In the last post I presented the albums from 2014 that I played through once or twice; however, it was difficult to come up with a reasonable Short List because so few of those albums tweaked any real interest. I like to create a short list of albums wherein most of them have some kind of shot at making the final Ten, but this time I had to add a few no-hopers just for padding. It really was pointless, but…oh well, I did it anyway.
The Short List, in alphabetical order
Crippled Black Phoenix — White Light Generator
Katatonia — Kocytean
Knifeworld — The Unravelling
Lunatic Soul — Walking on a Flashlight Beam
Opeth — Pale Communion
The Pineapple Thief — Magnolia
Rival Sons — Great Western Valkyrie
Salt of the Chief Cornerstone — Intelligent Design
Seven Impale — City of the Sun
Solstafir — Otta
Sounds Like the End of the World — Stages of Delusion
Trojan Horse — World Turned Upside Down
Tuber — Desert Overcrowded
Tune — Identity
John Wesley — Disconnect
Honourable Mentions:
A couple of albums arrived too late for me to fairly include them in this year’s lists. It is just one of my personal rules, mostly based on my rather idiosyncratic way of listening to music—or to put it another way, I have learned not to trust my first impressions about an album. They are generally wrong over the long term. So if I do not have the time to devote to an album, to at least get a sense of its long-term replay value, then I will have to set it aside. Maybe it will sneak into next year’s list.
Necro Deathmort: EP 2
I’m not sure if this would have made it into the Top Ten, but it sure had a shot for the short list. A nice concise EP of five tracks, ranging from drone ambient to crunching drone metal, it is great for background, and great for foreground, an enjoyable slice of dark electronica/metal.
https://soundcloud.com/distractionrecords/channel-fever
Blindead: Live at Radio Gdansk
Blindead are a Polish dark progressive metal act, with a lot of guest musicians at any one time, and their 2013 studio album Absence (which I didn’t actually discover until early 2014) was a very pleasant surprise, full of rich dark textures and dense guitars and a nice sexy vocal performance from their main singer. This live album was made in the early summer 2014, finally released in November, and proved hard to lay hands on until mid-to-late December. So it could not make the current year’s list.
An official video (“A7bsence”) from the show had already been making the youtube rounds before the release, and the performance it captures is fierce and energetic, and notable also because of the guest appearance of Piotr Grudzinski, Riverside’s guitarist. The live album itself more than lives up to the promise of this video: polished, professional, full of energy, and almost spot-on perfect renditions of the album tracks. I may seriously consider moving it into contention for next year. I hate to see it fall through the cracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opuk1eReL-A
