Exactly, a few flashy allusions that have a peripheral relationship to the album are interesting, but aren't really a substitute for the descriptive content. People get so dang hung up on the icing that they forget that the cake is there too.

Gothic_Metalhead's review of Cold Lake had me revisiting it (through Youtube); he's on the money about those 'obnoxious' vocals. I managed to get through side A, and at that point I'd really had enough of those ridiculous vocal deliveries.

Has hells_unicorn become the new kluseba now?

In reviewing terminology, "the cake" is the four paragraphs on how grunge killed heavy metal.

Why do you say that?

eyy King Gizzard... are on MA

a band to get to work on, perhaps?

I was just getting into them coincidentally after finding a random album at the library. They should make for some intriguing reviews.

Kinda disappointed that it took me this long to get around to them. We'll have to see how many of their albums still haven't been reviewed when the next challenge rolls around.

because of the Sweet Oblivion review and the way he defended that Slipknot band. don't take me too seriously, though

I've dipped into them. For only putting out full lengths for 7 years, they have an overwhelmingly large discog.

I'll admit up front that there is a slight kluesba flavor to my Slipknot review, though it wasn't exactly intentional, but guilty as charged nonetheless. That being said, the Sweet Oblivion part is a bit perplexing, kluesba has consistently hated on a lot of the stuff that has come out of Frontiers Records over the past several years while I've been kind of the only person giving them praise consistently.

I actually though you were referring to my manner of posting recently, which really perplexed me because I was basically just goofing around, I'm not butt-hurt because some of my reviews get criticized on here, it goes with the territory.

That wasn't the whole review, I was just having you on. It's a good review. I basically like all of her reviews. I had just happened to read that one and liked that paragraph particularly.

you'd hope after 1000+ reviews she'd know how to describe a piece of music properly, lol

If you haven't read 1/1000+, I guess I can see how you might think you were on to something.

I know, I was kind of clowning around in an attempt to play into BH's raillery. She has a very different style than me, I'm big on doing concrete comparisons in order to play to as wide of a potential readership as possible (part of this is due to a lot of my work now being geared towards webzines outside of this site), whereas she has more of a specialized target audience and tends to make more abstract analogies that might not translate to a layperson just getting started in the atmospheric black and sludgy doom metal she tends to focus on.

Well shit - I felt like trying The Chasm's debut again and it sounds a lot better to me now than it did before. it's certainly very dense, though. Time to delete my review of it.

Tanuki just made me check what TM36 was. And it's even the original one. Hardwired to...

You better believe I'm gonna review the Gizz discography. Gonna try and toss up some more reviews for other stuff soon. I'm older and more mature now and hopefully less stupid, so mayhaps I can bring some decent little writeups to the word table.

Can we just throw Superchard in the trash?

Yeah, most of my review titles are pretty corny, but that one might be the best/worst. And hey, if anyone's planning on reviewing any sludge metal, TM36 can also be Sludge Bomb. Just saying.

This has probably been brought up before, but how do you guys like to title your reviews? Do you think it matters much? I'm honestly less inclined to read a review that's just titled "Band - Album", personally.

I dunno, your title for Belphegor's Last Supper, "I Couldn't Eat One Moabite", was pretty great.


Like you, I try to think of something clever. If nothing comes to mind I'll just try to summarize the album. Some ended up being forced or made references few will understand, but there are some I'm proud of like:

"I've Fallen in Gore and I Can't Get Up!" - Fallen in Gore split
"Mince Meeting" - Agathocles/Unholy Grave split
"Fist in the Face of Barry Gibb" - Headbangers Against Disco Vol. 1
"Kanabō Smashed Face" - Gotsu Totsu Kotsu LP
"Speak Engrish or Die" - SOD/Yellow Machinegun Split

Those along with 'Good but Not THAT good'' are pretty off-putting indeed.

I usually try to pull a lyric that either stands out or summarizes the album in a nutshell, but paying less attention to lyrics over the years has led to me getting somewhat lazier about it. If one doesn't pop up, I'll aim for snarky.

I think that a good headline is pretty important, but due to whatever reasons I like one-word-headlines and then it's rather difficult to create something special. I also like a connection between all headlines of the outputs of a special band, I did this in case of Falkenbach and OHL for example. Pretty absurd headlines are also a good thing, something like I chose for the first album of Total Hate. Excerpts of the lyrics can work well, too. But some headlines like RAW AND BRUTAL are not very exciting, too bad that I also used them from time to time and it can happen again...

I have flat out not submitted reviews for days because I couldn't think of a title. If I can't think of a Futurama reference or a dumb pun then I just don't submit it at all.

Personal favorites of mine:
"Power Bodom seeking fit top" for Sinergy
"Sxtiousie and the Blandcheese" for Sxuperion

I will always associate you with "They Call Me Guan Yinping, the Shit Wrecker"

That title had me in stitches

BH's titles are rather good; I'd say they're the reason I started reading his reviews in the first place (as a good title will do.) Though, I do mainly mention them as the observant among you may have noticed this.

Also, titles... they tend to be a tl;dr of my feelings on the album and/or band and can be any number of things - a lyric, song title, album title, outright stating something like 'This isn't good', or some other quote/reference that pertains to how I feel about the album. Sometimes it can just be a quoted lyric that sticks out to me, however,

Nah, my favourite of Tanuki's probably has to be 'Another One Rides the Bus' for the Hexen album. Pure, simple, nose-fracturing facepalm.

A personal favourite of my own was the one for an Ungraven review. It only works in context though.

Generally, I go for a succinct summary or something to suggest the flavour of the album in question.

I know I've brought this up to you before, but I'm going to do it again:

I am still eagerly awaiting you to title a 0%-er "Your music is bad and you should feel bad."

Speaking of silly review titles, I'm tempted to review Conception's Flow just so I can mention it doesn't flow too well. D:

Ah dude! I remember reading that one when you first submitted it, I laughed my ass off.

"Power Bodom seeking a fit top" got a chuckle out of me too, followed by a terrible realization that I've been pronouncing Bodom wrong my entire life. For some reason I thought the Bo was like "bowtie"...


Great title, and that opening paragraph did not disappoint

In fairness I think that is the proper way to pronounce it, I just had to pull a Nicki Minaj and mispronounce a word in order to make the punchline work.

Well that's a relief. Hey man, good puns like that have earned the right to flexible pronounciations. (On a somewhat related note, I also pronounced Sodom with a long O for the longest time, because the first time I saw the word was in Street Fighter Alpha when I was like, six.)

Also, "Eunuchorn" will always be my favorite of BH's. That's pretty perfect, I must say.

Boo-dom. Well, the vowel in dom is the same as in boo, just short.

Mine are usually a play on words that fit, rhyme, or are a few letters off with something related to the album. Also love using classic metal references for newer discs.

Reading this over lunch and wondering who I could possibly explain it to. This is a very specific form of humour. Most people would probably call that “niche”, but we’re too niche for that. We’d call it kvlt.

Nice Lamb of God reviews from BastardHead recently! I like when people go through the whole catalogue of my favorite bands, makes me more inclined to read each individual review for some reason. Your assessments of each album could almost not be more different from mine though, save for Resolution, which is a real turd yeah.

I enjoyed BastardHead's thorough look at Lamb of God too, probably more so because he called each album as he saw it, as well as filling in some context about how other reviews have been too reactionary.

It made me look at 'Wrath' is a slightly new light, but I'll never understand why 'Resolution' gets such a bad rap. It's got some filler, but most of it is pretty good.

Thanks guys, I really don't even know why I decided to cover all of them, but when I realized that I was only a few posts away from 500 on my blog (I post plenty more stuff over there that doesn't make it to MA, which is why I've only got like 390 or whatever here) I decided that was a good enough excuse to do the retrospective.

I'm glad it got brought up actually, because there was even more I wanted to say in the Wrath review that I wound up cutting because the review would've gotten way off track otherwise and now you've given me the perfect excuse, lol. My account started in 2005 but I've been lurking since about a year and a half before then, and it might be easy to forget since we're so far removed from that era now, but -core hybrids were practically a moral panic for several years in the mid to late aughties here. Many of the "true" metal scenes were in a huge lull at the time and, while there were a few bands that had a real profile outside of the Extremely Online crowd like Behemoth and such, when the layman on the outside thought of "metal", they were probably thinking of bands like As I Lay Dying and Killswitch Engage. Today there really isn't an analogue to what it was like back then besides djent, but the rules of the site here pretty clearly dictate that djent is its own genre (I personally consider it a subsect of prog metal but I'm not about to change many minds on that I don't think) so almost no djent bands find themselves with profiles here. But with metalcore and deathcore, they were hybrid genres, so like half of them wound up with enough genuine metal in their sound to qualify by our standards and all of the sudden this stupid "false metal" bands started intruding on this space that is seen as the beacon of metal authority on the internet. And man the old guard was not happy. Not only was this in the era of Myspace bands being the next big thing, it was also just kinda hard to find new bands that sounded like the old stuff you liked from the classic eras unless you knew the right circles on slsk or whatever. Bandcamp and Spotify with all of their convenience and free listening weren't really a thing yet either so you pretty much had to rely on download blogs and torrents and such if you didn't have the scratch to just buy records.

The point is that metal didn't spread as easily as it does now, and so it really and truly seemed like the direction the genre was heading, at least in the eyes of the mainstream, was the direction of metalcore and deathcore. Most metalheads are proudly underground but it's undeniable that headbangers weren't happy that they were being lumped in with wimpy and/or brainless shit like that. We'd survived the nu metal boom and were now faced with the looming specters of Killswitch and Job for a Cowboy. Lamb of God was thrown into that mix because, even though they were obviously different, they still had a lot of hardcore influence early on (and even later they went full groove metal which was also poison to the types of people that tend to use MA (possibly because it was also big in the mainstream but I should probably limit how much I imply metalheads hate popular things by default (even though it's demonstrably true))) and they were never scared of chugging one-note breakdowns, which seemed to turn into this fucking curse that would instantly turn anybody off as soon as they heard one. I think a big reason it was all so hated is because of what I said earlier: it really seemed like the direction metal was heading at the time because it was much harder to find alternatives back then. Change is scary to our kind, and this change seemed to be for the worse, and Lamb of God was kind of a poster child for it since they were hugely popular and lacked the wimpiness of AILD and such since they never had whiny clean vocals or overtly melodic In Flames ripoff melodies, so it was harder to argue that they didn't belong. I really don't think I noticed people caring less until the rise of OSDM worship and Dark Descent Records really getting off the ground and helping it proliferate so much. Now if you don't like the hot new thing (which I suspect is still djent), it's a hell of a lot easier to just avoid it entirely and just listen to stuff you like. Most of the site is probably a lot older nowadays as well and don't need to deal with high school bullshit or care about what our peers think. Also, after rethrash failed to be anything more than a trendy fad, it seems like every other revival scenes (the aforementioned OSDM along with stuff like speed metal and atmoblack) has been flourishing and is generally really well received. It doesn't really relate to Lamb of God anymore but this is at least why I think we don't seem to have this looming fear that metal is going to inevitably keep getting shittier and shittier like we used to think.

Anyway all of that context explains, to me at least, why Lamb of God was shit on so badly and why Wrath in particular got it real bad. The current extreme/classic metal scenes we enjoy today either weren't around or were much more obscure, Lamb of God was huge, a lot of people didn't like what they symbolized, and there seemed to be a weird unspoken thing here that if you didn't publicly disavow whatever the mainstream trend at the time was then it would be implicitly accepted and all metal would sound like that forever and ever in the future. The Contractor single dropped, somebody jumped on it with weirdly reactionary criticism (much worse than Sacrament got for some reason) and before you know it Wrath was persona non grata here, despite that fact that it's basically their Great Southern Trendkill, which has always been the one post-Cowboys Pantera album that true metal fans are allowed to like.

I'm speaking from my own memory and the benefit of hindsight, and I wasn't immune to the community's reflexive vitriol of -core bands back then either, so I hope I don't sound too holier-than-thou with all of that. And of course it's perfectly valid to just think Lamb of God sucks (I think they certainly have some really shitty albums and I'd consider myself a fan) but I think at least a few parts of that up there rang true to you if you were around back then and can be honest with yourself.

And that, as they say, is that.

Hah, yeah I can definitely relate and remember all that when I think back to being in my mid-teens. I kind of wonder what it was about Lamb of God that allowed them to reach such a mainstream audience who otherwise didn't listen to/know about any other metal. They almost seemed as big as Slipknot around when Ashes of the Wake came out. I remember every high school party I went to some random polo shirt dude would inevitably put on Laid to Rest and scream at me to headbang with him. It might be for that reason more than anything else that I've always really disliked Lamb of God, since I sure as hell listened to my fair share of other big dumb popular metal bands back then. But as far as the band itself goes I've never been able to tolerate Randy Blythe - hate his voice and he just seems like such a cringelord of a person.