Rolling 2020 Metal Thread

Revolver Magazine
Top Albums of 2020

25. Imperial Triumphant - Alphaville
24. Touché Amoré - Lament
23. The Acacia Strain - Slow Decay
22. Ozzy Osbourne - Ordinary Man
21. Avatar - Hunter Gatherer
20. Necrot - Mortal
19. Puscifer - Existential Reckoning
18. Mrs. Piss - Mrs. Piss
17. Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo
16. Nothing - The Great Dismal
15. Gulch - Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress
14. Lamb of God - Lamb of God
13. Marilyn Manson - We Are Chaos
12. Poppy - I Disagree
11. Higher Power - 27 Miles Underwater
10. Ghostemane - Anti-Icon
9. Killer Be Killed - Reluctant Hero
8. Spirit Adrift - Enlightened in Eternity
7. Bring Me the Horizon - POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR
6. Run the Jewels - RTJ4
5. Loathe - I Let It In and It Took Everything
4. Body Count - Carnivore
3. Greg Puciato - Child Soldier: Creator of God
2. Code Orange - Underneath
1. Deftones - Ohms

http://www.revolvermag.com/music/25-best-albums-2020

I've decided the Melted Bodies album is a better Mr. Bungle comeback than the (actually pretty good!) actual Mr. Bungle comeback.

Skepticism have recorded their next album - some short snippets of the process here - more news about a release date is probably coming in the next couple of years

https://www.facebook.com/officialskepticism

lol

Maciej Kowalski uploaded this on his channel, pretty cool stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MXb8dh-Wkw

Really digging the new Dark Buddha Rising, I love that "Uni" is basically a drum solo right in the middle of the record.

I'm also really enjoying this new Boris with Merzbow album, 2R0I2P0. Might be my favorite Boris thing in a long time. Ranges from surprisingly pretty to nice and noisey.

Seriously, this take on "EVOL" is gorgeous with that soaring guitar solo spiraling up out of Merzbow's noise.

Dawnwalker are pretty good at this whole wistful, proggy post-metal thing. lj, you a fan?

Holy shit, I was not expecting to be blown away by a new prog/tech death metal release this late in the year, but this had the same effect on me as last year's Blood Incantation:

https://omnivortexofficial.bandcamp.com/releases

Kevin has uploaded sheet music for all the guitar parts on Dysrhythmia's Veil of Control to Bandcamp: https://dysrhythmia.bandcamp.com/merch/the-veil-of-control-the-complete-guitar-transcriptions-digital-pdf-book-with-guitar-pro-files . I probably won't pay 10USD for it but still p cool. The tunings on the sample pages are crazy.

Dawnwalker are pretty good at this whole wistful, proggy post-metal thing. lj, you a fan?

― pomenitul, Thursday, 3 December 2020 20:58 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

lmao I used to be *friends* with the guy! should really listen in and let him know I'm still out there

Looks like they're a proper quartet now, per Metal Archives.

yeah this seems to be a much more full-band thing than his previous albums, excited to hear it

lol I bought it and he immediately messaged me asking how I was, how nice

Would I like it, LJ?

bought it anyway as its bandcamp friday

Most brutal DM is an indistinguishable din to me but this right here is some good shit:

https://newstandardelite.bandcamp.com/album/putrescent-seepage-dead-and-demented

Production is pitch-perfect.

good call on Omnivortex. even occasional clean vocals that actually don't suck!

Glad you like it. Prog death that's both cohesive and rifftastic isn't easy to come by. I don't often agree with AMG, but this review is on point:

https://www.angrymetalguy.com/omnivortex-diagrams-of-consciousness-review/

i hate a lot of prog death but this shit has hooks amongst its arrangements, def worthy addition

Kind of unrelated but is there a single ESL metal vocalist who pronounces the word abyss 'uh-biss'? It's always 'AB-iss', it seems.

We need a linguist to write a monograph on international metal English.

AB-iss has been a metal tradition since Celtic Frost on "Visions of Mortality."

Diablo Wind is so good - as in: a well written song! you gotta love Jackie's light air chanting the future is dark- that it made me to re-evaluate the first advance track This Bed: i changed my mind, it doesn't just aimlessly wanders. the middle section could have been slightly edited, though.

new Grayceon in a couple of days: https://grayceon.bandcamp.com/album/mothers-weavers-vultures

very nice sludge/drone/postmetal from my hometown: https://pothamus.bandcamp.com/album/raya

Hey, look what slithered out into the world this weekend...

https://taucross2.bandcamp.com/album/messengers-of-deception

Apparently (there are a couple of interviews and reviews floating around) Miller re-recorded the entire album (omitting one song by a former bandmember who wouldn't let him have it) using a guitarist and drummer who didn't want their real names appearing in the credits.

what a piece of shit. very fitting that this is the only positive user comment so far

Giving the middle finger to cancel culture the Baron roars back with this monstrous record.

that's gonna be a 'no' from me, Tim

I'm gonna be honest. I fucking loved the first two TC albums. When Miller turned out to be a raving asshole, and backed into all the usual depressing brainworms bullshit ("virtue signaling" et fucking al.) when people called him on it, it really pissed me off. And now he's done an interview with some Aussie blog (which I'm not gonna link to) and said shit like this:

“My idea is that the Babylonian exile is where the Talmud seems to have taken shape. It was taken back to the Jewish people in Israel and was very different to the religion they had been used to, viz the Pentateuch and the Torah. I regard Talmudic Judaism as a supremacist Death Cult presided over by Priestcraft and demonic intercession. I believe that the Esoteric traditions were subverted towards an allegiance with extra human forces in the Archontic pantheon, and that rather than the traditional view that the Jews were in captivity in Babylon I believe that they became captive to their own Levitical priesthood subsequent to the introduction of the Talmud, which through the Rabbinical tradition has maintained the apartheid between the Chosen and the Cattle. Christianity dispenses a watered-down version of Judaism to bind the Gentiles to the same stream of Demonic Influences. All roots of the Abrahamic tree are corrupted, despite some glimpses of the older beliefs that managed to survive”.

FTR, the "interviewer" responds to that with "Interesting stuff, perhaps linked in some way to what you were saying with regards to indigenous religion in 'Burn With Me'? Maybe that’s another discussion for another day." Quality music journalism thrives in the metal underground, don't let anybody tell you different.

It's just fucked up and depressing.

unsurprising. no less infuriating. i still own two amebix recs :( the tat i had it removed. afaic he died last year

Brand new metal publication with a list that's a bit more like it imo

https://cursedzine.com/index.php/features-cursed/albums-of-2020/10-1

Not bad, considering, although I'm pretty sure only two of those will make my metal ballot.

Should have linked from 50 onward, oops

It does hew close to the RYM netal consensus admittedly

Make that nine, then. Still, much more to my liking than the usual fare, no doubt about it.

This, from Bandcamp's best metal of 2020 list, might be the most misleading blurb I've read all year.

The bullet-belted thrashers in France’s Hexecutor aren’t above a little showboating. Pretty much every song on Beyond Any Human Conception of Knowledge… indulges in at least one tongue-wagging, knee-sliding, pelvis-thrusting guitar solo. This is Eurothrash made for the big stage, conversant in the machine-gun Teutonic riffing of Destruction and Kreator, but seemingly more enraptured by the overt theatricality of Iron Maiden and King Diamond. Songs like “Tiger of the Seven Seas” and “Belzebuth’s Apocryphal Mark” may traffic in arcane subject matter, but they vamp like Van Halen. It’s was the most fun you could have with a metal album this year.

I'm listening to this album right now and I'm not hearing any Destruction or Kreator, never mind Iron Maiden or King Diamond. At best, this sounds like Tribulation with half the production budget; it's way too black metal-damaged (especially in the vocals) to work for me at all. I'm extremely disappointed. I seriously feel lied to. Anybody else heard this record? Thoughts?

this is pretty fun raw death metal with sick vocals

gets a wee bit monotonous halfway through but it's only 5 bucks

https://altarofgore.bandcamp.com/album/obscure-obscene-gods

I'm not hearing any of those things either. Perhaps the person who wrote that blurb thought 'this sounds like the 80s to me, which I know next to nothing about, so let's just namecheck a handful of random metal bands from that decade'.

xp

my only thought worth sharing is that i strongly disagree with: It was the most fun you could have with a metal album this year

definitely no Iron Maiden or King Diamond. definitely no Teutonic thrash.

it's pretty decent though

though looks like we're wrong

Flammenkanonier
1 month ago
Best Record of 2020.

actually I kinda like this! just doesn't sound like who they claim it does

just doesn't sound like who they claim it does

Indeed. Betcha they pronounce 'Hexecutor' as 'Executor' because they're French.

this year's Katalepsy sounds pretty good! got it earlier today.

full of hooks. I guess I like my DM hooky.

Norway's TV Haugaland has put together a 12-part documentary on Enslaved, in Norsk but with full English subtitles, which they're putting on YouTube one episode a week. The first five are out now. Here's the first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGlN57sXqI

12 parts? Impressive.

Btw you should definitely vote in this year's edition of our metal poll, unperson.

In the meantime, The Quietus put up a sub-list:

https://thequietus.com/articles/29321-the-best-heavy-metal-2020

The Pallbearer is the only one I actively disliked out of the lot – and I very much enjoyed their first couple of albums – so that's a pretty decent ratio, all things considered. The Black Curse is merely ok – I have no idea why nearly everyone holds it in such high regard. For my money, those guys are much better at DM than they are at BM.

As usual, No Clean Singing has a list devoted to the 'good' (i.e. not quite 'great'):

https://www.nocleansinging.com/2020/12/08/2020-a-year-in-reviews-the-good/

And now the 'great':

https://www.nocleansinging.com/2020/12/09/2020-a-year-in-reviews-the-great/

Really nice and concise writing style and link-embedding format on those N.C.S. best-of writeups IMO--thanks for the link.

Am esp glad to be reminded of that newest Serpent Column! Had it in my wishlist and forgot about it.

Maybe it's just b/c I was paying more att'n this year via snooping on, I mean following, some deep metalheads' fan accounts on my Bandcamp feed, but there seemed like an endless am't to check out this year.

My personal EOY genre list was at 30 releases, and after tabulating realized I could've easily stretched it to 40, which is wild since overall I'm a bit more of an experimental/electronic/jazz fan if I had to pigeonhole my listening tendencies.