The Independent's Top 20 Rock & Metal Albums of 2017

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

Myrkur’s second album is a haunting journey into the bad dreams (the title means \"Nightmare\") of Danish singer and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun. Writing in English for the first time on “The Serpent” and “Funeral” (which features American songstress Chelsea Wolfe), Bruun also uses various Scandinavian languages in her alluring amalgamation of classical music, black metal, and Norwegian folk. With traditional rock instrumentation against a backdrop of strings and her own piano, violin, and nyckelharpa playing, Bruun deftly balances beauty and darkness.

Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. Produced by psych-rock luminary Dave Fridmann, it's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There's percussive, dream-state electronics (“Coolverine”), church organs as chariots of existential fire (“Brain Sweeties”), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android (“aka 47”). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realized art-pop sing-along of their storied history, “Party In The Dark,” a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips, featuring Braithwaite's seldom-heard melodic vocals declaring he's “directionless and innocent, searching for another piece of mind”. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armor through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal “Every Country's Sun,” its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.

Although \'68 was founded in 2013 by Josh Scogin, of beloved metalcore titans The Chariot, the duo take their heaviness in an entirely different direction. *Two Parts Viper*, the band’s sophomore outing, hews toward scuzzy blues-punk, with rickety garage-rock marathons like \"This Life Is Old, New, Borrowed and Blue\" and grungy post-rock wailers like \"Death Is a Lottery\" setting the tone for the proceedings. Even the lighter songs, like sparse breakup ode “What More Can I Say,” are charged with an impassioned agony.

Early support from The Guardian (Band Of The Week), The Quietus, Stewart Lee, The Line Of Best Fit, Prog Magazine, Ransom Note + more Bio / Press Release from comedian/writer Stewart Lee: I’m nearly 50. I don’t know what’s going on anymore, I’ll admit. The internet’s availability of all sources ever simultaneously has destroyed my understanding of cultural development as a logical progression.  All music is time travel, forward and backward both at once, now.   But three years go my friend Simon Oakes, of prog-psych conceptualists Suns Of The Tundra, directed me to a Youtube clip of  The Physics House Band. Impossibly youthful looking, and sounding like vintage Seventies stadium-prog behemoth, a Yes or a Rush, but stripped of any errors of taste and judgment, fed amphetamines, made ashamed of their record collections, slapped in front of the whole school, immersed instead in post-rock procedure and practise, and made to apply their obvious talent and ability to a more worthwhile end than their forebears.   Three years on here’s their second album, a super-dense sci-fi mindfuck of a thing, music scholarship charity case keyboards in combat with squally spacerock guitars, dub boom bass and multi-time-sig clatter; a territory staked out over mushrooms at break-time, on the top floor of the multi-story car park, overlooking the ‘70s Bauhaus shopping centre concrete functional fountain square, but now gone all Escher in the aftermath, like a black and white architectural schematic drawing dipped in tie-dye.   Mercury Fountain doesn’t stop, a twenty nine minute surge of tracks that it would be a crime to split apart, the kind of part work The Physics House Band’s progenitors aimed at but never quite produced, settling instead for gatefold sleeves that gave the illusion of structure and intent; a fulfillment of the Red-era King Crimson manifesto, channeled by boy-conduits that needn’t have even have known the source documents, learning their lessons instead from hints woven into the post-punk works of Radiohead, Tortoise, The Mars Volta and 21st century sub-krautrock.   Mercury Fountain loads you into a water canon and shoots you out through its intermingled opening tracks, the group finally allowing you a pause for breath at the half way point, during A Thousand Small Spaces; and then you’re kicked out of the airlock back into the Negative Zone again in Obidant, the laws of physics in reverse, Newton’s apples flying upwards past your grasping fists, your hair on end, arching to follow them, until you’re finally abandoned into the techtonic drift of Mobius Strip II.   It’s a two black Americano experience that makes me wish I still had pin-sharp hearing to lose.  Another minute would be too much. - Stewart Lee The Physics House Band are: Adam Hutchison Bass Guitar, Electric Guitar, Synthesisers, Organ, Vibraphone, Keyboards, Piano, Midi Programming Samuel Organ: Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Piano, Keyboards, Organ, Synthesisers Dave Morgan: Drums Featuring: Raven Bush - Violin (6 & 8) Biscuit - Flute (7) Willy G: Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone (8 & 9)

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.

The Liverpool group’s 11th album is a conceptual sequel to their sixth, 2001’s *A Fine Day to Exit*, made when they were still a doomy metal outfit. But *The Optimist* caps their interim transformation into a cinematic art-rock ensemble, whether building minimal electronic beats into hard-charging anthems (“Leaving It Behind”) or using desolate piano chords to summon a shoegaze tsunami (“Springfield”). This album finds its suitably grand finale in “Back to the Start,” whose comfortably numbing Floydian sway blossoms into orchestral ecstasy.