What Are You Listening To?

[JamesT]

3 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Bonded By Blood - The Aftermath

Fantastic newer thrash band!  I have 3 of their albums, but I'm not sure how many they have in total.  Really enjoy the material, though!

HammerFall - "Built to Last"

HammerFall - "Dominion"

[AlSymerz]

25 minutes ago, JamesT said:

Fantastic newer thrash band!  I have 3 of their albums, but I'm not sure how many they have in total.  Really enjoy the material, though!

Only three and they haven't released anything since 2012 so they are overdue, if their reformation is still happening.

Carpet Bomb - Awaken Terror

 

[RexKeltoi]

Orbit Culture - From the Inside

[AlSymerz]

King Giz - Flight B721

[Yannis]

Suspiria - Darkwell

Nemesea - Mana

 

[Yannis]

Ulcerate - Stare Into Death And Be Still 

 

[Nasty_Cabbage]

On 8/12/2024 at 1:54 AM, GoatmasterGeneral said:

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.

 

Excellent. Sometimes you and I differ sharply on how exactly we approach these things, so I can't offer any guarantee you'll like the full album, but I definitely found that it stands out from the later DT albums. Kudos on showing Mikael Stanne some much deserved appreciation. His particular style was pretty key for me realizing that there definitely was a difference and technique to harsh vocals as well. It's interesting to me how melodeath seemed to work as a catalyst for extreme metal to you that you eventually moved away from. A ton of people I know can really only just barely tolerate extreme vocals because they enjoy the guitars. So they tend to latch on to the Gothenburg bands and not go any further than that.

23 hours ago, Yannis said:

Cirith Ungol - King Of The Dead

 

One of my top five albums EVER. I bow to the master of the pit.

NP: Necht - The Prophecy of Karnifor

▶︎ The Prophecy of Karnifor | Necht (bandcamp.com)

 For a band listed as "independent" they sure have a professional sound. There's a ton of really big metal bands that don't get this kind of love and care in the production. This sounds like it could have very easily gone the Dimmu route with a full orchestra and all kinds of bells and whistles, but thankfully there's not much of that. Further proof that you can be just a good black metal band with a pro sound without the poor habits or marketing bombast of some of the symphonic black metal bands. That said though, they are just a "good" black metal band who I'm happy to support and listen to, but they don't have me wailing in the streets to herald their arrival.

[AlSymerz]

Flotsam And Jetsam - Dream Of Death

[Yannis]

Grand Magus - Iron Will

 

[Yannis]

Death Angel - The Ultra-Violence

 

[Yannis]

Diamond Head - Lightning To The Nations

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

3 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Excellent. Sometimes you and I differ sharply on how exactly we approach these things, so I can't offer any guarantee you'll like the full album, but I definitely found that it stands out from the later DT albums. Kudos on showing Mikael Stanne some much deserved appreciation. His particular style was pretty key for me realizing that there definitely was a difference and technique to harsh vocals as well. It's interesting to me how melodeath seemed to work as a catalyst for extreme metal to you that you eventually moved away from. A ton of people I know can really only just barely tolerate extreme vocals because they enjoy the guitars. So they tend to latch on to the Gothenburg bands and not go any further than that.

Yeah well since I was a kid of maybe 11 give or take, and an older kid up the block introduced me to Led Zeppelin II, it really had a profound effect on me almost immediately. Might sound like a strange or unlikely album to be someone's introduction to "heavy" music, but this would've been 1972 or probably '73 and as a little kid I had no way to find out about music or bands unless someone I knew turned me onto it. Because NY radio was notoriously soft-cock back in the day. In the early 70's if you wanted anything heavier than Paul Simon or Ringo Star or Neil Young or James Taylor or Elton John you were shit out of luck. Only Zeppelin song you'd ever hear on the radio was Stairway, the rest were deemed too heavy for the general public's delicate sensibilities. So it wasn't easy being a metalhead before there was even metal, and being a pre-teen with no money to buy records anyway made it even tougher. I couldn't even listen to music that much at the time because I had to wait 'til mom and dad were both out to use the family's hi-fi stereo. I rode the Zeppelin train for a year or two and there were always mom's Beatles records, but that was about it aside from whatever I could find on the radio, because I didn't know of any other heavy bands.

But then by 8th grade '74 or '75 I  discovered Circus magazine at the supermarket, and I started skipping lunch to save all my pennies to walk down into town every week or two and buy the albums I saw featured in the magazine. And I'd pick the hippie's brains who worked in the local record store/head shop, ask them if they knew what various bands sounded like and how heavy they were. Because there was no try before you buy, you had to buy it to hear it, and once you opened it you were stuck with it. Records were $4.19 back then ($3.99 + tax) and my lunch money allowance was $5 a week, so I only had one shot at picking something, had to make it count. Definitely suffered more than my share of buyer's remorse in those days, but I did the best I could since I was basically flying blind. Sabbath was the big eye opener for me. Heard Paranoid first and that was cool, had Iron Man and War Pigs and everything, but then when I bought Sabotage my whole world turned upside down. That was some heavy shit for me in 1975 compared to what I had been listening to, and from that moment on I was on a mission to find the heaviest shit out there. I just knew there had to be more where that came from. Problem was most 70's rock fucking suuuuucks, it just wasn't nearly heavy enough for me. And even the heavier bands would mostly only give you a couple of good heavy tracks with a bunch of soft-cock filler. It was always about the heaviness for me, that was always the main consideration. 

Much to Doc's chagrin it was the Ramones in 1976 that really saved me from 70's rock purgatory. Because even though their music was mostly based on early 60's pop songs, there was an underlying speed and aggression and attitude there in Johnny's distorted guitar that just wasn't present in any of that bluesy 70's dinosaur rock or high falutin prog rock. And that's what I'd been searching for all along. Johnny was no virtuoso, he'd just stand there head down and tirelessly strum the fuck out of that $50 guitar, running through 20 three chord songs in 15 minutes. But that's all he needed to do, he was my 70's punk rock hero. Just a few years later a bunch of heavy metal bands mostly from the UK came along and out-heavied the Ramones, but those first 4 Ramones albums really got me through the barren years of high school in the late 70's. And Sabbath of course, Iommi was my other 70's hero. They're really the only two 70's bands I'll still listen to with any regularity now 50 years later. Guess I should include the Scorpions and Thin Lizzy as well once in awhile, and those three Iggy and the Stooges albums still get spins occasionally. Can't forget The Dead Boys Young Loud and Snotty album, and the Beatles I guess but they're from the 60's. But that's about it, I don't ever go back for Zeppelin or Deep Purple or Aerosmith or Van Halen or AC/DC or Uriah Heep or any of that kind of stuff hardly ever.

The 80's were a lot better for me because heavy metal was finally a real established thing by then, as well as hardcore punk, and then speed metal and thrash came along and then suddenly there were all these heavy bands to choose from, I didn't have to go crazy trying to find shit that wasn't soft and lame anymore. But man that decade went by quick, because then by 1990 life got in the way, marriage and a kid and work all combined to take up all my time, and I mostly stopped going to late night shows in the city, (NY club shows used to run til 3 am back then, and I still had to make the hour's drive home) and then I just kind of lost track of the state of the art cutting edge of heaviness. Metal had basically gone underground by 1990 and I must have missed the memo. So I suffered through the 90's listening to the heaviest mainstream shit I could find, and even some grunge rock, but I still relied quite heavily on all my old 80's records. And of course Overkill remained a huge staple for me all throughout the 90's and 2000's, they were the lone 80's thrash band I really kept up with past 1991.

But somehow I was just totally oblivious to the rise of extreme metal. Which I think played a part in why I kept trying with Dark Tranquility and those other melodeath bands in the mid 2000's. Because by 2004 it had been so long since I'd heard something new and heavy and aggressive like that. And even though the vox were a bit of a turn off for me at first, I was definitely still drawn to it. Not that DT is so insanely heavy, but compared to mainstream 90's bands like Monster Magnet and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and Godsmack and White Zombie it was. DT was like Maiden on steroids but without that 'orribly annoying Dickenson dude. I knew I needed to get more heavy new shit in my life, and I could see that the only way forward was going to have to be to just make my peace with the harsh vocals. So I did. And the rest is history, because once I got comfortable with the growling that really opened the door for me to explore and get into all the much heavier darker shit which was what I was really looking for anyway. And I still have that heavier is generally better mindset even now in my 60's. I guess it will always just be how I'm wired. I have a natural affinity, I'd probably even call it a primal need for the heavy brutal shit, even though it took me 'til my mid 40's to find it.

 

Dark Tranquillity - Character, Sweden 2005

 

Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish - For A Limited Time, grindcore Switzerland

 

[Yannis]

Immortal - Sons Of Nothern Darkness

 

[Nasty_Cabbage]

1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Because NY radio was notoriously soft-cock back in the day. In the early 70's if you wanted anything heavier than Paul Simon or Ringo Star or Neil Young or James Taylor or Elton John you were shit out of luck. Only Zeppelin song you'd ever hear on the radio was Stairway, the rest were deemed too heavy for the general public's delicate sensibilities. 

 Problem was most 70's rock fucking suuuuucks

Much to Doc's chagrin it was the Ramones in 1976 that really saved me from 70's rock purgatory. Because even though their music was mostly based on early 60's pop songs, there was an underlying speed and aggression and attitude there in Johnny's distorted guitar that just wasn't present in any of that bluesy 70's dinosaur rock or high falutin prog rock. And that's what I'd been searching for all along. Johnny was no virtuoso, he'd just stand there head down and tirelessly strum the fuck out of that $50 guitar, running through 20 three chord songs in 15 minutes. But that's all he needed to do, he was my 70's punk rock hero.

Ha. By some unseen act of a benevolent deity, I had, until two weeks ago, never even heard of James Taylor or his music. I was carpooling back from a funeral with the rest of the family who had the satellite radio on something or other and one of his songs snapped me out of my malaise to complain. It was more than just disliking the song. I felt physically revolted and repulsed. I think I said something to the effect of "Who thought to record this old man struggling to sing while trying to row himself out of a waste deep pool of soggy bread with an acoustic guitar?" My family actually seemed surprised I'd never heard of the guy. 

The rest of those names from the seventies I can mostly tolerate. My sisters were huge Paul Simon fans. Ringo and Elton I can take or leave. Not going to seek them out, but if you're in a vehicle with others and you have to play something it's unlikely to draw complaints.

I've always enjoyed the Ramones, but gauging their true significance in the music scene they were in is hard for me to really read. Most of the punk-rock people I know are sort of retroactively working backwards through the warped-tour Epitaph records stuff which I think lines up pretty well with the Ramones when they get to them. Then I've met people who travelled right through the Ramones and ended up in hardcore and a little bit of the metal-ish stuff like D.R.I. who will tell me that they were always an industry assembled plant band (one in particular who was fond of saying The Ramones were the Backstreet Boys of punk) there to capitalize on the highly malleable spending habits of younger consumers. How much of that is hyperbole I don't know. I wasn't there. It wasn't my thing, but whatever the Ramones are I don't mind them when I hear them.

2 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish - For A Limited Time, grindcore Switzerland

 

🤣I'm sorry, but this made me laugh. What is this, economicore? If only the presentations I saw in Civics class had this as accompaniment I might have paid more attention. I knew that Keynes guy was a closet metalhead.

Servant - Aetas Ascensus

Aetas Ascensus | Servant | AOP Records (bandcamp.com)

Another black metal band punching way above their class in the production department. Maybe my ears are finally wearing down, but this style of recording really does sound more fitting for a huge arena than a flyblown dive. I'm still not sure how to feel about that. The material is good, even excellent at times (I'd rate songwriting about 8/10), and like Necht they mostly avoid the pitfalls of "symphonic" black metal, but it's hard to argue that something of the earnest and agonized humanizing touch isn't lost.

[FatherAlabaster]

37 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Ha. By some unseen act of a benevolent deity, I had, until two weeks ago, never even heard of James Taylor or his music.

Holy crap, I envy this.

[Yannis]

Tiamat - Sumerian Cry

 

[AlSymerz]

Dio - Magica

[Yannis]

Immortal - Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism

 

[MarkhantonioYeatts]

X - Live

....50 years of maximumrockandroll.........

[MarkhantonioYeatts]

BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS - Stir It Up

 

[GoatmasterGeneral]

8 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Ha. By some unseen act of a benevolent deity, I had, until two weeks ago, never even heard of James Taylor or his music. I was carpooling back from a funeral with the rest of the family who had the satellite radio on something or other and one of his songs snapped me out of my malaise to complain. It was more than just disliking the song. I felt physically revolted and repulsed. I think I said something to the effect of "Who thought to record this old man struggling to sing while trying to row himself out of a waste deep pool of soggy bread with an acoustic guitar?" My family actually seemed surprised I'd never heard of the guy. 

The rest of those names from the seventies I can mostly tolerate. My sisters were huge Paul Simon fans. Ringo and Elton I can take or leave. Not going to seek them out, but if you're in a vehicle with others and you have to play something it's unlikely to draw complaints.

I've always enjoyed the Ramones, but gauging their true significance in the music scene they were in is hard for me to really read. Most of the punk-rock people I know are sort of retroactively working backwards through the warped-tour Epitaph records stuff which I think lines up pretty well with the Ramones when they get to them. Then I've met people who travelled right through the Ramones and ended up in hardcore and a little bit of the metal-ish stuff like D.R.I. who will tell me that they were always an industry assembled plant band (one in particular who was fond of saying The Ramones were the Backstreet Boys of punk) there to capitalize on the highly malleable spending habits of younger consumers. How much of that is hyperbole I don't know. I wasn't there. It wasn't my thing, but whatever the Ramones are I don't mind them when I hear them.

Yeah, no that's not true, the Ramones were a real band of misfits who came together all on their own. Three of them had gone to high school together in Queens. Their manager/producer ended up becoming their drummer on all their classic 70's albums because when Joey moved from drums to just vocals they couldn't find a drummer who really fit. At the time they came out of left field, no one had ever seen or heard anything like them before. They were weirdos and people really didn't know what to make of them. They could barely play their instruments in the beginning and record companies didn't want anything to do with them, they had a really hard time getting signed. They were far from a commercial success, their classic debut album peaked at 111 on the Billboard charts and didn't go gold until 38 years later in 2014 after all 4 original members were dead.

Your friend's probably thinking of the Sex Pistols, their 70's punk rock peers from the UK. That was always the commonly accepted rumor about them that they were the industry assembled band masterminded by Malcom McLaren. Although I don't know how much truth there really is to that. I like their one album and I bought it back in the day, but that was '77 and they didn't change my life like the Ramones had a year earlier in '76 with their wall of noise. By '77 there were a bunch of other punk bands who had gotten their albums out: the Clash, the Damned, the Jam, the Buzzcocks, the Dead Boys, the Saints, the Stranglers...but in '76 the Ramones were the first.

I wasn't super into punk rock at the time in the 70's tbh other than just the Ramones, because I didn't see any of those other punk bands as being particularly heavy. It wasn't until I got ahold of albums from UK hardcore bands Discharge, GBH and the Exploited in the early 80's that I really got heavily into punk because at the time those bands were far heavier and more aggressive sounding than anything I'd heard from the NWOBHM scene. And for me it was always about chasing heaviness.

Motorhead had a lot to do with it too, because in the early 80's they tied the punk and metal scenes together appealing strongly to both, and drawing both metalheads and punks to their shows. I can appreciate 70's punk rock now, but at the time in the 70's when I was in high school I mocked it for the most part. Especially the "new wave" end of '70's punk, trendy stuff like Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Talking Heads, the Police... I hated all those trendy bands with a burning passion. We don't even think of these bands as being "punk" anymore now, but back then they all seemed new and different to us so it all just kinda got lumped together, until a few years later when more new bands came along and the various scenes differentiated themselves. 

 

NP: The Stooges -S/T 1969

 

[RexKeltoi]

3 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

Dio - Magica

Fever Dreams is my favourite track on this album, always meant to learn this one but forgot 🤷‍♂️ 

14 hours ago, Yannis said:

Grand Magus - Iron Will

 

A band I like that always seems under the radar 

[AlSymerz]

15 minutes ago, RexKeltoi said:

Fever Dreams is my favourite track on this album, always meant to learn this one but forgot 🤷‍♂️ 

 

I go through stages with Dio. He's a great vocalist and all but sometimes his songs just don't do anything for me whereas other times I could listen to them all day.

Blaze Bayley - Infinite Entanglement

[RexKeltoi]

3 hours ago, AlSymerz said:

I go through stages with Dio. He's a great vocalist and all but sometimes his songs just don't do anything for me whereas other times I could listen to them all day.

Blaze Bayley - Infinite Entanglement

I get it, to be honest I am not really into lyrics much, my focus is on instrumentation, probably why I like instrumental music the most, especially lyrics in more extreme metal genres, sometimes I have to stifle the urge to laugh so I don't look like a dick. I am the guy at the show who usually stares at the pedalboard of the guitarist trying to see what gear he is using etc...  I find very few lyrics in music enthralling unfortunately most times even a bit corny preferring more metaphorical and poetic prose, its getting worst unfortunately in all genres. I remember during the Satanic Panic in the 80's and people being fearful of the metal scene and my friends and I at shows looking around at the people thinking what the fuck are they afraid of 😅🤦‍♂️ I can honestly say I MIGHT know all the lyrics to maybe 10 songs, maybe 20 tops 🤷‍♂️🤘

[AlSymerz]

 Night Demon - Darkness Remains