Rolling Stone's 20 Best Metal Albums of 2017

The Pittsburgh band\'s follow-up to 2014\'s I AM KING, FOREVER.

Released on 2LP/CD by Stickman Records and Armageddon shop. US: armageddonshop.com Europe/World: www.stickman-records.com/shop/elder-reflections-of-a-floating-world/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reflections of a Floating World is Elder's fourth full length album and second LP released via Stickman Records (EU) and Armageddon Label (US). Long, undulating and dense tracks float between psychedelic passages and progressive rock without missing a beat; adventurous and unpredictable songs are punctuated by hypnotic jams, all colored by the tendency toward melody and dynamism that has become the band's hallmark. In keeping with their motto of expanding and expanding upon their repertoire, guest musicians Mike Risberg and Michael Samos joined the core three in the studio to add extra guitar, keys and pedal steel, adding vibrancy and lushness to the album. In all regards, Reflections shows a band with a clear vision honing their skills with every year.

Pallbearer’s third album stretches the Arkansas outfit’s brand of doom metal to mountainous new heights. More polished—but no less punishing—than *Sorrow and Extinction* or *Foundations of Burden*, *Heartless* is a gleaming bulldozer of a record, shifting effortlessly from the operatic melancholy of “Cruel Road” to “A Plea for Understanding,” which blows out the spacey grandeur of Pink Floyd to nearly 13 minutes.

Pallbearer’s third album, Heartless, is an inspired collection of monumental rock music. The band offers a complex sonic architecture that weaves together the spacious exploratory elements of classic prog, the raw anthemics of 90’s alt-rock, and stretches of black-lit proto-metal. Lyrics about mortality, life, and love are set to sharp melodies and pristine three-part harmonies. Vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell has always been a strong, assured singer, and on Heartless, his work’s especially stunning. This may in part be due to the immediacy of the lyrics. Written by Campbell and bassist/secondary vocalist Joseph D Rowland, the words have moved from the metaphysical to something more grounded. As the group explains: “Instead of staring into to the void—both above and within—Heartless concentrates its power on a grim reality. Our lives, our homes and our world are all plumbing the depths of utter darkness, as we seek to find any shred of hope we can." Pallbearer emerged from Little Rock, Arkansas in 2012 with a stunning debut full-length, Sorrow and Extinction. The record, which played like a seamless 49-minute doom movement, melded pitch-perfect vintage sounds with a triumphant modern sensibility that made songs about death and loss feel joyfully ecstatic. Pallbearer possessed what many other newer metal groups didn't: perfect guitar tone, classic hooks, and a singer who could actually sing. For their 2014 followup, Foundations of Burden, the band worked with legendary Bay Area producer Billy Anderson (Sleep, Swans, Neurosis) for an expansive album that was musically tighter and especially adventurous. Armed with a more technical drummer, Mark Lierly, Foundations feels like it was built for larger shared spaces—you could imagine these songs ringing off the walls of a stadium. It was a hint of things to come. While the debut earned the band a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork and rightly landed the band on year-end lists at places like SPIN and NPR, along with the usual metal publications, Foundations of Burden charted on the Billboard Top 100 and earned the band album of the year from Decibel and spots on year-end lists for NPR and Rolling Stone. Returning to where it all began, the quartet recorded their third full-length, Heartless on their own in Arkansas, and it’s grander in scope, showcasing a natural progression that melds higher technicality and more ambitious structures with their most immediate hooks to date. The collection, which follows the 3-song Fear & Fury EP from earlier this year, was captured entirely on analog tape at Fellowship Hall Sound in Little Rock this past summer and then mixed by Joe Barresi (Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Melvins, Soundgarden). From the gloriously complex, sky-lit opener “I Saw the End” to the earth-shaking (and heartbreaking) 13-minute closer “A Plea for Understanding,” the entire group puts forth the full realization of their vision: More than a doom band, Pallbearer is a rock group with a singular songwriting talent and emotional capacity. Heartless finds the group putting forth their strongest individual efforts to date: Campbell and Rowland, along with guitarist/vocalist Devin Holt and drummer Mark Lierly, turn in peak marathon performances. Both Campbell and Rowland also handle synthesizers alongside their normal duties, and there are plenty of gently strummed acoustic guitars amid the crunchy electric ones, adding a moody, ethereal spareness to the towering metal. The almost 12-minute “Dancing in Madness” opens with dark post-rock ambience and moves toward emotional blues before exploding into a sludgy psychedelic anthem. A number of the seven songs feature a humid rock swagger. By fusing their widest musical palette to date, Pallbearer make the kind of heavy rock (the heavy moments are *heavy*) that will appeal to diehards, but could also find the group crossing over into newer territories and fanbases. After having helped revitalize doom metal, it almost feels like they’ve gone and set their sights on rock and roll itself. Which doesn’t seem at all impossible on the back of a record like Heartless.

Over the 30 years of Oxbow’s operations, no one has come comfortably close to classifying the Bay Area group. This could arguably be the result of Oxbow’s ongoing evolution, but accurately describing any particular phase of the groups’ seven-album career is no easier than describing the broader metamorphic arc of their creative path. This is especially true with their seventh album Thin Black Duke, where Oxbow’s elusive brand of harmonic unrest has absorbed the ornate and ostentatious palate of baroque pop into their sound, pushing their polarized dynamics into a scope that spans between sublime and completely unnerving. This is new musical territory for all parties involved. As throughout their history, Oxbow grapples with channeling man’s most primal urges through a framework of meticulous, cultured, and cerebral instrumentation. But the unadulterated electric roar and percussive barbarism of their past work wasn’t as wholly satisfactory as it had been in the past. Other flavors were deemed necessary and called into play, both to slake unnamed thirsts and to suitably fit the Thin Black Duke’s lyrical themes, but also to explore the further reaches of Oxbow’s studied approach to tension and release, structure and dissonance, and melody and abstraction. “Certainly we all became increasingly aware that none of us are getting younger,” says guitarist Niko Wenner. Recognizing one’s own mortality can render one’s art to the ranks of ephemera, but Oxbow lashed out at such notions. “For this record I wanted to go even further in the way we always make recordings, as music that hangs together over an entire album, 'large scale coherence' if you will,” Wenner says of his compositional strategy. “I was inspired by pieces like Bach's Goldberg Variations and the formal technique in classical music where a small idea, a kernel, is reiterated, morphed, expanded and truncated, to make a piece of music permeated with the potent perfume of that small element.” Consequently, the attentive ear will notice recurring musical phrases and motifs throughout Thin Black Duke. Noticing such details isn’t necessary to absorb and appreciate the album, but as Wenner suggests, “I think I'm not the only one that finds a visceral satisfaction when you can look into something you like deeper, and deeper, and find more and more there.”

On their first album in 14 years with returning vocalist/bassist Steve Tucker, Floridian extremity experts Morbid Angel rediscover death metal after 2011’s industrial-influenced *Illud Divinum Insanus*. Led by guitarist and founder Trey Azagthoth, the revamped band careens through an intense hellscape of rapid-fire riffs, whiplash-inducing arrangements, and swarming blast beats on “D.E.A.D,” “Garden of Disdain,” and “From the Hand of Kings,” while tracks like “Paradigms Warped,” “The Pillars Crumbling,” and “Declaring New Law” decelerate the relentless pace with grinding, mid-tempo grooves.

Legendary death metal band OBITUARY return with their self-titled, 10th studio album, further cementing their legacy as one of the most important metal bands of all time! Picking up where 2014's critically acclaimed Inked In Blood left off, OBITUARY show no signs of slowing down as they continue to reign as Kings of their genre. Recorded at their home studio in Tampa, FL, Obituary is a 10 track tour-de-force of bone-pulverising death metal that is as heavy, uncompromising and infectious as anything they've released in their historic, nearly 30-year career!

*What Passes For Survival* is technical death metal seemingly created by Dadaists. Most of its songs are nonlinear splatters of amorphous riffs and centrifugal rhythms: “The Invisible Hand Holds a Whip” drops gooey layers of screams and grunts into the already disorienting mix, while the grindcore-flavored “Trash Talk Landfill” turns all of it cold and atonal. But Pyrrhon can also drop down a couple of gears, as on “Empty Tenement Spirit,” which is a bottomless pit of blackened clangs and plodding drums.

Continuing to shapeshift and unravel, while using unorthodox songwriting techniques that border on the incomprehensible, avant-garde extreme metal quartet PYRRHON return with What Passes For Survival. Dense, volatile, and drenched in manic ferocity, What Passes For Survival is an aural challenge that refuses to adhere to genre conventions, merging strategic orchestrated bursts of death metal chaos with expanses of unhinged improvisation. The latest stage of PYRRHON’s metamorphosis is one that demands repeated audio submersion from the listener, and satisfies those craving sonic extremity that pushes limits. Also available on vinyl via Throatruiner records: music.throatruinerrecords.com/album/what-passes-for-survival

On the second album from this Cave In/Converge communion, the band’s metallic post-hardcore assault is as frenetic as the melodies are refined and the lyrics cheeky. “Micro Aggression” is just that: thrashing double-timed stomps, proggy guitar shredding, and ray-gunned synths packed into a two-and-a-half-minute burst; Stephen Brodsky answers the onslaught with a smooth chorus hook, self-deprecating lyrics, and spasmodic vocal tics. Besides, it’s not all full-throttle anarchy here—“Kiss of Death” is a sarcastic love song set to a stalking grungy groove.