I don't know if this has already been brought up already or not, but are these guys still posting reviews from time to time? I miss reading their shit. It was always funny and well-written.

I haven't seen Ultra Boris for some time. I sent him a message a while ago asking him to complete his superb Black Sabbath reviews.

UltraBoris came back sometime a year ago and submitted a few reviews but they were crap and got nuked pretty quickly after being accepted.

Like all paradigms of their time, their stars fade and they slowly, gradually leave for more compelling ventures. This is the fate of all reviewers. Do not mourn; for while both those reviewers may seem long gone and their zenith passed, they may drop in from time to time.

To use a local figure of speech as a baaaad translation: "Everything begins and everything ends", said the ram as his head was being cut off.

In other words, they just got fed up/bored and left. It's unlikely they'll come back for extensive reviewing, people rarely do that once they leave.

Spoken like a wise elder to ragtag heroes in a heavy metal fairytale.

Word is that OSheaman became really balls deep in the trance/club scene. I guess he took a heavy dose of X along with some bad acid, went on a trip and never really came back. He apparently wandered out of the rave, frothing and twitching. He was yelling something about Icke's Lizard Men attempting to vacuum his thoughts, and he was aware of the presence of his tongue. He was found a couple of nights later, serenading a quesadilla behind a dumpster. When approached, he scurried away like a frightened spider monkey and was never seen again.

Boris lost his job/home/girlfriend and became a drifter. He's been assumed dead somewhere between Vegas and Albuquerque for a few months now.

Haha, good jokes

No. No joke.

Or god, for that matter.

It sounds an awful lot like someone's trying to blow smoke up my ass. I would ask for some hidden camera footage or something to that effect, but I don't know what they look like anyway.

I haven't been near anyone's ass within the past 72 hours. How dare you assume such of me!

Hehe, I love the rare occasion that there is some entertaining horseplay on the site

Yes, I remember seeing a review for Overkill's "Immortalis" being there, but then getting axed...its a shame i know he's got quite the love for the 'Kill

Here we go:

http://www.metal-archives.com/board/viewtopic.php?p=1357475#1357475

I remember when I first read UltraBoris's review for St. Anger a few years back (agh jeez has it really been that long?!) and laughed hysterically. I have no idea what happened to OSheaman or UltraBoris, likely just became bored and left for other endeavors.

Yeah, I heard about that on 60 minutes. Word on the streets is he's working as a roadie for Fozzy, and during off time operates the Ferris wheel at the Sky Valley county fair.

Ultra Boris is funny,and has some good wiewpoints,but,his style is always about the same,or simillar.
St. Anger's review is just hillarious,i couldn't stop rolling of the laguh when i read it for the first time..too bad that there were not much more reviews like this generally on the site.

I've always found UltraBoris' fame amazing in how undeserved it is. He's enthusiastic, which is a good thing, but he doesn't really manage to say anything exept whether he likes it or not. There are reviewers with far better analyses, and there are reviewers with far funnier gimmicks. His works are generally worth a quick laugh or two at best - why do people miss him so?

Probably because he is such an old, legendary, prolific and iconic character. It's funny knowing him before he was as much into thrash or traditional meal and before he was aware of bands like Dark Angel or as crazy in voicing his opinions as he was on the reviews he wrote for MA.

You have to remember, the MA of 2002-2004 was a much different place than it is today. For the time, most of UltraBoris's reviews were of relatively high quality. There were far fewer reviews around back then, too. On top of that, he wrote reviews for many major and minor classics in the thrash/speed/heavy metal genres, so for people just getting into metal, he offered a roadmap of sorts. Before standards got higher, he used to have WAY more reviews up than he has now. In 2004, you could look at a band with a large discography like Overkill, and get a good picture of where their highs and lows were because UltraBoris had written a review for every album. Aside from that, yeah, his reviews could be pretty funny. I don't miss him, though; as proven by a couple of short-lived attempts at returning, he doesn't really fit in with the MA of today.

there's not a man alive who writes better than UltraBoris

Makes sense. I can understand it from someone's point of view who has been here since the early days, I suppose, especially if his writing helped to find new great music to listen to, but then there's this whole new school of ultraboris worship:

I don't know if the above poster is in fact a phantom user of some old m-a dweller. In fact I don't doubt the prospect of phantom usery the least bit, but I doubt he has been here for eight years. This I don't understand.

I've been on this site for a couple years now and seen hundreds and hundreds of reviews...and UltraBoris is simply the best writer I've seen! He's got that real spirit and his awesome style (as opposed to faceless typewriters like hells_unicorn or something) and he does pretty damn good job at describing the sound of those records he writes about. And also...he's got awesome taste in music! I can actually agree with nearly all of his views...I do disagree about some stuff he hates but all the albums he calls good ARE good

The only reason he does a halfway decent job of describing the music these days is because we've deleted a large number of his reviews where he didn't.

Indeed, at least 150 are gone.

I knew I should have knocked off that annoying capitalizing of the first letter of a sentence habit I have and made more analogies using shit, balls, and vaginas. I could've been a contender damnit!!

On-Topic:

I do enjoy Ultraboris' brand of humor, though some of those 1 paragraph deals he did early on were pretty crappy and told next to nothing about the album in question. He had template that consisted of saying "riff A does this, riff B does that, riff C kinda sucks, but riff D kicks ass" in most of his 2002 reviews that got old pretty fast. His stuff in 04 and 05 got better, particularly his rants about "Master Of Puppets" and "St. Anger" which were utterly hilarious.

Description of the music is overrated.

I already know what Overkill sound like. When I read a review I want to know if it rocks or not, and UltraBoris provides that information better than anyone on the site.

this

You do realize that most people who read a review when deciding to make a purchase tend to not know what Overkill sounds like. Furthermore, without at least some description, you could easily be duped into buying "I Hear Black", "Necroshine" or "From The Underground and Below" without knowing how groovy and modern it sounds in comparison to "The Years Of Decay" or "Horrorscope". I'm not knocking Ultraboris, but his descriptions of a lot of non-thrash albums, particularly during his 02-03 era tend to blow ass, despite how funny they might be.

But this isn't the first Bal-Sagoth album we are talking about here. Old-school thrash is one of least malleable genres in the metal world, and frankly if you don't know what it sounds like then you probably aren't on the Archives.

I just think this 'musical description' obsession is somewhat self-defeating and is taking away from what made MA great in the first place. When I read a review I generally know what the band sounds like and I almost certainly know what genre they play sounds like. The last thing I want to read is a mini-essay breaking down the sound of Overkill or Kreator. What I want to know is what fans of the genre whose opinions I respect think of certain albums. Boris probably played more of a role in shaping my musical tastes than any reviewer or music writer in the world - professional or otherwise.

There are multiple kinds of audiences, Devils, and the top reviewers on this site who've written hundreds have their own way of writing reviews, but description is always supposed to be first and foremost. If not for the reviewer, then for the website, because that's part of the rules. You can't just say how awesome something is an expect it to get passed the site, and even if you do describe the music to the minimum extent, it's still more fulfilling to describe an album or release akin to the reviewer's take on it.

I was probably lurking around reviews in late 2005-2006, so barely missed the UltraBoris train I guess. What mattered more to me than his writing was the simple fact that I matched his tastes quite a bit and it was just so easy to pick and choose albums he had reviewed with high ratings and love that stuff myself, so I discovered a lot thanks to him back then.

Him and Gutterscream for the most part, before I took things into my own hands and started searching the archives itself, or just started posting around and getting rec's here and such.

That's all well and good when you're talking about a reviewer you already know, but what about when you're reading a review from someone you've never read anything by? A simple "this rocks" is going to be worthless. What if you're reading a review from a thrash metal band you've never heard of before, who could be playing groovy thrash, brutal thrash, melodic thrash, Bay Area thrash, or whatever? If you want to know what style of thrash they play because you like some kinds but not others, a simple "this rocks" is going to be worthless. What about if you're reading a review of an album you're already familiar with, because you're interested in another perspective? Again, a simple "this rocks" is going to be worthless. What if you're familiar with an album but want to know what makes it tick? I think you get the point. It's fine that you like reading UltraBoris reviews to be entertained and to see what his opinion is because, based on prior experience, you respect his taste; however, that is only one reason people read reviews and there are many others. We do our best to strike a balance.

If this were a website that posted reviews from a small, dedicated staff of reviewers, instead of one that takes review submissions from all users, we'd probably have standards more in line with what you're talking about, because readers would be familiar with our reviewers and their various tastes. But with the number of reviewers we're dealing with, to most people each reviewer is anonymous. Therefore each review has to stand on its own merits, and hence, we have to have higher standards.

Just voicing my opinion.

I don't expect everyone to agree.

You're not making any sense, though. If you know what Overkill sound like, why do you need UltraBoris to tell you whether an album of theirs rocks or not?

Are you suggesting that if you know and like one Overkill album you will like them all?

I really don't think my position is that difficult to comprehend.

No, I am suggesting that if an Overkill album sounds like the Overkill who you know what they sound like, it rocks. If it doesn't rock, it does not sound like the Overkill who you know what they sound like but something different that requires description as to why it does not sound like the Overkill who rock.

(Pardon the convoluted (and probably screwed-up) syntax.)

-edit- I'll try untangling it a bit. Being someone who knows what Overkill sound like, most likely, if an Overkill album rocks, you know what it sounds like. In the case of an Overkill album that does not rock, it has to be different to the Overkill album that does rock, and therefore needs description as to what makes it different.

Albums can suck even if they follow the same formula as the rest of the band's oeuvre (especially in the case of bands like Overkill who have been around for 20+ years). I really don't need an in-depth description of the sound of a band's 15th album - I want to know if it measures up to their classic albums and I want to know in a well-written, preferably humorous way.

In any event it's not something I feel strongly enough about to launch a campaign over. I just think the new arbiters of the MA are overlooking what made this such a great site in the first place.

Well, I can relate from a writers perspective, when I review a band's entire discography or at least several releases of theirs, it feels frustratingly redundant to write basically the same introduction like ten times.

By the way, I was not talking about any "formula", that's not all there is to music. Obituary for example followed the same basic formula for all their albums, yet the reasons why everything from "The End Complete" onward sucks can still be found in the music, and can still be pinpointed in musical description. My point being, even if something that sucks is the same type of stuff as the stuff that doesn't suck at first glance, once you look at it more closely it clearly sucks for reasons that can be found in the music being different in some way or another.

I donno about Boris but this is accurate.