what does everyone think of decibel magazine's metal album hall of fame so far?

Never heard Atheist, though; maybe I should check them out.

And maybe I should check out those Paradise Lost and Entombed albums, too (I like other albums I own by those two bands.)

The Sepultura one has really good drums.

Only *Reign in Blood* is in Stairway to Hell.

And no albums from the '70s, right? Sorry, but that's retarded.

The Sepultura one has "really good drums".

I'm not being sarcastic about it, though. Any rhythm section that is friends with Carlinhos Brown is friends with me. But I swear, I got the two CD expanded reissue of *Roots* in the mail a couple months ago, and I couldn't get through the damn thing even once, though I really tried. Their singer really did suck. What an unlistenable mess.

Anthrax before Voivod or Celtic Frost or Motorhead or Uriah Heep or [fill in the blank]. Yeah, that makes a *lot* of sense, decibel dudes.

"Reign in blood" and "left hand path" are the only ones i like on this list thus far.

Life Of Agony were fucking terrible. Like Biohazard meets Alice In Chains but even worse than it sounds.

Metal mags always hail the crappiest albums by the corniest bands as being classic/seminal. Replace that crappy Life Of Agony album with "slave" by Infest or "remain sedate" by Rorschach. Hell, better yet the Siege discography since they invented grind.

at the gates - slaughter of the soul (I dig it yep.)

sepultura - roots (Choas A.D. is better, but this isn't a shame either.)

life of agony - river runs red (haven't heard it.)

paradise lost - gothic (i've heard albums i like more by them)

anthrax - among the living (hehehe. it's Anthrax's best album.)

entombed - left hand path (obvious but joy!)

carcass - necroticism - descanting the insalubrious (heard better albums by Carcass)

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence (incredibly underrated classic)

Don't have problems with too many of the choices so far, except for Life of Agony and Sepultura (never got either one of these two, though Sepultura's live double disc was pretty good and the song-title "Biotech Is Godzilla" always makes me laugh).

Some left-field choices I'd like to see them tackle:

Godflesh, Pure

Fudge Tunnel, Creep Diets

Eyehategod, Dopesick (would love to read the stories behind the sessions for this disc)

Electric Wizard, Come My Fanatics... ("I don't know how much I remember, man, we were really fucked up that day week month...")

Is Black Sabbath too acid-rock and not enough metal? What about something a little left of the dial like Kyuss or Sleep? Seems like a real boring list, even if it has some great albums on it.

ellis is otm about life of agony. ugh.

It's nice that they would pimp Atheist. "Elements" deserves some attention as a departure from formula into instro jazz metal to Latin beats and would make some listeners happy. But the first two, and I'm repeating myself, sound more unremarkably in style although extremely ably performed, sort of like Coroner. Hall of fame is a bit too stretched and elastic bit of praise. How about: Stuff we liked the most this month and selected for some entertaining space filling?

sepultura's classicest album is beneath the remains. by picking roots and life of agony i don't think i can take them seriously. i mock their value system.

and i would've picked symphonies of sickness and clandestine, too, and stuff.

I still love Slaughter of the Soul. It still sounds tight and vicious and still kicks the ass of the imitators any day.

at the gates - slaughter of the soul (why pick this fairly weak tail-of-career album when "With Fear..." and "Red In The Sky..." are the classic/influential/etc albums?)

sepultura - roots (this is an atrocious album. if the best thing on a metal album is the ethnic percusssion, well that says it all right? the production sounds like shit, vocals are limp, riffs are cookie-cutter moshfodder, and songwriting is non-existant)

life of agony - river runs red (they had a great rhythm section, but this is a typical example of a best forgotten flavour-of-the-week, see also: Machine Head, Coal Chamber, etc. Also, whiny singer with issues = dud dud dud)

paradise lost - gothic (best album of theirs, copied by thousands of bands, undisputed classic)

anthrax - among the living (no "Spreading The Disease" but close and Anthrax was very consistent back then. Also holds up far better today than they usually get credit for.)

entombed - left hand path (undisputed)

carcass - necroticism-descanting the insalubrious (excellent)

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence (amazing and I'm glad that this sort of music is still rated.)

For the black metal nomination, it'll probably be "In The Nightside Eclipse", if they want to boost their credibility, "Transilvanian Hunger" or "The Return", and for a left-field choice "Hvis Lyset Tar Oss".

>ahhh i submitted an official Top 10 LPs list with that PRM "history of heavy metal" spring 1973 cover story...but they forgot to include it (as a sidebar with my commentary or smartass overview/remarks). so i dunno.

LZ IV was considered very much a heavy metal album at the time...uh, by those of us fanzine people who were busy setting the standards or rules for yes/no yep/nyet, ha!

off the top of my head (in no order)

Black Sabbath -- PARANOID and MASTER OF REALITY, duh

Blue Oyster Cult -- 1st lp (jan 1972) is one of my favorite hard rock albums of all time, easy. Side 2 is more psych/hard rock than heavy metal...but live, they were over the top musically in their stage gear/sound. no live hard rock band ever even close to them, 1973-1974 (with material from the first two, then first three albums).

Dust - 1st lp. i actually played/heard it this year. pretty darn good. Kenny Aaronson went on to be a well known in-demand bassist for hire by everyone, including many years in Bob Dylan's late 80's/early 90's endless-tour road band. saw KA live twice -- 1978 Rick Derringer Band / Whiskey (KA was amazing, and the reason i went down; couldn't give a fuck about Derringer. Myron Grombacher from that band next played drums for Pat Benatar for over 15 or 20 years, or maybe still counting); 2nd time, 1982 w/the Billy Squier Band at the Warfield Theatre (a 2,000 seater)...amazing (and a great live band, same as the triple platinum DON'T SAY NO album).

>

Grand Funk Railroad - E Pluribus Funk is non stop heavy assed stuff. Way their best/heaviest album. and plus a Top 40 radio hit, "Footstompin' Music." their last album before suing Terry Knight (after he had legally fleeced them of everything including maybe the shirts on their backs). (hippie-era rock bands were big on "trusting your brother").

Led Zeppelin IV. their one-album deal with the devil guy's organization, supposedly. at least that's the off-the-record word of mouth from people who actually worked in that band's organization... Ithaca, NY where kevin has been since 1979, is famed for having a spectacularly high percentage of ex-NYC burnouts, old hippie types who migrated upstate to just be vagrants and neer do weels. including one or two who roadied or whatever for the miscreants of backstage behavior everywhere during their rise and heyday. but anyway...no other album Jimmy Page ever produced/engineered (for LZ) ever sounded like anythnig but crap (2nd album on out...he didn't have much to do with the first one, it being a debut and al). miraculous one-mike-on-the-ceiling drums-in-the-big-hallway drum sound on "When The Levee Breaks"? that's way more freaky good-luck coincidence than any hyped up Robert Johnson story. and in t he years after that lp, all kinds of mishaps (the two deaths included, if you count Plant's child) beset the band. maybe they renenged on the follow up album for lucifer's flunky monkeys. but anyway i'm sure ANYONE who does enough coke and hard drugs...and is rich and famous...doesn't have much trouble getting a cursory looky-loo from one of beezlebub's lower helpers, with or without tenative "offer sheets."

and you have to remember how BADLY led zeppelin 3 stiffed (even with "The Immigrant Song" a radio hit) wordwide, compared to #1 and #2's monster sales...in the UK and America, LZ3 had only 1/3rd to 1/2 the total chart weeks of either LZ1 or LZ2. and LZ4 in america? well over TWICE the total chart weeks -- FOUR AND ONE HALF YEARS, 234 weeks straight -- of any other LZ album past or future. maybe the devil heard what a piece of shit Houses of the Holy was (aka LZ5) when he slapped it on his turntable and got real pissed, independent of any contractual obligations by the howlers junkies drunks and skunks (john paul jones not having any vices that rhyme with the other three guys'). even the devil doesn't like being made a fool of.

Nitzinger - 1st lp (1972), i really like about 60% of this album. and even played a dupe give-away copy (from a thrift store) the other day. amazing drummer, the best "fusion influenced" monster-chops drummer next to Albert Bouchard of BOC. woman named LInda Waring who still plays gigs in area bands (Louisana; Nitzinger were Dallas / Ft Worth, and john nitzinger started in the mid-60's and have several garage-band 45s with the Barons, then later was in Bloodrock for about a year, who he wrote for from day one). the lead guitarist on this lp was on the Mouse & The Traps all-time window-shatterer 2nd 45, "maid of sugar / maid of spice" yep, Bugs Henderson from the Mouse & the Traps tyler, texas original lineup. Tyler's about 90 miles due east of Dallas heading to Shreveport -- and just on the other side of the freeway from that new #1 chart debut album by the young ocuntry singer/writer -- the Miranda Lambert thing in the bo x (a cheap cassette dub).

Stooges - Raw Power, DEFINITELY. Funhouse precedes the codification of "heavy metal" sounds / standards so it might fall into the same gap as the 2nd Mountain album (which is pretty good also).

Uriah Heep -- Look At Yourself (1971) is totally raw and totally great. probably cut lickety split on 8-track, maybe even with live vocals. even the guitar solos might be live (cause ken hensley would pound fat block-chords on organ in back of their guitar solos). GREAT pounding wild hard rock drummer. he was gone by the next album and their first american hit ("Easy Livin'" in 1972). this album just has a complete live-in-the-studio feel to it. non stop hooks, and only the one mandatory ballad (like a Sabbath album).

man, i must be forgetting something because that's not even quite 10. (once i rightly booted off Machine Head). maybe my list was cheesy and let Machine Head, or Fireball or even
maybe Led Zeppelin II squeak by to pad out the Ten Best list? most likely, Machine Head -- and not Funhouse. who knows.

Alice Cooper - Love It To Death is non stop a great great hard rock album (save for the endless "black ju ju" the last of Side 1's four tracks), but the tunes aren't even vaguely heavy metal. Side 1 / Track 3 "Long Way To Go" was in this spring's late 70's skateboarder (fictionalized, but not much) film Lords of Dogtown and boy did it sound great. like the other early - mid 70's trackspulled for the movie soundtrack..."Space Truckin'"/deep purple, BOC "red and the black", etc. great mood-music as background for crazy assed first generation dawn-of-modern-skating (the polyureathen wheels that showed up in 1975 at the start of the movie).

"REAL." Wtf.

Up above, I ask why Anthrax made the list instead of Voivod or Celtic Frost. I've never said that metal stopped existing; I just don't pretend that it never existed before fucking *Reign in Blood.*

Yeah, those people are strawmen. They don't think "metal only existed post-Slayer." They think that Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper have all been done & done to death, often with great panache by folks like your good self, and there's really no point in "paying tribute" by running over the same ground just to flex historical-awareness credentials. No more point, anyhow, than demanding that when a person writes about pop music, they spend a lot of time proving that they're keenly aware of Tin Pan Alley.

Slayer or Nitzinger? You choose.

x-post point taken

Scott, I agree with you (though not with them) about how Decibel sets its (silly so-called "extreme") perimeters (just like how No Depression, say, is too stodgy to include Big & Rich); as I said above, I really do *like* the magazine (and I read a copy of No Depression on the toilet this week, and it wasn't horrible -- great Big Al Downing obit by Ron Wynn!). But my point here (if I have one) is that Uriah Heep, Purple, Sabbath, Dust, etc, are not and never have been "the roots of metal." They ARE metal. They defined the game. And, interestingly, Decibel has no qualms about including so-called stoner rock bands (many of whom I like) who blatantly rip the '70s guys off. (I also don't personally buy the idea that thrash "advanced" much anything. But I don't wanna get into that argument again.) Mainly, though, where I differ from Banana is that I'm the one always saying that the definition should be *less* constrained, not more. Exclusion and constrainment go hand in hand. If Decibel had any balls, they'd be including Montgomery Gentry reviews -- hell, they'd make more sense there than in No Depression!

> Decibel has no qualms about including so-called stoner rock bands (many of whom I like) who blatantly rip the '70s guys off. <

basically negates this:

>...they also think, I'd say, that the bands who made a conscious decision to eschew blues-based structure changed the game pretty permanently<

If they think the game was changed permanently, why include stoner rock bands at all?

And Love it to Death is more jarring than Reign in Blood, to my ears.

xpost that was why I said "point taken" there

I'll bow out, too, your point about thrash's self-limiting parameters is a good one but I disagree entirely with the removing rock 'n' roll as backwards point - while I do think one can always make great rock records, I think in a genre like metal the esssential next move was to break away from the essentially make-you-feel-good nature of the one-four-five progression. Even Sabbath records give a good groove. Thrash was about looking for different feelings, which was an utterly sensible & pretty literary move to make, whatever the hamfistedness of the execution.

I keep wanting to make a "Suffragate City" joke in answer to your feminism question, but I can't think of one.

xp

>to whom does Master of Reality still pack that "fuck, this is heavy!" punch? It's like a handjob after you've lost your virginity

and fucking feels pretty good too, oddly enough.

It's a good feature, it transcends monthliness, and it'll be around long enough to hit all your favorites.

Except Uriah Heep.

A lot of stoner rock, a real lot of it, doesn't pack more whump to it than the style it imitates. Often, it waters it down or misses the point, loses the sense that it's good to have a swinging drummer.

As for it being louder, you put the old musics through the digital louderizer and it sounds just as loud, so a lot of it is springs from trivial technical details.

Maybe; but Earth does, and High on Fire does. Jerusalem sure did.

Eh, for the average fan they might as well spend their cash money on stoner rock if they like retro style. Generally, it can be easier to find the titles than the equivalants that didn't sell thirty five years back. Thirty five years from now you'll still want your own and the new men will want their new Sleep imitations, which are easier to get at than JerusaSmoker.

"Left Hand Path" of course. Morbid Angel's "Blessed Are The Sick". And Morbid's Pete Sandoval + Napalm's Jesse Pintado = the mighty Terrorizer

This is the only good thing about No Depression.

Goatsnake yes. The Want, best Led Zeppelin imitation EVER, yes, disappeared without trace. St. Vitus reissues, good idea. Thumbs up on "live," not so hot on "V." Sourvein, file under poor man's Electric Wizard. Let's see -- Toadliquor, no idea. Distributed Pentagram's "Review Your Choices" and I'd have never had seen or heard it if not for them. Thumb's up! Boris, no way. The label's
a good polarity -- a fair amount of stuff I like, a fair amount that sends me running.

Both those bands were the kind of thing you would have heard only in basements '71-72 because no one would hire you to play out when you did that back then. And people did, they tuned down and no one could sing and the vocal mike ran through a guitar amp which always overloaded and distorted the voice, and the tunes just shambled around and the best thing they had going for them was a loud drummer and big stacks.

Which might have something to do with the fact that used old Sunn amps were dirt cheap. For a new Marshall stack, you could afford two or three Sunns.

Yeah, exactly. Sunn started life explicitly calling themselves an Earth tribute band.

I don't get the appeal of Boris. I've only heard Absolutego and Amplifier Worship, but neither did anything for me. And don't Sourvein share a guitar player with Electric Wizard (Liz Buckingham) these days?

My favorite semi-forgotten Southern Lord release is the Rampton four-song thing by a one-off band called Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine (named after an Earth song).

slayer - duh

at the gates - yeah

sepultura - haven't heard this since high school

life of agony - ditto

paradise lost - never heard it

anthrax - haven't heard this since junior high

entombed - yeah

carcass - necroticism - yeah

Nah, but I'm too old. Perennial undercard band in the Lehigh Valley when the newspaper editor wanted local-local-local coverage, so they were playing locally all the time and then the same editors would snap out at seeing in the paper exactly what they asked for. Anyway, for Anthrax and me, everything sounded the same, even when Scott Ian had his hair and before he was arrested for being a kleptomaniac or something. King Diamond was more more entertaining.

Where's The Forbidden's "Twisted into Form"? Now I know we had this thread a year ago, too.

The path between Opeth and Black Oak Arkansas contains 10 steps:

Opeth Still Life

1.Mikael Akerfeldt, Bloodbath
Resurrection Through Carnage, 2002

2.Dan Swano, Bloodbath
Nightmares Made Flesh, 2004

3.Peter Tagtgren, Lock Up
Pleasures Pave Sewers, 2001

4.Shane Embury, Brujeria
Raza Odiada, 1995

5.Raymond Herrera, Fear Factory
Soul Of A New Machine, 1992

6.Burton C. Bell, GZR
Plastic Planet, 1995

7. Deen Castronovo, Bad English
Backlash, 1991

8. Neal Schon, Soul SirkUS
World Play, 2005

9. Marco Mendoza, Thin Lizzy
One Night Only, 2000

10. Tommy Aldridge, Black Oak Arkansas
If An Angel Came To See You, Would You Make Her Feel At Home?, 1972

Between the Buried and Me

neanderthal meets slade?

Mastodon's Leviathan?

Just heard their album two days ago; they struck me as completely conventional, generic as dirt. But maybe I just don't like Mohinder and Morbid Angel, who knows.

And I WISH I heard some Slade in Mastodon (who I do like, regardless.)

That's BTBAM's third album you just got handed; The Silent Circus from a year or two ago is great. Convention clash.

http://www.gravelvoice.com

Recordings That Changed My Life by Scott Colburn

We've all had this happen to us. We've heard a record or a song that really hits home. At the time we may not have known why or how or what it meant to us. We only knew that it marked the time. This column is dedicated to those moments and the analysis of those recordings.

Black Flag - My War
Caroliner Rainbow Cooking Stove Beast
The Residents - Mark of the Mole
Chrome - Alien Soundtracks
Insane Clown Posse - The Great Milenko
The Junglebook Soundtrack
Ken Nordine - Evatone Soundsheet
kd Lang - Shadowland

(Look under "Articles" for the links)

Fudge Tunnel, Creep Diets

Godflesh - Streetcleaner

Fudge Tunnel - Hate Songs in E Minor

I thought that was the whole point to angry, ugly, hateful, music. Nothing goes with sexual frustration and alienation like some angry, ugly, hateful music.

I'm mostly a lurker, but I love reading metal threads with xhuxk and George. You guys always manage to frustrate me, and then eventually I start to agree with you despite myself. Keep it up, plz.

One thing the metal genre mags don't do well is distinguish leaps in sound that are due to simple technical means as opposed to art. Popoff makes this mistake all the time in his "metal" book, attributing advances in technique and printing to advances in art, the former which have always been irrelevant to me, lining up metal standards in an ISO 9000 coporate business accounting way.

You have to swallow the belief, and it's an easy conceit to fall prey to, that somehow there's something -more- in the art/DNAstic genome of kids doing metal now than there was in the late 60's. There isn't.
Our abilities remain common.

If you think it's new, it was probably thought of back then. What's the diff? An audience for it. What never got out of the basement in '72 now can be etched in digital code and distributed. The technical ability to get it recorded and mass marketed started in the late 80's and sloped upward to where we are now. There were limitations to vinyl, not only technical but what a small group of mastering engineers pressed onto people, limitations that no longer exist.

You yell at the guy running the mastering lathe: "The bass is all cut out!!! Damn you!"

And he tells you to shut up because recording it at the right level will "make the record skip." And it's your money that goes into the toilet.

No you can make metal the way it's supposed to sound and the mastering engineer can fuck himself. Which has opened up quite a few styles over the past decade or two. But not necessarily showed them to be unique in human endeavor. By example, Angel of Decay recorded for Relapse in 2004 -- no different than what was done on cassette in '84-'85. Not worse for it, just sharing a common experience, made better by 2005 technology.

Possibly true; but said sexual frustration would seem to be more associated with handjobs than actually fucking (which was my point).

>"the only good hiphop is Melle Mel because the stuff that came after no longer sounds like Melle Mel" <

Nah, I'd never say this. But I do have to admit that people who think Rakim and KRS-One and Tribe Called Qwest are "old school" will forever be a pet peeve of mine.

i disagree. technology can and does change art. and sometimes even advances it. not always though.

"One thing the metal genre mags don't do well is distinguish leaps in sound that are due to simple technical means as opposed to art."

i dunno, depends on what you read. a lot of metal writers are anti pro-tools, drum triggers, and ross robinson. they know what they like and what they don't like and they usually know where the sounds are coming from. more than me anyway.

"that somehow there's something -more- in the art/DNAstic genome of kids doing metal now than there was in the late 60's. There isn't."

kids today have new playstation and red bull dna. they are way quicker with their hands. they make the speedfreaks of yore look like grandma moses. (i am making this part up. but there are people who believe that kids have a freakier energy now cuzza corn syrup, ritalin, and internet porn that kids in the 60's and 70's didn't have cuz all they had was uranium-spiked milk to drink. okay, i'm kidding about the milk. but most 60's freaks could only keep the freakshow going for a couple of years until they all fell down and started jug-bands out of sheer exaustion. Immolation have been playing like robotic freaks for, like, 12 years. and there are plenty more who have been doing it even longer for less money.)

"There were limitations to vinyl, not only technical but what a small group of mastering engineers pressed onto people, limitations that no longer exist."

I find it hard to believe that people were stopped from playing like napalm death in 1972 because of an international cabal of recording engineers. even i had a tape recorder in 1972. could it be that the idea to sound like napalm death wasn't invented until AFTER 1972? nah, couldn't be. everything had been done by then. (cue 400 ilm stabs at pre-1972 examples of people playing like napalm death.)

"By example, Angel of Decay recorded for Relapse in 2004 -- no different than what was done on cassette in '84-'85."

i don't remember the argument on this thread that music being made now doesn't sound like anything that came previously. i can honestly say that the new ulver album does NOT sound like anything made on a cassette in 1984 or 1985.

Haha!! This is fun.

No international cabal. Just practices and standards. Pre-68 EQ cuts for mastering, now included in recording software so you can get back the vintage sound, radically cut balls out of recordings. Changes were gradually made to the practices, brought on by those working hard rock and metal acts. It's a contributing factor, not the only one.

a lot of metal writers are anti pro-tools, drum triggers

Hmmm, it actually seems to me a lot of the records reviewed by
metal writers are very heavily invested in Pro-tools-like work stations and drum triggers. Like Nile. The woman working the p.r. for Leng Tche told me how the label had to go through their demo and take out all the samples that were copyright violators before producing the thing.

Anyway, I don't many people who aren't doing the digital workstation heavily, at some point or another. They have to. Modern levels for CD play can't be set any other way, the digital louderizer has to be used. Maybe the writers don't actually know much in detail about such things.

By extension, you can go back to early metal recordings and stick them through a variety of digital louderizers so they blow you out of your chair.

but there are people who believe that kids have a freakier energy now cuzza corn syrup, ritalin, and internet porn that kids in the 60's and 70's didn't

Naw, we had corn syrup and ritalin. Not the porn, though, that was in the back under the old hats in dad's closet.

Botch - We Are The Romans (never heard it. and i think it's one of those albums that was highly influential to lots of other bands that i never listen to. or maybe not. maybe i would dig it.)

Emperor - In The Nightside Eclipse (Yay!!! I haven't read the making of the album oral history yet. i'm looking forward to it.)

Also, my copy of Decibel was missing, like, 30 pages!

no opinions on any further inductees? Precious Metal?

Ha ha, I like how up above I complain about No Depression not covering Miranda Lambert. (Think she even eventually made the cover, before the mag went web-only.)

also (just in case anyone here happens to know or care): is it really the magazine's policy to NOT induct anything from the '70? not even Sabbath or Priest? just curious, btw. but 1980 does seem to be their cutoff date thus far; tr00 metal doesn't seem to exist prior to Heaven and Hell's release apparently. i mean, zero '70s inductees out of what, some sixty records? just seems kinda silly--if not perverse--to me. and willfully silly at that.

still love the book (and magazine) nonetheless.

The book is great-the rule is they induct for albums where everyone is still alive. No Pantera, no Metallica,etc.

To answer a four year old question:

"C'mon, now: to whom does Master of Reality still pack that "fuck, this is heavy!" punch?"

Yes

Uh, but they did induct Metallica!

Post-Burton, but still.

so Ozzy is dead then? and Halford as well, i guess?

so the april 2010 issue hall of fame went to dark tranquillity's The Gallery. which i've never heard. guess i should download it or listen to it on youtube or something. is it really that great?

lots of folks at decibel are bigger on the 90's gothenburg/swedish stuff than i am, i guess. i just wasn't listening to too much of it back then. i would usually only hear it on metal mag comps that i would buy.

To me, The Gallery is one of the finest examples of Swedish deathmetal combined with lots and lots of melody, almost to the point that it's not really deathmetal anymore but more of a thrashier version of Maiden (if that makes any sense). After that they made a few more decent albums but to me it was all downhill from here. But then again, I also adored In Flames around that time, who had just released The Jester Race.

I actually dug out my Gallery cd. Haven't listened to it in years, but the first few tracks still hold up.