Most of the time when Rolling Stone writes about metal, it’s done pretty dismissively or covering bands much more mainstream, like Metallica. That’s why we weren’t all that surprised then their list of the top 50 albums of 2014 only contained one metal album, Yob’s Clearing the Path to Ascend. However, they’ve pretty much atoned for that with their genre-specific list of the top 20 metal albums of the year. Yob is, again, number 1, but instead of trotting out a safe list of everyone that released metal albums in the last, their list is pretty adventurous. We’ll give credit to Brandon Geist, who just arrived at the magazine, along with Grayson Currin, who works at Pitchfork, among the seven who contributed to the list.
Here’s who made the list:
20) Twilight, III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb
19) Krokodil, Nagash
18) Slipknot, .5: The Gray Chapter
17) Ommadon, V
16) Electric Wizard, Time to Die
15) Tombs, Savage Gold
14) Melvins, Hold It In
13) Blut Aus Nord, Memoria Vetusta III – Saturnian Poetry
12) The Austerity Progam, Beyond Calculation
11) Indian, From All Purity
10) Body Count, Manslaughter
9) Crowbar, Symmetry in Black
8) Mastodon, Once More ‘Round the Sun
7) Godflesh, A World Lit Only by Fire
6) Behemoth, The Satanist
5) Scott Walker + Sunn0))), Soused
4) Old Man Gloom, The Ape of God
3) At the Gates, At War With Reality
2) Triptykon, Melana Chasmata
1) Yob, Clearing the Path to Ascend
There are some pretty left-field choices in there. I didn’t even know anyone outside of the NYC area even knew who The Austerity Program were, and if this isn’t the first time Blut Aus Nord was ever mentioned anywhere on Rolling Stone, I’ll buy a subscription. It’s good to see the magazine write about heavy music, or music in general, as opposed to whatever Miley Cyrus is doing these days. They’ve definitely redeemed themselves for having only one remotely heavy album in their top fifty.
