List season has arrived. Soon the internet will be littered with countless lists of the year’s best albums. After pondering what my own list might be I realised that I couldn’t possibly come up with a truely ‘best of’ list. I haven’t even heard every album that’s come out this year, I imagine no one has. So, to do something a little different I’ve put together a list of my favorite releases from 2011 that were offered for free, including some with a name your price option. Remember, this is a ‘favorites’ list not a ‘best of’ list, I haven’t heard all the free ones either. Of the freebies I’ve heard these are the ten that have kept me coming back and I’ll present them two at a time.

10. – Savage Messiah – A Plague of Conscience

Much of the best Progressive Metal always seems to come from the UK. Whether it’s mixed with Death, Black, Thrash, Brutal, or lemon juice doesn’t seem to matter. Today we’ve got one by suggestion of Uzi that is just Progressive, without frails. Which kinda means it’s Metal with a lot of frails.

Haken, from London, England, consists of the same six members that joined up in the band’s founding year, 2007. Though a pretty standard line up – dual guitars, drums, bass, vocals and keys – the band’s music isn’t standard at all. It reverts to the Prog Rock of the Seventies, but infuses it with a very modern touch, using a bunch of effects and cheeky playing styles. Not, by far, as loud as you’re used to hear, but music educationally very valuable!

For my next trick, which is another review, I’ll listen to only one fuckin’ song and tell you exactly what the whole EP is like. No cheating involved. Honest to God. Swearing on the tip of my dick!

Know why? ‘Cause there’s only one song, though a long one, on this thing. The thing in question is called The Sunless Country, which evidently is also the name of the one song on the disc. The disc is released by UK Prog Metal outfit Bleaklow and they deliver it in a handmade leather container / envelope thingy. Cool! Except that you’ll be disappointed, because it’s already sold out. According to the band’s own Joe Clayton that happened within an hour and a half after pre-ordering started. That’s slightly misleading, because there were only 25 copies available. But, come on! You wouldn’t want to hand sew together 1,000 leather envelopes. You’d get fuckin’ bored!

So unless the band decides to put together some more physical copies, this review isn’t particularly useful as a piece of consumer advice. So scrap that. The goal of this is to make you familiar with what is an awesome three-piece band making awesome fuckin’ shit!

We’ve got three new guitar freaks in this fifth installment of the One Man Show series, a continuation of the series after some four months. As nearly always, we’re dealing with purely instrumental Metal again, focusing on beautiful and generous melodies. ‘Nuf said.

More proggy Djenty stuff, once again British and once again thanks to Rufio’s suggestion. But where yesterday’s entry was pretty much purely instrumental, today’s definitely isn’t. FellSilent’s the name of the first band in the post and it’s a late Progressive / Experimental Metal band that existed between 2003 and 2010 and they’ve got some groovy tunes on their record.

Their continued existence wasn’t to be and when the band fell apart, members spread out to other projects, including TesseracT. Two members, John Browne (guitars) and Neema Askari (vox), went on to join a band called Monuments full time. The former co-founded that band as a side-project the latter has reportedly already left the band again.

We’ll give you a bite of both.

Anyone up for some Djenty stuff? We’ve got a one-man band that creates some mighty interesting stuff of the stuff. Normally CroOZza would cover this type of shit in his One Man Show series, but today, thanks to Rufio’s suggestion, I’ll cover it myself. ‘Cause I’m just that sneaky.

Anyfuck, the one man band in question is called Returning We Hear the Larks, and it’s the project of UK student Jak Noble. Apparently he took the name of his project from a poem by Isaac Rosenberg. The guy himself is a self-proclaimed multi-instrumentalist, ”although primarily a 7-string guitarist and sitarist”. You know, a sitar. That’s that odd looking guitar thing they use in India.

He’s also very generous, as he offers some of his releases for free (and others for little) on his Bandcamp page, so that means free fuckin’ music chaps – though you really oughta give him a couple of coins for it! We’ll sort you out with the link at the end of this post.

The UK seems to be a hatchery for high quality Progressive (Death) Metal bands these days. I mean think about Sylosis, Viatrophy, Xerath and TesseracT to name just a varied few. Actually, I had a discussion with someone the other day, that so many of all the well-known Classic Rock bands are from the UK. Think Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Def Leppard, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who and you can go on and on like that. Apparently then, it’s not all that different with British Heavy Metal then – I mean, NWOBHM anyone?

Anyfuck, it leads us to yet another example of this: The HAARP Machine. After Will brought them to my attention, I searched around about these guys a bit and apparently there’s quite a lot of fuss about them. Still though, there’s very little info.

[Today marks the first writing performance of a new face on our block: Robert, a.k.a. toreignimmortal! He drops in his review of the debut record, titled Turn up the Gas, of UK Thrashers Danmaku today. Thumbs up for both a great review and some great music!]

Looking at the name and album cover, one might quickly shove this record aside when confronted with it. But don’t misjudge this, because this, my friend, is not an obscure, one-in-a-dozen Thrash band from nowhere. I tell you. This is quality British Thrash Metal!

Comprising of guitarist Paul Harrington (Anaal Nathrakh), singer Mike Pilat (The Ocean, ex-Hospital of Death) and guitarist Stuart Pendergast, (Hospital of Death), this is expected to be a head-on Thrash machine, and that’s what it is. These guys are intense.

The front cover perfectly describes what this band is all about: a rough ride on a blood-covered tank of death.

Sanhedrin was an ancient Jewish council or high court of sorts. The council that tried Jesus before his execution and alledgedly paid Judas to betray him. It is also an English four piece Blackened Death Metal band who’ve only been active since 2009. In that short time they’ve released a full-length album and an EP, both of which you can download for free, compliments of the band themselves.

I know, news of the release of Xerath’s II album has reached the outer shells of the Milky Way by now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find them worthy to write about. Besides, one of you may just be some kind of lone cave dweller that hasn’t heard about it yet, despite the vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation spreading the news shooting straight through your brain.

II came out on April 25^th on Candlelight Records. Xerath – we wrote about them before last year – outputs ten tracks, 56 minutes of Progressive Symphonic Groovy Mathematical Death Metal. Characteristics, for as far as not yet obvious: bombastic, dark, mood-swinging and, indeed, very fuckin’ groovy. And it is was very well received by global Metal press.

I’m not surprised, despite not having heard the full record, because the English band’s music is incredibly rich. Very sophisticated. And just very fuckin’ terribly pleasant to listen to!