What Are You Listening To?

[AlSymerz]

Fossil metal sounds cool. Who would want to live in the present when there is fossil metal, and presumably, fossil rock to keep us entertained.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

At least Bruce Bruce released a killer album everyone loves this year.

[AlSymerz]

Well that answers that question.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, Thatguy said:

CONVULSING - perdurance

WESENVILLE  - III:The Great Light Above

NP - ISENORDAL - A Moment Approaches Eternity

Isenordal, you jumped on me the other day for the choir, and then you turn around and post this nonsense?!? My choir was way cooler than this shit yo.

Wesenville, not really bad, though not really good, just kinda there, going nowhere, wasting my time.

Convulsing, this one came the closest to being good. But these boys from Sydney (by way of Adelaide) are just not straightforward enough to suit me, and not nearly riffy enough. Just slightly off-kilter at all times and dissonant as hell which irritates the fuck out of me. Their last one Grievous was better than this. I'd rather go back and listen to the fossilized Preest compilation.

And also this new Convulsing reminds me that the new Ulcerate should be poised to drop pretty soon, and I'll hate that one too, all the same criticisms apply.

 

 

G.Z.P - Brain Bucket, groovy French goregrind 2021

 

Gamborimbo - Fiesta Mexicana, groovy German goregrind 2022

 

[RelentlessOblivion]

4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

ZZ Top - Eliminator, 1983

 

Thin Lizzy  - Thunder & Lightning, 1983

 

You won't have to twist my arm, I was the first one to turn on Maiden in 1984 when they released that Powerslave garbage. I can't even remember the last time I felt like listening to anything of theirs. Back in the day I was pretty taken with Killers, and then Piece of Mind, but that feeling hasn't persisted.

I think it’s just a sign of how much my taste has changed over the years, it’s not that long ago that I was probably the guy defending Iron Maiden and like but increasingly I find I only have an appetite for the extreme side of metal.

[JonoBlade]

5 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Alright then, so taken from across their whole catalog?

Living After Midnight

Hot Rockin'

All the Priest I could ever need in roughly 74 minutes, so it should fit on a CDR. (remember those?) If the Ripper fits you could throw that on there too.

Oof. I actively dislike those songs. Always seemed like they were trying too hard to write hits in those moments and definite album low points for me (which on Point of Entry is saying something). The writing team in Priest were too influenced by external trends and a dream of being popular (which is hard when you are as ugly s they are), whereas you can just tell that someone like Iommi wasn't interested in what others were playing. He's still in business, so would rather be popular and successful than not, but stayed truer to original mission statement.

I take issue with @markm piling on Ram it Down though. That came out just as I got into Priest and, as such, was amazing/life changing. And it was obviously better than Turbo, even for someone who'd been into Bon Jovi the year before. Turbo was Priest trying to write Bon Jovi songs and failing so bad, mainly because no one (and certainly not a Halford and a KK) can be as dreamy as Jon and Richie.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

5 minutes ago, RelentlessOblivion said:

I think it’s just a sign of how much my taste has changed over the years, it’s not that long ago that I was probably the guy defending Iron Maiden and like but increasingly I find I only have an appetite for the extreme side of metal.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you that my tastes have changed and evolved quite a bit over the years. You don't think they ever will, and you don't always notice while it's happening because it' tends to be quite gradual. But looking back from here I can see that I've covered a lot of ground since I first became aware of rock guitar music and discovered bands like Zeppelin and Sabbath in the early 70's. It's only been the last 20 years that I've been listening to extreme black & death metal, which means that for the first 42 years of my life I must have been listening to something else. It was still hard rock, punk and metal, but it wasn't anything more extreme than thrash or hardcore until 2004.

You're still pretty young yet Blivvington, so you'll probably have a few more major shifts in your musical taste to look forward to in the years to come. I know it's hard to imagine now how there will be new genres of music you'll be listening to one day that haven't even been as much as dreamt of yet. But there will be.

Now there are some people who don't do what we do, and will just find some shit they like in their youth and then basically just stick with that forever. We all know people like this. I don't understand these people, I can't relate to that mindset because the search for new music has been a constant in my life. If I couldn't have access to streams of new music I'd probably stop listening to any music at all after awhile, or at least I'd lose all my enthusiasm for music listening just from the sheer boredom of listening to the same group of stale albums over and over again ad infinitum.

That's kinda what happened to me in the 90's when I was on the road and working a lot, and I'd had a child, and I wasn't going to any shows or finding any new music except for the few things I managed to get from the mainstream. Looking back it was pretty terrible, I'd never want to go back to that decade when I was in my 30's and had completely lost track of what the fuck was going on in the world of metal. The only good thing that came out of that period was that my tastes changed drastically when I came out the other side and got back down to the business of hunting for new music and quickly realized that the entire metal world had gone extreme on me while I wasn't paying attention. So after 15 years of being asleep at the wheel running on autopilot, I had 15 years of catching up to do all at once in the mid 2000's which was pretty exciting.

[AlSymerz]

13 minutes ago, JonoBlade said:

Turbo was Priest trying to write Bon Jovi songs and failing so bad, mainly because no one (and certainly not a Halford and a KK) can be as dreamy as Jon and Richie.

 

Pfft. As if!

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, JonoBlade said:

Oof. I actively dislike those songs. Always seemed like they were trying too hard to write hits in those moments and definite album low points for me (which on Point of Entry is saying something). The writing team in Priest were too influenced by external trends and a dream of being popular (which is hard when you are as ugly s they are), whereas you can just tell that someone like Iommi wasn't interested in what others were playing. He's still in business, so would rather be popular and successful than not, but stayed truer to original mission statement.

I take issue with @markm piling on Ram it Down though. That came out just as I got into Priest and, as such, was amazing/life changing. And it was obviously better than Turbo, even for someone who'd been into Bon Jovi the year before. Turbo was Priest trying to write Bon Jovi songs and failing so bad, mainly because no one (and certainly not a Halford and a KK) can be as dreamy as Jon and Richie.

It was the early 80's Jon. Point of Entry was released on Feb 17 1981, I was 19. Heavy metal the genre had literally just been invented a year or two before. I was of legal age and I fucking wanted to go hot rockin'.

A band like Priest in their 80's phase essentially played catchy pop songs that they heavied up a bit with more layers of crunchy guitars. They weren't trying to be really heavy like Motorhead or Venom or Discharge or Exciter or anything. They always maintained a catchy radio friendly sensibility about them. That's why I rarely ever listen to Priest anymore, because catchy pop music's not really my thing or what I'm usually looking for these days. But back in 1981, my choices were limited to 70's dinosaur stadium rock, soft-cock 70's radio rock, disco, pop, jazz, 60's hippie flower power rock, punk rock, or the nwobhm craze. So I went with the punk and the heavy metal.

I've never understood why people who generally like that ''78 to '84 era of Priest would single out Living After Midnight as one of the worst offenders in the too poppy Priest tune sweepstakes. Because they had plenty of other songs which were just as bad if not far more obnoxious than LAM and were very obvious and tragically failed attempts at writing catchy radio songs. Love Bites? Heads Are Gonna Roll? Take These Chains? Pain & Pleasure? Fever? Another Thing Coming? Metal Gods? Even Breakin' the Law is worse than LAM. I honestly don't see what separates LAM or HR from any of the other songs on those early 80's JP albums. To me they've always seemed right in line with what they were doing on most of their other songs at the time. LAM in particular happens to be one of my top 2 or 3 favorite Priest songs of all. Certainly the best song on British Steel. It's just a great song all the way around imo.

Bizarrely I've seen people defend lightweight early 80's bands like Crue or WASP or Ratt or Dokken or Van Halen or Queen and then turn around and slam Living After Midnight as being too lightweight and catchy?? WTF? That song kicks ass!! The second part of the chorus, that riff they play where he's singing: "'I'm aiming for you - I'm gonna floor you" is pure genius Jon-O, really gets the old blood pumping. Whatever you do just don't watch the video for Heading Out to the Highway though, you'll never be able to listen to the song again after watching Rob's idea of dancing in his skin tight jeans, pointy boots, sparkley belt buckle and plain white T.

I'm gonna need your list though Jon-O. What's your best of Preest compilation track list?

 

Living After Midnight

 

Hot Rckin'

 

 

Headin' Out to the Highway

 

[Thatguy]

4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Isenordal, you jumped on me the other day for the choir, and then you turn around and post this nonsense?!? My choir was way cooler than this shit yo.

I listened. I didn't say I liked it

 

4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

the new Ulcerate should be poised to drop pretty soon, and I'll hate that one too, all the same criticisms apply.

Sad but true. You don't know what's good for you.

 

2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

So after 15 years of being asleep at the wheel running on autopilot, I had 15 years of catching up to do all at once in the mid 2000's which was pretty exciting.

Yeah, but you haven't quite caught up with Ulcerate yet.

[navybsn]

12 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Except as she grows up it turns out she really can't sing. No problem, she can always be a black metal vocalist

Qualifies for most punk bands too. Lots of options for the kid.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

5 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

Sad but true. You don't know what's good for you.

Yeah, but you haven't quite caught up with Ulcerate yet.

Well you see the thing is they're not playing a sub-genre I'm interested in Doc. I'm sure they're gifted and innovative kiwi musicians, and great rugby loving blokes to boot, more power to 'em, Kia Kaha boys, but that's not what I come here for. I don't think I ask too much from my death metal, I want cool riffs and a little filth and maybe a smattering of evil atmosphere. Ulcerate doesn't deliver any of those things, they're all weird, wacky, dissonant and complicated. I don't want my death metal so wacky and complicated. 

But I'll make you a deal Doc. Gimme your Best of Preest compilation track list, and I'll give the new Ulcereate disc a listen when it comes out and then report back to you with my honest appraisal. I had no plans to listen to it at all, but I will in order to get your Preest list. You can't tell me that you were too old and set in your ways already in the 80's to have been affected by Judas Fucking Preest. I know you weren't a hardcore metalhead like most of us back then 40 years ago, but you couldn't possibly have lived in the UK as a young man in the 1980's and totally escaped hearing Judas Fucking Preest. You had to be aware of it, even if you weren't necessarily into it.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

3 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you that my tastes have changed and evolved quite a bit over the years. You don't think they ever will, and you don't always notice while it's happening because it' tends to be quite gradual. But looking back from here I can see that I've covered a lot of ground since I first became aware of rock guitar music and discovered bands like Zeppelin and Sabbath in the early 70's. It's only been the last 20 years that I've been listening to extreme black & death metal, which means that for the first 42 years of my life I must have been listening to something else. It was still hard rock, punk and metal, but it wasn't anything more extreme than thrash or hardcore until 2004.

You're still pretty young yet Blivvington, so you'll probably have a few more major shifts in your musical taste to look forward to in the years to come. I know it's hard to imagine now how there will be new genres of music you'll be listening to one day that haven't even been as much as dreamt of yet. But there will be.

Now there are some people who don't do what we do, and will just find some shit they like in their youth and then basically just stick with that forever. We all know people like this. I don't understand these people, I can't relate to that mindset because the search for new music has been a constant in my life. If I couldn't have access to streams of new music I'd probably stop listening to any music at all after awhile, or at least I'd lose all my enthusiasm for music listening just from the sheer boredom of listening to the same group of stale albums over and over again ad infinitum.

These are some really good points. What keeps all of this old stuff afloat and active is remaining in a constant state of learning more. I do think that people who tend to stick with the same few bands and sometimes even within one or two albums from said bands aren't really in a state of arrested development. For that you'd have to define not just development, but have a sort of agreed on universal theory as to what the harder rock/metal was developing towards. It's why, despite enjoying a good portion of the music itself, I've always disliked the term progressive. What are we progressing toward exactly? Is there a general sentiment that somewhere just beyond where we're at there's this perfect song that we're all trying to find. The stuff people cling to from their youth could be that way because they hear something universal in it and are testing it's rigor against the passage of time.

I can't really blame them, even if keeping yourself within the confines of very small and rigid corner of the musical world is almost incomprehensible to me personally. Like it or no, there are people out there for whom music is simply not that significant an aspect of their lives. As looming a figure as music's been to almost all of us here your taste will change and the musical part of your brain might not even bother to let you know when it does. I know I've softened a ton in my judgement of certain bands and or singer/songwriters. A younger version of myself would be flummoxed and probably a little embarrassed to see my older self listen to things like Joanna Newsom , and certainly wouldn't understand my appreciation for Thelonious Monk. I couldn't tell you when I let my guard down, but it did happen, and we probably need both types to keep this whole music thing we've got going for ourselves healthy.

NP: Voice of Destruction - Bloedrivier

Bloedrivier - 10th Anniversary Special Edition | V.O.D - Voice Of Destruction (bandcamp.com)

I can see a lot of people really hating the vocals, but honestly, I don't really mind. Dude's not reaching for anything he can't pull off, and the songs are almost catchy. Band's been around for a long time too. Only two full lengths though.

[markm]

10 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

ZZ Top - Eliminator, 1983

 

Thin Lizzy  - Thunder & Lightning, 1983

 

You won't have to twist my arm, I was the first one to turn on Maiden in 1984 when they released that Powerslave garbage. I can't even remember the last time I felt like listening to anything of theirs. Back in the day I was pretty taken with Killers, and then Piece of Mind, but that feeling hasn't persisted.

Sacrilege! Even I, the anti metalhead metalhead know that Powerslave is one of the greatest metal albums of all time. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner along with  a bottle of chianti and some fava beans still bring a tear to my eye. 

[JonoBlade]

4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I'm gonna need your list though Jon-O. What's your best of Preest compilation track list?

I don't really do compilations. I'll just have to choose a roughly favourite from each album.

Winter

Dreamer Deceiver/Deceiver

Dissident Aggressor

Heroes End

Hell Bent for Leather

Steeler

Desert Plains

Fever (yeah, I know)

The Sentinel

Out in the Cold

Blood Red Skies

Night Crawler

Cathedral Spires

Feed on Me (scraping the barrel, but I always thought this was pretty catchy)

Loch Ness (the most ridiculous song in a career of absurdity, but musically cool)

Nostradamus 

....I don't have any favourites after that because they all blend into one amorphous mass of generic, if perfectly serviceable, filler.

Nostradamus and Future of Mankind would have been a pretty reasonable way to go out.

 

[AlSymerz]

You people make me laugh with all your wacky ideas about music.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

4 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

I don't really do compilations. I'll just have to choose a roughly favourite from each album.

Winter

Dreamer Deceiver/Deceiver

Dissident Aggressor

Heroes End

Hell Bent for Leather

Steeler

Desert Plains

Fever (yeah, I know)

The Sentinel

Out in the Cold

Blood Red Skies

Night Crawler

Cathedral Spires

Feed on Me (scraping the barrel, but I always thought this was pretty catchy)

Loch Ness (the most ridiculous song in a career of absurdity, but musically cool)

Nostradamus 

....I don't have any favourites after that because they all blend into one amorphous mass of generic, if perfectly serviceable, filler.

Nostradamus and Future of Mankind would have been a pretty reasonable way to go out.

 

Thank you for playing along Jon! I haven't ever heard several of those Pweest albums and I'm not all that familiar with many of the rest, but man that was totally worth it just to see that Fever is your favorite track off possibly their best 80's album with the least amount of filler. And here I always thought that was the one of the two surefire skippers on that record. But there's no (yeah I know) about it my friend, it's your list Jon-O Blade and you should put whichever tracks you like on it with your head held high. It's Judas Pweest FFS, we already know they're 80's commercial pop/metal barely one step up from Motley Crue. I just can't reconcile you dissing one of my Pweest faves Living After Midnight for being too calculatedly commercial and dumbed down for mass market appeal, while at the same time praising Fever of all songs as your fave track off Screaming. (mine is Bloodstone) But I guess I could see that bridge part at the end there they threw in is pretty cool. The rest of the song is completely generic and worthless of course, but who knows, maybe you like it so much because you have fond memories of getting some boy/girl action as a teen 30 years ago with that song playing in the background or something. 

 

38 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

You people make me laugh with all your wacky ideas about music.

Where's your best of Pweest compilation track list bro? Stop stalling and cough it up already. I know you must've been a massive Pweest fan back in the days before your beloved thrash came along. I'm sure you saw them in Melbourne in 2001 when they finally ventured down under. Take 10 minutes and slap something together, the cows & goats will wait.

[Nasty_Cabbage]

6 hours ago, markm said:

Sacrilege! Even I, the anti metalhead metalhead know that Powerslave is one of the greatest metal albums of all time. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner along with  a bottle of chianti and some fava beans still bring a tear to my eye. 

😆 I do love to drop in random Silence of the Lambs quotes from time to time. Best I ever came up with was when we were learning some useless thing in math to do with order of operations, and the teacher asked me to spot problems with the equation on the board, so I hit 'em with "It puts the quotient in the brackets or else it gets the hose again." Apparently neither the teacher or the class had really seen the movie so everybody looked at me like I was a lunatic. I was always a little bitter that didn't get a bigger laugh.

NP: Darker Mysteria - Ceremonia de Brujeria Ancestral

▶︎ Ceremonia de Brujería Ancestral | Darker Mysteria (bandcamp.com)

Surprisingly competent clean vocals peppered around the album for some spice in an otherwise fairly straightforward affair. I can't find much more info on these guys online save some fairly basic specs, which is a shame because these Argentinians have something seriously going for them. Well executed unadorned black metal. Gotta hand it to 'em.

[Thatguy]

8 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

but you couldn't possibly have lived in the UK as a young man in the 1980's and totally escaped hearing Judas Fucking Preest. You had to be aware of it, even if you weren't necessarily into it.

I actually would love to play along ( I was in the UK in the 90's not the 80's - still as a young man though), but I genuinely could not name one JFP song. I have heard some, but I paid no attention. So I guess I'm a Jonny-come-lately metal head, but I don't think I've missed anything. 

Just say no to fossil metal!

And it's cool you don't like Ulcerate. All the more for me.

[FatherAlabaster]

10 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

 I do love to drop in random Silence of the Lambs quotes from time to time. Best I ever came up with was when we were learning some useless thing in math to do with order of operations, and the teacher asked me to spot problems with the equation on the board, so I hit 'em with "It puts the quotient in the brackets or else it gets the hose again."

Better choice for class than "I can smell your quotient!" 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

6 hours ago, markm said:

Sacrilege! Even I, the anti metalhead metalhead know that Powerslave is one of the greatest metal albums of all time. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner along with  a bottle of Chianti and some fava beans still bring a tear to my eye. 

I remember when that album came out. September '84 I was 23. I liked the first two tracks Aces High & Two Minutes well enough, but that was it, I absolutely hated the entire rest of it. That's when I realized I'd been following the wrong path and Maiden was a fool's errand. Within the year I had all but taken Maiden out of my rotation completely, and I've never looked back. Once I'd discovered bands like Metallica and Slayer and Exciter and then Celtic Frost circa '83/'84 a lot of things changed for me very quickly as far as my musical tastes were concerned. Celtic Frost in particular was a real game changer for me. 

I'll do that though, once a band gives me something I really hate, I'll often cut them out of my listening repertoire completely like a necrotic tumor. And then they're dead to me. It's not like there aren't always tons of other bands with killer albums more deserving of my attention waiting in the wings. I look at breaking up with a band kinda like breaking up with a chick, often times it's just easier and cleaner and less hassle to lose her number and cut off all contact than to try to go back to being just friends or friends with benefits or something which never ends well. So if Maiden was a chick, I'd stopped taking her calls by the end of '84.

But objectively speaking, Maiden had two great albums, maybe 3. Killers & Piece of Mind for sure are in the heavy metal HoF, and to a lesser extent Number of the Beast. I don't consider that one to be a truly great album overall, just average, but you can't just leave it out of the conversation completely because it's got Run to the Hills and Hallowed be Thy Name, two of their very best and most iconic songs. But that's it. All the rest of their recorded output has been superfluous. Powerslave is not even in the conversation for "one of the greatest metal albums of all time" cuz it's not even one of the best Maiden albums of all time!

 

You want a great metal album from 1984 Mark? This was a truly great album that still holds up today. I do happen to hate all of their other albums, but this first one at least is super ultra mega awesome.

Metal Church - 1984

 

You want another riff-tastic Hall of Famer from 1984...Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Motherfucking Oath

 

You want another all time great one you say? Alright try this one on for size: Exciter - Violence & Force - 1984

 

And then there's Ride the Lightning of course, but I'm sure everyone knows about that one already, even anti-metalhead metalheads like you. And the aforementioned Morbid Tales was '84. Metal was doing just fine in 1984, lots of new bands popping up all over the place. I discovered Overkill and Anthrax in '84 as well from going to live shows at L'Amour. I had no real need in my life by then for any more of that Iron Maiden nonsense.

[markm]

You could make the argument that, while often inaccessible musically to the masses, most metal is cartoonish and dumbed down from Dio dungeons and dragons to extreme metal infantile obsessions with gore, laughable Satan themes to overused  Lovecraftian horror. Most of it's themes are ridiculous pastiche. 

[RelentlessOblivion]

12 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you that my tastes have changed and evolved quite a bit over the years. You don't think they ever will, and you don't always notice while it's happening because it' tends to be quite gradual. But looking back from here I can see that I've covered a lot of ground since I first became aware of rock guitar music and discovered bands like Zeppelin and Sabbath in the early 70's. It's only been the last 20 years that I've been listening to extreme black & death metal, which means that for the first 42 years of my life I must have been listening to something else. It was still hard rock, punk and metal, but it wasn't anything more extreme than thrash or hardcore until 2004.

You're still pretty young yet Blivvington, so you'll probably have a few more major shifts in your musical taste to look forward to in the years to come. I know it's hard to imagine now how there will be new genres of music you'll be listening to one day that haven't even been as much as dreamt of yet. But there will be.

Now there are some people who don't do what we do, and will just find some shit they like in their youth and then basically just stick with that forever. We all know people like this. I don't understand these people, I can't relate to that mindset because the search for new music has been a constant in my life. If I couldn't have access to streams of new music I'd probably stop listening to any music at all after awhile, or at least I'd lose all my enthusiasm for music listening just from the sheer boredom of listening to the same group of stale albums over and over again ad infinitum.

That's kinda what happened to me in the 90's when I was on the road and working a lot, and I'd had a child, and I wasn't going to any shows or finding any new music except for the few things I managed to get from the mainstream. Looking back it was pretty terrible, I'd never want to go back to that decade when I was in my 30's and had completely lost track of what the fuck was going on in the world of metal. The only good thing that came out of that period was that my tastes changed drastically when I came out the other side and got back down to the business of hunting for new music and quickly realized that the entire metal world had gone extreme on me while I wasn't paying attention. So after 15 years of being asleep at the wheel running on autopilot, I had 15 years of catching up to do all at once in the mid 2000's which was pretty exciting.

I don’t know what those new genres will be, but I’m sure something will come along. Honestly, the hunt for new music is almost an addiction for me, especially now that I have the means to discover and buy new albums again. Come to think of it. I have the same attitude towards food and whiskey, by stick with the same old reliable when there’s so many things out there to try. That being said, I can’t wait for the new Ulcerate to drop.

 

NP: Hades - Again Shall Be

[GoatmasterGeneral]

54 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

I actually would love to play along ( I was in the UK in the 90's not the 80's - still as a young man though), but I genuinely could not name one JFP song. I have heard some, but I paid no attention. So I guess I'm a Jonny-come-lately metal head, but I don't think I've missed anything. 

Just say no to fossil metal!

And it's cool you don't like Ulcerate. All the more for me.

I love ya Doc. You might be a very refined Johnny-come-lately metalhead, but you're still one of us as knuckle-dragging yobbos far as I'm concerned.

"All the more for me" I don't think that's 'ow it werks bruv. I'm pretty sure there'll be enough Ulcerate to go around for anyone who might want some. Although why anyone would want some remains a mystery to me.

My intent here when asking for your Pweest list is not to try to 'expose' you as some kind of false or pseudo metalhead. I've actually been trying to drill down and get to whatever the fuck you were actually listening to back in the olden days of the 70's and 80's, since it clearly wasn't what most of the rest of us old farts were all listening to. But not to take the piss out of you, I'm just genuinely curious as a friend of yours going on 8 years now to learn what your musical background has been. What was tickling your fancy back in the day? What was I missing in 1984? I know you've posted the odd obscure 70's prog album a few different times here and there, was that your deal, were you a big 70's prog-head?

[GoatmasterGeneral]

27 minutes ago, markm said:

You could make the argument that, while often inaccessible musically to the masses, most metal is cartoonish and dumbed down from Dio dungeons and dragons to extreme metal infantile obsessions with gore, laughable Satan themes to overused Lovecraftian horror. Most of it's themes are ridiculous pastiche. 

That's absolutely true my friend, can't argue with any of that. Metal routinely deals in utter nonsense and ridiculousness as its bread and butter, its stock in trade. But to some of us, these underlying themes are completely irrelevant. There's a reason I'm not a lyrics guy. I would never ever read metal lyrics, I have absolutely no interest in whatever they might be screaming about, maybe less than none. And I don't care at all, not one little iota about concept albums or literary tie-ins or thematic trilogies or similar such high-falutin matters. That kinda thing's more suited to yours and Cabbie's wheelhouse, and maybe other smart guys like FA or Doc who might get something out of it. I don't personally have even a mild passing interest in death or violence or gore or horror or Satan or corpsepaint or Lovecraft or Tolkien either. None whatsoever.

I just come for those cool, evil, heavy, filthy riffs and pounding drums for purely visceral reasons. Because they do something to me, they make me feel some kind of way that I like feeling. Metal for me is about the primal, visceral sensations I feel somewhere deep in my lizard brain or wherever. I really don't want to have to think too hard about my music. It's my escape, my catharsis, my lifeline to sanity, so I just want to be able to enjoy it in peace from a purely hedonistic point of view. No intellectual strings attached, I just want to engage it with my lizard brain for pleasure's sake. In that way metal is much like porn. I don't want to have to follow along or become emotionally invested in the plot, or have to suffer through a lot of pointless nonsensical dialogue, just drop your drawers and get down to the fucking already. Shut up and play your damn guitar. I've never been into the artistic or theatrical aspects of music, that artsy pretentious stuff's all totally lost on a knuckle-dragging philistine like me. If I wanted to read a book, I'd go read a book.