His first album was just him with electronic drums, but this was the first with live drums – his friend tracked the drums first and sent them over, then he wrote the songs to the drumbeat. He wanted to make something different that incorporated his love of classical music and for metal, and grindcore was the most abrasive genre he’d experimented with so far, so he chose that. “Nicola Manzan studied violin at a conservatoire in Italy and he’s also in a metal band playing guitar. It gives you a little bit of rest before this really erratic, relentless, short burst of energy, then rests again – like someone is beating you up in little intervals. It’s one big unit, even though there’s loads of different songs and pauses between them, it sounds like it flows from one to the next. There’s a hint of Mike Patton to it, there’s a craziness, but I also like the fact that every song is as short as it is. “I can’t remember how I found it I went on Bandcamp wormholes most nights during the year when I was buying this music, but I just ended up there somehow. When you hear it, you can hear someone in their bedroom really getting obsessed with this new sound they’re creating, but have no idea if there’s an audience for it.” There are sub-sections of black metal that are misogynist and racist as well, so he was kind of upsetting people on both sides in different ways, but he wasn’t thinking about it being big, he was just making this album himself. Spiritual music is very Christian and black metal tends to be very not Christian ( laughs). “It’s two genres that shouldn’t go together, obviously. He decided to interpret that as blues but also spiritual music that was made by slaves in America, and mixed it with black metal. Someone suggested black metal and another person suggested N-word music – which is a pretty horrible thing to write, but I don’t know the race of that person or if they knew he was mixed race himself. I don’t know if people know the story behind the album, but he went on 4chan and asked for recommendations of genres he should incorporate in his music. “I liked the music on the album, but for a while I wrestled with how okay it was that he’d done this, and then I read more about it and made my peace with it. It got re-released in 2017, so some people like Ed Gamble try to pass it off as a 2017 album, but they should have gotten into it at the right time. “The reason it wasn’t on a lot of lists was because it was released on Bandcamp in 2016 independently with no PR whatsoever, Manuel Gagneux (frontman) just did it on his own, and it blew up. Any time that happened I got quite excited it was an album I hadn’t heard of but it was someone’s favourite album of the year, so I was intrigued by it.
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I hadn’t seen this on any lists anywhere, and suddenly it was number one on someone’s list. “I’d been searching for music for ages and reading everyone’s top lists of the year. “I didn’t get into metal straight away from that issue, but shortly after that I bought Kerrang! and it was the age of nu-metal, so I was buying stuff like Soulfly, Korn and bands like that.” “It was something like the Top 100 Albums Of All Time, and I loved lists like that,” he remembers today.
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James first discovered metal through Kerrang! magazine at the age of 13, reading his friend’s copy in a caravan while on a rugby tour. So we’ve given him the chance to speak at length about the 10 metal albums he deems the best of 2016 (aka the best year for music).
#METAL ALBUMS 2016 FULL#
This obsession soon became a full-on work project and the topic of his book Perfect Sound Whatever, which tells the story of James’ rollercoaster year through the lens of different 2016 albums.įrom Bowie to Beyonce, Kanye to Radiohead, 2016 was full of huge artists releasing landmark albums, hundreds of which are examined throughout the pages of James’ book, but he only had room to deep dive into two metal albums.
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Not our words, but those of comedian James Acaster who made it his mission to collect and consume hundreds of albums from 2016, spanning all genres and styles.įollowing a breakup and subsequent breakdown, James found himself adrift in 2017, seeking comfort in discovering and listening to music from the previous year, a time when he was truly happy.