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I'd buy that, except for this: Ever since the Jethro Tull debacle in 1989, the Grammys have pretty much treated Metallica as an auto-nomination. In 2000 Metallica WON A GRAMMY for their 1998 cover of Thin Lizzy's 1972 version of the traditional Irish folk song "Whiskey In The Jar." Metallica performed at the Grammys last year and it was one of the big things that happened that night. (Metallica were nominated for a Grammy last year too -- in 2014, only six years since their last album.) We agree the Grammys recognize Metallica's name. Right? So here's the fucking crazy thing: Metallica actually contributed a medley to that Dio comp. And it is legitimately the best thing Metallica have done since 1991. I'm not saying it deserves any superlative awards compared to the whole universe of metal, but the fact that TWO SONGS from that Dio tribute album were nominated and NEITHER ONE was the Metallica song is confounding. But that's not enough! Not only was Metallica excluded, but one of the songs nominated is a cover of a Dio song BY A NOVELTY BAND. I just ... I mean, this award is utterly irrelevant to metal; it's beneath mockery because it's so out of touch. And somehow, this is EGREGIOUSLY wrongheaded even by Grammy standards to the extent that I feel a need to vent about it here.

"Scribes." Billy is the best. This is a great found Morrissey lyric: "But as I like to tell my daddy, if I’d been loved right, with the gifts that I had, I might have been a classical composer, having a very quiet life and a glass of wine, and not have been in this dirty pop business."

I gotta mention this somewhere so I'm gonna do it here. The 2015 Grammy nominees in the category of Best Metal Performance: Anthrax - Neon Knights Mastodon - High Road Motorhead - Heartbreaker Slipknot - The Negative One Tenacious D - The Last In Line Two of those songs are from a Dio tribute record. One of the Dio tribute songs is Tenacious D.

I dunno, I guess that's what I'm getting at: Billy has been working with Schroeder since 2007 but nothing they did together (three Teargarden EPs and Oceania) sounded like Monuments. Maybe Tommy Lee was inconsequential and it's just a crazy coincidence -- I honestly have no idea, I'm just speculating based on the scant evidence. It's obviously all a product of Billy Corgan, he deserves all the credit/blame, I just think it's interesting the way different collaborators APPEAR TO bring out different elements of Billy Corgan, somehow.

Man, "Muzzle" to me is the perfect example of what I said in this review: "Corgan has never been a gifted wordsmith, but at his best, he wrote scathingly confessional lyrics that were oblique but inviting." The apex of that song: Have you ever heard the words I'm singing in these songs? It's for the girl I've loved all along. Can a taste of love be so wrong? That evokes something in the listener and it's a deeply honest sentiment but IMO it's just not great lyricism compared to Billy's peers -- say Kurt Cobain or Beck or Malkmus or Liz Phair.

I think it depends how you assess an album: the first Machina is 15 songs and 73 minutes long. I LOVE "Stand Inside Your Love" and "Everlasting Gaze" and "Try Try Try" and maybe even three or four other songs, but I can live without a full half of it for the rest of my life. As a collection, it feels totally unedited and sprawling to me. I'm not penalizing it for being long -- Melon Collie is 28 songs and 120 minutes long and it's one of my favorite albums ever -- but for being a giant mess. To me, Machina doesn't feel carefully considered or deliberately plotted. I can't listen to it in a single sitting. It feels punishing, especially because it's not only a massive commitment-blob, but it sounds so fucking extreme: the loud songs are deep in the red, the soft songs are really sugary-sweet. So there are six or seven songs that I love, and eight or nine songs that seem to me superfluous, and every song feels assaultive in some way. I'm assessing the album as a 15-song experience -- a full-length album -- not a 15-song menu from which I can draw my favorites and discard the rest. But it's totally fair to assess only the highlights and discard the bad stuff, and if we're doing that, then Machina 1 is at least as good as Monuments.

Thank you! Re: Adore (for you and everyone else who mentioned it): I know I'm in the minority on that record, and I accept that -- I don't think my opinion is the right one, but I can't connect with or even really enjoy that record. It was maybe too much of a shock to my system when it came out, and as much as I've come back to it, it's never delivered. The first three SP albums (three of the my favorite records ever, and IMO they got better with every record) were a mind-destroyingly gluttonous display of guitars and drums. And then on Adore, BOTH those things were gone. It just feels empty and flat to me; I truly prefer the MACHINA records and to some extent even Zeitgeist, just because I crave those guitars and drums. So anytime I write about the band, I try to be respectful of the Adore fans, but I also state that it's just not a record I like, and my opinion should be taken (or disregarded) in that context.

I agree with points [2] and [3] though! That's pretty much what I was trying to get across in my review.

Nah, Melissa only toured with them. All the bass parts were played by D'Arcy and Billy, and considering the degree to which it seems D'Arcy's absence affected the making of the album -- not to mention the fact that she didn't even play bass on the records when she was a full-time member -- I'd guess she's barely on the album at all.

They started the record together, then D'Arcy quit, and they pretty much started again from scratch. This is from Wikipedia's entry on Machina 1: Much like previous albums, the songs were first tracked acoustically at Corgan's house in late 1998 before the band set to work on them at their practice space and the Chicago Recording Company. The recording was conducted with the team responsible for finishing Adore – co-producer Flood and engineers Howard Willing and Bjorn Thorsrud. The band took a break from recording in April 1999 to embark on the Arising! tour, which took the band to nine small clubs. After the tour's conclusion, bassist D'arcy Wretzky left the band, leaving the rest of the band in a difficult position. Corgan later said, "This put a stress obviously on the full integrity of the project, because it was connected to the band not only bringing the music to fruition fully, but also the public component of being in character. I ended up in a broken band with a half-ass enthusiasm towards finishing a project already started." Flood later remembered, "We decided that we were going to have to make a very different kind of record [...] we pretty much went back to the drawing board. Certain songs on the record are survivors from that first period, but it meant a shift in the ways songs had to be formed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machina/The_Machines_of_God#Recording

It's streaming on iTunes but I put in an updated link -- just click that and hit the "Listen" button.

I listened to a bunch of Iron Reagan stuff this year and it all sounded good but it's just not my thing, so I don't really have thoughts of any value -- Aaron or Doug or Ian can probably offer actual nuanced opinions on the music. I know people LOVE that band so I'm not that surprised they did well on dB's list, and while I've never met anyone in the band, I'm happy for 'em just the same.

I'm not sure the metal world has an Arcade Fire analogue; the closest comp would probably be Baroness. Blut Aus Nord lurk in self-imposed obscurity to such a degree that they almost shun accolades if not all media coverage. I'd be surprised if Vindsval has done even five interviews over the last five years, and his output is really idiosyncratic: The first Blut Aus Nord record came out in 1995. The first Memoria Vetusta record came out in 1996. Between 2003 - 2007 BAN released four albums with no connection to Memoria Vetusta I. Then they released the second Memoria Vetusta record in 2009. Between 2011 - 2012 they released all three parts of the 777 trilogy. And in 2014, they released the third Memoria Vetusta record. I could forgive anyone for not being 100% comfortable trying to contextualize a single edition of that catalog two decades after its inception. That said, BAN's profile has risen with every passing year, and their last album -- 2012's 777: Cosmosophy -- was high on dB's list that year. However, Cosmosophy (and to a lesser extent the rest of the 777 trilogy) sounds pretty much NOTHING like anything else BAN have ever done AND it is one of the truly essential, undefinable, and most magical metal albums of the decade IMO. Saturnian Poetry is a much more traditional style of atmospheric/pagan black metal. That said it is a masterclass in that style, and I think it's an apex, too. I'm just playing devil's advocate trying to justify the exclusion. But in truth I fundamentally disagree with it.

(Not that you implied it was nefarious!)

So dB did 12 issues in 2014, eight of which featured bands promoting new records (the other four were King Diamond, Lemmy, GWAR, and Carcass -- as it happens, the Mastodon cover is actually the Jan. 2015 issue). Of the eight eligible bands, only Electric Wizard weren't on the list -- which is actually sort of a surprise now that I think about it. So it's a pretty solid theory, although it doesn't seem nefarious to me: They're just riding for records in December that they were riding for earlier in the year, too.

Yeah I mean I guess you could say release date is secondary; it really depends on when the editors get the music for review. I got that Primordial advance on 9/22, even though it just came out today. That said, looking at some old emails, I'm pretty sure print publications had the Blut Aus Nord record in August so that's probably not a factor in its absence here.

The impression I got (and this might have been in the writeup, I honestly can't remember) was that Cult Of Fire arrived too late to be considered for their 2013 list, because print publications have long lead times. Like dB probably had to figure out this list in October in order to get it assigned, edited, to the printer and in the mail on time. Which would maybe explain why Blut Aus Nord wasn't on this year's list. (Promos for that thing went out in late September.) But then again, the Cretin record isn't even out yet and that's on their list so who knows.

I'm wondering if that one just hit their desks too late for consideration. I can't think of another (good) reason for its absence.

That could be it but they're not usually sticklers about genre purity, plus Trap Them and YAITW are no more metal or less crust than Nux. And that Solstafir record sounds like Sigur Ros. I think Nux probably just didn't get the votes. But IMO it's better than almost every single thing on this list or any list of 2014's best records. I could see a stronger case for making it #1 than for excluding it.

I was surprised by that, too. There are a few notable absences on their list, IMO, and that one is particularly glaring.

Yeah, I am saying that! But I actually don't really like Adore, and the few songs I do like aren't as good as "Tiberius" IMO. There are songs on Machina and even Oceania that I like more than anything on Adore.

Black Market bro Aaron Lariviere wrote a crazy-good Worst To Best on Swans actually: http://www.stereogum.com/1197001/swans-albums-from-worst-to-best/top-stories/lead-story/ Also they are one of Doug's favorite bands, so he'll probably chime in, too.

Yep, you guys are quite correct. I've amended the post, striking this error. Thanks for the heads up!

I have, but haven't sat with it at length. I wanted to really immerse myself in this one before moving on to the next. What are your thoughts?

One of the best metal albums of the year IMO. I think the prank release is a little hard for people to wrap their heads around, even the people who are supportive of it -- a lot of folks still think the "fake" advance was material not included on the two albums. But no question this thing is ridiculous, it hits so hard and has so many hooks, and balances that with a softness in the ambient sections. I love it.

No, no -- you are totally right. Well, partially right. But I didn't say it WAS cynical and soulless! It just SEEMED to be. That was the perception. When Celtic Frost made Cold Lake, their decision to tease their hair and cake on makeup didn't seem like an artistic progression; it seemed like an attempt to cash in on the metal style that was popular at the time. Metallica wore their street clothes on stage -- that SEEMED real. Poison wore pirate shirts and waxed their chests -- that SEEMED pandering. It didn't help that once grunge hit, nearly all those bands grew goatees and stopped teasing their hair. Why? Presumably because there was no more money to be made in glam metal. If a band invests so much time and effort in its image, and then it changes that image as soon as it's passé, then that band does seem a little cynical, no?

Hey Joseph! Grunge is an interesting one because many of the early grunge bands were marketed to metal audiences: Soundgarden toured Louder Then Love with Voivod and Faith No More; Alice In Chains and Mother Love Bone were pretty much just glam metal bands from the start (look at old AIC flyers: "Alice 'N Chains formerly Sleze"); Kurt Cobain hired Andy Wallace to mix Nevermind because Wallace engineered and mixed Reign In Blood, South Of Heaven, and Seasons In The Abyss. Also, those bands got a whole lot of their initial exposure on Headbangers Ball. But aside from AIC, none of those bands really embraced metal as a part of their identity. Glam metal obviously evolved from traditional metal as well as hard rock like Aerosmith and AC/DC. I don't think metalheads resented glam metal for anything in particular, it just became a binary: You were either a true metalhead or you were a poseur, and the stereotypical "poseur" music sort of embraced vapidity and excess. Also, the "poseur" stuff often seemed cynical and opportunistic and soulless. Like, bands who did that thing were perceived as being inherently insincere and willing to throw away their credibility for money and attention. It's why everyone hates Cold Lake and laughs at old Pantera photos. It also drew a line between "hard rock" and "metal." That was the first of a lot of such fissures that would follow, which kind of came to define the metal landscape. Nu-metal almost belongs to a different species and is just misidentified as metal, the way people misidentify tomatoes as vegetables. As I said in the Kreator story at the top of this post: "There's a through line that is constantly being drawn and underscored, telling us exactly how we got from Blue Cheer to, I dunno, Babymetal or Unlocking The Truth or Deafheaven or whatever it is that will come to define metal in 2014 and beyond." Nu-metal doesn't exist on that through line. It didn't evolve from metal; it evolved from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Cypress Hill and Nine Inch Nails and the Judgment Night soundtrack. And I guess maybe White Zombie, too, but it's not like the music or the practitioners talked about or placed themselves within the lineage. This is too broad to be sociologically worthwhile but it's telling in some fashion, I think: In the days of glam, "real" metalheads aligned themselves with Metallica and against Poison; meanwhile, Slipknot fans align themselves against Juggalos (while "real" metalheads today align themselves against, um, Babymetal or Unlocking The Truth or Deafheaven).

I wonder if she's gonna announce some exclusive arrangement with Beats/iTunes actually. That would be a pretty significant blow to Spotify.

If you don't think of them as nu-metal that's OK but it's not like the shoe doesn't fit: 1999 was also the year Limp Bizkit's Significant Other came out ("Nookie"); it was the apex of nu-metal. Both Slipknot's debut and Iowa were produced by Ross Robinson, famously known as "The Godfather Of Nu-Metal" (Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit, Coal Chamber, Vanilla Ice's nu-metal album, etc.). They prominently employ a DJ. They never "went soft" because the image wouldn't allow it but Corey Taylor has released four albums with Stone Sour. And I'm not concerned with hardness anyway: I love Deafheaven! I'm also not concerned with popularity or obscurity: I love Metallica! I believe Slipknot came up in a hard-as-fuck place and had hard-as-fuck lives, and I believe that comes out in their music, too. I respect that. I respect that they have succeeded and continue to succeed. I don't hate them, I just don't like them. And no, it's not required that Stereogum writers only cover stuff they like or anything. That only pertains to this one column that comes out once a month. There's a lot of great metal out there, so we talk about the stuff we find that we think is great, to the extent we are able. I assure you, no one else who writes for Stereogum likes this stuff.

I don't know if I can answer this question in the space of a single comment -- I feel like it deserves a dissertation or something; there are just so many contributing factors and residual effects. Basically, though, so we're clear: When I said "a sound and an era," I was talking about nu-metal specifically. And I think nu-metal almost across the board is just really bad music. It wasn't JUST bad music, though: It was oafish and empty and whiny and pandering and styleless and bereft of any of the qualities that made metal a great, powerful, mysterious thing. It affected the health of the genre and the community in ways that I think have still not healed. I get angry thinking about it. I'm sorry I can't give you a more detailed answer, though; it's a good question. I assumed the answer was self-evident, but it's really not.

I encouraged Chris to cover Slipknot in Week In Pop because that's not really something we'd cover here. Not because it's not metal or not noteworthy but because none of the people who contribute to this column like Slipknot. I'm happy to see a metal record doing well, but Slipknot are a product of a sound and an era that to me represents the very lowest point in the genre's history.

Yeah, weird coincidence that we did so much black metal this month. I noticed it too, and was gonna mention it. I mean, it's still a pretty broad array of sounds across that spectrum: I don't think Primordial, Darkspace, Cult Of Fire, and Taake, for instance, sound anything alike. But you're right to point it out. I was gonna do ATG in the intro, actually! That was my initial intention. Just as I was gonna do a PE of the record. But time didn't allow. I mean, you kinda know my thoughts: I love it without reservation, and it's one of my favorite albums of the year. But all that comes with a ton of personal stuff, too, so it's hard to hear it critically. Anyway, that was all woven into the review as I had it sketched out in my head. I still want to write it. Maybe for next month's intro?

Yep, you're right. I've amended the text above to reflect this. Thanks for the heads up!

Mudd Pudd was another Durst product. Guy might've had the worst ear in the history of music.

Totally fair, can't argue. I guess I feel like some bands have adopted elements of LP's sound and done good things with it. For instance, this AFI song:

Linkin Park don't belong in that conversation. They are a horrible band but there are positive things to be found in their songs, mostly in the hooks. Limp Bizkit and Staind have committed crimes against music that I believe demand the highest penalty. Who was worse? On one hand, the grooves in "Break Stuff" and "Rollin'" at least qualify as guilty pleasures, which is more than Staind have ever managed. On the other hand, Limp Bizkit were sort of solely responsible for the existence of Staind, so ...

Maybe? I always felt the primary barrier for Beats was the fact that they didn't offer a "free" ad-sponsored alternative to the subscription model. I assume iTunes will eliminate that paywall but who knows?

Oh wow, I think you might be right. Maybe it's not a cover per se but elements of Smetana's composition are certainly in this one. Good ear! The other song on the EP is called "Váh," and I can't find a song matching that name in relation to Smetana, but I wouldn't be surprised if that too borrowed from/updated/paid homage to his work.

That's actually a good point! FWIW, I'm not sure if Albini played ANY role here -- as I said in the post, it was recorded at EA; Albini could have just unlocked the doors and turned on the lights and then sat in his office playing online poker for the next few hours/days while the meter was running.

Nah, I meant "preceding," like: the s/t was really ambitious relative to what preceded it, because in Grohl's career preceding that record, he was just Nirvana's drummer: That record is pretty much PURE ambition, because before that, there was nothing. It is 100% more ambitious than what preceded it. The Colour And The Shape is super ambitious, because before that, Foo Fighters were just something Grohl was recording by himself in his house, and now, he was making these glossy, forceful, arena-sized anthems. It is, let's say, 65% more ambitious than what preceded it. Since then it's been diminishing returns -- with each album maybe 10% more or less ambitious than the one that preceded it. Right? Or am I wrong?