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Musos' Guide's 2016 Top Ten Of Metal & Punk

  • Published in Albums

 

Picking only ten punk and metal albums from 2016 is like trying to decide which death of a musical icon affected you most. Nevertheless, after many tears, much gnashing of teeth, and a hostage situation with a beloved teddy, here are Musos’ Guide’s top 10 albums of the year; with a “Ho, ho, ho!” and a “Hail, Santa!”

Against Me! - Shape Shift With Me

It was a good year for bands whose names begin in an ‘A’. None more so than Against Me! The Floridian quartet have, without fanfare, made the best two albums of their career. Soon after Thomas Gabel became Laure Jane Grace, she found herself without a label and with half her band gone. She proved that revenge is a life well lived with a career best performance of Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014 but this year she made Shape Shift With Me and put every other Against Me! album in its shadow. An absolute gem of acerbic, melodic punk, Grace’s voice is better than ever and the tunes are punky, tuneful, intelligent and emotional. ‘Crash' and ‘Rebecca’ are two of the finest pop punk tunes you will ever hear and on ‘Norse Truth’ Grace gets furiously experimental.

Anthrax - For All Kings

It's the new Anthrax album. It sounds like Anthrax. If you like Anthrax, you'll like For All Kings. Another band hitting a career high, New York’s favourite thrash metaller’s 11th album has managed to recapture the spirit of their earlier work without repeating themselves. This is the finest recording Anthrax have put out in a very long time. For All Kings sits comfortably with their very best work. It is refreshing to hear a seasoned act revisiting their roots but still experimenting with new ideas.

Anvil - Anvil Is Anvil

Wait, isn’t this a joke band? Yeah, they kinda were. If you’ve seen Sacha Gervasi’s superb documentary Anvil!; The Story of Anvil, you’ll have some idea what to expect from them. What you may not expect are good tunes but Anvil’s fifteenth studio album, Anvil Is Anvil, delivers them from start to finish. The Canadian rockers are unreconstructed old school metal. Like their pals in AC/DC, every song starts with a big riff, and the song subjects are made to match the tone of the guitars.

And the lyrics…Where to start?! Steve “Lips” Kudlow makes Liam Gallagher look like W. B. Yeats. They are cringe-inducing and could easily pass for Spinal Tap. If you only know Anvil from the movie, you should get this album. Any rock or metal fan will appreciate it. Play it loud, where no one else can hear, and air guitar ‘til you drop.

Audacity - Hyper Vessels

With 11 songs over 35 minutes, Audacity’s Hyper Vessels is a short, sharp shock of tight, aggressive hardcore musicianship, overlaid with catchy lyrics, and delivered in a delightfully tuneful, shouty manner. They have the chops and chantability of Black Flag and DOA, and the fuzzy wall of sound of Husker Du, but thanks to the production skills of Ty Segall, Hyper Vessels doesn't sound like it was recorded in a pub toilet.

Slower numbers like ‘Umbrellas’ display an innate sense of pop songwriting and they know when to drop instruments from the mix and how to bring them back in with maximum impact. Audacity tick all the boxes on this album. This is not the slick, over-produced power pop brand of Californian punk spoon-fed to the masses with poolside videos. Hyper Vessels cleaves through the armour of shitty American pop punk and rends the flesh of generic cartoon punk imitators in twain.

Death Is Liberty - A Statement Darkness

Finnish metallers Death Is Liberty present an immediate surprise on A Statement Darkness. ‘To The End’ begins with an enveloped guitar line and faux-electro drum beat that sounds for all the world like the intro to a Franz Ferdinand single. This doesn’t sound like Finnish metal as we know it. And so it is with the music.

At a time when most metal bands pride themselves on their ratio of notes per minute and the constant throb of double bass drums, the first notable thing about DiL is the space. Space you could steer an oil tanker through. In that context, every note has import and the songs have room to breathe. DiL eschew traditional metal riffing in favour of rhythmic grooves and emotional soundscapes. Sure enough, there are downtuned bass and rhythm guitars, blastbeats and occasional prog rhythms but they are so different from their peers that you wonder if metal is an appropriate description, but no other category will do.

Metallica - Hardwired...To Self Destruct

What list of metal would be complete without San Francisco’s thrash gods. Hardwired...To Self Destruct is the looooooong-awaited follow-up to 2008’s Death Magnetic and it is a prime example of why Metallica are the most important band since Black Sabbath. Thirty five years into their career, Metallica produce another one from the top drawer.

Of all currently active musicians, only Madonna and The Rolling Stones have come close to selling as many albums as Metallica but those are mere nostalgia acts; Hardwired...To Self Destruct proves that Hetfield and Ulrich are still amongst the best songwriters in rock. They have never made the same album twice and they are still experimenting. While it is immediately obviously that this is the same band that made ...And Justice For All and Load, there is much here that is new. Some of the songs could have done with editing down but these guys have never done things by halves.

Savages - Adore Life

The Mercury award nominees, Savages, dangle complexities of rhythm in the form of throttling guitars and fuzzing feedback in second album, Adore Life. It’s atmospheric, creating black watercolour imagery in songs like ‘I Need Something New’ and ‘The Answer’, both sound almost post-apocalyptic.

The album is shaped like their previous but carries greater lyrical value. It stretches further into darkness with ‘When In Love’ and ’Surrender’ and carries a certain stern face with it. Adore Life is a unique and refreshing sentiment to punk music, so enjoy and relish in the scowl.

Slaves - Take Control

There is something quite magical about one of Slaves’ bone-rattling tracks playing after Pitbull's drivel on the radio. This is probably down to Slaves’ playful punk style being more relatable than most, so it would be foolish to deny them from this list. Large crowds eagerly immerse themselves in the madness that spirals out of Slaves one guitar and simple drum set up.

Their latest, Take Control and Are You Satisfied, have only a year's break between them, so it’s bound to have some similarities and it does sound like an extension of their debut. However, working with the Beastie Boys, Slaves have vamped up their entertaining storytelling with tracks like, ’Steer Clear’, ‘Angelica’ and ’Consume Or Be Consumed’ sitting among the highlights.

Surgical Meth Machine - Surgical Meth Machine

Uncle Al gets weird and experimental with Surgical Meth Machine, even more so than usual. After thirty years of Ministry, ten Revolting Cocks albums and various other projects, Jourgensen still makes the effort to create something fresh and invigorating. With spasmodic machine gun beats, downtuned guitars, lightning fast riffing, helicoptering effects, and layers of vocal samples, Jourgensen is evidently enjoying the freedom of stepping away from Ministry. It is possibly the best thing he has ever done.

This is the sound of a man using the studio as an expressionist tool, I haven’t heard such a fiercely inventive and musically aggressive record since Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR. Surgical Meth Machine is a Frankenstein assembly of two mini albums. The first; fast, frenetic and heavy and the second; poppy and experimental. The juxtaposition shouldn't work but it makes for an exciting and emotional journey over the course of the album.

WitchcraftNucleus

This is stoner/doom metal/classic rock with a direct line from Black Sabbath. On first listen it sounds simple but further spins reveal new layers. String samples, a flautist, and additional vocals supplement the spare arrangements, and squealing guitars howl discordant harmonies to the seriously crunchy power chords. The music may be Sabbath influenced but the vocal inflections are more like those of Robert Plant or Muse's Matt Bellamy.

The Swedes incorporate a grunge underbelly. Pelander's guitar shrieks feedback between chords like Billy Corgan’s on the early Smashing Pumpkins stuff. The blunt, bludgeoning riffs smell like Nirvana’s Bleach. Witchcraft went as far as covering the Seattle trio’s ‘Even In His Youth’ for the B-side of the lead single from Nucleus.

‘Nucleus’ and ‘Breakdown’ are 15 minutes long each. It’s those two Brobdingnagian monsters that make this record into something greater than the sum of its individual songs. Given such space to breathe and flourish they explore musical territory that one might not expect from Witchcraft, without succumbing to onanistic prog.

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Best Kept Secret Festival Preview : An Interview With Audacity

Audacity

Best Kept Secret festival kicks off in Tilburg in eight weeks time. We’ll be building up to the festival with features on some of the bands involved. 

Californian garage punks Audacity will be playing on Saturday 18th June. The band formed in 2001 and have just released their fifth album, Hyper Vessels, through Seattle’s Suicide Squeeze Records. We spoke to guitarist Matt Schmalfeld about their current tour and their new album, which was recently reviewed on Musos' Guide and can be read here.

Matt, you've been together for 15 years now, did you get together in school?

Yeah, me and Kyle Gibson went to the same elementary school and we were best friends from 1st through to 5th grade. When we were 10 or 11 years old we started playing guitar and formed a band shortly after that with another couple of classmates and just kept going from there. It’s been a long time. We're just starting to be able to rent cars and stuff like that.

You have a real influence of old school punk.

Yeah, definitely. We started listening to punk when we were in seventh grade, maybe the end of sixth grade. Ramones and The Clash and all of that. We like that stuff.

You're doing a UK tour in June?

Yeah we'll be there the end of June. We were there in the fall of 2014 so it’s been almost two years. It was great the first time. I ended up having to come back and hang out more in London because I had so much fun.

You'll be doing the festivals too; you're playing Best Kept Secret with Beck.

Yeah, I still haven’t wrapped my head around it. I’m just thrilled. Beck is the best guitar based act in the world right now. Best album too.

It sounds like there are a number of songwriters in the band?

Yeah, we arrange everything together. So in the songs, maybe I’ll write the layout, or Kyle, the other guitar player. Then we'll write down lyrics but it will always get put together at a practice, for the most part. With a couple of songs on this record they were pretty much all the way done by the time we jammed them. But it’s a collaborative effort.

Do you take the lead vocal on each of your songs?

No, a couple of songs like ‘Not Like You’ and ‘Dirty Boy’, we both sing pretty much the whole time. A lot of the songs like ‘Fire’ or ‘Riot Train’ or ‘Hypo’, Kyle sings those. He wrote the body of those songs. We're blessed and very lucky to be in a good songwriting partnership. We can bounce ideas off each other. You know sometimes it doesn’t go that way. People don't like being told what to do, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to be able to work on stuff together. 

It's hard enough to find someone who will accept criticism and be critical of you as well.

Yeah, I think a lot of it goes back to how long we've known each other, bouncing ideas and criticism. We don’t mind if that hurts someone’s feelings. It’s all part of the greater good of the band. 

‘Previous Cast’, is that one of yours?

That's Kyle’s song. It's my favourite song on the record. I think we did the vocals on that once. Then Kyle redid them. I think I told him “This is the best song and you’re singing it so good, we’ve got to stick with it like you have it.” Kyle could probably speak more about it but that's probably my favourite song on the record because it’s so…, it’s got more feeling to it. It'll make you cry!

And you're in the middle of a big tour now.

Right now we’re in beautiful Chattanooga, Tennessee and heading to Atlanta tonight. We’ve about a week left on a month long tour. Everything has been great fun this time round. We haven’t been on a US tour in about a year and a half so it's good to not be working six days a week and be able to do what you actually want to do. It’s like being on vacation.

When you're doing something you love it doesn’t feel like work.

That's right. And we get to try different cuisines and different beers. Our van is very comfortable. It looks like R2-D2. Things are good for Audacity these days.

Have you a message for your fans over here?

Just let people know that sacrifice is very important. Sacrifice is a big part of life. That’s our mantra that we live by. If that doesn’t sound too weird?! Life is full of little sacrifices but sometimes they lead you to a pot of gold, whether it’s a literal or metaphorical pot of gold. 

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