Metal fans: Your top 5 contemporary metal albums?

Cafe Society
1

Ok, for the purposes of this thread I’m defining “contemporary” as “album released since 2004”. This may seem restrictive but I’m looking to limit some of the typical “old metal” that generally overruns these types of threads on the SDMB (Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Master of Puppets, Jethro Tull etc…). Yeah, those are great bands with lots of great albums, we all know that already. This probably greatly reduces the number of interested parties, but oh well, my thread.

Oh, just to head this off before it starts, all sub-genres of metal/hardcore are included here, so lets not get tied up in the inevitable debate about which sub-genre. I’m also pretty sure that there will be alot of albums/bands that are not recognized by folks that aren’t deep into metal.

  1. Trivium - Shogun. This is a masterpiece. The guitar work on here is some of my favorite of all time, not just the last 10 yrs. Each song fits perfectly and there is not a stinker on this thing. Trivium has had a few really good albums but none since has been able to top this one.

Throes of Perdition

  1. After the Burial - Rareform. I stumbled on these guys when they were the opening act at another show I was at a couple years back. If I had looked at pictures of these guys online before actually hearing them it would have poisoned the well because they look like Hot Topic kids but these guys can play the hell out of their instruments. There is only one song on here that isn’t a 10 to me and it happens to include my #1 favorite metal song of all time Ometh (I know, sounds like hyperbole but I’m 38yrs old and have put much thought into this, it is my favorite metal tune of all time). The second solo is awesome and there is something about the tune that feels optimistic and happy. I dunno. Great great album. The follow-up, In Dreams, is also outstanding, but this is the winner.

Ometh

  1. Anterior - Echoes of the Fallen. This is another album that is just great beginning to end. Unfortunately these guys broke up shortly after this album came out so we’ll probably never hear from them again but Blood in the Throne Room is amazing. Absolutely love that one. You gotta listen through the whole song to appreciate it. Flows so perfectly. Love it.

Blood in the Throne Room

  1. All Shall Perish - Awaken the Dreamers. This whole album was in HEAVY rotation for several years for me. Their lead guitar player at the time, Chris Story, was a sweeping badass. He moved on to join a horrible band, Smashface (yeah…) but he is a unique talent. I think I read an article somewhere that Kirk Hammett declared this his favorite metal album of the last 20 years or something. I dunno. Either way this is one of the most satisfying albums I’ve heard in my metal life.

Black Gold Reign

  1. Parkway Drive - Horizons. For some reason I ignored these guys for a long time even though I had several of their albums. Once I really discovered them I was blown away by the energy. The song Breaking Point is bad as hell. The intro gets me pumped as hell every time I hear it. Their other albums are good to, but none reach the heights established by Horizons.

Breaking Point

Ok, your turn. I expect this thread will have limited attendance but it is what it is.

2

Well, as far as I’m concerned, A Twist in the Myth by Blind Guardian is the best album of all time.

Other than that, it’s very hard for me to nominate whole albums. There are too many variables in terms of how to weight them. But here are some others I liked.

At the Edge of Time, also by Blind Guardian was also very good work.

Ten Thousand Fists in the Air, by Disturbed. This is the only one in my list that isn’t power metal.

Northwind, by Falconer. (Whoa! I just realized Falconer released a new album this year in June and a missed it. How did that happen? Sorry, gotta run. :slight_smile: )

And… how about Black Halo, by Kamelot?

3

I might get laughed out of the thread, but whatever, these are records i like a lot:

Rescue & Restore by August Burns Red

They’re Only Chasing Safety by Underoath

Crimes by Blood Brothers (admittedly this one is maybe more noise rock than metal, but i like it a lot and am including it)

Sempiternal by Bring Me The Horizon

and last i guess i’ll go with…

Lovers’ Requiem by I Am Ghost

4

Judas Priest Angel of Retribution, what a great return for Priest with Halford. The last two albums are almost up there as well.

Accept Blind Rage, this album just came out and and I’ve been listening to it constantly. The other two recent albums have been almost as good.

Iced Earth The Glorious Burden, I’m really not a fan of Iced Earth, but this is a great album.

Subway to Sally Bastard, might be all in German, but it’s still a great album. Die Trommel is a great song. It was a toss up between a couple of other albums they’ve released.

Europe Last Look at Eden, may not be strictly metal, but it’s a good hard rock album.

5

I’ve hear a couple songs off the new Priest and they aren’t half bad I agree.

6

#1 is easy: Suicidal Tendencies - 13. I listened to this album non-stop for over 8 months in my car. Nothing else was ever played and no songs were ever skipped. IMO it’s their best album yet. Check out the opener Shake It Out.

WARNING

THE NEXT THREE OF ENTRIES MAY REQUIRE SOME TEMPORAL INVESTMENT ON YOUR PART

#2 is also easy: Turbid North’s Orogeny. I can’t say enough good things about this nifty little progressive technical death metal album. They careen from some of the most brutal chugging riffs I’ve ever heard to acoustic passages to pure noise to Floyd-like psychedelia and back again. The vocals are harsh & guttural but still discernible. This lived in my car for about 6 months and is favorite for when I’m running at the track. Here’s Stormblast.

#3 is only easy because without those other 2, it’d be in the top spot: Ne Obliviscaris’s brilliant debut Portal Of I. Progressive black metal with clean and CM vocals plus the addition of violin! This album is absolutely perfect in every way: songwriting, performance, engineering are all fucking perfect and the band’s different parts interact so seamlessly and complimentarily that the album is fun, exciting and amazing to hear every time I play it. Forget Not is brilliant; simply brilliant.

#4 I gotta go with Shrinebuilder. Their eponymous album brings the best parts of doom and drone and that classic Sabbath sound; it offers compelling rhythms and lyrics that leave themselves open to interpretation by the listener. It’s an altogether enjoyable example of veterans finding the right chemistry, if only for 40 minutes. Still, it’s one helluva 40 minutes. Here them for the first time as the rest of us did when we popped that album into a CD player: Solar Benediction.

#5 is tough because it means I’m excluding a lot of truly awesome albums, but I’ll go with a band that doesn’t exist anymore: A Life Once Lost’s final album, 2012’s Ecstatic Trance. The album is dizzying combination of all the good parts of Meshuggah, doom, drone, hardcore, aggressive freakout psychedelic rock and rave music. It’s a completely unique and trippy album; each song has like two dozen layers to it, so you can endlessly switch focus to different instruments and voices and underlying polyrhythms, finding some unique combinations of sounds each time you listen, even tho the song stays the same. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like hearing different perspectives, almost, on the song even tho they clearly describe the same song. I’m proud to say that this album has done more to inform my own songwriting than anything else I’ve heard in years. Doug Sabolick, if you should ever stumble across this, you totally fucking rock; let’s jam. The rest of y’all can listen to Something Awful.

(Hope y’all like that last one; I had to make it 'cause I couldn’t find one on the intarwebz alrdy!)

My Honorable Mentions list would go on for dozens if not hundreds of albums. The quality and diversity of metal has increased significantly since about 1998, IMO. I’ve been happily spending huge portions of my income on various methods of enjoying and/or acquiring it all for decades now, but the past 15 years or so have been fucking awesome. Onward & upward!

7

Cubsfan, I just wanted to say that I love After The Burial, but I prefer In Dreams over their other albums. To me, it’s the perfect crux point between Rareform and Wolves Within and that pocket is freaking awesome.

8

I started out with In Dreams as my #1 seed for them but after spending more time on Rareform, and really investing in Ometh, it’s my jam now.

Oh, you may not know this but there are 2 releases of Rareform. They re recorded the entire album with their current vocalist who is LEAGUES better than the original. So make sure you are listening to the one with the Green cover and not the yellow one.

ETA: They botched the production on Wolves so badly that it’s hardly listenable to me. The bass guitar is overpowering to the point that the guitars are impossible to hear. I know bass is a core part of this Djent sound but it’s poorly mixed on wolves.

9
  1. Demilich (band) Nespithe (album, 1994)

Just this.

10

Aye, I have both versions of Rareform and yeah, Anthony Notarmaso’s vocals are not only much better than Grant Luoma’s. they are also a perfect fit for the band’s oeuvre.

And doubly aye: Wolves is like a poor attempt at recreating In Dreams only it’s somehow supposed to be more. Poor songwriting and lopsided production (that tried too hard) make this #3 on my list of their 3 albums (Luoma’s album is #4 and I seriously just ignore that it exists except as a collector).

11

I will say that A Wolf among Ravens is a great tune. They played that one when I saw them and it was just BOOMING. The album cut is really good too, but again, the bass is just too overpowering and the guitars are lost.

Go look up a youtube video for the Djent Stick. You may get a kick out of it.

Meshuggah Obzen was quite an album too BTW. The only reason it’s not my favorite Meshuggah album is because it doesn’t have New Millenium Cyanide Christ on it. That’s a top ten metal songs of all time contender for me.

12

Drudkh - Autumn Aurora
Mastodon - Anything they’ve made, really, but I guess if forced to I’d choose Blood Mountain out of all of them
Blind Guardian - A Night at the Opera (close enough to 2004 I say, but I’ll take At the Edge of Time too if forced into after 2004 exactly)
Eluveitie - Slania
ISIS - In the Absence of Truth

And the almost but not there because Drukh is basically the same genre and I like Drudkh more…
Summoning - Oath Bound

The thing about metal is there’s so many subgenres that we can all be fans and barely even touch on each other’s picks on an average day. Anyway, I actually haven’t been into metal as much for years now so I consider this a pretty weak top 5 pick, really. I mean there’s also The Sword, Down, Kyuss (does Kyuss count? Are they really metal? Well, they’re 90’s ayway), Red Fang, Opeth, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Meshuggah, Baroness…but I haven’t really listened to their whole albums for years to really place them in my heirarchy right. Whereas all the bands above I’ve got integrated in my MP3 shuffle list to come up randomly so I figure that’s my best bet for picking my top albums. Well, I do have The Sword, Kyuss, and In Flames in there but claiming In Flames is opening a can of worms these days…

I mean I’m listening to the Mystery Skulls release now, and that might as well be nu disco or something.

Also I think The Sword kind of sucks live. Don’t do it.

13

:eek:

Really? When I saw them they were awesome! Maybe you got them on a bad night or something. Saw them with Clutch I think, who ended up being mediocre.

ETA: In Flames on the other hand, they SUCKED live. I was so disappointed as I waited quite a long time to see them. Really changed my opinion of their music, and not in a good way.

14

Hahaha I saw them with Clutch too. Loved Clutch, energetic stage act, really amped it up. Feeling the energy in the crowd as they waited for the sound to drop in Spacegrass was awesome. The Sword just kind of stood there and the vocals were too quiet. The one guy had a fan blowing directly on his hair so it could majestically flow in the wind but none of them moved at all. I just wasn’t impressed. I came to see a band play live, which means they should look alive. I’m biased though, Clutch is one of my top 5 bands while The Sword is only somewhere in the top 100.

I enjoyed In Flames and Children of Bodom live, thought they were both good. The vocals were spot on for In Flames and so often the sound techs screw that up for metal. Children of Bodom wore the crowd out with all the moshing and walls of death though, that the crowd was pretty pooped by the end of In Flames’ set. Like I wanted to fall over and go to sleep…but that wasn’t their fault.

Funny how we disagree on this! Can we agree that Mastodon puts on a good live show, maybe?

15

Did you see them at HOB in Orlando on the Earthrocker tour by chance…

Clutch is one of my favorite bands of all time. I’ve seen them 3 times and each time they have been outshined by the opener. Neal is very high energy and a great front man but the rest of the band is definitely NOT. They sound exactly like the CD, for better or for worse, in my case I think worse. The guitar player (can’t pull his name right now for some reason) is the ultimate deadfish rock guy. Literally stands there looking annoyed for the whole show. Great studio band but live they are meh…

Sword guy had his fan kickin blowing his hair and shit. I thought they sounded good. True they weren’t very animated but I thought they sounded really good.

Not a Mastadon fan unfortunately. Supersuckers? HELL YEAH!

16

Nah I saw them at the Electric Factory in Philly. Good venue, probably my favorite place to hear bands between where I’ve been in Philly and NYC. Big but not too big. That and I don’t know how sound stuff is handled really - if the venue has an in-house tech to handle everything in the booth, or if the band’s sound guy handles everything - but the Electric Factory has had the best sound set ups on average of the bands I’ve heard there. I hate it when the guitars are so pumped up that you can’t hear the vocals at all. My main gripe about The Sword is even on studio tracks they leave his voice without much volume. Live, I could barely hear him at all. I love instrumental bands but come on, guys, you have a vocalist so make him heard.

Haven’t listened to Supersuckers. Punk Rock/Rock’n’roll? Aw hell yeah, I’ll give these guys a chance. I think I’ve heard of them through way of The Hellacopters, which are another top band of mine. Maybe Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t dead :cool:

17

Oh man, you’re in for a treat.

Start with their best, Motherfuckers Be Trippin, and Evil Powers of Rock and Roll. Anything older than Sacrilicious Sounds of the Supersuckers is more punk than rock.

Great great band, though not metal. :slight_smile:

18

Motherfuckers Be Trippin’ is such a terrific album. It’s got a perfect mix of silly juvenile fun (It’s a Good Night For My Drinkin’, Bubblegum and Beer) mixed with really fucking catchy music and fun, instead of silly and stupid, lyrics. Plus the more serious songs (Sleepy Vampire, Nowhere Special) are legitimately good songs. It’s also the only album I’ve ever heard by them. But they remind me of The Bloodhound Gang, but more straight-up rock, and less goofiness. Just great sounding music that’s fun to listen to.

As for my favorite contemporary metal:

Coheed and Cambria

Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness

Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow

Year of the Black Rainbow

Coheed is definitely not going to be for everyone. First, if you don’t like the singer’s high pitched style then you’re out of luck. Second, (to the best of my knowledge) all their albums are each parts of an overarching story. But not just any story! A scifi comic written by (I think) the singer. So that’s gonna turn some off. But, I love them, especially From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. I think I soiled myself when I first heard Welcome Home. But then I heard it after listening to the first two intro-ish tracks and pretty much just needed a shower to clean up. The albums released before the ones I listed are ok, but the song composition doesn’t sounds as well done as the ones after. And the albums after the ones I listed I just haven’t had much chance to get to know better. By the way, if you like these guys they have a 4 disc DVD of a 4 night live performance where they played every album (up to that point, obviously, it was 5 years ago or so) all the way through. It’s a terrific set

Volbeat

Guitar Gangsters and Cadillac Blood

Terrific album. Suffers similarly to Coheed in that the singer seems polarizing to me. I personally really like his style. I was very surprised to learn they’re Scandinavian of some sort…Dutch, I think? (And I may be using Scandinavian wrong. But I think they come from within driving distance to wooden windmills and pot cafes.)

Korn

Untouchables - 2002 according to Google Play, but I’m a dirty cheater.

See You On the Other Side - 2005, so I’m clear here.

I really disliked Korn as a die hard metalhead in the late 90’s. But I did enjoy some of their early stuff. Then Untouchables came along and I was blown away.

I’m going to kind of cheat again and toss in Nonpoint. They are still putting out albums, but the only ones I’m very familiar with (and love to pieces) are Statement (2000), Development (2002), and Recoil (2004).

So, I went from devouring metal in the very late 80’s through the mid 90’s. Then got stuck on that same music until finding the better “new” metal of the 2000’s, then sort of stopped paying too much attention after '05 or so. I’ll definitely have to check out some of the suggestion in this thread!

Jeff

19

This is what I came in to say. Awesome album.

However, the best modern metal album is Sepultura’s Roots, which is massively cheating since it came out in 1996. In fact, it’s the best metal album of all time. It felt and feels contemporary to me.

20

That would have been on my list too, except that I was sticking with the time limitation literally.

“And Then There Was Silence” from that album is what opened my eyes to the existence of power metal. My iPod hasn’t been the same since.