GoatmasterGeneral

My extreme metal awakening/epiphany was similar to yours in some ways, (I too once bought records by Lamb of god and The Haunted that I then traded back into the store upon my next visit) but my journey's a bit different than yours in more ways than it's the same. I had never grown tired of or stopped listening to metal, I was always pretty much one of those all metal all the time kinda guys. Or let's say metal and other reasonably heavy metal adjacent stuff like hardcore, punk and hard rock. I had just gotten caught flat-footed when real metal disappeared underground seemingly overnight right around 1990 and no one had thought to tell me. I'd had a kid in June of 1990 so our going out to shows 4 nights a week lifestyle came to an abrupt end because we had to be home to feed the baby every two hours. Problem was that talking to dudes at shows had always been the best way to find out about bands in the pre-internet era, along with trips to the specialty metal record store an hour away which also became few and far between after 1990. So I basically got stuck still listening to thrash and all of my 80's stuff all throughout the 90's. For my infrequent new music fixes I had resorted to finding crap off the radio or MTV in the 90's, which I guess is why my purchases (aside from those bands I already knew and had multiple albums from, like Overkill) became much more mainstream oriented in the 90's. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Godsmack, Social Distortion, White Zombie, STP, Puddle of Mudd and Monster Magnet were all bands I discovered and listened to quite a bit of in the 90's. Not exactly trve kvlt stuff, definitely not brutal or satanic, and not even as heavy as a lot of the shit I'd previously been listening to in the 80's and considered pillars of my collection. I guess I was just too busy working and being a single dad in the 90's to have much time leftover to devote to being a dedicated metalhead who stayed up to date on all the latest bands. It's always really cool to see the other guys' list of albums that hold great significance to them. So thanks for sharing. Looking down your list I see we have very little in common, or less than I might've thought we would anyway. Almost none of those 2000 - 2005 records mean anything at all to me, and tbh quite a few of those bands I really actively can't stand. I do dig some Electric Wizard though, and of course as I've said Dark Tranquility were huge for me in the 00's, but they're not in the rotation at all anymore. Dead Heart in a Dead World was once in heavy rotation, dig YOB, dig Moonsorrow, I liked The Work Which Transforms God, I went through a brief Naglfar phase (just the early stuff, nothing past Sheol), and I believe I did even buy an Orange Goblin record once. But that's about it, just 8 out of the 60 you listed, the rest of those bands/albums aren't anything I've ever been interested in. Funny how that works, people like us will have completely different impressions and recollections of a musical period in time, in this case the early 2000's, based on what they were personally listening to at that time. My extreme metal awakening came a bit later than yours did, and I was a bit older. It was late 2004 so I was 43 already by the time I got into extreme metal. I've told the story on here before, it hit me at some point that a good deal of my favorite albums were a decade or more old, so I just got a bug up my ass one weekend to go to the record store and see if I could get up to speed on wtf was happening in the world of 21st century metal. Came home with an armful of the rankest garbage albums that day, all based on magazine reviews, none of which stuck with me at all. Except for DT, which for some reason I kept going back to and that led me to find similar stuff like Hypocrisy, Kalmah, Insomnium, Amon Amarth and Opeth. But then once I found Necrophobic a couple of years later that was it, I became much more interested in the harder more extreme forms of death metal. Necrophobic were also the band that really got me interested in black metal around '08/'09, and by then I'd left most of that commercial melodeath crap behind me in the rear view mirror. But I guess that's how gateway bands work for me, once I get to where I've actually been trying to get to, those gateway bands are no longer needed for anything. Like when rocketships destined for deep space jettison the spent boosters they needed to get themselves up and clear of the Earth's atmosphere. So in the mid aughts I quickly went from like a heavy/thrash/grunge/punk mix to melodeath and from there to blackened death metal and then by the late 00's I'd joined a metal forum and had started the arduous but rewarding process of combing through 15 - 20 years of 'old school' 90's death and black metal bands I had slept on for all those years. I don't remember ever really going through a specific stoner phase, I had just came across random stoner bands and albums here and there over the years that I liked so I mentally filed them away in that Sabbath/Soundgarden/Kyuss area of my brain. Cool for a spin or two now and then, but that bluesy stoner rock stuff was never going to be my main focus, I was always focused on searching for something a bit heavier. Fu Manchu was not a band I ever connected with, even back when I was buying those kind of stoner rock records at one time in the early 00's. I was more of a Sasquatch guy. I'll still buy one or two "stoner" rock/doom albums a year when I find one that speaks to me, but not usually more than that. I've never had any use for post-rock or post-metal, just never found any of that stuff interesting or heavy enough to suit me. Much like funeral doom, another genre I tried to get into a bit but then eventually gave up on as just not for me.

Americans love our shrimp man, we consume 1.7 billion tons of them each year. Dangle your big-ass shrimp over a grill in front of the Sydney Opera House with chicks in summer clothing hanging around and Yanks will be buying plane tickets and updating their passports before the commercial is even over. I've seen Fosters for sale in the stores, but I've never ever seen anyone actually drinking one. Why they'd choose to market it in what looks like an old fashioned motor oil can is beyond me. But I suppose someone must be drinking that shit or they'd have to stop selling it.

That shit stick on the left would be a massive fucking tool in any language. Yanks over 40-45 still think all Aussies are basically like 80's Paul Hogan urging all of us Yanks to come down under and throw another shrimp on the barbie, while skulling Fosters lager.

Dude, I'm always taking the piss. I don't have it in me to refrain from taking the piss. I'm literally incapable of holding back my piss taking. Most Aussie guys ever foil robbery despite a 'busted plugger' This bogan on the right's fucking hilarious, I've listened 10 times and I still can't understand what the name of his fishing team is at 4:40. I'm proud to know what a 'plugger' is though, I suspect most Yanks wouldn't have the foggiest.

Was that how it was marketed down there in the deep south bible thumping zone as an extinction event? Those whacked-out Christian fundamentalists can turn anything into a existential catastrophe. My son was all excited about this eclipse, his class had just finished learning about all the planets and stuff, his favorite is of course Uranus which he likes because it gives him an excuse to say 'your anus.' Ten year olds. I'd ordered us two pair of them eclipse glasses off Amazon, and his bus was set to get him home 10 minutes before the peak coverage. We weren't in the path of totality, we were supposed to get 85% coverage at 3:23pm. At 3:13 he came running up the stairs, threw his backpack down and grabbed his dark glasses but it turned out the cloud cover was such that we couldn't really even find the sun in the sky at 3:20 much less see any of the eclipse. There's $9 down the drain, I'll be dead before I'll have a chance to use those glasses for the next solar eclipse. For the next half hour he was pacing around exclaiming "What kind of fucking solar eclipse was that!? All I could see was clouds!!" I feel bad for the people who traveled long distances with their entire families to see this shit better and then it was too cloudy to see anything at all.

Interesting. I wouldn't put stoner rock and post metal/rock in the same realm, they'd seem to be at odds with each other, at least to me anyway. One's riffy, the other's not. But that's probably because I like the one and can't tolerate the other so I don't connect the two. I've loved Sabbath since the beginning so I always liked stoner rock with the recycled Sabbath riffs. But that's casual listening, that kind of stuff didn't ever have the same impact of the heavier shit. That was my musical journey back in the early days, essentially just a search for the heaviest shit I could find. So the albums that changed my life were usually the ones that reached a new level of heaviness, or in some way opened my eyes to shit I had yet to experience. Which is quite different than my 20 favorite metal albums, which would disproportionately be stuff from the last 25 years. The game changers would mostly be older stuff, 70's-80's-90's much of which I rarely listen to anymore. Because once I got up to speed with the real heavy shit then new albums weren't really life changing for me anymore, they were just new albums. Now you've got me wondering what the very first black metal album I connected with might've been. I really don't remember. I mean Don't Break the Oath in '84 could have been the first unless you consider Celtic Frost black metal, which I don't. But for stuff that everyone would agree is black metal I'm gonna say Darkthrone's Panzerfaust could have been the first. Hard to say for sure because when I joined my first metal forum in '08 I was getting tons of recos and discovering many years worth of black and death metal all in a short period of time. I remember the general consensus back then on that board was that Mayhem's DMDS was the best black metal album ever made, a sentiment that I strongly disagree with. So I had to find most of my favorite black metal on my own, because most people, even most metalheads, are black metal casuals who just want to recommend all those same old early 90's Norwegian bands like Mayhem, Darkthrone, Burzum, Immortal, Emperor, Gorgoroth and Satyricon. But besides Darkthrone whom I worship, none of those other Norge bands really do much of anything for me. So I had to do some digging to find the good stuff that no one was recommending. So it was probably Darkthrone first, but it could have been one of the Finnish bands, Behexen, Horna or Azaghal.

That's the posh high falutin ABC newscaster voice Yanks like so much. I was talking about the common bogan accent or what's known as the broad Aussie accent. I can only understand about 42% of the words coming out of his mouth. Every Concreter Ever... | Garn.

Who said this was black metal? This is death metal. No mention anywhere on the Youtube vid about any black metal. I've come to like most of this Sentient Ruin issued stuff. Not everything they put out is killer, but lately it seems like 4 out of 5 are pretty damn good. Quite the lengthy blurb though, whomever wrote this must've really been into these dudes, and been really stoned, or been tripping or something. Or else they're just having us on. The album's pretty good though, cavernous, brutal and dissonant, but not dissonant enough to make my head hurt. Funny though, looking at who these guys actually are and what other bands they're in, I like all of these dudes' main bands better than this. SRUIN227 Refracture, the process of light deviating as passed through a medium. A similar concept explored by US necromorphed death metal disfiguration Aberration (formed by members of Void Rot, Suffering Hour and Nothingness among others), who finally present their long awaited debut offering "Refracture", a mind-bending, obliterating displacement of mutated dark death metal tonnage set to permanently reshape the lineaments of experimental and underground USDM. But there is no light contemplated in Aberration's contorted audial design, only darkness, and specifically, rather than light, the self, consciousness is passed through a perceptive medium of surrealism, and is refractured into "other" self, the core concept of all abominations. Bands like Antediluvian, Portal, Hissing and Altarage are no new comers to the art of death metal defilement through the ritual of perceptive and deceptive psychic mind wars, but what Aberration have accomplished with "Refracture" defies definitions and ads an ulterior progression to the end of death metal and of music as we know it. With dissonance used as a weapon and compositional surrealism metastasized into a ravenous dissociative medium, "Refracture" tunnels through the listeners brain like a psyche-boring destructive mass, devouring conscience and ravaging synapses through the sheer force of musical absurdity. An anti-reality is achieved through its sideways-moving sprawl and its labyrinthine, shapeshifting pace, with the listener's senses and mind used as helpless hosts in which a mutant parasitism is unleashed into a form of absurd, demented and frenzied perceptive devourment.

I remember liking the debut White Tomb to a certain extent, but then I lost track of them. Not sure what happened, maybe I didn't like the 2nd album as much or whatever. But now it seems they've broken up a decade ago anyway after this Teethed Glory album in 2013 and the subsequent tour. Still I think I'm gonna give it a shot. What have I got to lose? So far 12 minutes in it's not knocking my socks off just yet.

The new Coffins album Sinister Oath that dropped 10 days ago as well as the one before that from 2019. Can't get enough of them. Also I can see that Fluids binge I was on last night continuing. Love that band. Like a modern take on Mortician except even better. Not Dark Yet 2021

Except there ain't no chicks/Shielas gonna be watching no old man podcast about 40 year old metal albums by the likes of: Metal Church, Manowar, Anthrax and Exciter. That's a sausage fest if ever I've seen one. The chicks might only tune into the podcast when it's about the sexy 80's glam metal MTV bands they remember having crushes on. And did no one ever tell you that of all the accents of all the English speaking countries, Americans typically find the Australian accent the least pleasant to listen to? Even the Kiwis have a more pleasing accent. Personally I'd rank South Africa as the worst of all the English accents, and then Australia'd be next, and then Canadia right ahead of OZ just for their silly O sounds. Aotearoa goes in front of Canadia. Scottish and Irish are at the top of my list #1 & 2 I could listen to them talk all day. And then that leaves England which is the hardest to rank because English accents run the gamut. They have some truly lovely and very appealing melodious accents over there while some others are just pants. Now I think I might get inspired to come up with my own albums that changed my life list. Blackwater Park won't be on mine, but Dark Tranquility probably will, as they were my main gateway band into extreme metal with harsh vocals in '04/'05 along with Hypocrisy. Might have to give this some thought for a few days though, because I'm too distracted tonight. Electrical inspector is coming tomorrow and of course my hallway smoke detector starts beeping at 10:30 pm. 3 quick beeps every minute apparently means "fault" but I'm not sure exactly what that means or what I can do about it. I took it off and took the backup batteries out for now so the kid can sleep, he goes back to school tomorrow after 10 days off and he was totally freaked out about the loud beeping right outside his door in the hallway, he was expecting fire engines to start rolling up any second. These 6 hardwired units are all brand new only 3 months old, that's what fucks me off. Just replaced one of the two downstairs units that had been doing the same thing after changing the backup batteries (twice) didn't work, and we were all good for 36 hours no beeps anywhere. Now it's the one at the top of the stairs giving me problems. If only I could hear the Orca's soothing mellifluous bogan tones and let them lull me off to dreamland.

Well right off the bat most 58 year old guys aren't obsessed with music like we are to begin with. But it's certainly more typical that a 58 year old guy would be a big prog rock guy and an 80's hard rock & metal head and an album collector than he'd be someone who's more interested in hearing the latest and greatest blackened goat filth. I've seen a few of his videos where he'll have multiple guests on, some of them a bit younger than him, and they'll talk about and rank different stuff, and it's always 99% mainstream shit that I wouldn't be interested in, or shit I might've liked once upon a time in my youth that I wouldn't give the time of day to now. You seem to be somewhat more familiar with Pete's channel than I am apparently, but if he "clearly knows his way around death metal" then I must've missed that video. And it's not "milk toast" my friend, the word is "milquetoast" and it's spelled with a Q. Most of what I've seen Milquetoast Pete talking about on his videos is mainstream stuff from 25-45 years ago. I looked up that 20 albums that changed my life video and it was all classic rock, prog rock, and jazz fusion. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that just seems to me to be more Boomer-ish than Gen-X-ish, that's all I'm saying. Many of my Gen-X friends have musical tastes that span a pretty broad range, and they're all physical album collectors like you and Pete. But we did all originally meet on a metal forum, so when they're listening to 'metal' it's mostly gonna be extreme death and black metal, not old Ozzy and Dokken records. That's why most of my friends are 10 - 15 years younger than me, because that's the Gen-X generation who listens to the most old school black & death metal. If 33 year old millennials my daughter's age happened to be the generation who mostly listened to old school black & death metal, then all my friends would probably be 33 year old millennials. I don't know anyone else from my age group who's primarily into the extreme stuff. Usually it's either none at all, or the heaviest would maybe be thrash and they have an aversion to the more extreme stuff. But if anything like Mr. Pardo maybe they just dabble a little in some of the heavier bands from decades past. Well there is our buddy Doc, he's old like me, but he also listens to a lot more non-extreme, non-metal stuff than I do, prog, avant-garde, post-rock, jazz and classical and what have you. And when he is listening to some of the more extreme stuff, he comes at it from an entirely different angle than I do. He's not a lifelong metalhead, a dyed-in-the-wool denim & leather wearing headbanger, he's an old prog guy who played in wedding bands and against all odds we've just somehow managed to develop some musical overlap here in the 21st century. And I love Doc, but 30 - 40 years ago he and I lived in completely different worlds listening to completely different music, no overlap whatsoever. We took radically different paths to get to the same general destination in our old age. So I have to give Doc an asterisk, which means I'm still waiting to meet some old Boomer dude my age who mainly listens to the same kinda stuff that I do. Marko's probably the closest I've ever found, but he's still a few years younger than us, another Gen-X dude born in the late 60's. Where are all the 60+ Boomer bangers? I can't be the only one. When it comes to metal, Pardo and his buddies are all stuck in 1984. They should get the Orca to guest star on there, but no one would be able to understand his bogan accent. The Hudson Valley Squares: Album Wars (1984)-Anthrax/Manowar/Metal Church/Exciter

I get that Pete Pardo like most people our age want to have or feel they deserve to get something they can hold in their hand when they have purchased music. But as someone who moves around a lot I don't understand why anyone would want to own 10,000+ CD's. Silly to argue they take up less space than vinyl bevause if space was really a concern you'd go all digital, which takes up no space at all. Not everyone has a spare room they can dedicate entirely to their large and ever growing physical music collection. And who wants to keep all those discs organized and then have to get up and go look for the ones you want and then put them all away again later when you could just scroll and click? I understand that some people do get value from staring at the little booklets, but I'm old and I can't read print that small anymore anyway. So just the files for me thanks. I hate when something I really want is only being offered on some physical format and not available digitally. First world problems I know. But still fuck these old guys like Pete Pardo with his extensive Tom Petty collection and his prized signed copy of Fly Like an Eagle. Can you say milquetoast? And they wonder why people make fun of Boomers. Actually it seems he's your age Mark, he's 58, so he's just a Gen-X'er with the musical taste of a Boomer, even worse. I'm a Boomer with the musical taste of a Gen-X'er. I don't know many Boomers who have really embraced extreme metal and the black arts. Most of 'em are happy playing around with their Billy Joel, ELO, Fleetwood Mac and Eagles box sets. Maybe some Van Halen or AC/DC if they're feeling frisky.

Fluids - Ignorance Exalted, 2020 Fluids - Exploitative Practices, 2019

Fulci/Fluids - split, Italy/AZ 2022 Oozing/Pharmacist - split CD, AZ/Japan deathgrind/goregrind 2023 FesterDecay - Reality Rotten to the Core, Japanese goregrind 2020

Coffins - Buried Death, Tokyo 2008 Fluids - Not Dark Yet, brutal deathgrind AZ 2021

Perverted Ceremony - Sabbat of Behezaël, Belgium 2017 Bafomet - Baptized In Goat Blood, killer punky blackened speed metal from Japan 2023. So good, even the clean vocals on track 3 don't phase me. No doubt I'll be coming back to this one daily for awhile. Nightpröwler - Unholy Rawness, punky blackened speed metal from Ecuador 2017

Ereshkigal - Tragedies of Death, Mexico 2020 Gratzug - Offenbarung, Germany 2014

Invocation - Attunement to Death, Chile 2020 Bleed - Magna Morte, Chile 2021 Rebaelliun - Burn the Promised Land, Brazil 1999

Devourment - Obscene Majesty, BDM Dallas Texas 2019 Devourment - Butcher the Weak, 2005

Grave - Back from the Grave, 2002 Grave - Burial Ground, 2010

Barbaric Horde - Axe of Superior Savagery, war metal Portugal 2020 Bode Preto - Inverted Blood, black/death Brazil 2012 Morbosidad - Profana La Cruz Del Nazareno, war metal Houston Texas 2008 Invocation Spells - Descendent the Black Throne, black/thrash Chile 2015

Razor - Evil Invaders, Canada 1985 Razor - Violent Restitution, 1988

Exciter - Heavy Metal Maniac, Canada 1983 Exciter - Violence & Force, 1984

Bonjour Ari. Si tu es là, je suppose qu'il doit être temps pour moi d'aller me coucher. Arboricidio - What we Leave Behind, d-beat crust based in London with members from Spain, Italy and Germany. Deletär - S/T, hc crust Saint Étienne, France 2023 I concur, Slowly We Rot #1, CoD #2. For whatever reason I happen to really like World Demise and put it at #3.