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Good Shit I Missed in 2020 - Part 1 - The Entire City of Denver Colorado

 So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate.

What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band.

These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished. 

Part 1 - The Entire City of Denver Colorado

Somehow I have been neglecting to dig deeper into the music scene in Denver. How I failed to realize that a city with a TRVE KVLT brewery making beers I liked would also have a bunch of metal bands I liked is beyond me. But I did, and I missed out on a bunch of outstanding albums this year because of it. In my humble opinion, these are the standout albums of 2020 from Denver:

In The Company of Serpents - LUX

I love me some spaced-out stoned-as-a-goat sludgy doom. I also love me some weird-ass spaghetti western themed metal. So how delighted do you think I was to discover this slab of crushing weight from Denver, Colorado? Very. 

Sludge riffs dense enough that New Orleans can feel their gravitational force interspersed with clean chords and psychedelic viola(?!) passages create a completely unique atmosphere. I can imagine that i am not the only fan of Goatsnake that would also really like this album.

Wayfarer - A Romance With Violence

Also hailing from Denver, Colorado, Wayfarer have managed to sneak 4 full length releases by me before I discovered this beautiful album, chock-full of folk/atmospheric black metal about the wild West. (Is this a thing now? This is the third fantastic album in 2020 I've come across that has the American West as it's theme.)

As their Bandcamp bio puts it

WAYFARER is black metal of the American West. A cavalcade of fury, melancholia, and dust-laden storytelling; the band is informed by the fierce and adventurous spectrums of heavy music, along with the stark Americana of the “Denver Sound” artists that carved the identity of their home.

 So what is the "Denver Sound"? Gothic Americana, Dark Roots Music, Colorado's answer to Nick Cave and Tom Waits? So it seems.

Melancholy, gothic country punk—with banjos, accordions, cellos, violins, and other non-rock instruments, you know.

Since I was already a fan of 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, and the like, so I see how this fits right into my tastes.

Of Feather and Bone - Sulfuric Disintegration

Now I will be honest, Death Metal is something I am unreasonably picky about. People joke that I haven't liked a Death Metal album since 1993, which isn't entirely true, but is close enough. This album meets my standards though, in a big way. 

All the Platonic ideals of Death Metal are on display here: pummeling double bass drums, whiplash-inducing riffs the size of icebergs, brutal snarling vocals, all wrapped up in an intimidating wall of sound. There is also a hint of Grindcore intensity here that I really like. Like Bolt Thrower before them, they flirt with the genre without ever falling prey to the "play all the riffs at once and make all the songs 24 seconds long" excesses.


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