Metal albums that Jordan remembers from high school

I'd have thought I'd know more of these but only really familiar with a couple. Went with Opeth.

Records that I actually want to listen to again:

Edge of Sanity
Death
Fear Factory
Meshuggah
Cynic
maybe Paradise Lost

Anathema 4

lol I mean Alternative 4. Coffee.

Symbolic is my fave Death so have to go for that. Edge of Sanity did make me think about it thought,

i adore this poll. ocean machine!!!!!!!

lol ivy I figured you would also go for that one.

definitely Ocean Machine for me, with a very close honorable mention to the Meshuggahs, the Opeth, and SYL's City.

I got into Ocean Machine later but it was a transformative album for me that made me feel complete zen when I'd spin it on my 45 minute commute to work.

Iced Earth's Burnt Offerings is pretty great too. but I give them a demerit for, well, Jon Schaffer trying to take over the government.

FUCK, I overlooked the Death!

well, I'll let it stand. Symbolic probably would have gotten the nod from me but I want to show Devy love.

I'm also one of the weird ones who prefers early Sentenced to Amok-era, even with the keyboards/guitars being out of tune with each other on North from Here

I did some needle drops through some of these and Amok sounds terrible to me now, Down slightly better.

Fear Factory sounds fantastic, and has aged very well?

yes

co-sign. I love Demanufacture. I put the title track on a Touchtunes recently.

fuck I missed Cynic as well. lmao. seeing them Saturday, doing this album.

the Edge of Sanity is also very good, I got into it much later in life, haven't listened to it in a while.

ANGRA! Holy Land is great. I shit on a lot of power metal but this is really good power metal.

I have that Fates Warning somewhere and can't remember a single note of it. lol

same with Therion.

with having G/Z/R on there you have technically two Burton C Bell albums!

Went with Fear Factory, though I like their earliest stuff (Soul of a New Machine and the very early tracks released in 2002 as Concrete) best. I saw them in 1993 when they opened for Sepultura; the whole lineup was Sepultura, Fudge Tunnel, Fear Factory and Clutch. An amazing show. I grew very sick of Clutch after a while, but they were great that night.

Deen Castronovo (unfairly maligned for being brought in to replace Patty Schemel on that Hole album) is really crushing on the title track of that G//Z/R record

Ummmm, but fairly maligned for domestic abuse, I forgot about that

Most of these are post-peak albums by these artists.

I think only Fear Factory, Cynic and Meshuggah triggered a reaction with me of “yeah cool!” rather than “great band but definitely not this one”.

OH and I love that Pain of Salvation album but i think I'm the only PoS fan on this board. and I don't like their new stuf.

I don't remember anything about it except that they throw in a cheeky two bars of swing, and I don't think I can bring myself to put that one on

devin townsend with strapping young lad in 2nd

Death over Opeth and Cynic

Metal albums from my school days would include The Gathering, Anathema, and Pain of Salvation at the top. PoS is probably the most difficult to come back to, you can't really separate the music from the emotional content and corny concepts. It hasn't bothered me so much when revisiting Anathema, maybe because "woo-me" goes with being goth. The Gathering really holds up imo.

Fates Warning is classic, I'd pick Awaken the Guardian. Death obviously classic. Opeth has been maligned and mocked, but they're solid especially the later albums where not every song is 20 minutes.

I can live without hearing My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost or Dream Theater again and I was never into the industrial metal stuff.

I remember listening to that Anathema album and thinking "is this what listening to the Cure is like?", lol.

Is Pain of Salvation Christian prog metal? Surely, right? I don't think that name cued anything for me at the time.

I skipped through that Fates Warning album and definitely can't take the vocals but there are some cool riffs, and the drumming is fantastic, all that linear stuff is better than I remembered.

xpost lol prog metal, yes. Christian, very much not, though the name definitely reads that way.

very liberal hippie-dippie metal, pretentious but also meant a lot to me during my 20s.

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Huh, I was just watching a Swedish interview with Meshuggah that youtube recommended to me and thinking of going through some of their records (or at least tracks, which is probably as much as I could handle these days).

I think Chaosphere is the only metal album I’ve ever bought (not counting, like, Paranoid)

Hmm yeah I think I respect Meshuggah more than I want to listen to them, although tbh I do like the faster early Destroy Erase Improve style more than the later slow heavy djent that they became famous for.

they were still playing with more conventional song structure with the weirdness crammed into that framework on DEI. it works very well.

but I do also appreciate the "lol our songs are just patterns of insanity" that they adopted on Chaosphere and later.

I do find it funny that Nothing sort of became their 'big' album in the US, like....it was around the time they got more national presence here, were taken out on Ozzfest, and it's still the album they tend to favor the most in their setlist (outside of whatever album they're touring behind).

predictably, some reviews at the time and even retrospective try to paint this as a 'sellout' attempt even though, for all intents and purposes, their sound didn't really get dumbed down any at all. they just decided to adopt more of a mega detuned, single note jazzy groove rather than the power chordy, outerspace polyrhythms of yesteryear.

Listening to the Violent Sleep of Reason after reading that they recorded it live in the studio, sounding pretty sick so far.