The new
Isis is pretty fantastic. Saw that one coming. Sounds great on vinyl.
White Tomb is pretty great. I like that band.
Can't Maintain might be my favorite album of the year. Goddamn that was so good.
Blue Record is awesome. I don't fucking care what anyone says, that band has consistently put out great pieces of work. Saying they sound like radio rock is like saying Fugazi sounds like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. A bootleg of Baroness' performance at Roadburn from this year is floating around on the interwebs if you're interested. It's pretty great up until they start playing
Coeur but then just suddenly kick into the end of "Rise" and finish. If they did that and I was seeing them live I would just flip.
Between the Buried and Me put out another record which I forgot to listen to. I bet it's good.
Unblessing The Purity by Bloodbath is fucking great. It's only an EP, unfortunately. I just love Bloodbath. They're one of a select group of modern Death Metal bands that actually really excites me. That shit just kills.
Swallow Your Teeth is another winner. The new songs were really killer live, too.
Gin is a really peculiar but impressive USBM album that deserves the hype it has been getting. That's another album on Profound Lore, which is currently putting out by far the best extreme metal albums lately.
Axe To Fall is just as intense, incomprehensible, and jaw dropping as one would expect a Converge album to be. I love how I can always count on the "what the fuck? that's just crazy" sensation to hit me when I come across new Converge material without fail.
He Is Never Coming Back came to me late in the year, finals to be precise, and preceded to knock me on my ass. Just the perfect mix of dissonant, abrasive, mathy Coalesce shit and savage grind with an incredible low end. That band is great. The production on this album reminds me so much of the open, huge sound of
Interviews With David Frost.
Deconstruct is another incredible album. The female vocals add a lot, it's incredible fast and incredibly heavy. Words don't do it justice, truly. Check it out if you have not.
Buttsweat and Tears is another damn good release by one of my favorite damn bands, the Lawrence Arms. I should give that thing a few hundred more spins.
Black Eye Blues is a really captivating, dark album that came at me by surprise. I liked Lewd Acts okay when I saw them like a year ago but they didn't make an incredibly strong impression outside of how drunk the lead singer was and the bassist making sure that everyone at the show was respectful towards the women at the show that evening, which I appreciated. The album though, has such a manic desperation to it. It hits really deep, sort of similar to bands like Another Breath and Modern Life Is War. It sounds a little bit like Born Against, too, which is a plus.
MAGRUDERGRIND is just an incredible album. It could very possibly be my favorite grind album of all time. The new production has added so much body to the songs in a way that would have been impossible on the older shit, first of all. Secondly the new songs are just so much heavier.
Bridge Burner, for example, is like being smashed vertically by a truck. Damn that album rules. I've had trouble revisiting the older Magrudergrind albums as a result of this one.
Paint It Black put out two 7"s this year. I loved "Amnesia". I never bothered to listen to "Surrender". That band never gets enough credit. That's all I'm going to say.
Collapse by my favorite USBM act, Panopticon, is stunning, expansive, mournful, beautiful, and crushing, typically all during the course of one song. That dude has been keeping pretty busy and evidently there are some splits cooked up for this coming calendar year. I await them.
Aw shit.
Propagandhi put out a new album this year and I've hardly listened to it. Dumb.
Punch by Punch fucking rules and that band also rules. Enough said.
Shrinebuilder is as great as one would expect a Neurosis-Melvins-Sleep super group album to be.
Breathing The Fire is another album that deserves more attention from me. It's great, really.
Suffocation put out a new album this year and as the originators of that hyper-brutal/technical shit, it's only appropriate how massive the new album is. Maybe I'll see that band live some day, barring I don't get karate chopped in half by some nut ninja pitting or something.
Black Cascade may be the contender for my favorite record of the year after the new Jihad album. Not that I'm going on a qualitative scale or anything. I'm falling asleep as I speak. I could drift off into sleep listening to that album, which I have before many times. Yeah, that's a good measure of quality. Dreamability.
I'm sure I forgot some things. I still primarily listen to shit that sounds kind of similar fundamentally. I need to work on that. Next year.
Suffocation
