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Best of 2016: Dan’s List

Dan1 Comment

Nine Circles Best of 2016 Standard

So yeah, this year sure sucked in a lot of ways, didn’t it?

On a personal level…where to begin? My family said goodbye to our beloved dog, Bailey. I had a rough breakup at the end of April. I got into a deeper rut in my professional life than I’d ever experienced before, which culminated in me quitting my job and leaving New York. I also, briefly, quit Nine Circles. (You didn’t think I’d stay away for good though, did you?)

And that’s just my stuff! Beyond that…well, for starters, pretty much everyone died. Prince, Alan Rickman, Phife Dawg, Craig Sager…I mean, you kind of had to know 2016 was going to be shitty on that front after we lost David goddamn Bowie when the year was scarcely a week old. And that’s all to say nothing of the other shit: escalation of racial tensions across the country, continued apathy toward a changing climate, Christmas Eve / Day and New Year’s Eve / Day both falling on Saturdays and Sundays…it was a lot, man. Oh, and we also elected the personification of an Internet comment section to the presidency. That was neat.

In spite of all that, 2016 wound up being a goddamn banner year for metal. When I first started thinking about this list, I was envisioning maybe a Top 15 – but that quickly grew to a Top 25, and then to its current incarnation: a Top 50, with 20 “ranked” albums and 30 honorable mentions, not to mention EPs. It was just impossible to whittle it down any further; that’s how good metal was this year. Hell, I had a number of albums that featured in my mid-year list that didn’t even make it into the honorable mentions section of this one!

Make no mistake, this year would have felt exponentially shittier without all of those records. In times like these, cueing up a metal record that’s driving you bonkers, throwing your head back and howling at the moon kind of becomes essential to maintaining your sanity. And you know what? Sanity was maintained. (Well, mine at least…I dunno about America’s. All the more reason for America to start listening to more damn metal.)

This year may have thrown every possible pile of feces it could at us, but you know what? We made it through anyway. We’re still here and it’s not. And that’s nothing to turn our noses at. Here are the records that helped make that happen for me:  Continue reading →

Best of 2016: Zyklonius’ List

Zyklonius9 Comments

Nine Circles Best of 2016 Standard

I am writing this intro blurb on Christmas eve, on Lemmy’s birthday and almost exactly a year after his death. Today, the largest newspaper in Finland published a fascinating article discussing Lemmy’s life (unfortunately in Finnish). The article’s lead paragraph notes the failure of humanity to carry on without Lemmy and the shockwave his death created, paving the way for 2016 in all its depressing grimness. Continue reading →

Best of 2016 So Far: Dan’s List

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It’s been a busy half-year. After promising myself in January that I’d take it easy in 2016 and be more selective with the music I listened to, I proceeded to listen to roughly 125 albums in the first six months of the year. (You know, after listening to 170 all of 2015 and thinking that was too much.)

At any rate, I’ve done enough of these over the years for you to know the drill. I’m doing a Top 10, followed by 10 honorable mentions. A full sixth of my album listening in one post? So be it. As always, I’ll keep the blurbs for each album brief so as not to become tedious. Yada yada yada. Now let’s jump into the list…

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2016 – ‘The Score So Far’ by Jesse

Jesse1 Comment

This year in metal got off to a bit of a slow start for me, with the first two months not offering anything that I care to remember for this feature. Then, the ball got rolling, and now that we’re closing in on July, there’s enough good stuff to craft my two cents out of. Continue reading →

Nine Circles Ov… June 2016

Manny-O-War1 Comment
Photograph by our Dæmoness of Design, Jaci Raia. For more of her beautiful work follow her on Instagram or Twitter.
Photograph by our Dæmoness of Design, Jaci Raia. For more of her beautiful work follow her on Instagram or Twitter.

Not surprisingly, as its become a theme in 2016, May was an outstanding month for metal. Well, another shocker: June is just as good. On the larger side of things a new Thrawsunblat LP was released, there was a Blut Aus Nord / AEvangelist split, Vale of Pnath dropped an LP, Aaron  Turner’s celebrated sludge project Sumac put out an absolute burner and, thanks to Shadow Kingdom, Tombstalker finally got to release Black Crusades on vinyl. But where June really shocked was in the amount of smaller, quality releases. July is looking to change that fact with a bunch of super high-profile, high-quality releases on the horizon. But we will save those for the end. So, for now, let’s take a look at nine releases from June that knocked our (well at least my) socks off.

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