Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 02:18:58 PM

Login with username, password and session length

2021's been a fucking great year for metal

Started by The Mollusk, October 17, 2021, 06:46:23 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dirty Boy

Damn, i've gone from struggling to find new stuff to listen to to bookmarking months worth of shit. New Deerhoof and Vanishing Twin albums just dropped as well.

Agreed about the ERR & Thou, really enjoyed that. Don't know the others so will investigate when i get a minute.

Sludge heavy hitters Mastiff have a new one out which i haven't heard yet, but Plague from 2019 sounds fucking furious (turns out they're from HellHull which might explain it).

Oh, and The Sciences is a bloody great album!

The Mollusk

The Mastiff album is really good. It's also got an Athletico Mince reference as a song title, bonus!

The Mollusk

Ahh fwaaack I just realised I still haven't listened to the new Lingua Ignota album!

The Mollusk

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on October 19, 2021, 05:01:39 PM
Darkthrone's latest

I've not really followed the band at all through their various incarnations of hardcore punk, heavy metal etc., but I fuckin love the early stuff to bits. A key defining point in my adolescence and also seems in tune with my dismal attention span, where I got into the nu-metal that all my mates were listening to but quickly got bored of the same few albums and very quickly started looking everywhere else. Discovering this band and Emperor when I was about 16 was crucially important to me.

Anyway! Just had a spin of this new album. It's quite good, but I have my reservations. I think the evil freezing cold squall of their early stuff and the repetition of it is really what allows you to forgive the production value and very quickly accept it as part of the aesthetic, whereas here when they take on a slower approach to their trademark sound and give the tracks more room to breathe, there's too much exposed. Listening to the early 90s black metal stuff, I can't picture anything but desolation, but listening to this album I can very clearly see two blokes in a room recording it. It sounds thin, there's little to no embellishment on the majority of it and resultantly the tracks often sound more like demo versions.

It's not a bad album, though. It certainly gets better as it goes along, with the last 3 tracks being the strongest. The spooky outro that closes the album is great, and really highlights one of the key strengths of the band: they're frequently able to charm you with their primitive approach to songcraft to the point where something as cheesy as this synth section sounds quintessentially Darkthrone and thoroughly enjoyable as a result. Without a doubt, a big part of my attraction to the band is how unassuming Fenriz and Occulto are (especially the delightfully amiable and funny Fenriz) and how this reflects in their music. Two dudes rocking out, having a great time doing it, not giving a fuck about what anyone else thinks about that. Unfortunately that means I don't particularly find this album as dark and doomy as it's supposed to be, but I do enjoy it nonetheless.

idunnosomename

#34
funny i was absolutely floored by 2020 releases, but this year not much has grabbed me. well except fuckin Torn Arteries which is definitely my album of the year. cant imagine anything beating it

edit bug so reply:
Florida-death pioneers Massacre's new album is out today. not bad but also not blown away like I have been by some similar comebacks. will give it some more spins

DoesNotFollow

Quote from: JaDanketies on October 20, 2021, 01:49:27 PMHere's a Dread Sovereign album from 2021. They definitely played songs from this the other day. The guys are from Primordial and he's still doing the Primordial voice, but it's a totally different genre. Still works.

Listened to some of Dread Sovereign's newest album in-between doing some hoovering (rock 'n' roll) and on that bought a ticket to see them supporting Winterfylleth tonight. Covid aside it feels like ages since I've seen some proper trad-sorta doom metal live so very pleased. Must say I'm not familiar with Primordial; like 'Fylleth I recognise the name and could've maybe told you they were black metal.

The Mollusk

New album from Monolord out today on Relapse. I quite like this band but they're nothing amazing. Sometimes I think my threshold for good stoner metal is too high because I tend to more easily enjoy cookie cutter death metal, maybe it's the slow tempo that allows me time to see the faults more easily? This new album is mostly decent but there are moments where I'm lifted out of the bluesy reverie and left thinking "this is really quite plain actually". The lack of any bells and whistles (it's just bass guitar drums and vocals throughout) and the unimaginative singing don't help.

Ah while I'm on the subject of crap Relapse releases, I'll tell you who's a load of turgid shite: Red Fang. You'd think having a great sense of humour in their videos and stuff would help elevate their mediocre beer-swilling bro-sludge to something a little more passable, but no. It makes it worse somehow.

Dirty Boy

QuoteDomkraft - Seeds
Catching up with this thread and this is deffo my favourite thing posted thus far. Strong 'Leccy Wizard vibes and some fine riffs without being as dull and predictable as stoner metal often is (see The Mollusk's post for a more thorough explanation).

Eyehategod's album from this year A History of Nomadic Behavior is also very good, albeit incongruously polished sounding. While i prefer the 'end of tether, dying of gangrene in a cobwebby basement while screaming at the ceiling' approach of Dopesick and Take As Needed For Pain i can understand why they couldn't sustain that level of heroin addled misanthropy forever.

btw Finding out Dale Crover sat in with them a few years back has made my night. (the) Melvins are still one of my favourite heavy bands despite their patchiness and Buzz's increasing cuntishness.


wrec

Quote from: Dirty Boy on October 29, 2021, 06:43:05 PM
(the) Melvins are still one of my favourite heavy bands despite their patchiness

Somehow became obsessed with the Melvins this year, strange as I got a couple of albums c.20 years back and saw them live but only recently got my head around their catalogue properly. So the arrival of a 2 and a half hour album of acoustic remakes (Five Legged Dog) came at exactly the right time for me. Working with God is one of my most listened to albums of the year too. I *mostly* find Buzzo delightfully contrarian.

Will be going through this thread and checking everything out, notice lots of stuff that's gotten lost in my Bandcamp wishlist. Have been very out of the loop with metal this year but one thing I haven't seen mentioned here is Avow by Portal, one of the few bands that always give me the same feeling of eerie disorientation that the likes of Morbid Angel did when I first heard them, though they're stylistically distinctive and original, and absolutely otherworldly live. They also released a decent abstract ambient / noise companion album (Hagbulbia), but Avow is the main event.

On a different note: the Cirith Ungol EP Half Past Human, which follows last year's excellent comeback LP Forever Black. Despite consisting of new recordings of old (but previously unrecorded) songs, it sounds invigorated and timeless. CU are one of the most criminally underrated metal bands of all and were basically crushed by the wheels of industry in the 90s, so it's great to witness them picking up where they left off.

JaDanketies


The Mollusk

Damn that new Portal album had totally passed me by, cheers.

Incidentally anyone who digs that sort of post-death metal atonal nightmare fuel should check out Altarage's latest album "Succumb", it's fuckin' 'orrible.

boki

Quote from: The Mollusk on October 20, 2021, 09:26:34 PM
The Mastiff album is really good. It's also got an Athletico Mince reference as a song title, bonus!
Just seen these lads live and can't recommend it enough. On record, I wasn't too convinced but fucking HELL I just has a good time.  This is a bit of a weird gig for me as I haven't heard of the headliners (Calligram), and had mainly come for Hidden Mothers who were opening (and amazing).

The Mollusk

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on October 17, 2021, 07:13:54 PM
Here's another banger from this year:

Ad Nauseam - Imperative Imperceptible Impulse - https://youtu.be/ma3cKFX9_0g

I'd heard of them a couple of years back with people saying they were a Deathspell Omega ripoff, and you can hear the similarities in this one a bit, but it's definitely its own thing. I'm struggling to remember the last time I've been physically disoriented by music!

Fuck, only just getting around to this (since they rightly refuse to have their music on Spotify etc so had a sit down and whacked it on the stereo this morning). I listened to the title track and it blew my head off, went on their Bandcamp and saw there was only one CD copy of the album left so instantly bought it.

I've never got into Deathspell Omega since the band name is off-putting (it sounds like a load of pretentious symphonic wank in my head) but I'll have to try and give them a proper spin at some point. Ditto Wolves in the Throne Room whose music I find to a bit too high concept and grandiose for me to really engage with but I'm sure it'll just take time. I've heard that their new album is supposedly great.

JaDanketies

Went to the Send More Paramedics reunion show yesterday. Was the tits. If you get the chance tonight they're in London and it's like £15 a ticket.

Magnum Valentino

Limp Bizkit has released their first album in about ten years so the thread title has been unfortunately and entirely compromised.

The Mollusk

Damn. Badmin please change thread title to BEST YEAR FOR METAL

The Mollusk

Full of Hell - Garden of Burning Apparitions

Without a doubt one of my favourite extreme metal bands of recent years, Full of Hell are back with another aurally stimulating release that packs more nightmarish visions into its 20 minute runtime than many other bands can manage in an entire career. To call this record a breakneck ride, one might simply imagine short songs which jackknife from one section to the next with alarming precision, and you wouldn't be far off in that summation. They're not a million miles away from The Locust in terms of style, and yet although I adore The Locust, it's undeniable that Full of Hell are the next logical step in this particular vein of experimental metal/grindcore, and undoubtedly at the very top of their game in 2021.

What the band brings to the table on this new album is a smorgasbord of shimmering and immaculate delicacies, each as uniquely brutal and horrifying as the next. The saxophone on "Asphyxiant Blessing" and "Urchin Thrones" is a flailing scorched alien howl, piercing through shuddering walls of brutal death metal. "Reeking Tunnels" finds the band in relatively safer waters with angular barbed noise rock instrumentation reminiscent of The Jesus Lizard, whereas "Derelict Satellite" is the most unapologetically caustic slab of punishing noise they've produced to date.

It's a testament to their prowess that they can create something so relentlessly and cohesively nasty as this whilst ensuring it's a total delight to indulge, since veteran producer Seth Manchester's attention to detail here is outstanding. A gourmet tasting platter of ungodly pleasures, writhing, squirming, corroding, erupting and screeching around your ears. Something as short and sweet as this is worth waiting two years for, especially if you're as eager to give it a second consecutive spin as I am, just to marvel at the fucking glory of the thing.

Full album stream here.

boki

Quote from: Magnum Valentino on October 31, 2021, 12:46:24 PM
Limp Bizkit has released their first album in about ten years so the thread title has been unfortunately and entirely compromised.
It's probably no less embarrassing than anything else they did after Significant Other. Not in a hurry to find out, though.

Magnum Valentino

Not to be outdone by their turn of the century zeitgeist buddies in Limp Bizkit, Slipknot gave returned with a new single today.

Please take this opportunity to talk about it, them, and whether you ever called them "Shitknot" to piss off a fan.

The Mollusk

RAINY WEDNESDAY BLACK METAL DIGEST

New album from Wolves in the Throne Room is right load of wet shite. I've never listened to their older stuff when apparently they were a heavier and gnarlier band but this stuff is like the Explosions in the Sky of black metal. Mawkish pap with the EMOTION dial turned up to the max, really boring.

Same applies to the new one from [/b]Panopticon[/b] which I cannot get into at all. Mate if you're gonna pose for a professional photo playing a banjo with a cig hanging out your gob I'm sorry but how do you expect me to ever take your music seriously?

Conversely, "Ετερόφωτος" by Spectral Lore is definitely some of the best black metal released this year. Maddening in its complexity but hugely rewarding, frequently jazzy and avant-garde but always maintaining a solid core of the ethereal and almost ambient sonic qualities of black metal. Dark, enthralling, otherworldly, weird and fucking heavy.

I already covered the fantastic new album from Krallice which, despite the scores of metal releases I've been soaking up these last couple months, still easily remains one of the best things I've heard in 2021. If you're not yet familiar and you want some genuinely unique cosmic fucking bizarre and brilliantly atmospheric black metal, get on it!

I'm yet to listen to "Solar Paroxysm" by Mare Cognitum but it's being touted in a few places as being the very best the genre has to offer this year, so I'm keen to get stuck into that, probably today.

Nah that new Panopticon one is mint and skill.

The Mollusk

Atmospheric/symphonic metal doesn't really do anything for me. The softer moments focus on sounding profound and beautiful but it's just basically second wave post-rock with more extreme sections. I find that stuff schmaltzy to the point of irritation unfortunately. The reason I lean more towards bands like Spectral Lore and Krallice is because reaches those levels of profundity by scrambling my brain or sounding totally alien and weird. I realise all this makes me sound like a pretentious twat but I don't know how else to put it, sorry.

easytarget

Quote from: The Mollusk on November 10, 2021, 12:12:28 PM
RAINY WEDNESDAY BLACK METAL DIGEST

New album from Wolves in the Throne Room is right load of wet shite. I've never listened to their older stuff when apparently they were a heavier and gnarlier band but this stuff is like the Explosions in the Sky of black metal. Mawkish pap with the EMOTION dial turned up to the max, really boring.
Controversial (though I've not really dug into this one yet). I like WitTR a lot.


Quote from: The Mollusk on November 10, 2021, 12:12:28 PM

I'm yet to listen to "Solar Paroxysm" by Mare Cognitum but it's being touted in a few places as being the very best the genre has to offer this year, so I'm keen to get stuck into that, probably today.

I found that planets record they did a couple of years ago a bit boring TBH. Still, horses/courses.

Any thoughts on the new MOL record (Diorama)?
I'm about halfway thought and it sounds like all the exciting bits from a Deafheaven record. Good stuff.

boki

Ah yeah, I need to check out the Møl album, they were ace at ArcTanGent a few years ago.

boki

Quote from: talking to myself like an utter loon on November 10, 2021, 07:09:34 PM
Ah yeah, I need to check out the Møl album, they were ace at ArcTanGent a few years ago.
This is sooo good.  Feels like the guitarists have really stepped up their melodic chops.


a peepee tipi

#56
Quote from: Magnum Valentino on October 19, 2021, 05:01:39 PMOne for the nerds - LTE3 reunited Mike Portnoy, John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess for the first time properly since Mike left Dream Theater, and with Tony Levin on bass it's been my most listened to record of the year. Heavy enough for this thread but it's a prog album for larks and bobbing your head weirdly more than anything.
Y'know DT was my favorite band until recently, but buried within a 9 minute song about like Arab Spring you'll still find wicked ideas from top musicians who have always tried to challenge themselves. Can't fault them for that, "Pale Blue Dot" and  the first couple of minutes of "Awaken the Giant" for example have traces of the inspired upstarts they once were, though that said I am surprised by the praise both the recent LTE and new DT have received. If I were to compare, shits on modern Megadeth and IM's track record, for pop metal examples  The central motifs of The Astonishing made me feel like, "Ok Petrucci is getting out the rest of the best of his mythological riff library" and I have a lot of time for it than most despite the objectively stupid concept.

On the Prog Metal front, Thank You Scientist just released an EP that serves as further proof that they are at the top of their game and stars of an over-saturated, yet simultaneously dwindling scene. Highly recommend 2019's Terraformer. For points, their drummer came out as trans earlier this year on their official social media accounts and she was met with lots of love. Also I got to see them before COVID hit and it was easily the best concert I've ever been to - a weird mix of die-hard fans and venue-regulars who were like "I can count 6 pentagrams on the decorum round here and this dude is setting up his sax pedals" who totally fell into the vibe.

EDIT: Immediately after posting this Google told me that Faye Fadem, mentioned in this post, left Thank You Scientist earlier this year. It seems like there was no love lost between her and the band and it was a difficult decision made with support from both ends. To reiterate, the new EP fucking rules and so all the best to both Trust Fund Ozu (Faye Fadem) and TYS!

a peepee tipi


niat

Quote from: a peepee tipi on November 20, 2021, 10:38:15 AMOn the Prog Metal front, Thank You Scientist just released an EP that serves as further proof that they are at the top of their game and stars of an over-saturated, yet simultaneously dwindling scene. Highly recommend 2019's Terraformer. For points, their drummer came out as trans earlier this year on their official social media accounts and she was met with lots of love. Also I got to see them before COVID hit and it was easily the best concert I've ever been to - a weird mix of die-hard fans and venue-regulars who were like "I can count 6 pentagrams on the decorum round here and this dude is setting up his sax pedals" who totally fell into the vibe.

Seconded. Shame it's just an EP but hopefully an indicator of what's to come.

Was that the gig at Satan's Hollow? That was my last pre-Covid gig and it was a belter!

Famous Mortimer

I just listened to the first Thank You Scientist thing that popped up on Youtube and it irritated me a bit. Perhaps it would have been better just listening to than watching.

And then, for some reason, the next recommended thing was the new song from Arch Enemy, a metal band who - going by the visuals of their video - appear to have hired a lady fitness model as their lead singer. I think she should start insisting that the rest of the band start combing their hair, washing themselves and their clothes occasionally, working out all day and showing off their ripped bodies too.

They were formed by a former member of Carcass, their former lead singer retired to become their manager, and it's just the sort of slightly silly symphonic metal stuff I love.