By Stewart Lucas
Here we go. Our annual TOP 100 Albums. This is 100 to 81. The first of five instalments. So buckle up and read all about the first lot of records that made us go weak at the knees.
Hailing from Sydney, Australia. We Lost The Sea sculpt beautiful and immersive post-rock that goes heavy on the emotion. Rather than dwell on loss or regret, it is about the euphoric, wonderfulness of life, and it is a life-affirming validation that actually everything is probably going to be okay.
Thrash Uberlords who are more popular now than they ever were in their heyday. It is album number fourteen and by far the heaviest for a long while. Instead of just chucking out yet another collection of thrash tracks, “Para Bellum” sees them to develop their style to take in both black and death metal. It is a well-rendered album that shows that they have indeed been listening and taking notes on where modern metal is.
Sometimes there is nothing better than uncompromised heaviness. Despised Icon may well be labelled deathcore, but this is route 101 undiluted death metal. It is majestic in its fist-pumping raw brutality. Gloriously unfiltered.
Technical thrash from the Netherlands that is crisp and frenetic. Large and dynamic in its sound, it is immaculately produced and constructed. There is an intricate nature at play here that feels clever and cerebral.
With Grave Pleasures going the way of Beast Milk and being put on hiatus, Mat NcNerney is back with his new project. This is a colder, more foreboding and bleak endeavour than his other instalments. It still has that early eighties goth aesthetic but is more early Killing Joke than the pop sensibilities of the Cure. There is an accessibility in its dourness, but in all it is a pessimistic portrayal of the world to come.
Gloriously eclectic, there is not a sub-genre that isn’t portrayed or pilfered from in this album. It hams everything up to the ninth degree and in places is rather ridiculous in its theatrical grandeur. However, it is rescued because the songs are really good and the closing track in particular is a doozer.
Massive over on the continent, this is a competent and rather enjoyable exercise in melodic death metal. Containing lush production values, it manages to eloquently balance the brash with the accessible. This may well be the release that finally gives them the dews that they require in this country.
A veritable cult concern, Cryptopsy are a massive influence on many in the modern metal game. After a length of inactivity, this is their second album of this decade. It is great. Big and boisterous, it is rather muscular in its uncompromising vision. Technical and brutal it is precision-engineered to create as much carnage as possible.
BIG|BRAVE make difficult records, end of story. They cultivate a sound that seems at odds with everything else around it. OST is a soundtrack for images yet to come. A turmoil of tempestuous sound that borders on the abstract. There is nothing as conventional as a structure here; instead, noises float in and out with little cause or effect. Eccentric and improvised it is intriguing in its non-linear entity.
When a band declares that they are returning to their roots, the result is usually a watered-down and sanitised version of the past. Not here, this is a visceral and crushingly chaotic retread of Whitechapel’s early years. They strip back all the progression of previous records and go for the jugular. Potent heaviness personified.
As you would expect from a side project of Greta Van fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka, this sounds like Greta Van Fleet. But here is the rub, I like this a lot more than I have ever liked a Greta Van Fleet album. It feels rawer, more improvised and less produced. It’s still bluesy classic rock but it is looser and less contrived.
More deathcore from another legend of the scene. Simultaneously barbaric but also brave and beautiful. This is Deathcore the vulnerable years. The chest beating male toxicity is put to one side and instead we get an album that explores and questions their own very being.
Gloriously uncompromising Swedish death metal. It revels in its nastiness and brutality. Zero production values and just razor-sharp riffs that pierce into the soul.
Yes this sounds like Tool. In fact, Chevelle have been a Tempu Tool for thirty years. However, whatever it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in creative flair. It is a very good album full of well-crafted, sumptuous tunes. Everything flows incredibly well, and it is intriguing in both its intelligence and its depth and flair.
A great album title that welcomes us to the freeform world of Prog jazz. This is a complex but free-flowing album that feels improvised as opposed to constructed. There are repeated patterns but in the main this is a plane of spontaneity. Inspired flourishes are all over the shop and it feels fresh and uncharacteristic.
Polish blackened metal that unsurprisingly does sound a lot like Behemoth. This is a hard and heavy album that sees a scaling back of the epic and atmospheric and moves back to the blatant brutality of the past. It still has scale and cinematic values but in the main it feels jagged and (forgive the pun) hateful.
The vast majority of the interesting metal in the last decade has hailed from France. This is yet another treatise on loss, inner turmoil, and existential struggle, however for all its navel gazing woe, it is done really well. A maelstrom of up-tempo noise, they create spiralling waves of sound that cocoon the listener. Its beauty is how the instruments entwine to create a result that is far more than the sum of its parts. An inspired descent into the battered human spirit.
Black Metal auteur, Gaahls is an enigmatic figure more than happy to throw off the shackles of the musical form that birthed him. “Braiding The Stories” is his second album with this self-titled unit and he further gleefully deconstructs all the tenants of Black Metal. There is so much in this album; folk, synthwave, goth and post-rock. In fact, the one thing you will struggle to find is communal garden Black Metal. What we are instead presented with is a top-of-his-game storyteller, spinning atmospheric yarns.
Conan play doom. A base-level granite-heavy version of Doom that takes everything back to its core components. There is no nuance or niceties to be found here, this is a primordial sludge of raw ingredients. With Long Player Number Six, they have made no attempt to cultivate or expand their sound. It rumbles as ever with malicious intent and is a gloriously simplistic, muddy mess of low-level tempos. Stunning in its sparse nature, this is rock ‘n’ roll slowed down and de-evolved back to its bare atoms.
A cacophony of both soaring melody and incoherent chaos. This is an album that is fascinating in its level of instability. There is beauty and accessibility to be found within it, but it is not necessarily at right angles with everything else. It feels like a stream of consciousness unloading of the collective members' feelings about trying to be adults in today’s challenging world.