I think he got the wrong album.

The tempo isn't as slow as he's saying at all, the production is much better than he says (as I own the album and have played it through many different speakers) and the singer sounds NOTHING like Tom Araya and only like Dickinson a teeny bit if you squint...really I just don't know where he's getting any of that shit from.

Haha, I already did a review for the Agalloch album with a massively positive score. Butthurt reviewers trying to counter scores they don't like are never a good time.

I support this feeling as well.

It did bring enough attention to Animals As Leaders that they were re-evaluated and removed from the site.

I pretty much agree with that guy about Eleutheria. That albums just made me want to vomit the entire time I was listening to it. But, to each their own.

Can we have some reviews for Enslaved's RIITIIR that actually have a clever title?

What an interesting coincidence we have here.


This is not about the score but about his questionable remarks on the album. Saying that the album sounds like a 56 kbps MP3 rip, the vocalist comparison and saying that they could be a doom band are all completely off the mark and have no truth in them whatsoever. I'm all about different opinions but did he hear the same album as the rest of us? The question remains.

I will never read a review when the writer's too fucking lazy to even think of a title.

Prerequisite: it has to be a palindrome as well.

It seems that the user 6CORPSE6GRINDER6 really likes Immolation... a lot!

True, but forgivable.

Yes, Immolation are great indeed. But then again that's a lot of perfect scores!

I get that Immolation is well-loved on these forums, but wow is that some fanboyism.

I don't care about the percentages, all of these reviews are terribly written, riddled with poor grammar, and they rarely offer a decent description of the music. Several reviews completely leave out anything about what sets Immolation apart as a band (there's a lot to pick from), and most of the descriptions of it are more obtuse than the music itself. The review of "Failures for Gods" offers some odd descriptions, but some points are lost by poor description. The poetic masque of piece-by-piece reviewing appears in some sparse-but-specific descriptions in a row.

The reviews notably improve from the earliest to most recent, suggesting an inexperienced writer who could be helped greatly with some feedback.

This quote from hells_unicorn's review for Hammerfall's debut is a rather ridiculous assumption. People don't hate on bands for making money but for adapting their sound to a more 'radio-friendly' style which many people dislike, me included. Plus very few bands actually make much money off of their music, and we had a thread fairly recently about this so no music is not just a business in the metal world.

One of my old ideological defenses of late 90s power metal, which was my bread and butter at the time. Most of my stuff from 2006, which I am probably going to edit at some point to rid the endings of all the "In conclusions", was hyperbolic and reactionary, in fact that statement I think I had a particular couple of people I had discussed the genre with that I was thinking of at the time, both of them people who hated just about anything put out on a label that didn't specialize in underground black metal.

I think I may slice that phrase out of the review as it doesn't really add anything to it, but I still basically view all musicians as businessmen, unless they are literally doing shows for free and giving their music away online, which begs the question of how they are able to eat. I don't mean businessmen in the sense of some suit-toting Wallstreet tycoon who loots everybody he can, but in the sense that making money tends to be the consequence, no matter which scene is in question.

Great review on Wolverine Blues hells_unicorn, even though I'm a sucker for that album...

It's good to see and read a bashing of one of your favourite albums that isn't ranting or bitching about this and that, but rather making use of good points and proper argumentation. With that being said, and pureness of death metal aside, you think the album is that boring? I've always thought it was pretty catchy in its simplicity. But then again I may be biased since that was my first Entombed album, eh.

I love Wolverine Blues as well, hell I even like parts of Same Difference (it's my guilty pleasure). Guess I'm a just a massive Entombed fanboy.

Honestly, I've listened to Wolverine Blues 6 times over the course of the past 3 days and I can't really find anything on the album that really excites me apart from the first song. A few of the slower ones catch my ear for a minute, but like with a lot of the stuff I've heard from Black Label Society and Lamb Of God, it wears thin for me after about 3 or 4 songs and it gets difficult to sit through an entire album of it. Granted, my introduction to death metal was Death's "Individual Thought Patterns" back at around the time it came out and I never heard anything out of Entombed until the early 2000s, so part of it might be that I'm conditioned more towards a faster, more dynamic approach to the style.

That and the fact that, well, they've released stuff like Left Hand Path and Clandestine.

By the way, your sig link is broken.

Really enjoying BastardHeads Arghoslent review. Though I'm compelled beyond reason to point out that Herman and Denner had nothing to do with the riff writing on The Oath!

Anyways, great review so far.

Bah! They were the guitarists, I'll always associate early Fate with them. Whoops I guess

Hahah it's no big deal. I had no idea for the longest time that King Diamond is actually a really good riff-writer, so when I found out it kind of became a personal mission to make sure other people realize he's not just a pretty voice!

I actually got schooled by a swedish hip hop head of all people, on a rap forum. We were discussing metal and I was like "It's honestly astounding how consistent the riffing has been throughout King Diamond's career, he got really lucky with his guitarist choices." And he was like "Yeah it's consistent stupid, he writes 85% of them!". Blew my mind.

I'll continue to give Sherman, Denner, and Larocque credit for the leadwork, but if King really does write most of the riffs across his two bands, that's incredibly impressive.

And thanks for the feedback, by the way!

Yep, I plan to review both of them at some point, 2 certified classics from the early Swedish scene. And fixed my sig, I had not updated it since the changeover to Ver. 2 and Frost Giant had since moved off myspace, and my reviews link changed with the changeover.

No I think Sherman and Denner had a big hand in the writing on the early Fate stuff. You can kind of figure out from the credits in the liner notes who did what. But The Oath and Come to the Sabbath (my two favorites by far) are both credited STRICTLY to Kim, and he's said in several interviews that he writes 80-85% of the riffs for his "solo" material. Really impressive to me. It lends some weight to his non-stop air guitaring on stage too, hahah.

King ain't a bad guitarist either. Some of the bonus demo tracks on the KD remasters have King playing.

Seems a decent point to start- does anyone know which band, as of yet, has the highest average review score for an album, or throughout their discography? Mainly wanted to know just to see if it was just blind fanboyism or if that band in question was a shining piece of metal.

This will be of interest to you: http://www.furia.com/em/releases-style.html

That's a very useful resource, but some albums are listed as one of the top albums of a certain genre only because the band has played that style on another album. For instance, Altars of Madness is listed as the best industrial album. As well, the only two deathcore albums listed are the first two Cryptopsy albums, when the band was basically just technical death metal. Similarly, I don't consider Bergtatt an ambient record, yet it is in the number two spot for the genre because Ulver is tagged as an ambient band. Anyone with an ounce of metal knowledge, however, will be able to discern this, so it's not a big deal at all.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/I ... ConorFynes

LOL, come on!

Not at all shocking with who it's coming from though!

I knew it was only a matter of time before you guys started panning him. Its not that great of an album though but it could do with at least fifteen points higher

Killers is awesome. All other opinions are obsolete.

I agree, it's actually tied for my all time favorite Maiden album. CF just gets more nauseating by the minute.

Agree. The album sounds nothing like what the guy described. Nothing at all. And I'm not just saying that because I happen to think that album is awesome.

Yeah, I swear man, sometimes it feels like he just listens to the album once before reviewing it.

Judging by the amount of reviews pumped out in a similar fashion, this may be the case.

He has like thirty Senmuth reviews, that's obviously what he does.