The Number One album of 2009

The Number One album of 2009

Before we start the Countdown of 2019 we look back at those past 10 years of Stoner HiVe. We know it is now the eleventh edition of the Countdown. But we celebrate 10 years. 10 years of heavy riffs, romps and stomps! 10 years of heavy magic! That all started back in 2009 when the blog started to have a vehicle to count down the best 20 albums of 2009. A list deduced out of eighteen sent in lists. (One list came in later, but was counted anyway.) It resulted in a countdown that started on Number 20 with the Palm Desert album Dawn Of The Burning Sun and found Feuerzeug’s  Drive Fast And Crash on third position and Crack The Skye by Mastodon on Number 2. But what was the Number 1 album from 2009 according to those eighteen heavy music fiends? 

We wrote: “…produced by the masters of meditative atmospheric doom and minimalistic metal. Heavy like a blackhole and loud as a sun storm. Recorded with fifty percent new blood; there is a new drummer in this two-piece; the album does take on a different approach then earlier ones. The search for the perfect tone, the godlike chord continues but with a bit more frivolous instrumentation. Powerful and graceful; less a dead beast dragging itself towards its inevitable end and more that of contemplative remembrance of how existence started…”

And we must conclude, unfortunately, that we have not listened to this album all that much in recent years. Hell, not at all since 2011, we think. And so when revisiting it for this little piece, we do understand why it ended high on that first edition of the Stoner HiVe Top 20 Countdown. It still retained that meditative quality and projected the artists as deviant cult leaders. Yet, after these many years, so many cults have come and gone, the minimalistic approach has become a bit stale or simply a bit too easy. Without any doubt there are moments of beauty and even brilliance on those four tracks and especially the nineteen minute opener Thebes. But these are mere glimpses of bright light that die away pretty fast; soon God Is Good becomes clichéd and almost frustrating. Cause you remember reaching enlightenment through OM and now there is only rage when the flute drops in. What happened? Did the world move on? Has the listener been treated to so much meditative heaviness that this sounds old and dated? Or was it never that good to begin with? We don’t know. All we know is that the Number One album from 2009 does not seem to grace our ears much nowadays… How about yours?

Om – God is Good

(For the rest of the Top 20 of 2009, that very first one, visit the Countdown So Far post on the blog...)