We’re still not finished posting our own year-end lists — that will continue today and into next week — but this morning I learned about an “international list of lists” that I thought you folks would find interesting.
To the Teeth is the name of a Facebook-based metal blog that began life last May. The proprietor, Dutch journalist Peter van der Ploeg, regularly posts about new extreme metal songs and full releases, and he has a Reddit thread in which he often goes into greater depth about what appears more briefly at To the Teeth on FB.
To compile this “international list of lists”, Peter began by assembling a population of 83 year-end lists. In order to be included in this “list of list” exercise, the original lists had to rank the albums numerically; of course, not all lists do that. The 83 that Peter chose included a total of 558 albums and were drawn from these sources, which include a lot of “big platform” mainstream publications as well as lists from scurrilous metal-only outlets such as our own:
Decibel Magazine, Terrorizer, Invisible Oranges (14 staff lists), PopMatters, Consequence of Sound, Metalstorm, Treble, Rolling Stone, Exclaim!, Loudwire, MetalSucks (8 staff lists), Last Rites (4 staff lists, 1 general), Angry Metal Guy (21 staff lists), No Clean Singing (3 staff lists), Stereogum, To The Teeth (Peter’s own list), FasterLouder, Cvlt Nation (5 genre lists, 1 general), Metal Injection (5 staff lists), Nine Circles (3 staff lists), L.A. Weekly, Heavy Blog Is Heavy (2 staff lists, 1 general), and the personal lists of Kim Kelly (Noisey) and Fenriz (Darkthrone).
Peter then winnowed that group of 558 albums down to 230 by doing such things as deleting any album that only appeared once, even if it was a No. 1 record on a list, and weeding out non-metal albums that appeared on cross-genre lists. He then assigned numerical values to those 230 remaining albums based on their original rankings (giving 10 points to a No. 1 ranking, 9 points to a No. 2, and so forth). Through those calculations, he came up with a Top 50 “list of lists”.
I’m going to re-post the Top 20 names on To the Teeth’s “list of lists”. To see the complete ranking of 50, go HERE (Facebook) or HERE (Reddit).
1. Vektor – Terminal Redux
2. Khemmis – Hunted
3. Blood incantation – Starspawn
4. The Dillinger Escape Plan – Dissociation
5. Inter Arma – Paradise Gallows
6. Oranssi pazuzu – Värähtelijä
7. Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner
8. Oathbreaker – Rheia
9. Nails – You Will Never Be One of Us
10. Alcest – Kodama
11. Astronoid – Air
12. Mithras – On Strange Loops
13. Anaal Nathrakh – The Whole of the Law
14. Katatonia – The Fall of Hearts
15. Meshuggah – The Violent Sleep of Reason
16. Neurosis – Fires Within Fires
17. Haken – Affinity
18. Gojira- Magma
19. Hammers of Misfortune – Dead Revolution
20. SubRosa – For This We Fought the Battle of Ages
10 Responses to “LISTMANIA 2016: A METAL “LIST OF LISTS” FROM TO THE TEETH”
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Sad to hear about Vektor’s mass exodus after they released such a universally praised album.
Yeah, but from the sounds of it those guys were mostly hired guns. As long as David DiSanto is still there, nothing really changes
That was very cool of him to put all that time and effort into creating a list like this. The end result was not surprising though
All kudos to Peter for putting this together. Interesting to see how it came out in the end (very glad to see both Astronoid and Mithras so high).
Had to laugh at the guy commenting on the facebook page about the absence of Babymetal, and complaining that people “only listen to the dark and serious stuff”. My heart bleeds.
Thanks man!
And as a consolation: the babymetal dude is just kidding, luckily.
Ah. Well then, my apologies for judging him too harshly. I recant my above statement.
Also, was mine one of our three lists by any chance? Because, if so,I’m going to hazard that most of them fell foul of the “one mention” rule, and we’re culled.
Yeah yours was one. I wanted to add more NCS lists to the equation, but not many were numerical like yours. The other two are Todd Manning’s and Ben Smasher’s lists.
And you’re right, but maybe not as much as you’d think. The records that only you mentioned: Fyrnask, Phobocosm, Veilburner, Obed Marsh and Ruins.
Well, that IS interesting.
For one thing I definitely thought Phobocosm would make more of an impact this year, so it’s quite telling that it didn’t appear anywhere else. Ruins should have too… but was clearly released far too late in the year.
BUT… that means quite a few albums I didn’t think would get enough coverage elsewhere (particularly Death Fortress and Ancst) must have turned a few heads too. Which is always good news.
And, obviously, that means Wildernessking, Dormant Ordeal, Khonsu, etc, all got mentioned elsewhere too. Good stuff.
Ta sélection est excellente ! Tout est de qualité.
Je valide à 100% tes choix.
Merci pour les découvertes ci-dessous :
Mithras – On Strange Loops
Anaal Nathrakh – The Whole of the Law
Hammers of Misfortune – Dead Revolution
Désolé pour le français…
The statistician in me just loves these meta-lists so much. As predictable as this list is, I really like that there are no serious “eye-rollers” here for me (coughMetallicacough). It is, objectively speaking, a good list, even if it doesn’t overlap my own very much.