Sonny's Forum Replies

I don't much care for metalcore at all, but Trivium's previous feature release, In Waves, I actually found surprisingly listenable, so I was more than a little sceptical about Daniel's Nickelback jibe (I really don't like Nickelback). After listening to In the Court of the Dragon this evening though, I think he has a point. On several songs, but especially on Like a Sword Over Damocles, the shadow of Chad Kroeger is cast long. In fact, I swear a couple of tracks sound like Slipknot/Nickelback collaborations (no, this is unlikely to be a good thing!).

Anyway that aside, following the unexpectedly positive experience I had with In Waves I found this disappointing. It feels like an album that has been written by market researchers, the songs optimised to sell the maximum number of t-shirts. I don't hate it - it isn't offensive enough to generate that much emotion - but it just ploughs a completely different furrow to what I personally find interesting in metal.

2/5

Well it's only an initial listen-through so far, but it seems that The Infinite continues to impress with the quality of it's monthly features. I'm gonna add Core to the albums by Lucid Planet, Altesia and Ne Obliviscaris that I've enjoyed hugely over recent months. I will endeavour to produce a review at some point after further spins. Great choice Andi.

Black Sabbath - "Mob Rules" (1981)

40 years young today!! I first heard this one through my best mate's older brother when I was in my early high school years back in the late 1980's & it's still my pick of the Dio-fronted Sabbath albums to this day. It's darker & heavier than the widely preferred but slightly more commercially focused "Heaven & Hell" which gives it the edge. Still sounds great all these years later too.

Agreed and Falling Off the Edge of the World is Sabbath's best Dio era track.

A new favorite track for me from 1914's new album, Where Fear and Weapons Meet. Genuinely affecting, especially leading up to Armistice Day, and one of the best anti-war songs ever.

Never fear Sonny. Your entries meant there was no need for me to hunt down War Metal tracks for inclusion. You covered that for me perfectly! 

Yeah, I'm sorry about that Ben, but as our selections are intended to reflect our listening over the previous month and I had only been listening to war metal for my North-related fix, I ended up submitting only tracks from those albums. I will endeavour to be less of a dick in future as, now I've had a taste of compiling a list myself, I realise that it throws up additional challenges.

Suggestions for December:

Mare Cognitum - Occultated Temporal Dimensions (11:23) from Luminiferous Aether (2016)
Antaeus - Inner War (4:28) from Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan (2000)
Marduk - Beast of Prey (4:07) from Panzer Division Marduk (1999)
Runtime: 19:58

I thought I'd forgotten to post my suggestions, but I've just noticed they are there.

The new album from much underrated Floridian death doomers Worm. If you like foetid-sounding death doom that sounds like it crawled out of some necrotic, ooze-filled swamp then these are your guys.

The closer and best track from the brand new Monolord album is a trad doom epic.

Managed seven of the nine features this month and enjoyed most of them. In order of awesomeness:

The North: Panopticon - Kentucky (2012) 5/5

The Fallen: Reverend Bizarre - III: So Long Suckers (2007) 4.5/5

The Pit: Kreator - Extreme Aggression (1989) 4.5/5

The Infinite: Ne Obliviscaris - Portal of I (2012) 4/5

The Guardians: Fates Warning - Night on Brocken (1984)  4/5

The Sphere: Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid (1990) 2.5/5

The Horde: Necrophagist - Epitaph (2004) I'm not going to rate this as I only listened to it once and so that would be unfair.

Well this one came and hit me straight out of left field. I am unable to put Night on Brocken into any kind of context within Fates Warning's discography as this is the first album of their's I have listened to, but I derived a huge amount of enjoyment out of it in it's own right and I think if I had heard it upon it's release back in '84 I would have been a massive fan. Sure, it's quite derivative, drawing heavily on Iron Maiden and particularly Judas Priest for influence, but it is an album so chock full of infectious riffs and sheer exuberance that it would be churlish to dismiss it. Sure the production isn't the most accomplished, but I kind of like the effect, particularly on the rhythm section. What with it's triumphant heavy metal and truly bonkers cover art, I have got to admit to being won over by it's charms and would count this as a great example of early eighties US metal.

4/5

I'm very excited to announce that Vinny will be taking over the programming & management of the monthly Metal Academy Radio "The Pit" Spotify playlist moving forwards (starting with the November list). I think this will be a real win for the site as it was always hard to me to ensure the highest quality standards when programming nine two-hour playlists every month. I'm very excited to see what Vinny will pump out each month too as our tastes are pretty well aligned & he's consistently shown himself to have his finger on the pulse as far as underground releases go.

This is a great move and this collaborative approach, which has already proved popular with the monthly feature releases, is a really exciting direction for the site to take. Good luck to Vinny and Andi and I'm really looking forward to what those guys come up with on the playlists going forward. Speaking for myself, I hugely enjoyed putting November's Fallen playlist together and hope that it ticks the right boxes with everyone. It is a task I have approached very seriously as I feel the playlists are one of the major external faces of the site and I'm sure I speak for all involved in saying I hope we can provide a positive face and help to grow Metal Academy in the future with our efforts. Also many thanks and much respect to Daniel for what I now realise must have been his many hours of dedication in putting together NINE playlists every month solely for the enjoyment of other metalheads.

Just looking at some of the albums in the Anniversaries section and one is by a black metal outfit I've never heard of called Ceremonial Castings who have fourteen albums on here with no ratings and a highest number of ratings on RYM of 64 with some in single figures. Judging by the covers, these are professional releases and all are available on CD, although they are released on Dark Forest which apparently was a label founded by one of the band's members. Seven of the fourteen have average ratings of below 3.00 which isn't a good sign either. Might check them out just to see what none of the fuss is about, but they play symphonic black metal which was never one of my preferred genres of BM so maybe too much of a chore. Some of their covers are very good though.

Kreator have always seemed like the European Slayer to me. Now don't misunderstand, I'm not accusing them of plagiarism or anything, what I mean is the fan's perceptions of the two are very similar. To a degree, both have accumulated enough credibility and respect to almost be above criticism. Even though we all know that both bands did their best work in the 80s and early 90s, even their less well-received works of the later nineties have their advocates and neither band suffered the critical mauling that most other "big name" thrash bands endured for their later work. Personally, I think Kreator's twenty-first century output is superior to Slayer's with Enemy of God and Hordes of Chaos being a couple of my favourite thrash albums.

That said, their run of albums from Pleasure to Kill up to Coma of Souls is thrash metal legend and third in the run was Extreme Aggression. I can't really add any more than has already been said, but this is certainly an aptly-titled album and is obviously the output of a band firing on all barrels as they refined the early aggressiveness of Pleasure to Kill into an even more lethal weapon. A band like Kreator doesn't achieve the level of respect they have by accident, this is a band who have earned every drop and Extreme Aggression is one of the reasons why.

OK, so please don't get mad any of you Necrophagist fans out there, but after the vocals kicked in on opener Stabwound I just burst out laughing. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, but I've been feeling in a strange mood today and as I thought I'd better get through the features, I decided to listen to Epitaph this evening. At the aforementioned point in the album, I just pictured the band playing with extremely frowny faces and thought bubbles saying something like "shit, we are SO intense, man" and the inherent ridiculousness of the human condition must have overwhelmed me. I have no axe to gring with Necrophagist, I've never listened to them before, but they just painted such a vivid picture for me that I couldn't help myself. And before anyone points out the fact, I include myself in the being ridiculously intense about metal camp. How could I not with all the utter bollocks I write about music?!

Anyway, as for the music in question - it really isn't my thing unfortunately. I find overtly technical death metal never really "get's going", it just sounds too stutter-step to me and as such I can't get into it. 

Apologies all round, I don't know what's got into me today at all.

First off I chose this as a feature release not just because it is one of my favourite albums but also because it shows that black metal needn't necessarily be hateful and misanthropic all the time, but can actually be used to relate human stories and illuminate it's listeners about topics of which they know little or nothing. Austin Lunn is also an artist who flies in the face of genre stereotypes. This is a guy who actually cares about people - he used to be a social worker but quit, I believe, due to the frustration of working within an overly bureaucratic system. So when someone tells you all black metal bands are nazi satanists then point them in Panopticon's direction.

I was originally turned on to Panopticon via his 2014 album Roads to the North and was so impressed I dived right into his back catalogue. The preceding albums were not as impressive as Roads... that is until I got to Kentucky, which is the album where the Panopticon sound really began to gel. The introduction of bluegrass music into a black metal environment was a revelation to me. Of course I was more than familiar with the inclusion of european-derived folk elements in black metal and even middle-eastern influences via bands like Melechesh, but this was a whole new take (to me anyway) and as such sounded fresh and exhilharating. I have always quite liked the sound of bluegrass, it has a kind of melancholy to it that is difficult to pinpoint, but that resonates with me somehow (although coming from England's northern midlands I have no endemic cultural attachment to the music) but it wasn't until I heard it welded to atmospheric black metal that it actually began to make sense to me and none more so than on Kentucky's telling of the struggles of early twentieth century American coal miners against their profit-driven bosses. I don't want to get into the politics of the record, but as I worked with many family members of miners who were part of the bitter early 1980's miner's strike here in the UK, let's just say that I have some sympathy for the album's protagonists and the history of labour struggles does hold some interest for me.

Of course what we came here for is the black metal and Kentucky contains three of my all-time favourite black metal tracks in Bodies Under the Falls, Black Soot and Red Blood and Killing the Giants As They Sleep, these tracks owing much to another of my GOAT albums, WitTR's Two Hunters, an album I've waxed lyrical about on more than one occasion! This blend of poetic black metal, folk protest songs and effortless storytelling makes for a unique listening experience that defies the norm in metal music and firmly plants Kentucky on my list of great black metal albums.

Could you also add Indian doomsters Djinn and Miskatonic please Ben.

Hi again Ben. Could you please add the new Monolord and Count Raven albums, both released today.

Altesia - Embryo

It's here and it's fantastic. 

I've given it a couple of spins over the weekend and I agree, Xephyr.

Only now have I listened to this for the first time and it has had a most profound effect upon me. Within it's crushing drone I hear the dying of stars and the destruction of galaxies. This is one of the most affecting metal releases I have ever heard:

I'm really glad to have had Portal of I pushed into my periphery via this month's Infinite feature. It may not be very apparent, but I am actually quite a bit of a prog nut. 1970s prog rock is one of my favourite genres, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gabriel-era Genesis and Yes are three of my all-time favourite bands and in fact there's a few modern prog bands I enjoy too like Riverside and Galahad. However, an awful lot of progressive metal leaves me cold for some reason - if it's not one band trying to be the next Dream Theater, it's another trying to impress everyone with their technical prowess. Meanwhile they all seem to forget about the songs. This is why I admired Opeth so much - they were technically superb but never forgot that the song was king and everything they did worked to that end without resorting to technicality and flashiness for it's own sake. On the evidence of Portal of I, Ne Obliviscaris seem to be a band with the same philosophy and with this album have ticked many of the boxes that appeal to me. I'm especially on board with the marriage between prog and black metal, in a similar way that Oranssi Pazuzu's fusion between black metal and psychedelic rock is so successful, Ne Obliviscaris seem to understand exactly how to alloy black metal with progressive metal in way that makes the whole more than the separate elements (something Opeth also achieved). While the entire album is exceedingly good Forget Not, for me, is a song on a whole different level and has jumped right onto my list of greatest tracks of all-time.

I've got to admit that the past four or five months' features have got me much more interested in Infinite bands. Despite my previous reservations, I look forward to Infinite features as much as any now, particularly as I am unlikely to have heard them before. So thanks to all you Infinite contributors who have proved once more that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Could you add Peruvian funeral doom band Lament Christ please Ben.

I've posted my review. Here it is:

Even prior to the release of So Long Suckers, Reverend Bizarre had announced their intention to split, so it seems that they decided to go out with an album that could be viewed as the last word in traditional doom metal. Everything about the album is exaggerated and drawn out to a point (or more accurately beyond a point) at the edge of comfort. Intro riffs are played over and over way beyond where you would expect the vocals to kick in (They Used Dark Forces), chords are held for an interminable amount of time (Sorrow) and there are passages of bass-led noodling that act as more of a buffer than an intro or outro that seem at odds with the track they are attached to (Anywhere Out of This World). Then of course there is the extended track lengths. For trad doom some of these tracks are historically long, three of the seven tracks are over 25 minutes long and the album as a whole weighs in at a hefty 130 minutes.

And you know what, I love every minute of it. Reverend Bizarre are one of my absolute favourite traditional doom acts and, for me, very few can hold a candle to the Finnish trio. So Long Suckers isn't a perfect album by any means, look to the debut In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend for that level of doom metal nirvana, but it is a great example of an album pushing a genre to the absolute limits of extremity whilst remaining wholly within it's confines, so no harsh vocals, blastbeats or synths are to be found within this two hours plus of no frills, fuck-you-if -you-don't-like-it doom metal.

The riffs are memorable and gargantuan, courtesy of Lord Peter Vicar (Kimi Kärki), subsequent founder of the excellent Lord Vicar and the drumming of Earl of Void (Jari Pohjonen) is on point and, despite the extended repetition of the tracks, he does plenty to keep it interesting. For me though, despite his vocal shortcomings, the bass playing of Albert Witchfinder is fantastic and the instrument's presence is stamped all over So Long Suckers in a way that is reminiscent of how Lemmy's bass would often dominate Motörhead's sound (and even more so, Hawkwind's), adding a real depth and heft to the material that takes it to a different level of doom-laden substance.

This really isn't an album for the doom metal newbie and deliberately so I guess. Reverend Bizarre have wilfully gone about testing the limits of Traditional Doom and the mettle of it's adherents with their swansong, in an attempt to go out with the last word in the genre. To this end, I would suggest, they have been singularly successful and have produced an album that may alienate some but will heavily reward those willing to go along with it.

4.5/5

Hi Ben, please add Tankograd's latest album KLĘSKA.

It sounds amusing to say that deSade is mangled in the French language when, being a French nobleman, I''m pretty sure that's the language he wrote his works in!

1. Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970)

2. Iron Maiden - Killers (1981)

3. Angel Witch - Angel Witch (1980)

4. Judas Priest - Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)

5. Grand Magus - Hammer of the North (2010)

6. Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1975)

7. Diamond Head - Lightning to the Nations (1980)

8. Motörhead - Bomber (1979)

9. Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1973)

10. Iron Maiden - Piece of Mind (1983)

Similarly mine is heavily weighted with nostalgia - maybe those early albums that get us into metal have a more profound effect on us than any others.

The only modern act to get a look in is Grand Magus whose Iron Will and The Hunt albums would definitely get in my Top 20.

Do you have any submissions this month Sonny?

Yes I do:

Skepticism - The March of the Four (10:04) from Companion (2021)

Warning - Footprints (7:31) from Watching from a Distance (2006)

Tankograd - Nie Dać Się Zarżnąć (7:06) from Klęska (2021)

Total Runtime: 24:41

Unlike you young whippersnappers I didn't grow up with the internet and until I joined the Metal Academy I had never frequented an internet forum before (not even on RYM), basically because I thought "who would be even remotely interested in what I think about anything?" So I'm not upset or enraged by these negative comments, but the vitriol in some of them I do find surprising, almost as if the author was bullied by a gang of metalheads at school or something that has left them with a grudge against the scene in general. My theory on internet posting is that if I wouldn't say it to a person's face then I wouldn't post it. I don't have any problem with the fact that some people don't like metal, why would I, but the outpourings of hatred for what is essentially a form of entertainment just have me baffled. I understand metal is an easy target. Several well-publicised incidents of suicide and murder added to a scene that is predominently white male oriented and has a recognised problem with right wing ideology will always attract comment I suppose. It's a pity because we all here know that metal has so much more to offer. I still think it's an interesting phenomenon though and is probably more a societal / social media issue than actually a musical issue.

I guess he just wants to be an internet star like seemingly every single fucking person under 30 years old. 

Holy shit!! Managed a first listen through of this on my dawn dog walk this morning and it has blown me away. There is so much going on that it's going to take a few listens for me to absorb all it has to offer, but I'm looking forward to discovering it's intricacies. This is what progressive metal should sound like to me. Many thanks Saxy for possibly filling the Opeth-shaped hole that's been in my life since 2005. What a great start to a Monday morning!

Hi Ben, please add the new album from Antichrist Siege Machine, Purifying Blade.

In fact, the whole record sounds very much like Jello singing over the top of Ministry's "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" album to be perfectly honest (a record that I adore).

That was exactly my  thoughts when I initially heard the first four tracks and, as I said in my comments, I quite enjoyed that part of the album, along with Bozo Skeleton and Sylvestre Matuschka (a track about a 1930's Hungarian train bomber of all things!) The three more experimental tracks that take up half the album's runtime, however, left me cold as I am pathologically adverse to excessive experimentation and whilst I recognise it as my failing and not the musicians' fault, because of this I don't feel I could in truth score the album any higher. It's a pity too as DK are one of my favourite HC bands (along with Bad Brains and Minor Threat) and I am usually a huge fan of Jello's.

Well, initially, this wasn't quite as awful as I feared it might be. In fact, I gotta confess that I kind of enjoyed it up to Can God Fill Teeth? which is where things start to go horribly wrong. It's a silly and annoying track. Jello Biafra used to be much better than this, his humour was much more amusing and his societal critiques were biting, but this just sounds like the worst kind of dumbed down shit... until They're Coming to Take Me Away and it's eight and a half minutes of nonsense that make Can God feel like a classic. The closing fifteen minutes of I Am Your Clock is just boring and tedious and ultimately this is an album I can never see me returning to. If the first four tracks were released as an EP then I would have had much more time for it, but as it stands it's a release I can't get behind at all.

2/5

Hey Andi, I'm sorry to hear about your current tribulations with the virus and everything and completely understand the steps you have taken. As I have alluded to before, I myself turned my back on metal completely throughout most of the nineties after an awful family tragedy (which I won't elaborate on) caused me to question pretty much everything about life. I was heavily into thrash at that time and the violence and satanic content of a lot of metal didn't seem appropriate as a form of entertainment just then and so I walked away from it, stopped listening and sold most of my records. I mention this only because, as is now obvious, I came back to it and now enjoy it as much, if not more, than I did previously. So maybe one day when things seem better, you too may return. 

As regards the virus, there were two pandemics in the twentieth century (1916 and 1968) with far higher mortality rates and they eventually ended. With the combined might of the world's scientific community thrown at it, I'm sure it won't be long before COVID is just an awful memory and we can all get back to normal. Just remember Andi, even this too must eventually pass.

Hoping things get better for you soon my friend.

My playlist suggestions for November:

Dark Angel - Black Prophecies (8:27) from Darkness Descends (1986)
Bewitcher - The Widow's Blade (5:20) from Cursed Be Thy Kingdom (2021)
Onslaught - Metal Forces (6:38) from The Force (1986)
Sabbat - I for an Eye (5:24) from History of a Time to Come (1988)
Testament - First Strike Is Deadly (3:41) from The Legacy (1987)

Total runtime: 29:50

This is my favourite Fallen playlist to date. There's some serious hardcore Fallen-related shit going on here. OK, so I'm not crazy about that lengthy first track and the Lacuna Coil track is lightweight, but everything else really hits the mark with me. Well done all round to everyone involved. Here's some brief thoughts on each of the tracks:

01. Midnight Odyssey – “Dawn-Bringer” (from “Biolume Part 2: The Golden Ord”, 2021)
2.5/5 Summoning do doom metal - not really for me and way too long.

02. Body Void – “Wound” (from “Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth”, 2021)
4/5 Crushing, droning sludge metal that's like a bull elephant standing on your balls. Strongly reminiscent of Burning Witch (which is a good thing).

03. Melvins – “Isabella” (from “King Buzzo”, 1992)
4/5 Ah Melvins. Never has a band made me feel more schizophrenic - sometimes fucking unbearable, sometimes sublime, but never boring! This I like.

04. Lacuna Coil – “Senzafine” (from “Halflife” E.P., 2000)
2.5/5 I had a spell around the time of this EP's release of having quite a thing for Lacuna Coil, but as I have descended further down the extreme metal rabbit hole the less this sort of commercial metal appeals. Nowadays this doesn't sound all that different to Evanescence which, just to clarify, is not a good thing.

05. Earth – “Thrones & Dominions” (from “Phase 3: Thrones & Dominions”, 1995)
4.5/5 Really love this. Like some kind of primordial soundtrack to the formation of planets. I'm not at all as familiar with Earth as I know I should be.

06. King Woman – “Celestial Blues” (from “Celestial Blues”, 2021)
4/5 Will have to check this album out for sure. Shoe-gazey, atmo-sludgy marvellousness.

07. Solitude Aeturnus – “The 9th Day: Awakening” (from “Through The Darkest Hour”, 1994)
4/5 Classic epic / trad doom from a band with a huge debt to Candlemass.

08. Pentagram – “The Ghoul” (from “Pentagram”, 1985)
4.5/5 Proper Sabbathian old-school shit? Fuck yeah!!

09. The Slow Death – “Famine” (from “Siege”, 2021)
4.5/5 Initially soaring, turning infernally subterranean, death doom that has a lot going on.

10. Black Lodge – “Dissonance” (from “Covet”, 1995)
4/5 Great track from a criminally overlooked album.

11. Esoteric – “Dominion Of Slaves” (from “The Pernicious Enigma”, 1997)
5/5 Yet another example why Esoteric are the greatest funeral doom band of all time. Unremittingly bleak and desperate doom metal just how I like it.

12. Vouna – “Vanish” (from “Atropos”, 2021)
4.5/5 Eigenlicht's Yianna Bekris proves (if proof were needed) that women can contribute more than just nice, ethereal vocals to extreme doom metal. If not for Skepticism this would have been my funeral doom album of the year (so far).

I do enjoy drone metal when in the appropriate mood, but can't claim to be any kind of authority.

Anyway, my top ten goes like this:

1. Bismuth - The Slow Dying of the Great Barrier Reef (2018)

2. Boris - Boris at Last -Feedbacker- (2003)

3. Khanate - Khanate (2001)

4. Wo!vserpent - Aporia:Kāla:Ananta (2016)

5. Neptunian Maximalism - Éons (2020)

6. Trees - Light's Bane (2008)

7. Nadja - Radiance of Shadows (2007)

8. Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions (2008)

9. Khlyst - Chaos Is My Name (2006)

10. Father Sky Mother Earth - Across the River of Time (2017)

Hi Ben, could you please add Richmond's Tel, including their new split with Costa Rican sludge/doom band Age of the Wolf.

(Tel's vocalist Dante DuVall is sounds_of_decay on RYM).

OK, so I've been OD-ing on War Metal over the past month, so here's my selections for November:

Teitanblood - Sleeping Throats of the Antichrist (12:27) from Death (2014)
Bestial Warlust - Death Rides Out (2:26) from Blood & Valour (1995)
Blasphemy - Blasphemous Attack (2:01) from Gods of War (1993)
Conqueror - The Curse (2:33) from War.Cult.Supremacy (1999)
Total runtime 19:27

Yeah I've been meaning to check them out for some time now as I know you're a big fan & I trust your judgement when it comes to all things doom. Thought I'd throw myself in the deep end too.

Well, you've certainly managed that, Daniel. I'm a bit nervous now you say you are unfamiliar with Rev Biz, because I'm not sure So Long Suckers is the best place to start with them. It's one of those albums where I know I love it, but I can also understand why others might not. I'm very interested to see what you think of it now.

Seriously though, it's not that I have anything against MDB, I certainly don't entertain Type O Negative levels of hostility towards them, but prior to this month every single 2021 Fallen playlist except April's had a track of theirs on it and I just think there is more to The Fallen than My Dying Bride specifically and gothic death doom generally.

What exactly is going on there on the cover? I can't fathom it at all.

No but it is compulsory for you to sigh & shake your head whenever you spot them in the playlist each month Sonny.

Hey... have you been spying on me?!

Wait a minute... (quick doubletake)... are you aware there is no My Dying Bride on this month's list? I thought it was compulsory!

Oh, excellent choice sir! I love Reverend Bizarre and this double discer is a doom metal monster.

Great album Daniel. I'm not exactly a grindcore aficianado, but Horrified is my second-favourite example of the genre after Terrorizer's World Downfall. I didn't realise it was a  collection of demos. As you say, you can't tell that it wasn't all recorded at the same time and shows that if nothing else, Repulsion were consistent.

In saying that though, I don't think they've released anything essential since "Mob Rules".

On that we can definitely agree.

Look, I do think that "Technical Ecstasy" starts & finishes quite well (strangely "She's Gone" is the highlight of the album for me) but I really struggle with the four track run in the middle of the record, particularly "It's Alright" & "Rock 'n' Roll Doctor" which are amongst Sabbath's worst failures in my opinion. Also, I think it's a stretch to call it a metal record. I actually don't think it knows what it's trying to be but a hard rock tag seems much more appropriate to me. I'd comfortably take "The Eternal Idol" over it. In fact, I'd take "The Eternal Idol" over six or seven of their albums as I quite like it.

As far as The Eternal Idol goes then, Daniel, we are going to have to agree to disagree as I think it is a woeful album and sullies the Sabbath name with it's mere existence. I am not a big fan of any of the Tony Martin albums to be honest and would take Technical Ecstacy over any of them, as well as Seventh Star and the awful 13.

...sorry, Skepticism have had to go on hold temporarily as I've just got hold of Warning's Watching from a Distance - Live at Roadburn.

Anybody who has listened to any of my bullshit already knows that the original WfaD is my all-time favourite album. This is an extremely faithful rendering of the album and Patrick Walker's vocals may be even more heart-wrenching as a one-shot deal (or due to there being an extra ten years in his vocal chords) than on the studio release. I can feel myself tearing up already!!

Here I am wide open,
Surrendering to your side
I have laid down my armour,
I have no sword at my side

I leave behind me the ruins
Of the fortress I swore to defend
I leave behind me foundations,
I'll leave you a man I'll need you to mend

And through all the battles around me
I never believed I would fight,
Yet here I stand a broken soldier,
Shivering, naked, in your winter light

My favourite vocal ever - gets me every time!!

45 years old today & still just as disappointing.

I don't wish to be a contrarian (no stop laughing, I really don't!!) but I think TE is unduly lambasted by Sabbath fans, especially considering that it has an average rating on RYM less than The Eternal F@*$ing Idol for chrissakes!! Yes, She's Gone is a bit wimpy, the Bill Ward fronted It's Alright isn't great and Rock 'n' Roll Doctor is a bit naff, but Back Street Kids is a decent opener. You Won't Change Me and Gypsy are brilliant tracks and Dirty Women, besides the un-PC lyrics has one of, if not THE best Tony Iommi solos ever. I get it that if you bought it as the new Sabbath album at the time after following Sabbath through the classic years, you may have found it disappointing, but how many people can say that? Conversely, it was the first Sabbath album I shelled out good money on and as such was my first proper metal purchase, so maybe my opinion is coloured by that, but I still get plenty of enjoyment when I play it (which I do often enough).