I often find specific passages from reviews that I either love, hate, or can make absolutely no sense of whatsoever. There's threads to talk about deleting reviews, or recommending them, but none to merely discuss specific quotes, and god knows there are plenty I'd like to share. Let me start off with a few of my favorites:



The final line of this passage is someone's sig, and for good reason: it's fucking hilarious and incredibly true and appropriate. This was probably Falconsbane's cleverest line and I can't help but grin whenever I read it.



One of those passages that's undeniably Gutterscream. Not only is it perfectly representative of his style as a writer, but it's an incredibly evocative and descriptive piece of writing. I read this review a lot; the whole thing's pretty masterful. Perhaps the most important point is that he really describes the music in a way where you can nearly hear it for yourself; god knows that's a difficult thing to do.



I can hardly think of a weirder passage in a review than this. I'm not sure if it's the weird sentence structure, strange hint of prudishness, nearly contradictory statements, or referring to Dani's vocals as understandable, but this section never fails to completely perplex me.

So, what're some of the passages that have stuck out to you?

I like the idea of this thread a lot. Let's see if I can think of something. A bit long compared to the one's already posted but bear with me...



Elaborate metaphors and long-winded comparisons can, to me, easily break a review and create a "wtf?" moment, but Napero's comparison to food of all things perfectly describes what is so good about Monetheist, without compromising the integrity of the review in other areas. Right on the fucking money.

You know, I was initially going to try and comb through this review to find things I loved:

http://metal-archives.com/release.php?id=2886

But I can't do it. It's all too good, and I've never heard a review pinpoint the atmosphere that a specific album conveys as perfectly as droneriot did with Joyless' "Wisdom & Arrogance." For specifics, I'd suggest the whole second paragraph, and this line from the third:

"The voice of Ida Hellebø gives this a particularly morbid touch, creating a whole that somewhat reminds of the band playing at that one run-down bar in the darkest corner of the city, where only the lost go and roam the location like ghosts of their own lost paths."

I'm not saying this is the greatest album ever, but this review is perfect.

Navy_Blue_Vicar had some great ones:






Wish this guy had written more reviews.

Hee, it's nice to get a mention in this thread, thanks! Also, an exellent thread idea, this is like a highlights compilation in a sports event. In slow motion, the beutiful songs of breaking bones included.

For the record, I sort of expected that very part of the review to cause several mentions in the oven fodder thread, but I guess nobody noticed it. What can I say, I like food.

I don't have anything worth mentioning right now, but I'll certainly post something if it pops into my mind. I think I've read a couple of thousand submissions of varying quality too many for anything to stick easily...

droneriot's take on the 'Frantic' single.
http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=25704#16199



Perplexingly true.

A few quickies...

From Ultraboris review of Coven's Blessed is the Black

And then later on...


From Cheeses_Priced's review of Abyssic Hate's Suicidal Emotions


From Droneriot's review of Slayer's Christ Illusion

Wow, all of the above post are simply amazing. Whether original or inspired, definitely great. We need more of that, that's for sure.

Cheeses_Priced - Nortt - Ligfærd



Cheeses_Priced shows that his strength is in musical evaluation, not pretty words. He perfectly got what Nortt is doing right here, and the whole review makes a great point that it's black metal and funeral doom and nothing else. There are maybe four other reviewers on the site that can articulate abstract ideas as well as he does.

Just a few I could find in-between doing stuff at work -

AleksZ – Trouble’s Psalm 9

“…Oh, and never forget that many of these riffs wouldn’t really exist if all of Judas Priest died in a van accident in 1973.”



A few I could find quickly by OlympicSharpshooter, though there are many more

Sabbath’s Iron Man -

“…Oh, and dear lord, "LAGUNA SUNSHINE" AGAIN!?”


One of a few excerpts from Anacrusis's Reason -

“The album feels like a Suffering Hour crushed and choked by the weight of the world, this funereal vibe seeming to shroud the decaying corpse of your average headbangable thrash ‘em ups. The light-speed open-architecture riffic labyrinths practiced by the likes of Metallica, Coroner, and Destruction here usually take place in a sort of resolute half-time crunch, allowing you to watch the cyclopean relics being built step by blasphemous step rather than zipping by and leaving nothing but smoking tire marks. There’s almost a hardcore vibe going on here, thrash riffs played slow, doom riffs played fast, always an unpredictable paradigm shift just as you were starting to get into the groove.”

Rush’s Permanent Waves

“Warmth. As the shining silver disc spins round the spindle, traveling along its intransient and unwavering path as it always does, the music produced induces a peculiar feeling in its host. Warmth creeps from out the headphones nestled in your ears and travels through your nerves, tingling, thrumming, gently probing for those secret places in your heart where it might curl up and brighten your day. It speaks of comfort and companionship, unquestioning affection and heartfelt belief in music for the sake of music. As I glance at the pulsating red line that runs through the liners, the lifeline that is the 'permanent wave' of the album's title, I come to realize something profound and beautiful about this record. There is devotion here, and love too. Rush loves us.”

Malmsteen’s Rising Force –

“This album somehow became a holy grail of shred, perhaps only because the nebbish, elitist school of neo-classical guitar aristocracy realized it was something that would take them more than two hours to know front to back. Personally, I feel that the next album from Malmsteen, Marching Out, is actually a pretty good album, an integral piece of power metal history. However, Marching Out is not the album I’m reviewing right now, and most certainly not the album I’m handing a whopping 17% to. Rising Force is the only metal album I’ve ever fallen asleep listening to… in the middle of the afternoon.”

Nightgaunt

Emperor’s Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk.

“These eight tracks are the laurels on which Emperor's reputation has rested for just under a decade now….interesting that said reputation, perhaps always just a bit corpulent (as one might reasonably expect of a band that has always been as extroverted and as highly visible as Emperor), has now become as bloated and "sacred" as the cold flesh and warm memory of a recently deceased housepet. "Buttons" met her end beneath the wheels of the family's old rust-red Caravan (Sarah never was one to check her mirrors before backing out); Emperor as a respectable entity met its end under the silky, molesting caress of the rhinestone-gloved hands of overexperimentation and overexposure-and it began here. Truth be told, this is the nadir of the band's career…and with a career like Emperor's, that's saying something.”

more later...

Ultraboris' over enthusiastic reviews have always resonated in me, he writes as a thrash fan for thrash fans. He's also fucking tops at riff analysis. One of his best reviews would definitely have to be for Torture Squad's "Pandemonium".

Zeingard above me is also an excellent review writer. I feel I may be bending the rules a bit, but here's some excerpts from an excellent review he did on last.fm, for the rather excellent album Weighing Souls with Sand by The Angelic Process. So I guess it's not a Metal-Archives Review, but it's done by a metal archiver, and hopefully we'll be seeing more reviews by him.



Excellent Review. Link: http://www.last.fm/user/zeingard/journa ... 24/508250/

Edit: Turns out this guy has done some excellent reviews on MA too!

For Nile's Ithyphallic:



Meshuggah's Destroy.Erase.Improve:

Gutterscream, perhaps you could help me out...

"...is a stretch even Mr. Fantastic would raise an eyebrow to"

Which review is this from?

Off the top of my head I'm not really sure. I'll have to check. In the meantime, some more...

Napero’s Master of Puppets – I can’t really slice this down to one paragraph ‘cause I think the whole thing’s genuinely genuflect-able, and not just from a like-minded POV. *Closes-eyes-and-points* - here’s an excerpt -

“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.”

Mornox describing the paradox of perception in Crimson Moon's Under the Serpentine Spell album.

“This is as trance-inducingly minimal as it is staggeringly complex; springing out from chaos is a perceptible order, threading its way through the deterministic randomness of history.”

I can’t remember which review it was for, but absentee Gabometal86 once described a rhythm, or a band’s attempt at creating rhythms, as ‘a camel floundering in a river’ that for some reason has always stuck with me.

Grim and Frostbitten's review of St. Anger always manages to crack me up.



He also inspired me to write my own (and personal favourite review of the ones I wrote) review for St. Anger.

This one manages to be good yet with a dash of WTF?-ery.

http://www.metal-archives.com/review.php?id=9802#5966

Cheeses Priced's Tartaros review has always dazzled me with it's "WTF?-ery."

Forgot about that one. This is it's best moment though:

Perhaps one of the best moments in any review on this site.

Indeed, although I do like the Killer Klowns from Outer Space namedrop as well, and the "named after a Pokemon" tidbit.

Agreed, that's what stood out to me.

The title to Gutterscream's review of Wild Dogs' self-titled debut cracked me up the first time I saw it, probably because it's only funny in the context of the band's name.

UltraBoris on Heathen's '2005 Demo'



It might not be extremely sophisticated, but I just love that part.

The classic, for Unholy Trinity's 'Omnimalevolence' by Baal_Graphics:



Dear god.

Uh....

This one was cool, or at least an methinks so.

Yeah, Vim's reviews are cool as shit. It's a shame he doesn't come around much anymore...

Napero's thrashing of "The Glorious Burden",



No musical description at all, but quite an amusing read.

From the same review:



UltraBoris on "Never Say Die":



One of Boris’ funniest reviews.

OSS on Dream Theater's "Awake":



That paragraph pretty much made me want to listen to the album, despite my general dislike for the band.

I question what made me write my Lord Belial review the way I did.

This is awesome.

I like how enthusiastic he gets over some of his stuff.

Holy fuck, now I need to hear this song.

All I'll say is... it's a good song

hells_unicorn, on Iced Earth's song "Hollow Man":

"However, the ugliest of all the philosophical contradictions in this album come alive with the lyrically nebulous “Hollow Man”. The casual reader of philosophy might think this a sort of homage to irrational Existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard, but I see a much darker person as the subject of worship in this song, the original villain of western thought, Immanuel Kant. It is no surprise that the only song that doesn’t deal directly with historical events is the one that reveals the hand that guides Schaffer’s work here, as Kant’s hand is in the thoughts of nearly every post-Enlightenment thinker, save the Objectivists and his intellectual opponents in the Catholic Church, particularly Thomists like myself. Every evil ideology that has poisoned Western Civilization since the end of the Enlightenment can be traced back to him, be it Communism, Fascism, Nazism, or other brand of tyranny by way of altruistic manipulation of values and thought. The first ingredient in subverting a population is to associate suffering with enlightenment, as this song seems most willing to do, and once a populous hates knowledge, they are easily manipulated by those whom still possess it. Immanuel Kant knew this as he poisoned the minds of the people he taught with the viewpoint that reason was impotent, and his bastard progeny of witch-doctors emboldened a new generation of Attila-like despots such as Lenin, Hitler and Mao to re-define the meaning of the word tyranny and to rain blood upon the earth. I can’t fully blame Jon Schaffer for allowing this kind of influence into his thinking, because Kant is the master of all our public schools, he is everywhere except for a few crevices of resistance in the realm of private study. Many say he was the greatest thinker of the late 18 century, and that maybe, but he may have also been the anti-Christ. (figuratively speaking)".

...I really don't know what to think about this, but surely it'd be nothing related to said song.

That was just stupid if you ask me. I'll give him the Kierkegaard part but the rest... well, I guess he -is- a christian.

Yeah, I thought so too. I'm not an advocate of Kant per se, but hell_unicorn's view of him is just so biased that it is hard to take him seriously. And I didn't know he was a Christian, let alone a Thomist, by the way. Talk about a shocker.

Blarglepop on Aborym's 'Generator':



BLARGLEPOP WINS - FLAWLESS VICTORY

That's probably the most unintelligent and pointless rant one could forge. It was a waste of time reading that "paragraph."