GoatmasterGeneral

8 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

If an intro or outro goes for 3 or 4 minutes that is a wasted slot that could have been filled with another song.

Well it's filler to make the albums or EP's appear longer than they really are because clearly they didn't have another actual track to put in that slot. The worst is when it's just like a short little 15 or 20 minute EP with a 3 or 4 minute intro track. Weaksauce. I just wanna tell them "Dudes, put the damn bong down for 10 minutes and write another fucking song!!"

6 minutes ago, JamesT said:

DragonForce - "Maximum Overload"

My favorite DF album - not a single weak track.

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. 😜

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

I just spent some time on YT looking for new music and I realised another reason why I don't do it as often as I used to. I don't have the patience for intros any more. I do need to get outside and do some work but it's not really the deadline of that which is driving me. I just don't seem to keep playing anything after a minute or so if the first track is some kind of intro that doesn't catch me.

I automatically skip roughly 90 seconds ahead on every YT album video i click on to hopefully skip the intros. Pisses me off when 90 seconds isn't far enough 'cause they've got a 3 or 4 minute intro. Can't imagine there'd be any metalhead in the entire world who really wants to sit through a pointless 3 or 4 minute intro. 

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

38 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

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.

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.

23 hours ago, navybsn said:

The Looney tunes down here take everything as either 1) Jehoshaphat is telling us all to repent and devote our lives to him (see the recent earthquake in NJ as said evidence), or 2) that it's the end of the world and the Rapture is imminent (see any predictable natural event outside the norm a la said eclipse). Both are interchangeable and or substitutable depending on who you're talking at. I think I've personally lived through 30+ Raptures and at least a dozen extinction events.

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.

35 minutes ago, markm said:

Yeah, and the other thing is I'm kind of into it. I mean, into it enough to write lists and buy albums, but your REALLY into metal. It's a huge part of who you are. I respect that. To me it's kind of a voyeuristic dark little corner of my life like having an affair or something that I keep to myself of the most part.

Your also unique in that you take ginormous amounts of time to find the music that appeals to you and buck the notion of using referrals and recommendations whereas I think I might be more typical in that I need filters, I need short cuts. So for me having online sources of information where cites list albums that are coming out and provide mini reviews and monthly and year end lists are really important because I don't spend much time in YouTube or other 'net sources looking for gold nuggets. I need Cliff Notes. It's not perfect but it keeps me in the mix and has given me hours of listening pleasure. 

I would happily use the filters and shortcuts too my friend if they took me even close to where I wanted to go. But my problem is they inevitably take me much farther away from my intended destination, so they're of no use to me. Obviously it'd be so much easier for me to just be able to enjoy whatever music was readily available, like turning on the radio was for lots of people I knew back in the day. I'd love it if I could just buy like the 40 albums on the Decibel list every year and then just enjoy them and be done with it. But that method doesn't work for me. I have some pretty specific requirements for what I want from my music, and I have yet to find a reliable source (other than Marko) who consistently nails it and gives me the type of music I'll most likely dig. So to find what I specifically want, I know I'm going to have to put in the time, there's just no way around it. Because if I don't even know what I want until I find it, how is anyone else supposed to know? But that's ok because I happen to actually enjoy the hunt for new music, and at least I do feel that for the most part the bulk of that time I've invested has consistently paid back some pretty solid dividends. If it didn't, I guess I'd stop wasting my time fishing in the fishless lake, and I'd be back to square one.

But I can certainly understand that you, like many others need filters and shortcuts, and I'm truly glad that you have found sources that can give you the kind of time saving recos that consistently work for you. That's awesome for you. But I need to listen for myself. That's just how I'm wired as a person, I can't take anyone's word for anything, ever, I simply have to see for myself. If you personally Mark, knowing me and knowing my tastes were to listen to 10 albums, and then you reported back that you were firmly convinced that #6 was the one I'd want, I still wouldn't be able to sleep until I'd listened to every single one of the other 9 just to make sure. I'd have no choice, I always have to see for myself and make sure. It would just eat away at me thinking you might've picked the wrong one and I'd possibly missed out on some amazing and life changing music. I suppose I just have a really bad case of FOMO is what is comes down to. That's what drives my marathon late night new music sampling sessions, FOMO. It's not easy being me.

2 hours ago, markm said:

I think a lot of guys in our generation basically got burnt out when as you say the good stuff went underground and metalcore, alt metal (much of which I like to certain point) and Nu metal were the norm along with changes in tastes to hip hop/rap. 

I should be clear, I was listening to other albums besides stoner metal but it was what I think I prefer to call riff rock (stoner) and doom and then post metal which opened me up to hardcorish vocals that got me to listening to metal with growls. I listed albums that came out during that time period, but I was buying a bunch of albums we all know that came out earlier.  Slaughter to the Soul seems like the first reco people give for melodeth. That was one of my first pick ups. I still listen to it from time to time. I bought some cringy stuff that like a bunch of symphonic albums like Nightwish, within temptation, after forever,  Dimu Borgir, Cradle of Filth (both band I rarely listen to anymore, except for Nightwash haha-I still have a soft spot even though it's really pop dressed in metal clothing), and other bands I still like-The Gathering, Tristania, Tiamat. I did like symphonic black like Arcturus' Aspera Hiems Symphonia  I don't know why I didn't buy classic DM, because I bought the usual second wave black suspects you listed in this time period-Immortal, Gorgoroth (bunch of their stuff), Emperor, the Darkthrone seminal early albums, Satyricon, Mayhem. Never bought any Burzum. But then, I pretty much moved on from most of that stuff except Emperor, DT and Immortal. 

I guess because I had completely missed the rise of black and death metal in the early 90's and was going through all of this stuff at the same time so many years later, I just never gave any weight to what others might've thought were supposedly the better bands or the classic albums. I'm definitely not a usual suspects guy. I just listened to everything for myself with an open mind and then whatever appealed to me I'd go back to, and anything that didn't grab me right away got passed over. Which isn't really any different than what I do now, it's just that I had close to 20 years of metal to go through all at once back then, which was a bit overwhelming. So I just wasn't going to waste any time at all on the stuff that wasn't blowing my doors off, because I was finding so much other stuff that really was. It might not be fair to judge 2000's albums against those old 90's albums on an even footing but that's the position I was in, discovering it all together at the same time like that. 

So the net result was I have a pretty low opinion now of a lot of these bands that are considered by many to be the consensus cornerstones of early 90's extreme metal. Not just to be contrary which is what I think many people seem to think, but just to be honest with myself about what I like and what I don't. I couldn't possibly care any less what some other dude's opinion of Morbid Angel or Deicide might be, those bands mean nothing to me, I give them no metal cred status points whatsoever because their music does absolutely nothing for me. Same with a lot of those other early 90's Florida death metal bands as well as just about all of those original early 90's Norwegian black metal bands - save for Darkthrone whom I do really like, just not necessarily the consensus albums I'm supposed to like. I'd put The Cult is Alive far ahead of Funeral Moon or Transylvanian Hunger for instance. I've just formed my own ideas about which bands and albums should be the exalted ones, and very few of them match up with the consensus revered early 90's originators. I've replaced most of those bands with my own picks which are often more obscure less visible bands. Nobodies in other words. But they're somebodies to me and that's all that matters.

This is why over the years I've pushed back so hard on your tendency to let others' concensus picks save you some of the arduous and very time consuming digging. Because I know that if you were to take any 100 metal albums at random and have 100 metalheads evaluate and rank them all, I can predict with 100% certainty that my picks for the best and worst standouts aren't going to match up with the group's consensus opinion. At the Gates Slaughter of the Soul, an album you brought up that gets mentioned quite a bit did absolutely nothing for me, nor did any of their other albums, so AtG has no significance at all to me either positively or negatively. Same with early Carcass which so many seem to love, those albums don't mean anything at all to me. Don't hate 'em or anything, I just don't care, they're not on my radar. They're insignificant to me. My friends mostly all seem to love Voivod and Vektor and I can't stomach listening to even one song from either one of them. I could give you dozens of examples like this. I just go by what I enjoy listening to the most so I have my own favorites and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

Now you know that I harbor much disdain and repulsion for all that frilly sparkly symphonic stuff, and that even includes Emperor whom all my metalhead friends seem to revere. Won't waste much time talking about any of that stuff because I'm not at all familiar with any of those kinds of bands or their albums so I really don't have much to say about them. Like power metal or Queensryche it's immediately apparent 5 seconds in that stuff's just not going to be for me, so I've just ignored it all for the most part, as if it didn't exist. Which is weird because my best and oldest and dearest friend in the entire world now tells me that Nightwish is his favorite metal band. And I have trouble reconciling that fact with the dude I remember going to all those many dozens if not hundreds of metal and punk shows with back in the day. We were like brothers for years, but then we got separated in '93 when he moved down to Nashville for over a decade. And from that point on musically speaking he went one way while I went the other. We're both in Jersey now and we still hang out, and we'll still always have a lot of the old 80's stuff we grew up with in common like Overkill and Riot and Sisters of Mercy... but we have an unspoken agreement that I won't make him listen to my ugly black/death goat filth and he won't ask me to listen to his symphonic pop metal.

20 minutes ago, Yannis said:

Yeah time waits for no man and i can already feel the cold lingering breath of death on my neck 😭. At least i take i solace in the fact that i will have several more killer albums to jam to with you guys on board hehe. Now i imagine you guys like a row of ripped tall vikings in battle armor all the while i'm just cowering in a corner like an infant, seriously you're not old at all..on the contrary i love to converse with more mature guys, like i dont know how to explain, it's like they know what they want and have more experience in many things. And please you're triggering my cute aggression when you speak greek words..its so adorable 😖 You're kidding mee? My dad only listen to ACDC despite all my efforts to introduce him to new stuff he just says "Ai Yannis this is demonic!!" (he said this for Black Sabbath's self-titled btw can you believe the guy..)  and goes back to listening to Thunderstruck for the 146743th time... Oh i don't mind to put the title before the link, its just how i was used to posting back in the old steam group. I'm more keen on posting individual songs, because after i listen to the entire album i pick my favourite track, i hope its not troublesome. I don't blame you my boyfriend is from Spain and finds it very difficult to learn greek but i help him all i can xD

Alright now I have to ask, how old is your dad? My dad was a Bob Dylan fanatic, but he was born in 1934 so I guess that's understandable. He liked 50's do-wop music too. In his later years (1990's early 2000's) he finally branched out and discovered some "newer" classic rock from the 70's, stuff like Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Kansas, Billy Joel and Springsteen, but being an intolerant metalhead I wasn't able to really share any of that with him. Wasn't about to congratulate my old man for finally discovering some 30 year old has-been milquetoast bands. I sometimes wonder if I would have ever been able to introduce him to some better music, but he died in 2007 so we'll never know. Shit I haven't ever heard any of the AC/DC albums that came after Flick of the Switch in '83. So looks like I wouldn't even be able to get along musically with your dad either, who I suspect is probably a bit younger than me, so it's not just a generation thing. I can't imagine wanting to listen to any AC/DC album 146743 times.

15 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

That is indeed a hell of a blurb. I think maybe we need a more metal term for lily gilding in this manner: Lamb-gutting? Liver-grating? Limb-graveling? Any suggestions?  

Bowel stretching. Because that was some load of shit they sharted out just to say it was ugly dissonant death metal. Unless it's a war metal band from the Ross Bay Cult school of the black arts and then I suppose goat fucking would probably be more appropriate.

Warning - Watching From a Distance, UK doom 2006. Vocals were a bit off-putting at first, but then I realized they fall into the so bad they're good category, and now I'm rather enjoying this.

25 minutes ago, Yannis said:

Heyy καλημέρα! I never expected to be asked something like this, panic attack INCOMING!!! No its fine hehe, I mean it's only fair to share some things about me since i'll be joining you guys along your everyday musical journeys. To put it simply I posted almost everyday in another metal group through steam, but it pretty much died down and there weren't many people to engage with. So I just googled "metal forum" and found this site! I've been a metalhead ever since my school years. Fun story one of my classmates kept sticking his phone to my eardrum blasting Disturbed haha I'm glad he did that xD Ahh please my English isn't that good, I'm glad at least I'm able to communicate and get my point across, well most of the time 😂 Yeah I love to meet new people also and staring at them creepily until they run away, uhm scratch that last part..thanks for having me! 🥳

(27 isn't even remotely young, but thanks for making me feel better 😥)

ORKBLUT!!!

Haha no dude you're fine, don't panic! I'm not trying to interrogate you or put you on the spot or anything, just extending a friendly hello from the group since I see you here every day now, and inquiring about what your deal is since you hadn't offered any information other than your location. I like meeting new people too, we're a very welcoming bunch over here, and I think I can speak for everyone when I say we're glad to have you.

I understand at 27 you must feel like you're getting older now, rapidly approaching 30 which sounds very adult-like. I remember 27 was the age when I realized there was no going back I was going to be an adult soon whether I liked it or not. Just realized 27 was also the age when I got married for the first time in '88. But trust me aderfé, you're still quite young to someone 62 who was already 35 when you were born.

I'm actually quite fascinated when I meet younger people like you who are into real metal. I've gotten it into my head that young folks under 35 or 40 aren't generally interested in real metal anymore these days. And as someone who has a ten year old son who has yet to really dive head first into music, I spend a fair amount of time wondering what kind of music he could be listening to in a few years when he does (hopefully) become interested in music. So meeting young dudes like you in their 20's who are metalheads gives me some hope that maybe metal could be something that he and I could bond over one day. My dad never cared for any of my music as a teen in the 70's, so we had to bond over sports.

My one big question that I have for you though Yannis, is why do you always seem to post individual songs instead of full albums? Not that there's anything wrong with that, you do you, but most metalheads post the whole album because we tend to listen to albums in their entirety most of the time, not just random songs on shuffle. Except for Mark and his infamous playlists of course.

Also maybe you could start labeling your posts with at least the band name and album/song title? That way when I get one that says "video unavailable" like the one you posted 3 hours ago, I'll still know what it was. Also I'm pretty old and I have a lot of trouble deciphering most of these crazy intricate band logos. ευχαριστώ

And no, if you're wondering I don't speak Greek, but I was married to a Greek and then I worked for Greeks for 20 years so I might've picked up just a few words. 

3 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I knew Americans ate bell peppers rather than capsicums and I can see why they are called bell peppers. I'm pretty sure that as a kid we knew them as just peppers, but I'm not sure if that was exclusively the name for them or not because I don't remember what age I was when I realised the two items were the same thing. This year I grew a heap of different sorts of capsicum and very few were bell shaped, so I see why less people here refer to them as bell peppers.

Prawns at a restaurant are ok because they are prepared, but prawns at home are bloody annoying. Usually they are quite expensive, but they are a bastard to peel, especially when you get a dozen or so on the plate. Many people don't have an issue doing it but I hate doing it at home, probably the same people that enjoy sucking the meat out of a crab's claw. Shrimps are much easier when it comes to prep work but it would take quite a few to satisfy my hungry.

We used to go out on a summer's night and walk around the lake with under water lights and nets catching prawns, some were bite size other were massive. Some nights we'd come home with 5 or 6 kilos of prawns. For a week away we'd catch a years supply of prawns at night and fish during the day. But I'm not a huge fan of frozen seafood any more and most of the places we used to go got fished out and are no longer worth it.

I'm not a huge pizza fan so I don't care what people put on them, but then I have only had Aussie pizzas which are nothing like an American pizza. I wouldn't mind trying an American pizza but I could happily live not having another Aussie pizza in my lifetime.

I don't get real excited about pizza, don't ever eat it more than once a month if that, I could easily go several months between pizzas. But my wife and her mum both liked pineapple on theirs which to me is just sacrilege. I don't want fruit fucking touching my pizza man. That's worse than fruity metalcore with their melodic sing-songy choruses. But we all know Kiwis are a bit weird to begin with. I mean just look at Jon-O Blade and Luxi. The boy likes pizza though of course so I just keep some little $2.50 Totinos frozen ones on hand that I can chuck into the air fryer for 10 minutes for him on a Chewsday arvo after school.

Never had an Aussie pizza during the month I was down there, didn't even see any pizza shops that I recall. Just a bunch of Oportos and tons and tons of noodle shops and greasy fish & chips shops. Here on the east coast especially up here in NY and NJ with our large populations of Italian ancestry, we have a pizza shop on almost every block. In the city you'll often find two or more of them on the same block. Staten Island's the worst, they must have 1 pizza parlor for every 9.2 residents.

As far as peppers go, no one really bothers to say 'bell' anymore except maybe in recipes sometimes it'll say bell peppers. We just call them by their color: red peppers, yellow peppers, green peppers, orange peppers. I won't buy green peppers, mostly just red and occasionally a yellow or an orange one. And then we have all different kinds of hot peppers: poblanos, anaheims, jalapeños, serranos, habaneros...but yeah I put peppers in almost everything I make and then have to pick them all out for the boy because he won't eat them. But I swear when I got married for the final time (never again!) in 2012 and she put "caps" on the shopping list I honestly had no fucking idea what she wanted me to get. 

Kalimera Yannis, if you're going to be posting daily with us here and since you never properly introduced yourself I guess it's time someone asked who you are and what's your story? I see you're in Greece, and you look fairly young (compared to some of us old geezers) how'd you become a metalhead? And welcome to the Metalforum btw it's always good to get new people. Are you a Greek who's fluent in English, or maybe using a translator or maybe a Brit or an American living in Greece? I need to know these things, your English is very good.

3 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Is there a difference between shrimp and prawn? We call the tiny ones that go in meals like fried rice or noodles, shrimp, but anything bigger is called a prawn, and then the really big ones are king prawns. I've never really noticed American's talk about prawns.

I won't say most, but many Americans don't even understand the word prawns, (or capsicum) they're all shrimp to us over here. Don't remember how old I was when I discovered what a prawn was (I do remember it was written on an Asian restaurant's white board as the special and I asked someone I was with wtf are prawns? and was told they were like really huge shrimp) but I was definitely already well into adulthood. We don't usually see those real big 'king prawn' sized ones over here except maybe at certain Asian restaurants. We mostly just get the bite sized ones or the two bite ones in the supermarket, and if you go out to a chain restaurant and order a dish with shrimp, you'll generally get those little tiny ones.

Don't know why they even need to sell the pre cooked ones as the raw shrimp cook up to opaque in just 3 minutes. Don't turn your back on them, they'll overcook and get tough. I buy kilo bags of shrimp mostly because the boy likes them and there aren't that many proteins he really likes. Shrimp is one of those strange products where the big bag can often cost less than the smaller bag. Like ice cream, the little single serving pints are $7 and the bigger 3 pint box (that years ago would've been 4 pints) is only like $4. I try to keep ice cream out of my life because I know I'm a recovering addict, but once the kid discovered the joys of ice cream he started demanding that I keep some in the freezer for him. Fortunately he likes that mint chip flavor that I can't stand. Putting mint in ice cream is just as bad as those idiots who put pineapple on their pizza. 

1 hour ago, markm said:

I see now, that Encyclopedia of HM book was updated ten years later in 2012, so it must have been 2002 when I bought the book and started reading about stoner and doom and figured that might be up my alley, because I had no interest in death metal at the time. I bought a Lamb of God album and hated it and sold it back to the store-hard to believe but the Baltimore area chain Record and Tape Traders would actually give me my money back if I didn't like an album-wtf? What a great place that was.

Looking at LoG album covers, I think it was New American Gospel (2000) or maybe it was As the Palace Burns ('03)-which places my time frame between 2000 and 2003 when I started dabling and that LoG album made me think death metal was not for me until I started listening to Opeth, Behemoth, Nile, Kataklysm,etc.  It was literally unlistenable to me. 

It just so happens there was a lot of newer stoner metal, hardcore influenced stoner/doom and post rock that came out in the early aughts and it was my metal rebirth.  I keep a list of albums like most of us probably do that I buy each year. It was the years between 2000-2005 that solidified my listening. I think in retrospect there was a kind of renaissance of metal and heavy psyche during these years that helped create or delineate many of the sub genres or incubate kernels of heavy musical ideas that would flower that we see prominently today and haven't seen that kind of growth and creativity since...at least in what you'd call mainstream and maybe "arty" metal. Maybe it's different in bestial black/death circles but the aughts were special in my old world of stoner/post metal/post hardocre/doom/hard doom/sludge/avantish, blackened sludge, prog black/death, etc, etc. Something was in the bong water back then.

Here are some of the albums that made a big impression on me. In a sense these are all gateways:

I list them by  year but I didn't buy them all by release date. I jumped around a good bit from year to year. I don't think I really started buying any "mainstream black/death" until 2003 or so:

2000:

Electric Wizard/Dopethrone -this was like the heaviest thing I'd heard in years and it was somewhat of a come to Satan moment of me. 
The Haunted/Made Me Do It- I probably found this album a few years later but was one of those albums where I opened up to 'core vocals and hardcore influenced vox enticed me before death or black vox.
Nevermore/Dead Heart in a Dead World
Fu Manchu/King of the Road-Definitely a eureka album-I absolutely loved Fu.

 

2001:

Boris/Amplifier Worship-Boris were a big influence on my listening especially their early drone masterworks like this beast. It was actually released in '98.

Opeth/Blackwater Park-I actually came to this after Ghost Reveries

 

2002-was a big year: a lot of foundational albums for me in my re emergence

**Isis/Oceanic-Isis began the post metal plunge for me and at this point I was listening to a lot of Neurosis

**Agalloch/The Mantle 
**High on fire/Surrounded by Thieves 
Porcupine Tree/In Absentia
**Dark Tranquility/Damage Done
**Entombed/Morning Star-this was my introduction to Entombed and it was years before I went back to their classics
**The Reverend Bizarre/In the Rectory
Arcturus/The Sham Mirrors
Pentagram/First Daze Here The Vintage Collection (recorded between 73-74 w/  original line up) & Pentagram/Turn to Stone compilation (80’s & 90’s classic Peaceville releases)
**Immortal/Sons of Northern Darkness
**Xasthur/Nocturnal Poisoning-somehow I jumped in to Xasthur early
The Hellacopters/By The Grace of God
Opeth/Deliverance
Orange Goblin/Coup De Grace
 

2003-

Mars Volta/Deloused in the Comatorium
**YOB/Catharsis
**Cult of Luna/The Beyond
Katatonia/The Great Cold Distance
**Spirit Caravan/The Last Embrace (probably Wino's finest hour, IMO)
**Enslaved/Isa
Nebula/Atomic Ritual
**Boris/Akuma No Uta
**Boris At Last/Feedbacker
Naglfar/Sheol
**Sleep/Dopesmoker

2004: really opened up the flood gates

**Mastodon/Leviathan-this definitely pushed the needle-Mastodon's death metal album, some would say\\

**Enslaved/Issa

**Marduk/Plague Angel-this was a pretty big turning point and began my love affair with Mortuus
**Isis/Panopticon 
**CUL/Salvation
**YOB/The Illusion of Motion-one of my favorite albums of all time!
**Blut Aus Nord/Works that Transform God (came out in -'03-such an important album in my metal renaissance)
UFOmammut/Snailking
Therion/Lemuria/Sirius B-went through a symphonic/operatic phase
Dillinger Escape Plan/Miss Machine
***Behemoth/Demigod -an early death metal album for me but I came to this much later 
**Clutch/Blast Tyrant-still one of my favorite hard rock albums 
Neurosis/The Eye of Every Storm
Electric Wizard/We Live
Goat Snake/I and + Dog Days (reissue compilation full length plus EP)
The Haunted/Revolver
Borknagar/Epic
**My Dying Bride/Songs of Darkness, Words of Denial-perhaps beginning my MDB love affair and a great album
Orange Goblin/Thieving from the House of God
Red Giant/Devil Child Blues

2005:

****Opeth/ Ghost Reveries-this was my first Opeth album 
Bill Evans / Bill Evans Trio/The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (essential jazz purchase remastered and complete)-OK, not metal but brilliant!
The Mars Volta/Frances the Mute 
**Sun0))/The Black one
***High On fire/Blessed Black Wings 
**Akercocke/ Words that Go Unspoken, Deeds that go Undone
Nevermore/The godless Endeavor
**Earth/Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method    
**Dark Tranquility/Character
Deathspell Omega/Kenose
**Primordial/The Gathering Wilderness
*Moonsorrow/Verisakeet
Acid King/III
Corrosion of Conformity/Through the Arms of God 
Kamelot/The Black Halo-I was listening to a little power metal 
 

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.

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

Shrimp (Prawns) were cheap this year it would have been a good time to throw them on the barbie, although most people cook the shit out of them anyway. Actually for a country that prides itself on a 'barbie' there is a lot of Aussies who cook the shit out of the food to an almost inedible state.

The Fosters beer promos worked well though because exporting it in the quantities we did meant that no reasonable Aussie was caught drinking the stuff.

Paul's looking a little like he was a shrimp on a barbie these days. But I thought we were all supposed to look and sound like Crocodile Dundee, or more recently Steve Irwin. Crickey!

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.

8 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I remember that interview. While us Aussies may not all have the hero quality of that guy we do all aspire to reach the legendary status of him. Sadly though the idiot host on the left is too often represented by overseas media as a 'real Aussie'.

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.

2 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Now I know you're taking the piss.

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.

37 minutes ago, navybsn said:

Guess the world didn't end with the total eclipse. Either that or I wasn't in the group being Raptured. Too bad, I hadn't planned for dinner tonight and didn't really want to do any chores tonight.

Guess I'll have to wait for the next predicted extinction event to procrastinate.

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.

2 hours ago, markm said:

I'd have to really think about that myself. I'm not sure if it would be that different than my 20 favorite albums of all time. I've got a couple of thoughts. As far as gateways, Dark Tranquility was one of my first intros but I honestly don't remember if I bought  Character or Damage Done first, but both of those would be up there and are kind of interchangeable. My gateways would include those and albums like  Ghost Reveries, Slaughter of the  Soul and Gorgoroth's Ad Majorem was one of the first BM albums that riveted me. But the albums that really had an impact were more in the post metal and stoner/doom realm because they convinced me there was interesting riff rock I needed to dig for-off hand I'd say, Oceanic, Through Silver and Blood, The Illusion of Motion, Leviathon, Surrounded by Thieves, In Search Of, Welcome to Sky Valley, Blast Tyrant, Dopes to Infinity....

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.

28 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

It doesn't matter the content of the podcast the chicks just flock to the hot Aussie for the sound of his voice.

To be honest I have never heard an American suggest the Aussie accent it unpleasant. Maybe I'm taking the piss a bit suggesting all the chicks will flock to such an accent but most American's I know rate the Aussie accent pretty highly.

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.

32 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

NP: Abberation - Refracture

Don't know how this gets in under black metal. I gets they have to categorize it somewhere. This is right off the Impetuous Ritual branch. The opening track, at least, is about how I like to take this stuff: a trudge through several varieties of foul, noisy, clattering, but structured metal. I'll take it.

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.

6 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Altar of Plagues - Teethed Glory and Injury   ...I feel like @markm would appreciate the artsy synth/industrial post-BM vibe of this album. Great on the big speakers.

5 hours ago, Thatguy said:

I listened to this album years ago on headphones on a long haul flight. I had it on repeat and kept drifting off to sleep then back into the music. I finally stopped listening and decided that I had fathomed all its convolutions but I was probably in fact dreaming. 

Excellent album but I haven't listened to it again since then.

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