Requiem

This is what I'm finding. I can't believe I haven't read it until now. The scary thing is it's really drawing me back into Tolkien's world in a big way and it's taking on new heights. 'The Silmarillion' is enriching everything that I already know and love.

Incredible to think that while Poison were dragging cats around, Quorthon was under the sign of the black mark. In conclusion, the 80s was a decade of contrast.

Sounds fancy. I do drink quite a bit of cafe coffee so I'm not sure why I insist on the worst possible coffee at home. I guess I can't be bothered making a full plunger/pot thing of coffee just for me to have a cup. Then you have to wash it all out and stuff. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Speaking of cool: What the hell, I've just discovered that Ex Deo have a new album out and I didn't even know. I hadn't even heard about it. Ex Deo is the side project of Maurizio Iacono from Kataklysm and play Ancient Rome themed metal and it's a lot of fun. I love their first two albums 'Romulus' and 'I, Caligula'. Great stuff. I'm a history nerd and a symphonic metal nerd, so it ticks the boxes, to quote Escape to the Country. NP: Ex Deo - 'The Rise of Hannibal' Sign me up for another stint in the legions, Maurizio. Centurion Requiem is reporting for duty. Hail Caesar!!

She? I was trying to paint a dude! Looks like it's back to the drawing board for me...

hahaha, yeah, Georgey-boy struggles a bit. I actually watched the video all the way to the end and he has all this lame looking make-up on as some sort of scary reveal. That whole band is pretty dorky, visually and physically as far as their gurning is concerned. I watched the first couple of minutes of another video of theirs too, can't remember what it was, but it was even worse. The drummer, who this time had kind of shoulder length blonde hair, was wearing sunglasses and looked... what's the opposite of cool? Uncool. Very uncool. There's nothing wrong with looking uncool (hell, I hang out with you don't I True Belief), but when they're posing like that it just looks bad. Tone down the posing.

So I'm finally sticking with 'The Silmarillion' and now intend to read the whole thing after two or three false starts. I've read 'The Hobbit' twice and 'Lord of the Rings' twice, and I figured it's a pity that I haven't bothered to stick with 'The Silmarillion'. It takes a huge commitment though to get through those first 50 pages that are so dense with names, places, and Tolkien's love for archaic phrasings. For those who haven't read it, it's more about the lore than a traditional plot as it explains the creation of the universe which Middle Earth inhabits. I was turning to the glossary at the back after every second or third paragraph so that I was 100% clear on what was happening to whom. I didn't want to miss a detail. By page 65 I really got the hang of it and the whole picture is starting to form. I think I'm at about page 70 now. I can thank Blind Guardian for the impetus by the way. I figured if a bunch of Germans can write a whole concept album on it then I, with my fancy book learning, could at least read it! I'm glad I'm reading it because I'm actually finding it very relaxing as the last thing I do before sleep. Normally I'm storming through books with reckless abandon, but with this I'm taking it slow in order to savour it, like a fine wine or the courtship of a beautiful woman.

This is what I'm talking about. Nowadays you go out for a beer and end up being served a science experiment.

Sounds intriguing! Edit: Holy shit, this girl is the hottest girl I've ever seen. hahaha, what the hell. As for the song 'What Lies Ahead', I guess it's ok on first listen but feels a little 'modern metal' for me. The girl is amazing though.

Black Sabbath are one of the greatest bands of all time! I'm hardly being original with that proclamation but it needs regular saying nonetheless. There's no way Ozzy was the weak link. There wasn't one. Those first six albums are untouchable, and the vocals are a big part of that for me. I also love the 'story' of Sabbath. As a narrative it's brilliant. Humble background, severed finger, speedy success, drugs, break ups, middle era struggles, Ozzy's solo stuff, Sun City, revolving door of awesome vocalists, Sharon, reunion, bye bye Bill, farewell tour. What a story.

Here's a thing I've been working on for a while now. It's alright but not my best.

Marduk - 'World Funeral' This album is amazing and really underrated. Legion's vocal phrasing and timing is stunning. I've got a lot of time for Legion. Tracks like 'With Satan and Victorious Weapons' (come on, what a title), 'Bleached Bones' and 'Night of the Long Knives' are dripping with atmosphere and glory.

Tell that to Skull "what has Martin Popoff ever done before the internet" Kollector. The @Skull_Kollektor refuses to acknowledge the existence of Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles. Actually, where is Skully these days? Great post Morbid. I felt the nostalgia and I felt great empathy. I forgot to mention that I used to read Metal Hammer back in the late 90s too. That was a strange magazine sometimes, touching on nu-metal and being obsessed with Peter Steele. It was really too commercial for my tastes, so the discovery of Terrorizer was a supreme moment. As for the hilarious pen-pal ads, I used to be fascinated by the English ones as well - they were always so colloquially British. Now here I am online as a 400 year old vampire... the more things change hey?

Labelled as norsecore by some, I think both of these bands have followed a fairly similar trajectory in many ways, and they both represent the more popular end of black metal. Both have the look figured out, with tonnes of merchandising and the paraphernalia of the 'career band'. So who do you like better and why? I think I can guess the outcome of this by the way. I'm going with Marduk. I think they have a broader range of top quality albums that I really like, such as 'Frontschwein', 'Panzer Division Marduk' and my personal favourite 'World Funeral'. I find some of their albums a little hard to get excited about, such as 'Rom 5:12', 'Serpent Sermon' and 'Wormwood'. They're also great live. They also seem to have a bit more authenticity. I think Morgan and Mortuus are the real deal. Dark Funeral have some classic albums 'Diabolis Interium' and 'Where Shadows Forever Reign' and I think they're a very good band. When I've seen them live their sound was one big blasting mess of nothingness and I think they work better on disk. They also strike me as a little bit cartoonish as well, but only a little. Marduk for me.

Marduk - 'Frontschwein' Their best album in years.

Firstly, I'm glad the forum has become a bit more a nicer place than it apparently was three or four years ago. Gosh. Secondly, I think Ghost are actually pretty good, although it's really only just recently that I've bothered to listen to them. There are certain of their songs that I actually really like a lot, but I do find that others don't really excite me, so I haven't yet mustered up the effort to buy a whole album. Songs like 'Square Hammer' and 'Circe' are great tracks.

My favourite non-metal albums are all classical music works, but leaving those aside for the moment: The Beatles - 'Revolver' The Doors - 'The Doors' Michael Jackson - 'Thriller'

I sort of feel this way about techno music too. There's just something so goddamn uncomfortable about it.

Cheap supermarket instant coffee. Waddaya gonna do about it?

FBI. More official and a better support network. Bounty hunter also sounds more precarious and dangerous - things could easily turn sour. People with bounty on their heads usually don't submit nicely and are likely to fight dirty. With full supplies in both cases, would you rather cross a desert on a camel or an ocean on a raft?

This is a great album. I also like their 'Patrick Bateman' EP with all those classic samples from American Psycho.

I love America; my sister lives there, my brother in law is American and I've been there three times and can't wait to go back. But you really do need to fix your health care system.

For years I've been a reader of music magazines, principally of the heavy variety. I first started reading random magazines that made their way into my local newsagents back around 1993. This was the era where the vast majority of bands were only read about and never heard. For years I knew about the ups and downs, releases and concerts of bands before ever hearing them. These bands were filled with mystery and romance. They were exotic. I'm interested in reading about some of the forum users' metal magazine memories and experiences. I started reading the UK magazine Terrorizer back in 1997, and I still have many of those copies with me today. I've been a subscriber from about 2005-2014 but left the magazine after they completely dropped the ball, stopped sending out issues that had been paid for and refused to reply to my emails. There was quite a scandal at the time because a lot of subscribers got the same treatment. To this day it's the worst customer service I've ever had after showing years of loyalty. Anyway, Terrorizer was a brilliant magazine back in the days of Nick Terry's editorship. The standards were really high. I also love the Englishness of it. The polls and lists were always interesting too, but as I grew up I realised that my tastes differed. I've also flirted with Zero Tolerance, especially after Terrorizer decided they no longer wanted me as a customer, although the small A5 size of ZT makes it hard to read and they cover a lot of local underground bands, which is great for the bands but I find pages and pages of bands that I just lack the initiative to check out, due to being old. They also confusingly have a full page column at the back of every issue where the singer from Primordial writes a crazy right-wing political diatribe about random things. Very strange... The American magazines were always too impersonal for me, especially the ones with black and white pages and a U.S-centric focus. They often felt thrash heavy too, which wasn't my cup of tea. I couldn't really connect with them on a personal level like I could with the British magazines. Australia has had some metal magazines from time to time as well, with Hot Metal being a particular title from the 90s that I remember fondly. There was an Australian Kerrang that wasn't much to write home about, and it's subsequently disappeared (I presume). Being a Mick Wall fan, I bought an old 80s copy of Kerrang on ebay the other day. It's amazing as a piece of history. I want to get hold of a few more to get a taste of that era that I was really too young to understand at the time. To this day I still have stacks and stacks of Terrorizers from 1997-2014 in my garden shed in boxes. I'm going to throw them out and just keep the earliest copies as relics of a bygone age. Were you lot into magazines?

Some of these old threads are worth dredging up. Not sure if this one actually counts, but anyway... People have been lamenting the apparent decline of Kerrang since the late 80s. It's hilarious. I bought a copy of 80s Kerrang from ebay the other day just to get some history. Metal Hammer doesn't do it for me either.

Mayhem - 'Out from the Dark' 1991 rehearsal.