THE 10TH ANNUAL ILM METAL POLL:2017 RESULTS THREAD

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and good luck Odysseus!

Best of luck!

Indeed!

Good luck, Odysseus. And yay Thantifaxath. I was surprised by how eclectic this album was.

Planning for Burial has been in regular rotation btw.

Fuck you guys move fast. Are we finishing this today? Anyway for some reason I have resolved to listen to the top 25 in their entirety, even if it kills me. Won't pretend that I'm not dreading some of it.

Unsane sounds pretty all right so far.

And hope everything goes well Odysseus

we're going to 11 today.

This penultimate track on the Boris album is stunning!

Yeah, I listened to that album last night and really liked it. I never think to listen to Boris but I usually seem to enjoy them when I do.

19 Cleric - Retrocausal 336.0 Points 8 Votes 2 #1 Votes
http://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Cleric-Retrocausal.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/4LUiTgSAzBciSeoFeDcZDc?si=XotAe8okQy20Y1dTIN7Khg

Beyond the accurate comparisons to both Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3 mentioned above, in both the ambitious scope and multi-genre blender approach to music that Cleric share with them, Cleric have a well-developed, Swiss-army-knife style of metal welded to their theatrical, noisy, and film-score-sounding layers, filtered through atypical labyrinth-like songwriting structures. While Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3 have always had metal in their blood, they often played it in various styles, whereas Cleric on Regression, and even further developed on Retrocausal, have a highly specific and zeroed-in mesh of metal influences that weave together like sheets of abstract armor on acid, terrifying yet complementing each other splendidly.

On Retrocausal, that takes the form of something akin to Fantomas-meets-Dillinger Escape Plan clashing with Converge, Botch, Meshuggah, and proggy sludge influences. But beyond that, I’ll quote our esteemed overlord Islander’s past description of Cleric’s music at NCS as well, since the music is so vast and expansive, so easily defying any simple singular description. He described them as “something like Portal, Blackjazz-vintage Shining, and Behold… the Arctopus communing in a hurricane. During an earthquake.”

Ah! My #1. A portal into the world of musical chaos I would prefer to exist.

once again resolutely Not My Thing but more power to you goddamn freaks

Of course, it isn't chaos. Everything here is rigorously-composed and minutely thought-out by four mad geniuses

someopick image up off the floor please

(I am pretty stoked to see them live though - with Thantifaxath, appropriately enough)

bloody autocorrect

Cleric/Thantifaxath had best have a UK reprise at some point

Unlistenable rubbish

Lol

I sincerely hope the cover image was taken from their actual studio. 2017 turned out to be a wonderful year for bizarre metal.

Too many ideas for you ultros? ;)

I think the cover is meant to be from the cut-off submarine of the album's concept - a sci-fi idea I came up with independently but which I couldn't have realised half as well as here, in the form of mad, mad metal

Seriously though I still don't really know what to say. It feels like a real achievement and is somehow even better than Regressions. Well worth the wait.

If the length is forbidding, btw...try Ifrit if you like King Crimson gone feral; try Resumption if you like the idea of The Mars Volta being tortured; try Triskaidekaphobe if you like Kayo Dot underwater (my personal favourite) and try Grey Lodge if you like John Zorn - like, the actual John Zorn. He's on it. In fact the whole thing is in some avant-jazz/prog-metalcore crossover, it's bonkers

The Lingua Ignota album is very moving. I wish I'd heard it earlier.

Yay Spirit Adrift! That was in my top three I believe, depending on if I counted Elder for metal poll or not. Probably I did.

I have a bit of metal fatigue

Following the year-end list rollouts, this happens with many people by the second week of December, and albums that I consider "palate cleansers" become more appealing, at least temporarily, such as Lingua Ignota's. Something so absurdly extreme and unique does help reset my brain. However it's not something I return to much later on.

Appropriately enough, our next album should come with a medical warning that anyone experiencing fatigue should probably stay away, especially if they're likely to be operating heavy machinery.

18 Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper 338.0 Points, 10 Votes 1 #1 Vote
https://imgur.com/a/a9S9G
https://open.spotify.com/album/64BDVizsgNdQ1CWeMrh4P7?si=EMS4AnlSSFipPCCAKclieA

Arranged as a single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper steps back from the resplendent gestures that swept across Four Phantoms. Each beat of Jesse Shreibman’s drum kit, each throb of Dylan Desmond’s six-string bass sounds labored, as though they’ve had to drag the sounds out like lead hammers. Doom metal works with fewer notes at a time than thrash or death metal, so the key to its emotional power is to pour everything you’ve got into each one. Bell Witch do just that in Mirror Reaper’s quiet moments, which are more abundant than their previous albums, and also in its loud ones, where Shreibman lurches forward one kick of the bass drum at a time and Desmond carves mournful leads out of his extra wide fretboard.

Few bassists can make their instrument sing quite like Desmond. About 33 minutes into Mirror Reaper, he climbs a crescendo that, in its tone and its simplicity, sounds like a human voice singing a funeral hymn to itself. He exploits the upper range of his bass, digging out emotional extremes from the notes that could be mapped onto the low end of an electric guitar if they weren’t quite so rich with overtones. He’s newly joined by the sounds of Shreibman’s Hammond B3 organ, whose chords tangle with the distortion on the bass and the echo of the cymbals. Plenty of metal bands play impressively in step, but here, Desmond and Shreibman play as though they are clinging to each other.

(I love these guys, I own both Longing and Four Phantoms, but even I thought the length on this one was a wee bit much.)

It's obviously a very accomplished and complex work, but I couldn't in good faith put this into my ballot since my attention span has reduced it to about five minutes of skipping each time I've tried.

Never made it through the whole thing.

I made it through the whole thing but passed into such an attentionless trance that I got about ten minutes into the next thing on Spotify before noticing

Anyway, it wasn't bad

It does an excellent job of messing with your perception of time.

It's a challenge for sure -- if I were to see them live, I would want a beanbag chair and drugs.

Bell Witch was fine. Didn't ever want to go back to it but I guess I have to now.

I know Lingua Ignota isn't meant to be easy listening but this is really not for me at all.

I will say they've basically done everything they can with their unique brand of glacial, bass-led doom and I'd like to see them diversify a bit on their next one.

That said, I want a giant poster of that album art.

I think I wanted the clean vocals to be more operatic on my first listen to the first two tracks. Definitely deserves more time. xp re Lingua Ignota

going to give some of these a go the rest of this week, I didn't manage to post a ballot in the end (sorry Odysseus!) The Unsane record is sounding pretty great so far.

k3rr sez: TOO LOOOW!

17 Pillorian - Obsidian Arc 386.0 Points 10 Votes 1 #1 Vote
https://www.metal-archives.com/images/6/2/7/3/627316.jpg?3424
https://open.spotify.com/album/6TU6SitNE1kA0ai313FAnD?si=w1Ei4hxpR-KOfaGIkQIxfw

To see the lineage of the past reborn so darkly, wander the enchanted ebony hallways of “A Stygian Pyre” or “Forged Iron Crucible,” where the melancholy of The Mantle has been charred into something far more scornful. The masterful blending of charged violence and acoustic calm that we know, love, and miss is quite present, but oh so much angrier. Rather than peering through every window into the past, Obsidian Arc forges a path ahead into the marrow of trve black metal’s spirit. While one can clearly hear aforetoomanytimesmentioned band’s influence, listeners will recognize this as something more sinister than anything by the heathen saints of serpents and spheres.

That said, the ghosts of Haughm’s musical past can’t help but rise from the flames, and nowhere is their haunting presence felt more strongly or perfectly than on closer “Dark is the River of Man.” An ominously mercurial and flowing clean intro, doleful rasps and haunting guitar melodies coalesce into the most beautifully dark song that Agalloch never wrote, their old voice of wisdom haunting the vale as a new age of rebirth darkens the dawn. I’m running out of references and allotted words, so suffice it to say that the song fucking rules. If you liked Agalloch, you’ll love this.

(personally I liked this fine but found it a bit on the safe side)

Yeah pretty much

(k3rr also says TOO LOOOOW re: the next one, incidentally...)

I did a terrible job of predicting the top 35.

Less than 25 correct?

way less, from 35-11 (which is all I've seen) I only guessed 12 correctly.

It has been a surprising mixture of things this high up, but I feel like I've got a good idea of what's on its way. I hope I'm wrong though in a way! It'd be nice to find something completely unheard of in the top 10.

There's some good stuff to come but yes I'm hoping for some interesting discoveries! I think only two albums on my entire ballot aren't going to place in the 100, which is mad tbh

can some of you pls get Brad to come back as well, at least to ILM

brad quit?

lmao not as far as I know