If there was one good thing that came out of the misery of 2020, it seems that a lot of artists used their lockdown time to create fantastic albums that trickled out through the year. For me, 2022 was an embarrassment of musical riches that featured some rock steady releases, some fantastic returns to form and even a couple of new discoveries.
The year wasn’t without its disappointments, and some of them were tough ones. The much-anticipated return of King’s X after a 14-year absence, for example, just didn’t connect with me the way that I’d hoped. But those were anomalies this year and certainly not the norm. I can’t remember the last time that I had 20 albums that I wanted to talk about at the end of the year, but here we are:
No. 20. HORIZON IGNITED – TOWARDS THE DYING LANDS: The second album for Finland’s Horizon Ignited was my introduction to the band. What they deliver on this first Best of 2022 honoree is not ground-breaking, but it’s very well done melodic death metal in the vein of Soilwork and In Flames. Unfortunately for them, they were competing this year with a new record from Soilwork and four incredible songs from In Flames’ upcoming record, due in early 2023. That said, Towards the Dying Land is still a very enjoyable 40-ish minutes, and “Reveries” remains one of my favorite songs of the year.
No. 19. EVIL INVADERS – SHATTERING REFLECTIONS: I’ve encountered Evil Invaders a number of times over the years and found them entertaining, but never gripping enough to draw me in as a fan. Shattering Reflections scratched the right itch, though. I described it as the baby of Judas Priest and Mercyful Fate with David Wayne-era Metal Church as the godfather. There’s plenty of classic metal in the 10 tracks, along with a heaping helping of thrash and speed. Throwback metal doesn’t get much better than “In Deepest Black.”
No. 18. BLOODY HAMMERS – WASHED IN BLOOD: The two-piece outfit from Transylvania County, N.C., does its thing again – a blend of goth rock, light industrial and Misfits-style horror punk with some psychedelic leanings here and there. They’re consistent, but how much I like each of their albums really depends on whether or not I’m in the mood for it. This one hit me right. I particularly like the Misfits feel of “At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul.” It’s so inspired by them that I had to actually look it up and make sure it wasn’t a cover of some obscure Misfits rarity that I’d overlooked.
No. 17. KENDELL MARVEL – COME ON SUNSHINE: The first of a few non-metal albums to make the list, Kendell Marvel delivers a late ‘70s/early ‘80s country-rock style that’s heavily reminiscent of classic Hank Williams Jr. and Waylon Jennings’ rowdier side with a little bit of blues in the mix. Though I have to question getting a guest spot from Chris Stapleton – who’s arguably the best voice in country music at the moment – and only having him do backing vocals on “Don’t Tell Me How to Drink.” Marvel has a very gruff, classic country voice that works equally on everything from hell raisers to sincere ballads.
No. 16. DISTURBED – DIVISIVE: Picking Disturbed these days on a best of list that’s largely metal will certainly be, pardon the pun, divisive. But this record is something of a return to form for the band. While it doesn’t quite capture the wild and aggressive spirit of their debut album, Divisive does blend that sound well with the more refined things that they’ve been doing more recently. Dan Donegan’s riffs are brutal and raw, but David Draiman’s vocal lines retain some of the more melodic stylings of their more recent work. I can feel Draiman’s middle fingers rising toward me as I write this, but I honestly needed more than one “o-wah-ah-ah-ah” to bring back that untamed spirit a little. Nice score getting Ann Wilson of Heart to sing a duet, too.
No. 15. BLIND GUARDIAN – THE GOD MACHINE: Man, this is something that I’ve wanted for a while, and in any other year, it would probably be a Top 10 album. Blind Guardian returns to the more aggressive sound of their earlier work. They back down the symphonics and just let it rip. It’s really nice to hear the blazing guitar riffs and Hansi Kursch belting out the vocals with anger and fire. This is the Blind Guardian that I’ve missed over the last 15-ish years, and it’s nice to have them back.
No. 14. MEGADETH – THE SICK, THE DYING … AND THE DEAD!: We were “promised” a lot before the release of this album. From the early riffs that Dave Mustaine allowed fans to hear snippets of down to the ellipses in the title, everything signaled a return to the band’s classic sound. What we got instead was a little faster and slightly more aggressive (in spots) version of the modern Megadeth. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but not quite what a lot of fans, myself included, were expecting. The album did give us one of the strangest duets of the year (at least until Billy Gibbons showed up on a Morris Day song in November), as Mustaine teams up with Sammy Hagar for album closer “This Planet’s on Fire,” which oddly is one of the more interesting songs, blending some Megadeth-style riffs with the big party choruses of Hagar’s work.
No. 13. AMORPHIS – HALO: Amorphis is almost incapable of putting out a bad album (we don’t speak of 2003’s grunge-inspired Far from the Sun), but they seem to have been stuck in the same formula since 2009’s outstanding Skyforger. Halo is a great album as usual. It was an early contender and spent a lot of time in my playlist, but it really doesn’t distinguish itself all that much from their last several records. I won’t complain about another dozen albums exactly like this, but I also wouldn’t complain about a small bit of evolution either – as long as they don’t go back to grunge for inspiration.
No. 12. WARD DAVIS – LIVE FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION IN HAYS, KANSAS: I wouldn’t normally put a live album on my end-of-year list, but this one is a lot of fun. And since I missed his incredible 2020 album Black Cats and Crows, which should have been near the top of my list that year, I figure I owe it to him. Davis returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to deliver a strong set of his own songs, songs he wrote with friend and collaborator Cody Jinks, and covers, including one from … Richard Marx? It’s great fun and good stuff for fans of what country music used to be.
No. 11. SOILWORK – OVERGIVENHETEN: One of my favorite groups of melodic death metallers continue in the more progressive vein they’ve traveled in recent years. Sure there are still plenty of blast beats from Bastian Thusgaard and screams from Bjorn Strid that are fairly safe melodeath, but there’s also a fair bit of artsy and experimental stuff. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Overgivenheten is a bit uneven compared to 2019’s Verkligheten, but it still delivers some bangers – and songs like “Dreams of Nowhere” and “Death, I Hear You Calling” were staples of my playlist in the last five months of the year.
No. 10. OZZY OSBOURNE – PATIENT NUMBER 9: Who’d have thought that an Ozzy Osbourne record would ever crack my Top 10 again? This one really kind of hit home for me despite some questionable production choices. The title track with Jeff Beck is the best thing that the Prince of Bleeping Darkness has done in ages, and there’s plenty more to like here with guest shots from Tony Iommi, Eric Clapton, Zakk Wylde and Mike McCready. Though it doesn’t quite capture the classic Ozzy energy, there are certainly shades of all of his incarnations to be found in the songs here, and it’s probably the first Ozzy album that I’ve truly enjoyed since 2001’s Down to Earth. (And yeah, I know most people dislike that one, too, but I don’t.)
No. 9. PARKWAY DRIVE – DARKER STILL: If you’re a fan of Parkway Drive’s first few metalcore albums and think 2018’s Reverence was a complete sell out, Darker Still is not for you. Luckily for me, I really enjoyed Reverence and, let’s face it, metalcore as a genre gets pretty boring and repetitive after a minute. The Aussies push even more toward catchy and hummable hard rock here on tracks like “Ground Zero” and “Glitch,” and there’s even a hip-hop influence on “If a God Can Bleed.” There’s some heaviness still left in one of my favorites, “Like Napalm,” “Soul Bleach” and album closer “From the Heart of the Darkness,” which is probably closer to their older sound than anything else. The centerpiece, though, is the title track, which reminds me of Savatage’s dark ballads and is unlike anything the band has done before. I don’t like Darker Still quite as much as Reverence, but it’s still entertaining.
No. 8. AMON AMARTH – THE GREAT HEATHEN ARMY: I had my doubts about this one after the first few songs trickled out, but fortunately, they were some of the weakest on the record in my opinion. The Great Heathen Army really plays into Amon Amarth’s more melodic side with a lot of classic metal influence and a couple of really enjoyable romps. The folk metal of “Heidrun” is infectious, and “Saxons and Vikings” (a duet with – who else? – Biff Byford of Saxon) is fantastic fun for old-school metal heads. In places its hummable, in others its epic, and it’s always as heavy as Thor’s hammer. This is the side of Amon Amarth that I love.
No. 7. LOCUST GROVE – THE BATTLE OF LOCUST: I’ve made no secret of my love for Anti-Mortem’s 2014 album New Southern. While the reformed version of that band went down a more modern rock path with its self-titled album released last year, former guitarist Zain Smith doubled down on the attitude-laden hard southern rock with Locust Grove. The Battle of Locust is the follow-up to New Southern that I’ve been waiting eight years or so for. It’s dripping in attitude, grooves and memorable hooks from start to finish. From raging about the world around us on “Sick of It All” to the blues-rock tones of “Bluebird” to angry, grooving headbangers like “Not Worth My Time,” “Why Run” and “These Hands,” this record satisfies my need for heavy Southern fried rock that, quite frankly, there’s not enough of these days.
No. 6. ALESTORM – SEVENTH RUM OF A SEVENTH RUM: After 2020’s Curse of the Crystal Coconut, which included a lot of silliness even by Alestorm standards, my favorite pirate metal band got back on course with this release. While there’s still plenty of goofiness – it wouldn’t be Alestorm without it – they also dipped back into their past to deliver some songs that would have been right at home on their earliest albums, long before they traveled through time to battle Vikings, came to drink your beer or pulled out that infamous anchor. Most notably, the title track really feels like something that could have appeared on their debut Captain Morgan’s Revenge. They even saved the disastrous “Tortuga” from that last album with a metal re-imagining here, and despite my gripes at the time of release, I even came around to “Cannonball.” It’s nice to have them back at the top of my playlist.
No. 5. HELLBOUND GLORY – THE IMMORTAL HELLBOUND GLORY: NOBODY KNOWS YOU: Simply put, I believe Leroy Virgil is a poet. Even when he’s singing about subjects like burning down the Dairy Queen and robbing a cash machine, there’s something in it that speaks to me. When he takes on something more serious, it’s even better. There’s an old-school honky tonk feel to Nobody Knows You that’s a little more understated for Virgil, but suits him well. There are still the fun romps that you expect like “Can’t Wait to Never See You Again,” “Word Gets Around” and “Didn’t Die Young (Aint Done Trying),” but even they have a little different feel from his usual rowdy tunes. The ghost story “13 Corners,” probably my personal favorite here, evokes the dark storytelling of Johnny Cash. But even more haunting than his ghost story is “Evacuation Song,” a mournful acknowledgement of the western wildfires. Though I do love the louder, more raucous Hellbound Glory of their early records, I think this might be Virgil’s best work to date.
No. 4. SKID ROW – THE GANG’S ALL HERE: Skid Row’s first three albums are classics for me, particularly second album Slave to the Grind, which ranks as one of my favorite records ever. While I enjoyed some of the things that they did in the years after they split with vocalist Sebastian Bach and drummer Rob Affuso, I never thought that they’d deliver another album that belonged in the conversation with their early work. I was wrong. Young gun Erik Gronwall has brought a new energy to the band. A fantastic vocalist, he sounds enough like Bach to do justice to the old material, and the new music has more fire than it has in a long time. The Gang’s All Here draws on those three albums for inspiration, but also sounds fresh and not like a band trying to reproduce its glory days. This was by far the most pleasant surprise of the year for me.
No. 3. ARCH ENEMY – DECEIVERS: I’ve been happy on the last couple of albums to hear Arch Enemy stretching out a little bit. While the music here still sits firmly in the melodic death metal style that they’ve made their name on, they play here and there with some different melodic ideas, and we also get to hear Alissa White-Gluz’s natural voice a little more in the context of a heavier song on “Handshake with Hell.” I know there will be fans bemoaning the band going soft, just like there have been since their first female singer (now band manager) Angela Gossow joined in 2000. Let them bitch. White-Gluz is too good a singer to be pigeonholed into nothing but death growls. (See her collaboration with Nita Strauss, “The Wolf You Feed,” also released this year.) Michael Amott and Jeff Loomis deliver some great guitar melodies on songs like “House of Mirrors” (one of my most played of the year) and the classic metal-flavored “In the Eye of the Storm,” and this album is honestly bad ass from start to finish.
No. 2. WHISKEY MYERS – TORNILLO: Early Morning Shakes has always been the album that all other Whiskey Myers efforts are judged on for me (not that they’ve done a remotely bad one). But Tornillo will give it a run for its money. This album is basically a love letter to the Southern American music that influenced them, and they wear those influences on their sleeves in places, as on the Skynyrd-style romp “Feet’s” or the Stevie Ray Vaughan-like blues groove of “Bad Medicine.” They cover the bases from Southern rock to blues and even throw in some funky and more heavy rock touches. Tornillo is fun, rowdy and at times very gritty and touching, and it produced one of my absolute favorite songs of the year in “The Wolf.”
No. 1. ZEAL AND ARDOR – ZEAL AND ARDOR: This is the one album that has not left my player since it was released in February. I’ve always enjoyed Manuel Gagneux’s subversive blending of traditionally black music – gospel, blues, soul – with more extreme music like black metal and industrial, but he really hits his stride on this record. The blend on this Best of 2022 LP is perfect with raging metal songs like “Gotterdammerung” more soulful (ironically) offerings like “Church Burns” and the perfect mixture of the two in tunes like “Death to the Holy.” It’s very rare in 2022 to find a musical take that you haven’t heard hundreds of times before, but Zeal & Ardor are stunningly different, and while the styles mixed are often miles apart, the transitions are never jarring. Gagneux makes them sound like they fit together naturally. And maybe they do.
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