Metal Awards

Charles's Top 15 albums of 2011

  1. Opeth - Heritage
    Apparently there are some cloth-eared twerps that don’t like this record. No, I can’t believe it either. Who could not adore its every note? Each twang glows with warmth, and each beat is lightly sprinkled with the dust from old prog records. Every album in this top five has been in pole position at some point or another over the last few weeks due mainly to my perpetual indecisiveness, but then I looked at everyone else's list and I thought "when in Rome...". I love this, and it seems to have almost inexhaustible replay value.
  2. Esoteric - Paragon of Dissonance
    YOUR FACE MELTS WITH DESPAIR
  3. Ash Borer - Ash Borer
    Ash Borer would be a good name for Drudkh, because the latter’s music is so tedious that it could even have a tree looking at its watch. Bazinga! But it isn’t Drudkh’s name, it’s Ash Borer’s, and Ash Borer is awesome. In a final twist, Drudkh’s name also means “wood”. Coincidence?
  4. Witch Mountain - South of Salem
    Actual proper songs, and insanely good doom riffs. This album was a revelation for me.
  5. SubRosa - No Help for the Mighty Ones
    This wins the prize for most intriguing genre mix for bravely mashing together doom, folk and noisy alternative rock. You could have thought of that but you didn’t, hence your band is not in my top five list of 2012.
  6. Antediluvian - Through the Cervix of Hawwah
    Somehow, I don’t quite like Autopsy’s Macabre Eternal now as much as I did on its release. And Encoffination’s album was impressive but not quite year-end-list material. So the only real representative of the primitivist end of the death metal continuum is this record; a beast.
  7. Fell Voices - Untitled
    I don’t think Fell Voices’s album was quite as good as their split from last year, but certainly good enough to include here. I wanted to write it up for this site but some guy joined the team, reviewed it (I didn’t complain because he was new), then off he fucked forthwith. I swore then that I would never do anything nice for anybody ever again, and I’ve been as good as my word.
  8. Pyrrhon - An Excellent Servant But a Terrible Master
    I love this album. The solos go “Wwwoooooooaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmmm!”, and the riffs go “twiddleiddleiddleiddlesqueeeeeeeeeeak”. I find it hard to describe beyond that. A bold new step for tech-death.
  9. Ulcerate - The Destroyers of All
    Unlike the above, I don’t love this album, especially, but it has a rumbling, ominous power that demands homage.
  10. Absu - Abzu
    Ok so this did better than Liturgy, are you happy now?
  11. Liturgy - Aesthethica
    Black metal is known for violence, bigotry and criminality, but when I heard that one new band on the scene had written a pamphlet and cultivated trendy hairstyles, I thought the genre had finally gone too far. Apparently they have even suggested that it might be time to move beyond the traditional genre confines and introduce new techniques and compositional ideas! Pull the other one, lads! But such despicable behaviour on the part of the individuals involved doesn’t matter so long as the music is good, right? At least, that’s what I tell myself again and again as I rock back and forth listening to my favourite Nazi acts fighting the international Jewry with their hurdy gurdies.
  12. Petrychor - Effigies and Epitaphs
    Petrychor is just superb. This album is so strange and singular; the folk guitar playing is so delicately alluring as to make Ulver’s Kveldssanger sound like some twat ham-fistedly mashing a glockenspiel. But as we all gather round this particular bonfire for a midnight singsong, we find it instantaneously extinguished by a gushing stream of black metal piss.
  13. Execration - Odes of the Occult
    I wanted to make room for this, because it is so screwy. The ageing remnants of old-time Swedeath has moved to Norway and gone completely senile.
  14. Negative Plane - Stained Glass Revelations
    Jangly.
  15. Thrall - Vermin to the Earth
    I gave this a relatively lowly mark at first, but in every single version of this list I made, there was Thrall, demanding to be let in. Something about its collision of polished groove and scary ambiance makes it genuinely compelling to listen to.
Charles's Top 5 surprises of 2011

  1. Lake of Blood - As Time and Tide Erodes Stone
    I felt like I had to make room for at least one USBM album somewhere in my lists.
  2. Undergang - Indhentet af Døden
    Ooooooooooooh. They have a new one coming out imminently, by the way. In the next few days.
  3. Obake - Obake
    Super-cool avant-garde stuff in the vein of Patton or somesuch, but with more doom riffs.
  4. Revocation - Chaos Of Forms
    The surprise is that it's new thrash album I actually like.
  5. Aosoth - III
    A surprise because I didn't especially rate their last one.
Charles's words about 2011
  1. Albums that I meant to include in my top fifteen but couldn't because then it wouldn't have been a top fifteen: Virus, Autopsy, Abhor, Midnight, Altar of Plagues, Azarath, Oranssi Pazuzu. Human society as a whole is constantly changing, and music is no different. John Stuart Mill said that "although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative". More than ever, I think this is true of music. But then, I put a 70s retro album called "Heritage" at number one, so I'm not sure how that squares... Have a lovely final 11 months of 2012.