With an exception, my 2010 best albums could’ve been predicted months in advance. To me, last year was all about reliable, established bands and their awesome but journalistically unsexy jams. But elsewhere than my best-loved albums, 2010 had a few saucy surprises up its tattered sleeve. For one, it was shocking to find that the best melody record of the year was made by a fake band for a suckass movie; nope, did not expect to love that shit. Also, I didn’t remotely foresee announcements of Judass Priest’s final tour (bummer), Adrian Smith’s pairing with members of Sikth (wtf/awesome), the Mike Portnoy saga (over it), or the slight return of Coroner (full bonerz). Again and again, I was surprised!

But in a couple cases, my mere surprise was no longer adequate; I was forced to upgrade to astonishment. Example? Okay here’s one: It turns out that I really like Silent Civilian’s Ghost Stories, a surprisingly unshitty 2010 metalcore outing led by the surprisingly huge-gutted Jonny Santos of Spineshank. I mean, it’s metalcore that isn’t total garbage! Wild, huh?

But that shit was nothing compared to the brain-blasting shock that awaited me the late December evening that I first laid ears on Flotsam And Jetsam’s The Cold. Goddamn! Those guys haven’t made a listenable jam since the Troy Gregory-heavy 1990 gem When The Storm Comes Down and that was um two decades ago. So my low expectations were primed to be vaulted over by a good Flots album. Well, forget “good;” The Cold is awesome — like, freaking Nevermore awesome! By the second song (below), my bowtie was spinning so hard that it detached itself and beheaded my best geraniums.

-ADF

Order Flotsam And Jetsam’s The Cold here and then glue your socks on. Safety first.

Silent Civilian have released a new video, for the song “The Last One Standing,” and, uh, wow. That not-so-subtle mix of jingoism and terrible special effects just really hits the spot for me, y’know? Like, I always thought “Gee, those recruitment ads for the marines would be sooooo much hotter if they had generic metalcore instead of Three Doors Down,” and now the band has granted my wish! Hoo-rah! I’m off to enlist.

Oh well. While Vince categorized the song as “a little bit meh” when we first heard it last year, I’d argue that it is, at least,  better than “Atonement,” the new song the band released earlier this month. The guitar solos are pretty epic, anyways.

Silent Civilian’s new album, Ghost Stories, comes out May 18 on Mediaskare/Century, and I’ve now officially lost all interest.

-AR

I enjoyed a handful of tracks off of Silent Civilian’s 2006 debut, Rebirth of the Temple; I seem to recall “Bitter Pill” having a pretty cool guitar solo and a catchy chorus. It was certainly better than front man Jonny Santos’ other, more famous band, Spineshuck. So we were stoked to hear what SC came up with for their sophomore effort.

Unfortunately, the new song they debuted last April, “The Last One Standing,” was, in Vince’s words, “a little bit meh.” And a new track the band has just debuted at Revolver, “Atonement,” is pretty much more of the same.

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Silent Civilian’s 2006 debut Rebirth of the Temple was a really fucking solid record, a shining example of metalcore done right at the peak of the genre’s popularity. The riffs crushed, melding American core and Swedish shred with the now infamous Decibel-named “good cop / bad cop” vocal style, only at the time it hadn’t been beaten to death yet. Who woulda thunk that any member of Spineshank could shred so hard? Rebirth also benefitted from ginoromous Logan Mader production (Gojira, Psycroptic, Cavalera Conspiracy). I remember really digging the record at the time, so I was elated to hear that from a press release that Silent Civilian are working on a new record, Ghost Stories, for release this October.

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In hindsight, that time you were a kid and went camping with your friends and some sketchy dude in a car rolled up out of nowhere and rolled his window down just an inch and spoke real low so you’d have to get close to his car because he was probably trying to abduct and rape you might seem like a funny story to tell people – but it doesn’t mean you’d necessarily wanna re-live it. I mean, it probably sucked at the time, the realization that you were a half-step away from living out a Friday the 13th movie.

So Spineshank have gotten back together.

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