Angry Metal Guy

Well, here it is folks. The final 10 [Here's the first 40: 50-41, 40-31, 31-20, 20-11 and Steel Druhm's: 50-41, 40-31, 30-21, 20-11, 10-1]. And this is going to ruffle a bunch of feathers, I guarantee it. These are, for the most part, not widely considered “favorites” and would never make fan-voted lists, but these tracks all got onto this list pretty easily. I’m not as angry about the whole Gibson list anymore, and I’ve lost a bit of steam because of that, but these tracks are all fucking fantastic, top-o’-the-line kind of shit. I hope you enjoy the list and I look forward trolling you soon. U MAD BRO!? Continue reading

It’s hard to make this kind of broad list, I just want to say that from the get-go. How do you do this? Do you choose your favorites, or do you choose the genre defining records? Because saying, for example, that some of the following records are really genre defining wouldn’t be true. On the other hand, these are the records that when I go back and look at the 2000s I think of pretty immediately as some of the best stuff and the things that I keep coming back to.

But the 2000s have been an interesting time for metal in a lot of ways. One of the things that happened was that death metal and death metal-influenced music really hit the mainstream in a lot of ways. For the first time since the 1980s there were larger groups of young people who really started getting into metal and there is an entire generation of musicians who have been influenced by the heavy metal of the 80s and the underground of the 1990s (particularly black and death metal). While I believe that metal is on the ebb again (in a popular music sense) and will once again retreat underground to lick its wounds and come up with something fascinating, interesting and new, the 2000s have been a great time to be a fan of the genre.

This list is going to take a lot of hits. I can already hear some of them, and some of them will come out of left field. But, as usual, I refuse to apologize for my taste. The focus on “magazine metal” bands will probably irritate some, and others will argue that my choices from one genre or another aren’t representative of the best of that genre during the period (specifically death metal in this case). But when I look back on the last 9 years, these are the ones that stand out. And trust me, there’s some stuff that I wish I could get on there, but I didn’t include an honorable mentions section since I expanded the list to 15. But there are some amazing records (Moonsorrow‘s Hävitetty, Anata‘s Under a Stone with No Inscription and The Conductor’s Departure, Agalloch‘s The Mantle, Turisas‘ The Varangian Way, Necrophagist‘s Epitaph, Ásmegin‘s Hin Vordende Sod & Sø, Absu‘s Tara, Rhapsody‘s Power of the Dragonflame, Anathema‘s A Fine Day to Exit, Nile‘s Black Seeds of Vengeance, Otyg‘s Sagovindars Boning, Obscura‘s Cosmogenesis, Watain‘s Sworn to the Dark, Akercocke‘s Antichrist, Enslaved‘s Below the Lights are just a few of my major oversights) that came out during this period that haven’t ended up on this list and I’m aware of that.

Anyway, I hope you find this list enjoyable, shocking, provocative and maybe even dead on. Backwards this time…

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Barren Earth // Curse of the Red River
Rating: 4.5/5.0 — Stellar
Label: Peaceville
Websites: barrenearth.com | myspace.com/officialbarrenearth
Release Dates: EU: 29.03.2010 | US: 04.06.2010

Barren Earth took me completely by surprise. As a rule I do not post reviews of records from labels that do not send me promos of them. I think it’s a disincentive for them to do so and generally bands don’t deserve the promotion. However, sometimes bands come onto the radar that I can’t ignore, as is what happened when I picked up this new Barren Earth record on a total whim. In fact, I didn’t even know that this band had ex-members from Amorphis, the drummer from Moonsorrow, the guitarist from Kreator or the vocalist from Swallow the Sun involved—or that it was mixed by Dan Swanö. I guess I should have expected that this would be a great record…

And great it is. No normal “super group” kind of album (you know, the kind that lacks a soul), this project has taken time to gestate and turn into a real band and the listener definitely gets that feel. If we start at the top and work our way down; one of the thing that stands out about this project is definitely how cohesive the record is. This is not an album with a “hit or two,” but instead a complete album that flows beautifully and is meant to be listened to from beginning to end every time you break it out. Not to say that the tracks aren’t strong, because they really, really are. The opening track on the album “Curse of the Red River” blends death metal pig squeels with a Jethro Tullesque flute solo and excellent melancholic melodic riffing. “Flicker”, another of my favorites, twists and turns from strumming acoustic guitars to machine gun double bass and bestial growls and back, showing off what dynamics can do for a band who is intent on using them to their full extent.

Curse of the Red River is, if you haven’t figured it out, the unholy union of Amorphis and Opeth. If you take Still Life and Blackwater Park era Opeth and mixed it with Elegy and Tuonela-era Amorphis, this is probably what it would sound like. You can hear the kind of mid-paced melodies that you get from those mid-era Armophis albums, for sure. But with the vocal breadth and dynamism that vocalist Mikko Kotamäki displays gives this a much deeper, heavier feel than anything they were putting out during that era. His vocals stand out from the background and offer that perfect contrast, with a good, smooth clean tone and amazing growls which give a force to the tracks that would be sorely missing if performed by anyone else.

The band, in what is quickly becoming a progressive death metal genre in the wake of Opeth‘s gigantic popularity, does an excellent job of blending the styles of doom and death metal with beautiful clean vocals and acoustic parts. However, unlike some bands who are intent on sticking clean vocals into the music, these guys aren’t just building tracks that are throwaway vehicles for a big chorus. Instead, they have all the intensity and melancholy that you expect of the genre and the band involved. On top of that, Barren Earth has a sense for catchy guitar melodies that really stick in your head, leaving the listener humming them for hours after listening to the record.

My biggest complaint about this album, honestly, is that it’s a little too easy to draw the continuous comparisons to Amorphis and Opeth as I’ve done here. Particularly the former band is ever-present in their sound. This isn’t bad, but one wonders if in the long run this will sit well with listeners, or if they won’t just go back and take out Elegy and Tales from the Thousand Lakes and relive something that happened a couple decades ago. While I personally think that this record will probably rank high at the end of the year list, I think there is a possible critique with it being considered too derivative and thereby losing some if its credibility. But personally, this Angry Metal Guy thinks that’s bullshit and will be listening to this album in as much free time as he can spare…

‘Cause it’s fucking great.

Orphaned Land // The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR
Rating: 5.0/5.0 — A work of art
Label: Century Media
Websites: orphaned-land.com | myspace.com/orphanedmyspace
Release Dates: EU: 25.01.2010 | US: 02.09.2010

Few bands will ever make their own mark on a genre of music—it’s just a statistical rarity. Someone once told me that there are something like 5 million bands on MySpace, if that gives you an idea of the breadth which exists when one is thinking in terms of how many musicians there are out there. Of those, most of them probably last longer than a year, never produce much of a demo much less get signed to a real label—and how many ever produce a real step forward into a new decade with a statement of great things to come? The chances of becoming a professional musician are basically NIL and then of the number that do, how many ever produce something that will be remembered and affect enough listeners to ever influence any? That number is even smaller. Orphaned Land is one of the few bands that will ever exact change in metal and they are doing so now with their new record The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR.

For those of you not “in the know,” (though frankly these guys are on Century Media if you don’t know by now…) Orphaned Land is progressive death metal act from Israel who produces masterpieces at a snail’s pace. However, they do, in fact, produce masterpieces. To do the band no justice at all, imagine Orphaned Land as the culmination of progressive metal (in the vein of Opeth and old Paradise Lost), traditional heavy metal and folk metal. But not Otyg, Eluveitie or Finntroll folk metal, which is very much a northern Europe kind of thing, but instead blending in all the textures and unique flavors of “oriental” and middle-eastern instruments and big orchestrations into one cohesive, and epic as hell, whole. Blend all of that in with a tendency to get a little chuggy at times with off-tempo and syncopation and beautiful female vocals and you have Orphaned Land.

For fans of the band, The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR picks up where Mabool, the band’s 2004 (!) release, left off. Well, musically, that is. Despite the 6 year break, the sound is still remarkably fresh. This might have something to do with the fact that this album was mixed by Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree genius-at-large, temporary keyboard player for the band and Opeth go-to guy for Blackwater Park, Deliverance and Damnation), who added some of his distinct, trademark sounds (see: telephone line vocals, mellotron keyboards, etc.) to the album giving the tracks a different flavor than Mabool had—though, I’ll guess that a higher budget probably had something to do with that as well (though this is conjecture). The tracks flow into each other perfectly, balancing mid-paced death metal riffs and mid-range death metal growls against folky klezmer sounding pieces and huge sweeping orchestras which use unison violins to imitate old Lawrence of Arabia style movie soundtracks—a stunning and chilling effect, surprisingly. [Editors note: it was confirmed for me by Kobi Farhi that this orchestra is indeed the Nazareth Orchestra, which plays the violin in a different way and that it was chosen specifically to give this album a different approach.]

As Mabool before it, The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR is a concept album—but the unfortunate side-effect of promotional media is that I have not received lyrics to give you a picture of the story. However, from what I’ve read elsewhere on the net and from the band’s own statements it is clear that they are maintaining their overarching theme of the unity and common ground of Islam, Judaism and Christianity—even appealing for peace openly on the track “Disciples of the Sacred Oath II” and singing in Arabic for the first time on that track. In a sense, these guys are breaking ground with this stuff, too. Without being an overtly religious band, they have broken away from the confines of EEVIIIIL heavy metal and moved into the arena of smart, appealing and interesting themes on their own. This gives the band a sense of sincerity that I think a lot of bands lack, and gives them credibility overall.

I admit freely that Orphaned Land has pretty much cemented its place as one of my favorite heavy metal/progressive bands of the modern era and, frankly, ever. The complexity of the thought processes, the writing, the arrangements and production are not lost on me and I encourage everyone to give this a record a listen in high quality earphones, because that is to some extent how it deserves to be listened to. I suspect that I will be listening to this album every day for a long time to come, despite the huge number of CDs I should be reviewing, because I can’t keep myself away. And if it holds up as well as Mabool has to the years, then I strongly suspect I’ll be about ready for a new album in 2016 when they finally get back around to it.

Wow. Things have been busy around here, honestly. One of the downsides of doing this for fun is that one makes no money doing it and has to come up with other ways to pull together an income. I’ve been trying to do that, plus, other things. Anyway, this is the stuff that I’ve been up to and listening to in my freetime (of which there is actually very little). In this time, however, I have pieced together a list that I would call the “best albums of the 2000s.” I don’t know if I’d actually call them the best, so much as the ones that have really stuck with me. As a guy who thinks that it was actually the mid/late 90s that were really the defining point in heavy metal for the modern era, and that what we’re dealing with is very much the outcome of this, this list was actually very difficult for me to produce.

1. Opeth // Ghost Reveries — This is always the toughest for me. Choose which Opeth record I think most defines the modern era. I finally always decide on GR, which incidentally I hated when it came out. But it totally grew on me after that and now it’s probably my favorite.
2. Katatonia // Last Fair Deal Gone Down — Again, this is tough. I love all of their modern stuff, but I think this is probably the most consistent of all their albums. Another defining record in my life, I think, too.
3. Turisas // The Varangian Way — I consistently come back to this record over and over. It pretty much represents everything that big, awesome extreme metal should be. I also think it was very much new. It combined much of that power metal and viking metal stuff that’s been threatening to merge for years into a cohesive whole.
4. Vintersorg // Visions from the Spiral Generator — Again, how do you really choose? I chose this one because I think the whole album is fantastic. But they’re all fantastic. It’s definitely between this one and Cosmic Genesis. I chose this one ’cause I love Digorgio and Mickelson’s performances.
5. Amon Amarth // Versus the World — Again a hard one to choose. But this record has some of the best tracks these guys ever wrote and some of the best melodic death metal ever.
6. Anathema // A Fine Day to Exit — This record is fucking tremendously written and perfect from first note to last note.
7. Amorphis // Eclipse — The rebirth of Amorphis is quite possibly one of the greatest things that happened in the two-thousandsies. This album, and the two that have followed since, are some of the finest metal records produced in the modern era.
8. Rhapsody // Power of the Dragonflame — Sets the bar for orchestrated, ridiculous over-the-top metal. They’ve never produced anything like it since, nor has anyone else for that matter.
9. Ihsahn // angL — I love Ihsahn’s solo stuff. It’s a perfect blend of extreme metal and prog. His writing is massively improved since being out of Emperor, in my opinion, but I’m sure there’s a black metal guy on this board who will shriek in horror at those words.
10. Shining // V:/ Halmstad — This record hooked me immediately and hasn’t let go.

You have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to write a list like that. And I do really like writing lists, I think it’s a good time. A game for me has always been top 5s or top 10s.