Depraved

Not exactly a metal meme but close enough and I still lol'd:

It has some good interviews but I guess watching Until the Light Takes Us first kind of ruined it for me. It was so awkward. I still can't get over how bad most of the acting was. I don't think they even read about the people they were supposed to be portraying. And like half of it was just Culkin narrating everything as Euronymous, which was weird and kind of boring. Then there was this bizarre redemption thing toward the end where he tries to "change his ways" or whatever. And what the fuck was up with Varg and the chocolate milk?? I watched it like three times and I still couldn't figure out why it was supposed to be significant lol. That entire scene made no sense whatsoever. The only thing they got right was Euronymous dying in the stairwell but I don't think he would have been chit-chatting with Varg trying to change his mind about killing him and refusing to defend himself while bleeding to death in his kitchen. Pretty sure he most likely fled the second he knew Varg's intentions given the locations of the stab wounds. And I seriously doubt he went down like a bitch like Rory fucking Culkin lol. As a film it's mildly entertaining, if you completely ignore any facts about Mayhem's history or the Norwegian scene in general. I was still cringing at how "high school teen drama" it was, though. I was cracking up every five minutes at how terrible the script was. Really the only thing I found genuinely enjoyable was the cinematography during certain scenes, especially when there was no dialogue, they still managed to make it interesting. They also put a ton of work into the sets to recreate places exactly like they appear in pictures, which was impressive. Otherwise, what a fail. ?

I caved and decided to watch Lords of Chaos since I have the night off. I was expecting it to be terrible going in since the book was a joke but I'm not even an hour into it yet and this movie is such a mindfuck lol. Not just the glaring historical inaccuracies, most of the acting is fucking awful. Like it's so bad I'm really not certain if they meant to inject this much humor into it. Is it supposed to be serious or did they mean to make it sort of a parody??? I do think it's fucking hilarious that they butchered Varg's character and Varg was freaking the fuck out about it though. ? Also I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Euronymous where he looked anywhere near that ripped. ?? I mean I kind of feel bad for laughing about how bad it is but...goddamn...

Slayer - Reign in Blood

Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath - "A Dangerous Meeting" The first 45 seconds or so...fucking sick. Kind of surprised no one's mentioned it yet. Mayhem - Deathcrush - "Silvester Anfang" Even more surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. One of the most infamous and recognizable intos in black metal. Oh you know what? To add to that - Queensryche - Queensryche - "Queen of the Reich"

Yeah I have to agree with you a lot on these. I cannot stand metalcore. It's like the frat boy version of metal, it's not interesting, and it all sounds the same to me. Most boring and generic tripe I've heard outside of pop and/or rap. Unfortunately where I live, local shows have been inundated with metalcore bands for like 10 years now and it's nearly impossible to catch a band that isn't metalcore. Same with numetal. It's just the stupidest hybrid genre I've ever heard. Makes me cringe. Also it reminds me of high school because everyone was listening to it back then. Ugh. (I actually like glam/hair bands though lol. Well to a certain extent; it's about the heaviest thing I can get away with playing at work and it's really grown on me. Motley Crue, Scorpions, and Dokken all the way.) Idk wtf djent is but from the description alone, I already know I hate it. Okay, just listened to some of it. And I was right. **Yawn** Other genres I can't stand: Industrial Sludge Stoner Symphonic (actually I wouldn't mind this too much if not for the operatic vocals) Pretty much anything else that ends in "-core". ?

Yes hahaha but what I mean is that most metal in general requires one to do some thinking in order to understand it and find enjoyment in it.

Most people are too stupid to understand metal.

Yeah, I think it's pretty poorly defined, but once you're used to identifying it they're pretty easy to spot. It usually sounds noticeably different from the rest of the song and there's typically a break in the melody or the melody changes entirely for the duration of the breakdown. It can also be a bridge or directly precede a bridge, I believe, although my understanding was that the bridge typically has lyrics/vocals and is used to transition to the final chorus or outro. Not every song has a breakdown, and they're more prevalent in certain genres - folk metal has a fuck ton of them and it's usually the most folky/dance-y part of the song with lots of keyboards or traditional instruments or whatever so it's always pretty obvious.

I've always thought a breakdown is the part in a song where most of the instruments fall away and you're left with sometimes just rhythm section playing that part themselves or could be like a sort of guitar interlude (not really a solo). or sort of instrumental part typically with no vocals. Honestly the first example I can think of at the moment is this from Moonsorrow's Kylän Päässä (3:18 - 4:05):

I really got into old punk rock when I was like 15 (Clash, Ramones, Misfits, etc.) so my taste in music was already moving in a much heavier direction than what everyone else I knew was listening to at the time (Linkin Park and Evanescence lol). I grew up listening to stuff like the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and so on because that's what my parents always listened to in the car. So I guess I learned young that I really enjoyed rock music in general and when I got old enough to begin looking for music on my own I immediately gravitated toward older rock acts and eventually punk rock. As for metal, I used to listen to a hard rock station on the radio in the car when I started driving myself to and from school. They often played a lot of Black Sabbath, Dio, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and the like, and I knew I liked it a lot, but I was still caught up with punk rock at the time so I didn't pay too much attention to metal back then. I got some exposure through Suicidal Tendencies but that was about it. Until around 2004(-ish?) that is, when I heard Opeth's "Patterns in the Ivy" for the very first time on Liquid Metal, and my immediate thought was "what...is this?!" I'd never heard anything so beautiful and complex in my life and I felt like I had been looking for music that sounded like that forever and I had finally found it. I ran out and bought Blackwater Park, wore that album out every morning on the way to school, then went back and bought up all the albums I could that they had available (I believe Ghost Reveries had just been released at the time). I read everything I could find about them online and that led me to discovering Katatonia after I found out Mikael Akerfeldt had done the vocals for Brave Murder Day. Listened to that album and was completely blown away. Now that was even closer to the sound I'd been looking for all my life; Blackwater Park began to pale in comparison. So I became a huge Katatonia fan right then (still one of my favorites) and through them I ended up finding Paradise Lost (also still a favorite). I guess I listened to these bands the most as a teenager, not really looking beyond the sort of gothic/death/doom stuff. I found Anathema and My Dying Bride, Type O Negative and a few others, but I always kept coming back to Katatonia and Paradise Lost almost exclusively. What's funny is, in retrospect I didn't really know I was actually turning into a huge metalhead at the time. I knew that what I was listening to was metal, but I was like this 5'2" 90 lb little girl and I looked nothing like the tall long-haired battle jacket-wearing metal dudes I'd seen around at school. None of the people I hung out with listened to metal and I very much felt alone in the world. My parents couldn't stand it; I was once listening to Katatonia in my room at home and my dad came in and asked me "what the hell are you listening to?!" Then he went on a tangent about how it was "so unbecoming" for a girl to listen to that kind of music. Whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. (Funny story though - I had a cat growing up and she hated me, always hissing at me and never let me pet her without trying to claw my fingers off, but whenever I listened to Dance of December Souls she always came into my room and jumped up next to me and cuddled and rubbed her face on the speakers lol. I guess she just liked Renkse's voice, or maybe she was fascinated by all the reverb hahaha). I've had severe/chronic depression with psychotic features for many years, and when I was 21 I dropped out of college and ended up working retail/food service and being poor as shit (I'm still poor as shit even after going back to college and graduating and getting a professional job lol) and for like 2 months I experienced the worst psychotic break of my entire life. It was fucking terrifying, I really believed I was a perambulating corpse or something I was convinced there were maggots in my stomach so I stopped eating completely because I thought that if I'm dead anyway then why do I need to eat and woudn't they just eat the food before I could digest it? I had these impulses to drink bleach to kill the maggots and I was extremely violent toward myself. At one point I tried to pour candle wax into my eyes. I forayed into black metal and picked up De Mysteriis and blasted that album while driving around in the middle of the night, every night, because I kept hearing these crazy things which I knew weren't there but I couldn't sleep, and being awake for 36 hours and then only being able to sleep for 3 or 4 and then being awake for another 36 hours or whatever was making the psychosis worse. I was so out of my mind I thought that those couldn't be the real lyrics, like I honestly thought I was broadcasting my thoughts and they were reading my mind or something because it was just way too accurate - only to find out after the psychotic break was over that, no, those actually are the real lyrics. ? So of course that led me to Darkthrone and Satyricon and Immortal and I got really into the early 90s Norwegian black metal stuff a few months later and I listened to it ad nauseaum for years. I can't really keep track after that. I just listened to metal and only metal and it's pretty much been the same ever since. There was a long folk metal phase and a glam/hair band phase somewhere in there too during which I found a lot of bands I still listen to and enjoy. I'm currently going back and listening to some early death metal and 80s thrash bands and making my way through a bunch of albums I've never really given a lot of time to. When I'm not listening to my favorite bands, of course hahaha. Oh, and Cloak, because I've become a disgustingly rabid fan since I saw them a couple of weeks ago lol. I still revisit punk rock and some classic rock now and then, though not very often. I'm not against playing some Saint-Saens or Tchaikovsky, either.

Why are all my youtube recommendations either black metal or cat videos? ?

Honestly, everything they did before Tonight's Decision (and possibly including that album) is some of the most beautiful and unique shit I've ever heard. Can't tell you how many times I've listened to those albums including the EPs and they never get old.

Katatonia - For Funerals to Come... Katatonia - Sounds of Decay Katatonia - Saw You Drown Mayhem - Deathcrush Celtic Frost - Morbid Tales Gehenna - First Spell Anathema - The Crestfallen Queensryche - s/t Technically not an EP but I would also like to add Paradise Lost's Forever Failure single. I absolutely LOVE "Another Desire" and they made a mistake leaving it off Draconian Times, in my opinion.

I dreamed last night that I was exploring ancient ruins and playing poker with Mayhem and Darkthrone on some tiny quarantined island in the north Atlantic while "In the Shadow of the Horns" played over and over again and we were all dying from plague. Wtf, brain. ?

There are some really good songs on there (well songs I enjoy, at least) like "Through Eyes of Stone" and "Striding the Chasm" which sounded excellent live and actually fit right in with their older material. I do think the thrashy riffs can work for them in the right amount despite what almost everyone else is saying. But yeah, like half of that album kind of sounds like filler to me which is a shame.

Right?? Screw that! Small gigs are the best. It's such an intimate environment and you can feel a real exchange of energy and emotion between the band and the crowd. There's also a certain novelty about being that close to them, close enough to touch them, even. Ditto for getting a killer solo played right in your face. Cloak took like an hour to set up and Uada had some technical issues so that was another delay. 1349 was supposed to go on at 10:30 but they didn't go on until about 11:20. They were done right around midnight I guess, when I got back to my car it was 12:15 and that was after picking up some merch and chatting with Cloak for a few minutes.

Yes! 300-capacity nightclub and it was sold out. It was crazy shit. I still can't really wrap my mind around it. Seeing 1349 was like watching an explosion, I was in awe and couldn't look away but like I also couldn't process what exactly I was hearing and looking at. They really blasted through their set, too and it makes me wonder if that's how they always play or if there was a city ordinance and they had to meet a curfew or something because the place was a block away from a residential neighborhood. They went on nearly an hour later than they were supposed to and played a full set but they were only on for about 40 minutes. They really didn't stop between songs, either. It was over way too quickly. Well...I mean...if they could somehow convince Hellhammer...but I try to stay realistic. ? Dominator was fucking impressive, though. I could not believe how loud he was. At times I couldn't hear the rest of the band. Wish I could have gotten pictures of him, but 1) I'm really short and 2) Seidemann was 2 feet in front of me the entire time and completely blocked my view haha. Not only that but Dominator himself is surprisingly pretty short/slight so he disappeared the moment he sat behind his kit. I could only see his hands occasionally.

I totally agree with you about them sounding like Tribulation. I also hear some death/doom-ish shit à la Katatonia's "Tonight's Decision" and October Tide's "Rain Without End" as well as something that kind of reminds me of Dissection's "Storm of the Light's Bane". Actually I just listened to an interview where they were asked about their influences and they listed most of my favorite bands haha. No wonder I like them so much. The main thing I hear is the songwriting is a bit inexperienced/amateurish, which isn't exactly unexpected given their age. I can tell you though that they were absolutely brilliant live, and so tight for a band that hasn't been around very long. Maybe I'm still riding the concert high but where I live in the US we are starving for young talented bands so they were really a pleasant surprise and very refreshing opposed to the generic/ambient/hybrid-metalcore garbage I've seen and heard the last 10+ years. Waaay better than any of the new bands I've seen from this area since forever.

Oh, believe me, they came out with big hair, some black spandex, and studded high heel cowboy boots. Although to be fair, it was pouring rain so the big hair may or may not have been intentional lol. And once I found out where they were from the cowboy boots sort of made sense. And their frontman totally looks like Quorthon and Chuck Schuldiner's lovechild hahaha. My first immediate thought was "wtf is this band?" but then they started playing and it was like getting kicked in the face.

I discovered and was a fan of punk rock before I gravitated toward metal. I like a lot of the old bands from the 70s but also some of the American hardcore/revival shit that was around in the 80s and early/mid-90s. I still listen to it sometimes but my taste in music grew so much heavier in my late teens/early 20s and stayed that way. Favorite band? Probably have to go with the Clash on this one, but it's impossible for me to pick a favorite song.

Thanks! I fixed them! I don't know about that, I ran into Cloak's rhythm guitarist at their merch table and promptly stuck my foot in my mouth when he spoke to me because I'm an awkward idiot lol. Shows are actually kind of difficult for me because I'm so tiny and I always end up feeling like...I don't know...a 2 year old little girl that has no business being there. ?

Pictures from this weekend. Sorry in advance for the image quality; I have an older phone so my camera isn't that great and it was dark as fuck in there. Couldn't imbed the photos themselves so here are the links. Nevermind, I'm just a dumbass lol. It took me more than an hour to upload this shit successfully so you motherfuckers better appreciate it. ? Uada ? ??1349 ? ?

I was completely blown away by these guys over the weekend when I saw them open for 1349. Thank fucking hell for them, American metal has been needing a real kick in the ass for several years now as far as I'm concerned. Finally, some kids from this generation who know how to shred and aren't trying to sound just like everyone else. That being said, I'm not entirely sure I would classify them under black metal. It's pretty obvious they've got a lot of thrash, death, and doom influences as well. But then again, who the fuck cares when they sound this good?? Often the mark of a great band is one that can't be pigeonholed into a single genre.