5 Albums I Missed in 2017

I was pretty pleased with the thoroughness with which I covered the output of metal in this blog’s first year last year, all other obstacles that popped up considered.

This year has already been better; I’ve covered more music and in more depth, and I’ve had less in my way this year it seems. I was trying to do this piece in a more extensive series, or just one monster post, around June. But metal had a substantially prolific mid-year and my own academic obligations of course reared their head again, so after pushing it out again and again, I decided to just trim it down to one regular post.

These are just a few albums from last year that I either didn’t hear or just didn’t didn’t get around to writing about.

Steel Panther - Lower the Bar

I was kinda-sorta planning on giving the album a listen. I had always respected Steel Panther for their commitment to their very comedic act of satirizing one of metal’s most widely acknowledged embarrassments (80′s hair metal), but I never really followed them too closely because I thought their act wouldn’t be around for long. And the repeated release delays their fourth album suffered from cast an unfavorable light upon it and led me away from it.

Buuuuuut, fast forward to this year and the band’s guitarist, Satchel, has the joke police knocking on his door for naming a guitar effects pedal the “Pussy Melter”, and simply out of principle for my not wanting to see comedy needlessly suffer, I decided to listen to Lower the Bar, with my expectations exactly where the album told me to place them. And honestly, I was pretty entertained throughout the course of the album. Yes, the subject matter is obviously juvenile, but that’s kind of the point: to take the piss at all the dumb hedonism and comically goofy masculine posturing that metal likes to not talk about having happened 30+ years ago. And the piss the band takes is an accurate, no-spray stream right into the bowl; the mockery they make of hair metal is clearly a loving one, a parody coming from fans, well aware of hair metal’s ridiculousness, of the groups who spearheaded the genre. The performances are tight from the glamorously narcissistic guitar solos to the glorious quasi-operatic vocal highs, and the consistently well-constructed lyrics that take the band’s light-hearted joking beyond toilet humor and middle-school-tier sex jokes and into a condensed comedic embodiment of all that was wrong, and all that was intoxicating at its time, with hair metal.

Adrenaline Mob - We the People

Post-Portnoy Adrenaline Mob still aren’t exactly hard rock or classic heavy metal heavyweights at this point, but We the People was an album whose strongest moments (“Til the Head Explodes”, “King of the Ring”, the indulgently heavy “Ignorance & Greed”, and the extremely Dio-esque “The Blind Leading the Blind”) have stuck with me since its undercooked political message left me with simply not enough I felt like I wanted to say about it. The band have MVP Russel Allen’s emphatic vocal presence to thank for what character this album does have, despite its basic and often writing (especially in its first half). I had seen so many people hail this as a stunning ascension from what their first two albums brought, but I honesty didn’t hear what was so special about this album, and I still don’t really. After the death of bassist David Zablidowsky, I just didn’t feel like detracting from what silver lining of critical praise the band could look to for comfort after losing Zablidowsky so tragically.

Venenum - Trance of Death

I arrived about a year late to this debut album’s party, and it was the first album that made me want to really make this piece, not because its a particularly ground-breaking piece, but because it fills the space it does so thoroughly. 

Trance of Death is a mostly blackened death metal project, but with its black metal influences coming largely from nihilistic ambient black metal and DSBM. Taking death metal into more depressive territories without diluting its power, Veneum debut with one of the most oddly ambient death metal pieces I have ever heard, and they make their appeal not simply on the tokenism or mild novelty of the sound. Trance of Death is magnificently written and complete with strangely eerie black metal ambiance that sounds more rooted in death metal grandiosity than psychological torment, readily armed with fierce riffs that jolt away from the dark serenity of, and even proggy pieces like the instrumental second installment and the sprawling third installment of the titular trilogy of songs that comprises the album’s second half. There exist even hints of doomy sludge at some moments on the album. It’s a perplexing, but thrilling listen, and I wish I had heard it sooner, because it has distracted me from many albums this year. 

This is the kind of debut most bands hoping to carve out their own niche hope to achieve, one that both presents their sound in a fascinating manner, but without expanding all their creativity and leaving plenty to be explored on what’s to come, which I will definitely be looking forward to.

Ne Obliviscaris - Urn

I had heard so much ranting and raving over Ne Obliviscaris in the years before this album, and I decided to see what all the hype was about earlier this year after seeing the accolades Urn had received. So when I heard what I thought was some pretty standard progressive metal with flashes of black metal on Urn, I had to figure out what I was missing, it had to be something.

After repeatedly not being convinced of its apparent genius I took a lot of time away from it and came back again earlier this year, ultimately to similar results. Not entirely as epic as it’s convinced it is, Urn is certainly not short of theatrical bombast and instrumental proficiency, but it throws all its ingredients in the same bowl at the same time and mashes everything together in a recognizably messy and undazzling soup of proggy bits and the death metal with a dry personality. It reminds me of Rivers of Nihil’s new album this year, minus the thrilling energy and the emotional diversity that helped a physical copy of that album into my collection. Urn is like the shy version of that album. The two-part song that leads the album exemplifies the album’s dilemma, reeling in hazy progressive death metal strangely droning and devoid of direction.

Bell Witch - Mirror Reaper

I wanted so badly to discuss this album when it came out, but October was a turbulent enough time for me last year, and being that Mirror Reaper was born out of and mournfully embodied the tragic loss of drummer Adrian Guerra, and in such a unique way, I had to give it time and even by the end of the year I hadn’t really found the word for it. And to a great degree I still don’t. It’s a slow and incredibly sorrowful album that doesn’t necessarily cultivate a type of patience while listening, but demands it. It’s a single 83-minute opus and one built of solidarity and fortitude in the face of grave tragedy. And in a fitting manner, its lyrics don’t gush tears theatrically or even turn Dylan Desmond’s focus inward. Its melancholy and its focus on the slowness of time that the music matches and the coldness that brings all to a frozen standstill of mournful petrification reveal an honesty in the approach to this album’s creative process and Dylan Desmond’s approach to Bell Witch’s present and future.

On one hand, I grappled with feeling like I was disrespecting this album by relegating it to this list, but on the other I wanted to express how much it’s come to mean to me now. The death of a bandmate is a traumatic moment for nearly every group that experiences it, but in a band of only two members, the casualty that leaves the other alone yields a different aftermath. I wasn’t really much of a Bell Witch fan before this album, but the strength with which it stood its ground in tribute to Guerra was something I couldn’t ignore and eventually became enraptured by. Having already been on the creative trajectory of focusing on mourning through funeral doom metal, having a close and personal real life experience of loss has certainly made Bell Witch’s already-somber dirges more gut-wrenching to the point of being uncomfortable. But the strength with which Mirror Reaper approaches such a close death, it’s impossible not to admire and I can’t say enough to do its solemn beauty justice.