2K7 In Review: My Favorite Albums, #1
Egad, it's over. I'm not referring to my recent vehicle drama (car reported stolen on Sunday, recovered on Friday), but to both this list of last year's audio highlights and this humble condo's welcoming of three new female residents. Both conclusions signal a new realm of possibilities, on the blog and at home. Of course, a few obvious things must be done, such as decorating the "suicidally bare" walls or detailing this summer's terrible old film selection (hint: it has something in common with some satiric fan fiction I presented in April), but overall I am thrilled that the main task is behind us and that the future can unfold at its leisure.
For this very post, I have saved a conversation with one of my favorite band's founders and main creative forces. My September phoner with Katatonia guitarist Anders Nyström is the 2007 interview of which I am most proud, although I should say up front that it's the most fanboyish of these things that I have conducted in a long time. I'm cool with that. As far as I'm concerned, nobody does it better right now, and it was my honor to tell him so. Check it out if you like.
Also, before I get to my favorite album of '07, I want to belatedly acknowledge Entartete Kunst's anniversary, which coincidentally shares a date with my parents'. Since my first entry more than three years ago, dozens of eyeballs have scanned this blog for my opinions on unpopular culture and life as I know it. I know it's been a bumpy ride marked by periods of inactivity, but I want to thank everyone who's left a comment, considered my recommendations or merely stopped by in the past year. This blog was, is and always will be a place for me to unwind and unload, but that anyone else bothers to absorb it makes all the difference. My mission continues to be thoughtful transgression, best described by a quote attributed to André Peret: "Now, more than ever, it is evident that 'good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo."
1. Bloc Party, A Weekend in the City (Vice)
Two terms of Republican White House deficit expansion, the unfortunate return of fluorescent colors to young people's wardrobes, an uninterred Rambo crinkling his swollen features in disgust at Strawberry Shortcake's post-Britney hoochie makeover... there is no denying that we are still stuck in serious 1980s mode. This bothers me somewhat. My first era of genuine cognizance coincided with the Greed Decade, and having grown up past it, I tend to view the '80s as a garish, Reagan-stained neon nightmare of hard edges, poofy hairdos, nuclear waste, satanic panic, crooked televangelists, fractured marriages and disposable status symbols. As a kid, I had no perspective and naturally bought into much of the plastic junk they waved at me, including the popular music of the time. I haven't listened to the radio for new musical entertainment since I discovered new music that wasn't played on the radio, which was around the time that the Top 40 format fractured into segregated genres and MTV started replacing music videos with Christ knows what. Yet, although I eventually grew impatient with the stupid shit being pushed on the cusp of the '90s, I must admit that thanks to radio slavery, for most of the decade I had a reasonable introduction to various types of music. Top 40 radio wasn't just a procession of slick, cheesy R&B/hip-hop crossovers back then, but a place where you could hear a slate of performers as diverse as Duran Duran, John Fogerty, The Fat Boys, Patti LaBelle, Linda Rondstadt, Twisted Sister, Al Jarreau and The Fabulous Thunderbirds within any given hour. With that kind of variety early on, it's no wonder that I can't listen to the same type of music all the time, or that I prefer music with as many facets as fits the mood. As much as I will typically protest, I suppose I do have an ingrained attachment to certain aspects of '80s music. Oddly, the band that brought me to that shocking realization did not release a recording until 2003, and that band is Bloc Party.
On paper, Bloc Party's second LP, A Weekend in the City, is as '80s as it gets. Post-punk, new wave, shoegaze and early alternative rock styles still factor into the English quartet's arsenal, a combination that provided suprising heart and firepower to 2005's Silent Alarm, now a little older and less flabbergasted at the ways of the world. The cynical, cosmopolitan electro-rock feel of some tracks could accompany a Gaultier runway show, while others offer a keening, wistful romanticism fit for a John Hughes montage. There's even a doomed love song to cocaine ("On"), which I didn't get until after about a dozen listens. Yet Bloc Party's glorious distillation of the gloomy, pretty, defiant spirit of non-mainstream Thatcher-era UK music merely employs popular sigils to set an unmistakably modern scene.
Kele Okereke breathes the album's dramatic opening lines ("I am trying to be heroic/In an age of modernity") like a poet born in a war zone, then spends the rest of the explosive "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)" detailing a deadened life of joyless consumption and calculated distance, sickened at his own compliance ("How we longed for corruption in these golden years"). The tension mounts as broadcast snippets morph into Morse code guitar bleeps, Matt Tong's drums clattering the club-friendly beat that drives disco-punk barnburner "Hunting for Witches." Gordon Moakes' bass thrums and throbs sternly on this standout single, Russell Lissack channeling Randy Rhoades with a conspicuously "Crazy Train"-ish guitar riff that remains economically British. The band creates an appropriately apocalyptic bedrock for Okereke's vocals, which remain eerily soft and blissful while relating post-9/11 conservative paranoia, a portrait of fear and ignorance spurred by mass media made spookier by its thrilling hooks. Finally, the white knuckles loosen as "Waiting for the 7.18" introduces a wintry morning stillness, Okereke's falsetto brushing against gentle chimes and guitar swells. It sounds so peaceful, even as the lyrics drip with the same urban ennui and loathing that came before, until it bursts open with deafening abandon, Lissack's shoegazer guitar blazing with light and color. Kele begs his companion "Let's drive to Brighton on the weekend," inverting the album title by suggesting they get the fuck away from the suffocating concrete and noise and congestion. By invoking the popular seaside tourist town, he suggests a nostalgic indulgence of an illusory utopia, yet sadly acknowledges the artifice of such a conceit ("Can I still kick a ball a hundred yards?/Now we cling to bottles and memories of the past"). With this attitude in mind, Weekend cannot honestly be deemed an '80s throwback.
The electronically-enhanced lead single "The Prayer" follows, stomping into a posh club with overdriven swagger as Okereke recites the silent mantra of a soul yearning for adoration in an anonymous environment, his chorus ("Tonight make me unstoppable/And I will charm, I will slice, I will dazzle them with my wit") heartbreakingly delusional and painfully recognizable. The ebb and flow of "Uniform" takes a torch to fashion victims, bitterly addressing the conformity of nonconformity ("We tell ourselves we're different/I've gotten so good at lying to myself") while a robotic voice plays Greek chorus, repeating "You can be happy, just play dumb." The protagonist of the aforementioned "On" may as well be the jittery club kid from "The Prayer" having found his apparent savior at the other end of a rolled-up twenty ("You make my tongue loose/I am hopeful and stutter-free," "I can charm them all"). The music turns melty, Tong's slippery rhythm an irregular heartbeat as our tragic hero discovers "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Lissack's guitar conjures a desolate Western wasteland during the sweepingly sad chorus of "Where Is Home?" Some disappointed listeners found this album too apolitical after Bloc Party's debut; I disagree, but admit that even this electro-touched powderkeg, the disc's most overt "message" song, has a personal touch. Okereke's parents emigrated to England from Nigeria, and the song expresses the grief and frustration left in the immigrant community in the aftermath of xenophobic violence. If you cannot be moved after a line like "In every headline we are reminded/That this is not home for us," then congratulations. You have achieved the sort of aloof numbness Bloc Party instinctually rages against. Just stick with your T-Pain mp3s and don't bother listening to Weekend.
The languidly beautiful "Kreuzberg" concerns a fumbled interpersonal connection, using the city of Berlin as a metaphor ("There is a wall that runs right through me/Just like this city I will never be joined") for a sensitive heart after a too-brief love affair. Again the past rears its bittersweet head on the Cure-riffic single "I Still Remember," Okereke putting on his best Robert Smith while lamenting an innocent childhood love that could have, should have been more, the fact that he's singing about another boy making the unrealized desire even more poignant. This makes the driving "Sunday" the most optimistic track on offer, its naked sentiment ("I love you in the morning/When you're still hung over") infused with working class warmth. Kele returns to Weekend's opening theme on closing number "SXRT," observing with Morrissey-style bluntness, "Being a man made me coarse/When I wanted to be delicate." The track's title refers to Seroxat (aka Paxil), a pharmaceutical antidepressant believed to cause suicidal thoughts, which are presumably what are afflicting the song's protagonist. Despite building to a heavenly post-rock crescendo, the lullaby-like track is the final transmission of someone who, try as he might, cannot relieve the pain that comes with having a heart in this cruel milieu: "If you want to know what makes me sad/Well it's hope, the endurance of faith/A battle that lasts a lifetime/A fight that never ends." This seems like as good a place as any to note that another entire album's worth of b-sides and bonus tracks came out of the same recording sessions. Unofficially dubbed Another Weekend in the City by fans, tunes such as the menacing "Secrets" (from the version of the album found exclusively in Canada and Target stores) are frequently as gripping as the album's proper tracks. And, before the year was out, they also released a dancey new single entitled "Flux," in which Kele is smooshed through ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch alteration to further cement it in the now.
A Weekend in the City tanked with many hipster critics, and my theory is that it cut those chin-stroking nosepickers too close to the bone. It is not a carefree, windows-down pop record, although it is plenty catchy, the material is mostly upbeat and while sonically adventurous, never approaches experimental tedium. It is also not hellbent on sociopolitical browbeating, despite brimming with righteous indignation fueled by contemporary unease and interpersonal division. Bloc Party doesn't simply demonize George W. Bush, which is the only response most politically-charged musicians today seem to be able to muster - quite an impotent gesture when you consider that the asshole's somehow still stinking up his elevated office. The album is prone to mopey fits of self-pity, and its occasionally naïve emotional frankness might somehow relegate it to the "emo" bin. Yet, this is inextricably linked with recognizable, real-life trigger points. More factors are crushing the boys' brittle optimism than mere romance. Indifference and ambition beget soulless conformity. Massive monuments to commercial dependency obscure the untamed wilderness. There is simply nowhere to hide under the oddly soothing yet hideously artificial greenish-yellow glow bathing the elevator-bound quartet in the booklet photos and the headlight-streaked freeway on the cover (likely the one on which "people are afraid to merge"). A Weekend in the City turns the anti-human culture bestowed by the 1980s on itself, and in doing so both evokes and repudiates what it meant to be a human in 2007.
Three videos were made for Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City... see below.
"The Prayer"
"I Still Remember"
"Hunting for Witches"
15 RUNNERS-UP (in alphabetical order):
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ire Works (Relapse)
Gamma Ray, Land of the Free II (SPV)
Helloween, Gambling With the Devil (SPV)
High on Fire, Death is This Communion (Relapse)
HORSE the band, A Natural Death (Koch)
Immolation, Shadows in the Light (Century Media)
Parts & Labor, Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar)
Rotting Christ, Theogonia (Season of Mist)
Skinny Puppy, Mythmaker (Synthetic Symphony)
They Might Be Giants, The Else (Idlewild/Zoë)
Thurisaz, Circadian Rhythm (Shiver)
Tomahawk, Anonymous (Ipecac)
The Tossers, Agony (Victory)
Ween, La Cucaracha (Rounder)
ENTARTETE KUNST'S PREVIOUS '07 MUSIC ROUNDUPS:
Spring special
Year-end music, part 1.html
Year-end music, part 2.html
Year-end music, part 3.html
OTHER ENJOYABLE RECORDS THAT CAME OUT IN '07, BUT WEREN'T FEATURED IN ANY OF ENTARTETE KUNST'S ROUNDUPS:
3, The End Is Begun (Metal Blade)
Aabsinthe, In Search of Light (Rupture)
Aereogramme, My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go (Sonic Unyon)
All Smiles, Ten Readings of a Warning (Dangerbird)
Anaal Nathrakh, Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here (FETO)
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino)
Antimatter, Leaving Eden (Prophecy)
Avichi, The Divine Tragedy (Numen Malevolum Barathri)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface)
Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)
Captain Yonder, Good-bye, Woland! (Strange Midge)
Constant Velocity, Constant Velocity (self-released)
Dawnbringer, In Sickness and In Dreams (Battle Kommand)
Deerhunter, Cryptograms (Kranky)
Dethklok, The Dethalbum (Williams Street)
Ghost Brigade, Guided By Fire (Candlelight)
Lesbian, Power Hör (Holy Mountain)
Manes, How the World Came to an End (Candlelight)
Ministry, The Last Sucker (13th Planet)
Steve Moore, The Henge (Relapse)
Andy Palacio (RIP) & The Garifuna Collective, Wátina (Cumbancha)
Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
Powerglove, Metal Kombat for the Mortal Man (self-released)
The Red Chord, Prey for Eyes (Metal Blade)
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, In Glorious Times (The End)
Sonata Arctica, Unia (Nuclear Blast)
Spectral, Stormriders (CCP)
Svartsot, Ravnenes Saga (Napalm)
Type O Negative, Dead Again (SPV)
Ulver, Shadows of the Sun (Jester)
Volbeat, Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil (Mascot)
Wyrd, Kammen (Avantgarde)
Yakuza, Transmutations (Prosthetic)
Year of Desolation, Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)
Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free)
For this very post, I have saved a conversation with one of my favorite band's founders and main creative forces. My September phoner with Katatonia guitarist Anders Nyström is the 2007 interview of which I am most proud, although I should say up front that it's the most fanboyish of these things that I have conducted in a long time. I'm cool with that. As far as I'm concerned, nobody does it better right now, and it was my honor to tell him so. Check it out if you like.
Also, before I get to my favorite album of '07, I want to belatedly acknowledge Entartete Kunst's anniversary, which coincidentally shares a date with my parents'. Since my first entry more than three years ago, dozens of eyeballs have scanned this blog for my opinions on unpopular culture and life as I know it. I know it's been a bumpy ride marked by periods of inactivity, but I want to thank everyone who's left a comment, considered my recommendations or merely stopped by in the past year. This blog was, is and always will be a place for me to unwind and unload, but that anyone else bothers to absorb it makes all the difference. My mission continues to be thoughtful transgression, best described by a quote attributed to André Peret: "Now, more than ever, it is evident that 'good taste' only refers to that which reinforces the status quo."
1. Bloc Party, A Weekend in the City (Vice)Two terms of Republican White House deficit expansion, the unfortunate return of fluorescent colors to young people's wardrobes, an uninterred Rambo crinkling his swollen features in disgust at Strawberry Shortcake's post-Britney hoochie makeover... there is no denying that we are still stuck in serious 1980s mode. This bothers me somewhat. My first era of genuine cognizance coincided with the Greed Decade, and having grown up past it, I tend to view the '80s as a garish, Reagan-stained neon nightmare of hard edges, poofy hairdos, nuclear waste, satanic panic, crooked televangelists, fractured marriages and disposable status symbols. As a kid, I had no perspective and naturally bought into much of the plastic junk they waved at me, including the popular music of the time. I haven't listened to the radio for new musical entertainment since I discovered new music that wasn't played on the radio, which was around the time that the Top 40 format fractured into segregated genres and MTV started replacing music videos with Christ knows what. Yet, although I eventually grew impatient with the stupid shit being pushed on the cusp of the '90s, I must admit that thanks to radio slavery, for most of the decade I had a reasonable introduction to various types of music. Top 40 radio wasn't just a procession of slick, cheesy R&B/hip-hop crossovers back then, but a place where you could hear a slate of performers as diverse as Duran Duran, John Fogerty, The Fat Boys, Patti LaBelle, Linda Rondstadt, Twisted Sister, Al Jarreau and The Fabulous Thunderbirds within any given hour. With that kind of variety early on, it's no wonder that I can't listen to the same type of music all the time, or that I prefer music with as many facets as fits the mood. As much as I will typically protest, I suppose I do have an ingrained attachment to certain aspects of '80s music. Oddly, the band that brought me to that shocking realization did not release a recording until 2003, and that band is Bloc Party.
On paper, Bloc Party's second LP, A Weekend in the City, is as '80s as it gets. Post-punk, new wave, shoegaze and early alternative rock styles still factor into the English quartet's arsenal, a combination that provided suprising heart and firepower to 2005's Silent Alarm, now a little older and less flabbergasted at the ways of the world. The cynical, cosmopolitan electro-rock feel of some tracks could accompany a Gaultier runway show, while others offer a keening, wistful romanticism fit for a John Hughes montage. There's even a doomed love song to cocaine ("On"), which I didn't get until after about a dozen listens. Yet Bloc Party's glorious distillation of the gloomy, pretty, defiant spirit of non-mainstream Thatcher-era UK music merely employs popular sigils to set an unmistakably modern scene.
Kele Okereke breathes the album's dramatic opening lines ("I am trying to be heroic/In an age of modernity") like a poet born in a war zone, then spends the rest of the explosive "Song for Clay (Disappear Here)" detailing a deadened life of joyless consumption and calculated distance, sickened at his own compliance ("How we longed for corruption in these golden years"). The tension mounts as broadcast snippets morph into Morse code guitar bleeps, Matt Tong's drums clattering the club-friendly beat that drives disco-punk barnburner "Hunting for Witches." Gordon Moakes' bass thrums and throbs sternly on this standout single, Russell Lissack channeling Randy Rhoades with a conspicuously "Crazy Train"-ish guitar riff that remains economically British. The band creates an appropriately apocalyptic bedrock for Okereke's vocals, which remain eerily soft and blissful while relating post-9/11 conservative paranoia, a portrait of fear and ignorance spurred by mass media made spookier by its thrilling hooks. Finally, the white knuckles loosen as "Waiting for the 7.18" introduces a wintry morning stillness, Okereke's falsetto brushing against gentle chimes and guitar swells. It sounds so peaceful, even as the lyrics drip with the same urban ennui and loathing that came before, until it bursts open with deafening abandon, Lissack's shoegazer guitar blazing with light and color. Kele begs his companion "Let's drive to Brighton on the weekend," inverting the album title by suggesting they get the fuck away from the suffocating concrete and noise and congestion. By invoking the popular seaside tourist town, he suggests a nostalgic indulgence of an illusory utopia, yet sadly acknowledges the artifice of such a conceit ("Can I still kick a ball a hundred yards?/Now we cling to bottles and memories of the past"). With this attitude in mind, Weekend cannot honestly be deemed an '80s throwback.
The electronically-enhanced lead single "The Prayer" follows, stomping into a posh club with overdriven swagger as Okereke recites the silent mantra of a soul yearning for adoration in an anonymous environment, his chorus ("Tonight make me unstoppable/And I will charm, I will slice, I will dazzle them with my wit") heartbreakingly delusional and painfully recognizable. The ebb and flow of "Uniform" takes a torch to fashion victims, bitterly addressing the conformity of nonconformity ("We tell ourselves we're different/I've gotten so good at lying to myself") while a robotic voice plays Greek chorus, repeating "You can be happy, just play dumb." The protagonist of the aforementioned "On" may as well be the jittery club kid from "The Prayer" having found his apparent savior at the other end of a rolled-up twenty ("You make my tongue loose/I am hopeful and stutter-free," "I can charm them all"). The music turns melty, Tong's slippery rhythm an irregular heartbeat as our tragic hero discovers "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Lissack's guitar conjures a desolate Western wasteland during the sweepingly sad chorus of "Where Is Home?" Some disappointed listeners found this album too apolitical after Bloc Party's debut; I disagree, but admit that even this electro-touched powderkeg, the disc's most overt "message" song, has a personal touch. Okereke's parents emigrated to England from Nigeria, and the song expresses the grief and frustration left in the immigrant community in the aftermath of xenophobic violence. If you cannot be moved after a line like "In every headline we are reminded/That this is not home for us," then congratulations. You have achieved the sort of aloof numbness Bloc Party instinctually rages against. Just stick with your T-Pain mp3s and don't bother listening to Weekend.
The languidly beautiful "Kreuzberg" concerns a fumbled interpersonal connection, using the city of Berlin as a metaphor ("There is a wall that runs right through me/Just like this city I will never be joined") for a sensitive heart after a too-brief love affair. Again the past rears its bittersweet head on the Cure-riffic single "I Still Remember," Okereke putting on his best Robert Smith while lamenting an innocent childhood love that could have, should have been more, the fact that he's singing about another boy making the unrealized desire even more poignant. This makes the driving "Sunday" the most optimistic track on offer, its naked sentiment ("I love you in the morning/When you're still hung over") infused with working class warmth. Kele returns to Weekend's opening theme on closing number "SXRT," observing with Morrissey-style bluntness, "Being a man made me coarse/When I wanted to be delicate." The track's title refers to Seroxat (aka Paxil), a pharmaceutical antidepressant believed to cause suicidal thoughts, which are presumably what are afflicting the song's protagonist. Despite building to a heavenly post-rock crescendo, the lullaby-like track is the final transmission of someone who, try as he might, cannot relieve the pain that comes with having a heart in this cruel milieu: "If you want to know what makes me sad/Well it's hope, the endurance of faith/A battle that lasts a lifetime/A fight that never ends." This seems like as good a place as any to note that another entire album's worth of b-sides and bonus tracks came out of the same recording sessions. Unofficially dubbed Another Weekend in the City by fans, tunes such as the menacing "Secrets" (from the version of the album found exclusively in Canada and Target stores) are frequently as gripping as the album's proper tracks. And, before the year was out, they also released a dancey new single entitled "Flux," in which Kele is smooshed through ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch alteration to further cement it in the now.
A Weekend in the City tanked with many hipster critics, and my theory is that it cut those chin-stroking nosepickers too close to the bone. It is not a carefree, windows-down pop record, although it is plenty catchy, the material is mostly upbeat and while sonically adventurous, never approaches experimental tedium. It is also not hellbent on sociopolitical browbeating, despite brimming with righteous indignation fueled by contemporary unease and interpersonal division. Bloc Party doesn't simply demonize George W. Bush, which is the only response most politically-charged musicians today seem to be able to muster - quite an impotent gesture when you consider that the asshole's somehow still stinking up his elevated office. The album is prone to mopey fits of self-pity, and its occasionally naïve emotional frankness might somehow relegate it to the "emo" bin. Yet, this is inextricably linked with recognizable, real-life trigger points. More factors are crushing the boys' brittle optimism than mere romance. Indifference and ambition beget soulless conformity. Massive monuments to commercial dependency obscure the untamed wilderness. There is simply nowhere to hide under the oddly soothing yet hideously artificial greenish-yellow glow bathing the elevator-bound quartet in the booklet photos and the headlight-streaked freeway on the cover (likely the one on which "people are afraid to merge"). A Weekend in the City turns the anti-human culture bestowed by the 1980s on itself, and in doing so both evokes and repudiates what it meant to be a human in 2007.
Three videos were made for Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City... see below.
"The Prayer"
"I Still Remember"
"Hunting for Witches"
15 RUNNERS-UP (in alphabetical order):
Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Definitive Jux)
The Dillinger Escape Plan, Ire Works (Relapse)
Gamma Ray, Land of the Free II (SPV)
Helloween, Gambling With the Devil (SPV)
High on Fire, Death is This Communion (Relapse)
HORSE the band, A Natural Death (Koch)
Immolation, Shadows in the Light (Century Media)
Parts & Labor, Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar)
Rotting Christ, Theogonia (Season of Mist)
Skinny Puppy, Mythmaker (Synthetic Symphony)
They Might Be Giants, The Else (Idlewild/Zoë)
Thurisaz, Circadian Rhythm (Shiver)
Tomahawk, Anonymous (Ipecac)
The Tossers, Agony (Victory)
Ween, La Cucaracha (Rounder)
ENTARTETE KUNST'S PREVIOUS '07 MUSIC ROUNDUPS:
Spring special
Year-end music, part 1.html
Year-end music, part 2.html
Year-end music, part 3.html
OTHER ENJOYABLE RECORDS THAT CAME OUT IN '07, BUT WEREN'T FEATURED IN ANY OF ENTARTETE KUNST'S ROUNDUPS:
3, The End Is Begun (Metal Blade)
Aabsinthe, In Search of Light (Rupture)
Aereogramme, My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go (Sonic Unyon)
All Smiles, Ten Readings of a Warning (Dangerbird)
Anaal Nathrakh, Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here (FETO)
Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino)
Antimatter, Leaving Eden (Prophecy)
Avichi, The Divine Tragedy (Numen Malevolum Barathri)
Björk, Volta (Atlantic)
Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface)
Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)
Captain Yonder, Good-bye, Woland! (Strange Midge)
Constant Velocity, Constant Velocity (self-released)
Dawnbringer, In Sickness and In Dreams (Battle Kommand)
Deerhunter, Cryptograms (Kranky)
Dethklok, The Dethalbum (Williams Street)
Ghost Brigade, Guided By Fire (Candlelight)
Lesbian, Power Hör (Holy Mountain)
Manes, How the World Came to an End (Candlelight)
Ministry, The Last Sucker (13th Planet)
Steve Moore, The Henge (Relapse)
Andy Palacio (RIP) & The Garifuna Collective, Wátina (Cumbancha)
Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
Powerglove, Metal Kombat for the Mortal Man (self-released)
The Red Chord, Prey for Eyes (Metal Blade)
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, In Glorious Times (The End)
Sonata Arctica, Unia (Nuclear Blast)
Spectral, Stormriders (CCP)
Svartsot, Ravnenes Saga (Napalm)
Type O Negative, Dead Again (SPV)
Ulver, Shadows of the Sun (Jester)
Volbeat, Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil (Mascot)
Wyrd, Kammen (Avantgarde)
Yakuza, Transmutations (Prosthetic)
Year of Desolation, Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)
Yeasayer, All Hour Cymbals (We Are Free)
posted by SoulReaper at 11:59 PM
1 comments
