End of Year List Peace Heavy Mark II's Highly Disappointing Best of 2011 List

[Peace Heavy mk II 7200]

My "Best of" lists are always short: I really don't spend much time thinking about a cluster of things I feel I've liked the most, so don't expect to find anything life changing here. It also doesn't help that I don't realize I like something or find out something exists till way after it comes out . I've already kind of ranted about my tendency to suck at "best ofs" here, but I'll rehash the albums I managed to come up with (and really, there weren't that many that did a lot for me this year). This list has no order to it:

lynch. - I BELIEVE IN ME

A few other people made mention of this album. I'm a casual lynch. fan, only really listening to them when I'm in the mood for music like that. Overall, I was really surprised with this album since it seemed pretty balanced without trying too hard to be heavy or brutal. In fact, a lot of songs aren't even that heavy and are just nice to listen to. Definitely my favorite album by them, especially since I don't even like any of their other albums.

The Kiryu - 夢幻鳳影

This is The Kiryu's second album, and I enjoyed it much more than their first one although both suffered from too many re-recordings and not enough new material. Still lots of good neo-traditional Japanese music mixed with some progressive visual-kei found here.

The Human Abstract - Digital Veil

Absolutely love this album. I had their other two albums because of a friend and I never really cared for them. Then, someone posted a Japanese metalwhateverpostcore band video here, and it eventually led to some samples of this album that really blew me away. This band is not typical metal-core at all: they highly classically influenced and are incredibly progressive as well. Very very good album!

Dream Theater - A Dramatic Turn of Events

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I only tried out this album a few days ago, so in all honesty, I won't be able to recognize 90% of the things here. However, upon listening, I really enjoyed most of what I heard. This album is not easy listening in the least, but there's a lot of nice atmospheres and 10 minute + songs on here if that's your kind of thing. The vocals are a bit ~eh~ , but they make up for it else where. I'm not uploading an mp3 for this. You'll have to settle for a youtube video.

XA-VAT -艶℃

This is probably my favorite album of the year: great 80's like electronic music that's catchy and memorable. The reason I consider this my favorite album is because I still get cravings to listening to it months after it came out instead of my own personal hype quietly dying down.

E'm~Grief~ - Grief

Not EXACTLY 2011, but it came out on December 22nd and I didn't receive my copy till 2011 so...I'm counting it. They've been one of my favorite bands for a while due to their sort of old-school visual-kei approach to their music, mixed with some industrial metal: plus I have a fixation for deep and pseudo-operatic vocals. They aren't popular here because of their "Amentia" mishap, but I'm still left confused as to why people even like Dimmu to begin with. Anyway, this is actually all of their songs sans 1 Phantasmagoria cover.

Well, that's it for albums for me. I did like a lot of other releases and I did like other individual songs a whole lot, but I honestly didn't find many albums that really came off as amazing to me.