With 2017 drawing to a close, it seems fitting to look back on the year in music. What have your favorite artists released this year? Have any memorable scandals taken place? Did any new artists catch your ear, or old artists lost your interest? Sit down and tell us all about it.
This year was big for me in Showtunes. It's when I started working hard to find more modern musicals instead of just going to the local theater stuff and hoping I liked what they did. It's how I started listening to Waitress and The View Upstairs.
Take this as a promise of a more comprehensive post when I'm no longer neck-deep in papers and mourning Warrel Dane's death. (And when I have given the new Diablo Swing Orchestra a few spins.)
Spoiler alert: this list probably contains more black metal than my 2016 list. Hm.
2017 has been a great year for music that I like (mainly Metal).
My favorite band Helloween started their Pumpkins United Tour, reuniting with Michael Kiske and Kai Hansen - a tour that I'm seeing next year! In conjuction with the beginning of the tour, they released the first song with all seven members of the lineup. It's called "Pumpkins United" and it's easily one of my favorite songs from the year.
Some of my favorite albums from the year in no order - and there's still WAY TOO MANY more that I need to listen to, so I probably can't do a proper list until it's almost 2019:
Deep Purple - inFinite
Persefone - Aathma
Place Vendome - Close to the Sun
Sanctuary - Inception (even if it's recordings from 1986)
Palast - Palast
Creeper - Eternity, in Your Arms
Tankard - One Foot in the Grave
Masterplan - PumpKings (their Helloween cover album of all songs Roland Grapow wrote)
Beast In Black - Berserker (one of the best from the year!)
Battle Beast - Bringer of Pain
Venom Inc. - Ave
Great White - Full Circle
Aldaria - Land of Light
Coldplay - Kaleidoscope
Imagine Dragons - Evolve
Linkin Park - One More Light (loved it from day 1. I was more than excited to go grab the album on May 19)
and all the songs from the "Night Begins to Shine" episode of Teen Titans GO! mrgreen
And I went to some cool concerts this year, making this my personal favorite year for concerts so far.
Sabaton, Battle Beast, and Leaves' Eyes in Tampa (May 20)
It was the best Birthday I've ever had! At the time I had never been closer to a stage before. My brother and I waited for hours outside The Orpheum so we could be close to the stage and it was so worth it! Iron Maiden and Ghost in Tampa (June 11)
Got to hang with my brother and his friends. Both Iron Maiden and Ghost were great. Coldplay, AlunaGeorge, and Izzy Bizu in Miami (August 28 )
Drove all the way down to Miami for this one and the trip was 100% worth it! Coldplay was AMAZING. Jack Russell's Great White in Largo (September 22)
This one was in my hometown, a venue only a few minutes from where I live. I was able to get directly in front of the stage and got a lot of smiles from Robby Lochner and Jack Russell. I even got to meet everyone after the show. This was on one end a huge highlight and also not, in a way Jack was in awful shape after the show, which kinda hurt. But he was killin' it on stage! Tesla, Weapons of Anew, and Voices of Extreme in Clearwater (September 29)
This was my second time seeing Tesla and it was their first time in Pinellas County in a long time. I couldn't miss this one. :] Imagine Dragons, Grouplove, and K. Flay in Orlando (November 10)
Orlando is a few hours away and we hit so much traffic that we missed all of K. Flay's set and most of Grouplove's but Imagine Dragons were so amazing that I was perfectly just going to see them.
I also managed to finish up studio album collections for some of my favorite bands:
Helloween (I now have at least one copy of all of their studio albums/EP's)
Deep Purple (It took forever to find copies of Bananas, Purpendicular, and Abandon)
Tesla
And I even bought music when we had absolutely no power from Hurricane Irma and I had no way of playing it... but I bought some anyway. rofl
I dived into The Killers older albums, And Bad Suns. The killers came out with a new album buuut I stick to the older songs, Kept on from deftones to the lead singers side projects and dumped Korn. I'm just not feelin it anymore as i used to.
Here's my brief rundown of a few albums I've enjoyed.
Harley Poe - Lost and Losing It
Archivist - Construct
Wind In His Hair - Earthwrecker
8 6 Crew - Working Class Raggae
The Menzingers - After The Party
c**k Sparrer - Forever
Dawn Ray'd - The Unlawful Assembly
and pretty sure Toundra's - IV will be added onto this once it comes out in a week or so.
As promised, here is my recap of my 2017 in music. Lots of semi-underground metal, lots of black metal, a good sprinkling of death metal too. Kind of a down year for doom (except death-doom if that's your thing), when last year was so good. Anyway. Here's a top-15 list with a couple of honorable mentions. Top-10 was not enough but top-20 had me feeling like I was reaching at some points for albums I ended up not really paying a lot of attention to this year.
Favorite albums of 2017:
HM: Venenum - Trance of Death
HM: Undrask - Battle Through Time
15. The Great Old Ones - EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy
14. Pyrrhon - What Passes for Survival
13. Havukruunu - Kelle surut soi
12. Spirit Adrift - Curse of Conception
11. Archspire - Relentless Mutation
10. Alestorm - No Grave But The Sea
9. Blaze of Perdition - Conscious Darkness
8. Caligula's Horse - In Contact
7. Der Weg einer Freiheit - Finisterre
6. Diablo Swing Orchestra - Pacifisticuffs
5. Impure Wilhelmina - Radiation
4. Asagraum - Potestas Magicum Diaboli
3. Chelsea Wolfe - Hiss Spun
2. Dodecahedron - Kwintessens
1. Bestia Arcana - Holókauston
Disappointments and heartbreaks:
Pallbearer - Heartless. This one is kind of unfair, I know. It did spawn one of my favorite songs of theirs, ever, "A Plea for Understanding." It's far from a bad record. But I can't place it in my year-end list, and that's a huge disappointment. Part of this is that I feel that the band turned away from what made them so great in the first place, their writing of epic, emotive, heavy, hooky doom. I'm all for going prog, but the hooks hadn't landed for me this time around, and while I don't wanna be the guy who goes "this isn't heavy enough," y'know...
Artifical Brain - Infrared Horizon. I'm a huge fanboy of these guys, but this new album didn't do it for me the way Labyrinth Constellation did. They've traded their writhing, filthy, chaotic sound for the sterility and emptiness of outer space. Sometimes, less isn't more.
Myrkur - Mareridt. I'm gonna keep rooting for her, but she still hasn't given me a full-length I enjoy. The songwriting still feels terribly half-baked as it did on M. Plus, she managed to make a boring collaboration with Chelsea Wolfe of all people.
While Heaven Wept going on hold and Spawn of Possession disbanding.
The deaths of Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, and Warrel Dane. Truly tragic, especially with the first two. These three were among my favorite vocalists, and sang for bands that got me into heavier and heavier music: Linkin Park, Soundgarden, and Nevermore were all bands that I loved and bands that led me to explore rock and metal more. I haven't bothered to check if 2017 took more of my favorite artists than 2016, but goddamn did these losses feel more personal.
Favorite song of the year:
Manetheren - "The Ritual" (The End) Idk how the ******** this won me over, but somehow it did. Maybe it's the galloping intro riffage. Maybe it's the beautiful and subtle melodies. Maybe it's that amazing use of guitar modulation to create an atmosphere. I'm struggling to do this song justice, but it's so damn hypnotic and has not ever left my playlists ever since The End came out.
Favorite "mainstream" songs:
Despite me living under a ******** rock, I also have a few pop songs I like. I sadly have not heard much of what Pitchfork et. al. thinks is good pop. So don't expect a "cultured" list.
(I've heard DAMN. Not bad, but not Kendrick's best, definitely overhyped.)
Big Shaq - "Mans Not Hot." I unironically love this song. It's stupid as hell but it's too much fun and Big Shaq somehow makes it work. Also, I didn't enjoy a lot of pop this year so I just had to fill it with what I was actually listening to the most after these four songs.
Ed Sheeran - "Perfect." I'm willing to claim this is the "Wonderful Tonight" of 2017. Watch this become everyone's wedding song next year. The fact there are three good versions of this makes this all the better. Shame that ÷ is such a crappy album as a whole.
Sam Smith - "Too Good At Goodbyes." Not-so-guilty pleasure. I love Sam Smith's voice and wish I could sing like him. Stellar vocals, anthemic and relatable as ********. Also, who hurt you, Sam?
Carly Rae Jepsen - "Cut to the Feeling." This song is pure sugary goodness and the fact that there wasn't any room on Emotion Side B for this is a testament to what a treasure Carly Rae Jepsen is. Any other year, CRJ woulda won this. Except...
Luis Fonsi - "Despacito" (feat. Daddy Yankee) Yeah, 2017 was the year of "Despacito" as far as I'm concerned. It's just impossible to get out of your head even if you don't know the lyrics. This may be the one thing I like that Daddy Yankee was involved in.
A lot of music I've listened to and obtained has come from YouTube oddly enough this year.
When I'm working on stuff, I need music in the background. I found NCS on YouTube and let the music they put up play. I found I liked a lot of it, and I've found a lot of new artists because of it. And since I was listening to that all the time, it gave a suggestion for another artist called TheFatRat, who I soon I bought his EP and a bunch of other songs. He's the artist I've bought the most music from for this year lol whee
I made a list of my favorite albums of this year! (plus a couple singles)
Jersey Devil - Ducktails
Corpus I - Show Me The Body
Avalon - The Huntress and Holder of Hands
You're Welcome - Wavves
Yours Conditionally - Tennis
Wolves - Rise Against
Trash Generator - Tera Melos
The Deep - clipping.
Bitter Wine - Most People
Mumble Rap - Belly
Villains - Queens of the Stone Age
Savage Sinusoid - Igorrr
Nervous - Cocainejesus
Bloodshot Tokyo - The Dig
Coils - Ramona Falls
You're Not You Anymore - Counterparts
Plural - Electric Guest
Still Striving - A$AP Ferg
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