Riff Of The Week: Best ov 2019 Edition

December 28, 2019

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Here are your fave riffs of 2019, who will you crown king shit?

Last round our theme was Smoke. 40% of you publicly outed yourself as bottom-feeders. I’m awarding victory to Witch Vomit anyway, sucked in.

This week we asked for your top riffs of the year
Here’s what you sent in…

Positronic Brain
Blood Incantation – “Awakening From The Dream Of Existence To The Multidimensional Nature Of Our Reality (Mirror Of The Soul)”(Riff @ 7:20)

Five minutes of sick death metal. Some ambient/backwards stuff for a little while. A deadly synth sequence. Some spooky vocoder spoken word shit. And then BOOM!, the best riff of the album, especially when the other instruments come in at 7:30, with the guitar on the right just playing big power chords. These guys are worthy of the hype, and their understanding of dynamics is a big part of that.

Richter
Jute Gyte – “Dissected Grace” (Riff @ 1:42)

I dissected Grace once. She didn’t appreciate it. This was back before anesthesia. Bit of a bugger, yeah? Anyway, here is a riff that happened this year. The grating, noisy, slip-slidiness of it is like ASMR for people who already sleep 23 hours a day. Bonus: It’s in 7/8, so you can do maths while waking up to it. Everyone loves doing maths. Except Grace, whose favorite subject, ironically enough, was Anatomy. Also, Americans hate maths because it is pronounced “math”–singular. Buncha dogs’ bollocks’n gobshite.

Hans
Gutvoid – ‘They Came Dripping From the Stars’ (Riff @ 0:46)

This got dang riff, man. This whole song, really, but mostly this got dang riff.

ZMapp
Ayakasi Kagura – ‘Ju On’ (Riff @5:25)

An incredibly gloomy melody played over a 10 minute long breakdown with extremely spooky throat noises on top of it all. Seriously, the vocals on this whole album are insane. It’s definitely my number 1 of 2019

GoatForest
A Novelist – “Apparitions” (Riff @ 3:50)

Insane drums, magnificent guitars, and fantastic vocals all combine here to create a badass groove and some unusually atmospheric death metal. What we have here is a perfect riff, from a formidable competitor for my album of the year.

Brock Samson
Suffering Hour – ‘Dwell’ (Riff @ 5:44)

How could it be anything else?
[Lizard Note: vote for this]

McNulty
Ceremony Of Silence – “Ceremony Of A Thousand Stars” (Riff @ 4:25)

I had lots of trouble picking a standard death metal riff this year, because there were SO many great ones. And I can’t nominate the entirety of “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)” so I had to dig deep for something off the beaten path. Ceremony of Silence knocked it out of the park with their debut LP and the second track ends with some gorgeous, post-metal style lead work. The rest of y’all will have the brutal stuff covered, but here is something pretty.

[Lizard Note: yeeeeesssss, or this]

tigeraid
Spirit Adrift – ‘Hear Her’ (Riff @ 0:00)

I think I already submitted it earlier this year, and there are a lot of strong contenders. But this is probably my AotY and goddamn this tune just crushes from the start.