Rexorcist's Reviews

The glory days of The Chasm started with their third album, Deathcult for Eternity: The Triumph, which had its strengths but wasn't the legend it was made out to be by some websites. Maybe the big flaw was that it was too long? Well, with the 40 minute fourth entry, Procession to the Infraworld, I knew that wouldn't be a problem. All that mattered was what it would sound like.

I expected so many different things from this album considering what the band had done in the past and its diverse genre-tagging across the internet. But the first thing I noticed was cleaner production. THAT is a very hit or miss thing in death metal. Why it's true that the most famous death metal album, Symbolic by Death themselves, has some of the cleanest production death metal has ever been granted, I've met lot of death fans who prefer the dirty stuff. So the real question was, can this album justify the production with its heaviness or not? Well, either I just wore THAT ONE right pair of headphones, or the heaviness of this album, while not obsessive like Deathcult, was more than good enough to get by.

The opener, Spectral Sounds of the Mictlan, was really just a good instrumental intro that ran for three minutes and did a good enough job. But the magic began on The Scars of My Journey. The instruments were well-produced and well-played, but I found the vocalist just a little difficult to hear in comparison, so there's that. Already not a perfect album, but satisfactory. The song was heavy as all crap, anyway, and the black metal influence mingled perfectly. The audio problem was fixed on the third track, At the Edge of the Nebula Mortis, which wasn't quite as progressive and used its melody more sparingly, which brought out a lot of the thrash factor. So the first three tracks gradually got better and heavier.

After the third track, the high quality stays consistent, as the riffage displayed is nothing short of incredible, especially in Return of the Banished, which handles its progginess and occasional subgenre-shifting perfectly. Unfortunately, around Architects of Melancholic Apocalypse (I actually typed that title?) you kind of know what to expect by that point, despite the fact that the musicianship is still peak musicianship for death metal. So, even though you don't have anymore surprises, you will likely still have a great time.

The production and musicianship of Procession to the Infraworld beats the previous album by a country mile. But the real reason this is such a treasure is because it handles so many different kinds of metal so well and so lightly that it feels like the band can play multiple genres without even noticing. Among the progressive structures we have traces of melodeath, meloblack and thrash here. This is one of the finest death metal albums I've heard, and I'd recommend this to anyone as a good intro album to death metal since it handles so many kinds with peak consistency.

95/100

It shoves the heaviness at you instantly, and with better production values the album is all the more effective. Of course, I wasn't in love with the songwriting at first. The opening Revenge Rises/Drowned in the Mournful Blood, starts out with pretty standard riffing, showing nothing spectacular whatsoever. I hate to sound like a “prog rules all” kind of guy, but the truth is the truth in this instance: once the song kicked into prog metal, it was less predictable and it grabbed my attention. In contrast, I liked the opening riffs to the next song, No Mercy. They were wild and untamed, as were the bandmates as they thrashed through the song, even though it sounded just a little messier than it needed to be at times.

The album's quality of writing would fluxuate for a while as we get songs that are just there for thrashing purposes like I'm the Hateful Raven and songs that are there to focus on the music for artistic purposes like Apocolypse. Highlights for me are when songs get incredibly unpredictable but consistent nonetheless, like A Portal to Nowhere, which was a five-star performance as far as recounting everything the album had done beforehand went.

It's quite obvious that this album was successful among metal fans for its raw brutality. The band went from 6-10 on that scale immediately after the second album, and it switched from pure thrashing to quick-thinking and clever songwriting often. It's a good album for the death metal fan and I recommend it. It's certainly heavy and quirky enough to get the job done, although I've heard a lot of death metal that's impressed me, and I'm not sure this would make top 100 death metal for me. Nevertheless, I'll give it a good rating.

87/100

As I explored more and more metal in my early days online, some of the giants in their respective fields would typically be moved upward on my charts once I "got them."  Now I've fleshed out a criteria so strict that some of these giants are just getting seriously lowered.  Today's example would be an album I still consider great on its own merits, but I feel has been slaughtered at the altar by better bands like Morbid Angel: Consuming Impulse.  Don't get me wrong, I really do enjoy a serious metal edge here.  This is one of those albums that allowed for a perfectly produced take on an otherwise noisy metal genre to reach its fullest power without anything being drowned out.  Most of the songs here are somewhere between copies of each other and just different enough to get by, so it's a highly consistent piece with no real variety.  Death had already been established by this point, so some more of that would be appreciated.

If you want some raw thrashing for 25 minutes, this is one of the best examples, much like the Ramones debut was for the punk attitude.  But both albums are still samey throughout.  This is about the same as the Ramones debut to me.

After Nile's third album, In Their Darkened Shrines, took the metal world by storm, the upped the heaviness ante with their most popular album, Annihilation of the Wicked.  Nile cemented themselves as one of the most capable death bands of their time, but this album ensured their historical status.  After having heard this before and heard Darkened Shrines today, I had to play this one again.

Now this album just blasted brutality in my face once its acoustic intro was done and "Cast Down the Heretic" began.  This is Cryptopsy level brutality.  Of course, the next track, Sacrifice Unto Sebek, followed suite perfectly, without even letting up.  Although this is potentially a con considering that their previous album had made a point of displaying the diverse range of their one genre, the fact that they kept the brutality and technicality just as strong while keeping the song short says that this song acts more like an epilogue to our first song.  Our next track is the epic "User Maat Re," which starts off with an intro and style similar to the first two songs, so it doesn't feel very original.  However, its varying songwriting structures are consistently played throughout the whole nine minutes to keep it original.  But when "The Burning Pits of the Duat" started, it was obvious to me that this album wasn't going to change its pace like the previous album did.  In other words, it's only going to rely on the band to try and keep the most basic and generic sound that was already pioneered and perfected by Suffocation original.  Thankfully, the writing was still incredibly strong.

The album sacrifices much of the mythological and even horrific vibe of the previous album for more brutality, almost like they sold out.  But this is an exceptionally brutal album with a lot of raw talent behind it.  They obviously didn't sell out because they wanted more brutality and succeeded.  But they lost a piece of themselves thanks to the transition, so this almost cosmic vibe about their previous album was gone.  But the death metal performances themselves still denoted that this had an incredible amount of effort put into it, so I won't fault it too much.  Sameyness may be a slight problem, but some of the finest death metal performances I've heard are here, so I'll still consider it one of their best.  But I also feel like there's a bit of a case here like South of Heaven or Pleasure to Kill where the heaviest is considered the best based on that and not on the writing quality.

Well, here we go.  Yet another exercise in influence vs. quality.  The mighty Meshuggah apparently reinvented metal with this album by creating the subgenre "djent," which is an onomatopoeia for the guitar sound they were going for.  They had been working on djent for a few albums, but this fifth album of theirs is the one that gets the ladies for being JUST THAT djenty.  The genre is built on repeated angular riffs of a nature right in between avant-garde and prog.  Now I wrote a glowing review for a djent album that appears on the same Metal Academy list challenge as this: Sol Niger Within, by the guitarist of Meshuggah, Fredrik Thordendal.  That was a high creative peak for metal.  This?  Does is hold a candle?  I've heard it a couple of times before, and it didn't.  Will it hold now?

First lemme just say that I see ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to write multiple of the same 100-second song and stick them together in a way that acts like pieces of a puzzle such as other prog epics, because the idea of using the same riff for three songs at a time is definitely NOT prog.  I compare this to the more diverse Destroy Erase Improve already and there was still more diversity and creativity, while maintaining the djent focus.  I mean, don't get me wrong.  A lot of the decisions they make are very cool here.  For being such wacky alien rhythms, they do a bang up job at being just that with the right amount of personality to remain accessible.  After five albums of this, I guess that's to be expected.  But still, these guys are a djent band, which means they are a PROG band.  I mean, if you're gonna have three 100-second songs and a 13-minute song that sound the same, then you're obviously just fucking around.

Well, this one was pretty cool and all and easy to return to for its powerful persona.  But as fare as constructing an album goes, this was a bit of a bust for me.  Since it's got its strengths, I'll give it the bare minimum rating for a good album and that's it.

I don't follow Thy Catafalque very often, but I'm familiar with the way they work.  The truth is that I don't entirely agree with the "prog" and "avant-garde" tags, since the structures of most of these songs feel so typical.  But that doesn't mean the album isn't weird.  Rengeteg's tracks aren't always wild and unpredictable, but they certainly are weird.  The first track blasts you with a powerful combination of black metal and death metal, and afterwards we have heavy metal songs with occasional straying into Hungarian folk and dungeon synth, making for a truly Gothic album that plays around with music like an imp trying out different black magic spells.  And the more the album plays around, the better it gets.  It's probably a lightweight album for people wanting to get into experimental music, but that's what makes it a good introduction album at the very least. 

Esoteric emerged in the early 90's, quickly invented a new version of the music of Saint Vitus and Candlemass, and since then they've been inducted in the pantheon of doom metal.  Their funeral sound has lots of replicators but no equals... or at least that's the story.  Truth is, I've only heard a handful of funeral doom albums.  But that doesn't mean I don't like the genre at all, since there are plenty of slow-moving metal artists I like, notably The Ocean, Neurosis, My Dying Bride and Solstafir.  So it should be no surprise that I enjoy slow doom like Esoteric, and their most famous for its surreal sound is The Maniacal Vale.

Some people read the lyrics as they go along an album with indeterminable vocals.  Me, I say, "if it's indeterminable, then it's optional."  I decided to look at this album from the perspective of the aura itself and just let it all take me away.  "Circle," the opener, made the easy.  The 20-minute epic sacrifices melody and rhythm to draw you away into a dimension of deathly energy, lost in uncharted space.  You've essentially hit the astral Bermuda Triangle.  This is post-metal at some of its most atmospheric.  And honestly, I hate it when post-metal songs just play the same note constantly for their riffs.  "Circle" does that occasionally, but its atmosphere is so effortlessly thick and dense that you feel smothered.  This is what doom itself is supposed to sound like.

And it got to the point where every track on the album was essentially putting slight twists and turns on that same trick, meaning despite the shifting in tones, the album is essentially a very clever one-trick pony.  Now this isn't a bad thing if the trick is still very good each time it's played, but I can't help but compare longer albums to other longer albums, especially when a focus on heavy atmosphere is involved.  As a result, I instantly compare this to other dark, deathly and atmospheric bands: Swans, Neurosis, My Dying Bride and Sleep.  With several of their albums, there's more creativity boasted, even in a longer runtime like the two-and-a-half hour Soundtracks for the Blind.  So I wouldn't put this album in the same league as that album or The Seer.

But for 100 minutes of doom metal, each of these minutes is beautifully produced and written, so the album still greatly succeeds at giving a doom metal fan what he wants to hear, especially if he's looking for the funeral sound.  It's unlikely that I would recommend this to the average metalhead to start them off in funeral doom.  But once they get into funeral doom, they should check this out.  They may end up loving it.

No More Color is that benchmark between the accessibility of Punishment for Decadence and the extremely experimental Mental Vortex, and as a result it has everything a real thrash album needs by combining the best aspects of both albums.  As a result, this album takes technicality to a new level of catchiness.  And it really helps that these guys make heaviness look like an easy feat, and this is coming off of having finished Anthrax's Among the Living just before turning this album on.  Ron Royce's monstrous voice feels so authentic that you'd wonder if the guy really killed anyone.  Hell, "D.O.A." sounds freaking foreign to our planet, like these Swiss thrashers are really from Neptune or some crapo and they came here to annihilate us.  The album actually FEELS threatening despite how much of a jam every track is.  In fact, it's safe to say that there are very few albums that can jam this much despite its terrifying presence and technicality.  And because the album is so short, every idea the band had in this album has to work with the speed in order to perfect the mood and the presence.  I'd say it definitely succeeded there.  Listen to "Mistress of Deception" with headphones and tell me that's not the case.

Coroner's No More Color might show the effort put into it, but for the half-hour it runs, it still manages to achieve perfection.  I don't know why it took me so long to finally listen to this album by the time I started listening to albums and back in 2020, but this is one of those pieces of work which will show you exactly why thrash metal is so good.  This is the rare kind of album where every song can get away with the same goal and presence in mind because the band still manages to show a level of creativity that's hard to even train yourself to get.

The most popular prog metal band on Earth (that can make up their status) is probably Dream Theater, either that or Tool.  Tool is the more proggy band by nature, but Dream Theater is more accessible.  The Rush influence became much more obvious once their first metal opera, Metropolis, Pt. II, was released.  This album was my entryway into prog metal, and I'm tankful that this album exists.  Dream Theater may have gotten worse overtime, but one thing will never change: their classic era is made up of CLASSICS.

Metropolis, Pt. II follows in the same vein as previous rock operas like Pink Floyd's The Wall, relying on psychological storytelling centering around one man's odd, cerebral experiences.  But this time, it's more akin to TIME TRAVEL, as the story centers around the concept of "past lives."  Not only that, it's a murder mystery.  This gives the album a feeling and approach of a noir film, but still manages to be the same accessible prog that Dream Theater is known for.  LaBrie carries his soft-spoken voice perfectly through this story, effortlessly bringing out every emotion detailed in the story, and the story never gets in the way of the rhythms or progressive melodies.  In fact, they work perfectly together.  And this emotion is carried through the album, bringing out the suspense of solving the mystery while still being catchy.  Both the music and the story are bound by the common factor of cerebral behavior.

This album, thanks to its incredible story, likely deserves to be the most popular Dream Theater album.  The only thing it's missing is that oddball diversity from Images and Words, and the heaviness could be cranked up just a little bit.  But taking the mood of rush and combining it with the surrealism of Pink Floyd, and translating both into metal was exactly what metal needed, and it probably came later than it should've.  Metropolis Pt. II is essential listening for any metal fan, even if the accessibility turns of prog purists.

I've lost some of my love for Dream Theater over the years.  Metropolis, Pt. 2 was the album that got me into the progressive side of metal, so I had a special place in my heart for it for a while.  But after exploring so much prog, I grew out of that album because all of the songs were pretty much trying to do the same thing.  Such is not the case with Images and Words, which is constantly trying to reinvent itself.  The album is much heavier and more melodic than Metropolis, Pt. 2 ever was, and it doesn't keep the album from being heavily accessible.   It's a little experimental, too.  Another Day has a sax solo that sounds exactly like Kenny G (although that's not a bad thing in this instance because it somehow fits right in), and Take the Time's first verse has a funky bass solo and the 80's synths you'd get in all those later disco albums or even Prince songs.  And let's be honest, the guitar tones of Surrounded belong in an AOR song.  It's like the album is deliberately experimenting with the concept of accessibility.  If that was the mindset, then Dream Theater did a perfect job.

So let's take a quick look at Metallica's openers for Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning, and how they start off with a couple catchy and beautiful acoustic melody before going right into the thrash.  While I adore both albums, the acoustic intro of Beneath the Remains SLAYS BOTH.  Our opening title track is switching between death and thrash like it's absolutely nothing, and we can expect this to happen a lot in this album.

I'm on this album right now because I am in a serious need for a metal kick after watching some of Lords of Chaos again and having gotten through the new Burzum album, The Land of Thule (kinda lame), and since I still have to be careful about my metal intake in comparison to other genres I want to explore even further, going back to a couple albums I need to review here for the lists is the way to go.

Sepultura are Brazil's dominant thrash band for a reason: they understand what heaviness really is.  They display a variety of different ways to bring out the brutality of thrash and death even on Inner Self alone.  If you like thrash metal at all, then this is one of those perfect examples of how to endlessly thrash with a constant and never-wavering selection of riffs and rhythms that pretty much keep you on your toes at all times.  Since the songs are all following largely the same vibe, it's easy to day that it's not the most original or even groundbreaking release.  But since all of these songs are so damn good despite this old tricks, this also makes the album a perfect introduction to anyone looking to get into thrash, or even maybe to slowly break into death.  In fact, it also makes it hard to pick favorites out of this bunch of thrashers.

This is a fan-favorite for many, largely because it's their darkest and likely even their heaviest, despite the fact that it's not the most original.  I'm glad I came back to this today because I really needed some serious metal energy.

Power metal may be where my heart lies, but I am in a rare drone metal and post-metal mood, and I plan on utilizing that as much as possible.  I previously detailed my venture into the catalog of Nadja, a Canadian band who helped make drone metal what it is, partially due to their heavily packed studio discography.  One of the more well-regarded one is the one-hour track, Thaumogenesis.  Hey, I've heard Bull of Heaven albums before.  I can take this.

At first, the album starts with a lightly more imaginative take on the tropes of drone metal, molding its dark and quite atmosphere with shifting moments of melancholy and surrealism.  Within the first ten minutes it had become more than an average drone album.  And eventually the surrealism and melancholy would occasionally mingle as the album's overall tone got louder and higher (slowly, though, as it should be).  And eventually, I felt sucked into another world as the atmosphere overpowered the living room.

When I checked the time, a half-hour had past.  But the beautiful thing is that it didn't FEEL like a half-hour; it felt closer to twenty minutes.  So if someone create slow music that makes time fly, you know he's doing a good job.  And by the halfway point, this dark and surreal experience turned into a choir of orchestral reverb slowly bringing out the most beautiful moments of the album before shifting into an almost demonic raspy siren of low-tuned guitars that would make my favorite sludge band Neurosis proud.  And the shift from one tone to another was seamless and without notice.  Genius work on their part.  Once this darker atmosphere slowly shifted its focus from the guitar riff to the atmosphere (once again, slowly), the album became a true testament to emotion once again.  And after they go back to the riff focus, somehow it goes even lower than low, toning down to a hellish vibe before resorting to mellow acoustic guitar, almost like an attempt to comfort someone after descending to hell, and turning into a piece of ambiance filling the room yet again.

I'm gonna be honest, if there was a drone album I'd recommend as a starting point for exploring the genre, this would likely be it.  I found myself really enjoying this.  And yes, I prefer the album I heard last night when I was tired, Truth Becomes Death, but Thaumogenesis delivers on its good with a great deal of slow-moving experimentation, making this an effective drone album in the end.  It takes a special drone album to get a recommendation from me, and this album gets better as it goes along.  I can't say I'm a drone metal fan, but this is one of the two albums that I can say made me a Nadja fan.

I'm slowly getting into drone metal, pun intended, and I'm working my way through several Nadja albums as a starter, working my way up from the decent ones to the better ones to get the strongest idea of what's typically considered great drone.  But it's a challenge.  Drone is my LEAST favorite genre, and as a result, drone metal is my least favorite form of metal.  But this isn't to say I haven't enjoyed or seen value in Nadja so far.  After a few of their studio releases, I headed towards their live album, Trembled.

Despite being a drone album, Trembled runs at a brisk forty-five minutes.  Perfect for the beginner, right?  Well, this album is a little too perfect for a beginner, as the album doesn't really deliver any new good to the drone metal scene.  It's a pretty simple piece, giving the listener four soft, ambient tracks that alternate between a doomy-emotional feel and a soft aural melancholic atmosphere, acting as sort of a lullaby for anyone who wants to relax.  The latter is especially present in the album's Swans cover, "No Cure for the Lonely," which ends with a collection of higher sounds and drops to the bottom of the scale with a deeper and slightly more experimental track, "Corrasion."  But once again, the simple drone structure is delivered with just enough good production and emotion not to be a "bad" album.

I don't want to say Trembled was a "disappointment," but out of the few Nadja metal albums I've already checked out, this is the worst.  It offers no incredible melody or sound effects to progress or repeat like the original 2003 version of Touched, and it doesn't have a surprising level of emotion and experimentation like Truth Becomes Death.  It delivers the basics right to the core with only a little bit of style.

Let's be honest, Iron Savior are not one of Germany's best.

Iron Savior are practically the sci-fi counterpart to Rhapsody of Fire.  Both bands released their debut albums in 1997, and Iron Savior came first by seven months.  Now, metal operas were becoming more popular, especially to those influenced by Savatage or Queensryche.  It wouldn't be long before every fifth band in the metal world wanted to do a concept album.  And Iron avior was one of them.  Did that make their music better?  Not really.  They hadn't captured the sci-fi vibe the way Scanner did in their early days. 

If you don't know the story, the debut talks about the history of Atlantis, its war with another race, and the creation of a great battleship called "Iron Savior" which was seized by the enemy and used against the Atlanteans.  The Iron Savior was launched into space for thousands of years in a last-ditch effort to saver the planet, but has returned to conquer Earth.  Unification is about the humans attempting to overthrow the robot and discovering proof of Atlantis.  And this dramatic metal opera is recorded with better lyrics, getting just as much into the spirit of the story and sounding less generically power metal.  "Coming Home" opens the album, and it's level of heaviness is unbelievable, slaughtering the Iron Savior debut by staying true to heavy metal brutality and still keeping Helloween's anthemic vibes strong.  Of course, those kinds of vibes are needed for a metal opera that takes place during a great battle between man and machine.  Especially songs like "Deadly Sleep."  Piet Sielck is the perfect vocalist for this story, sounding completely masculine and full of power and energy.  And many of Kai Hansen's best solos are on this album.  Of course, he's practically the Godfather of Power Metal.  Without the necessity for trumpets or pianos, the band creates an operatic symphony on their own.  Songs like "Forces of Rage" would make Taro Bando of F-Zero fame proud.

Ther only problem with the album is that all of the songs still sound the same, despite changes in tempo.  But if you're not bothered by that, then I recommend you check out this album as soon as possible.  This is real metal, and if you like sci-fi stories then pay close attention to the lyrics.  This is a pretty cool story.

Helloween, the pioneers of power metal, made the genre possible from their early days.  Their self-titled extended play was already showing early stages of metal brilliance, but that speed metal album was only the beginning.  They had perfected themselves more and more with their albums Walls of Jericho and Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. I.  And Pt. II cemented their footprints in the everlasting heavy metal hall of fame.  Pt. II is everything a metal fan can ask for.  While the structures of most of these songs are very poppy, making the album seriously accessible, the metal energy is still very strong.  Maybe it doesn't reach the thrashing heights of Walls of Jericho, but the anthemic energy makes up for that.  Anthems to freedom like "Eagle Fly Free" and "Rise and Fall" make a full grown man wanna jump on the bed when he's just chilling in the bedroom.  But there's also a weird side to it, bringing out Helloween's jovial childishness.  Songs like "Dr. Stein" and "Keeper of the Seven Keys" bring out the sci-fi and fantasy that so many power metal bands sought to imitate and build their images off of, but they hardly feel cheesy because Helloween weren't TRYING to do anything, they just did it.  And with Michael Kiske's vocal range rising beyond the stratosphere and scratching Heaven, there's no way to resist the band's raw force.

Keeper of the Seven Keys is considered to be Helloween at its most iconic.  And while I'm not sure I'd call it their peak, it's certainly something that needs to be heard.  This was the first power metal album I ever heard, and because of that I got an early start on looking through dozens of power metal acts.  But very few of them could replicate the energy and independence that Helloween stood for during the Kiske era.  Purely incredible, and definitely essential.

Rhapsody's second album, Symphony of Enchanted Lands, is a power metal fan-favorite for two very good reasons: 1. "Emerald Sword," 2. most of the album follows in the vein of "Emerald Sword."  This reason both makes the second entry in the famous five-part metal opera their most famous, but also hurts the album.  How?  Simple.  Did you ever find an album to be monotonous or samey?  Unfortunately, half the songs of the album are essentially trying to be sequels to "Emerald Sword," bearing the same tempo, vibe, style of instrumentations, everything.  But the thing is, they're following in the vein of "Emerald Sword."  In other words, they're songs by the exact same band trying to recreate one of the most powerful and symphonic songs on Earth.  As a result, the whole album is loaded with the symphonic power metal atmosphere they themselves invented and perfected more than BLind Guardian ever did.  And as a result, we have yet another entire collection of jams that make it hard to resist the urge to get out the toy lightsaber you haven't used in years and pretend you're gonna slay a dragon with a band of metal mistrels at your side.

Most people believe this is the best album of Rhapsody's five-part album series, and their best in general.  Well, I'm different.  I believe it's the worst of the opera, but I do NOT, I repeat, NOT believe that this is their worst album period.  I actually started their sixth album and got bored, so I shut it off.  Because Symphony of Enchanted Lands is so accessible, it makes a great entry point for anyone looking to explore symphonic metal.

Helloween may have been the ones to pioneer the anthemic flow of power metal by singing about freedom and independence, but Gamma Ray were the ones to tell stories out of that feeling, and Land of the Free is a collection of those stories.  I find myself putting on their incredible opener, "Rebellion in Dreamland" every now and then.  The song is already incredible even if you have a bad speaker, but there are so many faint little details you catch with headphones, the only way to properly listen to this album.  Its melodramatic feeling is so empowering it borders on alcoholic.  But it's never too much because it never resorts to cheesy instrumentations like orchestral moments.  It's all one heavy metal band screaming for freedom, the way metal should be.  And the best part, the whole album follows in this vein.  The direct follow-up, "Man on a Mission" isn't really one for melody, but it's certainly one for empowerment.  There's no real reason for the next track, "Fairytale," to not be connected to "Man on a Mission," though.

Throughout the whole album, Gamma Ray switches from hyperspeed riffs to empowering anthems to beautiful melodies to occasional trumpeting segues, and the songs that aren't brilliant still have short bursts of brilliance, whether it be an incredible solo or just seriously heavy atmosphere.  "Gods of Deliverance" is an example of the sheer heaviness driving a song when the riffs can be a little hard to hear under the production.  However, this doesn't keep the album from boasting its presence better than Ramones ever did.  And an example of a melodic song is "Farewell," which gets right down to the nitty-gritty of the ballads that metal bands like to include in between solid thrashers like "Salvation's Calling."  There are even hints of prog metal, such as in the largely prog and speed-influenced Land of the Free, which likes to shift between a soft-spoken astral presence and bursts of metal thrashing.

How could I call myself a metal fan and not recommend this?  Every time I listen to it, I find a lot of things I like, and a few little things I don't like, but those little things are never enough to keep it from a five-star rating.  Whenever you need to feel independent or you feel like life has you in a cage, you need to just play one song from this album.  And if you're a decent human being, you'll likely play the whole damn thing.  Either that or "Rebellion" ten times in a row.

Grave Digger could never reach the heights of the giants of German power metal, and more often than not they fail to make something truly noteworthy.  Such is not the case with Tunes of War, their best album so far.  Backed up by a Scottish folk vibe to help bring out the vibe of its historical themes, Tunes of War is Grave Digger's roughest and most melodic album, and thus far the easiest to headbang to.  And because it's unique from most of their discography, the album is also their most creative.  After seven tries, Grave Digger managed to make an essential to any power metal collection, and would continue to do so with Exccalibur.

Stylistically, however, they offer little new.  Their overall genre is still pretty much the same as most of their notable works, Scottish folk influence aside.  They are all great takes on the typical power metal structure, but it's still a little typical, which is the only real flaw.  Otherwise, I recommend this for any power metal fan.

Two years beforehand, The Chasm released a fairtly impressive debut which had a little trouble balancing the death and doom atmospheres together, but still provided a sense of entertainment. We get much of the same on the follow-up, From the Lost Years, with its own strengths and weaknesses. The consensus is that this album is an improvement, but I'm not so sure.

I was not really impressed with the opener, The Gravefields. One of the major riffs was just going, nuh-NUH nuh-NUH nuh-NUH nuh-NUH, and it almost got annoying. Secret Wings of Temptation was a step in the right direction with a successfully progressive structure, and the doom elements were improved on as well, being a more serious piece of music rather than a simple genre-track opener. After these first two tracks, however, the focus of the balance between the album's three major elements is cranked up to 10, and the production flaws are largely made up for. However, since these songs are so long, they run the risk of getting boring. Once the balance kicks in, there are very few surprises left.

And... that's all I really have to say about it. If you're a huge death metal fan, then I imagine the fairly progressive structure should be enough to satisfy you for the 70-minute runtime. But in my honest opinion, this should've been cut to about half of it's length, because there are some real strengths of the album that improve on the debut, but thanks to drawing the songs out these improvements hardly matter.

The one that started it all, right? Well, yes and no. There was no instant success with this one, but they showed some real promise here, since a couple of the songs actually kick major ass. At a time when genres didn't have to be combined, the influence of early doom metal is pretty apparent here. And while that influence would be discarded when the new stuff came out (as I read about), this is still worth listening to for the band's history alone.

The key thing about this album is that it seems to follow up where the demo left off: mingling death metal with doom metal, and switching between the two. The demo wasn't very consistent with that, but this decent debut combines the two seamlessly, especially concerning Honoris Lux Infinitus, which is one of the better tracks. The Day of Liberation adds a layer of prog and carries some of the best riffs on the album. Easily my favorite song on it. The album even revives the demo track The Cosmos Within, which was a decent song on its own in the demo, but with slightly improved production, the song's better.

The album isn't without its flaws. Early on, "Confessions and a Strange Anxiety" started to bore me. The riffs just weren't good enough to keep its hold on me. So sometimes the riffs aren't good enough. That, and the album isn't super-heavy by any means. The dark atmosphere can possibly make up for that, though, not in terms of quality but in being playable. And when songs get more progressive, they either pretty hit or miss, like the difference between The Day of Liberation and the atmospheric Lonely Walker, which are side-by-side.

Problems aside, I had fun with this one and I know if it had come out just now, or if it was 1994 and this had just came out, I'd find myself eager for the next album. It's said that this is their worst album, but that's only a good thing. That means the whole discography is worth listening to, especially if we've got such a high-quality song on the debut as The Day of Liberation.

If there's one thing I admire in music, it's a band out to set out they can do anything.  We had a band like that for a couple of albums, before a nasty accident lead to a break-up" Acid Bath.  And get this: they hate it when their music is online.  But if you can pick it up or find it, I strongly suggest it because this is one of the most fun and eclectic sludge albums in the world.

Acid Bath's debut album is a legendary album for a mutlitude of reasons, the most important one being just how much this band is able to do with sludge metal.  We have a few Melvins-style jammers that go back to the roots, slow doomy songs that make a man wanna get as high as possible, a couple of death metal songs and a folk song for crying out fucking loud, and some raw psychedelia to keep things quirky and fun.  The same goes for our vocals which can go into raw screams, doomy growls and a more melodic alternative sound.  But the best thing about this album is how unpredictable it is while still feeling like "Acid Bath."  There isn't a moment wasted where the band doesn't put their personality into the music.  This is all about a love of metal, and what can be achieved through it.  Superstrong recommendation from my part.

I admit that, even as a prog fan, I never really held djent in the highest respect.  Not that I don't judge the albums fairly, but I never have the highest expectations for djent considering that it turned one of the world's most innovative music genres into a monotone mess full of would-be innovators that need to resort to grindcore and other like genres to have some sort of edge over Meshuggah.  This is because Meshuggah, who invented the "genre" brought some sort of class to it on the first ever djent album: Destroy Erase Improve.

Out intro alone, Future Breed Machine gives us this Voivod-noise atmosphere while the band effortlessly takes us through thrash, industrial, and some weird Cthulhu shit that all feels natural because Meshuggah have their own fairly unique tone.  And you really have to appreciate some of their weirder timing techniques, molding 120 BPM drums with 180 BPM guitar riffs like it's nothing, and when it's not thrashing its riffing with the same kind of energy displayed by some of the best guitarists in metal.  Soul Burn is one of the slower songs on the album, being more groove that thrash, and it pulls many of these tricks with perfect personality mingling with a healthy sense of art.  And this djent album also leaves some room to just thrash out, like with the shorter song Transfixion.  And while Vanish combines thrash with djent, its behavior in heaviness and structure is a more akin to death at times.

You may notie that I only covered the first half, well that pretty much shows you what we're dealing with.  Side B starts us off with a calmer electric guitar instrumental that us soak in the vibes while we cool ourselves off after such menacing examples of Meshuggah's power.  And it does a pretty good job at it (although it doesn't match some of the segues in Issues).  The problem here is, after the sixth track, it largely runs out of freah ideas.  I mean, unlike Hetfield in Ride the Lightning and Majewski in Butcher the Weak or Jax Coleman in Extremities, our singer here is mostly just shouting the same way usually does.  And on top of that, all the ideas that were present on the first five tracks are pretty much repeated, so the variety suffers a little bit.  But overall, the album still builds itself on its strengths while largely justifying the flaw.  There's no denying that Meshuggah were a very creative band at one point, and they've managed to maintain their rep in the music industry.  However, it would be nice to see them try to reack the creative hieghts of Destroy Erase Improve instead of just trying to maintain their djent rep.

Each time I complete one of my top 100 "insert genre here" charts on this site, I go over to the next metal genre.  The death metal binge of mine involved some acts that occasionally steered into "death doom metal," like Obituary did on Cause of Death.  So I decided after comparing a couple doom albums before my death binge, like Idolum by Ufomammut and The Dreadful Hours by My Dying Bride, I decided it was finally time to revisit those classic gothic and doom masters and re-evaluate the other albums of theirs I've heard.  Everyone seems to love Turn Loose the Swans, so I went for it.

This metal album is made of several epics, and the opener is a much more simple one, Sear Me MCMXCIII, which is a simple piano / darkwave track that builds itself on monotony and simplicity, forsaking darkwave ambiance for pure instrumental hypnotism and enough slight changes along the way to keep the song inventive.  But as simple as this beautiful opener was, it couldn't prepare you for the ever-shifting follower, Your River, which goes over a plethora of different riffs and even genres a little at a time before going into the song.  Although this should scream "inconsistency," the effect is metallic and mesmerizing.  Songs have a tendency to shift their focuses from the previous track, and this includes structure and layout.  Despite the gothic metal bits we get, there are even times for pure death metal like during segments of The Snow in My Hand.  Speaking of The Snow in My Hand, sometimes the changes are very abrupt, so be prepared for that.  The album rarely looses inconsistency for it as their ambitions and their romanticism are both working together perfectly.

Any faults?  One.  While the production gets everything across clearly, I feel like the overall atmosphere of the album pales slightly in comparison to my favorite doom album: The Dreadful Hours.  Otherwise, this is a very ambitious album where the band is getting a much stronger grasp on what they wanted as a unique metal band.  Their love for the romantic and their desire to be great musicians really showed a healthier take on metal than what a lot of metal bands have been doing for years and relying on the art of a single genre for credibility.  A little less gothic but a bit more progressive than the later Dreadful Hours, I'd say if you're going to get into doom metal, Turn Loose the Swans is obligatory.

From their debut, Mastodon had made a name for themselves as masters of riffage, and they continued to do so even when they abandoned the faster-paced punk sound and wrote the Moby Dick concept album that made them big: Leviathan.  And damn is this album a leviathan of riffage.  The whole album displays Mastodon's knack for very carefully placed melodies and riffs, treating each song like a radio jam by keeping things short, sweet and more effective as a result.  And it helps that all of these jammers are freakishly catchy prog that's easy to get into, notably its opener, Blood and Thunder.  Yes, there is in fact a prog epic on this album: the thirteen minute Hearts Alive and yes it does get a little old.  But the truth of the matter is that it's still a very catchy album.  It also helps that this is one of their heavier and sludgier releases, so there's a good reason to love it.  Maybe it doesn't have that versatile behavior from Remission or Blood Mountain, but this is a prog metal classic nonetheless, and one that I would recommend as the first non-Dream-Theater prog metal album you should play if you want to get into more of it.

Emperor's debut, In the Nightside Eclipse is a classic for many reasons, notably all of the things that made it so unique for its time.  Emperor created the symphonic black metal genre by committing a taboo worse than human transmutation, killing your parents or putting pineapple on pizza: synths in black metal.  Cue Carmax commercial ending.  But because the group took it seriously by using a thin layer throughout the whole with a more gothic and cinematic approach than anything, as well as going head-to-head with some astounding riffs and melodies, Nightside Eclipse became an instant classic.

What we have here is a thematic improvement on every aspect of Nightside.  The elements that comprise Nightside are a heavily present but thin layer of dungeon synths, melo-traditional behavior and clean production.  On Welkins, everything here is not only improved, but refined like a purified crystal, now with some or another power of night, darkness, yadda yadda.  The album is one of those that goes through a plethora of influences ranging from some of the most blatantly gothic synth the genre has, newly found progressive styles, and the original genre components of Nightside, all purified... but like Butcher the Weak, it recycles the same influences throughout more than half of these songs.  This is because of the final element of Nightside: the shifting riffs and layouts.  This is what united the identities of Nightside as one whole, and it largely does the same here.  But I'll be damned if I didn't honestly say that each melody and riff wasn't great if not incredible.  I gave Butcher the Weak five-stars for that behavior because it worked, and this 40-minute maelstrom of gothic evil lasts without a real blemish throughout its 40 minutes.  I mean, technically each song is predictable when you think about it: heavy start, several symphonic riffs, abrupt ending.  But each song is pulled off in an almost beautiful manner.

There is dirty, edgy and speed-based metal like Darkthrone or Immortal which knows how to amaze, and then there's the orchestral presence of Emperor, especially on Welkins, where the album doesn't simply "emit demonic energy: it glows black and violet behind its thickly green album cover, never oozing or dripping, just glowing.  The definition of the album is majesty, and is a rare example of me giving an album with "technically" samey behavior on a song-to-song basis five stars.  The finest tuned axample of symphonic black metal I can think of, Welkins is a rare breed by a band all about crafting a different kind of breed each album.  All of these songs amaze with the various influences, and that shows something: Emperor can actually get away with the behavior that leads many bands to write the same song over and over again, because Emperor still had new rhythmic and melodic tricks up their sleeves.

Black Metal had been out for about a decade by the point of this album's release.  We already had a revolution that was beating Venom at their own game, a dorky club pretending to be a cult before someone killed the founder of the club, and of the genre, and the same year as this album was the long awaited release of Mayhem's debut studio album.  By this point, Darkthrone had cemented itself as one of the greatest metal bands on Earth to the masses, and Immortal was just starting.  It had a crazy run before we finally got to Emperor.  Unlike grunge, black metal lived on because it was a niche market that relied on negative rep.  Emperor might've lost their lead influence, but they didn't lose their willpower.

In the Nightside Eclipse was their first outing, and to this day it remains one of the most emulated black metal albums on Earth.  In fact, this album represents a lot of firsts.  The most notable "first" of this album is the dungeon synthesizers, which were an unholy sin that even black metal fans wouldn't commit.  That's boldness for ya'.  And it's not ham-fisted or cheesy in anyway shape or form; they're gorgeous in their Gothic behavior, creepy as hell and add a thick layer of personality without being overused.  Another one is the clearer production.  The guitars might be quite dirty, but through the clean production you get not only the most of the beautiful synths, but the most of the guitars.  let the shredding handle the, ahem, dirty work.

Our singer, Ihsahn, has that absolutely perfect voice for the job.  If you're familiar with their second album, Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk, you might recognize something about this album.  It sounds more like typical black metal, right?  Right and wrong.  These guys were one of the first bands to really perfect what the pure sound of black metal is with the right production, except they also had a symphonic sound to work with.  So instead of being Darkthrone knockoffs, they became something more medieval, fantasy-inspired and epic.  In a way, they totally beat Darkthrone, making a new sound even more fresh, something these guys would do continuously throughout their four album streak.  They were a great bridge between melodic, traditional and the newly formed symphonic brands of black metal.  In other words, this album is purely essential by any definition for technical and melodic proficiency.  On top of that, it sounds exactly like its incredible cover wants you to think it sounds like, so there's a perfectly fitting cover, and one of my personal favorites.

Although it must be said that most of these songs sound very much the same.  I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't point that out.  Maybe I need to compare this to their "worst" release, Equilibrium IX, but I feel that they had every ability to try to write songs with different approaches and they completely neglected that in the long run, relying on smaller surprises in a few areas rather than trying new things.  At least the album never gets boring.  But on top of that, I think there's a newfound diversity that's still there, especially for its time.  On top of the aforementioned balance between traditional, melodic and symphonic black metal, there are notable traces of gothic metal and prog metal to it, so despite its obvious flaw it's actually quite revolutionary.  Because of this, there's a constant aura eminating from what could be a perfect black metal sound in general, something that's difficult to achieve, and Emperor somehow found a way to make it look easy on their first album.

In the Nightside Eclispe will be iconic throughout the rest of metal history.  It's going to serve as an example of how to perfect the black metal sound, even though it suffers from monotony in comparison to more creative outings by not only Emperor but by other bands.  If your going to check out Emperor, I suggest you do it in chronological fashion.  This is the kind of album that will keep you headbanging throughout its entire run.  For all of its innovations, this is at least a mile ahead of the earlier traditional black metal classic, A Blaze in the Northern Sky by Darkthrone.

1987 was one of the most incredible years in the history of recorded music.  We had experts of practically every genre belting out some of the most amazing compositions you've ever heard, even reaching parts of your soul you didn't know you had.  Most famously, Guns N' Roses had released their diversified and spirited street rock debut Appetite for Destruction, which is ranked among the finest debut albums ever, Def Leppard had improved once again on their essential arena rock album Hysteria, Swans mastered their sense of atmospheres with a wide-ranging album called Children of God, Dead Can Dance let out their best album, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, Webber's Phantom of the Opera made it to vinyl, Paul Simon kickstarted a worldbeat fad with Graceland, Jackson followed up Thriller with perfection on Bad, and even Karajan released the most haunting version of Requiem I've ever heard.  I haven't even dived into David Sylvain, U2, Helloween or Dinosaur Jr. here.

With so many raw classics from many different worlds, you're probably wondering, where's the thrash metal?  Right here.  Testament's The legacy is yet another powerful debut which spelled nothing but good for the band's future.  While this style had largely been done many times before, taking a couple little points away from the originality, you'd be hard-pressed to find any riffs this insane that came out during 1987.  Some of Skolnik's riffs even rival that of the works of Slayer on their albums Seasons of the Abyss and South of Heaven.  The Haunting is one of the finest examples of just how wild the band can go.  And another excellent plus is Chuck Billy's voice.  He sounds like that darker middle ground between Dave Mustaine and Vince Neil with all of the good attached and none of the bad.  And because his voice is deeper than both, his overall sound is just extraordinary.  Chuck's got the perfect voice to replicate if you wanna start a pizza thrash band like Havok.

While this is an absolutely standard thrash album as far as its sound and diversity goes, the musicianship is peak and the riffs are some of the best in the whole genre.  While I can't really compare this to some of the more creative legends like Rust in Peace and And Justice for All, this comes close and deserves to be checked out by anyone getting into metal, not just thrash.  Even if all you like is cheesy stuff like Acheron, I'd still recommend this.

Finland is a key country in the power metal scene.  If I had to think of a "Big 4" to describe Finnish power metal just as thrash has Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax as their official four is music discussion and marketting, and just as Germany's "Big Four of Power Metal" is Helloween, Blind Guardian, Gamma Ray and Running Wild, I'd have to say that an official big four for Finland's power scene would be Stratovarius, Nightwish, Sonata Arctica and Children of Bodom.  The most famous album from this group seems to be Nightwish's Once, but the most iconic among metal fans seems to be Stratovarius's Visions, which showcases the band's best efforts and made the efforts look easy.  However, I also feel that it's easier metal to make than most other acts.

I think the biggest reason why Stratovarius are so big is because they are uncannily good at atmosphere.  Sometimes their music just gets otherworldly, and this sometimes makes up of the lack of anything truly spectacular in metal's essential fields of rhythm and force.  As far as I'm concerned, the finest example of Finnish power metal is Sonata Acrtica's sophomore, Silence, for its clever handling of the progressive and neoclassical influences.  But the truth is simple: Stratovarius got their first, and the influences are more noticable because Stratovarius had much more practice by that point.  This is also likely the reason why Visions is considered the finest Finnish power metal album in the world.  The rhythms certainly have a lot of jam-factor and atmosphere, which makes for a beautiful combination here.  But the truth of the matter is that the album isn't perfect for one very good reason: these melodies aren't the most original or outstanding.  You don't have to be a prog band to think of something new, and I don't really feel like the album offers anything new.  It does, however, offer a lot to like, since they make atmosphere look not only easy, but accessible.  So I'd say that this largely unremarkable album is driven by a form of imagery that is exactly what metalheads want in the vein of science fantasy vibes.

I'm gonna be fully honest, this is one of the worst pieces of trash I've ever heard.  Deathcore is supposed to be a true tstament to the bridge between the extremist forms of hardocre and metal, yes... but that doesn't mean they can pretend their Frank Zappa and just wail like hell and expect it to work.  Right Squidward?  There isn't a single likable thing about any of the songs.  Any simple, cheap-ass rhythms are brought down even further by terrible production and the most unintelligible wailing I've ever heard.  The only thing the album could've had going for it is consistency, and even then that just means there's too much.  It gets tiring too quickly.  At least this was their worst album.  They improved greatly once they became a nu metal band... yes, that is precisely how bad this album is.

Italy is just as essential to modern power metal as America or Germany.  Let's keep in mind that there are three power metal songs the world loves to emulate, usually the first three that comes up when you google "power metal songs": "Through the Fire and the Flames" by Dragonforce, "Mirror Mirror" by Blind Guardian and "Emerald Sword" by Rhapsody.  Now Rhapsody redefined symphonic power metal with their metal operas, but that doesn't mean that's the only kind of power metal worth looking into.  Before Rhapsody, there was Labyrinth, and before "Emerald Sword," there was Return to Heaven Denied, an album with a focus on perfecting the tropes of contemporary power metal, and it succeeds in every way.  The problem is simple: they aren't popular enough in AMerica to talk about...

Depending on whichever effects and instruments they use, RtHD displays Labyrinth's signature sound faintly switching from typical power metal to light sci-fi to light fantasy.  The many elements that contribute to the album are never quite overused, so you get the full power metal experience without any serious risk taken.  On top of that, the album is quite heavy.  "New Horizon" is an excellent example of just how rough and nasty their guitars can sound, despite the fact that their primary focus is atmosphere and melody.  And "The Night of Dreams" is an example of how the album can switch its focus on different types of metal without losing consistency.  It's easily more recognizable as a prog metal ballad in the style of Dream Theater than straightforward power metal.  Neoclassical organs, synth effects and violins can take over in focus without a direct genre-switch, and it can get to the point where a song can simply focus on beauty and an aquatic/heavenly feeling like "Lady Lost in Time" before coming back at you with the heavy power metal.  And the act of drawing songs out is rare on this album, despite the obvious progressive behavior in several songs.  And because these extre-stylistic elements are used lightly, it feels almost as easy going as Sonata Arctica made it out to be on Silence.  And sometimes we have songs that focus almost purely on heaviness, but still have room for neoclassical melody, like "Thunder."

I'm not sure I'd call this a perfect album since i8t doesn't really offer anything "new" or "original."  But it offers some of the best of the power metal tropes that had been around at that time.  In some ways, this album is better than Helloween's Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. II, but I'd still say it's a worse album because that Helloween album practically cemented power metal perfection during its earliest stages, and Return to Heaven Denied simply perfected the common tropes.  But still, the album is more consistent in the sense that each song is largely maintaining a 95/100 average.  It's worth noting that Labyrinth doesn't have the skill to top the best songs on Keeper Pt. II, but if I were to select a top five power metal album starter set for noobs, Helloween's aforementioned album would be the first, and this would be the second in the pack

Edguy seems to be an essential for power metal fans to look for, especially due to the album Vain Metal Opera.  Edguy was Tobias Sammet's band before forming the superior Avantasia, and the connection can be seen.  Truthfully, Edguy's best albums are worth checking out, especially this one, even though it's a pretty standard album.

The album starts with a symphonic intro that focuses more on lyrics and vocals than anything, which isn't exactly common for power metal intros.  However, the obvious attempt to be the next Helloween is pretty obvious from the start.  One can find faint traces of Avantasia coming out of the music, traces that will fully bloom by the time Sammet founds the band.  But until then, we're relying on heaviness ans riffage.  With the symphonic sound occasionally popping up, one has to ask, does this really stand the test of time?  Well, it certainly has a strong air of independence, and there aren't many power metal albums heavier than this.  And for a little while at least, the album shifts its emotional focus without losing its consistency, even if it's steering near minstrel territory like "Scarlet Rose" does.  The band didn't need to try hard to maintain their sense of drama.  The heaviness and occasional classical vibes carried that feeling strongly.  Basically, the album is occasionally acting like an opera, and it succeeds more often than it fails.

Overall, the album is very heavy, quite dramatic as a result, and has a lot of great rhythms.  The problem is that there's almost nothing here that stands out as "amazing," but this is still a good enough album to recommend, especially if you like the 80's power metal works.

I understand that right now, Iced Earth is cool to hate for reasons every metalhead knows about.  I really don't want to get into that, because the music itself can still be really good.  In this album's case, the music is absolutely phenomenal.  It's unpredictable and includes a plethora of influences from the entire metal spectrum, such as the combination of death metal and symphonic metal in the title track.  And yet, this feels completely consistent with the obvious doom metal sound of "Diary," which includes surreal instrumentation in the background to make the aura more distressing and authentic before flat-out morphing into a heavy/power metal song.  Not only that, but this is the most melodic album they've done during their classic era, and it's full of dark and Gothic imagery that Cradle of Filth wishes they could achieve.  This is the kind of consistent genre-hopping that made Hell II so brilliant.  "Brainwashed" even begins with a Gothic low-toned solo reminiscent of some works of Metallica before emerging into an otherworldly extravaganza of symphonic keys and psychedelic riffage pairing with the death metal beautifully.  This track is thrash first and formost, but Iced Earth obviously didn't care about limits or status among a specific fanbase they way they clearly did on Night of the Stormrider.  It's also worth noting that this is one of their heaviest songs.

One thing that could potentially annoy people is the album's uncommon but noticeablehabit of changing genre and tempo instantaneously with little to no sense of buildup or transition, which might feel a little "cut and paste" in its behavior.  And yes, it has annoyed people before.  Then again, the segues on Nightfall in Middle-Earth annoyed people before, as well.  Honestly, the songs suffer only very so slightly that this oversight on Iced Earth's part is completely made up for by everything else.  Besides, the habit itself only happens occasionally.  It's practically no problem at all in the second act.  All things considered, this album does way to many things beyond right.  Iced Earth proved that they weren't just another metal band who popped out a great album with Night of the Stormrider.  Even for just one album, they evolved to a level of metal blackness that is hard to achieve without letting musicianship suffer.

From an early point in his musical career, Burzum wrote the book on how to produce a good black metal album, and Hvis lyset tar oss delivers on all of the basics well enough to get by.  It mastered the cold winter aesthetic and has some beautiful melodies emitting from its dungeon synth atmosphere, and Burzum expresses his anger perfectly through his vocal delivery.  So it fits right in with traditional black metal, the depressive stuff and the winter metal people love so much these days.  However, despite mixing its ingredients well, nothing really amazed me.  On top of that, everything about this album was dethroned by the subsequent album, Filosofem, which came closer to amazement.  But if you need a good example on how black metal typically operates, check this out.

I only recently became a big fan of Symphony X.  By this point, I've heard almost all of their albums and I'm been finding myself going back to the albums I've already heard more often than most prog bands I've heard, even my ex-favorite Dream Theater.  This is progginess at a very creative level, and they keep being creative even by today's standards.  And one of those shining gems is ironically their most accessible, Paradise Lost, which sacrifices some of their signature neoclassical sound (the genre they perfected) for more straightforward prog.

The album starts out with the band's best "intro" song, "Oculus Ex Inferni," which boasts the band's strongest symphonic sounds yet.  Honestly, the intro is so magical that you'd have to wonder if James Horner wrote it.  Then "Set the World On Fire" comes up, and it's probably Symphony X's heaviest song so far.  There are significantly less neoclassical elements as a result, leading the organ the band loves so much to be an occasional element of instrumental focus.

Obviously, Paradise Lost was an attempt in making their most "metal" album, and while I willingly promote the progression and right to change a signature sound, the album did come off as a little samey at the end.  But these guys have not lost any of their identity; they just cranked the power of their prog and power metal up a notch.  In "Domination," it's more of the same but with a little more groove.  Nevertheless, Russell Allen is wailing like he's got something to gain, and as a result there's a lot of spirit and power in the songs, and he keeps itself from being "too much," even though the extra power could potentially be considered too much when compared with past albums.  There is more of this kind of vibe with the edge factor cranked up until we reach its first ballad, the title track.

That title track is fucking addicting.  The instrumentation of the 6-6-6-7 timing of the intro is one of the most beautiful opining melodies I've heard, and the rest of the song progresses along with that beauty.  True, the lyrics to the verses are damn typical, but the chorus is so beautifully worded that it almost doesn't matter (besides, the lyrics are still better than the damn catchy Huntik theme).  And once we reach the guitar solo, it manages to be a metal solo but still carry that melodic beauty of the intro well with its very high pitch.  I just wrote a full paragraph for the once song.

Immediately afterwards, we get the heavy metal riffage of "Eve of Seduction," which carries an attitude only seen in 80's-90's hard rock and grunge for most of it, so the song itself ends up being a real jam, despite the fact that it's still susceptible to the progressive nature of the album.  Afterwards is the second-to-longest track, "The Walls of Babylon," which begins with a surreal Babylonian instrumentation... but then tricks you and goes right back to the heavy metal.  Still, the way the international influences are mingled in rings heavily of the best works of Therion.  It's also their most progressive song on this album, as the metal, symphony and progginess switches around for three-and-a-half minutes until we get our lyrics.

Afterwards is "Seven," which is the most blatantly power-based and neoclassical, ringing some memories of "The Divine Wings of Tragedy," despite the fact that its cheesy power metal lyrics ring of past heavy-power acts like Grave Digger.  Next is "The Sacrifice," and I don't have much to say about this one except that it's yet another great ballad, but nowhere near as good as the title track because it's more melodramatic, and once again our friend Russell feels the need to wail like a lion.  And finally, we hit the big grand finale, the epic "Revelation," which carries a tone, structure and vibe very reminiscent of "Evolution" from their previous album V: The New Mythology Suite, carrying a very strong heavy prog presence, and vocals by Russell which aren't as loud or over-the-top.

Diehard prog fans may be turned off by the newfound accessibility of Symphony X, but this is not to say that they sold out.  The musicianship is still at peak level, even though it's more straight-up prog than neoclassical.  Honestly, if you like your metal heavy, the this is definitely the Symphony X album for you.  It's not a worse Symphony X, just a more traditional form of prog metal (and I separate "traditional" from "generic" in this instance).  I give this my highest recommendation, as it is a perfect entryway into Symphony X and prog metal.

Symphony X are pretty much the go-to band for the neoclassical sound.  Yes, there were earlier guitar pioneers, like Yngwie Malmsteen, but Symphony X are about the BAND, not the riffs.  It took three albums for them to perfect the art of riffage, thus being the firest neoclassical prog metal act.  Divine Wings of Tragedy is seen by some as their opus, but they hadn't yet mastered the art of album-making, which requires some diversity to stay as strong as possible for an hour.  That's something Divine Wings of Tragedy didn't quite have.  Twilight in Olympus had it in spades, and because of that I feel it is my proud obligation to express my opinion that Twilight in Olympus shows clear superiority over Divine Wings, which is an unpopular opinion to say the least.

Divine Wings of Tragedy was all about the progressive riffage mingling with the classical, but it was pretty much one kind of classical.  Twlight in Olypus sounds like it is in fact a magical album, one that givies into the glitter without giving up the crunch.  Because of this, the more surreal and mythical moments feel so natural that it's easy to float on a cloud whiles and at the same time headbanging.  This is very true for some of the more conventional songs as well, such as the incredible opener Smoke and Mirrors and the later Orion, which mingle the pop structure with the neoclassical prog sound beautifully.  But our show stealer is the thirteen minute epic, Through the Looking Glass, which recounts the story of the same name with a type of magic unheard of in previous Alice in Wonderland songs, one that does everything a prog epic should, deliver a part of a rock opera while carefully balancing out the multiple essential aspects of rock, metal, prog and classical.  bsolutely flawless.

This album carries a lot of tricks up its sleeves that Divine Wings didn't have, and to this point the album is only surpassed by the band via V: The New Mythology Suite, and closely followed by Paradise Lost.  This is THE essential neoclassical sound which anyone hoping to get into the genre should probably check out first.  This is also the album I return to the most when I want serious magic.

Aside from the solo careers of Vinnie Moor and Yngwie Malmsteen, there weren't many people taking part in the more neoclassical side of metal.  Two bands can be thanked for bringing classical to metal: Blind Guardian and Symphony X.  Blind Guardian started as a thrash band and eventually evolved into a more classical one over the course of six albums.  Symphony X, however, started immediately.  But they needed practice in making it sound good.  By their third album, The Divine Wings of Tragedy, they had done it.

Divine Wings of Tragedy is a 65 minute blast of symphonies and and technical riffage that never once lets up.  The first and foremost aspect of the album is the art of the tune.  Yes, there are plenty of moments where the band goes off on hyper-technical construction where some might call it pretentiousness, but the truth of the matter as that every note, every progression and every effort to capture the essence of the Western Classical era is lived up to.  SOme of the most incredible guitars solos I've ever heard are on this album, and practically the whole album is incredible.  And their singer, Russell Allen, gives it his all.  His range is at full display as he knows when to sing like a rough and nasty metal artist, when to be more soft-spoken and to reach soaring heights.

There is one faint problem with the album.  The entire album takes right after the opener, "Of Sin and Shadows," which means despite being incredible, it's essentially predictable by the end because the pace itself isn't really changes and these songs don't really have their own identity.  But for some, that may not matter, because as a metal album, it's practically a perfect example of how to balance riffs, melodies, aethetic and meaning.  This is a very complex album in terms of structuring.  And it serves as a great entryway into the neoclassical genre that Symphony X redefined.

I discovered Sonata Arctica through their sophomore release, Silence, and I fell in love with it.  At the time of playing their music for the first time, I was aware that the metal masses consider their best release to be their debut, Ecliptica.  I wasn't fully converted, but I admit this is far better than most power metal albums I've heard.  Sonata Arctica's sense of magical energy and hyper-jovial attitude reached soaring heights right from the get-go as neoclassical guitars effortlessly carry the overpowering mood from one track to another.  Ecliptica boasts some of the finest power metal solos and riffs known to man, and the band made it look easy, proving that they didn't need any time to develop their style over the course of their musical career.  They were already brilliant.  The key factor in the difference between Ecliptica and Silence is that the latter boasted more diversity, switching from power to prog to neoclassical to ballad to jam to epic.  The debut is different in the sense that most of the songs, while typically brilliant, are effectively attempting to achieve the same goal of hyper-jovial energy and riffage.  But nevertheless, this album boasts early stages of brilliance, and it's a shame that the Sonata Arctica albums of recent times can't carry that same spirit anymore.

The creators of death metal, the very band the genre is named after, weren't just a bunch of guys that did really good metal.  They KEPT ON revolutionizing the genre.  All this started when they released what was potentially the heaviest album ever made with their debut: Scream Bloody Gore.  It ended when they made death metal an accessible genre with their sixth album, Symbolic.  And in the middle of that was a strange progression from the ultra heavy sophomore, Leprosy, the more technical but still underwhelming Spiritual Healing, and the album that turned death metal into an intelligent genre where one had to actually think, you know, beyond making gory sentences out of long words and medical terms.  They turned death metal into a metal genre for thinkers and intellectuals, one that was all about exploring the human condition, and that album was named: Human.

This is the second-to-last album to feature the traditional tone of Death albums before they raised the thrash influence on Symbolic.  This also means it bridges the gap of general accessibility between the raw thrashing and the lighter and more melodic introspection.  So suffice it to say, this is the most representative of the whole Death catalogue.  Because this is the first to get really technical, the drummer hired from Cynic was allowed to get crazy with it and build a real beat-based album by just being himself.  The intro of our first track, Flattening of Emotions, literally opens up with the drummer bridging a weird gap between tribal atmospheres and jazzy technicality.  This is a major factor for what makes Human one of those albums where tempo changes feel so fluent and natural, and the rest of the band is doing what they can to keep up with that technicality.  This also has to do with the clean production and the flawless flow of the album, the latter of which leads me to call into question the typical criticism I have where an album's songs are a little difficult to truly differentiate from each other because of so few changes in style, save for the softer and more melodic instrumental, Cosmic Sea.  I mean, how many blastbeat sections need to be at 200 BPM?  This isn't a symphonic power metal album.

Human redefines death metal in a plethora of ways.  It captures the roughest and nastiest sides of the band's music without relying on the goriness of previous albums, because there's a lot of room for intelligence and sophistication that they rarely wasted.  This album is the definition of effort, as an overwhelming amount of it was put into the idea of composition.  Death pulled a Wes Craven by focusing less on the rated-X sex, gore and yadda yadda, and focusing more on themes.  In other words, Chuck grew the hell up.  And while the recycling of the same base structural ideas does get on my nerves slightly, I'm still going to commend this as the standard sound for what a death metal album should be like.

At the time of Blind Guardian's conception, they were just another speed band trying to make it big in a German scene.  There was no way in hell they could compete with Helloween, who defined the power metal sound.  This isn't to say they were bad, but they couldn't hold one of their LOTR-scented candles to them or Running Wild.  But thanks to them and Symphony X, the classical/symphonic influence was no longer a lyrical thing.  Albeit, Symphony X got right to it with their debut, and Blind Guardian slowly built it up from Tales from the Twilight World.  Just before the band went almost full-symphonic, there was that transition from speed to fantasy: Tales from the Twilight World, Somewhere Far Beyond, and one of their two most iconic albums: Imaginations from the Other Side.

Imaginations delivers all of the goods a true Blind Guardian fan should want from them: the speed, the symphony, the heaviness and the pop-culture poetics.  The title track alone lets you know just how hard these guys will thrash without being an extreme band, but at the same time the heavy symphonic sound is exactly like something you'd expect from a "dark fantasy" film like The Dark Crystal.  Truly epic without overdoing it.  And Hansi Kursch, as a singer, absolutely refuses to control himself, which helps the heaviness a lot more than it hinders.  And thankfully, not every song is just another excuse to be as heavy as possible at a 180 beat rhythm that power metal fans obsess over (thanks a lot, Rhapsody).  There are moments of true poetic focus, such as the minstrelized "A Past and Future Secret" and the perfectly placed grand finale, "And the Story Ends."  And melodically speaking (which is most important for the so-called subgenre "melodic power metal"), most of these songs fall into the best of Blind Guardians melodies, along with the majority of their near equal follow-up, Nightfall in Middle-Earth.  But the edge this album has on Nightfall IS in fact edge itself.  Nightfall pioneered the symphonic sound by sacrificing most of the speed edge, so it sets up a new era of Blind Guardian, forsaking the speed until the singles for 2022's The God Machine was released.

Imaginations provides the ultimate Blind Guardian experience, perfectly balancing the best of both worlds in the best of all ways.  Key tracks like the title (my personal favorite power metal song), "Bright Eyes" and "The Script for My Requiem" may be among the best BG songs, but there is no such thing as filler on this masterpiece.  With Imaginations from the Other Side, Blind Guardian proved that they could stand with the greats like Helloween and Running Wild, and that the brilliant Somewhere Far Beyond wasn't a one-time success or a fluke.  This is the peak of power metal.

There was a time when I just wasn't into this album, going as far as to consider it heavily bloated and a little too thrashy.  Maybe I just wasn't into thrash at the time.  I had to take some time to get used to heavier metal, and eventually I did.  At that point, this was my number 1 Metallica album for a while.  But I always felt this itching feeling like I was overrating it a little.  At this point, I've come to accept Ride the Lightning as the better Metallica album because despite the fact that Metallica's style had fully matured during MoP, RtL was the better METAL album.

Master of Puppets is a lot like a companion piece to Ride the Lightning.  Both albums start out with a moody acoustic melody, but I'd give the edge on the intro to MoP.  "Battery" might not be as heavy as "Fight Fire With Fire" (although that's a high bar for heaviness), but the songwriting is improved, and the melody is catchier.  The title track is probably Metallica's crowning achievement, because its level of poetry and melody, as well as the progressive nature that would define many songs of MoP and In Justice for All, were all at their creative peak.  The album shifts from thrash metal monstrosities to slow and doomy songs which may evolve into eruptions, thus bridging the gap between thrash metal and 890's heavy metal akin to the level of brutality displayed on Iron Maiden albums of the time.  But Metallica were a little more Gothic.  After two thrashers and two songs bridging the gap between the two genres (and ending with a prog influence akin to RtL's "Fade to Black), the album gets right back to thrashing with "Desposible Heroes," continuing this theme with the weakest song, "Leper Messiah," similarly to how RtL continued the thrashing with "Trapped Under Ice" and the album's weakest song, "Escape."  And finally, the proggy nature of the final two tracks on each album end it with bursts of creativity that act as proper finales, with the only difference being that the seventh song and the ending instrumental of RtL have their album positions switched on MoP.

The album's darker tone and cleaner production are part of the reason metal maniacs have accepted this as a contender for the finest metal album ever made, but I still feel that it's slightly bloated in comparison to RtL.  But the dark vibe, incredible lyrics and pefect melodies are so addicting that the replay value of this album surpasses many other metal albums.  You could play this twice in a row and not get tired.  This is one of thrash metal's finest achievements, and proved to the world that Metallica were the next true artists, and that brutally heavy metal has a purpose.