IAN GREY

Deathspell Omega – Paracletus

The record of their career and of the year. Beautifully recored, with rich building cadences, this is something beyond ‘dark’ or black or any of metal’s old news. The best tracks here are transcendence that growl.

Triptykon – Eparistera Daimones

It’s easy to do evil, but desperate, wild-eyed crazy evil? Evil like you’re trapped in a German Expressionist nightmare and can’t get out and all you have is your melting brain evil? That’s harder. I nominate “Shatter” for year’s best metal song. There are no power chords–there are sounds, originally from guitars, of terrifying dark power. Whatever I say here is nothing compared to the majesty–yeah, the majesty–of what Tom Warrior has pulled off here. Nobody will be copying this because you can’t do a cover version of meteor landing on your face.

Cynic – Re-Traced

There’s a reason they call experimental music experimental–it usually fails. Here, Cynic take songs from their come-back, “Traced in Air”, and totally Trent Reznors them, as in re-imagining them to the point that they may as well be new songs, with the addition of for-real  new songs to seal the new-feel deal.

Usually I kind of can’t stand Cynic. I mean, I understand why you love them, I get it I get it. But it’s too frilly for me, too filled with, pace Oz on Buffy, with “fruity jazz chords” and not enough metal attack.

All that’s moot here in lovely, floaty, strange, almost drum ‘n bass’y mood music with a mood I can’t describe. Which is what keeps brining me back. The quiet strangeness of it.

Rotting Christ – AEALO

If Rotting Christ had instead been called Decayed Icon they’d be as big as anyone in metal. Anyway, there’s nothing that sounds remotely like this. You have a problem with triggered drums? This sounds like triggered-everything. The vocals sounds triggered, for fucks sake, like every ultra-dude in 300were synced as back-up singers in a best-case-scenario, death-ish metal art metal band. The aesthetic is one that assumes robot battering rams do destruction better and I can’t argue here. It’s all Greek to me, but the vibe is one of, to quote Vincent Cassel in Black Swan, “Attack! Attack! Attack!”

Father Befouled – Morbid Destitution of Covenant

Father’s low death grooves sound filthy as the oldest dirt ever, with speaker-rip, anti-harmonic guitars that finger the raw edge of actual atonality. You’re in the most horrible dark drinking place ever and this is what they play before whatever’s in that cocktail really kicks in and puts the kibosh on everything

Electric Wizard – Black Masses

What it sounds like when a stoner buzzed on his first Satanic verses sticks his head into a wind tunnel. But even better!

Year Of No Light – Ausserwelt

Imagine if Sunn O))) could do something more than bully gullible critics who don’t really like metal anyway into thinking druid dress and low drones were high art and you’d be at the starting point for Year Of No Light and their four-long-song ‘Ausserwelt’.

Just as distorted as any Southern Lord but for some greater purpose beyond from noisy stasis, Year’s long pieces are actually thematically concise and shot through with a luminal anthemic quality; anthemic about what, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s kind of the point with abstract mysteries.

“Year” should be getting all the ambient-doom ink with their gorgeous hauntings, but this is Earth, not heaven, so what are you gonna do, ghostbusters?

Wolfshade – When Above…

France, man. It’s like the new Sweden, or New Orleans something. Wolfshade did the thing to my brain that I love, where it’s at first like, Oh, ambient downtempo NeurIsis sorta-Gothic metal whatever. But there’s something more insistent here that made my brain do, Dude, put that shit on again please, I rather fancy that huge, rattling snare that sounds like a door coming unhinged into some dark hell dimension. I like how the rasp-vocal (™ All BM bands) sort of drift into the music like mash notes from a crazy person’s diary. Support these guys; what they’re doing could be a carbon copy instead it’s an ear wig. I mean that with love.

Killing Joke – Absolute Dissent

Not strictly metal, but Wiki says they’ve influenced Lamb of God, Behemoth, Faith No More, Korn, Rammstein and more so respect the architects, man. Then again, even when the Joke were actually playing metal, or Joke music that was formalistically metal, it wasn’t really metal but let’s just put all this aside; all those bands will be sucking this up and you should too.

It’s so Joke-like that instead of retreading past glories almost 30 years into their career, they drop the best record of their career. There’s the metal attack,  post-punk jabs, assault and battery grooves. And there’s “Geordie” Walker’s amazing guitar palette, sometimes sounding like trashcans with a chorus pedal, sometimes soaring elegance, always in attack formation. Jaz Coleman sings top flight melodies from some deep echoed place, some place full of wonder, not that he’d ever tell the exact nature of transcendence here: why spoil a good joke?

Rose Kemp – A Hand Full Of Hurricanes

Go to eMusic and click on Rose Kemp and you’ll  see a PR shot that sums the music here perfectly.Staring you right in the eye, she looks bruised, bemused by your bullshit, just too been-there, barely-survived-that for Dresden Doll cabarets.

This is some new sort of folk doom metal that’s about implication and dark axiety as much as it is sound explosions. Mainly, it’s Kemp’s burred alto, staring at all sorts of spiritual wreckage, that bewitches even as we’d like to turn away (we can’t).

Exodus – Exhibit B: The Human Condition

There are death, taxes and Exodus records, except the former is always a pleasure-jolt to the system with their inevitable thrash chewy goodness. And as we all stare down the barrel of this worldwide recession, we need lefty asskickers like Exodus to remind us how the right wing of every government on this planet is in the business of assfucking us all with chainsaws. Epic WIN, and all your adorable neo-thrash kids? Do listen to the masters.

Madder Mortem –  Eight Ways

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again and again: If Madder Mortem had a male singer instead of a female with three octaves of hellraise and coo, they’d make the relative amateurs in Opeth and Porcupine Tree look like, uh, amateurs.

This is pro with passion, with a touch of delirium, with ceaseless, artful invention. Nobody’s going to become a Guitar Hero here, Madder are about better things than technicality though the playing is always what’s needed, with elegance. Maybe this is too fine for coarse tastes. Maybe metal needs to fucking grow up and out of its ichorous misogyny.

Enslaved – Axioma Ethica Odin

A great year for older dudes as Enslaved finally, after decades of patient slow progress get their black metal/Pink Floyd/wall-of-sound thing in order. “Ethica Odini” sounds like a mad house in a phase shifter parented by raw beats and Viking maelstrom guitars. Not as easy as you think.

Grave – Burial Ground

Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is to have classic, relentless, messy mid-tempo Swedish metal crush my little head, okay?

Withered – Dualities

Death-y, sludge-y, arty, I don’t know what you call this, but it feels like a guy wandering out from a rough therapy session with demons whispering mean somethings in his ear as he pulls his collar up to enter that long cold night.

Sigh – Scenes from Hell

Finally, spaghetti western metal, how long we’ve waited. Except when it becomes B-movie Roman empire epic movie-metal, except when it becomes surf metal. This is all in one song, “The Soul Grace”. Are they certifiable? Of course! Is listening to any of these songs as close as you’ll get to a blotter acid/thorazine cocktail? Absolutely.

Aborym – Psychogrotesque

It’s easy to tell when an Aborym song comes out because it’s when your speakers have gone insane. Aborym look at the kitchen sink and find it lacking. Saxophones, trance, supermarket synths, black metal black as it gets, circus carnival organs, it’s all here to offer land speed record experiences of “What the fuck am I hearing?” followed by “Fuck, that’s just amazing.”

Mar de Grises– Streams Inwards

They seem like another Swallow the Sun, epic misery  outfit but being from Chile, mainly of Spanish ancestry but with a mess of indigenous people and Germans, Irish and French thorn in the mix, makes a difference, I think.
Showing no interest in tech chops or the crushing depression, Mar de Grises can sometimes sound like a metal mid-period Roxy Music in that there’s this deep melancholy, this dark Latino sense of looking back in regret, with a rhythm, section that actually swings a slow tango into oblivion.

Dawnbringer – Nucleus

Traditional heavy fucking metal just like they used to blah blah blah. There’s nothing to add to what everyone has said about this except, yes, it is that good and yeah, it’s great to have someone to work these old mills and still come out with new dirty diamonds.

In This Moment – Gun Show
Volbeat – Heaven Nor Hell
Bring Me the Horizon – Crucify Me

To be a Top 20 contender ya gotta show heart and originality and you’ve gotta do it all the time. That a mess of contenders didn’t meet my unforgiving criteria–or preset prejudices, the dif is what?–does not mean there were not great records. There were–there were an almost ludicrous amount of inspired releases in a metalscape totally benefitting from music’s worldwide subgenre atomization.

There was true blood from bands in the process of scratching their way to higher realms  (Otargos, Ghost, Horned Almighty, Howl, KYPCK), bands in the thrilling, if uneven, process of going somewhere else entirely (the new Agalloch, Dillinger Escape Plan’s wondrously scabrous “Option Paralysis”), bands drifting, perhaps, beyond metal’s porous boundaries (Barn Owl, Indica), great, great bands missing that indescribable Element X that makes a fantastic record a fantastic record, if you know what I mean (Dark Tranquillity, The Meads Of Asphodel, Withered, Woe) and best-in-show acts in over-exposed subgenres that I will die horribly if I read about any of them again, especially if by my own hand (Kylesa, High on Fire, 35,978 other sludge-y, doomy bands)

So in the spirit of my favorite Daikaiju, mighty Ghidrah, I’ve decided that #20 of my Top 20 was a three-headed beast of single-track 2010 greatness.

Before “Gun Show”, I’d never known that In This Moment’s comely Maria Brinks’ had balls of this extraordinary size and heft. And don’t you love it when somebody screams and you can hear the lining of their throat bloodily shredding? Anyway, thanks to producer Kevin Churko, who ProTooled Five Finger Death Punch with a laser-precise ferociousness which he abandons here for Muse-level over-production and thank God for tastelessness, the resulting track is downright steroidal in its hugeness, rage and back alley East Hollywood-style filth.

Volbeat’s latest long-player,  “Beyond Hell / Above Heaven”,  was a major bummer with its consistent inconstancy, but on songs like “Heaven Nor Hell” they locate the reason they’re like nobody, no-body else in metal because nobody would think, to say nothing of trying, to say even less of being able to pull off an AC/DC guitar chug topped with a harmonica straight out of The Beatles’ Please, Please Me”  followed by a melody The Everly Brothers would wish they’d written in their prime and make it all indisputably work as metal, complete with a rhythm guitar sound imported from  the Metallica school of buzzy whoop-ass.

Finally, there’s Bring Me the Horizon, who you probably hate because of the way they look but can you find one band that isn’t Sigh, Ihsahn or Aborym that’s doing shit this whacked out and unlike either of them, making it insanely, ludicrously commercial and as much a high/low art edgeplay dance as the new Laurie Anderson. So come on, drop the attitude and feel the new noize, already.