Are you serious dude? You have no idea what you're talking about.

28 posts and no mention of Manowar??!

if one traces down the history of most metal bands today you would lead it back to venom and not iron maiden.

I actually agree with cronos that venom is more important than iron maiden. I mean venom was pretty much the band that laid down the groundwork for extreme metal. Iron maiden ofcourse was a very big band but what exactly was really new of what they did? They combined a few things that before that were not often seen together sure but if one traces down the history of most metal bands today you would lead it back to venom and not iron maiden.

If I had to choose a band, I would say Hellhammer. It's influential, I guess, but it's also mostly garbage and I've never had the desire to ever listen to it again since I first heard it.

Machine Head have achieved a remarkable amount of success with basically nothing to back it up. They were a terrible nu-metal band in the 90s who achieved some success on what everyone hates now, but they managed to avoid/shed the nu-metal label (despite this) and re-emerge as a metal band despite their more recent material sounding like a nu-metal song, a really long guitar solo, and a groove/thrash song all mixed together into one long mess. In the 90s, at least they had some sense of songwriting, then they started just trying everything with no sense of actually making it memorable or catchy, other than their nu-metal grooves.

Despite being absolutely fucking terrible, The Blackening was considered a comeback album. I don't know how it managed to be commercially successful with four songs that are around ten minutes, dragging on forever and having the least interesting extended guitar solos I've heard, but the only decent part of the album is the nu-metal. They're just not good at the rest of it. I like some bands that are considered similar too, and even those that I don't care for like Trivium, I understand the appeal to their music. The only thing I can come up with here is that nu-metal isn't cool anymore but a nu-metal song can be redeemed if there's a long guitar solo and a groove metal song all shoved into the same abomination, but it's boring and sounds like shit. At least All That Remains' new album has tons of melodic choruses.

Sure, they're commercially successful, and they act like it, but they fucking blow. They're terrible, they built their career on being an Ozzfest nu-metal band, and they somehow revived it by getting even worse. Nu-metal is kind of like original sin, you can never repent for this:

I call bullshit. Hellhammer was very influential to extreme metal and the fact that you find them shit is irrelevant to that. I don't think Tom ever overstimated its influence, mainly because of the fact that it influenced so fucking much of what came after

I think that a good deal of the thrash revival bands could be accused of this.

Most of these bands are completely random, are bad, and are imitating better bands but unsuccessfully.

There is one exception.

I actually agree with cronos that venom is more important than iron maiden.

I'm not entirely sure if Anvil was mentioned, but I'll mention Anvil. Cockiest sons of bitches ever, and I guess their bassist quit because of this.

agreed on most points, hey. but i kinda have to give robb flynn some kind of award for bandwagon-jumping at every given opportunity and making a decent living out of it without really being reprimanded for it. i mean he played in possessed and vio-lence early on as thrash was huge, took the leap to groove thrash at JUST the right time (and MH's first two albums are imo great, especially the first one), then dropped it for the nu-metal stuff just as that hit it big, then managed to jump that ship just before it sank, and since then he's been playing that kinda metalcore/modern mainstream metal stuff. his entire career has been covered by magazines like kerrang and he's just done it perfectly. it's like he has a knack for it, a vision of where he'll go in an album or two and writing "transition" albums, as opposed to just changing style completely from album to album. there's always a smooth flow, and with the exception of the "true" metal fans getting pissed off with the burning red album (most of whom listen to them again now, in any case) he's pulled it off amazingly.

but is machine head an important band? i don't think so. their first album no doubt influenced a lot of nu-metal bands, but otherwise they've always just kinda existed alongside other bands. also agreed that their newer stuff fucking sucks. i've listened to their last 2 albums maybe twice each, and it's just like a collection of riffs and melodies that don't actually fit, all stuck together in a worse fashion than the last metallica album

In a way, I feel tempted to say Mayhem. I do understand that they are basically the first bm band from Norway, but that aside, I think their only really good material came a bit too late to be called 'groundbreaking'. They got most of their fame before having a full length via controversy, with only a couple of demos (which sounds like shit) to back up their existence. When DMDS came out, most of norwegian black metal bands already had albums released and the 'norwegian' black metal sound was already known and defined - personally, I give the credits to Burzum, Darkthrone and Emperor for that (maybe Immortal too).

Regarding thrash revival, I wonder if the new bands do have some degree of importance to begin with? what's the real contribution of, for example, Municipal Waste to the genre, to metal? besides rip-offing 80's thrash (and badly), I feel they do absolutely nothing but exist.

How about a simple fucking question like: Metal artists with an overinflated ego?

This is an extremely judgemental topic, so its subjective as hell, but I'll go with Reverend Bizarre with their "Doom is Dead" sticker when finishing their shitty, boring band. Pretty glad to see how much doom has flourished and expanded since they bailed out.

I agree though that the question shouldn't be which bands, but which musicians. We could also discuss people like Geoff Tate and Bobby Liebling who considerably exaggerate their input in their respective bands. Levasseur? According to Thibault, Levasseur didn't write nearly as much of None So Vile has is generally claimed, and the band's lack of success at delivering even nearly as great material ever after would provide reason to believe that there might be some truth to it.

Venom are nowhere near as big, but did something which people hadn't done before. The way I see it, another band could have been Iron Maiden, but I'm less sure another band could have been Venom.

People probably saw 'Maiden coming... I doubt they saw Venom coming.

What's next? Megadeth likes long walks on the beach and enjoys watching basketball while sipping a Budweiser? Megadeth has taken a few pounds recently?

rethrash

Obviously it's hard to overstate the importance of their early material, but they seem to think that their status in the death metal genre meant they were immune from criticism, and that came back to bite them when they fucked up.

that in and of itself doesn't make Metallica worse. It is the fact that their egos have run so rampant, they believe anything they do is genius, even absolutely horrible garbage like the Lulu record with Lou Reed, and that they believe that they are in fact unquestionably at the same cultural level as the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin (hint: they aren't) that astounds me.

Metallica essentially believe they are the most influential living rock band of any kind and perhaps the most important force in all of music today. That is a whole different level of crazy.

is it odd if i've never actually heard this von band? and am i missing out on anything?

While they didn't release the album until later, their standing among those bands wasn't purely social. They were playing some of the songs that were on DMDS in 1990-91, and they were heard by the people close to them - there's a 1990 demo with "Freezing Moon", the live tracks off of DotBH, and the crappy Liepzig versions. The excellent atmosphere of the album sealed the deal, but the setbacks in releasing the album did lend a lot of notoriety to it, as well as all of their peers.

is it odd if i've never actually heard this von band? and am i missing out on anything?

Metallica essentially believe they are the most influential living rock band of any kind and perhaps the most important force in all of music today. That is a whole different level of crazy.

I think that has been said more by the media than the guys themselves. Still, they're the biggest thrash band ever (or the ones who made it bigger than anyone) and their influence is undeniable, so it's not that crazy to think like that.