The Best Albums of the Year - D.M's List

 

Alright, we’re not going to waste a lot of time here – you all know what this is, so let’s get to a refresher on the rules and not waste any time –

Here’s how this works: to qualify, every album must be an original studio composition released for the first time in the calendar year of 2020.  No live albums, no compendiums, no re-releases.  Simple enough.  Only one other rule – it goes to 11.

Also, a brief disclaimer - some of these videos are Not Safe For Work.  You've been warned.

I dare say this is my most diverse top albums list ever.  Without further ado, let’s get a move on:

Honorable Mention) Eyes – Underperformer

It’s hard to find such open dichotomy on a single album.  There’s a lot here that doesn’t work on paper, and doesn’t even necessarily work in the execution, but the album contains a lot of cool moments and is persistently, violently ambitious.  That’s a strange combination of adjectives to be sure, but there it is.  The vocal performance is uneven and jarring, and the music can often descend into madness.  Yet, here it sits, earning recognition in a column extolling the virtues of the year’s best albums.  There’s something about this record that just clicks.  Try it out.

11) Dynazty – The Dark Delight

I dare not put this album higher than this, because it is irrepressibly over the top and cheesy as hell.  But there’s something about it that I can’t shake.  It’s unreasonably fun to listen to, and perfectly tuned to an adventuresome time or a robust night of D&D.  I can’t explain why I like it.  I just do.

10) Mollo Rilla – Viva El Camino

Let’s be clear at the top – not everything on this album works, and there’s no certainly that it’s even meant to.  But no album has reminded so closely of the single effort we got from Them Crooked Vultures as this expansive and varied record.  For an album that falls well within the confines of rock, there’s a sinister edge that lurks not too far beneath the surface.  The album crashes back and forth between sounds, all the while writing melodies and verses that go all the way to the margins and often beyond.  This is an explosive record, filled with roof-raising moments, hypnotic interludes and unhinged catharsis, all tied together with clean riffs and easy to recognize tenets of the genre.  The connective tissue is what makes this album work.  It won’t be for everyone, but those who give it a shot will likely find something that stokes their fire.

9) Psychosomatic – The Invisible Prison

Thrash isn’t dead!  Nevermind that Jeff Salgado sounds a little like young James Hetfield, that’s beside the point.  What Psychosomatic has crafted here is an old-school thrash banger, complete with buzzsaws for guitars and big, wide-open riffs that are elegant in their simplicity.  “The Invisible Prison” doesn’t seek to be anything but what it is – there’s no play at progression or artistic diversity or needless preening here.  The album is a full-speed-ahead battering ram sent to remind us all that thrash, in moments, is just as vital now as it has ever been, and will continue to be.

8) Ghostemane – Anti-Icon

As many of you read in the year-end conversation between Chris and myself (you did all read it, didn’t you?) I am deeply fascinated with whatever the apropos label for this burgeoning genre is.  Until I hear something that feels more comfortable, I am going with ‘industrial rap.’  In the final analysis, they seem so natural a pairing – a genre built to resemble the ceaseless pounding of machinery and a genre that thrives on memorable beats – that it’s surprising it took this long to see the marriage happen.  There is a note of caution; there’s not a huge amount of separation between this album and Ghostemane’s “N/O/I/S/E” from two years ago, which as a single album in 2020 doesn’t mean all that much, but does make one question the genre’s lifespan as a whole if no further innovation is possible.  That’s a problem for the future, though.  In the present, “Anti-Icon” is a killer ride, vacillating between punk and metal and electronic and rap and combining all those in a way that’s totally unique.  To write this off as ‘rap metal’ is to sell very short on its creativity and potential.

7) Turmion Kätilöt – Global Warning

For the second album in a row, I’m going to question the degree of separation between an album and a predecessor, but in this case, the comparison is with another band.  I’m not so sure there’s a great degree of different between this record and Fear of Domination’s “Metanoia,” from 2018, but that’s not a bad thing, because that’s a great record, too.  There’s something about this style of record that’s instantly and deeply infectious, either as a reflection of the catchy, overdriven beats or because of the inherent, almost pop-like insistence of them.  Most people would listen to the album and think that analysis mentally insane, but metal fans know that there’s a certain sensibility to this particular brand of metal that is highly digestible and devilishly melodic.

6) Blackguard – Storm

There are approximately ten thousand words I could write here about this album and how long it took to get to this point, but you’re all tired of hearing it from me over and over again.  We finally got here is what’s important.  “Storm” is everything Blackguard fans wanted it to be – it is the sublime combination of the spirit and energy of “Profugus Mortis” and the power and grit of “Firefight.”  This particular brand of symphonic death metal never really got a chance to shine, and indeed, Blackguard may be the last practitioners of it.  There is a fear here both that the musical world has forgotten about the band in the long wait between albums, and that this may be the band’s swan song effort.  If it is, it’s a fine way to go out, and astute listeners will be sure to drink in the skill it took to brew it.

5) Within the Ruins – Black Heart

I’m not sure ‘progressive deathcore’ is actually a thing.  It sounds kinda made up.  What isn’t made up is how powerful this album is.  There tends to be one album every year that cracks my top albums list because of the sheer force of its will, and this year “Black Heart” is it.  Within the Ruins’ new album takes the best part of The Browning and combines them with a variety and creativity throughout the record’s soundscape that the latter band has only been able to generate in moments.  The uninitiated will hear this album as an unholy pile of smashing and banging, but if you’re willing to listen to what’s actually happening, there’s an underlying sense of rhythmic timing that belies the cacophony laying it on top of it.  The guitars are in their turn both biting and delicate, creating an album that is many things rolled into a single, sonic assault.

4) Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats – Unlocked

I kept going back to this album over and over.  I wanted to absorb it, process and digest the production, track the cadences and rhymes in a way that I hadn’t felt about a rap album in literal years.  Kenny Beats does an excellent job winding his way through seemingly unrelated samples to create a jagged, surreal landscape, but make no mistake – that landscape exists for Curry to stand on and be a star.  He slings words like the great MCs of old, channeling the spirit of Rakim, but makes those words matter by emphasizing them with the bite of DMX.  In a mumble rap world gone mad, Curry represents a breath of positively pure oxygen.  Most shocking of all is that there are four or five distinctly different, memorable experiences on this record, and the whole takes less than eighteen minutes.

3) Master Boot Record – Floppy Disk Overdrive

A year ago, I don’t think I would have been ready for this record.  And I am fully cognizant of the fact that ten years from now, I may look back at this top albums list and say “what was I thinking?”  But there’s something here that’s undeniable.  Sure, long stretches of it may sound like ‘Battle at the Big Bridge’ from Final Fantasy V, but hey, that’s a great tune!  Kidding aside, this is too easily dismissed as ‘video game music.’  The fluctuations in tempo and the depth and range of the pieces, nevermind the endless twisting and weaving and aural combinations, are symbolic of the effort and craft that went into creating this record.  I have talked many, many times on these pages about wanting to hear something different, have a music encounter with something heretofore unheard and wild.  In 2020, this was it. 

2) Blues Pills – Holy Moly!

I’m going to invoke the great poet R. Kelly for a moment, and make reference to “Real Talk” (if you’ve never heard the song and need a good laugh today, I’ll wait while you go find it…….)

…..are you back?  Feel better?  Okay, let’s continue.

Real talk: the song “Dust” is reason enough to have this album at #2.  Especially for where it comes from, smack in the middle of the album, a wicked 12-6 curveball that collapses your knees because the five songs preceding had you looking fastball all the way.  I’m pretty comfortable calling it the best single of the year (though I admit, I probably introduced Alestorm’s “Shit Boat (No Fans)” to more people, but for totally different reasons,) and if the album had done nothing else right, that one transcendent moment would have been enough to deserve a standing ovation.  And yet, Blues Pills gave us a record of great experiences, and one small blemish that is, to my mind, not a musical problem but one of order (“Song From a Mourning Dove” should close the album, rather than “Longest Lasting Friend.)  Blues Pills has been a band on the rise since their ambitious, eponymous full-length debut six years ago, and in 2020, you can’t have a better forty minutes listening to music than “Holy Moly!”  That is, unless you’re listening to…..

1) The Heavy Eyes – Love Like Machines

Instant masterpiece.  Every time, and I mean every time, I was ambiently in my house, cooking or cleaning or doing laundry or whatever, and I wanted an album to put on, this one came to mind first.  Never once did I put it on and say ‘you know, I’m not feeling it, I’m gonna go somewhere else for my fix.’  This is a punchy record that delivers efficient feeling and power in a genre where the temptation to wander is often too great to resist.  The Heavy Eyes only break the four-minute barrier once, and this is the only band I can recall that can make a two and a half minute cut feel like four minutes – and have that be a compliment.  “Love Like Machines” demonstrates effortless mastery of the blues and its interaction with rock and metal, then clothes the whole thing in fuzzy, fat guitar tones and impossibly simple but devilishly catchy riffs.  This album is a must.  Tell your friends.  There’s something here for everyone.

Album Review: The Heavy Eyes - "Love Like Machines"

To recap from yesterday - in these trying times, individuals find comfort in the familiar.  For me, and I’m sure for many others, a good chunk of that comfort comes in the form of music.  So it is that while I am locked in inside, held at an (understandable) arm’s length by my job and society as a whole, I while away the hours by scouring through promos and new music that come into my inbox.

During these days, I hoped to merely find something interesting, and in doing so I stumbled across two revelations – though revelatory for different reasons.  Master Boot Record was the first of these, and so consider this the second part of what is a two part review.

Where the joy in discovering MBR came in the unveiling of something novel and different, there is also a profound joy in finding an artist who understands the conventions of a genre with such genius as to render the familiar new all over again.

So, The Heavy Eyes.  A band based deep in the blues of Memphis and fully capable of brewing that inexorable heritage into their particular backyard moonshine blend of rock and metal. 

At first blush, the combination of fuzzed-out, yowling guitars and Tripp Shumake’s measured and monotone vocal delivery bring to mind the image of Everlast performing a set with Kyuss.  That might be an oversimplification, but it’s perhaps the most efficient way to describe the rolling blues vibes of this colorful and vibrant record.

This new record “Love Like Machines,” because it displays such mastery of the best aspects of the genre, begets automatic comparisons to the heavyweights and boutique acts that have come before.  If you’ve ever listened to Clutch, Mothership, Scissorfight, Sundrifter, Shawn James & The Shapeshifters, Devil to Pay, Screaming Trees, Graveyard, The Blue Van, Midnight Ghost Train, or yes, even Black Sabbath, and thought ‘yep,’ then you’ll instantly fall in love with The Heavy Eyes.  To steal from the sampled phone call at the beginning of Anthrax’s “Cadillac Rock Box,” there’s some mighty fine groovin’ goin' on on this record here.

“Love Like Machines” delivers throughout its brisk thirty-four minutes, and the length itself is worth noting.  For the ocean of immersive blues possibilities that this kind of metal offers, The Heavy Eyes show no proclivity for meandering down lengthy paths.  The riffs, albeit it customarily tuned to be round and warm at the edges, are punctual and efficient, which lends the album some immediacy in a genre that so often gets lost.  Only once does the band adventure past the four minute mark, making for bite-sized blues bullets that shoot straight to the heart of the matter.

The brevity does not listen the impact.  The album shines brightest beginning with “Bright Light,” an airy, haunting piece that resonates with a stop and go riff and a lot of empty space, which allows the vocal tone of Shumake to set the tone and pace.  His is a voice that one wouldn’t expect to be able to effect that kind of momentum, but there’s something magnetic in his delivery that makes the song seem more direct, more dire.

Part of the genius of “Love Like Machines” is that while it was clearly concocted in a blues metal mold, there’s a healthy streak of grunge in the alloy that lends just enough luster to make the record seem both familiar and cutting edge.  The back half “A Cat Named Haku,” doesn’t work without the idiomatic guitar bending and out and out note strangulation of grunge.  And perhaps it’s all cyclical – blues metal begat grunge which begat blues metal, but the two are intertwined and both necessary to make this record a success.

The record hits more highlights on the back end with “The Profession,” which moves with a White Stripes beat and an infectious insistence.  The drums of Eric Garcia, while not overwhelming, craft a delectable beat that helps float a riff honed over fifty years of blues metal knowledge and distilled into a deceptively simple but no less effective mix.  It’s the album’s best track, a rolling good time that could raise the mood of a social gathering, or raise your own spirits during social distancing.

You’ve heard “Love Like Machines” before.  You’ve heard it a thousand times, in steamy, swampy clubs, emanating from beer-addled dive bars, hanging out with your friends in a basement, whatever the case may be.  Yet you’ve never heard this before.  It’s a real skill when a band can make the old new again, and the reinvention of the familiar is always a good day at a time when there are thousands of also-ran bands copying a template without really innovating on it.

If Master Boot Record is laudable because it is the celebration of something new and different, than The Heavy Eyes are laudable because they remind us how fulfilling it is to be greeted by an old friend.  It’s a pleasant reminder that every now and again, just for a while, you can go home again.