Metal Poll 2012 - The Countdown

51 Asphyx - Deathhammer    60 Points,   2 Votes,   2  #1 votes
http://www.metal-norge.com/images/AsphyxDeathhammer.jpg

Greetings ɷ

that album cover fucking rules!!!

50    Angel Witch - As Above, So Below    63 Points,   7 votes
http://hangout.altsounds.com/geek/gars/images/2/1/3/3/0/angel_jk_convert_20120306103534.jpg

Sean OTM. Love that Asphyx cover.

so far, two things on my list, yay!. (I'm one of the #1s for Asphyx). dug the Angel Witch too but it was lower on my list, it's no s/t album but there's some quality stuff on there.

Haha, two votes, two #1 votes. I'm the other one.

http://open.spotify.com/album/0CyBrwxv0udr8MCpI3CKTZ
Angel Witch spotify

49 Pinkish Black - Pinkish Black 64 Points, 4 Votes, One #1
http://f0.bcbits.com/z/39/98/3998738522-1.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/0Trzfu3LfcYalkMZIywkkd

apt cover

Thanks for posting the spotify links, I fear this is going to add even more new albums into my listening queue now

YESSSSSSS

Unsurprisingly my #1. Much love for Pinkish Black.

48    Atriarch- Ritual of Passing    71  Points,  6  Votes
http://cdn2.pitchfork.com/albums/18468/homepage_large.b8f2f60b.jpg

TIE

46    Wizard Rifle - Speak Loud, Say Nothing    72 Points,   5   Votes
http://i27.fastpic.ru/big/2012/0304/d4/a25ce1aba67f39e9055f188866bcbad4.jpeg
http://open.spotify.com/album/38SzN4VslJSb7iov7Jfatv

46    The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre    72 Points,   5 Votes
http://theobelisk.net/obelisk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/thedevilsbloodcover.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/2RTRGV2at6og16x0TLcvw8

Solid records, though in the end I didn't end up voting for either; Wizard Rifle was a very late cut, and I think of The Devil's Blood album as 2011.

btw: there were 51 ballots and 208 albums got at least one vote.

down from 80 last year. but good results nonetheless

45    Meshuggah - Koloss    72 Points,   7 Votes
http://www.pattonmad.com/Vinyl%20&%20CD/Images/Vinyl/12/MeshuggahKolossLPGermanyGoldF.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/7hS4Yx78GjZlylkpnHsmr4

Wizard Rifle is a trippy band.. the drummer is a beast. I saw em live awhile back and was impressed by their energy.

sad that Koloss isn't a wee bit higher. I think I liked this one more than Obzen (which I liked a lot). I have tix to see them in Feb. I've seen them twice as an opener (once for Slayer in 1999, when they outright destroyed, and once in 2008 for Ministry, and they looked downright bored)...never as a headliner.

Animals as Leaders are opening, I'm kinda 'meh' about them as an opener for Meshuggah.

44    DEFTONES - KOI NO YOKAN    72 Points,   8   Votes
http://fanquarterly.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/cover.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/4PIVdqvL1Rc7T7Vfsr8n8Q

43    Pagan Altar - The Time Lord    74 Points,   6 Votes
http://metal-exposure.com/wp-content/gallery/cd-hoesjes-2012/pagan-altar-the-time-lord.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/2HIETDxWAc7DhsERwlpjGU

love the cover

wizard rifle just missed my ballot, and pagan altar either missed it or made it (and then i cut it from a later non-submitted list). both great tho!

I might think that the effort to be kookie and/obscure kept that Deftones record from being higher.. Its really their best record since White Pony, and the production is fucking amazing.

Fwiw, Pagan Altar (and Coven too, if they make this countdown) would be higher if I had remembered to vote for them. (I had them listed under "reissues" in my word file of favorite 2012 albums, and that list slipped my mind until after I'd filed my ballot. Oh well.)

I'll just continue the countdown today if that is ok

42    Earth - Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light II    77 Points,   6 Votes
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b1aVGWUrKRE/T28ltQ6pY3I/AAAAAAAAAL0/JDphl2vR7Kk/s1600/earth2.jpg

hearing a lot about that disc

got last year's HOoded Menace yesterday and now I'm sad I can't vote for this, cuz this is totally my wheelhouse.

41    Graveyard - Lights Out    77 Points,   9 Votes
http://www.nuclearblast.de/static/articles/205/205037.jpg/1000x1000.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/48i0IlTk89zjBCsbbqXjE6

The record that made me a Graveyard fan. Didn't care for the first two, but they found their own voice on this album and it only gets better the more I listen to it. Probably ranked it too low.

40    Kowloon Walled City - Container Ships    80 Points,   7 Votes
http://f0.bcbits.com/z/16/72/1672853970-1.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/0EOjjXZ4y45WH4vuEczBjG

Another of my favorites. With such a late release I know it got overlooked in some places, so to see it place here is cool. Probably the best sounding recording I heard all year.

Loving a lot of the non-stereotypical album art itt.

39    Menace Ruine - Alight In Ashes    82 Points,   7 Votes
http://thatshowkidsdie.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/aia_cover_highres1.jpg

Seandalai is going to mark covers out of 10

This one could be an out-take from the title sequence for the Lizard TV version of Knightmare. 5/10

Another one I liked. Talked about the track "Salamandra" on the latest podcast, actually.

the Kowloon was my #2!! I love that band, and they are really really cool guys..

good results thus far. I voted for Earth, Pinkish Black and Kowloon Walled City thus far. I want to hear that Pagan Altar record and will give the others a go as well...

thus far thus far

38    Enslaved- Riitiir    82 Points,   7   Votes
http://theobelisk.net/obelisk/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Enslaved-RIITIIR-Artwork.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/60HnsRer7dv8poS7977qqv

I forgot to vote for Menace Ruine but "Salamandra" really is A+

37    Gojira - L'Enfant Sauvage   86 Points,   6 Votes, One # 1  
http://cdn4.pitchfork.com/tracks/13534/homepage_large.3cd9c48c.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/5dxqD5Kc6cRRi3rErmDfXG

That was my number one vote. Probably me being lazy, but damn, they really took it to the next level on this one.

36    BLACK BREATH - SENTENCED TO LIFE    96 Points,   7  Votes
http://www.revolvermag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/PromoImage-1.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/4xOhXPxrcjesTwl6dhLZUb

Yay! Loved this joint

yeah so awesome

Song of the year btw is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgfNY5TujCY

aldo i have no money

nycnative it was on my fb xhuxx said it!

Yeah, but it's the third week on January dude. If it's the end of the year for you then lots of people including Gregg Anderson should call it a day.

Lotsa moaning about what is and isn't metal. I thought I saw even xhuxk complaining about it somewhere (maybe not above) which is ironic. All of it amuses me... I used to joke that whatever I liked had to be metal but I am going to just start believing it.

― Loud guitars shit all over "Bette Davis Eyes" (NYCNative), Wednesday, January 16, 2013 4:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh there's a diff between the marginal 'are they metal?' acts and the obviously-not-metal acts that got nominated.

jeff and chuck complained about goat

AG were you saying "that's my purchases for this year (as far as stuff discovered via the metal poll)" or "that's my purchases for this year ... period, until 2014"?

i don't really care, just wondering if aldo misunderstood

I dont have any money. so i wont be buying much if anything.

thats why ive not been around ilm lately for months. All this chat of music i cant afford. I only came back as im recovering from flu which floored me and i wanted to see metal poll results (its a bastard not knowing them like i did when i ran it). I missed that part of it. Wouldnt have had the strength to run it this year. Good news is blood tests came back and im ok now. So i might finish that 70s poll that got revived the other day. I had been put off polls.
Firstly i need to do my big poll ballot.

good to have you back AG!

lots of stuff lower down in poll i need to check out on Spotify

wow I love the Witch Mountain. grats to Nate and company.

Pazz & Jop Metal(lic) stuff

7 Swans, The Seer
24 Baroness, Yellow & Green
42 Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind
53 Goat, World Music
56 Metz, Metz
58 Pallbearer, Sorrow and Extinction
60 Sleigh Bells, Reign of Terror
69 Redd Kross, Researching the Blues
79 Rush, Clockwork Angels
119 Torche, Harmonicraft
146 Van Halen, A Different Kind of Truth
150 Pig Destroyer, Book Burner
152 Witchcraft, Legend
157 Ufomammut, Oro: Opus Primum & Alter
162 Gojira, L'Enfant Sauvage
167 Royal Thunder, Cvi

I may have missed some and I stopped at the top 200.

So if we wanna split hairs about what is and isn't metal... I guess that Pallbearer is the undisputed metal record for mainstream music critics.

nice that redd kross did well.
what actually won pazz n jop?

Frank Ocean.

no surprise there.

no, its not is it?

chuck said swans never made the poll in their original incarnation.

Goat just announced a Philly date. I haven't heard the disc yet but it's so fucking polarizing I wanna go just to see what all the fuss is about.

make sure to scream "ARE YOU GUYS METAL?"

finished basically listening to the records i was interesting in and:

- hey, goat's world music is pretty great, isn't it? think i can fold weird groovy hard rock into my metal this year

- i've been meaning to listen to the black breath record all year and holy shit i've been missing out

- i also sorted through a few individual list and i got to say it is totally exhilarating to experience grave doing their thing for album no. 10293840

- leave it to the blackened death bands to totally surprise me: weapon's embers and revelations is really good and i don't feel like i'm done listening to it at all

- my opinion of death/doom is mostly "gtfo doom"; this especially applies to the asphyx record, which is pretty good but the doom sections are a slog imo. weird that i'm not experiencing that crushing boredom with the ahedonist record right now but maybe that's because it's a bunch of excellent death metal riffs stacked hypnotically

i was interested in* jesus do i need more coffee?

I dont really care if Goat are metal or not. Its such a good album.

Grunge wasnt metal they said

i don't think of that Goat album as metal at all, and i'm definitely not a metal expert. it is awesome, tho. just wish that band would come west of Texas this spring. :(

- i also sorted through a few individual lists and i got to say it is totally exhilarating to experience grave doing their thing for album no. 10293840

this statement also applies to cannibal corpse forever

wow I love the Witch Mountain. grats to Nate and company.

― NINO CARTER, Thursday, 17 January 2013 22:17

Thanks Nino! There's also an even newer track that you can download for free over at Scionav.com \wm/

oh yeah forgot to mention that the witch mountain record kicks

approximate amount of times i have smiled while listening to last year's cannibal corpse album: 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Rush was #1 on all of my ballots. And while they might not have placed here, they still won by selling more records and concert tickets than all of our top 50 combined, I imagine.

Thanks for all the thanks

word Nate!!!!!

I thought there were more writers here who'd have voted in Pazz & Jop. With fewer people voting overall, it could have been a great opportunity to bring more attention to some metal. Maybe next year. Hope you all voted in the big ILX poll.

This poll was the first one that I saw Les Discrets, let alone seeing it nearly overtake Alcest. I'm enjoying it, even slipped it in on my ballot in the poll that ends today.

This was my P&J ballot and where they placed.

01 - #585 Colour Haze
02 - #157 Ufomammut
03 - #500 Graveyard
04 - #152 Witchcraft
05 - #697 Troubled Horse
06 - #163 Gojira
07 - #1280 Golden Void
08 - #166 Royal Thunder
09 - #694 Spiders
10 - #251 Christian Mistress

Whoever told me last year's Incantation was awesome...was totally right. So good to hear raw death metal like this still, and their craft is still as tight as ever.

I'll never forget the time I saw them open for Nile in 2000. So dope, and people were throwing chairs during their cover of Death's "Scream Bloody Gore".

also I've now acquired the Dawnbringer...I love how this is a 'neo-heavy metal' album that doesn't do what some of the others did and wear its influences strictly on its sleeve, but rather made something of their own. I love teh vocal harmonies too, has a real 70's rock vibe to it.

this was maybe the year I listened to the least metal ever (and just about none of it from 2012), so that's why I didn't vote. but I'm catching up a bit and am loving the pallbearer record so far. it's almost like a new asunder lp!

thanks for your work on this poll, guys!

that was 2011 for me (the not listening to a lot of metal). every time I go 4-5 months without listening to metal, it winds up creating more of a glut when I return to the fold, so NEVER AGAIN.

yeah but you do that with hip hop too, right?

yeah

i can spot a man in overdrive a mile off!

I missed the Pazz & Jop deadline. Also don't feel like my vote over there means much...

Well, just 5 more people giving Christian Mistress another 40 points would have moved it from #251 to 119, a very respectable position tied with Torche. If just one other person put, say, Witch Mountain at the top of their ballot it would have gone from 527 to 291. So yeah, it makes some sort of diff!

What the Quietus said about Aluk Todolo

An hour and a half of technically adept instrumental near-black metal with the metonymically beating heart of krautrock; Occult Rock has the potential to upset a lot of people – not in the way that Liturgy put people's corpse paint so continually and hilariously out of joint ("Wah! They're just soulless hipsters, they're not black metal at all, they're just play acting at it. Waaaah!!" like it's a fucking secret) but they too do seem primarily concerned with the transcendental nature of the black metal beast. The difference is that not only have this French trio served significant time in traditional black metal circles (playing in the likes of Diamatregon and Vediog Svaor) and spent years honing their craft, Occult Rock still carries that intangible undercurrent of nihilism and despair; 'I' might be ten minutes of blast-beat black metal channelled through Hawkwind's third eye, yet 'VII' sounds like early Can haunting a deserted, plague struck village, and it totally fucking works.

According to EM review-scores (fed through my secret math), the album of the year was actually Cattle Decapitation's Monolith of Inhumanity.

http://furia.com/em/releases-year.html

I keep forgetting to check out that CAttle Decap...

It isn't my thing, necessarily, but I recognize that it's really good – a couple decibel writers I was chatting with at the show on Saturday were saying that it was their pick.

Best Album Winner of Previous ILM Metal EOY Polls

162 Early Graves - Red Horse - 10 points, 1 vote

man, i'm sorry to have missed out on this. everything about it is sick.

yes!!.. and that one vote was mine I believe. i wish the production was a bit better, things get a little too washed together, but the songs are ripping! They crush live too. they're about to go out with Nails here pretty soon