Rexorcist's Forum Replies

Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene (1976)

Even though I not really into prog electronic, this is a strong contender to become one of my favorite albums.  Its sense of mood, melody and variety is perfect.  If I had to fault it for anything, I guess it is a little cheesy, but it still sounds beautiful.

I agree that this would fall into a category of hard rock/metal. Not the biggest listener of stoner, so I won't comment on that either way.

This exercise was interesting, because were this any other band, I'd think right now we'd say this is hard rock. This album, outside of the first song, really dances around genre. But, because it's Black Sabbath, we're trying to find ways to justify it back onto metal. (not accusing anyone of anything I'm not doing myself) Between the songs agreed to be metal and the non-metal songs with metal bits, we have enough, but it is interesting how close things got.

No you're right, I made a very clear post about justifying Warning, and now looking back it sounds like I was spouting bullshit.  Of course it only got that close because we decided to do this with an edition that includes Wicked World.  But I don't think we'll have any problems with Paranoid at all.

Mm, it is pretty druggy at times, but the problem here is that only a quarter of the songs would be stoner metal.  This seems like a conversation more fit for RYM considering that they have a plain metal tag, and in the instance where 40% of it relies on two variants of metal, that tag actually feels appropriate.  But here, I'm not so sure.  The truth is it's so difficult to classify.  But because it's so difficult, why not just consider it the earliest form of "heavy metal" because this was basically a practice run for better things?

Now I already removed the metal tag on my log and took the album of my top 100 heavy metal albums list in progress.  It's not really going to affect the group's relevancy as a metal band for me.

Just a reminder: the clans can choose each next album to review if they want.  Next week is the Gateway's turn.

Bluesy and jazzy for the first fifty seconds, but its major rhythm and delivery is pretty heavy, especially for its time.  Not the heaviest song on the album, but certainly heavier than all the hard rock songs that came before it.  It's a little difficult to classify this song under one tag since it shifts so much, but I'm gonna chalk this one up as hard rock / heavy metal.

I'm posting my review today, so I'm gonna need someone's help bringing this in the charts.  Since I've been working on all the previous Evoken albums to prep for this, I've been able to get the Antithesis of Light in the charts as well, totally intentionally, too.

Each Evoken album is a little different, and each time it gets different, it also gets stronger.  But how could you possibly get any stronger than the third album with its perfect atmosphere, evershifting sense of anger and despair as well as its perfect consistency?

Evoken had to step it up to compare this time, and while I don't feel that they did that with the titular opener, I still greatly enjoyed what I heard.  The production was cleaner and less dense, so it was more accessible.  But it didn't lose any of the structural strengths and emotional core of any of the songs from Antithesis.  I could only hope that the other songs wouldn't sound exactly the same.  Thankfully, Mare Erythraeum didn't.  I've gone on about how Antithesis has some gothic touches, but this is more than just touches.  This is the kind of heavily gothic doom you'd expect from My Dying Bride, and it's just as good as you'd expect from MDB.  There are few changes in the main riff, but thankfully everything in the background is there to change things up and either get more melancholy, more artistic or even more melodic.  It all depends on the section.  This beautifully instrumental epic also goes into an amazing metal solo which is quite out of place for Evoken's catalogue, but also perfectly fitting for this album.  That tells me that they're innovating once again.

We re-enter the death doom with a heavy dose on Of Purest Absolution.  Despite that, it's surprisingly more melodic as well, and throughout the middle section, the doom is placed behind an aquatic guitar riff that carefully layers over the doom without drowning it out.  The third section relies on none of that and goes right for tribal drumming and placing the vocals in the foreground to really bring out that deathly vibe.  Astray in Eternal Light is dense in its production, but not so baritone.  It's a very noisy track built on the same guitar sound as the middle section of the previous song.  We also get clearer vocals to bring in more of a depressing tone as opposed to the deep-seeded hatred we've been subjected to before.  But there's also something very sensual about the vocals, although this guy can't beat Peter Steele at this game.  And I also feel that the monotone nature of the album isn't quite as strong as before, as much of it is simply going "up down up down" between two notes.  So while it's a bit unique to the album for shifting focuses of similar elements in the same way that every song in Antithesis did, I can't help but feel it's a bit weaker than the previous songs.

Descend the Lifeless Womb is louder, deeper and slower, once again pushing the soul past its limits.  And boy, does it feel epic.  The general idea of funeral doom is extremely strong on this track.  Unfortunately, because it's so standard, it feels like it's missing something in comparison to the first three songs.  This is remedied during the third act, where things get more atmospheric and clear, as opposed to rough and dirty, and it features an ambient guitar drone which feels very astral.  Suffer a Martyr's Trial begins very quietly and carefully steers into some droning sludge and doom.  Throughout the thirteen minutes, it changes its monotone riffs and the back-layers of the density constantly, bringing back the overall high quality of the first three tracks as well as the previous two albums.  And because of this, the longest song on the album goes by more speedily, even when much of it is snails pushing their way through heavy mounds of dirt.  And finally, we have a single riff played with an orchestra of variation in the back, Orogeny, which has this post-metal vibe about it.

I have to say, I really like how straight-forward and accessible this is, not because a weird-ass like me who enjoyed Grand Declaration of War needs accessibility, but because it represents an incredibly healthy and high-grade kind of album which can be a very good introduction for noobs to get into both death doom and funeral doom, maybe even doom in general.  I honestly don't know why these guys aren't more popular in the doom community.  Is it the surrealism of esoteric?  The traditional behavior of Skepticism?  Either way, these guys are way underappreciated.  Unfortunately, this also sometimes gets in the way of the emotional core, which didn't always feel so varied.

Well I can safely say that at this point, my favorite funeral doom band is definitely Evoken for their ability to deliver seriously heavy music.  Even though this wasn't quite as creative as the last two albums, it more or less got the job done and would make a great introduction into doom, one that's very heavy but never too dense.  So I'd say this is another success for the band.

91

Klaus Schulze - Mirage (1977)

Genres: Berlin School

X is actually in my top 100, although X still doesn't come close to the Blade Runner soundtrack, but it's finally time for me to get through more Klaus Schulze and further my prog electronic experience.  I'm adoring the new age ambiance of this.  It's simple and right at home in a winter cottage fashion, but it's the kind of album where you still have to look at the sky and wonder about the universe.  It's both sci-fi and fantasy in a heavily atmospheric format.  It's simple and not complex, but varied and imaginative.

Then it's settled: the European edition isn't a metal album.  It would be safer to assume that the album was in fact responsible for the creation, but was more of a practice run for the future genre.  So all we have to worry about now is the US edition.

Now the RY chart tags two more albums as metal: Paranoid which came out in December, and Sir Lord Baltimore's Kingdom Come in December.  And of course, there was my nomination Deep Purple in Rock which I feel goes between both more so than being purely hard rock or heavy metal.

This also means that since I'm still not fully sure about Warning, I might as well just say it's not metal, and that means 2/7 songs aren't metal and only twelve minutes total make it.  So I'll have to remove the tag from my log since I only catalog the original edition.

I certainly think of the bass and drum combo as heavy enough to qualify as early metal, but the blues rock kinda gets in the way of it until we're 3 minutes in where it becomes all about heaviness until going back to blues.  But as part of me really does feel like it's "early metal" as opposed to hard rock because its mood, bass and drumming are just so deep and dark.  It's like my instincts are telling me, "this really is metal, and you just don't see it."  It's kinda Zeppelinish, but Zeppelin has a few metal songs among the first four albums.

Evoken - Antithesis of Light (2005)

Genres: Funeral Doom, Death Doom

What with doom metal being my new primary focus, I'm becoming more determined than ever to perfect a proper chart of it all because my overall knowledge and experience of its various subgenres is actually minimal.  I've only heard 17 death doom albums and 11 funeral doom, including only three Evoken albums.  Thankfully, Evoken can add to both to help, so I have a foundation for either genre.  I already reviewed two other Evoken albums over the past couple of days, and I was more impressed with the atmospheric focus of their second in comparison to their good but generic debut.  I had no idea of knowing what was going to happen.

After our creepy intro of noise and wails, In Solitary Ruin covers a freakishly heavy blackened death background molding with structural and atmospheric aspects of the previous album, Quietus.  The band wasn't afraid to teeter-totter between slow, middle and fast paces in order to keep the song's specific mood original and to keep the layout challenging.  This one song is an incredible combination of doom, death, post and even black, aurally turning hell itself into a cold and desolate winter world with a few instances of hypnotic gothic guitars.

Now that I've written a good paragraph about the 10-minute intro and the first epic, let's head to the next song: Accursed Premonition, which sets up a slightly more classical vibe with hypnotic, aquatic dripping of noise and some choral vocals.  It starts out much clearer than In Solitary Ruin, and the atmosphere is more gothic and funeral, and slightly less death to make room for a little more black.  This song doesn't take a lot of time to speed up, either, even going into some much lighter moments and switching to heavily blackened ones without ever losing its hypnotic presence.

The Mournful Refusal is deathlier in its backgrounds, but includes clearer and higher-pitched guitars digging into some more melodic territory, bringing back the hypnotic gothic picking as well, and including the speedy and tamed drumming of In Solitary Ruin.  Every bit of slower or faster pacing is used sparingly, and normally only by one instrument at a time to help the middle-pacing of the song's primary focus.  Even for the longest song on the track, the atmospheres are always shifting in consistent ways, relying on the occassional metal solo, molding perfectly with the vibe and giving us another unique track to the album.

Pavor Nocturnus throws us right into the middle of neoclassical darkwave paired with loud guitars, increasing the melody factor.  The synths give us a strangely heavenly approach, like the lamentation of seeing a spirit of a beloved one rise to the sun shining beyond silver clouds and entering Heaven.  Pavor Nocturnus shows a perfect layout where each and every shift is carefully built up to and flows with incredible consistency.  Eventually it evolves into a storm of black riffage with flawless atmospheric riffage, but even that devolves into another doomy outro.

And now we enter the title track.  We have quiet synths leading us into the gloom of gothic doom metal, slightly romantic but just as scary as before.  But this song also gradually gets more extreme and less gothic overtime until it returns to the gothic behavior during the outro.  What we have here is a patient and sometimes progressive outlook on many of the elements that made previous songs so special, using length in unpredictable manners.

The final track is The last of Vitality, and it doesn't hesitate to start us off with a snailish stoner riff bereft of any of the black and death influences the album boasted about for so long.  And we get our most haunting dungeon synth backdrops to go with it, acting much more upfront.  But we soon get into a ferocious blast of bestial black speed and fury, almost creating a feeling of riding a motorcycle through a massive graveyard.  But we return to the gothic synths and our singer's growls turn into whispers.  This song is taking us all the way across the world of death: above the graveyard, six feet under all the bloodied dirt, and straight into heaven with no regard for sanity.  Our most haunting synths and backing vocals are featured here, creating what I believe is a perfect ending.

It is so true that these songs are very long, but for once in my life I came across a doom album that managed to keep these lengths generally inventive and creative.  A large part of it was the fact that this is one of the most deathly and metallic atmospheres I have ever heard, relying on a number of metallic elements like black and goth as well as non-metallic elements like dungeon synth and darkwave to get a very strong hypnotic vibe.  This is the kind of album where many of the songs will switch out the same elements every so often, justifying such a move by applying different levels of focus to both different moods and different genres, so it's an incredible challenge to predict what's going to happen.

I have never heard a doom metal album like this.  Antithesis of Light gave me more than what I ask for from a good album.  This is the first funeral doom album that passed the fifty minute mark and didn't feel too long, because its atmosphere, emotional core and presentation are all superbly well thought out.  Each brand of hypnosis is similar yet shifting.  Very diverse and intense, depending on my future moods this could very well be the best doom metal album I've ever heard.

Gonna post three Evoken reviews here.  Third one will come after these two shortly.

Evoken - Embrace the Emptiness (1998)

Genres: Funeral Doom, Death Doom

Evoken seems to be considered as essential to funeral doom metal as Esoteric.  They're one of those bands that many say has never made a bad album.  The debut left an impact on the metal world for helping to cement a darker side of funeral by combining it with the death doom of bands like My Dying Bride and Katatonia.  So when you combine the two, I would expect the result to be something even darker than the norm.  But for a debut, how well could it go the first time?

From front to back, atmosphere was their strongest point, and in the context of the funeral sound, that's exactly what they needed.  This careful balance between the sombre classical sound of funeral death and that malevolent sense of fear and anger that death doom is known for is carefully handled.  One of the biggest pros of the album is the variety of vocals, going from low growls to despairing cries to black metal pitches.  So we get the a very healthy doom experience that covers a lot of ground for the fans of the sombre world of doom, and not the psychedelic Sabbath lovers.  The guitar tone has a fairly gothic touch to it to bring out more of the funereal vibes  Of course, this is a funeral doom metal album.  There's a general flaw that's apparent in so much doom metal, especially the funeral brand: the length and sameyness of the songs.  A couple of these would be five-star songs if I couldn't tell what was gonna happen next.

For a debut it was nice.  The atmosphere was more than what I asked for and much more impressive than what a debut album generally says about the act.  But as far as structuring a song goes, these guys are pretty standard.  They got the mood just right and left the idea of variety and uniqueness out the window, but at least they nailed what they focused on.

81

Evoken - Quietus (2001)

Genres: Funeral Doom, Death Doom

Now that I'm more serious about exploring doom metal, Evoken has become a top priority for their high reputation in my least favorite doom genre: funeral.  Evoken bridged the gap between death doom and funeral doom on their debut, already making a name for themselves as one of the darkest bands on Earth since the debut's atmosphere was perfect, although the variety was low.  Let's see what they can do with death and funeral this time.

There's a stronger structural touch which is a bit more unpredictable and organized at the same time.  That drumming in Burning really added another layer of depth to an already deep and seriously atmospheric song.  Thanks to an thin-layer of general creepiness akin to a Blut Aus Nord album, there's a unique touch to this album without losing the deathly vibes of their debut, which makes the vibe of the first two tracks more ghostly than anything.  After having heard and loved In Their Darkened Shrines after the second playthrough, I've been itching for more "ghostly" metal.  The vibe of Withering Indignation, however, is totally different.  The snailish doom has a serious rasp to it akin to stoner metal or a good Boris song.  The droning creates a perfect vibe as dungeon-synth backdrops occasionally make their way into the mix.  It's a great combination of psychedelic noise and neoclassical ambiance.  Tending the Dire Hatred starts by following the same vein as before, but when it switches to a faster tempo, we get a raw heavy metal vibe that switches to tribal drumming like in a Neurosis album.  But eventually it calms down into a very dungeon-grounded song when the metal becomes equal to or second to the synth via atmospheric focus.  And Where Ghosts Fall Silent seems to switch through several of the previously established vibes in a manner similar to My Dying Bride until settling on a slower death doom sound.  The title track builds itself on louder drums and synths for a more menacing approach to its own reverb.  But Embrace the Emptiness is pretty much a shameless rehash, even more so than Quietus, even though it was still a good doom song.  Thankfully, the final track goes into softer alternative territory while maintaining that reverb-based sadness of the album.

I think this album really showcases the band's willingness to push forward everything that made the first album so good.  And while there is still a little sameyness attached, for the most part this highly hypnotic sophomore album proves that Evoken are more than willing to grow so that they can be seen as one of the best in doom.  For the most part, I was very pleased with the band's sense of atmosphere, experimentation, emotion and improved variety.  This is easily much better than the debut.

95

It's closer to metal than the other hard rock tracks on this album, but I think since more hard rock appears than metal, I'll go hard rock primary with metal secondary.

Just a note for the future: in the event that we do "first ten" lists for other genres, we should take into account the possibility of including a section in the list for metal albums that influenced the genre, like if we wanted to handle black metal we'd need to mention Venom.

Hhmm... I forgot that "Evil Woman, Don't Play Your Games With Me" wasn't on some versions of the album. That complicates things a little. Perhaps we come to a position on "Wicked World" at the tail end of this exercise & then treat the whole collection of songs as one record?

Maybe, but if our ten minute closer is deemed as metal, then over half the album will be metal anyway.  But if this is a list entry, and we cover the differences between the European and American editions, then we'd have to cover the two medleys, too, which will complicate things as the different pieces will undoubtably be different genres.

In this instance, the breakdown would go as follows:

Metal tracks: 2/5 = 40%

Metal time (more accurate): 12.5 metal min. to 11.5 non-metal minutes = 52%

Minimum currently met on both accounts.

Totally hard rock.  Not even gonna pretend it's remotely metal.

Awe + some on both accounts.

I'm gonna be checking out one Evoken album a day until I review Caress of the Void.  I want my review of that album to be as accurate as possible, and this will add another band to my death doom and funeral doom charts when I make them.  So today it's Embrace the Emptiness.  And I'll be working on that while also working on prog electronic.

I just finished hosting the war movies ballot on movieforums.  The number one was my number one too, Apocalypse Now.

And in a couple weeks I'm gonna see Alice Cooper.

I got through three Oneohtrix Point Never albums today: Garden of Delete, Transmat Memories and Again.  After that, I checked my log and found out that, out of almost 13,000 albums, I've only heard 38 progressive electronic albums, and half my "top ten" are by Vangelis.  I'm gonna remedy this overtime for a while and try to make a good top 100.

Morbid Angel - Heretic (2003)

Genre: Death

While putting together my recent Top 100 Death Metal Albums chart (ending with all 100 albums ranked 9/10 or higher on my chart), I was getting through an album that a few people here on Metal Academy loved: Altars of Madness by Morbid Angel.  I liked it so much that I decided to listen to most of their first six albums not once but twice.  This really helped me evolve my death metal standards, and can now safely say that my current pick for the number one death metal band for ALL the right reasons is Morbid Angel.  Reasons include: having a better debut than Death themselves, a more surreal willingness to evolve, heavier and darker music, no lightening their heaviness later on and two incredible vocalists with their own classic eras.  The first six are all death essentials, and I even gave two of their albums perfect ratings.  After the glory that was Gateways to Annihilation, their slowest but doomiest and possibly most soul-crushing and psychedelic effort, I was hoping I would once again be going against the metal grain and enjoy Heretic, the first of their albums that is considered unnecessary.

Well, I gotta say it.  For the most part, their heaviness didn't wane from their previous effort.  Morbid Angel went back to death metal roots with this one, and because of that, there's practically no willingness to evolve.  This means that the album is largely made up of standard pounding death.  The album doesn't do anything freaky or surreal until Place of Many Deaths, which is seven songs totaling up to 25 minutes in.  Only then does it go into weird, freaky and creepy background ambiance akin to Blut Aus Nord's The Work Which Transforms God.  Lemme tell you, it was a major breath of fresh air to get away from another mid-to-low-tuned flat-ass pounder with only a couple decent riffs to make it fairly enjoyable.  But deep down I knew that the chances of this continuing through the album were minimal, but not impossible.  Turns out, that minimal chance had a breath left for the two-minute ambient track, "Abyssous."  But as soon as that was done, we went right back to what the band was playing for the first six tracks.  Thankfully, it gets pretty unexpected out wild in the last few shorter tracks, but it would've helped the album if these shorter, weirder bits were more scattered around the album instead of lumped at the end.  Putting some of these unpredictable and shorter bits in with a bunch of silent pauses on,y made it less charming.  They should've been segues.

So in their efforts to remain a relevant death band, they put to much focus on the weirder bits and not enough on the actual point of their career: death metal.  So Heretic shows the band just putting out generic death metal and sticking weirder tracks on for the heck of it without organizing things or making the death metal rock.  It's raw heaviness brought down by riffs of either middling or decent quality and an unfocused teeter between laziness and ambition.  The long and short of it is simple.  The staggering potential of this album by evolution revolutionaries is both untamed and untapped.

63

Kind of an amalgam of it all.  It's mostly heavy metal, but the tone it creates can easily but faintly be compared to psych, doom, blues and even stoner.  Two metal, two hard rock.

Metal tracks: 50%

Metal time: 12 min. vs. 8 min. = 62.5%

This week's FALLEN album:

Evoken - Caress of the Void (2007)

Genres: Death Doom, Funeral Doom

Votes: 3

Reason: This album will make it into the charts with 2 more votes, so to get it there I'll need help on this one.  You got a week before we switch to the next Gateway album.

I agree that "Behind the Wall of Sleep" is more rock than it is metal. It obviously has that doom riff in the verse but it feels slightly psychedelic in its minimalism & Bill Ward gives it a real swing that's quite foreign for metal. The guitar work in the remainder of the song is unapologetically rock-based though so I'm gonna throw out a curveball here. I know that it wouldn't fly on other websites where they seem to care a lot about when a subgenre tag was first created but I'd suggest that if this track was released by a new band today it would be tagged as stoner rock. That's my hill & I'll die on it.

Piss them off, bro.  Take their graves and drown them in it.  This is metal; we live to anger the world.

Review:

One day, and industrial band said, "let's put a better scifi twist on it" and created cyber metal, a niche genre that no one has really made a pure artform yet, and way?  Because it has a tendency to be very trope riddled.  But the appeal of the genre is obvious: cyber metal is all about the scifi, and one of the best bands to recreate that "cyberpunk" feel is Sybreed.  It shines at full force on Antares, no star pun intended.

The album recreates scifi vibes beautifully.  It's like all at once I'm being dragged out into space, experimented on in a lab or having to deal with dystopian problems in a cyberpunk world.  The drama is there, but never played up too much.  We have plenty of room for serene and melodic moments to just drag you away into "a sea of nothingness."  Sometimes the atmosphere is Floydian.  As for my favorite aspect of this album, I'd say it's Nominet's melodic vocals.  His high and youthful pitch is just robotic enough for the cyber sound but powerful in its softness.  The guy also has some decent metalcore growls, occasionally going into Wayne Static territory, which is pleasing to me considering that Wayne's voice was the best part of Static-X.

Unfortunately, the same problem that takes over the vast majority of cyber metal (I've started many albums but haven't finished them because of this) is that all the songs are pretty much covering every layer of influence at one.  There's cyber, pure industrial, groove, djent, electronic and death here, but most of these songs are made up of multiple sections each covering one or two of these genres at once, so originality becomes repetitive.  There's a little differentiation between songs sometimes, like the shift from atmospheric serenity in isolate to the raspy djent of Dynamic.  But otherwise, the reliance on shifting the same genres becomes tiring by the end, despite the melodies and atmos still being good.

Although cyber metal is a genre yet to be mastered and perfected, the fans of this niche genre will still have Sybreed and Antares.  This has very heavy feeling to it, which is the most powerful aspect of the album and the standout as well.  If you want metal that will put you right into a scifi world, I can't think of a better album.

85

More bluesy hard with, but only with a slight hint of prog.

1-2 Metal vs. rock with 7 minutes of metal to 9 rock minutes.

Song total: 33%

Time total: 43.75%

Wicked World was on the American one.

I just realized, which edition are we going with?  The original European one or the North American one with the different tracklist?

My Top 100 Death Metal Albums.  Comments on the list are appreciated.

After going over a bunch of death metal, I can see some elements of it in Symbolic, but they're much more faint in TSOP.  Although I feel like TSOP switches from being a prog death album to a prog album on a regular basis.  But I'd say that the majority goes to prog because the album is more melodramatic and emotional on a slower and higher-pitched level than death really allows.

Big Brother and the Holding Company - Cheap Thrills (1968)

Cold mornings like this bring me back to when I was first getting into albums, especially classic rock, blues and prog.  All that's left is pancakes.

Alter Bridge is my number one post-grunge band ATM, but this album, despite being good fun, felt more standard.  It gave me everything I wanted out of an Alter Bridge album, but I don't feel that they improved or fleshed anything out as well as they could've.

Napalm Death - Mentally Murdered EP (1989)

Genres: Deathgrind, Grindcore, Death Metal

The Napalm Death legacy is a weird one in which people are constantly battling over which ND albums are the best because of the various sounds they've covered in different eras, save the experimental scene in which they produced subpar albums during the early 90's.  The 1980's and the 21st century are totally different stories where most of the wars take place.  Me, personally, can't stand the fact that it took Napalm Death more than 30 years to create an album up to my standard of fine making: Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.  This album has death, blackened crust, metalcore, industrial and more.  The problem with ND albums is that they make 40-fifty minutes of the same song on each album, usually.  And it gets on my nerves.

This EP doesn't have any of that stuff to worry about.  This is the kind of album a deathgrind album should be, not close to an hour but short and powerful.  I admit, I might've liked it to be a little longer, but thanks to the 2.5 minute average of these six songs on this EP, none of the ideas overstay their welcome.  It must also be said that the production of this album is noisy and dirty, which brings out the most of the punk attitude and the metallic vibes.  This helps make this one of their heaviest releases.  I love the fact that the percussion is so powerful on this album.  I mean, on Harmony Corruption, they were so weak I wanted to puke.  And people actually like that album.  I guess if I had to pick a favorite track, it would be Walls of Confinement.  It displays everything the albums about, fast, mid-paced, violent, hardcore and metallic.

Sometimes, all you really need is a short burst of heaviness to keep you going.  You draw that out for too long and it loses its effect.  I mean, why not?  So many punk genres along with their metal mutants build themselves on the EP instead of the album.  This is more than welcome to me.  It's got the brutality of Suffocation's Human Waste, although it could have slightly better production as it drowns in its own noise sometimes.  But 90% of the time it's very clear what's going on.  And even if it gets noisy, that's when it becomes one of the heaviest releases in either punk or metal.  A lot of lengthy ND studio albums could take a few cues from this EP.  I mean, yeah, there isn't a lot of differentiation between tracks... but this is only fifteen minutes.  And honestly, I'd scold myself for being so obsessive over fifteen minutes.  After hearing so many samey deathgrind albums, the variety-cultist in me wants more, but the critic in me won't allow that to be considered a con.

95.

I completely agree that "Black Sabbath" is a metal track & should have a doom metal tag of some description. I'd argue that it's not just the last 1:40 that represent the traditional doom metal sound though.

I think you either misread my post or mistyped yours.  I said the last two minutes doesn't really represent doom at all.

If anyone considers it light for doom metal, that's just because of the time period.  The whole point of this song is soul-crushing guitars drowning to sadness and despair.  That's doom metal in a nutshell.  It doesn't even steer into any hard rock or real levels of psych until the last two minutes.  Until the last two minutes, the psych is faint

My vote goes to conventional doom metal.

I'm redoing my review of In Their Darkened Shrines right now, because I just found out the playlist I listened to mixed the track names and even left out one.  It shows in my old review, and I wanted to fix that before more people saw it and I looked like a fucking idiot.  I went and fixed the mistakes, but it's still not a review I'm fully proud of, so I'm redoing it.

Nile - In Their Darkened Shrines (2002

Genres: Brutal Death, Tech Death

Secondaries: Traditional Death, Death Doom

Normally it takes me one listen to an album to grasp it all.  But sometimes I need to flesh things out a little more.  In this instance, it was relistening to Nile's tertiary album, In Their Darkened Shrines, after going through a bunch of brutal death metal.  I'm in the middle of my death metal standards and opinions changing drastically, which may also reinvent how I rank my overall top 100 metal albums.  Now there was a lot I appreciated about this album, and there was a little I criticized.  Let's see how it pans out this time.

The intro started out similarly to how I would start out a tech metal album, weird and melodic at the same time.  Overtime, the album would cover a variety of moods and atmospheres with this single genre, taking time to be proggy, epic and doomy like with Unas, Slayer of the Gods, or speedy and catchy, like with Kheftiu Asar Butchiu, or just plain evil like Churning the Maelstrom, which reaches Devourment levels of brutality.  Notice, that this is only in the track 4-6 string. The general consensus after comparing this to albums by Suffocation and Defeated Snity, as well as ones I heard less recently but am still familiar with like Devourment and Disfiguring the Goddess, tells me that this album's primary focus is depth, not necessarily brutality or technicality.  However, the brutality never suffers.  Honestly, this is as brutal in its instrumental delivery as the Human Waste EP, but this album boasts a presence drawn in by its Egyptian subject matter, which means Nile are operating on a spiritual level, truly making ART in order to rise about the ranks of their genre.

While the style itself and the formatting of each song isn't always new or revolutionary, their moods and tricks are all healthy enough to keep the album entertaining.  This is largely because of a very strong depth to the band's personalities, effortlessly perfecting the "mood" aspects and overshadowing their own technical and songwriting skills, as good as the writing is on its own.  Our epic Unas, Slayer of the Gods is probably one of the finest death metal songs I've ever heard.  It's an 11-minute track I'd easily return to if I was in the mood, and honor I've only ever given two 11-minute epics in my life: Through Silver in Blood by Neurosis, and the album version of Anything for Love by Meat Loaf. And after having heard the doomy masterwork Cause of Death by Obituary and the slower and psychedelic Gateways to Annihilation by Morbid Angel, I have a much deeper appreciation for the ghostly depths of the droning sound effects of slower songs like I Whisper in the Ear of the Dead.  If I were to make a Halloween playlist, it wouldn't have any corny metal covers of Spooky Scary Skeletons.  It would be all about truly creepy atmospheres like the one I Whisper in the Ear of the Dead provides.  And the best part is that songs like that feels so consistent with faster-paced blasters like Wind of Horus, and even then, that track has an atmosphere in the middle that's not only furious, but slow building with an atmospheric guitar drone similar to atmo-black metal.

All of my needs for brutal death metal, specifically the begging for more depth and variety, are met in this hour long entry to a genre where even a half hour can feel overlong thanks to monotony and velocity.  The greatest albums in the world need DEPTH, and this is an album that's loaded with it.  It provides a unique experience that only Nile could provide thanks to their passion for myths, legends and themes.  I'm honestly having trouble deciding whether or not this is the greatest death album I've ever heard because it covers so much within the genre, and it doesn't even need brutal's famous subgenre, slam.  This might be a death metal album, but it goes beyond that.  In Their Darkened Shrines is a spiritual journey of the souls of the undead and their suffering over several millenniums.

100/100

Got a Michael Whelan list right here.  I'm a huge Meat Loaf fan, and I generally love the cover art, but Whelan's had a couple other amazing works, notably Arise and Dark Days.  I wish he would do album covers more often.

Not many Whelan cover were made specifically for the album we see them on. His art first appeared on novels, then metal labels started licensing it for album covers.

I know that.  That doesn't mean I don't like his covers or feel they're innapropriate for the music.

Got a Michael Whelan list right here.  I'm a huge Meat Loaf fan, and I generally love the cover art, but Whelan's had a couple other amazing works, notably Arise and Dark Days.  I wish he would do album covers more often.

Deep Purple had a few albums before "In Rock" Rex. Is "In Rock" the only one of their first four that you consider to be metal or would you like us to consider any of those earlier releases? I completely agree with you on Led Zeppelin. The greatest hard rock band that's ever lived but certainly not a metal band.

Like I mentioned, that's the only one from DP's early works that I consider a metal album.

Three albums of 1970 are tagged as metal on RYM: Sabbath, Paranoid and Kingdom Come.  Using this chart here and adjusting the years through the 70's and the early 80's, we can have a clearer description of which albums to look through in terms of development.

https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album,ep,mixtape/1970/g:metal/

This will also take into account extended plays, just in case we miss something small.

However, this leads to another question: if it was all released later, how much does it contribute to the genre back then, assuming it was ever heard at all?

That's entirely my point actually. The intention behind this exercise is to give people a road map of the releases that built the scene. I don't think you can say that archival releases have had much of an impact in the majority of cases. This also leads into the question of when a release is popular enough to be relevant too but I don't think that'll be an issue for some time yet so it's a conversation for another day.

We should really just stick to the bare essentials of popularity for the early stages of the scene itself.  A good example would be how Deathcrush helped skyrocket the popularity of black metal, which is an obvious one.

Good question Sonny & that sort of thing was something I pondered over yesterday when considering a release like Motorhead's "On Parole" which was technically finished in 1976 but wasn't released until 1979. Personally, I think if we're to keep things historically accurate we have to take each release on its actual release date. I'm certainly open to going the other way if that was the consensus though.

I'd like to get at least five of us contributing to this exercise to make it valid so hopefully a few more members put their hand up today.

I don't see any problem attaching the actual release date to the entry on the official list as long as we mark it as something like "archival" the way RYM does, or at least write in its entry slot that it was recorded long before and released later.  However, this leads to another question: if it was all released later, how much does it contribute to the genre back then, assuming it was ever heard at all?

There's only one place to start for me and that is Black Sabbath. The S/T was released almost four months earlier than In Rock, on 13th Feb 1970, so that is my nomination for the first true metal album. Side one especially is where it's really at. I'm guessing Tony Iommi's forced downtuning helped, but that's where I first hear heavy psych morphing into true metal.

Blue Cheer's Vincebus Eruptum is often quoted by some, but I don't buy it. That one is still heavy psych for me. High Tide's Sea Shanties is another, but again, I don't hear enough true metal there.

I just mean to nominate it as a bare minimum standard for what heavy metal was back then and may be now.  The Sabbath debut is definitely the beginning of metal, but it's so heavy even by today's standards that it's not much of a bare minimum, but more like the fine line between heavy metal and traditional doom.

Other albums we should EXCLUDE include the whole Zeppelin catalog.  They are easily my favorite band, but they only had a handful of songs that to me would qualify as early metal, and those handfuls are rarely even on the same album.  In other words, we have to be careful about which early albums qualify as "heavy metal" and "proto-metal."

I'm cool with the 40% cut.  Like I said, it's not the biggest issue to me.  So I'll nominate In Rock, as it's a very early album that had a big say in metal's development.  Count me in.  I'll even chip in to help write paragraphs or even articles if you need me to, as I enjoy that.

I've already been outspoken about how I consider Deep Purple in Rock to the the bare standard for the heavy metal subgenre, as there are some classic "metal" albums that are indeed too light to call metal for me, notably Sad Wings of Destiny and Never Turn Your Back on a Friend.  Another bare minimum IMO is Under Lock and Key.

As for percentages, I reiterate a previous statement that the bare minimum should be 50%.

Having said this, places like this are so personal in the collaborative sense that I largely don't care what the final consensus is as long as I keep that Deep Purple album on my top 100.

Is it just me, or is Giger's work on Heartwork severely underwhelming in comparison to the other album covers, even Brain Salad Surgery?

I'm happy to see this thread. Anyone that knows me will understand how much importance I place on cover art. I'm a lover of art in general, but particularly dark art.

I actually managed a list of Dan Seagrave covers on RYM for quite some time. I really should replicate that over here at some point.

I've been thinking about creating a list of all Kris Verwimp covers. There are a LOT of them, and it's pretty easy to tell who was behind them, so I'll try to get onto that soon. If you want to know what his work is like, just check out Cermonial Casting's covers from 2004's Immortal Black Art album.

I just watched a documentary I think you'd like: World of Darkness, about the culture and art behind the RPG Vampire: the Masquerade.

This week's SPHERE album:

Sybreed - Antares (2007)

Genre: Cyber, Industrial

Votes: 2

Reason: I was meaning to revisit this, anyway.