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2011's Best Metal

The Top 25 Metal Albums of 2011

by Chuck Eddy

First, caveat emptor: if you're still obsessed with metal being as "brutal" or "extreme" as inhumanely possible (i.e., if you didn't start looking elsewhere when said ugliness turned into the most tedious cliché on earth, like, 20-plus years ago), there's a good chance you'll find plenty to disagree with amid the selections below. Ditto if your idea of metal "innovation" is undie rockers playing shoegaze snooze really loud (which was maybe an interesting idea for a couple months a decade or so ago, until the first time I saw Isis live and wished there were chairs to fall asleep in). On the other hand, if you enjoy metal that actually, you know, rocks -- with songs and riffs that'll stick to your innards when the album's over, no less -- you've come to the right place.

Prior to 2011, I had given up on metal more or less completely at least two or three times in my adult life. And ambivalence had pretty much been my mindset for a few years, before the Rhapsody folks courteously asked me this spring to start specializing in metal. (I've had a long, tumultuous history with the genre, having once written an infamous record guide ostensibly about it and stuff.) But once I stopped grumbling and dug out my metal detector and started excavating for actual new noise, I found way more to appreciate than I ever would have guessed -- my overall rock-critic best-of lists this year will be more metallic than they've been in decades, and maybe more than at any time since I started writing about music, period. Whether that means that 2011 was an especially amazing year for metal, or just that I finally managed to open my ears up to more of it, has yet to be determined.

Anyway, before I get to my top 25 metal albums of the year, one thing worth noting is how much of it hails from the Western Hemisphere, and not just Oakland and Atlanta and Boston, but such relatively provincial middle-of-nowheres as Wichita, Indianapolis, small-town western Pennsylvania and Tempe, Ariz. Not to mention that three of my list's 11 highest-placing long-players come from Ontario, Canada, of all places. Not sure what all that geography adds up to, except that all the Northern European wizards who had seemingly had a lock on metal domination in recent epochs better watch their backs: something might be gaining on them. (Though a Viking ship's worth of those still wound up on this list, too, of course.)

Meanwhile, speaking of wizardry, I've apparently also developed a taste for black masses in my advanced age, seeing how such occult shtick figures in at least three of the top 15 albums below: Blood Ceremony, Ghost and Electric Wizard, all of which also happened to come out on London-based Rise Above Records. That was easily my label of the year, with two more entries (Gentleman's Pistols, Gates of Slumber) in my top seven. (I count Ghost and Electric Wizard, and Woods of Ypres too, as 2011 since that's when they were released in the U.S. and when I heard them, even if other nations got 'em first.) Anyway, enough filibustering! Bang what thou wilt ...

The Hunter

Mastodon

Dedicated to (and named in honor of) guitarist Brent Hinds' brother, who died of a heart attack while on a hunting trip in December 2010, The Hunter is the Atlanta-based prog metal band's fifth record, and their first since 2002's Remission that is not a concept album. Featuring stolid, mid-tempo riffs and the careening seaworthy rhythms that made Leviathan an all-encompassing experience, The Hunter finds Mastodon returning to the simpler structures and all-out heaviness of their beginnings.

Chaos of Forms

Revocation

These Boston deathcore bullies start out their third album jumping up and down, breaking things, marching in circles with fists flailing, flapping their gums in an unseemly and unfeminist manner at a "Harlot," and even doing a geekily nasal nyah-nyah chant in "Cradle Robber." But beginning with the fourth cut, "Dissolution Ritual," they give David Davidson more guitar-solo room, and against all odds he frequently winds up sounding intricate and tranquil, mining jazz fusion and blues in ways both wanky and wacky -- and, in the brief, chaotic instrumental "Fractal Entity," darn near futuristic.

Cenotes

Giant Squid

Though each of these five mostly long songs gets its own Latin scientific-name subtitle, you'll be hard-pressed to decipher their paleontological specifics with the undulating mullah-like boy-and-girl vocals. But that detracts little from Giant Squid's congruent Middle Eastern drones, which somehow link goth, psych and Krautrock into modern metal. One track, "Snakehead (Channidae erectus)," turns cello parts and an Eastern European gypsy two-step into swirling chamber metal that somehow channels obscure old art-bohos such as Certain General and Azalia Snail.

The Calydonian Hunt

New Keepers of the Water Towers

For contemporary metal, this is both protean and meaty stuff. Arrangements take surprising turns but don't outwear their welcome: Four (of nine) tracks clock in under three minutes. And the rhythmic throb often retains a whiff of the blues, a la certain nuclear-caveman thrash bands (Carnivore, early Voivod) from the mid-'80s. The vocals, nearly as tough to decipher when howling as when grunting, can be an Achilles Heel; too bad, since these Stockholmers' alleged obsession with mythical beasts is a new twist. But cuts like chugging closer "The Sword in the Stone" hook you regardless.

Set The Dial

Black Tusk

Playing heavily rhythmic, butchershop-riffed metal, but yelling like punks (low voice sorta early Black Flag and high voice sorta Dropkick Murphys, usually with An! Exclamation! Point! On! Every! Word!), this Savannah band keeps things concise, by metal if not hardcore standards -- 10 songs, almost all around three or four minutes. The tracks assume creative stop-and-start structures, grind speedily here and sludgily there and oily always, and boom like old Swans toward the end of "Carved in Stone." But does "Bring Me Darkness" go "Six! Six! Six!" or "Sick! Sick! Sick!"? Or both?

Ukon Wacka

Korpiklaani

Korpiklaani's seventh album stays mostly concise and festive: staccato vocals chanted in double-time rhythm, sometimes with drunken oi!-like gang-chorus accompaniment, over thrash-chorded forest jigs. "Tequila" exhibits both an anomalous Mexican influence and an extended drum break; the title track is sung with quivering gruffness by Finnish rock songster Tuomari Nurmio and showcases a ghostly minor-key melody oddly similar to John Anderson's "Seminole Wind." At the end, the set's second fast polka leads into the six-minute "Surma," alternately solemn and triumphant, until woodwinds take over.

Dead Roots Stirring

Elder

Monster drum grooves (slammed out on an enormous John Bonham-style kit) and verdant, searching soloing is what sets this power trio apart from most Sabbath-doom types. In some ways they're more a heavy hippie band, stretching out every one of their second album's five elongated (about 9 to 12 minutes apiece) songs with blues-based jam interplay that mimics the album art's drug-dream vistas, and occasionally blasts into a deep-space black hole. In parts of the title track they even sound like the mid-'80s, Dead-and-Neil-Young-infused Meat Puppets -- perhaps absorbed via J Mascis.

Death's Procession

Saviours

Though they claim to be inspired by speed metal's early giants and flaunt the negative production values to prove it, these Oakland, California throwbacks rarely keep their tempos fast for long -- not even in the drum-rolled "God's End," which enters whiplashing like 1983 Metallica. But they can stomp. "The Eye Obscene" and instrumental "Earth's Possession and Death's Procession" are seven-minute wonders of moon-cave ooze; "To the Grave Possessed" tops hearty '70s rock riffs with a manly chorus. Then "Walk to the Light" finishes it all by scaling Power Metal Mountain.

Sons Of The North

Black Spiders

These Brits know their way around a hook and a joke -- "KISS Tried To Kill Me" is almost too catchy and wacky for a metal band. But they are one, at least in the sense of intermittent knuckle-dragging heaviness (stoner-doomed "Mans Ruin," high-speed "What Goods a Rock Without a Roll"), Zep rips ("St Peter," "Si El Diablo") and distorted wank. There's also a memorable coed drinking duet, followed by a seven-minute epic that ends with a chain-gang spiritual: Enough winners to excuse the not-quite-superhuman vocals.

Premonition 13

Wino Weinrich's umpteenth outfit sets itself above the stoner metal pack both via its employment of open space (two guitars allow for lush beauty to balance out the brawny hairy Yeti doom), and via a butt-boogie groove harking back to Mountain or early Grand Funk Railroad as much as Sabbath. The prevailing mood, highlighted by titles about peyote roads and (in Spanish) syringe sorcery, conjures endless brain-burned wandering across sun-baked equatorial expanses. But riff behemoths like "Modern Man" and the Motorhead-style "Deranged Rock N' Roller" stay meaty, beaty, big and bouncy regardless.

Ministry of Kultur

Kultur Shock

These globe-trotting Seattlites pile up menacing tar-pit riffage for a bash that's equal parts System of a Down, Gogol Bordello and Rachid Taha, with maybe some Sepultura in the percussion. But give or take the dirge-turned-jig-metal "Sheitan" and the martial "Revolutionary Song Intro," tempos stay Eastern-European-wedding upbeat, often stampeding against the free-jazz sax skronk as vocal pitches switch deftly between high-wailing emotion and low-chanted slapstick about a self-medicated nation, a rich man's war, the falling sky and an antisocial coal-mine woman who can kick your butt.

Heritage

Opeth

The Swedish progressive metal band's first album since 2008, and the last to feature keyboard player Per Wiberg, opens with a plaintive solo piano piece courtesy of Wiberg before launching into "The Devil's Orchard," which may as well have been written by Yes at the very height of their powers. That's a good thing. The similarities with classic Yes continue through "I Feel the Dark." In an era when all rock music essentially is run through Pro-Tools and made soulless, these highly intelligent beings have put out a record as alive as anything released in the '70s -- another good thing.

Boldly Stride the Doomed

Argus

Five burly blue-collar Pennsylvanians recording for an Italian label, Argus split their time between Sabbath despair and Maiden conquest, and rule at both. They open serene, with a minute-long instrumental, but soon they're thundering across mountain ranges with swords drawn, the belting of aptly nicknamed Brian "Butch" Balich leading the charge. "Durendal" is gargantuan glory-metal with a whiff of Thin Lizzy, and 11-minute romantic downer "Pieces of Your Smile" sounds suicidal to a Joy Division degree. But they can speed-race, too; interstitial pianos, bells and horns add emotional weight.

Big Dogz

Nazareth

Dan McCafferty's screech flies higher after four decades than his disciple Axl Rose's did after four years. But with McCafferty and bassist Pete Agnew both turning 65 in 2011, aging's clearly on Nazareth's minds, and their more nostalgic cuts serve up a wistful autumnal swirl. The grizzled Scots get witty like a music hall ZZ Top, too, but they're still best when heavy: in an ominous dirge aimed at religious zealots, a cynical swipe at government in times of austerity, some epic metal about mental illness, and a mean-swinging, maybe rap-inspired bilingual boogie about gang war in the barrio.