That's How Kids Die.

Best Albums I didn’t get to talk about in my death/black metal top 20 list for Dethroned Emperor / Sonic Frontiers.net: (and yes, this list does go up to 11)

Crack the Skye was hands down my overall Album of the Year.  Of all the new music I was inundated with (and believe me, there was a ton of it), this was the album I returned to again and again.  I’ve been following this band since their first ep (Lifesblood) and I’ve enjoyed every step of their evolution from monstrous sludge purveyors, to mammoth-bearded prog-lords.  Looking forward to hearing their Jonah Hex soundtrack in 2010, hopefully the accompanying movie does not suck.

This year, I was feeling pretty basic when it came to music.  Hence, the inclusion of the likes of Megadeth, Slayer, Amorphis, Kreator and Slough Feg on this list.  With the notable exceptions of SunnO))) (and Gnaw Their Tongues, who doesn’t appear on this list), I wasn’t much interested in anything terribly noisy, pretentious, avant-garde or experimental.  Slough Feg brought the the Thin Lizzy-style swaggering bad-ass fun to metal in 2009 with just a dash of doom and folk, while Megadeth and Slayer each put out their strongest albums in years.  Kreator showed thrash veterans and toddlers alike how they do things in Germany, and Amorphis struck a catchier-than-herpes balance between power metal and melodic death metal.  Rammstein, whom I’ve already blogged about extensively HERE, HERE and HERE, also released a great album in Liebe ist Fur Alle Da, their best since the classic Mutter.  Oh, and about that SunnO))) album, Monoliths & Dimensions is the duo’s most varied, dynamic and layered album to date, featuring a stellar list of collaborators ranging from Attila Csihar to Eyvind Kang.

I really, reeeeally didn’t want to like Alice in Chains without Layne Staley.  However, Jerry Cantrell and the surviving members of AIC surprised the hell out of me with Black Gives Way to Blue. The vocals throughout the album recall Staley without being a carbon copy, as if the man’s specter is still informing the band’s performance from beyond the grave.  Of course, Cantrell was and is the band’s driving force, and his sludgy guitar riffing remains AIC’s calling card.  Maybe not as amazing as Dirt, but a more than worthy addition to the canon nonetheless.

Now in spite of feeling basic, psychedelic and progressive I could still get behind, and this appetite was more than sated by Mastodon’s absolutely stellar Crack The Skye, Between the Buried and Me’s The Great Misdirect and Isis’s Wavering Radiant. I was especially pleased to see Isis come back with a stellar new album, since 2006’s In the Absence of Truth did absolutely nothing for me.  BTBAM get better and more interesting with every album they release and I’m glad to see them going further out there in terms of progression and technicality.  As mentioned above, Mastodon’s 4th album was my favorite release of the year and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be ruling the world with their utterly compelling and highly conceptual take on progressive metal. Finally getting to see them live this year was simply icing on the cake.

So there you have it folks.  Nothing particularly obscure, no bands you haven’t already heard.  Just stellar material from established bands that have long been staples of my rotation.  And in 2009 there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with that.