Anaal Nathrakh - Passion

Anaal Nathrakh’s ‘Passion’ sounds like the final evolutionary step of heavy metal music. It combines unspeakably extreme, wall-of-sound mixing, absurdly fast and intricate drums, searing riffs with the most violent vocals imaginable. Frequently, the shrieking departs from the standard death-metal howls and enters a dark new territory of disturbingly convincing pained-yelps, and hoarse, tearful cries. AN has long been one of the honored and reviled chaplains of extreme metal, and with this release, they have offered up the audio equivalent to a mass-extinction event. It’s the noise of pigs being slaughtered, the treads of tanks shredding through bones and flesh. If music is ever going to be fully weaponized, these British bastards are at the top of the list.

Devin Townsend - Deconstruction

Sometimes I listen to a new release and feel like I could fit the entire album in a shot glass. Some bands like to think that they’ve got a unique sound, so they pigeonhole themselves with their style and refuse to change it, lest they be seen as betraying their image. Devin Townsend doesn’t do this. Devin Townsend is on a mission: he has to make everything he records huge—not state-fair-pumpkin huge, circus-freak huge. Landkreuzer P-1500 Monster huge. He mixes his music so that every instrument is playing at one hundred percent power nearly the entire time, while including moments of serenity and softness to tease the listener into turning up the volume, only to be blasted away by the unfathomably low, hydrogen-bomb power chords. This process produces a record that sounds like Devin bought a retired missile silo, filled it with VX gas, set an orchestra on fire and gave his band a Chinook of black tar heroin, and told them to not stop playing until everyone in the orchestra died. ‘Deconstruction’ isn’t just the best death metal album I’ve heard all year; it’s one of the best metal albums I’ve heard in my life.

But what makes it worth your time?