Bezoar
Wyt Deth
No World Order Records

That’s it. You’ve convinced me, Brooklyn. You are now thee number one spot in the world for heavy, weird, fuzzy, psychedelic music. Okay? Hull, Elks, Bad Dream, Weird Owl, Children…and now Bezoar. I’m sure there’s plenty more rats crawling around in the sewers there that I’m not even aware of, but as far as I’m concerned right now, none of ‘em are bigger — or carry more diseases — than Bezoar. I mean, even their name invokes images of a mythical beast from children’s fables, and this three-headed varmint more than lives up to the hairy, red eye scares it promises. Expounding doom-infused wyt noize, Bezoar’s debut full-length, Wyt Deth, is a lumbering mess of feedback and mildewy riffs, a witchy, warbling deth-psych album that’s definitely hard to listen to, but surely impossible to turn off. Whether it’s the short and sweet allure of songs like “Burn Everything” and “Nikola” or the long and devastating hold of songs like “We Are Not Alone” and “Knight,” the whole damn thing is nauseously enchanting, and you might think it sounds like a dungeon full of hungry, dying prisoners moaning for sunlight, water, and mercy, but that’s just Sara Palmquist (bass/vocals), Tyler Villard (guitar), and Justin Sherrell (drums) laying down the most mystical stoner metal you’re likely to hear all year. Awesome stuff.

Listen to Wyt Deth in it’s entirety right here!

Elks
Destined for the Sun
Tee Pee

You know the kind of bat-shit fury Kvelertak stirred up last year when they jammed everyone’s radar with their maniacal Norwegian death punk? Well, this year’s ‘Holy-fuck-these-guys-are-my-new-favourite-band!’ band is Elks. The Brooklyn quartet light up the skies with their six-song debut, Destined for the Sun, a cosmic metal racket that shamelessly picks off select parts of a great handful of heavy music genres with a precision laser guiding system manned by a drunk galactic warrior. Those righteously ragged parts are then collected and fused into one 22-minute static mess of ballsy glory, the mere sound of which will fill you with the same excitement you felt when you first heard The Number of the Beast or Reign in Blood or Blues for the Red Sun or Remission. From their northern-inspired, horned mammal moniker to their spacey, void-voyaging concept, Elks are nothing if not a beard’s wet dream, and the fact that they hail from the same place that currently boasts the spawning rights to Children, Weird Owl, and Bad Dream puts ‘em in elite company. A company, mind you, these young riff-wielding upstarts ought to own outright very soon. It’s okay to lose your mind, friends. I am and so is everyone else.

Listen to Destined for the Sun right here!

#8 Trigger Effect – Dare to Ride the Heliocraft

This album may have been released digitally and on CD in 2008 (I know I was certainly listening to mp3s of the songs in 2008), but I recently picked up the vinyl version put out by Signed By Force and it says 2009 on it, so who am I to argue? Besides, this album is so insanely good (and straight-up insane) it deserves to make this list anyway, regardless what year it actually came out. Trigger Effect is a nasty kind of mayhem, a brutal force of punk rock fury so libelous that you’re likely to come away with bruises, both physically and mentally. Likewise, Dare to Ride the Heliocraft is 21 minutes of pure VENOM and the only thing crazier than the the album is Trigger Effect’s live show, which is highly volatile and inherently dangerous. This is one of my favourite Canadian bands right now and just like the patch on the back of my denim vest proclaims: Turbo Machine Ain’t Nothin’ To Fuck With.

Listen to “Nothing Says Action Like Giant Robots” from Dare to Ride the Heliocraft!

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