NPR: The Best Metal Albums of 2011 (by Lars Gotrich)

I made it my personal goal to listen to more death metal in 2011. We all have our blind spots and this was a gaping wide hole in my horn-raising knowledge. I’m happy to report that I spent a massive amount of time and cash on these filthy sounds, and particularly fell hard for such harbingers of death like the Nuclear War Now! and Hells Headbangers labels. Strangely, when it came time to rank my 25 favorite metal albums of the year, that investment only landed one album in my top ten: Ulcerate’s The Destroyers of All, maybe the most inside-out album of the bunch. What can I say? I’m a creature of doomed and blackened habit.

You can listen to the top ten of those picks below and let Google guide the rest. As always, I couldn’t possibly hear every metal record released in 2011 (though I damn sure tried), which is why reading other year-end lists (and your comments) makes for good filling-in of the gaps.

10. 40 Watt Sun – The Inside Room

Sad bastards have a place in heavy music — Harvey Milk, Mournful Congregation, and Loss, to name a few — after all, what’s more depressing than a bunch of grizzly dudes strumming slow and low at full volume? But sadness can be pretty, too, and former Warning member Patrick Walker gets that. The songs on 40 Watt Sun‘s debut, The Inside Room, are bleak and beautiful, full of melancholic melodies, a funereal pace and Walker’s desperate yearning.

9. Krallice – Diotima

As always, Krallice continues to be very good at what it does, that being mind-melding, long-form discourses through the polymath-metal-cal strata. Eight months after Diotima‘s release, I’m still finding new layers and new riffs that sharply counterpoint a frankly unbeatable rhythm section on the band’s third album. Krallice gets the hipster tag sometimes, but Diotima is not so-called highbrow black metal. It’s total sense-obliteration

Continue reading:  The Best Metal Albums Of 2011 : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR

Tags: 40 Watt Sun, Hammers of Misfortune, Kralice, Lars Gotrich, metal, NPR, Tombs, Witch Mountain, yob

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 at 7:49 pm and is filed under 2011, Playlists, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.