“But I like my metal loud. It just sounds better to me.”
This is bar none the number one reaction I get from fellow headbangers, who after they read one of our articles, go off in a frenzy and measure all their record’s dynamic range only to discover they almost always prefer the hyper compressed albums over the dynamic ones.
Not surprising. In fact most of the time, their results only reinforce why the Loudness War exists in the first place. Let me explain.” And explain he does!
It’s that time again, everybody. Liveblogging Eurovision.
Yer Metal Is Olde! is a recurring thing that we’re using to fill up space while we scramble around looking for reviews of new material that is worth reviewing. The idea was spurred on by the swath of amazing and classic records that are turning 10, 20, or 30 this year. It’s crazy to think that all the stuff that we worship is really as old as it is. Time moves quickly, but these classics never seem to lose their shine. Still, their enduring quality doesn’t change that your favorite metal is fucking old. Note: our focus today, Ulver’s Bergtatt is actually only 19 years old, but it was recorded in 1994 and for some reason I thought it was released then, too. Once I’d written this retro-review, I discovered that I was wrong. While it makes it less Olde, it’s not so much less. And it certainly deserves recognition.
Cast your minds back to a time when metal music was not cool. Nay, indeed, a time when metal was anathema to all that was considered to be “chic” and “in.” A time when your favorite bands were actually encouraged by the music industry to play slower, cut their hair, and write sensitive lyrics about their childhoods. Yes, this unfortunately really happened. Our semi-irregular feature “90s Metal Weirdness” focuses on albums released between 1992 and 2001 and which we all probably would rather forget. — AMG
Gather ’round Internet travelers. Take a seat, and warm your hands by the fire. Load up that Rhapsody CD or maybe Nightfall in Middle-Earth to set the mood. In this new, but probably semi-recurring feature (unless there’s a mutiny), Angry Metal Guy will review things he thinks are awesome but that most of the world thinks are “nerdy.” Or geeky. He can never get those two straight. Anyway. The point is that he’s going to drop probably fairly infrequent reviews of random nerdy stuff that he loves because it’s his website. Or think of it like this: he’s the DM. And therefore, he can. Quit your moaning and roll initiative…
“When Dave and I founded Metal-Fi, we were prepared for many things, but the one thing we weren’t prepared for was that Angry Metal Guy would get well, angrier.” So begins the first in a series of cross-posting articles about production and sound dynamics in heavy metal from the boys at the excellent website Metal-Fi, called “Angry Metal-Fi.”
Yesterday, I discovered that I’m on Twitter. And so I took to Twitter and made some pretty lame updates, as I’m wont to do. I tweeted YouTube videos that I think are better than the new Ihsahn record (Helloween’s “Mr. Torture,” Dr. Dre’s “Deeeez Nuts,” and Meat Loaf’s epic “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer than They Are“). Then I started listening to Iced Earth.
Recently, we dropped a review of the new Carcass record Surgical Steel, that eviscerated our daily records in terms of number of visitors and was an all around awesome record. With amazing cover art, a really great name and a few pretty ballin’ tracks, Surgical Steel is an album worth owning. As you can see from this picture above, it comes in several formats. It comes on MP3, on vinyl, there’s a digipak and jewel case CD. Hell, there’s even a cassette. Wait. What? A fucking cassette!? Nuclear Blast Records is releasing their most hyped release of the year on a motherfucking CASSETTE TAPE!?
Norwegian former metallers have released their new album Messe I.X-VI.X via Bandcamp and their store today. Garm put up a message on the website announcing its release. That’s how we all found out. We live in interesting times.
For those of you unaware, July is always the slowest month for releases. This has to do with the fact that major labels basically shut down for the festival season, releasing live records and DVDs, but rarely new albums. In fact, I suspect that only shitty records get released during this period by most record labels; though that is entirely speculation. In any case, July tends to be a bit of a weak month and 2013 is a weak year, so that doesn’t say a lot for any possible Record o’ the Month right now. Still, that might be a bit misleading, as we had a few records that came out in July that were worth your time. One in particular blew away the competition…
