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

My #2. Because funeral doom rules, because the current Icelandic metal scene rules, because the vocalist's operatic pipes rule, and because I never totally got over early Sigur Rós.

I can easily imagine this guy singing Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil.

xps to be having, as already mentioned above, a more lively countdown in years, must counts to something, also

never heard of those morbid stuff dudes. will listen to their pup rec

otoh always have the time to hear doug moore. didn't make my ballot tho

its a name your price download on bandcamp too

Anyway, thanks to the other two voters who helped land it in the top 100.

Next up: a concept album, and a really awesome one at that.

71
Funereal Presence - Achatius
132 points, 3 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0735819330_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/3WeeuEe2iIUnAECJBEUwu0
https://funerealpresence.bandcamp.com/album/achatius

https://www.angrymetalguy.com/funereal-presence-achatius-review/

I’ve reviewed a lot of fucking black metal for this blog, and while I could never see myself tiring of covering the genre, I’d rather drown before hashing out another “The current state of black metal…” intro. For one thing, the sound and philosophies of modern black metal are constantly in flux, meaning that those who stumble upon my writings more than a year after publication will find them roughly as relevant as an instructional hip-hop dance VHS tape from 1992. For another, releases like Achatius feel displaced from the black metal timeline as a whole; it’s a record whose influences are clear, yet whose ambitions intriguingly conflict with its intent. This places Funereal Presence in a prime spot indeed, leaning into reliable second wave tactics as it blazes its own distinct trail. It’s not a masterpiece, but damn if it isn’t close.

Achatius represents black metal smelted down to its primal essence, then reforged from the ground up through a lens of modern songwriting and experimentation. Sole member Bestial Devotion’s prime influence to these ears is Darkthrone’s original quartet of black metal records, distilling that band’s trademark abrasion and Celtic Frostisms into four massive (and massively unpredictable) tracks. While the tempo and tonal tangents housed within these mammoth constructions recall Darkthrone’s “Kathaarian Life Code,” the execution here is a degree smarter; the compositions are sprawling, but their conclusions bring things full circle by reintroducing motifs with clever revisions. I normally groan when presented with the all too common trope of “black metal album with four big-ass, ten minute-plus tracks,” but Funereal Presence makes the endurance test well worth my time.

An early 2019 highlight that I didn't come back to as much as I should have.

from that amg review, i can probably get down with this

It's very thrash-esque, so yeah.

This one is monstrously good, gave it loads of points

I only realised after submitting my ballot that this was not Andavald but Andvaka, sad lol. So I didn't vote for it, but it slays. Icelandic doom w/ chants = catnip.

xp

tt can't talk right now due to being in a seminar but she says to say re: Funereal Presence "OMG too low, my #3"

Can't believe that only one person other than us voted for it! Seems right up many of your streets

^^ best Ted talk ever

xp

Can't believe that only one person other than us voted for it! Seems right up many of your streets

― imago, Tuesday, 25 February 2020 17:27 (thirty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

you didn't campaign iirc and campaigning is what works in these polls

and i dont mean just you, the the voting threads need more campaigning from everyone, inc pom & I but as pollrunners its kinda awkward if all the stuff pollrunners campaign for places. If only everyone campaigned

Yeah I felt bad about repping so much for my faves but better that than a dead-ish thread imo.

^^ was gonna say. I think it goes for a lot of voters that they would've campaigned if they'd found the time. No reason for remorse imo.

We've got some more 'Fork-core coming up (just being facetious, this isn't necessarily a bad thing and I owe much of my listening history to them).

forkscore?

70
Black Mountain - Destroyer
132 points, 4 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1848302029_10.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/3NWMc0pI8amx5vpl29Em1a
https://blackmountain.bandcamp.com/album/destroyer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-mountain-destroyer/

Like a bitchin’ phoenix airbrushed on the side of a tricked-out ’78 Dodge B200 van, Black Mountain is a band always in the process of being reborn. Turnover has been almost constant in the metal outfit’s 15-year history, with each album boasting a slightly different lineup. Founding members Joshua Wells and Amber Webber left the group in 2016, shortly after the release of their fourth album, handily titled IV. That leaves frontman/chief songwriter Stephen McBean and keyboard player Jeremy Schmidt as the sole founding members, and that makes it all the more tempting to label this something like a solo project, one whose mission is to realize one man’s vision of heavy rock in the new millennium. But the remarkable thing is how much Black Mountain remains a band, how vital each member’s contributions are. What in the early 2010s looked like it might be a one-note project has pulled out of the skid to redefine itself and its relationship to crunch and riff.

Conceived and sequenced as a soundtrack to an epic desert road trip, Destroyer introduces a new gang of Black Mountaineers, most of whom are actually replacing Webber. That includes one singer, Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun, and three drummers: Adam Bulgasem of Dommengang, Kliph Scurlock formerly of the Flaming Lips, and Kid Millions from Oneida. Their version of the band has a lot less boogie but a lot more swamp, a lot more Frank Frazetta fantasy, a lot more majestic doom. As on IV, Jeremy Schmidt stands out as a co-writer and arranger, and his synths taunt McBean’s sludgy guitars, adding friction to the gnashing opener “Future Shade” and dystopian menace to “Closer to the Edge.”

As befits a band that imagines a Ballard-esque tower block as “the loneliest cock in the sky,” this version of Black Mountain have a healthy sense of the ridiculous, which is food of the gods where heavy guitars roam. McBean can deliver a line like, “One thousand horses form in a Flying V” with no smirk of irony and no Darkness-style in-joke. On one of the album’s gnarliest moments, he ends “Pretty Little Lazies” with a coda of menacing, tortured la la la’s, each one sounding more regurgitated than sung, his voice distorted with metal poisoning, like Zardoz puking up an arsenal of assault rifles.

Basically any heavy music that the 'Fork takes note of is 'Forkcore in my book.

I love In the Future but I lost interest thanks to Amber Webber's departure.

Read that as Andrew Lloyd Webber's departure the first time

Conspicuous lack of Large Sad Men today btw. I'm a little sad about that.

ok this Funereal Presence album rules. I found the murky sound tiresome at first but it eventually won me over pretty hard.

How far along are you counting down today Pom?

Taking it down to 61 today.

I'll pick up the pace in a bit.

Mostly because I find these guys grossly overrated aside from Paracletus.

if you're talking about their music from the last decade, i would agree with you. but IMO their older, simpler music was really good. 'si monumentum requires circumspice' was my favorite album and i enjoyed most of the stuff they released before that as well.

I've been meaning to revisit them all for some time.

69
Warforged - I:Voice
132 points, 5 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1504869041_10.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/1kS9bkcY4yORQ9IVN5N4Y2
https://warforged.bandcamp.com/album/i-voice

https://www.angrymetalguy.com/warforged-i-voice-review/

The Artisan Era has been on a decent roll lately, releasing good to great albums left and right for just over a year. Warforged seemed like a bit of an odd duck for the label though. The Chicagoan five-piece of progressive blackened death metal don’t really fit the tech-death-heavy mold The Artisan Era have curated for themselves. It was this fact that initially drew me to I, Voice. What solidified my interest was the Equipoise-rivaling list of heavyweight guest spots.1 One can only imagine the level of anticipation growing within me for what Warforged had in store for their debut record, but does it live up to my own hype?

Warforged claim to craft progressive blackened death metal that should appeal to fans of Portal, Opeth and Lantlôs. Personally, I would add Artificial Brain, Alkaloid and Gorguts to that list. The sound concocted here is a creepy, sprawling, stream-of-consciousness kind of blackened death. Haunting shrieks (Adrian Perez) coalesce with dissonant riffs (courtesy of guitarists Max Damske and Jace Kiburz), frenetic drumming (Jason Nitts), eerie keys (Perez again), subterranean bass undercurrents (Alex Damske) and unpredictable song structures to send you running for seventy-three minutes from these forbidden forests into which you have unwittingly wandered.

So I'm fairly sure I heard this but… I don't remember a single thing about it despite the fact that prog blackened death is very much my cup of tea?

This is very cool and I voted for it

Nice! One of my votes today finally. This truly scratches my proggy metal itch.

Coming up: yet another band so SCANDALOUS that several noted review venues flat-out refuse to inscribe their very name!

68
Mgła - Age of Excuse
133 points, 3 votes, 1 #1 vote

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0663928566_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/7f9rcN8BIitOLXecj1bheu
https://no-solace.bandcamp.com/album/age-of-excuse

https://distortedsoundmag.com/album-review-age-of-excuse-mgla/

Though MGŁA have been grafting in the Polish underground black metal scene for well over a decade, it was 2015’s landmark Exercises In Futility that really saw the duo rocket form relative obscurity to underground darlings. Their raw, but melodic, brand of black metal has seen MGŁA become one of European black metal’s premier exports in recent years, and after a four year wait, the duo return with their fourth full length album, Age Of Excuse. But do the duo maintain the incredible form of Exercises In Futility, or do we see a drop in quality as MGŁA progress? 

As with every release from MGŁA, Age Of Excuse is best enjoyed as one whole, rather than a collection of individual songs. However, here marks the strength of Age Of Excuse: while the record works best as one continuous listen with each track acting as a chapter in the musical tome, every song here also works fantastically in isolation, memorable in their own rights. I opens the album with an unsettling gnashing of teeth, before M. drives the track forward with cold, despairing riff work. There’s a very real sense of urgency running through I as it progresses, the melodic elements of MGŁA‘s sound falling subtly into place as the ever-tight drum work from Darkside keeps the pace high.

Picked up the Coffin Rot.

Some really great stuff. The guitar tones sound like 80s Trouble filtered through death metal.

YES! :D

Love this more than I should. Voted for it obv.

While I don't love these guys as whoever put them at #1 (Siegbran maybe?), they seem incapable of making a bad album. My #13 (heh) and therefore TOO LOW.

*as much as

I haven't heard this one yet as it somehow passed me by when it came out, I loved the previous one.

Then chances are you'll love this one as well.

good good. What was the controversy about them btw? It wasnt actually band related was it?

This is more thorough than what I could muster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mgła#Controversy

Ok so since this is a NSFL cover, you'll need to click on the link if you're a curious cat.

67
Pissgrave - Posthumous Humiliation
133 points, 5 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3301336635_16.jpg (NSFL cover)

https://open.spotify.com/album/1iTPEduzZ4XhOJEjWAbQaW
https://pissgrave.bandcamp.com/album/posthumous-humiliation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pissgrave-posthumous-humiliation/

Pissgrave had only one option: to get more extreme. In 2015, the Philadelphia band released one of the most disgusting death metal albums in recent history, Suicide Euphoria. A more frenzied version of Revenge’s blasting war metal, the album led with cover art where bones floated in what’s most politely called brown death goop. Posthumous Humiliation makes the gore even more clear, sporting a ripped-open face with its jaw prominently split in two. If you’re familiar with goregrind’s frequently exploitative, voyeuristic tradition, it’s nothing new, though most goregrind bands wouldn’t pass the muster of a tastemaking, subgenre-agnostic label like Profound Lore. As such, some potential Pissgrave fans may actually be turned off by such a blatantly malevolent image. But the music matches it: Posthumous Humiliation is gratuitously violent, getting off on its own vulgarity. It is not the first great death metal album of 2019 in spite of being reprehensible but because of it.

Pissgrave are again chiefly driven by war metal’s savagery-above-all approach, but the crucial difference comes this time with intensity. Despite its fury, war metal—black metal concentrated on speed and near-endless blasting, nothing else—is tight and controlled. Pissgrave are not sloppy, but they understand that carnage is messy, and their music should reflect that reality. Humiliation is louder and noisier than Euphoria, as Demian Fenton and Tim Mellon render endless sheets of mangled guitar noise, screamingly incoherent but cohesive. Blown-out riffs, torrential blastbeats, and vocals so low they seem subterranean crowd the same space, inseparable in their pain. “Emaciated” has what you could loosely call guitar solos, so damaged they make Kerry King’s Reign in Blood squabbles sound like the disciplined work of some YouTube shredder. Even when these leads suggest something familiar, like the swells and carnivorous bird pecks of “Into the Deceased,” they feel wonderfully senseless.

As with the cover, those guitar sounds may suggest that Pissgrave only provide denim-and-leather’s version of shock and awe. But there’s more here. Where their chaos ultimately leads is not as important as its blistering, tumultuous course, akin to Cecil Taylor’s percussive, jarring piano flights or Australian extremists Impetuous Ritual’s howling towers of noise. They seem free and unplanned, not deliberate. Each track is a new trial, a chance to live again through a cycle of misery and pain. Are the opening blasts in “Canticle of Ripping Flesh” and “Celebratory Defilement” the same as opener “Euthanasia?” Not quite—it just feels that cyclical, the ultimate source of Pissgrave’s bloodlust. “Catacombs of Putrid Chambers” seems like it offers a different path through Incantation-like dirges, yet it’s ultimately the same torture.

Yay! This one was further down my ballot but love these peepees

more fey Pitchfork metal, I see.