that is fucking great. Hands down not only one of the funniest, but it's the fucking truth! lol

...ssssssooooooooo...he's implying that Lacuna Coil are fish people?

Holy shit. Liquid_Braino is utterly fucking brilliant. My sides have been swept up by the cosmic winds and now course through universes unknown.

From

to

If you haven't read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," you really should. It's pretty insane. It also makes Liquid_Braino's comparison 100x funnier.

wrote my first review in months, i've not been very content with the sole review for Signs of the Decline and suddenly felt inspired to write a review for one of my all time favorite albums.

I've wanted to check out that Massacra album but have only heard the first two (no interest in those last two ). My familiarity with the first two plus the "German thrash overdrive with primordial death metal" part gave me the push to listen. Thanks.

So am I the only one who found not a single humorous sentence in that wall of text?(referring to the Liquid_Braino thing)

I didn't think it was funny on the level everyone else praising it seems to think.

yeah i didn't find it funny either. but you can't win every reader i guess. the 2-3 people here who found it funny are 2-3 more than have found my reviews funny, so there ya go. i just personally groan every time a metalhead references lovecraft, so he was never gonna win with me anyway.

Aww, you guys are no fun. Personally, it was the "shopping malls of Y'ha-nthlei" that got me.

Y'all a buncha humorless killjoys I tell ya what.

I'm sure at the time he was like "Woah this stream of consciousness is hilarious!" but it is just a wee bit too long. You could say it lacks elegance.

Dude, your reviews are funny as fuck. You need to write more!

Z is definitely one of the underrated greats from the heyday of the MA Reviewing Culture.

This guy is pretty hilarious, but he only wrote a few and his reviews are usually riddled with typos. It's like he doesn't give a shit, and I guess that sort of makes it funnier:

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/M ... tar/182617

hahaha ok this guy is great. see *this* is funny.

The "his leads sound like airplane noises you made when you where 5." part got me

Ehh, Diamhea...? His nickname is Rasta...because of hair...

Changed it anyway.

I didn't actually know that, heh.

When water shall turn to pitch

When ice shall act as burning coals

When the sky shall wrought but slings of napalm

...I shall return

...Soon

I realized I had written the word "melodies" two times, one after the other in the same sentence, after I submitted the review. Silly me and my proofreading

Bah to proofreading! If people can't read around a misspelled word or some dodgy grammar to understand what it means, they're the ones with problems, not you!

Good call on the recent Pilgrim album, Gunther! A hollow shell of their former selves.

Yeah, shit album, I'm in total agreement as well. I wanted to cover when it was released but forgot to do it and it already had a negative review.


^perfect.

Good one for Portrait too but why are you submitting a bunch of reviews all at once?

First review for that Pilgrim album: 95%

Second review: 45%

Third: 95%

Fourth: 45%

The next needs to be another 95.

Thanks, Necro and Tony. Sorry about the bulk submission. I had those reviews sitting on my computer for a long ass time, so I decided to dump a few.

Gunther I didn't even have to read the review to check out Portrait; all I had to do was see the cover art. So props for putting the name out there on the front page.

The new Portrait is actually SO god damn good.
Also, thanks autothrall for the great Halberd review! I'm usually not a huge fan of the 'thrall, but that was the most interesting to read for Halberd so far.

evidently thats not a high bar to clear b/c this isn't very funny

bug_man is the first mean kiwi we've had here.

The -40% drop in VilliThorne's Trinity Of Falsehood review is literally the most kneejerk retarded reason ever to drop a review score. That's like me saying "Oh I kinda like this odour but it's in a pink bottle, so I fucking hate it".

Is a band pretending a reason to be mad? Yes. Is a band pretending a reason to take 2/3 away from your review score? No.

Since when do aesthetics make music worse than it actually is? MA should have a rule prohibiting this crap.

EDIT: He also found it worthy to note that he's "totally unbiased", yet a band pretending to be something else than you expected them to be is a reason to hack 40% from your review score...

I haven't listened to that band/album but uhh... yeah I think LeMis might have a point for once. So what happened is that he checked the band out, assumed them to be deathcore, listened to the album, gave it a decent-if-nothing-special score of 6/10 because they weren't particularly good or anything (I'd've scored it much lower anyway based on his description but clearly we have different scales so that's neither here nor there), then finds out later that the band is listed everywhere as tech death, considers themselves tech death, are compared to tech death giants like Deeds of Flesh and Decrepit Birth, and so he interprets it as some sort of wolves is sheep's clothing situation and flips the fuck out and knocks the score down to 2/10? Again, I'll listen to this album shortly to see how far off he is and if the genre needs amending or anything, but I mean come on, judging a book by its cover... how could you think it wasn't tech death? The super clean jagged logo, the Ken Sarafin cover art, the fact that they're on Unique Leader Records? Did he seriously just look at that one dude's earlobes and be like YEP THEY'S A CHUGGA BAND.

I'm not gonna torch it right away because the review is fine before that last paragraph, which admittedly kneecaps every previous word, and I'd like to see if any other mods agree with what I've said here.


EDIT: From the band's Bandcamp - " No throwbacks, no breakdowns, no wanking, no trends. "

No breakdowns contradicts the review, no wanking and no trends contradicts their label!

EDIT 2 - Edit Harder: Also I should clarify, since LeMis and I both implied it this way but it's not entirely accurate. He didn't submit the review and have it accepted as a 60 and then rant about it later and knock it down to 20. The whole deal about him saying "it was initially higher but once I learned this and that I knocked it down" was within the text, so he's not pulling an old trick that we've seen a few times before.

Also a few songs in and there was one breakdown so far (and it wasn't even the really big stupid kind you associate with deathcore, but a breakdown nonetheless) but otherwise this really isn't all that different from Deeds of Flesh. Just less technically impressive. The cover artist also did the new Archspire album and that's really who this reminds me of; a much less good Archspire.

The only valid reason this would have a place in a review, is if the guy got a promo raving about how the band were the saviors of metal when they had too much influence from other genres - even then it's a bit shaky to include logic like this in a review.

Yeah unless these last four songs are all Suicide Silence ripoffs, I have no idea what the reviewer is talking about. Kind of a bummer because I seem to recall VilliThorne being a very consistently solid reviewer, but yeah he's just completely off his rocker on this one.

Alright well let me clear this up since I'm here now.

Like I said, I knew people would get pissed off. And I was right. As a reviewer, am I allowed to have a personal opinion? No, not really. However, I get HUNDREDS of promos a year. It so happened that TKV album was expiring soon, so I grabbed it. I didn't even look at the band before hand, as stated. I didn't see that they were tech death, or if they were deathcore, I didn't even know what the dudes looked like. I grabbed it and ran to catch my bus to work.

Now. I have come across a surprisingly, alarming really, amount of mislabeled bands this year. Bands that have been playing -core of some type, who've been considering themselves as something different. I've shrugged it off from those other groups figuring hey, you know what? They probably didn't have any idea what to label themselves as, some bands don't. Some bands don't like labels either. But TKV really took the piss on this one. You guys keep arguing with aesthetics. Record Label - Unique Leader Records. Have you guys actually listened to some of the stuff they've put out this year? Well, everything I've reviewed from ULR this year, save Beneath, has been generic waste. They're not the Tech/Brutal Death Brand Warrior label that they once were. Cover art - Ken Sarafin? True, he's done some tech/brutal death albums... but also, if you care to check, he has also done at least four or five deathcore album covers.

So here's what happened. I grabbed this album, caught my bus, went to work, listened to this album (without ANY prior knowledge of the band) and reviewed it under deathcore standards. I came home to write the review, found that they're tech death, and that they're boasting "fag" and "swag" and a whole lot of not-so-tech death oriented things on their Facebook. This just added to the irritation I was feeling, as honestly (unlike with the other bands), these guys know that they're genuinely misrepresenting themselves. Either that, or they just really, REALLY suck at what they do and don't realize it. The fact that they have like 12k fans astonishes me, while other groups who are masterminds in comparison are unheard of.

So, out of my hundreds of reviews (tons that aren't even posted here, because Metal Archives leaves out a lot of Metalcore, Deathcore and Hardcore bands), if you guys want to shame me for losing my crap ONCE. That's fine, I don't really care. I knew it would happen because people are predictable. But I wanted to clarify the situation. This is at least the fifth time I've encountered genre misconceptions of a -core band this year. If that doesn't make some kind of alarm go off in your heads, I implore you to wake up. Now that I'm not AS irked as I was earlier today, I've revamped the review on my website back to its original score. Which I think is fairly generous given the fact that this release is another generic title, with a generic logo, and is another in a long wave of generic ULR releases this year.

Edit: I also forgot to say, since you guys are on the same consensus that TKV don't really have very much "technical" attributes to their 'technical death metal', it really leaves scraps now doesn't it? So lets see, we have a pretty cruddy bass line that really doesn't do anything magnificent, some not-so-chugalug palm muted guitar (not all deathcore is chugging either, just saying), melodic segments as brief as they may be and a couple of breakdowns. Technical attributes? The drums are a little advanced and there are some rests in the compositions. Last time I checked, tech death was a little more than some two second one-stringers and killswitch type rests.

Cheers.

Is it a one-time slip, or an most overt indication that many of your reviews are hardly worth your own time? You have different standards for tech death and deathcore, yet you can't tell the difference between the two by listening? If you need someone else to tell you a simple premise that you base your reviewing on, why are you even writing about it?



Of course you're allowed to have a personal opinion, though it seems like it has no value to anyone else.

.

Err, I could have really cared less at first, but the worst thing you could have possibly done (after the initial transgression regarding the score) is change it back after that rambling, passive-aggressive diatribe. Plus I get what you are saying about not being a social butterfly. with that "Multiple labels send me promos, my opinion is therein validated!" crap. May I remind you of the illustrious institution that is Metal-Temple.com? Otherwise, you're okay. Hope you don't stop contributing at least.

Really didn't care to look up the review in question or anything, but this part... the holier than thou attitude. Yuck.