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Bathory - Hammerheart (1990) Each time I tell myself I am done with Bathory and Quothorn's shit singing capability that he somehow relentlessly hacked away at showing a resilience that far outweighed his vocal capacity, I put on Hammerheart and soon find myself completely enamoured with them for an hour or so. The heavy Viking metal aesthetic helps no ends of course, it sort of excuses all the roughness present on the record. This and Under the Sign of the Black Mark should get more plays I have decided.

Well, got the word today that I got a significant promotion. Moving up to the Deputy Nurse Exec for my healthcare system. I'm not sure what they've done putting a dirty hesher in a position like that, but they're about to find out. Huge step up in responsibility and worst of all, I will now have to wear a suit or sport coat to work every day. Where's our resident fashionista @markm when I need him? Not sure about a step up in pay just yet, but I'm going to need something to stock the closet with something other than Archgoat and Vomitor shirts...

Here...Revealed is on Bandcamp in its entirety https://thorybos666.bandcamp.com/album/monuments-of-doom-revealed Immortal - Pure Holocaust

Nirvana - Nevermind (album) Megadeth - Rust In Peace (album)

Akhlys - The Dreaming I (2015)

It's extra bitter to remember that the whole reason Napster and Limewire were sooooo bad is because they were "devaluing music" and everyone who used them was a bad person driving a nail into the coffin of musicians everywhere, just think about the poor musicians... but as long as you're paying some middleman $10 a month or listening to a bunch of ads, everything is fine. The only real problem is that there was all this activity happening without some tick squeezing profit out of it. Fuck spotify.

Nothing wrong with Blasphemy music wise. Foundational war/bestial black metal that inspired tons of good bands that followed. From a personal standpoint, I don't endorse their beliefs anymore than I endorse overt satanists, anarchists, or any of the other ideologies ascribed by many of the bands we all listen to. I look at it as the shock value means they chose to offend the establishment and attract attention from the outcast. The green Mohawk if you will. An open affront to proper societal values. Are they devout national socialists or stupid kids that took shit to far and stuck with the gag too long? Don't know, don't think I'd ever find out. But I won't part with my copy of Gods of War or Fallen Angel of Doom because some Internet detective with a platform says so. Even if they were reciting the entire text of Mein Kampf in the songs, I doubt anyone could really tell, and I don't pay any attention to lyrics myself. Don't research bands either. The music bangs or it doesn't. That's my only criteria. Ymmv. The great thing about metal, and music in general, is that we get to set our own criteria of what is good and what we value. I like bands like Rush and The Cure that 95% of the board absolutely hate. No shame either way. If I see someone really enthusiastic about a particular album, I'll give it a shot. I know most of the guys well enough to know what to expect, but I make my own decisions about what I spend my money on and put in rotation. Maybe it's filthy black metal or polished prog wankery. Don't worry about what others think about a particular band that you like. Doesn't really matter in the grand scheme. But know the audience you're talking to and maybe don't bring up certain topics around those with highly charged opinions that may or may not be rooted in fact. I don't discuss politics with my wife for that very reason. She bases her position on Tiktok news and the like with no other research. So there's no point unless I want to fight. Metal is no different. Everyone has an opinion and you know the old saying about that. Few if any of us really know these people and what they think. Never will. Where it gets troublesome is when you start adopting the same pov as the ideologies represented by the band(s). You'll see the argument that just purchasing or streaming something from a specific band is supporting their ideology. I don't agree. This is all extremely low volume low demand stuff that even big bands make little to any money from. So how can you really be supporting a movement of ill repute? 99.9% of the world doesn't even know most of the subgenres and bands we metalheads obsess over even exist. And even if no one buys it, horribly offensive stuff will still be made and said. So the argument doesn't hold up with me. We give politicians with much more dangerous views much bigger platforms to spew their garbage which causes considerably more damage to the populace while we all just go about our lives. Listening to something you enjoy with the mind that there are some things or ideas embedded that may not be kosher and being conscious about keeping them from influencing your own beliefs is a key tenant to listening to anything these days with the access to music we have. Same as objectively watching the news and drawing your own conclusions. As long as you are able to do that, I don't see where bands like Blasphemy, Burzum, Goatmoon, Grand Belials Key, or Graveland pose any threat to you. Most of them suck anyway. And if I hadn't started with Blasphemy back in the mid 90s, I probably wouldn't think much of them had they come out in the past few years. But to write them out of the development of heavy metal because they have distasteful or even disgusting personal beliefs would be a disservice.

They'll be lucky if he doesn't make them all shave their heads like him.

Hail of Bullets - Ordered eastward Not only is the opening riff+drum part absolutely tits and instantly memorble. Then they follow up with another excellent marching riff at 0:42. Then the bridge at 2:45 where Dan Swanö growls "We were ordered eastward", gives me chills everytime, knowing that east was almost certain death by.... frost or war. In total, just a masterpiece of a song. Pink Floyd - Time Everyone knows this song. What makes it is of course the lyrics. Incredibly poetic and poignant, and actually carries different meanings as you grow older and you move in and out of phases of your life. The Gilmour guitar solo is of course beautiful, and the delicate vocals of Richard Wright.

Crown of Thorns - The Burning (1995) Bought in 1995 for the fabulous track Soulicide Demon-Might, heard on a CD sampler in the European magazine Metallian, I love the raw, slightly messy energy emanating from this album. I'm not a fan of the melodic bits slipped in here and there, but on the whole I like it. G.B.H - City Baby attacked by Rats (1982) The first few listens to this record gave me headaches: I wasn't used to it, having listened mainly to Twisted Sister, DIO, Maiden and Scorpions. Now, this record plays perfectly. Once again, the energy is raw and palpable. Angelcorpse - Exterminate (1998) The cover announces the colour: total and abominable war! The music really drives the point home. Last night, on the train, I was trying to keep up with the drummer's frantic rhythm with my hand on my thigh. People looked at me strangely: I didn't give a damn! 😁 Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse (1994) Every time I listen to this album, I'm plunged into a mystical, dark atmosphere. I own the CD, of course, but I listen to it mainly in FLAC version, on headphones. And it's a delight. The ambiences come from all sides, I'm in heaven (if I can put it that way!).

Mortuary - Blackened Images, riffy thrashy Mexican death metal 1990 Carbonized - For the Security, excellent Swedeath 1991

That's the problem with these kind of things, we all have our own personal moments, but we see the other guys moments and can't help thinking wtf is this dude smoking? Had to quick search up a video because I couldn't remember Jaded. My Draconian Times cassette got unceremoniously binned in 1995 because I couldn't accept my favorite band selling out. Still a little salty about it now 28 years later tbh even though I've mostly made my peace with the album. I have heaps of goosebumps inducing PL moments, but none of them from that album. No Forgiveness is the song that does it for me, as well as 4 or 5 other songs from Shades. Best doom album I've ever heard. This should have been the closing track, and it would've been if I had been the one sequencing it. Can't give you timestamps for this one bruv, the whole song stops me in my tracks. Can't ever play it just once, I have to go at least 3 in a row. Never been a big lyrics guy but I've always fixated on the line "hearing you talk is a waste of silence I can't bear" No Forgiveness Shallow Seasons. They were so good, I often wonder if they had found just a bit more success as a metal band in the mid 90's if they might have continued playing metal instead of going the electrionic route for the better part of a decade. And I don't even hate all those albums, just fun to wonder what might have been. Jaded The Writ is your favorite track from Sabotage? Clearly their best album, but I would rank the songs as follows: Hole in the Sky Thrill of it All Symptom of the Universe Megalomania The Writ I remember arguing with Carlissimo on the old forum about The Writ. He claimed it was a mish-mash of disparate thrown together ideas that didn't work together and he cited it as the main reason he couldn't rank Sabotage higher than he did. I love the song personally, don't let my ranking it last of the Sabotage tracks fool you, it's hard to rank greatness. Hole in the Sky is the clear winner for me here though. Best hard rock/metal song of the entire 1970's. I remember that day in 1975 quite clearly, walking 2 miles down into town after school and buying Sabotage along with Sweet's Desolation Blvd, and then walking 3 miles back up the hill to my house. Threw Sabotage on mom's stereo in the living room immediately, got lucky she was out that arvo so I could crank it up. 1-2-3-4 Then that riff hit me and my jaw hit the floor. By far the heaviest thing I had ever heard at that point in time. Possibly Ozzy's best ever studio vocal performance. No cover has ever done this song justice. Nothing super complicated about it, it's just tough to replicate perfection and nobody can seem to hit those high notes. Hole in the Sky + Symptom of the Universe The Writ. Killer track, there's about a dozen really badass riffs to be found in here and there's no denying the bass intro is cool as fuck. I love 80's Slayer but Seasons (1990) not so much. Always thought that was their sell-out album where they got just a little too commercial and civilized for my liking. I certainly wasn't buying Slayer albums for civilized commerciality. Skeletons of Society was the track that really turned me against them. It was practically radio friendly. I still love everything up through South of Heaven though. So I had to go refresh my memory on this song too. The opening build up makes you think something really big and heavy is coming and then the song breaks down into total mundanity and it's just so disappointing. The chorus in particular is too melodic and harmonious, whatever that combination of chords is I really fucking hate it. The intro is cool and they do go back to the opening riff briefly at the very end, but I hate everything in between, so I'm not seeing this tune as particularly epic. No, for me it's Reign in Blood that gives me the chills, the entire album, every single second of it. Still can't listen to it without headbanging, and I'm an old man now. Best metal album of the 1980's for me ahead of Ride the Lightning and To Mega Therion and Epicus Doomicus by just a cunt hair. If I had to pick a special moment it'd be either the brutal and speedy title track (including Post Mortem) right at that spot when they kick it into overdrive going into the "trapped in purgatory" verse. Or Altar of Sacrifice/Jesus Saves which I consider to be all one track, I'd never play just one without the other. Enter to the realm of Satan (satan, satan, satan) Seasons in the Abyss Altar of Sacrifice & Jesus Saves Postmortem/Raining Blood live. You left us too soon Jeff.

We could be here a while. Akhlys - Somniloquy (from Melinoe) The start of this track proper after the faded up intro. Just the sense that I am being cast into the bowels of every skin-crawling nightmare ever dreamt as that ghastly howl and mining riff starts: Altarage - Altars (from Nihil) One of the nastiest opening riffs ever committed to tape. Here be an absolute "fuck you" to my comfort zone and let's take a couple more steps forward to really drive that blade home. Slayer - Dead Skin Mask (from Season in the Abyss) I have never been able to cope with the kid crying on this track. When I was a kid listening to this in my bedroom I genuinely thought it was a kid trapped in my room somewhere. Even as a grown up I find this unsettling still. Asphyx - Serenade in Lead (from Last One On Earth) The bit from 01:25 into the track is just all the back of car seat fumbles, unexpected one beer left in the fridge and lost a fiver and found a tenner moments from my whole life rolled into one: Dismember - Override of the Overture (from Like an Ever Flowing Stream) That section at 03:20 is one of the most memorable pieces of Swedish death metal ever written. It says "STOP WHATEVER THE FUCK IT IS THAT YOU ARE DOING AND LISTEN TO ME DICKHEAD!" I'll be back.

Vesthangarth - Ominous Path of Spectral Knowledge https://vesthangarth.bandcamp.com/album/ominous-path-of-spectral-knowledge

I've realised I more often get those goosebump moments when vocals and music meet, but there are a few guitar solos that do it. Paradise Lost - Jaded (the Draconian Times album is the sound of a band trying to sell out, but that song is still great) ▶︎ A Doomed Lover | My Dying Bride | Peaceville (bandcamp.com) (4:35 onwards unto oblivion) The Writ (best Sabbath song, best Sabbath album) Seasons in the Abyss is probably Slayer's most epic song. A masterclass from start to finish. That sure shivers me timbers. Again, I observe that ALL OF THESE are closing tracks. The closing track on an album has always been the most important one to nail for me.

NP: Ritual Necromancy - Disinterred Horror https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/disinterred-horror There's something really odd going on with the cover here with it's sections that were obviously given more effort (Which is parfectly understandable.) Either way pretty decent death metal. Giving me early Cannibal Corpse vibes.

At war with satan (1984) - venom alters of madness (1989) - morbid angel Ave santanas (2017) - venom inc

Gamerra - Tedium (2023) Cannibal Corpse - Chaos Horrific (2023) Ritual Carnage - Every Nerve Alive (2000) Testament - Dark Roots of the Earth (2012) Bolt Thrower -...For Victory (1994)

What a busy weekend - I didn't manage to listen to more than a couple of songs here and there! Phew... Cannibal Corpse - Red Before Black Carcass - Torn Arteries Metallica - And Justice For All Napalm Death - Words From The Exit Wound (ironically this album sits better alongside Metallica than any kind of grind or death metal. Good album though people would say it reeks of selling out!)

Cannibal Corpse - Chaos Horrific

Dream Theater - Falling Into Infinity (album)

ASET - Astral Rape

Is that one of those hanging spitting bug things from Elden Ring on that Altarage cover? Kill it! Giants Flame now! I love that Teitanblood album. That reminds me I think they have an album out that I'm missing. Between them and Impetuous Ritual I almost always have something utterly obscene and filth caked to listen to. Been slacking lately though. NP: Ceremonial Bloodbath - The Tides of Blood https://vaultofdriedbones.bandcamp.com/album/the-tides-of-blood Ah, what a wonderful morning to peer into the depths of hell. I can't really pretend to know much about how some of these music contracts work / who owns what etc. After a fashion I do what I can to keep my music consolidated to a single service and hope the artist in question sees it. If the phrase "the more things change the more things stay the same" isn't a cliche by this point I don't know what is. When I truly want to support a band I'm not all that far from a major city where a lot of hard touring bands stand a good chance to stop and play a gig. I go to shows, I buy the merch directly from the band and their roadie/technician if they have one at the show itself. I enjoy shooting the shit with some of the old road warriors out there, and I'm not above networking to find a crash pad and some good local grub in a safe neighborhood for a band to park their van and crash for the evening. When you get into the contractual details of intellectual property, umbrella companies that encompass many different smaller commpanies, and some of the shady stunts even well respected labels have tried to pull over the years I start to find a bunch of it is nearly indecipherable. It's always geared to grant the label or publisher an advantage. The house always wins as they say. There's a reason I couldn't cut it as a business major and didn't really even want to try. My own personal music is primarily on CD, but I still have some things scattered over a few years of laptops from either iTunes or Bandcamp. That's about the best I can do for support in that avenue, and we've seen so many music services flare up and die out through the years it's almost not worth the time to invest large amounts of memory in decent and accessible data storage in a single format. The free market for music is wonderful, but at a certain point any company's success or failure is going to come down to sheer volume of listeners at a manageable technical cost and who can process this with the highest efficiency. I know not to have anything I want permanent access to exclusively on the cloud, though, that's for sure.

Kowloon Walled City - Container Ships (2012)

Bandcamp has been sold again! This time to Songtradr. Whatever that is. Epic Games still seems to be involved but I do fear for the integrity of bandcamp. BANDCAMP Acquired By SONGTRADR - BLABBERMOUTH.NET Bandcamp does take quite a cut when you add in the transaction fees...but I guess that is the price of business. A band should still clear more than 60% or so on a downloaded album. Throwing all my IP ideas out there (which is ironic for a patent attorney), there is a gap in the market for an app that is both a direct-to-artist marketplace, social page (way to post info about tours etc and interact with fans) and somewhere to curate your own collection (e.g. ripped from CDs) in one place just as a music player and file manager. Mind you, I guess you don't need it if you download all your bandcamp purchases to FLAC for a home server....except for a facebook style socials page. Which reminds me.... does anyone use something like this? All-in-One Desktop HD DTS Decoding and Ear Mafer-FiiO R7 It seems to tick all the boxes for a lossless DAP which can plug directly into studio monitors. You can't put it in your pocket but out and about I have a phone or a Fiio x3 as a back up. I feel its one of those things I could easily do without but it would set me up for years to come.

I agree. There's a difference between purchasing something in ignorance and making an active choice to support. Many of us are old enough to have purchased plenty of stuff that had we known more at the time, we would have made a different choice. There just wasn't the information available in the 80's-00's that there is today. I'm not going to go back and purge my collection for purity sake at this point. I pull something out once every few years that I haven't listened to in a while for a trip down memory lane. I usually come to the conclusion that I don't really care for the majority of it anymore. That includes plenty of stuff of non-questionable origin btw. But I keep it because I did once see something in the music and may again one day. If I had to reduce the size of my collection, however, this would be the first stuff to go. Most wouldn't be a purchase today and certainly none of ill repute. My general argument was that even purchasing something out of ignorance likely doesn't generate enough income for any of these pukes to make a real difference, and I don't believe listening to a few Absurd albums will make you a devout supremacist anymore than Dissection or Mercyful Fate will turn someone into a devout satanist. Those are active choices made by the individual. Merch to me is a whole different thing. Purchasing and wearing merch is moving to the "representing the band/ideology" stage. Essentially broadcasting to the world that you approve of said band and their message. You're no longer just enjoying a nasty riff. That's where I draw the line. I'm fairly selective of the merch I buy anyway, so there's no way I actively choose to spend my money on a sweatshirt with "Black Metal Skinheads" in 60 pt font. Of course, I wouldn't have 30 years ago either.

Icon was on Music for Nations which went bust. The rights got transferred somewhere in the bankruptcy but are a mess. I completely understand that you'd never want to hear a new version. I am in the unusual position of knowing I liked the album but don't have it burned into my conscience (like Shades of God). I could just buy the Icon CD off eBay but I like the idea of giving the band money today. Spotify is not the modern day equivalent of radio. Radio plays singles and that is absolutely fine. It is a great promotional tool. I use You Tube in this way. Watch a new promo video or old gig footage, but spotify makes entire catalogs available for a pittance. It's very true that it's a free market and each artist/label has the right to choose. But artists are not rocket scientists and frequently make bad choices. Getting your stuff OFF spotify is a pain in the ass and they charge you to do it. Far more than they ever would pay out for it to be there in the first place. Everyone (managers/labels/venues) has tried to screw over artists since the beginning of time. I only rail against it for the sake of awareness. Anyone who pays a subscription to Spotify to listen to albums day in day out is a piece of shit. If they think they are actually contributing somehow, they are a delusional piece of shit. If they're just fair weather music fans wanting to line up a playlist of feel good modern hit singles, fine. That is radio. Listening to your favourite bands' albums and discovering new whole albums to listen to over and over is not radio. "They're not trying to fuck anyone over." It is hard to know whether whoever created Spotify is actually the devil. Was there an intent to devalue music in the way they do? Possibly not. It is not active fuck-overy in the way a manager or a record label operated, but it is still bad.

This is my take too. There is just so much music out there that you can afford to pass over bands that appear dodgy. Of course, if you listen on Spotify they're not getting paid anyway - so have at it. Buying merch is a step beyond buying music I reckon. You are proudly representing and endorsing a band by wearing a t-shirt, whereas having a few MP3s on your phone is just your dirty little secret.

And here is my second favourite Thrash album: Dark Angel - Time does not Heal (1991) 9 songs, 67 minutes, 246 riffs! Of course, I love Darkness Descends for its devastating fury, Leave Scars for the huge, unhealthy edge it exudes, but on this album, I find the band less crazy, but the compositions are ultra effective with me, whether the tempo is fast or mid. It has enormously riffs, which makes the album enough difficult to assimilate but what happiness! The production of the first two Sabbaths isn't great, I agree. But I wouldn't want a remastered version with a different sound for anything in the world. Their production is part of their identity and bears witness to a time when you could recognise an album, or even a band, from the first few seconds you listened to it.

This morning I decided to listen to my two favourite Thrash albums of all time. I love plenty of Thrash albums, but these two surpass them as far as I'm concerned. And neither of them is produced by Andy Sneap 😅 I'll start with : Forbidden - Twisted into Form (1990) I love this band! And I'm HAPPY to see them back in action, even if Russ Anderson is unfortunately not with them (the new singer is doing very well). I love Bay Area thrash. Bands like Testament, Death Angel, Exodus, Defiance and Vio-Lence have shaped my imagination and my taste in music. But Forbidden, with Forbidden Evil, brought me more. Unstoppable melodies, lots of energy, sick breaks, Russ's vocals and Craig Lociciero's solos. I love it all! And on Twisted, Forbidden have mastered their art perfectly. It's a less crazy album than Forbidden Evil but I find it more homogeneous. Everything I love about them is even more pronounced, with riffs you can't hear anywhere else. It's all good! A real treat!

I totally agree with what you say about Andy Sneap. I love what he did in the first two Sabbat, but as a producer, he's a shit. The same sound applied to every band that comes into his studio, a sound that's clean and powerful but where you rarely hear the cymbals on the drums. You get the impression that he has a default setting for his equipment and when a band arrives, all he has to do is say: come and welcome! Come on, plug in your instruments, we're recording! In his defence, I'd just say that the bands he produces don't particularly want to have a personalised sound. Do they come to him because of the prices? His potential reputation? PS: I have both versions of Nevermore's Enemies of Reality and I too prefer the original edition.

Altarage - NIHL, España 2016 Teitanblood - Death, España 2014

Scumdogs of the universe (1990) - Gwar I will be seeing these guys live in October. hopefully I'll be able to get into a moshpit for the first time at this one

I generally agree, and just so I'm clear here, I do think that the way that evening went down might have had to do with more than just Blasphemy's music, but it's one of those lessons I've learned the hard way to just keep a level head and stay quiet in certain situations. Basically I was at a house show with a few friends and a few people I knew more-or-less by sight, but not by first name. These second group of kids were the type who would often freeze bottles of water before a show and huck them at people's heads if there was a line or down time between bands so that if they got arrested for assault the charges wouldn't stick simply because of the general pandemonium that occurred when stuff like that went down. I wasn't even all that interested in the band since I'd seen them play before and they were of the type that believed if they wished hard enough and were pure of heart they'd magically turn into Sevendust. I agreed to go because the sister of a friend wanted to go get drunk there, and we knew she liked putting herself in dangerous situations when she did. Now I cannot stress enough that I am not some dip who thinks he's Sir Ivanhoe in these situations, so I was very very clear that all of this was dependent on how late the evening ran, and if I was ready to go they'd need to be ready. No twenty minute goodbyes no negotiating my way to the door. If it's time to go it's time to go. So my job was to stay sober and make sure nobody separated her from the larger group / get her to her place if things started to turn south. Thankfully that didn't really happen, but there were some guys there who knew what I was doing and were getting progressively more annoyed with me running interference through the evening, and when I happened to bring up Marduk I think they saw their opportunity to kind of flip the good will of the room back toward their side. They essentially named off a few bands and asked some sort of broader general questions and when I replied that I'd only heard one Blasphemy album, but I did like Arghoslent they got a little too physical for my liking, and since the band was done playing, when they decided to throw me out and immediately separate the drunk girl I did manage to get a word in that I was being booted out and threatened and if they wanted a ride it was last call. All in all nothing came of it and I was able to get the girls home and go catch some rest myself, but the dudes did make sure to corner me and say that they'd kick my "nazi pig ass" if I showed up to one of their house shows again which made me laugh since I knew the guy whose house I was actually at and he would have shut the whole operation completely down if he got wind of somebody acting like that. So in any case what I'm saying is there might have been a little bit more going on than me taking some altruistic stand for free expression in music. Doesn't change that I really can't be bothered to check in on the general moral character of a band if the music's good. Hell there are a few sites I used to frequent that would unequivocally ban any sort of discussion on the subject at all. I didn't really mind since at the end of the day it's their site and up to their discretion what type of content they chose to include and omit. It's difficult on occasion to simply accept that, but it's rare enough that I run into gatekeeping zealots to really get upset about it. For my part I've always thought a happy middle ground would be to include a warning at the start of coverage of that nature and then we can all be happy enough to choose how we would engage with the material. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I just wanted to clarify a few things since these types of discussions so often devolve into feces flinging chaos, and that I don't tell that story to make myself into some sort of hero figure in the most backward ass sense of noblesse oblige imaginable. NP: Proscriptor McGovern's Apsu - s/t https://agoniarecords.bandcamp.com/album/proscriptor-mcgovern-s-aps My god I love this album. I know Proscriptor's not an original member of Absu, but with him as the de facto bandleader they have yet to release anything below an 8/10 for my money, with this one being near perfection.

Thing is I don't think Carlos liked metal. He was an indie rock guy that pretended to be into metal. He was a latte leftie ie middle/rich guy pretending to be left wing. I miss him but he did piss me off. I found the vocals in Spill The Blood off putting at times. They're disjointed and sound atonal in context of the song. I love rest of South of Heaven. I prefer the original of Enemies of Reality. Sneap's remaster didn't ad anything to it. As for Sneap and metal nobility, his problem is he essentially applies the same sound to every band he produces. He is very good at what he does but he doesn't vary it. I also condemn Andy Sneap for paving the way for modern Nuclear Blast/Century Media style overproduction. He was never as bad as what these two labels do now but he was a pioneer for that type of production. Oh and irony, NP Kreator - Enemy of God produced and mixed by one Andy Sneap.😁

Aha!! Kerry still had hair on Seasons. It was definitely on its way out but the bald headshot didn't appear until Divine Intervention. As for drummers. I really like Forbidden so it's not Bostaph who I don't like. It was just some of the life and soul went with Lombardo. Perhaps AC/DC was on the decline anyway, but there was something about Phil Rudd's drumming that glued them together. The man is practically a vegetable now, but he can still play drums.

Soulfly - Primitive (album) Gojira - From Mars to Sirius (album)

Gang of Four - Entertainment!

Manowar - Fighting The World

This is good. I can't figure out what type of effect they've got on the keys. It's certainly not vintage to my ears, but it's also very quiet in the mix which isn't a bad thing. It sounds like a sort of half marimba, but the harmonics in addition to being down in the mix really gives these songs (at least the two I've heard so far) a little extra oomph when they really want to drive. Perks the ears up for sure. I don't know if a whole album would desensitize the listener to it though. Still I like it and I don't think I could name another band using that particular effect on the keys. It's funny, it reminds me of an old roommate who would just sit out in the living room with his "vintage" keyboard set, make the whole apartment smell of densely cultivated foliage and play around with the effects. I don't think he actually knew his scales or anything like that since most of what he played around with were things like wind effects and various knob fiddling all run through high gain configurations. Good guy, and one of the better roommates I've had through the years even if deafening blizzard sound played on a back loop is not music to make spaghetti to. Hadn't thought about him in forever. I'm certainly not getting a Facebook or any social media to find him though, since apparently he's been asking around about me. I've held out against it all these years so there's no reason to get one now. He can write me a letter. Do kids today even remember handwriting letters?

You probably stopped listening to it on time. Overall it gets very meandering at times. Nile - Annihilation of the Wicked Sometimes but usually during an epic lead break eg solos in Slayer's Seasons In The Abyss

This one's for Surge

No! Flawless catalog or death! One clunker is proof that everything else was a fluke! Talentless hacks! I am of course also talking about Altarage.

I consider Vengeance and Defenders two sides of the same coin. Both have some not-great tracks but the highs are high and overall sets well balanced. Heavy Duty/Defenders of the Faith still gives me goosebumps all these years later. Few songs achieve that mainline of pure joy. Does anyone else get that? Y'know, that shiver that can only be borne of sonic perfection. I should keep a list of those, because surely that would be the playlist at one's funeral. One other I can think of is the monk chant bit at the end of part IV "Requiem for a Soulless Man" from Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 × 10−8 cm−3 gm−1 sec−2 ..and not always old nostalgia tracks. This one gets me at around 7.00 onwards Tides of the Mourning | Void Of Sleep (bandcamp.com) There is a pattern here....outro tracks. Just me? Nevermind.

Altarage - Succumb (2021)

In honor of the Autumnal Equinox this morning I'm having a mini Finnblack marathon. And it's making me wonder whatever happened to my Scrobblin' buddy the Finnish cum blaster? Been a minute since he came and told us how many times he listened to Blood Chalice each day. Guess we weren't trve or kvlt enough for him. Behexen - My Soul for His Glory, 2008. Horna - Askel Lähempänä Saatanaa, 2013 Azaghal - Codex Antitheus, 2005

Who keeps bringing this shit up? I feel like we keep taking out the trash to the curb and no sooner do I turn around then someone has carried it back inside again to stink us out. Rap rock ~ nu-metal, who cares, what's the diff? Same shit, same can o' worms. Alright listen up teenyboppers and noobs, Public Service Announcement: whoever came here looking for stimulating in depth convo about rap rock or nu-metal or metalcore...you've come to the wrong place. No one here listens to, knows about, or wants to know about this shit much less talk about it. Listen to whatever you like, but nobody here wants to talk endlessly about this smelly rap/rock garbage. Unless it's Body Count, then I'll allow it. Body Count - Body Count, LA 1992

Darkthrone - Panzerfaust (1995)