Rolling Metal Thread 2007

thanks for the link to that jesu live stuff, kerr; meant to say before. i'm psyched as fuck about new jesu. roll on february.

That is, if you're as into their turn for the bluesy as I am. It's really a tremendous transformation by the band.

As for the new Jesu, it's really good, but I find myself liking Silver mroe.

2007:
Phazm – Antebellum Death ‘N Roll (Osmose Productions)
Altered State – Get Real (Altered State)
Melechesh – Emissaries (Osmose Productions)
The Boils – The Orange And The Black: Hockey Anthems (TKO EP)
Die Berbannten Kinder Evas – Dusk Und Boid Became Alive (Napalm)

2006: "Real" Metal
1. Fentanyl – Feeble Existence (www.fentanyl.nl)
2. Tyr – Eric The Red (Napalm reissue)
3. Korpiklaani – Tales Along This Road (Napalm)
4. Crucified Barbara – In Distortion We Trust (Liquor and Poker)
5. Ahab – The Call Of The Wretched Sea (Napalm)
6. Warpig – Warpig (Relapse reissue)
7. Voivod – Katorz (The End)
8. Summoning – Oath Bound (Napalm)
9. Pentagram – First Daze Here Too: The Vintage Collection (Relapse reissue)
10. Place Of Skulls – The Black Is Never Far (Exile On Mainstream)

2006: "Fake" Metal
1. Damone – Out Here All Night (Island)
2. Huck Johns – Huck (Hideout)
3. Leane Kingwell – Show Ya What (Krill)
4. The Left – Jesus Loves The Left: The Complete Studio Recordings (Bona Fide reissue)
5. The Spunks – Yellow Fever Blues (Gearhead)
6. Variant Cause – Excavating Variant Cause: 1980s Pacific Northwest Volume 1 (variantcause.com reissue)
7. Atomic Bitch – Bodyshop (Top & Bottom EP)
8. (Various) – American Hardcore: The History Of American Punk Rock 1980-1986 (Rhino reissue)
9. Killola – Louder, Louder! (Our EP)
10. Def Leppard – Yeah! (Mercury)

Unless Crash Kelly or Rhino Bucket should have counted as real, or Crucified Barbara or Montgomery Gentry as fake, in which case never mind.

11. Warmachine – The Beginning Of The End (Nightmare)
12. Falkenbach – Heralding The Fireblade (Napalm)
13. Solar Anus - Skull Alcoholic: The Complete Solar Anus (Tumult reissue)
14. Spi Ritual – Pulse (Sensory Dark)
15. Brain Surgeons NYC – Denial Of Death (Cellsum)
16. Tyr – Ragnarok (Napalm)
17. Ludicra – Fex Urbis Lex Orbis (Alternative Tentacles EP)
18. The Lizards – Against All Odds (Hyperspace)
19. Madder Mortem – Desiderata (Peaceville)
20. Rage – Speak Of The Dead (Nuclear Blast)

The great mailing of Korpiklaani/The Summoning/Falkenbach didn't stick even though, in theory, I thought the Summoning was cool. Didn't take 'em to the store for trade-in points, though.

Vains of Jenna came in too late to merit consideration. Maybe in the New Year, since I like at least half of it.

And the great end-o-beginning-of-year hard rock extravaganza at the famous DD blog:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2006/12/big-end-of-year-hard-rock-extravaganza.html

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2007/01/more-end-ofbeginning-of-year-hard-rock.html

Many things that were old and in boxes became new again.

Good little album, that one.

Great album! Proscriptor McGovern rocks!

all the math wizards should seriously think about going the Electro Quarterstaff route, and just ditch the singer. or grunter. cuz the music is usually pretty cool. unless, you know, you have an AWESOME grunter.

Last year was a surprisingly good one for Nuclear Blast. There were a couple notable failures (okay, mostly just that disappointing Hammerfall album), but a surprising amount of their CDs made my year-end top 25 for Metal Eater.com.

I think Car Bomb sent me a really strong cinnamon air freshener with their last record when I worked in college radio. That thing made my box of promo junk smell for a couple years until I threw it out. Band isn't really my thing, either.

Personally, i still wanna hear the new Deathspell Omega album. There is a new one, right? Talk about disturbing!

!

thanks, man, but i never got that. both my display e-mail and the webmail link should work perfectly; must have been spam-trapped somewhere. bah.

care to try again? just use the BT one, it should be cool; let me know here when i should check my inbox for glorious goodies :)

http://www.magikart.ru/images/covers/sundial_heart_400x400.jpg

goth/doom from russia. very cool.

like Joe Lynn Turner's Sunstorm!

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000JBXON0.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V36882124_.jpg

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000E8NQD6.01._SS400_SCLZZZZZZZ_V56973928_.jpg

The Car Bomb album has its charms. Some neat soundz on it.

http://www.ancestrallegacy.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/03_of_magic.jpg

dark/goth/doom/death. from norway, i think. terrible cover. cheap-o, er, "raw" production, that actually sounds cool.

http://mh09.multihost.ru/~magikart/ambivalence/Images/cover-the_splinters.jpg

http://mh09.multihost.ru/~magikart/ambivalence/Images/cdcovers/cover-pornomechanoid-front.jpg

http://www.magikart.ru/images/covers/phantasmagory-phantasmagoria_400x400.jpg

weird spacey sluggish prog/death that just goes all over the place. sounds like improv death.

http://www.magikart.ru/images/covers/phantasmagory-odd_sounds_400x400.jpg

Speaking of Joe Lynn Turner, during the Tower implosion I picked up the first album from a band called Fandango from 1977 with, you guessed it, Mr. Turner on vocals. Not really metal, per se, but very easy listening AOR. The photo on the inside has some of the most hair I've ever seen on a band, and I'm including Poison and Motley Crue in that statement.

Also, I don't quite get why everyone is so infatuated with Julie Christmas. I picked up the Triad compilation at the Tower implosion, and while the Red Sparowes are pretty great (although I honestly couldn't tell that they were live tracks until I looked on the back of the CD), the other two bands didn't really do anything for me. Battle of Mice are okay, but the shrieking on Made Out Of Babies was pretty unbearable. Ms. Christmas certainly has a unique vocal style, but to me she just sounds like a high school art chick who's totally psyched about this poem she just carved into her arm.

What's with the clock motif today, Scott?

Two French bands I thought I'd hate, but wound up enjoying recently: Fairyland, Anthropia.

Anthropia, especially, it's a one-man band that does the fantasy metal thing, but tosses in really fun snippets of jazz, folk, and 70s prog rock while sounding rooted in mid-80s proto power metal instead of mid-90s frilly power metal. Surprisingly robust, and quite a blast to listen to.

i don't come on this thread much, but my friends's band, Total Fucking Blood, might be something y'all would dig. Their album, Blaze the Lord is really good...

http://www.myspace.com/totalfuckingblood

here's something geoff who posts on ilm wrote abt it in the city pages local year end list:
Total Fucking Blood
Blaze the Lord
Freedom From Records

The midterms meant it was a bad year for extremity, so the story goes. Maybe so, but let's not have a return to normalcy in our music, thank you. St. Paul's Total Fucking Blood gave us the comforts of implacable, abstract ferocity, and for that they deserve a grateful nation's thanks. Blaze the Lord's 11 tracks are shorter than my commute and as mesmeric as Brazilian children's television. This is distilled music, everything superfluous blasted away, the exposed remnants blown out to absurd proportion. It sounds like it was recorded in your bathroom. There's a teasingly bleak sense of humor at work (the title track, "You Got Serbed"), perfect for another precarious year in a world adrift. —Geoff Cannon

i need some new black metal inspiration though, have you guys heard of Ettrick? Supposed to be some murky blackmetal/freejazz hybrid.

any other recent black metal tips?

http://www.myspace.com/blessedbyabrokenheart

Personally, I think they've got some serious potential. Crap production, but Century will probably just toss Zeuss or Andy Sneap at them.

i keep passing on the striborg double vinyl on southern lord for some reason. if i don't buy it, who will?

such a lovely looking boy too:

http://www.displeasedrecords.com/images/bandimages/striborg_band.jpg

Personally, I think they've got some serious potential. Crap production, but Century will probably just toss Zeuss or Andy Sneap at them.

Heh, I like this...part metalcore, part power metal, part mid-80s pop metal. Not as wildly uneven as Avenged Sevenfold, and yeah, the production is lacking (those synths sound straight out of Honeymoon Suite circa 1984), but with some bucks and a good producer, this could go over huge with the young crowd.

http://www.meyvn.net/images/splinteredskies_small.jpg

http://www.guitar6.com/images/interviews/meyvn_03.jpg

http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i294/jacketweather/meyvn.jpg

i don't agree! er, about every album being great. but then i kinda stopped paying attention not long after king of the road. i really loved king of the road though.

I've loved everything Fu Manchu put out from The Action Is Go onwards. Their first couple records were pretty underwhelming, and Start the Machine wasn't quite as good as King of the Road or California Crossing, but they've evolved into a very consistent groove machine. We Must Obey is probably their heaviest in a long time, too. You might want to at least check it out.

That Mevyn is as nutty as mid-80s Fates Warning. In other words, something I would have totally drooled over when I was 16.

I don't think the new EP got sent out for review; it's limited to 3000 copies. The full-length comes out sometime in February.

Okay, not really.

I don't think the band likes Start the Machine much, either, because they didn't play a single song from it when I saw them at the Viper room in December. I don't pull it out as much as the rest of their catalog, but I still like it. California Crossing had really glossy production, which took away from the raw sound a little bit, but there were a lot of great songs on that album. I'd say the new one is closest to King of the Road -- great songs, and they can't afford the great production anymore. Like I said, though, I like most of what they've done over the past 10 years, so that's my take on it.

for now, bed.

Looks like Arsis have signed with Nuclear Blast. On the bright side, that means I'll be getting their next album in the mail; on the dark, it'll be a 99 slices of death or voiceover disc. Emo tear. Prepare for the sellout accusations from the blabbermouth/lambgoat forum trolls!

And yeah, I'm looking forward to the new Neuraxis as well. One of the more fun live bands out there.

Never heard of the third SLB. Don't know anything about Anthology Recordings, either. My only SLB on CD is a two fer that was published in the late-90's are thereabouts.

So, I'm writing my Firewind review today, and as a matter of habit I went over to allmusic.com to see what they had to say about it -- and found two of the oddest metal reviews I've ever read:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:kzz1z81a5yv8
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:ndyvadoke8wn

It would seem that they gave the last two Firewind records to a jazz guy to review. He clearly doesn't know much about power metal beyond the basics, and spends a good portion of the review weaving a comparison between the power metal revival and the "Young Lions of Jazz." Not his fault, of course, since it isn't his specialty, but interesting reviews nonetheless.

"I don't "get" Mastodon or Isis, am I normal?"

people who like isis, really really like them. and they really like stuff that is similar too. red sparowes, mono, pelican, etc. they dig the vibe. my problem is i will never love those bands as much as i love neurosis, who i love with all my heart. i haven't heard the new isis, so i don't know how much better or worse it is to their other stuff. all their stuff has made year-end lists. metal fans like it. non-metal fans like it. same with mastodon. i thought blood mountain was highly entertaining. they are an entertaining band! and they are really heavy too. i might have voted for it in decibel's poll, but i hadn't heard it until after i voted.

Mastodon certainly take a little bit of getting used to; I had Remission for years before I could even get through it, but I love Leviathan and Blood Mountain. There's just a quirky craziness about them that appeals to me.

I haven't heard it, but the new Isis has been getting pretty mediocre reviews. That might be the problem.

Boris/Sunn o))/Earth confuse me. I suppose there's some artistic merit to it, but I can't help thinking when I listen to them that there's other stuff that I could be listening to that isn't just 10 minutes of the same buzzing noise.

I like Mastodon, but not Isis (zzz). Mastodon is a good middle ground between the more extreme metal bands and Metallica or Slayer, which not many bands attempt or do more successfully. Catchy, intense metal.

http://www.idolator.com/?op=jp_essays_smith

I have a Novembers Doom record lying around here somewhere. Good stuff. Very consistent band, if not particularly inventive.

Rod Smith is sadly mistaken if he thinks metal changes more than any other genre of music out there, which is what he seems to be implying in his essay. That's just silly. But the essay was quite readable regardless. I'm still really unclear about how a halfway decent but largely forgettable Mastodon album (the least exciting of the three they've made, to my ears) became "the token metal album for people who otherwise don't like metal very much to like," but at least he presented an interesting hypothesis about the situation.

From Chuck (in Texas)
(Anonymous)
2006-12-26 05:54 pm UTC (link)
Uh, this is Chuck. In Texas. On Vacation. A week ago I would have said Dylan wins the albums. Now I say TV on the Radio, who I don't get and never will, with Ghostface and the Clipse and Gnarls (who keep showing up on *album* lists I've seen everywhere, which I didn't expect at all) possibilities... Mastodon Top 20, pretty generous for something like the 50th best metal album of the year, if that.

Chuck Eddy
(Anonymous)
2006-12-26 06:06 pm UTC (link)
I may be overestimating Mastodon's and maybe even the Dixie Chicks' chances,though I think I'm starting to see a "token metal album" and "token country album" trend on year-end lists in the same way there are "token hip-hop albums"

mcatzilut
2006-12-26 06:12 pm UTC (link)
I don't think Dixie Chicks and Mastodon are the token Country/Metal albums. I think they are the country album and the metal album that the mainstream enjoyed for reasons other than them being country or being metal. I think I can prove it better with the Chicks - but even with Mastodon, they are accessible (and they have that really-cool factor, where people are listening to them because they seem to be doing something totally sweet, ie: making sprawling metal concept albums).

Chuck Again Again
(Anonymous)
2006-12-26 06:30 pm UTC (link)
Also, there was no lack of metal albums more tuneful/more accessible/less metal/more thematically goofy than Mastodon's this year. That was just the one that the press zeroed in on. They *defined* "token".

Re: Chuck Again Again
mcatzilut
2006-12-26 06:57 pm UTC (link)
I personally found Mastodon totally unaccessible and completely absurd, but they certainly got a push on this album because of Leviathan - because many critics think doing an album around Moby Dick means something about America, and about American literature, and about American pop culture. I think they see the new album as a chance to affirm their love for Leviathan. Maybe that makes the new album *token*, but I don't believe that if Mastodon hadn't come out with something, that there would've been a different *token* album. I think this was the opportunity.
(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)


Chuck
(Anonymous)
2006-12-26 10:51 pm UTC (link)
If people really think any Mastodon album is about Moby Dick, it's because of the interviews, not because they actually heard anything in the lyrics, which are incomprehensible at any speed. (But wait, wasn't their Moby Dick album the previous one? Which didn't really go anywhere in non-metal polls. Also, it was a better album than the new one, as far as I could tell. But criticwise, '07 was their moment.) As whale-metal goes, Ahab are more compelling. So was "Moby Dick" by Led Zep.
(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Chuck
mcatzilut
2006-12-26 11:54 pm UTC (link)
I agree that Mastodon is going to get much more placement this year (unless you mean '07, like an upcoming album?) -- but look at the ways it's been covered. Here's the lead to Ratliff's review of Blood Mountain:

"“We’re about things of majesty,” said Brann Dailor, drummer of the heavy-metal band Mastodon. He has an energized, curious demeanor, short blond hair, a silver incisor, rings in both earlobes and a chest tattoo that sprouted from the neck of his yellow T-shirt.

“Or monolithic things,” he continued over lunch recently. “A giant whale. Our band name. Grand. Gotta be big.”"

So first it's his appearance (which is a tokenish detail) and then it's a Moby Dick reference. But maybe the band is trying to enforce that - after all it's Dailor's quote. But Ratliff clearly seems more enamored with Leviathan than Blood Mountain: "Thus Black Sabbath. Thus “Leviathan”: in Mr. Hinds’s explanation, the album was about “the struggle between man and music,” a metaphor about holding together as a band through endless one-nighters. (What was the whale? That’s harder to say: the idea was of a band questing after some elusive liberation through music, something that might not even exist.) And thus Mastodon’s new record, “Blood Mountain,” which Warner Brother will release tomorrow."

There's all this romanticism mixed into the description - that the rest of the article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/music/11mast.html?ex=1315627200&en=a9f12a73d17dde99&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) lacks.

Ok - but I also read Pitchforkmedia a lot, so I admit some of my gaging of critical acclaim is from their reviews (which might be a mistake). Where they absolutely loved Leviathan, and then referenced it a couple time in Blood Mountain. So -- I feel like it's like giving Denzel Washington the academy award for Training Day, when he deserved it for Hurricane or Malcolm X.

Anyway - I don't get Mastodon, even though one of my close friends swears by them. But they don't blow me away. So I pick out the thematic elements, because they are the most interesting things to me - the music does less.
(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: Chuck
koganbot
2006-12-27 02:53 pm UTC (link)
Chuck, I think Mordy's saying that votes for Blood Mountain are (at least to some extent) delayed votes for Leviathan.
(Reply to this) (Parent)

Chuck Again
(Anonymous)
2006-12-27 04:26 am UTC (link)
oops, i meant '06 is/was mastodon's year, not '07.

(and also, you can tell their album's a token by top-ten list notations that read something along the lines of "a classic metal album like Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood," which would basically appear to mean "a classic metal album like the other two metal albums I own.")

No other metal band is as accessible while still being harsh, which makes them a fairly easy band to enjoy (if only as a novelty). If there has to be a token metal band that sounds somewhat modern, what other band can possibly replace them? Converge? I think they also have an opening for indie rock fans because indie rock has no (noteable?) bands like Drive Like Jehu, Unwound, etc. anymore.

As said in that article:

the safest metal vote around was for an album that ferociously inhabits its own world.

Or for people who grew up listening to bands that made the extremity of thrash/speed metal accessible. Clearly they'd see something again in Mastodon. It picks up where those bands left off. The 90s are dominated by bands too harsh or cheesy for classic status (and nu metal). Not sure what other metal average rock fans are supposed to like.

Voivod?

Hits the nail on the head, that's precisely why Blood Mountain reminded me of 1986. That combination of major label support, love from the critics, buzz among young listeners, and Mastodon's unwillingness to water down their sound (yet improve the songwriting enough to somehow make such extreme music sound more accessible than ever) is something I haven't noticed in metal music in two decades.

metal fans really like them! and metal writers are metal fans.

i don't think they are generic either. they are pretty inventive! there is a lot going on on that new album. it's neat. not that i don't like a ton of generic metal bands, i do.

And if they're too old, why not Tyr? Or Korpiklaani?

Not familiar with the second band. Folk metal and viking metal are about themes that are probably not that acceptable for most people (even if Mastodon writes fantasy-stuff, they're calculatedly cool about it), they don't sing in English, and basically you won't see them touring with Slayer.

1. Blind Guardian -A Twist in the Myth
2. Into Eternity - The Scattering of Ashes
3. Mastodon - Blood Mountain
4. Amon Amarth - With Oden on Our Side
5. Amorphis - Eclipse
6. I - Between Two Worlds
7. Damone - Out Here All Night
8. Korpiklaani - Tales Along This Road
9. Gojira - From Mars to Sirius
10. Muse - Black Holes and Revelations

1. Mastodon - Blood Mountain
2. Om - Conference of the Birds
3. Gorod - Leading Vision
4. Meshuggah - Nothing (remix)
5. Anata - The Conductor's Departure
6. Negativa - s/t
7. Blut aus Nord - MoRT

I'd recommend the Gorod album to people who haven't heard it. It's the best I've heard of the modern crop of overly slick technical death bands.

Gotta love the Saskatchewan metal. Awesome CD, that one.

Define 'metal fan' without excluding me or xhuxk.

>>and metal writers are metal fans

27 = 27.

I want to see sales figures for urban slum metal, sales numbers that actually benefit a band rather than marginally profit a collective organization that acts as a way point/distribution center for scores of such bands and merchandise based upon them for which the artists collect no royalty.

1. Blind Guardian -A Twist in the Myth
2. Into Eternity - The Scattering of Ashes
3. Mastodon - Blood Mountain
4. Amon Amarth - With Oden on Our Side
5. Amorphis - Eclipse
6. I - Between Two Worlds
7. Damone - Out Here All Night
8. Korpiklaani - Tales Along This Road
9. Gojira - From Mars to Sirius
10. Muse - Black Holes and Revelations

This is a good, even a fine list. But by example, 80 percent of it you can't get in BestBuy even if you ask. And I'm a practical fan of a quarter of it, a theoretical fan of half of it, neither of which can be fulfilled in any other the a half dozen stores stretched across the continent and catering to the blind fanatic. Except for Damone, which is an act aimed at the mainstream, which a label has financed to the point of thrusting them into an ad in primetime television. Damone has had more money spent on them than Mastodon.

So what's the definition of metal now? That's rhetorical. A music that has jumped up its ass with such enthusiasm that alleged excellence is directly proportional to insularity.

In Stairway to Hell, xhuxk broadly explained why a lay audience of variable taste would like the rainbow of records he had chosen to list. At the time, I thought 500 was close to an excessive number. Who can choose from 500 as a practical matter? Now 500 seems modest, about what's burped out every six weeks, minimum.

The window for such a gentleman's treatment snapped shut in a moment, historically speaking.

I'm someone who could have written such a book, as are others on ILM, but NOW I'm not someone who would in any way recommend his current top ten or twenty in any genre to any average music fan.

When I was on the cover of the Village Voice, the photographer asked me what music I liked and I told him -- don't ask me, go by your gut. I like what I like, fuck you, I said. I get paid for my opinion, you don't, and I wouldn't do it if I wasn't, the same as you wouldn't take pro photos of me if you weren't compensated.

I had no advice for him. Same with two interviews in the last couple of months.

Also, I know of no publication that even remotely allows or even welcomes any writer who would recommend an intellectually wide spectrum of heavy metal to a lay audience. Now it's the purview of specialty journalism, some of it good.

yesterday evening i found a promo copy of "blood mountain" on my desk at home. i've no idea how it got there, or how long it's been there. i've not listened to it yet, principally because i've been too busy being blown away by the new jesu. MY GOD, it is the music i was born to hear. as i've already said to kerr: "weightless and horizontal" is early human league goes metal, and as such pretty much eclipses everything else ever recorded :)

but of course i always feel like a bit of an impostor on this thread because ... well, i know shit about "metal" and am still filling in the gaps and links and looking round and going "wooah!" at all this frankly awesome music that for so long i ignored. i mean, it's only in the past two or three years that i've realised that the meta-genre "metal" contains a whole heap of sub-genres that can be simply classified as "stuff that rocks my world".

like i said before, my path to this stuff was via shoegazing: kinda MBV/mogwai/isis/neurosis/a whole new world of hitherto unappreciated genius. so when, for instance, people start arguing about whether jesu is "pop" or not i'm totaly nonplussed because, er, where are the genre boundaries now anyway? what makes - say - isis metal and mogwai not?

like i say: i'm a dilettante. i just like stuff i like (and if anybody else etc bonus etc). but there does seem to be more of a hang-up among the "metal community" about authenticity than anywhere else, and i think that at a time when there's so much fucking astounding heavy music out there, that's a shame.

people who love heavy metal?

http://www.majesticdarkness.com/katatoniadisc.jpg

i love gorod! they iz crazy. here's my review of their last one:

Gorod
Leading Vision
Willowtip

When we last left supreme French tech-death masters Gorod, they had been sent through the ethereal universe to fight the five creatures of anger, known as the Neurotripsicks, in the city of all perversions. The evil Neurotripsicks struck first by chewing up earth’s asshole and spitting it out in the form of liquid manure. Various cranial impalements ensued. Then Gorod got really pissed and proceeded to mince and mash the bloated pig-faced Neurotripsicks behind the stone door with pitiless savagery. Oh, it was awful. There was a whole lot of crushed flesh, perversion, torture, and the sucking of neurotripsick fluid in order to absorb the beasts’ evil souls. But then, the Neurotripsicks’ rats appeared in Gorod and the head of a pig was smashed until the earth oozed pus, and supposedly there were stab wounds from cunt to stomach and many lost souls practicing the harmony of torture and artistic violence in the city of sex and death while Gorod descended into madness, got lost with ghosts, became stuck in between two worlds, and traveled the dark seas of shredded organs while ultimately becoming the slaves of nightmares in a bloody place of tears. All of which was simple enough to follow. On their new album, however, they go on and on about global warming and how mean politicians are or some shit, and I can’t make heads or tails of any of it.

Which is fine, actually, because it enables me to sit back and enjoy the dizzying six-string solos that are the aural equivalent of a little kid spinning around and around as fast as he can until he falls down puking. Gorod create “songs” in much the same way that a meth-head dismantles a television set. It’s all very controlled and meticulous, and it probably makes sense at the time they’re doing it, but when all is said and done, there’s all this shit all over the floor and all you can really think to say is: What the hell just happened here? Gorod are the kind of band that can make Dillinger Escape Plan sound like navel-gazing slowpokes. You can’t get sick of their songs either, because there’s no way you will ever remember the order of riffs, parts, and changes that appear and disappear every four seconds. There is something distinctly unpleasant about Gorod—and I mean that as a compliment. They make truly unpleasant music for truly unpleasant people. While listening, I ask myself, “Wait, is this ‘Obsequiem Minaris’ or ‘Hidden Genocide’?” In the end, it really doesn’t matter. It’s just one big blast of bewildering noise. I dig it, and I don’t have a clue as to why. —Scott Seward

i don't. but, thanks to the miracle of last.fm, i am listening to bits of it now. and it sounds great. it's on the list :)

Every single one of the albums on Jeff Treppel's list is READILY available at BestBuy.

"Also, I know of no publication that even remotely allows or even welcomes any writer who would recommend an intellectually wide spectrum of heavy metal to a lay audience. Now it's the purview of specialty journalism, some of it good."

Well -- I've seen xhuxk's writing in Spin, on a variety of CDs. So, there's that.

I feel like you're taking a bit of a pessimistic view here. ALL music has splintered, not just metal. Except for the very broadest mainstream acts, you need to look in specialty publications to find different styles of electronic, hip-hop, punk, Latin (now THERE is a broad genre), etc., etc., etc. It's increasingly hard to find any acts with massive crossover appeal. In fact, it seems like the labels themselves have (slowly) started to embrace this, realizing it would be more profitable to throw out more diverse bands that will sell less copies as opposed to a few acts that will sell millions of copies.

Obviously you've been around longer than I have, but it seems to me like metal has always had an inherently niche audience (with the obvious exception of hair metal), so it seems like a lot of bands have started trying to serve that audience instead of seeking out huge mainstream success. After all, the most commercial form of the genre (the aforementioned hair metal) has already been thoroughly explored to death. Yes, it's become more insular, but that's more indicative of the prevailing trend in music/lifestyle rather than just something that metal has been doing.

I enjoyed Katatonia when they opened for Moonspell, and I've been wondering which record of theirs to get. Now I know, and knowing is half the battle. Thanks, Scott.

What? I don't get this at all, Jeff. It's barely been explored at all for the past 15 years! If anything, today's "extreme" metallers are limiting their creativity by not exploring hair-metal more!

I suppose I mean that hair metal is the most obviously commercial subgenre of heavy metal, and that sub genre has definitely seen its day. After hair metal, of course, nu-metal was pretty popular, but not to the extent of hair metal. Now, metalcore is the most popular metal genre, sales-wise, but even that isn't reaching the levels of nu-metal. There seems to be a definite downward slope in terms of the commercial appeal of heavy metal. The further down the slope the commercial stuff gets, the stronger but more insular the underground stuff appears to become.

I could be wrong. That's just how it seems to me.

i always feel like a bit of an impostor on this thread because ... well, i know shit about "metal" and am still filling in the gaps and links and looking round and going "wooah!" at all this frankly awesome music that for so long i ignored.

otm

"After all, the most obviously accessible form of the genre (the aforementioned hair metal) has seen its commercial heyday."

Does that make more sense?

http://www.paviljongen.info/images/Wig%20Wam.jpg

On a similar note, Lordi signed with The End a short while back, which is a really weird fit, but seeing how fun that album is (out over here in March), it could be a good seller for the label.

http://www.metaleater.com/features-2006recap.php

1. If they didn't have a singer (or if Anneke growled), and if their songs were 10 minutes long, they would totally be getting all the love that The Red Sparowes, Isis, Pelican, etc. are receiving.

2. They put out a great record that the mainstream press sure as hell isn't going to recognize, so I wanted to do my (admittedly microscopic) part in trying to get somebody to pay attention to it.

a quick check on Best Buy.com indicates that any of those records are available there.

Just because they're on the website doesn't mean they're in the physical stores though, right?

Even if, for the sake of argument, it's the second worst album they've made, all their other records are so great that a not-as-good Gathering CD is still better than most anything else out there. That's another album that underwhelmed me the first time through, but really grew on me the more I listened to it. It does work better as a full album rather than individual songs, but that's been how it's been with the last several Gathering efforts anyway.

Aside from the title track, which is pretty awesome, I haven't been able to get too far into the new Therion. Are there any other songs on there that will sell me on it?

Red! No green! White/black! Heh. Very few of the records mentioned in the list make it to the Pasadena BestBuy and I shop there once a week. Damone did and so have some Blind Guardian titles. The store stocks some Century Media but not all. Yes, didn't argue that BB doesn't carry metal. It just doesn't carry the preponderance of titles that are indicated in the specialty genre publications. It's pretty much the same for all the genres. Their catalog isn't rotten but OK as a descriptive, which is what I'd call it, isn't a ringing endorsement.

The store doesn't have the selection billed with whatever's on the website. If you want to be totally forward-looking and reductive about it, ordering through the web eliminates having ever to go to a store again yet some people -- perhaps quite a few -- still stubbornly insist on pursuing this antiquated practice.

>>Well -- I've seen xhuxk's writing in Spin, on a variety of CDs. >>So, there's that.

Of course. Let's see this same experiment under a pseudonym, sort of like the old social experiment where Elvis recordings were submitted to A&R reps in the 80's and soundly rejected.

>>In fact, it seems like the labels themselves have (slowly) started >>to embrace this, realizing it would be more profitable to throw >>out more diverse bands that will sell less copies as opposed to a >>few acts that will sell millions of copies.

Yeah. I think that's a calculus that's in practice. I also see A&R or artist location and development adopting more and more from risk management analysis.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I never shop online for CDs. I love going to CD stores and going through the selections and finding great stuff for cheap. There are two great used CD stores within a ten minute drive of my house, though, which I realize isn't the case for people that don't live in West Los Angeles. And I will admit that when I was digging through Tower during their closing sale, I found a lot of stuff I would never see in Best Buy or Circuit City.

Still, the nice thing about the Internet and specialty publications is that, even if you can't go to a store or read about deep genre records in Rolling Stone, there are readily available places to find out about and purchase more obscure titles. It's not ideal, but the choices are there. I guess you do lose sight of how difficult it might be for normal people to find some of these titles when you're a music writer, though, since we get sent these records in the mail for free.

I've really been enjoying "The Falling Stone" and the goofily titled "Tuna 1613". "Son of the Staves of Time" is the kind of Therion tune we've come to expect from the band, a good, catchy symphonic thing. And "Adulruna Redivivia" is a fun epic.

George, can't you shop at a real record store? Those box stores blow. There is only one record store where i live and they sell some metal. not a ton. but they get stuff on vinyl and i buy all that. and they have the last deathspell omega album in the used section and i might buy that to replace my promo so that i can have the swank booklet.

most stores can order stuff for you, can't they? even best buy? i dunno, i figure most kids have computers. myspace is lousy with metal. kidz got it easy. who the fuck cares about kids anyway? fuck the kids.

George - it might be a bit of a drive for you, but if you're in the LA area, I highly recommend Record Surplus and House of Records, both of which are on Pico, just west of the 405. Hell, I found St. Vitus's "Heavier Than Thou" for $.50 at Record Surplus. Also, every Skin Yard album ever.

So, The Sword? Not bad, there's some pretty good riffage and it's nice and heavy, but the songs are sort of repetitive and samey, and their vocalist is really one-dimensional. I know I'm sort of late to the party on this one, but why are they number 38 on that decibel list? As far as Sabbath worship goes, I much prefer the Obsessed "Lunar Womb" reissue that Meteor City put out last year.

Pfunkboy - got me.

Sometimes I feel like George and Chuck throw obstacles in their own paths to make sure they'll have something to bitch about.

I sort of forgot about the Sword for a while, but then playing "Freya" on Guitar Hero II had me rethinking what I thought was one of the album's more ordinary tracks. 38 seems a decent enough placing on the Decibel list...glad it's no higher, though.

x-post

MARDUK, ENSLAVED, Keep Of Kalessin, MELECHESH, GOATWHORE and PANTHEON I will team up for The Excess Of Evil European tour beginning in early May.
http://www.bravewords.com/news/58115

(Actually, that was an interesting tour... Fear Factory touring for Digimortal, Ill Niño off their first record, and Chimaira back when they were nu-metal and not New Wave of American Heavy Metal or whatever bullshit they say they are. In hindsight, I suppose it didn't take much for Machine Had to stand out.)

Not unless they were around in 1979 (or at least 1982), they weren't.

Swallow the Sun: Don't Fall Asleep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPLHGlE8oek

Okay, then apparently I didn't know very far. In that case, for my personal education, what did their sound consist of? Because it was definitely different than thrash metal, and I'm pretty sure it was new at the time. Maybe I need to be a little more specific... I don't know of any high profile metal bands prior to that early 90s Road Runner explosion that worked in breakdowns and that early 90s hardcore crunching sound.

I'm finding that, the deeper I get into extreme music, the more my limited knowledge of the metal-punk miscegenation (big word!) process becomes a liability. Can you guys recommend any website/books that detail that whole mess? I'm getting sort of tired of sounding like a dumbass, which, admittedly, is somewhat inevitable on a forum like this, but I'm not really sure where to go to further my knowledge.

Crossover thrash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossover_thrash

It's important to remember that there's 1979-82 "hardcore" (Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, early Black Flag, tons of other 1000mph bands), and then there's 1985-present "hardcore" (Sick Of It All, Breakdown, Judge, tons of other knuckle-dragging moshpit-riot-inciting bands). Machine Head incorporate influences from the latter, not the former.

I got the new Unsane album in today's mail. It's on Ipecac, but I bet it sounds just like all their other albums. And yesterday I got the new Minsk and Rwake discs. I like Rwake better than Minsk, but I don't have a problem with either of 'em. They're both on Relapse now, and will be touring together in April or so. I might go if they hit NYC.

That Jon Oliva's Pain album is indeed really good. I'm quite thrown by the thing. "Through the Eyes of the King" is on par with anything Savatage did in the 80s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KumYxSpYZeQ

Amoeba on Sunset, fairly regularly. Since upstream you listed the indie metal records you get from all the ex-commie Baltic puppet states, yeah, box stores would tend to stink from that perspective.

It's the Wig Wam picture that did it, isn't it?

Meanwhile -- Down and Motorhead are opening for Heaven and Hell? Suddenly, that tour is looking mighty interesting...

The tour likely won't be coming anywhere near where I live, so I'm just as bitter!

quick, someone give martian a list! he's going thru year-end withdrawal!

And wow, what a catchy power-metal (I guess) (= way more "groove" to my ears than most shit that people call "groove-metal") album! So far my favorites are "They Only Come Out At Night" and "Evil Love," though maybe it's just that those are the ones that come up most on my CD changer and stuck their monster hooks in my head right away. (Which was the Eurovision winning song again? Or was there more than one? I definitely like "Good To Bad" and "It Snows In Hell," too.)

Who next? ;)

Hell, I like Lordi. Back when they won Eurovision, I had their Finnish label send me all three of their albums. I just find your take on things funny in the context of US metal circa 2007, which is all about the downtuned noise and the atonal howling. And when I said generational, it wasn't meant as "ha ha, you're old," cause fuck, I just turned 35 last month and I could be a father (assuming I'd knocked somebody up at 16/17) to half the people that surround me at shows. It's more that folks your age (and my age) don't represent the majority perspective(s) in metal-land, because most folks your age and my age have given up and packed it in by now as far as keeping up with things. They might haul out their copies of Screaming For Vengeance and Master Of Puppets on the weekends or on the commuter train to work, but that's about it, is my impression. You and I are writing for people half our age; that's the reality. So it's funny to me that you're trying to push a sonic POV that most of these kids, at least based on the evidence of what they're listening to, simply don't share.

Nothing, I just want them to believe MY bullshit. Then I want their ATM card numbers.

I do, sort of; I write for Jazziz, which features at least as many "smooth" players as post-bop recyclers on its covers. I'm one of their token weird guys, meaning I get to write about Cecil Taylor or Matt Shipp or Derek Bailey instead of the Rippingtons. But they assign me reviews of Diana Krall albums from time to time, too, and I write 'em up on the merits, pointing out the good and bad, like any other album.

And I don't refuse to write about big name acts, really - nobody asks me to. If they did ask, I probably would say no, since as I've argued before those acts have million-dollar marketing budgets to do the work for 'em and I'd rather write about small bands that need more help getting into print.

But none of this is about what you write for public consumption. I'm just talking about what you say on this board, on this thread in particular, relative to what I perceive as the larger reality of the US metal scene. And now I gotta leave to go to work, where I will be writing a review of Belinda Carlisle's new album of French chanson. I interviewed her on Wednesday; she seemed like a nice lady.

exactly what i've done with every metal album (and every other album) i've ever written about. and now i'm off to work to.

listening to the black & roll of dodsferd on moribund. it's possible that black & roll IS the big metal style of 2007 like moribund sez. i'd rather call it blackened rock though. or frost rock. certainly seems to be the rage with necro types.

martian, keep an eye out for it if you haven't heard it. i think you'd like it a lot.

http://www.magikart.ru/

on the contact page there is an american contact e-mail in massachusetts. i didn't even know about that. i just sent an e-mail to russia. but my CDs came from massachusetts. i'm gonna write up the 15 i got for decibel.

So, how is the new Machine Head? You said you were going to listen to it, and then nothing! Inquiring minds want to know. (I also like the album cover, which is a nice break from their usual "band logo" or "indistinct image" approach)

And I love me some black and roll. Definitely the best new sub genre I've heard in a long time. I have that Craft album in my box of liberated Tower stuff, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. So far, I is the best of the black and roll bands that I've heard.

What, Bathtub Shitter, Solar Anus and Witchfinder General live were available at BestBuy? That's rhetorical. You should check my Top Tens at the P&J for the last six years. Heh.

I have that Solar Anus comp. It's great!

royal trux - interesting. i have a prejudice against these people in part because they're one of those bands (like disco inferno -- who may or may not actually exist in real life -- and gary numan) who seemingly have an extremely rabid and obsessed and deluded cult of people i can't otherwise identify on ILM who think they're the greatest artists in the universe, which may or may not be amusing but is definitely way beyond ridiculous. the one album i got all the way through by them before struck me as a shitty version of black crowes, more or less. (it was one of their mid/late '90s "sellout" albums i guess; i think i tried listening to one of their early noisier records once and it seemed completely forgettable even as background sound, at least at the time. i'm willing to concede i may have underrated both of those records though.) anyway, the new one western extermintator has some okay blues guitar jam parts (in "rat will kill") and one song that sounds like hanoi rocks drowning in your bathtub ("balls to pass") and an opening dark gypsy waltz that you might like more than me if you like tom waits or nick cave more than me. so...some of it, at least, is not bad. but mostly the music tends to muffle and distance itself into lifelessness.

the mooney suzuki - i liked their previous record, the mainstream hard rock one where they finally came to terms with their inner eddie money for an entire album. new album's lamer, and seemingly a deadhead hippie (= roots, sort of) move overall, though the jokey drug spiel "good ol' alchohol" is a decent commander cody type joke. if i had an ipod i'd probably put it on there and chuck the rest, though i'd be intersted if somebody hears something here i don't.

http://paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=143

Meanwhile, also on Paperthinwalls, Eric Davidson compares one of the songs on that new Mooney Suzuki album to the Doobie Brothers. He gives it a 5.5, but maybe I should give it a second chance.

Also meanwhile, the Lordi album just keeps growing on me. "Who's Your Daddy" is pretty amusing, I think. And the high-register non-lead vocals in "They Only Come Out At Night" remind me of Nazareth!

Minsk and Rwake in today's mail. I liked the previous albums by both of them, and I fully expect to like these as well, but we shall see.

Track 4 on the Minsk CD, "The Orphans Of Piety," seems to have some nice warm trumpet playing several minutes in. Track 1, "Embers," reminds me of Bloodstar! Excellent drum rumbling beneath it all.

I liked the last two Mooney Suzuki records, and I thought the song that they wrote for School of Rock was pretty darn good, too. Shame about the new one.

Ned is very identifiable isn't he?

In other news, despite enjoying both versions, I have to admit:

Lordi "Who's Your Daddy?" <<< Toby Keith "Who's Your Daddy?"

Credit to Big Business as much as Melvins. I thought it was good, but the last BB album, Head for the Shallow, was better (and then there's Karp). They have a new one coming out this year.

Daath, extreme metal with a purpose, according to the press release, and the first track is sounding pretty extreme and metal but not so much purposeful; Nightrage, heavy melodic death, I remember liking their last record; Sirenia, male-female vocal death, liked the record they put out a couple years ago; Audionom, not metal, but interesting electronic-punk-experimental stuff; Echoes of Eternity, female-fronted Gothic metal, boring live but I'm hoping they're better on record; and Nahemah, progressive death along the lines of Opeth but on Lifeforce for some reason.

Of course, I didn't get the Novembers Doom, which was the one I really wanted, but hopefully somebody else will be kind enough to send that one my way. I'll post my thoughts on what I got as I work my way through.

(Also, it seems that Gus G. used to play in them. Has that guy been in every European metal band?)

Anyway, Tool and Melvins both great too, etc. etc. In the hard rock vs. post-everything metal wars I am perhaps just a goth. Meantime, listening to the 2-disc reissue of Hysteria is a fine fine thing and cements my claim elsewhere that it is essentially a candy-pop industrial album, which is precisely why it is so epochal (reason 5414312).

Ha, and 20 years ago they were metal. This makes me think about how different the Rolling Metal Thread 1987 would have been from 2007. And how oddly similar.

haha, so otm.

http://decibelmagazine.com/features/feb2007/top25mostanticipated.aspx

but martian is probably already on the case.

torche i feel vaguely negative about. i can't remember if that's cause i heard them or just the name kinda sucks.

"MAKE! LOVE! NOT! WAR!!!"

Delivered in total seriousness as a deep thought. Makes it very hard to keep digging the bomb-string.

I'm just dipping my toes in the deep doom pit and think this should be a good first step. A friend sent me the last Ocean album (Here Where Nothing Grows) and I'm really liking it. Any recommendations? Where should I go next?

here is a link to the allmusic review. My friend thought I would like Boris but they didn't do anything for me. Anyone hear that Buried at Sea album from a few years back? I was told it was a touchstone for that dirge heavy doom.

I realize I'm not quite as hip as decibel, but here's stuff not on the list that I'm looking forward to (off the top of my head): Clutch, Type O Negative, Machine Head, Fu Manchu, Alabama Thunder Pussy, Dimmu Borgir, Arch Enemy, Dark Tranquillity, Nine Inch Nails, Soilwork, Rush.

Stuff that probably isn't going to be very good, but I'm curious anyway: Megadeth, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Metallica, and, of course, Chinese Democracy!

I'm liking Daath! They mix in a lot of elements you don't normally find in death metal, including stuff from groove metal, power metal, and even electronica. Definitely a pleasant surprise. Nice to see someone doing something different and not just sticking with the usual genre clichés.

I finally got the new The End album today, and I love it, it's easily my fave of the new year so far (well, that and the new Clutch).

That new Car Bomb isn't too shabby, either. It's going to be a good year for Relapse, methinks.

I'm beginning to suspect that you like Justin Broadrick, drone/a/sore.

The Ocean are from Germany and are one of those Neurisis bands(and are very good too)

Vinyl is way OOP.

Love this album. Try Orthodox - Gran Poder. More extended, sparse doom. Esoteric's Subconscious Dissolution into the Continuum would be a safe bet as well. I have a pack of other doom recommendations, but these are the most similar that I've heard.

Duh, yeah. That one. Not so much the sweaty, bald, shouting one.

Asunder - A Clarion Call (but only if you can handle the, ummm ... emotion)

I guess I'll have to ask around about the vinyl of Here Where Nothing Grows. Might be able to track it down in Portland.

Unearthly Trance - Seasons of Seance, Science of Silence / In the Red / The Trident

Not so parched + endless, but sometimes similar, with a bunch of Eyehategod thrown in for balance.

I'm a metal newb - I sort of stepped away in the early nineties (some really bad concert experiences soured and scarred me) and am just getting back into it. I've glommed onto the doom I've heard and some of the stoner/sludge stuff, but have a psychic aversion to anything with too strong a thrash antecedent.

"Sick of It All: here are my recomndations for you:
classic/epic/true Doom:
Candlemass: Nightfall
Saint Vitus: Born too Late
Reverend Bizzare: in the rectory of the bizzare reverend 2 disc set
(gives you three very distinct styles of the above listed subgenre)

Sludge:
Eyehategod: take as needed for pain
Grief: turbulant times(collection of rare stuff but easy to find as sl put it out)
Graves at Sea: documents of Grief demo/cd(available thru 20buckspin records)
others to take note of: buried at sea, facedowninshit, rwake, noothgrush, buzzov*en

Death Doom (not gothy crap like my dying bride/paradice lost ect)
Winter: In to Darkness
dISEMBOWLMENT: the 2 disc comp of all their material relapse put out in 05
Coffins: mortuary in darkness

Funeral Doom:
Therogothen: like streams from the heavens
Unholy: the second ring of power
Skepticism: lead and ether

funeral/sludge/drone:
Bunkur: bludgeon
Moss: Chtonic rites
Khanate: things Viral

blackened doom:
unearthly trance: seasons of seance, science of silence
Forgotten Tomb: springtime depression
Nortt: ligfread

Drone:
Sunno))): any/ flight of the behemoth or white1/2
Earth: 2
Black Boned Angel: latest album
Skullflower: iii'rd gate keeper

Stoner doom metal
electric wizard: dopethrone
Sleep: Dopesmoker
High On Fire: surrounded by Theives
Orange Goblin/Electric Wizard split

post rock/experiment/post doom/ whatever some people like to enculde as some weirdass off shoot of doom:
pelican: march in to the sea ep
Isis: oceanic
Cult of Luna: Salvation
Mouth of the Architect: ties that bind

So funeral doom it is almost ambient:
Untill Death Over takes Me"

Celestiial!!!

(Also, Blessed Black Wings is a better High On Fire record than Surrounded by Thieves, although Surrounded is still damn good)

already flagged up on this thread, upcoming albums from minsk and novembers doom

album titles announced:

Agathodaimon - Phoenix
Aborted - Slaughter & Apparatus: A Methodical Overture
Axis of Perdition - Grief of the Unclean
Blut aus Nord - Odinist
Bokor - Anomia 1
Car_Bomb - Centralia
Demiurg - Breath of the Demiurg
Detonation - Emission Phase
Dew-Scented - Incinerate
Dimmu Borgir - In Sorte Diaboli
Dødheimsgard - Supervillain Outcast
Drudkh - River of Tears
Ensiferum - Victory songs
Entombed - Serpent Saints
Furze - UTD
Green Carnation - The Rise and Fall of Mankind
Madder Mortem - Tervaskanto
Mayhem - Ordo Ab Chao
Mors Principium Est - Liberation = Termination
Naglfar - Harvest
Nightingale - White Darkness
Omnium Gatherum - Stuck Here on Snake's Way
Orphaned Land - The Never Ending Way of ORwarriOR
Pantheon I - The Wanderer and His Shadow
Red Harvest - A Greater Darkness
Slagmaur - Svin [new Norwegian black metal band]
Swallow the Sun - Hope
Throne of Katarsis - An Eternal Dark Horizon
Today Is the Day - Axis Of Eden
Type O Negative - Dead Again
Watain - Sworn to the Dark
Zatokrev - Bury the Ashes

also expected in 2007 new albums from:

Abigor
The Absence
Age of Silence
Amoral
Averse Sefira
Bloodbath
Buried Inside
Burnt by the Sun
Candlemass
Dark Fortress
Dark Tranquillity
Death Angel
Epoch of Unlight
Exmortem
Forest Stream
Frantic Bleep
Hyatari
Mare
Mourning Beloveth
Octavia Sperati
Opeth
Primordial
Prong
Scarve
Susperia
Thorns
Ved Buens Ende
While Heaven Wept
Will Haven
Winds

yeah, well, i love that stuff too. but the list is still great as far as it goes.

ooh, speaking of doom, i want to hear this. their last album didn't get enough love. i thought it was great. ultra-heavy neurosis + godflesh kinda vibe.

18.11.06: A NEW MESSAGE from Nemtheanga:
http://www.primordialweb.com/index2.htm

...message for winter 2006

...fuck autumn didn't seem to last long did it ?. we only seem to have two seasons these days. winter for nine months and summer for three. thats' global warming for you. doesn't matter my house will be underwater in about 50 years anyway. never liked this area anyway....

...firstly the songwriting for the new album has been coming along, slowly as usual but gradually happening none the less. to my ears at least it sounds more up tempo then gathering. there is one song which is mainly blastbeats and some more mid-up tempo anthemic sounding tracks. the projection for going into the studio is april/may 2007 but time is most definitely not constant in primordial land so that's completely open to change. as much of a pain for metal blade as that will be....

I'll believe Death Angel when I see it. Same with Trouble.

Green Carnation, Opeth, and Orphaned Land will most likely be cool. I'm a little iffy about Candlemass without Messiah. Frantic Bleep and Susperia's last albums were pretty interesting, don't know if they can continue the trend. And if the last Prong album was any indication, that thing is going to be a joke.

They had three pretty good albums in the early 90s. Then that's all she wrote. You never know, though, I could be totally wrong and the new one could snap both my fingers AND my neck!

Peter Lindgren said the other day on Bruce Dickinson's BBC show that they want the next Opeth album to sound as creepy as Scott Walker's The Drift.

And I'm kind of interested in seeing how the new Nightwish turns out. If they ever hire a singer.

thanks for that list! Should have known the recommendations would come fast and furious from everyone. I've got years worth of finding and listening to do - assuming all I do is explore doom/sludge/stoner/nigh-ambient funeral doom, and ignore all the stuff I usually spin.

Should be a fun year.

Oh, and i heard Wreck Of The Hesperus on there. they are my new favorite band. i was completely enthralled by their awesomeness. see, i learn something new every day.

http://myspace-098.vo.llnwd.net/01508/89/09/1508239098_l.jpg

You mean her?

uhm, didn't think about it. i have two, corrasion which is a little more heavy and bodycage which sounds like he was listening to lycia/bleak or something. maybe i need more points of reference for ethereal guitar.

http://www.last.fm/music/Intaglio

the first song i heard was a 17 minute epic. no vocals. they would just launch into these delicate and pristine guitar parts that are completely hypnotizing. and they've got that great postpunk/goth bass sound. their production even reminds me of the 80's. great echo.

Jeff, I think Nightwish showed on their last album that they're ready to move past the whole operatic thing, like on "Nemo" and "Wish I Had an Angel". Still bombastic (hell, they were just at Abbey Road recording orchestras and choirs), but with a little more nuance to the singing than just the usual soprano stuff. Interestingly, when the call went out for audition tapes, they said they were open to anyone, not just the operatic singers. So I guess we'll have to see if they take the safe route, or try something bolder. I think it really worked well for Therion.

I think I would like Therion a lot more if they would stop making double albums and just concentrate on making a record that was good all the way through. There are some very good tracks on the new one, but there's a whole lot of boring in between.

http://images.google.com/url?q=http://www.epinions.com/images/opti/a4/d3/204154-movie.jpg-movie-resized200.jpg&usg=__Oa4Kj31pIa7BjO-szvzTgqZg7Gs=

Mr. Lordi, frontman for Finnish monster hard rock act LORDI, has
been keeping busy in 2007 with both the upcoming North American
release of the album "THE AROCKALYPSE" (March 20, 2007, The End
Records) and the brand new LORDI-themed restaurant (also known as the
`rocktaurant' / http://www.rocktaurant.com/index_en.html ), which opened December 15, 2006 in Rovaniemi, Finland.

"Everything on the menu that is related to LORDI is our own
ideas. Like everything with this band, we always have our hands on
all projects," states Mr. Lordi. "I opened the restaurant with my
childhood friend (Arto Koivuharju). My friend used to run a
restaurant and he wanted to open another. He asked me for an idea
and I suggested the LORDI-themed restaurant. Everything we start
working on seems to get bigger and bigger. We wanted to open in
restaurant earlier in the summer but the whole concept just grew and
we finally opened it last month. It is a unique place, especially
from a European point of view." He adds, "I like the Ox item - the
rare beef with chocolate chili sauce and sesame seeds over bull
steak. People can order it medium, but I like my steaks rare."

Memo to new band on Southern Lord: If you are working within the already-stylistically-pretty-monochromatic doom genre, don't tempt fate by naming your band Orthodox. That is all.

i disagree! there are so many different shades of doom these days. it's a veritable doom renaissance. but i get what you mean.

The continuing influence of David Gilmour, I tells ya. Speaking of which, I haven't heard Meddle in a while here...

it's kinda like when people rave about that last misery index album. leaves me completely cold.

I loved the shit outta Chronoclast, I think it was my #1 of '05 (that was '05, right?), high hopes for new Buried Inside

May 30 - The Metro, Chicago IL
June 1 - BB King Blues Club, New York NY
June 3 - Key Club, Los Angeles, CA

http://mclub.te.net.ua/images/art/artist_10168.jpg

I think the clean singing have enough nuance and sincerity to it to put it a fair distance ahead of your usual cookie cutter metalcore. It's almost like the Deftones. I was playing this album again last night, and yeah, it is a great one.

I'm also very, very impressed by the new ones by Minsk and Rotting Christ.

Azrael (seems somewhat lovely so far, actually!)
Clouds (connected to Cave-in. In one song they attempt "Mississippi Queen" riffs but the singer seems real weak; not sure about the rest)
Dodsferd (or something like that -- all these metal logos lately have shitty penmanship! "Black'n'roll," supposedly...I dunno, I liked that Entombed mini-album on Man's Ruin a few years ago where they covered Alice Cooper, does that count?)
Horna (I liked their last album! I remember nothing about it!)
Lesbian (ha ha)
Zozombra (another Cave-in guy. Or maybe the same Cave-in guy. Along with an Old Man Gloom guy. Not to be confused with an Old Man's Child guy. I definitely like Old Man Gloom better myself.)
Moribund Death Cult Vol. 1 compilation (including Azrael's and Dodsferd's and Horna's top 40 mixtape hits, apparently)

Triclops (actually i'm not sure this has anything to do with metal, but the press bio uses the word "acid-rock" once and compares them to Steel Pole Bath Tub, who as far as I know I never heard a note by in my life and I have no idea whether people thought they sounded metal in any way or not. Apparently some Fleshies guy is involved.)

album due second half of 2007

If I ever heard any such stuff that actually sounded like this, I might like it.

As for Static-X, I only liked the first album. I'm surprised this didn't end the band completely, though:

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=33428

Seriously, Chuck, check out I - Between Two Worlds. It came out on Nuclear Blast at the end of last year. They really nailed the black and roll thing.

Adrien - I thought "We Must Obey" and "Hung out to Dry" had pretty monster hooks.

This Echoes of Eternity CD is so fundamentally misconceived that I can't even fit everything I hate about it into the allotted space for my review.

And I'll agree with Jeff, I can't imagine anything topping that I album in the black and roll department. I actually like that CD more than anything Immortal did.

I liked the first Static-X album quite a bit at the time. Profiled them for Alternative Press when it came out. Never heard the second or third discs, but the new one is on my desk at work - maybe I'll check it out tomorrow.

I'm honestly surprised! (That the Voice commissioned one.)

So Phil, have you heard his Lizards stuff? (He sings on their first couple or three albums. They're real good, actually.)

I pitched Rob and he bit, SLB bein' New Yorkers and all.

Haven't heard the Lizards stuff, but might be interested in checking them out. He's a hell of a drummer, and Dambra's a seriously underrated guitarist who hasn't lost a step in 35 years.

Just found out Rhino is putting out a previously unreleased live Dokken album from 1981 (predating their studio debut), in March. I've heard that Dokken are kinda underrated, as hair metal bands go, so I'm gonna check it out.

hey martian.....thanks for the heads up.

I'll even go as far as to say that Dokken is the best singles band of the 80s pop metal era.

There's a definite difference. 83-85 spawned some incredible pop metal, as major labels were looking to cash in on Quiet Riot's '83 breakthrough. So the bands that came around at the time were pop-oriented, no question, but there was an edge to the music, which you could hear in those Ratt/early Crue/Dokken riffs. The turning point was '86, you had Poison and Cinderella debuting with sounds that were much softer around the edges, and Bon Jovi went through the roof that fall. Pop metal was consequently wimpified from then on. Then it branched off again with the sleaze metal trewnd of GNR, Faster Pussycat, LA Guns, while in '88 the Warrants, Slaughters, and Firehouses took the frilly power ballads to unbearable extremes.

I greatly prefer that 83-85 style, and Dokken was absolutely perfect at it, singles-wise anyway.

I'll take your word for the early stuff as I don't know it.
But you will never convince me on the later stuff. Ask Ned, we chatted about it in the Solid Rock pub in Glasgow when he was over. Though I did like Def Leppard back then(1st 4 albums anyway).

Pyromania has to figure in this, too, right? That was also '83, and it sold way way more than Quiet Riot.

Let me guess, Chuck prefers the later style? ;)

In general, I suppose. Plenty of that '83-'85 stuff just sounds like bloated schmaltz -- if Twisted Sister or Dokken ever made any album worth playing all the way through, I never heard it. "We're Not Gonna Take It" is an okay Slade rip, though; I have nothing against it (and nothing against Quiet Riot for the same reason). And I like "Round and Round" more than anything by Poison (who made two great albums regardless), even more than Slaughter's great "Up All Night." (Also Cinderella and Warrant rocked as hard as Faster Pussycat--who I also love--did, so a lot of a.begrand's generalities about "edge" hit me as silly, owing more to do with how the bands' hair looked or how high the girl-to-boy ratio of their audience was than how their music actually sounded.) (But then again, who cares?)

I do remember Cinderella fondly, it seems like they had a concept album that kinda kicked ass. I don't think the issue has anything to do with the east coast, or hair. There is an audible sea change in production, guitar tone, use of synth, vocal styles, etc as the decade ballads toward its bloated middle section. If this coincides with a regional shift in focus, whatever - there are clear stylistic reasons for Begrand's insightful-to-my-eyes post above.

*which is all I'm talking about that, annoying vox or not, death 'n' roll is essentially blues-based psych on hard amphetamines

Ha ha, Metal Mike Saunders (or even Anthony Miccio) to thread.

Warrant! C or D?

"WARRANT. great band, great live band, two great hammer-down hard rock albums that no one (outside of their fan base) even knows exist--DOG EAT DOG and ULTRAPHOBIC. great songwriter (jani lane). great lead singer (jani lane). oh, and one of the best stage "frontmen" ever (again, jani lane). Warrant and JL (as a writer/singer/frontman) are absolutely the most underrated rock band of all time, from Little Richard through Hilary Duff.

If they'd had a cool name, a "cool image" (like the MC5 who took great photos but when push came to shove, were fuck-up loser junkies who choked over and over outside of their midwest fan base...as in, Grand Funk took the "detroit sound" to the country, however watered down or second-rate; MC5 totally failed, not to mention their halfassed studio recordings, third-rate at best), and had never done the "Cherry Pie" video or tune (which nonetheless is total trash-rock genius, close to the "Louie Louie" of its time)...i dunno, use your imagination.

if "Poison" (giant green logo everywhere, not bad) had been named "Warrant" (uncool name, no logo) and "Warrant" vice versa, is anyone gonna bet me two-bits that Warrant (with the different, cooler name) wouldn't be the no 1 band on that VH1 Top 40 Hair Metal Band Of All Time countdown?

Just punch up http://www.amazon.com and see what Warrant's fan base thought of DOG EAT DOG in the "buyer's reviews"...that is possibly the best heavy-guitar melodic heavy metal album of its entire generation. close to amazing. seriously. It of course came out it the hellmouth of the explosion of 1992 grunge crap-deluge everywhere, and so got buried; the band's manager died, their headlining tour tanked and was canned halfway through, the band splintered/broke up for a year...etc. There's probably a great unreleased Jani Lane solo album between the various (later) Jabberwocky and Lane-solo stuff that CBS eventually decided not to put out (he initially retained a CBS deal after the band was dropped in the mass purge of nearly all major-label hair metal bands, most of whom obviously deserved to return to the hellhole they came from).

if you are a hard rock/metal fan but don't own those 3rd and 4th Warrant albums DOG EAT DOG and ULTRAPHOBIC, your entire collection should be confiscated and traded in for Hilary Duff DVD's yesterday. I say this as someone who heard and loved it all first-wave heavy metal from ground zero, Sabbath in 1970-71 until "heavy metal" turned to formula crap within about a decade. For Warrant to cut a substantial body of truly great or near-great melodic and heavy melodic-metal during the nadir of idiot clueless poser hair-metal and speedmetal bands, was a remarkable accomplishment. (In baseball, that'd be called the "ballpark factor").

After the Beatles, Kinks, and Beach Boys (or whoever you prefer) as 60's giants, i rate Warrant's catalog (much smaller obviously) as impressive as anyone's since. AC/DC w/Bon included. also: if you don't own the CBS catalog best-ofvCD, THE BEST OF WARRANT, you know nothing about this band's music! that is a truly great, near-perfectly sequenced 16-tune set. And top to bottom it rocks as hard as ANY rock bandof the 80's.

for the record, i rate the Small Faces, Green Day, Warrant and a couple others as my favorite catalogs since the Class Of 1963-64 trioka (i'm rounding up a bit with the Beach Boys). I love AC/DC and Sabbath but there's only really two albums by each that kick my ass (and not the common favorites...over here it's LET THERE BE ROCK and IF YOU WANT BLOOD YOU'VE GOT IT, all the way."

Bluesy, yes, but like I said, a little soft around the edges...for every "Gypsy Road" there was a "Nobody's Fool". I actually liked Cinderella's first album, save for the odd laugher like "Push Push".

Kix really defied categorization in the 80s...it's a shame they didn't become bigger. Strangely, while metal video shows had really good ratings here in Canada back then, Kix got little to no airplay before "Blow My Fuse" came around.

It's weird, I remember so many more Quiet Riot knock-offs than Def Leppard ones copycats from the mid-80s, at least among North American bands: Kick Axe, Icon, King Kobra, Hanover Fist, even W.A.S.P. at times (Last Command era). Which made Dokken all the more unique at the time, with a singer who actually sung, instead of sounding like another Kevin DuBrow.

Seems odd that they're on Lifeforce. Have even Lifeforce recognized that metalcore is hitting critical mass and thus are trying to expand their roster?

Their first album for Southern Lord will be recorded this summer at Electrical Audio studios with Steve Albini at the controls. Album title and release date forthcoming. Please stay tuned for more info!

My ears also tell me that Thomas's late '80s/early '90s hair-metal glossy/synthy production accusation generalization applies to some hair metal (Bon Jovi, the first Warrant album, Slaughter, maybe Poison though I don't recall any synths on their two good albums, Kix sometimes) but not all of it (Cinderella, Britny Fox, Great White, Kix sometimes, every Warrant album after their first one). And sometimes it works (disco-metal is still a pretty smart idea), and sometimes it doesn't. And it's got plenty of early '80s precedents, anyway -- Night Ranger, Aldo Nova, Loverboy, Survivor, Van Halen's 1984 which was also bigger than any Quiet Riot album (which yeah, just like with Pyromania, that doesn't mean it was more influential. Maybe the reason I've never noticed an overwhelming Kevin Dubrow influence on '80s metal is that I never listened to either Dubrow or the bands he influenced all that much, then or now, but who knows?) So it's not like the synth gloss suddenly appeared out of nowhere in '86. It had always been there, as far as I can tell. And often it made the music rock more.

* - Though actually, on second though, I would probably actually keep a best-of by Bon Jovi! I just never considered it before.

And I finally heard the Gilby Clarke album from last year (not that I was especially looking forward to listening to it or anything -- it just basically showed up free and unnanounced at work, so I bit.) It's less bad than I expected; as post-sleaze-glam singer-songwriter stuff goes, I'd take it over, say, the new Jesse Malin album (which includes bad Springsteen cameos and a worse Replacements cover). But it still leans too much toward singer-songwriter, not enough toward sleaze-glam to my ears. Seems to improve slightly when it veers slightly toward country rock (i.e. in "Skin N Bones"), but even that just reminds me how much more fun Shooter Jennings makes such stuff.

Nah, I got bored too soon. Life is short; promo CDs are many.

MOST of the Lesbian album is ambient guitar drift psych stuff

Yeah, that was kind of my point Scott! It's listenable enough, just like all the other interchangeable ambient guitar drift these days. (Remember, I'm the guy who can't even bother to care about Isis anymore.) Two or three years ago, Lesbian would've bored me less, I guess. What do they do that zillions of other bands aren't doing? As far as I could tell, nothing, but I'm open to suggestions.

"What do they do that zillions of other bands aren't doing?"

i just like the sounds people make. i have an infinite capacity for some stuff. i can listen to third-tier and even fourth and fifth-tier death metal bands all day long and enjoy them. even when they are 100% derivative. and most of them are. same goes for most metal sub-genres.

novembers doom (this stuff was made for me)

solefald (part 2 of their iceland epic)

rotting christ (1st tier!)

laethora

melechesh

car bomb (which is really good as far as everythingbutthekitchensink grind/death/spazz/patton/dillinger/tech stuff on relapse goes.)

I need this so bad

I saw from The End that the 1st edition will be a limited thang with a book - my experience with metal book-and-records has been Mortiis's book, which was underwhelming, but hope springs eternal

finally I will rep for WASP's The Headless Children all day every day, that album was really nice & so was their circa-2001 disappeared-completely one whose title I can't remember (though I guess that says either that it's a little unmemorable, or that I'm old)(hint: I'm old)

Stuff I've liked this year, all 20 days of it:
Phazm
Fear My Thoughts
Firewind
Fu Manchu
Audionom
Daath
Sirenia
Nahemah

I have Novembers doom coming to me from one of the sites I write for, but first I have to get through the Mnemic and Therion reviews, which I'm not too excited about. Also, I have to figure out exactly which death metal bands Daath reminds me of, and that way lies madness.

The start of 2007 has yielded an incredible number of top-notch albums. Early faves on mine include The End (tops), Clutch, Rotting Christ, Novembers Doom (awesome stuff), Minsk, Therion, and Melechesh.

That Laethora's pretty cool. And if the Azrael album was trimmed to about 50-60 minutes, it might have come close to the coolness of Agalloch. As it is, the operative word is "bloated".

Haha, I got slammed for saying something positive about Goremageddon in the last thread (haven't heard the last album). This album seemed really dull on the first few listens, then I liked it, and now I'm back to thinking it's pretty dull. I'm not sure what I was hearing around listen #4, but it seemed like quality, melodic pop-mode Carcass. It's no Goremaggedon, that much is certain. Some fairly sweet melodies here and there, too infrequent (like a few minutes into "Prolific Murder Contrivance").

I guess I'll mention the other album I've heard, Psyopus' Our Puzzling Encounters Considered. I'm a sucker for tech metal and they do a pretty good job of it. Not exactly my favorite variety (more towards DEP-screeching), but there's some pretty instrumental passages and some glimmers of a more unique guitar approach than the average band (reminded me of Melt Banana). Doesn't completely come together.

For tech-metal there's a Beneath the Massacre album around, but I don't expect anything great.

Kinda looking forward to the new Immolation EP/LP. Have been playing all of their stuff for the last 6 months, but Harnessing Ruin is clearly the weak link.

One of my favorite memories of working at Best Buy was when this 12-year-old kid with pink hair and a Marilyn Manson T-shirt came up to me asking where the new Limp Bizkit record was. I told his father he was too young for it, and the father didn't let him buy it. Score.

But yeah, that Mnemic CD sucks pretty hard.

damn I'm liking this record

1. Crack The Sky – Alive And Kickin’ Ass (Lifesong reissue ’06)
2. Sir Lord Baltimore – Kingdom Come (Anthology Recordings reissue ’06)
3. Phazm – Antebellum Death ‘N Roll (Osmose Productions)
4. Novembers Doom – The Novella Reservoir (The End)
5. Minsk – The Ritual Fires Of Abandonment (Relapse)
6. Altered State – Get Real (Altered State)
7. Lordi – The Arockalypse (The End)
8. Rwake – Voices Of Omens (Relapse)
8. Therion – Gothic Kabbalah (Nuclear Blast)
10. Melechesh – Emissaries (Osmose Productions)

And does anybody have any thoughts about Die Berbannten Kinder Evas's "Dusk Und Boid Became Alive" (on Napalm)? I kept that one too.

i like it. very pretty. no guitars, right? or is that another one. dead can dance fans would love it. cool dead can dance fans anyway.

Hell, maybe I should pretend to be Decibot and get in through the back door. I could build a giant cardboard costume and go to the decibel corporate offices. Too bad I don't live in Pennsylvania anymore...

Meanwhile, Type O Negative are still great live. They played all really long, slow dirges (except for Kill All the White People), took a five+ minute intermission 40 minutes into the set, and toilet papered the House of blues when they were done. Brilliant!

(BTW, around the middle of last year, I e-mailed the Corrupted organization about the possibility of licensing all their various EP and split tracks to be put out as a nicely packaged 2CD set; I received an unsigned e-mail back claiming they already have such a project in the pipeline.)

if true, excellent news. but i don't think the world could be that good. plus it'll come with a hand-illuminated vellum book and cost more than a cherry geo metro.

PANTERA: We were never hair metal!

And I'm coming around on Firewind. I think it was "Breaking the Silence" that hooked me in. I like the singer, he's a rare power metal vocalist who doesn't over-sing.

So, Rage against the Machine reunion at Coachella. There goes my theory that Zach de la Rocha was down in Bolivia fighting against the fascist oppressors in a guerrilla army. I sort of liked that theory.

At least that means we won't have to deal with the sheer mediocrity of Audioslave for a little while. I don't much like Rage, but their shenanigans were pretty entertaining.

New Type O Negative album sounds a lot worse than that, for whatever it's worth. God he's an ugly singer -- like, he was reminding me of the guy from Creed. I saw them live a couple times a few years back, and I still have their Least Worst Of CD on my shelf, but I'm starting to wonder why. Though probably they've just grown less good.

Zach mostly's been hanging around OC performing with acoustic Mexican music groups. That or recording with Trent Reznor. I assume he's run out of money.

I haven't heard the whole thing, but I wrote a review of the single which ought to be up at ptw pretty soon. The gist: worse than Early Man. I like Early Man, but this is utter shit.

Recording with Trent Reznor is always a crapshoot... Two, anyone?

Meanwhile, I'm getting tired of 90s alternative guys thinking that they can do metal albums. Witch was okay for a little bit, but the longer the record went on, the less enjoyable it got, until I wanted to throttle the singer. The one thing I do like about this indie-goes-metal movement is that indie rock kids think that metal is easy to do, and then they try it, and they totally fail. Fun to watch! Not to listen to, but to watch. (Then again, there have been plenty of metal bands recently that have tried to sound like Slint and failed, so I suppose it's a two-way street)

Yeah, I was going to say -- Creed? Perish the thought, Chuck!

I'm currently enjoying the new Laethora on repeat, trying doggedly to review the thing this afternoon. Scott's right, it's a good'un, a cool twist on the death genre, with snazzy touches of goth/doom smattered throughout. Reminds me a bit of Zyklon, in that it's forward-thinking extreme metal, unafraid of the odd weird little tweak here and there. I think I hear a theremin on one song...

Big package in the mail again today:

Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound (superjudge-era monster magnet, but more doped-up, if that's possible. Good stuff, a lot of people on here would probably like it)
Minsk
Kittie (although Keith Bergman on blabbermouth already said what I wanted to say about this, which makes me sad)
Pain of Salvation (Prog-Metal; the press release says that I need to look at all the bands previous releases and context in order to understand the idea, message, and direction of this one, so I guess I fail already)
In This Moment (female-fronted melodic metalcore, they were quite good live)
Slaviour (they're on Inside Out and have a former member of Fates Warning, so I'm going to take a wild guess and say prog-metal)

I also got a 99 slices of death Echoes of Eternity, which is like someone stepping on your foot and then kicking you in the balls. If I had a blender, I know what I would be spending my evening doing.

Rasmus album from last year on the free table today. I'd never heard of them before; was for some reason under the impression they were Darkness-like -- not sure why I thought that; probably I just wasn't paying attention when other people talked. Turns out they just sound like yet more (scr)emo wimps, with more vibrato than average in the vocals. But if Brits can explain otherwise, then by all means do so.

Also on the free table: both the I and Chrome Divison advance CDs from last year, which I swear I both tried to listen to at the time but I will give a second chance to now since so many people are insisting I might dig the black'n'roll thang. Chrome Divison do seem to have a smidgen of Motorhead in their loins. But neither advance CD is conducive to random-changer play, which pisses me off as usual (and which may well be the reason I gave up on them the first time).

Just listened to the In This Moment, which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would. Not exactly original (bears an uncommon criticism), but they seem to have more songwriting chops than their other metalcore contemporaries, and singer Maria Brink (have to wonder if that's her real name or a stage name) has good pipes. The weird thing is, while her voice reminds me of some Lilith Fair singer, her delivery alternately sounds like Howard Jones from Killswitch Engage and the guy from Soul Asylum.

I'd heard of them, duh; just never actually heard them. (And maybe I was under the impression they were H.I.M.-like instead, come to think of it. Either way, they're not.)

What label is Minsk on again?

Minsk are on relapse.

The new Destruction CD, the one with the re-recorded songs, is shockingly good. Partially due to the fact that most of their 80s stuff had horrible production. I usually can't stand gimmicks like this (Loudness and Victory recently put out ones that sucked), but these songs are tight, and Schmier still sounds great. Man, so many of these 80s bands sound ageless.

it's great! as is the rotting christ album. they are both great. buy them both. great mystical mumbo jumbo mayhem on both albums. and it's catchy mystical mumbo jumbo mayhem!

Finished downloading the whole Corrupted discography yesterday, so here's the link. Just scroll down the page somewhat; you'll spot it. I've decided I like their epic works but can live without their 3-5 minute compilation tracks.

Audio samples from Olidous Operettas can be found via this TCME e-card and the band’s official MySpace page: www.MySpace.com/CountyMedicalExaminers.

http://www.necrodemon.com/HyperionFrontLarge.jpg

1) The Abominable
2) Terror in the Arctic
3) Funeral in the Snow
4) The Deep Freeze
5) Avalanche!
6) Frozen Sorceror (Chant of Making V)
7) Mesopotamia - Warriors of Ice
8) Empire of Winter
9) Benumbed Suffering
10) So Cold, So Evil
11) Hordes of Hyperion

Fucked Up's album is amazing, I decided to try it out after seeing it on the Decibel list last month, and was thrown by how good it is.

And back to Melechesh for a sec, the big reason why I like it so much is because of the cover of the Tea Party's "Gyroscope". They take a decent song by a boring, pretentious band, and turn it into a thrilling metal tune.

! (I agree with you, though, that they could only improve something by those dolts.)

Dir en Grey have attracted a decent following in the US. They were on Family Values last year, their headlining shows sold out in Los Angeles, and they got some sort of "best video of 2006" award from Headbangers Ball. The video is pretty neat, although I don't know if it's the best one of last year. The fact that the music wasn't very good hurts it. Reminds me of Mad Capsule Markets without the fun or catchiness. Maybe the new one is better.

I really enjoyed the Fucked Up album, too. The arrangements were actually kind of pretty. I even liked the cover art!

Yeah, it looks like punk, it sounds like punk, but the songs are long and the arrangements are far more creative than one would expect from a punk band. Epic prog punk, I guess one would call it.

I thought this described From First To Last, who are like Deftones to me in that they should have way more outside-the-niche popularity/cred than they do. Both FFTL discs have been great, to my ear.

I think I have two Mad Capsule Markets CDs in storage. They were pretty amusing for a nu-metal band. The videos were even better.

You pretty much named every major stoner rock revival band there except Monster Magnet, Chuck. Maybe you just don't like stoner rock revival?

I also wouldn't call Mad Capsule Markets nu-metal. They always seemed more like more danceable Atari Teenage Riot with a sense of humor and better (or actual) songs to me.

Speaking of nu-metal, Slavior works about as well as a former Fates Warning drummer attempting to fuse together Dream Theater and Drowning Pool sounds like it would. There are some neat early 80s King Crimson drum parts, but they aren't enough to hide the fact that this is one of the most ill-advised projects since the last GZR record. Of particular note is the spectacularly misconceived rap-metal revival of "Give It Up." Cringe-inducement at its best.

I borrowed the jewel case of the new Therion from my friend, and it does work better as two individual discs. Still a lot of filler, and the booklet makes me realize how dumb the words are, but it doesn't drag as much.

Nah, wrong again. Novadriver, Sheavy, The Obsessed, Queens of the Stone Age (early on anyway), Oneida (ditto -- when they actually fit the genre definition), Spirit Caravan, Sea Of Green, Fatso Jetson, the Lizards, Mammoth Volume, Goatsnake, Earthlings?, Electric Wizard, Bible of the Devil, and yep, Monster Magnet definitely had their moments, for starters. I just never thought Fu Manchu were very good at it. (And Nebula weren't much better.)

Battlelore is one of the goofiest bands out there, all dressed as Tolkien characters and stuff. And they have one really funny looking green dude. But the music is actually pretty darn good at times, especially when they let Elf Girl sing.

Battlelore don't just dress up as Tolkien characters, they dress up as Tolkien characters they made up themselves. It's like fan fiction with a recording contract!

And yeah, I definitely promise to give Battlelore more of a chance. If there are elves and green people in their music, I'll be happy.

Weird, I thought the CD would have liner notes. Well, that's not so hot. I met the Therion guys in October, and Thomas Karlsson did quite a riveting lecture on this guy, Johannes Bureus. It's funny, both he and Christofer Johnsson are totally obessed with the story, and the rest of the band just roll thir eyes and go, "Whatever."

it's not too good.

http://photos.lacoccinelle.net/72/64/217264.jpg

I think you have the wrong thread, Matt. Try the teen pop thread.

Apocrypha that kinda rings a bell...i got a whole box of old guitar for the practicing musicians i'll have to look around for stuff on them....

Heh, mention the guy's name in the piece to appear all smart. Actually, I didn't mention the back story in my review, there wasn't enough space, so I just focused on the music.

I'm doing a Web review, so that means I don't have a word limit. It also means nobody is actually going to read it, but hey, artistic freedom!

I always like it when bands give their fans detailed background info on song/album subjects, like Nile does, or like how Anthrax used to do. That was a fun part of being an 80s metal geek, looking up the Crimean War, reading Coleridge and Lovecraft, buying Judge Dredd comics, all because of the bands we listened to.

It's disappointing that Therion didn't do that...some kid is going to see the title "Tuna 1613" and wonder what the hell they're going on about.

Tracks I like: Gothic Kabbalah, Wisdom and the Cage, Tuna 1613, TOF - the Trinity, and The Falling Stone.

Been listening to the Melechesh some more...it really takes off from "Gyroscope", straight to the end. The one tune, "Leper Jerusalem", starts off sounding so much like the Foo Fighters, I had to check to see if I had the right disc in.

My sleepy point with Battlelore last night is that I want to hear the elvishness in their music, not just see it (in the way, say, I obviously hear elvishness in Korpiklaani's music. Or something along those lines.) That picture IS quite wacky, though!

"Concept albums" are just albums. Period. They are just a bunch of songs. I mean, it's cool that Hold Steady put so many Catholic songs on one album once, I'll admit that. But 99 percent of the time (from The Wall and Operation Mindcrime on down) I can't follow the story and have no interest in doing so and don't try. (Thomas up above said something about thinking that Cinderella had a concept album once, which was totally news to me, and I've been a fan of the band since the beginning. Not sure why a "concept" would have changed the quality of any of their albums, though. In most cases, if anything, concept attempts seem to just weight albums down. Which I realize was Jeff's point, sort of, so I sort of agree.)

http://www.candlelightrecords.co.uk/candleweb/redesign/furze/furze.jpg

On that note, though, the new Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound on Teepee totally, um, rocks. The title track, "Ekranoplan," sounds like "Space Station #5" recorded inside a giant bong, and there's plenty of Hawkwind, Monster Magnet, mellow jamming, spy themes, echoing vocal effects, and apparently a theremin. Groovy, man. Who needs drugs when you have stuff like this? (Well, Motley Crue does, I guess, but you know what I mean)

This is probably going to napalm what little credibility I have left, but I'm actually digging the new Kittie. It only took them four albums to learn how to write songs, but they did! I mean, it's all sort of the same song, but it's actually pretty pleasant. They got rid of the really ugly parts and went for a melodic classic metal thing, and they do it pretty well. Big complaints: Morgan Lander's voice, which sounds like (and I hate to use this analogy, but it's accurate) a mewling kitten and a screeching tabby. It isn't terrible, but she ain't the girl from In This Moment. Also, the bass sounds like two pieces of wood being clicked together, so much so that I initially thought it was something the drummer was doing. It overstays its welcome after 10 tracks (14 seems a bit much), but overall, it's very listenable. It would be a very impressive debut album!

Listening to Pain of Salvation now. Are prog metal guys so out of touch with the music scene that they're just now incorporating elements of nu-metal into their music? Or is nu-metal making a comeback? I'm guessing the former.

ooooh, gotta hear that! necromanzee cogent was such a monument of sewer-scraping guttural black doom-crawl.

UTD:BENEATH THE ODD-EDGE SOUNDS TO THE TWILIGHT CONTRACT OF THE BLACK FASCIST/THE WEALTH OF THE PENETRATION IN THE ABSTRACT PARADIGMAS OF SATAN

The rest of the Pain of Salvation isn't as much of a train wreck, but it isn't very good, either. There's one or two decent songs, but overall, very underwhelming. After looking over the lyrics, I can see what they were trying to do: the rap-metal song is actually a condemnation of hip-hop access and violence, etc.. That doesn't change the fact that it's, well, a rap-metal song.

What's the *quietest* metal act you all have heard lately? Or, if you like, the most spare in terms of arrangements or whatever?

Celestiial!

http://decibelmagazine.com/reviews/jul2006/celestiial.aspx

i think you might dig it.

I'm hoping to get the new Amber Asylum any day now, that's another more understated band.

Yeah, that's right. That label is on one hell of a roll right now.

people on another thread are comparing nick cave's grinderman CD to the scientists. but i don't buy it; just struck me as a slightly louder nick cave solo CD (in the way last year's new york dolls album just struck as me as slightly louder david johansen solo CD, i guess); didn't really kick like the birthday party used to to my ears. plus there have been plenty of young bands the past few years (golden boys, starvations, kill me tomorrow, killer's kiss) who have been putting more life into the scientists/birthday party thing.

here is my better half's (mostly but not all metal) top 10 list with comments from 2006. (apparently the person editing the page thought that "his name is alive"'s name was just plain "alive", though. i'm told that that is being fixed, but as of now it hasn't been done so):

http://www.peekreview.net/bestof2006/fissure.html

"Given to the Rising" due in May according to Terrorizer

http://www.myspace.com/heinouskillings

Meantime, I misread the thread title today as 'rolling meal thread.' So what do current day metal dudes eat? (I assume Neurosis are angry vegans.)

Quiet metal

http://www.angelfire.com/punk3/sufferingjesus/test.htm

http://www.opengraverecords.com/

i can't stop listening to it.

That new Beneath the Massacre is decent enough...extremely tight and well-played, as one would expect, but it didn't exactly grab me the way Cryptopsy or Neuraxis does.

well, jesu is mostly him and people are really digging it. late period godflesh didn't get much ink. of his side-projects, techno animal probably got the most press. and that was a much more faceless kinda thing. whereas as jesu is more intimate and definitely bringing in lots of non-metal folks and lots of folks who don't even know godflesh from a hole in the ground. which i think is great. cuz potheads rule!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=znrBtQkCFW0

I remember hearing some good double-kick action this week... the only thing I can think of it being on is the new Kittie. Don't quote me on that one, though. Man, I dig that album. There is some seriously sweet speed-Sab riffing on there.

http://www.teepeerecords.com/bands/ahiss/images/ahisscover.gif

Song sample located here ("Ekranoplan"): http://www.myspace.com/teepeerecord

As for Battlelore, I wound up not hating it. "Summon The Wolves" has a halfway okay tune to it I guess. But mostly they do not live up to their look, or their album cover. Not epic orfantastic enough.

Something I wrote about one of his projects from a couple years ago is here (along w/ other noisy stuff), but this CD is long gone now:

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0424,eddy1,54363,22.html

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CwJBWhaAahM

Fwiw, what I wrote about Comets on Fire's last album on my MTV Urge metal blog last summer (warning: html coding explosion dead ahead):

Hipster whippersnappers keep claiming the new Comets on Fire
album Avatar (Sub Pop) sounds like Blue Cheer, but it just plain doesn’t. A couple tracks galvanize okay, and the riffs in “Soup Smoke” even turn into Babe Ruth’s spaghetti-western border-metal classic “The Mexican” for half a minute in the middle, but mostly this is just an intermittently comely guitar jam album, rarely rocking and basically mellow, even despite all its feedback. The vocals are way too muffled, and there ain’t no songs. Freak-folk, maybe, but it wouldn’t fly on the parchman farm.

And what I wrote about the Comets-related Howlin' Rain:

a href="http://www.birdmanrecords.com/howlinrain/index.html">HOWLIN RAIN
Howlin Rain (Birdman) Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire attempts a shambling Southern plantation-porch choogle-metal thing, sort of like Humble Pie or the Black Crowes without the songs, though lines about liquor in formaldehyde jars and whorehouses and drinking beer all afternoon oozes out. Pretty at times, but ultimately too amorphous and incoherent.

And what I wrote about Chrome Division (I'd forgotten this):

href="http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=58397474">CHROME DIVISION
Doomsday Rock ‘n Roll (Nuclear Blast) Moonlighting Norwegian (from Dimmu Borgir, Kovenant, etc.) attempt a Turbonegro biker-metal thing. Or maybe hack Motorhead with worse vocals.

Many, many, many more where those came from.

http://www.godflesh.com/pics/slate.jpg

might just be their finest moment. but i'd hate to make that call.

lol

Let me echo that. For a while there I thought I was the only person who'd even heard it.

Comets on Fire, meanwhile...I just wish they'd be better. They made one really great album early on but everything since then kinda leaves me flat.

so i will now (at least temporarily) replace into eternity in the cd changer with ECHOES of eternity, and see if it makes a difference.

assemble head in sunburst sound: pleasant. wobbly. does not blow my mind or blast me into the stratosphere, however. not even close.

Assemble Head are a bit vague, but I didn't necessarily find that a problem. Sometimes I'm in the mood for stoner stuff that I can just put on in the background and enjoy. They do quote all sorts of stuff in their press release (Crazy Horse, Blue Cheer, 13th Floor Elevators, Blue Oyster Cult, MC5, and the Beach boys) that I just don't hear. Like I said, mostly I just hear Superjudge-era Monster Magnet, but then again I've never heard Comets on Fire.

Replacing Into Eternity with Echoes of Eternity will make a difference, but in the downward way...

Their 2006 album, The Scattering of Ashes, is even better, in my opinion. Slickly mixed by Andy Sneap, even catchier tunes, and there's a new singer with phenomenal range, he can mimic Udo Dirkschneider and Davis Wayne one minute, and then his ridiculous high notes a la 70s Halford the next. Their rhythm guitarist bolted on the band right in the middle of Gigantour (!!!), and despite being left in a serious lurch, they apparently went over really well as a four-piece.

With Into Eternity and Wold, could Saskatchewan all of a sudden have cachet in the metal community? Well, if we do have credibility out here, that doesn't change the fact that it's friggin' freezing outside.

New Sirens album, More Is More, ha ha, these dames and trannies from Detroit stomp the butts of pretty much everybody else mentioned on this thread so far, and they don't even hardly (if ever) write songs. They just did their version of "Hellraiser" by the Sweet, and now "High School" by the MC5. Muffy Kroha rules life.

Echoes of Eternity = yet another 99-track advance CD. Stupid label.

That, and slice open polar bears, rip out the guts, and huddle inside the carcass.

We actually don't have polar bears, but yeah, that's pretty much the gist of it!

"Ensconed in a genre that rarely concerns itself with matters of musical evolution, NJ square-peg hip-hop collective Dalek have long established themselves as a lone outpost of forward thinking and breathtaking innovation."

Because, you know, unlike metal, hip-hop nowadays sounds exactly the same as it always has -- five years ago, 10 years ago, 25 years ago, you name it. Darn music just plain never changes!

(New Dalek album sounded like they were spinnnig their wheels into inertia when I listened to it, by the way. Evolution my ass. But then again, it's not like I made it through the whole thing.)

One tune sounds like it could have been from an early Chrome LP. I know there are a bunch of digital presets in home studio software programs that allow you to make records like this one, should you wish to. Many do. One thing the software does not have. A switch that allows you to make your band name into a sinister graphic that is very finely illegible. That takes a bit of doing.

I'm listening to the new Tinariwen album this afternoon. Not metal at all, but it kicks tons of ass. Junior Kimbrough-esque trance-blues guitar riffs with high-pitched Arabic-sounding vocal ululations in the background. Makes me wanna ride a camel to the next village and burn it down.

(The inherently challenging and frustrating thing I've noticed about underground music criticism is that, even when you think you have a grasp on certain bands/styles, there's always more stuff out there that was apparently hugely influential even though you've never heard of it. It's hard to keep track of everything!)