What's on your mind?

[GoatmasterGeneral]

37 minutes ago, navybsn said:

Guess the world didn't end with the total eclipse. Either that or I wasn't in the group being Raptured. Too bad, I hadn't planned for dinner tonight and didn't really want to do any chores tonight.

Guess I'll have to wait for the next predicted extinction event to procrastinate.

Was that how it was marketed down there in the deep south bible thumping zone as an extinction event? Those whacked-out Christian fundamentalists can turn anything into a existential catastrophe. My son was all excited about this eclipse, his class had just finished learning about all the planets and stuff, his favorite is of course Uranus which he likes because it gives him an excuse to say 'your anus.' Ten year olds. I'd ordered us two pair of them eclipse glasses off Amazon, and his bus was set to get him home 10 minutes before the peak coverage. We weren't in the path of totality, we were supposed to get 85% coverage at 3:23pm. At 3:13 he came running up the stairs, threw his backpack down and grabbed his dark glasses but it turned out the cloud cover was such that we couldn't really even find the sun in the sky at 3:20 much less see any of the eclipse. There's $9 down the drain, I'll be dead before I'll have a chance to use those glasses for the next solar eclipse. For the next half hour he was pacing around exclaiming "What kind of fucking solar eclipse was that!? All I could see was clouds!!" I feel bad for the people who traveled long distances with their entire families to see this shit better and then it was too cloudy to see anything at all.

[FatherAlabaster]

Totality was fucking amazing. I'm sorry I looked away from it even to get a shot on my phone, which can't do it justice, but there ya go:

 

[AlSymerz]

11 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

That's the posh high falutin ABC newscaster voice Yanks like so much. I was talking about the common bogan accent or what's known as the broad Aussie accent. I can only understand about 42% of the words coming out of his mouth.

Every Concreter Ever... | Garn.

 

 

Now I know you're taking the piss.

 

1 minute ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Totality was fucking amazing. I'm sorry I looked away from it even to get a shot on my phone, which can't do it justice, but there ya go:

 

As far as eclipses go I think it was a one star event!

 

[FatherAlabaster]

7 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

As far as eclipses go I think it was a one star event!

Yelp Reviews Read By Real Farmers

[AlSymerz]

 

[navybsn]

1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Was that how it was marketed down there in the deep south bible thumping zone as an extinction event? Those whacked-out Christian fundamentalists can turn anything into a existential catastrophe. My son was all excited about this eclipse, his class had just finished learning about all the planets and stuff, his favorite is of course Uranus which he likes because it gives him an excuse to say 'your anus.' Ten year olds. I'd ordered us two pair of them eclipse glasses off Amazon, and his bus was set to get him home 10 minutes before the peak coverage. We weren't in the path of totality, we were supposed to get 85% coverage at 3:23pm. At 3:13 he came running up the stairs, threw his backpack down and grabbed his dark glasses but it turned out the cloud cover was such that we couldn't really even find the sun in the sky at 3:20 much less see any of the eclipse. There's $9 down the drain, I'll be dead before I'll have a chance to use those glasses for the next solar eclipse. For the next half hour he was pacing around exclaiming "What kind of fucking solar eclipse was that!? All I could see was clouds!!" I feel bad for the people who traveled long distances with their entire families to see this shit better and then it was too cloudy to see anything at all.

The Looney tunes down here take everything as either 1) Jehovahfat is telling us all to repent and devote our lives to him (see the recent earthquake in NJ as said evidence), or 2) that it's the end of the world and the Rapture is imminent (see any predictable natural event outside the norm a la said eclipse). Both are interchangeable and or substitutable depending on who you're talking at. I think I've personally lived through 30+ Raptures and at least a dozen extinction events.

[AlSymerz]

16 minutes ago, navybsn said:

 I think I've personally lived through 30+ Raptures and at least a dozen extinction events.

Oh, we've got another eclipse down here in the southern hemisphere next year, perhaps you can come down and do some survival courses for us.

[FatherAlabaster]

15 minutes ago, navybsn said:

The Looney tunes down here take everything as either 1) Jehovahfat is telling us all to repent and devote our lives to him (see the recent earthquake in NJ as said evidence), or 2) that it's the end of the world and the Rapture is imminent (see any predictable natural event outside the norm a la said eclipse). Both are interchangeable and or substitutable depending on who you're talking at. I think I've personally lived through 30+ Raptures and at least a dozen extinction events.

Just proof you aren't one of the chosen, like that bridge in Baltimore. 

[navybsn]

10 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Just proof you aren't one of the chosen, like that bridge in Baltimore. 

Yup. Hurts my feelings to not be included with the in group. And you identified option #3 - if you can't shoehorn something into #1 or 2, then it's a conspiracy/Democrats/ immigrants/poor people that are to blame. Occam be damned.

[FatherAlabaster]

12 minutes ago, navybsn said:

Yup. Hurts my feelings to not be included with the in group. And you identified option #3 - if you can't shoehorn something into #1 or 2, then it's a conspiracy/Democrats/ immigrants/poor people that are to blame. Occam be damned.

Occam? Doesn't sound like he's from around here. And you tell me they let him through with a razor?

[GoatmasterGeneral]

2 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Now I know you're taking the piss.

Dude, I'm always taking the piss. I don't have it in me to refrain from taking the piss. I'm literally incapable of holding back my piss taking.

 

Most Aussie guys ever foil robbery despite a 'busted plugger' This bogan on the right's fucking hilarious, I've listened 10 times and I still can't understand what the name of his fishing team is at 4:40. I'm proud to know what a 'plugger' is though, I suspect most Yanks wouldn't have the foggiest.

 

[AlSymerz]

I remember that interview. While us Aussies may not all have the hero quality of that guy we do all aspire to reach the legendary status of him. Sadly though the idiot host on the left is too often represented by overseas media as a 'real aussie'.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

8 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I remember that interview. While us Aussies may not all have the hero quality of that guy we do all aspire to reach the legendary status of him. Sadly though the idiot host on the left is too often represented by overseas media as a 'real Aussie'.

That shit stick on the left would be a massive fucking tool in any language. Yanks over 40-45 still think all Aussies are basically like 80's Paul Hogan urging all of us Yanks to come down under and throw another shrimp on the barbie, while skulling Fosters lager.

 

[AlSymerz]

Shrimps (Prawns) were cheap this year it would have been a good time to throw them on the barbie, although most people cook the shit out of them anyway. Actually for a country that prides itself on a 'barbie' there is a lot of Aussies who cook the shit out of the food to an almost inedible state.

The Fosters beer promos worked well though because exporting it in the quantities we did meant that no reasonable Aussie was caught drinking the stuff.

Paul's looking a little like he was a shrimp on a barbie these days. But I thought we were all supposed to look and sound like Crocodile Dundee, or more recently Steve Irwin. Crickey!

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, AlSymerz said:

Shrimp (Prawns) were cheap this year it would have been a good time to throw them on the barbie, although most people cook the shit out of them anyway. Actually for a country that prides itself on a 'barbie' there is a lot of Aussies who cook the shit out of the food to an almost inedible state.

The Fosters beer promos worked well though because exporting it in the quantities we did meant that no reasonable Aussie was caught drinking the stuff.

Paul's looking a little like he was a shrimp on a barbie these days. But I thought we were all supposed to look and sound like Crocodile Dundee, or more recently Steve Irwin. Crickey!

Americans love our shrimp man, we consume 1.7 billion tons of them each year. Dangle your big-ass shrimp over a grill in front of the Sydney Opera House with chicks in summer clothing hanging around and Yanks will be buying plane tickets and updating their passports before the commercial is even over.

I've seen Fosters for sale in the stores, but I've never ever seen anyone actually drinking one. Why they'd choose to market it in what looks like an old fashioned motor oil can is beyond me. But I suppose someone must be drinking that shit or they'd have to stop selling it.

[AlSymerz]

Those ads were very successful, although I never figured out why they showed them here as often as they did. From memory I think the only tourism ad they claimed was more successful was this one.

They did try to recreate the success a few years ago with some actors pretending to do Crocodile Dundee and some stupid ocka sayings which cost a fortune and failed dramatically.

Is there a difference between shrimp and prawn? We call the tiny ones that go in meals like fried rice or noodles, shrimp, but anything bigger is called a prawn, and then the really big ones are king prawns. I've never really noticed American's talk about prawns.

Back in the 70's when the Foster export train really started much of our beer did look like oil cans. They were even more oil can like when they were made of steel rather than aluminium. They have changed the shape a little bit over the years and made the logos and cans more recognisable as beer but they still look a little like oil cans. In the case of those that make stout the contents look like oil too.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

1 hour ago, markm said:

I see now, that Encyclopedia of HM book was updated ten years later in 2012, so it must have been 2002 when I bought the book and started reading about stoner and doom and figured that might be up my alley, because I had no interest in death metal at the time. I bought a Lamb of God album and hated it and sold it back to the store-hard to believe but the Baltimore area chain Record and Tape Traders would actually give me my money back if I didn't like an album-wtf? What a great place that was.

Looking at LoG album covers, I think it was New American Gospel (2000) or maybe it was As the Palace Burns ('03)-which places my time frame between 2000 and 2003 when I started dabling and that LoG album made me think death metal was not for me until I started listening to Opeth, Behemoth, Nile, Kataklysm,etc.  It was literally unlistenable to me. 

It just so happens there was a lot of newer stoner metal, hardcore influenced stoner/doom and post rock that came out in the early aughts and it was my metal rebirth.  I keep a list of albums like most of us probably do that I buy each year. It was the years between 2000-2005 that solidified my listening. I think in retrospect there was a kind of renaissance of metal and heavy psyche during these years that helped create or delineate many of the sub genres or incubate kernels of heavy musical ideas that would flower that we see prominently today and haven't seen that kind of growth and creativity since...at least in what you'd call mainstream and maybe "arty" metal. Maybe it's different in bestial black/death circles but the aughts were special in my old world of stoner/post metal/post hardocre/doom/hard doom/sludge/avantish, blackened sludge, prog black/death, etc, etc. Something was in the bong water back then.

Here are some of the albums that made a big impression on me. In a sense these are all gateways:

I list them by  year but I didn't buy them all by release date. I jumped around a good bit from year to year. I don't think I really started buying any "mainstream black/death" until 2003 or so:

2000:

Electric Wizard/Dopethrone -this was like the heaviest thing I'd heard in years and it was somewhat of a come to Satan moment of me. 
The Haunted/Made Me Do It- I probably found this album a few years later but was one of those albums where I opened up to 'core vocals and hardcore influenced vox enticed me before death or black vox.
Nevermore/Dead Heart in a Dead World
Fu Manchu/King of the Road-Definitely a eureka album-I absolutely loved Fu.

 

2001:

Boris/Amplifier Worship-Boris were a big influence on my listening especially their early drone masterworks like this beast. It was actually released in '98.

Opeth/Blackwater Park-I actually came to this after Ghost Reveries

 

2002-was a big year: a lot of foundational albums for me in my re emergence

**Isis/Oceanic-Isis began the post metal plunge for me and at this point I was listening to a lot of Neurosis

**Agalloch/The Mantle 
**High on fire/Surrounded by Thieves 
Porcupine Tree/In Absentia
**Dark Tranquility/Damage Done
**Entombed/Morning Star-this was my introduction to Entombed and it was years before I went back to their classics
**The Reverend Bizarre/In the Rectory
Arcturus/The Sham Mirrors
Pentagram/First Daze Here The Vintage Collection (recorded between 73-74 w/  original line up) & Pentagram/Turn to Stone compilation (80’s & 90’s classic Peaceville releases)
**Immortal/Sons of Northern Darkness
**Xasthur/Nocturnal Poisoning-somehow I jumped in to Xasthur early
The Hellacopters/By The Grace of God
Opeth/Deliverance
Orange Goblin/Coup De Grace
 

2003-

Mars Volta/Deloused in the Comatorium
**YOB/Catharsis
**Cult of Luna/The Beyond
Katatonia/The Great Cold Distance
**Spirit Caravan/The Last Embrace (probably Wino's finest hour, IMO)
**Enslaved/Isa
Nebula/Atomic Ritual
**Boris/Akuma No Uta
**Boris At Last/Feedbacker
Naglfar/Sheol
**Sleep/Dopesmoker

2004: really opened up the flood gates

**Mastodon/Leviathan-this definitely pushed the needle-Mastodon's death metal album, some would say\\

**Enslaved/Issa

**Marduk/Plague Angel-this was a pretty big turning point and began my love affair with Mortuus
**Isis/Panopticon 
**CUL/Salvation
**YOB/The Illusion of Motion-one of my favorite albums of all time!
**Blut Aus Nord/Works that Transform God (came out in -'03-such an important album in my metal renaissance)
UFOmammut/Snailking
Therion/Lemuria/Sirius B-went through a symphonic/operatic phase
Dillinger Escape Plan/Miss Machine
***Behemoth/Demigod -an early death metal album for me but I came to this much later 
**Clutch/Blast Tyrant-still one of my favorite hard rock albums 
Neurosis/The Eye of Every Storm
Electric Wizard/We Live
Goat Snake/I and + Dog Days (reissue compilation full length plus EP)
The Haunted/Revolver
Borknagar/Epic
**My Dying Bride/Songs of Darkness, Words of Denial-perhaps beginning my MDB love affair and a great album
Orange Goblin/Thieving from the House of God
Red Giant/Devil Child Blues

2005:

****Opeth/ Ghost Reveries-this was my first Opeth album 
Bill Evans / Bill Evans Trio/The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (essential jazz purchase remastered and complete)-OK, not metal but brilliant!
The Mars Volta/Frances the Mute 
**Sun0))/The Black one
***High On fire/Blessed Black Wings 
**Akercocke/ Words that Go Unspoken, Deeds that go Undone
Nevermore/The godless Endeavor
**Earth/Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method    
**Dark Tranquility/Character
Deathspell Omega/Kenose
**Primordial/The Gathering Wilderness
*Moonsorrow/Verisakeet
Acid King/III
Corrosion of Conformity/Through the Arms of God 
Kamelot/The Black Halo-I was listening to a little power metal 
 

My extreme metal awakening/epiphany was similar to yours in some ways, (I too once bought records by Lamb of god and The Haunted that I then traded back into the store upon my next visit) but my journey's a bit different than yours in more ways than it's the same. I had never grown tired of or stopped listening to metal, I was always pretty much one of those all metal all the time kinda guys. Or let's say metal and other reasonably heavy metal adjacent stuff like hardcore, punk and hard rock. I had just gotten caught flat-footed when real metal disappeared underground seemingly overnight right around 1990 and no one had thought to tell me. I'd had a kid in June of 1990 so our going out to shows 4 nights a week lifestyle came to an abrupt end because we had to be home to feed the baby every two hours. Problem was that talking to dudes at shows had always been the best way to find out about bands in the pre-internet era, along with trips to the specialty metal record store an hour away which also became few and far between after 1990. So I basically got stuck still listening to thrash and all of my 80's stuff all throughout the 90's. For my infrequent new music fixes I had resorted to finding crap off the radio or MTV in the 90's, which I guess is why my purchases (aside from those bands I already knew and had multiple albums from, like Overkill) became much more mainstream oriented in the 90's. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Godsmack, Social Distortion, White Zombie, STP, Puddle of Mudd and Monster Magnet were all bands I discovered and listened to quite a bit of in the 90's. Not exactly trve kvlt stuff, definitely not brutal or satanic, and not even as heavy as a lot of the shit I'd previously been listening to in the 80's and considered pillars of my collection. I guess I was just too busy working and being a single dad in the 90's to have much time leftover to devote to being a dedicated metalhead who stayed up to date on all the latest bands.

It's always really cool to see the other guys' list of albums that hold great significance to them. So thanks for sharing. Looking down your list I see we have very little in common, or less than I might've thought we would anyway. Almost none of those 2000 - 2005 records mean anything at all to me, and tbh quite a few of those bands I really actively can't stand. I do dig some Electric Wizard though, and of course as I've said Dark Tranquility were huge for me in the 00's, but they're not in the rotation at all anymore. Dead Heart in a Dead World was once in heavy rotation, dig YOB, dig Moonsorrow, I liked The Work Which Transforms God, I went through a brief Naglfar phase (just the early stuff, nothing past Sheol), and I believe I did even buy an Orange Goblin record once. But that's about it, just 8 out of the 60 you listed, the rest of those bands/albums aren't anything I've ever been interested in. Funny how that works, people like us will have completely different impressions and recollections of a musical period in time, in this case the early 2000's, based on what they were personally listening to at that time. 

My extreme metal awakening came a bit later than yours did, and I was a bit older. It was late 2004 so I was 43 already by the time I got into extreme metal. I've told the story on here before, it hit me at some point that a good deal of my favorite albums were a decade or more old, so I just got a bug up my ass one weekend to go to the record store and see if I could get up to speed on wtf was happening in the world of 21st century metal. Came home with an armful of the rankest garbage albums that day, all based on magazine reviews, none of which stuck with me at all. Except for DT, which for some reason I kept going back to and that led me to find similar stuff like Hypocrisy, Kalmah, Insomnium, Amon Amarth and Opeth. But then once I found Necrophobic a couple of years later that was it, I became much more interested in the harder more extreme forms of death metal. Necrophobic were also the band that really got me interested in black metal around '08/'09, and by then I'd left most of that commercial melodeath crap behind me in the rear view mirror. But I guess that's how gateway bands work for me, once I get to where I've actually been trying to get to, those gateway bands are no longer needed for anything. Like when rocketships destined for deep space jettison the spent boosters they needed to get themselves up and clear of the Earth's atmosphere.

So in the mid aughts I quickly went from like a heavy/thrash/grunge/punk mix to melodeath and from there to blackened death metal and then by the late 00's I'd joined a metal forum and had started the arduous but rewarding process of combing through 15 - 20 years of 'old school' 90's death and black metal bands I had slept on for all those years. I don't remember ever really going through a specific stoner phase, I had just came across random stoner bands and albums here and there over the years that I liked so I mentally filed them away in that Sabbath/Soundgarden/Kyuss area of my brain. Cool for a spin or two now and then, but that bluesy stoner rock stuff was never going to be my main focus, I was always focused on searching for something a bit heavier. Fu Manchu was not a band I ever connected with, even back when I was buying those kind of stoner rock records at one time in the early 00's. I was more of a Sasquatch guy. I'll still buy one or two "stoner" rock/doom albums a year when I find one that speaks to me, but not usually more than that. I've never had any use for post-rock or post-metal, just never found any of that stuff interesting or heavy enough to suit me. Much like funeral doom, another genre I tried to get into a bit but then eventually gave up on as just not for me.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

3 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Is there a difference between shrimp and prawn? We call the tiny ones that go in meals like fried rice or noodles, shrimp, but anything bigger is called a prawn, and then the really big ones are king prawns. I've never really noticed American's talk about prawns.

I won't say most, but many Americans don't even understand the word prawns, (or capsicum) they're all shrimp to us over here. Don't remember how old I was when I discovered what a prawn was (I do remember it was written on an Asian restaurant's white board as the special and I asked someone I was with wtf are prawns? and was told they were like really huge shrimp) but I was definitely already well into adulthood. We don't usually see those real big 'king prawn' sized ones over here except maybe at certain Asian restaurants. We mostly just get the bite sized ones or the two bite ones in the supermarket, and if you go out to a chain restaurant and order a dish with shrimp, you'll generally get those little tiny ones.

Don't know why they even need to sell the pre cooked ones as the raw shrimp cook up to opaque in just 3 minutes. Don't turn your back on them, they'll overcook and get tough. I buy kilo bags of shrimp mostly because the boy likes them and there aren't that many proteins he really likes. Shrimp is one of those strange products where the big bag can often cost less than the smaller bag. Like ice cream, the little single serving pints are $7 and the bigger 3 pint box (that years ago would've been 4 pints) is only like $4. I try to keep ice cream out of my life because I know I'm a recovering addict, but once the kid discovered the joys of ice cream he started demanding that I keep some in the freezer for him. Fortunately he likes that mint chip flavor that I can't stand. Putting mint in ice cream is just as bad as those idiots who put pineapple on their pizza. 

[AlSymerz]

I knew Americans ate bell peppers rather than capsicums and I can see why they are called bell peppers. I'm pretty sure that as a kid we knew them as just peppers, but I'm not sure if that was exclusively the name for them or not because I don't remember what age I was when I realised the two items were the same thing. This year I grew a heap of different sorts of capsicum and very few were bell shaped, so I see why less people here refer to them as bell peppers.

Prawns at a restaurant are ok because they are prepared, but prawns at home are bloody annoying. Usually they are quite expensive, but they are a bastard to peel, especially when you get a dozen or so on the plate. Many people don't have an issue doing it but I hate doing it at home, probably the same people that enjoy sucking the meat out of a crab's claw. Shrimps are much easier when it comes to prep work but it would take quite a few to satisfy my hungry.

We used to go out on a summer's night and walk around the lake with under water lights and nets catching prawns, some were bite size other were massive. Some nights we'd come home with 5 or 6 kilos of prawns. For a week away we'd catch a years supply of prawns at night and fish during the day. But I'm not a huge fan of frozen seafood any more and most of the places we used to go got fished out and are no longer worth it.

I'm not a huge pizza fan so I don't care what people put on them, but then I have only had Aussie pizzas which are nothing like an American pizza. I wouldn't mind trying an American pizza but I could happily live not having another Aussie pizza in my lifetime.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

3 minutes ago, AlSymerz said:

I knew Americans ate bell peppers rather than capsicums and I can see why they are called bell peppers. I'm pretty sure that as a kid we knew them as just peppers, but I'm not sure if that was exclusively the name for them or not because I don't remember what age I was when I realised the two items were the same thing. This year I grew a heap of different sorts of capsicum and very few were bell shaped, so I see why less people here refer to them as bell peppers.

Prawns at a restaurant are ok because they are prepared, but prawns at home are bloody annoying. Usually they are quite expensive, but they are a bastard to peel, especially when you get a dozen or so on the plate. Many people don't have an issue doing it but I hate doing it at home, probably the same people that enjoy sucking the meat out of a crab's claw. Shrimps are much easier when it comes to prep work but it would take quite a few to satisfy my hungry.

We used to go out on a summer's night and walk around the lake with under water lights and nets catching prawns, some were bite size other were massive. Some nights we'd come home with 5 or 6 kilos of prawns. For a week away we'd catch a years supply of prawns at night and fish during the day. But I'm not a huge fan of frozen seafood any more and most of the places we used to go got fished out and are no longer worth it.

I'm not a huge pizza fan so I don't care what people put on them, but then I have only had Aussie pizzas which are nothing like an American pizza. I wouldn't mind trying an American pizza but I could happily live not having another Aussie pizza in my lifetime.

I don't get real excited about pizza, don't ever eat it more than once a month if that, I could easily go several months between pizzas. But my wife and her mum both liked pineapple on theirs which to me is just sacrilege. I don't want fruit fucking touching my pizza man. That's worse than fruity metalcore with their melodic sing-songy choruses. But we all know Kiwis are a bit weird to begin with. I mean just look at Jon-O Blade and Luxi. The boy likes pizza though of course so I just keep some little $2.50 Totinos frozen ones on hand that I can chuck into the air fryer for 10 minutes for him on a Chewsday arvo after school.

Never had an Aussie pizza during the month I was down there, didn't even see any pizza shops that I recall. Just a bunch of Oportos and tons and tons of noodle shops and greasy fish & chips shops. Here on the east coast especially up here in NY and NJ with our large populations of Italian ancestry, we have a pizza shop on almost every block. In the city you'll often find two or more of them on the same block. Staten Island's the worst, they must have 1 pizza parlor for every 9.2 residents.

As far as peppers go, no one really bothers to say 'bell' anymore except maybe in recipes sometimes it'll say bell peppers. We just call them by their color: red peppers, yellow peppers, green peppers, orange peppers. I won't buy green peppers, mostly just red and occasionally a yellow or an orange one. And then we have all different kinds of hot peppers: poblanos, anaheims, jalapeños, serranos, habaneros...but yeah I put peppers in almost everything I make and then have to pick them all out for the boy because he won't eat them. But I swear when I got married for the final time (never again!) in 2012 and she put "caps" on the shopping list I honestly had no fucking idea what she wanted me to get. 

 

[AlSymerz]

I love the metal core reference to pineapple on pizza!!

I use peppers a lot too and that's why I grow them all year round where I can. I don't mind the hotter ones but I have to be careful I know which are which because my missus really hates them. Last summer I think I had some seeds cross pollinate and I pulled a large, long green capsicum off the bush and took a huge bite expecting it to be a normal one. I'm not sure if it was the heat or the surprise that nearly blew me apart but I make sure to only take small bites these days.

[markm]

7 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

My extreme metal awakening/epiphany was similar to yours in some ways, (I too once bought records by Lamb of god and The Haunted that I then traded back into the store upon my next visit) but my journey's a bit different than yours in more ways than it's the same. I had never grown tired of or stopped listening to metal, I was always pretty much one of those all metal all the time kinda guys. Or let's say metal and other reasonably heavy metal adjacent stuff like hardcore, punk and hard rock. I had just gotten caught flat-footed when real metal disappeared underground seemingly overnight right around 1990 and no one had thought to tell me. I'd had a kid in June of 1990 so our going out to shows 4 nights a week lifestyle came to an abrupt end because we had to be home to feed the baby every two hours. Problem was that talking to dudes at shows had always been the best way to find out about bands in the pre-internet era, along with trips to the specialty metal record store an hour away which also became few and far between after 1990. So I basically got stuck still listening to thrash and all of my 80's stuff all throughout the 90's. For my infrequent new music fixes I had resorted to finding crap off the radio or MTV in the 90's, which I guess is why my purchases (aside from those bands I already knew and had multiple albums from, like Overkill) became much more mainstream oriented in the 90's. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Godsmack, Social Distortion, White Zombie, STP, Puddle of Mudd and Monster Magnet were all bands I discovered and listened to quite a bit of in the 90's. Not exactly trve kvlt stuff, definitely not brutal or satanic, and not even as heavy as a lot of the shit I'd previously been listening to in the 80's and considered pillars of my collection. I guess I was just too busy working and being a single dad in the 90's to have much time leftover to devote to being a dedicated metalhead who stayed up to date on all the latest bands.

It's always really cool to see the other guys' list of albums that hold great significance to them. So thanks for sharing. Looking down your list I see we have very little in common, or less than I might've thought we would anyway. Almost none of those 2000 - 2005 records mean anything at all to me, and tbh quite a few of those bands I really actively can't stand. I do dig some Electric Wizard though, and of course as I've said Dark Tranquility were huge for me in the 00's, but they're not in the rotation at all anymore. Dead Heart in a Dead World was once in heavy rotation, dig YOB, dig Moonsorrow, I liked The Work Which Transforms God, I went through a brief Naglfar phase (just the early stuff, nothing past Sheol), and I believe I did even buy an Orange Goblin record once. But that's about it, just 8 out of the 60 you listed, the rest of those bands/albums aren't anything I've ever been interested in. Funny how that works, people like us will have completely different impressions and recollections of a musical period in time, in this case the early 2000's, based on what they were personally listening to at that time. 

My extreme metal awakening came a bit later than yours did, and I was a bit older. It was late 2004 so I was 43 already by the time I got into extreme metal. I've told the story on here before, it hit me at some point that a good deal of my favorite albums were a decade or more old, so I just got a bug up my ass one weekend to go to the record store and see if I could get up to speed on wtf was happening in the world of 21st century metal. Came home with an armful of the rankest garbage albums that day, all based on magazine reviews, none of which stuck with me at all. Except for DT, which for some reason I kept going back to and that led me to find similar stuff like Hypocrisy, Kalmah, Insomnium, Amon Amarth and Opeth. But then once I found Necrophobic a couple of years later that was it, I became much more interested in the harder more extreme forms of death metal. Necrophobic were also the band that really got me interested in black metal around '08/'09, and by then I'd left most of that commercial melodeath crap behind me in the rear view mirror. But I guess that's how gateway bands work for me, once I get to where I've actually been trying to get to, those gateway bands are no longer needed for anything. Like when rocketships destined for deep space jettison the spent boosters they needed to get themselves up and clear of the Earth's atmosphere.

So in the mid aughts I quickly went from like a heavy/thrash/grunge/punk mix to melodeath and from there to blackened death metal and then by the late 00's I'd joined a metal forum and had started the arduous but rewarding process of combing through 15 - 20 years of 'old school' 90's death and black metal bands I had slept on for all those years. I don't remember ever really going through a specific stoner phase, I had just came across random stoner bands and albums here and there over the years that I liked so I mentally filed them away in that Sabbath/Soundgarden/Kyuss area of my brain. Cool for a spin or two now and then, but that bluesy stoner rock stuff was never going to be my main focus, I was always focused on searching for something a bit heavier. Fu Manchu was not a band I ever connected with, even back when I was buying those kind of stoner rock records at one time in the early 00's. I was more of a Sasquatch guy. I'll still buy one or two "stoner" rock/doom albums a year when I find one that speaks to me, but not usually more than that. I've never had any use for post-rock or post-metal, just never found any of that stuff interesting or heavy enough to suit me. Much like funeral doom, another genre I tried to get into a bit but then eventually gave up on as just not for me.

I think a lot of guys in our generation basically got burnt out when as you say the good stuff went underground and metalcore, alt metal (much of which I like to certain point) and Nu metal were the norm along with changes in tastes to hip hop/rap. 

I should be clear, I was listening to other albums besides stoner metal but it was what I think I prefer to call riff rock (stoner) and doom and then post metal which opened me up to hardcorish vocals that got me to listening to metal with growls. I listed albums that came out during that time period, but I was buying a bunch of albums we all know that came out earlier.  Slaughter to the Soul seems like the first reco people give for melodeth. That was one of my first pick ups. I still listen to it from time to time. I bought some cringy stuff that like a bunch of symphonic albums like Nightwish, within temptation, after forever,  Dimu Borgir, Cradle of Filth (both band I rarely listen to anymore, except for Nightwash haha-I still have a soft spot even though it's really pop dressed in metal clothing), and other bands I still like-The Gathering, Tristania, Tiamat. I did like symphonic black like Arcturus' Aspera Hiems Symphonia  I don't know why I didn't buy classic DM, because I bought the usual second wave black suspects you listed in this time period-Immortal, Gorgoroth (bunch of their stuff), Emperor, the Darkthrone seminal early albums, Satyricon, Mayhem. Never bought any Burzum. But then, I pretty much moved on from most of that stuff except Emperor, DT and Immortal. 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

2 hours ago, markm said:

I think a lot of guys in our generation basically got burnt out when as you say the good stuff went underground and metalcore, alt metal (much of which I like to certain point) and Nu metal were the norm along with changes in tastes to hip hop/rap. 

I should be clear, I was listening to other albums besides stoner metal but it was what I think I prefer to call riff rock (stoner) and doom and then post metal which opened me up to hardcorish vocals that got me to listening to metal with growls. I listed albums that came out during that time period, but I was buying a bunch of albums we all know that came out earlier.  Slaughter to the Soul seems like the first reco people give for melodeth. That was one of my first pick ups. I still listen to it from time to time. I bought some cringy stuff that like a bunch of symphonic albums like Nightwish, within temptation, after forever,  Dimu Borgir, Cradle of Filth (both band I rarely listen to anymore, except for Nightwash haha-I still have a soft spot even though it's really pop dressed in metal clothing), and other bands I still like-The Gathering, Tristania, Tiamat. I did like symphonic black like Arcturus' Aspera Hiems Symphonia  I don't know why I didn't buy classic DM, because I bought the usual second wave black suspects you listed in this time period-Immortal, Gorgoroth (bunch of their stuff), Emperor, the Darkthrone seminal early albums, Satyricon, Mayhem. Never bought any Burzum. But then, I pretty much moved on from most of that stuff except Emperor, DT and Immortal. 

I guess because I had completely missed the rise of black and death metal in the early 90's and was going through all of this stuff at the same time so many years later, I just never gave any weight to what others might've thought were supposedly the better bands or the classic albums. I'm definitely not a usual suspects guy. I just listened to everything for myself with an open mind and then whatever appealed to me I'd go back to, and anything that didn't grab me right away got passed over. Which isn't really any different than what I do now, it's just that I had close to 20 years of metal to go through all at once back then, which was a bit overwhelming. So I just wasn't going to waste any time at all on the stuff that wasn't blowing my doors off, because I was finding so much other stuff that really was. It might not be fair to judge 2000's albums against those old 90's albums on an even footing but that's the position I was in, discovering it all together at the same time like that. 

So the net result was I have a pretty low opinion now of a lot of these bands that are considered by many to be the consensus cornerstones of early 90's extreme metal. Not just to be contrary which is what I think many people seem to think, but just to be honest with myself about what I like and what I don't. I couldn't possibly care any less what some other dude's opinion of Morbid Angel or Deicide might be, those bands mean nothing to me, I give them no metal cred status points whatsoever because their music does absolutely nothing for me. Same with a lot of those other early 90's Florida death metal bands as well as just about all of those original early 90's Norwegian black metal bands - save for Darkthrone whom I do really like, just not necessarily the consensus albums I'm supposed to like. I'd put The Cult is Alive far ahead of Funeral Moon or Transylvanian Hunger for instance. I've just formed my own ideas about which bands and albums should be the exalted ones, and very few of them match up with the consensus revered early 90's originators. I've replaced most of those bands with my own picks which are often more obscure less visible bands. Nobodies in other words. But they're somebodies to me and that's all that matters.

This is why over the years I've pushed back so hard on your tendency to let others' concensus picks save you some of the arduous and very time consuming digging. Because I know that if you were to take any 100 metal albums at random and have 100 metalheads evaluate and rank them all, I can predict with 100% certainty that my picks for the best and worst standouts aren't going to match up with the group's consensus opinion. At the Gates Slaughter of the Soul, an album you brought up that gets mentioned quite a bit did absolutely nothing for me, nor did any of their other albums, so AtG has no significance at all to me either positively or negatively. Same with early Carcass which so many seem to love, those albums don't mean anything at all to me. Don't hate 'em or anything, I just don't care, they're not on my radar. They're insignificant to me. My friends mostly all seem to love Voivod and Vektor and I can't stomach listening to even one song from either one of them. I could give you dozens of examples like this. I just go by what I enjoy listening to the most so I have my own favorites and to hell with what anyone else thinks.

Now you know that I harbor much disdain and repulsion for all that frilly sparkly symphonic stuff, and that even includes Emperor whom all my metalhead friends seem to revere. Won't waste much time talking about any of that stuff because I'm not at all familiar with any of those kinds of bands or their albums so I really don't have much to say about them. Like power metal or Queensryche it's immediately apparent 5 seconds in that stuff's just not going to be for me, so I've just ignored it all for the most part, as if it didn't exist. Which is weird because my best and oldest and dearest friend in the entire world now tells me that Nightwish is his favorite metal band. And I have trouble reconciling that fact with the dude I remember going to all those many dozens if not hundreds of metal and punk shows with back in the day. We were like brothers for years, but then we got separated in '93 when he moved down to Nashville for over a decade. And from that point on musically speaking he went one way while I went the other. We're both in Jersey now and we still hang out, and we'll still always have a lot of the old 80's stuff we grew up with in common like Overkill and Riot and Sisters of Mercy... but we have an unspoken agreement that I won't make him listen to my ugly black/death goat filth and he won't ask me to listen to his symphonic pop metal.

[markm]

Yeah, and the other thing is I'm kind of into it. I mean, into it enough to write lists and buy albums, but your REALLY into metal. It's a huge part of who you are. I respect that. To me it's kind of a voyeuristic dark little corner of my life like having an affair or something that I keep to myself of the most part.

Your also unique in that you take ginormous amounts of time to find the music that appeals to you and buck the notion of using referrals and recommendations whereas I think I might be more typical in that I need filters, I need short cuts. So for me having online sources of information where cites list albums that are coming out and provide mini reviews and monthly and year end lists are really important because I don't spend much time in YouTube or other 'net sources looking for gold nuggets. I need clffnotes. It's not perfect but it keeps me in the mix and has given me hours of listening pleasure. 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

35 minutes ago, markm said:

Yeah, and the other thing is I'm kind of into it. I mean, into it enough to write lists and buy albums, but your REALLY into metal. It's a huge part of who you are. I respect that. To me it's kind of a voyeuristic dark little corner of my life like having an affair or something that I keep to myself of the most part.

Your also unique in that you take ginormous amounts of time to find the music that appeals to you and buck the notion of using referrals and recommendations whereas I think I might be more typical in that I need filters, I need short cuts. So for me having online sources of information where cites list albums that are coming out and provide mini reviews and monthly and year end lists are really important because I don't spend much time in YouTube or other 'net sources looking for gold nuggets. I need Cliff Notes. It's not perfect but it keeps me in the mix and has given me hours of listening pleasure. 

I would happily use the filters and shortcuts too my friend if they took me even close to where I wanted to go. But my problem is they inevitably take me much farther away from my intended destination, so they're of no use to me. Obviously it'd be so much easier for me to just be able to enjoy whatever music was readily available, like turning on the radio was for lots of people I knew back in the day. I'd love it if I could just buy like the 40 albums on the Decibel list every year and then just enjoy them and be done with it. But that method doesn't work for me. I have some pretty specific requirements for what I want from my music, and I have yet to find a reliable source (other than Marko) who consistently nails it and gives me the type of music I'll most likely dig. So to find what I specifically want, I know I'm going to have to put in the time, there's just no way around it. Because if I don't even know what I want until I find it, how is anyone else supposed to know? But that's ok because I happen to actually enjoy the hunt for new music, and at least I do feel that for the most part the bulk of that time I've invested has consistently paid back some pretty solid dividends. If it didn't, I guess I'd stop wasting my time fishing in the fishless lake, and I'd be back to square one.

But I can certainly understand that you, like many others need filters and shortcuts, and I'm truly glad that you have found sources that can give you the kind of time saving recos that consistently work for you. That's awesome for you. But I need to listen for myself. That's just how I'm wired as a person, I can't take anyone's word for anything, ever, I simply have to see for myself. If you personally Mark, knowing me and knowing my tastes were to listen to 10 albums, and then you reported back that you were firmly convinced that #6 was the one I'd want, I still wouldn't be able to sleep until I'd listened to every single one of the other 9 just to make sure. I'd have no choice, I always have to see for myself and make sure. It would just eat away at me thinking you might've picked the wrong one and I'd possibly missed out on some amazing and life changing music. I suppose I just have a really bad case of FOMO is what is comes down to. That's what drives my marathon late night new music sampling sessions, FOMO. It's not easy being me.