Durf's Töp 15 Albums of 2019

Another year screams toward its conclusion, forcing me to once again realize my New Year's Resolution of "write more for that blog you love doing!" has again fallen by the wayside.  My lack of activity here at the Töp is certainly disappointing to me, but given all the satisfaction and happiness 2019 has given me by way of fatherhood, marriage, finding a great job, and fully embracing the Durfette and I's new home in Idaho, it's hard for me to be too angry about it.

That said, it was an absolutely stacked, fantastic year for music (again).  Obviously, given the title of this post, I'm only getting in to fifteen albums, which is a nearly insignificant amount given the sheer volume of great shit that came out this year.  I'm not doing an EP or Splits list (again), which means I just have this tiny space to tell you about Elder's absolutely stunning The Gold and Silver Sessions, or the wonderful doom that both Un and Coltsblood brought to their split very early in the year.  I'm similarly not doing a Non-Metal list, which means you don't have to read what I'm sure would be a lot of words on Lana Del Ray's sublime Norman Fucking Rockwell!, which is probably my favorite album of the year, metal or otherwise.  Maybe next year.  What I do have are fifteen metal albums that have stuck with me through the year, albums that have managed to stand out above the noise and din of (again) another packed year.  Without further pretense:

Tom's Töp 15 Albums of 2019

2019 was a year full of surprises. Not just in music, as seen in the graphic above, it wasn't so bad to be a fan of New York teams in blue and orange (sadly only the Knicks completely sucked). The saddest part of baseball season being over is not getting to watch the wonderful Met, Pete Alonso put a hurting on yet another baseball, but it was his personality that was most heavily on display this year, showing that age is probably the only thing he lacks but for our Rookie of the Year the sky's the limit. Or maybe former New York Islander goalie Robin Lehner's work towards acceptance of a mental health diagnosis, that he totally embraced on the way towards winning a Masterson Trophy and a Vezina trophy nomination.

Maybe 2x CY Young Award winning Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom who fought a good part of adversity this season before ultimately staking his claim as the best pitcher in baseball, showing incredible resolve when he didn't have "it". Or maybe Jack Adams trophy winner Barry Trotz who when he took the helm of the New York Islanders in June of 2018 was handed a bag of spare parts and asked to make something of it. Instead of the projected last place finish he brought them their best season since 1983. So when you feel like nothing is possible just remember the stories of these great men and maybe some of the tunes of 2019. There were a number of surprises but no true #1 album emerged for a long time; I was however surprised by what I enjoyed during the year, even if the Brutalitopia output was minimal.

A Link to the Past : Nostalgia Turned Metal

 Video game music/audio is one of the biggest unsung heroes of game development. A good theme can be as iconic as the game itself. Among gamers and non-gamers alike, you would probably be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn't immediately recognize the themes from Super Mario Bros and Tetris. Even a certain Street Fighter theme has found life as a running gag on YouTube. But whenever I reflect on themes that have stuck with me, I always go back to the heavier, more guitar-driven ones. Even further reflection made me realize the amount of times I've listened to the Mega Man X OST outside of actually playing the game is a tad embarrassing.



Years later, when I would go on to fall into the depravity that is heavy metal fandom, there was something in my brain that kept trying to make connections between the metal I was into and the video game themes I was into. It was a connection that was never cut and dry but at the same time I have never been able to completely disregard it. This abstract idea has bugged me for years and was the impetus for putting this article together. Thankfully, there were other like-minded individuals out there who were more than excited to dig deep into this. These interviews were approached as a free flowing discussion about connections between metal and video game music from the perspective of metal musicians, not necessarily to prove or disprove any theory of mine. But there certainly were some interesting revelations.

Read the interviews after the break!

Fire in the Mountains - A Review, Photo Journal, and Thought Piece

Metal festivals are all alike; each metal festival is metal in it's own way.  Tolstoy said that (or something quite similar), and this quote found its way into my head during my two days at Fire in the Mountains, a metal fest situated about thirty miles outside Jackson, Wyoming.  This year's edition of Fire in the Mountains marked my sixth ever music festival, and third metal specific fest after the twelfth and fourteenth editions of Maryland Deathfest.  Fire in the Mountains was appealing to me for its lineup (Panopticon, Falls of Rauros, Wayfarer, Krallice, and more), its location (the Grand Tetons are RIGHT there), and its proximity to my home (six and a half hours, give or take).  So with my trusty sidekick (my buddy Bryce) in tow, I headed toward the mountains to see whether a new festival was establishing itself or coming in DOA.

Brutally Short #7 : Cormorant, Falls of Rauros, GOLD, and Brand New

Welcome to another edition of Brutally Short, the not at all gimicky or lazy feature where we at Brutalitopia compile a group of reviews that are far shorter than our normal, endless word vomit.  The albums contained in Brutally Shorts aren't here because they're bad; quite often there are albums here that deserve far more words from far better writers because of how good they are, we just either didn't see them until now, forgot to write about them, we had a child and the responsibility of caring for a newborn person takes up, like, an inordinate amount of time, or (usually) spent another week rewatching Parks and Recreation on Netflix while drinking scotch instead of actively working to run a blog.  No one said we're good at this.