Morpheus Kitami's Forum Replies

So you’d like to nominate the Night Sun recordfor investigation here then Morpheus?

Yes.

Lord of this World, I'd say doom metal.

Solitude, I don't know what genre I'd say, but not metal.

I'm not really sure what I'd put an acoustic interlude under, beyond not metal.

Having given the two albums Daniel brought up a listen, Tarkus seems hard to tell over the noise, but I'd wager not metal. Night Sun could go either way, it has enough going on that it might just be enough.

Embyro, not really sure I'd say folk, but the specifics seem moot considering it isn't metal.

Children of the Grave, unambiguously metal.

I found this one quite by accident, having randomly decided to listen to SMG today, finding the chorus of this song:

...And noticed a similarity with a Metallica song.

The question is, intentional reference or plagarism?

Sweet Leaf, stoner metal, pretty obvious.

After Forever, while jolly, it seems pretty solidly heavy metal to me.

If you're looking for suggestions; Dissection, Dark Mirror ov Tragedy, and Bal-Sagoth are pretty nice and I'm pretty sure none have much in the ways of satanic lyrics. Though Dissection has some weird stuff going on with it.

Hi Ben, could you add the new-ish Lord Vigo and Domination Black?

Considering that it seems to be just you and me at this point there's not really much point to it if you don't think so.

I'd say this track is at least partially metal as well. This one was interesting, I don't think I ever heard Budgie before and it's surprising just how heavy they are, before this I heard no one from that time who got as heavy as Sabbath. I think I lead towards not metal myself, though it gets close in places.

That seems pretty solidly in the folk category, not metal at all.

I've kind of grown tired of melodic death/black metal and such sounds. Often, it feels like an excuse for a bunch of people who can't sing and some guitarists whose only virtue is their speed. How I long for more bands to style themselves after Satan's Host, but alas, I seem to be the only person on the planet to like them. Malkarpatan falls into the former category, but honestly, they aren't half bad.
I can't quite put my finger on what their melodic parts sound like. I wanna say Iron Maiden, but I can't think of a single Iron Maiden song which sounds like something off this. It almost feels like a glam metal inspired riff style. To complicate matters, this is mixed in with at least a dozen instruments and synths. I had my answer on Panstvo Salamandrov, it's black metal ELP. Everything makes sense now.
This isn't necessarily to pin the band into one specific thing, because this album does so many things yet feels very cohesive. They possess the unique talent to do something like play rigid black metal and then follow it up with something that wouldn't fit on 90% of albums that try it. Yet, they make it sound as natural as the calm before the storm.
They're an interesting band, and I look forward to hearing more of them.
4.5/5

I'd say some sort of rock as well.

I would go for hard/blues rock myself too.

I lean between heavy metal and hard rock. Not really sure which one I would give the predominate point.

Hang on, you sent the wrong version of Everything in My Heart, on the album that's less than a minute long, the track you linked includes The Author in it.

Changing votes based on this knowledge:

Everything in My Heart, folk.

The Author, a third folk, the rest metal.

I would say...

Guts, kind of hard, not necessarily metal, but not necessarily anything else. Some unholy heavy metal/heavy psych hybrid.

Everything in My Heart, half folk half metal.

Will get back to you on the Buffalo album.

That track gets a hard rock/heavy psych from me.

In the end I only gave half of a track a metal rating, so my opinion is obvious.

Straightforward hard rock.

Here's a quite infamous one. From Dimmu Borgir's famous Stormblast album comes Sorgens Hammer, a 1-to-1 copy of the theme to the Amiga game Agony. This is so blatant that errors that were accidentally left in the released song were included in Dimmu Borgir's version. (The plagarist, Stian Aarstad, was quite controversial in general, and probably ripped off other tunes)

The fixed version:

(TBH, it's worth listening to the complete soundtrack to the game, it's very nice)

I checked out Thin Lizzy’s 1971 self-titled debut album this morning too & there’s nothing even slightly resembling metal there, although I did get the feeling that a young Judas Priest might have been influenced by the beautifully organic guitar tone. Boy, Thin Lizzy were a classy & creative rock band though. It’s definitely worth a few listens.

With Thin Lizzy, we should probably just ignore everything until the late '70s/early 80s. It was a change in guitarists that brought them a metal sound on Thunder and Lightning and possibly some of their other albums. Kind of like Olympic or some other band M-A lists but only because they had some random album in the late '80s which was actually metal.

Baby You're a Liar, eh, I think contrary to my earlier opinion, this one might just be hard rock/heavy metal.

I'll just swing back myself on Sir Lord Baltimore when I have the time, since it probably won't hold up to scrutiny.

Free Baby gets a hard rock/psych rock vote from me. The long interlude is psych while the rest is hard rock.

For the next playlist that's available, I'd like to suggest:

Coroner - Mistress of Deception (off No More Color)

Doom - Ghost of Princes (off Killing Field+4)

Hard/prog, easy.

What sub-genres are there in the Fallen beyond doom/death these days? I think the primary genres are pretty much good as they are now, but couldn't tell you about any clan's secondary genres off-hand.

Hard rock, bit of prog, bit of psych.

A very hard rock approach to prog.

It's overly long & the zombie apocalypse theme doesn't really suit Deceased's sound as they're simply not deathly or grimy enough to pull it off in my opinion.

I'm curious then, what do you think of Goblin's soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead? Because that's basically the zombie soundtrack and it's farther away from those than Deceased is.

I think the horn is distracting people on this one. Hard rock.

Helium Head, heavy psych.

Ain't Got Hung on You, dunno beyond not metal.

I think that outside of the title track it wasn't very metal. Bits of it got into metal, but no more than your average album from then got into methinks.

My regards to both of you, even in an area of America where such a commute is considered normal, that sounds rough. Hopefully traffic really isn't that bad, and they know how to use their blinkers.

I've always been disappointed whenever I heard Call Me come on the radio because of that. That and some song whose name escapes me which starts with a suspiciously similar intro to Holy Diver.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, probably given that Moroder would have heard it at some point. Obviously the Looney Tunes song is just a straight up parody, which is a different matter altogether.

I'm going to break from you two and go for heavy psych/hard rock.

That's kind of freaky, but it seems to me it might just be coincidence. It just seems to me that the two travel in different circles on different parts of the globe and the song in question doesn't seem to be off that popular an album. I could be wrong, it's hard to verify the popularity of certain old songs in the modern era.

Heavy psych gets my vote.

Ah, this is what I remembered. Since we tend to be describing this kind of psych-heavy metal as stoner, stoner it is.

I forget what the exact song is off-hand, but Paranoid (the song) bore a striking similarity to some other song from around that time.

There's metal there, but I'm not so sure there's enough metal there to earn it a hard rock/heavy metal rating, it's just between having it as a primary and having it as a secondary.

No, I haven't heard any of their live albums. I remember trying to see if they had any when Joe Satriani was in the band, but left disappointed.

I think I've heard Fate use the first riff at some point before note for note. I think the latter is probably a, "well, let's make a riff like the one from Am I Evil?", and later on after having forgotten they adjusted it, did a new version of the riff where it sounded closer to the original.

If chamber folk describes a modern band playing a harpsicord, so it is chamber folk.

I was more impressed with than album than most people.  Even though they're better at hard rock, Deep Purple proved that they can really bring out the fantasy vibes through rock long before symphonic prog or any fantasy genres of rock and metal ever existed.  It was a very "vibes" album from what I remember.  And yeah, the prog wasn't always the MOST creative as it had been done more well before, but I kinda believe that the first two real prog bands were Moody Blues and Deep Purple, and this was one of those albums that helped cement it before King Crimson came into the picture (and coined the term).

Wait, King Crimson came after Deep Purple? (checks) I could have sworn In the Court of the Crimson King was 1968. '68 seems weird, because on one hand that's basically when the genre started, but at the same time you have about a dozen of the early bands releasing their first album then. Even some of the major Brit prog bands got their debut in, like Soft Machine. Seems weird in retrospect, because it often seems like rock sub-genres spring up overnight whereas metal took a while.

Recently, I've been getting back into Ningen Isu, a Japanese band very much like Black Sabbath. Very, very much like Black Sabbath. Too much like Black Sabbath, obvious.

(it should be timestamped properly, if not it's about 2:07) The problem is, while I know that's obviously taken from some Black Sabbath song, I can't actually put my finger on which one. It strikes me that this is less "ripoff" and more "obvious nod", since Ningen Isu in general often sounds like a tribute to Ozzy-era Sabbath.

(2:32 on this one) I know it's taking inspiration from something, but what I can't figure it out. Probably because my mental library of '60s psych is sorely lacking.

Heavy psych. Kind of sounds of like an amped up version of School's Out.

I didn’t reject any argument for Lucifer’s Friend Morpheus. You said it wasn’t a metal release & I took your word for it as I haven’t heard it. I was also conscious that RYM has a largely negative vote tally for "Lucifer's Friend" which isn't the case for "Budgie" so was looking for some sort of justification. I’m perfectly happy to include it if you think it’s justified.

I was kind of throwing it over to everyone else's judgment as considerable debate amount it and it might be interesting to discuss.

Interesting that the youngers ones of us, even if we didn't all hear them straight off, seem to all have roughly the same bands in our beginning years. Even though I don't think Kamelot, Nightwish, Avantasia or Opeth were among the very first albums I listened to, they were certainly up there. Dark Passion Play was absolutely massive despite the hubdrub over Tarja getting kicked out of the band and I think despite the Wicked Trilogy being weaker than the first two, people were happy to hear Avantasia again at the time. Opeth was also big enough at the time for people to license their music into games and movies.

Nice to hear that's finally behind you, sounds like it was really tough.

Hard rock.

While we explore "Kingdom Come", I'd also like to seek nominations for the 1971 records we'll be investigating. Black Sabbath's "Master of Reality" is a given & I feel that we probably should do Budgie's self-titled debut as well given the general feeling around that record. These are the other potential candidates:

Sir Lord Baltimore - "Sir Lord Baltimore"

Flower Travellin' Band - "Satori"

Thin Lizzy - "Thin Lizzy"

Deep Purple - "Fireball"

Anyone see anything they think is definitely metal & feel strongly about there?

The argument you're making for Budgie is the same argument you rejected for Lucifer's Friend.

That said, I see merit to the other Sir Lord Baltimore album, I distinctly remember one of these albums sounding metal and if it isn't this one, it has to be that one. Otherwise I don't think any of those are metal, Thin Lizzy is soft IIRC, and reading up on Fireball it's definitely hard rock.

I'm not sure what to describe it beyond not primarily metal. It dances around so much in ways I don't really know of as a style. I hear bits I would describe as metal but few and far between. I guess heavy psych primary, hard rock, blues rock secondary.

Before I somewhat randomly decided to pick up a Black Sabbath compilation from the local library, I didn't really listen to much music outside of the stuff in video games and Joe Satriani. I liked it, so then I picked up more compilations by Dream Theater, Iron Maiden and Megadeth. The first actual album I picked up to my memory is Dragonforce - Inhuman Rampage, which I enjoyed somewhat at the time, but even then I found it a bit one note. From there I found I got into power metal and started listening to Helloween - Keeper of the Seven Keys Pt. 2 and Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle-Earth. I also somehow decided to listen to Testament - Dark Roots of the Earth, I can't actually remember if I listened to any thrash albums before it, but it made more of an impression at the time than Master of Puppets. The first album I actually bought as opposed to just borrowing from the local library was Grim Reaper - See You in Hell/Fear no Evil, which I purchased because it was on a list of top 50 metal releases and I couldn't get it from the local library. In retrospect, I probably should have tried to get Satan - Court in the Act off the same list, but that's retrospect, neither album was anything but good.

I guess then I would say...

1. Dragonforce - Inhuman Rampage (2006)

2. Helloween - Keeper of the Seven Keys Pt. 2 (1988)

3. Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle-Earth (1998)

4. Testament - Dark Roots of the Earth (2012)

5. Grim Reaper - See You in Hell (1984?)

After thinking about it over the last few days, I don't think tagging a release with a broad, all-encompassing up-stream genre like "Metal" really accomplishes anything though to be honest. Genre-tags are really about drawing an appropriate audience to a release so they need to provide a broad overview of what people can expect to hear. Therefore, I've always thought that I should choose a tag that encompasses as much of the release as possible. If you ask yourself the question "Who will be more likely to enjoy this release?", is it ANY fan of metal or is it stoner metal fans? I would have thought that stoner fans are likely to enjoy the vast majority of this material, even if some of it sits outside of the metal spectrum. This concept is only made more relevant by our clan configuration & I'd suggest that The Fallen members are more in tune with this sound than The Guardians members are so the tag should reside in the group of genres attached to The Fallen in my opinion.

I would make the point that Black Sabbath is the kind of band most metalheads enjoy regardless of what genre they are. You could probably say the same about Metallica too, at least the thrash metal years.

Anyway, Fairies gets a hard rock/heavy metal vote from me.

Hard rock.

Oh, Ningen Isu's Rashomon album came out 30 years ago today. Been a while since I last heard it, so there's the perfect excuse!

Not really a lot else, King Diamond - Puppet Master and Kayo Dot's debut, but just a nice round 20. Protector - Golem was 35 years ago. Kind of weird to celebrate 35 years ago, but I'm guessing in a year or two I'll be questioning how weird it is to celebrate the 45th anniversary of an album...