“The year of our Angry Metal Overlord 2001 was a “very good year,” to quote the everyone who has ever spoken about wine in a movie. Indeed, the year that produced Opeth’s epic and scene-changing Blackwater Park and Propagandhi’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes, also gave us Mutter by Rammstein, Awakening the World by Lost Horizon and Laundry Service by Shakira. But is Last Fair Deal Gone Down the best album released in 2001?”
Katatonia are one of my favorite bands, I think it’s safe to say. In the top 10? Probably, but definitely the Top 15 – with A Great Cold Distance and Last Fair Deal Gone Down duking it out for one of the best records of the 2000s. Their development as an act that has moved this far from Dance of December Souls and Brave Murder Day is immense. Those records are absolute classics, but as a band Katatonia has developed a feel for modern, depressive rock in the late 2000s that one could only have guessed at when Discouraged Ones and Tonight’s Decision were being released. But I did not enjoy Night Is the New Day pretty much at all. Instead, while everyone was freaking out, I was underwhelmed. It was filled with songs that didn’t speak to me even remotely. And unlike Viva Emptiness which finally just clicked for me after about 18 months of not digging it, Night Is the New Day still doesn’t pack any kind of punch.
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.
