Andrew's Top 10 of 2007 (and a little more)

It's impossible to really digest every hardcore, punk, metal – whatever genre – record that each year has to offer. So, while that should be a given when it comes to viewing year-end lists, I felt this year like I had an especially short amount of time to devote to a wealth of deserving records. I've even been scrambling in the past few months to somehow get my hands on releases that might go down as "best of 2007s," partly because I want to best represent my favorites of the year, and partly because I slept on stuff that I should have snatched up right away. So what's my point? Take my list, as well as any other, with a grain of salt – I don't hear it all, and these are what I consider the best of those I heard.

10. Darkest Hour "Undoing Ruin"
Likely featuring Darkest Hour's most graceful and confident songwriting to date, Deliver Us expands on 2005's Undoing Ruin with more melodies, guitar effects and textures. The record is rife with technical skill, and a testament to Darkest Hour's ongoing evolution.

9. 108 "A New Beat from a Dead Heart"
A New Beat from a Dead Heart carries 108's angular, metallic hardcore style into 2007 in striking, tense fashion. Clearly, this revived band still feels and knows hardcore, delivering an expectedly unique style, thoughtful lyrics and plenty of raw rage.

8. August Burns Red "Messengers"
I'm past being interested in most of the up-and-coming American metalcore bands but, with Messengers, August Burns Red proves that it can still be done with style. It's super tight, technical without being showy, massive, distinguished and in your face; it man-handles all the lame whiners and everyday deathcore bands.

7. Allegiance "Desperation"
Desperation will be Allegiance's last record, but it's safe to say that the band ended the same way it started in 2002: hard, heavy, raw and pissed off. I'll miss these guys.

6. A Wilhelm Scream "Career Suicide"
Three full lengths in, A Wilhelm Scream is yet to do anything wrong. Career Suicide is another batch of ripping, bitingly witty melodic hardcore punk songs, complete with guitar wizardry and slick production values.

5. Crime In Stereo "Is Dead"
Is Dead showcases a noticeably restrained Crime In Stereo, but the band's confident delivery of Brand New-influenced rock and melodic hardcore punk is natural and affecting. Not dead.

4. The Swellers "My Everest"
My Everest combines my favorite elements of late-90s Fat Wreck bands (fast speeds, strong singing, confident melodies) and modern-day guitar theatrics a la A Wilhelm Scream. It makes me feel young, it's got energy and feeling, and it's catchy. Score.

3. Shipwreck A.D. "Abyss"
Abyss is the story of one man's journey from the depths of the sea to the highest of peaks, set to a vicious, groove-y metallic hardcore soundtrack. Vivid imagery, loathsome, self-questioning lyrics and powerful musicianship abound.

2. Life In Your Way "Waking Giants"
Adding more melody and clean singing to the foundation that bands like Strongarm and Shai Hulud laid, Waking Giants packs a hefty punch, musically and emotionally, and plenty of well executed catchiness. For the record, "Salty Grave" goes down as the song I listened to more than any other in 2007.

1. Between the Buried and Me "Colors"
Colors is such an ambitious undertaking that it suffers from a few flaws and some unabashed indulgence, but it's an expansive, engaging, thoughtful and heartfelt exercise in prog-influenced metal with hardcore ethos. Seeing the band play it live in October sealed the deal.

Honorable Mentions:
Bad Religion "New Maps of Hell"
Blacklisted "Peace on Earth, War on Stage"
Ceremony "Scared People"
Comeback Kid "Broadcasting..."
Death Before Dishonor "Count Me In"
Die Young (TX) "Graven Images"
Go It Alone "Histories"
Lifetime "self-titled"
Municipal Waste "The Art of Partying"
Pig Destroyer "Phantom Limb"
Pulling Teeth "Martyr Immortal"
Seventh Star "The Undisputed Truth"
Soul Control "Involution"
Steel Nation "Soul Swallower"
Strung Out "Blackhawks over Los Angeles"
The Warriors "Genuine Sense of Outrage"
Wisdom In Chains "Class War"

Albums that probably rule that I didn't really listen to in time for making this list:
Modern Life Is War - Midnight in America
Minus the Bear - Planet of Ice
S.S.S. - Short Sharp Shock
Capital - Homefront
Gaslight Anthem - Sink or Swim

Patrick's Top 10 of 2007

10. Green Lizard “Las Armas del Silencio”
I can’t decide if I enjoy this album as much as I think I might, or if featuring a Zoli-esque singer simply makes it inescapable. Green Lizard is no Ignite, but they play good, catchy tunes worthy of a listen.

9. Hot Cross “Risk Revival”
This album came in a plastic case with no artwork. Dear labels: please send liner notes, damn it! That complaint aside, this is a delightful album full of distortion and vocals cords on the verge of disintegration. In other words, if you like any of the music that falls under the “fast and loud music” umbrella, you’ll like this.

8. Comeback Kid “Broadcasting”
If there’s any trait I appreciate in hardcore, it’s a relentless attack. Also, rad gang vocals with a tasteful smattering of non-intrusive breakdowns. Thus we have an explanation why such angry music makes people so happy.

7. 7000 Dying Rats “Season in Hell”
Over-the-top grindcore is sadly underappreciated. Cramming 28 (frequently hilariously titled) songs into 48 minutes, the album is less predictable than a seizure. In one short segment, this manic rollercoaster sees absolute brutality disappear amongst a medley of bells, which slowly melts into screams and infantile cries assaulted by dissonant guitar stabs panned hard left and right. Every genre imaginable is represented and blasphemed here.

6. Birds of Avalon “Bazaar, Bazaar”
Classic rock and indie rock blended as smoothly as a milkshake. When The Shins met Deep Purple…


5. Smoke or Fire “This Sinking Ship”
One of the best examples of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, Smoke or Fire makes simple sound perfect. And the band scores mega-points for playing with such amplified intensity that fans forgot the band was touring a man short much of last summer.

4. Lil’ Wayne “The Carter 3 Mixtape”
Likely more prolific than even the world’s megacorporations, Wayne releases more albums (almost exclusively mixtapes) yearly than most artists do in a career. Few lyricists are as lyrically or vocally dexterous, and Wayne’s a truly interesting character, especially at his playful finest.

3. Hour of the Wolf “Waste Makes Waste”
This superbly crusty punk ‘n’ roll shines through layers of distortion and gravelly gasps, a blue-collar whirlwind of exceptionally catchy sewage.


2. Hopesfall “Magnetic North”
No other non-instrumental band captures the endless black, swirling-constellation-studded expanses of outer space like Hopesfall. Monster riffs slide into breathtaking melodies like supernovas easing into peace, and then explode again in collisions befitting mammoth stellar bodies.

1. Daymares “Can’t Get Us All”
Driven by more intensity than a crowd locked inside a burning building, this album is the first thing that’s ever led me to believe I could smash my head through concrete. Mashing the grimiest parts of punk and hardcore with a ruffian rock ‘n’ roll attitude, controlling one’s limbs during a listen is impossible.

Harlots "Betrayer"

Well, Harlots finally got the recording quality that their music has always deserved, needed and, in large, lacked. So, thanks to the improved aural clarity and balance, Betrayer is much more accessible than the band's previous outings -- something the band's fans will notice (and likely appreciate) right away.

But the improvements don't stop there, as Harlots has really refined their songwriting. Dramatically shifting between grinding dissonant chaos, droning sludge, soft ambiance and rhythmic post-metal, Betrayer has the formula for a choppy, jerky listen. After all, that's usually what happens when metal bands shift gears between extremes. Choppy and jerky this is not, though; there's a certain flow to the record's movements, and pacing is key. Take the first four songs, for instance. "The Weight Unweighable" and "Avada Kedavra" open the album with relatively short blasts of fast, frenetic drumming, twisted guitar riffs and bellowed vocals. "Full Body Contortion" takes that style in a driving, melody-infused direction to set up "Dried Up Goliathan," an eight-minute expanse of atmospheric guitars and distant singing that peaks with pounding, heavy crescendos. Then it's back to the chaos, where the band starts building up to the 12-minute closer, "Suicide Medley."

Betrayer is an accomplished metal record, encompassing a bunch of takes on the genre without feeling disjointed and clunky.

Worth a listen: Harlots - Full Body Contortion

Pick it up from Lifeforce.

Slow month...

Sorry for being such a failure lately. It's a slow time of year for music and we're working on "top 10" lists. Expect them, as well as an entry or two, in the next week or so. PEACE.

Nights Like These "Sunlight at Secondhand"

Last time I heard Nights Like These (which was promptly after finishing my review of their notably boring Victory debut), they were a sludgy, grinding technical metal act. Such is not the case on Sunlight at Secondhand, the follow-up full length that sees the band veering down the path of Neurosis, Mastodon and Baroness.

Nights Like These's music is still centered on lumbering heaviness, but, more often than not, it's delivered in the form of droning, riff-heavy grooves and dense, mid-paced, Southern-tinged sludge. It's a familiar sound, but there's no denying that the totally mammoth riffs deliver through and through, and that the hoarse, screamed vocals do a pretty ideal job of amping up most songs' intensity. The band gives plenty of obvious nods to post-metal acts -- Isis and Cult of Luna, especially -- which helps round out their more expansive, atmospheric side. And when they pick up the tempo for more chaotic and dissonant outbursts, the Mastodon in Nights Like These comes to life.

So there's variety, but nothing terribly distinct. If anything sets Nights Like These apart from their growing number of peers, it's the use of breezy, psychedelic overtones -- textures most similar bands haven't considered. While psychedelics aren't necessarily my thing, theywork in the record's context and, if the band wants to establish an identity, they're one means to that end.

I almost skipped this because I didn't enjoy Nights Like These's debut, but Sunlight at Secondhand is a decent release.

Nights Like These - Black the Sun

Can't get enough of this stuff? Buy it here.

Shipwreck A.D. "Abyss"

In 2005, it was Modern Life Is War's Witness. In 2006, it was Have Heart's The Things We Carry. This year, I'm thinking it's Shipwreck A.D.'s Abyss.

And exactly what is "it?" It's that one hardcore record of each year that, for me, is especially powerful, soulful and moving -- mentally and physically.

Abyss is an ebbing and flowing slab of mid-paced, metallic hardcore. Loaded with bold, bass-y grooves, urgent chord progressions, ample chunkiness, tastefully climactic peaks and hoarse, let-it-all-out shouting, the record packs plenty of surface-level similarities to legendary material from Cleveland greats Integrity and Ringworm, and contemporary stuff from Have Heart. But those really are surface-level comparisons; Shipwreck constantly reaches into their proverbial stronghold of character and personality to bring a unique approach to Abyss.

This is no breakdown-laden, straightedge-advocating, gang vocals-heavy, uplifting hardcore album. (That's not to say that any of those qualities are inherently bad.) Abyss is deeper in terms of musical quality and inventiveness, incorporating unexpected elements, from dark, twisted guitar riffs and scant acoustic passages to faint female singing and hints of lumbering post-metal. While it almost sounds indulgent for a hardcore record, these elements are comfortably and relatively subtly nestled in the metallic hardcore foundation. And, more importantly, they go a long way in rounding the overarching bleakness that accents Shipwreck's sound and lyrics.

Through 11 songs, Abyss tells the story of a person's not-so-life-affirming trek from the depths of the sea to the top of a mountain. You'd expect a tale of strength and determination with that sort of storyline, but it turns out to be a scornful, self-questioning journey. The narrative quality alone will keep listeners who read along captivated, but there's also meaning in the metaphors -- in "Ascent" singer J.D. ties himself (or the band in general) to a volcanic eruption:

the misery that dwells in me
wrath flowing through every vein
I feel the knot begin to tie
internal pressure starts to rise
fangs of temper bite my chest
with crushing jaws, it overwhelms
the lava, the angst, the eruption
from the --
from all the hate I try to redirect
from all the pain I don't let affect
my stone face, it's like this mountain is me
solid to the eye, but melting underneath

This is somewhat long-winded, but there's still more I could say. I'll leave it at this: Abyss is a special record, with a unique delivery and a personality that's largely based on the band itself -- not hundreds of predecessors.

Download: Shipwreck A.D. - Helix

Get it from the Deathwish Inc. store.

Light Pupil Dilate "Snake Wine"

Without rewriting the rules of metal, but by culling the best bits from musically specialized splinter sects, the Mastadons of the world amalgamate an undeniable and rambunctious stew of power and fury. Only a threepiece, Atlanta, Georgia’s Light Pupil Dilate musters more momentum than bands with twice the manpower.

Snake Wine is a twisting work. Michael Green’s massive drumming is the central force, a brutal backing to deft guitar- and bass-work that never pauses to breathe. The shared vocal duties expand the dimensions of the threepiece – Maynard-esque croons to throat-shredding shouts -- but the band's relentless motion belies their limits. From riff arrangements chunkier and heavier than the craggiest mountain ranges (“Phlebitis”) to tech-metal gyrations that spell seizure across fretboards (“Shower Me With Your Love”), Light Pupil Dilate is a no-frills metallic force. The closer, “Dive,” is a diamond in the crunch, creeping toward a punishing, chorus-laden finish. For fans of prefix-free metal, devour the indelible Snake Wine.

Enjoyable only in musical form: Phlebitis

Buy: Snake Wine on Lifeforce Records.

Pechblende "Collapse"

In the history of all deemed "gut-wrenching," few recipients actually manifest more than tummy flutters. Quebec's Pechblende, however, disciples of Planes Mistaken For Stars' gristle-punk distortion, paralyze like a length of rusty razor wire tearing through the viscera. There's a grisly intensity to Collapse, violence lurching between peristaltic plodding and horror film hemorrhagic explosiveness.

The recording oozes bile, a swamp of guitars and drums forcing out short, black encrusted bursts of bleakness, the lead vocals vomitus barks. Collapse doesn't feature long solos and clean, happy reprieves for broad appeal. It's is an unapologetic symphony of agony, and it's superb. If you want to "feel" Ebola without soiling your white wears, this is the your album.

Internal distress at its best: "Consent"

Buy Collapse at Tuned To You Records