If you had to pick a favorite decade of metal?

[SomeGuyDude]

Stopped at Dodecahedron taking black metal to new heights. You spelled Deathspell Omega wrong.

I'm pretty sure I didn't, considering I mentioned them in the next paragraph. DsO does so much more than Dodecahedron that I think it's unfair to just say "they're taking black metal to new heights". The trilogy is SOOO much bigger in scope and execution, it's like comparing a goddamn spaceship to the Wright Bros' Flyer.

 

[SentinelSlain]

They do not exist.

I suppose you could truthfully say that stuff like Crystal Viper is better than say a lot of the average NWOBHM. So it isn't as good as maiden or satan/blitzkreig etc or Cloven Hoof - A Sultan's Ransom, but it isn't that far from the latter and the production blows away most of the stuff from that scene, especially the early stuff. Any Crystal Viper album is a lot more mature and well thought out than anything Grim Reaper did, for example.


Compare this bollocks:



to this:

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Can you even count?

Unless this is a self-depricating joke, lol.

And really, you pick a song from Stay Hard to represent Raven? And what makes that Crystal Viper song "mature"? It's typical speed/power metal that had already been thoroughly done in the 80's. I'm enjoying it, but it does nothing to advance the genre, like every other retro-trad band. And Rock You to Hell is better than you are.

 

[SentinelSlain]

well they're all 11 years, that was the point. But the OP said decade and put 90-00 instead of 90-99 or whatever, so I went along with it. They way it's recorded and how good the vocals are make it mature. Most of the 80s stuff of the same style, at least the British stuff, is goofy in one way or another.

 

[SentinelSlain]

These bands aren't exactly from the same genre, but the songs kind of are. I think it demonstrates my point about the modern recording and production combined with different song writing leading to a greater feel of maturity.

 

[Mort Divine]

Leviathan took black metal and made it horrific beyond what Mayhem and Darkthrone were ever capable of

lmao

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The vocals? She sounds exactly like Doro Pesch when she's singing, and you can find Warlock songs that more or less do the same thing instrumentally as well. There is nothing unique or new or refined about the song-writing in that song, and the production is nothing special either. Yeah, it's clean (sterile) like every other modern retro-trad album. And the songs weren't a fair comparison at all; one was a mid-tempo pop metal song, the other was speedy power metal.

But I should have guessed you were just trolling. The Cage? I forgot that album even existed. It is not remotely representative of good 80's traditional metal. And I have no idea what an Evergrey ballad has to do with anything. You're probably being facetious and I'm just not getting it.

 

[SentinelSlain]

The point is more that a hell of a lot of NWOBHM was shit and that some of the modern stuff is better than a lot of it.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

lmao

I know you're Captain Weeaboo over here putting up nonmetal constantly, but if you're going to sit there and honestly tell me Tenth Sublevel and Tentacles aren't darker and blacker than Blaze or De Mysteriis I'm just gonna assume you've watched so much yaoi tentacle porn your brain is coated in underage anime semen.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The stuff you're posting is basically post-NWOBHM (in the sense that shitty Pantera clones X are post-thrash). Moreover, why limit it to the NWOBHM when there were several years of USPM, epic doom-influenced stuff, and early European power metal following the NWOBHM? And even though I can obviously agree with some retro-trad being better than some NWOBHM/USPM/anything else, I think it was obvious that Avigrus and myself were referring to something "fucking executed better" than the best efforts of the sub-genres, which is what SomeGuyDude seems to be talking about.

I know you're Captain Weeaboo over here putting up nonmetal constantly, but if you're going to sit there and honestly tell me Tenth Sublevel and Tentacles aren't darker and blacker than Blaze or De Mysteriis I'm just gonna assume you've watched so much yaoi tentacle porn your brain is coated in underage anime semen.

Only yaoi-loving chronic masturbators would possibly attempt quantifying "blackness" and use it as a metric of quality.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

Here's all I'm saying, let me make it brief-ish.

There are stellar albums all along the spectrum. From 1970 to 2013. Step back from things like "legacy" or whether an album came at the forefront of a wave or later on and if you honestly rank the best albums the best won't ALL be from the beginning. Some will be, a lot won't. Similarly, you'll snag newer albums that ABSOLUTELY rank amongst the all-times, and a lot that won't. For that matter, there might be more newer albums that rank highly just because there are a MILLION bands out there now rather than just a handful.

I've sifted through countless new albums that are eminently forgettable, as well as many that will get WAY more playtime than the old classics. Anyone out here yapping that the only good albums were those old classics is just claiming they can see the emperor's clothes.

 

[Mort Divine]

I know you're Captain Weeaboo over here putting up nonmetal constantly, but if you're going to sit there and honestly tell me Tenth Sublevel and Tentacles aren't darker and blacker than Blaze or De Mysteriis I'm just gonna assume you've watched so much yaoi tentacle porn your brain is coated in underage anime semen.

First off, Leviathan are absolute garbage so perhaps I'm just shocked that someone likes them - even worse more than Mayhem and Darkthrone.

That said there is not a song from them that can so much as touch the eerie, demonic feel of Kathaarian Life Code, or Pagan Fears. There is something truly 'off' sounding about these whereas Leviathan just sounds like a guy who likes black metal trying to sound as evil as he can...doesn't work that well. Also it doesn't help that on vocals he is neither Attila nor Nocturno Culto

 

[HamburgerBoy]

No one is saying that every good metal album was released in the 80's or early 90's afaik. Your reasons for dismissing legacy still aren't clear. I mean, wow, you can take five Slayer albums and five-hundred Slayer knock-offs, and that people might take a higher proportion of non-Slayer albums is supposed to be significant to the argument that those five Slayer albums were of no better quality?

 

[Inso]

80s 80s 80s

I can't get enough of traditional style metal, early thrash, the beginnings of death metal, etc. I love a lot of 90s and recent stuff but have to say at least 70% of my general metal listening comes from the 80s.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

Ignoring Mort because I'm really continually baffled at the nonsense he vomits up...

No one is saying that every good metal album was released in the 80's or early 90's afaik. Your reasons for dismissing legacy still aren't clear. I mean, wow, you can take five Slayer albums and five-hundred Slayer knock-offs, and that people might take a higher proportion of non-Slayer albums is supposed to be significant to the argument that those five Slayer albums were of no better quality?

I'm not sure exactly what your point here is. How do you defend that album X is of better quality if no one's opinion matters? I'm not saying that just polling people works, because there are a million things that factor in, but music isn't math. You can't say "objectively" that this or that is better by crunching numbers.

What I am saying is that people's opinion of old albums is heavily colored by reputation, emotional connection, nostalgia, all sorts of things. If, I don't know, Nader Sadek or Azarath had dropped their recent albums back in 1993 people would have SHIT THEIR DAMN PANTS at them. Similarly, if Legion or Tomb of the Mutilated landed in 2010 they'd be met with little fanfare.

Sure, you can say "well without those albums we wouldn't have the new ones," and that's my point. You're not ranking it just as music on its own, you're ranking it by everything around it. Instead of judging the album as a big item, judge it song by song, and ignore how old you were when you heard it or whether or not it took cues from an album previously. Things are different then.

 

[Mort Divine]

Music is not made in a vacuum. There is context to everything and you seem to be ignoring that.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Music isn't created on its own, so why should it be judged on its own? On the point of nostalgia and such, fine, but creativity is a significant component of quality in many cases. You may as well praise the college junior that can open a textbook and derive the exact concept or formula that some old dead scientist took a decade to accomplish.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

The problem then is you're ranking the CREATION of the music, not the OUTPUT. You're judging the ARTIST, not the ART. And that's a vastly different animal. You're talking about praising the college junior vs the old dead scientist. I'm not talking about the men and situations BEHIND the creations, I'm talking about the creations THEMSELVES.

Let's say you find some guy who was born deaf but learns how to create harmonies by playing instruments in a sealed room and feeling how the vibrations interact. He builds instruments himself that maximize this effect and after 20 years of painstaking labor creates an instrumental album. Another guy is born privileged, goes to a private school, and is trained by classical musicians. He also creates an album that's just plain better than the first. Are you going to declare his inferior to the first because he didn't have to discover the scales on their own?

You might praise the first musician for his creativity and ingenuity, and marvel at his ability to learn and write melodies and harmonies without anyone teaching him, but that doesn't make what he did BETTER.

I judge music on its own, I judge artists on their context. The 90s were the superior decade because of the who/where/how. But that doesn't mean all the best albums are there. If you build me a car, I'm not giving you extra points because you had to invent the ICE yourself if the thing runs poorly. If you cook me a steak, I'm not going to ignore the shitty quality of the meat because you had to hunt and slaughter the cow yourself.

 

[Lateralus14]

I don't care about this context argument. Point is the OUTPUT from the last millennium was just far superior.

 

[SomeGuyDude]

That's what I'm getting at.

And let me say this, too! If a band like Slayer, or Morbid Angel, or Darkthrone, or Napalm Death had its members born 20 years later and had the benefit of already having the outline drawn for them, I'll bet they would have made EVEN BETTER albums than they did. They're the legends for a reason.