LISTMANIA CONTINUES: DID YOU KNOW AMAZON HAD A LIST?

 Listmania, LISTMANIA 2012  4 Responses »
Dec 072012
 

I’m including this post in our LISTMANIA series more out of curiosity than anything else, because I don’t know many metalheads who get their music based on recommendations by Amazon.com. In fact, until this morning I didn’t know that Amazon even compiled Best of the Year staff picks. But they do. And because Amazon sells a shitload of music, I thought this was worth a mention.

There are actually three different lists that I’m including here. First, Amazon compiled a list of the 100 Best Albums of 2012. I waded through that list to find the metal albums that made it (at least as I define metal). And here they are, with their numerical rankings:

36.  Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind

39.  Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

40.  High On Fire: De Vermis Mysteriis

46.  Baroness: Yellow and Green

67.  Gojira: L’Enfant Sauvage

I guess five metal albums out of 100 isn’t bad (though I’m sure I would get an argument from many of you about the inclusion of Godspeed You! Black Emperor as metal). Interestingly, the No. 1 album on Amazon’s list is My Head Is An Animal, the debut album by an Icelandic band named Of Monsters and Men. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA CONTINUES: “THE BEST METAL OF 2012” FROM POPMATTERS

 Listmania, LISTMANIA 2012  30 Responses »
Dec 072012
 

While awaiting the rollout of our own series of posts devoted to the year’s best metal, I continue to keep an eye out for year-end lists published by what I’ve been calling “big platform” web sites. By “big platform” sites, I mean those that have web traffic which greatly exceeds even the biggest metal-only sites. By definition, these are sites that cover musical genres beyond metal, and usually entertainment interests beyond music.

PopMatters is a popular culture web site with broad coverage of music, film, television, books, comics, software and video games — you name it. Its articles get picked up regularly by the mainstream media, and it claims a readership of more than 1 million unique visitors per month. In other words, it fits the profile of “big platform” web sites whose lists of 2012′s best metal we’ve been re-publishing here at NCS.

Today, PopMatters published its list of “The Best Metal of 2012″, ranking the chosen albums from #20 to #1. The list was compiled by Craig Hayes, Adrien Begrand, Dean Brown, Brice Ezell, and Dane Prokofiev (who is an occasional contributor to NCS). To see the list with accompanying descriptions and explanations of the choices along with sample tracks from most of the listed albums, use this link.

It’s a very interesting list, which we’re re-publishing after the jump. You will see some names that have appeared on other lists we’ve published so far. In fact, those names are appearing so frequently I suspect they would be on some “consensus list” if anyone were to compile such a thing (with Panopticon’s Kentucky turning into a real dark-horse favorite). But you’ll also see some new entries that may be surprising (at least they surprised me — pleasantly): Author & Punisher (coming in at No. 4!),  Atriarch, Krallice, Dragged Into Sunlight, and Ahab. But the biggest surprise is the pick for the No. 1 spot. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA CONTINUES: THE LOUDWIRE TOP 10

 Listmania, LISTMANIA 2012  15 Responses »
Nov 292012
 

While awaiting the rollout of our own series of posts devoted to the year’s best metal, I continue to keep an eye out for year-end lists published by what I’ve been calling “big platform” web sites. By “big platform” sites, I mean those that have web traffic which greatly exceeds even the biggest metal-only sites. By definition, this means that they cover music or other forms of entertainment beyond metal. They may not be as trve as the sites that are completely devoted to metal, but I have fun watching what they say in their year-end posts, in part because their articles are written for a broader audience.

This year I’m including a year-end metal list by a “big platform” site that wasn’t included in our round-up last year. It’s called Loudwire.com, and it’s the national music website covering active rock and heavy metal of the Townsquare Media Group. Townsquare Media says that it’s “the largest music focused advertising network online consisting of over 1,500 music sites and reaching over 60 million people each month”. It also owns 250 radio stations, including 18 “active rock” radio stations nationwide. Loudwire has over 585,000 Facebook fans and reports that it receives more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month. This means that it edges out NCS traffic by a hair.

Yesterday, Loudwire published its staff list of the 10 Best Metal Albums of 2012. Though I wouldn’t agree with all the picks on the list (e.g., I don’t think Lamb of God’s Resolution is one of the year’s 10 best metal albums), I wasn’t surprised by most of the albums on there. I think we will see most of them on a great many lists this year. But there were two exceptions: Woods of Ypres seemed like an unusual stylistic choice, given what else is on the list, though I’m not criticizing the pick because I haven’t heard the album, and I wouldn’t have guessed the album that Loudwire picked for No. 1. Here’s the list: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA: AN INVITATION

 Listmania, LISTMANIA 2012  64 Responses »
Nov 222012
 

At least in my crazy country, Thanksgiving is a pivotal day in the year. Today, people who are lucky eat too much in the company of friends and/or family.  Tomorrow, people begin spending money they don’t have on presents people don’t need. And today also begins the countdown to the end of the year.  From now ’til then, people take stock of the year and begin making lists of the best and worst that the year has brought us.

In the world of metal, that means lists of the best albums (and sometimes the worst).  Back in 2009, when this site was just an ugly, smelly baby a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were the year’s best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end “best albums” list. It’s just too damned much work, and I’m allergic to work. Fortunately, we have some other regular contributors who have more energy, and we’ll be publishing their year-end lists in December. We’ll also be publishing the year-end lists that major metal publications and “big platform” web sites are compiling; we started doing that yesterday with DECIBEL magazine’s list of 2012’s Top 40 Albums.

We’re also inviting some other folks to give us their lists in the form of guest posts for this site. And we’ll also have our annual list of the extreme metal songs we thought were the most infectious of the year. Soon, I’ll post an invitation for your song suggestions.

But we ain’t stopping there. If YOU have made your own list of the best metal albums you heard this year, we want to see it. Because we’re fucking nosy like that. (details about this invitation are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

LISTMANIA BEGINS: THE DECIBEL TOP 40

 Listmania, LISTMANIA 2012  51 Responses »
Nov 212012
 

Well, here we are, the day before Thanksgiving, and year-end listmania is already upon us. Shit, most people don’t even turn on Christmas lights and start playing carols until the day after Thanksgiving. But DECIBEL magazine has broken the ice. Their January 2013 issue is in the mail, with Phil Anselmo’s baleful stare gracing the cover, and inside is the magazine’s list of the Top 40 Albums of 2012.

We previously reported that DECIBEL named All We Love We Leave Behind by Converge as Album of the Year, and now we know which albums fill out the other 39 spots.

Half the fun of year-end lists is the controversy they generate. It’s virtually a given that no serious fan of metal is going to agree 100% with any other fan’s list of any year’s best albums, because, after all, being disagreeable is one of the hallmarks of metal culture. And so there will be disagreements with DECIBEL’s list. I have a few of my own already. But let’s also be clear: in my humble opinion, DECIBEL is far and away the best metal print mag in existence, I certainly respect the opinions of their writers, and I think this list is definitely worthy reading.

Apart from generating controversy and discussion, year-end lists are worthwhile because they’re a source of new discoveries, and at least in my case that’s certainly true of the DECIBEL list. It makes me want to track down some albums I overlooked.

After today, we’ll be continuing our own Listmania series at NCS — and there will be more details about that (and invitations for your lists) in a special Thanksgiving Day post tomorrow. For now, check the DECIBEL list after the jump . . . prefaced by a few random observations. Continue reading »

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