LISTMANIA 2017: THE GRAND TOME OF ALBUMS THAT DGR ENJOYED IN 2017 (Part 3)

 

(This is the third and final part of DGR’s massive year-end list feature. Part 1 (here) included Honorable Mentions and albums ranked 30-21; Part 2 (here) counted down albums 20-11. And today we present DGR’s Top 10, plus a few other assorted year-end honors.)

 

There are few things that I enjoy each year more than the yearly list roundup here at NCS – including taking the time to write out my own personal favorites. This is a post that I spend a large part of the year dreading, knowing that my penchant for massive verbiage in the face of all things common sense will turn around and bite me in the ass and the stress implied therein of the constant re-reading and editing that goes into the joy of crushing one’s website editor under the sheer weight of text. Were the yearly list allowed to be a book, I would deeply enjoy witnessing the ever increasing size of the roll of toilet paper mine would have to be printed on throughout the year. Maybe one year I’ll actually be able to spring for two-ply and at least have some effect.

 

 

 

10) Dyscarnate – With All Their Might

I strongly suspect that if you want to watch someone become a figurative destroyer of worlds and they’ve listened to Dyscarnate’s album With All Their Might, all you would have to do is yell “PREPARE YOURSELVES!” and that person would instantly be looking for a fight.

Dyscarnate’s newest disc — after a five-year wait — is the sort of album that the tag “groove metal” should be applied to. The music here is what “groove” should mean, rather than what you get with a group has just discovered they really like Lamb Of God or can play Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven front to back. Every song on With All Their Might is just full of hefty groove, and countless songs on this disc could’ve easily spilled out into more tracks. The eight here are just guitar-heavy groove after guitar-heavy groove, absorbing enough of the death metal scene to keep things heavy; but mostly, With All Their Might is about as cro-magnon-man-lifting-stuff heavy as they come.

“Iron Strengthens Iron!” is almost anthemic, and “Traitors In The Palace” goes for the slow epic approach, yet includes one of the most-headbangable riffs this side of Dormant Ordeal’s closing guitar part on A Dim Reminder. As just a three-piece, Dyscarnate manage to sound bigger than some bands out there and are purpose-built to keep the pit moving the whole time. “Backbreaker” is a legit neck-snapper of a song, and of course Dyscarnate are one of the few bands who could name a track “To End All Flesh Before Me” and seem like they actually mean it.

With All Their Might is heavy-metal intellectualism left at the door, favoring the rocks-banging-together method of making music, and over the course of its time with you Dyscarnate succeeds in speaking to the primal creature trapped within.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

09) Order Ov Riven Cathedrals – The Discontinuinity’s Interlude

The mysterious two-piece brutal death metal project haling from Italy known as Order Ov Riven Cathedrals unleashed an absolute monster of an album in The Discontinuinity’s Interlude. A torrential downpour of brutal death dispensed with utter disregard for surrounding lifeforms, The Discontinuinity’s Interlude is one of those albums that — like a lot of its Italian hyperblasting brethren — never lets up from the moment it begins.

Order Ov Riven Cathedrals differentiate themselves from the pack not only by focusing on darker aspects, adding a blackened death element to their sound, but also by keeping a synth layer ever-present in the background. Sometimes it is used to add a small choir, as in “Dead Sea Scrolls Revelations”, and other times it can be as simple as a quiet and quick-moving electronic melody to keep thing spiced up, like the one that worms its way through the back of “6000 Years Of Hate” as the band just hammer away at their instruments for the closing half of the song. “Absolution from a Removable Discontinuity” also has a stop-to-gunshot-blast transition in it, which I will remain a sucker for until the end of time.

With its shorter album length, Discontinuity’s Interlude proved to be perfect as a quick hit to the system. You basically hit start and after the slow, quieter build-up of its intro, it basically becomes an otherworldly expulsion of violence until the album wraps back around to its intro again in its closing instrumental, “Starless Cult”. Order Ov Riven Cathedrals made one hell of an impressive debut with their 2017 release.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

08 – Abhorrent Decimation – The Pardoner

The UK deathcore troupe Abhorrent Decimation unleashed their second disc, The Pardoner, upon the world in 2017, and it proved to be a massive and ambitious improvement over the group’s first album. Already having demonstrated that they have the slamming groove part of the music well in hand, they decided not only to build upon it by just going “bigger”, so to speak, but also to give The Pardoner an overarching concept. You can tell when listening to the disc that the Abhorrent Decimation guys worked their asses off this time around, going past just sheer proficiency at delivering meatheaded death metal and adding the occasional melodic line to each and every mosh-heavy groove.

The Pardoner is a big disc, mostly built around hefty and mid-tempo chugging, but the band also fully display a teeth-baring ferocious streak. Some songs on The Pardoner come across as just mean, like “Granted Indulgence” and the excellent track “Conspire”, both focusing on religious hypocrisy through the lens of their album. “Votive Offerings” includes probably the biggest breakdown on this list, placed right at the end of an already thudding song.

The Pardoner is filled with songs like those, some with Abhorrent Decimation going full-blown blast-heavy death metal and others with the group giving over to their -core sensibilities. It remains relentlessly heavy, and the quieter bits only serve to amplify the next pummeling groove that is coming around the corner. As one of the more meat-headed discs on this list, The Pardoner was fantastic this year at leaving me with a neckache by the time it had wrapped up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

07) Antigama – Depressant

Antigama’s Depressent is the only EP on this list that made its way into the full album collection instead of my own little seperate grouping a little bit further down the line here. Part of the reason is the nature of the group’s spastic grind, where the difference between Depressant and their previous release The Insolent is scant minutes and maybe four more songs. The other reason is that Depressant is really, really fucking good.

It takes us through an insane asylum journey of violently packed grind songs that fling the band around as much as they do the listener. The seven songs hammer on the idea of painkillers and depressants and how they dull the senses, and the EP, whose album art depicts a pill on a fishhook and begins and ends sounding like an infomercial, feels like an attempt to drive home the insanity of it all.

Antigama blast through those seven songs, with one industrial-fueled dirge to break things up a bit and one song that sounds like the band becoming a more twisted version of Crown Feral-era Trap Them in the immensely fun (and likely my favorite song) “Division Of Lonely Crows”. “Shut Up” and “Now” both make Depressant cover miles at lightspeed, built on the backs of frantic blastbeats and guitar work displays Antigama’s trademark frenetic playing, leaping up and down the frets so they can get the perfect screech out of it every time. The light electronics layer that seems to pervade everything is unnerving, perfect for what the band are trying to do here.

Depressant fired on all cylinders for its twenty minutes and left a massive impression by the time it was done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6) Hate – Tremendum

Somewhere along the way I developed a soft spot for the blackened death metal issued by Poland’s Hate. When that happened, who knows? But it is incredible to think that a band on their tenth album could be hanging strong on a top-albums list like Hate is doing here. Yet, here we are with their 2017 release Tremendum, a record picks up the tempo a bit from the good-but-bloated Crusade: Zero and is mostly killer, with very few moments of levity.

Hate return to the well a bit, building their tracks out of big, imperial riffs and propelling themselves forward on the death of a thousand snare-drums, bringing back some of the ritualistic spirit that wormed its way into their sound on Solarflesh. Overall though, Tremendum is a densely packed disc, just one fast and angry song after another, dark in spirit and tone.

“Indestructible Pillar”, “Into Burning Gehenna”, “Sea Of Rubble”, and the brilliantly named “Ghostforce” are all classic-sounding Hate songs — massive heapings of guitar with vocalist Adam harshly barking one line after another. Hate have slowly been iterating on an excellent sound they found with Anaclasis, and five albums since then, Tremendum feels like the latest addition to that. It brought some of Hate’s ferocity back and put them back at the forefront of the blackened death metal bands who will be leading the death march to Armageddon.

One of the more blatant praisers of all things Satan and dark, Hate’s new album was one of those discs I defaulted to throughout 2017 whenever the need for heavy arose, because heavy and hellish is one of the tongues that Hate is fluent in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5) Gloson – Grimen

Sweden’s Gloson and their first full-length album Grimen is one of the few atmospheric, post-metal, sludgie hybrid acts contained within this collection of top albums, one of the few to burst the bubble of death metal that I tend to encase myself in.

The six-song affair is full of slow-moving tracks, constructed seemingly out of smoke-filled atmosphere and heated rooms. Burying themselves in distortion, Gloson attack with a multi-pronged vocal approach that sees the group alternate between a hoarse yell and a proper death growl, which, when combined with the massive grooves that the band contribute to each song, fits almost perfectly.

It’s hard not to get lost in Grimen, and with most of its songs nearing or exceeding the ten-minute mark, it’s not hard to imagine why. The group are content to let a song compound upon itself to the point of becoming oppressive. In fact, the one real head-turner on Grimen isn’t anything within its first five tracks, but the album closer “Embodiment”, which sounds like one of the best Isis songs that Isis never wrote during their time as a band.

“Prowler” and “Antlers” are both heavier than they immediately appear to be, especially as “Antlers” starts out more meditative than any of the other songs on the disc, and “Cringe” leaves behind an impact crater each and every time the band come around to another section of slow-motion headbanging, dramatically bent over backwards each time they strum their guitars.

Grimen was an excellent first statement and shows that Gloson have a ton of potential. It’s also going to be a monster of an album to top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) Belphegor – Totenritual

Did you enjoy that brief little break from Satan with Gloson there? Because with Belphegor and their 2017 album Totenritual we’re going to be diving back into a disc that pound-for-pound probably had the most dark lord within it.

This black metal crew from Austria have long been an established pillar, the inverted crosses in their logo becoming a quick shorthand signpost to what the band represents. After eleven albums filled with bellows from the furnace of hell, you would assume that it would be okay for Belphegor to coast a bit. Yet, they didn’t, and with Totenritual Belphegor have produced a fantastic slab of blackened death metal that was hard to top this year.

Almost half the songs on Totenritual begin with some sort of movie/tv sample dealing with the devil, and Belphegor quickly make it clear that the hefty death metal blast is the sound in which they trade. “Baphomet” sweeps back and forth through dusty ruins and “The Devil’s Son” does much of the same thing, only terrifyingly faster. Belphegor took to stealthily adding little melodic lines throughout the album, on top of each grinding guitar bit, and Totenritual is all the better for it. Songs like “Apophis- Black Dragon” benefit from the lead lines that streak their way through the song, making it one of the highlights of the disc.

A personal favorite and one of the bigger earworms of Totenritual is “Spell Of Reflection”, whose five minutes see Belphegor traversing multiple realms of death metal and back, to end on one of the heavier notes on the album. “Totenkult – Exegesis of Deterioration” is the song if you’re really looking for the big, dumb, heavy guitar chugs to lock your teeth into. I also enjoyed how the titular “Totenritual” song comes at the end of a series of tracks that “Spell Of Reflection” really kicks off, and is basically just two and a half minutes of inhuman screaming. Talk about a great way to send a disc out.

Totenritual basically ripped across the skies in mid-September and landed right on this list from that moment, a surprise from a band that have long since become one synonymous with evil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3) Hideous Divinity – Adveniens

One of the biggest surprises this year for me came courtesy of Italian tech-death nightmares Hideous Divinity and their latest album Adveniens, which was released in April. This is an absolute killer of an album, pulling inspiration from Cronenberg movies and focusing heavily on the concepts of “the new flesh”. Scores of brutality are woven into this disc and the first few songs are just a massive wall of sound, until you hit the epic track “Passages”, which calms down briefly before rapidly accelerating back up to light-speed.

On top of that you have tracks like the thrashy-introed “Messianica”, the “Embodiment Of Chaos” cover song, and the blindingly fast “Feeding Off The Blind” — which is one of the songs where Hideous Divinity transform into what could best be described as a death metal bulldozer.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the mathematically precise and percussive “When Flesh Unfolds”, which might be the best song on Adveniens. The tapped-out nature of the song and its piston-firing rhythms pushed Hideous Divinity over the top this year and made it clear that the band were really trying to break out of the mold of most of their speedy brutal death compatriots.

Adveniens and its interwoven concept was an absolute blur this year, but with it the band truly made a name for themselves. If the endless pile of blasts that I’ve likely buried you under by this point in the list hasn’t satisfied you, the Hideous Divinity crew would be more than happy to leave you a battered and bruised corpse by the time Adveniens wraps up. The group really pushed and prodded at the boundaries of their chosen sound this year and it worked out in their favor on this disc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) SepticFlesh – Codex Omega

Time for the weirdest statement in this list: SepticFlesh’s brand of symphonic death metal is basically my pop music. I listen to the band constantly, and perhaps because I was an orchestra kid — back when the US actually threatened to have well-rounded students instead of just number-crunching drones — I find myself continually seduced by any set of histrionic and pyrotechnic symphonics packed into a death metal song. That includes SepticFlesh, who over the course of their career have become the masters of that art, issuing albums that have a B-grade horror movie atmosphere to them, and Codex Omega is the latest dispatch from that realm.

With Codex Omega, SepticFlesh reignite some of that metal spark in their sound, with a multitude of songs where the orchestration is fairly subdued — by their standards — and others where it is so neatly written within the lines of the song that you can’t imagine the track without it. There are legitimate high-energy death metal headbangers here. The first few tracks, “Dante’s Inferno” and “Third Testament” are among them, and the effortlessly catchy bounce of “Portrait Of A Headless Man” (complete with White Zombie chug) makes that song an early highlight.

When the band pull away from the horror movie Satan subject matter, they cover other ground in the worlds of all things dark, including Cthulu in “Our Church Below The Sea” and Tiamat in “Faceless Queen”. Both of those songs include some clean singing in order to get that power-chorus effect stuck in your head for days later. In fact, the only rough track is album closer “Trinity”, where the worst thing that can be said about it is that it is a SepticFlesh song. It’s got all the trademarks and, honestly, one weaker track that arrives after the nine leading up to it — especially with the ferocity packed into “The Gospels Of Fear” — doesn’t weaken the disc one bit.

Codex Omega is a worthy addition to the SepticFlesh catalogue and one that should not be missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1) Vallenfyre – Fear Those Who Fear Him

There can, however, only be one album that tops the others, thereby rendering all twenty-nine other albums listed here and the countless others that I mealy-mouth inserted into the “Honorable Mentions” column absolute garbage and completely unlistenable trash. Somehow, that album this year was Vallenfyre’s Fear Those Who Fear Him, probably the most meat-and-potatoes heavy death metal disc on this list.

Ostensibly the group’s last album, Fear Those Who Fear Him was an ever-present play for me. This, like Harakiri For The Sky last year, has probably been listened to at least once a day on this end. It really only has two modes, mosh-heavy death metal and some of the gloomiest doom out there, which given that Vallenfyre consists of guys from Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, becomes immediately understandable.

The doomier tracks, such as “An Apathetic Grave” and “The Merciless Tide” are dark and miserable. The “My lungs could be your lungs, my life should be your life” line from “The Merciless Tide” sticks with me constantly. On the death metal side of the spectrum — which makes up a larger part of the album — you have one pit-riffer after another. “Messiah” and “Degeneration” are just walls of guitar and hollowed drumming that blur into one another, with “Degeneration” happily picking up the death ‘n’ roll approach.

“Nihilist” may in fact have been the band answering the challenge of “just how gloriously stupid can we make a song”. I’ve listened to “Nihilist” a shit-ton this year and can literally remember nothing lyrically from the song other than that I love how fast it moves and the over-and-over repetition of the word “Nihilist! Nihilist! Nihilist” being hammered into my skull. Special credit for pit-riffing goes to “Kill All Your Masters”, because that song is just a non-stop circle pit in song form. It’s the most Napalm Death that Vallenfyre get on this disc — outside of the forty-second grinder of “Dead World Breathes” — but there’s a lot of fun to be found in hearing Gregor Mackintosh yell ‘KILL ALL YOUR MASTERS!!!’.

Fear Those Who Fear Him really struck a chord with me this year, and since its June release date has been a constant accompaniment. You might’ve noticed earlier on in this list (if you’re still holding on strong here, in which case, thank you!) that I mentioned I was really drawn to albums that kind of did away with the bullshit this year, and Vallenfyre’s was chief amongst them. If you haven’t listened to Fear Those Who Fear Him yet, you owe it to yourself to do that.

 

 

 

 

The Small Collection Of EPs I Liked This Year

 

As usual I like to include a small grouping of year-end awards to close things out. This year I figured I’d try something different for the sake of preventing things from getting too silly. I actually want to highlight the fact that 2017 saw a shocking number of great EPs, and a handful of them even managed to land squarely on my radar.

Schammasch’s The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite was one of the bigger ones for sure, I’ve listened to it constantly and a main reason for that is because of a confession I need to make. My favorite Deathspell Omega song is “First Prayer” from Si Monvmentvm Reqvires, Circvmspice. A largely ambient and meditatively chanted black metal song, for some reason it is one of the few I go back to, and it felt like Schammasch’s first take on The Maldoror Chants was a thirty-minute expansion of that. Deeply fascinating and different from the massiveness that was the Swiss band’s triple album Triangle, Maldoror made for an artsier and more digestible take of their sound.

On the faster side of the spectrum you had the apocalyptic grind of Austria’s Distate with Todt, a criminally overlooked EP that I will continue to shove down people’s throats every chance I get. While we’re in Austria you also had the pummeling, precise death metal of Mastic Scum and Defy, and, combining the death-grind genres, you had Aborted who somehow felt they hadn’t recorded enough music yet and added a little brutal death to their sound with the two-song Bathos.

The UKs The Infernal Sea continued to refine their sound with a two song EP as well, updating one older track and gifting us one new groover of a black metal song in “Agents Of Satan”, and the internation Star Trek nerds in Kunstzone continued their descent into hybriding Anaal Nathrakh and Fear Factory into their own ugly beast in Creatures Of Lard And Sinew.

Finally, we have Portland, Oregon’s Vitriol and their late-year release Pain Will Define Their Death — a whirling missive of death metal that felt like some of the angriest music out there and put them on a lot of people’s maps. If any band is set to explode within the next few years I’d hazard to say the easy bet would be the three-piece crew that makes up Vitriol.

With that said, here’s that list in flat form for your shopping pleasure.

Schammasch – The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite
Distaste – Todt
Aborted – Bathos
The Infernal Sea – Agents Of Satan
Mastic Scum – Defy
Kunstzone – Creatures Of Lard And Sinew
Vitriol – Pain Will Define Their Death

 

 

Obligatory Collection Of Soft Ass Bullshit I Spent My Year Listening To

 

Finally, as is obligatory, I need to highlight the fact that I’m not all battle-scars and angst and I do in fact break out of my mold a little bit each year, so here’s the four main collections of soft bullshit I listened to this year, none of which will shock any of you if you’ve been hanging around for a bit.

 

 

Anathema – The Optimist

The funny thing about The Optimist is that it is probably Anathema playing it the safest they’ve done yet… and yet I still found myself enjoying it. I also have a soft spot for anything dealing with my home state and region, so setting your album’s concept so that parts of it take place within the Bay Area and California as a whole is a way to win me over.

Lee Douglas still has an incredible voice, and the song “Endless Ways” is tailor-made to make people go soft; I’d be lying if I said it didn’t work on me. I also enjoyed the smokier jazz-bar atmosphere of “Close Your Eyes”.

The Optimist is recognizably an Anathema disc in the vein they’ve been doing since their massive shift, soundwise, with We’re Here Because We’re Here, but the moodier ideals expressed in “Leaving It Behind”, “Can’t Let Go”, “Ghosts”, and “Wildfires” still stuck with me all the same. I don’t think The Optimist holds a candle to Weather Systems or Distant Satellites if I’m going full soft-prog-rock like this, but I remain a sucker for the band all the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leprous – Malina

I love when Leprous shift from prog-rock mode to absolutely shameless radio-single mode, because the Leprous crew are expert songwriters and the opening segments of their newest album Malina are all of that on display.

“From The Flame” has to be one of their catchiest songs since “The Cloak”, and the first handful of tracks on Malina run in similar territory. I love the overdramatic and moody nature of “Stuck”, especially its closing bit in which vocalist Einar Solberg howls out “I am not that strong” as one of the final phrases in the song. It isn’t until after “Illuminate” that Malina lets up a bit on the earworms, which has the effect of making Malina feel front-loaded as all hell.

Leprous retreat into their slower, proggier nature to close out the back half of Malina, perfectly content to stick with quiet keyboard works and vocals carrying each song until you hit “The Weight Of Disaster”, which is one hell of a song to hide in the back half. Fueled by an excellent chorus and great opening bassline, “The Weight Of Disaster” is one of those songs that makes the listener stick around for the whole of Malina.

It is a great disc though, and because of that, I wound up spinning far more Leprous than I was expecting in 2017, leading to multiple full discog runs just to hear how the band had changed and evolved into their current form. While it is starkly different from where they began, Malina should further cement Leprous on the map amongst music listeners, and absolutely deserving of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nine Inch Nails – Add Violence

I am a latter-era Nine Inch Nails apologist/defender. I’ve followed them for years and in general enjoy the whole of Trent Reznor’s creative output under the NIN banner. When they went quiet after the cycle for Hesitation Marks, one might have assumed they’d gone on hiatus again. When you’ve divided your time between the How To Destroy Angels project (whose album Welcome Oblivion felt partially like a Year Zero successor, musically) and that sweet, sweet Hollywood soundtrack money, NIN getting back-burnered would have seemed understandable. However, the group came back around and released the Not TheActual Events EP late last year and then followed it this year with an EP known as Add Violence — which has become a constant five-song spin on this end.

Not The Actual Events, while having a couple standout songs, didn’t stick as hard with me as I would’ve liked. It was a lot like Hesitation Marks where I was more happy that the group was back than with much of the music present. I even got the chance to see them live this year but had to pass on it due to a lack of funds, because, long story short, if I haven’t yet learned to translate a cosmic “fuck you” when it comes to getting the car fixed and what that means for concert money, I never will. However, that hurt even more because of Add Violence being out, and so many of those songs working their way into the live set.

Add Violence feels like one overarching concept song, more so than Not That Actual Events’ hazy, metallic bent did. Yes, “Less Than” is shamelessly danceable but the following four songs — including the standout, hypnotic, and minimalistic drone of “The Background World” — really tie the whole thing together, and thus, it became one of my most-listened-to releases this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ayreon – The Source

I warned Islander multiple times I was going to do this, and considering that I had previously reviewed Ayreon’s return album The Theory Of Everything, you better believe I was excited to hear his new 2017 disc The Source, especially as it marked a return to his long-running ‘Forever’ mythos; it also saw the return of a lot of familiar names that he had worked with previously as his vocal choir. Not only does this disc have people like Russel Allen, Tobias Sammet, Floor Jansen, Simone Simmons, Hansi Kursch, Tommy Karevik, and James Labrie finding their into the fold this time around, but Between The Buried And Me’s Tommy Rodgers also makes an appearance in the mix.

On top of that you have Michael Mills returning to play The Frame, the computer antagonist, throughout the album and he has some fantastic moments, including a much-lauded Bohemian Rhapsody-esque moment singing binary code during the opening track “The Day The World Breaks Down”.

This of course all comes to a head in the song “Aquatic Race”, in which almost every vocalist gets to deliver the opening lines in a segment that I think would make a fantastic alarm clock broken out from the song itself. There’s also an earlier highlight in the song “Everybody Dies” — itself a fantastic track — that has them saying “You’re all the same when extinction looms”, which is a shockingly brutal sentiment to hear pop up on an Ayreon album.

With The Source, Arjen Lucassen has the advantage of a massive mythos to pull from and does so multiple times throughout the disc, weaving both musical and lyrical references to previous works throughout the whole CD — I had a literal “clapped when I saw Darth Vader!!” moment when the closing lines of the album were “The Age Of Shadows will begin!”.

Musically The Source is also guitar-heavy as hell, surprising for an Ayreon album but also enjoyable as it makes this one of the more metal entrants into the vast pantheon of Ayreon releases so far. However, I do appreciate that Arjen recognizes what people truly come to Ayreon for, and he puts a flute solo right up front on the disc, about twenty seconds after you hit play.

As always, whatever Ayreon does from here will be interesting, as it seems like the project is now back in full musical swing. The Source is a Summer Blockbuster movie of a disc and if you can handle a shit-ton of clean singing with your heavy metal rock-opera then I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

2017’s 2010 album of the year – Gojira – Sea Shepherd EP

Keepin’ the dream alive Des!

 

******

 

And so, we draw 2017 to a close and, likewise, I have finished dumping a massive amount of verbiage for you, the reader, to enjoy. I hope you’ve found something to listen to in this gigantic list of albums, and if you haven’t, maybe I’ve reinforced your kvlt sensibilities with all this light hippy crap that I’ve considered my top albums this year.

2017 musically showed itself to be another massive year for metal, and 2018 is already looking stacked — even this early on. I know I can’t cover everything, and thats what a large part of the purpose of Listmania is, but I’ve been more than happy to contribute my part this year and look forward to the endless cycle of dreading and then enjoying constructing my list and then dreading and enjoying writing out each and every blurb afterward. ‘Til next time, I’ll see you folks around.