“There’re as many ways to suck as there are to rock. There’re bands like Akoma and Starkill that make watered down, lowest common denominator crap. There’re can’t-be-arsed bands like Green Bastard that sound uninterested in their own music. And there’re the inept enthusiasts, of which newcomers Dusius might be the patron saint. This band clearly love what they do, but most of it is truly, genuinely bad.” We are bad, and that’s good. We will never be good, and that’s not bad.
“Have you ever been away from someone for a while, whether a friend, family member, or former love interest, and when you reunite, that person has changed dramatically? Was it because they cleaned up, got their shit together, lost or gained weight in a healthy matter, or otherwise became an outrageously successful person without you? Or did you see them with a beer belly, receding hairline, on their third divorce, and you try to find a nice way to cheer them up while thinking in your head, ‘What the hell happened to you?'” Absence makes the heart grow fatter.
“As anyone whose late teenage years were lost in a fog of Jägermeister and regret will tell you, lessons learned the hard way often stay with you the longest; fuck things up badly enough and you won’t repeat the same mistake again anytime soon. There are, however, a few hardy souls upon whom this principle is destined to be forever lost—people to whom common sense and reason are just meaningless buzzwords dreamt up by the establishment. People like Chris Barnes.” Fight the power!
“Listening to Shifting.negative makes me want to apologize. To all members of Aborym, and particularly mainman Fabrizio “Fabban” Giannese – I’m sorry for whatever conditions existed in your lives that caused you to think creating this album was a good idea. I also want to apologize to curious listeners, who may have seen Aborym’s past works compared to Anaal Nathrakh and Blut Aus Nord and assumed Shifting was another misanthropic, industrial black metal romp.” The apology tour has begun.
“Let’s play a game of ‘guess the genre!’ We have a band with a nondescript, vaguely fantasy-sounding name. Google betrays it to be the Ghanese word for ‘heart.’ The album name is Revangels, which I’m guessing is a contraction of revenge and angels? That seems likely, but I choose to believe it’s about angels that have become groupies for deceased drummer The Rev, instead because that’s more clever than the alternative.” Show no symphony.
“December is a brutal month for us lowly reviewers. Between unreasonable demands for End of Year lists from our monstrous editors to unreasonable Christmas wish lists from our equally monstrous children, we get yanked in every direction. To make matters worse, all the good bands have finished issuing their albums and we are left sifting through the muck and the mire, desperately trying to find something that will boost our average review scores” Second prize is a set of steak knives.
“My short tenure with everyone’s favourite Angry Metal website has already changed my views on music in profound and mysterious ways. Forming an opinion on an album used to be instinctual; I either liked what I heard (and thus listened to it repeatedly), or I did not. I have since realized things are not quite so black and white. What happens when faced with an album that is not enjoyable? Disregarding it is not an option. As great as it would be to write “this shit stinks” and call it a day, such a review be in rather poor taste and probably land me squarely in front of HR.” Ask HMG how that went….
“Reviewing is not a complicated process. We listen to a promo album the same way an average listener would, with our heart and gut, gauging our emotional state during each separate song and the album as a whole. Aside from that, we analyze from a more clinical point of view, weighing factors like originality, history, and experience of the band, the skill of individual members, and production quality. We weigh all the good against all the bad like Anubis and his feather, but every now and then an album comes along that doesn’t seem to have any flaws.” The reviewing game is not for the squeamish.
“Commercialized metal is one of the strangest and most unnatural phenomena our beloved genre has gone through. I’m not talking about metal that happened to get mainstream recognition, by the way. Even Metallica, with the most lucrative metal act in history, started off as a thrash metal band like any other and only gained widespread fame after 5 albums. I’m talking about bands that seem to have been created or molded precisely to sell metal to the masses, like Amaranthe or Sonic Syndicate.” The vogue of metal.
“I’m sure we can all agree that if it wasn’t for the geniuses, the mavericks, the inventors, and the experimenters of this world we would all be living in a grim and destitute place consumed by darkness and destruction. If the likes of Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leonardo Da Vinci did not exist, where would we be today? The same can be said for the advancement of our beloved metal. With open arms we embrace those who experiment, those risk-takers who take the form forward, the advance guard who pave the way for copy-cats to follow. As the pioneers surge ahead into a glorious vista, The Chronicles of Israfel wobble and hobble with the wives and children at the baggage train near the back, drunk from last-nights ale and crippled with a mind-numbing fear.” One step forward, three steps back.
