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Albums of 2009
Dec. 23rd, 2009 03:05 pmI only bought 18 albums that were released this year, so a top 10 would feel a bit artificial. Instead, I'll do what I did last year and split them into the very good, the good, and the interesting.
Swallow The Sun - "New Moon" - An unfortunate name, given the similarity to the teen vampire film that came out at about the same time, but this is a pretty solid StS album. Objectively it's hard to claim that it's better than their first 2 albums, but nobody does melodic doom as well as this, and the extra black metal touches on this one add welcome variety.
Fen - "The Malediction Fields" - When I went to see Agalloch and Dornenreich earlier this year Fen were on the bill, but I missed them due to the queue taking too long to get into the venue. After being told that I'd missed a great performance I thought I'd pick up their cd to see what the fuss was about, and I wasn't disappointed. It's hard to describe what they play, despite loads of bands sounding a bit like this at the moment, but it has aspects of black metal, folk metal, and allegedly, post-rock. It'll be good to hear what they can do with a bigger recording budget in future.
Black Sun Aeon - "Death Walks Beside Me" - Another year, another Tuomas Saukkonen project. I had hoped for another Dawn Of Solace album from him this year but one was not forthcoming. Instead, we got this; a darker, harsher album, not too far removed from DoS or Before The Dawn, but with a different singer on the clean vocals. It's melodic death metal in the literal sense - fewer nods to the Gothenburg scene of old and more of an eye towards the haunting lead guitar work and acoustic sections of bands like Katatonia and Amorphis, set to heavy mid-tempo rhythms an.
Depressed Mode - "For Death" - Set aside the cheesy name for a moment and you find there is actually a very competent outfit here. This, their second offering, moves on from the standard funeral doom of the first and introduced some bludgeoning riffs into the mix, while keeping the vast guitars and deep orchestration of the original. Natalie Koskinen returns to perform the sparse vocal parts, which any Shape of Despair fans should appreciate.
The sad thing is, I don't think any of these 4 albums are as good as my top 5 from last year.
Forest Stream - "The Crown Of Winter" - This could have been amazing, but lax quality control has let this down. The long-awaited follow up to their 'Tears of Mortal Solitude' album which came out about 6 years ago, this work adds live drums into the mix with a positive effect on the arrangements and intensity. Such a shame then that the quality drops off a bit after the 3rd track, and the intro to track 8, 'The Beautiful Nature', makes me cringe more than anything else I've heard this year. I think they're going for some sort of angle demonstrating a harsh juxtaposition between urban life and a more natural rural existence there, but it's just too jarring, not to mention that whoever recorded the spoken word part fucked up royally on how to use a de-esser. This is still great for what it is - black/doom metal with ambient and symphonic aspects - but it should have been so much better.
Amorphis - "Skyforger" - the only criticism I have of Skyforger is that it's pretty much the same as 'Silent Waters' and 'Eclipse'. A great album, but nothing new here. Can a band release the same album three times and get away with it? I suppose Amon Amarth do ok...
Insomnium - "Across The Dark" - This is a great album, continuing where they left off with 'Under The Weeping World' but I think the clean vocal parts let it down. The accusations from some quarters of them becoming 'metalcore' are obviously ridiculous - adding clean vocals to metal doesn't make it metalcore - but the singer on those parts does have that slightly whiney quality which I dislike. Combined with the fact that the last album arguably has better songs in the form of 'Mortal Share' and 'The Killjoy', this one just isn't as good for me.
Ex Deo - "Romulus" - Ex Deo is a Katakylsm side project - or more precisely, pretty much the same band - with Roman themed lyrics and a more bombastic delivery. Despite being promoted as also featuring appearances from members of Behemoth, Nile, and Keep of Kalessin, this is actually a more accessible album than your typical Kataklysm release. Worth a listen if you like your metal aggressive but not lacking melody.
Wolves In The Throne Room - "Black Cascade" - I keep reading that this has post-rock elements. Admittedly I'm no post-rock expert but I just don't see it. On this album at least, they sound pretty much any other atmospheric/progressive black metal band these days, which makes me wonder if the hype around this band is all coming from people getting into black metal from the post-rock side who are unfamiliar with the other bands. It might explain why they have such a buzz around them despite not being particularly different, or competent - they certainly can't play in time for example, which irritates me. Having said that, I do quite enjoy this album in places.
SuidAkrA - "Crógacht" - a less interesting follow up to 'Caledonia', with an awful singy track in the middle. Not one I'm finding myself going back to, despite them having mostly sorted out the awful mix on 'Caledonia'.
Paradise Lost - "Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us" - my opinion here is not widely shared, but I do think this album is incredibly disappointing. Where are the SONGS? Apart from 'Last Regret' and the title track, it's an album of Riff 1 / Riff 2 / ...etc... / Riff 12, with little heed paid to structure and many of their melodic and harmonic trademarks stripped away in favour of heavier guitars. I like it being heavy and I like Nick putting the aggression back into his vocal deliveries but you can't compromise on songwriting like they have done here and get away with it.
Katatonia - "Night Is The New Day" - Again, I appear to be in the minority, but I think this album is a big disappointment. I prefer it to the Paradise Lost one, but it's still a massive let-down. To be fair, I didn't love 'The Great Cold Distance' either, but this time it's as if they've taken that album, stripped most of the interesting guitar parts out, and re-released it. A lot has been said about whether it would be 'more like 'Unfurl' ", the B-side that many of the fans of Katatonia's mellower side have become obsessed with, but while the quieter tracks are more in this direction, they're not as good. At the other end of the scale, the heavier tracks are lacking ambition with unimaginative rhythm guitar parts. Guitarist Anders Nyström had writers block going into this album and it really shows. I hope he is able to get more involved on the next album.
Lacuna Coil - "Shallow Life" - with the exception of the single 'Spellbound' which is awesome, this was atrocious. What happened to this band? Like In Flames, who rose equally quickly to worldwide prominence in the mid-90s, it's as if they've been bitten by the American bug and feel compelled to try and sound like the bands that the USA are desperately trying to move on from. Substituting interesting chordal harmonies for percussive chugging on the bottom guitar string might buy you a lot of fans quite quickly but leaves you with no depth, and I think they'll come to regret this in future years.
The Prophecy - "Into The Light" - this band have continued to take their death/doom music in a more progressive direction, and although it works well - 'Echoes' being the best example on this album - it seems to be pushing at the boundaries without risking breaking them. They work hard, they perform well, I'm just not sure whether the songs have the je ne sais quoi to push them to the next level.
Sirenia - "The 13th Floor" - Sirenia almost set a new record among bands in my collection for releasing 5 albums in a row which were each worse than the one before it. 'Luckily' this release was marginaly better than its predecessor so they are deprived of that particular accolade. It's still pretty awful bubble-gum post-Nightwish metal though, and when you find yourself thinking "Evanescence were heavier than this" you know something has gone wrong. Unsurprising then that lead songwriter Morten Veland feels the need to start up yet another band to get back to playing the sort of music he practically invented during his time with Tristania.
Other hopes and predictions from last year:
- still no album from Dawn Of Solace or Grey Skies Fallen
- still no demo from Twilight's Embrace - that is on hold indefinitely!
- no album from Dark Tranquillity, but that is due in March.
So, next year, I hope for all of the above, plus releases from Agalloch, The Fall Of Every Season, Daylight Dies, Slumber, and Draconian. And would it be too much to ask for another Primordial record? Hopefully not...
The Best
Swallow The Sun - "New Moon" - An unfortunate name, given the similarity to the teen vampire film that came out at about the same time, but this is a pretty solid StS album. Objectively it's hard to claim that it's better than their first 2 albums, but nobody does melodic doom as well as this, and the extra black metal touches on this one add welcome variety.
Fen - "The Malediction Fields" - When I went to see Agalloch and Dornenreich earlier this year Fen were on the bill, but I missed them due to the queue taking too long to get into the venue. After being told that I'd missed a great performance I thought I'd pick up their cd to see what the fuss was about, and I wasn't disappointed. It's hard to describe what they play, despite loads of bands sounding a bit like this at the moment, but it has aspects of black metal, folk metal, and allegedly, post-rock. It'll be good to hear what they can do with a bigger recording budget in future.
Black Sun Aeon - "Death Walks Beside Me" - Another year, another Tuomas Saukkonen project. I had hoped for another Dawn Of Solace album from him this year but one was not forthcoming. Instead, we got this; a darker, harsher album, not too far removed from DoS or Before The Dawn, but with a different singer on the clean vocals. It's melodic death metal in the literal sense - fewer nods to the Gothenburg scene of old and more of an eye towards the haunting lead guitar work and acoustic sections of bands like Katatonia and Amorphis, set to heavy mid-tempo rhythms an.
Depressed Mode - "For Death" - Set aside the cheesy name for a moment and you find there is actually a very competent outfit here. This, their second offering, moves on from the standard funeral doom of the first and introduced some bludgeoning riffs into the mix, while keeping the vast guitars and deep orchestration of the original. Natalie Koskinen returns to perform the sparse vocal parts, which any Shape of Despair fans should appreciate.
The sad thing is, I don't think any of these 4 albums are as good as my top 5 from last year.
The Runners-Up
Forest Stream - "The Crown Of Winter" - This could have been amazing, but lax quality control has let this down. The long-awaited follow up to their 'Tears of Mortal Solitude' album which came out about 6 years ago, this work adds live drums into the mix with a positive effect on the arrangements and intensity. Such a shame then that the quality drops off a bit after the 3rd track, and the intro to track 8, 'The Beautiful Nature', makes me cringe more than anything else I've heard this year. I think they're going for some sort of angle demonstrating a harsh juxtaposition between urban life and a more natural rural existence there, but it's just too jarring, not to mention that whoever recorded the spoken word part fucked up royally on how to use a de-esser. This is still great for what it is - black/doom metal with ambient and symphonic aspects - but it should have been so much better.
Amorphis - "Skyforger" - the only criticism I have of Skyforger is that it's pretty much the same as 'Silent Waters' and 'Eclipse'. A great album, but nothing new here. Can a band release the same album three times and get away with it? I suppose Amon Amarth do ok...
Insomnium - "Across The Dark" - This is a great album, continuing where they left off with 'Under The Weeping World' but I think the clean vocal parts let it down. The accusations from some quarters of them becoming 'metalcore' are obviously ridiculous - adding clean vocals to metal doesn't make it metalcore - but the singer on those parts does have that slightly whiney quality which I dislike. Combined with the fact that the last album arguably has better songs in the form of 'Mortal Share' and 'The Killjoy', this one just isn't as good for me.
Ex Deo - "Romulus" - Ex Deo is a Katakylsm side project - or more precisely, pretty much the same band - with Roman themed lyrics and a more bombastic delivery. Despite being promoted as also featuring appearances from members of Behemoth, Nile, and Keep of Kalessin, this is actually a more accessible album than your typical Kataklysm release. Worth a listen if you like your metal aggressive but not lacking melody.
Otherwise notable
Wolves In The Throne Room - "Black Cascade" - I keep reading that this has post-rock elements. Admittedly I'm no post-rock expert but I just don't see it. On this album at least, they sound pretty much any other atmospheric/progressive black metal band these days, which makes me wonder if the hype around this band is all coming from people getting into black metal from the post-rock side who are unfamiliar with the other bands. It might explain why they have such a buzz around them despite not being particularly different, or competent - they certainly can't play in time for example, which irritates me. Having said that, I do quite enjoy this album in places.
SuidAkrA - "Crógacht" - a less interesting follow up to 'Caledonia', with an awful singy track in the middle. Not one I'm finding myself going back to, despite them having mostly sorted out the awful mix on 'Caledonia'.
Paradise Lost - "Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us" - my opinion here is not widely shared, but I do think this album is incredibly disappointing. Where are the SONGS? Apart from 'Last Regret' and the title track, it's an album of Riff 1 / Riff 2 / ...etc... / Riff 12, with little heed paid to structure and many of their melodic and harmonic trademarks stripped away in favour of heavier guitars. I like it being heavy and I like Nick putting the aggression back into his vocal deliveries but you can't compromise on songwriting like they have done here and get away with it.
Katatonia - "Night Is The New Day" - Again, I appear to be in the minority, but I think this album is a big disappointment. I prefer it to the Paradise Lost one, but it's still a massive let-down. To be fair, I didn't love 'The Great Cold Distance' either, but this time it's as if they've taken that album, stripped most of the interesting guitar parts out, and re-released it. A lot has been said about whether it would be 'more like 'Unfurl' ", the B-side that many of the fans of Katatonia's mellower side have become obsessed with, but while the quieter tracks are more in this direction, they're not as good. At the other end of the scale, the heavier tracks are lacking ambition with unimaginative rhythm guitar parts. Guitarist Anders Nyström had writers block going into this album and it really shows. I hope he is able to get more involved on the next album.
Lacuna Coil - "Shallow Life" - with the exception of the single 'Spellbound' which is awesome, this was atrocious. What happened to this band? Like In Flames, who rose equally quickly to worldwide prominence in the mid-90s, it's as if they've been bitten by the American bug and feel compelled to try and sound like the bands that the USA are desperately trying to move on from. Substituting interesting chordal harmonies for percussive chugging on the bottom guitar string might buy you a lot of fans quite quickly but leaves you with no depth, and I think they'll come to regret this in future years.
The Prophecy - "Into The Light" - this band have continued to take their death/doom music in a more progressive direction, and although it works well - 'Echoes' being the best example on this album - it seems to be pushing at the boundaries without risking breaking them. They work hard, they perform well, I'm just not sure whether the songs have the je ne sais quoi to push them to the next level.
Sirenia - "The 13th Floor" - Sirenia almost set a new record among bands in my collection for releasing 5 albums in a row which were each worse than the one before it. 'Luckily' this release was marginaly better than its predecessor so they are deprived of that particular accolade. It's still pretty awful bubble-gum post-Nightwish metal though, and when you find yourself thinking "Evanescence were heavier than this" you know something has gone wrong. Unsurprising then that lead songwriter Morten Veland feels the need to start up yet another band to get back to playing the sort of music he practically invented during his time with Tristania.
Other hopes and predictions from last year:
- still no album from Dawn Of Solace or Grey Skies Fallen
- still no demo from Twilight's Embrace - that is on hold indefinitely!
- no album from Dark Tranquillity, but that is due in March.
So, next year, I hope for all of the above, plus releases from Agalloch, The Fall Of Every Season, Daylight Dies, Slumber, and Draconian. And would it be too much to ask for another Primordial record? Hopefully not...
