Top 3 albums/eps of the week.

[SurgicalBrute]

52 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I'm just lucky they put it up on Youtube because I had no idea he'd be releasing another one so soon after Nordic Storm last year.  He hasn't traditionally been an album a year guy. This new one was apparently recorded in 2013 and 2020 so I guess stuff he'd had in the can. It's available on CD from Germany for $12 +shipping so I'm hoping an American distro will get some in stock in the near future. Probably HHR will have it, he has a bunch of DTB stuff on his site and also a few older Diaboli albums.

Yeah, I'm sure it will get over here in physical format eventually...if not HHR, then probably Season of Mist's U.S. shop.

Check The Metal Detektor site every once in a while - https://themetaldetektor.com/

That will let you know if it's made it's way over and which U.S. distro has it in stock (no one right now FYI)

[LarsA81]

Terminalist - The Great Acceleration. Danish black/thrash metal.

 

Echelon - Open Wide the Adamantine Gates. UK/Swedish death metal with Ingram of Benediction doing vocals.

 

Dawn of Demise - Rejoice in Vengeance. Danish slammin' death metal. That intro, mmm!

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Don't have 3 albums for you this week, rather I have 3 bands I've been obsessed with as of late. And it's really been interfering with my list specific listening as none of these artists have put anything out this year except for one 18 minute 4-track EP between them. I've been listening to at least one or more albums from all 3 of these artists daily. Not gonna post more videos here because I've already been posting them repeatedly on the other thread.

1. Vargsang, Germany. This obsession has been going on for at least a month now. I'd had his first album Call of the Nightwolves (2003) for years but never really played it that much. Then I stumbled over his best and most recent album In the Mist of Night (2014) on YT a little over month ago and now I have the complete set of 4. Plus I already had the two Graven albums ('02 & '05) which I include because it's the same guy. But the albums under the Vargsang banner are better. I've been playing at least two or three of them daily. I think if I had a black metal band I'd want my record to sound just like their latest though. Straight-forward, nothing weird or innovative or complicated, riff heavy songs with perfect vocals and perfect production - raw but not retardedly lo-fi. Don't know how long this obsession could go on for, my short-term musical infatuations don't usually last this long without showing any signs of slowing down. 

2. Odious Devotion, Finland. Their first S/T album dropped 4 years ago last week, just in time to make my 2018 list and it's been a love affair ever since.  It's one guy writing the black metal music and providing all the guitars, drums and vocals, with a 2nd guy on synths. They've kinda become synonymous with Christmastime for me. Love this band, something about their music just says icy cold windswept boreal forests in the dead of winter to me. Which I know is a tired old cliche for atmo-black, but atmo-black isn't my sweet spot for black metal so I don't have that much of it compared to the punkier, riffier, rawer stuff. Not all atmo-black bands give you the soundscapes and still keep things aggressive, with the guitars up front and the vox semi-buried. I often think while listening "yeah this is what icy cold black metal's supposed to sound like." I play their 3 albums a lot all winter long, as long as it stays cold, but not so much in the summer. They're not terribly long albums so you can run all 3 in under two hours. They've been getting a workout of late.

3. Archgoat, Finland. What can I say about Archgoat? If I'm the Goatmaster General then these Finns are the Joint Fucking Chiefs. I believe over the last decade and a half they've truly and rightfully taken sole possession of the raw bestial black metal division belt from former title holders such as Blapsphemy, Beherit and Teitanblood. This type of primitive black metal is certainly not for everyone (but can you believe there are actually people who don't like this?!?) but Archgoat are the absolute pinnacle of what bands in this bestial black/death sub-genre should aspire to. Once I hear an Archgoat album I am overcome by the spirit of Lucifer and become physically unabe to resist playing a few more behind it. Funny, when the last few albums/ep's came out starting with The Luciferian Crown (2018) and even moreso with last year's Worship the Eternal Darkness, I remember being a bit upset at the time that the production was too clean, too tame, too sterile for a band like Archgoat. But after listening to them all several times each this past week they seem fine to me now. I guess I just got used to how they sound, but still I sometimes wonder what I was thinking. I can still hear the difference from these newer ones to the older ones, but it's not a problem for me anymore I guess is what I'm saying. But still, I know they'll never put out another Whore of Bethlehem (2006) which ironically has the lowest score on M-A (73%) of all their other albums. But that's just because among all the 100%'s and 95%'s there was a 50% and a 9% and a 5% which threw their average out of whack. Guess Archgoat is a love it or hate it proposition.

[RelentlessOblivion]

It’s been an eclectic week or so for me. So I guess the three albums I’ve played more then once:

Suffocation - Effigy of the Forgotten

Death - Human

Sinister - Cross the Styx

[AlSymerz]

For me the eclectic week was more like Helloween, Ugly Kid Joe and Brad Paisley

 

[agamerwholovesmetal]

bathory - self tittled

and justice for all - metallica

south of heaven - slayer

[RelentlessOblivion]

2 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

For me the eclectic week was more like Helloween, Ugly Kid Joe and Brad Paisley

 

I can’t consider anything to be my album of the week, if I haven’t listened to it more than once, but amongst those, there’s been a healthy dose of TON, Pink Floyd, Muddy Waters, Frank Zappa, and many more

[AlSymerz]

It's not often I listen to the same album twice in a week so if I had an AOTW it would usually only have one listen. It some times happens when an album is new but I prefer to mix it up listen to different stuff. Part of that is because I'm not yet part of the Spotify generation that just listens to play lists, I listen to stored music. Each car, the tractor and the truck all have their own USB sticks and the workshop has the pc connected to the server. So while I don't drive the wife's car that often I can feasibly listen to 3 different genres of bands before lunch depending on the jobs I've been doing. It's extremely rare that the same album comes on in any two places I listen to music.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

I guess I must have some type of undiagnosed obsessive/compulsive personality disorder thing where my brain just gets hung up on an album and I'll desire to listen to it again and again and again. I won't usually play an album more than once or maybe twice in a row, I'll force myself to mix things up and play something else when it finishes. But when I get stuck on something, which can be something new or something old, I can play it once or twice or thrice each day (not all back to back spins) for weeks on end til I get it out of my system.

When I was a kid and I'd get a new record, I'd usually pick out a favorite song or two off it, and I might play a favorite track probably 50 times in a row or more. Which was a hassle back then because I didn't have my own stereo in my room as a kid. I'd have to use the family stereo to tape records onto blank cassettes in the afternoons so I could listen to the tapes in my room in the evenings on my lo-fi Panasonic cassette player (exactly like the one shown) which I believe was originally designed to record people speaking, not for music playback. But this was the 70's, I was a budding teenaged metalhead music lover with not many resources and I had to make do as best I could. At least I finally got my hands on some wires when I was 15 or 16 so I could plug them in and record stuff directly through the output jack and not just have to let the music play through the open air and have to make everyone tip-toe around and be quiet while I was recording. Mom comes in and asks you a question or worse walks by and makes the needle jump, then you have no choice but to rewind your tape and start recording the song over from the begining again. My player didn't even have a numeric counter, so to play a song over and over I'd have to rewind it each time and blindly hunt around for the spot where the song began. Not like today when I can just double click on it again, or make a playlist of one song and have it play 5,000 times in a row if I was so inclined.

 

[AlSymerz]

I think we all have some sort of OCD but it manifests itself in different ways.  Back in the days of cassettes only I used to make tapes of my favourite songs so I didn't have to listen to whole albums. I also remember buying an album and listening to it time and time again until I wore it out. Not sure when that changed, possibly when I got more free time to listen to more music, I don't really know.

I was talking to my brother last night about music we'd been listening too and he's the sort of person who can't understand why I'd want physical albums, or to listen to one album from start to finish, or even to listen to bunch of bands in a particular order (alphabetical, chronological, whatever). He thinks the only way to listen to music is to put Spotify on the phone dial up a playlist and either listen through the car stereo or a portable speaker. I don't begrudge him his ways, but he can't see that my way suits me. Although given that one of the albums he recommend I listen to last night was the new FFDP album I can see why he's like he is.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, KillaKukumba said:

I think we all have some sort of OCD but it manifests itself in different ways.  Back in the days of cassettes only I used to make tapes of my favourite songs so I didn't have to listen to whole albums. I also remember buying an album and listening to it time and time again until I wore it out. Not sure when that changed, possibly when I got more free time to listen to more music, I don't really know.

I was talking to my brother last night about music we'd been listening too and he's the sort of person who can't understand why I'd want physical albums, or to listen to one album from start to finish, or even to listen to bunch of bands in a particular order (alphabetical, chronological, whatever). He thinks the only way to listen to music is to put Spotify on the phone dial up a playlist and either listen through the car stereo or a portable speaker. I don't begrudge him his ways, but he can't see that my way suits me. Although given that one of the albums he recommend I listen to last night was the new FFDP album I can see why he's like he is.

Having lived through the physical media exclusively era of the 70's, 80's and most of the 90's, and now at this point another 25 years of the digital music age, like your brother I must confess that I too do not understand this fascination with and attachment to physical albums that almost all of my metalhead friends still adhere to. They're just not needed anymore to listen to the music. For me personally convenience, speed of delivery, the fact that they don't take up any physical space, and most importantly price make digitally downloadable media the only sensible choice for my music. I do like to buy a lot of music and I love that I can get so much more digitally for what generally averages out to less than $6 a pop, as opposed to the exorbitant prices some of you dudes are willing to spend on CD's and vinyl. I can get 4 or 5 or even 6 albums digitally for what a lot of dudes will spend on just one LP. I can get 250 digital albums for less than what Navy spends on one metal cruise or one road trip to Houston. And I don't have to pay shipping charges or wait for some dude to pack shit up and drop it in the mail. I don't even have to drive down to the store. (if there even were still such things as record stores) I just click the Paypal button, download and tag the files, and then listen at will. I mean to each their own obviously, 'you do you' as they say, but shuffling these stupid discs around and having to store them all is just not remotely worth the trouble to me.

I don't do Spotify or premade dial-up playlists or Serious-XM or Pandora or anything like that. If I ever make a playlist it's my own creation from my own music library and I'll make them occasionally on the desktop computer for older bands that have a lot of albums as a way to get all their best tracks together in one place. But then I never remember to listen to these playlists again anyway after that first time. I do generally prefer to listen to whole albums and not just individual songs. I don't do the shuffle thing very often because I like to be more in control of what I'm hearing. But occasionally I will cherry pick a small handful of favorite songs usually from older legacy bands like Zeppelin or ZZ Top or Priest or Fate or Candlemass when I have the urge to hear them, but I don't necessarily want to have to commit to listening to an entire 35-45 minute album. I do like to have the music files so I can play them across devices without having to rely on an internet connection for streaming. I just don't need the old fashioned dust collecting discs they used to come on anymore, just gimme the files.

[AlSymerz]

I do both forms but they all get put on the server as digital files anyway. For a lot of albums digital is just so much easier to get in Australia. I can have it almost immediate, I don't have to stuff around with stores, or worse international shipping that takes weeks and costs way too much. But I still like physical media for some bands, more so bands that I've been collection since their first album.

One of the reasons I don't bother with Spotify type playlists is that we have so many black spots around here where mobile reception drops out it would make it difficult at times to listen. Even around the house we can loose mobile singal if we walk into the wrong room. For my brother he's rarely out of range for his phone, he both lives and works in a high signal area and for years he's had a company paid phone where data limits don't exist. I don't have a data limit now, but it's only in the last few years that has happened, so for me Spotify only gets used on the PC and not really enough for me to explore play lists.

 

[markm]

Crippled black phoenix-Banefyre

New country old road-Ants from Up There

Grimma/Frostsbitten

[GoatmasterGeneral]

I love this 3 albums of the week thread, I just forget to look for it.

Haven't been hunting for new shit too hard at all yet this year, it's only the last 2 weeks I've really started looking to see if anything good had come out this year yet and grabbing a few things.

Verminous Serpent - The Mailgn Covenant, Ireland. I've been playing the shit out of this one on Youtube the last few days and this morning I bought it. This is my front-runner for aoty so far, just can't stop going back to it.

 

Daemonlust - His Vast Coldness, Finland. Discovered this band just yesterday even though their new one has been out for a month now and already I can see them becoming my new obsession. Both of their albums are killer.

 

Disfear - Soul Scars, Swedish D-beat crust 1995. Had myself a little crust marathon for a few days earlier this week, and this one got the most plays I think, probably because I didn't have this particular album of theirs before this week.

 

Zoe - The Last Axe Beat, 2004 Japan. Another recent crust discovery, this EP is utterly fantastic. More musical than a lot of Japanese hardcore.

 

[DeathMetalBangers]

Cadaver-…In Pains(1992)

Creepmime-Chiaroscuro (1995)

Depravity-Evil Upeaval (2018)

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Parasitario - Everything Belongs to Death, friend of mine called these guys the Japanese Asphyx which I found amusing.

 

Upon the Altar - Absid ab Ordine Luminis, Polish black/death, new discovery just from last weekend that I can't seem to get enough of.

 

Sunken - Livslede, atmo-black Denmark 2020. Quite a departure from my usual diet of filth, but this album is amazing.

 

[agamerwholovesmetal]

Rigor mortis - rigor mortis

Cowboys from hell - pantera

And I return to nothingness - lorna shore

 

[MacabreEternal]

Djvel - Naa skrider natten sort (2022)

Finally dumped that shit band logo in favour of a more grown up looking one and this album feels like a real coming of age record also.  Love the dark cabaret aspect that subtly goes on in the background also here.  Strong release in contention for a vinyl purchase.

Drudkh - Microcosmos (2009)

Already adorning my vinyl shelves, Drudkh finest hour has seen a lot of air time this past week.  Never get tired of that metallic bass that "tanks" instead of "twangs", likewise the drum work here is subtle enough to let the rest of the instruments shine without needing to be entirely mixed out of the production.  Finally those soaring post-rock leads that hit like solar flares are the crowning glory here.  Fucking stupid folk switch out on track one is my only criticism - needed more thought guys.

Mork - Dypet (2023)

Drunken impulse vinyl purchase comes good and despite being unremarkable is solid and consistent enough to generate near 50 minutes of my attention.  The riffs are clean here (possibly too clean for some on a bm record) and as a result the album has a real heavy metal undertone to it which makes the transitions more accessible yet the album is slightly less catchy than Katedralen from a couple of years back

[agamerwholovesmetal]

1. symbolic (1995) - death

single handedly the best death metal album I have ever heard. it is a great mix of melodic and technical death metal with some of the best writing this band ever did.

2. sound of perseverance (1998) - death

a great send off for this band and its probably the most technical record they would ever release.

3. angel witch (1980) - angel witch

this is the best album released that year deal with it.

[RelentlessOblivion]

Re Death I personally rate Symbolic third-last of their discography, though it’s like choosing my favourite organ, I need them all.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

Re Death I personally rate Symbolic third-last of their discography, though it’s like choosing my favourite organ, I need them all.

I could be totally content living with just their first 3. Not that there aren't still some good songs on Human and Symbolic, but I could live without them. Speaking of organs, I look at SoP sort of like an appendix, it serves no critical functions.

[RelentlessOblivion]

That’s my personal favourite Death album, though I recognise, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum on anything progressive in metal.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

That’s my personal favourite Death album, though I recognise, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum on anything progressive in metal.

I know man, I just liked your organ analogy. 

[Skittler]

L7 - Bricks Are Heavy

Foxtails - Fawn

Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Two albums have dropped in the last week or two that I believe will be in the list conversation come January (for black metal fans anyway) and they've become daily spins.

 

Nattverd - I Helvetes Forakt, Norway. This one is feeling like top 3 material even considering the cringey thumbnail. A big step up for these guys on their 5th album (counting the EP as an album since it's 31 minutes) the songwritng here is exemplary.

 

Ondfødt - Det Österbottniska Mörkret, Finland. Even the modern digital homogenized production can't hold this one back. This one's top 10 material.

 

Concilium - Sky Bvrial, Chile. One of the leading contenders in this year's black/death space, this one's become a fixture in the rotation of late as well.

 

 

Canticum Diaboli - Ecce Pontifex Bonifatio. And there's this little EP from Italy. Without the 2.5 minute intro it's only 17 minutes of music so only like half an album basically, but it's a wonderful 17 minutes.