Yeah, I have been MIA for 18 months. So what? You don't pay for this blog, I do. And I've been really busy starting my permaculture farm / goat cult in the abandoned mountains of northern Spain. Now that things are appropriately sustainable and grim, I am back to vomit my opinions on music all over the internet some more.
Let's dive back into things with a wrap up of 2022. Here are my favorite-ish albums of the year, along with why they are superlative.
Best Aural Approximation of a Mental Health Crisis
Chat Pile - God's Country
Would you like to know what it sounds like to be stuck in a trailer in the middle of nowhere USA with none of the drugs you need to forget exactly how terribly and awfully fucked your life is?
Are you interested in turning the collective despair of a small town poisoned by unregulated mining and refining into a howl of impotent protest?
Would you like to peel back the facade of "faith, family, farm" to gaze at the raw and bloody disappointment it is meant to paper over?
Then Chat Pile may be just what your doctor ordered!
Best Russian Thing I Don't Want to Blow Up
Grima - Frostbitten
I am an unashamed fanboy of all the sadness/despair/rage excesses of the atmospheric black metal genre. Maybe it was growing up surrounded by a complete set of 4AD records, who knows. Anyway, I am super into the gothier bits of black metal, and in 2022, that means Grima. The Siberian masked twin brothers have laid a slab of dense raging frostbitten goodness that, while not lo-fi, is bleak and windswept.
Grima is, in my opinion, the best of Russian black metal, and this is, without a doubt, their best album to date.
Best Anime Tittie-based Metal
Imperial Circus Dead Decadence - 殯――死へ耽る想いは戮辱すら喰らい、彼方の生を愛する為に命を讃える――。
Inexplicably available only on streaming services, the third full length album from Japanese symphonic power metal weirdos ICCD is pretty much everything you could ever want from the metal world's most bombastic genre.
Add black metal screams and death metal growls to proggy choruses and Japanese idol singing and slap all of it on top of the best over-the-top 200+ BPM power metal you have ever denim vested to, and you have what might be the most fun metal album of the decade.
Best Troll-based Metal
Trollfest - Flamingo Overlord
Take the troll obsessed folk metal of Finntroll (or Troll for the TRVE) and cross it with the substance abuse tinged lyrics of Korpilkaani, and drop the resulting mess into the middle of a Jimmy Buffet concert.The result is some sort of weird balkan-sounding Flogging Molly tribute band.
Either way, it's weirdo Norwegians daydrinking rum-based pineapple cocktails and inventing what might be the buttorck or fratrock of folk metal.
If you can't have a good time with this album on, you're even more of a miserable bastard than I am, and I feel sorry for you.
Best Non-Metal Metal Album
40 Watt Sun - Perfect Light
Once upon a time (2009), in a land far far away (Engerland), there was a doom band so potent and magical (Warning) that all who gazed upon it became pallbearers at their own funerals. But lo, those who made such powerful magics (Patrick Walker and Christian Leitch) grew tired of the metallic ways of man, and retreated to the caverns of post-rock. Within those caverns they, like dwarves of old, hewed new and different sonic weapons with which to assault the human filth surrounding them. Two albums of morose weirdness that bore only passing resemblance to the doom metal from which they sprung.
Now, in 2022, the thread is severed completely. No longer even remotely related to the metal realms, Perfect Light is instead, a different kind of musically harrowing. This is the sound of Tom Waits strangling Father John Misty behind a Waffle House at 4am.
Best Metal Album in a Non-Metal Genre
Lathe - Tongue of Silver
Americana is a genre as insular and nerdy as metal, when you get down to it. It's full of the same sorts of lyrical tropes and musical attempts to recreate negative emotions in sonic form. So maybe it should be surprising how few crossover albums there are that bridge the two genres. Earth made two more or less successful attempts, in Hex and Bees Made Honey... Horseback put in a solid effort with The Invisible Mountain. But none have been as successful as this is. This is Sunn 0))) making spaghetti western film scores.
Hopefully this won't spawn a cowboy hat trend at metal shows though. No one deserves to be mistaken for David Vincent.
Pure Unadulterated Catharsis Award
Gaerea - Mirage
There are plenty of "avant-garde" metal bands trying to position themselves as black metal for smart people. Portugal's Gaerea are instead, black metal by smart people. They are serious and studious, and maybe even subtle.
Dark, dramatic, dense, deadly. They play with the well-worn pattern of tension / release that makes so much black metal work,and they keep you guessing. Sure, the cathartic payoff is coming, but when? How?
And in the end, do you really want to be released from these atmospherics? I don't.
2022 Steingrim Appreciation Award
ColdWorld - Isolation
In 2004, Steingrim Torson Brissac, recording under the moniker Selvhat, released Den Svarte Tid, a demo album that stands to this day as one of the best black metal albums of all time. Perfectly raw, downtempo, trve kvlt Norwegian black metal. It is still one of my most played albums every year. And every year I hope for another album as perfect for me as that one.
This year, the album that comes closest is Isolation. It has the same doom-y feel, the same booming drums, and while very different in style, the same minimalist approach to composition. Go listen to both albums why don't you.
Best Catchy(?) Black Metal
Ultha - All That Has Never Been True
Equal parts Darkspace and Tiamat, and with a healthy dose of Boris style genre hopping and bending, All That Has Never Been True is my favorite album of the year.
Other-worldly, shriek-filled, and several other hyphenated-term superlatives. Haunting and weird, but with melodies that get stuck in your head. Or my head, at least.
Bonus: Expand Your Horizons Award for Excellence in Not Metal
Fruela 757 - Fabril
woo
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