To keep the tradition going, here is my personal recollection of the previous year when it comes to music and this blog. It was quite an exciting year with a lot of content and various happenings. I always find it rather fun when I look back at what was behind us in the music world, which releases gave us anxiousness and excitement and which concerts made us go berserk.
I'm much more late with posting this retrospective, simply because it was way too hard to pick out the favorites, especially when it comes to concerts. If you cast but a tiny glance on the archive, you will notice a fine number of festivals and concerts which I covered in 2012 and it was abnormally difficult to make a top ten, let alone a top five. "June Paik", "Bokanovsky", "La Quiete", "Circle Takes The Square", "Kylesa", "7 Seconds", "Hellbastard", "Vestiges", "The Black Dahlia Murder", "Grinding Halt", "Russian Circles", "Light Bearer", etc. These are just some of the names that had amazing shows in the previous year, yet had to be left out even with the expanded runner-ups section. Making this list was quite frustrating and mind-bending, to say the least.
Interviews weren't very common in the past year, counting as low as only three of them, thus the list below is just for archive's sake. Needless to say, I am planning to do a lot more interviews until the next retrospective and I already have seven of them lined up. I'll try out some new things in that department, hopefully making the process of reading those much more interesting.
Similarly to reviews, not many releases were covered on the blog this year due to the high number of concert and festival reports I had to write about. I suspect that 2013 will see me writing more about 2012 releases, because of the innumerable submission that await, so I definitely need to step up my game when it comes to writing those.
Although my post count was fairly low, the amount of words I wrote was tremendously higher than before. I've choked you all with vast walls of text throughout the year and it brings me unimaginable pleasure that you boys and girls are still visiting the page on a regular basis, even when I am not writing regularly, and even commenting on my writing and involvement. Thank you all for all the support and attention throughout the past year and I hope that you will find more reasons to stick around in the days to come.
So without any further ado, here are my personal picks of moments and releases which made 2012 as awesome as it was. Not in that particular order, unless stated otherwise. Definitely feel free to post your favorites in the comment section below, I'm always curious about the opinions of my readers!
Top releases of 2012:
- Circle Takes The Square - Decompositions: Volume Number One
- Downfall of Gaia - Suffocating In The Swarm Of Cranes
- Kowloon Walled City - Container Ships
- Northless & Lightbearer
- Year of No Light & Altar of Plagues
Runner-ups:
- Black Sheep Wall - No Matter Where It Ends
- In The Hearts of Emperors & Reka
- Momentum - Herbivore
Top releases of 2012 featured on NWNP:
- Black Hole of Calcutta - S/T #2
- Coma Stereo - 1000 Mest
- Masakari & Tempest
Top performances of 2012:
- Battle Of Wolf 359 (at Cry Me A River fest)
- Celeste (at New Noise Festival)
- Crowbar (at Ieperfest)
- Deafheaven (Amsterdam)
- Tragedy (Nijmegen)
Runner-ups:
- Alpinist (at Fluff Fest)
- Cattle Decapitation (at Ieperfest)
- Eyehategod (at Ieperfest)
- Thou (Essen)
- Wolves In The Throne Room (Utrecht)
- God Is An Astronaut
- Momentum
- Wolf Down
Most visited posts of 2012 (in order):
- Gig review: Wolves In The Throne Room, Dodenkrocht
- Interview: Wolf Down
- Gig review: Deafheaven, Hierophant, Fire Walk With Us
- Interview: God Is An Astronaut
- Gig review: Russian Circles, Deafheaven
