Metal Thread VII: The Mosh Pit Don't Start 'Til We Walk In

[Mythestopheles]

This last machup is an interesting one for me, as bandwise, I prefer Iron Maiden to Black Sabbath (Not saying I don't like Black Sabbath, they're up there among my favorites). This may be heresy, but I didn't actually like The Number of The Beast very much, I mean it had great songs, (Hallowed Be Thy Name, The Number of The Beast, Run to the Hills, the classics) But I vastly preferred Brave New World. On the other hand, I really liked Paranoid, probably my favorite Black Sabbath album.

So my vote goes to Paranoid.

So did I, but like I said, this is the best album since Inhumane Rampage.

I've always had DragonForce tracks randomly get stuck in my head, without me listening to them, but then if I tried listening to them, I'd get bored before even a single song finished. But this album, I find myself actually wanting to listen to it multiple times, which is something DragonForce hasn't done for me for years. As for the new singer, he is indeed more generic, but I find he has a stronger, more diverse voice.

My personal favorite track is Give Me The Night.

[Feytalist]

Maybe you'd like The Greater Wrong of the Right.

Not so much, no. Although that solo stuff sounds pretty cool. I'm gonna give more of that a try.

But I vastly preferred Brave New World.

Word.

[godspit]

Exhumed and Autopsy are coming in November. I'm going with some of my death metal friends as part of a cultural exchange project I'm working on in my spare time. Went to a southern/bluegrass rock concert a couple weeks ago as part of it. One of the weirder experiences musically in my life.

[JoshL]

Good picks, Faulty. I'm a huge TG/Coil/PTV fan, though came into it from the other side (Current 93) and Skinny Puppy through the Tear Garden/Legendary Pink Dots. You definitely do need to hit Neubauten next, possibly followed by The Birthday Party (though they're more on the post-punk side). And I am an obsessive Swans fan, but even given your tastes, they're not for the faint of heart. Oh, and Leæther Strip may be to your tastes, for late 80s stuff, but "Serenede for the Dead" is a must-listen.

And the best Skinny Puppy album is CLEARLY Last Rites (Mythmaker >TGWOTR as well see "haze" for proof)

As for the Sabbath vs. Maiden question, the Maiden album SHOULD be "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son", but since it's not, Sabbath gets the win.

[eyeofsaulot]

It's over! The greatest metal album of all time iiiiiis...

[blastbeat drumroll...]

Spoiler

Show

02 Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970) VS (7 votes)
04 Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast (1982) (4 votes)

Paranoid's win tells us that to be the best, you gotta be the first. Thanks to everyone who participated. It was a bumpy ride, but despite all our differences, given this final matchup, it seems we can find common ground in the classics.

[grimbold]

well
that was hardly unexpected :P

[Faulty]

Good picks, Faulty. I'm a huge TG/Coil/PTV fan, though came into it from the other side (Current 93) and Skinny Puppy through the Tear Garden/Legendary Pink Dots. You definitely do need to hit Neubauten next, possibly followed by The Birthday Party (though they're more on the post-punk side). And I am an obsessive Swans fan, but even given your tastes, they're not for the faint of heart. Oh, and Leæther Strip may be to your tastes, for late 80s stuff, but "Serenede for the Dead" is a must-listen.

And the best Skinny Puppy album is CLEARLY Last Rites (Mythmaker >TGWOTR as well see "haze" for proof)

I still haven't listened to Psychic TV! I know they're one of the classic early acts but for a while my forays into extreme electronics was the noise/power electronics area rather than early industrial so I have gaps in my knowledge that I've been filling up. What's your favorite PTV album? Also, out of curiosity, what's your favorite Coil album?

Did you come through via neofolk C93 or early industrial C93? I'm not as fond of, say, Dogs Blood Rising as I am of Lucifer Over London or Thunder Perfect Mind.

I checked out EN's O.T. and it was pretty magnificent. For early Swans I've only listened to Filth and it feels a bit flat to me, but I dig Children of God. I know a Swans fanatic who prefers Cop to Filth so it'll eventually be listened to by me.

I think last.fm actually recommended Leæther Strip to me. Will need to also look into them.

For now I'm going to let O.T. and Last Rites (have it now!) sink in.

[JoshL]

It's funny, I started out with noise myself. Not industrial at all, but I'm a huge fan of Aube, who does structural noise based in minimal sound sources. Tangential relation; he did a great album with Die Form, who are more on the darkwave side of thing, but I also like them. Great stuff. Used to do noise myself for many years (and ended up on a Current 93 tribute cd around 2004-5ish).

Favorite Coil? Tough to say. Love Time Machines, and Musick to Play In The Dark. How To Destroy Angels is awesome (doubly so since I love NWW). Love's Secret Domain has a soft spot in my heart since it was the first I heard back in high school. I started with Current 93 with the Emblems comp, which covered the early stuff up to Thunder Perfect Mind. I liked almost all of it; the early noisy stuff, the pretty folk stuff. Generally speaking, my tastes are pretty eclectic and C93 just hit me at the right time, and that led to me exploring all sorts of stuff.

As for favorite PTV, probably A Pagan Day or Dreams Less Sweet. Trip Reset is pretty cool though, and Infinite Beat (while very dated) is worth a listen. Oh, and if you REALLY like spoken word (I do), A Hollow Cost is pretty great.

I also agree that Filth is the weakest Swans album. Cop is heavy, slow, painful and scary. Great stuff. My favorite is Soundtracks For the Blind, which ties together everything into a beautiful whole. They're touring again, and one of the loudest, mind and body altering shows I've ever seen.

[Faulty]

Oooooooh. What did you use to make noise?

Noise actually came to me through black metal via Gnaw Their Tongues.

I will check out those PTV albums. I've listened to the first half of Soundtracks but I wasn't ready for it yet. I think you need to be sipping the Swans Kool-Aid to like it. You hear the new Swans yet?

To keep things on topic: listening to the new Deathspell Omega EP again after a bit and the proggy riffs at the beginning of "Fiery Serpents" are so tasty.

[JoshL]

Haven't heard the new Swans yet (low on cash), but the new stuff they did live, and the live cd they put out this spring was fantastic. And awesome to see guest appearances by Low and Jarboe. I can see Soundtracks being a difficult listen (it is VERY diverse), and drawing more from Cage/Ligetti than from rock. But "The Sound" is an astonishing song.

My noise/abstract stuff (99-09ish. Would like to get back to that, but dayjob+filmscores+other band isn't leaving me much time) was created in a wide variety of ways. Guitars, processed line noise, effects loops, toys, etc. The last thing I was working on was done by feeding sounds into a loop and modulating them, both live and sampled. Always hardware, never software.

Also on topic (you might be right...we might need an industrial/electronic/weirdstuff thread), I've been listening to Jesu's "Silver" on repeat lately. Beautiful stuff...and absolutely touching on Moff's desired shoegaze thread

[RebelRogue]

I feel sort of weird for knowing more of the industrial bands you listen to than metal bands, Faulty

[Faulty]

Sounds like cool stuff Josh. I have a contact mic but I lack confidence about using it so I use that as an excuse not to touch it. @_@

Well I've been listening to foundational industrial but dig a lot of more underground black metal that you wouldn't know unless you listen to the genre at all.

[JoshL]

Sounds like cool stuff Josh. I have a contact mic but I lack confidence about using it so I use that as an excuse not to touch it. @_@

Contact mics are fun! You'll never get confidence unless you start doing it. Stick it on a brick and beat out a rhythm with a hammer! Grab the brick and drag it across the floor. Drop it for accents. No end of possibilities, and if your rhythm isn't good, well these days it's easy enough to record sounds to use as samples. Feel free to drop me a PM if you have questions about recording software/techniques, but by all means, start recording now!

[Kindablue]

Spoiler

Show

Paranoid's win tells us that to be the best, you gotta be the first.

Cough cough Led Zeppelin II cough cough.

[Killer Angel]

Cough cough Led Zeppelin II cough cough.

Well, in "A Headbanger's Journey", it is said that the word "Heavy Metal", was firstly used with Black Sabbath... Obviously, I don't remember the details.

[grimbold]

Well, in "A Headbanger's Journey", it is said that the word "Heavy Metal", was firstly used with Black Sabbath... Obviously, I don't remember the details.

i'm with KA Black Sab is WAAAAAAY heavier than zeppelin ever was!

[Moff Chumley]

What on earth does that have to do with which band had the term originally applied to them?

EDIT: Also, you're confusing "heavier" with "darker". Go listen to When The Levee Breaks or No Quarter and tell me that's not on par with Sabbath. It's just not as dark.

[RebelRogue]

I love Zep and Sabbath about equally, but I do tend to think of the former as rock and the latter as metal. Not that it matters much.

[Moff Chumley]

Of course not, and I'm not arguing otherwise, but I've always thought the idea that heaviness=metalness was sort of silly. Tim Hecker's hells of heavy, and it'd be a bit of a stretch to call him metal. By the same token, while I'm hardly denying that Dream Theater's metal, at their heaviest, they've still got nothing on Comets on Fire and suchlike.

[godspit]

Just thought I would tell you guys: got 15 new ambient/atmospheric black metal albums.

I squeed.

[grimbold]

What on earth does that have to do with which band had the term originally applied to them?

EDIT: Also, you're confusing "heavier" with "darker". Go listen to When The Levee Breaks or No Quarter and tell me that's not on par with Sabbath. It's just not as dark.

assuming when you say dark you mean in timbre then yes i agree

but THATS THE POINT
metal is metal and not rock because it IS darker and thats why sabbath is metal for me

[Moff Chumley]

Sabbath is metal. Zep is rock. I am not arguing otherwise, never have, and never will, because that's stupid. But Sabbath isn't heavier than Zep, because heaviness isn't a measure of how "metal" something is because then Lightning Bolt or White Mice would be more metal than anything y'all listen to.

But by the same token, darkness of timbre hardly indicates metal either. The Birthday Party. Darker than Sabbath? Easily. Heavier? In some senses. More metal? Not at all.

[JoshL]

Which brings us to the question "what is heavy metal"? As you say, I can think of tons of music that is darker and heavier than any metal track, but falls under other genres. Where is the line drawn between heavy metal and hard rock? I think we'd all agree that there is a line, but we might not all put it in the same place. But there is something that separates Iron Maiden from King Crimson or Jesu from My Bloody Valentine.

On the other hand, this sort of questioning easily leads into arguments about what is and what isn't (see also: any punk conversation). I would want to say that hard rock turns to metal when it starts to lose the blues influence. There are, of course, plenty of non-metal forms of pop music (as opposed to classical music) that aren't blues based, but between rock and metal that does seem to be a turning point.

As an aside, I think genres are best used to describe songs rather than bands. Mostly because I prefer bands that jump around a lot, stylistically.

[Feytalist]

Well, in "A Headbanger's Journey", it is said that the word "Heavy Metal", was firstly used with Black Sabbath... Obviously, I don't remember the details.

I had heard it was used to describe Jimi's guitar playing.

Just thought I would tell you guys: got 15 new ambient/atmospheric black metal albums.

You're now obligated to list them all. Kgo.



Someone (I think it was Arthur C. Clarke) once said that when categorising a work as SF or not SF, the best you could do is point at one work and say "that is SF", and then point at another work and say "that is not SF"; because of the wildly differing opinions of what exactly described SF. I think the best we can do is do the same thing with metal. Because there is really no one set of rules for metal music, especially what with the hundreds of wildly differing sub-genres that make up "metal".

[Moff Chumley]

I would want to say that hard rock turns to metal when it starts to lose the blues influence.

There's plenty of blues-derived metal, though. Eyehategod, Sleep, and so on.

To re-purpose everyone's favorite quote about pornography, metal is hard to define but you know it when you see it.

[RebelRogue]

There's plenty of blues-derived metal

Gotta agree with Moff here. It's not really that simple.

But anyway, I think there's little to be gained from a complete classification system for music.

[WhamBamSam]

There's plenty of blues-derived metal, though. Eyehategod, Sleep, and so on.

To re-purpose everyone's favorite quote about pornography, metal is hard to define but you know it when you see it.

By the same token, the most popular mainstream form of hard rock in this day and age doesn't sound that bluesy at all. I mean, it obviously stems from blues on some level, but it's no more immediately apparent than the blues influences in your average metal band.

I'm fond of Louis Armstrong's quote on jazz. If you have to ask what metal is, you'll never know.

If I were to try and classify metal I'd probably have a few different axes, heaviness, emphasis on guitar, aggression, etc. I would also point to minimalism as a quality that doesn't appear often in metal. Yes, there are Black Metal variants and the like that are somewhat minimalist, but they generally focus what little there is in a direction that is otherwise very metal. I would say that the Birthday Cake example Moff gave is a sort of Alternative/Punk type of minimalism, which isn't really the same as in metal bands that take that type of approach.

[JoshL]

Oh, yeah, there's absolutely blues based/influenced metal. There's also folk based/influenced classical music. But the question is, what is at the root, and what is added (back) in? Going back to Zep, they brought in a lot of folk influence, but you wouldn't call them a folk rock band (for that, of that era, you'd go to Fairport Convention, etc). Much later, when folk metal became a thing, I think it's easy to say it's folk added to metal, rather than a style that grew out of folk. This is all well and good for the armchair ethnomusicologist (which, if I ever start a blog, totally needs to be the name) but of course has no bearing on whether someone likes a song or not! I wonder sometimes if metal is just too general of a term, and some of the various subgenres should just be different genres all together. Musical Umami!

Thinking way too much about questions that have no answers is, in my mind, never a bad thing. The pursuit of understanding is both neverending and worthwhile!

And Sleep's Dopesmoker is an astounding album!

[Feytalist]

New Elvenking album out. Seems it's actually surprisingly good. Yeah, I'm getting it.

[grimbold]

But by the same token, darkness of timbre hardly indicates metal either. The Birthday Party. Darker than Sabbath? Easily. Heavier? In some senses. More metal? Not at all.

mind****

nice going moff
now i'm all confused