It’s Thursday, and by now you should know the drill. I’m doing blurbs for three more albums from my Top 25 list, presented in no particular order. This’ll happen again tomorrow morning, and then later that day, it’ll be time for our Final Fours in Episode 33 of the podcast. Those actually will be presented in a particular order, as you’ll see.

Anyway, it’s a busy one at the day job, so I’m going to keep both this intro and my blurbs short. Here are today’s entries from my Top 25:

Sólstafir – Ótta (Season of Mist)

When you try to digest as much metal as we did this year—usually four new albums a week for the podcast, sometimes even more than that—you end up needing the occasional change of pace from the super heavy stuff. For me, that change of pace ended up being Sólstafir’s terrific fifth album, Ótta, more often than not. It’s a stunningly pretty hour of atmospheric post-metal. You’ll notice the band’s airy, introspective side first and foremost,  but it makes their forays into slightly heavier fare (“Nón,” the second half of “Lágnætti”) ring out that much louder. On top of that, Addi Tryggvason’s singing couldn’t possibly be more perfect here. The ache and emotion he pours into his vocals (all in the band’s native Icelandic) create true beauty from sadness, and help make the album one of the most compelling, consistently revisit-able albums of the year.

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Thantifaxath – Sacred White Noise (Dark Descent)

From the opening cacophony of “The Bright White Nothing at the End of the Tunnel,” you know Thantifaxath’s coming at you with something different on Sacred White Noise. On their debut full-length, the anonymous Toronto trio serves up 43 minutes of a hauntingly eccentric, fully realized breed of black metal—and keep finding new ways to creep you out. Try and find me an eerier passage, for example, than the descending, tremolo picked chord pattern in the early part of “Where I End and the Hemlock Begins.” Oh wait, skip forward just two songs to “Eternally Falling” and you’ve got one—a deliberate, sinister instrumental interlude that acts a kind of eye to the storm. It might just be the most unsettling thing here. Ultimately, Sacred White Noise keeps finding more ways to suck you in and prey on the very concept of ever being “at ease” again—and oddly, that’s a good part of why I enjoyed it as much as I did. Really, really good stuff.

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Inter Arma – The Cavern (Relapse)

Just a year and a half after releasing their terrific full-length, Sky Burial, Richmond blackened sludge vets Inter Arma returned with a new EP called The Cavern—consisting of a single, 45-minute-long title track. It was a bold move, but thankfully, Inter Arma had more than enough chops to pull it off. Throughout the 45 minutes, the band segues effortlessly between styles—from an apocalyptically sludgy opening 12 minutes to more serpentine, Mastodon-esque sections in the middle, not to mention the occasional clean interlude—and do so enough to ensure you’ll never be anything less than captivated. By the time they reprise that original doom-and-gloom-oriented passage 45 minutes later, you’ll feel like you’ve been to hell and back—in the best of ways.

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That’ll do it for today. As I mentioned before, I’ll be back with the final seven albums from my Top 25 tomorrow–three here on the blog and the Final Four in the podcast. (Just writing that out reminds me how stupid our Top 25 presentation system is. Blerghhh.) Once all’s said and done, we’ll definitely be putting up a recap post with our Top 25s just, you know…listed out. Because coherence. But anyway, make sure you check out Corey’s latest round of honorable mentions, and stay tuned for Quickies later on. Until then.

-Dan

Live. Love. Plow. Horns Up.