If you’re a regular reader of my columns on this website, it’s been pretty easy to see the kind of pattern I fall into with my metal listening habits.  I’ve made no secret that I like my metal on the more extreme side, in particular the realms of funeral doom, black metal, death metal, and the intersections thereof.  Recently, though, I’ve felt like I needed to break out of my rut and see what else has been out there that I’ve been missing out on.  Prior to this article, my experience with the diverse world of post-metal was limited to my hometown heroes, Russian Circles and Pelican, with a Red Sparowes album thrown in for good measure.  When talking about this with my Nine Circles colleagues, I was bombarded with a slew of highly recommended albums that I had somehow missed out on over the years, and it became clear that this was the avenue I needed to pursue to broaden my metal vocabulary, so to speak.  Thus, the seed for this piece was born.  Some of these albums are classics that I never got around to visiting, some are more recent releases that simply flew under my radar, but all of them helped rekindle a love for a subgenre that I had been sorely missing out on.   Continue reading →