The Top 11 Albums of 2023 - D.M's List

Here we are again - we're at the end of another year, which means it is time for the most arbitrary thing of all, which is to recap the musical arts of the year in the manner of a concise, ten-item list!  Naturally, diligent readers will note that my list goes to 11, because Spinal Tap.  

I usually allow my editorial blurbs to speak for themselves as far as an individual album on this list goes, but I did want to pause to the make the following assertion - as recently as the fall, I was not confident in this list, and I was notably alarmed that I hadn't managed to determine what I wanted the number one album of the year to be.

This last four weeks of dedicated music listening and review to things that caught my interest over the course of 2023 has turned around my opinion of the year entirely.  There were a lot of strong efforts to be had in this calendar year, they just didn't happen to come from the usual sources.  That's probably my own hubris and lack of time that accounts for what felt like personal disappointment.  Luckily, hedging against my own laziness, I kept copious notes of what I thought was interesting this year, so it wasn't too terribly difficult to go back there and unearth what I feel now are the most valuable gems.

More than ever, in what was a difficult year in many ways personally, I found myself gravitating more towards albums that I simply enjoyed listening to, and away from ones that I found academically interesting or musically intricate.  Bear that in mind as you read on.

First order of business, the rules:
-All albums must be original studio content
-No live albums
-No covers albums
-No re-releases
-No anthologies of any kind

-No EPs (this is a little fungible, as if say, NIN's "Broken" came out this year, it is so good that it would merit inclusion.  But it would take an extraordinary effort.  Which is why I give away a separate EP of the Year Award.)

I first began reviewing music in a forum such as this in 2008, which is making me feel slightly nostalgic, so to catch up for new readers, here are all the albums I have ranked #1 over the years, beginning in 2011, when I did my first official year-end list:
2011 - Turisas - Stand Up and Fight
2012 - The Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovell - Don't Hear It...Fear It! (<--the only one on this list I regret.)
2013 - Turisas - Turisas2013
2014 - Red Eleven - Round II
2015 - Shawn James & The Shapeshifters - The Gospel According to Shawn James & The Shapeshifters
2016 - Destrage - A Means to No End
2017 - The Midnight Ghost Train - Cypress Ave.
2018 - Cancer Bats - The Spark That Moves
2019 - Destrage - The Chosen One
2020 - The Heavy Eyes - Love Like Machines
2021 - Cave of Swimmers - Aurora
2022 - Rxptrs - Living Without Death's Permission

A brief mention to some artists who put out albums that merited consideration, but didn't make the cut: Phantom Elite, DieHumane, Metallica, Asinhell, Kontrust, Jason Blake, Degrave, Smokey Mirror, Children of the Reptile, Glacier Eater and FLO (though this last was released this year, it was recorded in 2004.)

Alright, I've wasted enough of your time. Let's get to it:

HONORABLE MENTION: Blood Ceremony – The Old Ways Remain

Blood Ceremony’s stylistic shift toward the retro folk-pop they experimented with on “Lord of Misrule,” is a decision that I don’t know if I would have made, but after a long absence, the band proves that their unique mix of the occult, fuzzy guitar, haunting vocals and, well, flute continues to make them a force to be reckoned with.  Those who walk into this hoping for old Blood Ceremony may be disappointed, but if you keep an open mind, there’s a lot of well-constructed old-school rock to be had here.

EP OF THE YEAR: Hellevate – The Purpose is Cruelty

It’s been a long while since I enjoyed a sampling of thrash that reminded me so much of the golden days of thrash and the revival that Power Trip promised but was sadly never able to totally deliver on.  Everything about this EP works, and the very fact that it is an EP works in its favor,  As they say, leave ‘em wanting more, and Hellevate does exactly that.  The guitars are crunchy, the vocals are edgy but restrained, the beats are good but not obsessive – it all meshes into some of the best pure thrash that’s been produced in the new millennium.  This is also the best band from Kansas City since The Browning.

11 – Necropanther – Betrayal 

I published the review of this album a week after its release just because I felt I needed more time with the album to really digest it and try to make something of it.  It’s maybe the only review I’ve ever penned (typed? Word processed?) where I ended up scoring the album incomplete.  Some six or whatever months later, with a dozen more listens, I still don’t know if I really have a grip on everything good and bad that’s happening here.  But that sense of intrigue alone makes it a unique listen worthy of consideration for this list just because of its staying power.  Throw in the fact that the juxtaposition of rock guitar solos with modern death metal presents as novel a sound as exists in any quantity in metal right now, and this record is worth the time.

10 – Overkill – Scorched

Another couple years, another Overkill album.  Overkill may well be the thrash version of AC/DC – if you have some concept that you like Overkill, you may well like the overwhelming majority of their catalogue, and if you don’t, you probably won’t like this either.  But that’s overly dismissive and doesn’t address the fact that Overkill, some twenty albums into their career, still sounds dedicated and vital.  It’s hard to find that amount of professionalism within any band that’s been around so long, let alone among Overkill’s thrash contemporaries.  “Scorched” stands out because Dave Linsk, long undervalued in the metal community as a guitar player, finds new avenues to control the pace of the band without losing any of their famed teeth.

9 – Lord of the Lost – Blood and Glitter

I’m so glad that Chris and I had the conversation at the end of last year about how we define a ‘year’ for the purposes of these lists.  We came to the joined conclusion that any album released after the publication of the previous list should count toward the next year’s list.  Lord of the Lost released this record on December 30th of 2022, and I would have been loathe to leave it without any further consideration.  I’ve long been a tangential follower of the band (who’s popularity seems to only be growing after cruelly finishing last in the Eurovision song contest 2023,) but they’ve never put together a full album that made me say ‘wow’ until this one.  (That said, I still don’t know if they’ve ever written a better single than 2018’s “Loreley,” but this record’s “Dead End” comes close.) Every song on this record pops in some way, finds a way to be interesting or catchy or both, and culminates in the best LotL album to date.

8 – Hellfreaks – Pitch Black Sunset

What a strange record, and I mean that in the best possible way.  It’s one part pop-punk album, one part rock sing along and one part screaming hardcore anthem.  While those idioms are all related, none of that sounds like it should work on paper, but listen to “Old Tomorrows,” which throws in a quasi-metal breakdown, and pureblood metal solo, and you’ll see how this genre-bending, swirling mass of an album becomes so much more than the sum of its parts.  This is like if Cripper and New Year’s Day tried to write an album together, but, you know…good.

7 – Royal Thunder – Rebuilding the Mountain

I am not a typical musical listener in that I have very little emotional attachment to any of the music that I enjoy.  I don’t associate songs or albums with any particular feeling one way or the other (with the exception of the Destrage song “Rage, My Alibi,” for reasons I’ll keep to myself.)  I say that though, to say that the emotions of an artist that they press into their music is not lost on me.  And “Rebuilding the Mountain” is a deeply painful and cathartic album for Royal Thunder, and while the circumstances of the record are serious and dire, the record is so much better for the raw infusion of genuine frustration and pain and hurt and ultimately forgiveness that permeates every moment.  “Now Here – No Where” will live in my head for a long time. 

6 – Powerwolf – Interludium

Power just writes fun records.  There may not be a metal band that does that with greater skill or sense of adventure than Powerwolf.  That’s really all there is to it.  The fact that they live on the outer orbits of power metal without succumbing to the cookie cutter that’s disfigured that genre forever is even better.

5 – Lucifer Star Machine – Satanic Age

A new-age Misfits?  Well, no, because the songs are more than forty seconds.  But that’s the vibe, and I’m here for it.  To go one level deeper, there’s also a healthy dose of the Dropkick Murphys mixed in here, and I mean Dropkick Murphys from back in the “Do or Die” era, not in the last fifteen or so years.  It’s the rasp in the vocals that sells that latter aspect, but this whole record bops along with gross lyrics set against the kind of accessible rock that gave birth to the entire punk movement in the first place.

4 – Robots of the Ancient World – 3737

As good a slow burn as there’s been since the first Mothership album, or Sundrifter’s “Visitations.”  Less direct than the best works of The Heavy Eyes, RotAW succeeds in that this is a full-on stoner doom record that never retreats into minimalism or gets lost in jam-like wandering.  That’s not an easy feat when all your songs are 6-plus minutes.  “3737” is aided by the fact that it’s limited to 6 songs, one of which is a throw away interlude, so all the band’s good ideas were mashed into a few packets, rather than spread out unnecessarily.  (Subtracting the throwaway, this has the same number of tracks as Hellevate’s EP, but because it still runs more than thirty minutes, qualified as an album.  For those scoring at home.)

3 – Zardonic – Superstars

This is two years in a row now that a DJ has put out a metal album that cracks my year-end list (Dampf’s “The Arrival” last year.)  Maybe it’s time that I just admit that I was born in the 80s and a certain degree of automatic love for electronic programming is burned into my genetic code.  Still, you know why this album is here?  Not to go too deep into the reeds, but this has been a tough year for me.  Lot of adversity, lot of trial and tribulations that required patience to navigate.  And this album makes me smile.  The fun factor is even greater than the baseline for Powerwolf, since this album exists solely for the purpose of being a fun album.  There’s no story here.  No grand mysticism or mountain in the distance that holds the secret to the keys, or whatever the hell.  “Rock and Roll Tonight” is more or less a KISS song for the 21st century, but it's just so damn awesome.  In the end, if your music isn’t making you smile, or making you enjoy it on whatever level it needs to meet you at, what the hell is the point anyway?  Plus, a really banging cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” a song that was in desperate need of a kick in the ass anyway.

2 – Kiberspassk – Smorodina

When I first heard this album at the end of December last year (it was released in January of 2023,) I was convinced I had already heard the best album of 2023.  It’s been a long time since I had heard an album that was so different than anything I’d heard before.  The rarest of all gems in music journalism is an album that sounds like literally nothing else in the best possible way, and Kiberspassk (who, by the way, are the same folks as in the more traditional folk band Nytt Land,) have crafted an album that combines metal, industrial, dance, folk, mythology and throat singing into a stew that it totally without peer.  The single “Daleko” is as haunting and beautiful and strange and energizing as any song I’ve ever heard.

1 – Graveyard – 6

This feels a little bittersweet.  This is the fifth consecutive Graveyard record to appear in my top albums of the year.  And it’s the first to be ranked number one.  Which, to come around, is bittersweet because I don’t think this is the best Graveyard album.  “Hisingen Blues” is almost certainly better, and I think I enjoyed “Peace,” this album’s forerunner, more than I did this one.  That doesn’t mean, however, that this can’t be the best album of 2023, though I do think I’m going to mentally jockey between this and “Smorodina” for years to come, and there will be days that I’m sure I will regret my decision.  Still, as Chris and I talked about when we wrote the double review for this record, this is Graveyard’s most soulful, most cinematic album to date (I will cede the point that every song Truls Mörck sings, even the ones I love like “Sad Song” on this record, all have the same tone.)  Really, what this comes down to is that there are no songs on this record I have any inclination to skip – they are all not only enjoyable, but unique in their own right within the context of the album.  That kind of fluidity and consistency of songcraft has to count for something.

Album Review: Kiberspassk - "Smorodina"

 

One of the trends that’s been worth tracking over the past seven or eight years of music has been the complete breakdown of genre convention.  The walls that separated one genre from another, or indeed, one splinter genre from another splinter genre, are being torn down on an accelerated curve by an increasingly large collection of artists who were raised in the digital musicscape and have had occasion to sample the flavors of a myriad of different styles.  Sure, there are plenty of artists out there who want to live in one world, and do so with great accomplishment and fanfare.  Nevertheless, the horizon is teeming with a wave of musicians who will use any sound, bend any instrument, to find the right tone, the right feeling, the right mix.

Stepping to the front of the stage is Kiberspassk, a Siberian musical epiphany that uses witchcraft, folk arts and no small amount of black magic to at one time be industrial, metal, folk, chant and punk.

The statement of all those ingredients seems awfully definite, so let’s clarify a little – all of these are in the abstract.  Kiberspassk is at once each of them, and also none of them.  And then just when you think you’ve nailed down the ingredients of their new record “Smorodina,” you hear the pure rock-and-roll guitar solo of the title track, and you’re back to square one.

Leading this death’s head parade are Natasha and Anatoly Pakhalenko (yes, the same as from the folk band Nytt Land,) who have built upon their mysterious debut “See Bear” to weave an even more eclectic tale, one with greater depth and emotion and bucking of convention.  

For starters, Natasha, among her other talents, is capable of traditional Mongolian throat singing, like metal fans have only come to know recently with Tengger Cavalry and The Hu.  Her normal singing voice is ethereal but raw and real, full of conviction and spirit, weighted down with the pressures of trying to rationalize a challenging world around her.  The added dimension of her throat singing turns Kiberspassk into something else – something more challenging, less intuitive, more otherworldly.

Challenging may be the key word to the entire experience of “Smorodina.”  The album thrives on both being off-balance and keeping the listener in that same state.  That makes it no less rewarding for those with the patience, but it should serve as a warning to those who think they can dive right in – the album has a lot to digest and can be acerbic; the musical variety and twists and turns do little to minimize that.

For those willing to let the album unfold for them, regardless of the track listing, they should begin with the single “Daleko.”  It is the album’s most accessible piece, but also it’s most accomplished.  The slow build through the strains of a folk song-like beginning evokes visions of sitting around a campfire and listening to the chant of nature in the frozen wastes of the north.  That it then builds into something complex, haunting and beautiful is to the band’s credit.  The sheer amount of layering built into the song creates a wall of warm but fragile sound, concurrently bright but pained.

For the more adventurous, the industrial instrumental “Vii” is a must listen.  Imagine if you will that the opening of Pink Floyd’s “Time” (you know the one, with all the clocks,) was laid over a beat and pounded into a rhythm.  The song runs five and a half minutes, and never really ventures far from that source, but it never feels old or gimmicky.

Everything else on the record falls somewhere in between those two goal posts, though that makes “Smorodina” sound rigidly confined when it is anything but.  If “Daleko” and “Vii” are two opposing points of west and east, imagine that there is no boundary to how far north or south one could go in between those opposing points.

And the album goes in all those directions.  From the near-screaming and vitriolic protest song “Ne Otdam (I Won’t Give You My Son,)” to the excellent punk-rock infused folk beat of “Morozko,” every cut on the album tries a new path and veers off on vectors that seem impossible.

Now listen, it doesn’t all work.  It’s not worth singling out songs that falter, because those with different tastes might be attracted (or unattracted) to different aspects of the proceedings, but it’s hard to imagine that everything “Smorodina” lays out on the buffet table is going to be everyone’s first choice.  

It seems plausible though, that everyone will find four or five cuts that really speak to them, and that’s both a credit to the inclusive genre-bending that was spoken of at the top, and also the talent of the band to seamlessly weave in so many elements that on face shouldn’t work together.

Regardless, those who are looking for something different and are not afraid to color outside the margins should spend some time with Kiberspassk’s new statement.  And spin it more than once – there’s a lot to process, but it’s worth the extra effort.