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What Are You Listening To?


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11 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Interesting thesis. As I consult my LastFM scrobbles which I've set to my son's birthday: Jan 27th 2014 til the present day, I see The Beatles rank as my 8th most played artist, Black Sabbath is #22 and Type O are #31 out of 3,607 total artists scrobbled. This only counts songs I've played on my desktop player while sitting at the computer, not in the car or from my phone or DAP through iem's or Youtube videos or anything else. I might have guessed the numbers for those 3 artists would be flipped around with Type O on top and the Beatles on the bottom because I feel like I listen to Type O more, but it is what it is, the numbers don't lie.

Still all 3 of these bands have made their way into the top 1% of bands I've listened to the most, so it's safe to say my infatuation with Type O runs deeper than just a passing fancy. They're from Brooklyn, they're around my age (at least Pete and Josh were, Kenny and John are a year or two younger than you) they grew up listening to the same bands I did, they have metal and hardcore roots, they have a dark and savage NY sense of humor, I've watched tons of old interview footage and stuff and I feel like I know these guys. So it'd be all but impossible to imagine not having had them and their music in my life for the last 30 years and try to guess how I'd react to their music if I was hearing it fresh for the first time here and now in my elderliness.

Bloody Kisses was my first brush with Type O, I remember buying the cassette the same day I bought Sacred Reich's Independent. I wasn't in love with them right from day one, I was more intrigued than anything else, they are certainly a unique band. It took me a bit of warming up to really appreciate what they were all about musically, but it didn't take me that long to see there was a lot more going on there with them beyond just the vampire schtick. I still hear little things on those albums that I've never noticed before even now.

I can totally see how you might think they wouldn't be my thing, they're not extreme metal and they are a lot more polished and lush and pretty than most of what I listen to. I would not call them commercial though, maybe a song or two here and there but not for the most part. (give them the wife test and see what she says about them) But surely you understand by now that the evil goat metal filth and the caustic satanic black metal and the crushing cavernous death metal are just a few of the many facets of my musical interests. I suppose it's true that raw goat filth is the kind of music I get most excited about these days, and extreme metal does take up the bulk of my listening time, but I can still listen to and appreciate other stuff as well. 

In truth, I often make quick snap judgements about bands and then turnaround completely. I'm still digesting. I hear the remnants of 90's grunge, not style so much as in accessibility and by that I mean accessibility relative to heavy music. No my wife was clear Sunday morning with her disenchantment with one TON track or another that was on. 

For my money, and I know they are oft classified as goth metal progenitors, their sound hits me more or less like a form of doom, I find the Peaceville Three, EW and YOB's entire discography, Pentagram even,  and all the bands they spawned more "interesting", certainly more impactful in terms of being metaaaaal.  

Guess I didn't realize how much you liked the Beatles. Of course, I remember on MF discussing given our age how we have an appreciation for Dylan and The Beatles in way even guys in their late 40's probably don't and I remember debating the relative merits of Abbey Road with you, essentially my regard for that album being higher than years as I consider that one of the cornerstones of great classic rock, but yeah also surprised you still listen to that much of the fab 4 given you generally eschew classic rock. 

 

Joy Division/Closer

Agalloch/The Serpent and the Spehre-speaking of lush, nearly forgot how elegant their last album was.

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1 hour ago, markm said:

In truth, I often make quick snap judgements about bands and then turnaround completely. I'm still digesting. I hear the remnants of 90's grunge, not style so much as in accessibility and by that I mean accessibility relative to heavy music. No my wife was clear Sunday morning with her disenchantment with one TON track or another that was on. 

For my money, and I know they are oft classified as goth metal progenitors, their sound hits me more or less like a form of doom, I find the Peaceville Three, EW and YOB's entire discography, Pentagram even,  and all the bands they spawned more "interesting", certainly more impactful in terms of being metaaaaal.  

Guess I didn't realize how much you liked the Beatles. Of course, I remember on MF discussing given our age how we have an appreciation for Dylan and The Beatles in way even guys in their late 40's probably don't and I remember debating the relative merits of Abbey Road with you, essentially my regard for that album being higher than years as I consider that one of the cornerstones of great classic rock, but yeah also surprised you still listen to that much of the fab 4 given you generally eschew classic rock.

Yeah I don't post much Beatles stuff on the board here because it's not metal and that's more casual daytime listening and something I'll play in the car because the youngster likes the vocal melodies. It's not like I feel a need to turn anyone on to the Beatles, I figure anyone who'd be interested already knows about them by now. But they were my very first favorite band back in the days of my youth in the late 60's before I'd even turned 10 and then started discovering cooler, heavier bands like Zeppelin and then Sabbath.

Even as a little kid I knew about hippies and flower power and the Beatles and psychedelia and I was all in. They were the only rock band in my parents' record collection besides Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & the Papas that appealed to me when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 so I used to spend hours playing their records over and over and staring at the album covers, reading lyrics and liner notes. I was lucky that the kid across the street turned out to have just about all the Beatles albums that my parents didn't have like Revolver, Rubber Soul and the White album (along with all the ones they did have) so I spent a lot of time over there in the summers and after school and on the weekends watching Mets games with the sound off, playing pool and jamming Beatles albums.

I don't listen to them so often anymore 52 years after they broke up, but I'll still go on a Beatles binge every now and then and play a whole bunch of their albums for a day or two. With a few notable exceptions I generally like the Paul & George songs better than the Lennon stuff in case you wanted to know. My wife who was also a huge Beatles fan liked the Lennon stuff better. I remember our first cross country road trip in 2012 when she moved here from NZ she got mad that the 80 minute Beatles mix-cd I had burned especially for the trip didn't have any of her favorite Beatles tunes on it.

 

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1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

 

Yeah I don't post much Beatles stuff on the board here because it's not metal and that's more casual daytime listening and something I'll play in the car because the youngster likes the vocal melodies. It's not like I feel a need to turn anyone on to the Beatles, I figure anyone who'd be interested already knows about them by now. But they were my very first favorite band back in the days of my youth in the late 60's before I'd even turned 10 and then started discovering cooler, heavier bands like Zeppelin and then Sabbath.

Even as a little kid I knew about hippies and flower power and the Beatles and psychedelia and I was all in. They were the only rock band in my parents' record collection besides Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & the Papas that appealed to me when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 so I used to spend hours playing their records over and over and staring at the album covers, reading lyrics and liner notes. I was lucky that the kid across the street turned out to have just about all the Beatles albums that my parents didn't have like Revolver, Rubber Soul and the White album (along with all the ones they did have) so I spent a lot of time over there in the summers and after school and on the weekends watching Mets games with the sound off, playing pool and jamming Beatles albums.

I don't listen to them so often anymore 52 years after they broke up, but I'll still go on a Beatles binge every now and then and play a whole bunch of their albums for a day or two. With a few notable exceptions I generally like the Paul & George songs better than the Lennon stuff in case you wanted to know. My wife who was also a huge Beatles fan liked the Lennon stuff better. I remember our first cross country road trip in 2012 when she moved here from NZ she got mad that the 80 minute Beatles mix-cd I had burned especially for the trip didn't have any of her favorite Beatles tunes on it.

 

Actually, kind of same for me. My parents in the foreign service in the 60's became strong lefties, somewhat radicalized for the time. After the repression of their upbringing in the bible belt of TN in the 40's and 50's, Sargent Peppers seemed to liberate my Dad in a way that rocked his world and he never really recovered that time and that music-bring back the 60's, man. 

My Dad and I unfortunately didn't gel as adult men, but we vibed over music. He had a deep love of the delta blues and fight the power and loyalty to the workers movements of the 30's and the tragedy of racial injustice in the culture he was born into. Even though he was white and grew up in a proper Christian background which he later rebuked, I think, in his own way he was emotionally scarred and traumatized by the injustices he saw in rural TN that he described as a kind of lawless wild west in which blacks had zero recourse to the profound tragedy and torture of their lives without any equal justice and today we'd call apartheid. He needed something to set him free. It was his heroine although he was not one to dabble in drugs.  Music was a big part of it for so many in the 60's in terms of that culture as we both know. It intoxicated that generation I believe in a way that we, even we as their children-but of  the more selfish , indulged "me generation" can't completely grasp. 

When I was 6 we moved to Northern Virginia and my Dad had these reel to reel tapes with several albums on each tape. Those were magic. Nothing really cool. No Floyd or Zeppelin. But there was shit tons of The Beatles, CCR, The Who's Tommy. I loved the later Beatles period. I guess, I'd have to say I prefer Lennon and Harrison as songwriters to Mr. Silly love songs even though the cute one had an amazing knack for writing pop rock. TBH, with Lennon/McCartney as a songwriting team I wasn't always sure who actually wrote each song. And, then of course, Paul was really dead right?    😛

And my parents also LOVED the Mamas and Papas and Simon and Garfunkel. I can't lie, I bought some Mamas and Paps and S & G on disc a few years ago for nostalgia. Both kind of corny for those uninitiated in 60's flower power (I consider myself sort of a hippie metal fan at heart, certainly not in appearance ) but they both cranked out some irresistible harmonies that have never really been outdone in my book. 

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3 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Heaving Earth - Darkness Of God

...man, this is really fucking good. At least for me, and maybe Thatguy would dig it too. Some ambitious guitar interplay in spots. Super duper.

Mate, you get me. I have this one.

AOSOTH - V: The Inside Scriptures.

KRYPTS - Cadaver Circulation

TAAKE - Kong Vinter

 

 

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