A fabulously glorious return! : D

A goodass Nargaroth review by Cheeses_Priced

I haven't heard the album in question in probably seven years, so I can't say whether or not I agree. But Cheeses makes a good case for why the album sucks. Possibly my favorite reviewer on here tbh.

Cheeses is the king. Not only is that a great review, but in turn it also describes a system of numerically scaling albums so on point I think it should be in the rules. He has this way of being really funny without trying too hard, and he comes across as knowledgeable in really short, concise reviews. Everyone should read all of his reviews before they try and write one for the site.

Y'know, for years I've been using the exact rating scale described in the review (50% is a blank tape, anything above is varying degrees of "I'll listen to it" and anything below is "I'd rather not"), but I've always attributed it to droneriot. Huh, no idea how I've screwed that up.

Anyway yes, Cheeses was a treasure.

He's still the best reviewer on this site, in my opinion. His blogs on last.fm back in the day were similarly great- short, to the point and often hilarious. His in flames vs tiffany review was god tier.. He had quite a few god tier reviews really.

Shame he's gone. I briefly chatted with the guy on last.fm, and from what I could tell he got really, really into Bach and basically stopped listening to anything else. A fittingly eccentric end for a very unique guy.

I wish I still had that "family tree of doom metal" pic he made, with Pagan Altar being the offspring of Black Sabbath and the cartoon Hobbit soundtrack. I lost it in a hard drive crash ages ago, though

It's disappointing that nobody's been using "For Ass Tid" as a review title by going off what the album title on the original art's font looks like. What a missed opportunity.

Shit, never realised that before! Well that's been taken care of.

caspian? SA?

Uhhh, I think I meant solitude aeternus. Man, I'm not much of a proof-reading pedant but looking back that review needs some serious editing. Was bashed out rather quickly and it shows in a few places.

Empyreal nailed the new Testament, haha.

Man, that was a particularly brutal negative review. Good stuff.

That was a fun review to write. It is just such a bland album so I had to make it fun somehow.

I don't hate the album nearly as much as you do (though I do dislike it), but this passage:



Is basically perfect. It's metal for 15 year olds. If anything I'm upset you didn't point out how cringey the lyrics are, since I don't usually pay as much attention to them and even I couldn't focus away from how bad they were. Black Jack and Canna-Business were especially stupid from what I remember.

I didn't even care enough to read the lyrics. Looking back at my other Testament review, I actually did talk about the lyrics on that one. This one I just had such a perfect idea of what I wanted to write that I just didn't feel like spending more time invested on this. The first song's lyrics were ludicrous enough and "Canna Business" told me all I need to know.

And yeah, that passage was a joke on how my old review had kind of a dickish title, the "music for stupid people" thing. I'd never do that now. But I just had to point out how utterly banal it was and that whole Youtube comparison seemed like such an apt way to do it.

Someone had to Read it and Empyreal I think your review sums up pretty much my general feelings about Testament as a band and the vast majority of their career. Especially: "with every song just chugging along with generic, vanilla riffs you've heard a thousand times before, only played here with little actual energy and in the most predictable ways possible. Chuck Billy's vocals are utterly banal, a faux-gritty sneer with a really irritating timbre to them, and he doesn't really emote or sing any good vocal lines on here, just sticking the whole time to that constipated half-growl."

Kudos to Diamhea for his review of Atoma. I feel the same way as you about this album but I have become much more fond of the album than it appears you have. I'd give it a solid 80% just because of the songs. The lead work that provides so much of the melody on this album is so perfect and creates so much atmosphere. I would not mind if they kept this sound and expanded on it for a while. Your review did capture a lot of what I was feeling, though. Great job!

WTF is he talking about here? How does one discover metal music through a band that's not even metal. A band can only inspire if it makes good music....you know, leading by example. Besides, there's no reason to re-discover metal music so it's up to those once inspirational bands to produce solid albums. Finally, HammerFall delivers an album that isn't a steaming pile of shit and it gets accused of being an uninspired rehash. This sounds nothing like a rehash. It actually is very much a modern HammerFall album...just with way better songs. I'm still stuck on the Avenged Sevenfold reference, though. What the fuck does that even mean?

After seeing his posts here, it seems that kluseba guy has some sort of point to prove when it comes to Avenged Sevenfold. That name-drop is so painfully shoehorned in there that it's obvious he just wanted to pimp 'em out to the dissenters of the band. At least that's how I see it.

kluseba and GoatFangs are both pretty notorious for not only trying to shoehorn in every non-metal band that has some tiny amount of metal influence and/or is frequently misrepresented as metal by virtue of their mainstream popularity, but they also tend to take it personally and act completely baffled that these bands aren't accepted and do shit like that just to sort of rub it in our faces that they disagree, as if that means or affects anything atll (to be fair the former is much worse about this than the latter). Avenged Sevenfold, Kittie, Protest the Hero, Amaranthe, Babymetal, and in particular Soulfly (for years and years before they finally actually made a metal album) are all notable subjects that one or both of them has relentlessly tried to hammer into us via sheer attrition as if that'll somehow change our minds.

Man, I haven't posted in this thread for a while as I don't read many reviews anymore. But, I read Deathdoom1992's review for "Moth Into Flame" today, and I gotta say it kind of sums up how I feel about these songs. If you're going to take 8 years to follow-up your previous album, then it better be good. Now, I'm not saying that they have to work on the album every single day for 8 years, but at least make it sound like you spent time to write quality music. This just sounds half-assed and not well thought out. Maybe those songs were written after Kirk lost the phone that supposedly had 250+ ideas because he couldn't remember anything that was on it.

If you need a phone to remember your ideas, then either 1) the ideas weren't very good to begin with or 2) you're a fucking idiot. Lol.

However, I hold the opposite opinion. These last two have really appealed to me.

No offense, but as a guitarist who writes his own music myself, that's an absolutely retarded thing say. Some people come up with so many ideas (MoT said Kirk had 250+ on that phone) that it becomes impossible to remember them all. Especially if you take a break from some ideas in favor of other ideas, and keep writing new ideas, and new ideas, and new ideas. The human brain can't keep up with them all. The solution is to either write them down or record them.

I'm not really sure what you want from those songs personally, but eh, different strokes I suppose. I thought that review was pretty poorly reasoned and his critique of the lyrics was dumb because it just takes a few lines out of context. The lyrics were actually way better than I ever thought they'd be at this stage.

re: kluseba - I actually agree with him on that Hammerfall review, but yeah, the A7X thing is silly to say the very least.

Aside of Avenged Sevenfold and Babymetal which BastardHead mentioned, I never ever talked about the other bands. I don't even know what Kittie are for example. Soulfly are a band I find terrible and from what I know I wouldn't consider them metal. Protest the Hero and Amaranthe are bands where I only know two or three songs and I would consider them more rock than metal.

As I said before, in my job, I'm working with a lot of teenagers. Most of them are discovering metal music thanks to ''harder'' bands such as Avenged Sevenfold, Five Finger Death Punch and Disturbed. Look, I'm not even saying that Five Finger Death Punch are metal and I personally don't like them. Disturbed is a band I like but I wouldn't consider them a metal band either. It's only in Avenged Sevenfold's case that I honestly think their last three albums are metal albums (particularly Nightmare and even more particularly Hail to the King) and not hard rock, metalcore or whatever some people might think. Still, the band's last output is so eclectic that I could understand why it's not considered predominantly metal. From these bands, many teenagers go and discover these band's influences such as Metallica and the likes and get introduced to the metal scene. That's why these bands are vitally important for the scene even if purists might dislike them.

When I was a teenager, I discovered metal music thanks to bands like HammerFall among others because they were still quite popular and also played on radio and television. A lot of young metal heads wore HammerFall shirts and the likes at my school. Even then, I knew a lot of older metal heads who were laughing about HammerFall, Edguy and Sonata Arctica and the likes and declared them pussy rock or flower metal which I found closed-minded. Today, many older metal heads have the same reaction about bands such as Avenged Sevenfold which I also find closed-minded. They pretend only they know what metal is and are convinced younger fans have no clue.

What I'm saying in my HammerFall review is that nowadays, younger audiences don't care much about HammerFall anymore and rightfully so because three out of their last four albums were abysmal in my opinion. If HammerFall were a band younger people would get in touch with when trying to discover harder music nowadays, they wouldn't probably be interested in digging deeper into the genre which I can understand. Avenged Sevenfold's new album is much more exciting than HammerFall's new output in my opinion. I'm glad times have changed, tastes have changed and metal and related genres have evolved.

HammerFall is a band that belongs in the museum nowadays.

It's fine if young people get into metal through A7X or something; nobody is saying that's a bad thing and you have to start somewhere. But that doesn't mean I have to like those bands. I think they suck and if given the opportunity, I'd politely recommend bands I find to be better - and even if the person on the receiving end doesn't agree, at least they've now heard more stuff.

I guess you took it the wrong way; I probably phrased it oddly. I write my own music as well, and what I meant is that putting all of your ideas on a phone is definitely not the smartest thing to do. I've recorded a few riffs on the fly on my phone as well, but I always make sure to rerecord them somewhere reliable so I won't lose them. He's Kirk effing Hammet, he has access to all of the gear he wants, so blaming his loss of ideas on losing a phone is extremely irresponsible and not an excuse whatsoever. It wasn't retarded, it was calling him out for such a dumb mistake. My point stands, if you store over 250 ideas on a phone that can easily break, get lost, or whatever, and then end up losing it all, you are indeed a fucking idiot. No offense to you of course, but perhaps now you get my point.

If we're talking about losing ideas, Cunt Orlok just wrote in one of his FB pages that he lost a year's worth of lyrics, riff, and drum pattern. I truly don't know if I should laugh or cry

Yeah, I guess I misunderstood your post. I thought you meant that if you had an idea that you couldn't remember without recording it/writing down, it's not worth remembering.

You're actually incorrect on what constitutes elitism and what constitutes not metal. I'm an older metalhead and embraced Euro-power metal. I never called any of it pussy metal or flower metal...unless they were ridiculously over the top. Hel, I still love and listen to Rhapsody's first two albums. I know plenty of metalheads my age that feel the same. Ultraboris did not speak for all of us.

If Avenged Sevenfold bring people to metal then hey, it's all good. But to insert A7X into a review of metal band (I don't care how much some HammerFall albums blow, they are still heavy metal) and say that they bring more people to metal because they are more interesting than said band, you should expect this kind of reaction.

UltraBoris is not an older metalhead, he's younger than me.

It was a blissful few weeks, nearly devoid of needless belligerence.


#notallelitists

Kind of off-topic here, but how the hell do people lose data like that in this day and age? Like I get it if you can't afford a big external hard drive, but Google Drive is free...

Negligence. Like I wiped my phone once because Google told me my stuff would be backed up, but it didn't tell me it didn't back up everything - negligence on my part not to double-check. (In detail, Google said it would back up my photos and it did, but I misunderstood it thinking it would back up all my pictures, which it didn't, so edits, screenshots, etc. were lost.)

I fucking hate these.

Yeh I dunno why these shitty attention seeking reviews are being accepted

That review is basically worthless - we don't know who this guy is and have no framework as to what he considers to be so much better than MOP. The criticisms are scanty and rudimentary. Not a good review at all.

It's pretty hopeless. I think (if you're a MoP fan) you've just got to remind yourself that a few negative reviews on MA are no big deal and aren't exactly going to change the general consensus that it's a hard out masterpiece.