The Biggest Disappointments of 2016
It’s Xmas Eve and I’ve got terrible news: you ain’t gettin’ shit from Santa. Do you feel that? Do you feel bitter disappointment at reading those words? Good. Now you’re in the spirit to relive the biggest disappointments of this awful fucking garbage ass year. Enjoy.
The Sword – Low Country. First and foremost, I am a massive fan of The Sword. These Austin boys bring the riffs and even when a majority of their fans high-tailed out of sight last year, I remained. High Country was one of my most played records of last year, so when they announced and all acoustic version I was fairly excited. Fully prepared for some bad ass, Rick Rubin producing Johnny Cash, massive sounding acoustic album, I pre ordered Low Country in a heartbeat. I received it in the mail and played it once. One time was all it took for me to realize how the low the mighty had fallen. All of the energy and emotion felt on High Country was sucked away by thin sounding instruments, poor production and flat performances from the band. Sorry The Sword, this didn’t do anything for me but leave a bad, coffee shop taste in my mouth. –Boss the Ross
Dream Theater – The Astonishing. You know when your favorite band has such a diverse discography there’s absolutely no way you could be negatively surprised by the direction of new material? Apparently, Dream Theater decided to sit down and say “Hey! We’ve been way too acceptable in our output, so here’s an idea. Let’s write a concept album around a story Rush did almost 40 years ago, only instead of 20 minutes it’ll be over two hours long. We ABSOLUTELY need to make sure exactly 0 minutes of it are memorable, so every one of these 34 tracks needs to be as bland as possible, both in terms of music and production. We’ll make hundreds of thousands!” The result was The Astonishing. –Mosh Hoff
In Flames – Battles. Not because anyone expected anything drastically different, but because Battles is essentially pop music.
ALSO, Varg and his 90k+ subscribers on youtube who devour his ramblings like starving dogs. Racist starving dogs. –CyBro
Kayo Dot – Plastic House on Base of Sky. While I liked Coffins a little bit, this album was basically more of the same and I was hoping for a classic Kayo total shift of genre. –Joaquin Stick
The songs are long and directionless. It feels like several talented musicians doing freeform jazz, 80’s synth style. –McNulty
Nails – You Will Never Be One Of Us. This album is a great nine song EP when you subtract the eight minute closer that is sucking up almost half of the album’s runtime. They would’ve been better served to exclude that song altogether or write a couple more shorter tracks to round out the album. –Ron Deuce
Omnium Gatherum – Grey Heavens. Like any other year, 2016 was filled with bad records. Grey Heavens isn’t bad per se, but it is disappointing. After two magnificent AOR death metal records, they blundered. Vanhala had been saying he’d want to make a record consisting only of longer songs. Grey Heavens is the opposite. It’s their simplest, most immediate, has lacking songwriting, and occasionally sounds like 00’s In Flames. Almost makes me wanna call it their pop record. OG should have stayed happy instead of seeking the grey. –Karhu
Kawir – Father Son, Mother Moon. It’s a shame. Hellenic BM is probably my current favorite strain of BM. And Kawir I always felt were one of the premier bands of the scene. “To Cavirs” is a near masterpiece of an album IMO; equal parts vicious and elegant. You will find none of that in their 2016 release “Father Son, Mother Moon”. All of the songs wander with no interesting riffs or other instrumental passages to catch my attention. And the band as a whole just seems lifeless. While it’s not recent Rotting Christ bad, I’m still wondering what the hell happened. –Simon Phoenix
Blood Incantation – Starspawn. Yes, I went there. The debut EP was wild and spastic and fun from start to finish. Starspawn starts out with a very long and snoozeworthy track and never alters course from there. The whole thing just sounds like space-death pudding: more music yet a perplexing dearth of ideas. (Sorry Leif.) –-Richter
Gojira – Magma. It hurt that Joe described this album as buttrock, but only because it’s true. –Dubya
The American people. –Jason Kolkey
Metal fans the world over. The fact that every English-speaking metalhead on Earth isn’t regularly reading this blog and compulsively listening to Toilet Radio is a goddamn travesty. –Joe Thrashnkill
What was the worst box of shit you unwrapped in 2016? Share it below! Everything is terrible.
