Truthiness, Hot Buttons, and Why I’m a Progressive

Politics are draining. Depressing. Divisive. Yet unavoidable.

“Political” is a term that in a blanket-sense covers all interactions between individuals in a society. Party politics on the other hand are something else entirely. I’m beginning to wonder what that something else even is anymore.

I find it frustrating that the huge divide in ways of thinking seems less likely than ever to be bridged as years go by; with all of the media and information we have at our fingertips, we still have no way of reaching common understanding on certain basic issues by looking at “facts.” Two equally intelligent people can discuss an issue and both be convinced that the other is completely wrong, that they alone have studied the facts and determined the truth–why can’t their opponent see what is clearly in front of their face? Now, in terms of “facts” derived from media the issue is certainly muddled, to the point that those cynical post-modern thinkers who claim we can have no truth on any issue seem to be onto something–but I stress that must not be the case. I’m not ready to cede meaning in life to nihilistic claims of complete relativity. Yet media continues to pour gas on the division–you want facts? How about emotionally-charged, morally self-righteous, tell you what you want to hear if you’re a liberal facts from MSNBC? How about loose-with-details-about-what-actually-happened, appeal to your fears and prejudices, hyperbolic facts from FOX news? Or facts that hype a sensationalized, isolated news event for ratings while millions of other things are going on from CNN? Or scour the blogosphere for pundits, critics, bloggers, journaists who all have facts to support what you already believed before you went looking for something to back it up with. Facts like this are what led Stephen Colbert to accurately coin “truthiness” a few years ago, a reality now so recognized you can find his word in the dictionary.

What brings this on is a few issues that have bubbled up in the news the past few weeks; log onto facebook, if you are one of the suckers like the majority of us who daily use that medium to “connect” with people, and unless you’re one of those people who only adds friends who politically agree with you (and I know people who do things like that–it’s a continuation of the habit many keep for years, growing up with a certain ideology, surrounding themselves with others who share that same ideology, only encountering the other side in any serious way in an educational setting and then closing their mind off to considering that way from the start), then you probably see on a daily basis anytime a culturally significant news story occurs a host of hyperbolic reactions from the right and the left. Now, engage in a debate on one of those issues on a source like facebook and all you will produce is a string of responses that people frenetically hack out self-righteously without bothering to fully read or consider the opposing statements in the first place and everyone will log off a little pissed that people don’t agree with them, a little smug that they have retorted, and that will be it. Well, you can say this entire article, and for that fact this entire blog, is the same thing regarding different issues but in longer-form. I suppose so, I won’t deny that I feel like a hypocrite on a daily basis about a host of issues, but hey. We have to express these issues, debate them, consider them, and I try to formulate my thoughts and be open to different possibilities when I work on something like this. And I use the facebook to politically engage issues when something is emotionally or socially pressing for me, to express dissent or urge participation, to organize like-minded thinkers; yet I have my doubts that some of the debates on such a medium have any positive reaction (as an aside, it should be noted that for all of the gripes we can give FB, it does have the potential for more importance than most of us can imagine–look at the role it played in the Egyptian revolution; when facts and events are supressed and hidden, any medium that gets the truth out past those who might conceal it is essential).

All of this preamble to really get to my point. I began to wonder what some of the main reasons I have for holding onto some of the beliefs I have politically. I feel that I have developed my own political grounding from considering all of my alternatives; that I have been equally exposed to all political possibilities and views at different points in my life, and the views and positions I have developed at the present are a result of life experiences that have caused me to thinking about issues in  certain way, to  an ever continuing evolution in religious thinking I have gone through, to relationships I’ve made, jobs I’ve had, education I’ve received, reading I’ve done, things I’ve witnessed…taking all of that into consideration, what I feel forms my opinions in large part is the idea of “people over principle.”

Principle is a guiding rule for many people. “I believe in the sanctity of marriage and that is one man, one woman. Therefore I politically deny rights to same-sex couples,” a person with certain principles will say. Or, “I believe in State-rights and small government–if a state wants to create and enforce its own immigration laws contrary to what big government tries to impose on them, I will support that state’s right to do so even if I may disagree with how individual immigrants might be ill-treated in the commission of said laws,” another person with particular principles might say (and I have heard such statements in various forms from friends; I have also read such statements in history books regarding the south and the civil war).

I believe in people-over-principle. A friend of mine had a father whose job it was decades past to break unions in the south. He was staunchly anti-union on principle. I believe in people, that people deserve collective-bargaining rights to ensure government, businesses, or corporations do not strip them of the ability to organize and speak out against unfair labor practices. I believe big business, even public sector business, will exploit people, treat them unfairly, and pay them as poorly as possible in the name of profit or buget-reduction. In the current case of teachers Unions in Wisconsin, I believe that teachers are struggling to protect their right to be paid and treated fairly–the issue is the collective bargaining resource more than any particular cuts. The teachers union even agreed to comply with the cuts if they could keep the bargaining chip for the future and the other side refused. Take away a bit now and the right to debate the future reductions, and before long the teachers will have no right to a living wage. Education is a value in itself for people–better educated people have better opportunities. Another issue from this week involved the Obama administration refusing to defend the DOMA act in court. This has many conservatives crying foul. Some because they see it as a stepping stone to legalizing gay marriage and they see that as a step to an immoral society. The principle of “gay marriage is wrong” is more important than the people who are gay. To be fair, other conservatives disagree on the issue as a matter of another principle, that of our system of government and its checks-and-balances; they argue that the President is not doing his job by holding up his end of the bargain and defending DOMA in court regardless of how he or any of us believe about the issue itself. This is a rather tight argument based on principle, but can be countered in part in that Obama is reacting to the idea that certain clauses in DOMA are unconstitutional and thus suspending enforcement of the law until the legal ruling on its constitutionality is completed–enforcement of an unconstitutional law is itself unconstitutional. While certain recent presidents have overlooked the constitution in laws and have been selective in enforcing other laws (*ahem* Bush), this is only a major issue now that it is Obama doing it and that it concerns gay marriage. People over principle for me insists laws be judged according to many complex issues; slavery was once legal, it was once legal to kill Native Americans who were on your property, etc. Those laws were both immoral and unconstitutional to enforce.

So, this is why I consider myself a progressive. People over Principle is part of the groundwork of Progressive Politics. Progressive Politics can be rooted in any party; Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive in many ways; FDR, JFK, and Clinton were all Progressives in many ways that, though flawed and capable of great mistakes, also accomplished major feats for people over principle.

The political sphere will always be ruled by greed, self-interest, and contradiction. So when it cannot serve the best interest in a progressive vision, the religious community can. Progressive means looking to the future not maintaining the status-quo; in religious relationships, progressivism is the key to survival. Do we look to the past only–to the violence done by members of one religion to members of another? No. If we look for that, we will certainly find it in every sphere (but we will likely be overlooking the cultural, political, and social reasons that contributed to that violence or caused a particularly violent interpretation of religion to take root). Progressives can be found amidst the many brilliant Islamic Reformers and Muslim thinkers, Christian theologians, pastors, and priests, Jewish rabbis and teachers, Buddhist activists and monks, Native American ecologists, etc. In the moments when the political sphere ceases to do justice and make progress, there is much room for the interreligious community to step up, and perhaps the future of progress can truly be found there.

Drive-By Truckers: Go-Go Boots (Album Review)

Just like the artist from the last album review I posted (Talib Kweli), Drive-by Truckers are back with another full-length album less than a year after their last one. DBT’s output has been both perpetual in frequency and consistent in quality over the past few years. Go-Go Boots, their ninth studio record, is a quieter more story-driven album than last year’s The Big To-Do. That record pealed back the stories, decreased the word-count of Hood’s sometimes wordy lyrics, and turned up the amps to showcase noise and rock riffs. It was a solid, wonderful record, though not quite the classic its predecessor (Brighter Than Creation’s Dark) was. Go-Go Boots is a showcase of how great the current line-up of DBT is as a unit, arguably the best the group has been in organization in its entire history as this third record with Shonna, Patterson, and Mike splitting song-writing, vocals, and POVs continues to prove.

Patterson still leads the charge by penning the most songs on the record, and its again his work that structures and glues the concepts together across this 14-song album (spread across two 180-gram LPs if you snagged the vinyl, again worth it in that the background instruments and chords sound great, especially in songs like album-opener “I Do Believe,” which works on Mp3 or CD but in such formats the chords noticeably wash together to sound a bit too flat, more like punk that the hybrid of Americana-punk-soul-country-blues-rock that this stuff actually is). “I Do Believe” is a sunny, pop-inflected southern rock song that sounds like the Eagles and the Beach Boys got together in Alabama. The title track, “Go-Go Boots,” is a Story song (emphasis on capital Story) like middle-period Dirty South-era Truckers. It’s an enjoyable story, but it’s repeat value is somewhat limited because there is no hook or chorus, just an interesting tale that you likely don’t want to hear too many times on repeat; the band give it some grace by layering the background with great noir-ish punk-country chords. Shonna’s first song, “Dancin’ Ricky,” is a beauty vocally. She sings stronger with each song she leads on, with such a sweet and pretty voice tempered with a personable and unashamed accent that draws out her geography and character. She sings “Ricky” with such heart that it may take a few spins to listen to the lyrics–a surprisingly heartfelt portrait of an obese man who loves to dance at parties unhindered by his less than attractive appearance on display from clothes that don’t fit. Shonna doesn’t let him off the hook–”your shirt’s too damn small for your body,” but doesn’t neglect the character his dignity–admonishing him to watch his health, keep his diabetes in check because he has “plenty of moves left to do.” Anyone who has ever been to a small town party or bar knows the Ricky character. The Truckers never fail to give the protagonists of their songs, those never close to perfect humans, a dry warmth and appreciation of their inherent dignity. Afterall, like any great southern writers, the Truckers are trying to give voice and presence to creations modelled after the sort of people  they grew up around and sometimes still live near, the type of people rarely treated by any other medium and never with as much care. Of course, there are just slimy characters to sing about here as well. Not just the murdering preacher from the title song, but yet another murdering preacher in “The Fireplace Poker” (and last album around in “The Wig He Made Her Wear” we had the inspired- by-true events story of a preacher murdered by his wife–I’m sensing a theme of distrust of small-town southern preachers in the latest DBT work!). “Fireplace Poker” is downright eery; a bloody, creepy, crime tale that is pitch black and suffocating within its subtle country gothic chord trappings.

This album also contains two Eddie Hinton songs the band originally did as 45 singles promoting that troubled artist’s artistic genius and underexposed career. Hinton was an Alabama musician who played on the Staples singers “I’ll Take You There,” co-wrote “Breakfast in Bed” (a hit for Dusty Springfield and also UB40), and released two critically praised country-soul albums of his own. The band rocks the country soul sound excellently on their cover of his “Everybody Needs Love,” a great, positive, catchy song with Patterson’s best vocals on the album, a song which serves as the centerpiece to all the troubled tales which surround it; the other Hinton number, “Where’s Eddie” was written by Hinton as an attempt to speak from the POV of the nurse looking for him while he was out of his room during one of his frequent periods of institutionalization. Shonna sings it with wit, warmth, and soul.

“Used to be a Cop” and “The Thanksgiving Filter” were released as singles for the fall World Record Store Day in November and fit in nicely as part of the overall album; “Cop” is another long story song, this one with more replay value than the title track, with hints of hooks and a thudding bassline  that builds up the tension the protagonist feels; “Thanksgiving” is an honest and cynical appraisal of the holiday visits with family. Like “Cop,” “Ray’s Automatic Weapon” is about a man facing down demons he thought he could kick with age only to find them getting worse. He calls a friend to come take his gun because his nightmares continue and “the nights ain’t getting shorter, only my patience and checkbook and fuse.”

Mike Cooley once again is outnumbered by Patterson in terms of the amount of output, but he makes up for that in terms of quality. Cooley’s songs should be on maintream country radio, but I guess it’s fortunate for those artists that they aren’t because they’d put those artists to shame. His voice is classic country perfect, and his songs have catchy country-beats and rhythms, but he fills them with such simple yet profound observations and literate detail that he transcends the genre. “Pulaski” is a sad but pretty tale of a college girl not too thrilled with the world she found away from home; “The Weakest Man” sounds like a country hit from the 1970s, lost but now resurfaced, a break-up story of timeless appeal; “Cartoon Gold” is trademark Cooley humor and atmosphere.

Yeah, there are a few more songs here too; they’re also good. This record is really a good record–some songs get better with repeat listens, truly sinking in, other songs (primarily the story-heavy ones) are best on early listens but hold up for other reasons even when the story has been told. A record that shows the Truckers are still on track as a band that matters, as a band deserving all the heaps of critical acclaim they get from disparate sources and the cries of their overall importance; a band that still won’t earn anything close to mainstream appeal, but who can truly accomplish such a thing nowadays while still staying true to characer and identity, geography and texture, culture and sound anyway? Let’s just hope they keep a solid dependable following to support them through a dozen more albums this good or better.

Rating: 9/10

Grammy’s 2011

So, I notoriously hate on the Grammy’s. I stopped tuning in for several years because they always made the wrong choice for every conceivable category and they booked the most atrocious acts…eventually it seemed like every notable performer stopped even showing up at the ceremony. So this year was a total but pleasant surprise.

I wrote this review last year, bemoaning the tragedy that was the Grammy’s yet acknowledging the few right turns that managed to emerge from the mess. This year though, as the show closes out and as for the first time in my life I think I and the Grammy’s agree on album of the year (Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” made my “Best of 2010″ album list at number one), I find myself dumbfounded that the overwhelmingly mainstream, corporate event that seems like something that  mandates that actual “artists” skip putting in an appearance, has seemingly  woke up; or, perhaps with the economic downturn all artists decided if they were going to make a living at making music they should band together. Not sure, but with performances by Mumford & Sons, The Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan, a great live spot by BoB and his equally talented musical partners from “Nothin’ On You,” two songs by Arcade Fire, Cee Lo (a terrific artist long overdue for some mainstream attention) accompanied by puppets, a fabulous and true-to-form Gaga moment, Florence from Florence in the Machine getting to show off her pipes in an Aretha Franklin tribute number, and a return to the stage by Dr. Dre,  well, the Grammy’s paid off big for the first time in forever. Sure, Train won with a song that was overplayed and a bit under-cooked,  but even that was a comeback story that made you not begrudge them their win; sure Bieber performed, but he’s just following in the cheesy tradition of teen male bubble gum acts that bring the money into the labels to fund the next Mumfords; sure the voters dropped the ball on most categories and honored the wrong “record” and “rock album of the year” (among others), and sure the show can be criticized for not even bothering to broadcast worthwhile awards, i.e. Metal album of the year (did Slayer, Lamb of God or Megadeth win, all were nominated—leave a comment if you know yet), but at least the show was watchable and at least in the right terrain most of the time even if slightly off at some of the key moments.

Anyway, consider me pleasantly surprised.

Research Request: Calling all Metal Fans

Okay, I am fishing for information here; this is an attempt at gathering research for a book I am working on about theology in the music and culture of Heavy Metal, 1970+.

Though the project is more extensive than this aspect alone, this portion could be a very integral component to the finished work. If you are a fan or performer, past or present, in any subgenre of metal music and are also interested in religion or spiritual matters–whether you consider yourself deeply spiritual, involved in organized religion, or vehemently opposed to religion, your opinion is valued.

If you would be interested in contributing to this project by answering a few questions, please drop an email to:

metaltheologyresearch2011@gmail.com

This work will look at the theology within the lyrics and music of all major metal sub-genres and the critique or acceptance of religion found within them; this work will also look at how the christian church in different decades and geographic locations has reacted to such music; the primary information being sought through this email request regards fan’s/performer’s own spirituality–did/does such music fulfill a spiritual need you feel you have? Does such music offer a valid criticism of particular expressions of religiosity to you?

Thank you in advance.

Talib Kweli: Gutter Rainbows (Album Review)

“Voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless,” Kweli calls for in the title track of “Gutter Rainbows,” which is also the first song on the record following the opening skit. Gutter Rainbows comes just months after Kweli’s reunion album with longtime collaborator DJ Hi Tek, Revolutions Per Minute, which came out under the moniker of ReFlection Eternal last summer. RPM was a superb album–containing quite a few highlights it was simply an overall solid, substantial hip hop record (it made slot 10 of my 10 Best Albums of 2010 post).

So it’s a bit surprising Kweli was ready to make a follow-up so quickly; this new one was a digital only release (though he raps for the “hipsters” amongst many others as claimed here, he hasn’t embraced the vinyl resurgence amongst said hipsters and hip hop heads!). First of all, Gutter Rainbows is not quite as good as RPM and it’s certainly not a Beautiful Struggle, but what it is is a nice album with solid (but not Hi Tek) beats filled up by Kweli’s confident tongue-twisting rhymes. Kweli’s a rapper that you are happy just to hear new output from, anything that lets such a smooth, entertaining flow be showcased is better than 9/10s of the rap competition. The theme of this record seems to be the beauty amidst the grime, the sacred hidden in the profane, the humanity amidst broken structures within the inner city. Granted, a theme explored by a lot of hip hop, and not treated in huge depth constantly here (Kweli gets a break from the city to “write this album from my ipad” on an international flight–”Mr. International”). There are light affirmations of the value of “Friends and Family,” but there’s also the menacing, harrowing biographical depiction of a returning veteran from Iraq back in the inner city trying to “fit in with civilians” when he’s “used to killing,” and whose night out with a girl he meets at a fast food restaurant ends in a tragic way he managed to escape overseas (“Tater Tot”). “I’m on One” and “Cold Rain” are great hip hop tracks with car window rattling beats and top skill bars by Kweli. The album closes with the excellent jazz-infused call for responsibility and salvation, “Self Savior,” a song maintaining that race is no longer the classification for oppression but that poverty in general is (“every poor person is a n***** now”). Looking for help, the protagonist finds social structures and police not to be on his side and  only hate in far too much of modern religion, yet he affirms  “prayer for my enemy,” even though so many others put “style over substance.” Talib Kweli tells listeners to “get back to your essence, use your gifts to share your presence, don’t count your dollars before you count your blessings.”

Album rating: 7/10

Note: Talib kicks off the start of a new year of music; this record is the strongest of the year so far, though both White Lies and Smith Westerns also released solid work in January.  February is bringing us a new Drive By Truckers LP and a pre-release buzzed second LP by Jessica Lea Mayfield, and in early march we finally get to hear Lupe Fiasco’s long-delayed “Lasers.”

Post Superbowl: Baseball is Still Better!

On a song from the album that really gained them critical attention about 10 years ago, Drive By Truckers lead singer/songwriter Patterson Hood opined: “Me I was one of them p**** boys because I hated football so I got a guitar; but a guitar is a poor substitute for a football with the girls in my high school so my band hit the road” (“The Three Great Alabama Icons”). Such a sentiment seems apt now that Superbowl season has came and went. This year I didn’t bother tuning in at all; the Superbowl being the only football game I ever bother to sit through and then only for commercials, halftime shows and to perfunctorily take part in this sort of  US-only holiday that becomes more pervasive, expensive, and popular every year.

Like Hood, I have never cared for football; his statement reflected that sense that male non-football fans notice even if it doesn’t really bother them, that the overwhelming majority of their peers cannot comprehend  their disinterest in such a seemingly mandatory interest. A columnist on a graphic art and comics site I frequent wrote an interesting article awhile back (I’d link to it but can’t find it at the moment) about how he finds at his office the sports fans can openly and frequently talk about obsessive levels of fandom–quoting stats from plays and games dating back decades even–yet his interest in comics and graphic novels, including getting paid to write articles for comics journals and knowing the artists and writers that work on titles present and past in the same manner his coworkers can name players on teams is seen as somewhat freakish in comparison. Sports is a universal interest which invites high levels of fandom, creating its own network of socially acceptable bonding over said fandom.

So football. See, I came to sports fandom a bit late and not in not nearly as an intense manner as many; never caring for football and only having a passing interest in basketball, I rediscovered baseball in my early twenties, maybe five years ago; watching the games, rediscovering my childhood teams which I liked then for no rational reason and returned to liking now; I watched Ken Burns massive 10 hour documentary on the history of the game, caught up on giving my own management hand a try via Baseball on Playstation, read some literary journalism on the game, watched the predictable but entertaining sports drama films about baseball, etc.

I really do love baseball now and can watch any game when it’s on in season; yet, aside from certain occasional games, I can also pass on most games if something else is going on, and my love for the game never approaches the level of love I have for music, philosophy,  films, books, or comics. Yet I love baseball a bit more with everything I learn about it; it is one of those games that pays you back for learning its intricacies, subtleties, history, and stats.  I’ve waxed and waned on this site occasionally giving reasons why it’s the better game when compared with football, usually somewhat in jest, often invoking the classic Carlin skit. Now that football has passed from being a mandatory “male” interest to a seemingly mandatory “American” interest, I present a few post-superbowl reflections on why baseball still is the better sport!

I realize that criticizing football is inviting slurred insults my way; heck, even a football fan like Rolling Stone political hot head Matt Taibbi (who loves the game) can get ripped for criticizing the sport as he did  following a piece he wrote in a recent issue as part of his monthly football column in which he noted that the reason concussions were rampant and more often an occurrence now and would increasingly be so is because compared to earlier days today’s players have gotten bigger (due to genetics, steroids, diet), the game has gotten faster and more aggressive (due to fan expectations and advertisers), and the injuries were going to continue to build and be constant–that fans would have to accept responsibility for the collateral damage their hobby as viewers encouraged and that the big-wigs at NFL would have to decide how many physically debilitating events are an acceptable loss margin. Either that, Taibbi concluded, or Americans would have to embrace the game that all of Europe plays as football and we call soccer. So yeah, he got a bit of NFL sportswriters ire with those claims. So, don’t take my column so seriously, since every year even the friends I grew up with who also hated football seem to have been pulled into the armchairs to root for it now; I realize my opinion is that of a small margin of people (a fact I have to recognize in other ways, like I must be the only guy I know who hates “Family Guy” and “Glee” both).

So here goes:

Football is an American sport, granted; America took the name all of the world used for their global sport and attached it to a rougher, more aggressive stadium style game. Baseball is an American game too; the “american part-time.” Yet baseball is now popular in Japan, Puerto Rico, and South America. Baseball was born in America out of immigrant convergence, a game that took in all who came to find new lives and a game that traversed American history with the country, weaving and adapting like that other great American invention, Jazz (or even democracy!). Baseball created this poetic, subtle game that could translate to other cultures who caught a passion for it as well; football is an american game in an imperialistic manner–taking the name of a widely played and loves sport to co-opt it for something practically only played and cared about in this country. Football is ingrained with an American ethos–faster, stronger, crushing, commercializing; baseball’s american ethos is poetry, jazz, history, culture sharing and affirming.

Just some thoughts. Don’t hate.

Metal! Addendum : Iron Maiden and 2010

Okay, I feel the need to make a major revision to a statement made in my Metal! article posted here, thus here is this addendum.

See, as I described the artist at the fourth spot, Dio, I remarked that to capture the sound of metal for that particular time it had to be Dio or Iron Maiden and that I’d pick Dio over Maiden “any day of the week.” I massively sleighted the Maiden on the entire list. This might seem irrelevant and pointless to non metal fans, spot on to a few metal fans, and downright heresy to a huge number of metal fans. I’ve changed my mind about it enough to warrant this post.

Now, no slight is now intended to Dio, the group or the singer who gave it its namesake, Ronnie James Dio. I still think he was probably the coolest and best vocalist in metal and it was sad to see him pass last year. But I was wrong to overlook Maiden; my previous experience with their music  was a bit of their “Number of the Beast” record and “Piece of Mind.” For some reason, I stumbled into listening to their 2010 record, “The Final Frontier.” I liked it enough to backtrack to listen to their classic work;   to “Somehwhere in Time” and “The Best of the Beast” …which led to listening to the self-titled debut, “Powerslave,” “Fear of the Dark,” “Live After Death,” “Dance of Death,” and so on. In short, I haven’t listened to this much metal in a very long time and I have no idea how I overlooked this massive catalogue of excellent material, music that can appeal to metal fans, classic rock fans, pretty much anyone who likes great musicians and can dig a little fantasy and cheese. Because seriously, this is often cheesy stuff but I mean that in the best possible way. This is science fiction paperback cheesy that delivers excitement even when you know its “pulp,” and then you love it even more. Amidst the songs about sorcerors, warriors, battlefields, time travel, haunted woods and the like though, Maiden sneaks in heartfelt ballads about enjoying life, love, family and friends, about recognizing that you are living in the “Golden Years” already. They critique war, politics, and figures who misuse and abuse religion. They tell concept ablums about  the “seventh son of a seventh son” or narrate the life of Alexander the Great. Maiden have a wide range of excellence in their catalogue and appear to have stayed consistent and grown throughout about 30 years of music so that’s pretty impressive. And their album last year? It went number 1 in something like 30 seperate countries! For a band that hasn’t received mainstream attention in the US since the mid-eighties, that’s quite a shock, but after hearing songs like the album closer “When the Wind Blows” I can see why they’re globally appreciated. Another band I completely overlooked on the best of list was Judas Priest, a band I knew only for “British Steel,” and their biggest hits. I listened to their ’70s albums which pretty much crafted the sound metal later became and then dug into their more mainstream fair to catch some of their popular highlights, and I’m now aware that they certainly deserved to make my list as well. So, of all of the “genre best” lists I”ve done so far, “Metal!” is the only one I would re-evaluate in hindsight, the only one I feel I missed the mark on. Rather than re-factor the list now though, I’ll work on an upcoming one to revisit Metal in the album format, highlighting 20 of the best Metal records of all time.

So, while on the subject of metal I feel I should mention some great metal that came out last year– metal didn’t make the cut on my “10 Best Albums of 2010″ or “20 Best Songs of 2010″ list, and since I did a “Hip Hop in 2010″ post to make up for some of the almost-but-not-quite rap records  last year but not for metal, I figure it is now time to rectify that. So in addition to “The Final Frontier,” these are metal records from 2010 that are worth checking out:

* Danzig – Deth Red Saboth

Danzig hasn’t released anything in six years and nothing near the highlights of his first four records in more than a decade; no longer with any major distribution and releasing his work on a small independant label with a limited budget could have resulted in a record no one heard. Hopefully that’s not the case, because “Deth Red Saboth” (ridiculous title aside) is his strongest effort in quite some time. He melds together his punk rock garage tendencies that started him in his days with the Misfits and Samhain to the evil-Elvis/spooky Jim Morrison power goth metal of his own band’s early work and produces some classic moments: the pounding epic “Hammer of the Gods,” the creepy ballad “On a Wicked Night,” the Danzig II style outake of “Black Candy.”

*Deftones – Diamond Eyes

Deftones have been very consistent and proved to have a staying power that hardly any of their contemporaries proved to have–emerging with the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit in the nineties, Deftones proved to have much more style, skill, and substance than any of the “pimp rawk,” “mook rawk,” or nu-metal bands. Only Tool, System of a Down, and arguably Slipknot managed to build careers worthy of continuance from that era of metal popularity, but Deftones have always done their own thing and done it well, even with the occasional experimentation suceeding. “Diamond Eyes” is another strong record in their catalogue with melodic powerhouses like the title track, creeping tension laced songs like “You’ve Seen the Butcher,” and true to form metal jams like “Rocket Skates.”

* Ihsahn – After

I’m not sure what these guys are singing about, but what sends this record over the top for me is just the sheer sonic beauty found in such unexpected fusions. This record deserves your time if only for “A Grave Inversed,” a song which welds jazz saxophone of a frantic and technically magnificent caliber to black metal aggression. Metal Jazz fusion is something I never expected to hear, but this is a tremendous sound and the wildness of both artforms actual work remarkably well together. There are many other highlights from “After,” but I’m still processing that one.

* High on Fire – Snakes for the Divine

HOF records are always intense apocalyptic doom metal sessions to show off ridiculously heavy riffs which take unexpected turns. The lyrics and fvocals always match the sound, but that sound is what is important and those guitars are why you listen to the record. The latest album is no exception in doing what they do best, providing another hour of face-melting metal that detours enough to be a step in a different direction that the work last time around.