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

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.

excellent album

re: major stars. is this the first year a drag city record placed? maybe ty segall or six organs before?

Om had an album on Drag City that placed

just curious, great band. good memories of seeing them live years ago

alright xp

2019 pop 'n' heavy punk

This is a fine album that I refused to vote for

But isn't it 'the angriest PUP has ever sounded'?

I'm still trying to work out how psychedelic rock never went anywhere. What about the journey into my miiind?

It was inside you all along, maaaaaan.

Fullblown Meltdown is their go at a ‘heavy rock’ song, but otherwise the album is blissful, high-speed pop-punk. I love them to pieces but didn’t vote for this as it would have been second on my ballot and it didn’t feel right.

This is a GREAT album I did not vote for in this.

I dont get this. If an album is nominated and not vetoed then its fair to vote for it.

This poll is not a purists poll.

We have our own rules

you dont like actual heavy metal!

Next up: INSOMNIA aka SPIRIT INVOCATION.

yeah, of course it's fair to vote for anything but sometimes you see something in yr list and yr just like....it doesn't fit the ~vibe~, maaaaan

But before we get there… another personal favourite, which My Dying Bride fans are sure to love.

73
Weeping Sores - False Confession
129 points, 4 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3885326903_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/7F93HxoAH0o0nAFfBUBFP8
https://weepingsores.bandcamp.com/album/false-confession

http://www.invisibleoranges.com/weeping-sores-false-confession-review/

I, Voidhanger’s unquestionable presence in extreme metal continues unabated with Weeping Sores‘s debut record False Confession. The album is admittedly much less avant-garde than the rest of the fair from the label this year, a far cry from the primitivist folk of Onkos or the abstract psych-prog black metal of Esoctrilihum. That said, Weeping Sores earn their place among the incredible output of groups like Epectase and An Isolated Mind not by avant-garde tendency but a fine attention to craft, turning in a death-doom record that simultaneously eschews the more cartoonish stereotypes of the genre while also deeply embracing certain necessary fundamental components of its two primary compositional spaces.

Take, for instance, the presence of death metal on the record. The group does not arrive at death-doom on this album merely via deep growled vocals and occasional nasty guitar tone; instead, primary instrumentalist Doug Moore makes sure to include certain rhythmic passages, a tighter, almost thrashy chug at times, in combination with an absolutely filthy guitar tone to solidify the connection to death metal. Likewise, the doom isn’t the overly-polished post-epic doom direction that a great deal of the unnamed-but-cartoonish and overbearing death-doom and gothic doom bands deploy.

Instead, Weeping Sores crafts something closer to classic Paradise Lost or early Anathema, clearly developing from a post-Autopsy/Morbid Angel sense of increasing the potency of the death metal via atmospheric touches and sense of pacing rather than a purely speed-based sense of aggression.

If the whole album was like the first track, it would have made my top 3. As it stands, it's still a fucking great debut and I very much look forward to their future releases.

Voted for this! The violin is what makes the album imo

TOO LOW, this was real high on my ballot. brutal and beautiful.

Yep, that and their ability to keep the rigidity that plagues death/doom at bay, especially on the rhythmic front.

xp too low is right.