markm

Well done my man. I think you and Navy are about the same age so I have at least 10 on you. In Brenda's case she was able to take classes as a bennie for working at the Mount. The U is supposed to encourage employees furthering her their education but she had a control freak selfish boss and co worker who seemed to begrudge her and made it difficult...like some of the classes were during her work day and they just made it hard. But, like you, she found a way. And like you she had a bunch of credits from other colleges and U's...ended up getting an art degree as that's where most of her credits were with a human services minor. She actually uses her art degree in a sense as she's one of the go-to's on campus for desk top publishing art, brochures and web shit like that. It was one of the hardest things she's ever done. I'm proud of her doing it in her 40's and finally got her diploma at 50. She says other than our daughter and marriage it's her most meaningful accomplishment. She was so proud and I'm proud of her. And she's no slacker, having earned employee of the month at least twice and serving on committees as an admin and not a prof. You got this man! You won't regret the work when it's all said and done.

2022 stuff: Wilderun/Epigone-prog lovers rejoice, pleasant enough for a Saturday morning but don't love this style of prog over all. CUL/pre-released tracks on Bandcamp-sgtm NP Wiegedood/There’s Always Blood At The End Of The Road-sgtm a couple of tracks in.

You better stick around or I'm driving out to Anne Arundel in a beat up pickup truck and a shovel. What are you getting your degree in? My wife finished hers a Mount Saint Mary's U, she took one class a semester and then picked up the pace-took her 6 years to finish her undergrad while working full time and being a Mom. I stepped up cooking dinner, taking our daughter to activities and being home in the afternoon when she got off the bus through the evening. It's not easy. I know that for sure. Congratulations for seeing the end in sight.

Yep, fair enough guys. It is what it is. There is a lot of heavy music of many types to be enjoyed. That is something to celebrate.

Even I like this album-hooray for me

Well that's good to hear.

.....other than Bandcamp and social media...

It's all good-we're having a friendly debate. I don't pretend to have the answers or even be "right". I'm not even saying the music was necessarily better. I'm trying to look at it from an organizational standpoint. I'm looking at the system as a whole-does it work for the artist and consumer from nurturing and growing and developing talent all the way to providing a service and product to a public that actually wants said product? Does the system work? Is it functional? Is it fair to both artist and consumer. Surely not to the artist. It’s a theoretical debate and a mute point given the huge changes in technology and the music industry. For one thing, people aren’t interested in aggressive guitar music en masse as they were when I was young. Streaming has of course completely upended album sales, otherwise Mastodon, LoG, and Gojira would all be millionaires. Or maybe not, metal doesn’t fill stadiums anymore. Cleary, there’s a difference between the more upstream underground that I’ve traditionally listened to post 2,000 and the real underground you and GG mostly post. I do listen to a fair amount of stuff that's not simply the popular blog darlings but many of those would be in genres I don't believe you frequent-experimental, droney, avantish, etc. But just thinking of the well known artists-the Opeth/Amon Amarth/Dark Tranquility/Katonia/Marduk/Nile/Bohemoth/MDB/HOF/EW/Ihsahn/Enslaved's/Neurosis' of the metal world-Many if not most of these artists--are on some kind of label and more often than not have production credits whereas as GG often points out, most of the bands you all tend to post are are self released and self produced and one would presume have a much smaller audience than the anointed extreme metal artists who, themselves, have a small audience. The former, I should think, operate in a more systematic, strategic fashion and are interested in something we might agree on has to do with an element of "success" (in a free market sense) much more than a lot of these other bands you guys bring forth that are truly under the radar. For them, there probably isn't any "system" that they would want to work with. They're the sort of anti-anti of the metal world complete with their misanthropic, anti-social imaging, many seemingly prefering anonymity, obscurity, mystery even than participation in any system that has winners and losers. The former, I speculate would like to operate in a system that allows for an element of success- more exposure in the extreme metal world that would provide them a means to support themselves and provide a (hopefully) growing fanbase with music. But such systems as well as supply/demand don't exist or so it seems. I have to wonder if there is a better business-artist model for both artist and consumer.

Hey Jon, that was definitely a band that got on a number of above ground lists as I'm sure you know as an insider-haha. I thought it was pretty good but took a pass on purchasing. See, I do actually say no from time to time. It's a fun listen tho.

I'm going to just camp out here for the next ten months. Done!

I'm not arguing for well oiled one man black metal machines, I'm really just saying there were systems in place, infrastructure if you will, and a public who had an appetite for destruction that created a more fertile environment to grow and develop talent. These systems provided a kind of filter which no longer exists. Of course metal was young and the choices were fewer. I love today's array of genres and the creativity but the volume is daunting to say the least and requires wading through vast streams to self filter the wheat from the chafe. And as I've said before, the process of discovering new music without it being completely scattershot is inefficient. I mean, I'm just speaking for myself and my experience. And, it' not like I'm not going to stop looking for music or anything, I'm just saying from my perspective it's too much. It's like being in a sandbox and randomly grabbing a handful of tens of thousands of grains of sand and casting your lot with those grains. But at the end of the day, I find the music I find through various sources and spend time with those grains that I connect most with. Financial success isn't a reality right now. The day of the rock star is long gone. I have no idea. Maybe being marginalized is good. Music for the outsider, inaccessible and repellant to the 99. But you need enough interest to keep the art and culture sustainable. So many of the established artists are getting old. It would be interesting to look forward 30 years and see if metal survives with a thriving underground, small but large enough to sustain a "scene" or if it dies out after generations of people who have no real interest in aggressive guitar based music.

I think about some of those bands that I came up with in the 80's that blew up like Twisted Sister or GnR's who cut their teeth playing in the L.A. or New York show circuits and came out of the box-or so they sounded-fully formed ready for prime time. Of course they were playing accessible hard rock and the public had an appetite for that kind of music but, by the time I and millions of my peers heard Stay Hungry (their 3rd album, I believe) my senior year in H.S. way back in '84, Sister had been performing since '76 or thereabouts. They were a pretty well oiled machine....vs a one man project who never plans to play live and doesn't have people around him helping him develop his craft so to speak....

A big part of this whole piece of details can be the gear you listen to beyond the production. For instance, I was reevaluating Ruins Of Beverast/The Thule Grimoires, an album I admire, but have struggled with due to its meandering atmospheres that test my focus. But it's a cool albums. It sounded OK on my Sonos basic house speaks and pretty muddy in my Rav-4 (no surprise) but listening on my FiiO player which has a decent DAC/amp and Periodic IEM's made the album sound so much better in terms of details. It just came alive. And same with something cavernous like Mortriferrum/Preserved in Torment, a genre which can get lost with bloated bass given room acoustics. But on a decent little head system, there's quite a lot going under the hood that just isn't that apparent otherwise. Some say the best $500 headphone you can buy are two $250 headphones that give you a different coloration and appreciation of different kinds of music-say one that's more forward and aggressive with slightly recessed treble that will be more forgiving of harshness and one that has fantastic detail retrieval and accuracy. I definitely want the thunder, but even if I have swap out my gear, I want to be able to hear those details when it matters and I actually think a log of extreme black and death have great details but can be hard to preproduce properly. Decent head gear helps (for me) sort out chaotic, confused extreme metal that can otherwise sound like a hot mess.

Wow GG. Your dedication to the black arts as per usual is remarkable.

That's a good point-not giving notoriety or $ to someone that can benefit who's a legit dirt bag. It's one thing to say, I'm not going to deny myself the pleasure of enjoying Picasso's art because he was reportedly a misogynist who abused women repeatedly or demand we tear down The Jefferson Memorial because the man was had a relationship with a woman he kept as a slave-they're dead!

ruins of beverast /the thule grimoires

I've done a fair amount of mindful meditation myself although I'm not nearly as disciplined as I wish I were in my practice. Lately, I've been using a Headspace app on my phone for guided meditations. I've tried with music, but overall, I find it interferes with my ability to stay in the moment and watch my breath, but I know a lot of people like mediation with music. I've come to prefer listening to natural sound.

If the details are there, I want to be able to hear them while not sacrificing grunt.

Thanks everyone for the thoughtful responses. GG, I probably do bend over backwards sometimes because I know it's easy to personalize things. Also, I wanted to say from the get-go that it's a tightrope of having criticisms of the raw black/death while still enjoying a fair percentage of it. On the subject of clarity vs fuzz, part of the equation for me is being able to hear the details. I wonder sometimes with cruder production, if the details simply aren't there or if they are sacrificing details that do exist for the lower fi sounding mix....probably works for raw black and cavernous OSDM, but I think of a lot of modern death metal or anything that's a little more technical being congested and confused and hearing details can be important...

Dillinger Escape Plan/Miss Machine Metallica/Ride the Lightning-high water mark, remember when I bought this album it was probably the heaviest thing I'd heard and when I first heard Fight Fire with Fire, thought it was hardcore punk, times sure change but Fight Fire/RTL/ For Whom the Bell Tolls still gets me hyped for one of the greatest 3 album opening trios of all time from me.

Those of us veterans of the trade have a long story of our trip through the metalsphere to 2021. I'd love to hear any of the posters journey, I know you have one....Everybody's got a story, don't they? Here's mine in a nutshell.... I’ve been discussing, debating and generally bullshitting with all of the metal-fi transplants for years and I’d like to say here it’s been my great pleasure coming to these forums, commiserating with the friendly, intelligent group here on the metal forum. Thank you for the work cultivating this forum! Like the GG, I find the present era a playground for fans of heavy music but, I obviously come from a different perspective. What I love is the diversity of metal. I don’t really care about genres, it’s just soundwaves hitting my ears. In fact, I'll grab oddball albums that I probably wouldn't listen to in their entirety very often just to add some texture to my playlists. Shit, now that I think of it, I think I'll grab that Helloween album I was crapping on earlier in the year for some goofy fun. Or some eccentric prog. Shoot, I'll throw on some over the top symphonic horror like Epica-fuck it-that girl can sing her ass off. In the beginning.... My story is really of a guy who got hooked into rock and metal in my high school years in the 80’s surrounded by modern rock kids and had few peers that loved metal and then drifted away in the 90’s when thrash and hair metal ran their course and alt metal became redundant. Years later, sick of hearing Creed and Limp Bizkit on the radio, I realized I still liked to rawk and returned to the pursuit of new music in the digital age in the early 2000’s. I remember getting on Stonerrock.com back in 2002 or thereabouts and finding Chad Bowar who was the editor for About.com’s heavy metal page. Every month they’d post their best albums of the month. Back then it was a lot of stoner metal (Fu and Magnet-I'll never forget those binges we had together), doom and post metal and new discoveries every month. Albums like Leviathan, Dopethrone, Ghost Reveries, The Illusion of Motion, Oceanic, Surrounded by Thieves and Through Silver and Blood led me to open the Pandora's box of extreme metal. Sure, a lot of it was mainstream as it comes, at least in extreme metal. There was Opeth and Enslaved and prog through the lens of death and black metal, post metal (and post everything else, really), power metal, gothic, beauty and the beast symphonic tripe, metal adjacent, the explosion of female fronted wicca stoner doom, At-Dark-Amon Amarth-Tranquility-of the gates melo-overdone-deth, meloblack, atmo-never-eding-black, atmospheric/folk/Pegan/viking everything, math metal, metallic hardcore, entombedcore, OSDM, hard doom, blackened sludge (can I get a hell's yeah Lord Mantis), second wave Nordic black, brutal technical death (meaning shit like Nile but not techdeth if you please), Sunn0))) inspired hordes of drone, avante-weird-fuckery, DSO and the dissonance clones……a never ending sea of Mary Poppins wonderland for the damned. But time waits for no one and the devil will have your soul.... Jump forward to 2012, my collection outstripped my Ipod’s capacity and I decided to look into audio solutions. So, I began putting a little stereo and dedicated headphone set-up. I joined Head-Fi’s metal forum where I got schooled in fidelity, metal, dynamic range and compression. One of the poster's, Alex was passionate about demanding quality audio recording in metal with dynamic range and he founded Metal-Fi. Cards on the table.... So there lies my biases, a wide range of styles that include plenty of mainstream bands along with extreme metal and experimental, genre-shaping-shifting artists as well as adjacent metal. Full stop, I like music that’s well recorded and sounds good. Now, along the way to audio paradise, The Goat General formerly Whitenoise came in and shook things up with his insistence on listening to raw, underground music. He ushered in a new era at M-F and along came many of the ne'er do wells we have here now, all of whom found a voice and an audience-at least in me. I’m a big fan of all you guys. These guys have been great for my listening as I’ve enjoyed peppering my collection with more underground works. But as the more progressive and diverse listenership at Metal-Fi drifted elsewhere, I feel an obligation to stand my ground and advocate for well recorded good sounding music with dynamic range. The Absolute Sound....IMHO there doesn’t have to be a divide between raw and production values. Music can have an edge and be well recorded. And it’s happening with more extreme cavernous or at least intentionally raw or brutal---fill in the blank-sounding bands-looking at you Blood Incantation and Cerebral Rot-well done boys-DR: 12-thank you very much! Truth-I like plenty of raw music these days, but wouldn’t want to make a steady diet of it anymore than I would with post progressive sludge. Naturally, as a guy who gravitates to more then more popular (ahem, vetted) releases, I have a few minor quibbles with the low-fi-we-like-raw-fisting crowd. First, it's great live. I’d go back to MDF in a heartbeat. The visceral thrill of brutal DM should be heard live. But....oh you know there has to be a but.....with all of the self-released material, I feel like many of these artists would benefit from collaboration-working with additional ears giving constructive criticism and input. Like, uh, dude that sucks. Dead used to post about the show circuit and studio system that he was involved with in OZ. And I think he has some legitimate points, being that back in the day bands would spend time cutting their teeth in clubs working to get recording contracts. They'd really have to hone their craft, then would be and forced to collaborate, compromise, edit and ultimately produce better material. Today, left to their own devices, we find some brilliant work but often we find artists doubling down on their excesses and would benefit from some serious proofing. To be sure, some of those excesses are fantastic. There's something to be said about making strong artistic choices and sticking to your guns. I get that. And they have charm. But I find some of it (certainly not all), repetitive, samey, lacking in varied musical ideas, devoid of distinctive, memorable songwriting -frankly some of it is just uninspiring. Yet there are gems to be found which is why I keep one eye open for the. It's prolly what keeps most of us in the game. Keep 'em coming! Today-I have to admit, after several years of exposing myself to the land of the goat, my biases are actually moving away from slick modern production which is a completely different animal than production values and dynamic range. Two separate things-heavy/raw, visceral completely separate from SQ, fidelity, etc. I think some of the guys who listen to predominantly raw material, get skewed and begin thinking that-only raw or low-fi recording techniques can do justice to metal. And, it’s all good. It’s simply a preference. But let’s face it, humans are tribal. We have an instinct to protect and defend what we perceive as ours against outsider threats. This is mine and that is yours. Me, I don’t have any issues mixing peanut butter with chocolate. Or for that matter, eating cotton candy. After all, terms like poser and hipster are just words meant to trivialize other kinds of kinds of culture you don't like. But they don't add much to the conversation. So coming full circle, I've grown to love a lot of rougher, dungeon-y, putrid sounding filth. Some people just want the most brutal, primitive sounding material that they can find. I’ll take a small percentage-it does have a place. My argument is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Now, where's my new copy of Deafheaven.

Thanks gents for taking the time to post here.

You've been busy Dead NP: Celeste limited tracks on BC from their forthcoming Assassine(s) album

I finally started organizing my albums from 21 for the Listmania thread and had some thoughts on the metal I purchased. Don't want to clog up that thread, so I'll just post them here. I’ve had enough time digesting all the music I bought at the end of 2021 and through January. I really need the time to think and evaluate so I’m not just obsessively purchasing music without some level of mindfulness. Been writing lists with for a few years now like many of You. I write these lists for myself really to come back to to remember my reflections years down the road. It helps me remember shit if I want to make a point or pull from a list from a given year....keeping track of albums from year to year or decade. I do enjoy the forum communities I’ve involved myself with. I enjoy thinking about music, rationalizing my consumption of albums and looking for connections. Yeah, I enjoy the discussion and the analysis. So here goes… Well, I’ve been vocal about my stepping back from the hampster wheel of new metal for several years now reaching a loggerhead dam in 2021 for a variety of reasons. One being that I spent less time critically listening with other areas in my life taking precedence. The other is I’d rather spend time listening to music I own than searching for new music. Over the last few years (since 2015 or thereabouts) I’ve felt metal has become stagnant. Then, without fail, at the end of the year I find a slew of new music that changes my opinion. Every year, my curmudgeonry is upended by creative artists that find fresh ways to interpret old genres and to push boundaries. Now, as I look at 60+ albums both metal and non-metal ( notwithstanding a good deal of classical music that took up much ear space in 2021), most of my metal, purchased in December, I’ve put in the time listening to evaluate. I’ve got a nice rotation I’ll listen to driving to and from work and all of it goes into a 2021 playlist that I’ll live with for much of 2022 and beyond-looking to create a heavy music stew with a myriad of flavors. I hate the idea of buying music just to keep up. But I do enjoy being part of the discussion and following trends in heavy music. That said, it's important for me to be able find music that I hope to return to in years to come rather than just listening to music in the moment without coming back. Mostly, I enjoy following my muse as they say letting my intuition lead me in all sorts of different directions. But I ask myself questions like these: Do you go back and check what you were listening to 2-5-10 years ago? Do you routinely revisit albums? Do you have many albums that you listen to a couple of times, then put away for ever? Do you lose track? Or is it just random? These are rhetorical for me. So I make my little lists. And then try to go back. It's partly why I like physical media. The visual and physical qualities help me revisit like books in a library.

Spent a little time going through the forum recommendations/Youtube posts-I do go through and listen to stuff you guys post from time to time and one of my resolutions is to try to keep up with releases better especially when my outdoor activity heats up in the Spring which is when I fell off the wagon last year. Bestiality/Sacrificial Chants-this has promise-the question for me with this kind of raw material is always will it hold up over the course of an album as a complete work with memorable distinctive tracks or blur as indistinct aesthetic. Sometimes that is enough. Netativa-this one sounds good to me on first listen.