Metal Reviews

Wow, we have a lot of philosophy majors on the board.

Well, here goes me....

My name is Evan Bell I live (and was born) in Barrie Ontario Canada. I was born on June 13, 1989. I am a pretty outgoing person, but shy at first. I am absolutely horrible with the female race. I got into the metal thing when I was in grade 8. My school had gotten rid of the Music Class for a few years, so just before high school the Music teacher (who tought kindergarden and French while Music was no longer an option) wanted to give the Music class another spin. But he didn't force us to read notes or play stupid instruments. This time we did the histroy of music. Which turned into the history of rock and roll. There was this kid in my class who was a big Led Zeppelin and Guns N Roses fan, and all the bands he was naming off to the teacher, I knew of. See my dad drove a truck pretty much my whole life, so when I would go with him we would listen to lots of music. He was a fan of such bands like: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Metallica, Santana, ZZ Top, Neil Young, Rush, Motorhead, etc...so I got into this kind of music because of him. So as this kid was naming of all these bands, I was trying to out do him. And it became my goal to know more about rock and metal than him. So it started, I was hooked on Van Halen, Metallica, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden for a year until I got to high school, where I was introduced to Megadeth, Slayer, Pantera and the likes. According to a guy I use to work with, he says I am the biggest metalhead he knows.

More about me though...I love hockey. Die hard Leafs fan, I also played baseball when I was a kid. And I lived in a little town called Hillsdale, and my baseball team was the first ever championship team for Hillsdale. I am a big guy, 6 foot 2, roughly 280 pounds. I love the UFC, and when I was younger, a family friend wanted to get me into wrestling, but my parents would have none of it. I moved to the city of Barrie just over a year ago, and it was a big change for me as I always lived in the country. But now that I am use to it, it is much better. I love animals, but more importantly dogs. My current dog is a female named Roxy, she is a 9 year old golden lab/hound dog mix. My mother hates her, and made me take her when I moved out. I went to 2 different high schools, both catholic. St. Theresa's High School in Midland ON, and St. Joseph's High School in Barrie ON. I have not gone to college, and right now it is not an option, as my dad and I have started our own business. It is a patient transfer business. Which means, we take people from hospital to home, home to hospital, hospital to hospital, or any other such combination. The people we take are non-urgent or non-emergency patients. Things have been slow so far, but my dad found some steady work now. My mother is doing damn good for herself, as she is a manager and the RVH (Royal Victoria Hospital) here in Barrie. I have been working mostly at restaurants lately. Started a few years back when I got a call from a resort asking me if I wanted a job. I did, and I washed dishes there for 6 months. Eventually moving on to wash dishes at a less fancy restaurant. Then I finally got an oppourtunity to prove my worth at cooking, when on my 3rd shift I was told I was working a station all by myself. I blew my boss away and never looked at a dish pit ever again. I got a managers spot at a restaurant called Moose Winooskis, which I recently got fired from. I don't smoke cigarettes, but I do occasionally smoke weed. I love to drink beer, and my beer of choice is Moosehead. I love video games, I am a regular on Call of Duty 4. I have owned almost every system, NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, X-Box, GameCube, 360, and Wii. As well as some of the handhelds.

I know that was a lot, and I doubt anybody will read it all/or comment on it, but it felt good to type it all out anyway.

Holy shit, I didn't realise I'm on of the old men around here.

Im not used to being the oldie at 22!!

Oh, and I was a child prodigy too. Scholarships, skipping a grade, the whole bit.

To those fellow child prodigies out there....I have exactly one piece of advice.

If you're going to smoke weed, smoke joints not bongs. And if you MUST smoke bongs, don't do it all day, everyday for 5 years. It will take away from you the one thing you cherish most: your mind.

You will find that not only are you stupider than you were before, but you'll find you're stupider than morons you used to give shit to at school for being morons.

That's what happened to me.

Don't do it, kids.

Don't give us your lectures old man.

Fucking kids today.

Wouldn't know a piece of solid advice if it bit them in the ass.

My name is Elias Eiholzer and I was born in Oxford on January 1st 1991. When I was 2 we moved to New York, where I attended Kindergarden and shit and I learned to read. When I was 4 we moved to the north of Switzerland, Lucerne, where I attended a private school for bilingual anglo-swiss kids, so I grew up speaking and reading English.
I never had problems in school until I flunked the 1st year of Liceo twice, so now I'm being sent to private school for snobs, which we don't have enough money to pay for and which I don't really want to attend.
My parents are classical musicians, my father has a master's in philosophy of music, and my mother taught piano at the conservatory (where my father still works), so ever since I was old enough to discern sounds I've been listening to classical music. At a certain point, when I was around 11, my parents started giving me cds that they used to listen to when they were kids, so I was doing Black Sabbath, Santana, the Doors, the Beatles, the Eagles, etc.
When I was 13 my neighbour gave me three cds: Iron Maiden's "Rock in Rio", Metallica's "S&M" and Sonata Arctica's "Ecliptica", changing my life forever. A year later I began taking guitar lessons.
In my spare time I read, watch movies, listen to music, play music, (writing music falls under the "work" category) and practically do nothing else.

I really have no desire to smoke weed, so I guess that counts as taking your advice, right?

Well, yeah, that's good I approve.

But that "kids today!" comment was just a joke. DW was making a joke about my post above his, and that was my reply. Coz im 22 he called me old man....anyway.

Not to be taken seriously.

Alright, I'll post too.
My real name is Antonis (surprise) and I was born on January 1979 (right, that means wiser than you hehe). I was born in Greece where I grew up and finished senior highschool then moved to Sweden to study molecular biology and genetics at Lund university. I will soon return back home to serve my obligatory military service and then I'll look for a job. All in all in my almost 30 years of life I have very few things to complain about.

And here's my metal story. When I was around around 9 somebody gave me some Iron Maiden, Manowar & AC/DC tapes. At that moment I thought this was the worst shit I had ever heard, I was wondering how anybody can listen to these things. Anyway, then I started watching mtv and I started to like hard rock like GnR and Bon Jovi and Metallica (they had just released the black album). Well, little by little I got more into hard rock then slowly metal then at some point I borrowed those "awful" tapes once again from my friend and I saw the light! Iron Maiden took their place on the throne of my music preferences and have stayed there since then! (I must have been 12 then, Iron Maiden had just released No Prayer for the Dying but I didn't get it until next year) During the following years I would slowly move through and taste various metal genres but at school each year had its flavor as both me and my friends slowly learned stuff.
And here's a funny story, at my school there were two huge twin bullies but since we shared music interests we spent some time together (kind of arguing and fighting most of the time). So '92 it was between Manowar and another band, then '93 I was fighting in favor of Iron Maiden against their Metallica, then '94 I was defending Slayer against their Sepultura, then '96 they stopped listening to metal and I had nobody to fight with!

Might as well expand a little on what I wrote earlier…

My name is Zadok, I was born in 1985 in a small English town outside of London called Winslow. My parents were Christian back then, and when word got out that they were calling me ‘Zadok’ a mysterious old woman knocked on the door and said that they can’t do that, because people would think I’m Jewish. Irony! My parents owned a rather unsuccessful tearoom, then a rather unsuccessful crafts shop that made shoes and handbags and stuff. Things got so bad that my parents decided to move to Spain, where they had been offered a job with a sinister Christian organisation of some sort counselling drug addicts. I went to school there for the first time, and hated it, but looking back it was the happiest time of my life. The sun always shone, the sinister Christian people were nice (we were friends with this missionary/TV evangelist that had this act where he broke a sword, and it was the power of Babylon or something, it’s in my mind forever. I can remember going to watch people getting baptised in his swimming pool) and being an only child meant that I got my parents’ full attention. Life was good.

Of course, happy times must come to an end, and fearing for my impressionable little soul with all these drug addicts hanging about, my parents decided to move again and so we went to live in Wales. I know. It was rainy and green against Spain’s wonderful weather, but it wasn’t so bad. We then moved (forgotten why) to Yorkshire, and stayed with a retired Colonel and his family on a farm. After a few years there, we moved to Hull, where my parents had accepted a place with another sinister Christian organisation. This one went into the former Soviet Union and took coachloads of Jews to Israel, because they were the chosen people and when the End Of Days came God would look kindly upon people that helped them. We lived in a big house with about eight other people; I think it was some sort of waystation for people on their way to Russia. There was a Dutch man called Jan, a fat Scottish woman called Judith (looking back, she was obviously a closeted lesbian) and a deranged woman called Sheila. It wasn’t a cult or anything; there was a TV and that, and I wasn’t forced to sit in on prayer meetings.

Anyways, all this ‘Israel/Jew’ stuff got my parents going. My father had gone over in the ’73 war and picked oranges whilst the real orange pickers were off fighting. This clearly had such an effect on him that they decided to convert to Judaism, and so to be closer to a community we moved to Manchester, where we still are. Starting high school and getting bullied was pretty much where life stopped being fun. Was an average student. Never really got into trouble. Worst thing I did was start smoking. After that, my parents shipped me off to a Jewish college called a Yeshiva, which made previous sinister Christian organisations look perfectly normal. I hated it, but not wanting to get kicked out (orthodox Jewish circle run big on social stigma – it could have ended my parents’ jobs in the community, ruined my siblings’ lives…) I pretended to like it thinking it would be over soon, which looking back was a mistake – I should’ve run. It was a fucking weird place – people would regularly go through your stuff to make sure that you had nothing ‘forbidden’, which could be books, magazines, porn, non-Jewish music… having to deal with the cunts day in, day out, being propagandised and secretly on the side researching all that they said and finding it to be nonsense. Of course, not being able to discuss this with anyone meant I retreated inwards, and I more or less started living in my head. This effectively turned me into the psychological wreck that I am today, quite besides starting my rabid hatred for fundamentalism of all natures. I could write a book about that shithole, really. Depression kicked in, and twice over the three years that I was there I nearly killed myself. Not to be dramatic, but music quite literally saved my life. Being naturally rebellious I had a radio, and through that I discovered Evanescence, Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down. Buying albums by them led me to get more interested and ultimately it was the purchase of Iron Maiden’s Powerslave that got me into Metal properly. I came online at the local library, typed ‘Metal reviews’ into Google and discovered this place, which led me to extreme metal like Fear Factory, Darkthrone, Emperor, Enslaved, Napalm Death, and so on, and whilst battling depression I realised that Power Metal like Hammerfall and Edguy had a wonderfully happy vibe, which helped when I was at my low points. Thanks again, Ness.

Buying CDs by these bands and hiding them back at the Yeshiva, I became strangely happy for a while, developing a sort of nihilistic, fuck-it attitude that hasn’t left me. Leaving there, I started a law degree, work for a solicitor, and here I am, writing for Metal Reviews and having frequent and powerful mood swings that make me a bastard of a human being to be with and that I can only deal with through the healing power of alcohol. I still get the urge to jump off a tall building occasionally, but to date I haven’t taken it – I decided a time ago that suicide is a way out that I’m holding in reserve for another ten, fifteen years or so, to see what life has in store for me. I should probably be telling this to a psychologist rather than a buncha people on the internets, but having self-medicated this far to a successful degree I can’t see the point. Typing all this out is the closest I’ll probably get, and besides, reading about other people who have been through far worse and dealt with it much better just makes me feel silly.

Anyways, being a reviewer means I get most of my music free, but I still buy lots and am running out of space for them all. I like being a decadent westerner and having access to all our rotten culture, such as films and stuff, and am of average height, weight, shape. C’est moi! Thanks for reading.

I'm Pete. I have long hair. I'm 18. I drink a helluva lot. I like teh methul. I have a problem with respecting women.

Peace

You've led quite a life Zad, hahah. Whereabouts in Wales did you live?

Caerwent.

Don't know it.

The little similarities which many of us share are interesting.

My name is Charles, or Charlie if we are friends...

I was born in Derby, United Kingdom on 2nd July 1984, making me 24 as of about a week ago, and thus one of the forum's fossils. When I was 18 I moved here to Leeds, where I now live with my girlfriend in a cool flat that has a beautiful view of the city. (It's not as ugly as people think it is, really)

I was bad at school and didn't put any work in at all, because I was a saxophone player and was convinced I was going to be a jazz musician, and hence didn't need good grades. I went to music college in Leeds and studied Jazz. When I left, I spent a year practicing in order to get onto an Master's course at Guildhall in London. However, I bolloxed up the audition and didn't get in. In a fit of bad loser-ness I stopped playing the saxophone for a long time, but now I am playing again, mainly for enjoyment. I still try to keep my level up, but I no longer find myself smashing my head against the wall (sometimes literally) because I can't play some solo or whatnot.

Instead I did my MA at Leeds University in Politics. I decided I wanted to be involved in the global labour movement, and I went to Washington, DC to work on a semi-voluntary basis for the Worker Rights COnsortium at the end of last year. Now I am back in Leeds working for a similar British organisation. In October I am starting my PhD in Labour Studies with a scholarship, which I am very proud of given that I was crap at school, and have a music degree.

I love horror films, particularly Zombi films, and those of Dario Argento. Obviously I love metal, although I like a lot of different types of music (including jazz, of course) However metal is probably what I listen to 75% of the time, and it annoys me when people get on their high horses because they are "open-minded". The elitism of metal is part of the reason I like it.

I am quite good at Chess- I can think up clever tactical ideas but I often make humiliating blunders that lose me games.

Apart from my girlfriend and immediate family, my favourite living creature is my cat (who unfortunately lives with my parents)

I am quite tall and blonde. Norsk arisk rio. I also found out I am related to the Queen

If anybody's an old coot, it's probably me. I'm 25.

Heyo, i'm Nate...born in 1991, making me seventeen and the second-youngest person on the forum (at least according to this thread). Lived in Arizona, US my entire life. Both of my parents are lawyers and my family is pretty well-off...I'm pretty damn lucky. My life has gone through a few distinct phases, and now that I think about it it's kind of weird. Throughout elementary school, I was always one of the "cool" kids and had a lot of friends, etc. In middle school, I was still acquainted with all of my old friends and got a acquainted with some new people, but I never hung out with anyone outside of school and in retrospect, I wasn't too happy. I was well-liked, but I just didn't have any good friends. I got into fantasy literature, gaming, and the internet, turning me into the semi-nerd I am now.

Then, I made the decision to go to a private, all-boys high school. I forgot to mention I'm one of those super-smart kids, and I've pretty got my way to college paved out: I'm either gonna get payed to go to college in Arizona or I'll go to a good school in Cali on the beach. But, getting back to my previous social life story, I hung out with some kids from my middle school for the first two years of high school (a nice change from not hanging with anyone at all) and now I have a bunch of other good friends who are pretty sweet.

Other things: sports have always been a big part of my life. I'm a rabid Phoenix Suns fan. I started playing lacrosse sophomore year in high school and will probably make varsity next year--I used to be really good at baseball and I play basketball for fun. I didn't listen to music at all until eighth grade, and the first band I liked was Dream Theater...strange, I know. Being an internet fiend back then, I found this forum two years ago or whatever and it's pretty much guided my tastes in music to where they are now. I'm convinced that the only reason I don't know many girls is because I go to a boys school, since whenever I actually hang out with them I have no problem talking to them and they seem to like me well enough. Despite this, going into senior year i'd say it was a good decision to go to that all-boys school. As of right now (summer), I really enjoy reading (branching into other genres besides fantasy), gaming (on a mission to complete ridiculously long Oblivion), playing sports (played tennis for first time a few days ago, apparently I'm a natural), hanging out with my friends/family, and music (really expanding my tastes into stuff like post rock right now).

Life is good.

Hi! I'm a young Caucasian male who likes gaming and metal and I'm above average intelligence who is kind of an introvert but I have friends too . Amidoinitirite?


It's gonna be hard to fit in here everyone's so different.

Thanks for mentioning men in all of two sentences, half as many as Warcraft 3, Jeff. I feel so important.

I'm Kelsey Kotova, two parents, both Russian and was born August 22nd 1986. I lived in Russia until I was 6, then Edmonton until 12, then Australia until 16, then back to Edmonton, then I quickly left for Vancouver as soon as I finished Highschool, then left Vancouver for Victoria, where I live now. I met my best friend, Alyn, in Edmonton when I was 11 and she's mostly followed me through these movings, except for the first year I was in Australia. I've played piano since 10 and acoustic guitar since 12. I've tried to study English in University twice, but both times it's fallen apart. Alcohol and weed are awesome, so is life, that is all.