Marco's Top 23 releases of the year!

Welcome to the first installment of what we could call "the music that rocket Uncle Azrael's world in 2012"? or something along those lines.
I think this is the second, or maybe third time, that I made a "top list" of the music I listened to and that I spun during my DJ sets, but as this year I truly enjoyed a lot of music - a nice change of pace since the past years were really desolate - and since, well, this could well be the last year of humanity as we know it, due to the Mayan impending doom (and several other interesting synchronicities), I figured it was the right time to do.

So that if we have to go, at least we'll go with a great soundtrack.
I chose 23 albums to share with you, one per day, starting from tomorrow.
Why 23, and why tomorrow?
Well, 23 because it's one of my favorite numbers, because it's the number of the Chaos Current, because of the 23 Enigma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma), because it's a prominent number in our beloved Industrial sub-culture, and because, simply put, there slightly more than 20 good albums to share with you.
Why tomorrow? Because today we'll talk about something different? the honorable mentions.

There's really a huge lot of albums and releases that I would have wanted to feature, but like I said already, you had to stop somewhere, and 23 was the perfect number. So don't consider these honorable mentions just as "runner-ups"! Let's start mentioning The .Invalid "Aesthetics Of Failure" demo preview, WormZ "Emergency Alert System", Caustic "The Man Who Couldn't Stop", Everything Goes Cold "The Tyrant Sun", Advance "Demo" and Method Cell "Curse Of A Modern Age": going from straight futurepop to neo-ebm to american cold wave and industrial rave, these release are a little treasure trove that start outlining something that you'll see with me as the days go by: that is, the axis of quality has definitely switched towards the UK and USA (with WormZ being the only exception").

The renowned Germany of the big festivals and big labels only add the debut of Skyla Vertex to the plate, and while being a good first release, "Urwerk" suffers from a lot of the cliches that have been plaguing our scene in the past years. The odd name to this list comes with The Smashing Pumpkins new album "Oceania": at first, I found it extremely interesting but then I didn't go back to it very often, hence why it didn't make to the proper list. Still, their best since "Ava Adore" and a good comeback in general.

This is all for today: come back tomorrow and find out who's ranking at number 23!