The Top 10
- Alkaloid - Liquid Anatomy
- Amorphis - Queen of Time
- Beyond Creation - Algorythm
- Dimmu Borgir - Eonian
- Frozen Gate - From Ashes
- Ihshan - Ámr
- Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik - Hugsjá
- Judas Priest - Firepower
- Obscura - Diluvium
- Rivers of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name
A stellar year for Death Metal
2018 was a blessed year for Death Metal. I remember not even listening to the new Dimmu Borgir for a while because I was so content with living inside Alkaloid, Beyond Creation and Obscura's new releases. The Obscura is fantastic if that is your sort of thing and it's certainly up to standard, but Beyond Creation and Alkaloid both went next level with their 2018 releases.
I've placed all the albums in alphabetical order because it's hard to rank them in order of preference. I would say Beyond Creation and Rivers of Nihil pretty much tie at the top spot for my album of the year. Beyond Creation's guitar work offers some exquisite phrasing. While it's not anything surprising from their previous albums, it's just executed better than before and hits the spot every time.
Rivers of Nihil held nothing back with their new album either. You can expect some saxophone, polyrhythm and lots of tempo changes. Probably the last place where I would expect to find such prog elements, but they did a great job to make it sound organic and not like they were reading music theory textbooks the whole time. They take the best elements of America's Sludge Metal and mix it up with high-brow musical ideas in a dirty way.
Then there is the new Alkaloid, from a bunch of guys who could probably write music theory textbooks in their sleep. The opening track is a Yes tribute wet dream from start to finish. I'm still not tired of this album and I love the Cthulhu Mythos references too. This album personifies the slow heavy metal music playing meme, even though things do get fast and exciting at times. For the most part, it's the gnashing of teeth and the smell of brimstone.
And Judas Priest came from out of nowhere with one of their best albums in a long time. I can't wait to see them live again on their South African tour!
Amorphis and Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik take care of the folk stuff. Amorphis continues their exploration of Kalevala and related Finnish literature, while Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik offered a more coherent album than their predecessor. Of course the incoherence was conceptual and serves a purpose there, but this album of theirs is better than the previous one to me because it holds together better.
Ihsahn continues to push himself further. On the previous album, he tried 8 string guitars for the first time. On this album, the synthesizer and the keyboards play a more prominent roll. Always a pleasure to listen to.
Lastly, I found Frozen Gate on one of Bandcamp's lists. Their curation differs a lot in quality, from the excellent like Cosmic Black Metal to more luke warm metal lists, but there's usually at least one band worth exploring on there. This one is all about symphonic metal so they aren't out of place next to a Dimmu Borgir album.
Honourable Mentions
- Anaal Naathrakh - A New Kind Of Horror
- Behemoth - I Loved You At Your Darkest
- Bloodbath - The Arrow Of Satan Is Drawn
- Evoken - Hypnogagia
- Immortal - Northern Chaos Gods
I only discovered these fairly late except for the Behemoth. I haven't given it a proper listen so I'm not sure what to make of it yet. Certainly not a poor album at all but it just didn't grab me the way the others did.
Immortal likewise delivered another solid Immortal album despite Abbath leaving the group. Like Bloodbath, they're a formulaic band so if you like that formula then there's nothing wrong with it.
Evoken is a new band for me. I also discovered them through Bandcamp. They're more on the Doom side of things. I'll definitely listen to more of their music.
Finally, Anaal Naathrakh doing their over-produced, film score with blast beats thing. A single came out before the rest of the album so I somehow missed the rest when it was released. Lately, I like to pre-order an album so when it gets released I can consume the whole thing for a while, so I just miss albums if they do the old, dead music industry things like trying to hype an album with a single or pretending that there can be digital limited editions - a mistake that the Beyond Creation label had made but at least I could pre-order the album and listen to it in its entirely even sans bonus tracks. I usually enjoy Anaal Naathrakh and what I've heard so far is on par, but I haven't enjoyed it more than the rest.