DANCING UPON THE GRAVE OF 2022: THE DGR YEAR-END LIST: 50-41

(Today we begin the week-long rollout of DGR‘s year-end list with Part One, encompassing his picks from 50 through 41.)

It’s an interesting problem having one of your favorite albums from the previous year come in right underneath the wire for your personal year-end season. It results in a weird dynamic of the first few months of the following year having to compete real goddamned hard to try and make any sort of dent in the sense of ‘but what if I just go back and listen to such and such again…’.

However, I’d like to believe – and likely failed at believing – that I was aware this would be a factor for a decent period of 2022’s release schedule, and did start keeping track of what I’d been listening to early in an attempt to save room in the year-end festivities for those who would bravely set foot into 2022 early on.

Every year since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out has been one of fits and starts, awkward stumbles, drunken lurches forward, and massive waterfalls, at the same time as the music industry has attempted to adapt to the ever-shifting and nebulous landscape. Considering that the current ground we all stand on is about as solid and reliable as a newly forming sinkhole, that much is understandable. If you’re a numbers nerd that means you’ll get to see all sorts of weird patterns and things pop up throughout this list of 50 album from ye olde’ 2022, before we send this thing off in a fitting funeral fire.

As usual, this part of the list is the upper reaches of things, which always requires a bit of clarification and rule-laying, so folks, don’t get too wound up about certain rankings or why things suddenly appear and disappear with the suddenness of something you would read about in a quantum physics lecture.

 

Things to keep in mind #1: There will be no bubble list this year. I did away with it last year because I felt it sort of ghetto-ized releases that were good and enjoyable, but felt like a ham-handed way of mentioning them and not giving them proper writeup treatment. Some of the cuts to the list this year hurt, but alas, there will be a lot of lists this year and a ton of great releases that will likely get mentioned during them. I might even bring them up in the proces of writing about a different release.

Things to keep in mind #2: This is a personal list. That’s it, it’s mine. No one else’s. No Clean Singing as a whole does not publish an agreed-upon site-wide list out of a desire to not want to kill each other, nor debate one another. Our tastes are pretty varied, which means that likely the ones that would make the cut for a site-wide list would wind up being your solid ‘agreeable’ releases, and some of the truly great stuff might wind up camped out in the periphery. Thus, you wind up with the varied personal lists we as writers/editors give out each year.

Things to keep in mind #3: The top segments of this list are a lawless and wild frontier. There’s not much rhyme or reason to any of it save for some minor last-minute adjusting as things go through the list-making process. Really, this list only crystalizes into some sort of critically arguable fashion around the twenty-to-fifteen mark. Everything before that is like a sub-grouping wherein the albums are often placed with peers and moved around withint hat specific section of ten.

Things to keep in mind #4: Your favorite album is likely not on here. I’m not a super-underground guy nor could I even be close to the hipper side of the metal community. I’m a sad tech-death dork who happens to like a good pop song. Its probably because I didn’t have time to listen to it, not because I think it’s awful and could challenge cancer in a box for the word product placed on shelves. Do not tell me how to invest my time.

Things to keep in mind #5: You’ll have figured it out by now but I write way too much. If your eyes haven’t glazed over yet this is your final warning. The year-end shenanigans for me are fun because I often get to go back and effectively re-dive into an album I’ve already listened to a ton and write about it again with a shorter summary and highlights segment. I consider context incredibly important as to why certain releases may have stuck while others did not and I hope that by providing some maybe I can convince you to press ‘play’ on a release you might otherwise have glossed right past in a world where there are thousands of bedroom black metal projects and plug-and-play grind groups hammering out song after song.

With that out of the way, lets begin the festivities with the first ten releases to be placed upon the altar of 2022’s madness.

 

50 – Vittra – Blasphemy Blues

Remember earlier on when I mentioned the top part of this list was basically a lawless land? That was in part to explain the appearance of albums like Blasphemy Blues from the Swedish group Vittra. Having appeared not too long ago on this very website, the group’s sleeker fretwork and mile-a-minute guitar leads are very much in line with their peers in the genre at the moment. Partially tech-death, partially thrashier than all hell, and with a throughline of melodeath that is strong and hard to deny – looking at you ‘Satmara’! – there’s a lot of music that lay very much within the DGR wheelhouse here.

Yet, Blasphemy Blues still was enough of a surprise to skirt in just under the wire for the year-end festivities on this website. Granted, it’s only been a few weeks since its November release but Blasphemy Blues is one of those albums that you can sense, had it come out earlier in the year, would’ve likely dominated part of the playlist selection throughout the year. I can sense this especially because I keep returning to the album since it was reviewed on this here site – yes, in case you’re wondering, even the site editors use this place as a source of discovery as well.

Of course, there is always plenty of room for discussion when it comes to music like this effectively functioning as your ‘pop music’ throughout the year – especially when showing this sort of thing to other coworkers – but that’s kind of where stuff like Blasphemy Blues tends to hover for me. Songs here are written to be infectious and catchy, so when you have a mean-motherfucker of a blastfest in a song like “Halls Of Ancients” there’ll be a circle-pit gallop like “Feeding Frenzy” maybe a song or two away.

When you have an album wherein every song is kind of its own compact adventure then you wind up with a pretty even spread of favorites as well. “Self-Loathing” may be a song that is incredibly on-the-nose both thematically and lyrically but it does pull off the act of dancing between a mid-tempo rager and the faster-than-fireworks pyrotechnics I come to these sorts of releases for. I mean hell, the band even become Witchery for a moment with the song “Temptation”, even subscribing to the philosophy of ‘two minutes, over and fucking out because we’ve done what we needed to’, which is highly appreciated.

So yes; the combination of being a series of quick-hitters that are all different approaches to being catchy as hell while gleefully gobbling from the table of influences and pulling it off rather well means that Vittra have earned themselves a shoutout in the year-end festvities on this here site.

 

 

49 – Demiricous – III: Chaotic Lethal

Demiricous‘ third album Chaotic Lethal was a long time coming. The crustier-thrash act went on hiatus for a decade-plus following the release of their second album Poverty before managing to piece enough of their skeleton together to hammer out Chaotic Lethal over the summer of 2022.

In the span of time since then, the group have split up again as of September, which means we’ll also be partially eulogizing a whole lot of potential for seeing those songs live because Chaotic Lethal managed to make Demiricous sound as if they had never disappeared for the span of time that they did. A little more gruff and battle-weary for sure, but that comes par for the course with a group that had toured as hard as they did during the more active part of their career.

Where Chaotic Lethal picks up for the band has them careening right back on to the course they had set so long ago. You recognize a lot of the Demiricous trademarks from moment one of the album and as Chaotic Lethal burns its way through its tracklisting you get the sense that they were one of the groups of the early aughts to get a good amount of mileage out of just sounding inherently mean.

A phrase that you should probably prepare yourself now to be reading a lot is that I handled the review for a particular album, and in the case of Demiricous‘ latest that would’ve taken place in late May. Sufficie it to say, there was a period in 2022 where I was very familiar with the barrage of galloping riffs, circle-pit instigators, and surprisingly acidic songwriting style on Chaotic Lethal. In fact; many of them still pop up on ye olde’ mp3 player in shuffle form because while Chaotic Lethal wasn’t some overwhelmingly tied to its theme style album, it did have quite a few good songs that do great when broken out from the main run.

We even got to post up the video premiere for one of them in the form of “Smoke Chaser” a few months back. “Smoke Chaser” is an early album highlight though, and one of the ‘meaner’ songs on an album that is speaking through gritted teeth for most of its running. I still giggle a bit at “Merciless Slut Cult” but if nothing else the song title has kept the song at the front of my mind for the back part of 2022. The titular “Chaotic Lethal” track and opener “Unconditional Hate” remain the doctor-prescribed barn burners of the album but all of III: Chaotic Lethal was pretty well positioned to leave a lasting impression in the form of a tire-mark on your side.

 

 

48 – Raster Density – Apothecary’s Tome Ov Depravity And Filth

Finland’s Raster Density were one of the late-comers to the year-end party with their new release of Apothecary’s Tome Ov Depravity And Filth. They were part of a pretty solid three-banger of album releases in the tech-death (and beyond) sphere that Andy published in November that placed them alongside the groups Suborbital and Vormir. However, given the cover art displayed, Raster Density were probably the ones that I least knew what I was in for upon pressing the play-button, vs the space-chthulu nighmares of the other two.

Even when trying to guess what the hell a song title like “Excremental Bliss” might contain within, I was not prepared for the absolute fucking bulldozer that song plays out to be, and it’s something that left a lasting impression throughout the group’s latest album. Because, if nothing else, Apothecary’s Tome Ov Depravity And Filth is a lot of Raster Density just picking their listeners up and ragdolling them all over whatever room they may be in. Yes, the album is a technical show-piece as well and there are times throughout when it’s clear that Raster Density have a lot of sneering tongue firmly planted in cheek style songwriting happening. But, and like stated within the article that I linked to, the group have somehow grasped on to the nebulous ‘something there’ that can keep people sticking around for their particular brand of rumbling rhythm section and blastbeat assault.

Raster Density establish that they’re likely to be all over the songwriting map on Apothecary’s Tome Of Depravity And Filth, which basically states that everyone is likely to have a different experience in regards to favorite songs within the one’s particular bounds. There was definitely enough high-speed shiny key jingingling to hold my labrador-like attention span, but even a moodier song like “End Of The Bridge” could easily grasp you for a while. But it was songs like “Eyewitness (Salt Part II)” and “Of Ego And Exitus” and their ilk that won me over when it came to including the band on the year-end party here.

Really, any time that Raster Density thought it would be a good time to place their foot on the accelerator it was likely to work out with me. It’s a good thing then that Apothecary’s Tome Of Depravity And Filth does a good job mainting a 70/30 split in that specific dynamic. When it seemed like they might be dragging their feet a little bit, Raster Density were more than happy to respond with another headsplitter or somehow sneak in one of the most pig-headed (even by deathcore style standards) breakdowns into the otherwise rapid-fire beating.

It’s a lot to take in with the first go, but the potential to absolutely blindside you here was so strong that I couldn’t help bringing the band up one more time before we cast 2022 out to the sea.

 

 

47 – Wolfheart – King of The North

I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with Wolfheart and their tendency to stick to patterns. I even dove into it with my latest writeup of King Of The North but to say that I’ve been on the Wolfheart beat for a only a brief period would be a lie. I’ve covered the majority of the band’s releases for this site and they’ve consistently ranked pretty high with me, as their melodramatic and epic take on the melodeath genre has always worked out pretty well.

Even while joking about the band’s obsession with the interplay of frost and fire, or their love of pyro within their music videos, Wolfheart have always been a constant throughline in the year-end lists as one of those bands where the base formula has gotten so strong and so refined that at their simplest they’ll still score something of an easy layup.

King Of The North is Wolfheart‘s third-full length under the Napalm Record banner – having broken up the time in between full works with the Skull Soldiers EP – and one I was particularly interested in because it seemed like the group had bought themselves a little breathing room so that they wouldn’t quite wind up caught within the wheels of the year-over-year churn that a label switch can do to a group.

Of course, what resulted was Wolfheart dishing out the most-Wolfheart-sounding disc possible. Not to say it was entirely playing to the cheap seats, as the group experiment with varieties of vocal attack throughout and even invited Killswitch Engage‘s Jesse Leach to join them on one of the lead-off singles for the album, “Ancestor”. Karl Sanders appearing later on the song “Cold Flame” was even more head-turning because then the group’s chosen vocal dynamic wasn’t so much harsh-bark to gorgeous clean singing segment as it was harsh-yell to judo-fight-with-a-bear.

However, by that same token, the moment the piano-melodies start up and the blastbeat wall follows you’ll note that Wolfheart do a pretty-good job staying well within their musical lane throughout King Of The North. A little more ‘epic’ reaching than albums have been in the past, but a lot of this album remains Wolfheart comfort food. While I personally appreciate any opportunity to add more material like this to a band’s overall discography – full listening sessions remain on the enjoyable side of things because of it – I can also recognize that I was searching for just a little bit more than groups playing it close to the chest this year.

In spite of my bragging about being above all that, the previous two songs mentioned were still enjoyable as hell and elsewhere “Knell”, “Fires Of The Fallen”, and “The King” also held appeal. Plus; I always love the ‘haha fuck you’ that is placing a seven-minute song as your opening number on an album.

I came to this conclusion ages ago, but this style of music is one of a small handful that have become my easy-to-go-to pop music throughout the year. I can just throw something like King Of The North on and settle right in.

 

 

46 – Fit For An Autopsy – Oh What The Future Holds

If nothing else Fit For An Autopsy deserve serious kudos for holding on since the midle of fucking January to make it into the upper reaches of the year-end list. I know they’re doing pretty goddamned well elsewhere in the YE lists of a bunch of different sites, but they’ve always been a band where I can recognize a lot of their influences and what genres they’re pulling from, thus their specific branch of the deathcore tree becomes an enjoyable romp through stuff that I enjoy already, even though it’s clearly a new experience for many others. I don’t want to rob anyone of that, so I’m thrilled to see them doing well for themselves, especially after they discovered just how good a sharp groove works for Gojira and that they can make it work for themselves as well.

Oh What The Future Holds, I think, is a much stronger release than the album preceeding it, but generally since the addition of Joe Badolato to the lineup on vocals you kind of can’t go wrong with Fit For An Autopsy albums. They’re violent bruisers built around a wall of breakdowns, immense drumming, and sharp riffs that have such a martial stomp to them that the tendency to headbang along is near-subconscious. Oh What The Future Holds may not be as measurably brutal as the group’s Absolute Hope Absolute Hell album but there are some songs where the heaviness is so concentrated that you can tell they’re probably going to be part of the band’s live set for a long time coming.

Was there a review for this one on the site? Well you bet your ass there was! We ran it right around the time of release and genereally speaking Andy and I share a lot of similar sentiment when it comes to the highlight tracks on this one. The opening few numbers within Oh What The Future Holds are Fit For An Autopsy well on-point with their sonic blueprint, but when the album starts to hit songs like “Savages” and “A Higher Level Of Hate” then you have the ‘holy fuck this is heavy’ moments that you might come to Fit For An Autopsy for. Cheers to “Collateral Damage” between those two keeping the beatdown train running steady as well.

Fit For An Autopsy are a band that are hard to deny once the deathcore train gets rolling, and though they’ve long shifted tracks into a more groove-oriented version of what they started out as, the band still have such a rhythmic bludgeoning core that any time the hammer drops and things get heavy, you know its time to fight along with them. Oh What The Future Holds may be only a slight refinement on the last few releases for the band, but they were part of a group of -core oriented albums that became constant ‘go back to’ releases when I just needed “something, anything” heavy.

Again, I reiterate that this fucking thing came out January 14th. That’s quite the battle for mindshare throughout the year.

 

 

45 – Lament Cityscape – A Darker Discharge

Without fail, and I have an eleven year track record to prove it, there will be a few albums that make the year-end list not necessarily because I enjoy them a ton but simply because they fascinate me and I want other people to experience it as well. Lament Cityscape‘s album A Darker Discharge is one such album, an abrasive hybrid of varying electronics, industrial, noise, and heavy metal that has continued to fascinate me in spite of the fact that a brief summary of the album could simply be ‘droning nightmare music’.

There is of course, the obligatory much deeper review to be found within the site’s recesses so you can head over there if you want to watch me spend six or seven paragraphs stumbling over myself trying to make sense of how to describe the slow and relentless drum beat that powers much of this album or the wall of guitars that fade in and out in intensity as A Darker Discharge drags Lament Cityscape and their listeners through the audio-mud.

Normally this would be where I dive into song-by-song to give people a quick summary of the album, provide some highlights for those who’re time-strapped and just looking for a quick hit to maybe inform their buying practices. I can’t do that with A Darker Discharge, simply because the case with a lot of these albums that grab my higher-minded interest vs my cro-magnon man ‘i like the big breakdown make want punch things’ segment of my brain, I feel like i have to recommend you take this whole album in as one go.

A Darker Discharge is one of those that wants to be an experience and I see no sense in robbing the album of that. Hearing Lament Cityscape throw themselves into their music is so interesting that even as the band devolve into just pulsating beats and screeching electronics you’re still likely to want to know where the band will head next. Every slight melody feels like refuge in a storm and any shouted vocal section wherein the music becomes conventionally heavy is exciting.

A Darker Discharge was not an album that I listened to a ‘ton’, simply due to the nature of my day job, but it is one that every time I did give it a spin I was likely to just start from “Ocean Of Fuses” at the beginning and come drunkenly stumbling out like someone had punched me on the side of my skull when “Part Of The Mother” wrapped up a little over a half hour later.

 

 

44 – Author & Punisher – KRÜLLER

The last Author & Punisher review that I personally tackled was for the Pressure Mine EP all the way back in 2017. I’ve been more content to let other people tackle the act of trying to describe Tristan Shone and his varying army of drone machines in the years since. But that doesn’t mean that albums like 2018’s Beastland and now 2022’s KRÜLLER didn’t rank high with me. The overall tactile nature of his music alone is likely always going to do pretty well with the idiot drummer part of my brain, and like a lot of people it amuses me greatly that he’s gotten to perform on as big a stage as he has.

Not that he didn’t put it to good use either, since Krüller features an appearance by Tool‘s rhythm section across a few songs to join him in another celebration of slow, hammering beats, warbling vocals, and outright nightmare music. Initially I had thought that the Pressure Mine EP was going to signal a deeper foray into the post-rock and droning world with a lot of tortured clean singing along the way, but instead this is a project that has somehow spent its two albums since then getting heavier. Not as abrasive as the first couple of albums from this project – I still think “Terrorbird” may be up there as one of the more frightening things this project has put out – but Author & Punisher is definitely at a point where each low-end beat has the feeling of gods themselves punching the Earth.

Wil Cifer‘s review goes way more in-depth but unlike Lament Cityscape just above this one – weird how the two droning electronics albums found themselves paired together here – I can actually offer some quick-fire song recommendations. There’s a three-peat right near the end of Krüller that is kind of hard to fuck with and annihilatingly heavy – in the form of “Misery”, “Glorybox”, and “Blacksmith”. If you want the moments where Krüller truly shines as an album then those three back-to-back-to-back like that are where the album makes its money.

“Centurion” is also an interesting song and, once again, one of my favorite things has happened with a release in that the opening salvo from this project is the longest song on the album with the eight minutes and fifteen seconds of “Drone Carrying Dread” that kicks the whole affair off. Again, it’s not so much just the wall that people have to climb over to get into an album initially but the sort of ‘haha fuck you’ anarchy that is implied therein. Everything after that is a little more punchy than “Drone Carrying Dread” but its one hell of a first statement when it seems like your artist may be likely to pass out given the physicality involved in just that first song.

While I may not be the most doomed-out guy listening-wise in the world, I certainly have an appreciation for all the wires and electronics that go into making this particular machine run.

 

 

43 – Noctem – Credo Certe Ne Cras

The weirdest ones for me to write in my year-end garbage fires are always the ones that I’ve reviewed just recently. But alas, a month has somehow passed since then and this writing, so although it may seem like Noctem‘s latest venture into the void may not have been that long ago, it may be mostly because I still listen to this one a fair amount.

Noctem may have played it pretty conservatively here with Credo Certe Ne Cras, unleashing an album that refines upon their ‘goddamnit we can be black metal from the abyss’ album The Black Consecration, while not necessairly shifting the needle too much in terms of adventurism. If anything, you could likely describe this one as The Black Consecration but with better production and somehow slightly more grandiose in their sensibilities.

Songs on Credo Certe Ne Cras were written to be ‘big,’ and with that comes the understanding that you can’t just get by on ‘big’ songs alone. Noctem saw that and did their best to try and make it so each track stood on its own individual footing. So while it may have been a very recognizable form of fiery black metal there was always something there to keep your interest piqued in each song – whether it be additional female vocals, unexpected instrumentation, or even some pretty acoustic guitar.

If you just have the bloodhounds out sniffing for the scent of fast and fiery then the opening collective of songs within Credo Certe Ne Cras will have you covered. Noctem use those opening moments to lay a lot of the foundational work for the album and that is especially clear when you land on “Sovereign Of Providence”, which might as well just be the band running a chainsaw for five minutes with blastbeats behind it. It’s fast, loud, and anguished as can get. The followup track being the actual “Sanctum Of Anguish” only helps to hammer that point home.

Of course, yours truly was also drawn to the orchestral embelishments and occasional slower numbers that help break things up, which is why tracks like “Homilia Of Punishment” and “The Tolling Of The Nine Bells” have refused to ease their grip on my skull. And if you want a neat five-song sample then adding “Ceremonial Miasma” to the battle could do you well with this faux five-song sampler playlist.

We’ve been walking the musical path with Spain’s Noctem for quite a well now and they’ve built up quite the arsenal of music over the years. It’s still exciting to see the band going as strong as they are and hopefully grabbing new listeners – by throat or otherwise – along the way.

 

 

42 – Psycroptic – Divine Council

It’s an opinion of mine that Pyscroptic‘s 2018 release As The Kingdom Drowns and their 2020 EP The Watcher Of All are surprisingly underrated releases, given the group’s somewhat high popularity in the underground scene over the years. While their self-titled 2015 jam didn’t quite hold sway with me, I thought As The Kingdom Drowns was a fantastic return for a group who have made their name off of hyper-speed players and percussive vocal attacks, which have given them a manic energy that few groups have been able to match over the years.

The Watcher Of All was obviously a victim of circumstance – like so many – as recording artists found themselves at the bum-end of a world that couldn’t give two shits about them financially if they weren’t part of the greater business empire of top 40 chasing or constantly grinding themselves to dust on the road. Long story short, streaming royalties don’t cut it, even with the mealy-mouthed sentiment of ‘well at least it’s something…’

A lot of bands worked hard to bring out music in 2020 so they could get part of the increasingly small ‘well, at least its something…’, because they couldn’t play shows or tour due to the covid-19 outbreak, and The Watcher Of All wound up wrapped up in that flood. It held a lot of promise as a snapshot of where Psycroptic had been musically and likely where they were headed – which is why Divine Council effectively picking the musical ball up off the street, declaring “I own this now!’, and running off with it was so exciting.

We touched base with Divine Council here if you’d prefer something more cohesive and longform than the rambling clusterfuck this mess is, but long story short I still maintain the same conclusion with Divine Council now that I did back then. It’s a lot of fun, whips by quick, and is about what you’d expect from something bearing the Psycroptic banner. It refined a bit on a sound that they’d already been refining for a few years, and the double-vocalist shenanigans that take place throughout lend a little bit of crossed-arms hXc flavor to the overall song and dance.

Divine Council opens so goddamned strong too with “Rend Asunder” but the fretboard fireworks rarely, if ever, stop throughout the forty minutes here. The other chosen singles of “Exitus” and “A Fool’s Errand” were also great calls but the constant ass kicking that starts around “Ashes Of Our Empire” and “The Prophet’s Council” is what really gives Divine Council its staying power.

Psycroptic doing what Psycroptic do is always going to hold some court within the year-end lists here, even if the jump in sound is relatively minor. After a while it just comes down to really enjoying when the Haley crew go nuts on their instruments.

 

 

41 – SepticFlesh – Modern Primitive

Greece’s SepticFlesh returned to the stage in 2022 with their newest album Modern Primitive. I tackled the review for their 11th full length around the time of its release and found that Modern Primitive was the sort of album where a band are just fully ensconced in their specific style and there is little likelihood they are going to move from it. You can’t fault them for staying within their comfort zone either; they’ve been around for a good while now and through a combination of solid output and stubborn longevity have become one of the bigger names within the symphonics and death metal collision.

However, after a solid run of albums prior to Modern Primitive – especially the surprisingly in-depth and vicious Codex Omega – SepticFlesh playing it close to home just didn’t rank as highly with me this year as the group are normally prone to do. Does that represent a bad album? Not one bit. What you have with Modern Primitive is a solid forty minutes of music that is red-meat for symphonic death metal fans and still maintains enough spectacle to wow people on first impression. Maybe it was because a few too many of the songs hewed closely to the song ‘Martyr’ from Codex Omega, such that it didn’t quite stick as long with me as I would’ve liked it to.

However there’s still a few rock-solid bombs to be thrown within the tracklisting here, so even if you’re like me and found the polished mid-tempo stomp that dominates to be a little lesser here, you’ll have a few adrenaline rushes to slam into your system. The pairing of “Coming Storm” and “A Desert Throne” are likely the biggest highlights within the album – and somethng it seems like the band themselves recognized, given that they were early releases in the leadup to the album release – and they’re both the big, speedier numbers full of orchestral pyrotechnics in the album. They also tie into one another quite well and it almost makes the two into one track – which is something that happened a lot on Titan, given its use of repeated motifs throughout its songs.

Elsewhere among the mid-tempo stomps you have ‘Self-Eater” and “Neuromancer” – which is the mirror of its older sibling ‘Martyr’ – giving Modern Primitive the sense that the album takes a bit to find its footing and become what is deserving of the “Modern Primitive” song-title and album-title name. Perspective of course; given that SepticFlesh finding what will be representative of the new album is mostly them just playing to what they do best, and if that current formula didn’t work so well even at its most basic and expected, it wouldn’t be ranking among some of the best releases this year.

Modern Primitive still found a ton of spins throughout the year – if not just because it would eventually lead to me cascading down the rest of SepticFlesh‘s discography as well and falling down that rabbit hole for a few nights at work.

But what does tomorrow hold for this these year-end festivities? Well, right now it looks like the descent into the death metal world will continue with a few more from the -core scene getting their punches in. Things will start to crystalize a little bit and, by gosh, things will also appear from the outset to be just as scattershot genre-wise as they ever have been. If somehow we’ve all managed to make it through another day then I will see you there for the grand forty-into-thirty segment of the year-end list and another way too long opening paragraph that’ll make your eyes glaze over….maybe. I wish you all luck.