I've rarely cringed as much reading a review as I have reading this one. Not just because half of it is a weird anti-feminist tirade that has nothing to do with the music, but the actual musical description is totally fallacious and it's clear the reviewer went into it intending to trash the record no matter the musical content. I mean... 'She also performs some fills, but they sound like cheap photocopies of fills that were performed by far better death metal bands.' What does that even mean? Drum fills are drum fills, there's only so much you can do with them. The entire review is basically like that, nonsense ramblings and untrue statements, and then finishes by accusing people who like the band of being 'unlikeable bitches and faggots'.

Hatchet jobs are very appealing, there's a damn "hatchet job of the year" award for British critics, awarded to "the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review"! But those reviews require not only great insight but also a lot of wittiness and clever lines, while the hatchet reviews for Lulu and the likes mostly fall pretty flat: "When a formerly outstanding band get to release something this bad the impact is so huge that we might end up just like the dinosaurs"...
They think they're doing his sort of thing, which is entertaining but immensely difficult to do:

That is one of the most British sounding rants I've ever read. Flap and doodle for the win.

I've rejected it retroactively for now. The musical description is more than fine, which is probably how it snuck through, but yeah it spends WAY too much time on his beliefs of things outside of the music. A passing mention or even a paragraph relating to the themes and how they work with the music is totally fine, but four or five full paragraphs ranting about how broken feminism is is just completely off base and has no place in a metal review. If he cuts that part out it'll be back up with no problems.

And I've never heard the album, but there's no way in hell that Mallika Sundaramurthy phones in a shitty, 0% performance. The woman is a fucking beast in Abnormality.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/A ... d56/138425

Couldn't disagree more. Sure, the album sounds Cascadian and all, but it was really, really damn boring. I was really looking forward to this album too. What a disappointment.

My recommendation is to listen to Infera Bruo's latest and leave this one behind.

Ugh, that guy is so sloppy when he copies his reviews over from his main site. Bunch of missed/extra spaces, weird grammar mistakes, and it is really just a glorified track by track after the second paragraph.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid when dealing with these albums that only have three or four long-winded tracks. Still...

I feel like the "no track-by-track reviews" rule is enforced a bit too heavily at times. Years ago, I wrote a review for the Meshuggah EP The True Human Design, which got rejected on that basis... except the songs vary between standard Meshuggah, D&B and a goofy acoustic cover of "Future Breed Machine". Not sure what could've possibly satisfied the mod who rejected that review, I dunno know how you're supposed to summarize the sound of an EP that's basically a collection of oddities.

You would have to 'tie it all together' perhaps, by talking about aspects that apply to all of the songs, such as the performances of each of the members, or the production.

Seriously that MC review would had been fine, it's a case by case approach for me.

Yup, as it should be

Thirded. It's easy to tell which kind are the lazy amazon format. Must've been an oversight or something.

The real problem with track by track reviews is when new writers just put each track into a paragraph of its own and give some useless description, not really ever summing up what the album as a whole is like. I've done track by tracks for albums like Kamelot's Silverthorn and Sonata's Stones Grow Her Name among others, but I wove the song descriptions between the talk about the albums, so they were fine for the site.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/O ... oad/327181 - it's nice to see a review of this album that's not just slobbering. I've always found it to be 'extremely mediocre'... and Sy Keller sucks. His descriptions of Onslaught just being a sort of perfunctory metal band are spot on, too.

Looks like someone deleted the review. Was it that bad? Your description made me want to read it since I've never been a fan of anything past Power from Hell.

It's back now; he had to fix the score.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/G ... ws/486663/

I have absolutely no idea what the album sounds like after reading that review. I generally hate it when reviewers are completely fixated on the production and neglect everything else, including the music itself. There are two sentences about what the guitar plays near the end and they say nothing. At least I know a lot about the guitar tone now.

I too am baffled at how The Force outscores In Search of Sanity round here. I find that to be one of the better late-80s long-ass thrash albums.
PS, Acrobat, "extremely mediocre"... Is that not an oxymoron?

Yes, it is.

Hold your horses. The Force and In Search of Sanity both kick ass.

This is the most accurate statement in this whole argument.

I'm no fan ofThe Force either. The vocalist sounds OK, but I do agree he just doesn't stand out compared to other vocalists of its time. But man, those riffs....I'm sure I've heard plenty of those before. Showing your influences is fine but I feel these riffs are just way too unoriginal. And the songs just drag, bah. If you can't write longer tunes, stick to 3-4 minute ones.

The Force is basically exactly what I always wanted from a thrash album. Just the right combo of chugging, gritty riffs and classic metal flailing. Sy Keeler is great and the epic songs remain consistently entertaining. Though I'm not really a thrash aficionado and most of my favorite bands are the more off-kilter ones like Rigor Mortis, Sabbat UK, etc.

Metal_Thrasher90 has to die.

That Iron Maiden review is retarded as shit. I'm guessing he's either a troll or a teenager raised on Machine Head.

I've been meaning to review the Iron Maiden debut as my 10th anniversary of hearing it and being into metal. Hope it wouldn't look too much like a rebuttal of whatever crap he wrote...

I was reading his Lizzy reviews the other day and man, now that I actually sit down and try to read those, they're awful. He constantly approaches them from the point of view of how heavy and rocking they all are, like a band from the early to mid 70s was really going to be busting out constant thrashing, aggressive songs, rather than a mix of hard-driving rock and blues, soul, funk, or whatever, which many bands did back then. The lack of understanding is just amazing.

What does this guy have against '70s rock? All of his reviews of albums from the early 80's parrot on about they are entrenched in the 70's. (Just think for a moment how ridiculous that sounds- imagine criticising a 90's album for sounding 'too like the 1980s'). He does realise that Black Sabbath's debut is mostly heavy bluesy rock, right? Also, what sounded like Iron Maiden in 1980? How is it generic and how are some of the fills, transitions and solos designed 'without consistence, vision or inventive' [sic]? At no point is it not driven, it is the very epitome of youthful energy put into simple rockin' music. Like a more polite Motorhead.

I really want to see him review Rocka Rolla. Lets see him handle that.

Also, his introductions are terrible, they put off anyone reading immediately by chucking big, pretentious words and pointless history lessons at the reader. And stop putting all of the BLOODY BAND NAMES IN BOLD!

His review makes about as much sense as Empyreal and hells_unicorn complaining brutal death metal doesn't have enough thrash metal influence (it's not supposed to.) Almost everything he complains about is what makes the album so good.

Yes, I hate this!

Haven't done that recently...maybe back when I was like 17 or so, when it would have made sense to say something dumb because I was newer. But not now.

November 8th, 2013.

Oh, that one? I dunno, fair enough but I didn't use "it has no thrash influence" to give the album a 20% score, rant about how it's absolutely terrible and base everything on that. I think I understood it well enough to know the album didn't work for me. That review was mostly just a long meditation rather than damning it one way or the other. You could argue it wasn't worth writing that review because it's solely based on my personal feeling rather than analysis of the music's quality - but that's neither here nor there.

I've modified my views on this a bit in the past year or so, though I don't think any of the brutal albums that I ended up trashing or giving mediocre scores to will change. If you're feeling ambitious and want to cite the particular review, I'll probably touch up the wording to cut out the complaints about the lack of thrash riffs and just go back to complaining that it's utterly stagnant, reductive and devoid of any of the nuances that make Pathology and 7 H.Target more my style of brutality.

Machine what? Are you kidding, man

Considering your almost prideful lack of context for pretty much anything you've ever written, it's not a stretch to assume such a thing. I can't say it any better than anybody else has done on this page. I feel like this thread turning into bashfests of a select few writers is inappropriate and counterproductive, but you're something else, man. You keep saying things that are just blatantly ignorant and look like you're fifteen years younger than you actually are.

And it seems that ConorFynes has all of a sudden decided to put band names in bold. Anyway, not sure what he meant by this...

...but that's just one more shot to his credibility. That album is a masterpiece and is far more than just Sacramentum and Dissection worship.

at Metal_Thrasher90 for making an even bigger ass of himself with that Iron Maiden review. He used to get me fired up but I got past it. He's trying to make a name for himself by pretending to be edgy and all. We're paying attention to him and that was his objective.

And this whole discussion (past 15 comments or so), my friends, is a great example of why I still check the forum a couple times a week. Priceless!

Glad to see that DawnoftheShred liked Buckethead's "Colma" as much as I did. Such a breathtaking and captivating album that really doesn't sound like much of his other stuff. Check out "Electric Tears" too, if you dig the style. I still think "Colma" is his best album to date.

Oh btw, what ever happened to autothrall?

he finally reviewed every album ever. nothing left to do