Best metal of 2012

First, a disclaimer. I've only been a metalhead for about a year now, and I'm still developing my musical tasting and discovering new music. There's also no way I've been able to sit down and listen to every single metal album that has come out this year. All this means that what I have to say probably has very little merit to it. So feel free to completely throw my opinions out the window. Without further ado, here's some of the best metal of 2012:

An Autumn For Crippled Children - Only the Ocean Knows This is quickly becoming one of my favorite albums of recent memory, if only for the insanely beautiful bass sound (the rest of the music is equally as beautiful, I assure you). Bass guitar in metal is often overlooked and dulled down in the mix to the point where you can barely hear it. But on this album, it's as if the bass guitar is functioning as the lead guitar, which is unheard of in most metal (especially black metal). That aside, AAFCC (ridiculous name, I know) has managed to outdo Alcest with this shoegaze-style masterpiece. Phenomenal, breath-taking album.

Be'lakor - Of Breath and Bone Hands down, this is the best melodic death metal album I've ever heard. These Aussies have taken the '90s Gothenburg style of In Flames and At the Gates and perfected it into an hour of thunderous aggression. Every single track, every single note is flawless, unrelenting, and at the same time, a bit melancholy. There's a level of emotional depth (at least, to me) in the melodies that I'm not used to finding in music (metal or otherwise), and it's very moving. Given that this, their third album, is Be'lakor's best one yet, I can't wait to see if they can outdo themselves.

Pallbearer - Sorrow and Extinction I've recently discovered the wonderful world of doom metal: slow, heavy, boulders of music that slowly but powerfully bowl you over as you listen. Throw in some somber, sorrowful lyrics and you have the ingredients for a doom band. In their debut, Pallbearer executed all of those components successfully. Listening, you can't help but sink into the music, which slowly rolls over you, wave after wave and song after song. Damn those were some good metaphors.

Royal Thunder - CVI This band is one of my favorites, and they only have one full-length album to their name. Groovy, heavy, hypnotizing, and with a bit of Southern blues, this doom band from Georgia put out a great album, molding psychedelic influences with bluesy metal riffs that call back a bit of a retro feel. Mlny Parsonz, lead vocals, has a deep, haunting, and powerful voice that glide right along with the music. Imagine The Doors, but heavier and moodier, ready to guide you on your trip.

Woods of Ypres - Woods V: Grey Skies & Electric Light Hey look, more doom! But this time a bit of a different kind of doom: much more melodic and depressing. Pretty much every song is about how depressing life is, how meaningless living is, and how the narrator is ready and willing to die. Some sample song titles: "Death Is Not An Exit" "Kiss My Ashes (Goodbye)" and "Finality." Pretty unhappy stuff. (Fun fact: the lead vocalist died in a car accident shortly before the album was releases, which makes all the references to dying extra resounding). But that's only if the lyrics matter to you. On the other side of things, the rest of the music is faster and more melodic than other doom bands, which paints a very vivid soundscape. A good album to listen to when you're out while it's snowing.

Honorable mentions:

Ash Borer - Cold of Ages Atmospheric black metal of the Cascadian variety. Excellent full-length debut.

Oak Pantheon - From A Whisper Definitely inspired by Agalloch, this band incorporates acoustic, black, and post-metal into a great first album.

Skagos - Anarchic More atmospheric black metal, but this a bit more aligned with AAFCC. Band named after the island from A Song of Ice and Fire, which is rumored to have unicorns and cannibals. (Sadly, neither song is devoted to unicorns or cannibals).

The Sword - Apocryphon Yet more great stoner metal from the fearsome band. Some say they've lost their sound, but I disagree.

Sylosis - Monolith I'm not big onto modern thrash, but this album knocked my socks off.

So I listened to nothing but black metal for a week

Spent seven days giving "nothing but black metal november" a try, but there's simply too much out there to listen to that isn't black metal. (I also confused Opeth for Mastadon, a good sign I sufficiently soaked myself in corpse paint). HOWEVER, I would consider the past seven days a success for two reasons: I've expanded my music library to include some phenomenal new bands and I've really begun to appreciate black metal.

Reason the latter: Black metal may be the least accessible form of metal, if not one of the least accessible. It's taken me months and months to begin to appreciate it enough just to listen to an entire album. now i fucking love emperor, burzum, and deafheaven. I could listen to them for hours. Before, black metal was noise: fast, insanely distorted, without changes in dynamics, devoid of tri-tone riffs, blast beats, and with weird screechy vocals that had to be an octave higher than anything I normally listen to. But I swear by the time the seven days were up, there was a beauty to the intricacies of the arrangements. There are patterns to the guitar parts, the distortion delicately integrated, subtle changes in dynamics, the blast beats fit perfectly, and the vocals held a powerful meaning and symbolism I never knew of.

I rewatched the documentary "Until The Light Takes Us" in late october, and it rekindled my desire to get more into black metal. Before then (having not really given the film much thought the first time seen), it was a bizarre and irritating genre. It had some weird european history and was devoid of all other stylistic elements of metal. I've tried for months to get into it, going with a periodic brute force method. compared different eras. nothing. But then I gave "Hvis lyset tar oss" a listen after rewatching, and it all began to click. This wasn't just a couple guys mad at the world making music that was supposed to literally sound black. It was a very small, unique extreme counterculture movement, one that has roots in developing music of earlier eras (which I always find fun) and roots in social unrest.

These guys (the members of bands like Burzum, Immortal, Mayhem, Darkthrone) were deeply inspired by Bathory, Venom, and Mercyful Fate. they developed that into their own thing, deeply bathed in the social unrest that drove the scene. That unrest, at times, fueled a fundamentalist approach: church burnings, murders. Black wasn't just a genre, it was its own lifestyle. Most genres can't say that. The way black metal struck back at musical norms was also fueled by this unrest: the more lofi the recording, the bigger "fuck you" to the clean, expertly recorded and cut records that didn't question why clarity should be the norm. I feel this comes out in the music, especially in Burzum, Mayhem, and Darkthrone.

The dankness of "Filosofem" and "Under a Funeral Moon" suddenly make all the sense in the world. (I'm a big melodeath/folk metal fan, and we like crisp, clean mixes (see: Wintersun's "Time I")). The grueling wall of guitar noise and blast beats sounded instead like a violent cacophony, wanting to reach out and punch anything that hated it. The vocals had a melancholy quality to them, even within the underlying pent-up aggression. And that's just my revelation concerning '90s Norwegian black metal.

There are two waves of black metal in terms of rock history: the first wave (early 1980s Bathory and Venom), and the second wave (early 1990s Norwegian bands). There's a third wave developing right now in the U.S. Bands popping up incorporating post-rock/metal and shoegaze elements are growing. These guys are being inspired by the music of the '90s and reinterpreting it for themselves in the form of current U.S. black metal, and it's a kinda great result. These bands have locked in on the emotiveness of black metal, someone I never noticed before. There's a much different type of melancholy in this emerging wave, something very post-rocky a la every Sigur Ros song ever. What it is, I don't exactly know yet. and that's rather exciting. (But the answer is definitely not Liturgy's frontman's 'transcendental manifesto').

Reason the former (yup, I finally got there): I don't scroll through my music library and instantly skip over the various black metal bands. It legitimately used to feel as if I blocked them out completely, like they weren't there at all. Scrolling through my library now makes it look a whole lot more full. I have so much more to listen to now, and I can never have enough music to listen ton. I can unwind by putting on some black metal and letting it block out all the noise. I'm going to enjoy it while it still feels new.