Threw together a winter-themed playlist as the temps
start dropping.
I’ve never been big on Spotify before, but as my library
continues to exceed my laptop’s hard drive space, it has its uses. There were
some unfortunate omissions, but what can you do.
We start off with “The Northern Cold,” lead track from Woods’
3rd album. Woods 5 is the crowning achievement, but the run of 3/4/5
is as good as any metal band has had in a long time.
Segue into “At the Heat of Winter” which shows off
Immortal at their peak. Immortal I think is a great place to get started with
black metal before getting into the rawer stuff (like later on in this
playlist!).
Borknagar helps segue us into the power metal phase, and
I’ll mention that Borknagar has been consistently solid over their last few
releases, and don’t receive as much praise as their quality deserves. Pharaoh put out probably my favorite power metal release of the last few years in 2014 in Year of No Light, it captures the fun and energy of the genre but with a little less fluff than some bigger names. Yes, this song is about a father sacrificing himself to feed his son as they're trapped by a blizzard. It can't all be poetry, man.
Later on we see one of the glaring omissions, as Spotify
doesn’t have Stratovarius’ classic Visions,
preventing me from including “Before the Winter.” This track will do in a
pinch.
We segue back out with Sculptured, a strange band that featured
Jason Walton and Don Anderson from Agalloch (RIP). They’ve formed a new band,
Khorada, from the ashes of Agalloch so hopefully we’ll hear new stuff soon.
This song, “Snow Covers All” is a little strange (like all Sculptured) but I
only get so many chances to rec songs with creamy sax solos so I take them when
I get them.
That brings us to a triple header of black metal to close
out. Two legends of the Norwegian 2nd wave in Darkthrone and Mayhem,
and then unsurprisingly Agalloch to close out. I’ll take a moment to strongly recommend
every metal fan to check out Darkthrone’s commentary tracks, in which they
(usually Fenriz) talk over and explain their songs. Fenriz is probably the
coolest and truest guy in the metal community, and his comments are very
interesting and often very funny. I know they’ve done A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Hate
Them (my favorite Darkthrone album) and even Fenriz’ old solo project
Isengard.
Back to the playlist, we finish with absolute classic “Freezing
Moon”, from the Live in Leipzig album
because we do not fuck around here, and then “Falling Snow” from Ashes Against the Grain, which hardly
needs me to spill more digital ink on it.
