BlutAusNerd

Nice. I hope you guys made a good day out of it. It really doesn't feel like that long to me, but when I think about some of the other things that were happening in my life at that point, they feel like they've receded into the distant past.

Just a brief dinner date. I don't remember much of that time at all, and feel like a completely different person these days. It all seems so long ago, but I was still just a dumb kid back then.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

It's been a nice week. It's the first time in years that I don't have some kind of major project or other obligation hanging over my head. I've been reading a lot, staying off the internet more than usual, and trying to clear my mind. The weather has been good enough that I've been to the park with my son nearly every day, and I've gotten out on the bicycle twice. He and I are a lot happier when we get some exercise; winter sucked, it felt like all we could do was sit inside and rot. My wife and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday with a breakfast date and a walk along the river. Hope y'all have been well.

Wow, I guess you and your wife got married just a couple of weeks after me and mine, our 9th anniversary was on the 26th. My friend that drums in the band was just 3 weeks before that. Love was in the air for metal dudes.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Phobocosm - Deprived

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Pink Floyd -  Wish You Were Here

Nice, my favorite from Pink Floyd.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Brace yourself man, if you haven't heard their later material yet. Total wankery

No, I don't have anything beyond this point and haven't cared to check any of it out. I probably wouldn't even still own Testimony if it wasn't included with my copy of Consuming Impulse. I put it on every once in a while to see if my opinion of it has changed, but it still disappoints me every time.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Pestilence - Testimony of the Ancients

After how good their first two albums were, it really sounds like they phoned it in on this one. Mameli's vocals aren't anywhere near as good as Van Drunen's, and the songs are repetitious, dull, and directionless for the most part. All of the instruments hang back more than usual, leaving enough open space to draw your attention to how ineffective Foddis' drumming is. It always has been, but it didn't matter on earlier recordings because the intricate and dynamic riffs mixed with the raging vocals and frantic pacing did plenty to consume the attention of the listener. They added keyboards, but the keyboards don't really add anything since they just follow the guitars or fill the empty spaces with whole/half notes, and having two guitars similarly doesn't matter if they're both going to play the same thing. Even Tony Choy hung back, barely doing anything that doesn't just follow the rhythm guitars, which begs the question "why bother bringing him in or mention that he's 'Tony Choy (from Cynic)' only to not utilize his talents?"

I just don't get what happened here. How do you go from being the leaders of the pack to the runt of the litter in the space of two years? It seems like the pretense of ambition with keyboards and ambient interludes without any actual ambition.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Sunn O))) is and always will be an absolutely useless band. It's doom made by people who can't write good riffs even if their lives depended on it. 

Except that they have written a great many good riffs, with Thorr's Hammer, Burning Witch, Goatsnake, and Khanate. That's the confusing part, they should know what they're doing, but it's as though they decided to turn off their brains and record themselves whacking off to amps and pedals. I maintain that the live performance of theirs I witnessed was good, but that likely had everything to do with Attila Csihar's involvement.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Black Harvest - Abject; finally getting around to listen to it. Attrition is the next

That's top shelf material, nice.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Speaking with the people I know who lived it that simply isn't true. They were regarded as a prog band from Mindcrime, a band with some prog tendencies before that. Moreover Fates Warning and Crimson Glory were both Prog/Power metal bands from the eighties, Coroner were prog/thrash and also started in the eighties. You're wrong to suggest prog didn't exist until the last fifteen years hence the argument happening in the first place. But hey feel free to live in your delusion while we all laugh at you.

Don't forget about Voivod. What the hell would you call Nothingface if not progressive metal?

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

So I now know what inspired the Christians to craft the image of a burning abyss filled with the tortured souls of 'sinners'. One of them had to come up with an appropriate analogy for the pain of a kidney stone. Genuinely the most excrutiating pain I have ever experienced.

Indeed it is. When my doctor treated me for my first one, he said that he treated a cop who was suffering from one not long before I arrived, and the cop said the pain was more extreme than getting shot. Good luck, literally nothing you can do about it until it passes.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

I've always preferred Malleus to Consuming but that said, it still rules. 

I'm new to Malleus Maleficarum, and it is killer, but Consuming Impulse takes the cake for me.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

What horror movies would you say stand out of the crowd? When I think of a horror movie, I usually think of something like Insidious or Alien. I actually like Alien, but not because of the story or characters. I just think the atmosphere and filmography are quite good, and that's how I feel about most horror movies (but not all of them). It could be that I'm out of the loop or just watch the wrong horror movies.
To be clear, I don't have any problem *at all* with the concept of horror as a genre of film. I do find that the particular horror movies that I've been exposed to, for the most part, fall short on story and characters. Now I don't think a film has to have a good story and good characters to be enjoyable, but it seems to me like there are certain horror film formulas that have been used over and over. I can pick out almost any paranormal horror film and have a similar experience, for example. I think large budget horror films could really do a lot better in general, at least based on what I've seen.
What do you think?
 

You could definitely group it into genres and say that some have been done to death. Slasher films already didn't have much going for them other than jump scares and gore, but at least had some novelty at the beginning before being done to death. Paranormal horror seems to be the same in today's environment, I can't say that I've seen anything in that style recently that I've particularly enjoyed.

Alien kind of straddles the line between sci-fi and horror, but you're right that it delivers on atmosphere in a big way. You don't have to see a bloodbath to get creeped out, you can hear the sounds and feel like you're being stalked from the camera work. Not that bloodbaths are bad, they just have to have a point, otherwise they're not scary or even all that fun. I'm no expert, mind you, but here's a short list of some of my favorites, old and new:

The Shining
John Carpenter's The Thing
Suspiria
Hellraiser
Halloween
Antichrist
Let the Right One In
Rosemary's Baby


I can tell that I'm not feeling well, I'm drawing a blank on anything else. Anyway, you get the idea.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Into the Abyss by Posion (GER) is one of my favorites from that time, although it leans more towards first wave black metal than death metal. Messiah released some great albums too as far as I can remember

Yeah, Poison is more black metal, but Into the Abyss is killer. Messiah is cool, as are Necrophagia, Autopsy, Death, Obituary, etc..., but for 80's death metal, Consuming Impulse and Altars of Madness occupy the top spots for me.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Early Pestilence slays

Were it not for Altars of Madness, Consuming Impulse would be my favorite death metal album of the 80's. So damn good. Speaking of which...

NP:

Pestilence - Consuming Impulse

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Trying to retrofit that shit and rewrite history (to support your own position of authority)

Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Pestilence - Malleus Maleficarum

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Thoughts on horror movies...
Most horror movies have a terrible story and boring characters. That's why I rarely watch horror movies. I find that a horror movie is sometimes nice to watch when I feel some anxiety, but I rarely watch one anyway. I think the best horror movies are the ones that are carefully taken from a well-written novel, or something like that. As it stands though, horror movies are more focused on scares than anything else, which is unfortunate because I don't find any of them scary really.

That seems to be a pretty myopic view of a longstanding and broad genre of cinema. Sure, there are plenty in the field that do just go for jump scares and cheap thrills, but that's hardly indicative of all horror. That's kind of like writing off power metal just because you've heard how bad Hammerfall is, or writing off death metal because of how bad Six Feet Under is.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Funny how you think this argument is "eternally weak" when it comes to Butcher Babies, but somehow holds water when it comes to Queensryche.

Clearly the ladies from Butcher Babies are concealing deep artistic sensibilities within their plastic chests, whereas Queensrÿche is about the most trendy partying cock rock band of the 80's. To the untrained eye/ear, that black nipple tape hides their raw expression to all posers who wouldn't "get it" and don't belong among the metal crowd.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

From what I have heard, they are a band that is definitely meant to be seen live (I have yet to see them perform).  While I find them conceptually interesting, I do not listen to their music too much.  That being said, I think that they have produced some good songs on their studio albums.  What do you think of their live recordings?

I don't think I've heard their live recording. I have Black One and have heard studio tracks from a couple of other albums, but that's about it.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

I think that their work has some drawbacks, but there are certainly some merits as well.  Just as traditional art styles have survived the revolutions created by the avant-garde, so shall more traditional styles of metal.  That being said, I do think that Sunn O))) are pushing the boundaries of metal in novel ways.

They do push some boundaries, just in ways that I find really boring. Their albums don't do a ton for me, especially after seeing them live. If that could capture that atmosphere on recording, that would be something.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

I read an article once that described Sunn O))) as the future of metal...

I sure hope not.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Pest - Rest In Morbid Darkness

Black metal riffs FTW.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

Three minutes and twenty-one seconds is all I could take. Low energy death metal karaoke.

That's all the time it takes, and yet somehow they never got that impression themselves throughout recording that whole steaming turd. How did none of them come to the same conclusion, or did they realize and decide to make a comedy album?

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

The vocals make that song, even though they get a bit silly to my ears sometimes. His voice has aged well, huh? The music by itself doesn't do much for me, but the juxtaposition is cool.

If you heard the albums they did before that one with a standard black/death vocalist, I don't think you would enjoy it. I love the juxtaposition, it absolutely makes their sound what it is now, but somehow I feel that the strength of the vocals elevates the music as well. Then again, even when the music is top shelf on its own, I feel his vocals always have that power to give the music a boost. He has definitely aged well, especially by comparison to most guys his age who haven't.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk

I'm sure I'd enjoy a laugh at their expense. I checked in with them a couple of times over the years to see if I'd like them any better, and the answer was always no.

It's almost is if they're trying to get worse, because they can't just accidentally suck more and more every time. That cover album is comedy gold though, and while I can't imagine you'll make it far into it, you don't need to hear much to get the idea and have a good chuckle.

Sent from my HTCD160LVW using Tapatalk