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Why some people like (,or dislike) Nu metal?


DirtyParadox

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1 hour ago, Thatguy said:

Thatguy's awake.

Nu-metal - not metal. My son liked Korn for 5 minutes when he was a young teenager and that was my only exposure.

I am not usually the oldest bastard at gigs - not that there have been many in the last few years - and I will be at Hymns to the Dead in Hobart next week and I won't really know if I'm the oldest bastard because it will be dark. And I don't care.

The fires...bad memories from those pictures. We fled Canberra in the most recent conflagration and were smoke refugees staying with my mate at Coledale. Before that there were the fires that burnt into the west of the city. We were packed and ready to bolt with the police in our street but the wind changed and we were spared. It's a cliche but it really was like the middle of the night in the middle of the day. My poor wife had the same experience when she was a child and Hobart burned...

So wish I could afford to go to Hobart for Dark Mofo.  I say it every year...

 

So your wife was in Hobart for the 1967 Black Tuesday bushfires?

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1 hour ago, Dead1 said:

So wish I could afford to go to Hobart for Dark Mofo.  I say it every year...

Who are these bands?? I don't think I'm familiar with even one of these names.

Night Mass: Extasia Lineup 2023

Amnesia Scanner

Aqueerius

Arcana

Arunya Lee Olive

Axon Breeze

Aya Gloomy

Ayebatonye

Bambii

Big Wett

Brixx

Buzz Kull

CaucasianOpportunities

Claire O’Brien

CORIN

dameeeela

Dane Blacklock & The Preacher’s Daughter

Debby Friday

Desire Marea

Elisabeth Dixon

Eris & The Disciples

Estée Louder

Fabian B

IN2STELLAR

Jacqui Cunningham

JLaw

Joey Labeija

Kangding Ray

Kasimyn

Kinder

Laurel Halo

Lips Service

Liquid Nails

L$F

Mahne Frame

Makeda

Marie Davidson

Mobiletti Giradischi

Moktar

Ms Boogie

Nabihah Iqbal (DJ Set)

Nooriyah

OKENYO

ONYX

Our Carlson

Pelada

Prison Religion

Real Lies

SI Process

Simona Castricum

SMB8

Sote & Tarik Barri

SOVBLKPSSY

Stev Zar

Stormworm

Sveta

The Riot

Tjaka

Trophie

V

VACUUM

Varg2™

Violent Magic Orchestra

Vv Pete

Winternationale

WÖØLWORTHS\\FLUSHOT

¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U

ZCluster

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I mean if we open the discussion to alt metal, it just gets too broad. Most of us could admit to listening to crap that is some version of Nu Metal or alt mainstream hard rock/metal....I  used to (and sometimes still do) enjoy RAGTM, Deftones, NIN, Marilyn Manson (ouch),  SOAD, Tool, Jane's Addiction, White Zombie,  QOTSA and I'm sure a few others that don't come immediately to mind.  Sometimes mainstream media even lumps in stoner bands with alternative and then really all bets are off. For that matter, grunge is really a kind of alternative hard rock and I love me some Soundgarden and AIC.

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Wait that's not the Dark MOFO lineup, that's some other related fest or something. This is the Dark MOFO lineup. I've probably heard of half a dozen of these names at least:

 

Dark Mofo 2023 Lineup

Thundercat

Witch 

Ethel Cain

Black Flag

Drab Majesty

Bitumen

Eartheater 

Squarepusher

Plaid

Sleaford Mods

Deafheaven

Zheani

Mahne Frame

Fulu Miziki 

Zindzi & The Zillionaires

Keeley Forsyth

GLVES

Trentemøller

King Woman

BARKAA

Tasman Keith

dameeeela

DENNI

MARLON X RULLA

Uncle Dougie Mansell

Katarnya Maynard

Rob Braslin

Max Richter

Dødheimsgard 

Uada

Zuriaake 

Haunter 

Molchat Doma

HEALTH 

Drowning Horse 

Extortion 

Ironhawk 

Loraine James

Moktar presents Qarae

Nooriyah

Kid Pharaoh

Bo Ningen

Smug Anime Face

RVG

ENOLA

Adelaide Chamber Singers

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24 minutes ago, markm said:

I mean if we open the discussion to alt metal, it just gets too broad. Most of us could admit to listening to crap that is some version of Nu Metal or alt mainstream hard rock/metal....I  used to (and sometimes still do) enjoy RAGTM, Deftones, NIN, Marilyn Manson (ouch),  SOAD, Tool, Jane's Addiction, White Zombie,  QOTSA and I'm sure a few others that don't come immediately to mind.  Sometimes mainstream media even lumps in stoner bands with alternative and then really all bets are off. For that matter, grunge is really a kind of alternative hard rock and I love me some Soundgarden and AIC.

A case could be made that Alice in Chains and Soundgarden were both metal bands. I certainly think of them that way. And even maybe White Zombie. Commercial as fuck but metal, or at least industrial metal.

Only band that I frequently see tagged as "nu-metal" that I ever fucked with was Godsmack's first two. I'd consider them commercial metal too, at least that seems closer to me than calling them nu-metal. But I suppose it could go either way.

I could never get into any of those other bands you listed and I actually really hate a couple of them (especially Tool & Rage) Even though I do know some metalheads even today who defend and enjoy several of them like Tool, Deftones, SOAD...

 

27 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

Woolworths flu shot?

So it's official all decent band names have been taken?

 

When I turn 65 I'm gonna start a death/thrash band and call it Orca's Pineapple Farm.

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2 hours ago, Dead1 said:

So wish I could afford to go to Hobart for Dark Mofo.  I say it every year...

I can luckily make it as part of a family visit and not pay for accommodation .

 

2 hours ago, Dead1 said:

So your wife was in Hobart for the 1967 Black Tuesday bushfires?

Yep

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19 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

That's only because all the good, and many of the bad, goat names are already taken.

No, actually I think you could pair "Goat" with just about anything you could think of and have it sound metal as fuck. Just on my MusicBee alone I count 19 different bands with names that start with Goat. I can't pass them up. Call 'em bad if you want, but we'll never run out of stupid goat names.

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11 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

My mental image of you Mr Macabre has always been sort of a mashup of Rob Halford and Winston Churchill. We've all seen your pics so we know what you look like, the bald dome and white beard is why I say Rob Halford. But I mean your voice, personality and mannerisms are all still complete unknowns. So my brain has filled in the blanks with Sir Winston. Specifically Gary Oldman's portrayal of the old boy in that film I saw last year which I found quite enjoyable but whose name escapes me at the moment. 

 

Think more of Les Dawson (British comedian back when I was a lad - YouTube him) for the voice.

Yep, time difference is a pisser.  I am on here mostly during office hours nowadays as by the time the card's been punched to say I am out of the office it is the mental rush to cram food, chores, cat time, bathing and sometimes run errands before falling into bed (usually) around ten.

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15 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Haha yeah I know which super immature old man your finger would be pointed at if you were inclined to point it. Say no more say no more.

I made an abrupt change in my 40's to specialize in a new form of music. At least if you consider black and death metal different enough from clean vocalled 80's heavy metal to qualify as a "new form." It wasn't easy transitioning at first, but jumping ship to switch musical generations wasn't even something I intentionally set out to do. I really just woke up one day and wanted some new music to listen to because I hadn't been to the record store in quite some time, several years I guess. This was 2004 I was 43. I already considered myself a metalhead, my existing record collection was mostly 80's metal, speed metal and thrash with some grunge and a little hard rock and some punk. And of course my Jersey boys Monster Magnet, and Brooklyn bad boys Type O Negative. But I had never actually heard any extreme metal before that day.

And I was totally unprepared for what I found when I took the shrink wrap off those CD's when I got home from the record store with my big haul that day. I had literally spent half the day in that store and I'd spent hours standing by the magazine rack reading all these album reviews and taking notes about which new bands I thought I might like to try. But I had no idea that basically all the new metal bands had stopped singing and had switched over to some type of harsh growling by 2004. I was on the verge of tears after I'd had a brief listen to most of the 12 or 15 CD's I'd bought that day, as there wasn't any 'singing' on any of them, not even one. That really took me by surprise and I was so angry that I'd been duped into wasting a couple hundred of my hard earned dollars. But I really liked the super heavy music so I kept trying, and litte by little I got used to the harsh vocals. Then I came to like them. Now I don't often feel the urge to go back and listen to anything with clean vocals. I get annoyed when black or death metal bands slip in some clean vocals on their albums.

That's why almost all my friends who I talk metal with are 10 to 15 years younger than me. Guys like you who were born in the 70's. I just dropped back one musical generation because the extreme black and death metal speaks to me much more clearly than the traditional 80's metal or thrash, not to mention the 70's rock most of my "peers" probably still listen to. So I guess one could reasonably make a case that extreme metal might be "designed for younger generations" but now that even most of you 'younger' dudes who listen to the same kind of stuff I'm listening to are pushing 50, I don't feel so much like a fish out of water anymore being a bit older than everyone around me. That first MDF I attended back in May 2010 when I was 48 and all those forum dudes I was meeting up with in person for the first time were all in their 30's was a little weird for me. I was thinking wtf am I doing here? But now I'm well past those kinds of anxieties, I really don't give a fuck if I'm the only octogenarian in the room.

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. 

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8 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

MA has 388 goat bands , good bad or otherwise I think some of them are dredging the bottom of the barrel as far as names go.


 

Nah there’s at least 1000 combinations with the word goat that haven’t been used yet, for example have you considered Necrogoat Bloodkult?

 

Johno have you given Darkthrone’s Soulside Journey? Far from the simplistic, but imo brilliant A Vlaze In the Northern Sky where the track mention comes from, Journey could be considered an early example of tech-death.

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10 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

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. 

Well you see the thing is Jon, while it's true I had invested a bunch of money into those CD's that day and so I was motivated to try to like some of them, I ultimately traded almost all of them all back into the used record store. Because they were all shit. I didn't know any better back then. I had been away from the 'scene' for over a decade at that point and I didn't recognize any of the current top selling bands on the new release wall in 2004. But there was never any question that metal was where I needed to be. The heaviness is the most important thing for me Jon. So I just went strictly off metal magazine reviews that day, because I had to start somewhere and they had a large newsstand right there in the Tower Records store. So I ended up going home with a sack full of commercial nonsense. And Deicide's Scars of the Crucifix, which I was not ready for at all at that time. To this day I've still never been able to get into them. I can't remember every single CD title 19 years after the fact but I do remember a bunch of the bands. There was Shadow's Fall, Soilwork, Trivium, Himsa, Chimaira, Lamb of god, Mudvayne, As I Lay Dying, Deicide, Hypocrisy and Dark Tranquillity. That's most of them but there were a few more, I just can't remember the rest. There could've been an In Flames or a Scar Symmetry or a SYL or a Catch 33 in that bunch but I'm not sure, I could have purchased those CD's at different times. But it was all straight fucking garbage which I realized much later was why I hadn't been able to really get into any of it.

In the end Dark Tranquility's Damage Done was the record that sucked me in and made me want to keep going back to it, until it won me over. It's the record that gave me my handle Whitenoise (BlackSilence). And then not long after that I went out and bought their new one Character which blew me away at the time, I played it on repeat endlessly. DT was my gateway into extreme metal. I considered them my favorite band for a bit there in the mid 00's, till about '07 or '08. So for about 3 or 4 years I was completey infatuated with them. Drove 6 hours each way all in one night to see them play in Virginia, got home during rush hour the sun was already up. That was obviously before I disappeared down the filth rabbit hole. And I liked the Hypocrisy album The Arrival as well, but not as much. All the rest of them ultimately went back for pennies on the dollar except for those two. I don't even listen to those two bands much anymore, but they served their purpose. Until I found the Amazon metal forum in '08 I think it was and was finally able to get some better recos from actual metaheads who knew what was up instead of taking the word of idiot magazine writers and internet critics. That forum was where I met my buddy Marko and then that know-it-all brute Surge.

You know, I'd love to go back in time and do my PhD on why some people are drawn to simplistic riffs and 4 chord songs and find that much more appealing while others find that boring as fuck and seek out more varied and complex song structures. Just like they've done studies on what's going on in people's brains that makes some people tend to be conservative and fearful of change and others liberal and more open to change. Thinking about this kind of shit fascinates me. I like to think I'm not an idiot, that I'm at least as smart as the average bear, but yet I am powerfully drawn to simpler music. I can't imagine hearing a song and thinking "this seems a bit too simplistic" as if that were a bad thing. Johnny Blade likes Incarnated Solvent Abuse but thinks Shadow of the Horns is too simplistic. I like Shadow of the Horns, consider it a stone cold "classic" while I've always thought Carcass songs were kinda boring. Maybe boring's not the right word but let's say meh, I could take 'em or leave 'em. I've just dialed up Incarnated Solvent Abuse for reference, turns out they made an actual video for that song featuring sexy Bill Steer and his lovely blonde locks. Of course Bill's beauty gets balanced out by Walker's ugly mug, and Ken Owens is no stud muffin either. I won't say I disliked the song (that main chuggy riff they keep going back to was pretty cool) but overall it didn't do much for me. I'm not a Carcass hater or anything, I've just never been too excited about anything I've ever heard from them.

The Ramones taught me at 15 that all you really need for a good song is 3 or 4 chords and a backbeat. Add some attitude, count off 1-2-3-4! and you're off to the races. Simpler is better, less is more. But yet clearly I'm in the minority with this line of thinking because wherever I've gone on the internet for the last 25 years I've found (anecdotally at least) that overwhelmingy the majority of my 'peers' are seeking 'more' from their music than I am. While I actively and steadfastly seek out stuff that's basic and simple. And now I'll add filthy to that, and to a lesser extent evil, but that's just the last 15 years or so, evil and filthy were not requirements for me in the 80's or 90's or early 00's. Although I guess I have always preferred things that were stripped down and unpolished, rough around the edges, while I saw many other people praising things that were exactly the opposite, polished and tidy. Guess I'll have to add that polished vs unpolished component to my PhD studies.

I will say Jon as a huge Darkthrone fan that they're probably not a band you'd be super into. Their early stuff was raw, lo-fi, nasty and abrasive in the extreme to make a point basically. In their middle period or I guess by the 5th album in '95 they started writing songs with these great catchy riffs that stick in your head. I like that '95 to '05 decade of Darkthrone better than most fans do I think. In their later period starting with The Cult is Alive in 2006 they've abandoned any pretense at playing black metal and have become a band that plays what I'll call genreless, generically 80's metal inspired songs. You can't always place which specific bands inspired each of the songs, but you know it just sounds like an homage to the 80's. Nocturno Culto is a riff machine, on the level of an Iommi. He's got an endless well of riffs in his head, churns them out effortlessly, but they're simpler riffs and obviously he can't give you all those flashy Iommi solos. Not saying his guitar playing skills are up to Iommi's level, he just shares the ability to endlessly come up with cool riffs. And he's not a bad vocalist either if you're into that sort of thing.

Darkthrone - In the Shadow of the Horns, how can you call yourself a metalhead if this doesn't make you want to get up and bang your fucking head?

 

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10 hours ago, RelentlessOblivion said:


 

Nah there’s at least 1000 combinations with the word goat that haven’t been used yet, for example have you considered Necrogoat Bloodkult?

 

 

I did say the 'good' names were already taken, and I stand by that. Simply adding goat to another word does not a good name make

 

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20 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I did say the 'good' names were already taken, and I stand by that. Simply adding goat to another word does not a good name make.

This from the man who listens to bands with names like Lizzard Gizzard Wizzard Blizzard.

You could actually make 4 pretty good band names from that one shitty one though. Goat Lizzard, Goat Gizzard, Goat Wizzard, Goat Blizzard. See how much better those are than the original?

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5 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

No one is really worried about seeing a Goat Lizzard with dangling Goat Gizzards while the Goat Wizzard causes a Goat Blizzard. But seeing a Shit Lizzard and his dangling Shit Gizzards while a shit Wizzard causes a Shit Blizzard is not something anyone wants to be a part of.

Yeah try saying that 10 times real fast.

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8 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Well you see the thing is Jon, while it's true I had invested a bunch of money into those CD's that day and so I was motivated to try to like some of them, I ultimately traded almost all of them all back into the used record store. Because they were all shit. I didn't know any better back then. I had been away from the 'scene' for over a decade at that point and I didn't recognize any of the current top selling bands on the new release wall in 2004. But there was never any question that metal was where I needed to be. The heaviness is the most important thing for me Jon. So I just went strictly off metal magazine reviews that day, because I had to start somewhere and they had a large newsstand right there in the Tower Records store. So I ended up going home with a sack full of commercial nonsense. And Deicide's Scars of the Crucifix, which I was not ready for at all at that time. To this day I've still never been able to get into them. I can't remember every single CD title 19 years after the fact but I do remember a bunch of the bands. There was Shadow's Fall, Soilwork, Trivium, Himsa, Chimaira, Lamb of god, Mudvayne, As I Lay Dying, Deicide, Hypocrisy and Dark Tranquillity. That's most of them but there were a few more, I just can't remember the rest. There could've been an In Flames or a Scar Symmetry or a SYL or a Catch 33 in that bunch but I'm not sure, I could have purchased those CD's at different times. But it was all straight fucking garbage which I realized much later was why I hadn't been able to really get into any of it.

In the end Dark Tranquility's Damage Done was the record that sucked me in and made me want to keep going back to it, until it won me over. It's the record that gave me my handle Whitenoise (BlackSilence). And then not long after that I went out and bought their new one Character which blew me away at the time, I played it on repeat endlessly. DT was my gateway into extreme metal. I considered them my favorite band for a bit there in the mid 00's, till about '07 or '08. So for about 3 or 4 years I was completey infatuated with them. Drove 6 hours each way all in one night to see them play in Virginia, got home during rush hour the sun was already up. That was obviously before I disappeared down the filth rabbit hole. And I liked the Hypocrisy album The Arrival as well, but not as much. All the rest of them ultimately went back for pennies on the dollar except for those two. I don't even listen to those two bands much anymore, but they served their purpose. Until I found the Amazon metal forum in '08 I think it was and was finally able to get some better recos from actual metaheads who knew what was up instead of taking the word of idiot magazine writers and internet critics. That forum was where I met my buddy Marko and then that know-it-all brute Surge.

You know, I'd love to go back in time and do my PhD on why some people are drawn to simplistic riffs and 4 chord songs and find that much more appealing while others find that boring as fuck and seek out more varied and complex song structures. Just like they've done studies on what's going on in people's brains that makes some people tend to be conservative and fearful of change and others liberal and more open to change. Thinking about this kind of shit fascinates me. I like to think I'm not an idiot, that I'm at least as smart as the average bear, but yet I am powerfully drawn to simpler music. I can't imagine hearing a song and thinking "this seems a bit too simplistic" as if that were a bad thing. Johnny Blade likes Incarnated Solvent Abuse but thinks Shadow of the Horns is too simplistic. I like Shadow of the Horns, consider it a stone cold "classic" while I've always thought Carcass songs were kinda boring. Maybe boring's not the right word but let's say meh, I could take 'em or leave 'em. I've just dialed up Incarnated Solvent Abuse for reference, turns out they made an actual video for that song featuring sexy Bill Steer and his lovely blonde locks. Of course Bill's beauty gets balanced out by Walker's ugly mug, and Ken Owens is no stud muffin either. I won't say I disliked the song (that main chuggy riff they keep going back to was pretty cool) but overall it didn't do much for me. I'm not a Carcass hater or anything, I've just never been too excited about anything I've ever heard from them.

The Ramones taught me at 15 that all you really need for a good song is 3 or 4 chords and a backbeat. Add some attitude, count off 1-2-3-4! and you're off to the races. Simpler is better, less is more. But yet clearly I'm in the minority with this line of thinking because wherever I've gone on the internet for the last 25 years I've found (anecdotally at least) that overwhelmingy the majority of my 'peers' are seeking 'more' from their music than I am. While I actively and steadfastly seek out stuff that's basic and simple. And now I'll add filthy to that, and to a lesser extent evil, but that's just the last 15 years or so, evil and filthy were not requirements for me in the 80's or 90's or early 00's. Although I guess I have always preferred things that were stripped down and unpolished, rough around the edges, while I saw many other people praising things that were exactly the opposite, polished and tidy. Guess I'll have to add that polished vs unpolished component to my PhD studies.

I will say Jon as a huge Darkthrone fan that they're probably not a band you'd be super into. Their early stuff was raw, lo-fi, nasty and abrasive in the extreme to make a point basically. In their middle period or I guess by the 5th album in '95 they started writing songs with these great catchy riffs that stick in your head. I like that '95 to '05 decade of Darkthrone better than most fans do I think. In their later period starting with The Cult is Alive in 2006 they've abandoned any pretense at playing black metal and have become a band that plays what I'll call genreless, generically 80's metal inspired songs. You can't always place which specific bands inspired each of the songs, but you know it just sounds like an homage to the 80's. Nocturno Culto is a riff machine, on the level of an Iommi. He's got an endless well of riffs in his head, churns them out effortlessly, but they're simpler riffs and obviously he can't give you all those flashy Iommi solos. Not saying his guitar playing skills are up to Iommi's level, he just shares the ability to endlessly come up with cool riffs. And he's not a bad vocalist either if you're into that sort of thing.

Darkthrone - In the Shadow of the Horns, how can you call yourself a metalhead if this doesn't make you want to get up and bang your fucking head?

 


I’d break your study my Goat legged friend, being that I’m equally at home listening to Darkthrone or Emperor, Bolt Thrower or Gorguts, Overkill or Coroner etc.

Also Re Darkthrone I learned that track, super fun to play.

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16 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Darkthrone - In the Shadow of the Horns, how can you call yourself a metalhead if this doesn't make you want to get up and bang your fucking head?

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. 

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8 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

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. 

Ramones changed my life in 1976 (musically speaking) because at 14/15 I had already become disillusioned and disgruntled about the lack of heaviness and the trend towards excessive complexity, pretension and fru-fru-ness exemplified by a lot of the 70's rock bands of the era. I knew I wanted metal but there was no metal yet. Unless you count Sabbath.

Sabbath's Sabotage had dropped the year before in 1975 (the very year you were born) and that immediately became the gold standard for heaviness. Which was all I really cared about with music back then, and to a large extent it still is. Simplicity was important to me too (even then at 14/15 I fucking hated prog rock) but I really just wanted to find the heaviest shit available and whatever form that was going to take I would've dealt with it. With Sabotage the new bar had been set and I hung onto that thing for dear life, didn't ever give it a rest, played the shit out of it daily along with Master of Reality, SBS and Vol4. Problem then became that Sabbath made everything else in my budding collection seem lame and weak by comparison to the mighty metal prophet Iommi. Songs like Hole in the Sky and Supernaut became like relgious hymns to me, Sabbath was my religion. So by late '75 early '76 I had nothing else I really wanted to listen to. So many other bands like Zeppelin and Queen could rock the fuck out for short bursts of 20 or 30 seconds at the end of a song like Bohemian or Stairway, but I couldn't understand why they couldn't or wouldn't do that throughout the whole song. There didn't seem to be any bands I could find who wanted to keep that intenstiy and heaviness up for the entire duration of a song and then put out an album chock full of nothing but those fast heavy songs. I was just sick and tired of buying rock albums that only had maybe 2 or 3 moderately fast heavy tracks at best, and the rest a bunch of worthless filler and slow songs.

Until April 1976 when the Ramones came along. No ballads, no slow songs, no prog, no shade, no nuance, no pretention, no weakness, no bullshit. Just put you head down and strum the ever-loving fuck out of your $50 el-cheapo guitar for 2 minutes and 14 seconds, rinse and repeat for 13 tracks. Absolute Musical Nirvana. Finally I thought my prayers had been answered. Punk was what I had been wanting all along and I hadn't known it because of course punk hadn't existed up until then. Who would have guessed that 3 chords was all you needed to achieve nirvana? Ramones was the heaviest most aggressive shit I had ever heard. Yes even though they were mainly based on 60's do-wop pop songs, to me those fast unrelenting songs were more aggressive than Sabbath even. I was the Ramones #1 fan (and sadly their only fan) in my suburban Long Island high school 30 miles (50km) from the NYC limits. Made mom get me a leather biker jacket. Already had the skin tight jeans with ripped knees and shaggy hair. I was all set. Just needed a $50 guitar. 

I'm sure you know the story from there. Ramones, Sex Pistols, Dead Boys in the late 70's led to even heavier more aggressive punk bands like Discharge, The Expoited and GBH in the earlly 80's. I fucking loved those records. So did some of my peers in distant far away lands it seems because then thrash metal was invented not too long after we'd all found those same UK82 records in the import sections of our local record stores. Punk was the key to it all. I find it fascinating looking back that nwobhm bands like Iron Maiden took that punk infuence and went one way with it, while over in the states bands llike Metallica, Slayer and Overkill took that punk energy and went in a different heavier thrashier direction with it.

Kill 'Em All dropped in July '83 to much fanfare and then Show No Mercy followed that December. Fistfull of Metal came along a month later January '84. Again I thought my prayers had been answered. This time instead of just one band, I had been given a whole "scene" full of bands who all played fast and heavy all the time, never slowing down to take a breath. It's true that a lot of them didn't manage to get their first albums out for another 2 or 3 more years, but the music press continually assured us punters that more thrash bands would be coming our way very soon, any day now. What I wanted to know was why had it taken so long for this thrash metal to be invented? I knew I couldn't have been the only one who felt the way that I did about wanting faster more aggressive music. I felt personally validated and vindicated that the vision I'd had for so long of bands that could play fast, aggressive and heavy all the time without ever slowing down, like the Ramones but metal, had finally become a reality. 

So for me what happened was by the time I'd discovered and bought albums from 'traditional' 80's metal bands like Saxon, Scorpions, Priest and Maiden in '80 and '81, that whole trad metal scene was over for me by '84/'85 when thrash metal took over as the new state of the art for music because they were on the cutting edge of heaviness. Once we started seeing all these thrash bands playing live in the NY clubs with all the moshing and what-not, that effectively made all the 'old man bands' like Priest and Maiden irrelevant and redundant to us and we pretty much gave them their walking papers and closed the door on that squeaky high-pitched bullshit. All those nwobhm records went to the back of the pile. Because for me music had always been mainly about finding the heaviest shit out there. The only metal band that surived the purge and I brought with me from that pre-thrash era and continued to play regularly throughout the 80's and 90's was Motörhead. Because they're fucking Motörhead. 

Celtic Frost was a biggie for me too. Pretty sure I got To Mega Therion first in 1985, then went back and picked up the Morbid Tales and Emperor's Return EP's which had conveniently been reissued for me together on one vinyl LP. Another life changing band for me. All those 80's CF records (except Cold Lake) as well as 1990's underrated Vanity/Nemesis have not ever left my heavy rotation in the 30 some odd years since I got them. I would put To Mega Therion up there as possibly my #1 'classic' 20th century metal album of all time, right alongside Reign in Blood and Ride the Lightning, those were my big 3. Tom G. Warrior is my personal metal god. Him and Lemmy. I can't put Quothorn up there with them as I completely missed Bathory in the 80's and didn't discover those albums until 20 years later. But they stay in the rotation to this day as well, probably play UTSOTBM and Hammerheart weekly.

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Always interesting to read why people like certain types of music 

My own definition of heavy metal nirvana isn't neccesarily simplicity or complexity.

It is  combination of intensity and bombast coupled with focus on guitar riffs (preferrably with a razor sharpness), punk attitude and memorable song writing.

Basically defined as thrash metal (but even there many bands fall flat).

It is also what I love about early death metal, NWOBHM and lot of first wave black/speed metal

And I even love proggier stuff when they have those elements eg early Mastodon.

 

 

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