Rolling Metal Thread 2010

My favorites of the first quarter, in rough order:

Ihsahn
High On Fire
Ludicra
Orphaned Land
Burzum
Landmine Marathon

Still need to get the Triptykon album and patiently waiting on hearing the LotM, Nachtmystium, and Alcest ones.

Also one very, very small justification for the continued existence of Hot Topic:

Was waiting to meet my wife and mother-in-law at a mall in Ann Arbor and wandered into the store to idly flip through the tiny music rack. I was shocked to find, mixed in with a truly frightening amount of A Day To Remember discs, a $7.99 copy of Death's Scream Bloody Gore.

First-quarter(ish) stuff I like: Armored Saint, Bison B.C. (not out yet), Cathedral (not out yet), High on Fire, Ihsahn, Ludicra, Ratt (not out yet), Shining (NOR), Triptykon.

Definitely anticipating that Bison B.C. album too!

was streaming the ihsahn earlier; i liked it but maybe a bit too "smooth" for me? forgot to look for ludicra, ended up buying no metal :(

back to the Fear Factory show of last night - I've become resigned to the fact that with a few exceptions, most metal shows I see are going to have a shitty melodic metalcore band opening.

I don't inherently dismiss the subgenre - I've always liked Killswitch Engage, and early Shadows Fall, but it seems to me that from what I've heard of the genre, there are way too many faceless acts. I'm not even really a fan of Darkest Hour.

I kind of expected we might get one yesterday, being that younger acts seem to be gravitating towards this. But the first opening act, Periphery, were baffling. They were a six piece (from what I could surmise, three guitars, bass, drums, vocalist), and most of the pre-verse riffs were copped right out of Meshuggah's Nothing - not an homage, but a pretty blatant ripoff. But the vocalist sounded like the guy from Dashboard Confessional and they had really lame melodic metalcore choruses. It was sooooooo boring. They had stunning technical abilities, but it was wasted.

The next act, Dirge Within, was worse, as they were hideously generic. The vocalist tried to incite a mosh pit but it never really materialized and I kind of wanted to say to the vocalist 'you're not really playing the right music for that'. Very few breakdowns, and not many 'moshy' riffs.

I guess I"ll never get this genre. I love metalcore aka Converge/Botch/Cave In, just not this stuff I guess. Any examples of really good melodic metalcore acts that are a cut above?

no

lol - well good to know it's not my ears then.

stick with Converge/Botch/Cave-In

cool. ok, I was gonna ask about that style too but there's a thread for that so I won't use this one for it.

heh it's probably just the same posters!

The vocalist tried to incite a mosh pit but it never really materialized and I kind of wanted to say to the vocalist 'you're not really playing the right music for that'.

man, this is always so embarrassing.

same thing goes for bands that want everyone to dance. it's like, "well, make us dance then. WITH YOUR MUSIC."

God Forbid is awesome and I will fight anybody who says otherwise

Exactly. Generally speaking, if you're a band playing mosh inducing music, and you're an opening act, the pits don't form until the second song. The pit mavens use the first song to gauge your style, so you should always play your biggest pit inducer second. Even though they're a 'melodic' death act, Dreaming Dead got the pit going by their second song despite few people in the audience knowing them.

The funniest example of a musician bitching about the lack of moshing was back when I saw Dillinger Escape Plan back in 2000. It was a bill featuring something like 5 other bands, and a group of young kids named Cerberos took the stage. All of them were decked out in atrocious corpsepaint that looked like it was put on by one of those minimum wage stooges at a kiddie carnival. One of them had a Cradle of Filth shirt on, so I figure "hmm this could be blackened thrash metal or something".

Nope. They start playing hookless three chord punk rock, with "black metal rasps" that sounded like Captain Caveman on top. At plodding tempos. The crowd is clearly amused by them, and half of us are sitting Indian style, and looking at our watches. Nobody is moshing. Nobody is moving. Nobody is having a good time.

So after the first song, the vocalist says, now in a voice that resembles Black Metal Beavis, "You guys should um, mosh or something". After the second song, nobody moshes, and he complains, in a blithe voice "You all need to mosh...OR I'LL KILL YOU!". A frightening threat, being that the kid was about 17 and weighed about 140 pounds, and holding a microphone.

Then, they cover the Misfits' "Die, Die My Darling"...and play it incorrectly. (They used the same chord progression in the verse that they did in the chorus, but the verse/chorus riffs are not identical in the original). At that point, booing commenced from some.

The last track, the drummer asks if everybody likes old school rap, and then begins to launch into a cheesy 80's style Young MC-esque rhyme, and then they bust into their shitty punk rock and never return to the rap.

And they had the nerve to wonder why nobody was moshing.

I actually like God Forbid, though I haven't heard them in ages. I saw them open for GWAR and they were solid.

If there was any justice in the world, God Forbid would be bigger than Killswitch Engage.

I liked Killswitch's older vocalist better than Howard Jones.

when they got him I was hoping it would be the 80's pop singer :(

what is metalcore love?

Baby don't hurt me

no one is to blame (for metalcore)

Metalcore Can Only Get better

(no it cant remix)

New Metalcore Song

Enjoying the two-song Embers preview that Cosmo stumped for on Invisible Oranges recently. Not quite as druidic as Wolves in the Throne Room or Blood of the Black Owl, but with a vaguely similar density.

Got advance CD-Rs of the 30th anniversary reissue of British Steel in today's mail. Disc One is the remastered album, plus two bonus tracks: "Red, White and Blue" and a live "Grinder." (I think these are the same bonus tracks that were on the last reissue of this album.) In addition to a full in-concert run-through of the album, the live disc includes versions of "The Ripper," "Hell Patrol," "Victim of Changes," "Freewheel Burning," "Diamonds and Rust" and "You've Got Another Thing Coming." The third disc is a 90-minute DVD which has the same live concert as the CD (with "Prophecy" added) and a new interview about the album. So there you go.

Was the previous remastering decent?

got my profoundlore order in today, but they have another couple of albums new on sale now I wish I had waited and ordered too. Oh well maybe next month, im totally skint now. spent all my money i had saved up this year

Was the previous remastering decent?

Yeah, it sounded good. One other thing this version does, though, is restore the original running order, with "Breaking the Law" as track 3 instead of opening the disc with it, the way the first US version did.

XPost: Cheers Acolethic. It's quite frightening how many people think it's real. (Although I'm not sure how international a thing April Fool's Day is.)

Caught part of this on the way home today — Acrassicauda was on NPR's Fresh Air:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125471921

Day two of Ludicra tour, John Cobbett's appendix burst and is surrounded by an abscess the size of a baseball. Olympia, Seattle, Boise, and Salt Lake City canceled so far. So much for "De-cancelation".

I spent my Friday night in the E.R. with John. Here he is throwing the horns through a shroud of mortal agony. "The Trooper" in real life...

http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs429.snc3/24758_409254006413_741406413_5043196_7700616_n.jpg

With luck, dates will resume as scheduled in Denver this Tuesday. There will likely be a paypal account set up soon for the uninsured and bummer-prone. First Mayhem ditched us, now this. I love Ludicra.

Hope he'll be OK.

They've had the worst luck as far as touring goes this year! Yay Ludicra, boo US healthcare.

Soooooooooo.

What do you guys think of Finntroll?

A++

According to Profound Lore, Cobbett seems to be doing better. Re-de-cancellation FTW! Man, if there was one band I would love to see coming to Europe it would be Hammers of Misfortune. But I'd definitely settle for Ludicra too :)

There was room for a Ghetto Boys homage photo session here somewhere. Get well soon.

so i was in a specialty store looking to rebuy fear factory's obsolete on cd, which of course wasn't there (how this disc now is impossible to find in local chain stores here, I'll never guess). but I saw the new High on Fire and based on the raves here, checked it out.

wooooooooooooooooooooooow. \m/

That scares me abt the burst appendix, especially the abscess part! Was there much infection? I hope he plays it safe if necessary even if that means disappointing some heads.

Seeing Opeth at Terminal 5 on Wednesday. Super stoked. IIRC from the announcement, one normal set and one set comprising all of Blackwater Park. Catching up on Damnation and Ghost Reveries today neither of which I've heard yet.

There will likely be a paypal account set up soon for the uninsured and bummer-prone.

John Cobbett fundraiser: http://www.gigposters.com/classifieds/detail.php?siteid=10951&pre=1

Great poster for a great show. And so far the only show of this tour :(

Just finished reading TGFW's Only Death Is Real, about his Hellhammer days. For such a physically imposing book, it's actually fairly thin as art. Tons of pictures, but most of them are promo photos, and most of those are blurry. The snippets from people other than TGFW are, as a whole, less guarded and more interesting than TGFW's own writing, which, like in his blog, tends to be stiff and declaratory instead of personal and revealing. And there isn't that much of it, either, and the story doesn't end so much as stop. I'm not upset I bought it, or anything, but it's definitely not a book I'd recommend as anything other than a TGFW artifact.

I enjoyed it, the photo's provide a nice down to earth contrast to TGW's amusing selfpromotion in the writing. But yeah, too bad it stops just when Celtic Frost really starts taking off. Guess we'll have to wait until he finally rewrites Are You Morbid?, which I haven't read. Pretty psyched for Triptykon @ Roadburn next week!

Ludicra tour resumes with a quartet lineup this Thursday in St Paul, MN until John can rejoin the group. Hopefully much sooner than later.

Meanwhile, here's the paypal/donations link set up by Wolves in the Throneroom:

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=10894259&blogID=532297242

Holy fuck. Just getting around to Triptykon, this thing is massive. I love it.

I think scotts rule of shorter albums applies here. It's no Monotheist sadly, but some of it's really good.

Oh I don't know, it keeps up such a good pace throughout that I don't mind at all how long it is.

Is Monotheist something I should look into more or less immediately?