I'm considering rewriting my Blackwater Park review since my opinion on the album has changed pretty substantially over the years. But it feels kinda disingenuous to rewrite the whole thing as an edit. Yet if I delete and resubmit a new review, I'm not sure if it will even be accepted considering it would already have 25 reviews. Does anybody know the current stance on accepting new reviews for popular metal albums with a ton of reviews?

It doesn't matter. To my deepest regrets, we still approve reviews for Master of Puppets.

Metantoine...are you game (not gamy) for a consolidated collaboration [i.e. tag-team] on the new, winsome-and-then-some Emblem/Ezra Brooks (banana) split? It fucking rocks, as does the new Haunt EP!

You do it, fam. I've reviewed both bands already and I'm back on my reviewing hiatus unfortunately!

I agree with these reviews - I think Dawn has aged better.

I must say I'm getting a kick out of the reviews for the new Mayhem live album Peaceville put out. Love the contrast between one guy hyping it to high heavens, then the 5 percent and 0 percent reviews, which basically point out what a cash grab this is.

Hey bayern, kudos for that Malchidiel review. I'd planned to tackle that one during the reviews challenge, given that I finally managed to find a copy of it, but alas, I run out of time. We've been lagging behind our Chilean and Brazilian neighbors for a long while now when it comes to our respective metal scenes, and with good reason might I add. However, the precursors of our early extreme metal scene managed to produce a couple of interesting demos and LPs, to say the least. Off the top of my head I can think of Pandemia, Entre la basura, Mental Distortion, Sartan, Carnal Scum, Overthrow, and many others, good stuff. It's a real shame that many of them never made it past the demo stages. Anyway, good read!

I got excited to see someone else reviewed Mortal Scepter too.... and then I saw who wrote it. Wasn't horrible, but there were a lot of awkward sentences. Plus, they gave it a 94%, started off with praising it, only to say later that "the album didn't live up to my expectations" and then says it's a beast of an album. Like bruh...which is it?

So is Thy Shrine not aware that Savage Land exists? From the way things are worded, they seem to think Fragments of Psyche was Gruesome's first release.

Yeah, I see what you're talking about, I worded it that way because Savage Land, while unremarkable, and boring, didn't come close to plagiarizing as much as that EP and new album did. Basically, with each new release, Gruesome plagiarize more and more.

I can easily relate a Death song to every one that is featured in the Savage Land album as well though, they're ripping off everytime basically.

Hi; cheers. I wrote it quite a few months back, but didn't publish it cause I wanted to elaborate on it later... the thing is that there's not much to elaborate in this particular case as the guys only came out once, not leaving much legacy to ponder over.

And, thanks for those other names you dropped here; some of them I've never heard of... will invest some time to find out more.

The parallel vs plagiarism line in music is about as tough to negotiate as it is in comedy, but at least in music it can get worked out in court and result in gems like this:

It's annoying to hear a band so uncreative that it takes wearing its influences on its sleeve to choking the other band with its own coattails and donning their hero's skin like some kind of headbanging Buffalo Bob. It reminds me of this new Vanir album. The band is so utterly flat throughout 90% of the release and then out of the blue comes the opening riff to "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult made to sound like Amon Amarth covering Judas Priest. I can hear six Amon Amarth songs in it, three Priest songs (so you know where this immense variety is coming from), and finally found the one exact match when I was thinking back to listening to VRock in Vice City, and this coming from an album that attempts to sound like Amon Amarth and Primordial's lovechild but really is just stagnant while trying to be epic.

That V-Ice feed was...disturbing.

(Although, at present, I'm gleefully absorbing Iceberg Slim's final, dusty tome, Shetani's Sister, which, to my prim, cracker-jackin' sensibilities, evokes some wild and far-fangled, unhinged linguistic assault entirely made up of riotously rock & socking street heat featuring loads of gasp-worthy, Priest (p/)tickling lines imbued with Beck's timeless Cyrano de Belgerac meets Honore de Balzac poetry heavy on curb-syde ribaldry!)

ah, five N., V-Rock...they of the notorious "giggle(r) cream"...

+, Metantoine, what does "fam" stand for, "familiar"? Like a witch's familiar?!...Have you been playing d & D again?...

But, foolery aside, I wasn't aware Metal Church was so good on albums like Hanging In the Balance and Blessing In Disguise, as I just gleaned from gas' sag(acious) write-up for the latter (not the ladder). So...thanks! Good stuff.

Let's say he called you 'bro' instead. It's another form of colloquial epithet for a mate.


Glad to enlighten you, even if yesterday's write-up felt a bit heavy at moments. I really seem to go from "all" during the Review Challenges to "nothing" the rest of the time, pertaining to energy for reviews.

And by the way, thanks for sharing the academic journal Metal Music Studies a few days ago. That's been giving me some food for thought during downtime at work, especially the Mayhem lyrics!

If anybody wonders why we mods absolutely hate reviews that try leech off the limelight of Boris's infamous Metallica review, look no further than the most recent wannabe for Meshuggah's Obzen. This one is a wild ride because he obviously has intricate knowledge of the mixing/producing side of the board and accurately pins down that Meshuggah was the first band to ever use 8 string guitars in a rock context (even I didn't think that was true until fact checking here), but then he'll turn around and say something completely fucking weird like blaming Meshuggah for tapping and sweeping solos becoming popular (as though Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen didn't beat them to that punch by like 30 years), not knowing what a polyrhythm is, or what a Swedish accent sounds like.

Don't bite off more than you can chew. You will make a fool of yourself.

I'm not going to check, but hadn't Meshuggah already been doing stuff in a similar style for 15 years when that particular album came out?

Wait, what? Drum triggers and samey guitar tones were introduced in 2008? Don't tell this kid about Vulgar Display of Power, it's going to break his heart. Best hide the Korn CDs, too.

After checking his profile: wait, what? Was this person introduced to metal 25 minutes ago via random youtube videos?

In fairness he does say that they'd been inching towards Obzen for years and just thinks that's when it was fully crystalized, but even then he's wrong because they haven't changed their sound one iota since Chaossphere and they'd already brought in the 8 stringers on Nothing last I checked.

I think Obzen (and Meshuggah as a whole) sucks too but this was just a really weird attempt at retconning every bad cliche to be their fault. Like a decade after they had their last new idea.

Woah... which Metallica one was Boris's "famous one"? Y'all have peaked my interest.

To be fair to that review, Meshuggah is just kinda...eh? Like, what I've heard of them is boring as fuck and I like Djent.

The notes on production in that review make me feel like I don't have enough expertise in that field. Like, if you asked me to describe the production on Erra's Augment (my favorite album of all time at least for now), I wouldn't really be able to describe the guitar tone/drums/mixing/etc. with much of any details. Like, I can tell that, for instance, Suffocation's early work feels kind muffled and flat without much "oomph" sonically but giving a better description than that is kinda beyond me. Does that kind of thing just come with listening to hundreds/thousands of albums?

Meshuggah actually went more towards atmospheric in the last years and I think it nonplussed a lot of people. They're just doing OK I guess, and aren't going to pick up many new fans with their current approach.

As for describing production, I've learned quite a lot about that by reading other people's comments and trying to describe in the same terms, but no way do I feel confident about that area. I think you actually have to get some experience before being able to go into detail about production. Non-specialist descriptors are useful too, though. They give an idea of the "feel" more than the techniques.

Wowzer, that was tough to get through. What the hell is this guy's story? I only at the end realized that that was written in 2004....

Never liked Meshuggah, but that review is awful. Anything that starts going on about how modern metal sucks just makes me go 'well, sounds like you haven't tried much of it really.' And complaining about newer bands using modern sound technology is just so passe. Sorry they aren't all using recording equipment from the 70s and nothing else...

As for describing production, it's not necessary to know all the clinical terms. I just describe what I hear and if it works for me. Using metaphor or comparison is fine.

He was on his way out the door at around the time I got started here in early 2005 so I didn't really interact with the guy, and while I often disagreed with a number of his conclusions, his reviews did cause me to check out a number of more obscure thrash metal albums. He was kind of an edgelord type who wrote off the cuff, probably while plastered, for purposes of attention-seeking. Given the timing of that Master Of Puppets review, I'd venture a guess that he had recently seen that Metallica special on MTV that featured Limp Bizkit, Sum 41 and Avril Lavigne playing covers of Metallica's material and, along with his experience with St. Anger, allowed that to color his approach to reviewing said album. The caveat he gives where scoring that album on its musical merits would have put it up in the 60s is kind of a dead giveaway that he wanted to pontificate on how much he thought Metallica skull-raped the metal scene with their commercial pandering during the 90s into 2004.

I see... so wait was he like, banned or something?

No no no no, Boris was one of the earlier mods and also one of the earliest "personalities" the site spawned. He sorta got his name by being the first guy to really take the reviews seriously and plaster the site with hundreds of them in the first few years. Most of them were off the cuff and, frankly in hindsight, kinda terrible nonsense that just screamed random non-sequitors and talked about how thrashy things were. But at the time, he was the guy. In the first few years of the site, if you found an album with a review, there was an extremely high chance it was Boris. It's cringey to read his stuff 15+ years later but he was indeed very influential and a lot of people got their start just kinda ripping off his comedy-heavy enthusiasm (*waves to camera*). That particular Metallica review got a lot of notoriety not only because it was shitting on a sacred cow, but it was also really uncharacteristic of his style to do something so lengthy and in-depth, and was probably also one of the first to go for an iconoclastic thing that tried to reach beyond the scope of the album itself. A lot of the old timers here like to pretend that Boris was just some dude and that review is nothing special but the fact that it's endured for so long and spawned so many imitators (along with the author himself doing the same) shows that that isn't really true. He and that review left a mark on the site, and most of those "Album that killed X" reviews wouldn't be the same without it.

And he wasn't banned, he just kinda moved on and disappeared on his own accord. He'll occasionally still pop up (usually under an alt nowadays) every few years to make sure we haven't forgotten about him but he's easy to spot and usually just shitposts for a few days before disappearing again.

Don't get me wrong, I liked a fair bit of his content from a comedic perspective, but it got played out after about a dozen reviews. His best stuff was the Overkill reviews he did, which I admit influenced my reviews of said band to a degree, and my now grossly anti-PC but at the time tongue-in-cheek "Royal Seal of Gayness" series was inspired by his comedic style (as well as my all-time favorite South Park episode). The fact that I wasn't terribly active here in 2005 when he was winding down his tenure as a mod and reviewer on here is probably why I don't hold the same degree of attachment to his persona as some others have, or maybe that I've just turned into a grandpa as I approach 40 and don't have the same zeal for pushing the comedic envelope the way he did.

But yeah, I wasn't under the impression that he was banned (he'd be the most unlikely candidate for having the word Durst on his profile of any of us), though I am a bit curious to know just how many reviews he actually posted prior to some of his lackluster content being tossed into the oven. Did he ever get close to breaking 1,000 reviews at some point prior to 2006?

Production like other technical aspects (playing techniques, musical theory) is something you can learn about through reading lots of reviews, listening to interviews and ingesting other media where music is discussed in depth. When I want to use some description but I'm unsure if the term in my mind is accurate I'll Google it. There's often YouTube videos discussing/demonstrating the subject. Of course, as a dilettante I have to understand the limitations of my understanding. Including some technical term can add legitimacy, unless you're using it inaccurately in which case knowledgeable readers will come away with the opposite impression. Safe to say most readers aren't looking for advanced musical deconstruction so imprecise but evocative descriptions (e.g. your "muffled and flat" Suffocation example) usually suffice. Hell, even if you do have vast knowledge of such things, it's best to go light on jargon and use language that's most likely to be understood (this is dependent on the intended audience, of course).

A tip of my bilious, coffee-encrusted cap to aperson663's sagaciously "beyond his years" writes for Blade Killer and Metalian. Surely made my day! Chairs, freres!

I also acknowledge the fact my Wicked Inquisition morsel requires serious touching-up...anyone else write their reviews at a public library and suffer pedantically early (i.e. 9 pm) closing times as well (which double duly screws up the hallowed editing process)? Rectifying now, lest I toss and turn another (ever-lovin'?) "nacht"!

caspian's Trendkill write-up may be the best review that I've ever read for that album.

Thanks so much Chair! Means a lot coming from you since you and tanuki are the main writers that got me into new trad metal. Thanks to you Chair I discovered Enforcer, Borrowed Time (rip), Blackslash, Witchtower, Stereo Nasty and Sweet Danger. Over the weekend is when I actually have time to write album reviews, so I hope to cover more albums that came out in the last couple of years every weekend. It's a shame that some of these great new releases barely have any reviews on MA, so I hope I can help people realize there have been some recent trad metal albums that are really worth their time.

Greetings from NYC! I hope wherever you all are that you are staying nice and warm, because the whether here is brutal right now.

The even more interesting part is that he reportedly had a review on the subject to which he gave a score of 72... never read it cause I joined later. Then he deletes that one, and posts the crucifixion. From 72 to 0... wow, some really profound re-evaluation had taken place here... I don't know, maybe he'd gone through some kind of a very painful, punishing Metallica-guided therapy in-between that had only included "The Thing That Should Not Be"...

Note to self: Watch Wizards.

"Queen did this a million times better than anyone else ever could, it's called 'We are the Champions', and even that song sucked big dicks"

I don't think we can be friends anymore, Superchard.

Does Superchard even review anything that isn't a classic?

His tone is pretty annoying... mostly a lot of pointless nitpicking.



Why would you care if people say how influential stuff is? And if you hate all his other stuff already then why bother... not like this is something super underground or unknown...



Wow, what a classy guy.

I do give him props for giving attention to some obscure stuff like Tony Martin's various offshoots but it all seems very six degrees motivated. Like I'm not sure if he'd know how to review a band without having a celebrity to namedrop.

Spot on what I was getting at. I review classics too, it's fun as shit, but it doesn't show as much ability if that's ALL you do (unless you're a beginner maybe).



HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Supertard's opinions aren't always rubbish, but I've yet to read a review out of him that wasn't a total chore to read. The guy is too in love with his own voice to be taken seriously, and he has no sense of humor to speak of so he can't cut it as a comedic writer either.