Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. You got ’em, I got ’em, but more pertinent to this post Charles has ’em, so I’m jumping in to put together a batch of great music you can find on the grand poobah of digital music, Bandcamp. We got metal, we got stuff that’s tangent to metal, and we got stuff that is unequivocally not metal. Is that a typical Third Circle post? Hell if I know, but let’s jump in and see what you think…
It’s getting really hard to tell what’s real and what’s been pulled from a young adult dystopian novel these days. I’m pretty sure we started living in the future about 5 years ago, what with all the rapid technological and scientific advancements coupled with the rise of authoritarian governments and oligarchic corporations spying on and tracking every move we make and everything we say and think. If all this seems overwhelming to you, good news! You’re far from alone, and chief among your allies is Austin, Texas’ Expander, whose new release Neuropunk Boostergang is the perfect soundtrack to the technopocalypse.
It started about two years ago, and I have our Fearless Editor Josh to blame. For Christmas I received a flat, square cardboard box containing a creamy white edition of the self titled album from Succumb. I didn’t have a turntable…yet.
Two years later and I have a hefty collection spanning a plethora of genres, largely thanks my inability to stop my subscription to VNYL, a curated record subscription service. Every month I get three albums created to my tastes based on my listening history on Spotify as well as my Discogs collection. It can be hit or miss, particularly with their metal selections, but every time I start to pick up the phone to cancel another batch comes in with a surprise that makes me think, “Damn…maybe I should hold off another month.” So for this edition of Nine Circles ov…let’s dive into nine curated metal selections sent to me and see if they’re truly reflective of my listening tastes.
As always, let’s do this. Continue reading
There’s only so much you can get to in a given year. So many albums, so many bands, so many genres and sub genres and niche genres and one-offs and splits and reunions and supergroups and…you get the drift. It’s easy to have a few albums slip through the cracks for whatever reason, but it’s doubly weird when those same albums you missed appear on the very site you write for on another contributor’s list. I swear: we talk ALL THE TIME – sometimes even about music!
Anyway, one of my favorite things about Nine Circles is catching up on what my fellow 9C knuckleheads are banging their craniums to. So here’s nine selections I should have listened to, but didn’t in 2017. Continue reading
Hey y’all, it’s been a minute! More accurately, it’s been about 221,000! Over the last four months, when I haven’t been watching the world rapidly start to resemble a toilet overflowing with diarrhea, I’ve been slaving away at my first semester of nursing school. Which has meant that finally, after a solid 2-3 years in a row of telling myself, “I’m gonna listen to less music this year,” I actually did listen to less music this year! My best estimate is…probably 165 albums? Maybe 170? Still a bunch, but down more than a hundred from each of the last couple of years. MISSION [SORTA] ACCOMPLISHED.
On the other hand, this puts me in something of an odd position when it comes to picking my “Best of 2017.” I didn’t listen to as much music. I deleted my Twitter and reduced my overall social media presence by, conservatively, 75% — which, by the way, was a fucking AMAZING life decision that I recommend all of you try — so I had neither a steady stream of albums-you-must-hear-or-you-will-be-shunned crossing my radar screen, nor the urge to seek out even more obscure albums that I could shun others for not having heard. Oh, and also, most of my favorite albums this year were from outside the metal genre. Me putting this list together and claiming it to be THE BEST OF 2017 would be a little delusional.
So, that’s why I’m not doing that. Okay fine, I’ve made a list and ordered it — alphabetically, because EAT IT, BIG RANKINGS — but that’s it. This is just some stuff I listened to and happened to really enjoy this year. Authoritativeness be damned. (Or left for the folks over at Last Rites.) Let’s jump in.
This list is going to focus on the metal portion of this year’s listening. (And perhaps, in some cases, the metal-adjacent.) So, even though Ulver put out my favorite album of the year in any genre with The Assassination of Julius Caesar, you’re not going to see that thing in this post. Same with Anathema. Same with…I dunno, Steven Wilson, or The War on Drugs, or other contributions from pretty-blatantly-not-metal artists. If time permits, I’ll do a year-end Rainbows in the Dark recap. (Maybe.) But this is my metal list, and it shall be kept metal. Now, all that said…
Nine Circles 