| 4.5 superb |
| 808 State Ninety |
| A Winged Victory for the Sullen A Winged Victory for the Sullen |
| Against Me! Transgender Dysphoria Blues |
| Alcest Shelter |
| American Nightmare We're Down Til We're Underground |
| love it so much I took my band name from it. album slays |
| Anton Webern Complete Webern |
| Arnold Schoenberg String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 |
| Arnold Schoenberg String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 |
| Balam Acab Wander/Wonder |
| Bathory Blood Fire Death |
| Black Flag Damaged |
| Burial Kindred |
| This is ridiculously good. Not sure what I'm rating it quite yet, but god damn, color me impressed. |
| Burzum Filosofem |
| Candlemass Nightfall |
| Cecil Taylor Unit Structures |
| Charles Mingus Let My Children Hear Music |
| Charles Mingus The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady |
| Cocteau Twins Heaven or Las Vegas |
| Comadre Comadre |
| Corrupted Garten Der Unbewusstheit |
| Garten Der Unbewusstheit gives Deafheaven's Roads to Judah a run for its money for the title of metal AOTY and the album's final track, the 30 minute "Gekkou No Daichi", is easily the single most powerful metal track of 2011. |
| Corrupted El Mundo Frio |
| Cursed II |
| Darkthrone A Blaze in the Northern Sky |
| Deftones Saturday Night Wrist |
| Eels Electro-Shock Blues |
| Eels Blinking Lights & Other Revelations |
| Electric Wizard Dopethrone |
| Elysian Blaze Blood Geometry |
| Fleetwood Mac Rumours |
| Gaza No Absolutes in Human Suffering |
| Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. Album of the year. |
| Ghostface Killah Ironman |
| Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele |
| Gorguts Colored Sands |
| Gris Il Était Une Forêt... |
| Grouper Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill |
| His Hero Is Gone Monuments To Thieves |
| Hop Along Get Disowned |
| Infest No Man's Slave |
| Inigo Kennedy Vaudeville |
| Leviathan Massive Conspiracy Against All Life |
| Low I Could Live in Hope |
| Low Things We Lost in the Fire |
| Machinedrum Vapor City |
| Max Richter The Blue Notebooks |
| Mournful Congregation The June Frost |
| Nadja Touched |
| Native Orthodox |
| Om Conference of the Birds |
| Ornette Coleman The Shape of Jazz to Come |
| Ornette Coleman Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation |
| Paysage d'Hiver Das Tor |
| Pharoah Sanders Karma |
| "The Creator Has a Master Plan" might just be the pinnacle of jazz as a medium of emotional art. |
| Propagandhi Failed States |
| Propagandhi Supporting Caste |
| Propagandhi Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes |
| Raekwon Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... |
| Saint Vitus Saint Vitus |
| Saves the Day In Reverie |
| Self Defense Family Try Me |
| The first must have record of 2014 is here and it's still 2013. |
| Sparta Wiretap Scars |
| Spazz Crush Kill Destroy |
| Swarms Old Raves End |
| Teebs E S T A R A |
| The Angelic Process Weighing Souls With Sand |
| The War On Drugs Lost in the Dream |
| And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. |
| The Weakerthans Reconstruction Site |
| Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything |
| Third Eye Blind Third Eye Blind |
| Thou Heathen |
| Throwdown Haymaker |
| Venetian Snares Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett |
| Wheels Within Wheels The Six Months of the Northern Course of the Sun |
| 4.0 excellent |
| Albert Ayler Spiritual Unity |
| Alfred Schnittke String Quartet No. 3 |
| Amon Tobin Permutation |
| Amon Tobin Supermodified |
| Andrew Hill Point of Departure |
| Answer Code Request Code |
| Anti The Insignificance of Life |
| Apathean Eve |
| Aphex Twin Richard D. James Album |
| Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85-92 |
| Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II |
| Aphex Twin ...I Care Because You Do |
| Arnold Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 |
| Ash Borer Ash Borer |
| Ataraxie L'être et la Nausée |
| Austere To Lay Like Old Ashes |
| Balance and Composure The Things We Think We're Missing |
| Personally, I think this is by far the best thing they've ever done. |
| Bane Give Blood |
| Baroness Yellow and Green |
| The idea of a double album from Baroness was somewhat off putting at first, as each of their albums are so full of twists, turns, build ups and just plain old booming mischief that 18 tracks of it would be like running a marathon after finishing a triathlon. Yet thankfully Yellow and Green works. If one had been following the band it wouldn't be that much of a surprise that it does. Baizley has stated not only that the records would lack "edge", so to speak, but also would be much more straightforward. The songwriting is direct and to the point and Baizley's vocals are no longer burly mountain man shouts, but instead he shows off his clean vocal skills throughout. The sound is not only more "rock" oriented, but at times shows flashes of bands such as Cave In during their Perfect Pitch Black era in both mood and approach. It is definitely an interesting outing that is propelled by equal parts 70's influence and modern swagger. Fans of the riff oriented Baroness of old might be off put and understandably so, but for those looking for a quality rock and roll record look no further. |
| Bela Bartok Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, Sz 71 |
| Bela Bartok Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Sz. 83 |
| Ben Frost A U R O R A |
| Black Flag My War |
| Blonde Redhead Misery is a Butterfly |
| Botch American Nervoso |
| Burzum Hvis Lyset Tar Oss |
| calculator This Will Come To Pass |
| Candlemass Epicus Doomicus Metallicus |
| Carcass Surgical Steel |
| Caribou Our Love |
| Charles Bronson Complete Discocrappy |
| Christian Loffler Young Alaska |
| Church of Misery Houses of the Unholy |
| CHVRCHES The Bones of What You Believe |
| I feel pretty when I listen to this. |
| Coldworld Melancholie² |
| Darkside Psychic |
| Darkthrone The Underground Resistance |
| Darkthrone Transilvanian Hunger |
| Diarrhea Planet Loose Jewels |
| the epitome of wonderful, stupid, lovely drunken fun. |
| DJ Sprinkles Midtown 120 Blues |
| Don Cherry Eternal Rhythm |
| Don Cherry Symphony for Improvisers |
| Drake Nothing Was the Same |
| Drudkh Autumn Aurora |
| Electric Masada At the Mountains of Madness |
| Electric Wizard Come My Fanatics... |
| Eluvium Copia |
| Esoteric The Maniacal Vale |
| Fennesz Black Sea |
| Forgotten Tomb Songs to Leave |
| Four Tet Rounds |
| Francis Harris Minutes of Sleep |
| Freddie Gibbs and Madlib Pinata |
Pinata is everything a good collaboration should be. Freddie Gibbs returns to his role as
the last hard ass motherfucker in a mainstream rap universe that's about as threatening as
the bear in the Snuggle fabric softener commercials. His laid back drawl bounces in and out
of Madlib's chopped soul samples and Motown breaks with a streetwise nonchalance that is
reminiscent of Guru -- if only he came of age on a grizzled street corner instead of in
graduate classes. Madlib is in full on soul-jam mode. The jazzy experiments of his slew of
recent solo tapes is put on the back burner for a reprise of the chopped and sultry sounds
of mid-60's Detroit a la his collaborations with MF DOOM and Guilty Simpson. The final
result is somewhere between those two projects but no less immediate. |
| G.L.O.S.S. Demo |
| Gas Zauberberg |
| Gesaffelstein Aleph |
| Ghostface Killah Fishscale |
| Ghostface Killah Twelve Reasons to Die |
| Glass Bones Loner |
| Where the split with Les Doux felt more like a stop gap than a complete project, Loner is the true follow up to Seasons that we've all been waiting for. |
| Gris À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Âme Constellée... |
| Hatred Surge Deconstruct |
| In My Eyes Nothing To Hide |
| Infest Mankind |
| Iron Lung White Glove Test |
| Iron Lung Sexless // No Sex |
| John Talabot Fin |
| John-Allison Weiss Say What You Mean |
| Jon Hopkins Immunity |
| Judas Iscariot To Embrace the Corpses Bleeding |
| Jungbluth Part Ache |
| Jungbluth/Callow Split |
| Kreator Pleasure to Kill |
| Krieg The Isolationist |
| Krieg Destruction Ritual |
| Lindstrom Where You Go I Go Too |
| Lunar Aurora Andacht |
| Luomo Vocalcity |
| Minor Threat Out of Step |
| Moodymann Silentintroduction |
| Morbid Angel Altars of Madness |
| Murcof Martes |
| My Dying Bride The Dreadful Hours |
| My Dying Bride Turn Loose the Swans |
| Nadja Radiance of Shadows |
| Nadja Thaumogenesis |
| Nails Abandon All Life |
| Nicolas Jaar Space Is Only Noise |
| Olivier Messiaen Des canyons aux etoiles |
| Olivier Messiaen Turangalîla-Symphonie |
| Om Advaitic Songs |
| Om God Is Good |
| Owls Two |
| Pallbearer Sorrow And Extinction |
| Pantha Du Prince Black Noise |
| Pantha Du Prince This Bliss |
| Perfume Genius Too Bright |
| Peter Brotzmann Machine Gun |
| Preoccupations Viet Cong |
| Pusha T My Name Is My Name |
| Pyrrhon The Mother of Virtues |
| holy shit this rules. It's like Converge, Demilich, and Bastard Noise all rolled into one. |
| Raekwon Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt II |
| Cuban Linx II is the best Wu joint in years. Not only does it show off Rae and Co. at the top of their game, it features a wide range of A-List producers (J-Dilla, Dre, RZA, Necro, BT, and more) showing off their best beats. |
| Rapeman Two Nuns and a Pack Mule |
| Recondite On Acid |
| Red House Painters Songs for a Blue Guitar |
| Red House Painters Red House Painters |
| Rick Ross Mastermind |
| Rick Ross finally has an album that lives up to all of his show stealing guest spots. |
| Saint Vitus Born Too Late |
| Sara Bareilles The Blessed Unrest |
| Sharon Van Etten Tramp |
| Siege Drop Dead |
| Sleep Sleep's Holy Mountain |
| Sleeping Village Fragments |
| Sombres Forets La Mort du Soleil |
| St. Vincent St. Vincent |
| On one hand, St. Vincent is quite a good art-pop record. On the other, it sounds exactly like what you would expect a quite good art-pop record to sound like. I don't know if that says more about the creative strength and collective influences of Annie's contemporaries, or if it's that she's settled into a sound that she's comfortable with. Either way, it is quite a good art-pop record even if it lacks any real surprises. |
| Stars of the Lid And Their Refinement Of The Decline |
| Sylvan Esso Sylvan Esso |
| The Body I Shall Die Here |
| The Field From Here We Go Sublime |
| The Field Yesterday and Today |
| The Haxan Cloak Excavation |
| The National Trouble Will Find Me |
| The New Tony Williams Lifetime Believe It |
| The Obsessed The Church Within |
| The Suicide File Some Mistakes You Never Stop Paying For |
| Thou Peasant |
| Thundercat Apocalypse |
| Thy Light No Morrow Shall Dawn |
| Tim Hecker Harmony in Ultraviolet |
| Tim Hecker An Imaginary Country |
| Tim Hecker Ravedeath, 1972 |
| Torres Torres |
| TotalSelfHatred TotalSelfHatred |
| Tragedy Vengeance |
| Trist (CZ) Zrcadlení melancholie |
| Trophy Scars Holy Vacants |
| Darkness, Oh Hell still sits atop the Trophy Scars pantheon for me, but this is pretty darn close. |
| Twilight Monument To Time End |
| So far this is my metal aoty for 2010. Ditching Malefic and picking up Aaron Turner and Sanford Parker was the best thing that ever happened to this black/post metal behemoth. |
| Virgo Four Virgo |
| Voices From The Lake Voices From The Lake |
| Warpaint Warpaint |
| Weezer Everything Will Be Alright in the End |
| Woods of Desolation Torn Beyond Reason |
| 2.5 average |
| At the Gates At War with Reality |
| Remember when Carcass put out Surgical Steel? That was cool. |
| Boards of Canada Tomorrow's Harvest |
| I applaud what Boards of Canada are doing on this record. It brims with the eerie sounds of low budget films and documentaries that any one born in the 1980's should remember from when your grade school teacher used to wheel out the TV and VCR when he/she felt like not doing their job for an afternoon. The moods and textures that they're able to pull off while working in the austere confines of their obvious influences is quite astounding. That being said it really is a mood record. For a few tracks at a time it is wondrously trance inducing, but absorbed all at once it is furiously tedious. I think one's enjoyment of Tomorrow's Harvest comes not only from one's overall appreciation of the genre, but also to how much concentration one puts into finding and appreciating the small shifts in mood with each new layer in the tracks. Overall it's a good album, but not something I am an any rush to revisit any time soon unless as I prefer my zone outs to be more ethereal than adderall. |
| Cathedral The Ethereal Mirror |
| Celtic Frost Monotheist |
| Don Cherry "mu" Second Part |
| Finch Back to Oblivion |
| Finch What It Is to Burn |
| What It Is To Burn is one of those albums that tests just how important nostalgia is to its listener. If you had a deep connection with it when the album first came out, chances are you'll love it. If you liked it, but weren't exactly enthralled with it, chances are you'll think it has aged horribly. I happen to be in that latter camp. When I was 15 this was great. Now at 26 it's nothing more than slightly less annoying bro-rock. It's not without its moments, but you might want to stick with how you remember it sounding rather than taking the time to give it another spin with an older set of ears. |
| Hatred Surge Human Overdose |
| In My Eyes The Difference Between |
| Insomnium Shadows of the Dying Sun |
| Japandroids Near To The Wild Heart Of Life |
| Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is the sound going from being a cool kid hanging out in the sketchy part of downtown to being 35 and wanting the new condo built right over where the DIY spot used to be because it's close to the Whole Foods. |
| La Dispute Rooms of the House |
| Main Attrakionz 808s and Dark Grapes II |
| Modern Life Is War Fever Hunting |
| I was saying Boo-urns. |
| Okkervil River The Silver Gymnasium |
| That feeling when you go to an old person's house and the only soda they have in the fridge is TAB. You know better but you grab a can anyways. It's still warm. Obviously it was sitting in the pantry up until a few minutes ago but they put it in the refrigerator because company was coming over. You crack it open and drink it. All you can think is, "Fuck this shitty aftertaste," but you're thirsty and drink the whole thing. Then you remember that TAB is sweetened with saccharine, not aspartame or Splenda, and that saccharine has been known to cause cancer in lab rats. Fucking saccharine. |
| Queens of the Stone Age ...Like Clockwork |
| Red House Painters Red House Painters II |
| Run the Jewels Run the Jewels |
| Saint Vitus Die Healing |
| Saint Vitus C.O.D. |
| Seahaven Silhouette (Latin Skin) |
| Spazz La Revancha |
| Sun Kil Moon Benji |
| edit: after three play throughs this has gone from tough but good to insufferable. |
| Sun Ra The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra |
| The Decemberists What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World |
| The Average White Band |
| The Ocean Pelagial |
| Thrice Vheissu |
| Thrice The Alchemy Index Vols. I & II |
| Tiny Moving Parts This Couch Is Long & Full of Friendship |
| Venetian Snares My Love Is A Bulldozer |
| 2.0 poor |
| Agalloch The Serpent and the Sphere |
| Never before has an Agalloch record sounded so Agallochy. |
| Botch Unifying Themes Redux |
| Brave Bird Maybe You, No One Else Worth It |
| Candlemass Chapter VI |
| Cathedral The Garden Of Unearthly Delights |
| Count Raven Mammons War |
| Friendzone DX |
| Really? REALLY?! smh |
| John Zorn Duras: Duchamp |
| Kreator Cause for Conflict |
| Low C'Mon |
| Misery Signals Absent Light |
| Morbus Chron Sweven |
| Horse shit. |
| Moving Mountains Moving Mountains |
| I liked these guys better when they played poppy, emotive, post-rock influenced music. Not this adult contemporary snooze fest. |
| Sargeist Feeding the Crawling Shadows |
| Saves the Day Saves the Day |
| ScHoolboy Q Oxymoron |
| Sisyphus Sisyphus |
| Superheaven Jar |
| The Dear Hunter Migrant |
| The Weeknd Kiss Land |
| Even before Kiss Land was a topic on message boards, before Abel unsuccessfully tried to out jackass Kanye West, it was obvious that whatever he did next was going to be a slick and lifeless affair. His reworking of his near flawless Trilogy to make it uninteresting, clean, and safe enough for pop-rap radio play was the clarion call that it wasn't about the art, it wasn't about the sex, and it wasn't about the drugs; it was about how much of his art he could sacrifice to get more sex and more drugs. The answer on Kiss Land gives us is most of it. It's boring, it's bloated, and worst of all, it's comfortable. Mind-numbingly so. |
| YG My Krazy Life |
| Since I stopped smoking weed this kind of shit is dead to me. |
| Yung Lean Unknown Memory |
