Fading Light of Youth

 I revisited the entire discography for this post over the course of ten days. Most songs I had heard countless times and there was a practical enjoyment to grading them. The albums themselves were much harder to grade. At more than one point in their career, the Beatles were releasing admittedly fragmented and unfocused albums, sometimes by design. In the end, I decided to grade the albums using a simple total average of the individual songs. Nothing else was considered because of just how different the albums are in origin and scope.  The songs themselves were graded on a 100 point scale, 0.0 to 10.0, based on two key criteria: 1) Listenability/Enjoyability: Gut reaction response, personal connection/preference, how happy I am if it comes on the radio 2) The Bar Band Factor: How impressed I would be by the song if I heard it performed by an unknown band at random [Editor's Notes: Cover songs, marked with an * , count towards an album's final score but are not included in the

75. Exumer - Hostile Defiance SCORE: 6.5 Genre: Thrash Metal Label: Metal Blade Place in Discography: Fifth album Tags: Safe, Competent Review: Exumer plays an aggressive form of thrash metal but they keep things interesting with lots of classic heavy metal melody. This album beat out the other thrash albums because it has great quality control with no filler and most of the songs have at least one memorable riff or movement. I don't even know if it is possible for thrash metal to progress or be any more interesting, but I did appreciate this album's variety and it was strong from start to finish. 

This was going to be a quick and easy top ten list. Just before I was ready to publish, I checked out some top ten lists from the around the internet and realized I had a missed a lot of albums. Seeing as there was no rush whatsoever, I made a huge list of my own by scouring end of year lists and set about listening to, grading, and reviewing all of them.  With about fifty albums reviewed, I was once again ready to publish. I got my laptop set up in the bedroom, a baby Mountain Dew at my side, and put an on-topic album on: "Beyond the Circular Demise" by the Japanese band Coffins, one of my favorites of last year...which I realized was nowhere to be found on my best of list.