.Editorial - Cd Buyers Anonymous
Metal Reviews

Release year: 2004
Reviewed by Ben

So there I am in a dank, dark room lit by one swinging twenty watt light bulb with the stench of mothballs and urine, sitting in a crapped out folding chair with a slash through the seat and stuffing spilling out with about a dozen other people gathered in a circle. It’s my turn to speak so I sit up and stammer, “Hello, my name’s Ben and, and, oh god, (sobs) I’maddictedtocds, there I said it.” Huzzahs and cheers go around the circle of shame as we sit there and congratulate ourselves on the “courage” to admit that yes, we all have a serious problem. We’re addicted to cds. Bob hasn't seen his wife in a month because he's locked away in his basement room with the 5.1 surround sound system and Hellfire Club, Michael's kid has joined a cult to get his dad's attention to sway from Tempo of the Damned, Joey lost his job because he had three no call, no shows in a row after he recieved the new Wuthering Heights, and John does nothing but eat fried cheese and sort his five thousand disk collection by category, alphabetically, and by release date for twenty hours a day. Now, while that sceneario may be a little extreme, I have yet to gather myself and friends like a bunch of alcoholics to cry on each other’s shoulders on the irreparable damage that my metal habits have wrought on my life and others, I will say that I love my metal like some people love their crack. Seriously, I already have around seven hundred plus cds with more every single month trickling in. If a month goes by without more than five new metal albums then it’s a bad month for me and I start to get all anxious and irritable. I’m sure if you aren’t like me then you know a friend who has the same problem, and if you’re just an mp3 bitch then you’ll never understand, but why exactly do we spend so much of our time and our money on our albums? What causes us to go out and track down a rare as hell cd, that was only pressed in some guys basement in Denmark with a limited run of one hundred copies, isn’t there more important things in life than that?

For one, right off the bat there are a bunch of collector’s out there. The people that seem to have every single rare cd that you can possibly think of, like the Death Metal Sampler that Noise put out with the first Helloween, Celtic Frost, and Running Wild songs, Angel Dust’s first two albums, your favorite band’s demo’s, anything. And by owning these I mean the real deal, I’ve had someone tell me “I have ___… on mp3,” yea well then if that’s the case you don’t really have a damn thing do you? All you have is a digitally encoded copy, nothing more. It takes time, it takes drive, and it takes money to actually track down a group’s 1985 demo and collect every single seven inch, EP, single, and the Madagascar version with the exclusive bonus tracks. To those people out there that do so, I salute you. Then there's the lucky ones that I would kill to have a five minute grab and dash with their collection. Maybe you were one of the few people that were there when Sonata Arctica released the Full Moon demo, or when Edguy passed out the Children of Steel and Evil Minded tapes, or hell maybe you were even one of the thrashers with your denim vest on that got a hold of a tape by some group called The Legacy so long ago. Also, it just feels great to have something that you can’t just pick up at any store, I myself am excited to see what Tobias, Jens, and Dirk will say at Prog Power V when I show them my original 95 Savage Poetry disk.

I also think that another reason I buy so many cds is because, and this happens when you get older, you become more and more jaded to the music that you listen to. If I had heard some of the albums that I own seven years ago I would have been dumbfounded and in utter awe of a third tier group that today I give maybe five spins before it’s shelved for an extended period of time. With so many albums to buy, and so many cds to review, unless something really happens to grab me it becomes lost on the towers of doom (my cd racks). Sometimes when a cd goes into the tower it is lost forever, such as my Onward, Enchant, and latter day Royal Hunt discs, these I don’t think I have listened to for over a year if not two years. It’s not that they’re bad albums but when the flow of new metal keeps coming in I forget about them and so they sit there lonely and getting a tad dusty. On the other hand however, when the flow of metal dries up due to money problems or whatever, when you have over seven hundred cds to choose from you can temporarily stave off the frustration by scouring your racks and putting on some lost classics or even some albums that haven’t seen the light of day in months. It doesn’t cure the sense of anxiety you have knowing that you have five albums on the way but it does help a little bit.

So why do we metalheads buy so many cds? I do it because I love the music, I love the feeling of popping in a brand new disc and hearing new music for the very first time, even if that excitement wears off in five minutes due to a crappy cd. Thankfully though, those duds are few and far between and I’ll still continue to buy new metal at the rate I am now, that is until someone pulls me over in an intervention and tells me that I have a problem and forces me to take a trip down to that dimly lit room with all my fellow metal addicts.

Killing Songs :
Ben quoted
Other albums by .Editorial that we have reviewed:
.Editorial - Horny For Harpsichord reviewed by Ben and quoted
.Editorial - Why I need to take a break from writing for MetalReviews reviewed by Alex and quoted
.Editorial - USA / Germany Thrash Match: Big Four Style reviewed by Ben and quoted
.Editorial - Re: Reissues and Remasters reviewed by Ben and quoted
.Editorial - A Brief Run Through Power Metal (in 3 1/2 stages) reviewed by Ben and quoted
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