And I listened to a lot of metal. I've come back to metal every few years, ever since I first heard The Mob Rules and thought "See, I knew there was something heavier than 'Hold the Line' and 'You May Be Right'", so in some abstract sense it's possible that this is not a reaction to having a child. I inhaled a lot of Bathory and Emperor a few years ago during an extremely scattered period in which I was trying to understand way too many things at once, so I was way overdue to follow up on the related leads more attentively.

But the logistical reality is this: in my house, these days, there is usually a baby and two new parents, and much of the time at least two of those three people are operating on sleep deficits, strained senses of self-identity, tenuous napping or other conditions requiring mindfulness and/or calming distraction. Home music-selection is thus subject to newly numerous and varying constraints. But three days a week, I go to work. I kiss my constantly-amazing wife and daily-more-beautiful daughter, carefully detach my heart from their voices and discoveries, and walk the block and a half to my office. And for eight hours, more or less, I think about the semantic web and the structure of human knowledge and how to make something useful that I can explain without using the word "ontology". And I listen to metal. And I think about the semantic structure of metal discographies, and the algorithms for inferring similarity among metal bands, and the modeling implications of the interrelations of subgenres, and the proofreading nuances of the titles of metal albums, and the pseudonymous onomastics of Norwegian Satanists. And I definitely hope these things turn out to be good examples of the kinds of universal information problems that we have to solve to solve the climate crisis and world inequity and human ignorance, but those are real problems, and if I had to test my new tools on them, I'd never know when the tools are done. Whereas when we screw up the track overlaps on Cradle of Filth albums, I can explain what the answers are supposed to be, and maybe figure out how to tell a machine to reach them.

In deference, then, to my profoundly bifurcated 2007 listening (and not incidentally to the fact that I vote in two year-end music polls but know I'll be using the software from my professional life to collate them), this year I made two lists, split by genre. The old me would have said this is cheating, and would have spent hours finding subtle ways of rationalizing an interleaved unification. The new me would rather spend that time running circles around my living room with my daughter on my shoulders shrieking and pounding on the top of my head. She can learn to bang her head later.

But she sings the new songs like a life-force. More crucially, Anette sings them like a part of the band's life-force. Tarja's voice had to be framed. I know why they said they fired Tarja, but this is why they should have fired her. They must have known, must have at least sensed what was possible. And given the chance to start over, they pour into this record everything they have, and then, for good measure, what sounds like most of the rest of Finland. The chorus of "Amaranth" is the closest I heard music come this year to reproducing my own personal euphoria, and the rest of the album swells and crashes around it like a storm of origin. This may be overblown genre music, but it also may be the greatest evocation of musical maximalism since Beethoven's Ninth. A very primal part of me does not understand why this music does not make every human who hears it feel specifically and individually invited to living transcendence.