NokturnalBoredom

They're about as serious as most NSBM bands, in that it's done entirely for image and to shock in 99% of cases. Tom Araya of Slayer sang about Satan for nearly 40 years and is a practicing Roman Catholic and there's nothing wrong with that in my eyes, he was an artist and made a specific type of art for which there was demand, that got him paid. God bless him, he lived the dream. Glen Benton of Deicide sends his children to a Catholic school and has an inverted cross branded on his forehead. Sometimes when you're a musician, you have to do wacky shit to stand out. That's the way it's been all the way back to the day of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Alice Cooper after him.

And I don't care one bit. It comes with the territory of making this style of music. I am a person who is able to distinguish theatrics from reality, so I don't need my bands to be sincere about whatever the topics of their lyrics are. It's just rock n roll at the end of the day and I like listening to it.

Guns n Roses has a few songs that I like, but glam/hair metal is my most deeply hated subgenre of metal and I don't actually consider it metal so much as I consider it to be hard rock.

Witchtrap "Evil Strikes Again"

Graveland "Hour of Ragnarok"

Vietah "Smalisty Zah"

These are the albums I've listened to the most this week, with Witchtrap taking the top spot because I've listened to it probably like 6 times in 4 or 5 days. It's just that good of an album and I'm currently browsing Hells Headbangers looking for other bands from South America that might be as good or better. Central & South America seems to have a great metal scene & I'm looking forward to seeing what else the region produces, because it seems like thrash is really big down there.

For a while I've tried to pretend that I did not like Dimmu Borgir. Don't get me wrong, I used to love them as an older teenager because they were my first introduction to truly symphonic black metal. I had the albums Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, Spiritual Black Dimensions, Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia, Death Cult Armageddon, and an older album called Stormblast.

Stormblast quickly became my favorite because I existed in a phase where being kvlt and tr00 was all that mattered in my circle of black metal dork friends. While Dimmu Borgir was routinely mocked in this group after Bam Margera began using their music in his videos, I defended the kvlt nature of Stormblast. I liked how the keys were pushed to the front, swallowing the guitars completely, how the album was in Norwegian compared to their later English offerings with silly, flowery lyrics that often didn't make sense, and the overall production and tone of the original album. Which is why I was completely devastated when they rerecorded it in 2005, and figured that it was a shallow and cynical cash grab that was forced on behalf of Nuclear Blast, and I quickly became angry at Nuclear Blast for "making black metal accessible to normies" so to speak. Granted this was in the time where I was collecting CDs instead of vinyl, so I guarded my copy of Stormblast heavily and it was one of the only albums (along with Nokturnal Mortum's discography) to survive the collapse of the roof of the garage I was living in during Hurricane Charley, a hurricane that absolutely demolished my area and turned it into what appeared to be a war zone.

When I started collecting vinyl, I began looking for a copy of Stormblast to no avail. The cheapest copies I could find were purple vinyl rereleases from 2011 for $155 and I am willing to pay ridiculous amounts for single discs, but not almost $200 when shipping is factored in. So I went without. Until today, when I went down to the record store and noticed that a copy of Stormblast was available... but with one small problem: it was that cursed, goddamned cash grab rerecording from 2005. I was hesitant about using my store credit from trading in some records to pick it up but reasoned that I could not spend actual money on it, listen to it once, make fun of it and Dimmu Borgir for "selling out" and then slap it up for sale in my pop-up record store and make a quick $20 off some dumb kid who thought he was cool.

Keep in mind I had been hating on this album for fifteen years and had never listened to a single track off of it, because the general consensus was that Dimmu Borgir rerecorded the album to make it more accessible to Hot Topic teens who couldn't handle the kvlt and tr00 nature of the original's production. So I used some of my store credit and grabbed it up. Quietly and sheepishly from the shop owner who is just happy that someone under the age of 60 is in his shop, infusing it with current records and grabbing up the pithy offering og metal that his distributor has made accessible to him (we had a long conversation about this today: He wants to stock the shop with way more black and death metal, but his distributor says that nothing is ever available, so he gets what he can and hopes for the best. So far I have bought 3 Burzum albums from him, 2 Emperor albums, and now 2 Dimmu Borgir discs, and this keeps him attempting to bring in more metal because he knows "it's what sells")


And now I realize just what a prejudiced, moronic, stuck-in-the-past asshole I truly am.

This is a great album. It's everything I liked about the original Stormblast but with much better production value. The guitars are full and no longer tinny or pushed to the back, so it sounds like a proper metal album. The synth and keyboard work is more lush and filled out, giving the album a higher symphonic quality than even my previous "favorite" post-Stormblast DB album "Spiritual Black Dimensions" (which I bought the other day). It's now possible to hear this album the way that the band wanted it to be heard, but lacked the budget to do the first time around. It's heavy af, much heavier than Spiritual Black Dimensions or Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia. It has a very Death Cult Armageddon feel to it in terms of production without compromising the fact that it's easily their best work remastered and rerecorded in the way they can be proud of. While I previously thought that the original recording of Stormblast was fine, I don't think that I could now justify spending money on a pressing of the original album because I have this one. Oh and it came with a bonus 7" with two additional, until now unreleased songs on it. The cover no longer says "Stormblast 2005", just "Stormblast" so it's obvious that they want this to be the official version of their amazing second full length album & I agree. I know all the songs on here like the back of my own hand and to say that they sound better and more like what I would expect from Dimmu Borgir post Enthrone Darkness Triumphant is an understatement. I'm actually finding myself liking this version of the album much better than the original and that's because I'm 35 and no longer care about being "kvlt" or "tr00" because I have absolutely nothing to prove to any other human being anymore.

So in short, I feel bad that I shit on this album as a "sell out project" for as long as I did, because at 35, I really like it a lot and it's probably the best album that Dimmu Borgir has done. All of the melodies are the same, it still gives me that dark feeling of October 2003 (when I got the original CD) and just generally feels less like a really good demo and more of what the band is capable of producing. Granted I stopped fucking with Dimmu Borgir for a long time because of their association with Bam Margera (who I personally despise) but I am mature enough now to say that this was juvenile, prejudiced, and that I was wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong with listening to Dimmu Borgir. They've done a lot to give black metal a wider recognition beyond that of darkened bedrooms of teenage satanic dabblers and garage practice spaces in the suburbs. I should not have judged them so harshly just for appearing with a specific celebrity. I have returned to appreciating the artistic merits of this band because of this rerecording and will never say another unkind word about them.

Maybe I just grew up and realized that it's ok to like what you like, that's also a possibility.

I just have a shitty $14 pair of Skullcandy earbuds. I don't tend to use headphones very often because I'm always listening to stuff on my turntable and it doesn't have a port for headphones as far as I am aware.

My turntable is a Fluance RT80. Not the most advanced turntable by far, but does the job for me. I have edifier speakers that are bluetooth capable, but I'm not certain what the model number is for those. I eventually want to upgrade my turntable and give the one I have now to my buddy so he can get into vinyl too, but I'm not sure what I would even buy. Probably an RT81 elite by Fluance as I'm not looking to be shelling out tons of money on a turntable any time soon.

My room isn't really done up in a metal style persay. I have a lot of byzantine icons because I collect them, but it's just a standard bedroom with a bed, turntable, speakers, and a bookcase. I don't have any of my metal posters up or anything, I keep them all in the records they come in because I am saving them for when we relocate to NY, then I'll put them up. The only poster I have on my wall is my Seinfeld "Chart About Nothing" that links all of the characters to ever appear on Seinfeld together with one another. I also have a signed copy of the script for the first episode of Seinfeld and a few spare LP jackets on display, along with a few of my surviving show ticket stubs and a calendar of the Appalachian trail. My walls are like a greyish-blue color and I have an IKEA kallax shelf to store all of my records on.

Not gonna lie, I would get the first three Metallica albums on vinyl if I could find originals from the 80s. They're great albums from the infancy of metal and I'm not denying that. I just don't like the direction they went in post Cliff Burton, ...And Justice For All just didn't do much of anything for me & neither did the black album or any of the stuff since then. They were definitely three of my favorite albums in high school, but I sort of overplayed them (I listened to the three of them every day in the 9th grade) so now they're sort of albums that I'd like to have if I could find originals, but I wouldn't go out spending $30 a piece on the 180g reissues.

 
 
I first got into Slayer through Show No Mercy when I was in the tenth grade, because I was listening to internet radio and heard the song "black magic" and I liked the first two albums, Live Undead, Haunting the Chapel but Reign in Blood did not do it for me because they went full thrash and dropped a lot of their proto-black metal image that they had going on those first two albums. I'm not saying that Reign in Blood was a bad album, again it's just one of those ones that I've listened to so many times that it's sort of stale for me now.

I've never listened to any Slayer after Reign in Blood (no South of Heaven, no Seasons in the Abyss, none of it). It's not that I don't like Slayer, it's just that I liked their very early stuff a lot more because it was fundamental to the creation of what we now understand to be black metal. Same with Celtic Frost... I like the early stuff up to Into the Pandemonium but as soon as you hit the Cold Lake & Vanity/Nemesis period, I'm no longer interested in them.

The first two Mercyful Fate albums were amazing as well. I never got into anything they did post Don't Break the Oath though (and am still looking for a copy of Melissa on vinyl)

NP: Burzum "From the Depths of Darkness"

The worst thing about being a DM is creating a world, writing out a huge campaign, and then having nobody around to play it because they all went to college. This happened to me and it was irritating as hell, and is what made me put away my D&D rulebooks as something from teenage years now gone.

The thing is, I probably still have the campaign data somewhere in my house. In some forgotten box in my closet.

Dude, don't even think about that shit for any reason. As someone who bought a 9mm carbine and began sticking it in his mouth two years ago "just to see how it felt" as my relationship with someone I wanted to have kids & a life with was falling apart rapidly, please go talk to someone right away. The fucked thing about suicide is that these kinds of thoughts are how it starts and it may seem like a beneficial thing for the family, or a way out, but you have to think about the damage that you'd do to the people who survive you and are going to be asking why you did it, even when your financial situation seems insurmountable & horrible. I promise you that even if you think that you have a good reason, people are going to miss you much more than they're going to be thankful for a life insurance payment.

I have prior attempts on my own life. I tried to hang myself but the fixture I tried to do it from ended up collapsing. I also tried to OD on drugs and simply just got really high for days (and probably did permanent brain damage and heart damage in the process). I am on meds now that make me realize that suicide is never an option because as bad as things get (and they're going to get bad societally for me in the next few years), I'd rather force the authorities to kill me so I can escape the reeducation camps & political prison than die by my own hand and have the remaining few people who love me wondering why I did it and why I chose to leave them here without me.

Don't do it. Talk to someone. There are things that are preferable to life and I get it completely, but those things are not here yet although they are in the process of coming down the pipe.

 

Dude, don't even think about that shit for any reason. As someone who bought a 9mm carbine and began sticking it in his mouth two years ago "just to see how it felt" as my relationship with someone I wanted to have kids & a life with was falling apart rapidly, please go talk to someone right away. The fucked thing about suicide is that these kinds of thoughts are how it starts and it may seem like a beneficial thing for the family, or a way out, but you have to think about the damage that you'd do to the people who survive you and are going to be asking why you did it, even when your financial situation seems insurmountable & horrible. I promise you that even if you think that you have a good reason, people are going to miss you much more than they're going to be thankful for a life insurance payment.

I have prior attempts on my own life. I tried to hang myself but the fixture I tried to do it from ended up collapsing. I also tried to OD on drugs and simply just got really high for days (and probably did permanent brain damage and heart damage in the process). I am on meds now that make me realize that suicide is never an option because as bad as things get (and they're going to get bad societally for me in the next few years), I'd rather force the authorities to kill me so I can escape the reeducation camps & political prison than die by my own hand and have the remaining few people who love me wondering why I did it and why I chose to leave them here without me.

Don't do it. Talk to someone. There are things that are preferable to life and I get it completely, but those things are not here yet although they are in the process of coming down the pipe.

 

And that’s perfectly fine because it’s personal taste.
For me though, albums like ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’, ‘In the Nightside Eclipse’ and ‘Storm of the Lights Bane’, to name but three, are the near pinnacle of metal evolution and the beginning of its devolution.
Throw ‘Turn Loose the Swans’, ‘Bloody Kisses’ and hell, even ‘Demanufacture’ in there and we are starting to look at a special time in musical output. 
Hail 1993-1995.

Hello everyone! This is pretty hard but here it goes in no order in particular:
1. Judas Priest
2. Tristania (Vibeke Stene era not Mariangela, sorry!)
3. Draconian
4. Alice in Chains
5. Candlemass

Like I said, the only ones I've heard at this point in time are Wildfire, Call of the Wild, and Phoenix Rising. I'm actually not too up on Destroyer 666, but they're one of those bands that I want to get into because I hear a lot of great things about them and they seem to be on everyone's "best of" lists.

The other stuff I picked up was Rotting Christ "The Heretics", Panopticon "Social Disservices", Drudkh "A Furrow Cut Short", and Cemetery Lust "Screams of the Violated" (Because Hell's Headbangers the label puts out some great material like Acid Witch, Nekrofilth, and Nupraptor and I want to support them even if I've never heard of the band before). Usually ever two weeks or so I make an order from Hell's Headbangers. I was ordering stuff from Osmose for a while but it's all super expensive having to convert dollars to euros and for some reason, the last time I ordered something on Osmose, my bank shut my debit card off for "suspected fraudulent activity" because Osmose is based in France. Problem is, Osmose is the only place where I can get stuff like Nokturnal Mortum & Kroda reliably.

While I accept things aren't always great here I honestly think I live in a different Australia to Dead1

You only get $1 an hour extra to work on a holiday?
Shit employers in this country would love that, most here pay a minimum of time and a half, some pay as high as double time plus an extra day off for working holidays.

NP: Nokturnal Mortum "To The Gates of Blasphemous Fire"

NP: John Coltrane "Giant Steps"

...I don't listen to metal all the time, just most of the time

Slayer "Show No Mercy"

I'd love to witness a re-enactment especially a Civil War one as they get quite huge by all accounts.

Closest I ever got to that sort of thing was as a kid, when we'd tag along while my dad did Revolutionary War reenactment. Tents, hasty pudding, britches, a musket I wasn't allowed to play with, triangular bayonets. Ah childhood.

Slayer "Show No Mercy"

I've played Magic but it's a money pit.  You literally have to keep buying cards to stay relevant.  That and the scene is full of ultra competitive types which we historical wargamers generally aren't.

Slayer "Show No Mercy"

agreed. cool songs, too