I thought this year would go  much differently.  All the bands that I love were releasing albums this year, I thought I'd see them all here.  But Children of Bodom returned to their classical ways at the expense of hooks and In Flames made album of mediocre radio-friendly snorers.  Opeth's album is solid, and has some great songs (Burden, The Lotus Eater), but lacks the overall memorability that marks their previous efforts.

This was definitely the year for black metal Pink Floyd worship.  I thought Nachtmystium had taken the cake with Black Meddle, opening with a cover of One of These Days.  Then Enslaved reminded us why they're the kings of experimental black metal.  They take floydian harmonies into dark realms they've never seen before, but retain the darkness and dirtiness that made their straight black metal efforts so great.

Burst and Cynic are the kings of progressive metal this year.  As impressive as Cynic's reunion is after 14 years, Burst's album is perfect.  Each of the songs holds a very specific place in the album.  The fierceness of it is something that's been missing from prog, since Metallica abandoned their long form efforts.  The drama, too, reminds me of the classic metal that came from Cliff Burton and Dave Mustaine, it's not like Gojira, where you're pummeled with one sound for an hour - Lazarus bird swings from beautiful intro into full assault into spacey breakdown, uncoiling and tightening, and never losing your attention.  Meanderthal is a similarly tight effort, in a different way: the album is metal, but all of the songs are hook-laden pop songs that stick in your head and won't leave.  They'd be radio friendly, if mainstream metal existed in any way that wasn't insulting to the genre.

5: Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle Pt. 1
4: Torche - Meanderthal
3: Enslaved - Vertebrae
2: Cynic - Traced in Air
1: Burst - Lazarus Bird

Top 5 non-metal albums

I know, it's a weird distinction.  Nonetheless, combining my favorite metal albums into this list would result in a very odd top 10, that would only hold value for people very close to my musical taste.  Cloud Cult's most epic album to date needs to be recognized in a stronger way.  Their secular mythologies (he served us communion of cola and twinkies), fit the sound perfectly.  It's absurdly artsy, but in a good way.  Why?, too, is overly artsy with his prose, set against an organic hip-hop background of xylophones and simple drum kits.  The songs suck you in, seeming bigger than the sparce instrumentation that holds them.

Nine Inch Nails released 2 albums as free downloads this year.  While The Slip is easily passed off as Radiohead-wannabe-marketing, Ghosts squarely frames all of the issues with what the recording industry has become.  Not only does the first quarter play loss-leader to the remaining 3 parts, but the music itself would never be released on a major label.  The songs are short experiments, hanging pieces of the various incarnations of NIN, the acoustic intimacy of Still, the angry glitch of their heyday, and the dark groove of the last few years.  The songs play against each other, any sense of atmosphere is gone, you're forced to pay attention to each piece individually.  A record company would want a single, and they would want similar songs to sit near each other to form some coherent whole, some marketable aesthetic.  The album isn't about that, it's about experimentation, and experimentation doesn't sell.  Except it did, to NIN fans, many like me, who've wanted to see Trent flex his writing outside of pop formulas.

Fleet Foxes and Dengue Fever belong to a resurgence of psychadelia, both in warm happy tones (especially as compared to the floyd worship referenced above).  The aesthetic is certainly pop, but not in a formulaic sense.  Fleet Foxes rely on complex harmonies and lush instrumentation, crafting music that's endlessly interesting, while staying hook-y and memorable.  Dengue Fever writes Cambodian pop ditties, led by an iconic female voice, but the songs wind far afield.

5: Dengue Fever - Venus on Earth
4: Fleet Foxes - (s/t)
3: Why? - Alopecia
2: Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I - IV
1: Cloud Cult - Feel Good Ghosts

Top 5 EP's

EP's are a weird space - Some of these bands (Mogwai, The Gaslight Anthem, Jesu) released full albums that either had too much filler, or just lacked the punch of the EP tracks.  Agalloch and Cassettes Won't Listen just left me begging for more.  Agalloch's EP shows their neo-folk influences without their black metal ones.  The White EP is finely tuned, including the paired Birch White/Birch Black.  Unfortunately the EP is truly limited edition, it's completely out of print and unavailable.  The Gaslight Anthem's gruff vocals over catchy punk sound marries perfectly to their increasingly Americana/nostalgic songs on Senor and the Queen.  Unfortunately, The '59 Sound, released later this year, relies too heavily on classic storytelling, and waffles in mediocre.  Mogwai's Batcat EP snatches the heaviest song from Hawk is Howling, and adds a collaboration with Roky Erikson that's absolutely beautiful.  Their full length doesn't have the punch that this EP has, or that Mr. Beast had.   Jesu tends to be too precious in large doses, but paired against the heaviest output from Battle of Mice, they make sense.

5: Mogwai - Batcat
4: Jesu/Battle of Mice split
3: The Gaslight Anthem - Senor and the Queen
2: Cassettes Won't Listen - Small Time Machine
1: Agalloch - The White EP

Songs To Check Out:

1. Cassettes Won't Listen - Paper Float
2. Battle of Mice - The Bishop
3. Cloud Cult - When Water Comes To Life
4. Agalloch - Birch White
5. Dengue Fever - Tiger Phone Card
6. Burst - We Watched The Silver Rain
7. Torche - Across The Shields
8. Why? - The Hollows
9. Cynic - Evolutionary Sleeper (live)
10. The Gaslight Anthem - Senor and the Queen

7 Gravemakers and Gunslingers - Coheed and Cambria
Coheed finally has a woman singing for some of the characters, rather than Claudio singing falsetto. It actually makes them sound less twee, although that's also helped by their increasingly riff-based songs, and departure from the space-emo sound they started from. Both of the last two albums have started adding more and more instrumentation, high-gloss production, and anything else they can find, and I've yet to see them add more than their songwriting can absorb. Bigger and more epic just seems to suit them.

6 Type O Negative - Tripping a Blind Man
When Type O Negative was first popular, they really owned the goth metal aesthetic. By the time they got to "World Coming Down", they'd kind of jumped the shark as far as that atmosphere goes. It always had a limited appeal, and made several of my friends dismiss them outright. after a couple of "best of" releases, it seemed like they were done for. Their last two albums, though, have passed on the goth aesthetic, and gone straight for the self-deprecating humor, 3-act songwriting, and beatles-esque harmonies that have always made them great.

5 65daysofstatic - When We Were Younger & Better
These guys are a last.fm find, from my obsessive listening to dredg. There's a myth going around that the band formed to write a John Carpenter score, which is completely believable when you hear the band. All of their music follows violent storylines, at least in the fantasia world that I'm trapped in when I listen to it. The music is something like post-rock, something like industrial, and all instrumental. The soundscapes are all intensely memorable, which is a tribute to their songwriting. It took a while for this album to grow on me, since I just discovered them this year and was still obsessed with their last album.

4 Nine Inch Nails - Another Version of the Truth [Kronos Quartet]
Year Zero kinda slipped right past me. It's the first anything of his to do that since.... ever. Okay, since I started noticing him. The remix album, however, coincided with the launch of remix.nin.com, and my being reminded what a cool guy trent is. I picked up the remix album, and was immediately made happy by the daft-punk-gone-aggro "Meet Your Master" filtered through The Faint. The 14 minute "Me I'm Not" is also brilliant. This track, though, delivers on the hint of an idea from "Things Falling Apart"'s "The Frail" - the creepy string section that pushes a simple song into a mind-bending otherworldly soundtrack of doom.

3 Battles - Tonto (Four Tet remix)
I love Four Tet remixes. But I also really like Mirrored. I was completely non-plussed by their live performance at Pitchfork. I can't really explain what made me download the album after that experience. Nonetheless, I'm glad I did. The album is fantastic, and great for working to. Their music can border on the bland, in large doses, which I think is what happened at P4M Festival. Four Tet is great and teasing out the dark undercurrents in tracks they remix, which is what they've done to tonto (this track is from the tonto+ EP).

2 Burial - Archangel
Confession: I didn't even hear about Burial's debut album. Southern Comfort is by far my favorite song of his, but Untrue is the album that was released this year. The first single is more indicative of the brilliance of his self-titled debut, than the airy aesthetic of the rest of this years album. The songs ebb and flow in the way that great electronic music should, following from Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Roni Size. The wifest is weirded out by the traces of garage that linger in it, but I love the cool bits of actual dance music that hang in the shadows of what's essentially ambient music. The melodies in the foreground come and go, in the loose progressive style that I love dance music for.

1 Nahemah - Labyrinthine straight ways
The second Philosophy is an absolutely amazing album. I was only prevented from listening to it more by its absolutely devastating sadness. There were days I would sit down to work on something, put the album on, and be completely immobilized by the album. I haven't been this emotionally affected by an album since Cursive's Ugly Organ. The recommendation for this album came from invisibleoranges, and was the jumping off point for me being completely obsessed with everything he recommends. The keyboards on the album are the rare example of metal not being weakened by twee 80's sounds dumped in for filler. This is more like Opeth's "Baying of the Hounds", in that it draws from Moog-ish sounds that actually belong in a hard rock aesthetic.