Best of 2013

6) Katalepsy – Autopsychosis

Everyone hates death metal, especially brutal death metal. I completely understand. It's an easy target. You can't understand the lyrics and when you look them up they're usually pretty gross. The guitars shred along with hardly anything to hold on to. The song structures are chaotic and disturbing making any normal person edgy and anxious. Death metal presents a challenge to which there is no discernible reward.

But, I can't help loving it. When I was younger it was like someone flipped a switch and death metal was all I could listen to. And I was never completely satisfied with any one band. There was this insatiable hunger for something more brutal, more complex, more disturbing than anything I had heard before. Though I listen to a lot more these days, that hunger stays with me like an itch I can't help but gouge at. And lucky for me, there is no limit to how brutal these bands can get. Granted, it's the rare band that can impress me at this point, but a few still manage to do it. This year it was Katalepsy, a band that hasn't had a full-length in 6 years.

Autopsychosis came out of nowhere and it can easily compete with any modern death metal album and win. The leads are so memorable, full of perfectly timed pinch harmonics and frantic jumps between octaves. The percussion is so dynamic, swapping out neck-breaking rhythms with lightning precision. The vocal is ferocious, literally frightening. The lyrics are surprisingly thoughtful, each song reading like a modern H.P. Lovecraft. Even the album art is an intricate work of horrifying surrealism. I just hope it doesn't take them another six years before the next masterpiece of brutality.