Metal Reviews

I've been listening to a lot of music since around the age most people start really listening and immersing themselves in the sounds we create with instruments, age 14. As a wee lad my parents always tried to steer me away from rock music so I wasn't really exposed to it until late elementary school and junior high.

Music really affected me, I remember the first albums I bought were Creed and Nickelback when I was about 12 years old. I wanted to listen to any kind of rock music I could, whether through radio or going to the store and picking out what the popular or whatever I could find, really.

I was on a swim team ages 9 to 14 and found music extremely thrilling this way. My parents didn't want me to have a cd player, as they are strong christians and did not want me listening to rock music. It's never the fact that I wanted to rebel against them at all, it was just the pure fact that I loved, definitely loved the music. I remember hearing Korns "Untouchables" album at a swim meet and it was just unlike anything I had ever experienced. I also remember hearing Slipknots "Iowa" and my best friend at the time telling me not to show my parents because it was satanic. So every night I would hide under the covers with my CD player and listen to it as much as I could. I wanted to know more, so I did. My older brother introduced me to other bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and other rock/metal bands. From there I was always one to go out on my own and really immerse myself in something so that's exactly what I did. In 9th grade I dropped out of school due to having a lot of trouble with bi-polar issues. For the next year or so my main goal was music, looking back. I started looking for new bands to listen to everyday. Researching them, Metal (obviously) attracted me the most. Back then I would consider myself more of a "beginner" listener, as I wouldn't sit through a lot of music if it didn't catch my attention at first. If it did I may listen to a few more songs off the album, or possibly the album as a whole. I guess I was sort of ADD about the music. Today I find that I love listening to music much more "objectively" I guess you would call it. I love analyzing the music, sitting through the parts that 3-4 years ago may have made me turn it off or skip to the next song. I sometimes find that what may seem tedious at first to be what can make a song so great. I am planning on taking several courses involved with audio production and music this coming semester so one day I hope to be a producer or at least make music of my own that is of worth to myself or others.

Anyways, when I quit going to school music became somewhat of my religion. I gained a pretty elitist attitude about metal as it became the supreme form of music in my book, definitely not my attitude anymore, but looking back, it was a fun attitude to have as a kid. I liked the fact that this music brought that sense of energy and pride to myself and it really was my only escape route. When I quit taking medication for bi polar when I was 17 I got interested in a lot of other music, including rap and hip hop which I never really had the attitude of "rap isn't music" but more or less saw it as a lesser form of music at the time. I quit listening to metal for about a year or so and was more into classic rock, psychedelic music and I guess more music that was "acceptable" to the majority. Not how I feel at all anymore now that I've had a manic episode and am completely back into metal, as well as other forms of music.

I find that music is really the only outlet other than basketball that I can truly express myself. The medication I take decreases my drive as a basketball player so I am more in-tune with music, especially metal once again, it has that fire to it that is unlike anything else.

Listening to music is much more interesting for me these days as well than back 4-5 years ago when I was first getting into it. My attention span for it has definitely grown as I have sat through those once tedious parts and now completely understand why bands include those parts rather than just riff after riff.

I would like to see some other posts on this same topic and maybe some comments on my OP.

I'm majoring in music and hoping I can make a living off of it, so yeah, I love music.

Nice thread Husker

Music has always been huge in my life. My mom never practiced anything, but my dad has been an active blues-guitarist for over thirty years, so I have had a relationship with music since I was in diapers. Me and my neighbour started writing songs on our own when we were very young, about 5-6, we were both part of a church, so it was mainly christian lyrics really that we wanted to put some music on. We did this for several years and enjoyed it alot.

After a slump for a couple of years, I picked up the guitar when I was about ten or eleven. I got one and a cheap shit amp from my dad, and I started playing on my own. Before that I was very fascinated by rhythms as I was very focused on break-dancing at the end of 6th or 7th grade. I got more and more into guitar-playing and my dad taught me a couple of chords, and I started practicing on my own and have been since. Well, anyway, I was into Michael Jackson back then and after hearing Beat It and Dirty Diana, I started getting my eyes open for guitar-solos and a heavier sound. So, that's when a buddy of mine started to introduce me to Metallica. I was 11 or 12 I think. I refused to like it at first, but then I borrowed a Master of Puppets CDR and I LOVED it. Had kinda the same problems like Husker as my parents didn't really approve of it. However, they quickly let go of trying to suck me out of it.

Then I started my band-experience when I was 13-14 I guess. At first we just played covers of Nirvana and Metallica, but expanded to Maiden and Foo Fighters after a while as well. I got properly into Iron Maiden when I caught their Rock In Rio show broadcasted on Norwegian TV. The day after I downloaded every single song off of Bearshare, and well, the rest is history. But I think I only listened to Maiden for two straight years before getting into some other bands as well.

Meanwhile, the band was going strong, and we developed a kind punk/rock-sound. None of the other band-members were into metal except for a few bands so I didn't really have a chance to pull us in the right direction. However, I managed to keep solos a part of the band, and the first solo I ever learned properly was Iron Maiden's The Trooper.

While the bandwagon was rolling, I got into some new stuff, and I bought an In Flames album spontaneously to try and get into "harsh" music. At the same time, Mr. Laiho of Children of Bodom opened a whole new world to me when it came to soloing so I got into them as well even though I kinda felt bad because I thought it was satanic as fuck. Which it obviously wasn't of course. I started to like bands such as Pagan's Mind and other slightly more technical stuff when I was 15-16 and it was then I started to read reviews over at the metalcrypt and soon wanted to be one as well. I discovered tons of new bands, got tons of new inspiration for my own music and expanded my horizons. I gained, as Husker, a very elitist attitude towards other music, nu-metal and stuff like that in particular, but I learned over the years that there's enjoyable stuff everywhere, though I never really were able to stomach metalcore even though I listened to Killswitch Engage once or twice.

Since then, my horizons have gotten wider, but I gave up my solo-playing and started focusing on riffs, and that's why I think riff-heavy and rhythm-drenched genres like trash metal and post-hardcore and screamo/punk/hardcoreis my favourite genre right now. But hat changes from time to time, as when I focused on soloing, progressive metal was my favourite.

I eventually quit my band when I was 18, and fiddled around on my own for a while. I got more and more into hardcore, and fell in love with the rhythmic perfection, the dirty attitude and the image as a whole. I also started apreciating old-school music much more as well, as my favourite metal genres is thrash metal, old school heavy metal and 70s prog rock/rock. I never got into black metal properly though, but that's starting to change. Death Metal as well, the more brutal stuff is opening up and taking me in, after years of trying to get it.

I'm now in a new band, a post-hardore/hardcore punk band were I do most of the song-writing. I work with excellent musicians and I hope, and havee heard, that we have potential to go places.

By far the longest post on I've written here.

Music makes me really happy, and it's been a major source of reason to wake up in the morning, especially since just over a year ago when I started playing bass daily (and 8 months ago when i started piano, guitar and singing). I can't think of any times where it's omg saved my life or helped me through a hard time, but sitting down or going for a walk and listening to an album can take me from a bad mood to a great one 95% of the time.

Around when I was 12 one of my sister's and her boyfriend took it on themselves to introduce me to good music, and gave me a bunch of Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Radiohead, Sublime, The Offspring, and Rage Against the Machine CDs that I listened to pretty constantly for the next four years. Then a friend introduced me to rateyourmusic and I became an internet music dork and started discovering new music kinda obsessively, starting with metal. I think for a bit it made me enjoy a lot of music less than I would have otherwise because I was very angry and critical about music, which is no fun at all. I've always been focused on proggy rock/metal/punk. My theory is because I used to like video games a lot, and video game music is prog as fuck. For the last two years I've been getting into jazz, classical and pop kinda tunes more and more.

Kinda like noodles here in that I discovered a lot of stuff in a short space of time via the web, and like Thomas and Husko I was quite elitist at first (probably due to more or less going from Iron Maiden to Darkthrone) but I've caught up since and music is a big part of my life.

Music has always been a big part of my life. My father was a musician who played bass, guitar, piano and flute mainly but he managed on other instruments as well. As a result he got me into playing instruments pretty much as soon as I was old enough to grasp the notion of playing an instrument. The primary instrument I played for most of my life was piano, but I also played alto saxophone, guitar and a bit of flute.

Both my parents were big fans of music though only my father played, however, my mother was a big fan of a lot of early metal and rock. I got to hear a lot of Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper among others as a kid. Both she and my father also liked a lot of folk music of various sorts and classical music so I was heavily exposed to that as a kid (not to mention that since I took up piano at the age of 4 I spent a great deal of time playing classical). My father also exposed me to a lot of jazz though I never really enjoyed listening to it much on my own (though I did enjoy playing it for a while).

So with this background behind me music was always a huge part of my life, and I found it, along with literature, was usually how I best found myself expressing how I felt at any given moment. It was never just "I feel happy/sad/whatever" but it's always like there was some story or song that expressed that better than I could at the time which later grew into me transfering that into creating my own work that acted as an expression of whatever was in my brain at the time. To me I guess I find it difficult to think or really exist without some song or lyric in my head. The world would be a very boring place without music.

Music (and metal primarily) has always been my primary energiser, motivator or even soother. Perhaps it's better to say that it reflects all these things that already exist in me. Even before I began listening to metal I would prefer more aggressive, heavy or bombastic forms of classical music whether it be Wagner, Beethoven or pieces like Halvorsen's Entry March of Boyars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfyAQut2OcE or Nielsen's Negro Dance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PSvyBybEHs and found it caused a reaction in me no other kind of music could until I found metal at age 13. After seeing some albums at the record shop I began getting into Slayer and Pantera, shortly after discovering death metal which of course one thing leads to another and suddenly I was the black metal fan I am today. For me metal always expressed that balance between the primitive and the thoughtful/philosophical, which I always felt was a huge dynamic throughout my life.

Since then metal has become the ultimate form of music for me, and after 11 years that sentiment has not waned a bit. In fact it has intensified. It was my exposure to metal that got me writing poetry and lyrics, short stories, trying to create my own music and so on. It was also my exposure to certain kinds of metal music that caused a rather dramatic shift in my life and way of thinking (or rather brought my prior ways of thinking together into a more coherent way of thinking). It gave me the inspiration to take prior interests and to not rule out making those interests into a future career or path despite that other's told me it was useless and I should choose something more "practical."

A lot of people see "durhur elitism" as this horrible "closeminded" thing. To me my so-called "elitism" is my complete adoration of and obssession over metal. Metal "defined" me before I knew what metal was and so I even hesitate to use the term "define". Perhaps it's the same as those once in a life time moments when you find another person who thinks so much like you, enjoys everything you do and expresses themselves in an almost identical way as you do. Does either define the other or exist as a result of the other? Not really, they both just exist on a frighteningly similar level.

I got to know about metal in the midst of the nu metal fad, but mostly it was just limited to Deftones. After that I bought a few Slayer albums, and I was into them. After that, Vader, Amon Amarth, etc, Sepultura and so forth, until I got to know black metal through Emperor and Ancient, then Mayhem, then Darkthrone and the other core bands of the genre. Gradually got off the death metal side of metal, then expanded it with post-rock, industrial acts.

I don't know what I get out of metal. Don't care either. I like it for the variety of things; metal can be great background music, but upon paying attention it's intricate enough to keep you amused.