2019 Metal ’n’ Heavy Rock/Heavy Music Poll: RESULTS - Top 100 Countdown

Dumb jokes aside, palingenesis has many lexical applications beyond its (late) cooptation by fascists…

Back to the 'Fork with another trio…

77
Oozing Wound - High Anxiety
124 points, 3 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0319864493_10.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/2sYvdAeIBt5bGsQJXrmTDK
https://oozingwound.bandcamp.com/album/high-anxiety

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oozing-wound-high-anxiety/

The Chicago trio Oozing Wound have planted their flag in the spot where metal, punk, and experimental meet. Four albums in, they are firmly devoted to keeping that space both weird and uncomfortable. High Anxiety doesn’t stray from their aesthetic: it’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.

Whether or not you can understand any of Zack Weil’s shrieks in the opener “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots,” the bile in his guitar is easily understandable. They’re not interested in metaphors or dressing up their hatred in Latin and sigils. The second half of “Idiots” lurches into swampy riffing, a mutated take on a thrash breakdown. It’s more for throwing a bunch of aforementioned idiots off a cliff than for stage-diving, offering no release but annihilation. “Tween Shitbag” is equally incendiary, with Weil sarcastically yelling “Oh man I really love your band!”, a call back to the anti-industry screed “New York Bands” from their debut Retrash.

High Anxiety also recalls Voivod on “Die on Mars” and “Riding the Universe,” not just for their space themes but also how punky thrash and prog goofiness chop it up with one another. “Mars” throws some death metal in the mix, the intro guitar leads sounding like Bolt Thrower solos drifting into a trash-filled outer space. These songs are house shows as terrariums populated by metal dudes too strange for the pay-to-play clubs and punks who punish themselves in Ph.D. programs, and Oozing Wound makes the chaos coalesce. They’re serious, but not serious.

oh this record fuckin slaps

More stuff I need to hear. Mentions of Voivod and Bolt Thrower are more than enough to whet my appetite.

I FUCKING LOVE OOZING WOUND

the spot where metal, punk, and experimental meet

were TFS nominated/eligible? slightly annoying if so as I left them out

Eligible, sure. Nominated, I'm afraid not… (Don't quote me on that, though.)

There is absolutely nothing experimental about Oozing Wound, lol

Anyway, glad the real rollout has finally started ;)

Pffft.

Tropical Fuck Storm were indeed nominated

if that is who you meant

Aight, thanks. YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE, IMAGO!

That said, it disappointed me after a couple of spins and I never revisited it afterwards. And I was blown away by their debut.

I kept it kvlt, I did the right thing

And yeah, if I liked it anywhere near as much as the debut I'd have probably found a space for it

Actually, what is the least metal thing I voted for? Probably The Young Gods, who I think we can safely say won't place

76
Major Stars - Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy
125 points, 3 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0490728063_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/0TxomauWobIcb9XfYYtWID
https://majorstars.bandcamp.com/album/roots-of-confusion-seeds-of-joy

https://www.treblezine.com/major-stars-roots-of-confusion-seeds-of-joy/

Psychedelic rock never went anywhere. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherswise, considering the more recent fervor and enthusiasm for the psychedelic sounds of bands such as Ty Segall, The Allah-Las and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard such that it might have seemed like psych had been on a multi-decade holiday, the sounds of sitars and screaming wah-wah pedals thought never to return. The truth is more mundane than that; some have yet to opt out of the trip after quite a few decades, and if there’s a psychedelic renaissance happening right now, it’s simply the next in a long string of them, following an arguably weirder and more exciting acid communion in the mid-’00s among the likes of Dead Meadow, Comets on Fire and White Hills—not to mention Dungen, whose transition into the next generation of psych has been the smoothest.

Major Stars can be counted among this batch of mind-bending string-benders, the Boston group having released their debut way back in 1998. And after more than 20 years, they’re still delivering some of the heaviest and densest fuzz in psych rock with Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy. The influence of bands such as Hawkwind and The Stooges (particularly Fun House) still loom large in their soaring freakouts, and as is often the case with bands steeped in space rock and classic psych, they’re not completely reinventing psych-rock or putting it in a radically new context. What they are doing is continuing to write outstanding songs within this framework, that is when they’re not simply allowing their jam session to spiral out into far-off galaxies as on the album’s leadoff track “The Tightener.”

Psychedelic rock never went anywhere.

Speaking of ambiguity…

I voted for the young gods

xp

I also voted for this

I finally got george into this band

I still prefer their earlier stuff but they've never let me down

Someone wake up George

So far they sound like Acid Mothers Temple a bit!

Oh the saxophone made things better, this is cool. More sax

Just learned that Major Stars are the owners of Twisted Village!

Major Stars! My #6!

I've heard them described as a 'state fair band' but they're like the best one of those ever. The melodies and vocals are as strong as any Windhand or Bardo Pond album but even BP doesn't have such a preternaturally incendiary guitarist like Wayne Rogers

'preternaturally incendiary'

somebody wake up LBI

Crystallized Movements were great too

as were Magic Hour and Heathen Shame

I'm definitely planning to get into them this year re: CM

One of the best and most important bands ever up next btw

re: amygdala, yeah the well captured anguished vocals was what first kept me going back to this record

will rep even more for this band when they get a more unrestrained sound (iskra-like production would fit'em, i believe). my #18

'preternaturally incendiary'

somebody wake up LBI

― hooper (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, February 25, 2020 4:45 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Preternaturally incendiary is the name of my pet hamster! Your BP reference pulls me over the line to try this out though.

Quite enjoying Major Stars still. I like the state fair band description

you would love their earlier stuff

esp their live split with comets on fire

The Olds will relish the next entry…

(Not just the Olds, in fact.)

75
Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus
126 points, 5 voters

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2338532091_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/5IfUUKQ5lOfWlLOPJyxL2r
https://saintvitus.bandcamp.com/album/saint-vitus

https://www.indymetalvault.com/2019/05/20/album-review-saint-vitus-saint-vitus/

As with 2012’s Lillie: F-65 before it, Saint Vitus’s ninth full-length album comes with a mix of excitement and trepidation. The return of original vocalist Scott Reagers is rapturous news for any doom metal diehard, but it was inversely unfortunate to see longtime bassist Mark Adams step down due to struggles with Parkinson’s disease. The decision to release a second self-titled album is also pretty questionable, especially when you consider the iconic status of their 1984 debut.

But rather than serving as a straight nostalgia trip, 2019’s Saint Vitus is the band’s most experimental offerings since 1992’s C.O.D. This is established early on as “A Prelude to…” sets up on a spacy, moody sequence that is counteracted with punk vigor by “Bloodshed.” Alas, there are a couple misfires in the mix; the dark atmosphere on “City Park” feels like it should be leading to a “Psychopath”-style creeper only to play out like four minutes of a Halloween spooky sounds CD and the hardcore blast of “Useless” seems ill-fitting as an album closer.

Ohhh I was gonna listen to this too! This is def the 'longlist waste' section of the poll

The DsO was somebody's #1.

SAINT VITUS!!!

Tropical Fuck Storm were indeed nominated

― Oor Neechy, Tuesday, February 25, 2020 10:28 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

waht

I actually liked Braindrops way more tbh

Yet another case of classic bands I vaguely like based on what little material has made it to my ears but whose latest album I haven't dared listen to out of a superstitious sense that I should start at the very beginning of their discography.

(xps obv.)

I really dug Lillie: F-65 but didn't even know about this until someone mentioned it on the You Don't Know Mojack year-end roundup

Right around the corner: more Pitchfork-core.

74
PUP - Morbid Stuff
127 points, 3 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2228600663_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/504XSXhUJlzztcMV4YMaDV
https://puptheband.bandcamp.com/album/morbid-stuff

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pup-morbid-stuff/

In PUP, there is only one rule: the People’s Champ can never win. The Canadian quartet's sophomore album, the loudly beloved The Dream is Over, brought them perilously close to the kind of success that would strip them of underdog status forever: They made an album about the comprehensive mental, physical, and financial toll of touring constantly for two years straight, and their reward was...getting to do the same exact thing for even longer, in larger venues. The dream wasn’t over, it just stuck around long enough to prove hollow. As a result, Morbid Stuff is the angriest PUP has ever sounded. But it’s not a cry for help. It’s a cry of freedom, the sound of a band realizing that anger is liberating when depression is intractable and incurable—we’re not broken, so why bother trying to fix it?

Many PUP songs thrash towards a record-scratch/freeze frame moment where frontman Stefan Babcock becomes far too pissed off to bother with singing anymore. On Morbid Stuff, a lot of songs just begin at this place. During the bridge of “Full Blown Meltdown,” Babcock hectors, “I’m losing interest in self-help/Equally bored of feeling sorry for myself.” It’s Morbid Stuff distilled to an emotional concentrate, and a song that sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before: As the last great band to ever appear on Warped Tour, PUP have always boasted profoundly unfashionable influences, and “Full Blown Meltdown” wraps itself in sonic JNCOS—slap bass as thick as Tim Commerford’s lat muscles, a chugging circle pit coda scented by Toxicity, the unchecked aggro lyricism of nu-metal.

Though PUP are from Toronto, they’ve always channeled the perspective of the sheltered suburban loser for whom every social interaction is a chance to stoke their inferiority complex. “I was getting high in the van in St. Catharine’s/While you were rubbing elbows in the art scene,” Babcock sneers at an unnamed frienemy on the title track. However, the greatest and most frequently suffered indignity in PUP songs is simply seeing someone getting on with a relatively normal existence. On “See You At Your Funeral,” Babcock is in the grocery store, presumably living his best life— “buying organic foods/making healthy selections”—until he spots an ex; by the end of the song, he’s rooting for a televised apocalypse. Minutes earlier on “Free At Last”, Babcock is at Tim Hortons at 5 AM, prompting Charly Bliss’ Eva Hendricks to deliver 2019’s greatest one-line cameo: “Have you been drinking?” Babcock: “Well of course I have!”

Tim Hortons

They just couldn't resist, eh?

Anyway, I very much suspect this is Not My Thing.