“Each year we aggregate the voluminous listery that occurs in these hallowed pages in order to delineate the favorite (or rather, lowest common denominator) records from a given year across the various writers and tastes that we now characterize.” This is what it sounds like when mobs rules.
Kronos and Grymm deliver artisan Top Ten(ish) lists for 2021. Just look at that craftsmanship!
Saunders, Huck and Cherd deliver their weighty Top Ten(ish) lists and try to get along in the process.
Lists are a gift and Doom_et_Al and Dear Hollow have presents to distribute. Prepare for tidings of anger and joy.
“Rien ne suffit: nothing is enough. For Plebeian Grandstand, it might as well be a motto. The Toulouse have made their career defying categorization, and pushing each release to be something new, something more. How Hate is Hard to Define set a bar for blackened mathcore that no other record has come close to clearing, only for the band to sink into sludgy, dissonant black metal with Lowgazers. That muddy reek was fired with death metal oppression to make the gleaming False Highs, True Lows, and now, with Rien ne Suffit, it is shattered.” Enough is never MOAR.
“The concept album does not translate well to death metal. That’s not to say bands can’t pull it off, but the mangled vocals and chaotic nature of the genre work against attempts to tell a story across the length of a record. Most of the more successful death metal concept albums take musical cues from progressive rock—distinctive melodies, varied pacing, and tamed growls get the point across. Devangelic rally against this, writing concept albums that contain none of that.” Conceptual brutality.
“In the past couple of decades, metal has generated extremity along both rhythmic and harmonic paths, but the two have been largely insulated from another. Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan meticulously machined immensely complex rhythms, while Deathspell Omega and Ulcerate twisted strings to wring out sickening chords and chilling melodies. And while accusing Meshuggah or Dillinger of harmonic simplicity would be as absurd as dismissing Ulcerate or Deathspell’s considerable rhythmic weight, the approaches of the two schools are rarely invoked at once. That’s where Noise Trail Immersion come in.” New maths.
“The typical pitfall of pseudo-experimental metal bands is their tendency towards buffoonish self-aggrandizement and the accompanying insistence on pompous philosophical themes. Often drawing inspiration from edgy, coincidentally anti-humanistic philosophies and providing a “thinking man’s take” on black metal, they immerse themselves in childish interpretations of nihilism and neoreactionary doctrines. The similarly arty and bombastically theatrical Potmos Hetoimos, the long-standing one-man progressive sludge project of Baltimorean Matt Matheson, is an antipode of such acts.” Humanistic is as humanism does.
“Pop quiz: off the top of your head, name five Canadian bands. If you’re a geezer of some sort, Rush will take top billing, whereas the more brutal among us will have rattled off a litany of Quebecios tech death acts. Few metalheads will think to include a grind act in their list, let alone one from the flyover provinces. And yet, here Wake are, poised to release their fourth LP of brutal grindcore from their hideout in Calgary.” Wake off, you hoser!
“This being a Kronos feature, I must first launch into a brief and hateful tirade against an absurd and laughably incompetent enemy. Towards that end, I’d like to alert an Angry Metal Guy staffer that we are now officially beefin’. And that staffer is… 2015 Kronos.” War inside his head.
