...you’ve seen all those top ten rock and metal lists featuring Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC... here’s a list of ten slightly more indie acts that might not be on your radar yet:
10. Arsis - We Are the Nightmare (Nuclear Blast)
9. These Arms Are Snakes - Tail Swallower and Dove (Suicide Squeeze)
Post-hardcore insanity merges with strong songwriting on this Seattle band’s third full album. Direct and uncompromising, TS&D blasts through challenging math rock progressions, battering ram rhythms and bizarre grooves that’ll remind you equally of Fugazi and Blood Brothers. But what else would you expect from former members of Botch and Kill Sadie?
8. Abigail Williams - In The Shadow of a Thousand Suns (Candlelight)
7. The Faceless - Planetary Duality (Sumerian)
6. Protest the Hero - Fortress (Vagrant)
5. 5ive - Hesperus (Hydrahead)
Droning, delirious and devastating, this Boston experimental instrumental metal band combines blaring distortion and ambient buzzing all at the same time to create repetitive tidal waves of sound. Their first new album in six years should be a welcome offering for anyone who ritually kills brain cells to the tunes of Neurosis, Earth, Isis and Pelican.
4. Earthless - Live at Roadburn (Tee Pee)
3. Genghis Tron - Board Up the House (Relapse)
2. Torche - Meanderthal (Hydrahead)
Remember when Queens of the Stone Age did “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” on the album R — the ass-kicking, catchy-as-hell song that proclaimed the virtues of “nicotine, Valium, Vicodin and marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol”? Well, if the rest of the album had lived up to the propulsive charge of the track, it would have been a lot like Torche’s Meanderthal, which blends the harmonies and hooks of Jimmy Eat World with the lumbering thud of a herd of wooly mammoths.
1. Psycroptic - Ob(Servant) (Nuclear Blast)
