World Coming Down is the only TON album I enjoy.

Hum... Skip It is an obvious joke.

Jokes are funny, and it's not intended to be.

Blarglepop's review of Blood Tsunami's 'Thrash Metal' is effectively perfect.

Are you kidding? It sucked total ass.

[Perhaps; I'm not very well acquainted at all with Slough Feg's work, though I like what I've heard. I'll have to look into it further.

I like Noktorn's Phallic Decapitant review a lot.

The new review for Nuclear Blast's Allstars was a great read, and I found myself agreeing with the reviewer.

I really like that 0% review for the second album of Nuclear Blast sucking its own cock. It was quite funny, and I could agree with it all the way through.

Simply saying that the songs are "modern fecescore", have certain kinds of riffs and feature blastbeats doesn't seem like enough description for a 0% review. Cutting out all the "fuck this shit" and "oh look at this commercial pop wankery" - and leaving the parts which describe the music

saintinhell's new Black Sabbath reviews was liked by Napero. Especially the first two paragraphs, he reminds us of things that are too often forgotten.

http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=501#84278

I like it as well, because it's the first one of Technical Ecstacy that I really agree with - it's bad as a metal album, but okay as a rock album.

I sometimes get the impression that metal has the highest percentage of genre hardliners among its fans out of any modern style of music, which is pretty ironic considering how much of a hybrid it is.

I sometimes get the impression that metal has the highest percentage of genre hardliners among its fans out of any modern style of music, which is pretty ironic considering how much of a hybrid it is.

I sometimes get the impression that metal has the highest percentage of genre hardliners among its fans out of any modern style of music, which is pretty ironic considering how much of a hybrid it is.

Can't you tell the difference between philosophy and sound?

zeingard's review of 'Rise of the Tyrant' was an excellent review IMO. It was funny, true, and funny because it was true. He is becoming one of my favourite reviewers as his reviews are always quality and he expresses his thoughts well. Furthermore, his negative reviews usually have an element of humour in them which is well done.

Peregrin's new review of Awaken the Guardian by Fates Warning cuts to the heart of why the album doesn't thrill me like it does many other people. Unfortunately, because he did such a good job, I can see my review (even though it's not bad) being nuked now.

"Awaken the Guardian" is an album I ought to like. Its complex songwriting never at once calls attention to its artifice as is far too often the case, as an articulation of its creators' ideals it is practically without peer in its genre, as obvious as its sources of inspiration are (classic metal from Sabbath through Maiden, brainy progressive rock like Rush and Yes) it weaves them seamlessly into an easily distinguishable tapestry of music where every almost thread has a distinct purpose, the way the songs unfurl and progress is truly a thing of beauty akin to a perfectly symmetrical gemstone revealing new surfaces with each glance upon it... and being a Fates Warning album, it displays a level of instrumental proficiency most other USPM bands can at best dream of. It is, in other words, the perfect rebuttal against charges of oldschool heavy metal (frequently denounced as a mere transitional fossil by death metal fans) or just metal in general being a crude, low-brow form of music.

However, no matter how many generous albums I give this album it is clear that something quite important is missing... with the exceptions of "Fata Morgana" and "Exodus" (I'd also mention "Valley of the Dolls" if it wasn't an anomaly on this album in having a clumsy and meandering structure and a surprisingly straight-up thrash riff), I find "Awaken the Guardian" emotionally unengaging to an absolutely astonishing extent. It is not that it lacks passion - quite the contrary, a metal album made with purer genuine dedication to Neo-Romantic artistic ideals is a rare find. It is not a case of too much prog and too little metal - the riffs are as definitely metal as they come, the progressiveness is entirely in the arrangements. It is not the production being too clear for my taste, as evidenced by those two songs which do affect me. It is not even a case of me falling outside the intended audience, since I happen to be quite fond of Fates Warning's previous albums "Night on Bröcken" and "The Spectre Within".

In fact, at times it feels like a parody of how "The Spectre Within" became a classic in the first place for working both as art and entertainment (two things far too many people consider mutually exclusive these days). Here, there are very few songs here I can honestly appreciate in another way than putting on a beret, proudly sipping from a fresh cup of cafe au lait and babbling on in art theory speak about how this album deconstructs subcultural textual theory through contextualizing the thematic conflict between within and without into a view of consciousness as a totality. In plain English: A song borrowing the main riff from "Children of the Grave" as shamelessly as "The Sorceress" has no right to be this flat-out dull!

Another illustration of the disappointment that "Awaken the Guardian" is my argument starts with a perspective to much less famous USPM album - Brocas Helm's "Black Death". The two are basically polar opposites: "Awaken the Guardian" is by all logic a transcendental masterpiece, but I can barely relate to it no matter how hard I try; "Black Death" is bluntly put an artistic catastrophe, but kicks more ass than 95% of its peers could ever hope to. When the sort of album J. W. Goethe would write if he was a metalhead is upstaged by a disjointed and amateurish obscurity, something must be profoundly wrong with it.

So, what went wrong? I still have absolutely no idea, but for all intents and purposes "Awaken the Guardian" is an album I neither like nor dislike, but merely pity. There's very little lack of even waste of effort, but when it comes to unusually literate epic heavy metal there's many other albums I'd rather listen to.