if you’re a fan of music… any music… and it’s the year that Scott Walker has released an album… and it’s NOT on your year end list… well you’re not doing it right. To say that this man is ahead of all that’s going on in music would imply that someday someone will catch up to him. Well it’s been something like 50 years and we’re still trying. There’s Scott Walker, and then there is everything else.
2:
LORD MANTIS – Pervertor :
subterranean pus-waves crashing on the syringe shores of your wrecked and retarded ID. All the promise the first Lair of the Minotaur releases inspired, with none of the weak posturing of their disappointingly cartoonish follow-ups to Carnage. Just sludge and sadism.
3:
THE KILL – Make ‘Em
Suffer:
Exploding Machete Thrash from
Australia’s
definitive grindcore act. Schooling all would-be-blast-beaters on the Western
Hemisphere for over a decade.
4:
DRAGGEDINTO SUNLIGHT – Widowmaker:
the doomy
death metal equivalent of a grisly nightmare ride through the flash-card
thought patterns of a husband/father as he watches his entire family get slowly
eaten by a herd of zombies.
5:
THEOLOGIAN – the
Chasms of My Heart:
a sobering meditation on the purity of unwavering
hopelessness. Monolithic industrial clanging with ether-drowned vocals howling
from a dark matter void.
6:
BLOOD RED SHOES – In Time To Voices:
should I ever become a millionaire of Scrooge
McDuck proportions, I want to pay this young lady to sing me to sleep every
night. Power pop-rock with an emphasis on the power and on the rock. See also
the Joy Formidable.
7:
THEDOWNGOING – A Thousand Years of Darkness:
another slice of landmine-pitching
barb wire grind from Australia. High tension riffs with vocal so high you’d swear they were inspired
by a shredded testicle.
8:
SKIN AREA – Rothko
Field:
an artfully schizophrenic aural collage of cruelty, perversion,
mutilation, sexual psychosis, and suicidal terror from the incomparable Martin Bladh.
9:
HELL MILITIA – Jacob’s Ladder:
fanatically depraved black metal from the
fantastically depraved French Underground. Enough experimental dissonance to
appease the more prog minded Deathspell Omega sects of bizarre metal
enthusiasts, but with enough violent desperation to satisfy the blood-hungry
Marduk hounds (both Deathspell and Marduk had some pretty bad-ass releases this
year BTW).
10:
BAT FOR LASHES – the Haunted Man:
scrubbing around somewhere between the hypnagogic
80s pop revivalists (Austra, Zola Jesus) and nods to the very best of 90s
alterna-torch singers ala PJ Harvey, the achingly lovely Natasha Khan has
really found her stride with this release. Heartbreaking without asking to be
pitied (see: Taylor Swift, Pink), soulful without being forcibly melodramatic (see: Alicia Keys, Adele)… unlike almost every other
female in contemporary pop-music. Bat for Lashes is a fine example of intention
actually yielding its desired result.
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