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What Are You Listening To?


khaos

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Sam Kinison was originally selected to play Al Bundy, that means that Tom Araya could have been Al Bundy. That would have made a hell of a difference in later years when Scott Ian and Anthrax made it on the show, instead of chasing Kelly Scott would have been chasing Tom around kissing his arse just like he's been doing for the last 20 years...when he's not kissing Lars Ulrich's arse.

 

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He's turned into a huge dick since he was chosen to be a gambler. But he's always sucking up to James and Lars in interviews and on stage when he gets a chance. As for his passion with metal, the closest thing he's done that's metal in the past 6 years is the album with Bert from Big Bang Theory. His latest album with his wife is barely even hard rock and with the new Anthrax album that they started writing in 2018 now not due until sometime on 2023, possibly, he's about as metal as a cheese sandwich with pickles.

 

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3 hours ago, Thatguy said:

GOLGOTHAN REMAINS - Adorned in Ruin. Not nice at all. This one brings home the bacon.

But what's up with the howling and barking Doc? I'm just not sold on the canine aspects of the vocals. And then in track 3 the dude just randomly starts speaking French. I had to pause it for a sec to make sure the French speaking wasn't from some other tab I didn't know was playing. I keep going back to this album because so many people keep mentioning it in a positive manner. Now I'm not saying the album's bad, but the music isn't dense or suffocating enough for what I want from my death metal, it seems too casual and laid back to me, even as compared to their first album. At first I thought maybe it was just an Aussie thing, with all your sunshine, beaches, surf shops and everyone half pissed all the time it's gotta be hard to keep things brutal if you're hanging out in your boardies at Bondi Beach in the arvo chattin' up the Shielas. But there have been some pretty brutal Aussie bands so that can't be it. Can't quite put my finger on it, but if this album doesn't click with me soon I'm gonna have to stop going back to it and just let it go as one of the ones that got away.

 

Intus Mortem - Exiled from Light, Italy

 

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5 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

....Now I'm not saying the album's bad, but the music isn't dense or suffocating enough for what I want from my death metal, it seems too casual and laid back to me....

I threw on this (GOLGOTHAN REMAINS - Adorned in Ruin) to check it oot. Sure it has some odd vocal choices but we have very different views on what "casual and laid back" means. Your heart must beat at like 320bpm. That'll kill ya man. Meditate!

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1 hour ago, JonoBlade said:

I threw on this (GOLGOTHAN REMAINS - Adorned in Ruin) to check it oot. Sure it has some odd vocal choices but we have very different views on what "casual and laid back" means. Your heart must beat at like 320bpm. That'll kill ya man. Meditate!

Yep. 

And when was howling and barking a bad thing.

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3 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

I threw on this (GOLGOTHAN REMAINS - Adorned in Ruin) to check it oot. Sure it has some odd vocal choices but we have very different views on what "casual and laid back" means. Your heart must beat at like 320bpm. That'll kill ya man. Meditate!

Well you should understand Jon-O that with my 'casual and laid back' comment I was comparing the album just specifically with other death metal. I personally like a denser wall of noise in my death metal. These Golgothan dudes left a lot of space and air between their notes as compared to some other death metal bands, and that's how I chose to describe it. Laid back death metal, relatively speaking. It wasn't about beats per minute.

That'd be an inadequate way to judge extreme metal I think just purely by BPM. I myself actually prefer a more midpaced approach rather than the rapid fire blur of machinated blast beats approach some bands take with their death metal. Fast for fast's sake doesn't interest me any more than bands showing off their superior musical prowess just because they can. Sometimes less really is more. But too slow when it drags and gets all doomy & dirgey well then that doesn't work for me either.

So in my mind there's a real 'sweet spot' for death metal of let's say medium-fast but not too fast, with some good tempo changes giving me some faster sections and slower sections to keep things interesting. But not so many slower parts that I'll lose the plot and forget why I'm even there as well as all the reasons I thought I had to get out of bed and face another day.

But lots of other things come into play as well when I'm auditioning a death metal album and deciding if I want to continue listening to it, and then once I've passed that hurdle if I might want to own it. It needs to be overall rough-dirty-filthy sounding, but beyond that I definitely need sufficiently rough & dirty individual instrument sounds, guitar tone in particular is very important to me. Moreso than the overall production or sound of an album, I need to be able to find something to like about a guitar tone. You could have the worst production ever but if you have a sick guitar tone I'll still give you a chance. Too clean, too twangy or too thin just doesn't fit with death metal in my mind and I'm out. The vocals also need to have a certain timbre to them that I find appealing on some level. Nothing makes me click away from a death metal album faster than bad or annoying vocals.

Dissonance/discordance is another one of the biggest deal breakers in death metal for me, I'm not a fan of these techniques at all. Also odd time signatures, or like these wacky bands that try to pass free jazz off as death metal. I like a little bit of a groove in my death metal that I can bop my head along in time with. Dissonance impededs or sometimes completely removes my ability to keep time along to a piece of music prohibiting me from bopping my head along with it and that's simply unacceptable. 

So now you tell me Jon-O, what do you look for in death metal?

1 hour ago, Thatguy said:

Yep. 

And when was howling and barking a bad thing.

Since last night. There's good howling and bad howling. But mostly there's bad howling. I know the good kind when I hear it. Barking has a little more leeway to be good, but sometimes it can miss the mark for me too, like with that GR album.

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Personally, I'm more of a-the sum is greater than the individual parts-guy rather than pull out and analyze individual pieces, even though it can be important to analyze individual parts when describing music. As with most artistic endeavors, rather than conduct a death metal dissection, I know it's good when I hear it.

When it gels, good is simply good across a swath of extreme metal styles. It can be raw, chunky ODM, progressive death, atmospheric,  modern dissdeath....anything but tech death which I don't like.

When things click it's often an undefinable element than its individual parts. The sum is greater in combination with a variety of elements rather than the merits of those elements pulled apart....kind of like a good stew....

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2 hours ago, markm said:

Personally, I'm more of a-the sum is greater than the individual parts-guy rather than pull out and analyze individual pieces, even though it can be important to analyze individual parts when describing music. As with most artistic endeavors, rather than conduct a death metal dissection, I know it's good when I hear it.

When it gels, good is simply good across a swath of extreme metal styles. It can be raw, chunky ODM, progressive death, atmospheric,  modern dissdeath....anything but tech death which I don't like.

When things click it's often an undefinable element than its individual parts. The sum is greater in combination with a variety of elements rather than the merits of those elements pulled apart....kind of like a good stew....

I find that it can be very difficult to dissect and put my finger on exactly what makes something great to me. While it's usually much easier to figure out why I think something is bad. So I can relate to your greater than the sum of its parts thing, there are many albums I feel that way about.

But this is a metal forum where we come to talk about the music we love, the music we hate, the music we just checked out and the music we don't give a shit about. All we have here is words so I like to challenge myself to try to better describe why I do and don't like various pieces of music. I've never been any good at writing album reviews which kind of irritates me because I fancy myself as a man who's pretty good with words generally speaking. It's just so god damned hard to describe the intricacies and nuance of music.

So I will agree there is much more that goes into evaluating music than just dissecting the sonic elements and what each instrument is doing in a clinical way. Music is a visceral thing for many of us and describing how or why something makes me feel a certain way is an art I have not as yet mastered. Probably never will. But I'll strive to do better Marky Mark. For your sake at least.

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Blut Aus Nord/The Works that Transformed God-Zack's BAN deep dive has had me spinning this great album which was foundational in my understanding of millennial music. When I think of the albums that shaped my listening in the aughts, they weren't the heaviest albums necessarily but boundary pushing albums. Sure, Leviathon and BWP have to be mentioned, but for my money TWTTG has to be up there.  Not particularly heavy, but visionary in its  creativity and reimagining of heavy music that in my opinion are hallmarks of the aughts and pivotal to the sub genre stratification, weird ass metal that has come to color my listening. Listening now, TWTTG is not all that weird, not all that dissonant, and surprisingly melodic and dare I say smooth to the ears. But in 2003, this was out of the box and influential.

 

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