On My Turntable: Vreid, The KLF, Snares, YOB, Tombs

London winters are shitty

Amid the murky gloom of the grisly London winter, I warm myself by raking through the dying embers of the musical year just gone.

I love pecking like a vulture on the carcass of year-end lists, yanking out the gems I missed like so many scraps of bloody intestine .

Of course that’s in the very limited time I have left after doing my best to suck every last drop of pleasure from Trap Them’s Darker Handcraft and the Balaclava record.

I am seriously addicted. Darker Handcraft is utterly narcotic in its intensity: blissed out on buzzsaw guitar.

Anyway. On my (metaphorical) turntable this week are Vreid, The KLF, Snares, YOB and Tombs.

Top 10 Albums 2011

Speed demons or sweet feelings. The great gamut of music boiled down to that binary definition for most of 2011.

Music had only two roles: to put fire in my belly or smooth my furrowed brow.

I’m not cut out for new fatherhood, even second time around. My synapses need more help than ever to fire and my cranium is forever creaking, aching.

This list – my top 10 albums of 2011 – reflects this.

No black metal, no doom. Neither hip-hop, post-metal nor bass fuckery. Just various blends of death metal, crust and hardcore, preferably with that heartstarting Sunlight tone, or the polar opposite: the pastoral, the dreamy.