and I'm just speculating here, but I think you grew up right in the middle of the heydey of the 80s and were a fanatic for glam and classic metal, and when it died you were pissed and just never got over it. Everything in the 90s that you like, you like because it reminds you somewhat of the sounds you missed in the 80s. Soundgarden and AIC were on the cusp of glam, and no one had a wailing voice like Cornell which could have easily been transplanted in any 80s band, and AIC's Facelift was very nearly sleaze metal if they hadn't taken a right turn at the very end when they decided to be grunge. It still comes across in the album, though. As you got older things inevitably got heavier but you couldn't shake the vocal styles. You adapted but only begrudgingly and then you realized prog and power metal had what you're looking for, only prog got old after awhile due to DT and all the copycats.
It's funny just how close you are with this, but still in the almost, but not quite range. I grew up listening to Zeppelin, Sabbath, The Who, Alice Cooper, Rush, Yes, Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Styx and a bunch of other hard to pop rock bands because that's all my mother listened to. I was also around when MTV just started airing, so I ended up seeing pretty much everything that was popular at the time; Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, ZZ Top, The Scorpions, Ratt, AC/DC, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Depeche Mode, INXS, Wham/George Michael, Peter Gabriel, Men at Work, Kansas, Toto, Asia etc. you get the idea. My mother also watched American Bandstand, Friday Night Videos and Solid Gold, and she was also proficient on the piano (my aunt played the violin and flute, while my uncle the drums). When I was ten, I went through a hip hop phase, parachute pants and all, although I only had a few tapes and records of my choosing. I think the two albums I listened to at that age the most would have probably been Michael Jackson's
Thriller, and then a year and a half after Prince's
Purple Rain. Eventually, I started taking more notice of bands like Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Van Halen and Ozzy. When I was fourteen, I ended up buying Def Leppard's
Hysteria and INXS'
Kick (say what you will, but this album does have some timeless classics). Not long after that, I ended up getting Guns N' Roses
Appetite for Destruction, which was played every day over the summer religiously. After that, it was just whatever was on the radio, or MTV until Skid Row arrived, and I ended up buying their first album as well as Queensryche's
Empire soon after.
Incidentally, for various reasons that might seem pretty dumb, despite being bombarded with Metallica, Megadeth and Iron Maiden imagery everywhere, all of the time at school, I intentionally avoided listening to any of it. Mainly because of the crowd associated with all of those awesome shirts and how they reflected some issues going on at home at the time. Anyway, I also had a friend that wouldn't shut up about Suicidal Tendencies. He was a pretty big metalhead, with an extremely large collection of tapes, but they were his favorite band at the time, and he made sure to mention them constantly. So one day on an impulse buy, I just ended up getting
Lights...Camera...Revolution!. I wasn't exactly a stranger to "heavy metal", but that was quite different from what I had been listening to up to that point...and I wanted more of that. So I randomly purchased:
"Hook in Mouth" was literally the most amazing thing I had ever heard. I also ended up greatly enjoying pretty much everything on this tape aside from The Great Kat. "Metal Messiah" sucked then, and it still sucks. After listening to this tape on repeat for maybe a month, I finally ended up buying
Rust in Peace,
Peace Sells,
So far, So Good,
Kill 'Em All,
Ride The Lightning,
Master of Puppets,
...And Justice for All,
Among the Living,
State of Euphoria,
Persistence of Time,
Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and
The Ultra-Violence. The first few songs I learned how to play were off of the first three Metallica albums too. That's pretty much all I listened to, until one morning I saw the video for "Man in the Box". Wasn't sure what it was, but I knew right away that there was something very different about what I was seeing, and I also thought that it was going to be the next big thing. I ended up calling out Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden in the same way too. So the next albums I ended up with were
Operation Mindcrime (random, I know),
Nevermind,
Ten,
Facelift and
Badmotorfinger. Soon after that, I ended up being blown away by Solitude Aeturnus'
Into the Depths of Sorrow. And maybe it's just because of how much of a profound impact it had on me when I first heard it, but that's pretty much the standard for epic doom to me.
I didn't actually
start listening to Iron Maiden until '92, Judas Priest in '94 (aside from whatever I had randomly heard before) and Mercyful Fate/King Diamond in '94 as well. I didn't even start listening to those bands until
after their heyday by even a decade for some. I also tried listening to: Deicide, Morbid Angel, Napalm Death, Canibal Corpse, Obituary, Possessed, Venom, Celtic Frost, Vader and Darkthrone. Couldn't get into any of them at all, aside from Obituary. Not really sure why either.
Still, everything you listen to now is derivative of that because you listen to music with blinders on. It's not necessarily being picky, it's what Italians call a "pigna in culo", or a pinecone in the ass. Rompipalle, or "ball breaker". That is very much you when it comes to pleasing you with music.
I still just don't get this logic at all. Because you could apply it to literally every death metal band since the late 80s for everything that gets posted here too. Most of what is posted here is either death metal, black metal or stoner/drone/doom (which are all different, but related enough for them to blur). Yeah,
I'm the one stuck in a rut, and
I'm the one who doesn't really want to listen to anything new. LOL.
