It didn't at all. I fully support bands that change it up as long as it's still good. I'm gonna give that album a spin right now, to finish off my workday. Cheers!

Nice. Hope you enjoy it!

Sadly I could only find about seven of the tracks as a compilation on youtube, but what I heard was good. Didn't have the time to search the internet at the moment, work day was pretty busy. Noise-rock esque, kinda reminded me of Whores. (if you haven't heard them, I highly recommend).

From this: https://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/ ... Spinal/164

Rates 15%. Huh? I'd just about put this one in the oven fodder thread if it weren't for the two sentences of descriptions.

Great Warfield review by Felix! Very humorous as well.

Chapeau to Grizzly for his Urfaust review. Loved the read and have to listen to it soon, I think.

@SweetLeaf95

Thanks for you kind words. Always nice to get positive feedback.

Hey!.... Was GOOFAM implying that The Police, Tom Petty, and RHCP suck in that Axxis review?

Ha, well, I can't say I'm a huge fan of any of the three, though RHCP are fine and I do like a couple of Petty songs. The Police really grate on me though.

In any case, the point wasn't that the cleaner guitar sound is automatically bad in itself, because obviously there's good music with clean guitars. But it doesn't fit the music Axxis actually wrote on that album.

I figured as much, I was just being funny. Good descriptions!

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

I'm pretty dissatisfied with GrizzlyButts' habit of reviewing the periphery of every album he talks about. I've recently read his thoughts of At the Gates' newest and Nekrokraft's and both reviews spend too much time reciting the band history and reminding us about "the current situation" to actually talk much about the music. Songs are barely mentioned individually and then only as fleeting examples, while the majority of the text is context, not comments.

How could one possibly compare Axxis to Red Hot Chili Peppers? Back in those days, Dave Navarro had added a distorted, heavy and often psychedelic guitar play to the band sound while Axxis' guitar play sounded as commercial and polished as possible for a metal band. Red Hot Chili Peppers are much more exciting than Axxis.

Compare RHCP's Coffee Shop...



...to Axxis' Ecstasy



If I asked anyone who didn't know the two bands to identify the metal band among the two based upon their records released in 1995, I guess one hundred percent of all people would go for Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The one that made me think of RHCP was the main riff in Fan the Flames; it gave me a bit of a Give It Away feel.



But in general I agree. As I said above, I'm not all that huge on RHCP but one certainly couldn't accuse their guitar work of lacking energy in the way the riffs on the Axxis album do.

Gas: I agree. When he DOES talk about the music, it's actually really great and has solid descriptions. But those long rambling moments certainly make them too beefy and tiresome to get through. They just need trimmed.

Might be, but since I didn't know much about the band, but always wanted to get into them, but never had the time and or motivation to do so, that complete package of band history and album description was kinda what I was looking for. But I understand that this might be boring and off topic if it becomes a habit in every review.

Well, if you didn't think so before, give his Sleep review a read.

Also, can we get a negative Ghost review that isn't just "the first two songs are alright because they're heavier, but the rest is just ballads/pop rock"? Literally every single one of them says the same damned thing, only further proving my point that typical Ghost haters come from the same frame of mind.

Does every Sleep review need to have an "I'm getting high" story in it now? Should I come up with one and resubmit my review?

That writeup on Feel the Fire is pretty good, I particularly like the notes on the band's Manowar influence. Definitely puts their decision to cover Death Tone into perspective.

What the... I couldn't even make it to paragraph 2 before getting bored.

Felix's review of the new Marduk was a good read. One of the most consistent and thoughtful writers on the site.

Totally agree. In fact, Felix, Hells_Unicorn, bayern, and Twisted_Psychology are among my top reviewers that I constantly look forward to reading material from. Many other great ones too. I honestly love seeing peoples' interpretations of music in general.

I've been meaning to write a completely sober review of the new Sleep album but I've been procrastinating. But I agree on these past couple of reviews of The Sciences have been....weird.

edit: I caught the last paragraph of the review and he says he'll "stick with Volume One." Sounds like a lost cause.

Cheers Leaf; I promise I'll stay on for another while just for you.

By the way, are you done with the Scorpions review string? No rush, just curious...

Yeah, been done for a little while. I hit a few of them years ago, so it may appear that some are missing, but they're all there!

Twisted, gasmask and Hells_Unicorn are reviewers I really appreciate reading. But I think my favorite reviewer would be autothrall.

Nice job Felix for your review, very consistent.

All but one negative review states that they were written by people who liked the previous albums and like their poppy hooks in general, but Prequelle fails because the album never falls into a groove and the (many) ballads tend to be boring and/or bad. It's almost like everybody says the same thing because that's actually the problem or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If anything you're proving a stereotype about how Ghost fans are really bad at handling criticism of the band and oversimplify the complaints into something pettier than they actually are so they're easier to shoot down.

I think I just get annoyed in general whenever one release/band gets hated for the same reason over and over, which makes me think too many metalheads look at the same albums the same way, which comes off as narrow minded to me. Ghost just happens to be a hot one right now. It's like the whole "everyone thinks Load is a country album" when it has ONE DAMN COUNTRY SONG. Or how so many hate on the post-Dio Rainbow albums just because Dio isn't the singer. And I say "everyone" pretty liberally, I'll admit. I know many people who love Prequelle and the other mentioned albums as much as myself, but the people that don't like them tend to dislike them for the same stupid reasons that sometimes aren't even there (at least not all the time).

I think to some extent that annoyance is valid when it's just a vague reputation people get off a song or two (like Load being a country album when it has one song, or for me, Dream Theater being all mindless and clinical with no feel). But when the reviewers have taken the time to actually sit down with the thing and listen through everything, I don't think it's fair to accuse them of being narrow-minded; if anything, like BastardHead said, that consistency probably speaks to the actual nature of the music in at least some respects. Whether it speaks to the actual quality of the music or fully accounts for all the positives and negatives is a matter of opinion.

That's probably a more fair assessment. And I mean if people dislike it, fine, but I know a handful of those reviews specifically said that "the first two are alright and the rest sucks" (in one way or another), which to me was what made it annoying. That Dream Theater one is another good example.

Well, what that tells you is that the rest of the album deviates from their past sound in a way that seems to be splitting the fanbase to some extent, right? It's not like these reviews have been written by people who don't get what the band is about--several of them explicitly acknowledge their previous fandom. Except of course that one where it's "not a rock album," which probably was off the mark (can't say for sure, as I frankly haven't heard the Ghost album because I'm not into them, but this whole thing is interesting to follow).

Sweetie has always been sorta vocal about the chip on his shoulder when it comes to glam getting the shaft here, so a bunch of people consistently saying that the pop rock and ballads suck likely just gets under his skin in a very sensitive area.

Guilty. BH pretty much nailed it, not even gonna try and deny it.

I'll give you the collective blush for the three of us However, I don't think autothrall is going to pop and say thanks on the forum, so I'll offer a reaction for him too

I appreciate everybody's appraisal of my work as well. I sometimes feel like my work has a rather assembly line tone to it but I suppose that's what comes with having a signature style or what have you. Covering more genres may make up for it though.

Also gotta props for Sweet's Youthanasia review. I find the album a bit spotty in parts but I've always liked its approach. It's a very accessible album but Megadeth was very good at staying in character through it. Also, the fact that "Family Tree" marries such an infectious chorus to such disturbing lyrics without sounding goofy is one of the most unnerving things in mainstream metal. I've never felt so guilty singing along to a song.

Much appreciated my man, glad you liked it!

I'll do my own blushing, thank you very much.

Autothrall has always been kind of a ghost when it comes to presence on the forum, even during the high point of his output back in 2010-2012. The only thing about his reviewing approach that came off as kind of weak was his near universal condemnation of compilation releases. I'll be the first to admit that a lot of these well-known artists who have near a dozen "best of" compilations done of their material by about as many labels is highly pointless, from a historical standpoint, a number of the compilations he shit upon that were quite good (particularly Bathory's Jubileum series) had reviews that were so uniformly dismissive and generally uninformative that I felt obligated to defend them.

Autothrall's writing is consistently good, though not especially memorable. I'm able to overlook his questionable opinions (not liking Pungent Stench, being lukewarm on Asphyx) and respect those where he's spot on (Corpsegrinder era is leagues better than Barnes era). The compilation reviews are annoying, though I've only seen them in reference to "best of" collections when I understand where he's coming from and not rarity and unreleased collections which I can't understand being dismissive of.


The best example of a song like this is 45 Grave's Partytime (the album version, not the one in Return of the Living Dead).


Madness. Karmagmassacre and Sabbatrinity are great. Truthfully, the only Sabbat LP I don't like is Envenom.

*looks at most recent reviews*

...the fuck?

An industrial bout of Jute Gyte obsession.

Frog has gone down the rabbit hole. RIP.