Slightly off topic, but is Senmuth worth looking into on any account? Bands with large discographies tend to turn me away.

Senmuth is a total grab bag. Has he hit 100 albums yet? I have a few scattered albums and they're all fine, so his consistency is impressive unless by dumb luck I got the six good ones or something.

Well then he's doing better than ZBT, because I haven't found a good one in that giant heap of dog shit yet.

Back to CF's Killers review...


Really? You're saying that "Wrathchild" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue" aren't aggressive and intelligent? Reactionary reviews are not my cup of tea, but I feel the urge... Never mind, there are enough reviews praising it. Urge is gone.

Senmuth has some good stuff. Sebek is a great album. There's just a shitload of filler you have to sift through until you find the gems.

I'm very proud of RageW and his 0% review for Portal, the guitarist of the band acted like he was a 14 years old (discussions on facebook walls). I lost a lot of respect for this dude.

A friend (he's a fan of bitches and juice) agreed to let me post that: Portalgate
RageW (Andrés) is the leader of Prajna, the dude from Portal is Chris blablahorror.

You mean the 3% review.

There are a few things that dumbstruck me in all this situation:

One, RageW posted his good review, one has to point that fact out, bashing one of the most hyped up bands of the new old school. Personally I don't give two shits about Portal because they're just extreme for the sake of being extreme and different for the sake of being different. Their costume antics don't convince me and the band as a whole strikes me more as an act than a metal band. So it was actually good to see someone disagreeing with the flock for once and post a vivid and articulated opinion on why they aren't what people make of them.

Two, I think it was the day after he posted his review that a 100% review to the same album was posted. I'm not a conspiracy theoretic but I hardly believe in coincidences. That current of events just smells fishy.

Three, how on Earth is a musician bullying a fellow that works/practices/indulges in the same artistic area because he wrote a review bashing his band? So in his eyes only someone doing music better than Portal can deem his own work bad? All other people that don't play something as good as him have to shut up and not voice their opinions because they suck? Chris, if you're reading this then I have to tell you that your logic is fubar! In your own little world only Portal is good so no one will ever be able to criticise your music because they've been deemed "not worthy". To put it in a nutshell, grow the fuck up! Any people who puts anything out for public scrutiny has to deal exactly with that, scrutiny! Damn, your head must be the size of a storage facility to house such an ego.

Fuck this guy! RageW you have my sympathy.

Heh, wow. That's truly pathetic from those cunts. I think I can safely cross them off my "bands to check out" list; a huge loss for them, no doubt.

There's another post going on right now where Chris made a few comments and then fans of the band just exploded all over the place. It's amazing because the mystique of Portal has been completely shattered. They used to be these larger than life enigmas, now I know at least one of them is just a petty whiner.

You just gave him a new costume idea . I've always disliked this band's music.

I love Portal and absolutely disagree with Rage's review, but that facebook thing was ridiculous and completely immature of the band.

Oh man...

Some funny ass shit there.

I just can't believe that a band member, of any band, would be so full of himself to think that he's above being criticized by a listener. If you want your music to remain this untarnished mythological gem that can't be touched by mere mortals, then don't release it! No matter what type of music you write or release, there's bound to be someone that doesn't like it. It's a fact of life. Stop making music if your ego is too big to take criticism.

Seconded...

You know shit's goin' down when you manage to get Alhadis to post outside of Suggestions and Complaints.

LOL.

New Bodom review, I like this album a whole lot and the review is perfectly acceptable, but just how many silly or flat out bizarrely inaccurate statements can you spot? Follow the Reaper is riff heavy, the keys aren't showy, Bodom are pioneers of melodeath, and more. It's just.... what the hell?

It's a bit too fanboyish, particularly the whole paragraph dedicated to Alexi. There are some statements that are cringe worthy like the first sentence, but it's not that bad of a review I guess. He just loves that album very very much and has probably heard ten melodeath bands in his life, can you blame him that much?

It certainly helps to be reminded that CoB was in no way a melodeath band at this point.

That's a lot of loving. He just needs a "i'd have sex with..." line and it'd be like one of my "guys I'd go gay for" reviews.

They've always been a bastard hybrid of genres and as far as the first four albums go I wouldn't call any of them "pure melodeath". You can see though how an untrained hear could fall for the trappings of said hybridization, and go ahead and call it full-on melodeath with some other influences.

Quite often, when a review starts with "Ah," and a short introduction of the band, I scroll down for the next review. For example, the most recent Shadowmaker review ("Ah, Running Wild, one of the forefathers of german heavy metal.")

As if the reviewers happened upon the album (and the review html form) accidentally, like if someone asked him "what's this Running Wild thingy?". It's a very affected and banal way to start a review, and a hallmark of an unskilled writer.

Excessive prefacing also makes me skip over reviews. Unless it's an obscure band and you have extensive knowledge of them that is a strong supplement to the music, it's a mark of shitty writing. The shittiest writers manage to write entire reviews that sound like they read the Wikipedia entry for the album and wrote based on that.

All the reviews for the new album of Wintersun are starting with an history of the band. "After 8 years, Wintersun is finally back bla bla bla!" I mean, I like historical context but I prefer it to be intertwined with the actual content.

Nice review by Infernali regarding Scald's Vermiculatus. I have that album but I haven't heard that in a long time. I kind of even forgot I had it. I think I should bring that out again very soon and give it a listen. I remember it being a unique kind of album, too.

Anyway, cool review.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/K ... 8/Empyreal

I can't shake the feeling - is this a boring review? I feel like I might have lost my ability to write interesting super-positive reviews.

It doesn't need to be as long as it is, particularly since it's super-duper positive. Hit a few highlights, but don't go into a track by track, which is what you essentially did. That's what makes the review drawn out.

Bastard's newest Overkill review was an awesome read. Good work! I consider Bloodletting or Necroshine to be my two favorites out of that batch. I am definitely biased though, as they are the first two Overkill albums I ever listened to.

I don't think BH needed to keep going on and on about Overkill getting a free pass. I think we all agree that the '90s were a shit period for the band, and that Ironbound was the much needed revival. He could have easily cut that part of the review to create 1 paragraph instead of being as long as it is.

That's the reason I didn't move it over from my blog until yesterday (and it was also because I was planning another review (which I just posted) so I wanted to get my opinion out of the way). My initial thought was to start the review after that long intro and then during my "Originally written for" part I'd add that there was an extended intro on the original site, but decided to throw all that in there anyway so if anybody didn't want to go over there they'd get the whole picture anyway. And no, I don't see nearly as many people agreeing that they sucked for 9 albums, they're subject to so much apologism that it just blows my mind.

Plus I don't think I've seen the claim that they were a product of their environment before, so if nothing else I wanted to add a new argument to the table.

This is quite true indeed. There are so many people that staunchly defend Overkill as being a true, to the roots, thrash band for their entire career. Like they're this unwavering, unstoppable force that has never swayed to any mainstream markets. While they have at least had some thrash elements in all of their albums, they are not the mythical beast that everyone makes them out to be. They're great at the angst ridden, "I hate everything" style, but there is a period where they were not 100%, absolute thrash, and a lot of their diehards just cannot recognize this.

Hells has no idea what is Norsecore (or many other things for that matter)

Including hipsters. I know the term is often thrown around poorly and in a derogatory way, but the bit on hipsters there is more than far-fetched.

I thought he hated groove metal, but apparently this album could've been better if the wild tremolo riffs and blast beats were more often accompanied with groovy thrash breaks (read: groove metal riffs).

Apparently he fixed the norsecore part? As I'm reading it, it doesn't say "norsecore" anywhere in the review.

Pretty much every instance of "metalcore" in that first paragraph was initially "norsecore". I claim some bands are a different genre to what the normal accepted ones are, we all do, but calling The Black Dahlia Murder hipster norsecore was just too funny for me.

Yeah, that's definitely retarded. Calls for a public apology to all norsecore bands.

Hipster Norsecore...For some weird reason I imagine a bunch of medium sized guys, with ripped skinny jeans, long beards and who think viking helmets actually had horns on them, wearing lenseless glasses made out of bone and think that Amon Amarth was the first metal band with viking lyrics. They have a female singer that just goes under the name "Shieldmaiden".


Anyways, reading the latest Dingir review, using the term "The spazzy deathcore kids" should instantly connotate a negative rating. For me spazzy shouldnt be good. I have to hang my head when people call bands like this an "Opus to technical extreme metal", at least the reviewer recommended a better band, I'll listen to Fleshgod instead .

I just registered today on this site and wrote my first review (of Dismember's "Like an Everflowing Stream"). I think it's a good first review, so I wanted to know how long does it take for the moderators to accept it?

It depends on when the mods feel like checking reviews out, and which mods specialize in the subgenre your album falls under.

Shortest I've seen is ~20 minutes, and the longest I've seen is 4-5 days. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't appear instantly; they do, in fact, look at each and every submission. Patience is the key.