Rolling Metal Thread 2014

I haven't seen Graveyard.

The new Avichi just kinda dropped my jaw. Their (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary but this might be. Comes out next week on PL. Black metal that manages to sound modern without wobbling into other subgenres.
http://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/catharsis-absolute

glenn m on pazz n jop results:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2014/01/pazz_and_jop_tabulation_notes.php

• Enthusiasm scores (the average number of points awarded by each voter, which can range individually from five to 30) favor the extremes. Four of the top 10 albums by enthusiasm are metal (In Solitude, Black Sabbath, Locrian, Carcass), and three of the others (Dean Blunt, Autre Ne Veut, Julia Holter) are conversely atmospheric and oblique. The top of the full Enthusiasm table is quite a bit more adventurous than the raw winners list, and well worth poking through for new discoveries. At the bottom, the top 10 album with the lowest enthusiasm score is Haim's Days Are Gone, whose 9.6 average indicates that voters actually went out of their way to change the suggested 10-points-per-album default in order to properly quantify the limpness of their support. Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time would be ninth by simple vote count, but drops to 16th on points. The lowest enthusiasm score for any album with at least five votes is the Bon Iver spin-off Volcano Choir's Repave, which managed a remarkable 6.3.

• If those aren't quite adventurous enough, the Kvltosis table re-ranks the albums with an inverse weighting by how popular each voter's tastes skew, to deliberately look for intriguing anomalies. This reveals even more underground metal (SubRosa, Gorguts, Ghost B.C., Inter Arma, Windhand) and a variety of contrastingly rootsier folk/world/psychedelia (Tedeschi Trucks Band, Wayne Shorter, Mavis Staples, Rokia Traoré, Tal National, William Onyeabor). The Kvltosis winner (the album that people who don't tend to agree with anybody kind of agree on) is Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's English Electric. (Did you know OMD had a new album this year?) At the other end, the least kvlty album, and thus arguably the one even more definitively representative of the voters' aggregate tastes than the raw winners, is Miley Cyrus's Bangerz. Let this modulate your opinion of the whole enterprise however it must.

some album placements… i don't think i missed any before #89

19 Deafheaven, Sunbather
Deathwish Points: 361
Mentions: 35
37 Carcass, Surgical Steel
Nuclear Blast Points: 220
Mentions: 17
64 Black Sabbath, 13
Vertigo Points: 120
Mentions: 9
68 Gorguts, Colored Sands
Season of Mist Points: 110
Mentions: 10
79 SubRosa, More Constant Than the Gods
Profound Lore Points: 92
Mentions: 9
81 Kvelertak, Meir
Roadrunner Points: 91
Mentions: 9
89 In Solitude, Sister
Metal Blade Points: 81
Mentions: 6

o and:

• The Metalism table, which re-ranks the albums by prorating each voter's votes according to how much metal they voted for, turns up mostly metal, as it better, with In Solitude taking the title of Most Metal. Scanning through the rest of the Metalism top 20, though, makes me wonder if voters have actually listened to the things they say they like, as the non-metal entries show a distinct and frankly suspicious bias toward names you might mistake for metal bands if you didn't know: Chelsea Wolf(e), Burial, Forest Swords, Joanna Gruesome, Darkside. Although they didn't fall for Chvrches or Volcano Choir, which both seem like perfectly good metal names to me, so maybe it's fine. The two most popular completely un-metal artists, by this calculation, are the hip-hop group the Uncluded, and Elvis Costello and the Roots, which seems plausible.

They're having some technical difficulties, but that will all be back again soon...

60% of my ballot was metal, but i had two albums in the top ten so i think my kvltosis and eccentricity numbers are going to go haywire this year :/

congratulations, metalists:

http://furia.com/pjs/table_voter_2013_metalism.html

Chelsea Wolfe makes sense as metalist imo.

SURRENDER OF DIVINITY SINGER/BASSIST MURDERED FOR "TARNISHING SATANISM": http://www.ztmag.com/blog/news/?p=19655

heir (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary

mebbe not, but there's no way I can fail to queue up a song titled "The Devil's Fractal Part I"

new finnish metal documentary, no subtitles in the trailer (and a pretty shocking-to-me 91k views so far) - some sieg-heiling a band at one point that's pretty ugh, I think a fair number of these finnish bands are some strain or other of nazi (Goatmoon, Ride for Revenge maybe?) which sucks because they make good records imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWzlSeGR5bU

Currently loving Exmortus's Slave to the Sword. Firstly because that's the title, secondly because this is the cover (apologies for gigantism)

http://www.metalsucks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/exmortus-slavetothesword.jpg

and thirdly because the band has this totally kick-ass blend of death metal, thrash, and shredtastic power metal going on, like 3 Inches of Blood with less shrieking and more balls. Basically, they're what I wish Revocation sounded like. How power metal are they? There's a version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on this album.

I hope it's okay to post this type of thing, a Math Metal band I was in a bunch of years ago set up a Bandcamp page because we found a bunch of CDs, would appeal to fans of Russian Circles/Dysrhythmia maybe.

http://foeband.bandcamp.com/

Hey, what was the name of the project that made heavy metal soundtracks for sermons? IIRC it was a self-released deal, available on bandcamp, with at least 2 releases, within the last 2-3 years. Having trouble turning it up with a search engine.

Nevermind. Megachurch was what I was looking for.

oooh MaresNest I happen to love that kinda thing, will check it out

How power metal are they? There's a version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on this album.

hah, alright, I'll bite

Long-time lurker... Anyone else thinking the Aevangelist album got kind of lost in the year-end shuffle?

didn't hear this until today...really really interesting record, good stuff

this is apparently Kvelertak performing on the Norwegian version of the Grammys and it is kinda bizarre:

http://youtu.be/eMRn4GMwTfA

Kinda?

That actually could not have been timed any better as I'm in a discussion on another forum about metal not being perceived as threatening anymore, contra the satanic panic 80's. I was grimly reminiscing about being hassled by authority figures for my interest in such socially disruptive music. That video had octogenarians clapping along like they were in the pews.

To be fair, they always seem to be polite at awards shows. There is some incredulous laughter in the crowd shots at the end of the infamous KLF/Extreme Noise Terror collaboration at some UK Awards show, but a lot of applause, if nothing else because that's what they're trained to do.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2suew_the-klf-vs-extreme-noise-terror-3am_music

I had planned to spend 2014 avoiding black metal entirely, but I'm about to check out the new Murmur album because a) Alex Perkolup (Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident) is in the band, and b) they cover King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part 2."

do they do the jamie muir percussion??

Just check out Aevangalist for the first time myself, this is great. I need more demented, blackly psychedelic metal.

Nice to finally see the Aevangelist album getting some love! It seemed a bit unfocused to me at first, but it gets more gripping on subsequent listens. "Demented, blackly psychedelic" pretty much sums it up just right.

Haven't listened to the Murmur disc in full yet. The KC cover is kinda muddy-sounding, but I don't have much more to say than that yet.

Morning listening: Corpsessed, Abysmal Thresholds and Exmortus, Slave to the Sword. The Corpsessed disc is Finnish death metal that sounds more influenced by Immolation and Incantation than Swedish acts; I've already talked about Exmortus above, and they continue to rule.

New At the Gates in 2014? Sure, why not, everyone else is doing it.
http://youtu.be/EFKuR3-G4K0

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18827-indian-from-all-purity/

omg what is that noise on 'rhetoric of no', you know the one i mean ftftftftftftftftftftf

righteous screaming too

Great record! The aggression is off the charts.

I had planned to spend 2014 avoiding black metal entirely, but I'm about to check out the new Murmur album because a) Alex Perkolup (Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident) is in the band, and b) they cover King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part 2."

― Humorist (horse) (誤訳侮辱)

Apparently this is gonna be the year of black metal King Crimson because the new Hail Spirit Noir could not be Fripping any harder. Might wanna wait til next year to avoid. (The whole thing is on YT; I don't know if it's anywhere, uh, legitimate and I'm not sure how this forum feel about YT rips.)

On the same label and from the same country, the new Aenaon, despite the generic band name, is a really good, if less well integrated, black prog funhouse experience. Has some quality guesting on it.

I did some repping for that Hail Spirit Noir on the rolling middle eastern etc metal thread. I think it fucking kicks ass

Ah, cool, I only noticed and read that thread yesterday. Coincidence! (I wanted to love that Al Namrood too but the vocal effect made me wince.) And yeah, HSN is something special.

Skull. Fist.

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

I love Canadian metal bands.

Apparently this is gonna be the year of black metal King Crimson because the new Hail Spirit Noir could not be Fripping any harder. Might wanna wait til next year to avoid. (The whole thing is on YT; I don't know if it's anywhere, uh, legitimate and I'm not sure how this forum feel about YT rips.)

huh so they have kind of a carnival music prog thing huh

I wouldn't say "carnival music;" if anything the other band I mentioned, Aenaon, fits more with that. That term makes me think "novelty" or "flippant." Whatever HSN is doing, it sounds well thought out and developed. But we may be using the term differently.

That Skull Fist was the Headbangers Ballsiest thing I've seen in a while. Usually with these throwback METAAAAAL!!! bands I'm too wrapped up in suspicions about whether or not they're making fun of this favorite genre of mine, but that seemed miraculously genuine. Or yeah maybe it's a Canadian thing.

I tried to explain the Canadianness of Skull Fist and that ilk last week over at the Deciblog:

http://www.decibelmagazine.com/featured/sucker-for-punishment-the-new-wave-of-moose-molten-metal/

Haha, "Demon for a Day" - a demon job-shadowing program, I guess? This is a really good album.

Moose + Molten = Molson?

devilock, when i say 'carnival music' i'm thinking of, like, the third king crimson album, or some of the more curdled bits of faux-classicism you get from wakeman or elp or whoever in prog—or say like some of the more zappaesque bits of cathedral's records. i assume it often has a parodic intent; one of the reviews of hail spirit noir i read said 'theatrical', maybe not in reference to what i have in mind, but probably in the same territory. say, the xylophone in the first track—an instrument it's hard not to associate with puppet shows, children's music, etc.

some pretty dirrty guitar work going on tho.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense. When I've seen "carnival music" it's usually being applied to Dimmu Borgir's keyboards and such, as a pejorative (I assume). I like your unpacking of it more.

Or maybe I'm thinking of "calliope music."

well, it might be a little pejorative in my case, but i just find that whole feel kind of distasteful.

my dictionary sez 'calliope: a keyboard instrument resembling an organ but with the notes produced by steam whistles, used chiefly on showboats and in traveling fairs', so.

based on all of the above, going to listen to Hail Spirit Noir right fucking now

ok yeeeeeeah B-D

I'm just going to leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9unWRsD2QQM

Skull Fist RULES.

I like how HSN are able to use black metal while keeping a controlled distance from it. The baseline feel is a lot closer to dark prog-rock like KC or Balletto di Bronzo, black metal being just part of the progressive cobweb.

On Facebook one of the HSN members, the keyboardist, last month linked to The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble's Reflections, saying it was one of his favorites and an influence on the band. Apparently HSN's prior album was dedicated to the Greek composer who wrote Reflections' music. Anyway I'd not heard of NYRRE, but after listening to their "classical baroque rock" I can sort of see the connections -- lots of grand, sweeping but weirdly jolting music akin to Chicago, The Strawbs, even Renaissance. For my fellow uninitiated:
http://youtu.be/Tyj8nFoWNBM

I will witness Eyehategod, Graves at Sea and Stoneburner this evening in Oakland.. My god friends AUGURS are opening, stoked for them. Lycus was suppose to play too but dropped off the last minute. A long night of super heaviness with punk as fuck ethos..