Technical music has had a complicated and busy year in which death metal was pulled in three directions. Technical thrash flourished, bringing to mind the late ’80s and early ’90s heydays. Djent and instrumental metal had their best years ever. And, as they always seem to, the metalcore, deathcore, and brutal/slam subgenres coughed up a few quality albums as well. In this article, I’m going to examine each subgenre’s best album of the year and call attention to other high-quality efforts. The best album has a YouTube video embedded with it. After that will be a YouTube playlist with the other notable efforts. Trust me, they are playlists, so just use the next button in the video to skip between songs, or wait for a song to end, and the next one will start. If you want to choose a specific song, I’ve also included a link to the entire playlist. Enjoy!
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I mentioned the ways in which death metal was pulled, and one point in the death metal triangle was the old school death metal movement, comprised of bands that saw death metal’s future in death metal’s past. The old school wave was comprised of bands like Disma, Maim, Entrails, Mausoleum, and Gravehill. If a triangle could have opposite sides, the opposing side of old school metal would be technical and progressive death metal. The third point in the death metal triangle, the one which keeps the technical and old school movements from actually opposing each other, is plain old death metal. Azarath, Krisiun, Vader, and Exhumed all released brilliant albums that were a welcome alternative to billion BPM technicality and trudging murk.
As a listener, I see myself as sitting in the middle of death metal’s triangle, but I am always drawn towards its technical side. Origin has consistently released quality albums, but they really surprised everybody with 2008’s Antithesis. It was by far their best album due to the songwriting, and many fans, myself included, wondered if they could equal it, let alone top it. While in my opinion they didn’t top Antithesis, Origin managed to equal it with Entity. Describing the album is difficult. It had melodies, but the riffs did not ingratiate or beg for acceptance. The busy percussion, the velocity, and the guitar work’s technicality make the album a difficult listen. It rewards close attention, repeat listens, and demands to be accepted on its own terms. A recent trend with technical death metal has been to douse the music with melody. Decrepit Birth for example did it with Diminishing Between Worlds. Origin refused to follow that trend, and so Entity is both technical and brutal in the way Suffocation and Cryptopsy’s classic albums are.
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Origin – “Swarm”
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While Origin garnered most of the attention this year, another seven quality albums came out that received little to no attention. Each of these albums was nearly as good as Entity.
Archspire, All Shall Align – Catchy and technical in equal measures.
Burning at the Stake, Nefarious Campaign – Channels Man Must Die and Decapitated’s pre-Organic Hallucinosis albums.
Devolved, Oblivion – Californians by way of Australia. High speed, intense rhythm guitar work, a bit like old Decapitated’s palm muting patterns. Oozes passion.
Vile, Metamorphosis – Like Decrepit Birth and Deeds of Flesh, Vile (meta)morphed from focusing on brutality to focusing on melody. Not as technical as those bands, however.
Neuraxis, Asylon – A concept album about an alien invasion. Unlike Vile, Neuraxis became faster and more ferocious, though they still retained a lot of melody.
Faeces, Upstream – Catchy riffing and bouncy, lyrical bass work. Approximately the millionth obscure band that shouldn’t be unsigned.
Decapitated, Carnival is Forever – Forever the chameleons. Are they tech-death, or Vader clones? Adding Meshuggah to the mix expands the inquiry rather than answering it.
Best of 2011 Technical Death Metal Playlist
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The lack of attention towards tech-death’s great year is largely due to progressive death metal stealing the limelight in the metal media, and rightly so. Gorguts demoed new material, and their impending return is timely; their influence can be heard in many of this year’s best progressive death metal records. Ulcerate sat at the middle of the maelstrom, an appropriate position because of how The Destroyers of All sounds. It’s unlike anything else we’ve heard before, a swirling, churning blast. It’s claustrophobic, it’s angular, and it’s dissonant, but it never feels minimalist. Above all, it’s overwhelming and exhausting to listen to. It feels like a slow descent to nothing, like a head held in hands, like a catastrophic ending. No words can really do it justice, and no single song fully communicates the album’s whole. Listening to only this clip is a form of theft, and so you’re advised to give the entire record a few spins. Even if you don’t like it, it’ll affect you.
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Ulcerate – “Dead Oceans”
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Progressive death metal isn’t only about dissonance and angularity. Prog death got its start with bands like Atheist, Pestilence, and Death, bands that incorporated jazz, intricate melodies and whatever else they felt like utilizing. In that sense, Obscura’s Omnivium was the equal of Destroyers. There is life and breath in the album’s melodies. It feels natural rather than rigid or percussive. Frankly, its got quite a bit of groove, but it’s subtle and sophisticated groove. Above all else, it is neither tedious nor masturbatory. The contrast between Destroyers and Omnivium is startling. Zen is sometimes said to mean the ability to either flow around something, or to simply flow over it. Omnivium flows around the listener. Destroyers on the other hand is quite content to run right over us as it buries us in the depths.
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Obscura – “Ocean Gateways”
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In all honesty, The Destroyers of All and many of this year’s best progressive death metal records are barely death metal at all. I still think of them as death metal though. To me, death metal is the genre most capable of accepting outside influences without losing its essential character. The playlist below is designed to mix the melodic bands with the dissonant, angular bands so as to prevent listener exhaustion.
Gigan, Quasi-Hallucinogenic Sonic Landscapes – Unsettling, hostile and psychedelic. Blast furnace intensity. Oh, and it was odd . . . can’t forget that.
Baring Teeth, Atrophy – A loving homage to Obscura, and the closest thing to that legendary record without being a mutation of it.
Pyrrhon, An Excellent Servant but a Terrible Master – Sounds like a mixture of recent Immolation and From Wisdom to Hate. It doesn’t feel all that heavy somehow, but it grinds on the listener, pushing downward like The Destroyers of All does.
Flourishing, The Sum of All Fossils – The strangest of this strange bunch of albums. A swirl of every conceivable strain of death metal with many non-metallic elements mixed in. The Destroyers of All drags us down, and Fossils is what’s waiting at the bottom.
Best of 2011 Progressive Death Metal Playlist
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If technical death metal’s best efforts flew under the radar, then technical thrash’s best efforts stood out on the radar like a 747. Revocation’s Chaos of Forms saw the band’s sound evolving. It was still technical, fast, and complex but was also more fluid and melodic. I sometimes feel like modern thrash and death metal bands play guitar leads, but not guitar solos. In other words, the music lacks those soaring, guitar hero moments, the pieces of playing that seem to stop time and space until they conclude. Revocation is one of the few bands that practices the art of the guitar solo. Chaos of Forms is so natural and so effortless that it feels freakish to mere mortals.
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Revocation – “Chaos of Forms”
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Vektor, Outer Isolation – A total blur, spinning listeners’ heads in circles. Many modern bands have identities, but not unique voices. Vektor has a unique voice- something like Voivod if Voivod were making everything as complicated as possible.
Exmortus, Beyond the Fall of Time – Featured some of the finest soloing in all of metal, but married it to riffs that would do any ’80s thrash band proud.
Transgression, Cynic Verses – These guys have been around for a while, but have never received much attention. This is tech-thrash, but it incorporates some death metal elements.
Best of 2011 Technical Thrash Playlist
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If all the grunting, growling and screaming that accompanied the bands above didn’t agree with a listener, there was a wealth of quality instrumental music this year. First and foremost was a Blotted Science EP, The Animation of Entomology. The album’s title is perfect. The riffs have a buzzing, insectile quality, totally unique in metal’s history. Like any Ron Jarzombek joint, it was highly technical and thoroughly weird. Jarzombek came up with a 12-tone system based on groups of notes that correspond with the times on a clock’s face. It’s unique, and you really need to see his YouTube video to understand it. Because Animation was an EP, I’m going to also call out Mystic’s Grace as co-winner of instrumental album of the year. Mystic is so unknown that they don’t have a metal-archives page yet. A bandcamp page is the totality of their web presence, and I hope they remedy that soon. Like Animation, Grace is aptly named. The band brought jazz, metal, and fusion together to form a complex and liquid whole. If Omnivium lacked edges or rough surfaces, then Grace is a perfect musical sphere.
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Blotted Science – “Cretaceous Chasm”
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Mystic – “(Not Of) This World Pt. 1: Amartias”
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If 2011 was the year of progressive death metal, it was also the year of instrumental metal. My list of good instrumental metal more than doubled this year. Keelhaul and Karma to Burn finally have good company.
Christian Müenzner, Timewarp – Obscura’s guitarist wasn’t satisfied with releasing just one album, so he cut an instrumental album, too. It’s damned near as good as Omnivium.
Scale the Summit, The Collective – Their third full length and confirmation that they are still the most listenable instrumental band in heavy metal, except of course for Mystic.
Piotrek Gruska, Cosmogenesis – nearly as good and listenable as Scale the Summit’s The Collective. Spacey ambience, stellar themes, and stellar quality.
Animals as Leaders, Weightless – A slow retreat from djent. Not as heavy or intense as its predecessor but catchier while still remaining impressively technical. Better sound and a real drummer helped immensely.
Cloudkicker, Let Yourself Be Huge – A headlong retreat from djent! Gorgeous, melodic, and relaxing. Very little metallic content at all, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Paul Wardingham, Assimilate Regenerate – Djent and melodeath riffing. Ludicrous soloing. Clinical, captivating, and narrowly edged out by Blotted Science and Mystic.
Keith Merrow, Awaken the Stone King – Not as dedicated to chugging as Assimilate, and the guitar leads aren’t quite as complex, making it an easier but equally worthy listen.
Best of 2011 Instrumental Death Playlist
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I’ve been working in the D word, and so it’s time it’s time to talk about djent and the other iconoclastic subgenres, metalcore and deathcore. Born of Osiris stunned everybody by changing from deathcore also-rans to deathcore giants with The Discovery. Breakdowns used to be means to an end within hardcore and metal, rather than the entirety of a song. Deathcore happened and that all changed. The Discovery has breakdowns, but it wasn’t all breakdowns. It was riffs and melodies cut with breakdowns, not the other way around. It had the herky-jerky grooves that define -core bands, but it also had synths, keyboards, and ambience. A piece of criticism I’ve heard about metal is that a metal album is often the same elements combined and recombined with the expectation that the message will be different. The criticism is largely true, except for the part about the message differing (the criticism also doesn’t address quality either). Every now and then, an album will happen that defies the criticism’s root concept. The Discovery is one of those albums. Along with All Shall Perish’s Awaken the Dreamers, The Discovery will go down in history as one of those albums that transcends genre tropes.
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Born of Osiris– “Recreate”
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Djent might be a trend that will soon die, or it might be a subgenre that is here to stay. Either way, it’s interesting, and it had a banner year. As a genre, metalcore has been steadily evolving from its thuggish, brutal roots, while deathcore continues to separate itself into two categories: mosh junk and art. This year showed those trends continuing.
Circles, The Compass – Features beautiful singing over equally heavy riffing. Really, I mean that: the singing is beautiful.
The Human Abstract, Digital Veil – Catchy songwriting and huge vocal hooks? Not surprising in the least.
Last Chance to Reason, Level 2 – A concept album. Like The Discovery, it combines everything from synths and clean vocals to jazz and downtuned riffing into a masterpiece.
Textures, Dualism – Their most melodic album yet. They are prodjenitors, but they are also slowly backing away from their old djent sound and identity.
Uneven Structures, Februus – Feels almost like a metalcore album in the way that it jumps from brutality to melody and back. The band put a lot of time, effort and thought into this, and it shows.
Vildhjarta, Måsstaden – Djent’s core principle is that melding Meshuggah and melody will yield interesting results. Måsstaden rarely bothers with melody, but sells itself on heavy chugging and catchy rhythms.
TesseracT, One – They survived a change of vocalist, and One lived up to all the promise of the preceding EP, Concealing Fate. More melodic and less intense than any of the other bands on this list, and yet somehow…cold.
Best of 2011 Djent Death and Other Subgenres Playlist
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Back in the day, Suffocation were brutal and technical, so no discussion of this year’s technicality would be complete without some brutality. Benighted’s Asylum Cave had a nonsensical title but was easily their best album yet. Brutal death metal has a tough task in attracting listeners. Tech death and prog death garner fans amongst music nerds who are drawn to complicated, technically inclined music. A band like Benighted has no such draw. They exist to assault, crush, and destroy, and they make no concessions to listener comfort. Despite all the hurdles in their path, Benighted managed to craft an album with actual hooks. Be warned, though, because Asylum Cave does have pig squeals and bree-bree vocals. But also be warned that this album has the year’s best vocal hook for all of death metal: “Let the blood spill . . . between my broken teeeeee…eeeeth!”
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Benighted – “Let the Blood Spill Between My Broken Teeth”
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Disfiguring the Goddess, Circle of Nine – Slammed its way into my heart with low vocals and lower guitars. This album has one audio frequency, and it’s down in the basement.
Abacinate, Genesis – Terrible cover art but brilliant riffing, and it was a great send-off for their recently deceased vocalist, Jason Sica. Largely brutal death metal, but there are deathcore, slam, and technical elements in play.
Monumental Torment, Elemental Chaos – Their debut, and a catchy mix of tech, slam and old-fashioned brutality.
Syphilic, A Composition of Murder – And a solid composition it was. Catchy and sickening. This band is on such a roll.
Best of 2011 Brutal Death Playlist
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Josef Stalin once said that quantity had a quality all its own. Well, 2011 offered technical music in both quantity and quality, including a few classics. Just think about it: people will still be talking about Chaos of Forms and Outer Isolation a decade from now. Ulcerate’s Destroyers of All is going to go down as a classic, and Omnivium might as well. The Discovery and many of the djent albums, both instrumental and with vocals, will also go down as classics, at least within their respective genres. Technical music is all about discovering what the mind and body can do. Set aside your preconceptions, put a little effort into, and you’ll surely find something in the playlists above that will challenge and expand your mind.
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The title of this article had me excited, until I realized this post is all about the worst aspects of Death Metal (stuff that has a chance of showing up in Guitar World). Hope you guys do something about the actually good stuff from 2011 (Autopsy, Lantern, Morbus Chron, Necros Christos, Execration, Disma, Vallenfyre, Cianide, Cruciamentum, Krypts, etc.).
It seems there was an editorial error somewhere along the line, and the piece RSJ pitched (and wrote), “The Year in Tech-Death,” was renamed, “The Year in Death.” Absolutely a blunder on the part of those of us who edit and lay out this work, not the fault of the author. RSJ’s intention all along was to focus on technical death metal, progressive death metal, djent and so on. FWIW, as far as I know, he doesn’t even like Morbus Chron.
So I’m apologizing here to Richard for misrepresenting his work, and to you guys, for promising something we did not deliver (nor intend to deliver). I have amended the title of the piece, but the artwork will stand as-is: a permanent testament to the fallibility of our editorial process.
You may think of this as our “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment. (Or for the truly HARDCORE music journalism nerds here, our “Dewey Defeats Truman, Motherfuckers!” moment.)
Alright. But really though, no intention to have an article talk about Autopsy & Morbus Chron?
Thanks, Mike. In all fairness I think I submitted my copy with some throwaway or bad draft title, rather than a full one!
Thanks for pointing that out. You’re fired!
Just to say that I commented very soon after it was posted (as far as I can tell) and it was called “The Year In Tech Death” right from the offset in the actual article title, just not in the image. That’s why I’ve been a bit confused about all the bitching.
I enjoyed it. There’s a real trend for people to dismiss anything “technical” as not “tr00″ death metal these days, and while much of it can be like that, it’s obvious that the very best of the more technically inclined bands are death metal through and through, just aiming to push their own technical abilities as far as possible.
” To me, death metal is the genre most capable of accepting outside influences without losing its essential character.”
I’m not disagreeing with you on this (ok, I am a bit), but this is exactly how I feel about black metal.
I agree with your last statement. I think it’s been pretty well proven Black Metal is the most amorphous Metal sub-genre. I think in part it’s because it’s main identification is from attitude/philosophy and less so musical parameters.
All this djent shit will be gone in a year, two tops.
+1
Just an FYI, djent is generally thought to have existed since 2003. So I disagree that it will be gone, but rather that the coverage and attention will die down. Nobody called it djent back in 2k3. People said the same thing about metalcore, and that’s not gone at all.
Ack, that was me as Onward. Old name from before I posted. Also, Kids, what don’t you like about djent? I’m curious because I hear a lot of ‘fuck this djent, robble robble’ but no real explanation. Also, what do you think of post-Chaosphere Meshuggah? Because that’s intrinsically tied to djent.
I have a good friend who gravitates toward djent stuff and he loves sitting at his computer “composing” his own material by himself. he’s pretty OCD in general. that’s how I see everything that follows in the wake of Meshuggah (whom I love): just really watered down, essentially (as in, it’s very “essence”) formulaic and, more often than not, extraordinarily cheesy; lots of highly-capable guitarwork and little else to capture my interest. in general it feels “hollow” and “passive” in its energy/attack. it’s, debatably, the subgenre least able to incorporate other various elements.
I’m just a little confused. The title doesn’t really fit the article, and the article lacks any kind of central focus. You pay lip service to the idea that this is supposed to be about death metal, but then you don’t provide the best of OSDM or “plain old” death metal, and you throw in several genres that don’t belong.
Also, the only 2011 album associated with Osiris I want to hear is Lord Vicar’s Signs of Osiris.
“To me, death metal is the genre most capable of accepting outside influences without losing its essential character.”
I’m not sure whether I agree with this statement. Black metal has lost its essential character in some ways, or more specifically some things labeled as black metal don’t share that essential character. But I don’t think death metal is terribly “capable of accepting outside influences”. It’s a pretty restrictive formula, which is why you see so much more variety in highly-flexible black metal.
Seriously, it would be embarrassing to call any of the bands mentioned by the author as the best DEATH Metal of 2011. If there’s no article coming up about OSDM or just freaking DEATH Metal, then FAIL for IO.
Don’t worry, we’ll be publishing our top ten shameless Incantation-clone albums tomorrow!
So you’ll be listing Disma ten times over?
For some reason I missed the “tech” part of the title, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected OSDM or regular death here. Still, the rest of my comment stands.
You didn’t miss it. It just got edited. I SWEAR I read it a couple hours back as just Death.
See my response above. The title was indeed edited, by me, because it was mislabeled somewhere along the editorial chain. My apologies again.
FMA, and @Andy Synn, I don’t want to kick off discussion on ‘what is black metal’, but from my perspective, black metal is 1) a certain sound 2) that is intrinsically linked to invoking or communicating a limited subset of emotions. So while I really like Oranssi Pazuzu, recent Enslaved, etc. I don’t see it as black metal because of #2, not is that a problem for me.
Death metal on the other hand (to me) is the intent to take generally accepted metal techniques like double bass, blast beats, guttral vox, etc. and be as extreme as possible while primarily using guitar, bass, and drums. That to me is how Cynic, Atheist, Theory in Practice, Entombed, Incantation, Death, and Ulcerate can be lumped into the same general genre. Before somebody calls me out, I exclude djent and deathcore because breakdowns came from hardcore.
Yet brutal death (beginning with the incomparable Suffocation) has its “slams”, which is really just another word for “breakdowns”. The difference is not so obvious as “[has/doesn't have] breakdowns”.
wow, trooness is invading DM, god help us… So, according to the wolf, brutal and prog bands like Suffo and Death are not death. All hail stagnation and old-school copycat-ing. Now that’s a #fail.
Trueness seeps into any discussion that involves a genre that has been crossed with anything associated with punk or hardcore. There was a True Death Metal tour in I think 2010, bands like Gravehill. Some of the comments were of a similar sentiment as yours.
I’ve always hated Suffocation, except for their first ep. As for Death, the first three albums weren’t Prog/Tech and 2nd everything after that was TASTEFUL, like an Iron Maiden album. The stuff above is like the Dream Theater of Death Metal (puke!).
Well look at that. The title of the article got changed to Tech-Death. Alright, I’ll end my complaints. It obviously was recognized.
I’m confused by the whole triangle thing. You started out talking about all these different directions DM was being pulled, but as far as I can tell, the rest of the article focused on only one of the triangle’s vertices. Was that the intent? Did I misunderstand something?
Good article! Nuff’ said.
Interesting read even though it did not include reference to Spearhead’s amazing “Theomachia” album…glad to see Gigan and Baring Teeth get mentioned…both of those albums killed.
I hadn’t seen any reviews of Spearhead, but I intend to check that album out!
Give ‘em a spin…they are (old) Morbid Angel-influenced w/ traces of black metal thrown in for good measure…their vocalist is distinct by death metal standards.
Every day when I go to read whatever this quite well put together website has to offer me, I notice the same few people constantly bitching about the most absurd and trifling points of technicality – the gross blunders of the Invisible Oranges editorial and authorial staff!
Fie! You sinners and schismatics! How dare you make a claim that is open to argument? How dare you make… (FUCK!?) a mistake?
Seriously, this website rules and does not deserve the bitch bitch bitching that it constantly gets… In the words of my favorite bartender: “If you don’t like it here, fuck off!”
My sentiments exactly. Go read blabbermouth or something. Stop this trifle bitching.
surprised to see no mention of bands like Antediluvian and Mitochondrion. Sure, they’re brutal and raw, but still very technical.
Ah. Apologies, while I was typing my response, a whole slew of other comments went up that I missed. I need to learn to use this android keyboard quicker. And spend less time pretending to work, more time concentrating on my internet activities.
LOL @internet activities. Gotta keep our priorities straight! Offtopic but after my current contract expires, I’ll never use a touchscreen again unless forced to do so.
Last time I listened to Messhuggah was 2002. They did absolutely nothing for me then. Haven’t bothered paying attention to them since.
@RSJ – my dislike of djent is largely just personal preference, as I find Meshuggah painfully boring and monotonous to listen to… I can’t understand why “the kids” became so obsessed with that sound and style. It just seems like a fad to me.
I want a picture of that triangle!
Where’s K. Ann??? If I hadn’t just been fired, I would give her $5 and a Limp Bizkit CD to make that happen.
If I had any skillz, I would just photoshop Chuck Schuldiner at each corner in front of the cover of the appropriate Death album.
You’ve been re-hired*. I just can’t stay mad at you, ya big lug!
(*In the interim, your salary was adjusted and reduced by 15 percent.)
The “brutal death” part was horrendous. Sorry guys but ewww, those were all terrible choices. Disfiguring the Goddess is the second most meh-tastic brutal band, seconded only by every Mark Rawls project. For some decent ideas about brutal death metal check here http://slam-minded.blogspot.com/ I can’t believe you put in Syphilic and didn’t mention Putridity. Ouch.
That blog is amazing. Thank you SO much for linking to it.
Yeah, really. Condemned wipes the floor with all those bands. Kudos on mentioning Slam Minded too, one of the few blogs to treat bdm seriously.
I love lists and checking out new bands — lots of effort here. Flourishing seems amazing. Thanks a lot!
Andy I don’t mean to argue with you, but the title did say ‘death’, at least in the moble version.
I wouldn’t have clicked through to read something that said ‘tech’.
No worries at all, clearly something very confusing went on as I was essentially expecting the first of a series of columns on “The Year In Death”:
1 (this) being “tech” type stuff, then I assumed there would be an old-school, a prog, maybe even a deathcore one if they were feeling particularly fruity.#
Hence I myself was pretty confused by the fact that the scope of the piece was surpsisingly wide.
Has anything in this genre been really amazing since Cryptopsy’s “None So Vile”…? That’s The Brothers Karamazov of this style; it hasn’t been topped.
Mitochondrion is amazing but I’m not sure I’d call them tech death.
No mention of Beyond Creation? Easily some of the best modern tech-death of the year. And the new Gorod EP should have warranted a mention solely on the strength of the title track.
What the…? Somehow in between edits I deleted Beyond Creation and Alarum! GAH! Look at the youtube playlist for prog death – they’re totally in there.
As for Gorod, that didn’t do anything for me.
FUCK YEAH! BURNING AT THE STAKE! SICK AS FUCK! Totally stoked for these guys. THEY DESERVE MORE!!!
I thought the YouTube playlists added a TON. Nicely done. Despite the semantics mentioned above, etc, I feel like I stumbled across some stuff I otherwise would never have known about… stuff I may end up liking quite a bit. The Baring Teeth and Exmortus, in particular, were very nice. I also didn’t know Christian from Obscura had released a solo-album, which I will definitely check out. Vektor has been a favorite since their debut and it was nice to see them get some love… I felt that they were criminally under-repped on year end lists, possibly because of their later date of release. Finally, though not something I would normally listen to very much, that Scale the Summit video with the dual-frame fretwork was mesmerizing. Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but the term “transfixed” applies. Thanks for putting all the effort into making it easy for us to check out some good, new stuff. IO did / is doing a great job herding the cats of 2011.
‘carnival is forever’ is my personal favorite for 2011. what a riff-fest and what an outlook on records to come once this all new band has gelled touring and playing together.
Thanks for these rundowns. Who can keep up anymore? Is it just me, or is there a strong Coroner influence creeping into Decapitated’s music? Listen to Vogg’s solos and some of the arrangements (like when the rhythm guitar drops out) tell me you don’t hear Tommy T Baron in there.
By the way, the group with the album ‘Cynic Verses’ listed as ‘Transgression’ should be ‘Last Transgression’
Wow you are absolutely right this has been a great year for Metal. Although these are some difficult economic times bands are still taking the time to produce quality music. Metal as a whole has been constantly stereotyped and dismissed as being uncreative and a disturbing factor to society I beg to differ!! Metal has helped me from a very early age in my life and it is some much more complex and dynamic than people give it credit for. It’s always great to see bands dig out of the shell of what Metal is usually always associated with and the cliches around it’s sound and culture!!!!!!!