Dudes, almost all of your posts were reasonable and fine reads in and of themselves, but reading them only reinforced my impression that it all boils down to this:
The Truth wrote:
Tell me your favorite metal era, and I'll tell you what kind of metal fan you are.
Of course the guy who started a sentence with
"I would say 1997-2000/01-ish were the worst years for metal" (GravityLapse, was it?) WAS going to reveal shortly thereafter that he's not on speaking terms with EuroPM (which was at its peak at the time), and it's also a given that he's not at all into the type of black/death/whocaresanymore "extreme" metal awesomeness this exact era swarmed us with (what with calling that era "Hollywood" for BM).
It's also not in the least surprising that the dudes for whom the 90s were an obviously greater era for metal than the 80s are much more into either black, death and generally "extreme" metal or EuroPM, prog and otherwise soft metal than they are interested in the middleground genres on the aggressiveness scale (
the heavy metal,
the power metal,
the doom metal, speed and thrash, mostly). Conversely, dudes with the opposite preferences will obviously shrug at the very mention of 90s metal being superior to 80s metal, because that makes sense.
There was no middlegroung to speak of in the 90s, whereas the 80s almost entirely took place there, looking in all directions, often simultaneously. The 90s saw two main trends escalating apart from one another: soft metal and extreme metal. That's what made sense then, much more than proper subgenres. You'd buy the latest Metallian or another decent metal mag (yeah back then they were still immensely useful and mostly okay), and the sampler CD of new/upcoming releases would be roughly half/half soft and extreme. You wouldn't really need to give much thought to whether the new Labyrinth was prog with EuroPM tendencies or proggy EuroPM: it was soft, so it'd go to the soft pile. Likewise, the exact dosage of black vs death the new The Crown contained didn't matter much: it was extreme, so on to the extreme pile. However, in those days, finding a new release that met the following three criteria was damn near impossible: A) metal, B) roughly on par with the kind of soft/extreme balance your typical 80s album had and C) good. Much of the place formerly occupied by that type of metal was taken by the overwhelming wave of MTV-friendly, dime-a-dozen, barely even metal (if that) crap that the mainstream audience and less knowledgeable metal/rock enthusiasts alike vaguely remember as "90s metal".
So yeah, if your top 100 favorite albums of all times are mostly along the lines of, say, 'Heaven and Hell', 'Holy Diver', 'Piece of Mind', 'Crimson Glory', 'Heavy Metal Maniac', 'Show no Mercy', 'Orgasmatron', 'Master of Disguise' or 'Among the Living'... The 90s were very likely a tedious, desperate walk across the desert for you, with precious few oasis to just barely keep you alive.
If you're leaning more towards one extreme or the other in terms of overall aggression versus sweetness, then the 90s were THE DAYS, and looking back on the 80s, you might struggle to find much of interest to you.
For the most part, I'm in the former camp and the 80s are unquestionably the golden age of metal in my book. But an insane amount of greatness also came from the 90s, both extreme and soft, and I'd place it securely second in the Top Decades ranking system if there were such a thing, with the 70s close behind (as Riffs said, insane quality but so little to go buy, here's the desert metaphor again). The 2000-2010 decade has yet to redeem itself in my eyes, as it was right around the corner of that decade that I got my "fuck! metal is dead!" epiphany (I came around since, but still), and stuff from the past few years, although vastly clinical in its "reinvention" of the past and/or shameless exploitation of the nostalgia factor, actually gives hope that we're in what will end up being a really good decade for metal. We'll see.
Poisonfume wrote:
Rocka_Rollas wrote:
90s being shit for metal is so WRONG!!!
Running Wild and Grave Digger!!!
How is it that everyone on this board that likes Running Wild, fucking
LIKES Running Wild? I mean I like them too, a lot even, but I can't help but chuckle every time you guys throw a party in celebration of your fandom
Dude, are you for real? Do you realize who you're telling this to?! That man right there is not your typical RW fan, he is THE Running Wild fan. He's not merely celebrating the Rolf, he's making
this in his honor. Check your facts, bro.
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Osore wrote:
I would like to hear some recommendations of black metal bands/albums that sound depressive, yet sad and melancholic at the same time.