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!
August of 2024 was a pretty good month. First, it marked my return from the Injured Reserve, where I’d been nursing a high ego sprain and nagging executive dysfunction issues. These aren’t perfectly fixed, but being back on the field has shown beyond a doubt that I’m still a force to be reckoned with. Second, August of 2024 was a particularly fecund month for potential Records o’ the Month. That surprised me.
“In 2021, Fleshgod Apocalypse’s mastermind, Francesco Paoli (bass and vocals), suffered from a mountain climbing accident that landed him in the hospital. During the harrowing ordeal that followed, the band and he had little sense of what the future would hold for Fleshgod Apocalypse. It should come as no surprise that upon improving and getting back band activities, Francesco and the others burst into creative frenzy. From the remnants of this tragedy, Opera was born.” And what does a five year wait and a personally harrowing situation mean for the little neoclassical death metal band that could?
“Never before had I met a Promo God-designated genre-tag so perfect: “silliness.” La Suspendida is a wildly experimental Silent Pendulum-backed collaboration of four artists – and I’m not gonna pretend I know each of the act’s respective history or discography. Mostly based in Brooklyn, Kilteris a jazz metal trio featuring Imperial Triumphant drummer Kenny Grohowski, Andromeda Anarchia is an opera soprano and also a member of the opera/black metal Folterkammer project, the Growlers Choir is a Montreal-based group of metal vocalists, and Seven)Suns is a “dystopian” string quartet dedicated to translating metal to strings.” Gang’s all here!!
“No one does music like Jason Köhnen. His projects like Mansur, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and Bong-Ra constantly push boundaries, and while my reception to his work has been largely mixed, The Lovecraft Sextet has stuck. Debut In Memoriam was a unique and visceral experience, somehow weaponizing dark ambient, black metal, jazz, and opera into six tracks with three disparate but compatible palettes.” Sax and tentacles.
“After a 5 year hiatus, the madman Christopher Johnsson and his crew of musical misfits have returned in a big way with Beloved Antichrist, a TRIPLE album metal opera with 46 tracks running over 3 hours in length. Yes, this is essentially Swallow the Soprano, and it’s every bit as artsy fartsy as you feared, with numerous vocalists, endless interludes and more movements than a terminal dysentery ward. It’s yacht metal for the Lincoln Center set and the only album in recent memory to qualify as a lifestyle choice.” Opera-core forevermore.
