(Wil Cifer has written a five-part year-end series that includes top albums in the genres of black metal, death metal, doom, and experimental/progressive metal, but the first part of the series is this one.)
First, before the weeping of the message board rises to a fever pitch, “Mainstream” here is not referring to bands selling out, playing arenas, or becoming a household name, though some of those things might apply to a few of the bands on this list. “Mainstream” in this case means too middle-of-the-road to belong on the Top Ten lists for more extreme forms of metal such as black metal, death metal, doom metal… you get the picture. They could appeal to your average metalhead who does not just listen to cassette pressings limited to only 200 copies. So in other words, in most cases these bands are not ones I would be able to cover over at my other home Cvlt Nation. The bulk of this is just fun, driving-to-the-liquor-store metal.
These are ranked thanks to my Last.fm in the order of which got the most rotation on my iPod. It’s fine for an album to be highly regarded for its artistic merit, but what is a great piece of sonic art really worth if it’s not inspiring me to come back to for repeat listens? Continue reading »