Where it all started to go wrong. - 65%
Written by hells_unicorn on September 23rd, 2006

In recent years, after the plunge of this band into being a complete caricature of what is wrong with music today, everyone began to wonder what went wrong, why did this band turn into a walking satire. I myself had my own theories about it as I penned reviews for the substandard Load albums and began a rather painful listening session of “St. Anger”. But when I came to this review thread on an intuition, I read some rather scathing reviews of this album as being the death of metal/a corruption in the fabric that resulted in the death of thrash. On top of this, I’ve read some rather nostalgic, yet somewhat apologetic and weak defenses of this album. (I have a good deal of respect with Napero and the other Metal Lords of generations past, but I can’t agree with him here.)

As some may have gleaned from my profile, I am a guitar player who is currently co-fronting a power metal band with some symphonic influences, but what is not mentioned there is that my first introduction into heavy metal was in the realm of thrash, particularly MegaDeth’s “Peace Sells” album. I was 13 years old at the time and I was just starting to learn guitar with Nirvana as my primary influence, but my brother was liquidating his own stock of old audio cassettes and I ended up with a mountain of 80s metal albums, the two main ones were Metallica’s “And Justice for All” and MegaDeth’s “Peace Sells”. The latter received the most attention from me, although the former was very well received. Fairly soon after, Kurt Cobain shot himself, I realized that his music was an artistic dead-end and I began learning how to actually play my instrument.

Suffice to say, I didn’t plan to write a review on this album because truth be told, I had not listened to it in years. I bought this album in 1994 because everyone in my High School guitar class told me it was Metallica’s masterpiece, so I went to the store and picked it up on CD. Kill em’ all, Ride the Lightning, and Justice all receive regular play in my CD player, and occasionally I do listen to the Black Album. But for some reason, although I didn’t chalk it up to not liking the album, I just had other things to listen to and I didn‘t see it as that important musically. But I was so taken aback by the reviews on here by UltraBoris and InstinctKill, I decided to pop this one into my CD player and see what all the venom was about. And after listening to this album 10 times through, over a course of 4 days during some long commutes, I figured out where this newfound dissent is coming from.

One of the things I did during these listening sessions was re-learn all of the lead riffs and the solos, which are not all that technically or musically intricate actually. Kirk Hammet’s best solos on this album are the ones on “Disposable Heroes” and “Battery”, and they are good primarily because they are geared towards what Kirk has always been good at, venting anger through fast and repetitive pentatonic licks and scale runs. His more melodic solos on “Sanitarium” are extremely anti-climactic, as was the case with his lead work on “To live is to Die”, and sound more forced than anything else. All of the rest of his material is highly forgettable, because they are too long winded and localized to one spot. Kirk’s solos are best when split up into smaller doses and spread out through out the song in short bursts, when they are long-winded and done over a constantly repeated drone, it sounds like some shred kid doing basic pentatonic calisthenics rather than something musical. It is also important to note that this album is where Kirk is beginning to use the wah pedal as a crutch rather than an effect to complement some of his solos, and the result is his current overuse of it.

The main riffs of these songs are highly memorable, too memorable in fact, and this is where this accusation that UltraBoris raised about this album being a bunch of fluff and fodder for public consumption stems from. One of the reasons for this is that the riffs are played over and over ad nauseum. This can be readily observed in the intros to “Battery”, the title track”, “The thing that should not be”, “Sanitarium”, as well as the main riffs of “Leper Messiah” and “Damage Inc.” There are a good number of differing riffs and parts in each track, but all of them are repeated far too much and not developed at all. The Black Album at least attempted to vary the rhythm riffs, here there is absolutely no attempt being made. Back during the war in Afghanistan it was rumored that the Allied military was using Metallica’s music to extract information from prisoners, I wouldn’t be surprised if they used this album, because it is sheer torture to the ears, to the point of it becoming musical propaganda. It screams “these are great riffs, and you will hear them over and over until you agree with me!!!”.

The intros of all the mainstream friendly songs, minus perhaps “Orion”, are all geared towards one purpose, hiding the true nature of what Metallica is, a thrash band. None of the intros in the more thrashing songs that have them are brought back, making it sound like your listening to 2 completely different songs. There is something to be said for the idea that these intros are meant to suck in non-metal fans and boost album sales, but there is a deeper musical emotion at work than the pretense of greed, and that is shame. It is not a question of having soft intros to loud songs, many great bands do this effectively and “Fight Fire with Fire” is an example of Metallica doing it right, but it’s a matter of having intros for the sake of having them, with no other purpose than to act as window dressing to make what comes after not seem as heavy, as aggressive, as fucking metal.

Metallica has, in fact, taken the road of self-parody that InstinctKill alluded to, and this is readily observable in the structure of these songs. A good analogy, if anyone here is a novel buff, is the practice in architecture of setting up ornamentation and figurehead statues to hide the actual structure itself in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. The result is the articulation of shame over the goodness of your work, and ultimately the death of the art save the individuals whom rebel against the trend. This is exactly what happened in the early 90s in Metal, and the result was the worst possible band taking over the reins of heavy music, Nirvana. If you haven’t read “The Fountainhead”, I recommend reading it because it explains exactly how not only in architecture, but in every art it is guilt over your own greatness that destroys it.

I’m going to personally take a moment to single out “The thing that should not be” because quite frankly this is one of the worst attempts to re-capture the slower doom sound of Sabbath that I’ve ever heard. The intro riff is gloomy and dark sounding enough, but the rest of the song is so slow, over-long, redundant and boring that you almost want to yank the CD out of the player and crush it inside your own fist. If it wasn’t for the fact that this album has the old punch sound in the guitar that Metallica used to exhibit regularly, this song would almost sound like a slightly more organized version of “The Outlaw Torn”.

The lyrics of this album are a perfect reflection of the propaganda like nature of the musical structure, be it the tired say no to drugs theme in the title tracks, the words against televangelism in “Leper Messiah”, the collectivistic spirit of “Sanitarium”, or the post 60s anti-war nonsense of “Disposable Heroes”. But the important aspect of these songs is not the politics, but the underlying principle that causes one to take up these stupid pet causes and to turn your music into a slave of established and self-contradictory political ideologies, and that is the desire to have your music seem important for the sake of being important to others. Music is an art that is independent of the listener, the listener is drawn to it because of it’s nature, not because it panders to what the listeners may or may not agree with. This is where the line is drawn between true art and propaganda disguised as art, and the lion’s share of this album is the latter, not the former which could describe the works before this.

If there is any saving grace to this album, it is the things that I did not mention. Despite being overlong and essentially being an idea stolen from Dave Mustaine’s past work in Metallica, “Disposable Heroes” is a decent song and can be extracted from the rest of the garbage on this album. “Orion” is actually a good instrumental and highlights the strength of Cliff Burton’s post-Sabbath influence on the band, one that was sadly lost after his death. “Damage Inc.“ is a good song, even though the structure is thrown off a bit by the intro. And if you ignore the redundant and comical sounding acoustic intro to “Battery”, you have a song very similar to “Blackened”, but if you can’t do this, just listen to the opening track to “And Justice for All” and that will suffice.

As far as the socio-economic impact of this album, I have nothing to add to what UltraBoris and InstinctKill have already said in terms of what this album did to metal. However, I would like to add a few things as to how this album succeeded in doing what it did, and why it’s impact was delayed. In 1986 thrash was still alive and kicking. Nuclear Assault had just hit the scene, Anthrax would be poised to release a set of decent albums, and MegaDeth was still pumping out classic albums. As far as the death of thrash goes, MegaDeth’s “Peace Sells” was the primary delay in it’s demise. As far as the death of the entire metal movement in the early 90s, this was caused in part by the acceptance of this corrupt form of Thrash by most of the metal faithful, but it was helped by a lot of other circumstances, and also delayed by some stellar releases.

Judas Priest had probably their least heavy release in 1986, but in 1988 their classic speed and shred based “Ram it Down” provided a NWOBHM alternative to the disease that was slowly festering in the Thrash scene, and this was followed by the even more fast and fierce “Painkiller”. Also, Iron Maiden released their greatest album in “Somewhere in Time” the same year as this album was released, and followed it up by an ingenious concept album in “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”. Unfortunately, the self-destruction of these bands due to conflicts between the front men and the others left a vacuum to be filled by the first person with an ounce of angst in him, and that is how we ended up with Kurt Cobain, who basically filled a complete artistic vacuum with a nihilistic/anarchistic punk rock sound that was so self-parodying, even compared to this album, that it’s seemingly premature demise was inevitable.

Also note, Yngwie was still cranking out classics even after the death of metal in America and keeping others outside the states interested, despite being labeled as has been and being ridiculed by these closeted sausage hounds in the 90s thrash scene. If anything, Yngwie has as much of a brief against this album as all in the Thrash community, because his image and style of playing was what came under direct assault in the early 90s as a result of it. The darker metal that was influenced by Merciful Fate and others pioneering the occult side of metal were always underground, and they did well to survive this disease and are still going with their integrity intact.

In conclusion, Metallica did not kill metal with this album, but they made it so sick and decrepit that it had to disappear in order to heal from the wounds inflicted on it by this virus. What this album did to metal, however, is not the reason for the low score I gave it, a score that is actually slightly lower than the one I gave Reload. The reason is that this is a sub-standard and mediocre release that came from a band that was far more capable than this, and the only danger threatened by it is accepting it as being better than what it isI personally am not interested in dwelling upon the past of metal, I am more interested in it’s future, and it does not lie with this album, nothing great is influenced by anything mediocre. To those of you aspiring metal bands out there who want to do something great, steer clear of this release. I had a long talk with all the members of my band and we have all agreed that this album is one that will not impact our music in any way, shape or form.

Apologetics for a victim of the generation gap - 90%
Written by Napero on September 10th, 2006

Master of Puppets truly is an exceptional album. As a musical piece of art it hardly sets any superior standards never seen before, neither does it really exceed the standards set by its contemporaries. Moreover, the teeth of time have not been too kind to it. But it holds a special place in metal history for its commercial success and fame. Yes, an album can become legendary simply because it becomes legendary. At some point on the path to fame, a positive feedback sets in, and the album turns from a new favourite into a phenomenon. It's relatively rare in metal, but it happened to MoP. It isn't necessarily the album's own fault.

Somehow, for some people, it has become a fashion of sorts to attack Master of Puppets and claim it's a commercial sell-out, a bad album, undeserving of its fame, or even, amusingly, the death of heavy metal. If a single album can kill a genre, the genre was too weak to live in the first place. It may be that Master of Puppets is not the creative apex in the history of metal, nor the apex of Metallica themselves. I certainly don't consider it the best album ever. That questionable honour goes to, you guessed it, The Sane Asylum. But MoP sure isn't an inherently bad album, and probably its main faults lie in its relatively easy accessibility, in the way it gave a million metal laymen something a bit stringy but tantalizingly delicious to chew on in the mid 80's, and in its subsequent commercial success. I don't generally like the attacks on Puppets, unless the attack is based on solid reasoning. Just the fact that it sold millions of copies doesn't turn MoP into an album by Europe, and much more thought and arguments are needed before I can silently accept the downplaying of its importance. Neither is the fact that its ideas, song structures and sound have been imitated by gazillions of garage bands a reason to say it blows. On the contrary.

Everybody has heard the album. Or, more like it, everybody should have heard the album, there may be a minority of 6 to 8 percent here so far without the experience. There's no need to describe the sound, it is the definitive 80's metal sound. It must suffice to say that as certainly as the riffing became the model for many a guitarist in his garage, the Metallica sound became an equally revered goal for the producers. The effect of MoP can be easily heard in the production of mainstream metal until the mid 90's.

The songs are familiar to almost everybody, at least the songs Master of Puppets, Orion and Sanitarium, the three musketeers of overplayed metal. Master of Puppets is a work of truly monolithic stature, and I bet only a few works by Iron Maiden can challenge it's familiarity, as far as complete albums go, to such a a large portion of the users of the Archives. The Master riff alone is instantly recognizable, and Damage Inc is quite probably the fastest thing on any rock or metal album ever to sell over five million copies.

Maybe one of the most important things that turned the album into such a hit were the mellow parts. The whole Sanitarium actually becomes quite hard for the late 80's consumers of Def Leppard and Wet Wet Wet before it ends, but does it with stealth; many Madonna and Miami Vice fans didn't realize the gradual transition to metal, and would not have accepted Sanitarium as a nice song if they had only heard the end. The slower parts in Master of Puppets itself and Orion were, for some reason, often considered the album's real feats of musicianship by people who think becoming a metal artist equals trying to cover the lack of musical talent with excessive noise. Oh, the irony! Hetfield plays half an hour with his fingers bleeding, and Joe Sixpack thinks he was at his best during those moments that must have saved Ulrich from several looming heart attacks on live gigs. The mellowness turned the MoP into an effective gateway drug; there, on a thrash album, were parts that were easy and peaceful enough to be enjoyed by the guy from the street, slow and beautiful, but still ominous enough to tempt a dark-minded minority deeper into the album. MoP moulded millions from standard pulp into metalheads, and it did that by offering some sugar-coated bits, still attached to music that held within the essence and barbed hooks of metal, and reeled them in after the prey swallowed the lure.

I can't remember where I was when I heard about the Kennedy assassination. It must have something to do with the fact that my father was about fifteen years old at the time, and I was not to be born for another eight years. I was probably eating in a local McDonalds when I heard of the September 11th attacks, but I'm not 100% sure; a friend of mine says it's correct, though. What I am sure of is that I was sitting on a bus on a smaller road parallel to the road currently bearing the number 25 in Finland, right next to the Koverhar steel plant, on my way home from school when I heard Metallica for the first time. The song was Master of Puppets itself, and it was an exhilarating, confusing sonic blast. The bus driver, probably something like thirty or forty years old, and as far from a metalhead as anyone without a walker can be, had the radio on, and there it was, in the middle of the easy-listen radio show, a ruthless piece of thrash. I had some Deep Purple, Rainbow, Dio and Twisted Sister on crappy copied tapes, and I was a 15-year old nerd trying to find my place on the field of music, mostly leaning towards hard rock and metal already, but still soft and very impressionable. Metallica was truly something new, and it hit me like a ton of feathers, not necessarily knocking me out, but overwhelming and obscuring the rest of the world for a while. And that, people, was the magic of Metallica. It was mainstream enough to be heard by virtually everybody, yet aggressive and different enough to lure malleable young souls like me into the world of metal. Master of Puppets was the favourite gateway drug of the 80's metal, and it sold furiously.

It took a few days more before I heard Battery, and within a couple of weeks my friend had the Master of Puppets on vinyl. It was a curiosity, an album to be approached with extreme caution, and didn't really stick on my skin until a few months later. But it was different and, at the time, merciless. That year was probably the best metal year of the whole 1980's, and no matter what Metallica's current street value is, Master of Puppets was an essential part of that very year. Two years later I was a handsome, long-haired thrash Hercules with a beutifully matured and muscularly symmetric body, and MoP had played an important part in the incredible transformation from a tapeworm-colored 70-pound nerd into the beautiful (and largely fictional) mosh-Jesus.

All right, I admit, the music is what it is, and all of it hasn't aged well. The thrash parts -Battery, Master of Puppets, Disposable Heroes and Damage Inc- do not sound nearly as furious anymore as they did back then. Sanitarium's melodic progression from half-acoustic mellowness to mellow thrashiness had already been seen on Ride the Lightning in the form of Fade to Black, and would be seen again as One on the next album. The Thing That Should Not Be has never really worked for me, except for the lyrical content, and Leper Messiah is a curious attempt at doing something else. Orion, unfortunately, is the specific song on the album that crosses the line and becomes too accessible in its prolonged repetitiveness, and ends up being the only metal intrumental known by approximately 68 million people with otherwise minimal knowledge of metal outside Aerosmith and Van Halen. Yes, you know what I mean, and yes, I know Aerosmith and Van Halen are not metal, but They don't. Also, the aforementioned production has suffered an immense drop in respect, just because it was copied by everybody for a decade and sounds aged for that sole reason alone. But look back at the times when MoP was young, try to remember where you were, and conjure an image of the effect it had. 1986 was the year of Chernobyl, the Olof Palme murder and the Challenger explosion. Do those ring any bells?

I think most of the people who say they dislike MoP were still building sandcastles or learning not to wet their beds in 1986. And honestly, I don't really blame them. I've had a lot of trouble in learning to appreciate the music from the ancient times before I turned 10. Black Sabbath is a prime example of this: I recognize a dozen or so songs, but find none of them really worth my time. Iron Man gives me a rash and makes me restless and irritated, and that drunken, off-key feminine "Öy Yeeh!" in the beginning of that one song is stupid enough make me blush for Ozzy. But I still won't deny the band's influence or value. We would all be listening to elevator muzak pan flute synth versions of The Beatles if it weren't for them. Yup, Alphaville would have claimed a two-inch space on YOUR CD shelf without Black Sabbath. And the songs aren't bad, they are just... old, and they've been remade ten thousand times since. And that's the problem with younger people's ideas about Master of Puppets; everything on the album has been done again three thousand times since. But, remember, only a few times before it. And those few times were witnessed by just a tiny handful of people, before the albums gradually became recognized long after Master of Puppets had sold a million copies.

Master of Puppets taught an important lesson to the mindless masses of the mainstream hard rock and heavy metal crowd of the time. The lesson was simple: appreciate the Riff. That was the odd blast I had when I first heart the title track: the main riff, no matter if and from whom it was originally stolen, was something new, and the basic construction, the very essence of thrash, would be repeated many times over on the album itself. There were riffs before. Many bands certainly made equally or even more riff based metal already before Ride the Lightning. I'm not saying anything to the effect that Metallica invented riffs, or thrash riffs (or even their own riffs, for that matter). But Master of Puppets was the first riff-driven thrash metal album ever heard by the ignorant masses. That in itself is the defining achievement of the album, its claim to fame. Everybody knows it: you, me, the metalhead next door, the 30 years old nicely C-cupped secretary in your dad's office and that pale skinny guy handing you the fries on the drive-through (or, alternatively, receiving them from you). Try to explain something about Artillery's Fear of Tomorrow or Dark Angel's Darkness Descends to those people, and you get the same "get out of here, you untidy weirdo" look you'd give a flaming indie movie buff trying to tell you about the newest art movie with sexual minority cowboys eating quiche; it isn't familiar, so it's bound to be less interesting. And if the same movie freak at the same time makes the mistake of saying that The Last Boyscout is worthless mainstream junk of questionable entertainment value, you'd certainly punch the dweeb, right? Connoisseurs can have their opinions, but the great public knows and -surprisingly- tolerates MoP quite well. It is the defining habit of the snob to say that the things loved by normal people are crap. I've tried to avoid that at all costs: I like cooking and well-made food, imported ales and occasionally prefer certain european movies to their US counterparts. But I've also told my friends to bitch-slap me hard and repeatedly if I ever say no to a case of finnish lager, an ice hockey game and three bags of potato chips with chicken wings attached.

One of the stupid ideas certain types of people seem to love is trying their damnest to find hidden meanings and deeper ideas in mainstream works. Usually this overanalyzing takes place after everything really relevant has already been said. A while ago Master of Puppets was still included in the Wikipedia's list of concept albums; it seems to have been deleted now, and rightly so. The album's own entry used to contain the goofy interpretation. This is supposed to be a concept album exploring the idea of control, an esoteric and multifaceted puppet master, and even Orion is an alleged study on the use of power, because Orion in the ancient legends did some stupid stuff. Bollocks, I say. I will leave proving this amusing hypothesis wrong as an excercise to the reader. An inductive proof can probably be found simply by writing two dozen words on little pieces of paper. Use big blanketing words like "power", "corruption", "progression", "chaos" and "control". Be creative. Then blindfold yourself, draw one of the words out of the pile and an album from your collection at random, and spent fifteen minutes composing an essay to prove the chosen album is a concept album exploring the Big Word in question. Like, say, the word "religion" and the album Here Comes Trouble by Scatterbrain. It can be done, and in a convincing manner, just believe me if you can't be bothered to try.

Erm... Okay, I'll admit, it cannot be done with "religion" and Here Comes Trouble. But you get the idea. This piece of work is roughly equal in its concept album quotient to every single album released in 1986.

It seems that we have a young, eager generation of metalheads that have been brought up with the idea that Ulrich's first name is actually supposed be spelled Lar$. All right, maybe his bright-eyed and childishly idealistic opposition to Napster and other actions, not to mention the sub-par releases after Justice for All, all selling in the millions nonetheless, have lent some credibility to the joke, but anyone claiming that Master of Puppets was made with the single idea of cashing in is worthy of being pelted to death with Cradle of Filth CDs. Metallica, in 1986, was not yet a rich'n'bloated guy's milking cow. No, it still was an ambitious young group that, despite for the most parts just copying their previous work, still had their own idea. None of the money they gained from Master of Puppets in the end was by any means automatically there to be cashed in. Had it been, someone else would have grabbed it. Granted, the album idea was already formatted well enough to be franchised, a fact that can be verified simply by observing that the slow melodic pieces, i.e. Fade to Black, Sanitarium and One, are all placed on the same spot on the respective albums, and that the "progressive" instrumentals (Call of Ktulu, Orion, To Live Is to Die) hold an equally fixed position in the track listings. There is an underlying template at work here. But it was their own format, and if they managed to pull it off well enough to reap the rich harvest, it should be OK for anyone who claims to support capitalism. If it isn't, well, then the underground übertr00 black metal penguins with their obscure demo tapes (limited to 13 official copies and the six special top secret "goat blood" editions for the closest circle of friends and the artists' mothers) have already won. If getting a million dollars has something inherently bad in it, then stop trying to get a recording contract and simply shove your music to MySpace and Audiostreet, or better yet, shut yourself into the grimness of your step-dad's basement and play your music to no one. Don't be surprised if you get beaten up by the jocks sometimes, though. I know there are hundreds of bands that follow the ideology, but for every one of those, there's a hundred more striving to get signed. Commercial success does not always mean the album sucks. Most often it does, I'll admit, but not quite always. If there is an overriding, unavoidable need for chart music to exist, I'll take any song from any Metallica album (save St Anger) over any spanish/german/swedish/finnish brainless pop song and play it from here to eternity with glee. And I don't care if Ulrich can get better than average Westfalen air-dried ham onto his danish sandwiches as a result. That's the spirit of capitalism, and claiming it's wrong equals being a communist. The guys came up with a succesful formula, milked it, people bought the milk, and they got rich. Right?

So, I'd just like to point out that it took more than four years after the album's release before I heard anyone even remotely resembling a metalhead calling MoP overrated for the first time. Never, I repeat NEVER, during the 80's did anyone say that. And it took half a decade after the Black Album before Metallica-bashing became part of the metalhead trueness-olympics pentathlon (the second sport right after "I've met the guys from Beherit in a sauna" boasting contest, and before the much more rigorous field excercise of making the demo with the lowest number of released official copies, negative digits win). Curiously, a high crest in the wave of MoP-hating coincided with Ulrich's Napster goofiness, and the smell of a bitter revenge by the metal masses hangs heavy in the air. Repent, you fools. And don't come back until you've redeemed yourselves. It wasn't the fault of Master of Puppets itself, it was the amusing drummer guy who lost his hold on the controls of his intellectual moped after finding out that he had been robbed of his 123rd million.

I know it's too much to ask to tell people not to hate Master of Puppets because they only see it as just a thrash album among other thrash albums; it was a magnificient blueprint to be photocopied by thousands of others during the next decade, and cannot be judged among its own spawn, but in the end, it's just an album, and cannot be objectively elevated above the others of its kind, except for nostalgic reasons. But it simply cannot be too much to ask people to stop hating it just because they don't like Lar$ and hate St Anger and the Loads. This album has proven itself worthy of the attention it gets, and doesn't deserve to be treated rudely because of the things that happened after it was released. It has set a standard to measure other things with. And it isn't a bad album, honestly. You may hate it, but don't turn that hate into a public circus act, unless you already hated it in the 80's, in which case you are better entitled to your opinion than I am and I humbly bow and retreat in front of the tr00ness of the Great Old One.

I spent quite a while thinking about the rating. Finally I realized that my own rating guidelines in my profile give me an undisputable answer. I've written that a 90+ means the album will stay on my playlist for years. Master of Puppets has been on my "once-monthly" playlist for over 19 years already, and thus I guess it has proven its value many times over.

Shitty review that barely describes anything:

http://metal-archives.com/review.php?id=778#21511

Scar*SUCK* - A real pain to listen to - 10%
Written by xzander on January 4th, 2007


Some of you might say: "it's an album from 2007", and that it's very early to give a pointer like this, especially talking about a good prog-metal band like PoS. Well, there's an internet promo rounding out, I've listened, therefore I can talk about it. So I will start explaining why this album is a major letdown:
First of all, daniel gildenlow IS NOT Coby Dick from Papa Roach, Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, or Sonny Sandoval from P.O.D., he is DANIEL FUCKING GILDENLÖW, a kickass guitar player and composer. Then why the fuck does he have to rap LIKE A RETARDED CHAV in the first two songs!? These two crappy songs tears all the "concept" on this album apart, and throws it to the garbage. Tip to the future musician: if you are part/leader of a metal band, DO NOT RAP, please USE YOUR BRAIN, and stick with the style elementals!

Secondly, The fourth song, "disco queen" ... you know... it sounds catchy, pop-ish... yeah, like Muse or something... oh wait, we're talking about Pain Of Salvation. That's exactly what I'm talking about, goddammit! Pain of Salvation IS PAIN OF SALVATION, for god's sakes, they're not a nu-metal band (as much as they tried to sound like), and definitely THEY'RE NOT MUSE, so stop trying to sound like them, and stick to your own sound, you're very good at it.

Reason number three: Kingdom of loss and Idiocracy are good songs really... but wait, the album will have ten tracks. Yes, two songs are good, three are shit, you do the math. that makes five songs that have been placed as an ornament for the album. Yup, no good, no bad, just plain. And it doesn't matter how much I love a band, I wouldn't buy a record of ten tracks when only two are good enough for my ears.

Finally: The words "concept" and "Pain Of Salvation" always seem to come along. Well, I would change the word "concept" in this album for "fucked up". With this I want to say: there's no interesting concept in this album actually. Just a swedish man yelling ten thousand "fuck you's" at George Bush and the community of the United States. Well, if capitalism is so bad for these guys at PoS, I'll follow the advice and write a fucking letter to make them ship the album to my house for free, if they want someone to take their letters and "concept" on a serious manner.

We had to wait 3 YEARS until Pain of Salvation Finally decided to move a finger. Well, my recommendation for the band is: if you're going to make piles of shit like this album, then make them a week or a month after you've released your last one, at least you have a fucking excuse if you would make it that way.

To the genre fans, and/or band newbies: avoid this album at all costs, it's not even worth listening to.

The good: Kingdom of Loss and Idiocracy.
The bad: Everything else. Even the album cover.
The ugly: Daniel Gildenlöw rapping as a chav wannabe.
The sad: Kristoffer Gildenlöw leaving the band =(

Exhorder - The Law

http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=1257#902

Apparently, the reviewer is also dursted, so it won't be a great loss.

Lars said that it ain't glam - 91%
Written by StillDeath on March 18th, 2004

Pyromania is not glam and Lars Ulrich said so in an interview, sighting it as an example of tr00 metal with substance … and he never told a lie. He had??! Oh my God!! Lets face it, Def Leppard as a metal band – stick a fork in them. They are done. This album will be their great contribution, their metal masterpiece. If you are dreading of hearing bubble gum metal don’t worry – this has got screams and aggression aplenty. The main difference between this and their first two albums is that production and song writing has been stepped up. Def Leppard utilize a lot of interaction between lead and backing vocals, this in my view is their legacy, as seen in modern power metal.

Rock Rock – Scorching opener, just a bit uninspired. Sounds like something from High n Dry.

Photograph – You’ve heard it already. Next.

Stagefright – Now this is what legends are made of! Speed metal that is memorable, with screamed vocals, and throw in a few bad ass solos – the end result: the best song on the album, that would sound similar to Judas Priest at the time.

Too late for love/Die Hard the Hunter/Foolin’ – I think of these three tracks as one epic song. They are set up together in a haunting atmosphere and remind me of the Queensryche – Operation Mindcrime. Well written, with great sound effects and memorable lyrics as “ you got no enemy, no front line, the only battles in the back of your mind”. Another highlight, very close second favourite.

Rock of Ages – straightforward rocker, slowed down for radio play probably.

Comin’ Under Fire – mid paced track, with excellent vocal delivery. Memorable chorus and catchy hooks everywhere.

Action! Not words - another High n Dry – ish track. Does not sound too ground breaking and could have been a single.

Billy’s Got a Gun – brilliant vocals, and the atmosphere of the epic three- track sequence of Too late/Die Hard/Foolin’. This track has the best lead/backing vocal interaction, as good as Blind Guardian ever did.


Pick this one up if you like to hear NWOBHM, W.A.S.P., Judas Priest et al, and who doesn’t.

Napero's Master of Puppet's review is one of the best iv'e read on this site.

Well, I know they are good. But I think that the reviews in the site should be shorter. I understand that these examples are OK though.

Everything gone, except for the Nightwishes. There's too goddamn many to go through one by one, and I'd like Radagast to name the top-something worst cases to be nuked.

Also, I left Warmonger's Daudi Baldrs review. I don't feel I'm qualified to judge anyone's Daudi Balrds review...

Yikes, looks like I might need to...put some effort into being a moaning-faced bastard.

Watch this space...

Mutalitia - an incoherent rant "I hate this band...they were never power metal....to be honest I don't hate this band...they don't sound like Stratovarius anymore...my favourite member of Nightwish is..." Yech.

AN UNCOMPROMISING MASSIVE ONSLAUGHT OF HELL - 80%
Written by Necropenis on September 12th, 2004

It is Remarkable the form in that this Horde continues giving fight and it shows clearly that one doesn't need of third people so that your own projects and desires make you give steps every time with more stability... although this maybe molest some.... This time they give us nine tracks and a total of 47 minutes of total ideology... there are tracks that were composed in the year 1991-1997... The track that there will be this CD: "The Castle Trimensor" it is completely sung in Spanish language... in the book the translation appears in English... For many it is difficult to understand music's type that Nahual gives us... Sincerely when he listens its first demo tape in 1996, very difficult era to understand the music that they looked for to project. After several years I listen something of them again... (I know that they are of the few bands that in spite of lacking support... they continue publishing and taking out material... that which only makes me write a single opinion: my total respect for the itinerary and taken direction)... The track that more he got my attention it is "From Kether to Malkuth (Nine Sephiroths of Hell) ", a very dense track and full with dark shades... essentially pure under many aspects... the same as "Of fragmented skies and Weapons" which breaks the outline shown until that moment in the CD... The last track "Second Chapter" will be able to be listened in the track 9 to the 7:48 min... I take Myself the best in the impressions after listening to this CD, the time had demonstrated that NAHUAL is one of the most serious bands and that they have the enough essence and it forces to achieve goals... Without necessity of depending on anybody more than of its own ideas and goals.

It's about half twelve in the evening when I first load the flimsy CD into my stereo system. Hitting the big luminous play button not knowing what to expect, I carry on pottering around my room under the oppressive phosphorescent lighting. Suddenly, yet quietly - so quietly I barely even notice it until the full force of it is upon me – the sinister croaking of a death rattle leaks out of the speakers and into the room. The hairs on my neck raise and my skin prickles all over as my mind is cast back with sudden dread to the image of Kayako Saeki crawling across the floor, in Takashi Shimizu's 'the Grudge'. Yes I'll admit to being scared by it, and yes I'll admit to curling up in my duvet at night, hoping it'll act as some kind of shield. We all do it, and you know it. So I'm sitting in my bedroom, curled up in a bit of a state visualizing that strange Japanese lady making her way towards me. Black hair cascading down her anaemic features, head bent down concealing her grotesquely innocent face. But enough of that, as the second's tick on I realise that I should never have worried, the hypnotic crackling noise is joined by the haunting sounds of a guitar and a sigh of relief escapes from my lips as I realise, this is no bad dream niggling at the back of my mind! No, this is the ethereal sound of all girl black metal band, Gallhammer.

The first venomous and torturous offering is a simplistic, yet captivating one. It almost seems impossible to me that the three forlorn little faces staring out from the picture, could make such a beautiful, yet aggressive noise. I can only really describe the drone and hiss emanating from one side of the room, as the soundtrack to the dark underbelly of an industrial wasteland. Carving lurid visions of a nightmarish landscape, the grinding, clunking, thumping wails of black metal, is only broken momentarily, with bursts of delicious punky riffs. Yet the backdrop of long drawn out death rattles and strange, almost inhuman croaks still roar on, piercing into the mind and creating a wholly uncomfortable atmosphere.

Unlike most present black metal bands, it is hard to fit Gallhammer into a tidy little niche, where they can lay and stagnate like so many in the genre, instead the unusual trio hover between the boundaries of black, doom, and sludge metal. With a nod towards UK crustcore pioneers Amebix, and obvious influences from Hellhammer, Darkthrone and Burzum, the girls cultivate something dramatically fresh and new, with a borrowed sound long over used.



I wish I could stop right there, BAM! This band has it all, ice queen cool, super 'primal' music, attitude by the bucket load, and faces like they wanna stab you in a back alley at night, everything. So why do I get so angry when I read comments posted by gormless metal fans, on the big world wide web? Scouring the opinions of those willing enough to leave their two cents slapped over for all to see, I only discover unabashed sexism and objectification of women. Which, I suppose is something I should find totally natural in an environment as driven by testosterone filled bodies as this one. However this doesn't excuse phrases such as ' these girls should spend their time looking for a husband 'cause with their playing they won't go that far!' being the social norm when presented with a band, which just happens to have female members. Other intelligent conversation includes a strong debate as to whether Asian chicks are hotter than Caucasian ones. Its like the last thirty years of feminism never happened, I can almost hear Germaine Greer spinning in her grave. Well I would do if she were dead of course.

The mainstream metal press doesn't help this cause; flicking through the pages of many a big publication it is obvious that they are guilty of pressurizing female fronted bands into 'quirky' patronizing stereotypes. Building them up to be everything for the reader, and nothing for themselves. A novelty, rather than a serious act, so apparent in bands such as lacuna coil and arch enemy, who both contain pretty poster girls with no substance. The girls of Gallhammer are different however; putting no emphasis on their gender they encourage women to explore an entirely different form of femininity, or even masculinity.


Parts of the music industry may have softened when regarding its views on how women should act and appear, but it seems that metal has a long way to go before it catches onto the crazy notion that women are people too.

http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=61499#6887


Do we need a giant rant of femminism in a review? You'd never see an approved review on an NSBM band's newest offering with a rant on white power or a Christian "Metal" review with a rant on why we should all embrace Jesus so why is femminism (and stating the obvious) ok?

Why does the rant annoy you? Is that enough reason for wiping the text off the archive?

All you can really gather is that it's crusty oldschool black metal.

Uh. That sounds like what you're supposed to gather from a review.

There are plenty of other reviews with rants in them on this site. _Jessica's is no more or less acceptable than any of them.

You can remove your own reviews by yourself. Click "submit review" and you'll find a link for that.