Happy Metal Boy

Okay, so I’m feeling like a real numskull for this one here, not for missing out on talking about these albums in the first place last year, but because I already did a piece about albums I missed last year, and somehow completely forgot to include some of the albums I’m going to talk about here. Some of these I found out about this year and am giving my belated thoughts on because I think they deserve it. But some of these… I was just sterpid, and forgot to talk about them in the post I ALREADY DID about albums I forgot to talk about. Anyway! Here we go, ten more albums I missed in 2017. Arckanum  -  Den Förstfödde This was one of the albums that made me originally want to make the first installment of posts on albums I missed last year, but in my infinite idiocy, I somehow left it out. And since Arckanum’s mastermind, Johan Lahger, has now retired the project this year to focus on his writing career, I definitely wanted to talk about his last album under the Arck...

Last, but definitely not least in this series of non-metal albums to come out in 2018, I have to give it to Denzel Curry for undoubtedly my favorite hip hop album of the year. Hip hop has been moving in such an odd direction over the past few years, with so many artists focused more on the hardness of the sound of their beats than anything else. We’ve had our first wave of Soundcloud rappers coming up with some harder, underground production, but we’ve also had the fucking Lil rappers like Lil Skies, Lil Yachty, etc. doing so lil lyrically and turning the genre into a hype-off. And then this year we had the most relentless wave of sad rap with guys like Lil Uzi Vert and of course Post Malone making a pretty big mark on the year with his new album. We had a man named Juice Wrld actually making it big this year, along with the release of the long-dreaded debut full-length from Lil Xan. And of course while all this was going on, the world could not keep its eyes and ears off the tactle...

The second jazz album in this little series, this time the monster double-album+EP by Kamasi Wahsington and company:  Heaven and Earth . I mentioned in my little piece about the Sons of Kemet album this year that my taste in jazz kind of follows a natural trajectory based on my overwhelming love for metal, and while I was beginning to enjoy jazz in general a lot more after learning it was more than just elevator bullshit, I would say Kamasi Washington was the the guy that helped me get much more into it, specifically with his similarly monolithic 2015 album,  The Epic . What grabbed me with that album was not just the energy or the talent of the musicians involved, but how the smart compositions and the sheer, relentless freedom with which the band played somehow didn’t contradict one another, which is the sign of a both cohesive and well-led band. And while everyone on that album plays phenomenally, it is the main sax man himself who often grabs the spotlight with his vibr...

Not only did I not expect another Father John Misty project this year after his bloated full-length,  Pure Comedy , last year, I didn’t expect it to be such a nicely balanced and enjoyable effort.  Pure Comedy  was a weird one for me that I didn’t enjoy the first time I listened to it, but one that I did garner some appreciation for after a few more tries. It, however, tired on me rather quickly after my peak of enjoyment for it with so little instrumental substance and indulgent lyricism, I even began to lose sight of why I liked it at all. I get that an album with a concept as vast as  Pure Comedy ’s was it would of course be a gargantuan task to tackle, but I think it was one of those projects that sounded really good to Josh Tillman on paper, but didn’t really connect all that well on the musical front, the sparseness of which certainly provided less than adequate flattery. This unexpected release however, like the Vince Staples project I also wrote about earl...

The brief album/project  FM!  was one of the year’s many short-notice hip hop releases, that I and many others were surprised to find to be Vince Staples’ best work so far. His full-length effort last year,  Big Fish Theory , had some serious bangers across its track list, but it was a bit inconsistent, dry, and Vince wasn’t really as dominant of a presence behind the microphone when mellower production required him to be, save perhaps for the excellent lead single, “Big Fish”. It’s been good seeing Vince getting more spotlight these days (even if it did come partially as a result of a pearl-clutching mother’s heartbroken reaction to his song, “Norf Norf”), because even as inconsistent as he is both lyrically and from a performative standpoint, I think his blunt honesty about his unique perspectives is beneficial to hip hop and the people listening to it. Vince’s openness and unhindered expression of his thoughts is of course a bit of a double-edged sword, as he w...

I enjoyed doing this little series of posts last year about non-metal albums I enjoyed listening to, and I really wanted to do it again this year. And while a series of delays and breaks has pushed it back, I’m still going to try to do it this year, although they will likely be shorter this year because I still have a few metal albums to discuss before the year ends, as well as much longer year-summary best-of/worst-of lists. I was very focused on my metal this year and it was much harder to decide which five other albums I should talk about this year, but I figured a good place to start would be with my favorite non-metal project of the year:  Your Queen Is a Reptile  by the British band Sons of Kemet. All other genres do take a very distant second place to my main musical love of metal, so my lesser immersion into them individually compared to those who revere them as their favorite is something I of course acknowledge, but this is definitely one of the most interesting...

Ending this year of individual album discussions on a positive note, I’m giving my due respects to Chicago’s own Harm’s Way, a band Jacob Bannon has taken under the wing of his Deathwish Inc. label and given the proper spotlight. The band took their time after 2015′s dual releases to hone their sound and come back only more punishing than before after the break. The time since their previous effort has seen a previously unshed light grace their metallic hardcore style through the meteoric rise of Code Orange last year, a genre with the kind of cool head that (ideally) should operate just as if there wasn’t the pressure of increased visibility upon it, and Harm’s Way bring forth a convincing slab of muscular metalcore to slam onto the offering table of this new era of metallic hardcore. In most ways, Posthuman is Harm’s Way as confident in their own stylings as they’ve ever been, embodying the resolve of the genre exquisitely, but in a few ways, it is also a subtle update that keeps th...

I haven’t been keeping track of Venom for a good while now, but I know they went through some sort of fracture or split of some sort that has now produced two incarnations of the band: Venom, with Cronos, and Venom Inc. with Tony Dolan and Jeff Dunn. When I saw that Venom had a new album slated for the end of the year, I figured I’d give it a shot, and I also figured that I may as well do my homework and check out what the other head of the proto-trash hydra had created last year. Venom Inc.’s album was undoubtedly flawed, but I was pleasantly surprised with the energy and the groove the supposed B-team brought to the table. The album needed some trimming and some more imaginative songwriting, but it at least made an attempt to modernize the long-prototypic sound the band had been playing with and showed some potential for future improvement (if things go rather ideally). I hadn’t listened to a full Venom album past  Possessed , getting only unconvincing snippets from their pr...

I had no idea Carnifex had a new EP in the works, but by chance I have been listening to them a lot during my exercise lately (their 2016 album,  Slow Death , especially), so this EP that dropped this Friday ended up being quite a timely surprise for me. It’s a pretty minor, 4-track release from them, we get one original song (the titular track), a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole”, a cover of Slipknot’s “The Heretic Anthem”, and a Gost-remixed version of their Nine Inch Nails cover. The EP starts with the band’s original song “Bury Me in Blasphemy”, a pretty standard cut for the band at this point in their evolution, much like something that might have showed up on  Slow Death . I like the main groove and the big riff that rounds the song off in tandem with a string section. Well-mixed, well-supplemented with what what sound like synthetic strings and even horns at some points, and sufficiently brutal, it’s a satisfying little bonus addition to ...