Metal Awards

Goat's Top 15 albums of 2007

  1. Mayhem - Ordo Ad Chao
    The album that pretty much every Black Metal fan under the sun has been waiting for, this is the fulfilment of years of underachievement from the Norwegian legend. You want hope? You want light? You want happiness? You won’t find them here. It gains the top spot of 2007 for a simple reason – it affected me deeply, reminding of things I’d much rather have forgotten, and in a scene where most people respond to Metal in the same way (headbang… now! air guitar… now!) a piece of deliberately difficult art like this that speaks to each of us in a different way is special indeed. You can’t escape your dark side, however far you may run…
  2. Rotting Christ - Theogonia
    The Greeks prove that there’s more to Greece than, um… yeah, Theogonia’s really good, an atmospheric mix of Black Metal and Folksy Goth, ten songs of passion that’ll bring out the Achilles in all of us. Perfect writing, perfect flow, my introduction to a band that deserve far more attention than it gets - I’ll definitely be chasing past works down. Some might call it an odd choice for second-best with other deserving possibilities in the running, but it’s a classic piece of Metal and deserves every compliment that it gets. With albums like this being released in the here and now, Metal’s future is assured.
  3. Iced Earth - Framing Armageddon - Something Wicked Part 1
    Concept albums about aliens? Yes, please! Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens has never sounded better, and the fact that Iced Earth seems headed in a more Progressive direction is great news. Sure, Schaeffer and co. were awesome in the past as an OTT riff-heavy Power Metal band – let’s hope he ramps up the experimental Progginess with part II, due next year, even without Ripper on vocals. In the meantime, Framing Armageddon is an excellent album that rewards your time tenfold.
  4. Nightwish - Dark Passion Play
    Fine, they’ve got a new singer and she’s not Tarja. Yet the talent shines through, and Marco and co. have produced another million-dollar winner, with some supreme songwriting skills going into creating a classic for the band. The changes are for the better, I think, and with luck this band will be as good for many years to come.
  5. L'Acephale - Mord und Totschlag
    Who cares when it was released, the best Black Metal is timeless, and L’Acephale will still be putting fear in peoples’ hearts in a hundred years’ time if this blast from the sewer proves anything. Like staring into the abyss and having something cold and slimy stare back…
  6. Akercocke - Antichrist
    Mendonca, Gray and the gang have never disappointed me, and Antichrist is no exception. It might not be as immediately outstanding as Words… but give it time and you’ll see this is the Satanic Londoners’ best and most experimental platter o’splatter yet.
  7. Corpsing - The Stench Of Humanity
    Death Metal with style, with skill, and with variation, album number two from this English crew is more than a match for the big names this year. This brute is as much about the brain as the brawn…
  8. Ulver - Shadows Of The Sun
    Norway’s finest prove they can do subtle as well as overbearing with this heartbreaking album. If they were American they’d be superstars, as it is, well, they’re stars to us. Another slice of genius from the Ulver pie – long may it feed us all.
  9. End Of Level Boss - Inside The Difference Engine
    Voivod meets Kyuss in an explosion of riffs, taking in influences from Meshuggah to Led Zeppelin without losing touch with the music’s foundation. Anyone that appreciates the zanier Doom bands will love this.
  10. Therion - Gothic Kabbalah
    Cinematic Metal doesn’t get much better. Think you know epic? Think again, as this band of Swedes prove there’s more to Kabbalah than ropey pop stars and add another shining star to their collection.
  11. Lugubrum - De Ware Hond
    True genius lies in the hands of a bunch of Jazzy Black Metallers from Belgium, it seems, and their seventh album of 'Boersk Blek Metle’ is amazing. Blue-skinned dwarves have never been so creepy…
  12. Red Harvest - A Greater Darkness
    “Someone has found the antidote!” screams Ofu Khan on the ripping opening track. The antidote to the new Nine Inch Nails album, perhaps? Fear Factory’s heavier, scarier sibling proves Industrial Metal doesn’t mean Wimpy Metal yet again, with intriguing hints of a progressive slant meaning that this band isn’t going to run out of ideas any time soon.
  13. Entombed - Serpent Saints - The Ten Amendments
    These plucky Swedes are the original and best, and it’s about time that people start speaking of them with the respect they deserve. Serpent Saints is a ridiculously good collection of Death Metal anthems, and anyone that appreciates the genre should love it.
  14. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works
    Ire works, indeed, so well that you’ll be wondering how in the hell Justin Timberlake went Grindcore. Before remembering you are, in fact, listening to The Dillinger Escape Plan and they’re awesome.
  15. Megadeth - United Abominations
    Whatever you think of Dave’s politics, it’s impossible to deny that he’s still got it, and that this (eleventh!) album is the best his band’s put out for a while. There’s no way he can end his band when releases of this quality are ripping up stereos – let’s hope we’ll still be headbanging in another eleven albums’ time.
Goat's Top 5 surprises of 2007

  1. Dãm - The Difference Engine
    Progressive Death Metal that’s actually Progressive? That doesn’t rip other bands off? That’s fun to listen to? The queue starts here as London’s finest drop their second album of twisty riffs into our collective skull – damn, indeed.
  2. Ava Inferi - The Silhouette
    Well, did you know that Rune from Mayhem even had a gentle side, let alone that he was capable of masterminding some of the best Gothic Doom ever made? Or even that his partner Carmen had a voice that single-handedly makes Lisa Gerrard sound like the drunken singing of a gangrenous tramp? OK, so that’s exaggerating, but it’s not far off it. The next time someone tells you that female-fronted bands are rubbish, hit them in the face with a copy of this, then play it for them.
  3. Centurions Ghost - The Great Work
    Cathedral ain’t the only limeys around reshaping Doom in their own, spectacular image. An excellent album that lasts well beyond a few listens.
  4. The Chronicles Of Israfel - Starborn, Tome I
    Yes, it’s a silly name, but it’s an excellent modernized journey through Prog Metal. The first of hopefully many from these Canadian upstarts, let’s hope someone takes notice and this band gets the rewards it deserves.
  5. Nuclear Blast Allstars - Into The Light
    After the ‘heavy’ side of this project proved itself not much more than passable I wasn’t expecting much from the ‘light’ side, but the guys from Rage managed to make this a riff-heavy exercise in Power Metal goodness.
Goat's Disappointment(s) of 2007

  1. Blut Aus Nord - Odinist: The Destruction of Reason by Illumination
    One of the most out-there bands on the Black Metal front shoots itself in the foot by turning formulaic. Sure, bonkers kvltsters who put style over substance will love it, but those who care more for music than image will be as saddened as I was.
  2. Nile - Ithyphallic
    After the awe-inspiring epic pyramids of riffs to be found on Annihilation Of The Wicked, Nile abruptly turned around and produced… this. Although after many listens I’ve started to accept it as not being completely awful, it’s not an instant classic like, ooh, any of the past albums. People have been suggesting that this band has been running out of ideas for a while, and I didn’t believe it until Ithyphallic came along.
  3. Arch Enemy - Rise Of The Tyrant
    Following two underrated experimental albums with a riff-heavy blast may be the way to go. What a pity the riffs are all at least ten years old and the experience in total is about as engrossing as watching paint dry.
  4. Forgotten Woods - Race Of Cain
    In which it is proven that not every Black Metal legend that has split up should reform. The sound of men stuck ten years in the past, trying to sound as if they’re in the present.
  5. Epica - The Divine Conspiracy
    An exercise in cutting through hype, actually listening to music, and being disappointed to find that if not for their shapely fire-haired singer, none of you would ever have heard of Epica because they’d be lost in a sea of similarly mediocre bands.
Goat's Joke(s) 2007
  1. 1. Atreyu 2. Avenged Sevenfold 3. Trivium 4. Bullet For My Valentine 5. Bring Me The Horizon What Amy Winehouse is to Jazz and Ben Stiller is to comedy, these are to Metal. Mock them with harsh words, mock them with scornful laughs, mock their very existence and mock people that enjoy listening to them. It’s not that they aren’t extreme or underground enough, oh no. It’s that each and every song they’ve written is exactly the sort of rubbish that mainstream toe-dippers and day-trippers seize upon as being proof that Metal isn’t dead, that Limp Bizkit and Nirvana didn’t kill us after all. Welcome to the real world, cretins, we’ve known that for years. The above five make metal for the scum, the sheep, those that paddle at the edge of the sea of steel whilst the rest of us dive to its depths, and if you’re reading this rage-filled at this casual trashing of the five bands that have given you a new outlook on life, then may I respectfully suggest spending a shitload more time at this site because, heck, you sure need it.
Goat's words about 2007
  1. 2007’s been more than an interesting year for me, both on the musical and personal fronts. Of course, I joined MR late in the year as a reviewer, fulfilling an ambition that’s been hovering near the surface since I first joined the forum as someone who’d gotten into Metal through Evanescence and for whom all this ‘Metal’ stuff was a bit heavy. Thankfully, all it took was a few Iron Maiden albums, a chance Darkthrone purchase and many long hours spent exploring the steel world online to bring me around, and although at first I took the whole Black Metal thing too seriously, more recently I’ve realised that life’s as much about the greys as the black and whites and branched out a little. This didn’t help stop my Top Fifteen from being a real pain to choose! Those tearfully culled include Behemoth – The Apostasy (Nergal and co. really pushed themselves on this one, producing a fine set of songs that are leaps and bounds above the decent but rather more straightforward Demigod), Municipal Waste – The Art Of Partying (Thrash never sounded so good), Angelcorpse – Of Lucifer And Lightning (reformation of the decade? Old-school Death Metal proves it can still kick serious ass!), Machine Head – The Blackening (call it Metalcore if you want, it’s still a great album), Mithras – Behind The Shadows Lie Madness (not as good as the first two but, heck, if it gets the punters in who’s complaining? Still ten times better than most Death Metal bands could ever hope to be), Alchemist – Tripsis (I underrated this in my review. Excellent band), Vital Remains – Icons Of Evil (never let anyone tell you that Glen Benton is an embarrassment to Metal – just play them this and watch their feeble Christian souls melt away!), Coheed & Cambria – No World For Tomorrow (yet another masterly effort from these alt-prog-whateverers), Obituary – Xecutioner’s Return (the epitome of solid, these guys have never disappointed me, and this is another fine slice of Floridian Death), Deathspell Omega – Fas – Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeturnum (possibly slightly overrated by the kvlt krew, but still a remarkable achievement), and Ministry – The Last Sucker (I can’t believe Al’s bringing this band to an end, but it’s one hell of a final album). Not only did I find it impossible to whittle my list of best albums down to fifteen but also the ordering itself was near impossible. Is Dark Passion Play a better piece of music than Mord Und Totschlag? Impossible to answer without being biased one way or another, and as I equally enjoy poppy Symphonic Metal and underground Black Metal, not a choice I feel comfortable with. So, the order given above is the one that ultimately made most sense to me at the time of writing – it doesn’t mean that one album is better than another. I’d like to thank those who read my reviews and commented, as well as those that read and didn’t comment – and those that commented and didn’t read, and even those that did neither! Also more than deserving of thanks is the entire Metal Reviews Team - or The Gods, as I like to call them - especially Mike, Chris and Alex for showing me around and helping me feel welcome. Guys, it’s been a blast so far, thanks for everything. The forum in general deserves a thank you from me, I’m not going to start naming names but there are some great people on there and they know who they are. Looking forward to another year of talking to you all, and hopefully getting to know some of you better! Feel free to drop me a line either through my email address(es) or MSN IM, all of you… Last and not least: the bands, and the labels that pimp them out to us discerning kerb-crawlers. None of us would be here without them, so here’s to the ones that make the music: you keep bringing on the good stuff, and we’ll keep buying it. Long may they last, from least to greatest. Finally, I’ll destroy any underground credibility I’ve somehow built up by listing a few non-Metal albums that have caught my attention over the year. Kate Nash’s debut album Made Of Bricks was a great guilty pleasure, proving (for me at least!) that not all teenage girls have rubbish music taste. Rufus Wainwright’s Release The Stars was a wonderful piece of songwriting. Manic Street Preachers, Interpol and Foo Fighters all put great albums out, as did Cherry Ghost – their debut recommended for fans of Wilco especially. The Artic Monkeys surprised me with the accessible poppy post-punk of their second album (I’d previously written them off as rubbish – there’s a good deal more depth to this band than I’d thought) and The White Stripes proved yet again you don’t need a great drummer in order to write good songs. No doubt regulars are expecting a good deal of praise from me for Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible – alas, every time I tried to get my hands on a copy fate intervened. I’m sure it’s brilliant, and when I finally have a listen I have every faith that my hopes will be confirmed tenfold. With any luck, if you’re still reading and haven’t left in disgust, you trust my taste enough to stay with me into and beyond 2008. This is a brilliant site - the best Metal-related webzine ever, I believe – and we need you as much as (hopefully) you need us. 2008 has some interesting albums coming, from acts like Metallica, Meshuggah, Judas Priest, Morbid Angel, Opeth, Biomechanical, Testament, Deicide, The Axis Of Perdition (two albums!), Gorerotted, Unearthly Trance, The Haunted, Satyricon, Soilent Green, Voivod, Wintersun, Cryptopsy, Mastodon (here’s hoping, at least), She Said Destroy and Iced Earth to name some off the top of my head, and I have high hopes for them all. I’m also crossing my fingers for new material from two of my favourite bands, British Grinders Napalm Death and Norwegian Progsters Enslaved. In any case, I’m expecting much from the new year’s crop of releases, and it wouldn’t be half as much fun discovering them without an audience to share it with… I hope that all of you reading - and the ones that aren’t - have a great 2008, with health, wealth and happiness all around. It’s been an honour so far to have my feeble scribbling posted on this site for all and sundry – here’s to many more years of the same. Metal Reviews uber alles!