(This is the third installment of DGR's year-end Top 50 list, counting down the third group of 10, with the next two groups slated for the next two days ahead.)
I've been doing these lists long enough that I've developed a genuine fear that I might be repeating myself. I console myself with the fact that no one else seems to have noticed so far since every one of these has been a fantastic exercise in breaking out the thesaurus and learning new words every day - or reminding myself that I used to not be so dumb. I have yet to work "lugubrious" into one of these but you better believe I'm going to damned well take a swing at it at some point.
But it's the fear of repeating myself that drives me to such inanity, because I am worried that it might seem like I'm wasting your time. I don't want these to be the 'if you've read one, you've read them all' of the year-end lists. I even gut-checked myself by archiving them all together at one point just to make sure that each stood as its own artistic statement - or at the very least the authorial equivalent of changing the food for the dog every once in a while.
But like I said (twice already), repetition is a big fear of mine. Well, that and accidentally putting releases from last year in here or playing my hand early and putting something that comes out next January on here. Luckily I haven't been at risk of doing that last one yet, as I don't think I have any promos from that timeframe in hand nor would I likely acknowledge them. At this point I feel like I've taken a round off of the reaper just by making it to next week.
The collective thirty that remain in the year-end list are much like this particular entry into the overall list. They're all over the map, and sometimes it feels like my own ordering of the lists subconsciously made it so that every genre landed at least one per ordered ten in the overall list.
I say that while only looking at this most recent gathering, but you'll spot some familiar names here, including one that I'm pleasantly surprised to be including, given that I'd figured they've long since settled into one stubborn style and would forever hover just on the edge of my year-end sandbox-shitting.
If it hasn't become clear by now, I'm also running out of ways to talk garbage about my own tastes here, so if you happen to spot a hot air balloon with a message asking for suggestions, just know that it's mine. I live close enough to the airport that I could probably tag the Goodyear blimp without them noticing.
I can't help myself when it comes to Borknagar releases these days. For all my haughty talk of integrity and critical approach when it comes to music, I turn into a child whenever there's talk of new Borknagar on the horizon. I couldn't tell you if it's because I consider myself a fan of the band or if I'm just excited that somehow they've found a way to keep themselves going, because there are scant few out there that are quite like the creature Borknagar has evolved into over the course of their career.
Few have had such an array of talent and excellent singers pass through their lineup - and occasionally even remain! - quite like Borknagar have, and few can put out albums of hybridized progressive metal with a folk-metal bent and be about eighty percent clean sung and still find themselves in the hallowed halls that is the burnt out oil drum known as the NCS office. I would be remiss to not include the band and their latest album Fall in my rolodex to close out the year, given just how much I've enjoyed it as both a progressive epic on its own and also as something of an uplifting change of pace - subject matter be damned, some of those vocal lines are glorious - since its late February release.
I waffled hard on where to place Borknagar and Fall in this year-end list. I knew it was going somewhere into the pile because it would've felt inauthentic to act as if I hadn't listened to it a bunch, yet where was a weirdly complicated bit of mental debate. I finally settled on starting this particular subsection with them, as I kept writing out the releases that I enjoyed this year and noticed that Borknagar were kind of serving like a very large rock in the middle of a flowing river; they might shift with a huge torrent but otherwise everything seemed to flow around them in both directions.
They were like an anchor point in that way, and the one sort of constant for the year-end party we're throwing here. Part of that was that, overall, Fall played out as if riding waves. There'd be an absolutely fantastic song, then two or three good ones, then another fantastic song and so on. I could ride the high of a really good song starting out and otherwise drift through a song that sometimes got a little too 'bought in' even for me.
I appreciate that Borknagar were willing to swing for the fences on every one of the songs on Fall since this is an album where they do give it everything they've got. Everything is so richly textured and there's such dedication to whatever direction they choose in each individual song that you're almost won over on the strength of Borknagar believing in the song as well. "Nordic Anthem" is a little too 'hokey' for me but even it is still a well-constructed track.
Fall is an album that for me starts and ends insanely strong - which is partially why I mention it felt like riding the high of truly excellent songs to carry me through other songs on Fall - with "Summits" setting such a high mark that it's unfair the next two or three songs have to follow that closing few minutes. "Northward" on the other hand does itself a favor by being situated at the end of Fall so no one has to do any heavy lifting afterwords. It's the album's longest track as well, but damned if it didn't feel like "Stars Ablaze" was strangely longer, even though it's got a minute less time.
Borknagar go full prog-metal on this release as well, which is an interesting element of the six or so that they've made their overall sound, and it does help them achieve some of their longer run-times, though I'm not complaining as much because nobody can sing or harmonize quite like the Borknagar crew do. My journeys through Fall always kind of played out as really enjoying "Summit", drifting through the next four solid songs, and then picking up back into excellent territory with "Unraveling" onwards. It's such a matter of personal taste for me on this one because I think overall I was just picking the songs that sounded most like True North and Winter Thrice having children than anything else when it came to personal favorites.
Fall is a release created to be as majestic as it can at any moment, and for a large part of the time it does work. Borknagar's early-in-the-year release provided many a constant check-in throughout the year, washing out the dirt, gore, and grime of what I'm normally wading through musically, and hopefully their placement in the year end fist-fight helps recognize that.
Werewolves are, for lack of better terminology, hilariously stupid. Now five years into a ten-year quest to put out a release every year, it's pretty clear that any actual shift within the band's sound is going to be iterative at best. Werewolves themselves are huge fans of the berzerk style of death metal wherein the speed remains ludicrious throughout and the music itself is a belching flamethrower for about three minutes at a time. Coupled with the odd movie or tv sample to guarantee you can't play it at work and some generously dumb lyrical content, and you have a solid formula for a Werewolves album.
At this point, I'm probably giving the same treatment I was giving the orchestra sci-fi epic of Chicago's Mechina to the Werewolves guys, wherein I'm pretty sure they'll just have a spot reserved somewhere around here on the year end list. It would have to take the musical match of lifting a whole island off a map and relocating it somewhere else in order to actually stun on the audio front from these guys. Generally speaking, you know what you're in for after a few of these and if you've already paid the price of admission then you'll get what you deserve. Perhaps they'll find a way to out-dumb themselves yet and catch me on the back foot. I'll eagerly await the results of any attempt at that because now it is starting to feel a little like both a sociology experiment and a writing exercise combined into one every time a new Werewolves album rides into town.
Die For Us is the latest yearly issuance from the team behind such brilliant hits as My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me, What A Time To Be Alive, and The Dead Are Screaming. Each member of the three-piece involved in Werewolves have their own much more intelligent and professional projects, so at this point you could view the band as an almost practiced sort of 'stupid'. You have to aim to be this dumb, and it takes a surprising amount of expertise to basically loop back around to the opposite side of the spectrum and ascend to a blissful and jaded caveman approach the way Werewolves do.
Die For Us is like most other Werewolves discs in that the infernal hellfire from the band is constant in a way hard to describe. They blur through guitar riffs and the drumming at this point is more an extreme sports endurance race than anything ultra creative. Werewolves' musical style requires a nonstop blastbeat behind the kit, and for the most part that is exactly what you will receive. It's no wonder they've started to slip a slow groover of a track into the middle of each release, otherwise you'd have a musician passed out from exhaustion behind the kit at the halfway mark every time.
Naturally, I did cover the band's latest foray into the metal sphere here which is partially why this little 'why it made it on the year-end list' summary likely feels shorter than others. For a guy that has an earlier stated fear of repeating himself, it is a risk of sounding almost exactly like your review when you bring up Die For Us again to explain why its meat-tenderizing soundtrack manages to rank with you in the face of much more critical art-faire in the world. You can only deep dive into the morning dew's melt from your car so many times before you're just slamming face first into dry concrete.
Werewolves are a band that exist in spite of musical trends in a lot of ways and I really enjoy that. It's fun giving the middle finger to the idea of evolutionary releases every time, especially when that is the group's stated goal. When you exist in a form of tongue-thru-cheek it's hard to actually approach anything from a truly critical standpoint. They're understandably dumb and with a formula that was immensely strong from the start. Die For Us is more fuel for an increasingly large blaze and it's enough to keep interest up for whatever inane garbage Werewolves are going to volley forth next.
I hold steadfast to the idea that grind albums are perfect discs to slam in whenever on a year-end list and be perfectly placed. The lack of pretense and the straightforward relentless assault that is paired in a grind release tend to make arguments just kind of wither to dust - mostly because the monster you're trying to argue with doesn't really understand what arguing is. Thus, logic gets thrown out of the window and in its place is an animalistic desire for sheer energy and base proclamation.
Grind has its reliable tropes for sure and it is often the expert usage and sometimes reinvention of said trope that can mark a grind disc as great rather than just another silver platter for the pile. Also, when you nominate a grind release you also must acknowledge that it tends to come from the most unexpected names and places, as the plug and play nature of the genre can result in brilliance one moment and sticking a fork in an electrical socket the next.
This Star Wars opening crawl of a preamble of course is to explain just what a project like Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish is doing on here and how funny it is that it likely will take longer to read this entry than it will take for you to just listen to the release.
I pulled up to the roadside tent of Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish's newest album For A Limited Time incredibly late. I would've only been considered as being on the cutting edge of finding this project if the cutting edge in mind were that of a roll of bubble wrap. In fact, I only crossed paths with the band based off of a rabbit hole that had me sniffing around to see if anyone from Mumakil had recently been active musically after listening to their split with Misery Index. Naturally one thing leads to another and you're in a weird labyrinth of the Swiss grindcore scene and you land on an album like For A Limited Time after initially being in awe that someone called their project such. You know, normal sort of internet behavior.
Naturally, I was instantly drawn in by the pretty colors, like a bird spreading its tail feathers to attract a mate, only to be annihilated by a thumping rhythm section and a wall of blast beats. Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish don't stray tremendously far from the grindcore formula but when they're firing on all cylinders they're hard to deny as being a pretty good time, even if I'm never going to make an attempt at memorizing the one real long song title on there. I did manage to slam out a review of this one for the site as part of a larger roundup if you're seeking a bigger tome than what I'm laying before you here, so at the very least it's not a sudden appearance and a 'where the fuck did that come from?!' sort of album.
The more studious among us may have noticed already, but the placement here is part of a two-band block of some of the more singular-dimensioned bands out there at the moment. Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish are bought in to their chosen goal for sure and it is one they have a laser-guided focus on. It's not an artistic paradigm shift in grind music, but what it is is a very good slice of a genre wherein you could easily skate on the surface level and have a pretty good time completely unaware of the creatures which lie beneath.
I had a fucking weird year with grind as a whole, where after a while I started to feel as if I was made of Teflon with releases bouncing off of me constantly. I'd find something, enjoy it for a bit, and then second and third thought would get cast to the wayside. The classic one-minute blasters just weren't quite hitting me like I'd wanted them to. Yet from out of left field comes For A Limited Time and that is the one that seems to have landed with me. Personal taste can be goofy as hell in that regard.
For A Limited Time is worth a handful of spins at least. It slams into you so terrifyingly quick you'd think it was a freight train practiced in the art of assssination.
Necrophobic are another storied band making their appearance in the year-end list. They're likely a name you've recognized for some time now and we've been following them somewhat closely for a long time as well. I know we've touched base with each of their last few releases and I've been responsible for covering at least two, including their most recent effort In The Twilight Grey. You can read that mess from all the way back in March right here if you're feeling spicy enough.
Necrophobic have a very well-established career at this point and their wild sorcery of melodic black metal that verges on Ozzy Osbourne-esque glam-rock-era guitar work continues to win me over in a lot of ways. As much as the band portray themselves as bats in the belfry and haunting the attics of various unfortunate farmers, they do so in a remarkably catchy way; Necrophobic have taken the unholy trove of classic black metal guitar riffs with blastbeats behind them and turned them into something worth humming along to more than once.
They've become the gateway into the truly infernal, they're the sirens luring you in to the actual evil that waits right behind them, and at this point they're doing so shamelessly enough that you can't help but be proud. While I recognize that In The Twilight Grey is largely splitting the difference between the two more closely-packed albums before it and playing it close to Necrophobic's chest songwriting-wise, I'm not going to act as if it didn't charm me again anyway.
I found myself bemused a few times over the course of the year with how somewhat singles-frontloaded In The Twlight Grey felt at times; it seemed as if Necrophobic were putting their short and stabbing efforts up front for this round and saving the longer works for the end. It led to the sort of dynamic where the adrenaline rush of battle and fury hits early in the album and then afterward you're invited to explore the wreckage and continue to burn the ground behind you in the last few. There's only a couple of times where Necrophobic reach into the 'extended song length' category, and those don't make themselves evident until the halfway point - with two of them, "Nordanvind" and "In The Twilight Grey", being part of the closing trio for the album.
That means you really can't go wrong by picking up a song or two from In The Twilight Grey, with earworms like 'Clavis Inferni" and "Stormcrow" - both crafted around hefty double-bass gallops for their chorus bits - positioned up front and then the longer-length explorations laying at the end, save for "Cast In Stone" which is *ahem* cast as the one sort of late-to-the-show firebreather to pick up the pace a bit in the closing few.
Maybe it's been the extended time between albums for Necrophobic - listeners might've gotten too comfy on that two-year turnaround prior - but people seem really receptive to In The Twilight Grey this time around. I found it an enjoyable hybrid and summation of the handful of releases Necrophobic have put out previously. While they're hewing close to their now-established sound in the disc, it seems that for much of the album they have found a way to continue mining new ore from it so there wasn't much cause to worry just yet.
Criminally ear-wormy at times, In The Twilight Grey hung on for a healthy block of 2024 and while there were certainly releases that pushed heavy metal further in any particular direction than this one did, only a small grouping managed to do so with enough call to come back and listen again quite like In The Twilight Grey.
In the time since the release of My Dying Bride's A Mortal Binding it seems as if the waves have been rocky for the band. Who knows what could be happening behind the scene in such a group, but for a doom band that've built a career out of being emotionally dramatic, the shroud starting to slip off of the background scenes was starting to show a little bit in the music itself.
I have had the impression throughout my listens with A Mortal Binding that the result is oddly turbulent, as if there was a little bit more seething anger working its way into the music than you might be prepared for. It was an album that still had a lot of the hallmarks you come to My Dying Bride for, yet it was also a disc that was more ambitious and aggressive than you might expect.
Groups often find themselves settled into a groove deeper into their career and you'd figured that My Dying Bride would've been more than comfy wandering the woods of an album more in line with 2020's The Ghost Of Orion. They don't quite do so here, with music that has less of an equal throughline and is a little more scattershot as a result. My Dying Bride are still the wholesale purchasers of their own brand of bullshit and amplify it here to a completely different level - the song titles especially are a mouthful in seeking to tell a wider story - yet there are musically several different approaches to the overall My Dying Bride sound for close to fifty-five minutes worth of melodramatic doom swaying.
I think part of what made A Mortal Binding so interesting for me was the very above-mentioned fact that the songs were a little more scattered than you might expect from My Dying Bride. The main musical core of the band is still there and it is so recognizably them that you'd be forcing yourself to engage in parody by saying it isn't, but the 'where will this album go next' nature was something that had me very intrigued for my first couple of spins through the album. All of the set dressing, the various atmospherics, the wild and wicked attempts at poetry, make for an interesting time all around but there's a quiet thunder to a few of the songs on A Mortal Binding that I found myself probably reading way too deep into the dynamics of the band.
I can't act as if I'm some sort of prophet on that front but by when My Dying Bride basically shuttered earlier this year and started giving out interviews saying stuff like 'making this release took a lot out of us', I also can't act as if I was shocked. I've thought that sometimes I might've spent too much time belaboring that quiet tension in my review of the album in between creating something that read like the writer was falling down the stairs while attempting to describe a release.
It was that quiet intensity to many of those songs that did win out, and why I still found myself going back to the disc so much. I know I've hit the drum that I'm not a doom guy loud enough to wake the dead and I've even been admittedly hit-and-miss with the overall My Dying Bride discography, but they've been on a recent run that seems sharply tuned to my specific sad-boy tastes. There are moments on the new album that have some shocking heft to them and then segments of wailing misery that somehow don't manage to fall into pastiche that will fall in right after. That it was the limited track number - i.e., long songs - that it had and still kept my interest was a strong enough act, alongside my constant listening to it, that earned them placement here.
It is a bummer to me that Spain's White Stones continue to be as underrated as they are, because they seem to get better and better with each release. I thought they started with a solid foundation on their first album but quickly found a good twist on their take of progressive death metal with the followup, and now their 2024 album Memoria Viva sought to expand upon that and largely did so, while also calling to mind some of the other groups that this project is attached to.
Of course, if you've somehow missed out on who White Stones are, let's slam our faces into the rewind button and get introductions out of the way real quick. White Stones, as mentioned before, are a progressive death metal who gained a lot of their initial noteriety by being a project of one Opeth bassist Martin Mendez. Prior to Opeth's sort-of bringing the 'death' back this year, the White Stones crew had a lot of hype behind them initially, just based on people assuming that this would be where the death metal was to be found, and then surprisingly enough, it kind of wasn't.
I appreciated White Stone's debut album a lot for being off-kilter and dreadfully intense at times, while also folding in folk melody and legend into their songwriting. It wasn't perfect and it felt like a group still trying to find their way, but I can't act as if the quality on Kuarahy wasn't strong enough to catch my interest. Dancing Into Oblivion followed a year later and took that album down a much darker path. There were some serious shadows haunting that album, and that turn deeper into the shadows made the release that much heavier. It existed like a deadlier alternate-universe take on their debut and I found I actually enjoyed it more because of that.
If you're still catching up here, now you can see why their release of Memoria Viva in 2024 already started with a pretty strong placing; all I needed for them to do was land it and I'd be more than happy bringing the group up here. If you want the deeper look and want to take me to task on my bullshit, I wrote about this one back in July.
Memoria Viva's pacing caught me off-guard at first with a lot of extended instrumentals laying in between the actual full-band 'songs' on the album. There was clearly a lot of care and intricacy packed into each track though, and again, the White Stones crew make such fantastic use of the regional sounds available to them that it has become just as much a part of their sound as the strange colors they paint with for the progressive death metal side of things.
If nothing else, I was already primed to be in love with much of the band's music when it became clear that the rhythm section was a primary driver over much of their discography. Memoria Viva blew a few of those ideas up much larger, and then at the same time took the reigns off and got a little wilder than expected. Songs paired up well on this disc so it plays out as if many of these are two-parters, either with an instrumental opener or an extended bowing out. Even distant from Memoria Viva's June release, I still find it difficult to describe.
This was a disc that challenged me constantly and I found that I appreciated it more from an artistic standpoint than I did from the heavy metal headbanger segment of it. It's a mezmerising piece of work that was at times gorgeous and other times haunting and hypnotic. But with Memoria Viva, it seems White Stones have truly found a confident sound and one I would love to see them work with more in the future.
Probably far more often than it should happen, every once in a while a disc wins out with me not just by the strength of its music but also by the strength of its ambition. It may not hit all of its designated marks or have the musical machine work out exactly to plan without belching smoke and grinding a few gears, but the sheer fortitude of shooting for the moon literally every chance you get has a charm all its own, which is how I found myself drawn into 2024's Theurgia, the debut album from solo project Thy Shining Curse.
Imagined partially as a musical act and partially as a multimedia object, Thy Shining Curse has quite a bit of production and spectacle tied to it already with masked and robed figures serving as ambassadors for this project in all of its photos and music videos that are verging on conceptual - and all of this is then backed by a soundtrack of symphonic death metal that, like mentioned before, may not always hit its mark but is still impressive for just how grandiose it manages to be given its sudden appearance and humble background. My fascination with this one from writing it up way back in the halcyon days of April continues to carry itself through 'til now.
If you'll forgive me the indulgence of quoting my own review, I found myself musing quite a bit on the nature of Thy Shining Curse as a whole while also yammering quite a bit on just how much I was enjoying biting into their take on symphonic death metal.
Theurgia has a lot of time wherein it's just the core expected metal instruments hitting exceptionally hard, and often, it's just one vocalist against the world -- whether the mysterious singing female or the hefty death grunt -- driving things forwards. Thy Shining Curse don't make much room for big, bombastic choirs. Orchestrations, keyboards, and symphonic work are used as amplification of what the core of the group is already doing.
Thy Shining Curse excel at making use of the tools available to them and do well at making their songs as intricate as you'd expect. Normally you'd expect that an album full of tracks hovering around the five- and six-minute length would all be plodding or mid-tempo adventures, yet Theurgia more often than not is moving at a faster clip.
When you're in the symphonic death metal realm you're likely to draw comparisons to a few acts, but the most prominent are likely to be Fleshgod Apocalypse or SepticFlesh. Thy Shining Curse place themselves well within the latter camp then, because they aren't tailored much for those with a taste in sheer velocity but they do nail it on the utter bombast front from time ot time. Otherwise the actual 'symphonics' of the band can be fairly reserved, which I found myself appeciating quite a bit because it allowed for the band itself to sound as gigantic as the imagined orchestral section sitting just off in the wings.
Theurgia presents itself as an otherworldly creature consisting of 'seven musical rites' all tied around a centralized concept, and for the most part Theurgia does sound just like that. Thy Shining Curse did themselves well by settling on a concept and then running after it like a trained athlete would. At times it can seem like they are stretching themselves a little thin but there's so much grander ambition at play here that each 'epic' moment on Theurgia sounds like a small triumph of its own. Constructed out of many small victories and battles won, Theurgia takes a spot on my year-end list not just to reflect my nearly half-year-long fascination with it but also as a sign of encouragement, as this is another act that I would like to see take another wild swing for the musical fences.
I saw France's Merrimack live one time at Maryland Deathfest, based solely off of the recommendation of one of the other members of the writer cohort around here. What took place on stage that day was simultaneously impressive, depressive, and oppressive. It's hard to describe but it is rare to see a black metal band be overwhelming quite like Merrimack were with their set time that day. It was both cavernous and suffocating.
Somehow, Merrimack have figured out how to play on the edges of opposing musical sides in a chaotic dance that somehow just seems to work, and I have been searching through their discography for something to match near-exact what happened on stage that day. With their 2024 release Of Grace And Gravity, Merrimack might have created something truly frightening while also getting damned close to the auditory suffocation that they unleashed live for that show.
I'm doing something I don't enjoy doing when adding this one to my year-end list, which is bringing up an album without their being any forward context or warning that such a thing might appear. I believe it does a disservice to both the band and the reader, as it can make choices feel random and completely up in the air. Right when you think you might have the feel for something, all of a sudden there's a wall of out-of -left-field groups making sudden appearances and all of a sudden the trusted opinion just feels like more random tumble-dry being thrown out of the internet.
Me bringing up Of Grace And Gravity here means I've got the almost de-facto - for this site - opinion on the album, which doesn't seem fair since I am really not the guy to be discussing this spectrae of the black metal world. It's like having someone try to describe a taste to you after having spent years being numb in the mouth. I don't have the reference point to truly highlight why I think Of Grace And Gravity is such an interesting piece of work outside of the segments where it honestly terrifies me.
And yes, in case you're wondering, we have discussed Merrimack a lot before. We just seem to have missed the bus on this album for some reason.
Every song except one on Of Grace And Gravity clocks in at over six minutes. Everything here is weighty and Merrimack move their music in big, crashing, and lumbering motions coupled with near-feral howling and acidic guitar. The one five and a half minute song - "Dead And Distants Clamors" - is in relentless attack mode for the entirety of its intro. The time it slows down and sounds like a traditional black metal song for a bit is almost surprising, as it is following in the wake of songs like "Sulpherean Synods" and "Sublunar Dependency", both of which lay on the gigantic side of things when it comes to pushing the punching-weight of this release up. Merrimack's goal within the first three songs alone is to sound as distant and inhuman as possible and they do so with aplomb. They shoot past the required black metal standards within the opening minutes of the album, and everything after that is them contorting and bending everything until the bones inside of it crack.
There's a definite air of pretense to much of Merrimack's activities, but it is appreciated because they're a group who sound as if they believe in their purpose. On Of Grace And Gravity they seem as if they wanted to write a disc that existed fully in 'attack mode' alongside taking you along on a nightmarish journey. Merrimack absolutely murder when it comes time to break out the musical flamethrowers and burn the crowd before them, and Of Grace And Gravity, even with its much more intensely focused and larger ambitions, manages to nail that particular atmosphere down to a T.
So here's an album I honestly didn't think I'd be slotting into the year-end schoolbus pileup. Dark Tranquillity are a band who've long settled in their ways and more or less have been refining and iterating on a very specific style lying somewhere between goth, prog, and melodeath for about three to four albums now. I still enjoy them tremendously but I always have Dark Tranquillity hanging out in a known-factor spot for the most part.
They get their occasional wins here and there and even I've been willing to acknowledge that in spite of the massive lineup shifts the group has seen over the years, they've still had a solid handful of songs turn out to be any better than they had any right to be. I've even found myself liking albums that other folks seem to slowly be turning vitriolic toward. But, given that I've kept the band at an arms length critcally and always viewed them as a sort of comfort food, I didn't expect that I'd be ranking Endtime Signals so high when the curtains began to draw closed on 2024, and yet here I am, somehow attempting to dig upwards while explaining why, outside of the fact that somehow I have listened to Endtime Signals far more than I had initially expected to.
Suddenly the reason why some dipshit might decide to include them in a review round up reveals itself.
Dark Tranquillity are well into their long career at this point and it's something I think about a lot when I'm listening to their later albums. They've been through a lot of lineup changes in recent years yet somehow the last four albums manage to stay within a stunningly similar range, usually to be defined by just how many slight degrees they were off from the central throughline sound that they seem to have settled on post-Construct. Endtime Signals runs a little long in the tooth but that is largely due to the fact that the quicker 'classic' melodeath songs are way up front this time around and the band tend to wander more as you reach the back-half of the disc. But, I found over the year that my initial hardness toward those songs softened quite a bit and my approach to Endtime Signals has become more all-encompassing, as I tend to just let the whole release run and include the bonus songs as well. That translates to a healthy amount of music because for some reason when it came to Endtime Signals, Dark Tranquillity were feeling very generous.
In many ways, Endtime Signals may be the 'lightest' album of this particular collective. It became one of my go-to 'shut brain off' pop style albums. It's still leagues heavier than anything else anyone at work has been listening to lately, but obviously you can see how a melodeath band with a taste for balladry and prog-keyboard work might not be the most asphalt-chewing thing people think of when heavy metal gets brought up. It may be that the stars were just aligned for this one because I found myself genuinely excited to see them play a bunch of Endtime Signals material when I saw them live, and that likely amplified my taste for the disc as a whole. It felt good to be constantly firing up a recent Dark Tranquillity album in 2024.
I need to get new friends. Because it is not often I get the opportunity to discuss The Vision Bleak and their brand of classic camp and goth metal, and I feel like I am missing out because of it. I have no one to praise the virtues of their albums Set Sail To Mystery and The Unknown to. In fact, allow me to recommend you check out their release The Unknown again, particularly the song "Into The Unkown", which is one that has held permanent real estate in my head since its release in 2016.
The tale that leads us to The Vision Bleak's release of Weird Tales in 2024 is equally strange-sounding, given that the band vanished from activity for about eight years only to reappear with a new album released in April, bearing that title of Weird Tales and consisting entirely of one forty-one minute song chopped into twelve parts. It comes to pass, then, that I've developed something of a decent tolerance for a single forty-minute song turned album, so long as they're willing to make it into distinct chapters and not one grand forty-minute doom opus, as Necrosavant managed to land one with me years ago with its blackened death metal release Aniara MMXIV. Needless to say, I have found Weird Tales to be a fascinating take on the genre as well as a roller-coaster of oddball tropes perfectly fitting within the confines of the album which contains them.
My clearly Herculean song-tolerance fortitude allowed me room to review this album all the way back at the end of April and I found it to be particularly enjoyable. The Vision Bleak don't break any genre-bounds here nor do they make any great changes to their formula, but in Weird Tales they manage to keep things exciting for the entire time and generally have their music work in their favor. There are a few interstitials and some pretty obvious stopping points so the whole 'one song' thing is a little tissue-paper at times, but I found myself viewing it more as twelve chapters in a larger book - or magazine if you understand what the album title is referencing.
There were particular subsections of Weird Tales that stood out to me more, but The Vision Bleak do a pretty good job of making sure that the album as a whole has some high peaks and low valleys. That's where Weird Tales won me over more than I would've expected this year, because while the album format and direction of attack from the band is recognizable enough that a military with no scouts would've been able to see it, The Vision Bleak manage to make good use of a dyanamic song sequencing and flow within Weird Tales' twelve chapters to turn it into more of a roller coaster than you'd be prepared for.
Weird Tales was also a release that stood in pretty sharp contrast to a lot of what I listened to in 2024 and that is one of the reasons why I found myself ranking it so high. That I had so many options available to me this year - especially in some of my favorite more death metal leaning subgenres - yet I still wandered back to Weird Tales. The eight-year gap between releases did The Vision Bleak pretty good with this one, though I'm more overtly hopeful that they maintain the momentum instead and come out with a followup a hell of a lot sooner.