Drum roll please … or maybe a hearty dose of blast-beats! Tis the season to commence the good, bad and ugly of 2014! Of course we’re talking about BravePicks 2014, where all the staff put their collective metal minds together to build the ultimate lists including individual Top 20s (new studio albums ONLY),  Top 5 Brave Embarrassments, Top 3 Concerts, What/Who Needs To Stop In 2015? and Metal Predictions For 2015.

BravePicks 2014

6) AT THE GATES – At War With Reality (Century Media)

“Rhythm and melancholy and a lot of dark melodies," singer Tomas Lindberg explained to "Metal" Tim Henderson in an exclusive pre-listening session this past August about their triumphant follow-up to their untouchable 1995 album Slaughter Of The Soul. "As for it not being aggressive, we just wanted to be honest. Playing all the old stuff live for a long time … if you’ve been to an At The Gates show from 2008 and forward, it’s a combined experience of us playing all the old songs like we do now and I think that’s how this album sounds. The really old songs, how we play them now, that’s pretty similar to what we are hearing here. I’m not a musician, so I can say its very well-played, very focused, very precise, but it also has that melancholy dark light of the early albums.”
"It’s darker, almost more evil," Lindberg continues. "The heavier parts are heavier, the faster parts are faster."

 

 

And truly At War With Reality lived up to all expectations through the eerie spoken-word intro "El Altar Del Dios Desconocido", to the haunting "Heroes And Tombs", vicious "The Book Of Sand (The Abomination)" and grand finale "The Night Eternal". It was a bold step to follow-up such a work of genius and arguably one of the greatest extreme metal opus' of all time.

"I had all the time for it," Lindberg explains. "We are a great bunch of friends, as Anders said, we had this brilliant time together. The world paying attention is sometimes a good thing. As a band, you travel the world, you do the shows, you meet all these people, you have a great time together. What’s the fifth thing you do as a band, you create stuff, and that was the only thing missing really. I’ve been writing a lot of music with a lot of people, and Anders too, but we haven’t been writing stuff together for 19 years. So we said let’s try this, let’s see where it leads us. Very early when we first started thinking about what people would want, what would people expect and how we should approach this blah, blah blah. But after two or three songs, we looked at each and said, ‘we don’t give a fuck about people’s expectations.’ There was never any expectations on any other At The Gates record, because we were always an underground band. Let’s just do what we always did, write from the heart, create something together that we are proud of, that we feel is us. As soon as we found that, it worked.”

Read more at BraveWords.

BravePicks 2014 Top 30

6) AT THE GATES – At War With Reality (Century Media)

7) MAYHEM - Esoteric Warfare (Season Of Mist)

8) TRIPTYKON - Melana Chasmata (Century Media)

9) CANNIBAL CORPSE – A Skeletal Domain (Metal Blade)

10) OVERKILL - White Devil Armory (Nuclear Blast/eOne)

11) ARCH ENEMY - War Eternal (Century Media)

12) 1349 - Massive Cauldron Of Chaos (Season Of Mist)

13) SANCTUARY - The Year The Sun Died (Century Media)

14) OBITUARY - Inked In Blood (Relapse)

15) GRAVE DIGGER – Return Of The Reaper (Napalm)

16) ACE FREHLEY - Space Invader (eOne)

17) MASTODON — Once More ’Round The Sun (Reprise)

18) EDGUY – Space Police: Defenders Of The Crown (Nuclear Blast)

19) THE DAGGER – The Dagger (Century Media)

20) PRIMORDIAL – Where Greater Men Have Fallen (Metal Blade)

21) UNISONIC - Light Of Dawn (earMusic)

22) PRIMAL FEAR – Delivering The Black (Frontiers)

23) DEVILMENT – The Great And Secret Show (Nuclear Blast)

24) MR. BIG - ...The Stories We Could Tell (Frontiers)

25) EYEHATEGOD – Eyehategod (Housecore)

26) STEEL PANTHER – All You Can Eat (Open E)

27) CALIFORNIA BREED – California Breed (Frontiers)

28) TESLA – Simplicity (Tesla Electric Co.)

29) PRONG – Ruining Lives (SPV/Steamhammer)

30) GAMMA RAY – Empire Of The Undead (EarMusic)