Metaling Mage: The Stuff Too Long To Tweet

Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff My previous post had all my absolute favorite stuff from the decade, but there are still plenty of things I'd like to call attention to! The order here is going to be pretty random. Blut Aus Nord- 777 The Desanctification Blut Aus Nord- Hallucinogen Blut Aus Nord really bookended the decade for me with two albums I absolutely adore.  Both are black metal inspired, but beyond that the similarities are minimal except for the obvious genius behind both of them. The Desanctification is an industrial, dissonant nightmare while Hallucinogen is proggy and pretty and trippy in all the right ways.  Gorguts- Colored Sands   Ulcerate- The Destroyers of All Slugdge- Esoteric Malacology Gorguts- Pleiades' Dust Horrendous- Idol I promised there would be death metal! These are five of my favorite death metal releases of the decade. In my heart I always feel like the kind of guy who likes death ...

The last decade has been transformative for me as a music fan.  I spent most of the 2000s only casually listening to music, and it was almost entirely Neurosis, Converge, Mastodon, and a few old hardcore albums.  I went to only a few shows a year (a disaster given then I spent most of the decade childless living in Manhattan).  I had started a new job in 1999, moved to NYC in 2000, got married in 2001, etc.. etc... and back then it was a lot harder to just go online and enter an infinite wormhole of all the best new music. You had to work at it a bit more then, and between my job and parenting and semi-professional poker and dabbling in semi-professional Magic: the Gathering I guess I didn't have the time or energy to do the work.   Converge- Axe to Fall As that decade wound down and the new one began, a few pivotal things happened.  The first thing was a conversation with my friend Craig. I grew up with Craig in a town full of weirdos in Ind...