This week we have part one of our end of the year honors! Brian, Nick and Kyle give you what they think (and actually agree on sometimes!) are the Worst Albums, Most Improved Bands, Most Disappointing Albums, Most Overlooked Albums, Best Live Shows, and, last but not least, the Best Album Artworks. For the last honor, you disfunction SideShow hosts bring in none other than Mike Clancey, friend and designer of the SideShow logos, to share his thoughts on this year’s album covers since he actually has knowledge on the subject. Lastly, we bring you a rundown of the couple of shows we caught over the last couple of weeks including Dethklok’s headlining run and Killswitch Engage’s Alive or Just Breathing 10th anniversary show in NYC.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
The Sideshow Podcast 
My favorites of the albums you guys reviewed this year:
1) Baroness – Yellow & Green
2) Katatonia – Dead End Kings
3) Soen – Cognitive WEB
4) Skyharbor – Blinding White Noise
5) Torche – Harmonicraft
I also really liked Black Pyramid’s II, but you didn’t get to that one.
My surprise – The Haarp Machine – pretty good, actually. I want less screaming, but whatever.
Here’s a few more of my “best of” categories for 2012:
-Best album artwork: I’m going with the slice of a miniature forested world that is on Weather Systems by Anathema.
-Most disappointing? Storm Corrosion. A collaboration between Mikael Åkerfeldt and Steven Wilson being freed from any previous constraints of their band’s preconceptions could have yielded brilliance. Instead it yielded something that isn’t really even music.
-Best beers? Sounds like a good idea. If Decibel can feature all these micro-brews in their magazine then you can certainly have a beer of the year category. But for me, 2012 is the year I discovered the wonderful world that is single malt Scotch. Laphroaig is without a doubt my drink of the year.
-How about Cattle Decapitation for most improved? The addition of the cleaner vocals on Monolith of Inhumanity has made a vast improvement to the band as a whole.
-I’ll add one more category that I’ve made up on my own for the album that improved the most for me as the year went on. That album would be Resolution by Lamb of God. At first, I thought it was mediocre at best and was disappointed that the band didn’t show any real growth. But after some time to sink in, the singles on that album such as Desolation, Ghost Walking, and The Undertow showed themselves to me to be just as good as many other LOG songs. And to top it off, King Me now stands as one of my favorite LOG songs they’ve ever made.
-Brian, you made it through 4 or 5 songs at the Dethklok show? That’s 4 or 5 more than I made it through. Seeing Machine Head was enough for me. And you think YOU’RE getting to old to be in the pit at these shows? How do you think I feel? But it’s ok because I’m desperately trying to cling to every last ounce of my youth that I have left.