Rolling 2021 Metal Thread

ok then!

truly the Gas of metal

I never got Gas but I see what you’re saying.

Emphasis on the capital G, of course.

yeah I was mainly thinking....weird release schedule, super long super monochromatic releases, rabid cult following

but I'm feeling fancy so I preordered the 2xLP lol

the track you can buy now is pretty different sounding

https://www.guitarworld.com/news/man-builds-guitar-out-of-his-dead-uncles-skeleton-uses-it-to-play-black-metal

hey guyz any guess where dude was from

Florigreece

Downfall are a modern (read: not '80s clones) thrash band from Italy who sound to me like a cross between Testament and Trivium. (This is a good thing, FTR.) Their new album Passive Regression is heavy and shouty.

https://downfall1.bandcamp.com/album/passive-regression

wow, that is really good. exactly what i was looking for this weekend

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

I'm on board with most of those. Alas, I found the Beast of Revelation immensely frustrating, due to the uninspired songwriting. Everything else on that record is 100% on point, though, starting with the top-tier production.

Ulcerate, Neptunian Maximalism and Faceless Burial are the ones I'd rep for the hardest, if they needed my help (maybe the latter a wee bit?).

Yeah, I"m hoping Faceless Burial place relatively high on the ILM Metal EOY Poll--I placed them high on my ballot (which is a weighted one), so I guess I did my part to try to push them further up the pack...

New Dordeduh out in May. While we wait, here’s a single:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFmx82Dg2I

Really looking forward to it

thx for the heads up. there's a new LP pressing of dar de duh on the prophecy shop as well.

so this new Suffering Hour is quite good but did the guitarist leave his chorus pedal on for the entirety of the album or did LAME just encode this poorly

i appreciate the audacity but i almost wish he had gone for an Only Theatre of Pain level of chorus where it feeds back and detunes

It's a feature not a bug imo. Great album.

Vindsval (aka Blut aus Nord) is dropping a new one next week under his latest atmoblack moniker, Forhist.

No discussion of the Th1rt3en record that came out in January?

I concede it's more rap than metal but there's definitely some crossover here - "666 (Three Six Word Stories)" uses a Sabbath sample as a backbone, there's a ton of Eddie Hazel-gone-skrong guitar too.

I know it's kinda "Old man yells at clouds about a rap album he likes" but so is RTJ and this does a much better job of hitting the same rap/metal hot spots.

The Ad Nauseam album is excellent, probably the best skronk-metal I've heard in quite some time. It's also kind of melodic for its type!

It’s very good and scratches that post-Gorguts itch but I haven’t been able to get into it completely. It’s only a matter of time.

Just got a promo of the new album from The Crown, Royal Destroyer, which will be out March 12. It sounds like The Crown. The first video is for "Motordeath":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP8YfOSu2Dc

There’s a new Furia out and I can’t imagine it being of much interest to non-Polish speakers due to all the theatrical declamation involved. I liked the musical bits, at least.

Re: Ad Nauseam, their first album is equally excellent, I'm finding it hard to choose between the two.

On a completely different note, here's some shoegazey/ambient/drone metal for solo guitar:

https://gauntemperor.bandcamp.com/releases

It's quite beautiful, really.

Serena from Svalbard has apparently made a black metal album about Skyrim. I kinda dig how clean-sounding this is, her vox are great, and you gotta respect the sheer dorkiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUnxqczBQoA

i really like the Daius record and appreciate how well woven-in the "folk"/"atmospheric" elements are -- such a contrast with "here's the soft part, now here's the loud part"-metal

Glad you liked the Gaunt Emperor, NYCNative, and the Daius, roxymuzak. The year is still young but there's a good chance both of these will make it onto my EOY list.

paranorm's empyrean is essential listening for progressive thrash likers, one of the more accomplished and fun takes on this style I've heard in a minute

In an uncharacteristic move, Krallice just posted the following on Facebook to give us something to look forward to:

"Demonic Wealth"
the 10th album
written in isolation, recorded in isolation, listened to in isolation, released in isolation.
out next week, hopefully..

Maybe some day Krallice will fully click for me. Some day.

I haven't really cracked the recent releases tbh, but I always give the new ones a pass or two just to check in

ooh very cool. Krallice/Marston has been very active with promoting and releasing music on Bandcamp Friday's. seems like thats the idea for this one too. its been great. he's been promoting a ton of awesome projects throughout all of this.

Not metal, exactly, but it doesn't fit anywhere else: Lucifer have covered Dust's "Pull Away/So Many Times" for a split single with Kadavar (who cover Fleetwood Mac's "The Green Manalishi"). It's pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7OMvGoMTMQ

Much of the new Melvins sounds like a superannuated comedy rock album. The opener is a Beach Boys send-up whose 'humour' is derived from its copious use of the word 'fuck'. Uh...

'I Fuck Around', geddit? Geddit?

wah wah oooooh

Tbf 'much' is a bit of an overstatement.

Yeah, this is not good. Curious to hear what the Gen X crew makes of it.

Melvins have sucked since they let the Big Business guys walk away.

New Big Brave LP out in April. Here’s an appetizer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CgK5w6E2ns

Love it, can't wait for the album.

Same. I can’t wait to see them live, hopefully next year?

I'm a total sucker for Jón Aldará's vocals, so much so that I find myself otm'ing Angry Metal Guy for once:

https://www.angrymetalguy.com/iotunn-access-all-worlds-review/

There's a new Abominable Putridity album, their first since 2012. (When that album was reissued in 2015, I reviewed it for The Wire.) Parasitic Metamorphosis Manifestation has Ángel Ochoa of Disgorge and Cephalotripsy on vocals, and it rules.

https://inheritedsufferingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/abominable-putridity-parasitic-metamorphosis-manifestation

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0851292490_10.jpg