Rolling Metal Thread 2012

If there's no hamster then Jeff is not interested. You should know that by now.

Ha ha, that California one is WAY better than the last one I saw, which was trying to do a riff on the LA Dodgers logo and ended up just looking kind of bland.

man it would be so cool to do the kind of merch numbers that enabled you to do something this cool, and then to follow through and actually do it

If only every band could be Iron Maiden.

No, seriously. I would be okay with that.

well, at $40 a pop it makes the numbers a little easier to hit.

Yeah, that's why I never buy shirts at big shows. Got a totally rad, Power of the Riff-exclusive Ancestors shirt at said show last week for 12 bucks.

If I'm only gonna see a band every 25 years I don't mind the occasional overpriced bit of kit.

Yeah, Iron Maiden probably won't be as good live in 2037, anyway.

OK, I don't know which band I was confusing with Within Temptation, but they weren't this good. Pretty sure if I'd heard The Unforgiving last year it would have made it onto my best-of-the-year list somewhere. Although thematically it kind of fits better with my amazing gothic/symphonic 2012, anyway.

that cover is so bad

well, at $40 a pop it makes the numbers a little easier to hit.

no no - just the volume. to justify the expense of all these diff designs & print runs you have to be sure that you can sell as many as you print & sell through every night. Maiden, having been touring forever, pretty much knows how many they're going to sell in any given city, and evidently somebody did some math and said "if we had a different one for each city here's how much extra that would cost & here's what we'd get total" and they were able to say "that works for us" which means they get to do something different & cool with their merch. Most bands would get this idea and then go "what is the worst-case scenario?" and the math they'd do would be "and then we lose 60k minimum"

ahahaha yes

There are only two bands where I say "the hell with it" and indulge in a little overpriced merch: Maiden, and Rush.

Got the new Nachtmystium in the mail. Anyone heard the new Converge yet? I wanted to pre-order it from Deathwish but it's sold out already. Must've had some fancy versions for pre-order.

even eddie looks bored on that california shirt

After re-listening to the earlier Within Temptation albums, I feel better. I didn't misremember, I just didn't like them very much. But this one is great. According to Wikipedia it got only 1 star from Q, calling WT "the metal T'Pau". But I loved T'Pau, and a metal version seems like a perfectly awesome idea to me,

glenn what other albums are part of your symphonic/gothic year?

Taking the category broadly, and including some stuff that came out last year but has lingered in my listening, there's at least:

Ace of Hearts, Amaranthe, Cardamon, Cradle of Filth, Dark Princess, Deuxvolt, Devilish Impressions, Dharma, Diabulus in Musica, Down Below, Draconian, Echoterra, Ephemeral Temple, Epica, Ideas, Lacrimas Profundere, Lacuna Coil, L'Ame Immortelle, Liv Moon, Lullacry, Lunar Path, Lyriel, Nemesea, Nightwish, Saltillo, Semargl, September Mourning, Shear, Unleash the Archers, Xandria, Within Temptation.

Listened to the Bullet record today, and I basically just wish that the singer was *slightly* less terrible. Like, just a notch. He doesn't have the charisma of Udo, and while the songs are fun, they aren't good enough for me to forgive that truly awful gargling.

Yeah the Chicago Maiden shirt is dumb. It made it seem they played at Chicago Theater rather than Tinley Park. I don't know if a metal band ever played the Chicago Theater. That place is the antithesis of metal. Here's my favorite:

http://ironmaiden.globalmerchstores.com/ironmaiden/images/mexico.png

I'm OK with the Bullet singer's awfulness, but the songs aren't there this time around.

In semi-related news, I was in a meeting in our conference room the other day and when the screen of the laptop we use in these meetings was projected onto the big monitor on the wall, I noticed an MP3 labeled "Rock 'n' Roll is Still Around" or something similar. I immediately leaned over to my co-worker and said, "I guess Airbourne's putting a record out next year."

Also, pretty sure Within Temptation's "In Perfect Harmony", from Mother Earth, is the awfulest thing I've heard in several months, despite the fact that somewhere in there was a day when my job required me to listen to several Celine Dion and Michael Bolton karaoke tracks with enough attention to confirm which are which. 

Also, Secret Signs.

And I listened to The Unforgiving again today, and I'm really convinced it's a genuinely great record. But one that you might well not appreciate if you didn't previously appreciate at least one of Pat Benatar's Seven the Hard Way, Tori's Y Kant Tori Read or T'Pau's The Promise. It's not not a metal record, exactly, but it's definitely on the rock end of metal, cheerfully and magnificently, and I think that's totally fine.

I had that album on my 2011 list at MSN. They've achieved that transformation from gothy metal band to pop-oriented hard rock more gracefully than a band like Lacuna Coil could ever hope to do.

You know, I think at one point Lacuna Coil could've made that transformation, but then they went on Ozzfest and that was that.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, and the new Pig Destroyer...pretty darn good but not mind blowing. I'll like it more when I read the lyrics eventually of course, but still musically it doesn't feel on par with Terrifyer and Phantom Limb.

To me it felt like Lacuna Coil suffered from the same thing that Muse did: they got a taste of success, and liked it, and then tried with all their might to make more music exactly like what they thought people expected from them. And thus became a tribute band to themselves, rather than an actual band.

Yeah the Chicago Maiden shirt is dumb. It made it seem they played at Chicago Theater rather than Tinley Park. I don't know if a metal band ever played the Chicago Theater. That place is the antithesis of metal.

I dunno, it's not Maiden, but Dream Theater played there this summer. I once saw Tool at the Auditorium, too, which is even classier than the Chicago.

I feel so bad for missing Maiden this summer. I was so psyched to go with a pal, who was up for the drive, but then I realized I had missed it by a week. But then I realized it was on one of those 105 degree days, and I sort of felt relieved.

See, I disagree, Glenn – I think LC's downfall came when they added the chunky riffs to their repertoire and stopped making beautiful, dynamic songs.

And Secret Signs are worth more than just my mentioning their name. Spanish band, and this is their debut album, called For a Lifetime. If you miss operatic delivery and rococo gothicness, here's a band who still embraces those. They remind me a little of Cantata Sangui, although more in energy and restless inventiveness than exact sound. Lots of prog-rock filigree laced through the speed and crunch and lurch (of which there is also plenty).

I'm also liking this Asphyx album Deathhammer. Gruff, fast, thrashy, bass-heavy death. This is kind of what I wish Anaal Nathrakh sounded like; different sonic palette, but one that feels to me more effective at getting across the same kind of machine-drill menace. And in a more ominous, lumbering-giant variation on this theme, I'm also liking the four new Temple of Baal songs on their split with Ritualization (but I could do without the listless, croaky Ritualization half).

I'm also mostly in favor of the new one by Khors, Wisdom of Centuries. Part way into Pagan atmospherics, but that's fine with me. I wish it were longer, and even more than that, I wish that when I A/B it against 2010's Return to Abandoned I didn't feel like pretty much every real song on the new one has an exact correlate on the previous one, and in every case the previous one is better produced and better played.

And even further into the mists of atmospherics, I'm enjoying both Junius' Reports From the Threshold of Death (an extrapolation from Jesu further into darkwave) and the two-track 21-minute post-rock noise-blur battering of Surachai's To No Avail. Surachai strikes me as kind of like what Xasthur might sound like if he wasn't trying to win an obscure bet by making you either throw up or bleed from at least one eye just from listening.

xpost to Jeff: I think we agree about both what the downfall was and when. I just think they did it because they thought that's what people wanted to hear. Or, anyway, that's what it feels like to me as a listener.

Although if there's only one dose of a magic potion to rescue a once-soaring band from their own intentional self-induced ugliness, I'm going to vote for administering it to In This Moment, not Lacuna Coil.

New Converge sounds pretty good to these ears, but they are a band that I've only come around to very recently, so take that as you will.

XP I mean, there was certainly the pressure of following up an incredibly successful (both critically and commercially) record, but I feel that they were, at least as far as Karmacode went, genuinely trying to follow their artistic path – they had just absorbed too much nu metal, which was a novelty to them at the time, and decided to apply it to a sound that it was incompatible with.

That new In This Moment is definitely my contender for worst record of the year (which, it should be noted, I generally apply only to bands that should genuinely know better and not like Blood on the Dance Floor or whatever).

I agree with your assessment of ITM, Jeff, but look what happened, their first week sales are about to more than double those of the last record. One of the shrewdest examples of how pandering can sometimes pay off.

about a month of xposts, but siegbran if you're following, thank you for the ice ages recommendation. buried silence is hitting the spot in a major way.

and a different sound, yes. but the summoning vibe is here in full force.

I'm trying to tell myself that the In This Moment album will sound better if I ignore it for a few months and try it again. But I slapped it pretty hard in Alternative Press.

On the other hand, the new Sister Sin is great. Recommended to fans of Doro and Holy Moses.

I always enjoy Sister Sin, and am definitely looking forward to the new one.

Anyone else interested in whatever comes out of the VHÖL project (besides Nate)? It's Sigrid Sheie & John Cobbett of Hammers with Mike Scheidt of Yob & Aesop Dekker on drums. I'm bummed I can't make it to Fall Into Darkness to see them play.

anybody wants to completely destroy me at the songpop game on facebook I miss about half the metal questions, to my lasting shame.

oh i think viceroy might accept that challenge. He's always bugging me to play him at it.

lol I just bugged you to play me at it

strange i didn't get a request. I've never played it. is it just a 1 vs 1 thing or a group of strangers?

you play one on one - a song plays, you have four options (sometimes it's the band name, sometimes the song title) and your score gets lower the longer you take to get it right. Five q's per round. Earn enough "coins" and you can buy new playlists. I'm an old point-and-shoot video game player who loves quizzes so I am helpless before this thing even though I'm kinda bad under pressure & real creaky so I guess wrong on songs I actually know but it's ridiculously fun

Well I am utterly useless at these things but if you cant find someone else to play who would give you a better challenge then hit me up!

about a month of xposts, but siegbran if you're following, thank you for the ice ages recommendation. buried silence is hitting the spot in a major way.

and a different sound, yes. but the summoning vibe is here in full force.

What I don't understand is how Ice Ages seem to be completely ignored by the industrial/EBM scene. I guess being on a metal label + taking a leasurely six years between albums are pretty effective career killers.

Has anyone else heard the new album by Goat, called World Music? African beats, krautrock, psychedelic rock, and some of the wickedest wah-wah you'll hear. From Sweden, of course. That record's left me floored. I wrote about it at MSN:

http://social.entertainment.msn.com/music/blogs/headbang-blogpost.aspx?post=23c13964-a164-4396-a7cc-ca0c2761b653

Also, Spiders' debut album Flash Point, which I'd been excitedly waiting for over the past 12 months, is every bit as good as I'd hoped. Out of all the Swedish retro stuff that's come out this year (still waiting on Graveyard and Year of the Goat), this album has more of a rock 'n' roll feel, and I'd say right now it's the best of the lot. It's out in early October on Crusher Records.

Yeah, I have been listening to Goat a lot prior to the Supersonic show. Looking forward to it a lot.

Fall into Darkness 2012 fest cat out of the bag.

http://www.wweek.com/portland/blog-29054-exclusive_fall_into_darkness_2012_unveils_lineup.html

And as Erik mentioned upthread, secret band is VHÖL (Cobbett, Aesop, Sigrid, Scheidt).