Because not everyone is an exclusive reader of autothrall's reviews and nothing else. if you're reading reviews of one band's releases, it's useful to have such a thing there. Imagine if you were reading reviews for Aluminium Mosquito's albums, and if autothrall said, in a review of one of their compilations: "not gonna say what's already been said in the review for that Bronze Anus's compilation". The point is, why not cover both Aluminium Mosquito AND Bronze Anus with a tasty caveat emptor?

Goatfangs didn't waste much time diving into the Soulfly reviews.

Yeah, it's a little disheartening to think that there are people listening to metal that are so enthusiastic about that band. Although I just got a promo of their latest album and I think they may have won me over, provided that their material continues in this style. The rest of their stuff is so terrible that I don't know that I'll ever bother reviewing it, Max basically wrote Roots all over again 4 or 5 times.

And it's not even in a "They suck, but they suck in new ways we've never heard before, so in a way that makes them kind of cool" way.

black_slime is an awful reviewer.

In addition to being dumb as fuck (as is evinced on his profile info) his reviews are total garbage. Terrible rating system and equally terrible writing. I only read his Behexen review but glancing at his other reviews they don't seem to be any better.

From his Behexen review:
"Imagine Edgar Allan Poe being a lyricist for this band, that's how good the lyrics are."

Example of lyrics:
The rite of black mass. Deep in the dark forest.
Goats face in the ground. Surrounded by the congregation of darkness.
Nocturnal prayer for the mighty lord open this infernal night.

Truly poetic stuff there. And that's not even the dumbest part of his review.

EDIT: I lied.

Latest review of Aborted's "Global Flatline" made me go ... they're not from Germany... they're from Belgium.

The V album isn't exactly my favorite Symphony X release, but I find this review to be quite ridiculous. I might be pretty biased as I really like the band, but the guy's reasoning seems week to me. I mean; comparing Symphony X to Stratovarius? Calling Russell Allen's performance "powerless and lazy"? C'mon man. The second claim is particularly absurd.

LOL, this comes from the latest glowing review of the Behexen/Satanic Warmaster split:

"Personally, I think Behexen's two songs were better, but not a single second of this album fails to disappoint."

Classic.

It's probably a mistake, yeah, but I was frankly disappointed by the Behexen half, though I would still give the split a rather positive score (chiefly because of "Where Eternity Awaits"). It's technically possible to like it and consider it disappointing (though I can't imagine anyone being disappointed by "Where Eternity Awaits"; it's the band's single greatest song).

Metal_Detector, I'll be joining you sometime in a month or two on the new Running Wild album, but I'd like you to notice something.


EEAUUAUEEAUGGEHGEAUUH... Oh!

Also, *Half Mast.

Lol @ the new Draconian review being called "never failing to disappoint" yet being a glowing review.

I think something went wrong there.

The last sentence did make me laugh a bit.

I think they confused "never fails to disappoint" with "never fails to impress".

Whoops. Guess I skipped that day at flagpole terminology class. Leave it to me...



This must have happened when I transferred the review from my blog. Fuck, hate it when that happens!

These errors will be fixed. Thank you gentlemen!

Was I the only one who really didn't like the new review for Reign in Blood? The reviewer seems to contradict himself in a couple of places and doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on thrash at all. Maybe I'm just biased because it's my favourite album, but it seemed like a very poor review to me.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/S ... octavarium

You're not alone, I read that when he posted it the other day and I was thinking: "Man, this guy is not a very good writer.". Plus, he just goes on and on and on, stating inane points and repeating himself.

Empyreal's recent review of Unisonic's debut has one detail that I find odd. He makes a good case as to why he gives it a 60% (nothing wrong with that), but at the end he makes a point of saying it feels odd to give it that "high" of a score because its empty pop music. I wouldn't normally react to that, but Empyreal is the same guy that gave this album a 98%. Edguy is the tiniest bit more heavy/metal, but both are pop metal: big choruses, catchy melodies and loud guitars. Obviously songwriting would separate these, but at the core, these are both of the same flesh. Does Empyreal feel its odd to rate Edguy so high despite it being pop music?

There is a quote from the 2nd Die Hard movie that comes into play with this

Bruce Willis: "I was wrong about you, you're not such as asshole after all."
John Amos: "No you were right, I'm just your kind of asshole."

Empyreal seems to like a certain brand of pop/rock that happens to be the stuff Edguy has been putting out lately. It may not be in that particular review, but its pretty well implied in the bulk of his positive and negative reviews on various power metal albums. I tend to be the opposite way, I like my rocking music well produced and with a solid punch to it, whereas he tends to like it with that muddier, 70s feel to it. Though I do have to say that Tobias Sammet's attitude about his previous albums does give me added animus towards his current concoctions.

Fuck, my reviews are getting really sloppy. I used to write 4 essays a week and now in college (the year just finished) I had to write 4 maybe every two months, and I haven't really reviewed that much in the past few months, so not really writing all that often at all. Even after proofreading my reviews, I read them after their accepted and have to edit them for errors. Guess I'm just rusty and have to get back into the flow of it.

I've seen you allude to this before in your reviews stating Sammet's attitude toward his past. What exactly has he said about his past works?

There's little snippets in different interviews where he's hinted at his older sound being done to death by other bands, but the one thing that sort of got on my nerves was when he referred to Tinnitus Sanctus as being Edguy's most underrated album, which is mind-boggling given how little attention is paid to most of Edguy's material before "Theater Of Salvation". My reviews get a tiny bit hyperbolic at times, but the way he drools over his own later works just rubs me the wrong way.

Bitch needs to shut up and pump out more Mandrakes and Savage Poetrys.

Hells_unicorn is partially right about my affinity for certain types of pop-metal, and the comment about ‘seventies, muddy’ type of pop is interesting and may have some weight to it. But the reason I like new Edguy material is because of more individual aspects to the band. Yes, Tobias Sammet is adept at writing poppy material and certainly is a lover of sleek 80s AOR and Western hard rock, but it’s the honesty and scope with which he attacks those different elements that really grabs me. If the whole album sounded like “Fire on the Downline" or some of their catchy singles like "King of Fools" it wouldn’t be near a 98% score, but every song is unique and different and each one had clearly tremendous effort put into it. He is playing the music he wants to play, and it doesn’t sound like anyone else. The songwriting is dynamic, emotional and varied, and as I like every single song on the album, I felt it deserved the score for those combined reasons. It’s an incredibly epic and honest piece of rock music that is both easy to listen to and complex at the same time for its tightness of songwriting.

What I like in my music isn’t really power metal, necessarily, but a level of bombast and grandiosity combined with an airtight, trademarked, instantly recognizable sound. That’s why I usually heavily disagree with the mainstream opinion on bands like Edguy and, by extension, Sonata Arctica (I would probably give Unia an even higher score today than I did back then, and am considering re-doing the review to reflect how I feel about it now). I like to hear the core of an artist’s soul, which can certainly be expressed as well in generic, orthodox power metal or any other kind of metal, but for me it’s best when I get a really idiosyncratic, stylish take on rock music by an artist who knows what he’s doing and how he wants his music to sound. A big factor in my judgments for reviewing albums is the character, personality and emotional power behind the music, not necessarily how much it adheres to the traditional metal stereotypes and rules – not saying hells or any other reviewer strictly does that, but I just look at music in a much different way than they do, and I like it for different reasons other than just being good metal.

Edguy and Sonata Arctica do not even really make metal anymore in the strictest definition of the word. But they make powerful emotional statements that I can relate to and which are presented in artistic, unique and roundabout ways. And I can get behind that. If I were just to judge the entire pantheon of these artists’ music on how metal their early material sounded, I would probably have a much different view on metal. But both bands, despite having moved away from the sounds they started with, make some of my favorite music in the rock genres, for how well they have forged their own sounds and how they choose to express their emotions through the music. Music is all about emotional connectivity and these guys, Sammet and Kakko, just happen to have things to say that I find interesting as well as music that I find engaging. I don't know if I've entirely made sense with this, but you get the gist - it's about the character and soul of the man represented in the music.

Unisonic simply isn’t like that – it’s stuff you could put in the soundtrack to an 80s party movie most of the time, save for a few songs like “Star Rider” or “Renegade” maybe. Unisonic is just ear candy. It’s music you work out to and sing along to in the car, nothing else. I don’t think I could take a long walk or sit alone and concentrate on Unisonic’s music, as catchy as it might be. It’s just fun, and that is all it was intended to be, unlike the Edguy album which I found much more emotionally varied and long-lasting. Of course, there’s also the issue that I only like half of the songs on the album. Maybe if every song was as good as “Never Too Late,” which is my favorite on there, I would have given it a score in the high 80s. There are lots of factors.

In regards to Sammet’s attitude, he simply says he got bored playing straight up melodic power metal, and so he plays different stuff now. He gets defensive about it because a lot of his fans get really bitchy and annoying about it, and while I’d personally take a more mature viewpoint if I were him and not be so vitriolic, I can see how his opinion would get more extreme under the weight of so many people telling him his new work sucks and he should keep playing the same stuff he played when he was 18. So me, I have no problem with it. Hells seems to be a real metal purist and grew up in a different time than I did, and as such, has different and more rigid views of what the music should be like, so that’s mainly where we differ on the subject.

The difference between Edguy's and Sonata Arctica's poppy material (to me) is that I find Edguy's to be alright, nothing really special, while Sonata Arctica's is still as engaging and irresistable as their more power metal stuff.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/S ... ller_Clown

Killer_Clown is at it again with more inane and poorly written observations.

hah people keep stealing my thunder with these awful reviews. I had just looked at that Summoning review and stopped after a paragraph because it was ultimately illegible. How is this drivel getting accepted?

Yeah, Killer_Clown's reviews seem to be transposed through babelfish or some other free translation service that butchers the meaning of just about everything.

Another Engrish debacle. This one is a little more legible, this is probably the highest quality these type of reviews can get, sadly:

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/O ... ehualiztli

Wow hahahaha i really missed that when skimming the reviews on that page. Seeing that really makes me not want to try hard next time i review something. "Is best album by band of overkill american" is what i'm starting with when writing for Years of Decay.

From the new Sonata Arctica single:



I dunno, Khat, that cover looks more down the alley of pedophiles, who will probably file it next to One Small Voice and A Change of Seasons.

Yeah, I didn't like that song either but Khat really would have done well by NOT putting that opening into the review.

Quickest way to deflate my excitement over a new Master's Hammer review: Start out talking about how they aren't Norwegian. So tired.

edit: Also, make sure to force an awkward comparison with De Mysteriis, and then remind people one last time at the end of the review that they definitely are NOT Norwegian. Fuck out of here...

This might be a redundant appeal, since nobody with the problem probably reads this thread, but please, people, don't write band names in ALL CAPS, it looks stupid. Seriously.

Speaking as somebody who writes reviews for The Metal Observer, you're probably getting that from somebody not editing their reviews properly before re-posting them here or otherwise they likely got into the habit of it from there. I personally am not big on that format either, but I think you'll probably be dealing with it until the end of days.

That is some solid detective work, but I'm pretty sure (in this one instance, anyways) its just a case of ConorFynes being a fucking weirdo. I hope his review gets re-accepted soon though, so that my complaints above will be in reference to something that exists.

Thy prayers have been answered. With a bonus item attached.

_Sepsis_ is getting by with bare bones reviews.

Yeah, I figured I'd get railed for accepting this one as I ran out the door. I gave it a bare bones three points, but if it has to go, I won't let loose a sniffle.

As a relatively long time reviewer, I'm embarrassed to say that I had no idea that points varied due to quality. I actually hadn't checked mine in a year. I know this is off-topic, but what's the 'average' number of points typically given for a review?