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: Blood Ceremony - "The Old Ways Remain"

The last time we heard from Canada’s Blood Ceremony was 2016, seemingly in a different lifetime, for the sublime and timeless “Lord of Misrule.”  That album was a lustrous black pearl of occult rock; soaked in warm, amplified fuzz and full of leering eeriness and dread.  It was an album a reality apart, the kind of record that took the listener to a frightening, curious and exciting world, akin to the great works of Shirley Jackson, Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola.

Some seven years later, the band returns to a wearier Earth with “The Old Ways Remain,” a prophetic title, but one that also belies the album’s true nature.

This new record maintains the Old Ways of Blood Ceremony in that the bones of this lich remain true; songs that swarm with the aural locusts of yesteryear, born from fantasy and imagination and psychedelic rock.  What’s new is that this album leans heavily into the psych rock of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the kind of motif that we last saw the band dabble in for the positively bopping single “Flower Phantoms.”

In contrast to the catalog we’ve come to the know from the band over their seventeen years, “The Old Ways Remain” removes much of the existential dread that Blood Ceremony trades in so well.  That might be a misstatement, let’s be more precise – the crises of a haunting past and an uncertain present still ring true in the themes of the songs, but there is a sense of immediacy that’s been stripped away.  No longer does an uneasy and likely grisly fate lurk just around the corner with ragged claws and fangs that glint in the full moon.

The real takeaway though, is that even for the stylistic shift, “The Old Ways Remain” is a damn good listen.  In music, the best accomplishments often fall into one of two categories: the thing we’ve never heard before, and the thing we love done exceptionally well.  “The Old Ways Remain” falls firmly into the later camp.  The guitar tone has the perfect temperature for an album that aspires to channel the great fantasy/occult/folk rock of old.  The album feels familiar, even as the listener hears it for the first time.

And for all the focus on the flute that’s made Blood Ceremony so distinct on all their records, the overlooked hero of all their albums, including this new one, is the flawless timing of the guitar of Sean Kennedy.  Go no farther than “Ipsissimus” to hear Kennedy tail the song with a solo that fits perfectly into the pocket of the rhythm and melody, accentuating the previous three minutes and adding some snap to the outro.

“The Old Ways Remain” then moves in a few experimental directions, starting with “Eugenie” which sounds like a flute-heavy soundtrack piece, the kind of funky walking song that would be right at home during the opening scene set of an exploitation movie, following the main character as he walks through town and we see his life through his own eyes.  It is atmospheric in all the right ways, even if these are ways we’ve never heard from Blood Ceremony previously.

“The Bonfires of Belloc Coombe,” incorporates some accenting violin throughout which adds dimension and depth to the piece, while the highly enjoyable “Hecate” lives at the strangest of all intersections; that of ‘60s progressive folk rock jam and ‘80s sitcom opening theme.  These are all new facets of the diamond of Blood Ceremony, all unleashed at once in a single album.

If there is a place where the album could have used a little of the old menace, it would be for “Powers of Darkness.”  There’s nothing wrong with the song on its face, except that the lyrical theme is the kind of thing that Blood Ceremony did with such accomplishment and aplomb for so long.  To hear a song that in theory would be right up their alley consciously eschew that style is off-putting, and fans will miss the blackened edges of the band’s bread-and-butter.

That’s only one song on the album though, which is otherwise an unqualified success.  It’s rare for a band to be able to recognize and utilize their old roots while simultaneously showing new elements and patterns in their music not just for one song, but for an entire record.  Blood Ceremony should be lauded not only for the attempt, but for the success of their versatility.  And all this is without even taking the time to address the steadying hand of Alia O’Brien’s vocal performance, which provides the anchor point between the band’s past and present.  “The Old Ways Remain” is an enjoyable album for long time fans of Blood Ceremony and a good jumping-on point for those willing to dive in.

Here It Is - The Best Albums of 2016

Okay, so this is the culmination of the musical year, the part everyone wants to read because it satiates our two great needs – subjective, arbitrary rankings of art and numbered lists.  If this were the internet (hey, wait…) I might be so inclined to toss in a “Number 7 will shock you!” but because I respect the intelligence of those reading this, I won’t stoop to such a facile attempt to patronize your greater sensibilities.

Not much in the way of introductions needed here, because first of all, the headline pretty much covers what you need to know going in and if you wanted a more in-depth, analytical look at the year at large, well, you’ve likely already read the extended exchange of intellectual diatribes between myself and my esteemed cohort, Chris.

So real quick, let’s blast through the rules.  Pretty easy, there’s basically only one.  To be eligible, an album must be composed of original studio material.  Which means no live albums, no re-releases, no compilations.  You follow?  Good.  On we go.

One quick preamble before we sojourn further (and I know I promised no lengthy introductions.) As the year progressed, I kept a running tally of albums that I thought might prove their mettle enough to be included on this list.  In the end, there were thirty contestants, all of which I enjoyed, so just because an album does not appear here does not diminish its value.  So, with a tip of the cap to Black Wizard, Surgical Meth Machine, Jinjer, Dark Forest, Red Tide Rising, Prong, Deadlock and a fistful of others, let’s get to the awards:

Honorable Mention – Gypsy Chief Goliath – Citizens of Nowhere
As if anybody had any doubt about the future of baseline, sludgy blues metal, here comes Gypsy Chief Goliath to put all those fear to bed.  A stunningly powerful and at times abrasive album, the band also weaves some classic rock style songwriting into their mix, creating a much fuller and more robust experience.



11 – The Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell – Keep It Greasy
As eclectic and bizarre as ever, The Shovell returns to the halls of this list having once previously submitted the album of the year.  There was an effort in between that one and this one that didn’t make the grade, but the gents return to form on this record, combining their…unique…themes and visions with their penchant for writing catchy, old-school riffs that undulate with that glorious distortive factor that so characterized the most memorable experiences of rock in the ‘70s.



10 – Devil to Pay – A Bend Through Space and Time 
This is as much a vote for the entire Devil to Pay catalogue as it is for this specific album.  Every DtP album is different from its predecessor, which is an accomplishment in and of itself, this one being no exception to that remarkable pattern.  As I look back over the list, it’s probably a reflection of personal preference that the first three albums we’ve talked about today are all muddy reproductions of rock-as-we-remember-it, plucked from the tree of Black Sabbath and given to take root in the furnace of modern metal.  Anyway, “A Bend Through Space and Time” keeps the gears churning with that Midwest flair that Devil to Pay trades so well in, crafting a rolling, roiling listen that never rests.



9 – Red Eleven – Collect Your Scars
C’mon people, let’s help this band out.  They deserve to be on a world tour immediately.  Sometimes you hear new music and you just know that a band has ‘it.’  Red Eleven is one of those bands.  This is one part European metal precision and one part pure American grunge design.  There are few bands operating now who seem to want to admit they took their inspiration from the ‘90s, but Red Eleven is in that company, and leading the charge.  “Collect Your Scars” showcases the band’s smooth songwriting and easy composition while juxtaposing that against their aural power.

8 – Blood Ceremony – Lord of Misrule
And of course, right after we make one trip to a band influenced by the ‘90s, we crash right back into bands that have a public love affair with the ‘70s.  Or in some cases on this album, the ’60s.  Even more than their previous efforts, Blood Ceremony goes to great efforts to craft an experience that synthesizes their intimate knowledge of flower rock with the dread and occult of traditional heavy metal.  Top all this off with the siren song of Alia O’Brien and it makes for a can’t miss experience.



7 – The Browning – Isolation
Finally, I break my own pattern by including a record that shares nearly nothing in common with any of the others records on this list.  A unique mix of hardcore and edm, this is the logical extension of industrial metal as we’ve long thought of it, a pure give into the depth of electronic music.  At the time of review I said that this album possessed distinct flaws, and nothing about that has changed, but this is one of those glorious moments where the insight and uniqueness of the product overshadows the shortcomings.  Whenever I wanted something different in my speakers this year, this is where I turned.



6 – Death Angel – The Evil Divide
Thrash, when done right, is still a genre of malice and power.  Many of the hallmark bands of the once proud genre have strayed from that message or forgotten it entirely, but Death Angel is still carrying the banner, standing on the precipice and shouting to all those who would hear that thrash is alive and well.  Yet for all the shredding riffs and glass-chewing tones, it’s the emotional affectation of “Lost” that helps separate the album from the rest of thrash’s contenders this year.

5 – Red Fang – Only Ghosts
Only Red Fang can simultaneously sound like six different bands and yet still sound exclusively like Red Fang.  That’s an incredibly hard balance to strike, but Red Fang continues to exist at the unlikely crossroads of Clutch, Black Sabbath and Queens of the Stone Age.  One of the tricks of this album that makes it work so well is that no matter how far afield the songs get, there’s always a big chorus around the corner to bring everyone back into the fold.  It’s a critical talent, once that we’ll see again later on this list.



4 – Lacuna Coil – Delirium
Another record that works as a product of its emotional mix, “Delirium” sees Lacuna Coil tune down their radio-friendly metal chops and focus it into a sharp metal point that showcases fear, hope and anger in equal mix.  For the first time in a long time, the star of this album isn’t just Cristina Scabbia, but the play of her sanguine vocals laid against the harsh grunt of Andrea Ferro.  The return of that dynamic to the fore speaks louder than any other elements on this record, marking a new phase in Lacuna Coil’s already storied career.



3 – Texas Hippie Coalition – Dark Side of Black
As I talked about briefly in my discussion with Chris, some of what makes this album stand out is that I think THC fans were pretty sure we knew everything there was to know about the band’s musical acumen.  Then this album drops, taking their game to the next level both in ferocity and craftsmanship.  Big Dad Ritch confessed that the album was written and recorded quickly, an intentional effort by the band to release a record that shows some seams, while still showcasing the brilliance of Cord Pool, their guitarist who was finally involved in the writing of new material for the first time.  The band’s swagger is still ever-present, but there’s not genuine malice woven into the brew.



2 – PAIN – Coming Home
Heavy-handed proof that side projects need not be discarded.  All of PAIN’s records have been competitive against the established track record of Hypocrisy, but this one takes that game to a whole new level and challenges Peter Tägtgren’s main act to live up to this record.  “Coming Home” is a multi-faceted beast, one that showcases the power of rock, metal, weird samples, bizarre lyrics and straight-up tight songwriting.  The riffs, as ever for PAIN, remain the star.



1 – Destrage – A Means to No End
…and what else could it be?  The Italians top the list this year (after falling just short to Red Eleven a couple years back,) by bringing their full arsenal of musical mastery to the fore and combining all of the ingredients seamlessly before our eyes.  Destrage succeeds because they locate the sound they want, then acquire it, regardless of how far outside the bounds of what’s ‘metal’ they need to go.  Almost like a prog band, this group of artists can find and blend the best parts of rock, metal, hardcore, prog, grunge and maybe even some lounge material in such a skillful fashion that the listener never feels lost.  Much in the same vein as Red Fang, this is a band that knows how to craft a catchy chorus and always keeps one in the back pocket to bring everyone back together once the song has meandered too far.  Their talent is both undeniable and irresistible.  If you want to step outside the box a little, and really see what metal can do at the same time, there’s no better opportunity in 2016 than to hang out with Destrage’s new record.

Engaging in Ritual - A Conversation with Blood Ceremony

Blood Ceremony, perhaps more than any doom-based band working today, combines more elements and integrates more distinctive tastes than any of their contemporaries on the market.  As their new album "Lord of Misrule" stands poised to transfix listeners the world over, we sat down with vocalist Alia O'Brien to talk music, gender bias and a few others odds and ends.

D.M: Tell me about “Lord of Misrule.”  Where does this find your band, and what do you want people to take away from it?

ALIA O’BRIEN: I feel like it continues where “The Eldritch Dark” left off, first of all.  We again wanted to record analog, we wanted to record to tape.  This has some cohesive songwriting, I think.  Like “The Eldritch Dark,” I feel like our song length has diminished a little bit [laughs].  There is a degree of continuity between “The Eldritch Dark” and “Lord of Misrule,” but I do think this one is a little bit of a departure because we took more risks stylistically.  It’s also our first time working with producer Liam Watson at Toe Rag Studios in London, who’s known for his, well people call it the ‘Liam Watson Wall of Sound,’ but he records to eight track tape and really has his own very specific process that he uses.  I think this album does sound different than our last album because it has that Liam Watson sound.  Our vocal sounds are different on this album, for instance.  I think sound-wise, that’s where “Lord of Misrule” sits.
Thematically, it’s not a concept album, I think if anything we imagined it like a musical Feast of Fools, I guess the title implies that a little bit.  Just because everything is so incredibly varied, you know, a mysterious, buffet-style offering of musical tidbits or something [laughs].

D.M: You mentioned that there were a few places where you made adjustments to your sound for this album.  What kind of adjustments did you make and what made now the time?

AO: I think we made adjustments to, not the sound of the band, but the styles that we’re going to tackle.  Our lineup has been pretty solid for the last four years, which means I think we’ve developed a pretty consistent sound between the four of us.  There’s the musical dynamic that’s gelled into something that’s solid, basically.  I think perhaps because of that we feel confident tackling something like a northern soul style song like “Flower Phantoms” or a stark folk track like “The Weird of Finistere.”  I think probably because the band has become an entity unto itself, we can branch out in these directions and, I hope, still sound like ourselves.

D.M: This is a layman’s opinion, I’m not all that well-schooled in music theory, but it sounds like this album isn’t quite as dire as “The Eldritch Dark,” like you branched into some brighter musical directions.  Was that something you wanted to do, or did that just happen?

AO: I think that’s a product of some songs we had written trying a few things.  We wanted the production to stay pretty low key, so like, “Flower Phantoms” is an upbeat song, but it’s in a minor key and Liam Watson stripped a lot of things away to make it sound pretty stark, which I love.  Even in our happier numbers there’s an air of melancholy or unrest lurking beneath them.  In some cases, I think it’s a product of really crafty production on Liam’s part.

D.M: What was it about the Festival of Fools as a historical event that drew you to it?

AO: That was Sean [Kennedy,] that was Sean’s concept.  Initially I think what he imagined for the album once upon a time ages ago is that we would have between the songs a sort of Lord of Misrule figure introducing them or something like that.  Kind of in a “Sgt. Pepper’s” kind of way, like between the first and second song on “Sgt. Pepper’s” you have ‘one and only Billy Shears’ being introduced.  We were thinking we could be playful and do something like that, but then we decided that wasn’t really us.  But, the idea still influenced the order of the tracks, and we have a title track called “The Lord of Misrule.”  I think the thing that’s so compelling and tragic about the Lord of Misrule is that you have this temporary, in some tellings of saturnine practices, the appointment of someone to lord of saturnalia, and at the end of the festivities when the social order is reversed or inverted of muddled, the lord is sacrificed in Saturn’s name.  And this idea of a sacrificial lord being placed in a position of power and then killed is so heavy [laughs].  Our album ends with the song “Things Present, Things Past,” which is about death, basically.  We have these moments of strange festivity and this bit of revelry on the album, but it ends with quite a downer track.  That could be the arc of the lord’s trajectory.

D.M: There’s a common conception when people first hear Blood Ceremony that they listen for a few minutes and say ‘well, this is Black Sabbath with a flute,” but it’s not, really, is it?  What else is in there, who else inspires you?

AO: At this point, it’s funny, I think we listen to each other a lot.  I think in the early days, we were really looking to Italian prog for sure, some other places where that was common.  You know, some heavy rock.  For this album, I think our other influences may have bled in a little.  I was going through a pretty heavy Harry Nilsson phase, not that it’s my first time going through a Harry Nilsson phase, just revisiting it around the time of the album.  I think that’s seen on a couple of tracks.  I listen to a lot of soul, so when I wrote “Flower Phantoms” that was in there.  These things happen, I guess [laughs].  We all listen to so much stuff it all bubbles up in the music we write.  I think you write songs that you want to listen to.

D.M: Maybe this is a loaded question.  The identifier of Blood Ceremony, above everything else, is the flute.  What’s the deal with the flute?  How did you decide you were going to include that into the mix?

AO: For me, it was no decision because it’s my instrument [laughs].  It wasn’t something I picked up, I’ve played it for twenty years.  It’s my instrument of choice, although I did not initially choose it, it was forced upon me in a school band.  I quickly learned to do what I wanted with it.  I played a lot of jazz and I would transcribe guitar solos and stuff on flute.  It became my entry point into understanding all different types of music.  When Sean started Blood Ceremony in the early days and brought me on, I think he wanted flute on like, one song.  And it’s not unprecedented, Sabbath had, I think it’s “Solitude” they had flute on, Witchcraft had a song with flute on it, and we can name plenty of others, the Mamas and the Papas and so on.  He wanted to do something like that with a flute solo.  Soon as I showed up for practice, I think maybe he had never heard me play flute before, maybe he just knew I played flute, and I started playing along with the riff, getting into the song material and it just worked.  It was a little bit of a coincidence that it worked out that way.  I came in to play one song and ended up joining the band [laughs].

D.M: Now, most kids who have an instrument forced on them in a school band grow up to resent that instrument.  How long did it take you to enjoy playing the flute?

AO: It didn’t take me too long.  I was very disappointed, I wanted to play saxophone, but there weren’t enough to go around.  I came home and my dad asked me if I’d ever listened to Jethro Tull and I said ‘no.’  So he said I should go out and get some Jethro Tull, so I went out and bought “Thick as a Brick,” and I was like ‘oh, cool!’  There are many possibilities of flute playing, I don’t know what I had in my head, but it wasn’t Ian Anderson’s playing.  I started getting into Jethro Tull and I just learned flute alongside learning in band, I learned by listening to those records and playing along with them.  Then I started to enjoy it.

D.M: A few years ago when I was first listening to “The Eldritch Dark,” I critiqued it to a friend of mine, and I said it sounds almost like if Jethro Tull had deserved to beat Metallica for the Grammy in the ‘80s.  Is that fair?

AO: [Laughs].  That was really weird.  Genre’s a weird thing, right?  I think people in those decision-making positions can be out of touch at times.  I don’t want to say Jethro Tull didn’t deserve it just because I love them so much, but I think it’s a very interesting and confused moment in music history where there’s obviously a severe misunderstanding about what the genre of metal was, which is really funny.  I think the coolest thing was following that, Jethro Tull published an ad in a magazine or paper that said ‘the flute is a heavy metal instrument.’

D.M: As a woman growing up in heavier music, both in metal and rock, who were your role models?  Who did you look to?

AO: I have a smattering – I did look up to a lot of men, I wasn’t super limited to female role models, though I certainly had them along the way.  Any human who inspired me was helpful in guiding me along the way, I suppose, regardless of gender.  Ian Anderson, obviously.  I used to love the Beatles, I was quite obsessed.  I say ‘I used to,’ I love the Beatles [laughs] but at a young age I grew quite obsessed with them.  I love Bobby Liebling a lot, I think he’s a great performer, and I think I find him fun and frightening, which is a very difficult thing to be.  Another performer who is an absolute inspiration to me on many levels is Tina Turner, I think she’s incredible.  [Going back] from the Ike and Tina days, I love music from that era.  Also, she’s my multi-tasking hero because she’s paying a lot of attention to performance, she’s delivering these incredibly persuasive vocals and dance and choreography.  On stage I play the flute, keyboard and sing.  I look to her in those moments of transitions when she’s moving between vocals and dance just to see how she navigated that and I studied that a bit to see how to make my performance and my transitions between instruments look as smooth as possible and effortless.  Which it’s not, but there’s a way to make it look that way [laughs].

D.M: As a quick sidebar, you mentioned Bobby Liebling and I know you guys toured with Pentagram somewhat recently, how cool was that?

AO: It was great!  It was really great.  There was one night, I think it was when we were playing Burlington, and Bobby was taking a rest or gathering his energy before the show, and we were sound checking.  And he was standing right in front of us, watching.  I think we were all probably a little nervous, because he has amazing taste in music and he’d be able to exact where we pulled different ideas from or drew inspiration from.  I don’t know, it was Bobby Liebling, watching us!  That was a really great experience, and they were a really nice band and we only played a couple shows with them but they were really good.

D.M: Circling back for just a moment, as a woman in metal, do you find you are held to a different standard than your male contemporaries?  Either in how you appear or sound or present yourself?

AO: I’m sure, but that’s just being a woman in life, right?  Metal aside, definitely, there’s the notion of the male gaze and women are scrutinized.  I have been critiqued for not having a virtuoso voice, whereas I haven’t heard the same critique leveled at men who are just singing in various styles.  So, these sorts of things happen, but this is something that happens day to day on such a small scale that you stop noticing.  But I do generally feel that I’ve received a lot of support and been welcomed into the fold.  I’ve heard of other stories of individuals and women in metal having harder times, or encountering difficulties that I’ve never encountered.  My friend Laina Dawes, she wrote a book called “What Are You Doing Here?” about being a black woman in metal.  She talks about acts of targeted violence against people that she interviewed [for the book.]  She also included some of her own personal story.  None of that has happened to me, for example, but it happens.  So perhaps I’ve been lucky, I haven’t heard a lot of super sexist slurs, nobody has said ‘you’re good for a woman,’ or any of that kind of stuff.  I also step up on stage and I’m a classically trained flutist, so to some degree, I don’t think people are going to critique my skills as a flute player, for example.  I have this barrage of instruments that I can hit people over the head with [laughs] and maybe avoid some of the critiques that would otherwise be leveled at me.

D.M: Last thing – in reading other interviews that you’ve done previously, I picked up on something and I want you to know you’re not alone; among the various records that my dad played at the house when I was growing up, there was a lot of Boston and Doobie Brothers and The Who and all those wonderful things, but he also had a couple of Arthur Brown records.  What is it about Arthur Brown that so appeals, what is it about his particular brand of insanity that draws people to him?

AO: Man, I don’t know, but he’s just awesome.  It’s quite theatrical and melodramatic.  I think he has that voice, I can think of a few people – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Arthur Brown – that voice that sort of haunts you in your dreams.  And his monkey dancing!  You know what I’m talking about, with his waving arms, the moves are quite magnetic, you can’t forget him.  Once you see him dance, you’ll never forget the wonder that is Arthur Brown.

D.M: It always struck me that his were the rantings of a crazy person, but that whatever he was ranting about, he felt great conviction about.

AO: And maybe you should, too, yeah.  The doomsday prophesize-r who you don’t want to believe but maybe you should, because they’re so convincing.  There’s something about someone being so compelling and convincing that’s really attractive.

Find more about Blood Ceremony here

Album Review: Blood Ceremony - "Lord of Misrule"

Okay, so whenever someone who’s uninitiated first encounters Blood Ceremony, there’s a general predilection to say ‘oh, it’s Black Sabbath with a flute.’  The brain connects those pathways easily, and then without further inspection, the die is cast and the listener thinks they know Blood Ceremony inside and out.

But lo, we know there’s more to the story, don’t we?  The Canadian doom-y quartet hits all those hallmarks, yes, but they also expand into further and more indirect influences, gathering a throng of musical ideas ranging from devilish to celebratory and stirring them into a cavernous cauldron of rhythm, emotion…and yes, flute.

The band that first impressed with their self-titled debut in 2008 and floored us with the apex of “The Eldritch Dark” in 2013 returns this year with “Lord of Misrule,” an album that promises both more of the same and something inimitably more.

This record takes inspiration from the old Feast of Fools, which up until roughly the Enlightenment was celebrated in England in the saturnine custom of pagans.  The celebration was always roughly concurrent with Christmas and involved, among other revelry, the naming of a Lord of Misrule, who wielded authority during the festival, but was often sacrificed to Saturn at the end of it.  The band has said that there’s no single concept running through this new record, but that the central idea was in their minds during composition.

So what does the album sound like?  Let’s hit the highlights (spoiler, there’s a bunch.)

What one notices first and foremost is that Blood Ceremony is folding in many more aspects of rock and metal than they did even in their most recent works.  To hear “Half Moon Street” is to hear an opening that swaggers like a gunfighter sauntering confidently into an old west saloon…but if the saloon were full of suspicious-looking elves and owned by dryads.  There’s an earthiness that underwrites the entire song, including into the second half when the powder keg explodes and we’re thrust headlong into a shoot-out at the Tolkien corral.  The name Ian Anderson gets dropped a lot (too often) when talking about Blood Ceremony, but Alia O’Brien unleashes the most righteous flute solo (words I didn’t think I’d type today,) since Anderson was in his heyday.  If you hadn’t gathered, “Half Moon Street” is the album’s best cut.

But wait, there’s more!  While the Black Sabbath comparisons in this genre are overused and over-simplified, they’re not always without merit.  While those boys would never have penned the flighty outro to “Loreley,” Iommi and company could have absolutely crafted the rusted, grinding edge of “The Rogue’s Lot,” a slow burning dirge that throws shadows in its wake.

We’re not done!  Tune in a few songs later and you’ll walk unheeding into “Flower Phantoms,” and now we’re hearing….sixties folk pop?  Short a tambourine, that’s exactly where we are, and the riff of Sean Kennedy is the perfect tone to replicate that feeling of go-go gone by, Michael Carrillo’s drum beat a spot-on replica of rolls and fills from nearly fifty years ago.  It’s a song that shouldn’t work but mysteriously does, part of O’Brien’s continued spell on the listener and the capable craftsmanship of the band as a whole.

“The Eldritch Dark” was a top ten album in 2013, and at the risk of making a rash judgment, “Lord of Misrule” might well be better than that record, which tells you its prospects as we forge ahead.  Blood Ceremony has dropped a nearly flawless album of retro-metal and classic rock, and it is not to be missed.