Compendium Metallicum

The Nine Crucial Metal Albums I Don't Leave Home Without*

Carcass Necroticism (Descanting the Insalubrious)
This is a classic of death metal that's kind of grindy and sloppy, and includes what is perhaps the
best kind of grindy, kind of sloppy death metal song ever performed, Corporeal Jigsore Quandry. Later Carcass (such as Swansong) is cleaner, tighter, more accessible and more commercial, but somehow it seems to lack the energy and warped sense of humor of this album. If you aren't ready for the full grindy-deathy immersion, you may want to consider Choice Cuts, a "greatest hits" album that mixes early and later stuff into a mess that might be more to the taste of newcomers.

Mayhem De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
A classic in minimalist Norwegian black metal, and the only real album that ever came out of the
Count Grishnak/Euronymous pairing, a pairing more notable for murder than for music in that the former ended up stabbing the latter in the head (he claims it was self-defense, but still, he stabbed him in the HEAD, man). It's pretty good black metal, not as "abraded" as some early black metal, but well short of the florid nature of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse. The album has two main failings. One is that the vocalist sounds a trifle silly sometimes. Instead of sounding like an evil dwarf, the desired sound for a black metal vocalist, he sounds like he's trying to pass a navy bean through his nose. The other is that the album doesn't have much variety and if you listen to the whole thing, the last few tracks develop a strong "been there, done that" vibe.

Insomnium Above the Weeping World
This is a Finnish band that started out playing more or less conventional melodic death metal in
the Swedish fashion, but starting with their second album they began to move away from death metal and toward something that one is tempted to call melancholic metal. It's not really doom metal (or "doomdeath", as it is technically known) but it isn't death metal either. Indeed, by the third album (Above The Weeping World) the melodic death metal influence is difficult to detect, but the album is atmospheric, artistic and heavy all at the same time. Insomnium is often compared to Katatonia, and I can understand why, but I personally think they surpass Katatonia. There are three tracks of particular interest on this album, The Gale, Mortal Share, and In the Groves of Death.

Burzum Filosofem
This is one of the strangest and yet most evocative of black metal albums, minimalistic and spare, but at the same time almost hypnotic. Each of the six tracks are lengthy and could strike the pop-attuned listener as tedious, but each has a specific texture and feel that sets it apart from the others. It follows the usual black metal trope of having a fairly thin and "abraded" sound, especially the vocals, which even at high volume strike the listener as being at-best half-heard. This was the last album made by Varg Vikernes before starting his prison sentence for stabbing Euronymous in the head. Parts of the album hint at the dark ambient sound that he would later dabble with (dark ambient seems to be the curse of black metal - you make black metal, you experiment, and all of a sudden you're doing dark ambient, and nobody knows why).

Avenged Sevenfold Sounding the Seventh Trumpet
Normally I'm not a fan of metalcore. I leave the defense of metalcore to its fans; I for one don't
really enjoy all that hoarse shouting. And there's normally something poppy and juvenile about
Avenged Sevenfold - it, like Slipknot, is the Approved Metal of Summer Break, when fifteen year olds listen to metalcore and ride skateboards and experiment with cigarettes. But this album, Sounding the Seventh Trumpet, has a nice variety of songs and doesn't have that poppy teeny-bopper sound that we've come to know and hate. I quite like it, and I like the way that the album seems to knit itself together to form a seamless whole.

Metallica ...And Justice For All
America doesn't, in my mind, make good death metal, or good black metal. But it does make good thrash, and this is among the best thrash albums ever made. It isn't as aggressive and heavy as earlier Metallica albums, but it reveals a growing musical sophistication and confidence that the earlier albums didn't have. They were toothy, but unfinished. Justice isn't quite as toothy, but it's a more rounded listening experience, including as it does the seminal One and the slower, almost reflective To Live Is To Die. Some Metallica fans claim that one can detect in Justice the looming sell-out that the Black Album turned out to be, but I don't agree. I don't get much of a sell-out whiff from Justice, personally. But I do have a lot of fun spreading the rumor that Dyer's Eve is absolutely unplayable in concert even with fifty musicians.

Dark Tranquility The Mind's I
There are, as a general rule of thumb, three major Swedish melodic death metal bands. Not really three, but I simply for the sake of illustration. On the one hand is In Flames, which seems thrashy and commercial to me. On the other hand is At The Gates, a band that I'm frankly still trying to come to grips with. And on the gripping hand is Dark Tranquility, which is speedy and reasonably metallic but not really very heavy at all (where heavy means, basically, it sounds like Dismember). I like it, but sometimes I find myself wishing for just a bit more heavitude. The song Still Moving Sinews comes to mind: I love the beginning, with its strange stacked power chord descent, but then the bottom falls out and it turns into, I don't know, pablum. So I like Dark Tranquility, but I don't rely on them to deliver crushing riffs or mind-altering heavitude, because that's not their game. They're much more delicate than that.

Dissection Storm of the Light's Bane
Dissection did a form of music known to the inner circle as "blackened death metal", meaning it was musically related to death metal but employed black metal vocal techniques and lyrical content. And it's not a bad album. Better than hoary classics like Venom's Black Metal or Emperor's In The Nightside Eclipse. Where the album goes awry is its real-world trappings, what with the leader of the band committing suicide after penning an outrageous press release announcing that he'd accomplished Satan's work on earth. That so?

Dismember Like An Ever-Flowing Stream
This is pretty much the primal essence of grim death metal. Dismember reminds me of Carcass, but Carcass in a bad mood. The lyrical content of this album is pretty obnoxious and I wouldn't recommend anyone look up the lyrics, but the music is pure electric saw metal mayhem of a sort that I happen to like. Probably my favorite track on the whole album is Justifiable Homicide, which seems to invite one to engage in shoutery.

* It was supposed to be ten albums but I never could make up my mind on the tenth one.