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9 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

Anthrax - For All Kings

And still no release date for the next album despite many statements about it - clearly waiting for touring stability.

 

Hopefully Megadeth will release their new one this year.

 

 

Edge of Sanity - Cryptic 

Entombed- Wolverine Blues 

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Anthrax are pretty much done, they've been going on about this new album for 4 years now. Pre-pandemic it was aggressive, powerful and back to their roots, then the pandemic hit and they were going to record but had nothing written. 2 years in they've recorded SFA and by their own admission only have two songs written. Fair enough they can't follow festivals around and play 35 min sets at the bottom of the bill but they wont even be ready to tour because of how slow they are.

Megadeth are a little bit more speedy with theirs, it's been a long time but with Dave's cancer etc they probably deserve some leeway. At least the new Megadeth is titled and produced with a prospective Feb release date. For me both bands are on their last legs, I own everything both bands have released included rare shit but if they don't release something worth the wait we've had I wont be buying.

 

Xentrix - Shattered Existence

 

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5 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

Anthrax are pretty much done, they've been going on about this new album for 4 years now. Pre-pandemic it was aggressive, powerful and back to their roots, then the pandemic hit and they were going to record but had nothing written. 2 years in they've recorded SFA and by their own admission only have two songs written. Fair enough they can't follow festivals around and play 35 min sets at the bottom of the bill but they wont even be ready to tour because of how slow they are.

Megadeth are a little bit more speedy with theirs, it's been a long time but with Dave's cancer etc they probably deserve some leeway. At least the new Megadeth is titled and produced with a prospective Feb release date. For me both bands are on their last legs, I own everything both bands have released included rare shit but if they don't release something worth the wait we've had I wont be buying.

That seems a bit harsh. Not that I have listened to any new Anthrax since We've Come For You All, but I enjoyed watching their recent multi-part documentary. When they release an album that fits on one LP I'll be on board. 

Mustaine had cancer before the last album didn't he? I never heard that last one. Again, when I hear they returned to a nice succinct thrash format I'll be open ears. For some insane reason I ripped the Youthanasia CD to MP3 and have it on rotation in my car for long journeys. Y'know it is a pretty shit album. There are some good riffs here and there but at that point in their career they were told they should "cross over" and they just crossed over into being shit.

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2 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

That seems a bit harsh. Not that I have listened to any new Anthrax since We've Come For You All, but I enjoyed watching their recent multi-part documentary. When they release an album that fits on one LP I'll be on board. 

Mustaine had cancer before the last album didn't he? I never heard that last one. Again, when I hear they returned to a nice succinct thrash format I'll be open ears. For some insane reason I ripped the Youthanasia CD to MP3 and have it on rotation in my car for long journeys. Y'know it is a pretty shit album. There are some good riffs here and there but at that point in their career they were told they should "cross over" and they just crossed over into being shit.

Last Megadave album I really liked was Countdown. Shameful to admit, but I did enjoy a few songs from Cryptic Writings when it came out. Trust, while no where near thrash, is a good song. I've heard a song here and there since then but nothing of interest really. Still a great live band. Same for Anthrax. Lots of fun live. The last album was good, but outside of Persistence of Time, I don't regularly spin any Anthrax aside from a few songs here and there on mixes. Could throw Suicidal Tendencies in the same category. After Lights, Camera, Revolution I'm not really interested. Finally crossed them off my live bucket list this year. Sucks that it wasn't with Rocky and the elder Trujillo, but you takes what you can gets.

As for this morning, checking out a few CD pickups from my weekend trip to Austin:

New Order - Republic

Mastodon - Crack The Skye

Mastodon - Leviathan

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Onirik - The Fire Cult Beyond Eternity (2020)

Decent Portuguese bm bands/artist can be counted on one hand surely?  This intensely layered slab from a couple of years back was deemed good enough by me to be kept hold of but I don't think I have ever returned to it until today.  It has textures though and it stays authentic to the bm roots it was spawned from also.

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Forgot about them, There's another good Portuguese bm band. Obviously the more raw 1st wavey forms of black metal work quite well for me personally, as well or better than the 2nd wavers whether they're lo-fi or not. So I take 'decent' to mean shit I like and think is good. I just went down the list of Portuguese bands on my MusicBee library. He is free to cross any band he doesn't like off that list if they don't meet his standards. 

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3 hours ago, markm said:

Nice haul, Navy!

NP-Black Sites/Untrue

Actually got Crack The Skye, Leviathan, Blood Mountain, and that New Order for $17. Used CDs are where it's at if you are into physical media these days. To get all of those on vinyl, even used vinyl, it would have been over $100. Even thought about picking up a new/used CD player to add to my audio rack even though I rip most everything to my server and stream. Would be fun once in a while for those CDs I don't want to rip for whatever reason or when friends come over with a fat stack of CDs to check out.

NP: Albionic Hermeticism - Psalms to the Father

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8 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

That seems a bit harsh. Not that I have listened to any new Anthrax since We've Come For You All, but I enjoyed watching their recent multi-part documentary. When they release an album that fits on one LP I'll be on board. 

Mustaine had cancer before the last album didn't he? I never heard that last one. Again, when I hear they returned to a nice succinct thrash format I'll be open ears. For some insane reason I ripped the Youthanasia CD to MP3 and have it on rotation in my car for long journeys. Y'know it is a pretty shit album. There are some good riffs here and there but at that point in their career they were told they should "cross over" and they just crossed over into being shit.

As a fan of Anthrax since Spreading The Disease I don't think it's harsh. They have become a lazy middle of the road band not willing to risk anything. Anthrax has become a band that does little more than 30-40min sets at the bottom end of festival lists. Their constant sucking up to Metallica is fucking annoying, but laughable when Lars Ulrich was asked to name his favourite Anthrax songs and could only name cover songs. Joey has done a relatively good job live since he came back into the fold but Scott and Charlie's running of the band is shit and 6 years (next month) between albums when they first claimed that album was being recorded in 2018 is pathetic. Kings wasn't even that good despite the sales numbers being higher than their previous albums.

Mustaine's cancer was announced before the Greatest Hits album but after Dystopia, during the last leg of the Dystopia tour from memory. Warheads was always due for release as the follow up to Dystopia with a new album to follow that. But he also started sharing pictures and news from the studio while he was fighting cancer. Jnr was then summoned to the media circuit and was keeping fans up to date with what was actually happening in camp Megadeth. Jnr's sacking changed a lot and whether that was justified or not it will be justified by fans buying tickets and albums, but I still don't see any more than one more album in Dave, and none if The Sick, The Dying...And The Dead is not a commercial success.

 

Watching and listening to Roger Waters Us And Them

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8 minutes ago, KillaKukumba said:

Their constant sucking up to Metallica is fucking annoying, but laughable when Lars Ulrich was asked to name his favourite Anthrax songs and could only name cover songs.

Funny because I would say that their cover songs are their best songs. Antisocial and Got the Time are bangers. I even liked Bring the Noise way back when.

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They were once, but shit every show they play the same tired set and when that set may only have 8 songs in it why not fill it with less played songs from your own 40year catalogue that are equally as good? They played Now It's Dark for the first time in 27 years just before the pandemic, why not replace songs like Got The Time or Antisocial with songs like that? Simple, because so much of the crowd they play to only knows them from the songs they've seen played on MTV because they are there to see other bands in the festival set not Anthrax.

 

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I like the last two Anthrax albums.

It is certainly not thrash but it's still good modern heavy metal.

Given they haven't done a thrash album in 31 years it is hard to expect them to do one now.

And I suspect they couldn't pull a pure thrash album off anymore anyway. 

 

Most of the 1980s thrash bands that continue to play thrash are artistically bankrupt and churn out the same old crap (eg Overkill or Exodus or Destruction or sadly even now Death Angel or Kreator).  Most struggle to come up with anything interesting anymore (Testament is a rare exception and even they are inconsistent).   

I prefer to find better albums from newer thrash bands  and as always listen to the 1980s stuff.

 

EDIT: As for Megadeth I am s fanboy and incapable of dissing them out save Risk.  I even liked Super Collider.

The objective part of me will acknwledge that Dystopia never quote gelled, probably due to sterile production.

1 hour ago, KillaKukumba said:

They were once, but shit every show they play the same tired set and when that set may only have 8 songs in it why not fill it with less played songs from your own 40year catalogue that are equally as good? They played Now It's Dark for the first time in 27 years just before the pandemic, why not replace songs like Got The Time or Antisocial with songs like that? Simple, because so much of the crowd they play to only knows them from the songs they've seen played on MTV because they are there to see other bands in the festival set not Anthrax.

 

This is an issue with any semi-famous band that had hit songs.

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I prefer Worship to Kings. Whether one wants to call them thrash or not, I just don't think the song writing on Kings is as good as sales figures, especially in this country where it nearly made top 10, suggest.

Megadeth's biggest problem has always been MegaDave. He's had some good musicians in his band over the years and they've made some good music but he must be a real prick to work with at times.

21 minutes ago, Dead1 said:

This is an issue with any semi-famous band that had hit songs.

I don't see too many other bands within the category playing 8 song sets with at least 2 covers.

The last live show of Anthrax's I watched, just before christmas, had 7 songs, 2 of which were covers and included 2 dialogues of more than 5 minutes where Joey spent the entire speech praising Metallica and reminding people they were also part of the Big 4. Whether Anthrax can produce a decent studio album or not their live show has become a nostalgia act worse than those Vegas Strip residency shows.

 

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Festival sets are always crap. Big bands only ever play their most famous songs. Even the occasional "deep cut" will be something most fans are very familiar with. I'd rather hear that than their entire new album even at their own tour (looking at you Maiden). Festival gigs nowadays are filled with metal adjacent bands and metal adjacent fans. Last big non-underground fest I went to had Shinedown, Rob Zombie, and FFDP as headliners. And was very heavily attended (40k plus). This is with Megadeth, Suicidal, Anthrax, LoG, Testament, and whatever passes for Sepultura these days. The only band playing a nighttime set was Megadeth. Those fans who's idea of old school metal is post black album Metallica couldn't give a shit about thrash. I understand why bands do it. I'm sure they are well compensated and I can't blame them for grabbing some cash while they can. Let's face it, some of these guys are pushing 60 and life ain't cheap. Gets more expensive as you get older. So they give the fans what they want.

As for Anthrax, they did throw Medusa in the setlist at that show. A little nugget for the old timers.

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