blacksatyr

My wife and I danced to 'My Wine in Silence' at our reception. 'Songs of Darkness...' is one of the albums that helped me convert her from Latin music (she's Dominican) to Heavy fucking Metal. She found, as I do, that MDB is ethereal, dark, classy, epic, and deliciously doomy. Makes us feel doomed, it does, and we're already children of the Apocalypse. What a soundtrack.

I would rank this as being one of Priest's highlights when looking back on the whole catalogue, which is a lot to look back on: Screaming for Vengeance, Painkiller, Redeemer of Souls (deluxe) and now Firepower. It's a landmark release. It has big balls and it froths at the mouth like a wild boar with rabies. Must be Metal. \m/

While I love all their stuff, thus perhaps I'm less discerning than some of you regarding Immortal and Black Metal, I do see they've managed to just get up and keep going without him. No doubt about it, there is nothing missing here.

The album that really sold me on Iron Maiden was 'Piece of Mind', and especially 'Flight of Icarus'. That song captured my imagination like nothing else and I couldn't get enough of it. That album was huge for me when it came out. I still love almost all of the songs off that album, even the epic Dune tribute, 'To Tame a Land'. That's where this mark of the band really learned to fly IMHO.

I liked those two last albums IM put out before Bruce left. A lot of those songs resonated with me. However, you're right, from where I'm sitting. IM should've hung it up after 'Fear of the Dark'. After that, I find them absolutely unlistenable, and I assure you, I really tried. Whom do I blame? Not Bruce, Not Blaze Bayley, no one else but Steve Harris for increasingly repetitive and regurgitative songwriting. Some of these songs, even after Bruce came back, are far more repetitive even than those 'back in the day'. Well, considering how bad it's gotten, with this absolutely awful 'Senjutsu' album, which is the most tired thing I've ever heard, I also blame the fans out there for enabling the band to keep lurching forward like songwriting zombies. IM have really become 'Steel Dragon': they're convinced that fans have no discernment but will simply buy it up no matter the quality, and unfortunately they're right.

I'm blacksatyr, an old-school metalhead and Black Sabbath devotee. I like every true metal subgenre at least to some degree, including speed, thrash, death, doom and black metal. At this writing I'm jamming to Aeternus' 'Heathen'.