Several friends of mine have been tagging me in posts asking for my Top 10. It took me a while to figure this out since I'm so indecisive. Even then this list feels incomplete. So came up with a list of criteria and see which albums fit the metrics. The albums must be:
1) Albums that I listened constantly when I first discovered them
2) Albums that informed my taste in music and informed me culturally
3) Albums that changed the way I view or appreciate music, especially the ones that expanded from what is possible of the genre
4) Albums that I still go back to every few months
5) Albums that still surprises me every time I listen to it
6) Albums that I can sustain long conversations about
So now, in no particular order:
Name: The Dillinger Escape Plan
Album Title: Miss Machine
Genre(s): Mathcore, Hardcore, Jazz
Year of Release: 2004
I first heard this album on a bus ride back from school. It felt so real because I felt like going through a religious experience while everyone else around me was oblivious to what’s going through my headphones.
Imagine a jazz band. Put in the ferociousness of a hardcore punk band, the madness and quirkiness of Mike Patton, and the forward thinking-ness of Nine Inch Nails’s approach to instrumentation, the proggy extreme metal tendencies of later-era Death and pop sensibilities. Blend all of that and you get Miss Machine. Even the cover screams jazz, which incidentally how I described the music (scream jazz) before I knew what “mathcore” was.
Take the track Sunshine the Werewolf, the whole thing sounds like Dave Brubeck through a wood chipper. Unretrofied sounds like something you’ll get out of Trent Reznor if you only described jazz to him but never heard of it. I was also interested in poetry back then. So Greg Pucciato’s weird lyrics and word play informed my post-modern ish writing. “Does the cat has disease or does the disease has cat?” on Unretrofied is probably one of the funniest things I’ve read for such a long time yet it made me sit down and think about how I described things.
I knew jack shit about music theory, time signatures, anything related to jazz or people like Miles Davis back then. But this album made me add more colors to my pallette. It made me realize that metal, hardcore, and punk weren’t only about aggression but it can also be artful. The inverse was equally important.
Name: Death
Album Title: Symbolic
Genre(s): Death Metal, Progressive Rock, Experimental
Year of Release: 1995
It was either this or Sound of Perseverance or Human. But I had to go to this since it made me fall in love with progressive death metal.
Death basically created death metal but I think several records in they realized they can't do the same gore and violence schtick. There are two types of metalheads. The ones that are in it purely for the aggression or heaviness and there are the ones that see heaviness as a tool to push the boundaries of art or at least inform art. I think Death was tired of more people seeing their aggression as the end, not the means to an end.
Name: Death Grips
Album Title: Ex-Military
Genre(s): Hip-Hop, Noise Rap, Digital Hardcore, Experimental
Year of Release: 2011
I know I want Death Grips on this list but choosing which album was hard. It all boiled down to Money Store, No Love Deep Web, Steroids and this.
But if I had to say which impacted me the most it would Ex Military.
While I do listen to rap, I wouldn't have put it in the category of extreme music. This album (or mixtape) changed everything for me. It's an amazing blend of rap (especially boom hap), industrial, hardcore punk, noise, synth, computer virus whatever.
The track Guillotine is a slow spiral down to madness. It starts off with a haunting distorted bass bouncing back forth. MC Ride's demented vocals engulfed the track like a deranged poet struggling to breathe. The overwhelming static then devolves into a thousand synth charging at each other like the extreme pressure of the Mariana trench. Takyon sounds like if Public Enemy made a pact with the devil and it involved Ride and Lucifer sharing a pact of cocaine. The energy of the percussion sounds like an army banging on drums made from the bones of their fallen enemies.
If the images above aren't enough to describe the album then imagine the ferociousness of Public Enemy, the borderline nihilistic static and distortion treatment of Godflesh, the energy of old hardcore punk records, the abbrasiveness of Napalm Death, and think Slayer if they listened to rap.
It reminded me the time I first discovered extreme metal and started a new chapter on my discovery of extreme music. Today, experimental noise rap and industrial rap are a steady part of my musical diet. It's been awhile since I've stan-ed a band like Death Grips.
Death Grips went on to experiment with different sounds (some even super melodic) but still maintained this album's strangeness and weirdness.
Name: Chthonic
Album Title: Takasago Army
Genre(s): Black Metal, Folk
Year of Release: 2011
Black Metal today is mainly shaped by Western European and Scandinavian mythology. So while I do enjoy those bands there is a huge disconnect beyond the cool factor of Vikings and this boy from South East Asia.
Chthonic, despite being Taiwanese resonated a lot for me. They were the first few Asian metal bands to be successful without sacrificing their Asian-ness.
But what resonated me most is their lyrical content. Their exploration of indigenous issues in their music made me feel represented in a world where Dayak issues normally get sidelined. There so many cultural similarities between their Pagan culture and Dayak culture and as a young boy it made me want to read more about the pre Christian pagan traditions. Best part of all, it was wrapped up in the aggressive music I've been listening in my teenage years.
Sorry for being political on a music related post but arguments for native rights and representation in Malaysia has been co-opted and appropriated by UMNO, who are led by the faces of feudalism-light. So talking about native rights and representation unfortunately leads you to the same vocabulary of the establishment. The identity has been subsumed by a Nationalist agenda that forces to see all bumiputeras as the same despite the lopsided access to power structures.
Listening to Chthonic, despite them not from a Dayak background, at the very least let me felt represented, not have my identity erased.
While their album Seediq Bale was my first exposure to the band, I feel Takasago Army had a greater impact to the way think about music, poetry and history.
Takasago Army described the journey of a Taiwanese tribesman forced to join the Japanese Imperial Army and forced to take part in atrocities in Singapore/Malaysia. All he wants instead is to be free and return to Taiwan but he doubts if he can rid of the evil things he has done. The blend of aggressive music and melancholic chord progressions was the only way to portray this.
Name: Depeche Mode
Album Title: Violator
Genre(s): Synthpop, New Wave, Electronic
Year of Release: 1990
It was either this, something from New Order or The Cure. The problem from the other two was that their outputs can be quite inconsistent despite Bizzare Love Triangle being one of my most favorite track ever. This choice is also probably the most accessible material on this list.
This Depeche Mode album however, front to back is perfect. It's like the Sweetest Perfection. (Hehe)
I first heard these songs as remixes and covers. But delving into their discography made me appreciate how forward thinking this album was.
While people were complaining how synths were popular and it took away from the sounds of guitars, Depeche Mode just put the complains aside and wrote what was essentially post punk with synth pop/synthwave instruments. This is Vangelis if he were to write a pop record. What pop would sound like if it can from a dystopian negativity dominated, overpopulated future.
I got a new found appreciation listening to what in my head was soundtrack accompanying the more downbeat moments of cyberpunk movies and literature.
They managed to be dirty without being explicit. David Gahan even said they wanted to write the most metal sounding album without sounding metal. Maybe that's why the melody lines fit so well into so many Gothenburg melodic death metal bands like At the Gates or In Flames.
This was a gateway band to more synthpop and synthwave. If it wasn't for Depeche Mode, I wouldn't end up listening to Drab Majesty, Crystal Castles, Black Queen or Sally Dige. They aren't strictly synthpop but they share the same dark, electronic aesthetics.
Name: Converge
Album Title: Jane Doe
Genre(s): Hardcore, Metalcore, Experimental
Year of Release: 2001
There were 3 albums by Converge that were competing for the same spot: Jane Doe, Axe to Fall, All the Love We Left Behind. Fuck it, I’m going to put The Dusk in Us in contention too. But the latter has not been around long enough for me to consider it a personal classic.
But the main reason I put Jane Doe as my choice is basically my love for the tracks Concubine and Fault and Fracture. If Converge’s discography was taught as a class, Concubine is basically the class summary. It is the manifesto of sounds to come.
The few seconds with the dissonant higher strings acting like a warning alarm and it just explodes into a barrage of the most aggressive hardcore I’ve ever heard. It was like Slayer dragging my mind forward in time as they move down the fret and dragging my brain back to its original spot and beating it to submission. The high shrieks of Jacob Bannon sounds like black metal from a bankruptcy ridden dilapidated neighbourhood. Only instead of imitating a banshee from mythology of old days, he is imitating a battered domestic abuse victim fighting back while holding tears. He sounds like he got his revenge but the despicable acts he has done turned him into the creature lurking in back alleys. It then drags into halts and burst of what could easily come from an Eyehategod record. The sludgy hatred sounds like the equivalent of someone dragging a body that they’re convinced they killed out of self-defence but feel like no one would believe them. So they stop and start, doubting themselves as they wail.
It perfectly encapsulates what Converge is meant to sound. Surely enough their future eras were extrapolations of what Concubine was. There were parts that move up and down the fret board that treats your conscience like a physical object to be trampled that could fit All We Love Left Behind. Then there’s the sludgy monstrosity that appeared in The Dusk in Us’s Reptilian. Though their years of touring with Neurosis gave them a deeper more contemplative edge that sounds like post-metal for people with anxiety and isn’t sure they want to play in sludge band or a grindcore band.
If anyone tells you metallic hardcore can’t work, play this album.
Name: Vektor
Album Title: Outer Isolation
Genre(s): Technical Thrash Metal
Year of Release: 2011
I’m too young have ever experience anything from the big four of thrash metal first hand. When St Anger came out, I was too young to understand it or understood why it was so hated. So I never bothered with the checking out any of their tracks. All I remembered was this Christian kid in school who thought I was super Christian too showing me Creeping Death and saying how it’s about biblical Egypt. When Death Magnetic came out, I thought it was lame. I did finally gave thrash the chance later in life but a huge chunk of it sounded goofy and sounded so out of my time. Out of the four, I preferred Slayer and Anthrax the most. Slayer was my choice mainly because it felt like a step up in extreme music and Anthrax because I was into hardcore punk and shit.
Then few years ago, Vektor came into the page. Now this was years after I got into extreme music. I thought thrash metal had nothing to offer me at all. I was already listening to the most extreme iteration of black/war metal and blackened sludge to offer. I was already knee deep into the complexity and technical virtuoso of mathcore and Converge’s brand of oft kilter metallic hardcore.
Vektor felt like a thrash metal response to all that. It was like Slayer’s aggression merged with the madness of Converge and the creative arrangement of bands I normally associate with progressive or avant garde black metal.
If someone cut up Slayer and got Jackson Pollock to create a collage out of it, you’ll get Outer Isolation. The whole album wasn’t just a random assortment of ideas though. It felt like it was carefully constructed. So you know how post-modern paintings normally look like random brush strokes to the random eye? Well, this band could sound randomly chaotic at first listen. But there’s an underlying sense of art in it. The person who is just randomly dropping paint has a sense of what the colours represent and the direction is headed.
The song Tetrastructural Minds best encapsulates this feeling. It’s beautifully chaotic but you can hear familiar structures, art directions yet presented in way you’re not used to. The intro alone sets a flurry of notes but it has a structure that could easily come off from a prog record but with an edge that could only come from the most evil parts of thrash, accompanied with a shriek that crosses between Tom Arraya and an alien banshee.
This is so familiar yet so alien.
Name: Run The Jewels
Album Title: Run The Jewels 2
Genre(s): Hip-Hop, Rap
Year of Release: 2014
I initially didn’t want to put that many rap groups/albums in this list because it isn’t really reflective of my past. I only got into rap at a later age. I hated the false representation of rap I heard on the radio. It sounded cheesy, poppy, and it didn’t resonate with me. Also, I thought Eminem was cheesy and too much of a try hard. So I never really had an Eminem phase like many of my age. I liked D12 but mainly it was out of irony from their track “My Band” and his songs like Cleaning Up My Closet. Little did I know that there was a lot more from what I’ve heard.
During my late teenage years, I accidentally rediscovered Outkast, who I thought were the few anomalies. And I got deeper onto rap and through their song The Whole World I discovered Killer Mike. His aggression and lyrical abilities destroyed my expectation of what rap should be. It wasn’t long I found out about Run The Jewels. As a kid I played old Playstation games at a cousin’s place and heard Rage Against The Machine’s Guerilla Radio on Tony Hawk Pro Skater…errr I can’t remember. What’s important was the aggression of Zach De La Rocha.
Now combine that with the East Coast, gritty industrial like production of El P, Killer Mike and Zach De La Rocha’s no nonsense political lectures were the audio equivalent of a protest. The dirty bass and Zach’s hypnotic chant promised me a crazy trip. Close Your Eyes and Count To Fuck was an anarcho-rap master piece. If I got into a fight, and I had to choose a song to hype me up, this would be it.
There was a time where I would be depressed and I just wanted to shake it off, I put this album, but mainly “Close Your Eyes” on repeat. Right after writing this I’m going for a run/long walk and I’m putting this song on repeat.
Name: Godflesh
Album Title: Streetcleaner
Genre(s): Industrial Metal, Sludge Metal
Year of Release: 1989
Clunky. Chunky. Dirty. Apocalyptic. Disturbing.
Godflesh, the grandfather of Industrial Metal embodies every single thing that genre tag brings to mind. The electronic drums being dragged over the sludgy riffs sounded like the warning someone plays in the background as a fascist marching band are fast approaching.
Like the sound of an overworked factory that doesn’t care about what OSHA has to say, the drums sound like pistons that are about to malfunction. It’s the nightmare that Marx warned us about as the workers are only kept working due to their minimal labour instead of being replaced by automation. As Justin Broadrick gnarls “YOU BREEEEED, LIKE RATSSS” I can imagine him as a half mechanical, factory manager that does not give a fuck about who you are as an individual but only you as a number.
The guitars are thick, sludgy and uncompromising. Despite the crazy chaotic nature of most of the music I listen to, Godflesh is the one that stands out. It is repetitive but not in an uncreative way. It’s meant to translate the horrors of an industrial age that sees you nothing as a figure in an excel sheet. You’re just a cog in the wheel. You’re nothing more than someone who keeps the system going. It’s the horror related atmosphere that can only be done with dirty, sludgy guitars, but with the blues of doom and Sabbath removed.
Name: Napalm Death
Album Title: The Code is Red...Long Live The Code
Genre(s): Grindcore, Hardcore Punk, Death Metal
Year of Release: 2005
Finally, the album that cemented the idea of extreme music to me. This might be an odd choice to fans of Napalm Death. There are more iconic albums like Scum, Enemies of The Music Business or even in their modern experimental era, Time Waits for No Slave or Smear Campaign are better choices.
It all boils down to two things. The first is that this is the first few albums I bought with my own money. I think it was my second or third. I remember the first being Sum 41’s Chuck. Yes, I was listening to pop punk. Even my poppier punk choices had metal elements in it. I wanted to listen to more punk and for some odd reason the idea of punks attracted me. But I wanted something more extreme. Something that’s more metal. I googled punk and metal, found grindcore and the first album by Napalm Death I saw at the record store for reason was this.
I was already downloading old records of Agnostic Front, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies and many more as I traced the roots of punk but none of them prepared me for this. The guttural voice just slammed me in the face but the simple punk arrangements just made me want to move slam my body against the wall. If Run the Jewels wanted me to start a riot. Napalm Death is the soundtrack to what’s happening in a riot and everybody tries to get out of the way when the water hose came in. You’re breathing heavily as everyone scrambles. The fear starts to kick in. You know someone’s getting injured. The snare drums going on a blast beat puts images of riot police thirsty for blood flashing before my eyes. Having Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys coming in with his sarcastic voice was like an icing on the cake. This was the bridge of metal and punk I’ve been waiting for.
The second reason was that this album got me on a grindcore binge. Whatever grindcore I listen to in the future, this was the benchmark. I was listening to Lock Up not long after purchasing this and I kept comparing it to this. When I started buying metal shirts, Napalm Death were my first few choices too. To be fair, I got a Dimmu Borgir shirt first. Then I got a bunch of Napalm Death shirts and patches. Even today, I still have their Nazi Punks Fuck Off shirt.
Bite sized aggression. The perfect bridge between metal and punk.
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Honourable mentions: Ulver, Outkast, Faith No More, Mike Patton, Anaal Nathrakh, Rage Against The Machine, Bad Brains, Alcest, Public Enemy, The Misfits, Cattle Decapitation, Gravediggaz, A Tribe Called Quest, Nine Inch Nails, JPEGMAFIA, Agalloch, Wu Tang Clan, Chelsea Wolfe, Eyehategod, Bob Dylan, Suicidal Tendencies, Patti Smith, Johnny Cash, Social Distortion, The Beatles, The Melvins, Crowbar, Slayer, Necrophagist, White Lung, Deftones, Smasing Pumpkins, and more.
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Well, thanks for reading this list. I don't think I will make a chartpost this week seeing how this took a huge chunk of my time that I normally review new music with. If you haven't please check out my chartpost to check out what I listened to recently.
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