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.