Clayton Michaels

2014 turned out to be one of the strongest years for metal in recent memory, making the compiling of this list something of a challenge. It seemed like a particularly strong year for black metal, which comprises half of my list.

Here’s the thing about Soused, the collaborative album from avant-garde singer-songwriter Scott Walker and everybody’s favorite drone/doom merchants Sunn O))): it doesn’t really seem like that much of a collaboration. Yes, there are moments when the familiar downtuned bombast of Messrs. Anderson and O’Malley come to the fore, but if you come to Soused primarily as a Sunn O))) fan, you’ll find those moments to be disappointingly few (though they become more obvious with repeated listens). Still, there’s much about Soused to recommend, once you get used to some of Walker’s musical eccentricities.

I tend to be pretty open-minded when it comes to my musical consumption, but the one genre I’ve never really been able to get into is noise. The closest I’ve ever really come is Merzbow’s collaborations with Boris. When I try listening his solo recordings, though, I feel like I’m missing something; I have a hard time distinguishing one track from the next. But there was something about Decibel magazine’s recent Noise issue made me feel like I needed to revisit the genre, specifically the works of Margaret Chardiet, better known as Pharmakon, whose second album Bestial Burden was recently released by Sacred Bones, a decidedly non-noise label I’m most familiar with as the home of arty synth-pop chanteuse Zola Jesus. And while I still don’t know if I would say that I ‘get’ noise as a genre, I absolutely fucking love this Pharmakon record.