Dec 102015
 

STEREOGUM 50 BEST METAL ALBUMS

 

Of all the year-end lists we re-post from “big platform” web sites as part of our LISTMANIA extravaganza, this is the one I most look forward to seeing. It’s Stereogum’s list of “The 50 Best Metal Albums of 2015“, which was published today. I look forward to it because it’s assembled by a team of people whose opinions I respect a lot — the five guys responsible for Stereogum’s excellent Black Market column this year: Michael NelsonDoug Moore, Ian Chainey, Aaron Lariviere, and Wyatt Marshall.

This year’s Stereogum list is preceded by a long opinion piece — prompted in part by Disma’s removal from some metal festival line-ups — that raises the thorny and always-controversial issue of whether there are lines crossed by musicians that warrant “excommunication” of their music from our lives. Regardless of what you think about that issue, this is a good and interesting list. It includes some of whom we can safely anoint as “the usual suspects” this year, but some deep cuts as well. And I’m especially happy to see the pick at the top of the list. Continue reading »

Dec 072015
 

Stereogum 50 Best

 

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 StereogumRolling Stone, and SPIN. It won’t take you long to read the metal names on these lists.

STEREOGUM

Stereogum is a music web site founded in 2002. It’s part of the same SPINMusic network that includes the SPIN webzine (featured at the end of this post) and Brooklyn Vegan, among other music-oriented sites. SpinMusic says that Stereogum reaches more than 700,000 music fans a month.

In past years, Stereogum has published a list of the year’s best metal albums, and I assume that will happen again this year — and we’ll pay attention to that, because their staff of metal writers is a good one. But last week Stereogum rolled out its list of The 50 Best Albums of 2015 — not limited to metal. I perused the list in an effort to spot metal names, and below I’m listing what I found, along with their placement in the overall list. Continue reading »