Rexorcist's Forum Replies

You know, it's more than experimental enough for a punk metal album to say it, so I vote yes.

Awesome poster, Rex!

Thanks.

Knock 'em dead, Xeph.

As for what I came in here to post, I just finished another poster during my two-day break from my major reading binge (getting through the Inheritance series).  I've been speed-reading 200 pages a day at the very minimum, so I took a break.  But since I haven't been selling very well, I used the opportunity to practice mountains and clouds on Gimp, while also discovering the lighting techniques that can be used.

https://www.deviantart.com/mythbutton/art/Wings-of-Nialoca-Poster-950462579

I found this album to be monotonous as well.  I have difficulty giving high ratings to monotonous albums, even short 20-minute ones.  This and the "Brutal Autonomy" EP are both good examples of how monotony can hurt a rating for me, as I didn't care for either.

YES!  Genghis fucking TRON! Excellent choice for a new genre.

50% or no go for me.

I just put together a custom neoclassical challenge chart

1. Symphony X – Twilight in Olympus
2. Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force – Rising Force
3. Marty Friedman – Dragon's Kiss
4. Galneryus – Under the Force of Courage
5. Vinnie Moore – Mind's Eye
6. Iron Mask – Hordes of the Brave
7. Magic Kingdom – Symphony of War
8. Space Odyssey – Embrace the Galaxy
9. Tony MacAlpine – Maximum Security
10. Concerto Moon – Rain Forest
11. Jason Becker – Perpetual Burn
12. Narnia - Awakening
13. Cacaphony – Speed Metal Symphony
14. Ring of Fire – The Oracle
15. Evil Masquerade – Welcome to the Show
16. Exmortus – Ride Forth
17. Impellitteeri – Stand in Line
18. Time Requiem – Time Requiem
19. Apocrypha – The Forgotten Scroll
20. Warmen – Beyond Abilities
21. Joey Trafolla – Out of the Sun
22. Majestric – Trinity Overture
23. Wolf Hoffman – Classical
24. Kenziker – The Prophecies
25. Patrick Rondat - Amphibia

Mostly punk-infused like mine.

We got a date.


https://7htarget.bandcamp.com/album/yantra-creating

February 24.  I've been waiting over a year for news about their fourth album, and now I only have to wait three weeks for the release.

Out of interest, why is black noise excluded from qualification?

Feels way too much like general noise music with a black atmosphere than other kinds of metal, like the metal was sucked out to make room for more Merzbow.  Obviously this isn't true for all black noise albums, but most of the ones I've heard don't make the cut.

Not counting black noise.

1. Kitties of Death - Valley of the Dead

2. Sete Star Sept - Live Atrocity

3. Hello Kitty Suicide Club - ^_^

4. Tamagotchi Seppuku - Discography

5. Thrash Queen - Ashes to Ashes

6. Hello Kitty Suicide Club - o_O (EP)

7. Egon's - Auf einem Bein kann man nicht stehen!

8. Assück - Necro Salvation (EP)

9. Sete Star Sept - Gero Me (EP)

10. Attila - Fallacy

These are all in my bottom 50 albums.

Well this sucks.  I've been so busy the last four days that I didn't even notice two major editing errors on the book cover.  The background under the dragon's leg and arm are not there, and Nula's wing is improperly shaded due to a Gimp problem.  Fixed now.

That's quite awesome, Rex! I look forward to checking out that book.

And on that note, the next book I'll make is a spin-off to my main series, centered around the golden age of classic metal genres (the 80s).

Cool.  What's the series called?

That's quite an achievement Rex. Congratulations on completing such an ambitious undertaking. Is the book being published? You may be interested to know that we have another published author in our community in Andi who I believe has several children's books to his name thus far.

Thanks!  It's on Kindle right now.  There's the free promotional read-on-Kindle for the next three months, and then there's the paid download. It's only available for digital for the time being.

Sorry I haven't been on here very often recently.  I've been a little busy writing movie reviews... and a book inspired by power metal.

Consider the theme song "Imaginations from the Other Side."

January 20, 2023...

So now we got a winter theme, crystalline mountains in the middle of a forest, a dragon all "yo man these chains mean shit, King Kong aint got these biceps" and a knight going, "Whoa wait a minute!  Where's my phone?  I need this pic."  Coolest cover they've got so far.

Didn't think I'd win this.  Still, I got the message and discussion out, and that's good enough for me.

Found the worst folk artist in history: m_AJ_ik.  I heard his album "Wai Guo La" back in 2014.  He tagged the damn thing as gunge, metal and punk, but it's really avant-folk.  Just rediscovered his bandcamp page, and he's been busy.

The Story of a Colorblind Painter (2006)

The playing has a nice and dark mood to it that occasionally sounds like darkwave, but the playing can be very monotonous and occasionally really dull.  Still, while it was very flawed, it wasn't unlistenable.

Wai Guo La (2014)

This was the album I discovered him on.  There are a few more efforts to experiment and try out some new sounds, but the production and the voice still sucks.

precarious/vicarious: winter nocturnes (2018)

This is the worst folk album I've ever heard.  This was four years after Wai Guo La and he hadn't recorded anything in between.  How did he end up with such a downgrade?  Every song is drawn out way longer than it needs to be, even the four minute songs, and one of the four songs is EIGHT.  Ugh.  The guitar playing is all over the place, repetitive, ugly and annoying, as if this joker just decided that experimenting was all it took to impress the experimental audience.  If this guy wants to be as good as Natural Snow Buildings or Comus, he's gotta actually write songs.

Cephas & Wiggins - Bluesmen (1993)

Genres: Piedmont Blues

Since I've got quite a bit of freetime today, I have time for a longer album.  This is a 70-minute blues album.  So far, it's not very spectacular.  Let's see if they have anything new to add.  Otherwise, it looks like 1993 just wasn't the best year for blues...

Dude!

The Flaming Lips - "The Soft Bulletin" (1999)

Some poppy neo-psychedelia to keep me interested while I play with the kids & do some housework on my Sunday morning. It's not really my thing as it's a little too quirky & happy for my taste & is more of a pleasant background distraction than being genuinely engaging but fans of this sort of thing will no doubt love the shit out of it.

For fans of MGMT, Dorgas & Animal Collective.

My top neo-psych album is Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.  It takes the poppiness of Soft Bulletin and combines it with the experimentation that would later dominate another brilliant album by Flaming Lips: Embryonic.

Currently listening to a 90's blues album by Junior Wells: Better Off With the Blues.  The previous album was called "Undisputed Godfather of the Blues," but you wouldn't know it from this album.  I like blues enough, I've got a few blues albums in my top 500 excluding rock, including Muddy Watters, Wells himself, Etta James, Howlin' Wolf, B.B King and Albert King.  But this album is so standard, overlong and boring.  I'll finish it because I always do, but this has the makings of being the second worst non-rock blues album I've ever heard.

I didn't realize Michael Chapman died last year.

I GUESS Creatures of the Night falls under that category.

On the subject of GNR and Deep Purple, two of the three albums I specified are on my top 100 metal albums list, which I would like to add here.

Also, this begs a separate question: Should we have a list feature to exclude non metal from our charts?

Whoa.  Didn't expect to see ALL the Motley albums up there.  That was pretty generous.  Thanks!

I always felt that the classification was questionable.

La Lupe - Two Sides of La Lupe

I had a sudden urge to listen to obscure Latin soul.  No joke.

Not to sound parental, but if it's a small genre, you should at least listen to the highest rated albums in the genre (minimum saaaay 10?) before that level of certainty can be justified.

Gonna request some short discographies

MDMA, one album and one EP: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/MDMA/3540426556

Ophiocordyceps, two albums: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/ophiocordyceps

Brazen Bull, one album and two EP's: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/brazen_bull

Cuff, five albums and three EP's: https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/cuff_f1

Blind Guardian - The God Machine (2022)

I have to admit that I'm not really siding with what the BG fan club says about this album: it's not a tiring rehash of the past with less originality.  Melody may have been sacrificed just a tad bit, but the truth is that the sacrifice made it possible for BG to focus on making what could be their heaviest album yet.  Not only that, but it doesn't just recreate the past and improve on the things they ignored for a while, but they add a new vibe with a couple of space-style songs with real progressive touches.  And let's be honest: Hansi Kursch has lost practically none of his vocal power and this is 25 years after the release of Imaginations from the Other Side.  I listened to it twice just so I could cement my final opinion, and the second time blew me away even more than the first time.

10/10

Robin Roelofs - Fulfillment

Genres: Pop Rock, Power Pop, Acoustic Rock

I'm currently focusing on both blues and artists I've checked out once or twice but haven't thoroughly explored, so indie artist Robin Roelofs is next.  He's got a lot of self-released albums.  He kinda reminds me of Billy Cobb, but with less self-parody.  So far this one's pretty good.  He slightly rings of different stuff, blues, Springsteen, a dash of Weezer, but he's got his own strong personality.  There aren't any really any standouts and the lyrics aren't that new, but it's a consistently fine piece with a lot of decent songs.  7/10.

For a country album that is a VERY metal album cover.

The second of the four Mississippi John Hurt studio albums, and based on what people say, the worst.  I wanna like the Piedmont stuff, but most of the artists play a bunch of songs that sound the same, and it gets tiring.  So far, the best I've heard is Roustabout by Charlie Parr and I just scratched the surfact of Piedmont blues.

I just posted a bout how two Metallica albums should also have the heavy metal tag and nobody bugs me about it.  I might've committed the worst sin possible here, so don't worry about looking like a fool 

However, the fact that it has 9 votes and is still active says I'm not alone.

As long as we're on this subject, anybody remember how King Crimson decided to be a metal band before they stopped working in the studio?  Because those two albums were pretty kickass.

Just gonna say it: Def DEFINITELY stopped being metal after the second, and stopped being glam metal after the third.  I don't know why RYM has Hysteria tagged as glam metal right now.  I've heard that album a million times and it does have a couple glam metal songs, but not enough for the whole damn thing.  It feels too poppy even for glam metal.

I think I'll wait on another Hall for that, but thank you.  Honestly, I didn't expect it to be so easy to get it added, so I'll take one more fucking crack at it, the only other hard rock / heavy metal albums I want added: Deep Purple's "Perfect Strangers" and "In Rock," and only the first GNR.  I doubt I'll get that far, but I usually test my limits.

And don't worry, my firm opinion is that Appetite is the only GNR album that fits that bill.

Pixies should never be something that interests me in theory but I think I was programmed to enjoy "Doolittle" after being force fed it by a mate during high school. Now I find that whenever I revisit it I get into it more & more. I've even been known to do a laid back acoustic cover version of "Silver" at parties. I'll go with a 3.5/5.

The story of my musical life.  My top 100 even had a drone album at one point, and I hate most drone.

Right now I'm on a very rare blues binge.  Yesterday pretty much all I listened to was classic Piedmont era artists like Big Joe Williams and Sonny Terry.  I'm planning on some Howlin' Wolf today.

This is one of the best examples of a band who bridges the gap.  I'll also throw in Budgie.

I guess it comes down to what you understand rock & metal music to be, doesn't it? I was taught the different techniques for playing the two genres when I was in my early teenage years & those theoretical rules have stuck with me ever since so I see a well defined line between the two. As I've already explained in another recent thread, the point of contention shouldn't really be about how heavy or light-weight a release feels. You either have metal guitar & drum techniques being used or you don't as far as I'm concerned. Now, if we're going to be throwing the likes of Guns 'n' Roses, Def Leppard, Scorpions, AC/DC, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, etc. under the metal banner then I have to ask a pretty obvious question i.e. just what is hard rock music then because those are some clear examples of it as far as I'm concerned. To be open & transparent, my personal cut-off ratio for a release to qualify as metal is 40% i.e. if 40% or more of it's run time is legitimate metal then I'm happy enough to include it. Here's ten examples of some very big "metal" releases that I don't think should qualify as metal if we use that philosophy:

Kyuss - "Welcome To Sky Valley"

Boris - "Pink"

Rainbow - "Rising"

Black Flag - "My War"

Motorhead - "Overkill"

Primus - "Frizzle Fry"

Black Sabbath - "Technical Ecstasy"

Alcest - "Kodama"

Voivod - "Nothingface"

Elder - "Reflections of a Floating World"

My cut off is 50%.  Having said that, Zep is my favorite band and I would only put them as proto-metal, never the other.  Early Def counts, but AC/DC is hard rock through and through.  That's all they really do.  So far there are only two Deep Purple's I consider metal: In Rock and Perfect Strangers.

For the "clear example," every AC/DC album is generic hard rock, and I've heard them all for completionism's sake.  Occasional blues is present but that's pretty much it as far as diversity goes.  They do the same thing every album, and they never got any heavier than that.

Led Zeppelin could just be classified under hard rock, but they've done so many types of hard rock songs that a few early metal songs were thrown in the mix, but never enough one one album to count.  I mean, they had reggae and pop present on Houses of the Holy.

Hair metal itself is where it gets more confusing, as metallic production techniques were molded with AOR techniques.  But if you ask me, the majority doesn't even come close to metal, but there are a few who do, like Crue and Dokken.

Actually, if possible, there's one album I'd like added that isn't tagged as metal on RYM, but it fits my standard for regular heavy metal (and it's heavier than Sad Wings of Destiny, which is somehow metal, and heavier than the two Def Leppard albums that are allowed here), and three albums by this band are already one MA.  This is the ONLY album by this band I'll ask to add, and after that, I'm perfectly fine with all the other non-metal albums being excluded: Dr. Feelgood by Motley Crue.  It kinda mixes heavy metal with hard rock, but both are even enough if you ask me.

Could you also add Imaginations From the Other Side Live, please?

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/blind-guardian/imaginations-from-the-other-side-live/

It usually helps my listening experience.  Besides, I'm also comparing each thrash album to every other thrash album I've ever heard, so it makes no difference.

Although I only listened to Gore before checking this one out.  War By Proxy was listed as an EP so I got to that later.

Jurassic Jade - Never Forget Those Days (1991)

It's no surprise that international countries wanted a piece of some serious metal action.  Japan certainly loves their metal, and it's also no surprise that one of the more obscure ones would take the visual aspect into account by wearing corpse paint resembling kabuki make-up (or vise-versa?)  But did this really help the music?  NO!  Why would it?  Even after having heard their debut Gore, it's obvious that these guys are nothing more than just another thrash band.

I'm gonna keep this review simple for a good reason: Never Forget Those Days is a simple album.  Even though it's a fast and furious album, there was very little brainpower put into the writing, so it just feels like another garage band from Bandcamp.com.  Ironic; with titles like "The Warholic" and "Sayonara Suicide," you'd expect a very evil presence to plague this album the way it does the average Slayer release.  But no, the whole album feels like underdeveloped basic thrash that's trying to follow in the footsteps of the preceding album.  One of the pros of this underwritten album is that some songs like "Mere Anarchy" and the title track prove that these guys can play pretty damn fast without sacrificing too much rhythm.  And it's a suitable album for fans of crossover thrash or powerviolence since the production is more punk-oriented and the singer is doing more shouting than actual singing.

Fortunately, there are some moments where the band tries to take guitar "effects" and atmosphere into account, notably during the lengthy ending of "Kuroi Dōwa" where the guitars are going for a mix of white noise and space travel, so even though it wasn't an amazing solo by any means, it was one of the better and more original parts of this monotonous album.  And "Kindan Shojo" starts with some very dark moaning before going into a creepy and slow-moving metal piece with female orchestral vocals bringing out the mood.  So that really helped make the album less tiring.  But this doesn't always work.  Their attempt at a classic blues song with "Iyada" sucks.  It feels like a crappy bootleg demo from a different band.  And by the time the album ends, we just get a cheap and fairly dark instrumentation with some obnoxious group screaming that sounds completely fake.

I wouldn't recommend this album for anyone.  It's cheaply made and offers nothing new.  To be fair I found myself getting more annoyed by the album than anything.  These guys are pretty much only decent at the absolutel basics, and their efforts to expand their technique hurts as much as it helps.  Comparing this to their OK debut, Gore, helped bring a more accurate outlook on this one.  Gore isn't worth listening to, but it's still better than this.

5/10.

I'm going Jurassic Jade today.  I'm curious about Japanese thrash.

I wrote my Reign in Blood and South of Heaven reviews yesterday, and for some reason they're dated as having been published on the 22nd instead of the 31st.

When did people start using big four to refer to those bands, anyway? I remember reading that it was some record company invention to solely to sell more records rather than something people started naturally referring to. Although I guess it could be something that record companies latched onto, sort of how like every sports program I have the misfortune of listening to seems to consist of people screaming GOAT at each other. (greatest of all time, in case you don't get it)

As to Anthrax, their classic albums from the '80s sell a lot more than Testament's classic albums, while these days they're about neck and neck. This is probably because those classic albums get shilled a lot as "some of the only good metal" while Testament has escaped their notice. Probably because while they've had a lot of good stuff over the years, a lot of people probably wrote them off as a Metallica knock-off. I like 'em a lot, but its hard to argue with that conclusion.

Despite that, their newer albums are better than the current Metallica output.  Metallica haven't been sure of themselves since Reload failed.

Of course, I'm finding myself redefining my thrash standards on and off, so this may change.  In fact, you'd be surprised at my new pick for favorite Slayer album, and it was never once Reign in Blood.  I came into this thread to post that I have a pretty new outlook on Slayer, and yet it still fits my standards for any perfect album.

Slayer did the right thing taking time to focus on separate tempos and new melodies.  Even as a Christian, I gotta admit this is a perfectly made album.  It's more diverse than Reign in Blood and heavier than Seasons in the Abyss, which used to be my favorite.  I also appreciate the application of the crossover thrash attitude to the slower songs, and the traces of early groove that they'd take part in later.  And this change is right in the middle of me posting a preprepared top 100 metal albums forum on Metalforum and I'm halfway through the revelations.

What do you know?  I'm revealing that shit a few albums at a time and I'm already making changes.

Top 50 metal albums for me, and one of the first full metal albums I explored thanks to a long-lasting grunge buzz.

I guess I'll take the fourth Pit slot.  I can always hold off on the Pit challenge a little longer.

At the same time, I don't know if I can contribute to a pit one just yet.  I'm starting the early thrash challenge, so I've got 23 albums to review and listen to / replay.  Seriously, the way these guys sing is exactly like half the 80's hardcore singers I've already heard.

At least he's admitting to it.  But this is the kind of behavior that takes time to fully heal.  Hell, Meat Loaf saw three psychiatrists and he still couldn't get over his anger issues (though I don't think consistent family abuse was part of that).  I've worried about the bands status too, but this is the best decision Scotty could have made.  If Neurosis plans on continuing releasing music, they'll probably have to get some younger guy with a powerful voice the same way Alice in Chains did.