the top 50 songs of 2017 (VIDEO)

And there we go. Massive videos, really proud with how they turned out - enjoy!

the top 50 best songs of 2017

I said on Twitter a few months ago that of all of my year-end lists, this one is always the most complicated - because it's by far the most personal. With the constraint of a list of hits or talking about records in aggregate, you've manufactured some distance - but if you're just going through the list of the songs that spoke the most to you regardless of whether they were a single or not, there's no separation or barrier.

And when you add to the fact that 2017 was a tumultuous year - not just for me but for most of the world, although I did have my own share of trying times - it's a little unnerving to go through the cutting process and realize how dark it truly got. There isn't much escapism in this top 50, and what escapism does show up is very much colored by consequences waiting in the wings. I'm not saying it's downbeat - in comparison to the melancholy that colored a lot of last year, there are more pronounced moments of joy and triumph - but it is by far the most unsettled, pulling the least punches and ultimately producing a psychological profile of my year in 2017 I'm still not quite sure what to do with. But hey, all of these came from albums I covered this year, and I wouldn't have spent a month pruning this list to its form now if I didn't have faith in it - even though I can guarantee there'll be a fair few conspicuous entries that aren't here if you're comparing to other critical lists. So let's get this started...

video review: 'eternity, in your arms' by creeper

So this was a fun review to put together. My voice is still a little fried from being sick, but overall, pretty pleased with how this turned out, great record.

Next up, another cut from deep within Bandcamp, so stay tuned!

album review: 'eternity, in your arms' by creeper

Before we begin, let's go back about a decade to the pop rock scene in 2006-07. These were the years of My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, Fall Out Boy, and the peak of the mainstream emo boom that would turn about a third of teenagers scene that year. Now as I've said in the past, I wasn't really one of them - I was knee-deep in symphonic and power metal at the time, clearly I was embracing darker, heavier material - but that didn't mean I wasn't aware of or appreciate the music that was getting airplay. But it became a little hard that beyond the catchy, radio-friendly melodies, mainstream pop rock was embracing a certain image that was a little more baroque, for lack of better words, drawing on horror kitsch to craft a plainly theatrical image. 

And of course this was not new - the mainstream music scene has a habit of pulling on horror trends to construct weird or creepy instrumentals, often using the theatricality to blunt things from getting too weird - with the exception of the 90s alternative scene, of course, which frankly got away with a bewildering amount. But it tends to come in waves of popularity, often crashing hard at the point of overexposure, which last time in mainstream emo and pop rock around 2009. 

Fast-forward to now and the debut of an English horror punk band called Creeper, who had been building some buzz in their native country with a few EPs since their formation in 2014. Now I had heard good things going in - not just inspired by My Chemical Romance, but also calling back to glam rock, the Misfits and even Meat Loaf in their embrace of theatrical bombast. Now the last time I had heard someone adjacent to this vein cite some similar inspirations was Kyle Craft, and his debut album last year Dolls of Highland was a criminally underappreciated masterpiece, and thus I had a lot of curiosity going into this, especially as it's been getting frankly astounding amounts of critical acclaim. So with Eternity, In Your Arms, are we on the cusp of something big here?