Starting 2025 with a bang was always important, and I elected the “being 26 days late with your Record o’ the Year post” as the best possible way to give everyone that patented Angry Metal Guy feeling of waiting and waiting only to be smacked in the face with 5000 words that you disagree with entirely. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Executive Dysfunction™! Let’s make a list!
With a bumper crop of excellent records released in September, this has been one of the most difficult R(s)otM posts for me to write. And yet, such is my fate. Alas, that these evil days should be mine!
“When I wrote up Menschenmühle, the debut full-length by Germany’s Kanonenfieber, in late 2021, I described it as ‘stunning.’ The storytelling arc that it achieves, opening with the almost enthusiastic bombast of the early days of the Great War, through to the exhausted horror of No Man’s Land, is incredible. Cast in shades of blackened death metal, I ended up crowning it my Album of the Year, calling it a ‘masterpiece.’ So how does one write the follow-up to a masterpiece?” With one’s tongue, apparently.
