10. Marianne Faithfull – Horses & High Heels
So this album totally has the strongest great album/terrible cover art ratio since Leatherface's Dog Disco, but it's always good to hear another Marianne Faithfull album. Some of the bluesier songs maybe aren't as great as the gloomier material for which she's better known, but even those possess a world-weariness that that tempers whatever up-tempo moments are present. A good chunk of the album is comprised of covers as well, further demonstrating Faithfull's ability to claim others' material – from John Prine to the Gutter Twins – and make it her own. She's been at it for damn near fifty years now and hopefully she's got another fifty years of records in her.
9. Low Threat Profile – Product #2
Power violence had something of a renaissance over the past few years, but unfortunately most of it seemed to be dudes that were in shitty youth crew bands five years ago realizing that Infest is better than Hatebreed, but not really delving into the style enough to get the nuances and variations that characterized the genre's better moments. Thankfully Low Threat Profile - featuring members of first wave power violence bands like No Comment, Neanderthal, and the aforementioned Infest – turned in one of the most solid hardcore albums in some time, demonstrating that, despite the prevalence of the word “youth” in such bands' names, old dudes can still bring it without turning the proceedings into some bullshit nostalgia trip or an attempt to soften their approach.
8. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972
Hecker often gets lumped in with ambient music, but his approach has more teeth than most of what that term gets slapped on. His is a corrosive haze of sound in which the familiar crumbles away and lines between consonance and dissonance are rendered irrelevant. Another starkly beautiful effort from an artist possessed of a distinct vision.
7. Pharoahe Monche – W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)
Though it comes dangerously close to collapsing under the weight of its ideas, this album doesn't quite. And really, how many hip hop albums could that be said of? A stirring, lyrically dense evocation of a world teetering on the precipice of the shitpile that puts pretty much any other rapper's work from this year to shame.
6. Earth – Angels of Darkness, Demons Of Light
This is the only album on my list for which I didn't publish a review. This isn't to say I didn't write one. I tried. I got to about 6000 words on this band and their embrace of a sort of mythic Americana that subverts cliché in regards to ideas of historicity, masculinity, and the struggle between light and darkness. But then I gave up. Album rules though. Its sequel (due out in February) promises to be one of 2012's best.
5. Silla Electrica – Ritmo Suicida
Spain has produced some incredible punk bands over the past decade or so, but few of them attain the combination of ferociousness and catchiness that Silla Electrica does. Too much Negative Approach and Judgement for garage rock or pop-punk, too much jangle and melody to be straight hardcore. More energy than all the meth labs in Missouri.
While Nika Danilova's work to this point has been good, it largely relies on a standard aesthetic. Her newest shows an artist who's willing to move past the parameters she's used to define her own sound into something more varied and interesting. Pretty solid if you like keyboards.
Quartet of Swedes that do 1972 better than many in 1972 actually did it. While generally I would subscribe to the notion that retro anything equals total soulless bullshit created by people who regurgitated better ideas from eras past due to a lack of anything better to spew into the world, Graveyard's actually pretty goddamn good.
2. Corrupted - Garten Der Unbewusstheit
It was a hell of a year for doomier bands, with some excellent examples of artists doing the ol' slow-and-low – Loss, Dark Castle, and Yob all turned in consistently excellent efforts – but none can touch Corrupted. If continental drift were a band, it would be Corrupted. Theirs is music unconcerned with many of the strictures generally associated with songwriting, a sound that seems effortless in its flow and devastating in its attack. I know musical taste is subjective and all, but anybody who suggests there was a better metal album this year could not be more wrong.
Ever since I was a kid, listening to Black Flag and Napalm Death records in my bedroom, wondering how it was that this strange and fucked up music could reach across decades and time zones to point so directly at everything I thought was wrong with the world, I've been chasing a feeling. It's difficult to articulate, but it's the sensation when listening to a band that just gets it so thoroughly that when they latch on to one of their songs, a listener can be affected so viscerally that the reaction is my only frame of reference when I read about individuals who have experienced some communion with a higher power. “Transcendent” gets thrown around in record reviews and PR blurbs a lot, and I'd hesitate to use the term for that reason alone, though it comes somewhere in the ballpark of what I'm trying to describe. And it had been a long time since I'd experienced anything that came close, but I'll be goddamned if Amebix didn't elicit that feeling, especially with their newest release's closing song. A lot of people gave this band shit because they became proficient on their instruments and came up with fairly slick, polished results for this album, but anybody who dismissed it out of hand never really understood with that band was going for in the first place. Theirs was a constant progression, one carried out beautifully with Sonic Mass, a collection of songs that runs the gamut of the band's capabilities, displaying their facility with evocations of triumph and despair, of defiance and desolation – proving that they are as potent a creative force now as in their heyday three decades ago.
Honorable mentions:
Date Palms – Honey Devash
Gillian Welch – the Harrow and the Harvest
Dead Language – Dead Language
Bastard Noise – Skulldozer
Grown Ass Men – Too Old To Die Young
Biggest Disappointments of the Year:
5. Autopsy – Macabre Eternal/4. Morbid Angel – Illud Divinum Insanus
You might think that two of the best bands from death metal's earliest years would be able to come up with some killer music after decades of honing their respective crafts. You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
Low has always been able to work with differing degrees of minimalism without the term every acting as a euphemism for “boring”. C'mon, however, is just kinda uninspired. It doesn't really attempt the experimental spirit for which the band is known, instead opting for some fairly uninspired poppy indie rock that sells short their capabilities.
At best, Jesu has been able to mix heaviness and prettiness in a way that defies standard expectations of heavy or pretty music. At worst, they sort of plod along with morose navelgazing. This is the latter.
I suppose disappointment might be the wrong term here, as it suggests that I had some expectation of this album possessing any sort of positive qualities, which I definitely did not. Maybe disappointment in the sense that I'm constantly disappointed in humanity's undermining of our better traits, constantly engaging in a race to the bottom in which only the most vacuous and malicious emerge triumphant. I have to keep telling myself that whatever these two artists did happened to fart out in the studio was done with no real planning or decision making and that pretty much all of it got used, because the idea that there might be out-takes from this of insufficient quality to even make the cut for this bullshit album is so terrifying that I'm glad I sleep with a machete by my bed. Because I would machete the shit out of this record if I could.