The Official Metal Appreciation Thread®

Hnnnngggghhh

It doesn't have many moments of the heaviness of their previous albums and when they do it doesn't quite live up to those highs. Plus I think there may be too many slow, quiet moments but overall I'm digging it. You just can't quite pin one genre on this band at all, it makes them so interesting. Definitely feel it's gonna be polarising. Those hoping for heavier songs on the album than Focus or Clean might come away disappointed.

Huh, didn't even know about it. Will definitely be checking it out.

Aww, I came here to say I quite liked this. It's painfully lazy, but I like the tone. It'll be good to sink a couple of blue WKDs to down Satan's!

Not quite a big enough hook for me. Ghost are always best when they go big and this is just fine on first impressions

Despite knowing that I should know better, I kind of enjoyed that. Partly because of how low effort it all is.

By all accounts, Fred has been writing and rewriting his parts for the new album for *years*.

And then this, this is what finally gets put out? After all those years this is where he thought "yup, nailed it"?

This kind of reminds me of parts of Crack the Skye almost. I think Mastodon are going to give us something really career spanning this time.

It's a broad church. I've far more time for LP than I had at the time TBH. We were a bunch of Nu Metal kids and thought they were the manufactured, nu metal N Sync. Now I love it when I hear the big singles.

I actually met these in Jilly's Rock World when they were the support act of the White Pony tour. No Chester though. But Mike Shinoda is the most famous person I've met.

Anyway in other news, Trivium's 'Court of the Dragon' album is out tomorrow. Have heard three from this so far and I think it's going to be very decent.

They aren't always exciting Trivium but they are very dependable. And I commend them on their productivity.

After Mastodon another notable release is a new Converge album in November.

Halfway through 'Court of the Dragon'. Remember when Machine Head did The Blackening and everyone was like this is their Master of Puppets moment?

I'm getting shades of that. Its superb.

It's a Trivium album alright. Some bangers, some absolute shiters, and a bunch of filler, IMO. It's one of their better ones at least.

I mean, you can't really call BMTH the current metal trend - they aren't even playing metal, nor are they influencing any metal bands.

Trivium have always picked up a lot of unnecessary flak on account of being one of the more visible metalcore bands at the time when wider press were fawning over the various bland chugga chugga chugga + bad singing bands in the mid 2000s. They've struggled to shake off that label even as they've largely stopped playing metalcore anyway, but even their best records like Shogun are still patchy despite their undeniable technical ability. Part of their issue is their inability to pick a direction and stick with it.

They've never really been exceptional though IMO, and I doubt they ever will be. Unless they somehow manage to make an album which is full of tracks that are as good as Shadow of the Abbatoir and The Phalanx, there's always going to be hundreds of other bands that outshine them.

I'd argue it. Just that bit comes across really heavily hardcore punky more than anything else. Which isn't intended to be a comment on quality at all - there's a lot of hardcore punk bands I like, it just sounds a lot more like that. The blending of the two styles is essentially where metalcore comes from, which is why it's such a controversial genre in many ways as it's such a wide spectrum of stuff like early Trivium where it's very much taking more from the metal half, to stuff like Zao where it's very much on the core half.

Really I think it comes down to influence more than anything else. I don't really see anything heavy as being innately metal, as much as I don't see something non-heavy as not being metal (ie latter day Opeth). A good rule is whether you can easily draw a through line of influences back to something like Deep Purple or Sabbath.

It's a shame the Metal community went through the phase in the 2000s of "everything I dislike is metalcore, and metalcore I like isn't metalcore but but metal", really. Though I assume it was partly a defense mechanism after the 90s happened where everyone's label tried to get them to sound like Limp Bizkit.