Revocation, "Fracked"

I was glad to see Governor Cuomo move to ban fracking in New York today, with state health commissioner Howard Zucker noting that the health risks wouldn't be worth the gas and jobs. However, I was disappointed that the announcement didn't contain a single quote from Revocation's "Fracked."



Death metal lyrics are often useless, and usually incomprehensible even when they're good (see Misery Index and Pig Destroyer.) But "Fracked" ranks with Metallica's "Blackened," Testament's "Greenhouse Effect" and the entire Gojira discography as one of metal's sharpest odes to environmentalism. The lyrics are blunt but avoid the self-importance that undermines too many environmental crusaders' arguments. And even the less direct stanzas ("unearthing the crypts"--perhaps a Suffocation reference?) sound killer laid over Dave Davidson's progressions.

The Ten Best Metal Records of 2013, So Far

In alphabetical order:

1. Amon Amarth, Deceiver of the Gods

Not many bands can stay relevant by making the same album over and over again. But as long as the Vikings in Amon Amarth are owning death metal's most energizing riffs and sea shantey choruses, they'll be one of rare those bands.



2. ASG, Blood Drive

The riffs have slowed down, the melodies soar, and yet the sun-baked stoner metal tones that made Win Us Over a keeper radiate through. This year's gateway metal album to beat.



3. The Dillinger Escape Plan, One of Us is the Killer

Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Replacements, DEP's one consistency was that they were becoming more streamlined and produced with every album. Until this year--One of Us is the Killer is a heavy dose of ferocity that both reaches back to and expands on their early sonic furies. You know, from when mathcore was a punchline.



4. Intronaut, Habitual Levitations

"Nimble," "catchy" and "addictive" aren't words usually used to describe prog-rock. Unless someone is doing it better than everyone else.



5. Kvelertak, Meir

Nobody wants to feel the pressure of following up a monster debut, but Kvelertak sound like they love it. Your friends who tell you about DIIV saving punk and Liturgy saving metal are missing out.



6. Nails, Abandon All Life

Wow! Where did these guys come from? Did someone make a bet that they could make Pig Destroyer sound like the Foo Fighters in 17 minutes? Collect.



7. Ramming Speed, Doomed To Destroy, Destined To Die

It takes a lot for me to tolerate neo-thrash. Even the best bands, like Municipal Waste and Skeletonwitch, are hard to listen to when there's already the Big Four and Testament. But Ramming Speed fused it with just enough death metal to make me wonder why no one thought of this before, between headbangs.



8. Shining, One One One

I don't know what made a Swedish avant-jazz band decide that they could save industrial metal, but I hope they keep doing it. No wonder NIN is back this year.



9. Soilwork, The Living Infinite

Outside of Natural Born Chaos, I assumed that Soilwork was a perfectly honorable background metal band. I had no interest in picking up a double album from them, until a friend planted it in my dropbox. Who knew that a 2-CD death metal set, much less one from Soilwork, could rock this hard? Their countrymen in In Flames and Arch Enemy haven't put out anything this potent in ages.



10. Queens of the Stone Age, Like Clockwork

In which Josh Homme forfeits his title as rock's coolest man to out himself as an emotional wreck. The bravest twist yet in one of modern rock's most indispensable careers.

The Ten Best Metal Records of 2012

Alphabetical order.

1. Cattle Decapitation, Monolith of Inhumanity
Funnier than Meat is Murder.



2. Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind
Punk rock is a fine place and worth fighting for.


3. Deftones, Koi No Yokan
No matter how hard you try you can't stop us now.


4. Goatwhore, Blood for the Master
Decibel: 8. Pitchfork: 4.8.


5. Gojia, L'enfant Sauvage
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.


6. High on Fire, De Vermis Mysteriis
So do Motörhead, AC/DC, the Ramones and Little Richard.


7. Meshuggah, Koloss
Your djent is too short to box with gods.


8. Pig Destroyer, Book Burner
Sorry, pig. And book.


9. Revocation, Teratogenesis
The free, internet-only, Scion-presented EP that roared.


10. Torche, Harmonicraft
Flying outside now, too.

Five Reasons to Get Megapumped

1. Between the Buried and Me, "Telos"

Despite being titled The Parallax II: Future Sequence, Between the Buried and Me's new full-length, out October 9, confirms their status in the metal elite.



2. Converge, "Aimless Arrows"

Three years later, Axe to Fall is one of my all-time favorite albums. I can't wait to find out what happens next by October 9.



3. Deftones, "Leathers"

I didn't think the Deftones could top Diamond Eyes, but the first song from Koi No Yokan, out November 13, is metalgaze perfection.



4. Pig Destroyer, "Burning Palm"

Just in case five years was long enough for you to forget that nobody does grindcore better, Pig Destroyer is coming back with Book Burner, out October 22.



5. Revocation, "Teratogenesis"

America's best death metal band has a free new EP out this Tuesday. No excuses to miss this one.

System of a Down at Jones Beach Theater

Seven years after their last album, System of a Down still sound like mainstream metal's last stand. They're still the newest cutting edge metal act whose CDs could be sold at Target, the most modern metal band to write a tolerable song that your sister knows the words to. At Jones Beach Theater last Sunday, they gave no indication that they'll be releasing new music, even if that may be exactly what underground metal needs right now. System's ability to be avant-garde and popular was reflected in the line outside the venue, where Wiz Khalifa and Daniel Johnston t-shirts met.

Headbangers will always need our System of a Downs. Gripe all you want about it not being kvlt enough for you, but you never would have discovered grindcore if you hadn't heard Pantera, and there is an abundance of exciting underground metal bands with no modern gateway artist. Either System have to make new music, or Pig Destroyer is going to have to start writing choruses.



Openers the Deftones tore into "Rocket Skates" moments before the sky turned black and released a torrential storm on the band and attendees. Undeterred, either by their own professionalism, the crowd's energy or the fact that their biggest foe was still the Jones Beach acoustics, they boosted a standard "Best of the Deftones" setlist by employing the weather into their show. "This is some Michael Jackson shit happening, without (mechanical) fans," commented singer Chino Moreno, while the winds and downpour gave songs like "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)" a grandeur that they never could have found in the Deftones' usual club setting.



System of a Down opened with "Prison Song," an anti-incarceration anthem that alternates between singer Serj Tankian's barked statistics and guitarist Daron Malakian's squeaked imitation of a crack-smoking Hollywood dwelling. It was a reminder of how the band originally stood out, by blending goofy irreverence and dour politics somehow never undermined each other (most System-y shirt: an armored vehicle with an erected tank gun that read "MINE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.") Like Malakian's hero, Frank Zappa, System's songs danced between cheery melodies ("Bounce," "Cigaro,") and guitar spazz outs ("Suite-Pee," "Sugar,") often in the same composition ("Chop Suey," "B.Y.O.B.") If anything, the band's sense of humor gave their politics more weight than the self-serious riot acts of Rage Against the Machine and Lamb of God.

But like Rage, System of a Down showed last Sunday that they are best as a unit. Tankain's solo records or Malakian's Scars on Broadway have been struggling to come up with anything as instant as "Needles" or at wrenching as "Hypnotize" ever since System of a Down announced their hiatus in 2006. By last Sunday's show, they've still "got it," and if SOAD never records again as a band, it would the metal community's loss.

With a Purposeful Grimace and a Terrible Sound

When Gojira's From Mars to Sirius stormed the US in 2006, earnest but lazy stateside listeners called the band "a French Mastodon." Now that their fifth album, L'enfaunt Sauvage is out, no one with shrewder ears than Jann Wenner will be making that mistake.



Unlike the Georgia Giants, whose every record seems to reflect a new direction, or Lamb of God, content to stomp on their burnt palaces from heron, Gojira have found where they're going and gone deeper over their past few records. The oddly dry The Link excepted, each Gojira album succincts and out-brutalizes the serrated riffage and tribal drumming of the record before.

How Gojira can make death-prog this ingratiating is still a mystery. On L'enfant Sauvage, the band is wiping out old things like hooks and time signatures and rendering their Inconvenient Truth-worthy lyrics indecipherable. The push-pull of brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier is the kind of chemistry that comes around once in a metal moon--check out how Mario's cymbal precision glows under Joe's palm-muting in "Explosia," or how the drums infiltrate the guitar lines of "Liquid Fire" and the title track. A professor of tones, slides and pinch harmonics, Duplantier is one of the 21st century's guitar gods, whether turning "Born in Winter"'s mellow drone into a savage melody, eliciting cries under his brother's beatdown on "Pain is a Master" or dropping in on the ocean in "The Wild Healer." Unless Converge or Pig Destroyer can do better, this will be the year's best metal album.