In the last two years or so I've drifted away from seeking out new metal bands. My interests seemed more in line with piano-heavy music like the jazz and hard-bop scenes from the 1930s to the 1960s. I was listening to piano music and playing the piano several hours a day.
This last July I lost two people in my life. The first, a family member who might have been my earliest musical inspiration for playing piano; and the second, a friend with whom I played in my first metal band. Though neither death surprised me much given some long-standing health issues, they were a lot to swallow within the space of a week. I thought about the music that each of these men enjoyed playing. I felt that the piano side was covered, so maybe it was time to dig back into some metal.
I aggregated various "best-of" lists from 2019, listened to 22 selections (mostly on my way to funerals) and winnowed down my favorites. My reviews are always critical and sometimes petty, but these are a few of the albums I really enjoyed:
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Abyssal - A Beacon in the Husk This was pretty sludgy, and while it added some thrashy drums and doomy vocals as it progressed, it never lost the shitty guitars which sounded alternately jangly or bassy and slightly out of tune, almost like someone was playing in the next practice space over. This is a sound I like a lot. There are moments of sheer glory, but they are familiar instead of surprising, and I wish I had written them as they seem so natural. Much of the tempo is slow, and frequently this feels vaguely meaningful. The thrashing of the faster sections never reach for that clinical precision of modern technical death metal, instead happily banging away in a garage somewhere. Beacon retains its sliminess with gritty sound and occasionally sloppy songcraft, which somehow lends authenticity to the project. The songs are noisy and ugly and catchy as shit. The album is a little long. After 58 minutes, I was a little exhausted from the pummeling. |
| Gatecreeper - Deserted The Boss HM-2 rides again! That classic Swedish death-metal guitar tone was so in my face as this album opened that I felt like I had skipped ahead and missed the classic horror movie sample. The production was moderately clean but had enough dirt in it to keep me interested. The riffing was a little obvious and at times could be said to lack variety or creativity. The D-beat drumming felt immediately familiar and the whammy bar work was another throw back to classic death-metal. It sure sounded big, but it was missing the essential claustrophobia of my favorite early 90s Swedish death metal albums. |
| Memoriam - Requiem For Mankind This album jumps right in with melodies reminiscent of an early 2000s death metal sound, clean enough to understand the vocals, grimy enough to rock. The album is chock-full of surface-level hooks, catchy enough, but only a few seem to stick in my mind. While not weird or astonishing, it’s a pretty solid album. Reading a little about the history of this band made a lot of sense towards explaining their sound and their appeal. |
