Ranting & Ranking: An Irrational Love Letter to 100 Albums Released this Century
Nerds will be nerds
I’m dusting off the old blog space for the first time in over 20yrs to write what I’m most at home with… music that about 10 other people listen to.
I went through the roughly 2,600 albums in my collection that were all released since 2000 and recklessly meticulously narrowed down and ordered 100 records I’d recommend to anyone willing to listen. In 6mo I’ll look at this and scoff at a few decisions but this is a snapshot. It’s expected to fall apart, be butchered with criticism, and collect future cringes.
Like most lists, this is intended as a provocation to explore something new or start a debate that exposes something. I can always depend on music nerds to get passionate about these things. So, nerds, send me all the records I defiled by passing on them and hopefully you’ll introduce me to something new or inspire me to listening to something again with a new ear.
Now, take a few shots of skepticism and let’s start from the bottom…
100. The Bug - Fire
No album has come closer to smoking my subwoofer than this. Fire is a risky exploration of dancehall, grime, and industrial. Everything is contained in the deepest trenches of the audible spectrum sometimes confusing what is being heard, and what is being felt seismically. Only a thin layer of noise and a roster of vocalists like Flowdan and Daddy Freddy allow this record to come up for air. Playing this record demands high volume and plenty of space. It turns the air viscous and massages your shoulders. Keep some Dramamine on hand.
99. Dimmu Borgir - Death Cult Armageddon
Possibly the worst title for any album released this century and also one of the most interesting. On paper it’s just another black metal record like the last one you heard, until they recorded it with the full Prague Symphony Orchestra instead of the typical plastic keyboard lines. The pairing makes every track on this record epic and over the top and I want to listen to it wearing a tux and corpse paint.
98. Pallbearer - Foundations of Burden
It’s rare that bands name themselves as perfectly as this. Pallbearer’s sound suits the tone and mood reminiscent of a funeral (at least in my dreary Catholic experience) taken to another level by uniquely clean soprano vocals straight from some English men’s choir record. All of this, carried out as 10min long dissonant sludge dirges, equals a solid, haunting record.
97. Black Crown Initiate - The Wreckage of Stars
Prog-death bands from Reading, PA don’t get nearly enough love. What speaks to me is how technical it is without feeling like a prog record. There’s no noodling, the solos are understated, and the time changes actually enhance the floor punching experience.
96. Oh Hiroshima - All Things Shining
This is what I want from my post-hardcore, it’s everything so many albums had the potential to be if they weren’t drowning in reverb and chorus. This record is tasteful and playful with the effect so as to not distract from the technical abilities of the players and keep the dynamics rich and open. The final product is catchy and enigmatic.
95. Russian Circles - Memorial
This is a a masterclass in dynamic tension. The album's contemplative passages of crystalline guitar work and haunting melodies gradually build into towering walls of distortion and inescapable, thunderous percussion. It’s a seamless blend of beauty and crushing heaviness.
94. Bonobo - Fragments
Sometimes even I need something chill and uplifting, especially when I’m DJing for my kids and the metal is turning them rabid. This record is warm sunshine and a cool breeze wrapped in calming rhythms and fascinating sound design.
93. Minors - Abject Bodies
After finding this record, along with KEN Mode and Hammerhands records, I was convinced that I needs to be actively scouring the Canadian hardcore scene. This is the grindcore, punk, sludge crossover I want all day. I want entire labels dedicated to this sort of stuff, I want cities to be known for this stuff the way Memphis is known for blues and Redding is known for prog death. This record shifts back and forth between the sandblaster-to-the-face hardcore to grinding, baser sludge and back again as many times as it can in just a few 3min songs. Every once in a while we even get treated to a few minute of raging feedback just to smooth out the edges. This is the album I put on when I realize that I’ve been grinding my teeth and need a moment of zen.
92. Mastodon - Crack the Skye
You had me at Rasputin. End to end, this album is a psych metal masterpiece without any contributions from that one singer that turns everything he touches into yacht rock.
91. Made out of Babies - Coward
I hate this cover art. It adds a dimension of rage when listening, as if it needed it. Julie Christmas may be one of the most soulful singers alive today embodying fight, flight, and fawn with each individual word that commands attention and overwhelms. The music sounds weaponized, like it was recorded in a garage by teenagers angry at their suburban neighbors for breathing. The vocals are fevered, like they just got Julie sedate enough to hold a microphone for a few songs but the clock is running out. When put together, it has a rare pureness.
90. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
To say that the nostalgia of Boards of Canada takes me to a comfortable place does it little justice. In the early 80s in NY, I remember watching a lot of children’s programming from Canada that today we would call arthouse, psychedelic, or surreal but back then was the norm. The music for those programs, that often had little to no dialog, were trippy ambient tracks played on warm analog synths that were just as playful and alluring as the rest of the program. Boards of Canada recreates these soundtracks, and for me that experience, so accurately that I can hear it played on our 15” Zenith on the cart with wheels while I sit on the shag carpet, mesmerized.
89. Immolation - Close to a World Below
The late 90s/early 00s was a terrible time for metal unless you liked your JNCOs fat and your dreadlocks pink. In response, Immolation upped their production quality, halved their song lengths, and delivered this brutal and antagonizing beast to remind us that music still has a soul and it was sold for a good price.
88. Satyricon - Age of Nero
Proof that not all black metal needs to be recorded on a potato. It’s also the slowest and driest black metal record I’ve ever heard despite the blast beats. It’s the Steven Wright of black metal records, and for 70min straight I make a mean face and pump my fist every time I listen to it.
87. Druids - Shadow Work
Druids is playing me something I haven’t heard before, some weird place where Steely Dan and Death come together. Some alternate timeline where Tool doesn’t make the leap to Ænima and stadium shows but stays weird. It’s a record that has it’s way with you by knocking you off balance, catching and soothing you, then tossing you off a cliff.
86. Einstürzende Neubauten - Silence is Sexy
How do you play punk in East Berlin in the early 80’s? You collect a lot of scrap metal and trash and terrorize people with terrible noise. Some 20 years later, you’ve evolved your sound to stay true to the roots of home made instruments, but you’ve integrated notes of traditional German folk music, classical music, and post-modern performance art. This record is the apex of a massive discography where those elements came together to create moving songs played on air compressors and turbines.
85. Aesop Rock - Bazooka Tooth
In 2003, Tupac was dead and hip-hop as we’d known it with him. The world was sick of in fighting and embraced Bentleys and designer energy drinks instead. And it was shit. This created the opportunity for avant-garde hip-hop to talk non-sense, play with silly beats and awkward samples, and take big risks. To me, Aesop Rock was the greatest lyricist of this era and this record was the most inventive and playful, telling us, “there’s banana peels in your hamster wheels.”
84. Spotlights - Alchemy for the Dead
There’s been no shortage of shoegaze, alt rock, dreampop, trip hop, and sludge as of late. I’d argue we’re in a waste economy today, really. But, when Spotlights put all of the above together this elegantly, they’re cleaning up that waste and creating something new.
83. Failure - Wild Type Droid
This record is mature, introspective, melancholic, and simple… on the surface. When my daughter asks for sad music, and I don’t want to overwhelm her with truly abysmal music, this is what I go to. The sadness, of every track, is plain and consoling enough for even a toddler to identify with, thread with a beautiful subtext.
82. Helms Alee - Stillicide
I described Helms Alee as “post-grunge” once maybe because everything is post something these days, but that hardly does justice to the weird maneuvering this band does. It’s three unique players that write in isolation and then weave songs together in ways they admit that they lose control of. The result is beautiful, flowing mess.
81. Run the Jewels - RTJ2
I’ve been rooting for El-P to do something big since the Company Flow and the Def Jux days. Run the Jewels is what he’s been doing from the future the whole time, it just took the rest of us a couple decades to catch up and for Killer Mike to provide the perfect voice.
80. Neurosis - The Eye of Every Storm
Easily the most subdued, somber, and morose record in the Neurosis catalog. Possibly the best sounding record Albini has ever engineered. Every time I listen to this record I experience it in a new way and every time the cacophony that is Left to Wander comes on, I blast it like it may be the last song I’ll ever hear.
79. Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium
Listening to this record front to back is like getting a really good workout. It’s challenging, exhausting, you’re tempted to quit regularly but in the end, and maybe not immediately, it’s incredibly rewarding. Also, it’s a lot of work just to turn it on sometimes, but the unexpected twists and turns and the incredible hooks planted along the way are worth the push.
78. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven
I so miss when GYBE made records like this, 20min long tracks that were the film scores to movies I would want to see. Each song explores multiple ideas in ebbs and flows where I find myself leaning towards the speaker in anticipation in some parts, and leaning back overwhelmed in others. Seeing them play at Bard College in 2000 in front of about 50 people, all sitting together with the band on a cafeteria floor piled thick with oriental rugs was one of the five greatest concert experiences of my life.
77. Cloak - Black Flame Eternal
I’m taken back to ‘90 or ‘91 and the first time I heard bands like Sepultura and Testament, not because they recorded this on a 4 track in their uncle’s basement (it’s a legit, modern recording) but because it returns to a quaint definition of “evil” that was plenty threatening and still innocently resonated with my middle school, D&D definition of the word. This album makes me long for a time when I wore Metallica patches on my denim jacket and raised devil horns in earnest. This is the record the nuns warned me I’d be listening to at this age, and it is awesome.
76. Meshuggah - obZen
This era is where Meshuggah peaked. Every song is a brutal assault and even though the rhythms are all over the place, the beating flows and keeps you curious. Until the last song, Dancers to a Discordant System, which is nothing shy of musical contortionism performed by mutants that you just can’t look away from.
75. Behemoth - Evangelion
There are videos of Behemoth’s singer, Negral, spending 2hrs in make-up before a concert like he’s a villain in a Marvel movie. It’s absurd and fitting. Everything about this album is over the top from the gargantuan sound to the Wagner inspired songwriting to booming-voice-from-the-sky vocals. When you call these guys “metal”, you have to say it in your best Jack Black voice.
74. Coil - Music to Play in the Dark vol.2
The label “experimental” gets tossed around too freely but Coil earns it in a way others can’t. There’s a mischief to their music, listening to their records is like catching one of the kids doing something they know they shouldn’t but it’s clever so you can’t help but appreciate it. Coil’s biggest problem is that they’re also talented musicians and writers and every once in a while they accidently write some mesmerizing music entangled in brilliant mess.
73. Atmosphere - Seven’s Travels
The Roots always got the credit for being “the” live hip-hop band, and yes they deserve the love but don’t rob outfits like Atmosphere who took the art to another level in the late 90s/early 00s. Between the live band, the clever writing, and the mid-west stories and sounds of Minneapolis, Atmosphere was playing us something different. This record is a solid blend of the band’s immature risk taking, indiscriminate middle fingers, and agonizing desire to have their story heard with memorable upbeat hooks.
72. All Pigs Must Die - Hostage Animal
I used to call records like this “spreadsheet music” because it created tight walls of noise that allow me to hyper focus. It is all consuming, grating, and it demands that you don’t look away, the way you’d expect from a Kurt Ballou record. I’m not hanging on every word (that I can barely make out), I’m sucked into the vortex.
71. Burst - Lazarus Bird
Most post-metal follows the Neurosis build-and-burst handbook, based on Detroit techno song writing from the 80s where slight nuance and layers are added over long songs until, pause, and then boom all at once. Burst must have never heard Detroit techno, but they are jazz fans who have their own build-and-burst style. This final album of theirs masters it. The passage from one movement to the next is indelicate and disorienting but coherent. The drop offs are unexpected ledges and the crescendos are jump scares.
70. CHVE - Rasa
This record is a single track, a 30min mediation from the singer from Amenra and it feels like just that. It feels like he hit the record button and for 30min played some drones, sang a little, played some percussion here and there, and then turned it off. It feels natural and intimate.
69. Godflesh - A World Lit only by Fire
My intro to Godflesh was in ‘94, a time when I tried to buy any record I could find with the Earache or Roadrunner label on it. Selfless had just been released and upon first listening, it became permanently fixed as one of my musical cardinal points. A World Lit Only by Fire is a return to these roots with the deep tones, the hanging sludge, the pounding grooves, the minimal somehow delivering the excess.
68. Lustmord & Karin Park - Alter
This could be the score to a sci-fi movie I’d be counting the days to see. The hellish tone and abyssal soundscapes mixed with the angelic vocals put this on the shelf with scores like Gladiator and Dune. This is an ambient album I play at extreme volume. The environment it create wraps me in a warm blanket and paints lush, deep images.
67. Daylight Dies - Lost to the Living
I fall so deeply into this record every time I put it on, it makes it hard to describe. It’s clearly a prog metal record reminiscent of early Opeth but more concise and more hypnotic. It’s hard to identify one song from another, not because they’re monotonous but because of how they flow seamlessly through the entire record. Call it a death/doom metal opera.
66. Viktor Vaughn - Vaudeville Villain
This is one of MF Doom’s alter egos, the rapper/producer that worked “Eyjafjallajökull” into a rhyme. This is what ADHD sounds like when it’s put to strange beats and samples, it hyper focuses for two bars and then then we’re in another realm for the next two. The number of ideas explored, or maybe flirted with, on each track is too many to count. The rhyme structure is 3d chess that some how adds up and ends up being fun.
65. Fantômas - Director’s Cut
Full disclosure, there are a few tracks on the album I find unlistenable and the occasion to turn this on is rare but, an album of covers delivered by a supergroup that sounds like nothing done before that may never be approached again is an absolute triumph. Mike Patton, King Buzzo, Dave Lombardo, and Trevor Dunn re-create and re-interpret big band Hollywood classic theme songs like Rosemary’s Baby, Charade, and Cape Fear using torrents of vocalization, distorted theremins, and metal percussion. It is both chaos and bliss.
64. Radiohead - Amnesiac
Pyramid Song was what finally broke the wall I had held strong against Radiohead. In the late 90s it took all my energy to dodge listening to whatever Dave Mathews record and OK Computer. To me, Tom Yorke’s vocals were nails on a chalk board. Then I had one of those moments where I overheard something playing and I was stunned. The internal wrestling I had to do was fierce when I discovered that this band that had all my hair standing up was the band I’d established as my nemesis, totally off-limits. And that’s how fast music breaks you and takes you.
63. Russian Circles - Empros
In 2008, when Russian Circles release Station, we were all getting a little tired of post-rock. Everyone was doing it but a few records, like that one, were actually doing something interesting. I considered it to be a fluke. When they followed up with Empros I knew these guys were on another level. This wasn’t another echo of post-rock, they an were instrumental three piece, but there was a storytelling, a sophistication, and experimentation that I’d never heard before.
62. Pachyman - Switched-On
This is #1 on my list of greatest album covers of the millennium so far. Like the cover so perfectly says, Switched-On is a love letter to ‘70s Puerto Rican dub that could have come directly from the hands of King Tubby or The Scientist but with a unique island and Latin touch that keeps this from getting lost in my dub collection.
61. Torche - Restarter
I’d never call Torche pop-punk, or sappy, but they have an upbeat quality to them delivered with a traditionally sinister tone that is seductive. It’s Crowbar playing Ramones covers, Napalm Death with the B-52s, it just doesn’t make sense and yet it works perfectly. Their live shows are some of the most pump-your-fist fun I’ve had in recent memory.
60. Psychonaut - Violate Consensus Reality
Now that Neurosis and Isis are gone, post-metal is orphaned and needs to feed itself, create it’s new identity. Enter Psychonaut, showing us how predictable the formula had become and how a bit of technical prowess can have similar, more interesting effects. They’re not the next Neurosis, but this is what’s filling the void and I’m here for it.
59. Latitudes - Old Sunlight
Latitudes answers the question, what would a band like Pelican or Russian Circles sound like with vocals? The record uses the same storytelling technique as my favorite instrumental prog and post-metal bands, enhanced greatly by cavernous, clean singing that adds a dozen new cosmic layers to play with.
58. Daylight Dies - A Frail Becoming
It might be fair to call this post-thrash. Partly because we need a post everything anymore, partly because this sound seems to be the other trajectory trash could have taken in the early 90s when everyone started cutting their hair and wearing looser jeans. This album sounds like it could be Sepultura’s follow up to Arise if it was closer to Beneath the Remains. It could be Megadeth’s follow up to Rust in Peace, or Carcass’s follow up to Heartwork if they weren’t looking for radio play. It’s clean and barking vocals, it’s noodly thrash riffs and tasteful blast beats, it’s slow creepy arpeggios leading to a bendy guitar solo on nearly every track. Post-thrash, it’s exactly what I wanted in 92’ and plays well today.
57. Hippotraktor - Stasis
Pelagic Records is the present day iteration of Sargent House or Hydra Head and been producing some of my favorite records the last few years so I’m committed to giving an earnest listen to everything they release until that changes. Otherwise I would have ignored this band for their dumb name. Hippotraktor is djent without the djent, they’re screamo with composure, they’re groove metal with timing you can’t groove to, they’re metalcore without the lip rings. They’re a plate made from a robust enough salad bar to fit my tastes.
56. Deftones - Diamond Eyes
I’m convinced that the last 25 years of Deftones records have been some deep meditation on some high school event that is uninteresting to me, executed with potential but ultimately can’t get out of their own way. Except this album, this one returns to the mindlessness of Around the Fur. I think Stephen Carpenter just bought an 8-string and wanted to flex it, wrote an album of grooves in a weekend, and they printed it. As they should have. Chino desperately wants to make this about the girl that never called him back in ‘93 but the rest of the band is partyin’ hard.
55. The Ocean - Holocene
Post-metal but with perfectly integrated electronic components tone this record down to some really gorgeous atmospheres that move, break, and come back together. The whole album shifts between a calming peace and sudden tension that rarely resolves itself. I find most of The Ocean’s catalog to be overwhelming and disjointed but this is so brilliantly subdued and intentionally, obviously restrained and minimal.
54. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass
As rappers go, for my money, there’s Chuck D and then there’s Aesop Rock. Chuck knows how to hit us where it hurts, Aesop couldn’t be more of a polar opposite. Aesop drops high speed parables and stories fit for Seinfeld episodes, so drenched in surrealism and symbolism that the internet is still decoding. None Shall Pass is the record where Blockhead’s whimsical beats and Aesop’s perplexing delivery just hit perfectly on every track. It’s silly, fun, curious, strange, and still very approachable.
53. King Woman - Celestial Blues
Blues and doom have been perfect lovers since the first Black Sabbath record and done since ad nauseum, but Kristina’s breathy, labored alto vocals has added something new to the genre that I didn’t how badly I wanted. I am captured by her ability to jump from the whispering, sultry torch singer of some 40’s film noir into a rabid Janis Joplin, and back again.
52. Trap Them - Crown Feral
Again, Kurt Ballou is synonymous with the sound that brings hardcore, grindcore, and sludge together in this beautiful and scathing union. I turn to this record at punishing volume and I’m at peace.
51. Atmosphere - The Family Sign
One of my favorite things to watch is how artists age. Do they stay in arrested development, rehashing the same ideas only refreshing their image to stay relevant? Does their song writing change along with life around them? On this somber and reflective hip-hop record Atmosphere, now in their 40s, steer deep into the latter. Songs touch on struggling marriages, estranged friendships, fear of fame, reflecting on childhood trauma, and becoming parents. There are no club hits here and this is not good for parties, I listen to this when I can focus on the lyrics and count how many rich things are held by each phrase.
50. Meshuggah - Koloss
Koloss is the one album that gets played in my car more than any other, it might be the hardest and fastest record I own end to end. Richmond is the kind of town where people stop on the highway to let others merge, stop at yield signs and wait, stop in the middle of the road to change lanes, and generally tap the breaks when they see other cars on the road. The assertive and deliberate NY driver in me needs a 200bpm soundtrack of constant screaming and rage to navigate this death trap that will one day take me.
49. Failure - The Heart is a Monster
19 years since their last album, and if you told me they spent that whole time working on this I might believe that. The magic of this record is how dense it is without effort. These are standard format radio play songs, built for the alt rock audience but drenched in space rock production. It dips into the wall of sound of shoegaze, pops into the aggression of old Amphetamine/Reptile records, and then lulls us like something from the 4AD catalog. Depending on my mood, I can tap into a different layer of this thick weave and know a completely different album.
48. Leperous - The Congregation
Such a deceiving name, especially for a band out of Norway. These guys are a fascinating prog outfit with a unique chesty-falsetto vocalist. There’s little on paper about that is attractive to me but when I listen to this album I can’t look away. It refuses to be background music and there are no passive, throwaway track. Each shuffle beat, strange melody, bizarre time change, confusing poly-rhythm, and overall swirl is somehow deliberate and I’m slowly eating popcorn at the edge of my seat for it.
47. Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas - Mariner
Before this release it would have been hard to imagine Cult of Luna taking a dramatic leap from the sludge opuses that were regularly belting out with increasing complexity and potency. Collaborating with Julie Christmas is a cheat code to dramatically up anyone’s game. For the first time, we get to hear how Christmas navigates eight to fifteen minute long songs where she evolves from meek and playful to erupt into thunderous banshee and back along with Cult of Luna’s signature swells and dins.
46. Blindead - Absence
It’s criminal how I never find anyone talking about this Polish prog/post-metal band or this incredibly written record. The theme of Absence is, well, loss and grief. It’s execution is slow and meticulous, allowing the lyrics and music plenty of space to breath. It draws out anguish, it recalls fondly, it sits with pain, and it builds on strength. It’s a record worth a deep listen but not without caution.
45. Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss
I’d call this the first good industrial record in 20 years (the last being Download’s Eyes of Stanley Pain) and it is everything I’ve been looking for since. This is no dance album, it uses noise, electronics, and percussion to discomfort, threaten, and punish you and your subwoofer. Even familiar instruments sound tortured. All of this accumulates from bleak emptiness into massive discordant soundscapes. Finally, cast Chelsea’s angelic voice over this nightmare and you have an album worthy of being named “Abyss”.
44. Minsk - Ritual Fires of Abandonment
Minsk sounds like the scene in the movie when the old sailing ship in caught in a terrible storm at night. There are brief moments of reprieve to allow a little dialog through and then suddenly everyone is forced to hold fast and start shouting at each other, desperately and to no end, while waves crash and thunder deafens.
43. Cannibal Corpse - A Skeletal Domain
I’m convinced that there’s a sweatshop somewhere in Buffalo where thirteen year old’s are writing zombie apocalypse material to last us until it actually happens. Sixteen studio albums over 35 years, all about people being eaten by the living dead… these guys rival some of the biggest franchises out there. No one album, end to end, captured the childish joy and magic of gratuitous gore and wanton butchering like this one. Enjoy classic songs like Headlong into Carnage, Kill or Become, and Icepick Lobotomy. Get your chainsaw and your bath salts and play this at an unsafe volume.
42. Daylight Dies - Dismantling Devotion
Listening to this record brings be back to the early 90s. It’s not really revitalized classic death metal, but the tone and feel of those early Death and Morbid Angel records is there. The nostalgia is thick, I’m sitting in my bedroom fighting seasonal depression and oil heat nose bleeds in upstate NY, reading D&D books and writing campaigns while blasting this record on my oversized headphones. What I’m listening to is so sinister and haunting that I’m feeling like it’s dangerous just to be in the room with it. Yet, it’s also incredibly seductive and beautiful and I’m wondering what that says about about me.
41. Herod - Iconoclast
These guys are terrified of becoming Swiss Sludge Band Vol.367 and after their first record, that’s exactly where they were headed. This follow up took that Earth shaking sludge base they’d established and started painting layers of complex song writing and guest vocals all over it. I’ve resigned myself to sludge being one thing, and I very much like it when executed well. Like pizza. These guys have proven to me that sludge pizza can be Hawaiian and I can enjoy it in public.
40. Plastikman - Closer
Plastikman makes minimal techno interesting the same way I love good sludge metal. There’s a repetition and a comfort, lots of empty space, and then tiny nuances and minor deviations in that space. This record takes all of that to the next level with sophisticated reverbs and delays weaving thick atmospheres with a booming, ominous voice narrating like a hypnotist throughout.
39. Svart Crown - Wolves Among the Ashes
Every week it seems there is a tsunami of new metal releases and each week there are 40 new genres of metal invented. I really don’t know if there’s anything objectively spectacular or unique about this record but when one weekly tsunami came it was the record I clung to until it took me to safety. This record seems to traverse multiple genre’s of metal, uninterested in what it’s supposed to be doing and letting itself be carried and stay interesting, but in all its travels it stays clear and focused on just being a badass death metal record.
38. Isis - In Absence of Truth
Confession: I didn’t like Isis when I first heard them. Oceanic was a mess to me, still kind of is, but it sounded like Rush with 6 additional musicians and they all had too much chorus and distortion and a bad mix job. Then I stumble over this record, probably their most sober and gentile, allowing me the space to feel the complexity and I finally got it. Eight minutes of soft chords drone on forever and build imperceivably until a epic crash, so brief I’m constantly begging for more.
37. Process of Guilt - Fæmin
I’ve spent over 30 years begging the universe for more bands that I can love the way I love Godflesh and it’s only delivered disappointment until I found this record. There is nothing industrial about Process of Guilt, they have a living breathing drummer, and they don’t do dub remixes of all of their records but they do manage to deliver massive, brutish 2-note grooves. This album is what white knuckles and frowns sound like at deafening volume. It is sordid. To get lost in it is to abandon all thought and surrender to involuntary movement while the drummer bangs on the china cymbal like he’s beating his dinner to death.
36. Helms Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors
Listening to this record is like watching siblings interact. It’s three very different artists, bringing something very distinct to a dialogue that trades blows more often than finds harmony. The conversation isn’t just done with the vocals, it’s how the drums argue and then reconcile with the guitars while the bass gives approval. Like with siblings, there’s history, unsaid meaning, and agreement in the subtext but tension everywhere.
35. Every Time I Die - From Parts Unknown
This is less a hardcore record and more a 32min temper tantrum you can pump your fist to. It’s bliss in progress, the release of tension. It’s what The Beach Boys would sound like if The Beach Boys guided primal scream therapy and beat on pillows with tennis rackets. It’s Bob Ross with his afro on fire smashing his easel like Roger Daltrey, grinning from ear to ear. It’s that time you broke your nose or chipped a tooth in a mosh pit and laughed, euphoric with adrenaline.
34. Sraunus - Atmospheric Insomnia
Before my son was due, my wife asked me to make a mix of relaxing music for her while she was in labor. To paint the picture, we upended that birthing center with lighting effects, oil diffusers, and music. This is the record we listened to the most over those exhausting 24hrs. It’s rhythmic, hypnotic, atmospheric, and even a little perplexing. It’s densely layered, yet has a light touch. It sits in the background until you realize it’s been stealing some of your attention the whole time.
33. Amenra - De Doorn
Amenra has delivered a largely ambient record, broken up by moments of horrific intensity. The calm is a genuine peace rather than a platform for suspense, ten minute songs breath slowly, rest, and gather strength, then unleash. After six albums of unrelenting and exhausting purification, this record feels like they’re accomplishing just that.
32. Sumac - What One Becomes
It would be so much easier to talk about this record with grunts and hand gestures than text. It’s automatic, visceral, it’s the sludge record Jackson Pollock would record. It defies the math and still makes sense because it’s the way I hear music in my head. It’s a three piece super group meditating in cacophony. One of my top five concerts experiences of the last 25 years was seeing Sumac, touring for this record, in a tiny venue with about twenty people in the audience and them playing like it was the last show of their lives.
31. Failure - In the Future your Body will be the Furthest from your Mind
Time slows down every time I put this record on, there’s no way only one hour has passed after one play through. This post-hardcore masterpiece explores a tension between hope and despair and somehow creates the time and space for that very lengthy dispute. Failure has developed a craft of songwriting and production that transcends technical proficiency, they’ve developed an acute sense that allows them to construct an unbelievably crisp, yep expansive record that seems to billow while retaining sharp edges. Of all of the bands that have broken up and reunited over the years, Failure may be the most worthy of their reprise.
30. Wailin’ Storms - Sick City
For decades I’ve wanted a record that fit my definition of “American Gothic”, something steeped in delta blues and Appalachian folk with a heavy hand of punk and garage, painted thick with tragic and foreboding stories. Danzig had to do for so long but he carries so much baggage and Young Widows came close but it wasn’t until Durham, NC delivered these guys that I could finally rest. This is one of those sing along albums that is dangerous to drive to. It’s ugly, it’s eldritch, and it feels really good.
29. Spotlights - Tidals
The cover art does so much more to describe the tone and feel of this record than any words could. This two piece manages to drops wave after wave of freezing ocean with every beat. Everything about this record is vast and bleak, incomprehensively massive, terrifying and beautiful.
28. Monolord - Vænir
Just when I was thinking doom had shown all its cards in 1972, Monolord gives us a reason to grow a beard again! The formula is all there: heavy fuzz, muddy tones, trippy phaser on the vocals, conflicted Christianity. What Monolord broke was the 50 year tradition of recording these albums on an old shag carpet. For the first time, we learned the potential of doom when it’s well written and well produced.
27. Neurosis - A Sun the Never Sets
This is Neurosis in conflict, at their most vulnerable. This record is themed around the coexistence of cosmic insignificance and a connection to ancestorial strength and wisdom. The build and burst song format perfected by Neurosis isn’t just a winning pattern, it’s a narrative device for a band fraught with mental health struggles, addiction problems, and constant spiritual exploration. Over the years I hear something different, and connect to something different in this record, making much less something I listen to and know, and more something I inhabit and continue a journey with.
26. Amenra - Mass VI
The final album in the Mass series is a slower, deeper ritual than previous events. It takes its time building its tension and forcing you to sit in it before Colin’s tortured vocals lead a cathartic scourging. It then takes a moment to tend to wounds before the next wave comes. If only mass was like this growing up.
25. Big Brave - A Gaze Among Them
While the Swans have been testing us to see how long our attention spans could possibly be, Big Brave has moved in to take that crushing, wall-of-noise sound and play some grizzly music with it. This is the kind of record that gets no justice if you’re not playing it loud enough to create some threat of hearing loss. From the massive guitar sound and booming percussion to Robin’s diminutive voice slashing the sky open, it’s the kind of sound you bathe in as much as listen to.
24. Converge & Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I
My favorite moments from Converge are always when they slow it down a bit, or shift from the chaos to the calm to paint a more coherent picture. Every album has had a moment or two of this, until Chelsea Wolfe enters the picture and steadies hands. What we get from this collab is a constant volley between the noise and hardcore, blues and goth. Of course, you can only tie down the Tasmanian Devil or excite Morticia Adams for so long, so the expanse this album travels is massive and somehow seamless, stretching everyone involved the way collaborations should.
23. Heilung - Futha
People tell me that there’s no new music anymore. While there’s is something refreshing here, technically, Heilung is thousand year old music being recreated with a lot of attention to detail, respect, and a high bar for authenticity while still leveraging modern capabilities. In other words, this band of anthropologists and musicians play on animal skins and bones and sing in a long dead Northern European language. The result makes you want to either meditate next to a river or dance under the moon and howl at it.
22. Immolation - Kingdom of Conspiracy
For one album, Immolation got their six to eight minute technical epics to under four minutes of punishing death metal. Yes, it lacks the signature fanfare and passages but lays out the same ideas in a whirlwind. It’s the opposite of slowing down while driving by the car accident, it’s being on a bullet train while the tracks are littered with columns of disaster. It’s overwhelming layers of overstimulation with bendy harmonics while barking incomprehensively.
21. Process of Guilt - Black Earth
This record is just primal. Feral. It’s rhythmic and angry in a way that’s deliberate but unsophisticated, just pounding to beat out the demons. Even the moments of pause seem timed with exhaustion and are just long enough to catch a breath and then back to the steady, grinding tantrum. Hugo Santos’s guttural, booming voice sound like he’s shouting at nothing from a mountain top in search of healing. This whole album is a message of love and respect to the working slow brain.
20. Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun
Hiss Spun feels like Chelsea' Wolfe’s exorcism. It explores a crushing heaviness and ethereal beauty. It faces themes like trauma, anxiety and dysphoria but it holds them by the throat and calls them down. It’s running from demons and confessing to chasing them at the same time, the sort of way only Wolfe was built to do, “I called out from the deepest part, I feel concave, inverted for you, I’ll be screaming through the afterlife, I’ll be hunting for you, buried under flowers”.
19. END - Splinters from an Ever-Changing Face
This is, hands down, the most ferocious album I’ve ever heard. This will be the high mark for extreme hardcore for the next ten years at least. No second is wasted delivering punishing blows, no frequency is abandoned in this wall of noise. I imagine when they mixed this, the board had all volume sliders pushed to the ceiling, the control room lit red with clip indicators and various other alarms. The studio engineers scurry in panic, clawing at their ear drums.
18. Immolation - Majesty and Decay
Eight albums later, and Immolation is deep into their career as the standard bearer of technical death metal. This stand out album in their discography is probably their meanest. Each song peaks in a ferocity that stops me no matter how many times I’ve heard it, and I often have to rewind and re-listen to absorb it again.
17. Wailin’ Storms - One Foot in the Flesh Grave
This is the record I’d expect to hear playing in a seedy bar in a David Lynch movie, or in a strip club in a Robert Rodriguez movie. It has that hook that stays with you, it has that groove that you don’t even know you’ve been pulled into, and it sets the scene for something sinister. Like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, this record is clearly rooted in American tradition but immediately dips into the ugly underbelly. Every time I listen to this I want to buy a car with a carburetor, some snake skin boots, and drive the country roads from Richmond to El Paso so I can stop at every BBQ pit, abandoned bar, and alligator wrestling show along the way.
16. Hammerhands - Largo Forte
Hammerhands answers the question that no one asked (but absolutely should have), “what happens when Canadians mix sludge and psychobilly?” The answer sounds something like Swans with Angelo Badalemente or the Melvins and Tom Waits collaboration we’ve always wanted. This album manages to sound massive and calculated while also sounding like it was recorded in one take at a truck stop in Mississauga by three guys with blown tube amps. There is an authentic love for playing that transcends genre and songwriting expectations that sits on the palette above all else.
15. Stomach Earth - Stomach Earth
This is a one man band from a guy that seems to be involved with every deathcore band in Boston who recorded a one off “extreme doom” record that happens to be one of the best sludge efforts ever released. Sludge implies too much speed for this, it barely breaks 50 BPM. End to end, this records creates a gloomy, crushing, extra-planar atmosphere to dissolve into. The disembodied vocals and dragging guitars span bleak landscapes and the drums only serve as a reminder of how agonizingly glacial time is here. Please use caution while driving.
14. Isis - Wavering Radiant
After 15 years, I still perk up while this is playing and wonder “what am I listening to?” There is so much depth to this record, so much to catch and travel with on every play through that I’m still hearing new layers uncovered. The level of craft that went into this record is immense. It’s tragic that Isis broke up after this record because they believe they achieved what they wanted with this, but it’s hard to argue with.
13. Opeth - Damnation
In 2003 a Swedish death metal band hung up their blast beats and cookie monster vocals to write a prog folk record that sounds more like something Page and Plant could have written than just more death metal, and they dared their fans to come along. Still, 20 years later, that experiment stands out as the peak of their discography and holistically, a unique collection of incredibly written and produced songs. It’s proof that sometimes all artists need is space.
12. Below the Sun - Envoy
Imagine a band like Pelican or Swallow the Sun playing Godspeed You Black Emperor, wearing Sunn O))) robes and Buckethead masks. From Siberia. On a concept record about space. None of this was on any bingo card of mine, but they have made for one of the best post metal records I’ve heard this century.
11. Ulcerate - Stare into Death and be Still
When I first heard this band, if you told me it was a full symphony of musicians I would have accepted that. It sounds overwhelming but also it manages to stay cohesive while being wildly discordant. There’s no way a single person could play drums like this. To learn that this is a three piece still blows my mind. Seeing this drummer play live has been a high point of my concert experiences. As technically proficient as this band is, this record still feels operatic.
10. Russian Circles - Guidance
The inspiration for Guidance came from a stack of old war photographs, including the cover art, which depicts a man with a stiff posture and a proud look on his face being led to his execution. The accompanying music is Russian Circles at their most concise and cinematic. The album opens and closes with a calm, but everything in between flows seamlessly from one epic cue to the next. Guidance thoroughly tells a story without speaking a word.
9. Immolation - Unholy Cult
It was love at first listen for this record with a tragically dumb name. Things were being done to guitars I’d never heard before, musical things, not Thurston Moore things. It’s like they they were pulled from thin air, not plucked on any physical instrument. Every song twists slowly into horrifying crescendos, wreathed in agonizing dissonance. The entire album transcends everything I know about death metal. There’s plenty of blast beats and some familiar solos but the shape of these songs is otherworldly, some freak accident or unholy intervention that not even Immolation has been able to reproduce since.
8. Amenra - Mass IIII
Amenra has quickly become one of my favorite bands and the release of Mass IIII was my introduction. I still remember flipping through new release blogs and stopping abruptly hearing the opening of the first song, which is nothing more than gentle feedback. Then some slow quiet strumming. Then the drums slowly build, all of this over almost five minutes and I was at the edge of my seat in a session where I was just rapidly button mashing my way through dozens of other songs and discarding them after just a few measures. Finally, that build up pauses for a beath and something about how Silver Needle, Golden Nail explodes from there set the hook.
7. Tool - Lateralus
I find this band just as insufferable as the rest of you anymore. The stat that blows my mind is that the Beatles released their entire discography in less time that it took for Tool to record their last album. Maynard hates his fans and the only thing that amuses him is insulting them, endlessly. But, in early 2001 the magic was still there. Tool was different, we were different, the world was a different place and this album is still just as unreal as it was then, maybe even more so as we’ve had the time to grow with it.
I saw Tool five days after this released at Hammerstein Ballroom and when they closed with Lateralus all 3,000 of us are singing along, “spiral out, keep going!” It was a special moment, a song we’ve only had a few days with and we all knew the lyrics already. We were all that taken by it and rightfully so. Fast forward to seeing them in 2008, between songs Maynard gets the crowd chanting the Timothy Leary sample from Third Eye, “Think for yourself, question authority”. Most of the crowd gets going chanting along, and finally Maynard just laughs at everyone and says something like “don’t repeat what people tell you to”. Yeah, you can be right and be an asshole too.
6. Hania Rani - Ghosts
This is the one album I’ve played the most the last two years. It starts our day in our house. I find Hania Rani’s gentle piano and deceptively demure voice incredibly moving. Her light touch somehow evokes lush atmospheres. There is a calm, childish play, and strange melancholy woven throughout. In a day full of noise, this records makes its way with whispers, ghost notes, and a graceful presence.
5. Portishead - Third
What baffles me about this record is how there haven’t been any attempts to imitate it since. I don’t think it’s because it lacked exposure, or isn’t considered one of the best albums of the century to date. In my opinion it’s because Portishead created something untouchable, something that was so natural or accidental, that no one has been able to stumble on the recipe or reverse engineer the final outcome. This record is a time capsule, it’s meticulous in it’s preservation of a very distinct sound while being modernized with care.
4. Heilung - Drif
Heilung has done more for me than just make all of my hair stand up with incredibly beautiful music. They have connected me to a white, European identity that long predates colonialism, Christianity, and other uninteresting forms of civility. It’s not that I didn’t know that humans preceded suburbs, but listening to this album is a connection to a time and a reverence beyond that knowing. It’s an album that reminds me that voice is the oldest and still the most versatile instrument and how I can still be moved by words even if I don’t understand the language. It reminds me how naturally attuned we are to rhythm and harmony, and it’s had me thinking a lot about the significance of that and why that feature was selected for. It’s the perfect album to sit with and sift through our tangled roots.
3. Lustmord - The Word as Power
It’s impossible to put into words how deep and expansive this record is. Lustmord applied his style of cavernous atmospheric ambiance that is both beautiful and insidious to vocalization from guests like Maynard James Keenan and Jarboe as the theme for this record. I’ve probably played this record front to back more than any other since its release and disappear into it every time.
2. Neurosis - Fires within Fires
I wonder if they would have changed anything if they knew this would be their swan song. As unfortunate and unwanted as Neurosis’s demise is, they couldn’t have heralded their exit with a better album. This record sounds like what grey beards should sound like, it’s the album Gandalf would have made if he also wrote the book on post-metal. It’s old men yelling at mountains in the past and cautiously dressing themselves in the elder’s garb. This record is about trial, rebirth and renewal. It inadvertently became a passing of the torch.
1. Amenra - Mass V
A lot of things draw me to Amenra, their content for one. For example, the theme of Mass V is how we we still know and feel people, and will be known and felt, after death. For another, their pacing feels intrinsic, I already know the movement of their songs the first time I hear them. They straddle a rhythm that feels more organic than mechanical, with subtly and nuance that are inescapable. This is the album that inspired me to pick up a guitar again after 20 years.