Further dispatches from The Heavy Metal Yearbook, wherein Eric, of the Heavy Metal 101 podcast (https://anchor.fm/heavymetal101podcast), explores every nook and cranny of each year of heavy metal history, so that you can just sit back and enjoy the highlights:
So….How was your 2020? Mine was pretty fricking weird. I’m fairly certain yours was pretty fricking weird too, and hopefully just that. Strange and challenging times! 2020 may have deeply sucked in most measurable ways, but in heavy metal it somehow turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment of riches. Yes, it was awful that bands couldn’t tour, but we ended up with SO MANY fabulous albums! I’ve been deep diving into the metal of 2020 for a couple of months now, and it truly has begun to feel like a bottomless pit (in the best, most metal sort of way) of great, intense music. Strap yourself in. There were A LOT of damn fine metal albums in 2020, and this is gonna be a long one!
The first bunch of albums I’m going to discuss all worked as something like necessary heavy metal comfort food in trying times. We listened, banged our heads, and drank a toast to the end of the world. A perfect example was the fantastically titled 666 Goats Carry My Chariot by Belgium’s Bütcher, a fun-filled synthesis of nostalgia-tinged NWOTHM (that’s New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal to you and me) and excellent, memorable shit-kicking black and roll. Speaking of nostalgia, the prince of darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, managed to put out a very effective piece of delightfully accessible pop metal in 2020, despite being 50 years into his storied career, with the surprisingly solid Ordinary Man. Perhaps even more surprisingly, underground proto-power metal legends Cirith Ungol, who have been floating around quite nearly as long as Black Sabbath/Ozzy, released their first album since 1991, Forever Black. This was a really enjoyable release, and it is well worth a listen. One more great bit of party metal for the end times came from the always dependably awesome Kvelertak via Splid, an album which proved that even with a new vocalist and a new drummer Norway’s best party rockers would continue to absolutely slay.
There are a few more releases I’m going to put, kind of sort of, into this “comfort food” category which might seem like odd choices. I suppose most people don’t associate death metal and black metal with joy or as music to cozy up to. However, Ulthar’s Lovecraft-inspired black/death hybridization on Providence felt like just that. I found quite a lot of joy in listening to this album, which inspired fits of freaky dancing and big smiles. It’s all just such catchy, big-riffed, Immortal-esque greatness. A few more similarly “fun” albums that maybe weren’t meant to be fun, but still were: 1) My favorite Lamb of God to date, their utterly banging self-titled, 2) The best damn album of post-Cavalera Sepultura, the wildly varied, fascinating Quadra, 3) The delectably retro early 90’s-esque death metal of Skeletal Remains’ The Entombment of Chaos, and 4) The very contemporary, very cool death metal of Necrot’s Mortal. What can I say!? These albums all made me happy! I guess that this is my musical comfort food.
Now we start to get a bit darker, but mostly a lot weirder. Imperial Triumphant’s Alphaville might be a pretty damn dark album, but mostly it is really, really wacky. I don’t normally love my extreme metal to be jazz-tinged, but they do a particularly nice, heavy take on such things, so we’ll allow it. Brutal death metal, of course, tends mostly to be a very dark genre, but there’s something strangely catchy and…bright(?) about Afterbirth’s uniquely proggy take on brutal death on Four Dimensional Flesh, a fantasmically weird, great album. I’ll also mention the wonderously lovely, imaginative progressive metal of Haken’s Virus. This album sounds a lot like if Radiohead and Tool had a baby. Neat! Two of 2020’s other wildest metal releases included the schizophrenic, loopy delights of Igorrr’s genre-bending Spirituality and Distortion, and the dizzying eclecticism and often preposterous catchiness of Avatar’s Hunter Gatherer.
Sometimes, dark times just call for dark art. Sometimes we want to remember and to feel the feelings. Some of the very best metal of 2020, unsurprisingly, helped us to do just that. First, two dark releases for the more gothically inclined: 1) The great masters, Paradise Lost, offered up yet another beautifully sad slab of 2020-appropriate goth doom, Obsidian, another very strong entry into their incredible discography. 2) On the comparably younger end of the gothic doom spectrum, Arkansas’ finest dreary doomsters, Pallbearer, released their fourth album of achingly beautiful heavy metal heart break, Forgotten Days.
Of course, in difficult times us metalheads don’t always feel like being sad. Sometimes we just want to break everything. Primitive Man’s death-doom-sludge masterpiece Immersion is the aural equivalent thereof. It sounds sort of like the perfect aural accompaniment for a snuff film. Primitive Man is a relatively young band, all full of piss, vinegar, and rage. So, what’s Napalm Death’s excuse!? I don’t really know how they managed to sound quite so viscerally intense four decades into their storied career but damn it if Throws of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism isn’t possibly the best thing the band has ever done. It came perilously close to being my choice for the best metal album of the year.
But, alas, only one album could be the “best” metal release of (god damned) 2020. Among the darkest, ugliest, and, in its own unique way, most beautiful albums of 2020 came from those most fearsome extreme metal masters from down in New Zealand, Ulcerate. By combining a surprising amount of subtly beautiful melody within their swirling, visceral technical death/avant-garde/post metal stew, Stare into Death and Be Still was the perfect soundtrack for a world gone mad. It is my pick for the best metal album released in 2020.
For more fun-filled heavy metal chat, please do check out the Heavy Metal 101 podcast, available everywhere you like to listen! https://anchor.fm/heavymetal101podcast
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