El Widget’s best new tunes of 2021
Best metal album & Album of the Year: Crystal Viper – The Cult
Metal album runner-up: Heavy Sentence – Bang to Rights
Best metal song: Epica – Abyss of Time
As a keen fan of the Polish five-piece, this was an album I’d been pinning quite a bit of hope on to ever since the rapid-fire lead single (and title track) pointed a return to the early NWOBHM stylings of their late 2000s output. Upon release, it became clear that the majority of the album picks up the high-speed riffing where the aforementioned title track kicks off, with cuts like “Flaring Madness,” “Down in the Crypt,” and personal favourite ‘Forgotten Land’ all offering subtly different (yet universally excellent) takes on their proven template. Occasional deviations from this occur with the Sabbath-esque ‘Whispers From Beyond’ and the anime-theme-in-an-alternate-timeline ‘Lost in the Dark,’ but just as with the rest of the album, there’s no drop-off in aural enjoyment. Production-wise, it does lack sonic depth (even compared to their own previous output), but contrasted against the generally high standard of songwriting this gives it a highly endearing rough-diamond quality. A clear first-round knockout AOTY pick.
Best rock album: Chez Kane - Chez Kane
Runner-up: The Night Flight Orchestra - Aeromantic II
Best rock song: Sintage – Rock City
Spotify recommendations really came through for me on this one – even if I only clicked on it initially out of curiosity (when was the last time someone wore leather pants on one of their album covers?). This turned out to be a good move, as Kane’s first album is an inch-perfect re-creation of glossy, overproduced late-80s arena rock in the vein of Van Halen et al, with every conceivable genre-specific cliché present and correct. However, given that this album turns out to have been the brainchild of Crazy Lixx frontman and mullet enthusiast Danny Rexon, this is hardly surprising. Up-tempo tracks such as “All of it,” “Too Late for Love,” and the suspiciously familiar-sounding “Ball ‘n’ Chain” all evoke mental images of hairspray, pop-up headlamps and mountains of cocaine, and are generally fun to listen to. More tellingly, even the obligatory ballad “defender of the heart” fails to stall the album in the way so many of its kind do. All up, this is one of the best-executed nostalgia albums I’ve heard in a while, a perfectly romanticized microcosm of a bygone age, and easily my favourite rock album of 2021.
Disappointment of the year: The Darkness - Motorheart
Vice-disappointment: Iron Maiden - Senjutsu
As unenthusiastic as I was about Maiden’s latest release, a part of me always suspected that at some point their (or rather Steve’s) recent tendency toward ever-increasing pomp would eventually topple over into overly bloated meandering, and thus set my expectations accordingly. But the Darkness, modern rock’s most willfully bonkers collection of madmen, surely they’d deliver another grin-a-minute anthem parade in the vein of *Permission to Land” or *Last of our Kind* . . . wouldn’t they? Sadly, this latest effort has seen the band pretty well de-fanged, with the majority of tracks forming a down-tempo, forgettable facsimile of their previous stylings (apart from the title track, which is the closest thing we get to Darkness of old). There’s also a ballad in there, I forget what it’s called. The irony in all this is that the most convincing song on the album, Speed of the Night Time, is the one track that somehow turns this narcolepsy into a strength, as the mellowed-out band delivers a solid A-tier late-night chill-out anthem just begging to be used in a film montage. However, this (and the aforementioned title track) can’t make up for the rest of the album, and though it’s not the worst album I’ve heard all year, it is the one I’ve come away from feeling the most let down.
I welcome all retorts and refutations
