it as this doesn't ring any bells.

probably was on the drone/psych thread

That would explain it. Again, would love this with different vocals. Great droning grooves, interesting licks, shit smeared on top.

I dont have a problem with Horseback vox at all, I prefer it to the vox on the howling void album where the death growls suck but the music is great.