Eleven albums I quite liked in 2012

Seeing as it's that time of year in which everyone is compiling terrible lists of things they liked in the past 12 months, I've decided to write my own terrible list. I won't name these albums the best of 2012, because I can't be arsed to think hard enough about them to truly commit to that statement, so here, in no particular order, are eleven albums I quite liked in 2012.


Rush - Clockwork Angels

It's the new Rush. In the future it'll probably be seen as one of the top ten best Rush albums, which automatically makes it one of the best albums from this year. Or any other year for that matter.

Ram - Death

Proper heavy metal. Like old school Judas Priest, but Swedish. Other notable Swedish heavy metal bands that released quite good albums this year include Grand Magus and Steelwing, but their videos weren't as metal.

Astra - The Black Chord

70s style prog rock. You can listen to it ironically with your hipster friends, but deep down you'll be fucking loving it.

Accept - Stalingrad

Accept are now two albums into the best comeback ever, writing stuff that's on a par with or better than their 80s output. Anyone who thinks that Accept can't be good without original singer Udo Dirkschneider needs to give this a listen and prepare to be converted.

Ne Obliviscaris - Portals of I

This sounds somewhat like a black metal Opeth with good production and a violin. Fat teenage girls in corsets will likely froth at the gash whilst listening to this.

Dark Quarterer - XXV

This re-recording of their 1987 debut is the perfect marriage of prog and metal, and hopefully they'll soon get their well overdue success so I can shun them and tell people I liked them back when they were good.

Wintersun - Time I

It took 8 years in the making, but Wintersun's sophomore effort is finally here. It only has three actual songs on it, and, as a whole, is a quite disappointing album. I still quite like it though, so it's going on the list regardless.

Cauldron - Tomorrow's Gone

More heavy metal. I wish I had written the riff to Nitebreaker, then I could be in a heavy metal band that no one likes.

  

Atoma - Skylight

I quite like this one because it has some non-metal elements, which means that when I play it in front of my friends they are taken aback by my eclecticism.

Overkill - The Electric Age

Overkill are awesome. I haven't actually had the time to even listen to this album yet, but I'm pretty confident that it's good. Hey, I'm a busy guy, I'll get round to it. If it turns out to be a crock of shit though replace this entry with either the new Testament or Kreator albums, neither of which I have heard either. If those two also turn out to be shit then just despair for the thrash metal music scene.

Slash - Apocalyptic Love

If you don't like simple, good-time hard rock then you're a miserable twat who needs to lighten up.

Why I Hate Bonus Tracks

I hate bonus tracks. You might think that having extra songs on an already brilliant album can surely only make a good thing better, but in the overwhelming majority of cases it just sullies the experience. Listening to albums in their entirety seems to be a lost art among the youth of this digital age, probably because a steady diet of WKD blue and video games seems to have rendered a sizable portion of our ADD addled nation deaf to any song that even approaches five minutes in length. This unfortunately means that many people have almost no hope of lasting the course of an entire album, where they might have to actually listen to the music being played, rather than mindlessly absorbing the familiar sounds that have already been pre-emptively forced into their brains by the mass media.

These days people only download that one song they like and ignore the rest of the album. And it’s the artist’s fault, in mainstream music at least, because they are not writing albums anymore, they are writing collections of inconsistent singles that are put together as an album. Record labels know that one hit song can sell an album, and sales are all they care about. The problem is, singles don’t guarantee album sales anymore, as digital downloads enable the buyer and/or thief to separate the wheat from the chaff and target specific songs. And yet the music industry refuses to change.

I, however, almost always listen to albums in their entirety, the way nature intended. As a fan of rock and heavy metal, the genres demand that I listen to this art in it’s true form, as opposed to the form of disembodied snippets of the overall genius on offer. Anyone who skips a track on a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis album is dead to me. Sit down and take in the whole thing properly. Look at the artwork. Ponder the lyrics. Gasp in awe at the organ solo.

Like anyone I also occasionally listen to individual tracks, as sometimes you just want to listen to that one ripsnorter of a song that gets you in the mood to go out on the town and make increasingly bad decisions. Nothing quite compares to listening to a whole album though, as sometimes you need the full experience rather than a bite-sized taster. Back in the day everyone listened to whole albums: you had your vinyl and you would listen to the whole record, stopping only briefly halfway through to quickly turn the damn thing over. If you skipped the first track on a Rush album, you may well have skipped about half the album. Albums were originally designed to be listened to as a whole, as a singular expression. This ethos largely continues in forms of rock and metal to this day.

And this is why bonus tracks annoy me, because having been blown away by an album; I don’t want to then listen to a crappy demo version of the song I just heard. I don’t want to hear a crappy live version of it either. I don’t want to hear a boring interview with the producer of the album, who is telling us all about how he made such a brilliant album, whilst blissfully unaware of the irony that this very interview is ruining all his hard work. I also don’t want to hear a terrible cover song that was forced onto album because the record label decided they wanted to re-release the album 6 months after its original release, with a new flimsy “limited edition” cardboard sleeve. I’m looking at you Roadrunner Records. I've been burned before. B-sides and rare tracks are sometimes worthwhile, but are more commonly songs that weren't good enough to make it onto the album, and, as such, it should have stayed that way. At the very least even the good bonus tracks mostly ruin the flow of the album anyway. Such curios are just there to take advantage of the other side of the social spectrum, the OCD sufferers, who are compelled to buy this crap simply to complete their collection. I know I've been guilty of buying the same album several times in the past, much to my own disappointment.

“Okay then,” I hear you resolutely say, “why don’t you just turn off the album once it has reached its originally planned conclusion, bypassing the bonus tracks altogether?” It’s a valid point dear reader, but an ultimately flawed one, as I, like so many other 40 year olds trapped in 20 year old bodies, like to sit down and really listen to the music when the mood takes me. It’s not something that’s on in the background whilst I’m heating up chicken nuggets and sending text messages, it’s an immersive experience in which I will sit in a comfy chair for the duration much like if I was watching a film. And if a blooper reel was stuck onto the ending credits of Schindler’s List, the atmosphere of the film would be ruined long before you managed to scramble for the remote, in a desperate frenzy, in order to try and stop the offending, superfluous material. It is too late. The moment is lost. Time to write a whiney article about it.

Ultimately bonus tracks are trying to get money for old rope. Countless special anniversary editions of classic albums swamp the shops, with all manner of extra dross that does nothing but undermine the original quality of the album, at extra expense to you the consumer. It’s no wonder that people don’t buy albums anymore.