Musical Superlatives (2008 edition!)

It's getting to be the end of 2008 and you know what that means: I cram my musical tastes down everyone's throat in my top 10 albums of the year. But don't take my word for it... no, no, DO take my word for it. Moving on...

10. ObZen - Meshuggah
Every time Meshuggah releases an album I always think to myself: "why bother dividing this into tracks?" But the thing is, their hour long fiddling with spastic time signature changes and attempts to see how many more strings they can add below a low E continue to impress me. Is it as good as Nothing? No, but it's damn fine and they pull out plenty of riffs that will surprise and impress.

9. Fortress - Protest the Hero
Their initial effort (Kezia), while technically very proficient, suffered from really shitty mixing. This is a problem when you do really high, technical riffing and coheed-esque wailing (in a good way, but it's still really high) and forget to put any bass into the mix. Fortress fixed this problem, and the songwriting as a whole has stepped up a notch. Sometimes incredibly disonnant, sometimes very melodious, but very tight, fast, and technical. A promising act.

8. Shogun - Trivium
This is more of an award for improvement than for releasing a spectacular album. It's certainly no Ascendancy, but the way they removed everything I disliked about The Crusade, it's like this album was a personal apology to me, and that says something.

7. Watershed - Opeth
Opeth takes their usual sound here, but adds a lot of proggy little tidbits to distract from the Death Metal assault that their songs have a tendency to dissolve into. On the whole, this album feels more balanced than anything they've done in a while, which proves that even the most established death/prog acts can be subject to maturing once in a while.

6. Reason to Believe - Pennywise
These guys have kind of been phoning it in for a while, but this album gets them back to some silver age style Land of the Free type shit. It doesn't hurt when they just give the album out for free for the first two weeks of its release either. Point is, this feels like the first album where they've put in any effort in years, and it is a reminder of how great Pennywise CAN be. Now if someone could only convince them to play any songs from after 1995 in concert...

5. Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace - The Offspring
It has been 5 goddamn years since these guys have done anything, then out of the blue they came out with a full album and much to my surprise, it was really good. Like, at least as good as Splinter. A few too many slow-ish radio sounding songs, but the faster SoCal punk tracks completely make up for it. "Shit is Fucked Up" is probably one of the best songs they've done since "All I Want"

4. Agony and Irony - Alkaline Trio
The problem when a band's most recent release is your favorite is that the subsequent release is almost guaranteed to disappoint. This album, however, had me astounded at how fluidly the guys picked up from where they left off with Crimson, and keep moving in a new and fresh direction. They've gone in a less minimalist direction, but it's nice to see that they acknowledge that sticking with a minimalist sound stagnates quickly. Just another solid release in an ever improving series.

3. Appeal to Reason - Rise Against
You know, I have this written down as my number three, but coming up with specific reasons is hard. Rise against is one of the few bands where I like how relatively static their sound has remained, so the reason I liked this album so much is that it was exactly what I was expecting: More of the same, but a little tweaked for complexity's sake. This is a pretty subjective pick, but fuck you, you don't like it, write your own damn blog nobody reads.

2. Want - 3OH!3
I can't even begin to describe how much I love this album. I wish I could defend myself by saying it's an ironic love, but it has surpassed that. The songs are catchy, trashy, shamelessly self promoting, and probably the most fun ANYTHING I've heard in a long ass time. 3OH!3 is literally the only thing that I have a remote amount of Colorado pride for. Fun! Trashy! Catchy! Delightful! ETC.!!!!!

1. If - Mindless Self Indulgence
I mean, did anyone not see this one coming? Within 2 days of the album's release the top 15 on my iTunes "top 25 most played" were the tracks from this album. It exemplifies everything I loved about their last album, but even more so. I mean, MSI is totally one of those bands that you either like the sound or you don't. If you like MSI, you'll like this album, if you don't, you won't. I personally LOVE MSI and thusly would bed this album in an intimate manner. Several times. Consecutively.

And here is the rest of the crap that aaaaalmost made the list:

Scars on Broadway - Scars on Broadway - This was nixed because Daron is a bitch, no matter what captain "anonymous" says a few posts below. Also because half of the songs on it are shit, but the other half are really really awesome.

All Hope Is Gone - Slipknot - Maybe if Corey hadn't decided to make a new Stone Sour album featuring guest appearances by Slipknot, I would still care that this album existed. As it stands, it didn't bode well that when I went through the "list of 2008 releases" on Wikipedia, I saw this album and said "oh right, they DID come out with something this summer".

Death Magnetic - Metallica - A really solid effort. I just can't bring myself to honor James Hetfield or Lars Ulrich for anything. They are insufferable whiny bitches who just happened to make good music in the 80's and very early 90's, and then one more time in 2008.

Midnight Boom - The Kills - This album is really quite good, and their singer just has a very sexy sound (yes their singer is a girl, wiseasses). The problem here was that it was a little too samey and the sound never got quiiiite interesting enough to justify the samey-ness.

Well, that's that. See you kids around.