ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER LIST

Because of a two-month or so lead time, it's soon going to be incumbent upon me to prepare my year-end Top 20 list for Metal Edge. This is probably the easiest of the multiple lists I'm gonna wind up putting together (Village Voice, Idolator.com, The Wire), because it's limited to a single genre. So this morning I took the first step, going into my iPod and looking at all the metal albums from 2008 stored therein. This isn't everything I heard; it's everything that impressed me enough to stick around. I've got just under 90 albums from which I need to pull 20 keepers. I've got a pretty good idea what's gonna be my Album of the Year (hint: it leaked to the Internet one week ago today, it hits stores on Friday, and it's by Metallica), but the other 19 slots are uncertain. Definite contenders: Opeth, Amon Amarth, Burst, and several bands not from Sweden, including a surprise dark horse: Stephen Pearcy. Seriously, don't sleep on Under My Skin; it's a bare-bones hard rock record that plays to his strengths. In a generally lackluster year, you could do worse than that.