LISTMANIA 2016 Archives - Page 6 of 7

2016 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GOOD ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2016 54 Responses »

Dec 132016

(Andy Synn’s week-long series of year-end lists continues with his personal list of 2016’s Good Albums. Yesterday’s list dealt with Disappointments.)

So now we’re really starting to get into the meat of things.

Unlike tomorrow’s list of “Great” albums, the list of “Good” albums covers a bit of a wider range in terms of overall quality.

Some of these albums are ones I consider to be so good as to be almost “Great”, but which are perhaps held back from true greatness by one or two inescapable flaws.

Some of them are undeniably “Good” in the sense that we’ll all doubtless be coming back to them for a long time, but probably (if we’re being honest with ourselves) with some understanding that they don’t quite hit the highest possible standards.

And some of them… are just “good enough”. They’re certainly not bad albums and are more than enjoyable enough, but they’re probably not going to be winning any awards (apart from Revolver awards, but those don’t really count).

Of course your mileage may vary. Some of these albums you may think are the bee’s bollocks (that’s the phrase, right?) and deserve to be considered “Great” albums in their own right. And some of these albums you might actively despise and not understand why anyone could consider them to be “Good”. But I hope you know that I’ve tried to be as objective as possible here, and feel like I’ve given all these releases a fair hearing.

So why not click onwards, brave traveller, and see if anything in this list strikes your fancy? Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: A YEAR-END LIST FROM NEILL JAMESON (KRIEG)

LISTMANIA 2016 6 Responses »

Dec 122016

(We’re happy that for another year Neill Jameson (Krieg) succumbed to our entreaties to share with us a year-end list of metal.)

2016 has been a strange year. Not just in terms of the cultural shifts that occurred, or the copious amounts of deaths in the arts community, or even Antifa stepping over the line and using violence towards bystanders. It’s also been an unusually shitty year for a lot of our private lives as well, it seems. We weren’t able to make it a week without news that our friends were burying someone or worse, we were planning a funeral ourselves. But this time of the year is one bound by tradition so I’m back for my yearly review of music released in 2016 that you need to check out.

For me personally I didn’t buy a lot of new records this year. I don’t have any excuse, really, I just spent more time digging into older records or following some of my favorites without really checking out anything truly new this year. Did I miss out? Probably, but I don’t really care. I also tried to use only Bandcamp links where I could so that you actually buy some of this, instead of putting it on a YouTube playlist, which’ll lose its atmosphere when you can’t skip ads for Valtrex. Continue reading »

2016 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE DISAPPOINTING ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2016 73 Responses »

Dec 122016

(This is the second installment in Andy Synn’s series of year-end lists, which began last week with a list of favorite EPs and splits. The opinions represent those of the author rather than the site as a whole, especially in the case of one of these 10 “disappointments”, the selection of which is an invitation to pistols at 20 paces come the dawn.)

…and so it begins.

For this year’s listravaganza I’ve decided to change things up a little by kicking off with the “Disappointing” albums, rather than the “Great” albums. It’s a small change, but it means we can build up towards the best of the year, rather than spiral downwards.

Now although we don’t do negative reviews here at NCS, I still feel like there’s a place for reasoned criticism in what we do.

That doesn’t mean tearing bands down or belittling their efforts, it simply means acknowledging that not every album is a 10/10, and that sometimes even the best bands slip up.

Ultimately this isn’t a list of “bad” albums. It’s just a bunch of releases from bands who could (or should) be able to do better. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: ROLLING STONE’S 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2016

LISTMANIA 2016 40 Responses »

Dec 102016

No, we’re not being repetitive. Yes, we did post a year-end list by Rolling Stone magazine earlier in our LISTMANIA series, but that one was the magazine’s list of the top 50 albums across all genres of music that they care about. This, however, is a list in which metal isn’t elbowed aside by the likes of The Monkees, Elton John, and Brandy Clark, leaving only Metallica standing as the lone metal recognition.

This is Rolling Stone’s list of the “20 Best Metal Albums of 2016”, which appeared yesterday. And here it is: Continue reading »

2016 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE EPs

LISTMANIA 2016 29 Responses »

Dec 092016

(So far, our LISTMANIA series has mostly been devoted to year-end lists from other sites and print zines, but today we begin rolling out our own lists. As has become customary, we start with the first of six year-end lists that Andy Synn is preparing. Every day next week we’ll post his remaining five — along with other staff and guest lists.)

Somehow another year seems to have passed by, which means it’s almost time for my annual, week-long round-up of the year’s best and brightest (and most disappointing) releases.

For those of you unaware of how this whole thing works, I split my assessment of the year into three categories initially:

The “Great” albums, the ones which I honestly consider the true cream of this year’s crop, regardless of fame, fortune, or style.

The “Good” albums, which vary between solid (but not necessarily stunning) morsels of metallic goodness and those which (arguably) come within a hair’s breadth of greatness.

And the “Disappointing” albums of the year, the albums which, while not necessarily bad, I feel don’t live up to the standards which the band(s) have set for themselves, or which their listeners have come to expect.

Then, finally, I put together my two Top Ten lists. The “Critical Top Ten”, where I try to be as objective as possible in selecting ten of the year’s finest albums to serve as a representative sample of the best which 2016 has to offer, and my “Personal Top Ten”, which are simply the ten albums which have tickled my fancy the most over the past twelve months.

But first, how about we have a little round-up of some of the best EPs of the year? Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: TERRORIZER’S ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

LISTMANIA 2016 20 Responses »

Dec 092016

In past years I haven’t included Terrorizer’s annual lists of the year’s best albums in our LISTMANIA series, but I don’t know why. They’re a long-running metal print zine, and although their on-line site isn’t as large as the other cross-genre “big platform” web portals I typically include in this list, it’s a popular one, and of course far more metal-centric than most of the others. So this year, they’re in, especially since our own Andy Synn now writes more regularly for them (obviously an exercise in slumming).

Terrorizer began as a UK print zine in 1993 and now they’re up to Issue No. 275, which features a band on the cover that placed highly on the list you’re about to see. In in its own judgment Terrorizer “is considered the world’s most authoritative extreme metal magazine and when it comes to heavy metal and all forms of an ungodly racket”. They launched an online site in 2007, and now have hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: METAL NAMES ON YEAR-END LISTS FROM ROLLING STONE AND NPR

LISTMANIA 2016 21 Responses »

Dec 082016

As part of our year-end LISTMANIA series, we bring you lists of the year’s best metal from a few print zines with wide circulation and from some cross-genre web platforms that get orders-of-magnitude more eyeballs than we do. In the case of most of these other lists, we do this as a way of peaking at what the wider world sees, since our world is very narrow and subterranean. In this post, we’re looking at Rolling Stone and NPR. It won’t take you long to read the metal names on these lists.

ROLLING STONE

Last week, the venerable Rolling Stone magazine posted on their web site a list of the 50 Best Albums of 2016. This list isn’t limited to metal. In past years, Rolling Stone has published a separate list of the year’s best metal, but I’m not sure if they will do that this year. So what I did was to scroll through that “50 Best” list and carve out the metal names, which I’m listing below along with their rank on the list.

The full article appears here, with accompanying explanations for the choices: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: METAL ON NOISEY’S LIST OF THE BEST 100 ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

LISTMANIA 2016 36 Responses »

Dec 082016

Here’s another entry in the part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy where we re-post lists of metal from “big platform” web sites and print zines — the kind of places that get a lot more eyeballs on them than festering little metal-only hovels like ours.

To justify our selection of Noisey for this part of the series, consider these statistics: Noisey is the on-line music channel of Vice Media, which began as a Montreal-based print magazine in 1994 and has expanded into a global media presence. Noisey was started in 2011 and now has 1,132,220 Facebook followers and (according to this site) receives about 839,500 unique visitors and 1,477,520 page views per day.

Yesterday Noisey published its staff’s list of “The Best 100 Albums of the Year“. By my count, 10 of those albums are metal. Nine of those 10 appear to have made the list as a result of recommendations by Noisey editor Kim Kelly, whose by-line appears on the mini-reviews that accompany those 9 picks. The 10th one is Devil Is Fine by Zeal and Ardor, and a different author’s by-line accompanies that feature. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: REVOLVER’S LIST OF THE TOP 20 ALBUMS OF 2016

LISTMANIA 2016 23 Responses »

Dec 082016

As part of our LISTMANIA 2016 series, we’re re-posting a list of the “20 Best Albums of 2016” published by Revolver magazine yesterday.

Revolver bills itself as “the No. 1 hard-rock and heavy-metal destination in the world”. Their online site boasts 13 million page views over the last year, and the ad rate sheet for the print publication claims a total monthly reach of 300,000 readers. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE BEST 50 ALBUMS OF 2016

LISTMANIA 2016 17 Responses »

Dec 032016

As you probably know, part of our year-end LISTMANIA series involves re-posting year-end lists of the best metal releases as selected by what I call “big platform” web sites and print zines, i.e., publications that reach numbers of readers vastly in excess of those reached by sites like ours that are more exclusively focused on metal, and in our case the more extreme variants of the genre.

In recent days Stereogum posted its list of “The Best 50 Albums of 2016“. This isn’t a “metal only” list. It’s an impossible comparison of apples to oranges, identifying and ranking albums across a wide range of musical genres. I suppose in that respect it’s like the musical equivalent of the Westminster Dog Show. Continue reading »

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