When it comes to the art of metal, Rodney Githens of Vertebrae33 – a.k.a. the man who designed this awesome MetalSucks t-shirt – obviously knows his shit. Join him now as he tells you which albums had the best cover art of ’09, and why…

As the music industry crumbles around itself trying to deal with the digital age, metal bands have fought hard to give fans a reason to buy their music. There has always been a heavy importance placed on the artwork used by metal bands. This is evident when you check out album covers and, of course, when everyone races to the merch booth as the doors open at a show. However, recently bands have worked hard to give you a reason to buy the physical CD/record. There are kids who will buy music based on the cover and buy shirts from bands that they do not like that much, just because they think they look cool(see Cradle of Filth). So it is time to give some credit to the visual artists who have kicked some ass this past year.

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After posting our own year-end lists for 2009, we asked you, oh ye MetalSucks faithful, to tell us what you thought the best metal album of the year was. And you have answered, overwhelmingly voting for the latest from Atlanta’s psychedlic prog-metal masters:

Interestingly enough, the album that got the second most number of votes (although it still lagged wwwwaaayyy behind Skye) was Anaal Nathrakh’s In the Constellation of the Black Widow – we’ll let you guys decide if that’s because people stopped voting when they saw Mastodon were the clear front-runners, or just because Anaal Nathrakh’s fans are particularly loyal.

And now we can all start arguing about 2010!!!

-Axl & Vince

We published our lists. Now it’s your turn.

Here’s how it’s going to work. Rather than post a regular poll with hundreds of options, we’re going to conduct this poll via the comments. Here are the instructions:

Step 1) Decide what your favorite metal album of 2009 is. You only get to pick one.

Step 2) Search the comments of this post for your choice (Apple-F on a Mac, Control-F on a PC).

Step 3) If it’s already listed, hit the “reply” button underneath and simply post “+1″ as your comment. If it’s not listed yet, add it, making sure you include the band name and album title and double-checking that you’ve spelled both correctly.

That’s it! When we re-open the MS Mansion Gates for 2010 we’ll tally up the “+1″s and declare a winner. Nothing is preventing you from adding multiple +1s, but don’t be that douche. Have fun… go!

In the weeks prior to –  and even during — the assemblage of this Top 20 list, I went back and listened to every album I’d selected as a candidate, sometimes more than once. Some weren’t quite as impressive as I’d remembered now that the sheen had worn off, some were equally as good, and some were even better.

But what I think speaks most to the high caliber of metal released in 2009 is the great variety of types of metal albums that dot my list. There’s the usual suspects that you’re seeing on the lists of other fellow MS writers and the entire World Wide Interwebs, but there are some curveballs too — there’s a tech-death brand from France, a couple of retro(ish) thrashers, two bands that were previously left for dead and three, count them, THREE instrumental metal albums… plus a whole bunch of others. It wasn’t just a great year for metal but a varied one too, and a fitting end to a decade which saw a huge explosion of sub-genres.

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Anyone who says 2009 wasn’t an amazing year for metal is just being cynical for the sake of being cynical. And me telling you you’re too cynical is like Chris Holmes telling you you have a drinking problem.

Wanna know how good 2009 was? Every writer in metal is bitching and moaning about how hard it was to make a year-end list – but no one can seem to agree on which record was the best of the year. There weren’t two MetalSucks writers who agreed, and Decibel chose a different album from Revolver who chose a different album from Noisecreep who chose a different album from The Onion who chose a different album from your mom, and so on and so forth. There is no consensus. Chaos reigns.

But no one felt particularly wrong to me. I’ve been crying over making this list for months now. There’s so many good records I’m just not gonna get to pay tribute to, and even the final order in which I’m listing these albums is semi-arbitrary; I’m not convinced that one is really better than any of the others. But fuck it, shit happens. And so:

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Despite Axl’s & Vince’s (& the monkeys’) insistence that there were just way too many amazing albums released this year to possibly narrow a best-of list down to ten, I was (initially) only personally blown away by a scant few. Sure, there were plenty of solid offerings, but flailing within the maelstrom of more year/decade-end lists than ever, there oft comes an inevitable formality of having to fill up slots on a list even if such accolades aren’t always ultra-warranted (i.e., if it wasn’t the end of the year, would we be calling all of these albums the “best” of anything? Perhaps, but the pressure of naming names induces a bit of gun-jumping, methinks).

However, the more I listened and re-listened to several of this year’s releases I came to realize just how many great albums surfaced — twas kwite a year indeed. And thus the list of recordings from two-double-ohhhh-niner that did and continue to do something super-special for me grew to a diverse & fiery cannon of seven unique and incredible albums, as well as a few high-praising honorable mentions and one I overlooked last year. I’ve left some of my all-time favorite bands off the list because the records they released this year just weren’t enough of a leap forward enough to justify calling this particular round of work the “best”. However, I strongly believe in the powerful nature of vacillating trajectories of artistic careers, and I expect great things in the future from all of my former boys, even if things no look so good.

Aight — let’s do this shizznikkle.

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Axl and Vince really kept us busy this year with all the great stuff coming out, but it was worth it; those guys really feed us THE best bananas money can buy. We’re not kidding… Grade A stuff, perfectly ripe, and full of flavor.

It was tough, but we’ve narrowed down the year’s metal releases to only twenty. Here they are:

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MetalSucks intern Matt Heafowitz is making his editorial debut with his own Best of ’09 Br00tal-list! What can we say? The guy’s got great taste. We taught him well.

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In no particular order, here are a bunch of tours that made our collective nipples hard in 2009:

Meshuggah + Cynic +The Faceless: The original incarnation of the prog metal boner / wet dream tour, but the 2010 incarnation (BTBAM, Townsend, Cynic, Scale the Summit) is gonna give it a run for its money.

Opeth + Enslaved: There really isn’t much to say about this… a perfect pairing! Opeth were at the top of their game and Enslaved were coming off the success of Vertebrae.

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To those of you that haven’t been paying attention (which I imagine is only, like, five or six of you), this is only my second year-end list for Metal Sucks. And while 2008 was a pretty good year for metal, this year made it look like a Nachtmystium record and some other stuff. From great early offerings right out of the gate via Tombs and Blut Aus Nord through the September-through-Thanksgiving deluge of awesome – where a year-end contender (if not straight-up classic) was seemingly being released weekly – 2009 was a banner year for metal, pleasing all ends of the spectrum (great new records from Brutal Truth, Coalesce, Funeral Mist, and Suffocation? What God did we please?). It may have even been the decade’s best, capping off the ten years where metal simultaneously redeemed itself from the sins of nu-metal and reveled in the ever-expanding and ever-fruitful underground that became easy to access and impossible to ignore in the age of the internet (the tape trading of the future, it seems). But perhaps I’m playing up the symbolism of a year ending in “9” too much: this year had so many great records that Axl and Vince’s decision to expand to twenty great albums instead of the standard ten STILL felt too constricting; I could have easily gone to thirty and done no padding whatsoever. This was the kind of year metal journalists/elitist douchebags like me look forward to for writing year-end lists. You’ll find it below.

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20. Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Agorapocalypse (Relapse)

On the strength of history’s greatest band name, Scott Hull’s Agoraphobic Nosebleed doesn’t even have to be good. But ANb is awesome anyway and Agorapocalypse is an eerily accurate soundtrack to my brain’s default setting. I mean if you ever see me, say, testily waiting in line at the movies, I’m actually imagining punky grindcore about drugs and porno-violence played at ludicrous speed and packed with squealing guitar solos. But I think that’s only common sense.

The track that will hook you (click to listen): “First National Stem Cell and Clone”

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In no particular order…

Mastodon, “Oblivion” and “Divinations” – directed by Roboshobo

This is why music videos exist, kids.

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…and what a year it’s been! I wont bore you with a long intro, since we all know nobody reads intros. Hell, most of you wont even bother reading the descriptions of the albums I’ve chosen below, so I see little reason to preface my thoughts with anything meaningful.

So, without further ado, here’s my list!

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1. Dreaming Dead – Within One (Ibex Moon)

These guys have a leg up on the competition because they’re L.A. natives like me, but this terrific death metal album swept me away like no other this year. Chock-full of haunting riffs, expressive guitar shredding and real songs, it’s as close to a Death album as we’re gonna get in this post-Schuldiner world. Elizabeth Elliott takes her place as one of the great female guitarists in metal; Mike Caffell ain’t far behind with drums.

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Every now and then, a metalhead’s loyalty is tested. Whether it be a shitty year of music, an inability to purchase new product due to a thinner wallet, or simply too many real-world responsibilities that beckon for attention. Rarely, do all of these factors come into play simultaneously, but that is exactly what happened to the Old Fart in 2009.

Major commitments this year such as finishing up a new book (SAVAGE SON, out June 2010), house renovations, and, oh yeah, a new baby, lessened my time listening to my favorite genre of music. And what I did hear, I was not too impressed with. Of course, some of that has to do with the fact that I had to let my subscriptions to Decibel and Terrorizer magazines lapse for budgetary reasons.

Ahh, the joys of a dismal economy…

But enough of my panty-ass whinery. I’m sure all you care about is what bands tickled my privates.

As a result of the previous excuses listed above, my list is very short. Plus, in a year where the heaviest moment on disc came from The Beatles [listen to the re-mastered outro of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”], 2009 found me ready to write this year off.

Thankfully, there were two standouts – one which many of you will agree with; another which probably only 5% of you will even bother to investigate. Oh well, you other 95%, it’s your loss.

Albums that I dug this past year:

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1. Megadeth – Endgame (Roadrunner)

Two-and-a-half minutes of guitar shredding (a throwback to 1988′s So Far, So Good… So What!?) is a goddamn great way to start a record. Follow it up with a slew of shredding songs and you’ve got a recipe for the year’s most spun record. Full disclosure: I’m a Megadeth fanboy that still owns Risk. And even listens to it from time to time. But this is easily Deth’s best record since Countdown or Rust In Peace.

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Holy shit, has it really been another year already? And MetalSucks is still around? Who the fuck is reading this site? Don’t they know about None Louder?

Oh, well. If anyone is still paying attention to what these pussy boogers have to say, they surely won’t after today. For today, this most glorious of winter Thursdays, all the inhabitants of the MetalSucks Mansion present their lists of twenty – or sometimes twenty-one or, like, way less than ten – favorite metal albums of the year.

Bands you will read about today include Divine Heresy, Lacuna Coil, Dredg, and Anaal Nathrakh.

LET THE NEEDLESS BLOODSHED COMMENCE!!!

-The MetalSucks Mansion Monkeys