Ohhh he ~demands~ it!

Yeah, cause it's really inexplicable. There are lots of shit reviews floating around and he's rejecting mine because of awkward english? That's just ridiculous. Especially when it's for an EP that does not have any other reviews.

At least 10 articles were missing in your review. We do have standards, you know. Feel free to post the review here and ask for help: https://www.metal-archives.com/board/vi ... =4&t=16487

Oh and by the way, your attitude will not work here nor will it be tolerated so calm down and be cool.

Another note for the Warbringer one, please notice that I don't think it's a bad album, (I think I gave it like a 60%), it's just too in your face with the overuse, and I'm glad that somebody was able to see what I meant. Despite this, I actually do like early Kreator because of how raw and stripped down it is, but even that took me some time to get into as well. I'm sure I'll like the Warbringer one more, over time.

Edit: Side note, I'm really glad to see another positive review on Black Sabbath's "Forbidden".

This description makes it sound sloppy, or even too fast though. It's such a tight record. There's a lot of blasting, which I suppose could be interpreted as being too chaotic, but the band's playing is so controlled that I really didn't get the same impression.

Also, I saw Warbringer last night and it was awesome, so I'm on a huge Warbringer kick right now.

I get that. This was one of my tougher writes. I'm trying to balance out ones that I can easily describe, as well as challenge myself with ones that I have a harder time justifying myself with, such as that one. I appreciate all feedback.

Yeah, that review makes me think you oughta listen to something like Nekromantheon or Sauron before categorizing Warbringer in such a way.

SweetLeaf, I often see you commenting about your reviews saying things like, "I found it difficult to describe" or "I couldn't find the right word for it". If I may make a suggestion, perhaps you should leave your reviews for a few days after writing them and then come back and have another listen to the album, seeing if you still agree with what you wrote. Then, if you need to edit something, you can. It's just a shame to look back on your own work and find that it could have been better, especially since it seems that people are reading your stuff fairly regularly.

Yeah if you can't think of a good way to put something, either put it on the backburner until you do think of a way, or break out a thesaurus. No sense in putting out something that you know isn't well thought out. May be better not to review something at all if you can't describe your feelings properly.

Big fan of this. Often times when I write a review and find it getting too repetitive, I just google "synonym: word". It's not always perfect, but is definitely a good way to expand your vocabulary a little bit.

Yeah I've done it from time to time.

I just think it's important to not have something like a review out there where you go "I couldn't think of a way to properly describe this." That's rookie stuff - gotta get better than that and keep practicing.

Yeah, that's why I shuffle in ones that I feel very confident about (such as the Power Trip one) as well as those. For ones like that, I guess I'll take more time with them, because admittedly I tend to want to submit it soon after I finish it and read it over once.

That Zenith Passage review was pretty bad. I knew when it opened with a "personal story" that it would be a chore to sit through, and this proves why lame instrument checklist reviews are generally a really bad idea. Each paragraph starts with "The [INSTRUMENT] on this album is X," plus he manages to say surprisingly little in five paragraphs. Calling things "godly, phenomenal, amazing sounding, great, etc." is pretty vapid and weak.

Good Mechina review by Wily. I was gonna get to that at some point, as they are really hitting their stride lately. Shame you didn't mention "The Tellurian Pathos!" That's my favorite on the album.

Thanks! Funny thing was my thought while typing it up was "I'm doing this before you do, Diamhea."

http://thehardtimes.net/music/music-cri ... ar-review/



https://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/ ... ia4/212738

to his credit, that term describes quite well the feeling you get when you play on guitar dissonant stuff like DSO, their chords are like geometry!

*flips table*

I don't even know where to begin.

There isn't much to say about that one - just another short, unimpressive, non-descriptive review from that guy. He really doesn't review things in a very in depth or smart manner at all.

The title of his Morbid Angel review is "Morbid Angel's generic start to this millennia...". A common mistake, maybe, but very pedestrian. Mixing plural and singular in a simple sentence like that is one of the stupidest grammar errors to make.

Yeah, I'm not the biggest fan of Gateways but calling it generic is some truly anachronistic nonsense. Morbid Angel can't help it if everyone decided to take a few notes from that album in the years to come.

I think my favorite part of the Elvenefris review is that he calls some of the riffs "djent". Where could you possibly get that from Morbid Angel + Gorguts + Cryptopsy + Orphaned Land in a blender?

He's utterly without credibility. Any critique from him is completely void when it comes to releases that aren't strictly contemporary, which is ironic considering his handle.

He also completely failed to pick up on how varied and multi-faceted the riffing on Elvenefris on - or maybe that's exactly the source of his confusion as to how to properly label its style. My guess is that, Elvenefris being notoriously hard to follow for its entire length - and it is quite a lengthy album as well - it ended up blurring into a mess in his head, and he didn't know how to begin to dissect it. That more or less happened to me on first listen, although the first two or three songs managed to stick enough to leave a lasting impression on me, which made me return to it.

For some people (read: some stupid people), a few seconds of a chugging riff = djent. I can't confirm as I haven't heard the album, but I can guess that, at some point in its runtime, there might have been a moment where some chugging occurred, and so a light bulb goes off in this guy's head as he proclaims, "Aha! Caught red-handed!"

Ironically enough, wanting to do some table flipping was how I felt during and after listening to this album. Literally one of the worst progressive death metal albums I have ever heard besides the folkier elements, and I've listened to late-era Opeth.

That being said, I revised the title, I noticed I made a spelling error there.

The whole review is one big error.

the thing is you are describing something very different from what is actually going on there. You literally are factually wrong in a few parts.

Yeah, I really don't think you know what you're talking about if you claim the album is ostentatious progressive wankery. It's really not technical at all; bands like Gorguts, whom you revere in your review, were already sounding much more technical by '98 and then of course bands like Necrophagist came around by the early 00s and were much more oriented around guitar exercises rather than riffs. Elvenefris was actually the first death metal album I learned how to play on guitar. And djent wasn't even a thing until 10 years after this album was released. The vocals sound much more like Lord Worm than "slam vocals".

You remind me of my reviews when I was 14 and thought I was cool for "seeing through the hype" when really I would just listen to an album with the intention of hating it and crapping out whatever flimsy justification I could use for attention. I did the same thing, basing my criticism on comparisons that I thought were accurate because I once had listened to a djent song for 10 seconds and was therefore wholly qualified to compare things I didn't like to djent. Put me in your signature if you want to pretend to wear it as a badge of honor, but I'm warning you that you'll look back in about five years and cringe hard at what you were going for here. Lord knows I did.

Haha, I was wondering this morning if that review was going to survive. It was so off the mark. Exactly the kind of thinking that MutantClannfear laid out of not understanding even what the music is.

One day, maybe, I'll revisit that album since it's been years and years now. I just remember thinking, "ok, this is clearly good, except for all of the parts that are brutal death metal which are dumb and make me hate it."

Nice review of that Dumal album, bats! That come on after I finished listening to All My Sins earlier today. I was contemplating covering it, but no need now.

https://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/ ... erEd/21802

Maybe it's just me being a nitpicky asshole, but isn't calling Heaven and Hell a Rainbow album disguised as a Black Sabbath one kind of a huge overstatement? Like, I get it, it's got some of that brighter Rainbow feel that naturally came with hiring their then vocalist, but it's still pretty clearly a Sabbath album through and through. I don't know. It's just weird, man.

This is why I love you.

Yeah, it's a fairly stupid thing to say, and calling out on it is not nitpicky or assholish either.

Thinking Sabbath can only have the one sound, or that anything more upbeat and rockish is automatically Rainbow-ish, seems kind of reductive to me.

I also don't get the idea that there are fillers on H&H... just because songs like Wishing Well, Walk Away, etc are simpler and more rock-ish, they're not worth it? I think these are rich, well done songs. Very tight and enjoyable. The whole album functions as a unit.

It's really not though. I've heard a few people say flat out "The Dio Sabbath albums weren't Sabbath, they were Dio." Except Dio wasn't really a thing before 1983 so it's more chronologically accurate to say they were Rainbow.

I wasn't taking points off for the album being a "Rainbow album" by the way.

All I can say is as good as they are, songs like Heaven & Hell, Die Young, Children of the Sea (and Mob Rules) have way more in common with Kill The King and Stargazers than they do with War Pigs and Into The Void. Sabbath more or less stuck to the doom sound during the time they had their heads together. While you can say Heaven & Hell (deservedly) makes top 100 lists, doom metal lists are not one of them.



I firmly believe that if those two songs were on Never Say Die or Technical Ecstasy they would have been lambasted. It's not even that they're simpler (lol, don't Dio fanboys like to laud that Sabbath era as more complex and musical than the Ozzy one), its that Sabbath requires a certain standard of heaviness/seriousness and those two just don't hit the mark.

I'd also like to remind people that the 70-79s are a GOOD grade, not a bad grade in my book.

Don't let the fact that Rainbow was completely defined by Ritchie Blackmore being a central figure in the band - or the fact that Black Sabbath's Dio albums sound absolutely nothing like Rainbow - stop you from writing revisionist nonsense. It's especially amusing that you justify it by some people (who, anyway?) saying something else that maybe halfway makes sense, and taking the same reductionist view to an absurd extreme.

I think the score you gave it is almost spot-on, so this isn't about that, either.

Yeah I've never heard anyone saying the Dio Sabbath stuff is more complex or musical than Ozzy - usually just that the vocals are better and the songs are faster so they're more interesting, something like that.

There's nothing about that statement that's revisionist. The quote I gave is from former MTV VJ Ian Robinson. Whether or not you think he's a poser because he was on MTV is irrelevant. The point is the man gave his opinion, therefore such an opinion does exist. What you call "reductionist" I call being accurate to stymie any wouldbe "Actually..." super nerds. Also when the Heaven & Hell reunion was happening it seemed like every other interview Geezer and Tony were doing was talking about how the Dio years were more musically complex than the Ozzy ones.

And get the fuck out of here with "They sound nothing like Rainbow." Heaven & Hell as well as Mob Rules sound more like Rainbow than most people want to admit.

They still sound like Sabbath albums though. I'm sure Rainbow and 70s-style rock was an influence on where they were going with those albums, but to say they abandoned their sound and became some sort of Rainbow cover act has always seemed extreme. You can hear Iommi's distinctive riff style, the kind of blues influence and the rhythm section. Especially on Mob Rules. I just don't think it's a criticism that holds weight.

Ehhhh.....this is....putting words in my mouth. Abandoned makes it sound like they threw it away completely rather than naturally melded toward a different sound as a direct result of new songwriters in the band. Yes, plural. Geezer had quit for a bit, being replaced by Craig Gruber, a former Rainbow AND Elf member (who has also claimed he helped write good chunk of the album, but was never credited for it). And even though Ronnie would take over lyrics, even Geezers basslines were an important component to Sabbath songwriting.