You need this stuff

2011 has been full of marvellous albums and everyone loves a list. Hence today's 5 Albums From 2011 Wot You Must Own Or You're Some Sort Of Arsehole list was born.

1. The Bunny The Bear - If You Don't Have Anything Nice To Say...

Mental. Amon Amarth had a child with Savage Garden, raised if for five years, then went onto The Maury Show only to find out that Combichrist or Between The Buried And Me might be the baby-daddy. That's what this album is.

2. Malefice - Awaken The Tides
The latest album from the increasingly excellent British metallers is absolute class. They've taken their sound to a new level with more blasting, harder vocals, and cat's arsehole-tight musicianship throughout. A must have.

3. Agnostic Front - My Life My Way
Hardcore lives. Consistently intense, plenty of singalongs and hundreds of opportunities to rip off your shirt and get stuck the fuck in. So to speak.

4. Joe Bonamassa - Dust Bowl
Smoother than a freshly-sanded pint of Guinness and cooler that a Penguin's ballbag, Bonamassa's solo work is about as good a summer album as you could ever listen to. Pretty much perfect rock and roll blues, it's better than whatever you're currently listening to.

5. Evile - Five Serpent's Teeth
You want thrash? I said do you want THRASH?! Then buy this. Then grow your hair, buy some denim, and play air guitar like you mean it. Evile's return was highly anticipated and rightly so.

If you haven't bought any music this year, start with this lot. If you like metal, that is. And to be honest, if you haven't bought any music this year why are you reading a music blog? What's wrong with you?

With the promise of more musical excellence on the horizon, this is an exciting 12-month period. Either that or everything good has already come out and I've just fucked up my end of year Top Ten.

God speed

M

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'Appy day...(I should be shot for that pun)

Two of my favourite things are thrash metal and beer. The only thing that makes either better is the prefix 'free'. I spent last night enjoying both courtesy of Earache Records at the first playing of Evile's new album Five Serpents Teeth, scheduled for release on September 26th, and I am quite marvelously hungover as a result. Being as the full report is going on to MetalasFuck imminently I shan't regurgitate the evening here but needless to say that me and Shithouse, posing as our photographer and doing a bloody good job, had a belter.

One of our lengthier Stella-fuelled conversation was about genres and band classification. The beauty of Evile is that they're a thrash band. That's it. Simples. However, according to Heavy Metal Encyclopedia, an Android app available now via Marketplace, there are 86 genres of metal.

86.

Now although the app includes 'Punk' and 'Oi' as two genres, the rest are pretty legit, although what the fuck 'Humppa' is is beyond me. Seemingly that's what Finntroll is. I thought they were folk metal. And herein lies the problem.

I'm pretty sure no two people categorise bands the same. Iron Maiden are heavy metal, Megadeth are thrash, Sonic Syndicate are shit; this much we can all agree on. But I recently came across El Schlong who have been described as prog, post-hardcore, spazcore, all of which are broadly correct. Children of Bodom are, in my opinion, a melodic death metal band but are often referred to as blackened death metal, Opeth are everything from death to prog and back again. So despite being a good app, it's a tad flawed on the basis that the vast majority of us categorise bands differently.

It's worth downloading though, predominantly because it's linked to Spotify and has a vast amount of bands listed, although it doesn't have band bios which is a bit shit. There's also a lack of detail on the nastier genres, such as goregrind (which lists Carcass - I thought they were grindcore?...) I'm sure this will be updated over time though.

Another app worth exploring, particularly for fanboys like me, is the new DevilDriver app - tonnes of music, photos, a fan chat board, merch and band info. Both this and Heavy Metal Encyclopedia are free on Android, which is marvelous.

So now Metal Harmony officially does it all; news, reviews, tours, technology updates; you have to wonder if you'll ever really need another music resource ever again?

M

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