Best of 2013

2) Altar of Plagues - Teethed Glory and Injury

This album, unlike Subrosa, I'll forgive you for not listening to. I chose Altar of Plagues as my number two spot because it takes the genre of Black Metal and brings it somewhere it was never meant to go. Black metal was originally a demonstration of raw hatred, usually satanic, almost always poorly produced and simplistic. It was a movement of music that seemed to say “We hate you so much we refuse to care about learning instruments or making them sound at all pleasing.” I love a few of those old albums because they were something new, an original movement of music, but if black metal were to stagnate at that primitive beginning I certainly wouldn't have paid any attention going forward. Over the years a few bands have managed to give something fresh to that harsh rawness, that monotony, bands labeled as “progressive black metal.”

Altar of Plagues is one of those bands and I've been watching them closely for a while now. But, nothing could have prepared me for their latest record. Teethed Glory and Injury does something I've never heard in black metal before and that is largely the heavy presence of post-processing. By that I mean folding in sounds and textures that can't be produced by traditional instruments. By starting with the most primitive of musical styles and opening it to sampling, to frequency shifts, to endless filters and waveform shaping effects, they effectively demolished any boundary that may have remained in the genre of black metal. I was filled with sadness when earlier this year Altar of Plagues announced that this would be their final album, but I'm at the same time filled with hope for the profound influence Teethed Glory and Injury might have on the genre of black metal, on music in general.