FAVORITE ALBUMS OF THE DECADE SO FAR

spikes77 said:
Also erik, you mean Saivo not Maaäet
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i mean nothing of the sort, i don't have anything later than maaäet

i copy/pasted from discogs, i guess maybe they have the wrong date or i put the wrong release in my collection (mine is the original issue i'm p sure)
 
General Zod said:
Do you think "the feeling" that Summoning captures on their latest album is truly something special or is it just nostalgic? I tend to think whatever music we listen to in our formative years becomes imbued with a quality that music can rarely top again.
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no i think metal as a movement/genre actually genuinely stopped being interesting/innovative at some point between 1996 and 2000

i think there's a few different reasons

1) everyone can release an album now
you don't need money, you don't even need a physical release, but physical releases are also really easy/cheap to manufacture and distribute compared to back in the day. there are so many fucking labels that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE is bound to be willing to release whatever garbage you can fart out in a weekend.

it used to be that you were laughed off stage, laughed at in zines, and laughed at by record companies if your demo sucked. the metal scene used to be really elitist and weed out all the useless shit. you had to earn respect by making GOOD and ORIGINAL MUSIC. you had to REHEARSE FOR YEARS AND GET GOOD AT PLAYING before anyone cared. now we love everything because the internet is a bullshit hugbox echo chamber where no matter how worthless you or your band are, SOMEONE SOMEWHERE is willing to say "FUCKING KILLER SHIT MAN, LOVE IT, HOW ABOUT A LIMITED 7" RELEASE"

a band like NIHILIST would unquestionably have been signed today by virtue of their first demo, because even that sounds AMAZING compared to all the useless shit people release as ALBUMS today.

but in 1987-1990, nihilist/entombed had to work hard as shit, record four demos of ever-increasing quality and play lots and lots of shows to gain respect in the underground and eventually the interest of a label.

standards are WAY too low. imo about 95% of all metal albums released today would not have even cut it as a demo tape in 1993.

2) digital computer recording
this is not actually in theory a bad thing but two points:

2a) this ties into the previous point: the ease of editing and cheating in pro tools/cubase etc. means that you don't have to be good at playing. ask any metal engineer how good the bands are on average. "fix it in the mix" has become the RULE, not the exception. i mean you should go on the andy sneap forum sometime to see what happens to modern metal recordings. people are SO BAD at playing that they record their guitar parts at half speed then speed them up artifically, they even cut and paste single notes to "build" solos artifically. drums are almost always quantized to the grid and replaced by samples.

this results in sterile, boring, mechanical mixes and bands that can't pull off the same shit live.

2b) THE FUCKING LOUDNESS WARS -- almost everything in metal is DR6 or LESS. it's fucking insane and often verging on the literally unlistenable. i know this is not just a problem with metal but it's often worse with music that is already dense and loud as fuck. YOU DON'T NEED TO SQUASH IT FURTHER, JESUS FUCK. but it really doesn't matter because your music is shit with or without poor mastering.


3) there is no mystery anymore
there used to be an air of mystery to metal, and especially death and black metal. the internet ruined all this. no one thinks metal is ACTUALLY threatening and mysterious and scary these days. and i'm not as old as some of you, but even i am old enough to remember the tail end of the mystery. the internet ruined everything. now nothing is serious -- it doesn't matter how much you claim that your music is SERIOUS CHAOS GNOSTIC 218 WORSHIP, everyone has seen your facebook and knows what you ACTUALLY care about is your poodle puppy and getting that sweet ass FREE SLICE O PEPPERONI OFFER by liking domino's pizza.

-- and the point is that the mystery seeped into the music. this, general zod, is the Feeling. and it doesn't exist anymore. it existed to some extent in even the third tier crappy norwegian bands from '94. the Feeling was this mystery, the obscurity of the underground, the fact that your album was mixed by a 50 year old guy in a basement studio who had never heard anything heavier than thin lizzy. today's metal has no character, no personality. it's all streamlined, toothless, boring, SHIT.


4) there are no scenes anymore
it used to be that there were local scenes or movements of bands influencing AND trying to one-up each other -- like all the gothenburg bands have said explicitely that it was a thing to try to be faster, better, more technical than the other guys but NEVER to ape them. there used to be something like a code of honour where dark tranquillity would hear ceremonial oath's first album and be like "hey that's really cool, we're going to make something that is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT but MUCH BETTER". but 1995 rolls around, slaughter of the soul happens, and suddenly "the mind's i" (97) and "whoracle" (97) both sound identical* to that album. metal dies.

the same goes for norwegian black metal -- even though immortal, darkthrone, enslaved, mayhem, emperor etc were from the same "scene" they did everything they could to sound completely different from each other.

and this rivalry/friendship situation spawned totally immortal albums like de mysteriis, the gallery, the red in the sky is ours, transilvanian hunger, hvis lyset tar oss etc. tell me -- what local scene anywhere in the world will leave a legacy like this in 2014? or indeed, after 1996?

at some point during the later half of the nineties, this entire thing with local scenes dies out -- because of the ease of finding everything on the internet, now every metal kid has heard every band on earth, now noone goes to gigs, noone cares.

have you seen a live video from 1992 recently? kids went fuckin nuts for their local demo bands. now no one cares.


5) there is nowhere left to go
people have played at 30 bpm, they have played at 300 bpm. they have heiled hitler and glorified child rape. and released a fucking concept album about the adventures of scrooge mcduck. there is a clear, logical evolution from black sabbath (1970) thru thrash (1985) to death and black metal (1990), but then around 1995 evolution just stopped, because death and black metal went as far as they could, and then it was all gimmicks, all the way down.

metal as an evolutionary process has reached a dead end, and all the saxophones and folk instruments in the would can't change that. all the so called innovators of today are accomplishing is MIXING metal with other genres to various degrees of success -- but they are not furthering metal itself.




* not ACTUALLY identical, and i love the mind's i, but you know.
 
einride said:
people are SO BAD at playing that they record their guitar parts at half speed then speed them up artifically, they even cut and paste single notes to "build" solos artifically. drums are almost always quantized to the grid and replaced by samples.
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this made me lol and it's seriously cringeworthy at the same time. Do things like that happen that often? I mean, I can accept that a mix wizard helps pimp up stuff here and there, but tinkering with the actual music like that sounds actually pretty much criminal.
 
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Ellestin said:
this made me lol and it's seriously cringeworthy at the same time. Do things like that happen that often? I mean, I can accept that a mix wizard helps pimp up stuff here and there, but tinkering with the actual music like that sounds actually pretty much criminal.
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You clearly haven't heard Dragonforce :tickled:
 
...and you some of you make fun of me for not listening to metal anymore. :lol:

There IS good shit coming out nowadays but you have to tear through a bigger pile of shit nowadays to actually get to the stuff worth listening to due to Erik's first point.

Also, Nihilist wouldn't have to work as hard nowadays for the same exact reason why bands nowadays don't have to. It's all relative. I agree with the basic premise though just not so much your tangent.
 
Ellestin said:
this made me lol and it's seriously cringeworthy at the same time. Do things like that happen that often? I mean, I can accept that a mix wizard helps pimp up stuff here and there, but tinkering with the actual music like that sounds actually pretty much criminal.
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http://www.celemony.com/
http://www.autotuneforguitar.com/
http://www.morpheusguitarpedals.com/ <-- who has time to tune anyway
http://www.beatfixx.com/
etc. etc. etc.

EDIT: This kind of thing doesn't bother me, but it is amusing. I also remember many years ago when people claimed that Metallica recorded ...And Justice For All one measure at a time. Or maybe just the guitar solos, I forget which. I've consumed 14,235 beeeeeeeers since then.
 
Well... I think there's a fine line between using the studio as an instrument and using it to "cheat." Metal is one of the few genres in which musicianship is still so highly regarded -- trying to be IMPRESSIVE (prog is another). If it hadn't been for pitch-shifting and sped-up instruments/vocals, we never would have gotten

Sgt._Pepper's_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band.jpg




**cue the usual plebes saying the Beatles sucked**
 
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well if you're using technology as a crutch because you are terrible at performing the music you've written i think the line has been crossed

nothing good ever comes of that
 
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2013 was a great year for metal, too much young guy in an old guys skin bitterness going on here
 
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