Flush It Friday: A Look Back at Two Thousand and Six-Six-Sixteen
Taking a gander back at the year I became a music dork through the lens of a few albums from 2016.
While my love for music stems back to hearing Slayer for the first time in Guitar Hero III and re-listening to my first few CDs over and over (Daft Punk‘s Random Access Memories and Linkin Park‘s A Thousand Suns), the year it became a problem was 2016. A truly volatile year that, looking back, seems to mark a beginning of the end of what you dolts call “society.” Regardless, this year was one of the very first where I was actually paying attention to new releases and learning more about the various sub-sub-genres I’ve grown to love.
Now, 10 years later, I’ve grown older and dumber (in a Socrates way)—all the while only learning to appreciate this art-form even more. I’ve been lucky enough to, in that time, spend years honing the craft of album reviews (it’s really hard to find college-level words that equate to “this rules” or “this bites”). The amount of growth in my life since 2016 is not lost on me, which led me to some introspection: how well do I remember the albums that joined me on the way to (relative) maturity? Have records I’d considered classics lost their sheen? Were albums I disliked merely misunderstood and unappreciated by my child brain? Is Graveyard Classics IV: The Number of the Priest really as bad as we all thought?
Well, other than the last question, these are inquiries that I needed to think on. With all of the music I’ve taken into my ear canals since then, it’s impossible for me to have an intimate memory with every album released 10 years ago. As such, I thought it would be fun to go back to a handful of the big metal releases of the year and re-evaluate my thoughts on them. Starting with…
Metallica – Hardwired… To Self-Destruct
Starting out pretty big with a release that I was certainly excited for; 2016 was at a point in my life where I was still a pretty major fan of all of the Big Four thrash bands. Singles like “Hardwired” and “Atlas, Rise!” made this comeback LP from Metallica enticing to my teenage self, eager to be experiencing a ‘Tallicer roll out for the very first time. Upon release, I think I liked it? I guess it seemed like a record with a lot of good songs that sound the same and some standouts, but that reception dulled strongly in the rear-view mirror. By the time my taste in thrash became more and more particular, Hardwired… To Self-Destruct became a record that represented all the ineffectual legacy-act albums of the 2010s from (think Death Angel, Anthrax, and Megadeth), as well as exemplifying the Metallica brainrot that brings you from “Call of Ktulu” to “Dream No More.”
I can hear tiny bits from all of the group’s worst eras: the butt rock songwriting of Load and Reload, the overly-long runtime of Death Magnetic, and the cornball lyricism of St. Anger just to name a few. After their last mainline record Death Magnetic was hit with the brickwalled-to-shit-Rick-Rubin ray, Hardwired sports an overly-produced sound that comes off brittle and weak. Each track is sonically somewhere between lite-thrash and the plodding heavy metal of the sellout years. The whole is weaker than the sum of its already weak parts, resulting in a double album that’s 77 minutes long and feels like double that. Even fan highlights like “Spit Out the Bone” only succeed in making me interesting in jamming …And Justice again.
Oh well, at least Lulu can still stand alone as Metallica’s only good post-’80s album. [We’ll have to table this topic for now. ~Roldy]
Revisited opinion: Way worse than I remember.
Blood Incantation – Starspawn
Blood Incantation – StarspawnBlood Incantation have had a bit of a strange trajectory in the metal-sphere if you ask me. 2024’s Absolute Elsewhere saw the group embracing more of their progressive rock and Berlin school electronic influences, resulting in an album that received rapturous acclaim in many circles. Yet, I know many death metal listeners, ones who previously spoke positively of the group, who did not take to the band’s shift in priorities. Compare this to the debut full length, Starspawn, where it seemed like the group could do no wrong. Coming off the tail of a promising EP, this record immediately staked Blood Incantation’s place in the mid-2010s old school revival.
In a time when bands regularly built atmosphere by slathering on reverb and spending the mixing budget on pot, Starspawn manages to evoke a rich setting of cosmic horror while delivering an immaculate-sounding record. That magic from release is still there, as the songwriting is inventive and adventurous without sacrificing coherency and the performances are tight and versatile.
I can both see how fans of Starspawn‘s seemingly-effortless balance between death and prog have been turned off by the group’s further integrations of Pink Floyd-isms and Tangerine Dream synths, but I can just as easily see why the group never attempted a Starspawn II: where do you go from here? You already perfected it, might as well do something else.
Revisited opinion: Just as perfect as I remember.
Oranssi Pazuzu – Värähtelijä
Oranssi Pazuzu – VärähtelijäJust to be perfectly up front, I did not get this album originally; in fact, if I remember correctly, it made me feel quite nauseous. I had no clue what to make of this strange almost black metal wall of sound with laser gun synths and dissonant organs. My main frame of reference for black metal at the time was Darkthrone and Summoning, so Värähtelijä was like this impossibly warped visage of music, like a dissipating ghost. It seemed interesting, but also overly long and unintelligible to my untrained ears.
This is all very funny now, as 2020’s mesmerizing Mestarin kynsi and 2024’s haunting Muuntautuja made me realize that Oranssi were not just another droning fuzz factory of a black metal band. Värähtelijä strikes me as the beginning to this trilogy of albums, where the band went from space rock-informed black metal to avant-garde and esoteric soundscapes beyond genre. This 2016 LP serves as a bridge point, before the blackened psych-rock was fazed out but after their sound began to mutate beyond belief. It also fucking owns.
Revisited opinion: Way better than I had thought.
Nails – You Will Never Be One Of Us
Nails – You Will Never Be One Of UsI’m a bit better about this now, but I have always found it hard to be interested in music that’s surrounded by annoying discourse (I say that, but I still haven’t heard Geese). The penultimate example of this was Nails. I definitely listened to this and Unsilent Death in 2016 and remember liking them okay but never revisiting them. It doesn’t help that TO THIS DAY people are still arguing about whether or not this is grindcore or powerviolence. Genres aren’t real! None of these words are in the Bible!!!
I’ll tell you what Nails are: okay. I like Abandon All Life a lot, Unsilent Death is really cool, and the new one was mediocre. This leaves You Will Never Be One of Us (the most Mean Girls-ass album title of all time) somewhere in the middle. It’s fine and enjoyable enough, but it’s certainly not helped by the fact that I’ve had 10 years to absorb more grind and powerviolence into my brain. On its own merits, it’s a brisk and gratifying listen with some interesting riffs here and there, just not all too memorable in my opinion. If anything, You’ll Cowards Don’t Even One of Us marks a band victim to the hype train more than anything (here lies Gulch and Escuela Grind as well).
Revisited opinion: It’s still fine, I’ve more so come around to Abandon All Life.
Enough of 2016, we have topics to get to today!!!!
TMP as always, but there’s a special WWW edition of TTT. Wow! Yippee, even!
Falxy thrashes out with Aggressive Perfector. I wonder if those guys like Slayer?:
Tune into Toilet Radio for a chud-flavored episode of the podcast:
Big Hans premiered Protrusion‘s new track, give it a listen or you’re gonna end up like that guy on the cover:
Stevo is up playing with they wamypric Worm:
Get your D20 dice, your replica LOTR sword, and your V-Card for the newest edition of RT‘s Tag Diving:
IGoM isn’t Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean with you, you’re chained to the bottom of the ocean with IGoM:
Lets see some G/B/Us! GO GO GO GO GO!
