Monolithic is not a word to be used casually. If you say it, you must truly mean it. In the past, few albums have managed to gain the title – Sleep’s Dopesmoker and Electric Wizard’s Come My Fanatics… are two of the few examples – but every once in a while, you find an album that can’t really be called anything else. Welcome to the world of Ancestors. This is monolithic.

You know, it is not so often that a band sounds better than their primary influences. It is even rarer that they manage this right from the get-go on their debut album. Xerath somehow does this with one of the most creative, coherent, and astonishingly excellent sounds of today

The 8-string guitar is not a very common instrument. This is probably due to the fact that it is not for the faint-hearted guitarist. It takes a strong person to wield one, and playing those massive chords is not necessarily an easy tasks. One man, however, can do it. His name is Tosin Abasi, and damn can he shred.

Getting Ed Repka to do an album cover for you is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world. Somehow, Ravage have managed to get him to do the artwork for The End of Tomorrow. In my experience, most of the bands that Repka has worked with certainly play up to the quality of the art. These guys would appear to be able to do that, given their almost 15 years of experience, despite this being their sophomore effort. They cannot, though. By no means can Ravage even be compared to Death, Megadeth, Possessed, or Hyades.

Those of you educated in the vast expanse that is musical genredom will be able to say that post-punk and black metal have nothing in common. Even those of you who have never heard of either style should be able to tell immediately that they are unrelated. I agree. The Cure and Mayhem really don’t share any musical aspects with each other. However, the French men and women of Amesoeurs have torn down the wall and created one of the most intriguing sounds of today.

So much X-MESS! Listen for holiday- and winter-themed tunes throughout the podcast, with all the heaviness you’ve come to know, love, and expect

Featured Bands: Agalloch, Austrian Death Machine, Baroness, Converge, DragonForce, Earthen Grave, Halford, Hammer Horde, Joe Satriani, Marduk, Mastodon, Mithras, Månegarm, Nathruzym, Nile, Sebastian Bach, Sonata Arctica, Steve Morse, Steve Vai, Swallow The Sun, The Fucking Champs, The Sword, Unleashed, Various Artists, Wintersun

Featured Bands: Baroness,
 Between The Buried and Me, Black Sabbath,
 Coalesce,
 Converge,
 Ensiferum,
 Hidden Hand,
 Immortal,
 Katatonia,
 Mastodon,
 Melvins,
 Nathruzym,
 Nile,
 Pelican,
 Saviours,
 Secrets of the Moon,
 Shrinebuilder,
 Skeletonwitch,
 Sleep,
 Swallow The Sun,
 Swans,
 The Fucking Champs,
 The Red Chord,
 Volbeat,
 Vreid

Okay, so I was teetering on three albums for my Top 13 Metal Albums of 2009 list. It wasn’t easy to exclude these, but since they all had great packaging, I thought I’d make a separate post.

This year, I decided to tag certain albums as ‘Best of 2009′ as I wrote the reviews in order to make a year-end compilation list easier to construct. It helped some, but man was this ever a dense year! It’s difficult to make the decisions (and we all know opinions are like assholes), but I’m dang proud of this here lineup. So here goes…

It’s been a while since I have felt so… blasé about an album. This is certainly a great improvement over Belphegor’s previous release, Bondage Goat Zombie (especially in the artwork and title department), but I still don’t feel the band clicking like they did on earlier albums like Blutsabbath. It just feels like there’s something missing.