Metal Awards

Jake's Top 15 albums of 2010

  1. Decrepit Birth - Polarity
    I'm afraid I'll have to respectfully but emphatically disagree with our own reviewer Crash; far from boring or repetitive, Decrepit Birth's third album Polarity is the best album of 2010. Guitarist and band leader Matt Sotelo would have been called a virtuoso back when being called a guitar virtuoso meant something, and here he leads his cohorts through winding compositions so strikingly different in length, mood and texture that the album stands as a testament to the boundless potential of death metal. On the surface, what we've got here is compelling enough: a technical death album that leans heavily on inventive shred guitar and makes the winning and distinguishing decision to draw far more influence from the late-period progressive albums of subgenre progenitors Death than is conventional. But peel back the skin and dissect the thing and you'll find that Polarity is woven together from bits of brutality, melody, technicality, groove, shred and old-fashioned riffage that would have separately been monumental achievements in their respective fields of metal, integrated with a steady hand and a discerning ear. It's a fulfillment of the promise of every aspect of death metal, and damn listenable to boot. If Mohammed Suicmez is ever planning on getting that third Necrophagist album out, these are the guys he'll have to beat to reclaim his tech-death throne—and I don't think he can do it.
  2. Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier
    It's always a joy to hear from Iron Maiden, one of the oldest bands in heavy metal and easily the single greatest, but The Final Frontier exceeds even the considerable expectations that come with a Maiden release.The band haven't stopped being reliable for thirty years, and have been putting out consecutive fantastic offerings since the classic lineup reunited in 2000, but TFF is their best album since 1988's Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son and arguably what they've been building toward over their entire career. Like their prior post-reunion albums, TFF delivers a series of proggy, melodic epics, but bassist/perennial songwriter Steve Harris has brought the compositions back in touch with the hard-rock roots that were evident in the golden age albums, so that these songs are as much a culmination of 80s epics like Hallowed Be Thy Name and To Tame A Land and as they are a continuation of Maiden's work from the past decade. Adrian Smith, Dave Murray and Janick Gers rip out lightspeed bluesy solos as always, while drummer Nicko McBrain shows off his immense technical skill in the creation of inventive beats that bear in mind the lessons in dynamism learned on the albums of the 00s—and best of all, perhaps reinvigorated by the neoclassicist riffcrafting, Bruce Dickinson sounds like a young man again, leaping to high notes with the menace and resonant clarity that made him a legend and redefined hard rock singing in the 80s. The appealing darkness of the last album (A Matter Of Life And Death) is gone, but the energy of The Number Of The Beast is back, packaged together with the fierceness of Piece of Mind and Powerslave, the atmospheric ambition of Seventh Son, and the prog-rock noodling of Dance of Death. More than anything they've ever done, The Final Frontier is a celebration of Maiden's entire career. Nobody (including the band, from the looks of it) wants to see Iron Maiden come to an end, but The Final Frontier would have been the perfect final album, and not just for its title.
  3. Hail Of Bullets - On Divine Winds
    A World War II-themed death metal band is one of those ideas that's so good it was inevitable someone would try it—in fact, it's kind of amazing that it took until 2006 for one to form. Hail of Bullets have fulfilled the promise of the concept beautifully, though, turning it into something more than just a great opportunity for gore lyrics without losing sight of the old-school brutality the premise lends itself to. To paraphrase our fearless leader's review, their second album On Divine winds has an ear for both the glory of battle and the horror of war, but even if just for its riffs, it's not to be missed.
  4. Blind Guardian - At The Edge Of Time
    Nothing on At The Edge Of Time is new for power metal co-founders Blind Guardian, from the epic song lengths to the sweeping orchestral arrangements to the superhuman melodic belting of Hansi Kursch, but nothing needs to be—the band developed a truly spectacular sound long ago, and a new iteration of that sound is enough to excite anyone with an appreciation for melodic metal. Lest we forget, this is the band that did a concept album set in Midde-Earth and pulled it off--why would we ask them to change? Kursch is clearly one of Tolkien's immortal elves—how else to explain the unchanging sound of his magnificent voice over a twenty-five-year career?—and guitarist/composer Andre Olbrich has delivered another set of battle-ready but deeply emotional speed metal hymns, perhaps with a bit more menace in his soloing than usual. BG have been doing this for a long time, but they do it better than anyone else.
  5. Bison B.C. - Dark Ages
    You had no idea sludge metal could be this heavy. Bison B.C.'s sophomore album more than fulfills the potential of their good-but-not-great debut, zeroing in on the aspects that made its highlights work and crystallizing them over an entire LP. It was a good year for the stoner stuff, as this list will reflect, but BBC topped the heap with a collection sledgehammer riffs and piss-drunk wailing somehow woven together into dynamic prog epics.
  6. The Sword - Warp Riders
    The retro-metallers in The Sword have been recording great stuff since their first album, but on their third, Warp Riders, they move beyond the Sabbath-meets-Metallica bluesy heaviness of their first two and create an approach that is paradoxically an unmistakable tribute to bygone eras and one of the more original metal sound out there. By incorporating even more influence from 70s hard rock and, this time, introducing psychedelic concept-album nonsense in both the lyrics and the compositions, they've created a soundscape that can be enjoyed as a kickass heavy rocker or a cosmic head trip whose texture and energy earn the band a pass to be as indulgent as they want.
  7. Immolation - Majesty and Decay
    Immolation have always had a way of sneaking the emotional menace usually reserved for black and blackened metal into their lead-heavy, riff-driven death metal, and this year's Majesty and Decay, their eighth album, is one the best realizations of that so far, with an icy atmosphere that seems to lend the album a wordless ethos of glorified destruction. It's also a sublimely brutal album, bottom-heavy and fast the way death metal should be, and subtly more melodic than previous work by the band. It's original without calling attention to its originality, and deserves a spot on the shelf of any lover of old-fashioned death as much as it does among the soundscapes and manifestos of contemporary extreme metal.
  8. Enforcer - Diamonds
    The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal ended at some point around 1984, but it's lived on in pretty much every form of metal that;s come after, and in recent years it's finally begun to see the revival it deserves. Enforcer aren't the first young contemporary band to record original material in the NOWBHM style, but they're the first to take that revival beyond tribute-band glorification and really make a case that the music can be still be vital, not simply preserved. From piercing vocals to melodic grooves and galloping rhythms, everything on Diamonds was done in 1983, but Enforcer have recombined it all with more compassion and conviction than a novelty band could muster, and added just enough influence from mid-80s speed metal to keep the album from just spinning the genre's wheels. Just because the sound would have been at home in 1983 doesn't mean it isn't their own, and in addition to standing alone as a album worth your money and time, Diamonds is exciting for suggesting that the music of the past has a future.
  9. Cephalic Carnage - Misled By Certainty
    Cephalic Carnage has long combined grindcore with technical death metal, but Misled By Certainty is a new mix, somehow moving farther toward either extreme—musically, the band sound more in touch than ever with the classic bombast of heavy metal (and the hideous freak-out riffs of death metal) while the sheer weirdness of the songs is even more in step than before with the tongue-in-cheek, experimental ethos of grindcore. The result is an album that seamlessly blends modern technicality, old-school death metal insanity and bizarre new ideas. Also, +5 for saxophone.
  10. Deathspell Omega - Paracletus
    Leave it to the French to make extreme metal avant-garde. Deathspell Omega have been gradually transforming from straightforward black metal into whatever the hell Paracletus is over several albums, and it's amazing to see them get there. Paracletus still has the dark and cold atmosphere of black metal, but there's nothing like a traditional riff on the album—there might not even be a riff of any kind, as the instruments somehow move in perfect tandem and unison through music that doesn't seem to have been written with any repeating patterns. Even without repetition, the thing is hypnotic—those old fears about rock music lulling kids into suggestible Satanic trances may have finally come true. It's a fascinating album in every respect; let's get some music professors to work on explaining it pronto, while the rest of us figure out how the fuck you headbang to this.
  11. Ihsahn - After
    For a more accessible example of black metal gone experimental, there's good old Ihsahn, who hasn't made anything that wasn't awesome since he helped to define black metal by starting Emperor all those years ago. His latest solo album continues in the vein of the first two—he's spoken of it as the completion of a trilogy—and fully realizes their mix of black metal, death metal, classic metal and prog rock with a knack for overwhelmingly harmonic melodies to create a bludgeoning, beautiful album. There's something for you here whether you like your metal straightforward or forward-thinking. Also, +5 for saxophone.
  12. High on Fire - Snakes For The Divine
    High On Fire's brand of stoner metal has always been deliberately rough around the edges, and many were rightly troubled by their fifth album's offensively slick production at the hands of Greg Fidelman, who's becoming infamous for trying his damnedest to ruin metal albums (he also had a hand in the unlistenable wall of sound that was Metallica's Death Magnetic and the bizarre surf-rock twang of Slayer's World Painted Blood). But Matt Pike and company rose above it, proving that the strength of High On Fire was always in the songwriting and the playing—both of which have advanced here considerably—and not in the guitar fuzz. Snakes For The Divine would have been an even better album if it had the bassy fuzz Pike has been using since he perfected it in Sleep, but even without it, it's High On Fire's best to date.
  13. Shining (Nor) - Blackjazz
    When a critically praised free jazz band meets and befriends the dudes in Enslaved, everyone wins. Norway's Shining took a hard left after touring with Enslaved, retooling their sound from a prog- and occasionally metal-influenced brand of jazz into an entirely new form of extreme metal, which the title of fifth album christens Blackjazz. You've heard a great deal of jazz-influenced extreme metal before, especially if you're into death metal, but this is closer to the other way around, and that's something entirely more novel. It also defies description, beyond “what the fuck is going on” and “+5 for saxophone.” It has to be heard to be believed—more importantly, it has to be heard. This could be the start of something new.
  14. Kylesa - Spiral Shadow
    Here's a stoner metal album that commands you to get stoned. Kylesa have mastered the fuzzy wind-in-the-speakers heaviness that Matt Pike and Mastodon have made the standard grammar of the subgenre, but they're not just here to beat you over the head—they're also here to disorient you with strange and beautiful melodies perfectly suited to Spiral Shadow's Beetlejuice-in-Wonderland album cover. Kylesa were one of the most exciting live acts I saw last year, and the album somehow perfectly preserves the intensity and immediacy of a live show while still producing the textured and tactile sound that best suits stoner music of any kind. Whether you want to headbang or softly nod the night away, this one's worth your money.
  15. Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini
    The transformation of black metal into an experimental music is an exciting international phenomenon, but for all this talk about Ihsahn and French people and saxophone, it's important to remember who's been at the center of that transformation from the beginning. Enslaved have always been ahead of the curve and a yardstick for the state of the black metal around, form their early twisted brutality to their incorporation of Viking imagery and ideology to their noise years and now to the progressive approach of Axioma Ethica Odini. It's likely they'll never cease to be leaders, and if AEO is any indication, they'll never cease to make great albums either. The good sound quality of this album might offend what Trve Kvlt diehards are left, but even they should have a hard time resisting the album's mix of harsh and clean vocals against melodic, chugging speed riffs and unpredictable structures.
Jake's words about 2010
  1. Well, as the newest member of the MetalReviews team, I'm still fairly starry-eyed about all of this. That's why I left Surprises, Disappointments and Jokes blank; I'm simply overwhelmed by the enormity of selecting that many albums when I haven't had my ear to the ground all year the way writing for this site is starting to allow me to, especially given my self-inflicted compulsion to write something about every album I listed. But joining up has been a fantastic decision, and not just because I'm getting free albums and opportunities to interview musicians; I love nothing more than heavy metal, and talking about it has been my pastime of choice for years, so having a large and often appreciative audience for my musings on where the best metal is and why this music matters is extremely exciting to me. I sincerely look forward to spending 2011 with you guys. As for 2010, it was a weird year for me musically--as I've noted a couple of times on the site, I'm a lover of thrash metal, which wasn't out in full force this year. Last year was an awesome year for thrash--I drew up a Top 15 of 2009 in my free time, and it had 8 thrash metal albums on it--but not one thrash album made it onto my 2010 list. Instead, we got lots of great epic-length stuff this year (I can't believe how many times I typed "prog" in that list), and multiple terrific contributions from experimental black metal, stoner metal, and retro-metal of various breeds. It was a good year to expand your metal horizons, which is something this position has already allowed me to do and which I anticipate I'll get to do much more in the coming months, so thank you all again, and here's to a 2011 full of great metal!