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• A Tragedy In Progress – Mechanical Weather
• Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell – Don’t Hear It…Fear It!
• All Hail The Yeti – All Hail The Yeti
  
• Andrew W.K. – I Get Wet reissue
• Assembly Of Light – Assembly Of Light
  
• Autopsy – Born Undead DVD
• Bloodred Hourglass – Lifebound
  
• The Chariot – One Wing
• Destroyer 666 – Phoenix Rising reissue
• Dysrhythmia – Test Of Submission
  
• Eagle Twin – The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale
  
• Eluveitie – The Early Years
• Flobots – The Circle in the Square
• Gaza – No Absolutes In Human Suffering
• Get Scared – Built for Blame, Laced with Shame
• Grave – Endless Procession Of Souls
• Gypsyhawk – Revelry & Resistance
  
• Hex Machine – Fixator
• Holy Knights – Between Daylight and Pain
• I Am War – Outlive You All
  
• Ian Gillan & Tony Iommi – Who Cares
• Just Like Vinyl – Black Mass
  
• Kaipa – Vittjar
• Katatonia – Dead End Kings
  
• Khonsu – Anomalia
• The Last Vegas – Bad Decisions
  
• Murder Construct – Results
  
• North – The Great Silence
• Obey the Brave – Young Blood
• Over Your Threshold – Facticity
  
• Scum Of The Earth – The Devil Made Me Do It
  
• Sky Of Rage – Sky Of Rage
  
• Sound Storm – Immortalia
  
• Stealing Axion – Moments
  
• Stratovarius – Under Flaming Winter Skies – Live In Tampere
  
• Triumph – Live At Sweden Rock Festival CD/DVD
• Various artists – Holy Darkthrone
• Wind Rose – Shadows Over Lothadruin
  
• World Fire Brigade – Spreading My Wings
  

Chris “Weird Biker” Krovatin is the author of two young adult novels,

December is the harvest time for metal journalism. That’s when all of us misanthropic black-clad fucks put together our end-of-year lists, going over our entire musical diet for the last 12 months in an attempt to compile a decent final 10. And while it’d be easy to do a best/worst list, I want to take the high ground and not point out a Worst Album list. That’s just petty. (My 10 best of 2011, if you’re wondering, are: All Pigs Must Die, the Black Dahlia Murder, Tombs, Origin, Toxic Holocaust, Ash Pool, Revolting, Vreid, Hate Eternal, and the Atlas Moth.)

Artwork, however, is different. If your album is bad, fine. You know who you are, probably. When it comes to the music, let’s let it die—everyone’s made a Cold Lake in their lives, so let’s be the bigger man about it.* But there’s no excuse for shitty artwork. In fact, if your album sucks, the least you can do is put something really fucking amazing on the cover (for instance, I’ve always been 50-50 on Lair of the Minotaur, but their covers are damn cool). And unlike your music, which we all know sucks, your stupid choice of artwork is fair game for public condemnation. So here are my picks for this year’s Six Best and Worst Album Covers.

The Six Best Album Covers of 2011

1) Book of Black Earth, The Cold Testament Yes. With this cover, Seattle’s death-metal masters found a perfect image to describe their enthralling brand of fuzzy blackened death metal. If this doesn’t become a back patch soon, someone has to die.

2) All Pigs Must Die, God Is War You know what’s great? When your favorite album of the year has hands-down one of the coolest covers of all time. My No. 1 record of 2011, ladies and gentlemen, and it bears this breath-taking cover, courtesy of artist Florian Bertmer. It’s good to be the king.

3) Autopsy, Macabre Eternal This is one of those covers that’s comical to describe: Two zombies carry a giant stone skull towards an almost-completed statue of the Grim Reaper. Best part? That’s pretty much what the album sounds like.

4) Mhorgl, Heresiarch Until recently, I hadn’t heard of Australia’s Mhorgl, but not only is their brand of black thrash totally badass, the cover of their new record is a Miltonian flurry of demons, devils, wraiths, and fallen angels. When you stare into this abyss, it screams, “Charge!”

5) Chthonic, Takasago Army There’s something about a soldier carving a symbol into his forehead with a huge knife that touches me deep inside. The question is, what character is he carving? This album’s about Taiwanese soldiers, who spoke Mandarin Chinese, fighting for the Japanese! Then again, it might just be an inverted cross.

6) Mastodon, The Hunter Here, the Georgian metal titans left the world of over-the-top van-side illustration and had themselves a Communist Party. I mean, come on, how cool is this 3-D multi-jawed beast-creature? And look at the new logo—insane!

The Six Worst Album Covers of 2011

1) Cradle of Filth, Evermore Darkly Do you guys remember the Cradle of Filth I remember? The band that would put bathtubs full of blood and nude women on their albums, who put out the ‘Jesus is a cunt’ shirt? Remember that? So why does this album have a chick on a park bench for its cover?

2) Wayne Static, Pighammer You know what, I love this album title. It has so much potential to inspire a good cover—oh. Oh, you…you just want a picture of you, with scars, in a kimono. Oh, that’s, that’s cool…no, really, it shows a lot of…erm. Well.

3) Decapitated, Carnival Is Forever Yikes. I don’t know where they were trying to go with this cover, but Decapitated really fell short here. It seems like it’s really trying to say something, but…I dunno. It’s like a parody of a nu-metal album cover. Not a fan.

4) Sebastian Bach, Kicking and Screaming You really have to wonder about these hair-metal dudes sometimes. Like, was it the drugs? Was it the weird biker/homegrown sexuality being bred in the ’80s? What happened, once upon a time, that made them possibly think shit like this looks cool?

5) Limp Bizkit, Gold Cobra I like it when album art says something. For instance, when an album features a morbid sigil by Wes Benscoter, it says, “Good times ahead.” When it’s covered with Vince Locke’s unholy zombiescapes, it says, “This is a Cannibal Corpse record.” And, in the instance of Gold Cobra, it says, “Urinate here.”

6) Lou Reed & Metallica, Lulu To be fair, I’ve never heard this album, only the criticism of it, so for all I know the music rules. But man, how much did they pay the beret-wearing Sarah Lawrence sophomore who made this piece of shit? (Answer: Too much.)

*Actually, I have to be a dick about the new Morbid Angel. Sorry guys, big fan of your stuff, but you really shat the bed with the lights on with this new record.

Opening track “Hands Of Darkness” is perfectly sets the tone, staggering straight to the point with no sign of an intro. Further blood-sprayers like “Bridge of Bones,” “Born Undead,” and the title track bring more and more unsettling creepiness, with thick-toned punkish chug-alongs broken up by plodding melodic breakdowns. Drummer-vocalist Chris Reifert’s gutteral growls sound as haggard as ever, his unpolished vocal style, smacking of old Celtic Frost, is a breath of fresh air from the perfectly measured screams of many modern death-metal bands. But it’s chaotically catchy twin guitar leads of axmen Eric Cutler and Danny Coralles, especially on 11-minute massacre “Sadistic Gratification,” that keeps Macabre Eternal one cleaver hack above the rest.

One or two tracks are less than necessary; where The Tomb Within was five unbeatable ragers, songs like “Dirty Gore Whore” seems a tad predictable. But overall, Autopsy have created an album that easily stands next to the other fetid classics in their musical graveyard. Fans of ultra-technical death metal or two-second grindcore songs may shun this release, but old-school fans of death metal’s sticky plasma-drenched past will die over and over for Macabre Eternal. CHRIS KROVATIN

Autopsy drummer and vocalist, Chris Reifert, states, “We’ve brewed up the sickest and heaviest material that our rotten souls could possibly spew forth, and we are confident that it’s our best stuff yet. The EP was a taste of what’s to come, but now it’s time for the full assault from beyond the grave.

“The album will contain no repeated EP tracks, no re-recorded old songs, no triggered trickery and nothing less than the pure death metal brutality that Autopsy has always delivered.”