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GD's Most Dominating Albums Of The 1990's (60-51)

05/04/07 || Global Domination

60. Agalloch: Pale Folklore
^{Released: 1999}

A lot of people missed the boat on these guys when this album came out. Everyone was too busy listening to symphonic black metal and melodic death metal. Agalloch offered a very different product. The songs were slower and had a mellow, autumnal atmosphere. Resting somewhere between Opeth and Katatonia, Agalloch’s brand of doomy metal was unique enough to tell them apart from other wooden sobsters.

The soft production, simple musicianship, and abundance of clean guitars and vocals helped make this one of the prettiest, most emotional metal album of the 90’s. This album is practically John Tesh. It’s not that heavy at all, but holy shit is it amazing!

-Hanging Limbs

59. Meshuggah: Chaosphere
^{Released: 1998}

Wow, now here’s a band that just threw metal music up on its ass. HEAVINESS is so subjective, but it is almost an objective, empirically observable product of Meshuggah. On “Chaosphere”, the odd time signatures seem interwoven into a larger structure. And I’ll tell you what holds it together – the bass. Yes, the fucking bass for once. On this album especially, sometimes the guitars go off on parts that most would consider woefully-wrong, if not for the bass that holds it together. Meshuggah gives it their all on this one.

-Syrrok

58. Seance: Saltrubbed Eyes
^{Released: 1994}

You ready for this? “Saltrubbed eyes” is the best death metal album ever recorded in Sweden. “Saltrubbed eyes” is also one of the best albums ever recorded in death metal history. Sadly, this disc is fairly unknown, but if you are a death metal fan and don’t own this, you are retarded. Or related to Fishermane. Or a combination of those 2. I don’t think Seance had the slightest of clues as for what they did on this one. “Salt-fucken-rubbed fucken eyes” is relentless. It’s insane. It’s one of the best albums I have ever heard. Ever. And besides that, it holds one of the best productions you’ll hear in your life. That bass sound… Man, that bass sound… Thank you Seance, thank you so fucken much.

-Lord K

(Note by The Mane: Just so our readers know, Lord K clearly specified that if this album wasn’t on the list, we’d all be fired on the spot. To make things worse, he’d also mail nude pictures of himself and Sebastian Bach doing the robot to all our loved ones. Not that we don’t enjoy “Saltrubbed Eyes”, but it’s not like we had much choice. Just wanted to clear that up.)

(Note by The Lord: Just so our readers know, Seance rule.)

[Full Review]

57. Down: Nola
^{Released: 1995}

Phil Anselmo has never sounded as good as he did on this disc. The sludge is so thick here that you need about 10 bottles of fucken Draino to get rid of it. The guitar work is really good, using bluesy riffs with thick clear productions, along with fantastic harmony. There is definitely a stoner element to the music as well, so much so that if you take the booklet and hold it up to your nose, you can get a buzz. It’s true, try it.

-Eric W

56. Candlemass: Tales of Creation
^{Released: 1991}

The weakest of the 4 classic Candlemass albums and it’s not even close to weak. “Tales of creation” hands out hits such as “Dark reflections” and “Edge of heaven”, the 2 finest Candlemass tunes on this piece. The production might not be what I want for X-mas but the material makes up for it. There’s not one single band in the history of Doom that comes remotely close to what Candlemass did on their 4 first albums. “Tales of creation” is a fantastic album, there’s no two ways about it.

-Lord K

[Full Review]

55. Tool: Aenima
^{Released: 1996}

Tool’s always been a bit hard for me to classify. Most say progressive rock, but I always have a different mental and aural image of progressive rock. Technically though, that’s probably correct, because whatever they are, they are progressive (in the literal sense of the word, not the retro), and in my opinion, this is their best album to date. Remarkably cohesive and really well produced, it displays many different shades of light and dark (mostly dark), with even a slight twist of black humour. Tool have always had this arresting audio spiral entrenched in their songwriting, and with Aenima it started becoming really prevalent, notably in the bass work of Justin Chancellor. The band generally accentuate that, resulting in a somewhat hypnotizing effect on the listener, not unlike the way you can’t take your eyes off a fire. It’s quite a deep album, and as much anguish and intensity as it offers, its not impervious to the odd dalliance with the slightly bizarre, as displayed, for example, in “Die Eier von Satan”, an apparent recipe for hash cookies, recited by a demonic Hitler-type with industrial atmospheric noise and loads of crowd hysteria. It’s a very long, very rewarding album, with no throwaway tracks (and a couple of really brilliant ones) which well deserves its place on this list.

-Tash

54. Katatonia: Brave Murder Day
^{Released: 1996}

“Brave Murder Day” is perhaps the most innovative of the outstanding extreme-metal releases by Katatonia. The album is not easily classifiable into a particular metal subgenre; elements of death-doom, melodeath, and even goth (presaging the alt-goth releases of Katatonia’s later years) are prevalent on the record. The riffing is drenched with hypnotic repetition and masterful layering, and the growls are downright bloodcurdling (and are handled by the none other than Mikael Akerfeldt, of Opeth fame). Despite the evident influences drawn from different metal subgenres, the sound on “Brave Murder Day” is wholly original and rightly revered by fans of dreary, emotional, and unapologetically gorgeous metal.

-Consumer

53. Edge of Sanity: Crimson
^{Released: 1996}

A 40-minute, single-track death metal concept album seems like a crazy idea. And it was, right up until Dan Swanö and company pulled it off with style. “Crimson” is so stunning you don’t realize it’s one 40-minute track until it’s over and when it does finish, you find yourself begging to hear it again. The key is balance. Every second of this album is worth listening to, and no single part stands out because it’s all just so damn good. The instrumentation is all spectacular, with the most memorable riffs and percussion sections reappearing at different points to give the album an interconnected feeling.

Better yet, the concept is a delightfully over the top sci-fi epic of political intrigue in a post-apocalyptic future. In the story, people can no longer procreate and the human race is slowly dying out. When the King and Queen are slaughtered and the princess, considered humanity’s greatest hope, is usurped from her throne all hope seems lost. Through the course of the album she makes a deal with evil forces and returns to power in glorious violence. When it becomes apparent that hers will be a reign of terror, it’s quashed by the very rebels who helped her regain the throne. Fun stuff.

-Stephen Fallen

52. Ulver: Bergtatt
^{Released: 1994}

Ulver may be better known now for being an impossible-to-pin-down avant-electro-noise mindfuck of a group, but they started their journey in much more familiar terrain for most metalheads. “Bergtatt”, Ulver’s debut, is an exercise in folk-tinged black metal which may not seem very outlandish given the nature of the current folk-metal scene. However, at the time “Bergtatt” was released, there was scant material available which was at all comparable to that trend-setting album. The record is more raw and lo-fi than most contemporary folk metal, but “Bergtatt”‘s juxtaposition of acoustic passages and raw black metal assaults has a much more sincere and much less cartoonish gait than almost every release which is representative of the folk metal of today. With “Bergtatt”, Ulver was birthed in a manner that set the trajectory which they have followed into the avant-garde cosmos: they were born as and have consistently remained peerless innovators.

-Consumer

51. Danzig: II Lucifuge
^{Released: 1990}

No fan of Danzig can deny that there is a little bit of humour associated with Glenn Danzig being a bit over-the-top goofy. I mean, when this album came out (1990) I remember seeing an interview that MTV did with him (can you believe that?). There was Danzig in some weird Halford-esque see-thru mesh black thing bench pressing weights in what looked like a monastery, complete with weird stained glass paintings. Even at age 12 I knew there was a “dumbtarded” element to it all, but I couldn’t deny the man’s appeal in terms of metal imagery. So I dove into this album and got what I was expecting. A very moody metallic piece with perhaps Danzig’s most over-looked songs, such as “Snakes of Christ” and “Blood and Tears”. “Her Black Wings” remains one of my favorite songs from the time period, period. Huh? Anyway, this album definitely left it’s mark on the world, and all of these sad fucken emo bands have at least some debt of gratitude to pay to Danzig for wearing so much goofy black shit.

-Syrrok

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