Ha! That perfectly sums up how some bands make me feel too. However, I reckon these guys are up my street based on what Noktorn writes further on. Will be checking them out

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/Impious_Havoc/Dawn_of_Nothing/126461/

Really successful example of an unsentimental but very fair assessment of a band whose sole purpose in life is to ape their forebears (which in this case is done well, it would seem).

Caspian's new Falloch review was quite funny:


Falloch just might be the worst band to achieve some success doing the whole nature metal thing. Yes, even worse that Woods of Ypres.

Just popped in here to give a shout-out to caspian's Falloch review as well! I'm mostly indifferent to Falloch (they definitely get a lot of hate here, and I can understand that completely), but that review was still a racket. I really wish more people would write negative reviews that can still be as severe as this but don't come off as inflammatory.

Thanks, it was one of those reviews that wrote itself really; i'm honestly pretty chuffed with it, especially considering I don't write as much as I used to.

He called them worse than Hitler! Haha. Great review though.

http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/G ... ing/300419

Tl;dr - I'm a death metal newbie trying to understand why an album is a classic and I fail miserably at it, part 7269...

Annoying review if I may add, and I'm not talking about the score but how it clearly misses the mark. And didn't someone say a while back that if a review complained about the inaudible bass the reviewer would be shot or something like that?! Ready your kevlar son, they're coming for you!

Funny enough that was BH, who hates Obscura more than most people around here.

Oh, the irony!

This line made me laugh more than it probably should have.

I dunno, the review is a weird blend of missing the point and just sounding kinda confused. He praises the production to high heaven and notices all these little things in that regard, but then he says the songs mostly sound the same. Even though I hate this album with the burning intensity of a million exploding suns, and even though I think it's an hour long trainwreck of wailing and banging and generally cacophonous bullshit, even I can see the variety of ideas on display. I mean, I think they all suck, but saying that they all sound the same definitely makes you sound like you've been listening to extreme metal for no longer than a month.

I found the "it sounds like Cryptopsy" statements the hardest to follow... I mean... how? I can't identify a single aspect of Obscuras sound which sounds remotely similar to any of Cryptopsy's eras, not sound, not riffs, not tempos, not drumming, not vocals. NOTHING.

Oh you don't normally review albums like this? You just have to get your word out about it? It's a bundle of obnoxiousness in one big run-on punctuation swamp. I'd appreciate someone reviewing a classic album to at least take more care in their editing if they're not gonna care about coming up with something new to add.

"Kill The Crown might very well be one of the best deathcore albums I’ve heard. I’m not a fan of the genre, in fact for the most part I utterly detest it..."

"it's just that the most popular and most mentioned deathcore bands (the mainstream ones) are usually the crappiest. Better said, pure deathcore sucks."

Proposition: insta-bans for anybody who can't get through the first paragraph of a positive review for a deathcore album without mentioning something like "well just to make it clear most deathcore absolutely SUCKS so this one is really quite remarkable for not being totally terrible" (most people who write reviews like this have usually written like a dozen or so positive reviews for some form of deathcore or another). Does this sound like you do when reviewing? If it does, then you suck and I hate you.

^ I'll support that and add my two cents from a previous discussion:

Thirding that. It's like that with any genre though. Same thing when people review a Blind Guardian or Persuader album or something and talk about how every other power metal band in the world is flowery gay stuff and this is the only good band in the genre. If you're not a big fan of the genre, just say so and review the album from an outsider's perspective - there's really no need to half-ass some kind of posturing, pseudo-intellectual response and pretend you know more than you really do. Noktorn's reviews of Twisted Tower Dire and Excalion are a good example of how to do this right.

Well of course he got that one right! You cannot be a sane person and dislike Twisted Tower Dire.

Bumping this. It's an absolutely ridiculous review.

Thing is, NSV is a chaotic album or whatever you wanna call it. But calling it wankery or poorly structured just makes me wanna put 2 gigantic speakers in his lawn and spin Viraemia's EP until he finally realises what wankery or poorly-structured music is, NSV is heavy, fast, chaotic, but oh so well-structured, it's just that it's so insanely fast and bouncy that it makes you think it's bits and pieces thrown together, but that's just wrong, every song flows well and they all click, none of them sound out of balance or off-track or whatever bullshit he accused it of.

Bezerko has rated it 15% in his review, and I completely disagree with him anyway, but the things he said are atleast legitimate points of criticism, he didn't miss the point at all, he just didn't like it very much but explained clearly why he didn't like it instead of accusing it of being something it isn't..

Perhaps i'm affected too much because None So Vile to me (currently) is the ultimate pinnacle of (death) metal, but I really don't understand what he tried to achieve here, he seems like a competent reviewer, but he just completely missed the point...

And his line about Worm is amusing.

Okay, in light of this post, I'm gonna be real here: I think you need to explore metal more and decide what it is you actually like in music before you go around trying to opine on everything. I've seen at least two or three instances where you mention on the board that such-and-such album is garbage/wank/terrible and then somebody calls you out on it a month later and you pull a "WELL ACTUALLY I CAN SEE ITS MERITS NOW" card. And frankly, if you have such little faith in your opinions that they morph upon an additional listen, I don't have much faith in them either.

I mean, sometimes it feels like you assign descriptions to albums just because that's how you expect them to sound. You call Viraemia "poorly-structured", but I can't see any reason you would use this description unless you were convinced that poor structuring was inherent in the style. Most people will by-and-large agree that Viraemia are, by far, the most structured mega-wank technical death metal band. Their songs have repeated verses, they find interesting ways of building tension as they move from riff to riff, hell, a couple songs have honest-to-god choruses in place. For an example, "Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation" has a song structure that goes from Riff 1, to Riff 2, to Slow Riff, to "Chorus", to Riff 1, to Riff 2, to Slow Riff, to Bridge Riff, to Slow Riff, to "Chorus", to Riff 1, to Riff 2, to Bridge Riff. In comparison to a band like Brain Drill which literally avoids using any repeated motifs whatsoever, this band boasts some of the most well-planned, memorable song structuring I've ever heard in one of these bands (and trust me when I say I've heard a lot of them). I just can't see somebody saying it was poorly structured unless they had a preconceived notion that that was how it was supposed to sound. Hell, even The Red Chord have shittier song structures than this (uniformly so on Clients, periodically so on Fused Together in Revolving Doors), and you seem to love them to death.

Biggest difference really is that The Red Chord doesn't have 950.000 notes in each song. I find Viraemia to be well-made wanky mayhem, but I find it unfocused and way, waaaaaay too random, but that's just my opinion...

That said, i'll most definitely give the Viraemia EP a few more spins to see if it'll grow on me...

Bitterman's new reviews are actually hilarious! I had a good, sincere, with-you-not-at-you, five-minutes-straight laugh at "Another pile of sonic excrement from these energy drink dispensing corporate rockers (tagged metal for marketing purposes)" in his Whitechapel review. "a focus group project that aimed to satisfy the simple tastes of pickup truck drivers attempting to appear 'cultured' the world over" from the Melana Chasmata was also pretty funny. He missed a good chance to reference the BEANIE, though.

What a shitty review. Needs to be deleted this instance. Totally got his shit wrong. Angsty lyrics? C'mon... He's flaming the album for what he thinks (he's clearly wrong) it is...

Every single review he's done is a 0% review... I mean why are you even on MA when you hate metal that much?

I also wish bitterman would be recognized by the mods for the blatant troll that he is, but it's been discussed before, and unfortunately his reviews will stay. A glaring shitstain on the site, if you ask me.

Hehe, that Triptykon album totally has teen angst lyrics. bitterman: keepin' it real since aught-thirteen.

If you don't like him, just fucking ignore him. People whining about him are at least three times worse than he is.

Those kinds of comments are exactly what bitterman wants to read anyway. He's trying to make people say such things about him. MA is basically a big joke to the whole ANUS/deathmetal.org crowd and they're basically trolling.

Uh for some context, Goatfangs deleted his post about bitterman (how original of him to bring him up!), it was just before MC's "bitterman is hilarious" comment. I frankly think it's hilarious that LeMiserable would call him a terrible reviewer but that's another subject!

Just read his last few, as always they are fucking hilarious. People get all upset about it...why? He's no more a troll than someone who gives all favorable reviews. Bitterman only reviews what he doesn't like.

Did I?

@MutantClannfear. Yeah, gonna get that first paragraph fixed.

I know he isn't a terrible reviewer and that his reviews are acceptable (of course, or else they wouldn't be accepted), I just think he's a lame negative nancy who perpetually has his panties in a bunch and seems to have some weird vendetta against bands most metalheads agree upon. I'll shut up now though, since I've upset BastardHead.

It would be nice for him to write a review of something he actually likes so at least we have a reference point. At the moment, extrapolating the data suggests he hates all music. That doesn't mean his review aren't valid either, I'm just saying It would be nice to see something positive...

He says metal reached its peak with Onward to Golgotha (among others)? I wonder what he'd say about Mortal Throne of Nazarene, Incantation's actual best album.

I think we have very different perceptions as to what is pure deathcore. Bands like Suicide Silence, Bring Me The Horizon (kinda), Carnifex and later Whitechapel are pure deathcore to me...

Fused Together... is probably technical deathcore with major deathgrind influences, whatever...

I can clearly see the paragraph sucks though...

Every bitterman review:

A

By your logic, he's wasting his previous BitterCalories merely typing the reviews for those albums. Thank fucking Christ Almighty Himself that the real world doesn't actually revolve around the logic of "Don't put any effort into anything you do if it's based upon things you perceive as being unsatisfactory"; you'd essentially be killing the process of scientific invention in one fell swoop because no scientist would feel the need to waste effort expanding upon an obviously incomplete theory. People would not be able to contest anything sufficiently because their arguments would need to expend less energy than the original claim. Debates would devolve into repeatedly saying "no" to your opponent with as little breath as possible. Hooray for effort-efficient living!

Oh wait, no, because that would be chronically fucktarded.

Exactly. I read this and thought, "He nailed it!" I don't agree all the time because he doesn't really like modern metal but he nails a good portion of them.

I called out your post not to discuss The Red Chord's genre, but to bring up the fact that you even felt the need to add a disclaimer of "JUST TO MAKE IT CLEAR BEFORE I GIVE THIS DEATHCORE ALBUM A GOOD REVIEW, I REALLY HATE DEATHCORE". Please don't. Nevertheless, I would not in a million years describe The Red Chord as "technical deathcore" because, well, they were the prototype for the entire genre. You wouldn't call Morbid Angel technical death metal just because death metal bands formed after them that were less technical in comparison.

If you want to get really pedantic about it, bands like The Red Chord and early Despised Icon are pure deathcore, seeing as they were the first bands to play death metal with metalcore elements. The further down the genre's evolution you get, the less actual metalcore influence deathcore has and the more it developed into its now-nearly-impossible-to-describe sound. Material like Suicide Silence's first album quite clearly severs any connection to traditional metalcore (both of the "old-school" 90s variety and the modern poppy kind), but it dilutes the death metal influences as well by converting a fair portion of death metal's riffs into atonal chugging. Quite a curious case, as far as the evolution of metal goes.

B

I guess you've never heard "Dreams of the Carrion Kind"?

Well, can't argue with that. Thanks for the history lesson...

Ps. I don't hate deathcore, I do however, dislike the emocore side of deathcore (Suicide Silence, some stuff of Carnifex, etc.) I described as pure deathcore...

Oh I'm sure Nebster thinks all the positive reviews for that album are just "delusions".