As part of our year-end Listmania series, we re-publish “best metal album” lists compiled by certain “big platform” web sites and selected print zines. Today, we bring you what Rolling Stone magazine thinks are the 20 best metal albums of 2013.

Rolling Stone states that it has a total circulation of almost 1.5 million, and per this source, its web site receives about a half a million unique visitors every day. Its music coverage does include metal, but it focuses much more on rock. Or at least that was my impression back when I was a subscriber.

Rolling Stone introduced its 2013 list this way:

“Are these the most extremely extreme albums of the year? No, they’re more interesting and exciting than that. If there’s a thread running through these records, it is a lack of purity, a willingness to mess with metal’s structures and strictures. Here are Rolling Stone’s 20 favorite metal albums of 2013.”

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Part of our year-end Listmania series consists of re-publishing lists of the year’s best metal that appear on what I call “big platform” web sites, and today we have one from Stereogum. It was one of the web’s first blogs to offer mp3 downloads, and it has evolved into a high-traffic portal with a focus on independent and alternative music news, downloads, videos, and gossip.

Last year Stereogum published a list of The Top 40 Metal Albums of 2012. It’s not clear they’re going to do that this year [correction: they are, next week], because today they published a list of The 50 Best Albums of 2013, spanning a wide variety of music genres. What I did was siphon from that list only the metal albums I saw on it — as I define metal — along with the rankings for each of those albums. Of course, you may wish to see the entire list, but you will not see it here. Instead, you will see this subset: Continue reading »

As in past years, 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 call “big platform” web sites — those with web traffic that greatly exceeds even the biggest metal-only sites. By definition, this means they cover music or other forms of entertainment beyond metal. I get a perverse kind of fun watching what they say in their year-end posts, in part because they write for a broader audience that on average is less knowledgable about metal.

Last year I included a year-end metal list by a “big platform” site that wasn’t included in our round-ups for previous years. It’s called Loudwire.com, and it’s the national music website covering active rock and heavy metal of the Townsquare Media Group. Loudwire has over 825,000 Facebook fans and last year it reported that it was receiving more than 1.2 million unique visitors per month.

Last year Loudwire published a staff list of the year’s 10 Best Metal Albums. It’s not clear they’re doing that again this year, but what they have published is a list of the “10 Best Metal Songs of 2013”. And here it is: Continue reading »

There it is, the cover of Issue #111 of DECIBEL magazine, with a cover date of January 2014, because how in good conscience could you create a list of 2013’s best albums before 2013 is actually over?

Ha!  I kid. I take this shot every year — but I’m only half-kidding. I do wonder what would be wrong with having all Best of 2013 lists appearing in January 2014 instead of November 2013 when those poor bands whose albums were released in the last quarter of the year simply get overlooked in the year-end chase. But that’s not the way the world of metal journalism works. We start seeing year-end lists now, and we talk about them even if they’re a tad premature.

DECIBEL’s list of the year’s Top 40 albums appears after the jump. As you may have read already, the comeback album by Carcass got Album of the Year honors. And Tribulation and In Solitude are in the Top 10, along with Gorguts and Inquisition. But Melt Banana and SubRosa are in the Top 10, too. Continue reading »