What Are You Listening To?

[Miss_Teala]

I am currently listening to that second part of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" by The Beatles, and I have always thought that that part almost feels a little bit like doom metal.
It certainly seems like a kind of early inspiration for that genre.

It is a very exciting part, either way.

[thrashinbiker]

Another recommendation by the @GoatmasterGeneral himself.  @FatherAlabaster I am getting to yours once I've done the third and final recommendation by GG.  

I'm only ten minutes in so far and I absolutely love the music - though I am not entirely sold on the vocals.  The screams are good but the deeper growls are a bit what I call "sore throat vocals", which I must admit, in this case, aren't really reaching me, but like I said, I am only halfway through. 

Give that man a Halls Soothers, a glass of hot honey and lemon, tuck him up in bobos and he should be fine in the morning  

 

 

[JamesT]

Betzefer - "The Devil Went Down to the Holy Land"

The more modern groove metal band that comes closest to the sound of my beloved PanterA than any other band I've discovered in recent years.  

Beyond Perception - "Vital Ground"

Texas Hippie Coalition - "The Name Lives On"

[GoatmasterGeneral]

2 hours ago, thrashinbiker said:

Another recommendation by the @GoatmasterGeneral himself.  @FatherAlabaster I am getting to yours once I've done the third and final recommendation by GG.  

I'm only ten minutes in so far and I absolutely love the music - though I am not entirely sold on the vocals.  The screams are good but the deeper growls are a bit what I call "sore throat vocals", which I must admit, in this case, aren't really reaching me, but like I said, I am only halfway through. 

Give that man a Halls Soothers, a glass of hot honey and lemon, tuck him up in bobos and he should be fine in the morning  

 

Those weren't actually meant as recos for you TB, that post was just whatever random shit I'd found myself listening to that day. T'was really meant for this thread. I don't have any NWOBHM recos to share since it's really not a sub-genre I continued to be interested in after I discovered thrash 40 years ago. And then in turn my interest in thrash waned when I moved on to black and death metal in the mid 2000's. Unless of course the thrash has been severely blackened, or crustified, that's the shit I like. The only NWOBHM I ever go back to these days would be the occasional Saxon record for old times sake (because I was always a Saxon man) I suppose that Savage Loose 'n' Lethal album is pretty replayable, Tank'll still get the odd spin...and that's about it unless you count Motörhead as NWOBHM. I don't really do Priest and I deffo don't ever do Maiden. Many of those second tier early 80's bands I've heard their names and seen their albums in the stores but I've never heard their music because in those days funds were limited and I didn't want to invest the money to purchase the albums just to see what they sounded like, in case they sucked. Albums were/are one of the few products you can't return in the states just because when you got it home you found out you didn't like the music. Best you could do back then was trade it back in for pennies on the dollar. Now that we can check out whichever bands we want online with no risk it's too late, I don't care about second and third tier NWOBHM bands anymore.

There was this little forgotten gem from 1983, but listening to it now it doesn't have nearly the same impact as it did 40 years ago. From 'oop north' somewhere round about Newcastle.

 

Oh and I almost forgot the Rock Goddess album, also '83. Bloody hell I wore that one out back in the day and I still play it several times a year.

 

Savage - Loose 'n' Lethal, from the no man's land somewhere between Sheffield and Nottingham, UK 1983. Killer record in case there's anyone who's never heard it.

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Agonic Autumn - The Last Flame of Life, Chilean black

 

Abysmal Nothingness - Bajo el Abismo de la Nada, Chilean black

 

[FatherAlabaster]

4 hours ago, thrashinbiker said:

@FatherAlabaster I am getting to yours once I've done the third and final recommendation by GG.  

No worries man, those albums have all been there for at least 36 years, they can wait.

NP:

Dødheimsgard - Black Medium Current

Anachronism - Meanders

Slidhr - White Hart!

[markm]

Ahab/The Coral Tombs (23)-So, made it through it's entity. Cliff notes-I  like it. I've definitely seen these guys on the 'net, but for whatever reason, haven't ever listened...might have streamed the odd track from a metal blog, but I don't recall listening to them before. If  you're like me and curious about this band, they're a doom band that alternates between heavy-ish (meaning not that heavy) traditional death doom and clean vocals. The cleans are accompanied by melodic, pretty sounding post rock influence that don't scream out your listening to an Isis album -or anything but are quite beautiful sounding, which may scare away everyone who wants metal to ROAR 100% of the time. But here, the smooth parts take a dominant percentage of the playing time. The cleans remind me a bit of the dude in 40 Watt Sun. 40 Watt Sun's music is so dreamy that I lose interest after a few tracks, it turns into something like lounge music for me. To be clear, I love doom and I like a fair amount of post metal-but I prefer it balanced between heavy and light. All that said, I found The Coral Tombs to be a very enjoyable if not perhaps "lite" on metal, and I'm OK with that. I'm reminded of a doom/death take on bands like, oh IDK, maybe Giant Squid but without the weirdness. Oh and by the way, I'm 100% down with weird ass metal. 

Just as I'm OK with the direction of the New Tomb Mold album. Do, I prefer their earlier raw sound? Uh, yeah, probably. But I get that some artists get bored of playing more simplistic music that many of us enjoy and want to grow and flex their technical skills which sometimes manifests as articulate, complex, progressive switch ups in sound. I find Tomb Mold (23) still have enough balance  between ugly DM and their beautiful almost classical guitar sound to make it enjoyable but it's certainly less visceral and more cerebral. I bought the CD earlier in the year and lyrics are very spiritual which is interesting for DM. IDK how you can listen to  Tomb Mold (23) and not think of  Chuck Schuldiner's evolution form Scream Bloody Gore to his lyrics in albums like Human and Atheist's impact on prog death. I don't always love these directional changes but I respect the desire to grow as artists andto push heavy music  into new territory which the 2000's clearly have. So, I give TM  props for dropping the gore and Satanic themes (that's an assumption, I've never bothered to read their earlier lyrics and really why would you?) and actually exploring their personal philosophies on mortality and ya know all that meaning of life shit. 

[Thatguy]

3 hours ago, markm said:

The cleans remind me a bit of the dude in 40 Watt Sun.

Oh, well done and thank you. I keep trying Ahab because I love their cover art and in theory I should like them, but they end up annoying me and it's the vocals that put me off and yep, the 40 Watt Sun guy is the apt comparison. He drones on and gets on my nerves.

[RelentlessOblivion]

36 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

Oh, well done and thank you. I keep trying Ahab because I love their cover art and in theory I should like them, but they end up annoying me and it's the vocals that put me off and yep, the 40 Watt Sun guy is the apt comparison. He drones on and gets on my nerves.

I’ll admit Ahab’s vocals are more noticeable on their last two albums, probably the reason why I tend to prefer their first three releases, I have a similar issue with 40 Watt Sun actually. Their debut is enjoyable enough, but I have no time for the subsequent albums.
 

NP: Dark Angel - Darkness Descends 

[MarkhantonioYeatts]

DISTHRONED AGONY - Disthroned Agony

....came for the song titles, stayed for the song titles......

[thrashinbiker]

18 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

New York state is a tale of two cities. Majority of the state is a rural, pastoral wasteland of mountains, forests, lakes and cows. The southernmost part of the state has New York City and its 8 million people obviously, and then right next to it is Long Island which is the burbs where the people who work in the city come home to eat, fuck, bathe and sleep. I'm from the Burbs. About 30 miles out, (50 km's) just about a quarter of the way out to the end, roughly an hour from the city by car at night, 2 hours plus in the daytime, 3 hours plus in bad weather. New York and Long Island each had their own thriving club scenes in the 80's, multiple options of bands to go see pretty much every single night. Although out on the Island we had more cover bands making the rounds than all original acts. Shamefully, Twisted Sister was the biggest name to come out of the 80's Long Island metal club scene. (I know some people actually like TS but I'm not one of them) The place to go for big name metal shows back then was a club called L'amour "the rock capitol of Brooklyn" in Bensonhurst. But the clubs in the city proper (Manhattan) were a cornucopia of all kinds of wacky, weird and wild shit. From rock to new wave to country to punk to metal to performance art. You name it, they had it. I imagine it was probably something like London, we used to ride the train into the city just to walk around and look at the freaks. On the weekends we'd often hit the CBGB matinees downtown, then walk around the city afterwards seeing what kind of mischief we could get into.

 

So out in the suburbs, aka normieville, yeah the long hair, leather jackets, weed smoking and thrash metal was seen as subversive counter culture by most of the middle class old folks, who were our parents. But yet there was no shortage of long-haired leather jacketed headbanger metalhead youths at all the shows, they used to pack us in like sardines, you could hardly breathe down front at most shows. But just by virtue of having so many people all concentrated in one place, (20 milion people live within 50 miles (80 km) of NYC) there were a lot of different music scenes all running concurrently in the 80's besides just the metal and punk scenes I remember being a part of. In the city at night we didn't feel like outcasts with our long hair and leather jackets because the Village was literally chocka with all manner of freaks and weirdos. But back home out in the burbs in our regular daily lives we had to contend with "why don't you cut your hair?" and "how can you listen to that trash metal crap?"

 

OVERKILL "WRECKING CREW" LIVE @ L'AMOUR BROOKLYN, NY 3.7.87. This was 18 months before I got married so I'm sure I was there that night in March with my bullet belt on. 

My '81 Grand Prix looked like this right down to the stupid plastic spoke hubcaps. Got it used from the dealer 2 years old wiff 40k miles on it back in the days when cars were cheap and lots of people used to trade them in for a new model every two or three years. And no, we lost touch with those Irish girls many years ago, their visas eventually ran out and they returned to Ireland to be grown-ups and start families I imagine. 

First off - I fucking LOVE the car, man!  Haha, it's like seeing an 80's/early 90's US TV show here.  If you saw a car like that in the UK (either today or in the 1980s) you would expect it to be being driven by some poshly dressed chauffeur, driving a visiting dignitary about rather than occupied by some metalheads headbanging to some heavy shit.  Brilliant.  

Really interesting to hear about the scene in NY back then.  Like always, London was seen as the hub for alternative music and lifestyles, and it is mostly London that is quoted as being at the centre of these revolutions, however, a lot of this "teenage disaffection" and rebellion also took place "oop North", as you would say.  

In my suburb of Merseyside/Liverpool, like I said, it was, and still is, mostly populated by pensioners/retirees, and being the long-haired, leather jacketed youth that I was from the tail end of the 80s and into the 90s, my particular brand of self-expression was very unusual for our town and, even now, it still not exactly usual, even though you see a few more of us metalheads around now.  

But, even back then, you would only have to venture into the city (some 12-13 miles away - a half hour car ride or 20 minutes on the train) and there were some venues cropping up that latched onto the rock/metal scene.  A notable place was a metal club called The Krazyhouse, which, sadly, closed in 2018, though still holds the odd "nostalgia" event.  

Back in the early 90's, though, it was the place where, even if live bands weren't playing (I could look up some of the bands, probably, though I remember Korn playing there at some point) there was always metal playing.  At the K (as we called it, for short) there was no shortage of our long-haired leather jacketed brethren, and, as the place stayed open until 5am (most other places closed at 2am) you could even find a brave non-rocker in there from time to time.  

The K got onto this and, later on, as well as the main floor (on the ground, or first floor for my US readers) they added an Indie floor on level 2 (K2) and then a current chart/old pop floor on the level 3 (K3).  Of course, the metalheads generally contained themselves where the metal played, but occasionally, when those posh, middle-class folks from the other two floors decided to see how the rockers live, we would storm their floors (particularly the top one) and happily form a mosh pit to Alanis Morissette or Duran Duran.  

It was the sort of place where anything goes - I shudder to think how many children were conceived in that place because drunken fucking was highly prevalent - and this was never more so than on Thursday nights when ALL drinks were two for one, regardless.

Of course, it was the sort of place where the food available ranged from pickled eggs, pot noodles and burgers and chips and was a firm favourite all round.  It was also the sort of place that constantly smelled of cigarette/pot smoke, puke and had a floor that was so sticky that if you stood still for too long, the soles of your boots would melt into it.  And, naturally, the toilets were always at least an inch deep in piss (and fuck knows what else) but did it stop us going?  Did it fuck.  

Shame you lost touch with those Irish girls, man.  I bet they have told endless stories of you and your friend, hehe.  Of course, I had to add to the "bad guy" thing by also riding a motorbike - I was never allowed to be alone with girls such was my level of normie rebellion - but fuck'em then and fuck 'em now haha.  

Oh and to keep on topic, I am currently listening to (the final recommendation that wasn't meant to be a recommendation from @GoatmasterGeneral:

\m/ FUCK YEAH \m/

[RelentlessOblivion]

Deathrow - Riders of Doom

[FatherAlabaster]

Ivar Bjørnson and Einar Selvik - Hugsjá

[markm]

6 hours ago, Thatguy said:

Oh, well done and thank you. I keep trying Ahab because I love their cover art and in theory I should like them, but they end up annoying me and it's the vocals that put me off and yep, the 40 Watt Sun guy is the apt comparison. He drones on and gets on my nerves.

Very fair. I enjoyed the new album today, but it's my intro to the band and there were some meandering spots for sure where the cleans overstay their welcome. 

CRUCIAMENTUM/Obsidian Refractions (23)-Been reading a lot about this one-solid DM for sure. 

Cattle Decapitation/Terrasite-This is the first CD I've listened to in it's entirety since Monolith of Inhumanity back in 2012! Not really stylistically what I listen to DM for, but I like Monolith for what it is.  A decade later....my my, so melodic and accessible in a big budget, shiny, polished over the top popcorn movie of a DM album....I mean, I thought of Fleshgod Apocalypse with some of the production choices. No doubt an example of modern, polished DM, but still a banger and hugely entertaining. 

 

[markm]

Man, I'm really knocking out my 2023 DM 'need to listen" list. It's starting to blend, I mean bleed into my brain. NP: Sulphur Aeon/ Seven Crowns and Seven Seals

[RelentlessOblivion]

Exhumer - Possessed By Fire

[MacabreEternal]

Malokarpatan - Vertumnus Caesar (2023)

 

Krigsgrav - Fires in the Fall (2023)

 

[markm]

NP: Afsky/Om hundrede år (2023)-Afsky is so reliable for quality atmoblack. The new one sounds great but not dissimilar from their previous output. I don't listen closely enough to really parse out the differences, but honestly thinking their output is so consistent like the AC/DC of Sacndo Atmoblack. Regardless this is sweet.  Dang, I love those woodsy little acoustic babbling brook bits interspersed with their unleashing of  hells minions. 

[SurgicalBrute]

Sol Ether - I : Golden Head

https://solether.bandcamp.com/album/i-golden-head

Pretty decent death metal band from last year I some how missed out on.  I like it though

[SurgicalBrute]

Lore - Altars Of The Precipice Possession

Atmospheric black metal

https://lore8.bandcamp.com/album/altars-of-the-precipice-possession

[AlSymerz]

Exmortus - Necrophony

 

[SurgicalBrute]

PERMUTATION - Transience

https://permutationmetal.bandcamp.com/album/transience

[AlSymerz]

Cannibal Corpse - Chaos Horrific

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Nornír - Skuld, Germany

 

Kêres - Vexilloid, Finland

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

Flotsam & Jetsom - Doomsday For the Deciever