Last year I listened to and bought far more new stuff than I had for several years.\u00a0 I’m not really sure why that should have been, but I found myself in the unfamiliar position of looking at the music sections in the newspapers and actively looking forward for new releases by my favourite bands.\u00a0 Most of them lived up to expectations.<\/p>\n
Highlights included:<\/p>\n
Foo Fighters – Wasting Light<\/em><\/strong>: Dave Grohl has been reliable for many years and after battering his drumkit throughout my choice for Album of the Year 2009, Them Crooked Vultures<\/em>‘ eponymous debut album, he was back leading the Foos from the front with their trademark mix of melody, harmony and crunching rhythm.\u00a0 Not a foot wrong there.<\/p>\n Anthrax – Worship Music<\/strong><\/em>: I rather lost track of Anthrax after the Sound Of White Noise<\/em> album but caught up with them again a couple of years ago and am glad that I did.\u00a0 The skate and cartoon punky days seem a long time ago but the precision and energy of their playing remains undimmed.<\/p>\n My old favourites Opeth<\/strong><\/em> promised changes with their Heritage<\/em><\/strong> album and subsequent tour and they weren’t kidding.\u00a0 They came up with a collection of songs heavily influenced by Mikael \u00c5kerfeldt’s well-known obsession with prog and classic metal of the early 1970s, and there wasn’t a death metal growl to be heard.\u00a0 It was still a stunning performance, though, and a tribute to their talent and versatility that they pulled it off.<\/p>\n Still on the path of extreme heaviness, I also enjoyed Trivium’s In Waves<\/strong><\/em>, which was immensely powerful and sounded a little more mature and measured than their previous Shogun<\/em> album; and was also seriously impressed by Machine Head’s<\/strong><\/em> quite staggeringly heavy Unto The Locust<\/strong><\/em> album, fifty minutes of focused brutality.<\/p>\n In a lighter register I also particularly enjoyed the return of dEUS<\/em><\/strong> with their Keep You Close<\/strong><\/em> album, in which Tom Barman showed that he’s still able to conjure up compelling vignettes of daily life and relationship turmoil.\u00a0 Live they showed that they can rock as hard as anybody else.<\/p>\n But my favourite album of the year combined stark, clear melodies, unexpected and effective harmonies, inventive drumming, precise playing and quite stunning brutality.\u00a0 From the howling anguish of the opener Black Tongue<\/em> (“I burned out my eyes \/ I cut off my tongue \/ I sealed them with all of the silver”) and the dark humour of second track Curl Of The Burl<\/em> (“I killed a man ’cause he killed my goat”), to the tragedy-inspired The Hunter<\/em> (“All the love I\u2019ve shown \/ Given to the ones I’ve known \/ All the love I make \/ Is equal to the love I take \/ Life is fleeting fast \/ Be careful for what you ask \/ Along the way”) and the layered harmonies of final track The Sparrow<\/em> (“Pursue happiness \/ With diligence”), this was the sound of a band who were very focused, very in control, and who knew exactly what they were trying to achieve.\u00a0 Mastodon<\/strong>‘s The Hunter<\/strong><\/em> is my album of 2011 and I’m very much looking forward to seeing their gig in Zurich on 28 January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last year I listened to and bought far more new stuff than I had for several years.\u00a0 I’m not really sure why that should have been, but I found myself in the unfamiliar position of looking at the music sections in the newspapers and actively looking forward for new releases by my favourite bands.\u00a0 Most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/simms.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}