NIME is a pretty poor album for Blind Guardian, but it somehow contains no less than three of their best songs ever.

EXACTLY what I was going to say. As a whole, the album is kind of shit, but if I just hear the title track, Mirror Mirror, When Sorrow Sang, or maybe Into the Storm on their own, they're fantastic.

And Ozzy, the interludes are almost never more than thirty or forty seconds long. They aren't horribly lengthy but they're still flow breaking and pointless.

Nah NIME is their best album pretty much. It's not just an album it's like a play. Granted it's hard to determine their best but Imaginations certainly isn't that jaw dropping to justify it beating NIME personally.

A very poorly articulated, very dull play. Yes, if you meant that, then I agree.

Eventually smart ass retorts must give way to a superior pair of ears, me thinks. And eventually power metal has to do something else aside from slavishly following the dogmas put forth in the early to mid 80s by American and British bands.

I've had that album since I got into metal. It was my first BG album, and I pondered on why I couldn't quite get into it as a whole for a few years until I realized I just found the production weak, the songwriting cluttered and that there were only about five good songs on the whole thing, as has been previously noted here.

And of course it has to "do something else." I like tons of bands that progress it beyond its early roots. The problem is, when it goes too far, people complain that it has, well, gone too far. Where I usually do not agree.

I found Alcameth's review of Spiral Architect's A Sceptic's Universe funny, frustrating, irritating, and completely fucking ridiculous. Then I saw the list of other albums he's reviewed and it all made perfect sense.

I guess I should clarify that I found the review itself not that funny, just the image some guy sitting beside a stereo scratching his head was.

Which is why I consider Somewhere Far Beyond to be my favorite

One time I actually deleted the interludes from NIME on my iPod, and it somehow made the album worse. It has a few really good songs, but I find myself losing interest in the middle every time. SFB is probably my favorite, too.

Same with me, after The Curse of Feanor I just tune out and forget the rest exists. That album would make a great EP though.

Bolded part is especially important. I know it's a cliched thing to say, but it really is the perfect blend of their two styles in the midst of the transition from primal speed metal to majestic power metal. I was gonna review it a year or so ago with an absurdly high score but there's really no reason to at this point. Not to mention anybody who reads the forum surely sees how much I jizz over that album so they all know my stance anyways.

The production is a bit more posh than "Imaginations", which in turn was more posh than their earlier stuff, but it still has a good metallic feel to it. They started to lose me a bit with ANATO, which I am going to re-review and score a little lower after realizing that only half of the songs on there are really superb and the only actual bonafied classic is "And Then There Was Silence".

Furthermore, I tend to be an apologist for most progressive evolutions of power metal, although I really don't like it when that progression involves dumbing down the guitar work and making it sound like either mid-90s Pantera or Metalcore.

I guess its tough being one of a very small few who doesn't see either the USPM or European school being necessarily superior to the other. I'm almost tempted to treat them as separate sub-genres though, given how different they tend to be.



As an avid King Diamond fan, I tend to have a preference towards concept albums, and I found the interludes to be the glue that holds the whole thing together. I'm a pretty big fan of "The Silmarillion", which was itself a sort of touch and go collection of poems. I think the album did a rather fine job of capturing the spirit of the book.

As someone who doesn't listen to power metal and thus is the only relevant opinion, I can say that NIME is the last good BG album before the really really terrible crap of ANATO.

Yeah, that's about right. I'm a huge fan of The Silmarillion myself, and that's part of why I like certain songs from NIME as much as I do - for brief flashes, they're really able to capture the feel of the book. For example "The Curse of Feanor" really conveys the feel of the wrath and hatred Feanor holds for Morgoth, his father's murderer, thief of the Silmarils, such that he's able even to kill his own kin and essentially damn almost his entire race for revenge. It's also some pretty sweet speed metal. Really though, I think they would've been better off just taking key scenes from the book instead of trying to cobble it together into some sort of "concept album" that only covers about the first half of the First Age anyway. There's no coherent story arc, because it ends with Morgoth scoring a huge victory against the elves, rather than his defeat. It doesn't even begin to deal with Turin or Beren, basically the two major heroes of the First Age, despite the fact that it's one of Beren's greatest deeds portrayed in the cover art!

All of this Tolkien talk is giving me a serious boner. Anyway, maybe some day I'll have an epic metal side project with a 12-album series to mirror the twelve volume History of Middle Earth, as the versions of the stories told in The Silmarillion get expanded upon and read more like actual fictional tales rather than a dry historical summary.

Well, um... thanks for the feedback, I guess ?

I must admit you've got that image right, though. Boredom usually has me scratching my head frantically.

About the reviews, there's something about the line "Uhh, Judas Priest called. Freewheel Burning intro riff is only supposed to be played four times, not four hundred." in UltraBoris' review for Sonata Arctica's Ecliptica that gets me every time.

"Comprised of a pentagram of the douchiest scene wiggers society's membrane has to offer, Waking The Cadaver have taken the clown sperm-encrusted crown as metal's most mind-numbing act and simultaneously, sucked the deathcore bar down to a subterranean level..."

Waking The Cadaver review by MutatisMutandis

A certain passage from Hells_unicorn's review of Job for a Cowboy's Doom nearly made hurt something when I read it the first time.





Maybe I'm just immature, but the mental image of a tiger anally raping a bob cat in relation to deathcore vocals makes me laugh really hard.

Yes, one of my many attempts at channeling Ultraboris' brand of juvenile humor while still trying to keep my own style of "description first, novelty second" reviewing. It seems that whenever I trash a band that I don't like, I always come back to Boris' latent desire to have seen Sepultura killed in an accidental bombing during the recording of Roots.

It's an album that has to be heard all the way through each time which can be either positive or negative depending on the listener. The album has stronger melodies and stronger songwriting in my opinion then IFTOS. SFB is probably my second favorite, but NIME is engaging for me, the only main negative I can find is that it is a little bloated but I generally find myself enjoying such over the topness for lack of a better term.

I'm actually a fan of the album and own it myself, but it suffers from the exact same thing as the novel from whence it came: The "zzz" factor. The Silmarillion may have a handful of moderately interesting sections, little accounts of this or that which make you go "cool!" or "holy shit!" -- but it eats away at you; Tolkien's mind-numbing sense for detail and historical flim-flam going on and on as you search for a gun to make it all stop. Nightfall has some great metal tunes and a nice ballad here and there, but it all becomes an excerise in tedious monotony, nerve-grating interludes and it all overstays its welcome by the time 'Mirror Mirror' ends (at latest). I also find it ends on a very weak point ('When Sorrow Sang' - guh, what a terrible chorus).

Holy shit, did Boris actually say that? I know he was a little over the top at times, but...well...justified or not...

EDIT: Just looked it up, and well, he did. To be honest, I don't know whether I do disagree...Roots was pretty horrible.

Overall though, I think it's better that you don't stoop to his level of humour - it's funny some of the time, but when it's taken too far, it just becomes gross. Hating nu-metal is fair enough, but everything "modern"? The problem is, what is "modern"? There are lots of different definitions of the word. It can't just be entirely defined as "suck" which is what he always seemed to do.