Well I'm glad I intrigued you enough to revisit it. I wouldn't say walk is their worst song, but I definitely don't care for it much due to the excessive play it gets.

As one of the resident Pantera fans, I can say with certainty that 5 Minutes Alone is crap. They were never particularly good at riffs, but usually they had enough attitude and energy for it to not matter all that much. 5 Minutes Alone is an example of that not being the case, it's just bad riffs and bad yelling with little else going on.

Shame too because Far Beyond Driven is overall a really good album and Strength Beyond Strength makes me want to find the nearest living thing and punch it into vapor.

Same. And I have to disagree with the part about them never being particularly good at riffs. I think they're extremely groovy which goes well with that attitude and energy even more.

Can someone remind Caspian to use capital letters on occasion? And that the possessive form he's looking for is its and not its'. C'mon, mods, you used to be much tighter on this!

He may be a scribe.

He indeed is.

I've sent him a message.

I think he is, which means he can fix any grammar oversights without the necessity of mod intervention, he'll just need to be made aware of the errors.

I'd enjoy Far Beyond Driven so much more if Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills didn't exist. I swear I could devote four or five paragraphs to that song alone on the basis of how awful it is.

See, I think that one wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and is sorta supposed to be funny. And for that reason, I actually don't dislike the song.

a) 5 Minutes Alone is not only a fantastic song, it corrects the perennial mistake that was Walk.

b) Good Friends & a Bottle of Pills is a failure no matter which way you slice it. It's not a funny joke, and it's a terrible song.

c) The problem with Pantera's riffs is despite Pantera's tonality, sometimes they seem a bit too simple, almost like basslines. As if Rex wrote the riffs and Dimebag just copies them with no additional pizzaz. Granted the bass and guitar copying the same melody has been a staple of metal since Black Sabbath, but somehow Into The Void, Iron Man and a plethora of others never really had that problem.

d) I find myself liking Far Beyond Driven more than Vulgar Display these days, mostly for its intensity and songs like SBS, Use My Third Arm, Slaughtered, etc. It's much easier to latch onto Vulgar when you first discover Pantera because there's still traces of the CFH traditional metal formula rather than the all out grating assault of FBD and Great Southern Trendkill. I can see how the overabundance of piercing grating distortion can be a massive turn off for less extreme metal minded fans. One could just as easily blame all the trappings of modern metal on FBD as opposed to Vulgar, but Vulgar is the more popular album.

e) Strength Beyond Strength has a keyboard/synthesizer effect in the breakdown/solo. It always cracks me up with how as anti-keyboard as certain sects of metal claim to be, that one always squeezes by unnoticed.

There are MANY examples of this all over the place, showing how contradicting that mindset is.

Here in the German speaking corner of Europe, "Far beyond driven" was promoted and hyped as the most brutal album ever...does anyone else remember that? I of course headed out to the nearby CD store immediately, gave it a listen and compared it to stuff I was well familiar with at the time - Legion, Goetia, From enslavement..., Anticapital, Horrified, Onward to Golgotha etcetera etcetera...(using the word "to compare" is used as a very crude euphemism here, just to make that clear).

Acknowledged and subsequently ignored 8)

But yeah, 5 minutes- awful verse, awful main riff

I was going to talk about third arm and hard lines, also tunes I really like but I wasn't too bothered with going thru every tune. SBS and Slaughtered are clear high points anyway.



You're certainly right there, but as I said in my review, it's really remarkably heavy for an album that made it to #1. I very much doubt Phil in particular would have thought it was the heaviest album ever

Caspian is a scribe, so he automatically bypasses the queue...

... That said, if there's concerns about spelling and grammar, well, that can be... looked into.

Have you ever "revoked" someone's scribe status?

Caspian should be the first!

'... if there's concerns about spelling and grammar....'

Good God.

Desert Rat, do you really think it was a good idea to mention me in the headline of your first review ?

Nevertheless, a good review (and a proper rating).

No Prayer for the Dying isn't a terrible album but it is literally the last Maiden album I'd recommend to a newbie.

Well written review though.

I can here to say how happy I was that someone else loves it as much as I do. I wouldn't say it's the best either, but I put it pretty far up on my list.

Interesting Inhumano review, not a bad first effort at all from Diesel 11. I discovered that album near the start of this year and despite not being a fan of brutal death metal at all I found it clicked straight away

Hey, thanks for the kind words, it means a lot! I found that album recently and it clicked right away (currently I think that after Amputated’s ‘Wading Through Rancid Offal’ it’s the best brutal death metal album I’ve ever heard). Given that it had no reviews yet I thought I’d try my luck again after two (admittedly bad) failed reviews I’d submitted before. I’m really happy someone thought it was good enough to accept and I hope in future to add my opinions to some more albums floating around in the Archives. Big fan of the site and I enjoy reading the reviews of everyone else, so it’s very humbling to have my own included amongst the other greats here.

But yeah, thank you again for the shout-out, I hope I don’t disappoint in future, ha!

I'm really triggered by that new Gorefest review. One of my favorite albums, and the dude spends the whole review incorrectly referencing it's "groove metal" tendencies, which doesn't make any sense to me. I've heard that album literally hundreds, maybe thousands of times and never once have I picked up on anything like that...sure, it tends to stick to the slower end of the spectrum and has a "groovy" aspect in a general sense, but no more (and arguably less) than Obituary, Cianide, or Bolt Thrower (who he even references in the review), and comparing it to 'Fear Emptiness Despair', let alone bands like Machine Head or Prong, is completely absurd. To me, it's more like a cross between 'War Master', 'Necroticism', and 'Harmony Corruption'. Also, the complaint about the vocals makes no sense...I'll forgive the ridiculous claim that Jan-Chris' voice sounds "not too hard" (I consider his voice on that particular album to be one of the most brutal and powerful vocal performances in all of death metal), but saying he sounds like Max Cavalera...huh? Such an odd, odd statement...another comparison I would've never in a million years thought to make.

Could you say that that was a, wait for it, FALSE comparison? Ha...hahahaha..hahahahaha!

First of all, I'm deeply sorry that False is one of your favourite albums. Secondly, it really doesn't sound much like Cianide or Obituary (alright, maybe The End Complete when they turned shitty, too) mostly because those bands kept morbid, evil sounding riffs whereas Gorefest don't really have any riffs that do that for me on False. If you water down death metal enough and keep adding a bit of groove eventually it resembles groove more than death metal. The Max comparison is not a direct comparison but more of a "like how Max went from harsher vocals to gruffer hardcore-inspired shouting". FoD is a fine footnote for "death metal band flirts with 90's metal zeitgeist".

I agree with everything you said (except 'The End Complete' being shitty ), but that's not really what I was saying. The reason I brought those bands up, was not to say they sounded similar, but just to exemplify that plenty of death metal bands on the slower end of the spectrum have a sort of 'groovy' sound, while still retaining a very riff-oriented approach that is unmistakably pure death metal. These are the bands you'd generally hear described as "crushing" or "pummeling" or whatever. That is how I'd describe Gorefest, basically. You're right, it's not exactly "morbid" or "evil", but when I listen to that album, what I'm looking for is pummeling, (generally) mid-paced death metal with very catchy riffs & powerful, roaring death growls. Examples of what I mean: the verse riff in "State of Mind", or the intro to "Reality - When You Die"...some of the catchiest "slow" riffs I've ever heard in death metal - Gorefest had a real unique talent for that kind of thing. But of course, that's just me. You're certainly entitled to your opinion...I'm obviously not expecting to change your mind, it's just that people seem to be really mean to Gorefest these days (along with many other "second tier" OSDM bands like Benediction and Cancer), so I felt the need to defend their honor and describe why I personally hold the band in pretty high regard.

Sweetleaf95's rabid string of Megadeth reviews has given me pronounced hankering to b(l)acktrack and check out - as I've yet to, believe it or not - ThiRtEeN (ugh!) as well as Endgame; in fact, I'm mightily curious to hear the former, considering the wide margin of appeal in its regards between Leaf and TwistedPsychology (60% vs. 91%? I'm wondering how both albums will resonate with me, as they constitute a sallow gap/total cluelessness revolving around that era, namely the 2000s leading up to my Heavy Metal revival in 2008 or so...

Chairs!

False is pretty good, but Mindloss is a fucking beast. Second-rate Autopsy is nothing to sneeze at.

In hindsight, I may have overhyped it. Like, I still enjoy it more than most people but I'd probably rate it in the mid to high 80s nowadays.

If you reviewed it when it came out, then I understand, because when it first dropped I thought it was great.



I'm flattered that my reviews contributed to you wanting to visit these. Once again, proves that reviewing classics is not redundant.

In fact, I listen to <I>Th1rt3en</I> much more than <I>Endgame</I> because I find it more or less the only Megadeth album that I can sing along to from start to finish. Granted, there are some boring riffs and a few songs that never really take off, but it's wonderfully memorable, has a load of fun attitude, and puts me in a good mood.

How in the world did that new Nails review get approved? That's a 2004 review if I ever saw one on here.

If I didn't mess up the math, he even got 5 points (average review) for it.

Well, in his defense, there really isn't much to say about it. It's only 17 minutes and it's pretty one dimensional....

It was a bit too late for me to roam the queue hahaha. I've asked him to add more description and content.

I laughed out loud a few times while reading BastardHead's recent review of Two Paths by Ensiferum. He really nailed it on the head though. This has probably been the most frustrating band for me over the last 10 years or so, because at their best they blow every other folk metal band out of the water. When they are not at their best, however, they could be anywhere and these last few albums have been all over the place.

I give props to this new Diesel guy for having the guts to attack Killers like that, and I'll admit it's probably near the bottom of my Maiden album ranking, but some of that didn't make sense. First off, rating it that low while saying "it's actually quite good" and really enjoying half of the tracks seems a little off. Especially since it seems like the only reason it got a 45% was because "well the other albums are just better". Secondly, some of the descriptions seemed a bit off. I don't know, maybe I'm just being picky.

That was a very ‘stream-of-consciousness’ review and I should’ve gone over it again. I might edit it in future, but hopefully it wasn’t too terrible.

Killers rules, the fact that people would choose post-1990s Harris shite over the golden era just further proves that they're deaf.