Sunday Sesh: 2011 – Never Forget
“Change makes for horribly clichéd quotes” – Everyone (Always).
Last month, a member of our community who goes by the name Jom posed (no, not that pose) a question to the group asking what we were all listening to five years ago. As a relatively young dude, he said his “uncultured buttocks” were into what he described as “surface level prog,” noting that he didn’t really branch out until some years later. We had a little bit of discussion going on, and it got a few of us pondering the topic. As a slightly older and infinitely more stupid lizardude, an accurate answer to the question took me a little while longer to reach. After an interminable 13 minutes, I concluded that 2011 me was coming down from a four year weird shit and tech-death high and relaxing into some more familiar older favourites. After completing a degree at uni, I can only assume my mind craved things that would foster a certain sense of relaxation. Bands such as Behold… The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Cephalic Carnage and Psyopus kinda fell out of favour as a result. This brought me to the question, what then from 2011 do I still listen to regularly today?
[Yes, this song is from 2012, you canny fuckstain].
And to be honest, the answer is not a great deal. Sure, there’s obviously a tonne of stuff from before then that I still revisit quite often, but I can’t really pinpoint much from that particular period that has stuck with me. Now, I’m fairly sure this is just a function of my age and/or time that I’d been into metal before then. I’m sure that if I were just getting into the genre around that time, I’d have developed a greater affiliation and reverence for some of the albums from then. Things would have been fresh and exciting. However, this is not to say that nothing I appreciate came out around then. In fact, there are a bunch of albums I love from 2011, but what I’m getting at here is that I wasn’t listening to them at the time.
The only albums I can really say that I was jamming at the time that have stuck around to any extent are Origin‘s Entity, Vektor‘s Outer Isolation, and maybe a couple of tracks from Decapitated‘s Carnival Is Forever. Looking back, I can also remember feeling a a little disappointed with the follow-up to Animals As Leaders‘ exciting debut, and thinking Mastodon‘s The Hunter was so lacklustre that I didn’t need to just hop off the their train so much as I had to violently dive out at full-speed, with the knowledge that if I died during the resulting fall it would be an improvement over having my “burls” curled ever a-fucking-gain. There are albums that I have since discovered that really should have been on my radar at the time, some of which have only been brought to my attention through the power of the flush. Mitochondrion‘s Parasignosis (thanks Dubs), Revocation‘s Chaos Of Forms, Ulcerate‘s Destroyers Of All, and that absolutely crushing split from Mammoth Grinder/Hatred Surge (thanks Joe!).
So today we’re going to be looking back five years, discussing what you were spinning that year and whether any of it has stood the test of time. Maybe there are some 2011 albums you have stumbled upon since that you would have preferred to know about at the time? Let’s hear it.
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