Here are my top 25 of 2009, going to try to get more years done as I get more free time.

1.Be'lakor - Stone's Reach

2.Baroness - Blue Record

3.Amorphis - Skyforger

4.While Heaven Wept - Vast Oceans Lachrymose

5.Mastodon - Crack The Skye

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My top Metal picks for 2009. It was in interesting year and a good transition into what I feel will be a decade of progression as never seen before.

If you don't agree with my list, make your own. I obviously don't have time to listen to 5,000 albums every year. Magazines that do, such as Decibel or Terrorizer, usually have trouble conjuring up 40 quality albums to throw on their yearly lists, so cut me some slack...I am not working with a team of people, and I don't get paid. I'm sure there are plenty of great albums that I have yet to discover or that I have just not been able to listen to...but all of those that are listed have been personally approved by me. The numbers are not as important to me. I would greatly appreciate some "Thumbs ups", as I have put a lot of my personal time into this list, and also into reviewing these great albums.

1.Wodensthrone - Loss

2.Mastodon - Crack The Skye

3.Anaal Nathrakh - In The Constellation Of The Black Widow

4.Krallice - Dimensional Bleedthrough

5.Napalm Death - Time Waits For No Slave

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My favorite metal albums sorted alphabetically by band name and chronological by release date.

1.Æther Realm - Tarot

2.Acid Witch - Witchtanic Hellucinations

3.Allegaeon - Proponent For Sentience

4.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes

5.Amorphis - Silent Waters

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Subject to change from time to time. (Currently in a remaking process)

1.Avenged Sevenfold - Waking The Fallen

2.Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier

3.Avenged Sevenfold - City Of Evil

4.Opeth - Still Life

5.Ne Obliviscaris - Citadel

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2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
2010-2014 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5828
2015-2019 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=6722

I sure do love this site and it's rating system, it makes finding great music so easy and, even more importantly, when an album is overlooked for a while but starts getting a buzz a few months later, boom, there it appears in the top 20.

All that being said, I still wish there was some way to get a weighted ranking that not only takes the rating of the album into account, but also the number of votes that were cast. For example, an album with a rating of 8.8 and 1000 votes would rank higher than an album with a rating of 8.9 and 20 votes. So, I scraped all the albums on the site with at least 1 vote into a database. Then, taking a leaf out of IMDb's book, I used Bayesian estimation (like the IMDb's Top 250) to calculate a weighted rating for each album based on its Metal Storm rating and the number of votes it had received.

The formula for calculating the Top 100 Albums gives a true Bayesian estimate:
Bayes rating (BR) = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) where:
C = average expected rating given...
m = minimum number of votes
R = average rating for the album = (Metal Storm rating)
N = number of votes for the album = (votes)

The way the Bayesian estimator works is that all albums in the database are given and additional m fake votes with an average rating of C, irrespective of how many true votes it already has. Then a new weighted rating is calculated...
If the album has no true votes ( N = 0 ), then BR = ( C × m + R × 0 ) ÷ ( m + 0) = C × m ÷ m = C (the average expected rating).
If the album has a number of true votes equal to the minimum ( N = m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × m ) ÷ ( m + m ) = ( C + R ) × m ÷ 2m = ( C + R ) ÷ 2 (halfway between the two ratings).
If the album has a very large number of true votes ( N >> m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) ≈ R × N ÷ N = R (the Metal Storm rating).
This means that the Bayes rating will never equal the Metal Storm rating but will approach it as the true votes grow arbitrarily large.

Now that the maths bit is out of the way, here was my methodology:
Only Studio and EP album types, from the years 2005 to 2009, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2005-2009.
The minimum number of votes (m) was determined by calculating the 75th percentile of the votes, rounded to the nearest 10.
I also decided that if an album's Bayes rating was within 0.005 of #100, it would be included too; hence the +8.

C for 2005-2009 = 7.593
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2005 - 26
2006 - 20
2007 - 23
2008 - 17
2009 - 23

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Agalloch - Ashes Against The Grain

2.Opeth - Ghost Reveries

3.Be'lakor - Stone's Reach

4.Gojira - From Mars To Sirius

5.Saturnus - Veronika Decides To Die

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The music of progressive metal features complex, layered arrangements in longer than typical songs, often including lengthy instrumental passages allowing the performers to display technical proficiency and interplay. Many time signature changes are common, as is the incorporation of Western classical music influences. The sound is generally driven by the guitars and drums, but it is quite typical to add elements non-standard to rock or metal such as synthesizers and an array of orchestral elements.

1.Atheist - Unquestionable Presence

2.Cynic - Focus

3.Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Arcturus - Aspera Hiems Symfonia

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1.Mastodon - Crack The Skye

2.Amorphis - Skyforger

3.Baroness - Blue Record

4.Insomnium - Across The Dark

5.Ghost Brigade - Isolation Songs

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1.The Black Dahlia Murder - Nocturnal

2.Between The Buried And Me - Colors

3.The Black Dahlia Murder - Everblack

4.Heaven Shall Burn - Veto

5.Between The Buried And Me - The Great Misdirect

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Obviously, a list of my favorite songs, or songs that mean something special to me at least. I don't remember them all of course so I'll be adding more as soon as I'm reminded of them.
I wanted to pull this off on Spotify but I'm missing a whole lot of songs, so I figured this would be a good place to save it.

1.After Forever - Decipher

2.Ahab - The Giant

3.Amesoeurs - Amesoeurs

4.Arcturus - The Sham Mirrors

5.Between The Buried And Me - The Great Misdirect

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1.Monuments - Gnosis

2.Weeping Silence - For The Unsung

3.Munruthel - Epoch Of Aquarius

4.Ex Deo - Caligvla

5.The Levitation Hex - The Levitation Hex

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