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khaos

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gregsbrews
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Death - Human

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Slayer - Hell Awaits, 1985   Celtic Frost - To Mega Therion, 1985  

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Immolation - Acts of God (2022) Number eight on my end of year list that if I am being honest, the boredom of being unable to do much of anything with COVID has led me to do an end of y

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GoatmasterGeneral Grand Master

GoatmasterGeneral

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Dark Tranquility - Endtime Signals

Always had a soft spot for these guys. They've updated with the times to be a lot more friendly to your average listener, like most of the melodeath bands from that era. Still, I can almost always hear the early material and style forming the backbone of the newer stuff regardless of how over focused on textures over riffs they become. Truthfully this is fine, but not as good as Atoma for the newer stuff. 

DT were my main gateway into extreme metal. As an old dude, I grew up in the era of clean singing back in the 70's and 80's. I was already 43 when I bought my first extreme metal CD's back in 2004, and at the time I really didn't think I'd ever be able to accept the harsh vocals. I literally woke up one Saturday and decided to go to the record store to see what kind of new metal music I could find. I'd been listening to all my old 80's thrash records and some more mainstreamish 90's metal and grungey stuff for so long I'd just become sick of it all. I needed some new music. So I drove my ass down to the Tower Records and bought myself a whole stack of CD's from bands I'd never even heard of before. I'd carefully selected those particular albums after reading a bunch of articles and reviews in metal magazines for a couple of hours right there in the Tower Records. I must have spent at least 4 or 5 hours in the store that day and I ended up with about 12 - 15 albums.

I got them all home and started popping them in one by one and wouldn't you know it I hated every last one of them. I had never actually heard any death metal before at that point, or really anything heavier than some of my old 80's favorites like Slayer, Sepultura, Possessed or Celtic Frost. So I had no advance warning about all the death growling I'd have to deal with on these supposedly mainstream 2000's metal albums. None of those reviews had mentioned anything about that, I guess it was just understood within the metal community by 2004 that's what the vocals would be like, but it took me totally by surprise. I felt like I had totally wasted my money.

But eventually DT's Damage Done became the one album from my haul on that fateful day that for some reason I kept going back to, until after a few months I'd started to get used to the vocals. By then Character had come out and I liked that one even more than DD, so I started tracking down other similar Scandinavian melodeath bands like Hypocrisy, Insomnium and Opeth. During the years of 2005 - 2007 I would have considered DT to be my favorite band. I drove 5 hours each way, 300 miles to Virginia and back on the same day in 2007 just to see them live, since for the NY stop on that tour they weren't playing. For whatever reason Opeth was going to do that one NY show by themselves without any support just for that one night. Maybe they were filming it or something.

So I guess I can thank Mikael Stanne for being the enabler or maybe the catalyst for my eventual deep love of extreme metal. Unfortunately I've since  moved on from melodeath, and I rarely if ever revisit any of those old DT records I once loved so much anymore. I remember hating their 2010 record We Are the Void, and I can't even listen to anything they did past '07's Fiction at all. I don't know if the problem is with them, I think my tastes have just changed drastically since I got onto my first metal forum in 2008 and was exposed to some more extreme stuff like old school 90's black and death metal via recos from experienced metalheads who were mostly all a decade or more my junior. Once I got a taste for filth it became very difficult for me to go back to and appreciate the lighter more accessible melodeath type stuff. If a friend throws on Blackwater Park or something I can still enjoy it, but I don't ever seek that kind of stuff out anymore when it's just me and I can listen to whatever I want.

 

Dark Tranquility - Atoma, 2016. You mentioned this one as one of their better later ones, so I'm gonna give it a shot. I've checked out bits and pieces before, but I've never sat down and listened to any of these later DT albums front to back since the horrendous We Are the Void which I had bought right when it first came out. Never even occurred to me I should've sampled it first, what with them being my favorite band at the time when their previous album had dropped. But how quickly things can change.

 

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navybsn Grand Master

navybsn

Posted
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1 hour ago, MarkhantonioYeatts said:

BLACK FLAG - Live

 

Rollins was such a maniac as a front man. Controversial maybe, but I've always preferred him to Morris or Dez.

On to this banger. I see complaints every time Inquisition releases a new album that they've gone "soft" or are recycling ideas, but I just don't agree. Nothing they've ever done disappoints.

Black Mass for a Mass Grave

Might as well throw this in the pile for next: Veneration of Medieval Mysticism

 

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GoatmasterGeneral Grand Master

GoatmasterGeneral

Posted
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5 hours ago, navybsn said:

On to this banger. I see complaints every time Inquisition releases a new album that they've gone "soft" or are recycling ideas, but I just don't agree. Nothing they've ever done disappoints.

Black Mass for a Mass Grave

I've come to see Black Mass as one of his better albums. From a discography with 9 solid full length albums, and not aa weak one in the bunch.

 

Curse Upon a Prayer - The Worship: Orthoprax Satanism, Finland. Took me about three times through, but I'm finally coming around to this one.

 

Komor Romok - Ov Bones and Darkness, Hungary.

 

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