For too long we watch others around us suck at what they listen to. It's a proven fact that I made up with a general consensus that 80% of the people in this world have shit for music taste. This blog will help you help them, and you will, mark my words, you WILL see that everything I post here is a gem in its own right. Will you like it? Maybe not, but that means you just didn't try hard enough.
Let's begin. This year has been great for releases, the list is immense and includes such acts as Dying Fetus, My Dying Bride, Burnt By The Sun, Municipal Waste, Doomriders, Lewd Acts, Graf Orlock, Clutch, Hatred Surge, Magrudergrind, Insect Warfare, Suffocation, Dysrythmia, The Melvins, Dethklok, Depeche Mode, Coalesce, Church of Misery, Shrinebuilder, Ulver, Isis, Cattle Decapitation, Lye By Mistake, and the list goes on.
While I could do a year end wrap up, I believe the following two albums pretty much sum up this year in full and I consider them to be my top 2 favorites of 2009:
Slayer - World Painted Blood
Slayer is officially back. I don't know what happened but they probably had some sort of drunken thrash listening session and started thinking good and hard about what they are doing, where they came from and how they are still incredibly pissed off about the state of the world. The result was one of the best thrash albums I have ever heard and many can attest to this as well, they received a 10 in Decibel and Decibel hardly ever gives 10's.
The production is fucking raw. Araya sounds like he's going to pop a blood vessel. The solos are something awful as usual and yet, like all Slayer releases, they fit so well, you can never not have them in there. Everything is just in your face aggressive and if you take a listen to this release, then take a listen to the past three, you can see they were working their way back up to this point. They had their hiccups but the difference between Slayer and other bands is that they rebounded from those hiccups to put out their best release since Seasons In The Abyss (yes I say that fully aware that Divine Intervention was also very good).
Converge - Ax To Fall
When living legends Converge put out a release, it's a huge event. Deathwishinc's servers crash in a half hour after their vinyl pre-orders go up for their new releases.
No Heroes never really received the appreciation it should have. I believe that lack of interest occurred due to the pace of the album. Personally, I thought it was fantastic, and given the swift duration, it demands multiple listens. Ax To Fall picks up where No Heroes left off in the band's natural progression of finding a place for all of their varied influences. Kurt Ballou took a different yet consistent approach to the production, making the album sound full while keeping the raw sound the band is commonly known for. When the heavy parts hit, they are wild, when the slower parts come about, they are devastating. Converge is a band that utilizes dynamics to create a well rounded album every time.
Ax To Fall features a slew of guests from Neurosis, Blacklisted, Cave-In, Disfear/ex-Entombed, Himsa, Genghis Tron and so on. In making the album a truly collaborative effort, all of these guests are well integrated within the tracks they appear which then creates an ensemble of intensity that is unparalleled to anything else released this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment