JonoBlade

Queen II is heavier, pound for pound, than Sheer Heart Attack, I think. Queen I has Son and Daughter which might be my favourite song. For the record, I was born in March '74, a few weeks after Queen II was released. (Wikipedia says they finished some recording in January, then mixed/mastered and RELEASED by 8 March) It was when Highlander came out in 1986, which Queen did the soundtrack for, when I really got into them and went back to discover the 70s. They also did the Flash Gordon soundtrack (most of it is terrible), and I had seen that movie in the cinema in 1980. The outro credits roll with the song "Hero" which was pure rock. I think the track "Gimme the Prize" from A Kind of Magic might be singularly responsible for kick starting my entire interest in heavy metal. I had dabbled before that with Twisted Sister and was quite into it, but it was gimmicky and the hook was hilarious music videos as much as the music. It could have been a phase that passed. Which is why I have this bizarre affinity to Queen. I like the silly piano bits, ukulele, honky tonk and guitar noises as much as the rockers. To me the ebb and flow/variety of the albums was key. I am still that way. A relentless attack for 40 minutes usually bores me. It's why I like Black Sabbath so much too. Those early albums have massive variety on them, albeit darker overall than anything Queen did.

I meant to pick up on a similar Queen comment from ages ago. I'd argue that the first, true and best phase of Queen was '73 to '75 when they released 4 albums. From A Day at the Races onwards there was a slide towards more crowd pleasing tunes. By 1980 and The Game they were doing Dragon Attack and Don't Try Suicide. And using keyboards. A Kind of Magic is pretty awesome (like a few bona fide heavy metal tracks + only one or two clunkers). But they were a spent force. Innuendo does have some good songs...well it is bookended by good tracks. When you're writing songs about your cat pissing on the sofa, there's not that much further to fall. You mentioned hating Killer Queen. Yeah, ok, but it is a great piano driven song with no synthesisers which gets my vote. Overplayed sure. Nothing is as overplayed as Bohemian Rhapsody but it still gets me every time. A Night at the Opera is a perfect album, which is annoying because it's so bloody popular. Like rating TBA as best Metallica album. I assume people buy new vinyl either because they have bad eyesight and need the full 12" to see the artwork or are profoundly stupid. This is another thing bands should speak out about (along with Spotify being shit). I.e. be honest about what is the best and most efficient way for you as a fan to compensate them. My guess is that digital is far more profitable. I am now used to $10 for a download from bandcamp which is probably more pure profit that selling a $20/$25 + postage vinyl record which had a six month lead time, is made from dead dinosaurs and plantation trees established over old growth forests (sleeve + mailer). It makes my skin crawl that downloads are often more expensive than CDs. The world is geared to being as wasteful as possible. Mind you, there's far worse things to spend your money on. It is potentially a collectible time capsule.

How much you can cram on an LP is down to how good the guy who cut the vinyl was. But the more you put on, the weaker the sound gets. I read somewhere that Def Leppard Hysteria was one disc at the limit (62:32). I have that on a single vinyl. The first press of ...And Justice For All was a single LP apparently, but mine from 1988 is a double. It appears that TBA was always two discs (62:40). I don't have it as thrash is dead to me after 1990. Actually I think I have practically no vinyl past 1990 (a handful of new releases in the last 10 years only) as the output quality from all my favourite bands drove off a cliff. Queen's last true album was released in Feb 1991. I mean it's not great but mainstream music died with Freddie Mercury. Fun fact, the LP of Innuendo is edited by 5 minutes to fit onto one LP, yet the full length CD was only 53:48. Of course, it's unlikely both sides are exactly equal in length but you're right it should not have been hard to get As I DIe onto the SoG LP. The adjusted dollar vinyl value is really interesting. I believe I have seen US bands on bandcamp selling vinyl for around $25, but in the UK you'd pay at least £30 in a record store for a new vinyl. I sometimes browse HMV in the local mall because it is across the way from the health food shop, but I've never bought anything.

Telling it like it is: CRADLE OF FILTH's DANI FILTH: 'SPOTIFY Are The Biggest Criminals In The World' - BLABBERMOUTH.NET I wish more bands and artists would call out Spotify. Time for Lars to put on his big boy trousers again. There is a pretty mainstream acceptance that Spotify is shit, but yet the cattle continue to use it. I read this just today: The curse of the Harry and Meghan media empire: so much content, but we only care about the Windsors | Marina Hyde | The Guardian ".For Spotify’s monetisation guy to suggest the company has been short-changed or rinsed by the Sussexes really feels like posting the firm’s Ls online. I mean, what did they expect? I’m sure we’re all devastated that the obviously doomed Meghan-and-Harry deal didn’t work out for a platform that pays music artists as little as a third of a cent per stream, and whose biggest podcast has become a cynically counterproductive haven for anti-vax bullshit and other misinformation. But somehow I find the tears struggling to come. "

I read about this and thought it was a missed opportunity. Iron Maiden canon has a lot of in jokes like Ruskin Arms (pubs they played in early years as properties) and everything on the Somewhere in Time album cover. The Monopoly set was just the album names as properties. So boring and standard licensed cash grab for dummies. If an actual fan designed it, they could have made it really original. Even the money could have had a different Eddie from a different era. Instead every denomination is the same Senjitsu face. A fool and his money....

All I know is a while back I found a 1st UK press on eBay which I would have gotten, until I noticed that As I Die was missing. I never looked again and I don't do reissues and double LPs (unless it is The Wall). I think I have the CD in the garage, otherwise I'm not sure where the MP3s I have on my phone came from. I had it on cassette tape too. These (SoG and Icon) must have been some of the last cassettes I bought, because I am certain I had a CD player in early 1992. Maybe I thought CDs were a fad that would never last, compared to the enduring permanence of magnetic tape. It may have been an economics thing too. Import CDs were about NZ$35 in 1992. That was almost a week's rent in a student flat! A cassette was probably $15. I believe the To Mega Therion version on its way might be a double disc CD with some extras on it. LPs are going for $150 and up. Narp. The most expensive LP I've ever bought is possibly £50 for Sabbat Dreamweaver and then Masters of Reality/Paranoid etc (not first presses - those are £500).

I also had a run through of Shades of God on Saturday afternoon, in an uncharacteristic free hour sitting under a tree on the grass and not having to do anything family related. Apparently the vinyl issue omitted As I Die. Can you imagine the absurdity of that decision? If you're gonna drop a track for LP running time, you don't just drop the last song. It was a lovely weekend and sweet as. Hope yours was too. It's entirely possible I haven't heard Icon in more than 25 years. I only ever had it on cassette tape. It was on Music For Nations and none of that stuff is on Bandcamp. They are re-recording it for the 30th anniversary. Rarely are such decisions good ones. While sitting there under the tree I ordered To Mega Therion from eBay.

MDB is easily the most consistent and enjoyable of the 3. I don't think they've done a dud album. Last one was quite different with the layered vocals but I like it. Just let down by being too long. They released an EP of the leftover material....but should have just cut a few more songs from the album and turned the EP into a full length album six months after the first. They can charge more than an EP and the fans will still buy it.

Perception is a crazy thing. I'm not sure why Shades of God is "heavier" than a Fight Fire With Fire or a Postmortem/Raining Blood (I still marvel at the sonic weight of that combo). Maybe SoG has a spooky gravity from oop North that American thrash doesn't, but that is down to your unique POV. At the time I maybe wasn't looking for heavier, but interested in what metal could be. Like My Dying Bride which was violins and shit. Which didn't always work, but hats off to them for trying. Ha. I don't recall having quite the visceral reaction to Draconian Times. In fact, one of my favourite solos is in the closing track, but it wasn't a step in the right direction and you could tell they were definitively streamlining for more airplay. The fact it was so obvious is what stings. Of the Peaceville 3 though, it was Anathema that was the most unfathomable. Serenades was probably my favourite of the early doom records. I can't say I even hated the later Anathema stuff and I presume they went onto some success as an alt-rock band that chicks might like, but the leap was between worlds. "everyone had been telling me for so long that this heavy metal shit was just a phase that I would naturally grow out of and move on from" that is a quote for my gravestone.

All true. My point (seemingly misunderstood by Blivington) was that by '92 thrash and death were well established and the previous generation of conventional heavy metal, who were only in their 30s or early 40s, were seen as dinosaurs. It seems bizarre now but our Lord Tony was 44. 44! And considered past it. But he's still going and is more revered now than ever. Even I, worshipper of Priest, did not really listen to them or Maiden or Sabbath for about five to ten years from 92 because it was all about the death and doom then. It coincided with the Ripper and Blaze and inactivity from Sabbath except for Forbidden which I never even heard until relatively recently. I can't be sure but I think I discovered Shades of God in the summer of '93 (meaning Christmas 93 in great southern lands) where I also heard Turn Loose the Swans, because I didn't have a summer job and was bumming around. I lived in a shed for a few weeks. That was the summer of doom. To me Nick Holmes didn't go full Hetfield worship until Icon and especially Draconian Times. They were such sell outs ...but still a decent album compared to the headscratchers that were to come. Geez, I'll never live that nu-metal shit down. But it was never more than a dabble. Same as I went to raves 20 years ago, until you realise its dumb. But, hey, no regrets.

Was going to go on a tirade about how this was the first actual double vinyl (as in pressed onto 2 discs) studio album which signaled the downfall of Maiden...but it wasn't actually that much longer than earlier ones. It's funny that Maiden seemed like dinosaurs when this came out (Steve Harris was 36!), against the backdrop of thrash, death and emerging black metal. If they were dinosaurs then, what are they now? Trilobites?

Man I don't think I have heard this in 30 years. It was one of the last cassette tapes I ever bought.

Gnosis | Russian Circles (bandcamp.com) Random purchase for the day.

As the resident outcast for liking bands with questionable vocal choices, I feel your confusion and self-doubt. But sometimes things just click. This is not quite clicking with immediacy for me but I kind of get it. However, my unassailably favourite Spanish band is Eve | Balmog (bandcamp.com) Velcome.

It's a great track. I was just looking for something else musically 30 years ago. Now, I can handle it. I am pretty sure that Celtic Frost Dethroned Emperor was on the same radio show. Again, this seemed a bit too basic compared to what I was looking for. Now, I consider it one of my great shames that I didn't get into Celtic Frost. The evidence was in front of me as I thought the Obituary cover of Circle of the Tyrants was great. I'd get all their albums now if they were on bandcamp, but I'd have to hunt down old CDs on eBay and rip them. Which seems a ball ache. Simplicity in music is a tough balancing act. All the simple Judas Priest (my yardstick) songs are crap because it sounds like they're dumbing it down on purpose. But a band that nails simplicity has my respect. AC/DC is after all one of my favourite bands - although I am not sure "simple" is the correct term for them, in the way The Ramones is. I think I always veered away from what you'd call "punk simple" as I equated it with people that didn't take music seriously. But, I was checking out Discharge yesterday and that is something else again.

I did a double take here because, being Australia, one could be forgiven for believing you have trained snakes to unblock drains... You're a good boy Bubby.

There was so much posted yesterday after I logged off, I can only fit enough in my head to respond to the above... Great origin story. As you say, you were a metalhead before, but the jump to a more extreme form (which many of your peers will hate) is still quite a leap. I ponder whether you would have stuck with it if you hadn't invested hard earned cash in all those CDs. You needed to like it, in order not to have just wasted a bunch of money. These days, when everyone has access to everything, particularly the accursed Spotify (may the founder rot in hell), you might give up more easily. But you stuck with it. It's hard to pinpoint when I started liking death metal, or black metal for that matter. At first I did think it was a fad and a bit silly, but one acclimatises and the vocals just become another instrument that adds to the atmosphere. You'll laugh but I consider Annihilator, discussed at length earlier, a stepping stone for me because the vocals were a bit more harsh/shrieky. I was also listening to Sepultura which was more barky. Then one day early in 1992 I was sitting in my new flat, just moved away from home to uni and listening to student radio station Radmass. There was a two hour metal show that I decided to record onto tape. That show played Carcass, Darkthrone*, Sabbat (UK), Fear Factory (Soul of a New Machine, when they were good), Bolt Thrower...and that was it really. Despite never having heard it soon after I bought Death Human which was my first CD to play on the new combo system I had bought with the money my mum gave me for text books. Initially I was disappointed because it cost $33 and was about the same length in minutes. Terrible value for money. Now I long for 33 minute albums! *I've still not embraced Darkthrone. The song on the show was ""In the Shadow of the Horns" which seemed a bit too simplistic to me when you're comparing to Incarnated Solvent Abuse. But the song title and melody has stuck in my mind for 30 years, without ever having heard another Darkthrone song. That is nostalgia for you.

That's the best line I've heard today. I wonder if there actually are any over 95 (the near centennials) "metalheads." My grandma born in 1918 used a computer into her late nineties, making her eligible for the forum, but she weren't no metalhead. Was there a 43 year old at the Black Sabbath album release party? From time to time you meet super immature old people (I point no fingers) that might get into music designed for younger generations, but it is pretty rare for someone who has lived a life to make an abrupt change in their 40s to specialise in a new form of music. Old Man Blade Snr is 78 and perhaps now accepts heavy metal as a legitimate form of musical expression given his son's persistence in not "growing out of it" and as enthralled to its devilry as ever. But he ain't no metalhead. Shame, as it would give us a topic of conversation other than knee replacements.

Have you heard the new single from Kenny and Johnny + Down guy? Band name "Eye Am" is dumb and it is a bit odd just releasing one single before writing enough for an album, but it's decent. Kenny was always the vocal secret weapon in TON and I'll guy anything he puts out. Seventh Void and Silvertomb were great, so it's a bit of a head scratcher why he hasn't kept Silvertomb going with a new album, rather than making up yet another new project.

They have a song about dragons: Dragon, Why Do You Cry? | Unto Others (bandcamp.com) It is beyond the joke and back to super serial. I tend to get gyp for liking these bands with questionable vocals, which is now a badge of honour. It's funny that I actively disliked The Cure in my youth and considered any guy that liked them a homo. Now I embrace the inner homo. NP: The Malign Covenant | Verminous Serpent (bandcamp.com) Converging Ages (Remaster 2020) | INANNA (bandcamp.com) Grand Currents | Hammerhedd (bandcamp.com)

I thought I was being clever that stage left was from audience perspective. I won't make that mistake again. Fool me once. I've been listening to this Unto Others band all day (started with album called Mana). I cannot fathom why I like this. I think it must be a joke and I love joke bands. That is the only explanation that makes sense. The production is solid and there is random blistering fast footwork in the drums which was something I noticed while watching them last night. It is worth reiterating that this band opened for Carcass. Like, they actually asked them on purpose. Presumably they didn't book a band with a name that sounded like "Unto Others" by accident. Were they actually after "Reeking Stench Unto the Anus of the Other Dimension?" Y'know, that well known up and coming grind band from Macclesfield? Not a Cure worship hard rock band from Portland. It was my first time in Northampton. There is nothing to recommend it and the venue was a shithole. But perfectly serviceable actually and there was a parking building across the road. I was lucky to get into the line for the ticket machine quickly after the gig because the line was about a 100 deep a few minutes later. And only one of three machines was working. However, lucky that I didn't try for the London gig because there are train strikes today and tomorrow. Also, I don't like getting dragged to Brixton. I also don't like Shepherd's Bush but bloody Paradise Lost has just announced shows with My Dying Bride. MY DYING BRIDE and Paradise Lost playing Icon. Creaming Jesus. While I can imagine contending with bears is a ball ache, I wouldn't mind having that problem for awhile. I get excited just to see a dirty fox.

Mana | Unto Others (bandcamp.com) Torn Arteries | Carcass (bandcamp.com) Went to see Carcass last night. Openers: Conjurer and Unto Others. Conjurer were cool, not what I thought they were like. A few blast beats, and a classic windmill headbanging bass player, like Newsted in his prime. Unto Others... I am still not sure what to make of them. It was like The Cure molested Iron Maiden. Not necessarily the best parts of those bands, but original if nothing else. I think they even won me over by the end...because I am listening to it now to try and comprehend what it was I saw. Got a place at front barrier for Carcass and had 50% chance I was going to be at the same end as Bill Steer. Damn it all to heck but he was stage left and I had to get blasted by the newbie's 4x12 which drowned out some of Bill's playing. I had forgotten just how awesome that guy is. His playing is so fluid and tasteful. And he looks in great shape. Jeff's seen better days and needs to lay off the pies, but they all put on a good show. They must have played more than half of the last album, which does work really well live and I recognise enough of to enjoy. Live drum sound is much better than Andy Sneap production on the album. Can't beat the hits from Necroticism and Heartwork though. Medley tracks from Swansong are surprisingly great too. They even played a few from Symphonies of Sickness and a comedy drum solo to give Jeff a chance to catch his breath. I don't think they played anything from Surgical Steel. Perhaps one song I knew was newish but I couldn't place it. I have the CD lying around somewhere. Not a bad Thursday night and only a half hour drive from home!

Blessed Are the Sick (Full Dynamic Range Edition) | Morbid Angel (bandcamp.com) None So Vile | Cryptopsy (bandcamp.com) Void of Unending Depths | INANNA (bandcamp.com) Couple of classics and perhaps a contender for top ten 2023 so far. Really digging this Chilean slab of death to black crossover. Whatever it is, I Iike it.

Neither would I know who most of the guys in bands are I listen to these days. Not even the better known ones. 30 years ago there were a lot less names to remember, so surely everyone knew of Nuno, Gary and the other two that held their lighters up? I have only heard one Extreme album, III Sides to Every Story. Loved it, but never enough to get the more famous second album. Agreed about Edward. Watching his 10 minute solo in a concert bootleg was transcendental, but Van Halen songs were disposable. Extreme on the other hand could write an epic double album that was engaging all the way through. I suppose the Tipton/Downing and Smith/Murray double acts were my guitar heroes, and Brian May. But these were all guys in bands with good songs. Your Steve Vais, Satrianis and Yngwies were never my cup of tea.

Noel Redding was bass, Mitch on drums. But, yes, you make a good point that all of classic Motörhead is dead. I'd still take Hendrix, but Lemmy is a good call. To clarify, I reckon Jimi went off the rails and was never as good as in the original Experience. So I wouldn't put him in a supergroup with anyone else. Nuno is the guitar player from Extreme. Recently, some in the guitar playing community were losing their shit over the guitar solo in the new Extreme song. It is pretty cool, and it is fairly rare these days to have a solid song which rips into a genuinely epic solo. Not for goats. [this is the bit where you look up the single Rise and tell me it is shit and Van Halen was better, and Van Halen was shit too]. Oh, how often I have never thought to myself "it's a shame all the Sabbs are still alive."