Has there been a lull in reviews? Some albums have recently come out this month from "big" bands like Abysmal Dawn, Revocation, and At the Gates, and I don't see a single review for them yet.

At War with Reality's official release date was yesterday...no reviews can be submitted until the cutoff. Otherwise....no, not really? Flow seems pretty consistent, but I have had the review queue down to ~10 or so consistently, so the reserves are somewhat exhausted, so to speak.

Not a huge critique but I don't get the problem that Le Miserable has with Incantation. He seems to get the idea of the albums but still he finds them 'lacking'. I mean, Incantation have never been about truly memorable riffs one upon the other (although they have some). Atmosphere and cohesiveness of the whole album have been all the focus so why still insisting with that? It's like asking Pillard a variety of vocals, why? He does what he does and for that album nothing else was needed nor intented (He does vary a bit on other bands). What if the bass can't be audible? Who cares? With such cavernous atmosphere it would be ridiculous to have a pristine/clear mix.

I've seen the same critique to Dead Congregation. If the aim is clearly a total sound experience instead focusing too much on each song and listening separately, why people insist on that? Is their attention span that short?

That 0% to Blood Oath is bitterman level of trolling.

^ It's a very elementary style of reviewing I like to think of as "checklist style reviewing"...in which the focus is placed not on the overall experience, but graded like a mathematical assignment, where different elements need to be there, and if not, then points are subtracted from the score. Nothing wrong with that, and you can still have a valid opinion that way, but I feel it's an ineffective method personally.

When I'm listening to death metal I'm mainly looking for stuff that sticks in my head or amuses me enough to ignore memorabilia somewhat, Incantation are decent at both, but nothing special.

Speaking of AWWR's reviews, there's already one online and I do have to say:

The highlighted quotes just irk me. I know what "metalcore" he's referring to, but in reality what he just said is plain fucking wrong! Metalcore wasn't fucking invented by ATG for fuck's sake!!! Also, since when did IF and Soilwork carry the melodeath torch after ATG tumbled down?! Or is he just counting the late nineties and forgetting the best part of the last 15 years or so in both band's careers?

I thought metalcore was a bit older than SotS. It's true that metalcore took plenty of SotS and Heartwork but that came way after those albums were released.

The reviewer probably got into metalcore or metal as a whole past 2007 or so. If that's the case, it's an obvious pretention that Soilwork followed ATG steps, Stabbing the Drama has a lot of SotS riffs ripped off, some shamelessly the same (see Stalemate took the SotS title track main riff without any variation). IF? Lol, they don't sound nothing alike and IF is old as fuck.

I didn't like the review in the slightest.

I'll grant him Soilwork to some extent, although they did take the pedal of the gas after a few albums and started doing stuff that was very removed from say, The Chainheart Machine. Saying that IF was playing melodeath post-Colony is... Oh well...

Like I said, I know that he's referring to the post-2000 "melodic metalcore" movement. But metalcore as a genre is way older than that, and has actually little in common to that scene. Just compare Unearth or KSE with Earth Crisis or Integrity and the difference becomes very noticeable. Saying that ATG created metalcore is factually wrong, plain and simple.

That's why I usually hate 'history lessons' on reviews. Not only they're wrong in a lot of cases but they also put some fake evidence to historical revisionism.

That review will be read by a noob and will believe that ATG invented metalcore. There's a psychological 'blind spot' which consist in people creating their first concepts about a certain subject. The first information that enters and 'make roots' in the guy's mind is harder to change/remove that new information that updates the initial concept. He'll defend in his subconscious that concept that is deeply rooted in his mind and without thinking he'll repeat that wrong concept. Only time and experience will make him change that. I'm sure a lot of you have heard noobs repeating nonsensical crap that only they believe cause they read/heard it somewhere and they try to defend such claims even if they know they are wrong. That's the damage rumors do in some people.

Edit: Am I reading too much on this?

actually while you both are right mostly. ATG pretty have dictated every step in the evolution of melodic death metal.
Their debut led to albums like the first in flames and dark tranquillity. Their change towards a more straightforward sound was followed by other bands doing the same. As SotS is from 95 and melodic death metal certainly didnt overnight become the thing it is today before in flames and other bands changed sound around 2000 his points stands.
Not a lot of people around these days are that aware of 90s metalcore. Melodic metalcore is often used interchangeably with metalcore for that reason and definitely AtG is the predominant metal influence on melodic metalcore.

I think I need some clarification on this gem of a sentence here. Did he honestly just call SotS a "harsh" album? Did we listen to the same cd? If anything it was their most clean and polished to date, not including the new album because I haven't heard it so I can't judge it yet. This review feels uber lame and completely useless. I also like how at the end he tells you to buy this album instead of other melo death bands you may enjoy just because ATG did it first y'all.

Just saying, I was under the impression that Carcass' Heartwork was the ignition to the melodeath predominance and overall simplification. It was after that album that the swedish guys became more melodic and straightforward, including ATG. DT, while still melodic, was more complex and proggy (TG- TMI), same with ATG.

About metalcore, thing is that it existed pre SotS and not every metalcore band sounds like SotS. He's wrong but as I said, I can see why, since new metalcore is influenced by straightforward melodeath.

Yeah, I'd have to put Heartwork on the table here as well. That album was doing what SOTS went on to do (more or less) two years later. And honestly speaking, as much as ATG has influenced the scene I've always seen albums like DT and IF first two albums as also being stepping stones into the Gothenburg sound. It was never an "ATG or die" kind of thing, and I truly believe that without Skydancer/The Gallery, Lunar Strain/Jester Race and of course Heartwork, the Gothenburg scene wouldn't have been the same just with ATG pushing it forward.

Heartwork was an important album but you will find a lot more AtG riffs on a random melodic death metal album.
The thing is early DT and IF pretty much exactly followed in AtG's footsteps. Everything they did was done by AtG a year earlier.

Also ironically modern metalcore is more likely to sound like actual melodic death metal than modern melodic death metal itself.

Small pet peeve of mine, but whenever somebody talks about the obvious KSE style metalcore and somebody else brings up Earth Crisis in response, I can't help but imagine that second guy sniffing his own farts and stealing somebody's lunch money.

Nah, neither IF nor DT sounds like ATG at all. IF went from their own form of melodeath to alternative stuff. DT dropped most all the aggression in favor of a more atmospheric take on their sound. After all ATG died with SoTS, the only ones who took the SoTS formula were new melodeath bands and metalcore bands that got heavier.

I'm no expert on metalcore but what I've heard from KSE, early Poison the Well or Unearth they don't sound like ATG. From what I recall, Mid 90's metalcore was/started as a sort of branch of what Pantera, Fear Factory and even Sepultura (Chaos AD/Roots) did. Over time, metalcore got heavier and there was the time they borrowed elements from melodeath (and melodeath over time got closer to metalcore, effectively overlapping).

You do know I was generalizing with the name-dropping there?! I still laughed though.


Not entirely wrong, except that early metalcore bands were hardcore punk bands. Sure, they started picking up on the metalized chord style and the chugga chugga groove of some major metal bands, but they were still very much in the punk spectrum. I don't hear much hardcore punk in the post-2000 bands, they just mainly go the SOTS+breakdown route.

I mean, early Converge for instance was at a very basic point just HC+Slayer. That was basically it. And I remember listening to Unearth around 2006-08 and seeing them live at 2008 and they were basically just doing SOTS+breakdown. Not one of the worst offenders actually, but I just dropped that name as to mention something I'm familiar with that could be easily compared against, for instance, Integrity, which is a band that shows you clearly that it's HC+metal and not the other way around.

Impressive review of the new Blut Aus Nord by gabaghoul_totd, with some very nice description. Elaborate and even fanciful use of imagery in the review but pretty much kept relevant and didn't spill over into pomposity, nice one.

- from TrooperEd's review of "Under The Sign Of The Black Mark"

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/W ... omy/210275

Perfect review for today - great fucking album too.

Apparently I missed out on the promo party for that INCONCESSUS LUX LUCIS EP I'm listening to their album from earlier this year right now before I check out the EP. So far it kinda really kicks ass.

I hope I'm not the only one that thinks that EP is nothing special at all. Ok riffs and sounds like Watain which is good but not good enough to be on their level. Think I'd rather listen to Watain. Reminds me of (but not as bad as) Forgotten Woods' Race of Cain, and I hate that album.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/I ... eba/238242

If you think this is a weaker album from the band, that's not exactly an unprecedented opinion - though it is one I disagree with, and calling the album AOR and saying it's too mellow for a metal band strikes me as not digging beneath the surface of this release enough. Comes off as bullshit historical revisionism, basically, but hey, that isn't something new to this site's reviews...what really baffles me about this review is this:



Follow the masses? That really just seems like what this is really all about - being a special snowflake and having an opinion that's new and shiny and different from the dreaded "old school metalheads" like it's some kind of oppressive empire...ridiculous...

And Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime? I love that album to pieces but it's way more AORish than Seventh Son ever was (because Seventh Son isn't AOR at all). Doesn't detract from the riffs and songwriting scope, but it is.

kluseba and ridiculous are synonyms already, but this is still pretty funny.

Oh man! It's hard to digest that a guy who gave the new In Flames album a flattering review is labelling Maiden's prog classic as AOR and commercial.

I lol'd. What a gombean. He's pretty amusing though, tis always nice to see him yapping on about how everyone but him fails to be open-minded about modern "metal" and that everyone is a "close-minded metal elitist" and the like.

Yet somehow he found more ways to look completely fucktarded, I'm impressed.

Yeah, there's a tradition of whiny "open-minded" metalheads with a persecution complex. Unfortunately. kluseba is one of the most overtly passive-aggressive ones, though.

Both ''solos'' and ''soli'' are perfectly accurate terms, so you've probably learned something new. It's a Latin word and that's why both terms are possible. No trouble, you're welcome.

I really have difficulty believing that "soli" will catch on. So good luck with forging new frontiers and whatnot.

Never seen it in English, but it's a valid plural form in German. Didn't this come up once before (either with kluseba or some other German-speaking reviewer)?

EDIT: Ah, right. Anyway yeah, I don't think it's a correct form in English. Just because it's of Latin origin doesn't mean it can still follow Latin rules.

Yeah, it's definitely not correct in English, and saying "soli" in English sounds really goofy regardless of whether or not it was correct in Latin. I mean, we say "albums" instead of "alba", so suffice to say the inflection of loanwords doesn't have to be preserved from their original language.

ravioli ravioli give me the guitar soli

Italians don't pluralise borrowed English words and we return the favour by not pluralising the words we've borrowed. You're not as bright as you think you are, you're welcome.

http://dict.leo.org/#/search=soli&searchLoc=0&resultOrder=basic&multiwordShowSingle=on
Leo does not have it ...

dict.cc does not have it, either.

On that dictionary-website the German plural Soli is solos in English...

There are also sources that indicate both possibilities like this one: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/solo That's also the way I have learned it. I say both ''solos'' and ''soli'' and try to vary as much as I can to add some diversity and fluidity to the texts.

Anyway, it's not because English is your mother's tongue that you can know all the different words of your language. It's the same thing for any other language. I still discover new words in German each year that are rarely used. Let's say that I also have a special interest for this. I've learned and studied languages for quite a while and I need different languages in my everyday life and at my job.

Anyway, it's not my goal to give anyone here a lesson. It's just wrong that certain users laugh about this term when it actually exists for real.

I am likely so late to the party that the hangovers are gone, but does the reviewer bitterman like anything? I constantly see 0% reviews from him!

You are. He does. They're all previous to 1993. Get over it.

In all seriousness, look the other way as the subject has been trailed over to death and then some.

Noted, and subject dropped. Cheers!

Good to have you back, Mikey.

Thanks, mate.