Anso DF’s Top Fifteen Metal Albums of 2015
Hi MetalSucks reader! Welcome to the best heavy albums of 2015 according to me, Anso DF! These albums are what I play for a former, current, or future fan of metal if they ask for the year’s vital stuff. Moments of the below 15 come in handy for another purpose, too: When your loved ones feel excluded. They, as regular people, haven’t encountered metal; so they want examples, at least a vague idea of its vibe, maybe even a couple bands to jam together. In turn, you’re game to join them in front of the TV for the CMAs and at painful hip hop shows. It’s an expression of love. And lastly, these awesome albums — some as flawed as they are fascinating — are the ones that I most hope won’t sneak past any MetalSucks readers. Thanks for reading. Crank it up!
15. Secrets Of The Sky – Pathway (Metal Blade)
An album of six songs bracketed by minute-long interludes of footsteps, rainfall, and creaky doors doesn’t cry out to be described as “prudent.” SOTS likely hedged their bets on Pathway, for the moments of spa sounds get their own tracks and thus may be retired by a repeat listener. But the luckiest listener is the wise one who dumps the interludes before first listen, thereby clearing the way for the direct hit on your brain that Pathway deserves. Pass it on.
14. Iron Maiden – The Book Of Souls (BMG)
The narrative of Iron Maiden’s fourth era might remind you of a long-married couple’s attempts at preserving their lively love life. But all the talk of spontaneity — in which Iron Maiden compositions head straight to tape before being labored to death or whatever — may fail to invigorate listeners now faced with a third half-considered album to vet for moments of brilliance. The men of Iron Maiden need not rise to the task, ancient as they are; an iron-fisted producer is the one to “live with” new compositions and undertake their ruthless edits. Maybe even scrap the TSO-style finale and work with the drummer a bit. Steve Harris call me.
13. Torche – Restarter (Relapse)
Any common thread that runs through a calendar year’s new releases is mostly accidental, but one of 2015’s is the failure of creators of masterpiece albums to deliver another. Faith No More sounds anonymous as backing band for a Mike Patton solo album, The Darkness seems set on seducing audiences from their 2012 support slot for Lady Gaga, and The Crown has adopted the gait of a hulk hobbled by stroke. But Torche showed up like your diesel buds on moving day.
12. Void Of Sleep – New World Order (Aural)
Last year’s best album for lovers of bass guitar was He Is Legend’s Heavy Fruit, and all my favorite 2015 metal bass performances are all on Void Of Sleep’s powerhouse second album New World Order. You’ve never felt before that a bass was shouting inside your brain.
11. Enslaved – In Times (Nuclear Blast)
It might be fans of Genesis that have the most fun following Enslaved. For In Times is somehow the latter’s companion to the former’s Duke, in which a ravishing art-rock band drifts further from genre markers but seems less adventurous only to OG fans. Behold In Times‘ own “Misunderstanding” (“Building With Fire”) and “Turn It On Again” (“One Thousand Years Of Rain”), both ready for daring curators of hard rock, and an infinitely replayable epic “Duchess” (“In Times”).
10. VI – De Praestigiis Angelorum (Agonia)
Axl Rosenberg of MetalSucks on De Praestigiis Angelorum: “[VI reaches] through the listener’s chest and touches their heart with a frigid finger, letting them know, ‘Hey, it’s okay that your soul is so very, very bitter — our souls are bitter, too.’”
8. Hate Eternal – Infernus (Season Of Mist)
A veteran NBA player is mired in business troubles, legal scrapes, and defections, so his brilliant season goes overlooked. This is what awaits Infernus, Hate Eternal’s statement album, in the wake of its creators’ line-up change, doomed tour, and second line-up change. Along with a long gap between albums, that stuff must mean lost money for frontman Erik Rutan and company, so a fan wonders if this very moment on the HE timeline is a black moment soon to be forgotten. It better not be.
7. Ghost – Meliora (Loma Vista)
It once was tough to argue with doubters of Ghost, the most hyped crossover metal act in a thousand years. Now that Ghost’s muscle matches their mojo, it is impossible not to.
6. Bonehunter – Evil Triumphs Again (Hells Headbangers)
A lo-fi scum death metal album can seem distant, like it’s emitting from speakers on the far end of a dingy, dark gymnasium. It’s also like a dull knife, wielding which you exert extra force heedless of its resistance to control. It’s also also like a crude jailhouse tattoo, its misspellings discerned and meaning decoded over the same amount of time it takes to commit their evil to your permanent memory.
5. Demon Lung – A Dracula (Candlelight)
In the movie Repulsion, a spacey, superhot London manicurist experiences a psychotic episode over a few days alone in her apartment. It’s a harrowing breakdown of which she is aware but not in control, which for viewers is connected only to a trio of squeamish encounters with men who dot the spectrum of lusty intentions. Long story short, the situation ends in wreckage, no salvation. Mania, violence, guilt. Demon Lung’s new album is a soundtrack to that.
4. Pyramids – A Northern Meadow (Profound Lore)
Do an internet search for the biggest gloomiest new wave band, the huge one that still packs stadiums and tastemaker fests. Then imagine that one of our huge, revered heavy bands that openly adores the iconic mopers actually joins them for a collaboration album, and imagine the intense amount of interest from an intense number of music people. Then, a heavy, mushy beautiful metal album, a validation. Now imagine that that album actually exists in 2015 but it’s by Pyramids, a tiny, obtuse band of profoundly upset people from Texas. And heck, our little analogy about The Cure/Deftones or Radiohead/Tool or Depeche Mode/Meshuggah collab happens to ring a tiny bit true: For that genius album A Northern Meadow, Pyramids shelled out for help from freaking Colin Marston and the main dude from Blut Aus Nord. Turned out perfect!
9. Aevangelist – Enthrall To The Void Of Bliss (20 Buck Spin)
3. Aklhys – The Dreaming I (Debemur Morti)
“It’s as if the truth brought back to him a self that he broke with a long time ago. So fuck the truth, let’s concentrate on the lie.”
– Alessandro Piperno, Persecution
“Bring on the night.
I couldn’t spend another hour of daylight.”
– The Police, “Bring On The Night”
“It’s groovy being insane. Where’re you at?”
– “Denis,” Inherent Vice
2. Death Karma – The History Of Death & Burial Rituals Part I (Iron Bonehead)
It’s not odd that of your favorite 2015 albums, the uplifting ones all belong to non-metal genres. Resolution is the business of optimists, defiance the currency of the pragmatic. But it’s why the two best metal albums of 2015 stand slightly apart from the year’s other 2000 or so releases: their tone of mourning, not engagement. Each seems to take place in the silence that follows the struggle, where unselfconscious sadness and wonderment battle the fears found in a mortal soul. On Death Karma’s debut album, any of its guitar themes elicit these feelings of comfort and conciliation. Each of its “Death And Burial Rituals” assert also that those you left behind will take time to cherish you, to send you off secure in the knowledge that your death won’t hasten theirs or bruise their happiness. In place of an actual vessel to eternal peace, it’s a spell of goodwill that’s fitted around your soul to convey you away from your loved ones and all you know.
1. Myrkur – M (Relapse)
In the big fancy novel Infinite Jest, there exists a film in which Death appears as a wraith-like goddess of staggering beauty. Her only action is to apologize continuously to the viewer for a lifetime of suffering. Swathed in light and filmed with a powerful “optical perspective” that both obscures and enhances her beauty, she repeats her acknowledgement of the betrayal of birth and of its perpetrator.
In the novel, this film represents the doomsday device of recorded media, the potential for a commercial so powerful that it launches frenzied looting. To a viewer, it’s a message so elemental to human experience that an end to the gratification it provides is akin to life after the sun burns out. A lifetime-sized charge of vindication delivered at once to the part of your brain that believes secretly that you’re god but no one will admit it.
Like Infinite Jest‘s Death, Myrkur’s M arrives in shrouds, looms nearby yet unreachable, and displays horrible beauty. But M finds Death in a nurturing mood; it seems to accompany you into your history’s vortex, and through the photo album of your moments of extreme emotion. Its songs like “Onde Barn” soothe the agony, “Haeven” joins you in a chorus of regret and mourning. Call its source “feminine energy” or “the maternal” or whatever. M does not confront or fraternize. It admits, mitigates, shelters.
