Each month, the ManBQue Music staff lovingly presents our picks for the month’s best album. Our November choices may cause you to temporarily stop cursing the upcoming winter months (They’ve predicted 52 inches of snow. Is this Chicago or Antarctica?), or at least create enough volume so that your friends can drown out your bitching.

The Other Woman:

Black Skies: On The Wings Of Time (Self)
On its latest album (produced by Harvey Milk drummer Kyle Spense), this North Carolina power-trio breathes a breath of fresh air into alt-rock/punk-leaning southern sludge.

Bloody Panda: Summon: Invocation (Self)
Two years after the release of its expansive, often uncomfortably-heavy second album Summon, this Brooklyn-based group has created the unthinkable; a doom metal remix album. With guests like Matmos, Jarboe, Mick Barr, and Sanford Parker having their way with a track of their choice, it’s a safe bet that things will get pretty interesting, and that the project will undoubtedly question the convention of the remix record.

DWARR: Starting Over (Drag City)
In the mid-1980s, an introverted musician named Duane Warr began writing and releasing limited-editions of self-pressed records out of his bedroom. Over the years that followed, they developed something of a cult interest among record collectors, cummulating in the rerelease of Dwarr’s second album Animals in 2010, introducing a new audience to swirling, psychedelic musings that are both weirdly awesome and weirdly awkward at the same time. Starting Over, Warr’s first album, and second re-release, is rumored to be slightly less metallic than it’s follow up (or predecessor, in reissue terms), but no less a good listen.

Heartless: Hell is Other People (Southern Lord)
The debut LP from this Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania four-piece is a pulverizing, grimy, motor oil-spewing array of hardcore soaked in angst and rage as only a band living in the heart of the Rust Belt circa 2011 could muster.

Taake: Noregs Vaapen (Candlelight Records)
Norway’s Taake’s relies heavily on rock ‘n’ roll beats and punk sensibilities on it’s latest album. Powerful songwriting, near-perfect production, and an overall tone that somehow comes across more uplifting than angry (as far as black metal goes…) had fans of the band shouting “best of the year,” long before the album’s official release this month.

Ricky Thumbs:

Coliseum: Parasites EP (Temporary Residence)
This band started out a solid deliverer of gnarly hardcore punk / metal ala Tragedy and Motorhead, and over the years have turned into something completely different. This is another small sample of why I like em.

Boris: New Album (Sargent House)
Boris does everything from power-pop to prone-doom to rock ‘n’ roll to sludgy metal and all things in between. They remain one of the true innovators of underground rock.

Cathedral: Anniversary (Metal Blade)
A solid “best of” from a band one of the pioneering bands doof om rock in the 90s and beyond.