Rexorcist's Forum Replies

Thanks to the vocal effects, there's at least a metal approach to this.  The noisy guitars can be seen as an influence on bands like Motorhead.  This song is practically the reason noisy metal songs exists.  So I'm calling this a hard rock heavy metal hybrid, one that might have louder guitar tones, but that has nothing to do with the composition.

Getting through some more Jarre today.  I'm gonna finish his earliest albums first and go chronologically to help me keep track.

I think it pushes the boundaries but still barely makes it.  But for Deftones it's always been questionable.  There was maybe a tiny bit of it on White Pony, which was extremely diverse.

"Sad Wings of Destiny" certainly isn't a total metalfest. It's still a band in transition but I've always thought there was comfortably enough metal to qualify. Perhaps I'll get a chance to review that position a little later in this exercise.

I think it's an essential to cover given its rep as a metal staple.  It's everywhere on those online lists of classic metal albums.

I have come to yet another unconventional decision regarding my ratings: Korn's Issues drags on at the end, but there is another Korn album that gives me everything I look for in an album.  So, taking Issues' place as my top nu metal album is See You on he Other Side.  Why?  Yes, it's not always as dark and disturbing.  But it's extremely catchy, musically diverse and coherent, consistent in song quality and collects most of Korn's previous ventures into a consistent whole while sounding completely futuristic.

That's the same rating I gave it.  It's a very cool 70's hard rock album, but at the time I heard it, I considered it light even for 70's metal standards.  Hell I don't even think of British Steel as that much metal.

Metal enough for you?

This week's GATEWAY album

Jerry Cantrell - Degradation Trip (2002)

Genres: Alt-Metal, Grunge

Votes: 1

Reason: Since he's part of Alice in Chains, I figured we might as well give this album a go.

First off, lemme say that this is my favorite song off of this album.  The progginess of past DP albums takes a more tame less-is-more approach to the drama aspects.  And I'll admit that Gillan marked the b eginning of the heavy metal wail on this album.  This slow breezy melody that takes the first third of the song devolves into a massive riff that certainly has metal roots.  However, since it's still not as heavy of a song as the previous two tracks, even though the riff itelf is VERY heavy for its time, I'm gonna label it RYM style:

Primary: Hard Rock, Prog Rock

Secondaries: Heavy Metal

So my final consensus is simple: it's an obvious influence in the world of prog metal, but I'd say it's more of a hard rock song that belongs on a metal album, unless you want to count this as metal's first ballad.

You’ve clearly never pulled a cone to “Planet Caravan” Andi. That track is life-changing & one of the highlights for mine.

I've never even done drugs before and I love it.

But now my secondary username is Conepullio.  And I need TP (tea party) for my bonghole.

That's one of my favorite tracks from the album.  It might not be metal, but it carries the darkness of War Pigs over beautifully.

Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (1993)

Genres: Goth Metal

Secondaries: Doom Metal, Alt-Rock, Hardcore Punk

Goth metal is one of my least explored genres, which I think is extremely hypocritical of me considering that I adore gothic and dark touches in things.  You have Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf to thank for that one.  As such, I've only heard a couple of Type O Negative albums, namely their most famous two: Bloody Kisses and October Rust.  I'm literally working on a couple of vampire novel ideas, and my debut novel was partly about zombies.  Ever since I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas as a kid, I realized how much I like dark and gothic stuff.  The desire for it became stronger and stronger, and the best album I can think of that replicates my current love of darkness is Bloody Kisses.

Bloody Kisses is an album all about the balance of everything that makes music what it is.  For example, the wide variety of the album brings gothic metal and rock into the world of doom, alternative, psych, hardcore punk, shoegaze and industrial in random places, despite the fact that we still have a primarily gothic sound.  The album's shorter songs have a tendency to morph into other genres while never breaking form, whereas the slower songs are all about the atmospheric gothic doom sound that fans of darker and slower music tend to love.  Yes, the songs still morph occasionally and the atmosphere is a gorgeously produced blend of the two genres with Steele's voice poetically chanting Nick Cave style topics with flawless delivery, which brings me to the next form of balance: deep gothic whispers and growls as well as higher pitched singing.  Everything in between is there.  This variety also has a bit of a humorous side, as we get a serious parody of hippie pop rock and a couple hardcore punk intros and outros for certain gloomy gothic doom songs.  And they still remain catchy as well as heavy.

On top of this Beatles-style exploration of the metal and rock worlds, there is a balance of the slower droning that the niche fanbase loves as well as some serious accessibility.  I mean, even the slower songs have SOME catchiness about them, because Type O Negative is one of the best bands you can get when looking for a melodic act.  This never gets in the way of whatever moods the band is trying to go for, and unlike a similarly handled album, say the overly-ambitious self-titled Beatles album, there are NO weak tracks.  In fact, the segues and skits have so much atmospheric power in them that I can't possibly even enjoy the idea of listening to this album without them.  I'm really glad Type O Negative made that choice, considering their back-to-back jokes tracks from their next album, October Rust, did nothing to set up the mood for that album.  On Bloody Kisses, it's different; they're all about setting up sexual and gothic tones.

I enjoyed every atmosphere, every note played and every word sung.  The whole album shows the band mastering the advanced tricks of music in a perfectly balanced way, and its presence glows green with gothic power and lust.  I'm having trouble deciding whether this is my favorite goth album instead of Let Love In.  It's an extremely close call.  On the second listen, October Rust has made it to my top 50 albums of all time, and I can even say I enjoy this album more than Paranoid, an honor I've given to only four other albums at this point.

And now for the obligatory "Rest in peace, Peter Steele."

100/100

Unlike "Speed King" which simply amped hard rock riffs up to eleven, "Bloodsucker" is built on a riff that I'd describe as being the prototype for heavy metal & was enormously influential on bands like Judas Priest. In fact, check out the main riff from Priest's "Victim of Changes" which would appear to simply be a variation on the "Bloodsucker" riff. The rest of this track sits more in the hard rock space but that main riff is the basis for the song so I'm happy for "Bloodsucker" to qualify as heavy metal.

You've got a strong point there.  On top of that, the drumming is much heavier than most things that came out before then.  I change my vote to hard rock and heavy metal, so now I'm even further convinced of my stance.

Less heavy than Speed King.  Totally hard rock with a bluesy backdrop and a slight metal heaviness for its time.

Hint for tomorrow's Gateway album: the last album had hands, but this one has an ARM.

I'll always use the original cover for any release I'm adding to the site. While I understand your opinion, I refuse to censor the artwork here at Metal Academy.

Thanks for this, censoring of any art is awful. I mean, especially in metal, you start censoring a few covers, it's a slippery slope before there are hundreds of extreme metal covers that could be censored. Same goes for the musical content within. 

Now normally I'd suggest a content filter function for unregistered guests, but considering that this is a metal specific forum, I doubt many people under the age of 13 will show up.

On the contrary, that 40% rule is the rule I have afforded to literally every metal album on the site.

While my final opinion of the song is on Morpheus's side, I think 40% is a fair assessment, especially since I'm less merciful with my general 50% rule.

Oh really? Great minds think alike. I shall make a point of reading your review today.

Thank you, good sir.

A lot of this is the same as I wrote in my review for this a couple weeks ago.  Same rating, too.

I was banging my head just fine, and I usually tap anyway.

Lemme start by pointing out that the opening to this song is practically the heaviest thing that ever came out by that point.  All the noise, riffage and loud energy is there.  it doesn't even sound like Zeppelin.  The whole song is built on a hard rock riff with extra speed and energy, as well as Ian Gillan being more accepting of the "heavy metal wail" than on previous albums.  And yes, it has keyboards, but so does Highway Star and the single's tagged on RYM as heavy metal primary.  This song was the next step in heaviness, following Sabbath and Zeppelin in their footsteps and upping the ante.  Sure it has softer moments, but so does asstons of metal these days.  The artsier stuff has it all the time, look at power and symphonic.

Carnifex - Necromanteum (2023)

Genres: Deathcore

So I'm seeing people on the reddit Metal for the Masses, as well as a couple suggestions from my reddit page for other metal reddits, claiming that Necromanteum might be the best Carnifex album thus far.  I'm not really into Carnifex, as they were one of those bands I just got through the catalogue of to complete a discography and put some more deathcore under my belt, as well as balance out the overly positive ratings on my log with (hopefully) lesser quality albums.  But since I completed their studio catalog, I decided to keep it that way.

But damned if I say that I didn't wish Carnifex would try SOMETHING, ANYTHING new.  And my wish was ignored.  What is with deathcore bands and that same 360-beat tempo (doubling because "speed speed speed") as if it's a religion?  These are the kind of deathcore artists who treat variety like a Jewish priest treats bacon grease.  While there's an incredible amount of energy that keeps the album tolerable, the symphonic black elements are so undeutilized that they pretty much don't matter.  If something's going to be "blackened," I'd like a stronger dose, please.  There are only faint moments of prog metal which are only placed there to keep things edgy.

Anyway, this is all I can really say about such a generic album.  I can't even give this a 60/100 because I can pick any other Carnifex album and still get all of this.  Carnifex is lost in the so-called art of keeping up a one-trick image for street cred from overly edgy dudebros who's idea of a fine red wine is Code Red Dew.

57/100

Please add the new Carnifex - Necromanteum

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.