Top Albums Of 2010, #20-11

11. Bison – Dark Ages
The first four tracks on this album are absolute world-beaters. “Stressed Elephant” is the most incredible metal song of the year, featuring an ambitious “Master Of Puppets” arrangement and an unforgettable French horn overture as its secret weapon. “Fear Cave” boasts a devastatingly heavy riff, “Melody, This Is For You” steamrolls with its mighty refrain and “Two Day Booze” features a drunken gang chorus shout-along in the illustrious tradition of party thrashers from Anthrax to Municipal Waste. Unfortunately the quality drops off a touch over second half, but the band still finishes strong with the thundering third chapter to its “Windigo” triology to close the album. A strong follow-up to 2008’s world-beating Quiet Earth.

12. High On Fire – Snakes For The Divine
Like I need to tell you High On Fire put out an awesome record this year. High On Fire are the best heavy metal band in the world right now. They still play berserk war metal and Matt Pike still shreds with wanton savagery. The Oakland power trio packs more brute power than anything this side of Motörhead. Snakes For The Divine has got the sharpest production of their career and Matt Pike’s best vocals to date, he sounds like he’s been chewing on broken bottles of bourbon.

13. Paper Tiger – Made Like Us
A member of the Doomtree hip-hop collective, Paper Tiger released a low-key trip hop record this year that channels a love of rare groove crate-digging and classic hip-hop beats. The specter of DJ Shadow looms large here, but out from under his rhyming cohorts Paper Tiger uses the newfound sonic space to transcend his influences and make a sexy record that reveals new avenues of sound with each listen. Suitable for your bedroom or your burnt-out Camero, Made Like Us is an addictive listen. Get hooked.

14. High Wolf – Ascention
The world’s awash in droney psychedelic these days, so to stand out a record’s gotta have a distinctive flavor. High Wolf incorporate a tropical vibe that breathes colour into an inherently grey genre. In particular the albums’ second side is bright and vibrant, and the languid and layered soundscapes work well simply as background music washing over the listener while still rewarding patient and focused attention. The organ sounds on here are positively triumphant. These guys also put out a very good album called Shangri L.A. this year, but Ascention is the better of the two.

15. LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening
I’d never been a fan of LCD Soundsystem in the past. But that person died the moment I heard the fatass synth-bass on opener “Dance Yr. Self Clean” hit. The real story for this album is how backwards looking it is for one of the new indie vanguard’s perrenial all-stars. Channeling late ‘70s art rock favorites like the Talking Heads, David Bowie and Robert Fripp has worked wonders for James Murphy’s perpetually unsatisfied muse. Echoes of krautrock standbys like Kraftwerk and Neu! are also apparent in the endless motorik grooves of these tracks. That would make this sound like some sort of experimental release. It’s not. This is Happening works equally well as a party-starter as it does on headphones at 3am. Murphy’s self-aware asides (“love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry, and this coming from me”, “acting like a jerk, except you are an actual jerk”) bring levity to the proceedings. This is a fun, sonically adventurous record with a momentum that holds up from beginning to end.

16. Awesome Color – Massa Hypnos
Much like their spiritual Michigan forefathers The Stooges before them, Awesome Color’s third album is their best and most varied. Massa Hypnos is a short, ass-kicking blast of pure adrenaline-rush Motor City rock n’ roll packed with solid tunes. The opener “Transparent” is an absolute rager that blows the door right off its hinges, while the necrolust anthem “Zombie” nods to as many classic rock paragons as you can name with its Leslied-up vocals (I never tire of that trick, nice touch). This time out they vary the colors of their classicist garage rock pallet with a few influences from the 80’s underground. In particular “Flying” shows a deep understanding of the work of alt-rock signposts like The Replacements. You’d be hard pressed to explain to me how Vampire Weekend and the National have somehow inherited a legacy of critical adoration that (allegedly) ran directly from that same lineage while these guys got painted with the brush of original sin for actually rocking. Born to Lose.

17. Black Tusk – Taste The Sin
Black Tusk hail from the same swampy scene that has already coughed up Baroness, Kylesa, and Withered, and like those bands Black Tusk show a healthy appreciation for their hometown’s legacy of sludge and the bruising assault of Motörhead and High On Fire. Unlike their more established neighbors though they don’t really dress their sludge metal up very much, it’s basically just full-on pummeling throughout the length of the album. Black Tusk display a knack for downshifting into a crushing riff at just the right time. The full-on aggression of the album might cause it to fly by in a destructive blur, and individual tracks might be hard to pick out from the storm of torrential drumming, heavy slabs of brutal bass, scorching guitar riffs and bellowed vocals. If pressed, I’d have to say that “Snake Charmer” and “Way Of Horse And Bow” are the best tracks here, and the car crash trilogy that closes the album ends things on an appropriately destructive high note.

18. Electric Wizard – Black Masses
Acolytes prey to the shrine of the mighty Electric Wizard for one thing: the heaviest riffs ever heard. And as usual, Jus Oborn and crew do not disappoint, dispensing enough sickeningly heavy and oppressively hateful doom metal to keep the fanatics toking on the Dopethrone all night long. These guys are still the Heaviest Band In The Universe, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Others might play slower, or have rawer production or use more guitar tracks or tune down until their strings are hanging in the breeze, but no one has ever been able to equal the sheer evil that this band exudes. If you know about this band, chances are you’ve heard allusions to Satanism, crippling drug and alcohol abuse, children being run over by motorcycles, violent infighting between members and an industrial accident or two. The smoky purple cloud of mystery which surrounds the band obscures any attempt to probe any deeper into their mystique, but what is clear is that these are bad people.

Black Masses is basically a continuation of what we heard on 2007’s Witchcult Today, with the band’s four piece lineup steadily moving in a more professional direction. What is new this time is a slightly sharper production job that should appeal to some new fans who are wondering what the fuss is. Moreover this is the band’s most technically accomplished album to date, with metal-influenced guitar solos and even some slightly-upped tempos, although no one will ever mistake them for anyone but the same sludge merchants who crawled out of Dorsett almost two decades ago. A cleaner, more approachable Wizard might sound like anathema for those still waiting for a new Dopethrone, but consider that the Mk. II lineup has a vastly superior live reputation to the original trio. Moreover, this is all relative anywas: It’s STLL the Wizard. Classic death riff crawls like “Scorpio Curse” and “The Nightchild” will sound instantly familiar to a veteran fan, and will allow newcomers to test the waters a bit before diving into rawer fare like Come My Fanatics. They even manage a cosmic doom epic called “Satyr IX” that dissolves into spacey ether that as out-there as anything the original lineup ever did. The Wizard sill canes harder.

19. The Besnard Lakes – Are The Roaring Night
The Besnard Lakes do a majestic neo-shoegaze thing that’s shot through a cathedral of reverb. The opening two-parter is called “Like The Ocean” and it brings the goods, complete with gorgeous male and female harmonies and lush guitar swells. After that it’s more of the same, but Canada’s Besnard Lakes have so completely nailed down their hazy wall of sound on Roaring Night that it makes their past efforts (and really any other early 90’s shoegaze throwback you care to name) sound like a warm-up. The signifiers of such early 90’s favs as The Verve, My Bloody Valentine, The Smashing Pumpkins and Slowdive are all here in spades, but the Besnard Lakes never sound too reverent, always aiming for massive impact in their guitar explosions rather than extended blissouts. They may work with a limited pallet of colours, but within the confines of their sound, these kids are masters.

20. Robedor – Burners
Robedor’s discography grows bigger by the minute. While parallels with Boris or Sunn O))) can be spotted, their lo-fi drone-doom makes occasional and effective use of drums, and on the whole subscribes to a dungeon production aesthetic which is far more Grimmrobe Demos than Monoliths & Dimensions. If anything, Burning Witch might be the closest sonic reference point due to beyond moribund tempos and lurching heaviness, although Robedor do not share that band’s enthusiasm for extreme volume peaks and suffocating basement distortion, not to mention a singer neck-shackled to a wall of feedback. Instead they focus on crafting a minimal sort of evil ambient music. Burners might be one of the heavier Robedoor albums, but it’s still a long way removed from a number of today’s darkest drone, noise or ambient artists. I have to give them credit for following their muse and cranking out as many recordings as they possibly can. This can only be the work of some extremely dedicated wierdos. That's a good thing.