The Halo Effect - New Album 2023/2024

[DE4life]

This site’s been fucked for me for a few months now. Admittedly, I’ve been mainly using it on mobile, but especially when I made the acoustic compilation it took around a week before I could send it here because the site just wouldn’t load. There was only one other instance before that where it was that fucked up for me, but I don’t remember when or what was going on in that time. For the most part, it just takes a long time to load, but I’ll very happily take that. I’ve only recently gotten used to good internet as someone who grew up with ratfucked internet anyways, so it’s not exactly unfamiliar to me.

Random tangent, has Ethernet always been as good as it is? I only had mine put in like half a year ago for my computer, and I wish I did that so much sooner. It’s genuinely life changing to not have to deal with multiple second to minute delays on everything, even google searches.

I think ethernet is still the gold standard when it comes to gaming. As far as normal, everyday internet stuff I'd say WiFi in most cases is more than enough, but I guess it depends on your internet's base speed.

 

[Xpyro125]

I don't care about covers unless bands are willing to make them their own thing. Though I'm not sure if what I wrote makes sense.

Yeah, it does. I feel the same sort of way, though I also do enjoy covers that kinda just ‘refresh’ (I don’t want to say modernize because I would be dead wrong) the original in a well-executed way. I know Stairway is the song you don’t cover, but Heart and Mastodon did it wonderfully. Stuff like IF’s covers of Everything Counts and It’s No Good and Devildriver’s covers of Sail and Black Soul Choir are generally more of my sort of thing though.

I like covers as bonus tracks, or as a track on an EP. Also can be cool if it's an album where many different bands are covering songs from a popular band like Metallica or Maiden. Amaranthe's version of Powerwolf's Army of the Night is better than the original, imo.

An entire album of one band doing covers of other bands though? Meh.

I think something like 6-8 songs is the sweetspot for me. I’d love to hear quite a few, but not too many. Five songs like this just doesn’t interest me much, especially since How the Gods Kill just feels like Cemetery Skyline (Still like the track a lot) and since If You Were Here was boring. I’m hoping to hear a tried and true THE cover, rather than another excuse for Mikael to sing— Not that I’d complain about his clean vocals, they’re wonderful.

Then again, Down, Wicked, and No Good is a genuinely really enjoyable experience despite just being four songs. I think it’s because they’re all different from each other and from your usual In Flames affair, though I wish Down in a Hole and Wicked Game had a bit more guitar/were a little more In Flames-ish. It’s No Good did that perfectly to me, and I still regularly go back to that track to this day.

I think ethernet is still the gold standard when it comes to gaming. As far as normal, everyday internet stuff I'd say WiFi in most cases is more than enough, but I guess it depends on your internet's base speed.

That’s what I’ve heard for a long time, though I was stuck with shit wifi pretty much my whole life up until a year and a half ago. Heaving ethernet combined with a computer that can run games smoothly at higher than medium settings is still insane to me, I’m not used to it whatsoever. Really wish I could add Ethernet to my phone, but beggars can’t be choosers.

 

[The Grayfox]

There are a few cover albums I do enjoy, namely Metallica's Garage Inc. They picked interesting songs to cover and really made them their own. In quite a few cases, I think them covering those songs brought more attention to the original artists too.

 

[eochaid]

I have ethernet since... ever. And we have a more than decent speed here. Right now I think that it's 600 mb but that is relative since it doesn't only depend on your side bilut also on the server that you are trying to access. So, the speed is always far lower than expected. Still, good.

And yes. This place sucks. My guess is that it's mostly abandoned by the owners of the page and was moved to slower servers.

 

[Xpyro125]

There are a few cover albums I do enjoy, namely Metallica's Garage Inc. They picked interesting songs to cover and really made them their own. In quite a few cases, I think them covering those songs brought more attention to the original artists too.

That latter thing’s another wonderful quality for a cover to have. Admittedly, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Black Soul Choir, I don’t think most people have heard of 16 Horsepower, and a lot of those who do these days are likely because of that Devildriver cover (Myself included). I’ll give THE a point there since I didn’t know of Kent before, but their cover of If You Were Here is so by the numbers that those points really don’t do much at the end of the day.

 

[Xpyro125]

I’m hoping to hear a tried and true THE cover, rather than another excuse for Mikael to sing— Not that I’d complain about his clean vocals, they’re wonderful.

Well, I’ll be damned. That’s exactly what they did, it’s a tried and true THE cover. At first I felt the chorus was a bit stiff, but I’m gonna go against the grain: It’s stiff in the original too. I’m not as kind towards 80s rock and roll as most people, but I know a good 80s chorus. The original’s not really a great one imo, so I don’t blame THE for it whatsoever. It’s a pretty enjoyable cover, actually feels like it’s coming from the entire band this time, and I love that. It’s got a pretty Conditional/Detonate/What We Become sort of energy or feel to it, and I think that works pretty nicely. Turning an 80s rock and roll song into a modern melodeath song probably isn’t revolutionary to anyone within the melodeath sphere, but it’s about enough of a new spin on things for me to be happy with it.

Also, I’m only realizing it in retrospect, but I love how the cover art of the singles showed how many songs are on the EP from the beginning and where each song is placed within it with their symbols. That’s a really cool touch. I was gonna say it was cool how they progressively add more gold in the art, but no, that’s only If You Were Here adding some gold to the snake, I Wanna Be Someday only has gold in the symbol. Bit of a shame there, but this is still so cool on a micro level anyways.

 

[DE4life]

Do Upon an Oaken Throne you muthafuckas.