My median doesn't seem totally correct, either. And someone (think it was empyreal) had a median of 100%, and it's highly unlikely that's what his median is

Hah, forgot to sort the ratings before taking the middle one! If any of the medians were right before, it was the wildest coincidence (and if you couldn't understand how they were calculated, no wonder...). I just reposted the file with the medians fixed.

Thx again for the stats! In case you guys don't know, he's the one who did the EMpath, http://www.furia.com/em/

Checking out those stats was pretty neat, for the top 50 and the link to individual stats too, thanks. Does that link for http://www.furia.com/em/ freeze anyone else's internet page? It froze I.E. and booted me off when I tried it a few times.

Byrgan, I just cleaned up some HTML validation errors on that index page, in case those were causing problems in older browsers that I wasn't seeing in mine. Want to try again and see if you can load the page now?

Yeah, the link took a few minutes and eventually loaded. So I got to see the very bottom which was neat to see all of those stats. But when I scrolled back up to the top through all of the bands listed, it became really slow and froze again. Thanks for updating it, maybe someone else can comment on this, to make sure it is or isn't only coming from my end.

DawnoftheShred is back again and he submitted lots of reviews!

I don't get why people have to make sudden returns and flood the review queue. Did he go away for months on end with only access to Word? Perhaps a stint in prison with only a type-writer?

it happened to me...I had problems in the past with Internet and I wrote reviews that I submitted all together...

I'll let you off though, you written about a billion reviews. Most of the ones I've read have been of good quality too.

Thanks mate!

The gloves are off. I'm trailing h_u by only 3 reviews. The gap has been vanquished. Let's do it.

I'm already starting to regret taking that second job. But I've got some much needed hate to visit on Machine Head's discography so I'll try to make it appear as if I'm trying to stay on top.

Power Symphony's "Evillot" yearns for you to review it too. (I'm sure that album can be found in bargain bins everywhere).

I actually fished that out of a bargain bin about 3 months ago for $4, surprisingly enough I liked it slightly better than "Lightbringer", but it's definitely still in the sub-50 score range.

I will ascend to my throne via slam death and raw black metal while h_u does negative reviews of groove albums and positive ones of power/prog. This is the defining moment of not just MA, but metal as a whole.

The world. This is for the world.

Well, a visitation to Emperor's and Burzum's catalog may be in order somewhere down the road, but Machine Head demands my attention, especially after hearing "The Blackening".

Aye, that album was fairly amateurish, but it sorta had a sense of genuineness to it, from what I remember. The 2nd album was essentially the same amateurish band, but masked with a polished production. Their first album was originally an a small Italian label (Northwind, I think), the 2nd for Pavement. "Lightbringer" is a good indicator of why Pavement went tits up.

Don't you people get it, god damnit! This is bigger than you! It's bigger than me, you, and everyone else put together! It's bigger than all of us! This one is for all the goddamned pogs, and if we don't have the right slammer we can all kiss our narrow, poorly socialized asses goodbye.

EDIT: Ironically I have Lightbringer too.

Well then your highness, do me a favor and share the raw black and death wealth, my pallet has become a bit more refined and I could use some entry level educational material to be a suitable 2nd-in-line-to-the-throne at your right flank.

P.S. - If you've got the time, I'd love to see your take on it.

It's the gay generic crap that sunk Pavement. I've actually reviewed an unusually high number of crappy generic Pavement/Crash releases.

I'll have to sift through your review archives, of which I've only read about maybe 10%. I'm tickled at the irony that Pavement was partnered up with Crash considering what ended up happening to them.

Crash these days seems to exist exclusively by wholesaling their back catalog at ultra-cheap prices to various distros. I really should talk to them and pick up some of the 1% of their reissues that are worthwhile. It's sort of an interesting spin on Metal Blade's hemorrhaging of their OOP stock that no one wants.

I really should look into picking up some wholesale stock at one of these labels at some point, although I am getting a fairly healthy infusion of promos from The Metal Observer. Until then, I'll either be bargain bin diving or scavenging amazon.com's used CD section for cheap ones. If I keep buying all this stuff at full price I'm going to kill myself with all the overtime to match it.

P.S. - I visited your Septic Tomb myspace page, very interesting stuff.

It's really infinitely cheaper when you're more into death/black/grind, I can rattle off distros with $6 new CDs all night. Harder to find for less extreme genres, but they're an easy source of new, cheap music.

Glad you find it interesting. I'm somewhat disappointed in the almost exclusively positive responses I've been getting; if so many people like it I'm clearly not achieving my goal.

You're not taking into account that I'm so great that my opinion counts tenfold.

Even yours was uncomfortably positive. I'm really hoping to turn it into full-fledged goregrind/funeral doom eventually, and while I like the current material, I'd like to shed some of the more 'normal' death and black influences and move in a more extreme and unusual direction (not that it's super typical now).

Well, a couple of obscure progressive metal bands have been sending me free stuff. Rusty Eye is actually thinking about sending me their next album free of charge. That melodic death metal act you reviewed a while back that's now going by the name Withered Sun (I think they used to be called Graves Over Autumn) also sent me their album free.

P.S. - Your stuff is endearing in a raw and somewhat disturbing way. I'm assuming that you view brutal death and funeral doom to be the two most incompatible styles possible. Nonetheless, it's less painful than listening to Machine Head's "Supercharger".

Well, I always thought that there had to be a way to fuse brutal death/grind with extreme doom and it was an avenue that hadn't really been explored much. Goregrind and brutal death can really be much more atmospheric and interesting than they typically are, and I thought an easy shortcut towards a more interesting style of BDM/goregrind would be to combine it with extreme doom, which isn't totally incongruous in aesthetic but forces the faster music to change in tone. But as I said, ultimately I'd like to combine the Catasexual Urge Motivation/Paracoccidioimitosisproctitissarcomucosis style of 'atmospheric goregrind' with a bit of late Last Days Of Humanity chaos and make that face off with the morbid, slightly industrial doom feel and throw in some of the weird, Gallhammerish midpaced stuff I do on the EP.

Now hold on while I pick up all these names I just dropped.