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I'll have you know I read the whole thing. Surge finds some interesting stuff, sometimes. Good dude. Glad he got a job after getting his degree. I know he was trying to make a better life for he and his wife.

Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus

BAD BREEDING - Human Capital

Yeah man, killer shit. Saw them back in 2016 with 3 other war metal bands in a dive about the size of your kitchen. Trust me when I say that you can only take so much war metal live in one sitting. I think my ears are still ringing 8 years later... Said other bands on the bill: Abysmal Lord (NOLA) - Exaltation of the Infernal Cabal Abysmal Lord (NOLA) - Disciples of the Inferno Caveman Cult (Miami) - Supremacia Primordial Caveman Cult (Miami) - Blood and Extinction Wørsen (Jax, FL) - Grand Scheme Wørsen (Jax, FL) - Stronghold Saturnine (Jax, FL) - Shield The Light in a Veil of Darkness

Holy Moses - The New Machine of Liechtenstein (1989)

I've known this band for about 2 years, when I discovered their second album, Grand Currents. When you know that these 3 brothers formed Hammerhedd in 2012, that the guitarist was then 9, the drummer 7 and the bassist 4, it makes you smile eventually, except when you watch their first videos. And that's when we calm down. It's enough to see them covering Sepultura covers in their garage... Now aged 21, 19 and 16 respectively, the 3 brothers have already released 3 albums and 1 EP. Stamped Thrash Metal on Wikipedia and other sites, Hammerhedd's music goes far beyond that. It's aggressive as Thrash, with lots of palm-muting, snarling vocals, but there are plenty of progressive moments. One of my finest discoveries of recent years, if not THE finest. Hammerhedd - Essence of Iron (EP) (2018) Hammerhedd - Nonetheless (2023)

Haha Surge is still alive, I just saw him post a pic of the eclipse obscured by clouds yesterday on the 13 man txt thread we're both a part of. But he doesn't really pop in there so much anymore and neither do I really. I spend more time here. He threw in the towel on his former commercial carpet cleaning business a couple of years ago and went out and earned himself a high falutin college degree. So now he's joined the actual smart people workforce and he doesn't seem to have the same kind of free time like he once used to. I'm sure he still posts on a metal forum somewhere like NCS probably, but I don't have to tell you there are only so many hours in a day for this shit. Surge and I do have a reasonable amount of overlap musically, but his tastes seems to be just as specific as mine if not even more so, just in slightly different areas. So like we both consume a ton of black metal, but I'm more into caustic riffy Norsecore, Finnblack, first wave influenced stuff as well as black/death & war metal while he seems to be super into that fuzzily produced atmo-black right on the edge of lo-fi and some folk metal. We definitely like some of each other's stuff, we do both dig a bunch of the Finnish bands I think, but I think he and I are mainly focused in different areas and probably out hunting for different shit. Same with death metal, he goes more for the mid-paced Swedeath, Bolt Thrower and European style bands, some Chilean death, classic death/doom and maybe some more melodic Amon Amarth type viking stuff, while I cast a somewhat wider death metal net. I like all that kind of stuff he likes as well, (not the Amon Amarth so much) but I do also tend to go more for the ugly brulal and putrid caverncore, Incantation clones and more recently I've been getting into a ton of deathgrind and old late 90's/early 00's era BDM. Mortician, Malignancy, Suffocation, Exhumed, Devourment, Deranged stuff like that which I don't think he has much interest in if any. I didn't either tbh just a few years ago, but this is where my natural progression of heaviness has taken me. Seems I need it heavier and heavier and ever more brutal to get the same high off of it if ya know what I mean. Besides the black and death metal I know he dips his tootsies into stuff like modern day heavy metal and thrash which I have little to no interest in (unless it's been very heavily blackened) while as you probably know I'm heavily into grindcore, hardcore, punk rock, and of course boatloads of crust and stenchore, which I don't think he's too interested in. So you can see when you drill down a bit and take core samples there's not as much crossover between us cool cats as one might think. So sure, to the uninitiated we would both appear to be mostly into black and death metal, same basic shit, right? And it's also true we do both have a strong aversion to prog, hipster black, tech death and twinkcore. But to the well traveled extreme metal connoisseur he and I actually have somewhat different and pretty clearly defined tastes. We could both make top 25 year end lists and only have maybe 4 or 5 albums in common. There I go overexplaining again. Sorry dude, I know you don't read anything I write that's more than 3 paragraphs and that was just 5.

FIREWALKER - Firewalker

The epicenter of the recent earthquake here in NJ was less than 10 miles from Benedict Donald's Bedminster golf club and burial ground. I'm choosing to take that as a sign from Jehoshaphat that the orange menace better watch his fucking ass.

Orange Goblin - Frequencies from Planet Ten

Discovered last night on Youtube, I appreciate this kind of Thrash Metal that doesn't try to belong to the Bay Area scene, the South American scene or the European Germanic branch. And it doesn't sound like Exodus either. I can't help but like it, can I? Altars of Annihilation - Illuminate, Eliminate (2016) Altars of Annihilation - Sinarquies of Sion (EP) (2024)

Illdisposed - Submit (1995)

And a new one this year. 😊

I remember hearing them when they first broke, but I never actually followed them. Had no idea they released an album last year. NP: Danzig - Black Aria II

Abigor - Nachthymnen

Alright now Cabbage, what kind of dumbass nonsensical drivel is this?? We all slow down as we age?? Older people complain about how some people talk too fast?? Fuck you bruv, you can slow down to a crawl when you hit 40 if you like, but this old geezer's only getting leaner and meaner and faster and faster and more brutal with each passing year. By the time I'm Doc's age I'll be moving at light speed bruv, Mach 874,030. 😎 Haha but ok yeah seriously Chechnya is wack man. 80 to 116 bpm is pretty damn slow. Obviously this was a backdoor way for them to outlaw all or most forms of western popular music. Both top 40 pop music and hip-hop in particular generally have higher BPM than 116. I looked it up, one study said there are four levels of popular musical tempos. They are slow (66-76 bpm), medium (76-120 bpm), fast (120-168 bpm), and very fast (168-200 bpm). I'd think a lot of EDM would be up toward the higher end of that range, 130 to 150 bpm at least, so this must be like Footloose where they think they can protect the kids from the evils of dancing. I guess they couldn't set the upper limit too low or they'd end up outlawing all music completely, even the traditional Chechnyan stuff they want to encourage. 116 seems like a strange choice though, wonder how they arrived at that number?

Evoken - Quietus

Newstead - Heavy Metal Music

This is sort of like when I occasionally hear (usually an older person) complain about how some pundit/entertainer/whathaveyou online "talks too fast", and that you don't even have time to laugh at the jokes, accept this is like you gave that older person an rpg launcher and had to find entertaining videos for them at an acceptable speed since old man Mcgarret's known to be a little trigger happy. We all slow down some as we age. It's just the way these things work, and for the record, most of the complaints about younger generation's lack of attention span and constant need for meaningless stimuli and it's effect on developing brains is very valid. Why you would make an insane rule like that is one question. How in the hell you intend to enforce it, though, is quite another. Maybe if they had faster music they'd be able to deploy in a timelier fashion. NP: Brutalism - Solace in Absurdity ▶︎ Solace in Absurdity | BRUTALISM | Comatose Music (bandcamp.com) Decidedly average brutal death. In the right environment I could see them having a sort of home-town hero status. I will grant them that their drum sound is much more tolerable than most others in their niche. Good to catch a buzz during the opening act, if not really a headliner. EDIT: Probably my favorite as well. I feel so conflicted about their material from Unia onward. So much of it is interesting and really brings what feels like a more authentic "folk" essence from that part of the world as opposed to what we're used to getting with most folk-power bands. It also takes a lot longer to really get it's hooks into me, and what we lose from albums like this in their bouncier and unabashedly power-cornball era is too much not to miss. Their identity as a band has clearly changed with good and bad on both sides.

Was almost tempted to check this Maximum Overdrive record out to dispute your claim that there are no weak tracks (because I'm firmly convinced they're ALL weak tracks) but I'm not tryna click play on no fkn Dragonforce videos. Could you even imagine what something like that would do to my sidebar feed? Might take weeks or even months before YouTube would want to offer me something good and filthy and evil again. So I'm gonna have to let your ridiculous claim go by unchallenged....this time JT. Consider yourself lucky my friend. 😜

Good lord. Why? Just why? I understand they've a long history of religious/cultural warfare from both in and outside their borders (primarily because I find it funny when some idiot with too much money and not enough brains decides they're going to travel through the territory of the Sunni hill tribes trying to buy an ancient jeweled dagger ostensibly from the source, and comes up missing), you have to perform some major league mental acrobatics to put into any quantifiable terms how the bpm figures into anything that makes any sense at all. Do they have a national tempo I'm unaware of? I'd love to hear the logic behind this.

Ululatum Tollunt - Order of the Morningstars, war metal from Tennessee, 2016. Thanks @navybsn I had missed this one and it's killer. Temple Nightside - Hecatomb, black/death Australia 2016 Temple Nightside - Pillars of Damnation 2020

I never used to do this years ago because I was working stupid hours and just didn't have the time. But for me personally we've just in these last 10 or 15 years really gotten into this golden era of extreme metal where I'm finding the highest percentage of killer shit that's the kind of music I've always been looking for. I could probably let most of that old 20th century stuff go and just listen to my newer music from the 21st century and be quite happy. If I'd have had music available to me that I felt this way about back in the old days, I never would have bought 90% of the stuff that I did back then in the 70's 80's and 90's. Because there's only maybe 10% of that old stuff that I still have any interest in ever hearing again. This newer modern era black and death metal is the music I've always been meant to listen to, I was just born about 15 years too soon you see. So I'm stocking up on all this shit now while it's readily available as a hedge against the day when the torrent of killer music slows to a trickle and then inevitably peters out altogether eventually. I'll have my blackened goat filth already sorted and then everything will be apples for my few remaining twilight years walking this earth as a decrepit old goat.

I used to enjoy the hunt for new music, I used to want to hear every band I could, but it got to the point for me where the shit just all started to blend together. Too many bands sounded the same, committing bands names to memory just wasn't happening for 90% of what I heard. I'd hear someone talk about a band that sounded good, only to realise I'd heard them months before and forgotten their music and name.

Kreator -Pleasure To Kill

Sabbat - History Of A Time To Come

If you can find a way to listen to it on good speakers in a decent room, it's worth it. A good 320 mp3 should be fine unless you've got golden ears. I don't think it'll change your life or anything but it's engaging and I can't think of anything else that's quite like it. Local storage and physical copies are where it's at. No way I can rely on constant Internet connectivity and the enduring commitment of music and book publishers to artistic freedom, not to mention the ability of libraries and schools to keep carrying "objectionable" materials. Did you see that Chechnya just banned music outside the range of 80-116 BPM? NP: At The Gates - With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness ...maybe their best music, inarguably their worst mix.