Metal Reviews

I just now posted this over at RYM discussing whether or not we listened to records from our High School years. Considering that we can only take the Metal Books topic so far before it gets ridicuous, I thought this fit in with the train of thought that was addressing, so here it is:

The only thing I have is that I didn't know where the ceiling was for an outstanding song. What I mean is that obviously there were songs that I still think are masterpieces from that era and before, but I had absolutely no idea there was so much of it until I had to listen to hundreds of records to get the kind of music I would actually indulgently listen to.

I put up with so-so albums in high school because I thought the great ones were exceptionally rare and sort of excused mediocrity.

I thought Tool were making incredible records, they were great at the time, but now my patience for listening to their lesser material has waned. They are still great records, but nowhere near top 20 stuff I thought it was. I am in the precarious position that I listen to such different artists that I thought I was getting the best of each scene because...

...I was totally buying into the major label's campaign that popularity and hype was equal to quality and the trend of buying less popular records only reinforced such a disposition. For instance I would have thought ten years ago that Maiden was the best of the "power metal" type of bands because of their influence, or that early sabbath and old ozzy albums defined and topped the kinds of sounds they were going for.

How absolutely wrong I was. I started noticing that I often liked records others didn't and had little regard for what other people called classics.

When I started buying a lot of shit from european metal labels I really found what I wanted, which was some Children of Bodom melody, some Pantera power, a little old metallica and the complexity of Rush and Dream Theater. I also wanted 80's new wave and AOR mixed in. I ended up finding bands that had the same idealistic vision of perfection of myself in the end.

But man, I put up with some garbage back then that I wouldn't now. I still like the old records, if only for the overwhelming familiarity and after all, that was the stuff I developed my own sense of melody, rhythm and song structure with.


What is your opinion on this, and did you ever have a similar awakening? For me it started with Rush. I knew they couldn't be the only band doing such great stuff that hit me on every level.

Umm yeah I've found better stuff then when I was growing up but that doesn't make those classics worse.

Electric Wizard or some doom band basically rips off Sabbath but I put Dopethrone on the same level as some of Sabbath's stuff. I just have a beef with your Sabbath s/t hate. I get that bands have matched that but there is a spirit in the supposed "classics" and yeah new albums can also have that but it's few and far between just like it was back in that day.

I like how I start showing some love for Electric Wizard and you add them to your Sabbath rip off list.

Nice.

I love Electric Wizard. I was just using them as an example. Every doom and stoner band has, to some degree even if it's the smallest possible amount, ripped off Sabbath. Fuck, I recommended Wizard to V. Note I compared Dopethrone to some of the greatest albums of all time as I think it is.

No, I'm talking about bands like Static-X or something like that.

I'm saying I was never satisfied with a lot of the older bands, not they got worse. I like most of the classics, but they are always missing something I like. Some people aren't so microscopic, specific or critical, but I guess I am. They stayed the same, but there was always something less than ideal about them all and it seems to me other bands have come in and substituted the stuff I didn't like for something that I do.

Age doesn't matter to me and that is missing the point. I Think basically everything is perfect about an album like Kansas' Leftoverture. I mean isn't about songs when you get down to listening to thing. I've never listened to a Maiden album and thought to myself, "i'm going to believe these are the best songs ever because of who used to listen to them and what those people created." No, I just put it on. A great record is timeless and sounds like one of the best, forever, not until someone does something similar but better.

I don't mean specific band's sounds, I mean if a band isn't fast enough, funky enough, melodic enough, heavy enough, doesn't sound polished enough, ect. There is a band out there now that can satisfy the taste. In the past you got what you got and had to either learn to love someone's voice, or keep dreaming there were keyboards in there, or whatever. Unless you were there originally and had a very good store to go to that stocked the 3000 copy selling loser albums, you don't have many options about the past.


The whole thing comes down to this: almost everyone who creates music (the kind we like) does it to create something they couldn't listen to. It's a product of mild dissatisfaction, not complacency. They all think they have something to say that the previous didn't. That they could change that one thing that could have made another band better. I'm not suggesting they all sit down and think of which bands to copy, but those are their influences, conscious or no. A lot do it for the glory of saying they contributed something to this thing we all love. I mean you gotta be pretty stupid to think loose sexual encounters, piles of cash and fame on on the horizon to have started any metal band after 1995.

I'm saying the new have done as good, if not better than the old guard and frankly, why are we letting (and no offense intended) the old guard tell us their albums are masterpieces and our albums (this is for anyone that keeps up) that our new albums are inferior. I just don't get it. If you like both, like me, I think you are in the best position. If you think either the old or the new is vastly superior over the other, you just aren't trying and basically I think that kind of attitude has been fostered by invested parties. I have many friends that fall into all three, and without getting too psychological, there are serious logical flaws with refusing to listen to anything that came out recently and those who ignore anything older.

I like this site. It embraces the old and the new. I think some of the classics are a little over-trumped. but it's nice to see people that are really keeping this whole thing alive and kicking, not dead and buried with the VH-1 classics crowd waiting for the shitty new Extreme record because they don't have anything better to listen to, and they deserve those awful records for their lack of effort.

Minus Holy Terror this argument doesn't seem very difficult to agree with. Like the new and old isn't a hard plea to subscribe to. Sabbath s/t is comparable to Dopethrone is comparable to Ride the Lighthing is comparable to Jane Doe.

Opinions... seems like everyone has one these days.
Why can't people just listen to what they like and not listen to what the don't like, and leave it at that?
Why does it have to be "old guard vs. new guard" or any of that BS? For some, the more modren day metal has something that is appealing; for others, a different era does. What's the problem, and what do you care?
It's only natural that some will prefer one over the other, and some will have no preference... doesn't imply something"flawed" in an individual. It comes down to personal taste, and to suggest that because one prefers the old metal bands they are somehow ignorant, flawed or "not trying hard enough", is complete rubbish.
Some of the classics that you so cavalierly dump on put anything out today to shame. Of course, you'll disagree, but that doesn't mean you're right. Those bands / albums that you dismiss as somehow sub par, are responsible for pioneering the unchartered waters of the genre. I love it when kids somehow think they know whats what when it comes to metal classics.


If you cannot see how certain albums / bands are rightfully raised to CLASSIC stature, then there's something wrong with you.
I find it amusing that no matter what the topic, it always comes back to "being told what to listen to by the all-powerful industry" or some such.
As if we are all a bunch of stupid cattle.
Bullshit. Many of those bands, for instance Sabbath, were highly PANNED by critics, and were not hyped at all. Don't tell me about it, I grew up with the stuff. Many bands from the 80's were not even really promoted by their labels (or the labels were so small that it amounted to the same thing), but relied on tape trading and word of mouth to build a following. They were largely unlistened to outside of a small loyal cult-like following.


This:

Good for you, but that doesn't change the fact that the CLASSICS are so named for a good reason.
Children of Bodom (snore, will never be a classic), Pantera ( pseudo-tuff guy bullshit for meatheads that probably spend a lot of time standing in front of the mirror trying to look like a hardass) Metallica (snore, this listing kinda contradicts your whole point; they are the PRIME example of a band that is considered classic due mainly to being over-hyped and over-exposed. Slayer did it better, as did Exodus and Venom. Not to even mention Mercyful Fate)...
well Rush is awesome, but strangely enough, they are the only ones that deserve to be considered classic.

Why listen to a conglomeration of styles, when you can listen to music from each respective genre? I like a lot of different foods, but I don't throw them all in a blender and eat the confused swirling mess all at once, why would I listen to music that way?

I still love some stuff I used to listen to (Tool, Radiohead), like some of it (The Offspring, Rage Against the Machine), and can't stand some of it (Nine Inch Nails).

I have a weird view towards a lot of metal classics. It took me loving metal for 2-3 years before I even bothered to check Sabbath/Maiden/Priest/Metallica, and when I did my reaction was basically "oh, is that it?" I can appreciate Sabbath and Priest more now but yeah never really felt a deep connection with them. I don't think of stuff in terms of "classic" much because I mostly ignore other peoples' opinions and my list of classic albums would consist of stuff that most people haven't listened to, and even of those that have listened to them only like 25% of them would agree with me. Whatever.

I like the idea that when a band starts they're taking stuff that influenced them but adding things they think it needs or taking away stuff they don't like. That makes sense to me.

For me the experience of "holy crap there's lots of music out there!" came when I discovered RYM actually, and browsing through Lord_Chimp and DarkSideoftheAnimalswall's reviews at amazon.com. Good times.

As for old vs new I've always felt that there's so much music out there that any time period must have some amazing shit. Most of my favourite albums are from the last decade just because most of the music I've listened to is from the last decade. I can relate to people who prefer one or the other though because there's some stylistic trends that you'd either never find in older music, or would have to dig pretty deep into newer music to find bands capturing the same thing that made those older bands special.

The thing is that during my high school days the glam/hair bands were rising on top of the mainstream wave. Bands like Poison,Cinderella,Crew,Winger,etc were the it thing back then.

But some of the syrup band stuff I used to listen to back then seems watered down and cheesy at times.

There are still stuff of that era that I still listen and enjoy but some of it I won't because it's just too laden with syrup,cheese and bitter tasting liquid of nauseating mediocre fluff.

Lyrics about partying,sex,girl friends dumping,upset with mommy and daddy and teeny bopper shiznet which was the prime lyrical content of that era I can't stomach anymore. I need more serious,melodic stuff and overgrown "hey let's go party at the frat house" junk should be locked in the attic.

Give me Kamelot you can have your "unskinny bop" crap.

A. You obviously haven't looked at my list or taken anything I wrote to heart, you read it and made a bunch of assumptions outside the context of the original statements.

B. What do I care? I care about metal and want it to continue

C. There is something wrong with people that absolutely have refused to listen to anything past a certain arbitrary point because "it all sucks" the inverse is true. The same people that think the maiden/priest/sabbath combo is the holy bible of heavy metal have no fucking business determining what is a classic album.

D. Yes, everything does come down to fucking money. This is the real world and a billion dollar industry that wants to continue to make money will do whatever it takes to maximize it's profits. When Sony buys CBS, they immediately delete every album that doesn't meet certain criteria for sales per year divided by stores it distributes to. When 50 companies become 4, they don't increase their catalog, they just stratify it. The Sabbath comment is wrong. It sold a shitload of copies when released. Popular critics have never predicted anything either. They constantly go back and "evolve" ratings through editorializing and bandwagoning to make themselves seem wise and on top of things. Rolling Stone has panned every Rush album and The AMG has to, despite the amount of albums sold or percieved quality among the majority of those who bought them. Don't give people too much credit. They are dumb, they will buy whatever is available at a convienient location and whatever they are familiar with through advertising and promotion.

E. Why have an opinion. Because it is worth discussing. I think there were metalheads that gave a fuck at this site. You don't have to get involved in the conversation if you don't want to.

F. "it's old" is not criteria for an albums quality. I can only assume that is what you mean since you think my reasons are stupid (it being among the best)

G. Silly me. Maybe I should find a band that sucks at everything but melody. Then find one that sucks at everything but speed. Then find one that only the drummer is great. Anyway, I don't know what that comment was about. I guess only idiots want the best possible listening experience based on their tastes.

H. and thanks for mentioning how my tastes aren't exactly the same band you would have picked for a particular style, I'm going back to high school, which is when I was only exposed to mostly major label stuff basically everyone has heard, as mentioned in the thread of the title. I grew up in the late 90's. You apparently didn't. In my time it took effort, time and you were the only one listening to the stuff. It wasn't the 80's where even underground metal was mainstream enough to sell out an arena. We got to go see the Danzig "Over the Hill tour" in a bar with 400 other people from a hundred mile radius.

and another metallica cheap shot? really? how beaten is that dead horse?

I'm not trying to come off as confrontational, but the total lack of trying to find any middle ground makes you look like a bitter manowar fan.

Who doesn't?



a. who here can be accused of that? Right, nobody.
b. The Sabbath / Priest / Maiden (I'd add venom, Slayer and Fate)
"combo", as you put it, IS the Holy Grail of metal; anybody that says otherwise is an idiot and has NO BUSINESS DETERMINING WHAT IS A CLASSIC ALBUM. Period.
Fuck off with your bullshit, you don't have a clue.



Maybe in your world, but not in mine.
This paragraph really says it all, in fact it nullifies anything else you might have to say.
Stick to your AOR, new-wave overproduced pop music money making crap, I'll take pure metal (you know, the kind that doesn't give a shit about charts and record sales, but plays for the sake of playing what they love to play? Metal for the sake of Metal?) any fucking day of the week.



Well, obviously I did, so... I did.
Anything ele?



Again who said it was? Quality is the sole criteria for an albums quality... amount of influence and how groundbreaking it is added to that quality is what makes it a CLASSIC. Plus how well it has endured the test of time.
Am I going to fast for you?




"Best possible" is, whats the word I'm looking for? Ahh, yes, highly subjective.
Do you have a point?




Again,
Are you fucking serious?
80's (even underground) metal, mainstream?
Put down the pipe, son.
EVERY show I saw in the 80's outside of Priest, Scorpions and Maiden, was in a small "nightclub" venue.
You don't know what you're talking about, so stop.
Again, some kid that think he knows whats what regarding CLASSIC metal. Do you know how to reference a dictionary?






Let's break this down, shall we?
Bitter.
Wrong, i find this highly amusing.
Manowar fan.
I like Into Glory ride quite a lot, but thats about the extent of my supossed "fandom".
Any other brilliant flashes of insight?

Oh and, Metallica is the perfect example of what you are frothing against, so, yeah, not a cheap shot. You brought the "dead horse" up, don't blame me for pointing out the holes in your logic.
Just "try harder" next time.

Ok so a lot of this is a bit tl;dr so my apologies if I'm missing the point of what people have said slightly.

I think Adveser has a point about the holy trinity of metal to some extent. I mean, is the success, acclaim and sales Iron Maiden has achieved strictly proportionate to their musical worth relative to other bands of the same period? I would guess probably not, although obviously it's subjective. And I would also venture that things like publicity, as well as music journos looking to identify big, sellable heroes to put on magazine covers has something to do with why specific bands are such a towering influence on the metal scene.

That said, we judge classics by their influence, at least partly. If they are influential enough to be a classic, it doesn't really matter how they got there; for all intents and purposes they are a classic of the metal scene.

One thing that does annoy me is the attitude that 70s/80s stuff is the best metal, period. And that nothing else has, can, or will be able to touch it. IMO that's the attitude that leads to album after album of pointless imitations and "retro" bands. So in that sense it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

70's/80's metal being the "best" is a subjective opinion, of course.
But, one thing that cannot be denied; the metal landscape / scene / whatever you want to call it, was more pure then. For every ten bands, eight or nine were of top quality, whilst today for every ten good bands, you have a thousand shitty clones. Just take a gander at the bands by genre list over at Metal Archives. It's obscenely oversaturated.
Obviously, there were a lot less bands then, but the ones that were around had something new to offer, for the most part.
Quality over quantity.

Whether or not it was better is obviously an opinion, and is highly subjective, but the metal of the 70's and 80's, and ecen into the early to mid 90's, was more original. It was new and pure, just like I imagine it was during the British invasion of the 60's. Somebody from that generation and place in time could not explain it to those that came after, but it was a real thing.

Originality.
Very few modern bands can make that claim. Put another way, reproduction of any certain sound or "album after album of pointless imitations" is a hundred times more prevalent today than it was back in the 70's and 80's.
I'll take a "retro" band of quality over the seemingly endless ocean of 1,000 bpm blastbeating "extreme metal" clones any day, thank you. Because, that's all there really are, outside of the ten thousand power metal bands that are out there. "Extreme" metal.
A few good bands in that collective genre, but by and large, semi-talented (at best) hacks.
Somebody should clue them in that playing something as fast as humanly possible does not make up for a lack of songwriting ability.
What's left? Practically everything has been done, so what? Speed it up even more? More beats per second? Make the "vocals" more "extreme"? Make yet another post genre?
Music for the post MTV generation.
I'll pass, thank you.



That sounds about right.

@Cotb

I do agree with a lot of what you'r saying here but a few points.



I would say the genre list thing is more a result of the urge people have to categorise things in a microscopic way. If metal archives was around at the time of the British Invasion, every band in it probably would have got its own microgenre. If one black metal band comes out doing something slightly different, then some clever sod is going to come along and give that band some new silly genre name.

Agreed on the "purity" thing, but I would say the loss of that purity is not so much a bad thing in itself as the unfortunate side effect of an otherwise beneficial process. More bands about is a good thing IMO, even if proportionately the number of really good ones has decreased.



More original, absolutely, but that's part of the point I'm making. Let us take thrash as an example: there are a staggering amount of completely unoriginal, dare I say pointless thrash bands around nowadays. Why? Well, I would argue that this is a result of so many people looking towards the past, in this case the mid-late 80s, and deciding that this is the pinnacle of musical development. Hence if they're going to play music, they think they just have to ape that style. So reverence for the past is part of the cause of all these unoriginal bands.



Sort of agreed about all those techy bands. But, I don't think it is true to say that everything original that can be done in metal has been done.

Now, what I do think is true that because of the diffusion of music to so much more people and places, we aren't going to see big new "movements" arising like NWOBHM, Thrash, Death etc. Instead, we are going to see a great many individual bands going off in myriad different directions. Some of those directions will be tedious, and others will be new and exciting. But none of them will be big identifiable "movements" like those of recent history.

All those are very good points.
Just to focus on what you said about reverence for the past a bit; take for example Black metal. Now, IMO of course, the best modern BM bands are the ones that follow the old ways... it's not re-inventing the wheel, true, but it is in keeping with what the original movement was about in terms of what I would call musical presence, aura and so on.
There are a few good artists out there today doing ther own thing, and exploring new avenues of creativity, but, like you said, there aren't any really new movements on the foreseeable horizon; it's all a matter of tweaking things around at this point. And sub-genres within sub-genres.
As for thrash / speed, traditional heavy metal, and even doom, I still feel that the original wave or two has yet to be surpassed.
Of course, there are those that will disagree, but what can I say?

Sure, things seem a lot more pure if half of it is forgotten and becomes irrelevant. at least 75% of the 70's stuff has been lost to time.

I'm not gonna address any of the finer points, you seem to be drawing conclusions that are not what I said.

I wasn't talking about Metal reviews classics, but what VH-1 classics would call one, or the eddie trunk crowd, or any of the dozens of books tht claim to be an authority on metal.

I'll say one more think about metallica. Remember your first lay? it may not have been that great, but you will always have fond memories of it and consider it great anyway, no matter how many porn stars you fuck. It can't be any simpler than that. I think there are way too many bitter grapes from them being successful. I don't think people would be talking that much shit if they were in the same boat as testament and broke up after AJFA, if it had miserably failed.

All I have to say is: fuck VH-1.
And Testament is as mediocre as Metallica, so, no for me success is irrelevant to the matter.

I honestly don't think I can add a whole lot to this, but going to high school in the whole metalcore trend was interesting. My freshmen year was spent listening to a mixture of things however. It was the dying throes of nu-metal, and I loved Slipknot and a bit of Mudvayne. Yet at the same time I was discovering metal bands, some of my first albums was "De mysteriis dom Sathanas", "Reign in blood" and a lot of God dethroned, Moonspell, Cannibal Corpse, Death, and Rotting Christ. It was strange listening to all of them, and being 2004-08 was the hight of metalcore I worshipped Killswitch and all of those bands as well. I understand the whole nostalgia thing and I still listen to all of those bands still. Even with getting into the more obscure post-doom stuff, and some of the more extreme death metal they never top the classic. Though I never quite saw the importance of Sabbath and Priest till my junior year. Even then I grew up listening to those albums far before my high school years.

I definitely disagree with old bands being more original than new ones. imo at any point in time bands were just taking their influences and combining them in ways that hadn't been done before, resulting in gradual changes in the music. I can name tons of nowadays bands that are doing things in metal that haven't been done before, and I've listened to a lot of 70s rock and most of it is like "oh hey, sounds like a rock band from the 70s." Not that that's a bad thing because 70s rock kicks ass, but there wasn't more originality back then.

Music-wise, High School was definitely interesting. Mainly because, until becoming a metal fan, I had a helluva time finding mainstream music that I really liked. In late-1997 (when I started my Freshmen year), I saw that Boyz II Men was popular among my classmates. So I had my mom buy me their then-new album Evolution for my birthday.

Boooooooooooooooooooring....

In late-1998, I started listening to a lot of video game music. That lasted until about mid-1999. I actually detested metal at the time, partially for the sake of image fulfillment and partially because I had a lot of preconceived notions about it. However, I found myself gradually gravitating towards the heavy metal soundtracks in games like The Need For Speed SE and NHL '99 (Nintendo 64 version). Finally, in late-1999, I had to admit to myself that I was a metal fan.

And so I bought Load in February, 2000. Followed by Master Of Puppets, ReLoad, and The Black Album. That same year, I also bought some classic rock compilations by rock greats like Billy Joel and Aerosmith. Not to mention Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP (which, aside from The Real Slim Shady - a guilty pleasure of mine, was pretty dull IMO). By early-2001, when I was gearing up for graduation, I was a full-blown metalhead. Listening to everything from Slayer to Ozzy Osbourne.

Today, I don't know if I'd really call myself a "metalhead" anymore. I just like to think of myself as a hard rock fan (mixed in with some jazz, classical, and even occasional bubblegum pop).