If I've heard Scorpions I have not known. Why should I know the name of every shit band I hear like on radio? When I was 5 I played Nintendo and wrestled in the snow with friends, I didn't listen to rock bands... I listen to a lot of genres even tho mainly metal. I listen to dark ambient, rap, orchestral, just random mythical instrumental music, I love '80's style rock. Trust me, I'm not narrow-minded, I'm a very deep guy interested in astronomy and psychology etc. I just think COB has evolved to a shitty direction.
I don't even know all the artists. Modern technology has made it possible to search for music with keywords. I may use keywords such as mysterious dark ambient metal heavy riffs. I even love some computer music in that vein. I don't like listing bands or comparing them, but yeah, Swallow the Sun is doing very impressive art. These are of course two different genres but what StS is doing is so genious and great it makes me lose my mind sometimes. Very small target audience but I've definitely grown to be a big fan. It's impossible to place either COB or StS on top cos they're so different, but one of them is doing deeper art now.
I need to give a reminder since I'm being treated like an annoying pest here lately. What COB did back in the day and occasionally still do/did at their best holds a position of musical majesty in my mind that's hard to overcome by anyone. Alexi's vocals at their best, their sound and music at its best, the whole mythical thing, it was greatness. Their greatest works were Hatebreeder & Follow the Reaper, monstrous creations of mythical death metal with brutal riffs and melodies spewing with twisted consolation. What I think they should do is combine the best elements of those two albums and bring in some new experimentations also. Now I just want to wash my hands from this midget funnyass thrash influence crap that's ever more polluting their work. COB is now an entity being buried by sand, sometimes it struggles to maintain a breath of life with occasional flashes and moments, but you know it's gone. It's just my personal taste matter and end of story, I'm not interested in arguing about opinions.
You need to understand it's not so black and white. I still take a quick listen at RRF every now and then just for the heck of having some bass in the room. There's some material on it that freezes you to keep listening, I mean SKO is good and all that, but eventually this can't compete with legendary albums like the blue and green one. The best moments can, but that goes for every album. If you gathered one minute of best material from each album, you could not so easily say which is best. That's my tasteful opinion, sure you can make music into mathematics and argue how much more technical riffs there is etc. I think those songs could be very very good with more effort into building onto those great ideas instead of resorting to boring filler parts so often. For example Ugly has some very nice stuff to it but it's very tiresome, they should've build a couple more cool things and use that opening riff to interrupt verses or whatever, Roundtrip is a wasted gem because of that wtf chorus, Cry of the Nihilist could be awesome with some double bass and melody glory after the intro, there's even a promising little riff in Northpole 0:13 - 0:14, etc. There's potential for greatness but at the end it's like there was no time(?) to make it more epic and catchy, cos that's what you could do with this material. Even if I'm not exactly a fan of the style, RRF could've been made very good even with these vocals, *deep breath* thanks for listening to me rant.