Rexorcist's Forum Replies

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.

Hint for tomorrow's Sphere album:

Scorpio.

I gave The Black Halo another spin a couple months ago and put it in my top ten power metal albums.  And it's pretty clear you have a similar interest in Blind Guardian to mine.

Do you mind me asking how you score your releases out of 100 Rex? I assume there's some sort of calculation tool that helps you to come up with those results?

Actually, back when I first started getting into albums 11 years ago, I used a .5 system, like 0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, etc.  Eventually, I heard so many albums that it really just didn't feel accurate anymore.  So I've gotten extremely picky about my ratings pretty quickly.

But there is a reason.  Anytime I review something, I ask myself four questions:

1. What is the goal of this album?

2. Does the creator meet that goal?

3. What sacrifices or negligences were made to meet that goal?

4. Were these sacrifices made up for by other aspects of the album?

I do the same for movies, books and video games.  And after comparing it to other similar albums, which is where the score comes in, I then compare that album to other albums with the same score, which is how I organize my catalog.

I just updated my top 100.  The top ten has a couple new surprises.  Here it is.

One more thing...

My top 100 black metal albums

I just discovered something.  If there are two conjoined albums two numbers apart, like 13 and 15, if you press up on the lower number or down on the high number, the numbers will be connected properly, say 13 and 14, or 14 and 15.

Thanks for telling me how to fix this.

No, the top 20 section on user control panels.  It works differently from list making.  Every user has the "Top 20 Releases" page.

OK, so I think I've got my sludge standards re-evaluated, but after having heard several Ufomammut albums, I feel the need to recheck my doom standards again, so I'm going to go over some of my older favorites in the genre, starting with my number 1: The Dreadful Hours.  Hard to believe its title opener lasts nine minutes.  That's how you know the song hits you: overcoming its length, and this did so by constantly mixing that one song up by switching between post, goth, doom and death like it was nothing.

Review:

Although I don't think I'll be joining the Revolution, I have to admit that I love punk.  Right now the only punk genre I represent in a clan is crossover thrash, which is a problematic genre that rarely ever amazes me.  Metalcore, IMO, is the superior genre thanks to the presence of more excellent bands.  Unfortunately, the genre also gets very tiring thanks to the countless emulators of bands like Born of Osiris, so when someone in metalcore mixes it up, like Zao does with their own strong presence, I tend to feel a sigh of relief so powerful that it's almost like a weight is finally off my shoulders, as if finding creative metalcore has become a literal chore.

This is their most popular work: Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest.  At first it starts off pretty typically, even though it's clear that mood and delivery is taken more seriously than punk energy, which is a sigh of relief.  The same seems to be true even as it switches from calm acoustic james to slow punk screams in the beginning of the second song.  Unsurprisingly, there are faint traces of proggieness and djent in the behavior of the riffage, but not enough to even warrant a sub-tag.  This also feels like a smart decision to me because it's very tamed and used specifically for mood.  In otherwords, this is the kind of metalcore album that keeps you on your toes, guessing what's going to happen next even as it rarely breaks its genre.  There are quite a few instances of slow-paced growling and droning, which seems to me is an atmospheric choice that the band likes to take advantage of.  In other words, speed is of little importance, even for a punk album.  Very interesting choice, especially considering that there seems to be some sort of Neurosis influence.

But there's also some time taken for melody whether or not speed is a part of the picture.  Listen to the openings of March and Ember, and then finish the songs to see where things go, even if certain sections may easily be dragged on too long.  Another interesting choice the band made was writing some songs about hypocrisy in the churches, despite being a Christian band.  They're tackling a wide range of themes involving personal struggles, even avoiding the preachy side of Christian lyricism.  In other words, the band tried to make a Christian album that raw metalheads could relate to.  Again, a smart move.  But concerning the lyricism and quirky song structures, practically throwing pop structures in the trash, I'm wondering if each section symbolizes something, which would make this album more conceptual than advertised.

I can see why this is considered a metalcore classic.  It's a SMART album.  So overall, I kinda like this.  Zao have gone far beyond what the Christian rock tag might've indicated for the music browser in terms of both style and quality.  I can say, however, that I'd prefer a LITTLE more punk energy in certain sections, and that some sections whether fast or slow be shortened to maintain a further punk presence and less of a Neurosis one.  Zao did something very artistic here, and they had their bumps but they were still very smart about this.

85/100

I've been waiting!

This is sending major fucking chills.

God I wish this was a full length song.  And that the Edge could write stuff like that on actual U2 albums for once.

I revisited Dream Theater's 1989 debut album "When Dream & Day Unite" over the last couple of days & it fits very comfortably into this category for me. It's a fantastic record with stunning performances that is only held back by Terry Date's poor production job. People need to get over the fact that James LaBrie wasn't in the band yet & treat it purely on its merit.

I'm with this entirely.  Both times I heard it, even years apart, I thought it was a great debut.