I've always said Uh-nath-emma. I'd bet there's heeps of bsnds out there I'm pronouncing wrong.

And how do you pronounce Звёздный Храм?

Buh-dum-ts?

Same

Google Translate is your friend, just click the speaker button. (That band name is funny if you've watched Borat.)

The phonemic transcription I've found for it is /jʊ.ˈɹaɪ.ə/, which is something like you-RYE-uh, like others have pointed out.

EDIT: while we're at it, Anathema is something like /əˈnæθəmə/, so uh-NAH-thuh-muh. I've always put the stress on the "the", I guess I was wrong.

Has anyone seen Carach Angren live? Do they have a tour bass player? I recently got into them and was surprised to see there's no mention of a bass player in the CD booklet.

This was last year. No bass player. According to their Members tab they haven't had live bass since 2010.

Does anyone know songs that have the HAIL THE VICTORIUS DEAD! sampler from The Return of the King? I'm looking for a specific one that I can't remember. It's driving me mad.

What's a good starting point for Insomnium? I picked up One for Sorrow and it sounds like there's a band I'd like in there but the production is way too murky

Across the Dark is their highlight if you ask me, and a good starting point.

I would go with Shadows of the Dying Sun, but Heart Like A Grave and Across the Dark are probably the other two best starting points.

All right. I have a question aout Judas Priest in the 80s spcifically. I know that they used outside songwriters for a few tracks -- "Some Heads are Gonna Roll" comes to mind, and there were two or three others, possibly more. My question is, basically, what was the inspiration for them doing this? In the rock and metal field, not writing your own songs is sort of frowned upon, but of course there are exceptions. Blue Oyster Cult regularly used input from people who weren't really in the band, but well, it's BoC, and they kind of have this vibe of being a weird art collective, and the people who they sometiems brought in to write lyrics, bits of music or even do vocals seemed like friends of the band or people they just thought were cool (i.E. Michael moorcock). Kiss used outside songwriters and even players, but, well, it's Kiss, and as much as I can dig their straightforward rock tunes nowadays, we can mostly acknowledge I think that the guys had certain limitations that they couldn't overcome, and so the outside input was required to keep the machine going, so to speak. But Priest never had any issues writing songs and it doesn't seem like this is something they really needed to do out of desperation, a desire to be something a little weird and different or anything else. Was it label pressure? Whose idea was it to bring in outside influences during the period they were arguably at their most popular and successful as a band?

The answer to this, like most things, is capitalism. Major labels, particularly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, had immense control over their bands. Whenever a label brought it an outside songwriter it meant they were trying for a hit single that would appeal to wider audience to help drive sales.

From KK's book:



It's possible it was even in Priest's contract to allow this from time to time.

I thought it might be something like taht, but wanted to hear "frm the horse's mouth", as it were, if someone in the band had commented on it. After all it is possible that it had been the band's own idea and they knew these people and thought, "wouldn't it be great if they gave us some cool song/riff/melody ideas?" But, it seemed unlikely.

Above The Weeping World is the first one I heard by them and I think it's a great entry point, full of catchy, memorable riffs

My mind is absolutely blown to know Some Heads Are Gonna Roll was written with outside help. It's one of my favourite JP tracks and I distinctly remember writing a treatment for a music video of that song (which would have been sick: helicopters, heavy metal monks, gothic cathedrals - everything you think is cool at that age) in high school. I certainly don't love it any less but that's shifted my understanding of the album and the band in general. I would agree with KK in saying it has a slightly different sound and tone to the rest of the album.

Rob Halford writes in his book that they recorded some whole pop songs written by professional record label guys that never got officially released anywhere. Rob seems like he's incredibly open minded about music including the most shamelessly mainstream pop-type stuff - refers to himself as a "pop tart" several times and says he was a fan of stuff like Kylie Minogue. I think with him in particular he was never overly sanctimonious about that stuff. He's just sort of chill about it all.

How they re-recorded all the vocals for Unleashed in the East in the studio is like that too - they sort of just did whatever they wanted and were interested in all of it. Kind of funny in a cool way.

Sure, and he can like whtver he wants, and Kylie is pretty cool. For all I know she writes her own songs though (think she might actually), and tats reall the big issue here with regard to Priest. "Some Heads" wasn't the only one either, there were one or two others, will have to try and find them now, but they were all from that 82/86 period.

Yeah it's weird to solicit outside help. I agree. I just think it's kind of fascinating reading any of this stuff about the pop songwriting and the re-recording vocals and all that from this legendary band in a genre like metal of all things...

Glad you asked, I recently suggested this to another friend.
With Insomnium, start with the first album In the Halls of Awaiting. Then listen to every album in order all the way up to present. Take in the band as they evolved, they've never released a dud. Masters of their craft.
I love every album, and will probably get sand kicked in my face for openly admitting that my favorite record is Across the Dark, but that album just hit me right, as it came out at a special time in my life. That whole first 3/4 of '09 had some releases that were deeply personal to me. That one, Skyforger, Diabolical Figures, Slaves to the World, Faith Divides Us..., hell, even Backspacer came out then. What a Summer/Fall. Take me back there.
Back to Insomnium, Start with In the Halls of Awaiting, clean yourself up after the Across the Dark/One For Sorrow one two punch, and just keep going. They only got better.
Cheers.

True. Let's not forget thoughaht Priest themselves weren't above flirtign with pop music. I mean, really, what else is "Turbo lover"?

That's how I've always pronounced it, and to be perfectly honest I don't give a single shit about how much they wanted us to pronounce it Anna-Theema, that's not how you say it. We were right all along! https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronun ... h/anathema

Is it worth seeing cryptopsy in 2024 if I've only heard none so vile?

Then there's the songs they did with Stock Aitken Waterman that never saw the light of day. I mean, you don't work with the guys most synonymous with production line 80s pop if you have a problem with making pop music.

Turbo Lover is absolutely JP's attempt at doing a Billy Idol song.

Depends. They do a lot of special setlists, like anniversary shows for specific albums. I caught their 20 years celebration show for None So Vile back in 2017, and they played NSV in it's entirety.

Recently they played the As Summer Burns festival in Montreal, and they had two different sets for the two shows:
May 28th : https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/cryptops ... 6879a.html
May 29th : https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/cryptops ... 6f913.html

And this is their setlist from the Unquestionable Blasphemy Tour
March 23rd : https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/cryptops ... a0784.html

As you can see, they have a lot of tracks from their first two in there, as well as songs from all over their discography.

Bottom line : They play a bunch of songs from NSV these days. That last show I shared had 5 tracks out of the 12 from NSV. But they do mix it up quite a bit from tour to tour, or for special occasions.

I always thought it was interesting how they used Bob Halligan Jr. quite a bit in particular. Along with Heads, he’s the one that wrote Take These Chains and he even wrote a song for Halford’s Resurrection. No doubt it was the result of a label going for hits but it’s kinda wholesome that they seemed to have rapport specifically with him.

I was watching the Cherry Orchads video because I had never seen it before and I thought that although the music is clearly glam metal it has a dark feeling and tone that is not appreciated in the bands of the genre. Do you know of any other glam bands that have that darker, more sinister feel to their music?

These kinds of questions always baffle me - what do you expect if you compare a fixed moment in time from decades ago to a present moment?

I think his question is more about whether or not the band still features that album in their live sets. Yes they do, they usually play about half of it.

Listening to the album now and holy fuck it sounds just like Mystification. I'm so happy as the more research I was doing on them the more songs from this album seemed to show up on live sets and people's favorites. Considering this was 1984, getting that guitar sound now is actually pretty impressive.