Thew's Six Albums of 2012

Okay, look, I'm gonna begin by straight-up admitting that I don't really pay much attention to music anymore. There was a time when I'd buy ten albums a week, but that was a time when I really, really gave a crap about metal and hardcore and mathcore and metalcore and death metal and grind and deathgrind and aggro-grind and genres and sub-genres and micro-genres and meta-genres of supposedly varied music that actually is just metal and shut up.

But that time is long past, and I now keep track of an embarrassingly tiny number of artists. I am old and I am bored and I am jaded, and it's time to admit that there is no difference between Ion Dissonance and Through The Eyes Of The Dead; Viatrophy sound like Caliban sound like Killswitch Engage sound like Hatebreed; Arch Enemy sound like Shadows Fall sound like Devildriver sound like FUCKING CHRIST I AM SO OLD, SHUT YOUR FACE.

So given my devastatingly low interest level in the music I once fawned over and lived for, you'll forgive me for only buying six albums in the last year. These are not my top six albums of the year; they're the only ones I could even be bothered to check out. Here's what I think of them, in reverse order of how much I like them.

#6. Fear Factory: The Industrialist

For a disproportionately huge period of my teenage life, when asked who my favourite band was, I would say, "I don't know, either Fear Factory or Machine Head, I can't decide." But then the early 2000s happened and my life was thrown into disarray with both parties flapping out tragically mediocre efforts: the respective Digimortal and The Burning Red left me bereft of credible faves, and I was all of a sudden forced to pretend I'd been really into Carnal Forge and KMFDM all along.

Fear Factory have since broken up, reformed, broken up again, and reformed again, each time dropping an album or two along the same formula but with varying degrees of success. Their most recent incarnation sees Dino leading them along the super-duper heavy route: 2010's Mechanize was unflinchingly heavy and dirty, and it blew my fucking socks off. But, boringly, FF have done what they always do and followed up that smasher with what can only be described as an album without so much as looking at it. Just like Digimortal, just like Transgression, The Industrialist is a stone-cold snorefest that might have been passable if it wasn't so bloody obvious. I mean, give this a listen for ten seconds and tell me you don't know exactly where it's going.

How desperate must you be to hammer home the "industrial" aspect of your music that you actually use a sample of a fucking drill in your song?

I can't say that I hate this record; I can't say that I feel anything about it. It is a Fear Factory album. If you'd told me ten years ago that Dino Cazares would be making records with fucking Gene Hoglan, I'd have taken a quick break from jizzing my pants to expect slightly more from them than this boring bollocks. Yeah it's heavy, yeah it's technically proficient, but I'm going to bed.

#5. Lamb Of God: Resolution

2012 must have been a pretty tense year for Lamb Of God, what with their frontman being charged for accidentally pushing a fan to his death. This horrific affair is not what I'm here to talk about today: I'm here to talk about how their new record was a bit boring.

Resolution had a frig of a lot to live up to after the breakout success of Sacrament and the superb Wrath, and the band definitely knew it: listening to this record is like watching five dudes in their pyjamas shrug for an hour.

The album kicks off promisingly with the colossal two-minute groove of Straight For The Sun, which sulks its way through the (honestly) nastiest riff I've heard for years into a gut-busting drum solo from the magnificent Mr. Adler -- and that's pretty much your lot. From there on in, it's generic thrash and nothing else.  The band sound like they're bored of their own songs, many of which are sub-par re-treadings of older, better material: lead single Ghost Walking is so brazen a rehash of Redneck that I can almost see the band in rehearsal, scrabbling among themselves to distinguish it with ever-so-slightly altered drum patterns and way less memorable lyrics.

The record also features the prerequisite lone groove-rock track: To the End is a monstrous Pantera-esque screamer with an absolutely punishing swagger of which the band seem to be unnecessarily embarrassed - the nanosecond it's over, they launch into Visitation, a song disproportionately and seemingly apologetically aggressive even for a band like LOG. It doesn't go "juggajuggajugga" - it goes "sorrysorrysorry".

Once again, I can't actively hate this album: I have some great memories linked to it and it's still light years ahead of a lot of the dross out there, but Jesus Christ, it's no Wrath, and everybody knows it.

#4. Tiamat: The Scarred People

Oh, Tiamat. Oh, Tiamat, where to begin? I love you guys so much, but I'm not completely sure why.

Tiamat are one of those bands where you're pretty sure you know what you're getting, but you also absolutely don't. There have been periods of scorching technical death metal, floaty mescaline dreamscapes á la Pink Floyd, and bodacious Sisters of Mercy-inspired balls-out goth rock. I must confess that I only recently picked up 2008's Amanethes, which leaned toward the heavier side of the gauge (presumably because the band had just signed to Nuclear Blast), and its follow-up, The Scarred People, does an excellent job of keeping us guessing.

Because of their inconsistency of sound, there's no such thing as a standard Tiamat record. This one's as good a place as any to try and pigeonhole the band: you've got your storming goth rock title track, your elongated bluesy love stories (The Sun Also Rises, Messinan Letter), your gloomy crawlers (384, Radiant Star), and even a curveball Lana Del Rey cover song.

I've loved Tiamat for years, but I have a seriously hard time getting other people into them because I'm never totally sure how to pitch them. They're just a really, really good band, okay? I think what keeps me coming back to them is their enigmatic frontman, Johan Edlund. There are few figures so wordlessly charismatic, so honest (I assume), so fucking handsome as this talented motherfucker. He writes all of Tiamat's music and it always sounds like it's come directly from the centre of his brain. And oh my God, can this man bust out a killer guitar solo.

The magic happens at 3:10. You're welcome.

#3. Linkin Park: Living Things

Yeah, yeah, I know. I can see you now, looking at this blog and being all like, "Wow, get a load of this guy, he bums Transformers so hard that he even got into the stupid theme song band, what a lame-on." Well SHUT IT, my presumedly arsey reader, because I liked Linkin Park for a long old time before the Bayformers were even born. Jesus, if my 18-year-old self could see me now, boasting about having liked a band for ages and it's fucking Linkin Park, I think he'd murder me. Well, actually he wouldn't, because he was a coward.

In the beginning I hated LP to their very bones, because they were a bunch of privileged, attractive California pretty boys who didn't know shit about being brutal and they didn't even do blastbeats or have long hair or anything. Thankfully my then-girlfriend persuaded me to give them a chance, and I realised that actually their songs are quite good and I started to enjoy them for what they are, rather than perpetuating this ridiculous Slayer-fan image I was so fond of. Shit, I hate Slayer.

Ten or so years on and much has changed in the Linkin Park camp. They don't do two-note shouty drop-D breakdowns very much anymore, but they aren't trying to be fucking U2 anymore either. Having pretty much abandoned guitars entirely on A Thousand Suns in favour of electronics and vocal skillz, LP pulled it back a bit on Living Things and delivered a solid, interesting selection of tracks, ranging from the single-worthy opening salvo of Lost In The Echo, In My Remains and Burn It Down to the varyingly furious outbursts of Victimised and Lies Greed Misery, and the demolishingly powerful Roads Untraveled which brings a legitimate lump to even my fat old jaded old stupid old throat every single time.

#2. Meshuggah - Koloss

Goddamn, ain't nobody else like Meshuggah! This bunch of identical metal dudes and a bald guy have a wonderful habit of busting out tremendous albums that sound like absolutely no fucker else on the planet. Yeah, there are your Dream Theaters and your Gojiras, but ain't nobody else like Meshuggah. Ain't nobody reliable like Meshuggah. 

It baffles me how this band can continue to make music of such unwaveringly high quality. It's like they made a list of all the things that I like, chucked out all the lame ones, dipped the rest in whiskey-coated Snickers and stuffed them directly into my soul. This album chugs, it screams, it grooves, it scoops your pelvis out and breaks your nose with it, it gives you a big sexy snog made of blastbeats in fucking 26/9 time, then it wiggles its immaculate fucking drop-A buttocks in your eyeballs and it's fucking sleepwalking the whole time. It's the kind of music that you listen to and you think you're keeping up but the music knows that you never really can and you know that it knows that. You can see the riffs.

Koloss is not necessarily the Shug's best album ever. It's not the heaviest, maybe not the most accomplished, certainly not the weirdest, but it's a fucking good one and no mistake. And one good Meshuggah record is like fifty good records from almost anybody else. It's humiliating to listen to songs like Behind The Sun and The Hurt That Finds You First because even if you can follow the impenetrable time signatures, you'll never, ever match the pure precision of the musicianship of these five grebs from Umeå, so what chance have you got of ever writing a song to this standard?

The lyrics to this song are, "Shouting".

#1. Devin Townsend Project: Epicloud

Okay, time for another confession: I am in romantic love with Devin Townsend. The man has brought such a staggering amount of joy to my life that I can't help but immediately bump him to the top of this list. It's my default reaction to anything he does: it is instantly the best.

Epicloud, his latest offering, is the immediate successor to - and in many ways the cherry on top of - the Devin Townsend Project tetralogy. Sonically it retains the depth of each previous record, while building on the themes of self-realisation, hope, and an arch sense of affectionate exasperation with the world. At least, y'know, that's what I think. Ask anyone else and they'll tell you a bunch of different shit. Whatever. That's what this album means to me, and I adore every second of it.

This album is as brazen in its convictions as it is wonderful. It begins with a full-on chanting sesh from a gloriously over-the-top choir who pop up continually over the course of these thirteen sumptuous tracks, and it's straight into a little song called True North, which is probably the most unapologetically fucking happy noise I've ever heard. It is brash, it is powerful, it is magical, and it is alive. Epicloud is sound given life: an energy pure and untainted that breathes long and deep and loud; it reaches the very core of me and makes my heart cry and wail and smile all at once, with a force so gleefully free that it feels like you're spoiling it by merely experiencing it.

Sure, there's a couple of tracks later on that aren't so hot - More! is a fiercely average bit of work that tries to fool you into thinking it's a good metal song with its tediously vague lyrics ostensibly about disgust at human greed and a kinda-good groove riff thrown in for good measure, and Grace is a bit of a boring slog, but fuck all that. Devin Townsend's music is so unusual, so precious and so bloody good that I can forgive anything. Thank you for everything, Dev. Now shut up and let's get married.