Downtown Music Gallery, one of the last great New York weirdo record stores, asked me and about a dozen other people to write year-end lists for their email newsletter, which I think goes to about 8000 people. Here are all the lists, and mine is reprinted below. Nothing here will be unfamiliar to thread denizens, but the second section (five recommendations of anything you want to recommend) might be.
THE 10 BEST EXTREME METAL ALBUMS OF 2020 By Phil Freeman
I spent most of 2020 writing about jazz, so all the other year-end lists. I wrote up were focused on that. Just for Bruce and the crew at DMG, who were unlikely to agree with me on jazz picks, I thought I’d come up with something special: 10 albums guaranteed to peel your face off and tuck it into your shirt pocket for you.
1 Afterbirth, Four Dimensional Flesh (Unique Leader): Four Long Island dudes laying down skull-pulverizing riffs and machine-gun blast beats, but that’s a Trojan horse. Once they’ve got you, they start tossing soft synth washes, prog-rock compositional left turns, and bursts of almost Sonic Youth-ish dissonance into the mix.
2 Ulcerate, Stare Into Death and Be Still (Debemur Morti): This New Zealand trio’s brand of death metal is dissonant, atmospheric, and punishingly bleak; some of their albums feel like a single hour-long song, by design. This one, though, lets a little light into the room. It’s still ugly and severe, but it feels like they might want you to enjoy the experience.
3 Beast of Revelation, The Ancient Ritual of Death (Iron Bonehead Productions): Two relatively low-profile Dutch musicians recruited John McEntee, of Pennsylvania death metal legends Incantation, to handle vocals on this album, and it’s a crusher. Funereally slow and bulldozer-heavy, it’ll suck the life right out of you, and that’s a good thing.
4 Neptunian Maximalism, Éons (I, Voidhanger): Remember God, Kevin Martin’s band from before he became The Bug that sounded like Godflesh covering Charles Mingus? Neptunian Maximalism have a similar ritualistic, pounding pagan-apocalypse thing going on, with heavy guitars doing battle with roaring saxophones, and when they say maximalism, they mean it. This is a 3-hour 3CD set that’ll send you out of your body by the time it’s over.
5 Behold the Arctopus, Hapeleptic Overtrove (Willowtip): Tony Oxley is not a name one expects to see dropped as an influence on an extreme metal band. But this instrumental trio modeled the percussion on their latest album on his work, as well as classical compositions by Xenakis and Varèse. This means lots of wood blocks, small gongs, and tympani, and percussion that’s on an equal plane with the guitars and bass, not a mere timekeeping device. Complex, head-spinning, and brilliant.
6 Faceless Burial, Speciation (Dark Descent): The third album from this Australian trio is a giant leap forward from their earlier work. The music crawls along like a bus-sized caterpillar, the Immolation-esque riffs squeezing your head till your brain comes out your ears. Wild, almost prog-rock guitar solos and fascinatingly busy drumming keep it from being just punishment, though.
7 Xythlia, Immortality Through Quantum Suicide (I, Voidhanger): Xythlia is a one-man technical grindcore project that piles layer upon layer of Slayer/GridLink riffs and squiggly, shredding solos atop programmed blast beats. It packs 12 tracks into 23 minutes and is relentless, developmentally arrested, and brilliant, with vocals that sound like he recorded them from the weight bench in his garage.
8 Devangelic, Ersetu (Willowtip): This Italian quartet’s third album is based on Annunaki myths about human creation based on alien DNA. That doesn’t really matter, though. All you need to know is that the vocals sound like a broken toilet, the guitars sound like a chain saw, the drums sound like a belt-fed machine gun, and the guitar solos soar skyward in triumph.
9 Vader, Solitude in Madness (Nuclear Blast): Poland’s Vader are death metal legends for a reason. They hear the mixing engineer’s dictum that you can have big drums or big guitars, but not both, and say “f*ck that.” This album is maybe the most bludgeoning, cathartically aggressive thing on this list, built for savage headbanging and absolutely nothing else.
10 Abysmal Dawn, Phylogenesis (Nuclear Blast): Abysmal Dawn, from California, released their first album in six years in 2020, and honestly, it could have been recorded a week after its predecessor. Their chugging, knuckle-walking style of death metal is extremely traditional, but there’s a reason people still listen to AC/DC, too, you know? As snack food goes, this is tasty stuff.
5 ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS
Maria Golia, The Territory and the Adventure (Reaktion): An excellent book about Ornette Coleman (partly a biography, but much more) that places his own playing into the larger context of the Fort Worth scene and offers a lot of inside info about the Caravan of Dreams, which the author worked on back in the ’80s.
The Crew (original title: Braqueurs), dir. Julien Leclercq. Available on Netflix, this 2015 French heist movie is very much in the Michael Mann tradition, about a group of professionals who let one weak link into their crew and then have to recover when things inevitably go wrong. The lead actor, Sami Bouajila, is terrific (and Leclercq has used him in two other movies, The Bouncer and Earth and Blood), the action is incredibly well done, and the movie as a whole is a marvel of efficiency; it gets in and out in 81 minutes.
Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries (Tor): A series of five books (so far) about a cyborg that would much rather be hanging out in a storage container watching downloaded soap operas than saving the humans in its charge from the corporation out to prey on them. The books are fast-paced and exciting, and often quite funny, but they also delve deep into issues of identity in ways conventional literary fiction doesn’t bother with, or isn’t built to do.
Autechre, PLUS & SIGN (Warp): Two 2020 albums from the avant-garde electronic duo, released within weeks of each other (and nobody knew about the second one till the first was out). Some of the most thrilling and emotionally resonant music they’ve ever made.
Ivo Perelman / Nate Wooley, Polarity (Burning Ambulance Music): A CD released this year on my own label. Sax-trumpet duos, exploratory and lyrical at once. One of the most beautiful things Ivo’s ever done; I’m incredibly proud to be putting it out into the world. Available exclusively on Bandcamp. http://burningambulancemusic.bandcamp.com
― but also fuck you (unperson), Sunday, 14 February 2021 21:32 (three years ago) link