What Are You Listening To?

[Dead1]

5 hours ago, Arioch said:

 

You get the impression that he has a default setting for his equipment and when a band arrives, all he has to do is say: come and welcome! Come on, plug in your instruments, we're recording!

In his defence, I'd just say that the bands he produces don't particularly want to have a personalised sound. Do they come to him because of the prices? His potential reputation?

Excellent points.  Sad thing is Andy Sneap's work seems to have formed the blueprint for a lot of modern metal production.

 

Various - Metal Massacre Vol 5

1984 deliciousness.

46 minutes ago, MacabreEternal said:

Bathory - Hammerheart (1990)

Each time I tell myself I am done with Bathory and Quothorn's shit singing capability that he somehow relentlessly hacked away at showing a resilience that far outweighed his vocal capacity, I put on Hammerheart and soon find myself completely enamoured with them for an hour or so.  The heavy Viking metal aesthetic helps no ends of course, it sort of excuses all the roughness present on the record.  This and Under the Sign of the Black Mark should get more plays I have decided.

Quorthorn's clean vocals were terrible but I love them!  He was Viking Metal.  Everyone else is just a poseur!

[FatherAlabaster]

Sneap's mix is hit and miss. Neil Kernon too. Even if they don't have an actual template it sounds like they're mixing towards a particular target that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the sound the band is making. Terry Date is a good counterexample, he's got this bone-dry way of capturing exactly what a band sounds like and then presenting it in a balanced mix. The fight for full sound and clarity was still an ongoing thing in extreme metal when I was a kid, and for a while it was exciting to hear more and more bands getting the pro treatment and taking the blankets off their drum and guitar sounds, but it wore thin. 

Remixed Enemies Of Reality is vastly superior to the original Kelly Gray mix though. 

[FatherAlabaster]

1 hour ago, JonoBlade said:

Icon was on Music for Nations which went bust. The rights got transferred somewhere in the bankruptcy but are a mess. I completely understand that you'd never want to hear a new version. I am in the unusual position of knowing I liked the album but don't have it burned into my conscience (like Shades of God). I could just buy the Icon CD off eBay but I like the idea of giving the band money today.

Spotify is not the modern day equivalent of radio. Radio plays singles and that is absolutely fine. It is a great promotional tool. I use You Tube in this way. Watch a new promo video or old gig footage, but spotify makes entire catalogs available for a pittance. 

It's very true that it's a free market and each artist/label has the right to choose. But artists are not rocket scientists and frequently make bad choices. Getting your stuff OFF spotify is a pain in the ass and they charge you to do it. Far more than they ever would pay out for it to be there in the first place. 

Everyone (managers/labels/venues) has tried to screw over artists since the beginning of time. I only rail against it for the sake of awareness. Anyone who pays a subscription to Spotify to listen to albums day in day out is a piece of shit. If they think they are actually contributing somehow, they are a delusional piece of shit. If they're just fair weather music fans wanting to line up a playlist of feel good modern hit singles, fine. That is radio. Listening to your favourite bands' albums and discovering new whole albums to listen to over and over is not radio. 

"They're not trying to fuck anyone over." It is hard to know whether whoever created Spotify is actually the devil. Was there an intent to devalue music in the way they do? Possibly not. It is not active fuck-overy in the way a manager or a record label operated, but it is still bad.

 

 

It's extra bitter to remember that the whole reason Napster and Limewire were sooooo bad is because they were "devaluing music" and everyone who used them was a bad person driving a nail into the coffin of musicians everywhere, just think about the poor musicians... but as long as you're paying some middleman $10 a month or listening to a bunch of ads, everything is fine. The only real problem is that there was all this activity happening without some tick squeezing profit out of it.

Fuck spotify.

[Arioch]

I've never used Spotify or Deezer. Just Amazon Music, but that didn't last long when I realised that I was only using it to move quickly from one album to another without ever listening to the whole thing. So I cancelled my subscription.

Now I buy my albums on Bandcamp. Unless I have them on CD. As my CDs are out of reach at the moment and I only listen to music via a portable music player (lack of space, I don't live at home), I manage to complete my CD collection in other ways.

[JonoBlade]

9 minutes ago, Arioch said:

Now I buy my albums on Bandcamp. Unless I have them on CD. As my CDs are out of reach at the moment and I only listen to music via a portable music player (lack of space, I don't live at home), I manage to complete my CD collection in other ways.

Bandcamp has been sold again! This time to Songtradr. Whatever that is. Epic Games still seems to be involved but I do fear for the integrity of bandcamp.

BANDCAMP Acquired By SONGTRADR - BLABBERMOUTH.NET

Bandcamp does take quite a cut when you add in the transaction fees...but I guess that is the price of business. A band should still clear more than 60% or so on a downloaded album. 

Throwing all my IP ideas out there (which is ironic for a patent attorney), there is a gap in the market for an app that is both a direct-to-artist marketplace, social page (way to post info about tours etc and interact with fans) and somewhere to curate your own collection (e.g. ripped from CDs) in one place just as a music player and file manager. Mind you, I guess you don't need it if you download all your bandcamp purchases to FLAC for a home server....except for a facebook style socials page. 

Which reminds me.... does anyone use something like this?

All-in-One Desktop HD DTS Decoding and Ear Mafer-FiiO R7

It seems to tick all the boxes for a lossless DAP which can plug directly into studio monitors. You can't put it in your pocket but out and about I have a phone or a Fiio x3 as a back up. 

I feel its one of those things I could easily do without but it would set me up for years to come.

[MacabreEternal]

Kowloon Walled City - Container Ships (2012)

 

[Nasty_Cabbage]

11 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Altarage - NIHL, España 2016

 

  Teitanblood - Death, España 2014

 

Is that one of those hanging spitting bug things from Elden Ring on that Altarage cover? Kill it! Giants Flame now!

I love that Teitanblood album. That reminds me I think they have an album out that I'm missing. Between them and Impetuous Ritual I almost always have something utterly obscene and filth caked to listen to. Been slacking lately though.

NP: Ceremonial Bloodbath - The Tides of Blood

https://vaultofdriedbones.bandcamp.com/album/the-tides-of-blood

Ah, what a wonderful morning to peer into the depths of hell.

I can't really pretend to know much about how some of these music contracts work / who owns what etc. After a fashion I do what I can to keep my music consolidated to a single service and hope the artist in question sees it. If the phrase "the more things change the more things stay the same" isn't a cliche by this point I don't know what is. When I truly want to support a band I'm not all that far from a major city where a lot of hard touring bands stand a good chance to stop and play a gig. I go to shows, I buy the merch directly from the band and their roadie/technician if they have one at the show itself. I enjoy shooting the shit with some of the old road warriors out there, and I'm not above networking to find a crash pad and some good local grub in a safe neighborhood for a band to park their van and crash for the evening.

When you get into the contractual details of intellectual property, umbrella companies that encompass many different smaller commpanies, and some of the shady stunts even well respected labels have tried to pull over the years I start to find a bunch of it is nearly indecipherable. It's always geared to grant the label or publisher an advantage. The house always wins as they say. There's a reason I couldn't cut it as a business major and didn't really even want to try.

My own personal music is primarily on CD, but I still have some things scattered over a few years of laptops from either iTunes or Bandcamp. That's about the best I can do for support in that avenue, and we've seen so many music services flare up and die out through the years it's almost not worth the time to invest large amounts of memory in decent and accessible data storage in a single format. The free market for music is wonderful, but at a certain point any company's success or failure is going to come down to sheer volume of listeners at a manageable technical cost and who can process this with the highest efficiency. I know not to have anything I want permanent access to exclusively on the cloud, though, that's for sure.

[Kristiko]

Alice in Chains - Black Gives Way To Blue (album)

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

I love that Teitanblood album. That reminds me I think they have an album out that I'm missing. Between them and Impetuous Ritual I almost always have something utterly obscene and filth caked to listen to. Been slacking lately though.

NP: Ceremonial Bloodbath - The Tides of Blood

Ah, what a wonderful morning to peer into the depths of hell.

I love the smell of filthy rancid cavernous blackened death in the morning. Just listened to that Ceremonial Bloodbath album you just posted which I've got, now moving onto some Cerebral Rot since they're right next to them in my MusicBee library.

Re: Teitanblood, you're probably missing 2019's excellent The Baneful Choir. Better get on top of that shit Cabbage, it's 4 years old already.

You've reminded me I'm gonna have to revisit Impetuos Ritual sometime soon. I've been hearing their name coming up a lot lately but I dismissed them some years ago as impenetrable disso-atonal fuckery so I can't remember exactly what they sound like anymore. So I'm thinking a drive-by is probably in order. Another step in my ongoing plight to make sure I have enough of a variety of utterly obscene and filth caked options at my disposal.

 

Cerebral Rot - Excretion of Mortality, death/doom Seattle WA 2021

 

Void Rot - Descending Pillars, death/doom Minneapolis, MN 2020

 

[Serpentboi1992]

[navybsn]

5 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

I'm not all that far from a major city where a lot of hard touring bands stand a good chance to stop and play a gig.

Reminds me. If you happen to be heading to the Spirit Possession/Bell Witch gig at Santos on 11/2, I'll be there. If you are, maybe we can hook up and hit the banging Lebanese joint across the street before and I'll buy you a beer.

5 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

That reminds me I think they have an album out that I'm missing.

Woven Black Arteries is the best thing from them imo, but there's no bad choices. The Baneful Choir got a considerable hate when it came out. I think it's pretty decent.

[SurgicalBrute]

Skuggeheim - Daudssyklusen

Mostly overlooked, one man, lo-fi Norwegian black metal.

Comp of all his EP releases including the newest one. It's actually not as rough sounding as I was expecting, and there are a surprising number of melodic, interlude tracks on here with no actual vocals

https://terraturpossessions.bandcamp.com/album/daudssyklusen

[GoatmasterGeneral]

9 hours ago, MacabreEternal said:

Bathory - Hammerheart (1990)

Each time I tell myself I am done with Bathory and Quothorn's shit singing capability that he somehow relentlessly hacked away at showing a resilience that far outweighed his vocal capacity, I put on Hammerheart and soon find myself completely enamoured with them for an hour or so. The heavy Viking metal aesthetic helps no ends of course, it sort of excuses all the roughness present on the record. This and Under the Sign of the Black Mark should get more plays I have decided.

I went through a Hammerheart phase this past spring/summer when I became completely infatuated with the record and must have played it at least 40 or 50 times or more over a several month period. It really sucks you into and immerses you in the viking thing and it has endless replayability. Quothorn's singing definitely belongs in the so bad it's good category. Yet I've come to the iron-clad conclusion that Hammerheart is unequivocally my favorite Bathory album. Black Mark moving down a notch to my #2.

Sad to say I missed this band completely back in the 80's. I'd seen the records in the stores but I'd never actually heard a Bathory record until the early 2000's, probably right around the time of his death from cancer in 2004. But over the last 20 years Bathory have become a rock solid staple of my library. It feels to me at this point like they've always been with me from the beginning. Weird how that can happen. 

 

NP: Morrigan - Headcult, Germany 2005, hands down the absolute best Bathory worship band. First 6 albums are all solid gold. Chose this one this evening 'cos I probably play it the least of the bunch.

 

28 minutes ago, navybsn said:

Reminds me. If you happen to be heading to the Spirit Possession/Bell Witch gig at Santos on 11/2, I'll be there. If you are, maybe we can hook up and hit the banging Lebanese joint across the street before and I'll buy you a beer.

Woven Black Arteries is the best thing from them imo, but there's no bad choices. The Baneful Choir got a considerable hate when it came out. I think it's pretty decent.

Have we decided Le Cabbage is hunkered down in Louisiana? I thought his profile said the midwest? He said yesterday "one of the small town clusters that surround the two major cities in my state." so I was thinking either Missouri (the belt buckle of hypocrisy) (KC/StL) or if as it sounds like the cities are grouped together then probably Minnesota. (Minneapolis/StP) Could always be Kansas (KC and Topeka) but not sure if Topeka counts a 'major' city. Also Michigan (Detroit/Ann Arbor) but again Ann Arbor isn't a major city, only has that many people there cuz it's a college town.

Anyway... it seems I have somehow missed this Woven Black Arteries EP that came out two years before Death and must track it down immediately!

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Teitanblood - The Baneful Choir, Spain 2019. I really don't remember seeing a lot of hate for this one 4 years ago. (not calling you a liar @navybsn) Personally I think this one crushes every bit as hard as any of their others, maybe more than some of them. I do remember 2014's Death getting some shit just for being so damn long (69 minutes) but with this kind of music personally once I get in the cavernous filth groove I can't seem to get enough, I can listen to 10 of these in a row. Thinking this has got to be my favorite overall sub-genre as far as how the music makes me feel, even if it's not my most listened to sub-genre as there are only so many really top quality albums in this cavernous black/death/filth/war metal space. 

 

Pestilength - Basom Gryphos, Spain 2022

 

Nevermore - Enemies of Reality, 2003. I'm assuming my copy is the original version that I bought on CD and ripped to MP3s. But I'm not about to go hunt for whichever box of CD's it might be in out in the storage trailer to check. But I have A-B'd the two versions of the title track on Youtube, and while not the most scientifically accurate method, it has left me fairly confident that I prefer the original version. This was the last Nevermore record that I really liked.

 

https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/andy_sneap/credits/

I've looked over Andy Sneap's list of 138 credits, and there are only a very small handfull of these that I've ever owned or even heard. Looks like he doesn't do much work if any in the black or death metal arenas. Working backwards from the present day I have: Overkill's Grinding Wheel from 2017 which he mixed and mastered, Nevermore's 2010 Obsidian Conspiracy which he mixed and mastered, Testament's Formation of Damnation 2008 mixed, mastered and engineered, Exodus' The Atrocity Exhibition: Exhibit A 2007 he actually produced this one. Scrolling back even farther I see that everything else I have that he's worked on is either by Exodus, Nevermore or Testament. And of course these are all third and fourth tier bands if we're just going by how much airtime they get at the Goatmaster lair.

[navybsn]

2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I went through a Hammerheart phase this past spring/summer when I became completely infatuated with the record and must have played it at least 40 or 50 times or more over a several month period. It really sucks you into and immerses you in the viking thing and it has endless replayability. Quothorn's singing definitely belongs in the so bad it's good category. Yet I've come to the iron-clad conclusion that Hammerheart is unequivocally my favorite Bathory album. Black Mark moving down a notch to my #2.

Sad to say I missed this band completely back in the 80's. I'd seen the records in the stores but I'd never actually heard a Bathory record until the early 2000's, probably right around the time of his death from cancer in 2004. But over the last 20 years Bathory have become a rock solid staple of my library. It feels to me at this point like they've always been with me from the beginning. Weird how that can happen. 

 

NP: Morrigan - Headcult, Germany 2005, hands down the absolute best Bathory worship band. First 6 albums are all solid gold. Chose this one this evening 'cos I probably play it the least of the bunch.

 

Have we decided Le Cabbage is hunkered down in Louisiana? I thought his profile said the midwest? He said yesterday "one of the small town clusters that surround the two major cities in my state." so I was thinking either Missouri (the belt buckle of hypocrisy) (KC/StL) or if as it sounds like the cities are grouped together then probably Minnesota. (Minneapolis/StP) Could always be Kansas (KC and Topeka) but not sure if Topeka counts a 'major' city. Also Michigan (Detroit/Ann Arbor) but again Ann Arbor isn't a major city, only has that many people there cuz it's a college town.

Anyway... it seems I have somehow missed this Woven Black Arteries EP that came out two years before Death and must track it down immediately!

Eh maybe. I could have sworn I saw him mention Louisiana somewhere, but it's been pretty crazy this week and I could be mixed up. Wouldn't be the first time.

 

The Baneful Choir got some hate on a couple of other boards and even made a "most disappointing" list that year. Never any at MFi, and while it's not my favorite of theirs, it's a solid addition to the catalog.

Woven Black Arteries

 

[Thatguy]

RORCAL- Silence. I've been looking forward to this and it is as nasty as I'd hoped for.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

30 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

RORCAL- Silence. I've been looking forward to this and it is as nasty as I'd hoped for.

I knew there was a reason we've kept you around Doc. This is good. This could even be a purchse, but I'm only 9 minutes in.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

3 hours ago, navybsn said:

Reminds me. If you happen to be heading to the Spirit Possession/Bell Witch gig at Santos on 11/2, I'll be there. If you are, maybe we can hook up and hit the banging Lebanese joint across the street before and I'll buy you a beer.

Woven Black Arteries is the best thing from them imo, but there's no bad choices. The Baneful Choir got a considerable hate when it came out. I think it's pretty decent.

Sounds like a blast and this time last year I'd have been down, but circumstances find me in a different part of the country currently. It seems I've inherited my parents bad habit of roaming and rambling. Believe me though, if I could settle down in one spot permanently, I would.

NP: Mesmur - Chthonic

https://solitudeproductions.bandcamp.com/album/chthonic

Not a whole lot to latch onto here. Keyboards are a little to front and center with almost no hooks. Dips into funeral doom speeds at times. They can't all be winners I suppose.

4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I love the smell of filthy rancid cavernous blackened death in the morning. Just listened to that Ceremonial Bloodbath album you just posted which I've got, now moving onto some Cerebral Rot since they're right next to them in my MusicBee library.

Re: Teitanblood, you're probably missing 2019's excellent The Baneful Choir. Better get on top of that shit Cabbage, it's 4 years old already.

You've reminded me I'm gonna have to revisit Impetuos Ritual sometime soon. I've been hearing their name coming up a lot lately but I dismissed them some years ago as impenetrable disso-atonal fuckery so I can't remember exactly what they sound like anymore. So I'm thinking a drive-by is probably in order. Another step in my ongoing plight to make sure I have enough of a variety of utterly obscene and filth caked options at my disposal.

Well it kind of is dissonant atonal fuckery. It just does so with its guitar tone. If you're going for that rumbling in the bowels of a planet consuming giant sound, you are going to get some residual dissonance. Just the way it is. There are riffs to be had though. They just take an extra foot or so of digging to get to.

And you're correct about the Teitanblood. I haven't heard The Baneful Choir. Loved the Hell out of Death and Seven Chalices though.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

1 hour ago, navybsn said:

Eh maybe. I could have sworn I saw him mention Louisiana somewhere, but it's been pretty crazy this week and I could be mixed up. Wouldn't be the first time.

I did, for a time live around New Orleans. I like the area, and had a ton of friends down there, but basically as I got into the top half of my twenties I felt the need to leave for greener and mainly calmer pastures. I had opportunities elsewhere and the thought of slowly morphing into a cirrhotic blob talking about the 'good 'ol days' just didn't appeal to me.

Oh and I was in Louisiana for a couple of the last two years while I worked on not dying. It's all kind of broken up where and when I was in x place and what I was doing there.

[SurgicalBrute]

 Konfession - Rural Hypostasis

https://konfession-iec.bandcamp.com/album/rural-hypostasis

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Profanatica - Crux Simplex, NY/CT. No idea why I waited a whole week to listen to this new one, it's nasty as fuck. Gonna go ahead halfway through and say it's definitely one of their better efforts.                

 

Disguised Malignance – Entering the Gateways, Finndeath. I do have a predilection for all things Finnish

 

Rat King – Psychotic Reality, deathgrind Seattle WA

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Marthyrium - Through the Spheres of Darkness, Spain

 

Mephorash - Shem Ha Mephorash, Sweden 2019

 

[Kristiko]

Slipknot - The End, So Far (album)

[MacabreEternal]

Black Sabbath - Sabotage (1975)

 

[Nasty_Cabbage]

NP: Blood Oath - Lost in an Eternal Silence

▶︎ Lost In An Eternal Silence | Blood Oath (bandcamp.com)

Cool cover. I was kind of surprised that name wasn't already taken. Turns out there's one other Blood Oath in the U.K., and they're pretty clearly doing their own thing. Anyway this was billed at tech-death on the review I read citing influences around The Chasm and (I'm assuming later era) Death. Well alright I suppose. That's not what I would count as tech-death personally, but I could see the argument being made if you were to get down to the marrow of that assertion. Whatever you call it the influences are correct even if the band are a little more straightforward than The Chasm and certainly not of the 'Let's try our best to sound like Death's Human' variety. There's something else in here I'm having trouble pinpointing. At first glance I was thinking maybe it's similar to some of the Euro death bands that reared up in the nineties outside of your Entombeds and what have you. Pestilence maybe? The bass tone is definitely similar to Cynic, but your mileage may vary. In any case it's pretty enjoyable and I can appreciate what they're doing. The songs are not winding labyrinthian mazes and there's something to be said for that sort of restraint. The longest song is just over six minutes and nearly every other song starts on a clear arc and follows it to a satisfying resolution. Bottom line: if you like The Chasm a la Farseeing The Paranormal Abyss, and can appreciate sharp riffing that doesn't use keyboards to round out it's transitions give this a go.