Best of 2020

1) Cryptic Shift - Visitations from Enceladus

You want to be number one? Don't play me a song. Tell me a story. So often my end of year list concludes with a concept album so well-written it's no longer a collection of songs. These albums resemble operas, films, books, they create their own sets, characters, conflicts, and resolutions. Cryptic Shift is the best example of concept album writing in the year of 2020. There is so much to absorb here, so much to explore and dig deeper into. Reading the lyrics you'll notice that they've gone beyond just what the main vocal is saying in each composition. They've gone as far as naming the guitar solos to indicate more textures, to give us something visual to imagine as we close our eyes and sink deeper and deeper into this alien planet's atmosphere. Visitations from Enceladus is an original piece of science fiction that just happens to be one of the most compelling heavy metal albums of the year. I would expect this level of excellence from some of the greats, metal bands that have several full-lengths under their belt. This is Cryptic Shift's first full-length release and I am so excited to see where these guys take this project as the years progress.

Best of 2020

2) Akhlys - Melinoë

The first of two concept albums that top my 2020 list, Melinoë is a true example of how music can be sincerely frightening. Heavy metal is so often accused of this by politicians, that the music is going to turn the youth of America into Satan worshiping little demons. But, what they wind up citing as examples is often hilarious, ranging from the shallow teenage rebellion of Korn to the G-rated classics like Black Sabbath. If they knew about Naas Alcameth, the distorted mind behind Nightbringer and the project captured here, those politicians might actually have a decent argument.

Akhlys is Alcameth's attempt to envision a dream state, more specifically, "the many strange occurrences I’ve been through either whilst dreaming, falling asleep, or waking up." This particular album centers on the conjuring of the ancient Greek Chthonic nymph Melinoë known as the goddess of propitiation (the offerings made to the deceased by family and friends). She's also known as the bringer of nightmares and madness and it comes across very clearly that that is exactly what this album's purpose is, to bring nightmares to the listener.

It's difficult to talk about separate attributes of an album like this because it is such a successful cohesive vision. Talking about things like "that track is just filler," or "I'm not sure if this drum pattern is useful here," wouldn't make any sense. This album feels like a perfect realization of something evil and ancient. Taking the guitar tone as a specific example, normally I would talk about things like gain stages and amp settings, but I can't here. Listening to the guitar tone doesn't make me picture the amplifier used to create it, it makes me picture darkened halls and apparitions.

If I had any sort of belief in the supernatural, I might actually believe Melinoë was speaking through Alcameth during the creation of this album, I might think this is evidence of an actual conjuring of an ancient deity. Luckily, I'm of sound enough mind to disregard that possibility, however, I can't guarantee my subconscious is so convinced, and my dreams may very well be impacted by this experience.

Best of 2020

3) Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still

It's a common practice for me to read a bunch of reviews of certain albums before, during, and after actually listening to a given album. I do this for perspective, for context, for hidden details proffered by the humble heavy metal writers. For Ulcerate the message has been pretty consistent from the community, "Take my money." There are occasional caveats captured by discerning reviewers involving Ulcerate's conformity to the Ulcerate sound. If you don't like the first few Ulcerate albums, you won't like this one because it sounds unmistakably like an Ulcerate album. I would say this caveat rings true, however there's something to consider with the juxtaposition between style conformity and infallibility Ulcerate has accomplished with their career so far. That is how special the Ulcerate style is in the landscape of heavy metal. 

Very few bands have a sound this recognizable, this polished, and this distant from clear influences. I would make the argument this is due in large part to having a virtuoso included in the roster. Jamie Saint Merat is unquestionably one of the most technically proficient and stylistically original death metal drummers performing in the present era. Given a ringer like him, you don't have to do much else to be a great band, however Ulcerate also employ very recognizable guitar techniques and the leadership of a strong, often threatening vocal. The only danger Ulcerate can run into is not making these albums on the whole dynamic enough. There is a real risk when you have a bunch of exuberant death metal musicians who just want to blast and burn. Luckily Stare into Death and Be Still is one of Ulcerate's most dynamic if not the most dynamic record to date. There are many slower passages here, many moments of reflection buried in reverb bringing the illusion of distance and separation. These passages help to elevate the composition overall by allowing a breath between surges of violence

P.S. The music video for Dissolved Orders is very special. Give it a watch and be prepared for the nightmares.

Best of 2020

 4) Afterbirth - Four Dimensional Flesh

Listen, usually when a brutal death metal band makes it on my list I'm stuck talking about how brutal they are, "This is just so fucking brutal man!" If it's brutal death metal, that's the only thing you can possibly talk about, right? Because the fucking genre hasn't budged from its single attribute status since it was birthed from some fat asshole suspended by meat hooks many years ago. It's brutal, that's what it does. It belches and slams, it gurgles and pulverizes.

My usual practice of listening to brutal death metal is the following: Put on Track 2 (Track 1 is almost always a cut scene from a horror movie and can be discarded) for 20 seconds and see if it's more brutal than anything else from the given year. I did that here and it wasn't so I completely disregarded this album.

Then Afterbirth started showing up on a bunch of best of 2020 lists. Had I missed something? Was this the most brutal brutal death metal of the year after all? Nope. It's not more brutal, but lo and behold it does something different than belch and slam. Once you shake off all your expectations for brutality and reach "Girl in Landscape" you're left asking, "What the fuck is this?" It's brutal death metal but it does something different. It's not relying on rote brutality. It's using melodic chord progressions, it's playing with atmosphere, it employs the occasional viral hook. Afterbirth is breaking the one and only rule of brutal death metal: be most brutal. And so they can have my number 4 spot.

Best of 2020

5) Sweven - The Eternal Resonance

I think it's fair to say any metalhead worth his salt who grew up near or around the 90's was aware of Opeth and Edge of Sanity, two of the most dynamic bands led by two of the most charismatic and visionary musicians. Up until their discovery I was gravitating to the more extreme of music, the blatantly offensive grind-core bands and blasphemous black metal in hopes of disturbing my parents and teachers with shows of petty rebellion. Opeth and Edge of Sanity were both writing thrillingly dynamic music, records that challenged preconceived notions of what music could be. After this discovery I was now seeking intellectually challenging music and the heavy metal community has been delivering ever since.

Sweven led by Robert Andersson is continuing this tradition of highly dynamic, highly complex progressive death metal. The Eternal Resonance is not just an album, it's a place, with its own sights and sounds, its own textures. Listening to this over the past few months has been an odd experience for me. As different as the music sounds compared to other releases this year it very quickly starts to sound familiar. Re-spins are rewarded with a feeling similar to returning to a secret place only you know about, a place that will grow larger as Robert Andersson's career continues.

Best of 2020

 6) Odraza - Rzeczom

What does it sound like to have someone screaming in your face, what does it feel like? Imagine the mist of spit landing on your cheek, the spike of adrenaline as you look into their severe eyes and sunken features. Your eardrums are overwhelmed, you feel the sudden urge to escape away because past events have taught you violence may be close at hand. This is what Odraza makes me feel when listening to Rzeczom. It reminds me of that one show years ago in Richmond in some forgotten dive bar. A hardcore band from Poland showed up to a crowd of 8 of us. The lead singer stepped off the stage and screamed his lyrics at us individually. It was difficult to remain in the same position and take it. It’s this level of intensity you’d expect from almost all heavy metal, but so often this alleged most extreme of music sounds anemic compared to these high water mark moments.

Odraza are two men who understand honesty and intensity. What they’re writing isn’t Black Metal that they’ve heard before, rather it’s their bleeding heart, their screams into the darkness. That it resembles Black Metal is just a happy coincidence, or an unhappy one depending on who’s listening. This is honest underground music that has no intention of causing fan-fare or making money. Odraza has made it clear they have no intention of touring this material. The album is available on bandcamp for a measly 7 euro. I doubt many will ever hear this album, but it is certainly one worth listening to. When a band chooses to write music because of the way they feel rather than how much they can make, it’s a reminder that not everything needs to be motivated by money. Some things can be pure, uncorrupt.

Best of 2020

 7) Pyrrhon - Abscess Time

Rounding out my Hatred from the Fringe Trilogy is this barbed beast of an album. Easily the most masochistic act you'd embark upon, listening to Abscess Time is a hard sell. However, it most clearly makes my point of the fringe being something at the same time frightening and visionary. The aspect of this album I find most impressive is this was made to be reproducible and can be performed live when the stay at home orders eventually lift. There are so many seemingly unplanned moments, unfettered feedback, randomly placed harmonics, tempo changes that dip and dart with no apparent triggering event. Songs start and end without preamble or resolution. To realize this was purposely designed is to understand you're looking inside the mind of a madman. Reading the lyrics adds further confusion as one would expect them to be equally schizophrenic, yet they're some of the most poignant of the year.

Abscess Time is a thoroughly upsetting manifestation of Pyrrhonic victory, that is a victory so mired in the blood of your own men you have nothing left other than the word. This album makes the argument that we've waged war with ourselves for a long time and we have nothing to show for it outside of a cycle of violence and abuse. We have ruined ourselves and we should be ashamed.

"The rain is coming down, the gutters are bleeding

No crown will spare your kind from what you’ve got coming
The final instinct will be recursive gnawing
Among your brothers"

Best of 2020

8) Fawn Limbs - Sleeper Vessels

Second in my Hatred from the Fringe Trilogy, Sleeper Vessels by Fawn Limbs is a little harder to describe. They at times remind me of Genghis Tron, incorporating some electronic elements into their crusty, grindy delivery. This album relies more on being caustic than dissonant. Atonal arpeggios like wriggling centipedes dance to chaotic percussion within octave riff cages. And like the best grind of the past, when a given track reaches its most ugly, a breakdown groove pulls you back from the precipice of tension induced self-implosion. What separates Fawn Limbs from their contemporaries is their cyber-grind quality. This is a band uncompromising in their vision of a dystopian future. The way they use filters and effects sounds like they’re dissecting their own music, showing us something deeper, the mechanism, the sinew, muscle, and bone hiding within a seemingly simple down-tuned guitar riff.

"No one will heal, no wounds will dry
No one is safe
No one will flee from this
But I choose to depart from you
I choose to depart from you"

Best of 2020

9) Wake - Devouring Ruin

I made mention of the warning sirens of heavy metal in my introductory post. I believe this phenomenon is real, that fringe culture is a sensor of sorts exploring concepts and ideas that haven’t made their way into mainstream culture. The fringe will always be seen as frightening as it’s an expression of the unknown. It doesn’t have the advantage of passing through filters to soften its edges. It doesn’t have the benefit of a multidirectional perspective. So what did the fringe of heavy metal express this year? To me it feels like punishment for the mistakes we’ve made. There was so much hatred expressed, as if the fringe has given up on mainstream culture and is now seeking retribution against us.

I’ll attempt to express this sentiment in the form of a trilogy, Hatred from the Fringe, for the next three reviews. These three albums are torturous to sit through. They, at the same time, had some of the most inspired song-writing. The ideas in the lyrics, the complexity in composition are proof that this is the music we should be listening to. This is the penance we should be submitting to. This is our punishment for participation in something evil.

First in this trilogy is Devouring Ruin by Wake. Wake has never crossed the 30 minute mark with past releases for the simple reason that they were, up until this point, a grind band. Grind, being characterized by its condensed hatred, a swirling chaos that never takes too long to express. Devouring Ruin is 45 minutes long, so this is something different, something scarier. Wake is playing with more atmosphere here, taking what would normally be a 10 second riff and elongating it until all you’re hearing is a horrible unending dissonance accompanied by lurching grooves. At times these writhing sounds form into malignant hooks, capturing the memory, giving you something to look forward to with the next spin. For Wake to approach their craft in such a different way and for it to be this haunting is impressive.

“We've sealed ourselves in this casket
Together, in suffering
We'll expel all our righteousness
Expel all life to the darkness”

Best of 2020

10) Elder - Omens

This is a fun album. Normally my year end list begins with something somber, something instrumental or minimalist. This year was so bleak, before I proceed into the heart of darkness and spend time with the various methods of compositional violence that helped give this year context, I think it’s important to introduce Elder first so as not to scare away the fearful and traumatized among us.

For those uninitiated, Elder is a psychedelic stoner band. That simply means this is a tone-centric rock album that makes use of high gain guitar and ethereal sounds from synth keyboards. I think this might be their most psych album to date, including more dreamy synth parts, more reverb in the more common clean guitar parts. I remember past albums being louder, fuzzier, not quite as dynamic as this. Here the instrumentation takes more time describing winding paths through vibrant green forests, with the vocal being a gentle guide for when you might be feeling lost.

There are moments captured here, like on the track Halcyon that may, on the surface, seem a little directionless. My view is Elder is finding the right tone and sticking with it. When the studio space feels covered in thick moss, when the air is foggy with the smell of dew evaporating from the forest floor. These are the moments Elder wants to have the occasional rest. And after these gentle passages of quiet hypnosis, Elder continues on the path reaching for hooks with the intention of pulling you further into this other-world they’ve created.

When visiting this album in the years to come I don’t think I’ll view this as from 2020 as it's not quite congruous with the spirit of the times. It's more contemplative, more joyful, more timeless, a provocation to make sure one is enjoying life while defiantly ignoring the zeitgeist.

Best of 2020

Introduction

I've been delaying this for some time. The primary reason being that there have been myriad summations of this year, so many individual reflections that struck me as somewhat dull and I didn't really want to contribute with more platitudes. Thinking about all these social media posts of the dreaded year of our lord 2020, there were so many memes, so many ironic sentiments, so many dramatic diatribes that sounded more like petty complaint than honest strife. What can I provide in a way of an observation that can sum up this year? Drinking a beer in the shower this morning, a word kept being repeated over and over in my head.

Suffocation.

Covid-19 is a disease that disrupts the respiratory system caused by a virus that weaponizes the act of breathing. When caught, the air around you becomes poison to everyone else. Generating this poison may seem like a villainous act, and there were so many examples from the past year where an ill person was blamed for the fallout of simply breathing. One could say that this now walking weapon should stay at home and wait it out, or die, whichever comes first. But, many are forgetting the rhetoric of the nation, rhetoric so obsessed with personal freedoms that sometimes being given honest advice is taken as the most egregious offense. 

A society who thinks itself a rabble rousing group of revolutionaries is the perfect delivery machine for a transmittable respiratory illness. The soapboxes on which these revolutionaries stand have been transformed from a platform of idea proliferation to death distribution. So the loud Americans among us are given a profound conflict. They must stop talking, they must stop breathing, they must stay at home in the stink of cigarettes and dried beer, the musty stench of unwashed sweatpants and dog dander.

Walking around downtown, wearing my cloth mask of course, I couldn't help but think every time I smelled the expelled smoke of a cigarette, my life was now at risk. This smell which indicated the relaxing of nerves, the nostalgic moments in the back alleys of dive bars and music venues where tobacco gave the hard won and expensive drunken stupor temporary clarity, was now a warning signal that I'm now breathing in the content of someone else's diseased lungs.

There were countless moments this year I felt like I was suffocating. When someone gets a little too close, when my anxiety rises a little too much, when the nightly curfew gets more and more strict. In a way, this has forced me to rethink my self-destructive nature and subsequent behaviors. When getting wasted at a bar is illegal, I have to get wasted at home, and for some reason this activity is so much less rewarding. No one is around to overhear my overthought musings, my blowhard explanations of why heavy metal is the best music and if people were paying attention to the sound of warning sirens in distorted guitar leads the world would be a better place.

So without the pleasure of my close-talking charisma, interpret these posts as me taking a breath after a long hiatus from doing so. It's not the real thing in a dimly lit bar after a few beers, but it's the best I can do in this year 2020.