Just a quick addition to my post about DTP’s Ghost & Deconstruction.

On the third or fourth listen to Deconstruction (I was adamant that I would like it given time), it did hit home with me. While I don’t think it will ever be my favourite of the DTP albums, and I won’t change what I said about it being The New Black II,  it has started making a bit more sense to me.

On a separate note, while I do have Machine Head’s Unto The Locust sitting at home, I still haven’t had the chance to listen to it  when I am near a computer. Hopefully I will post a review sometime this week…

After having finally listened to Opeth’s new one, Heritage, I must say that I was not overly impressed. The new material, while technically good, just seems to be missing something.

The overall style of the album is fairly light, reminiscent of their cover of Deep Purple’s Soldier of Fortune from Ghost Reveries, so those looking for traditional Opeth heaviness will be disappointed. Anyone also looking for the melancholy beauty of Damnation will probably also be let down, as the album sinks its roots deeper into folk than anything previously heard from Opeth.

Maybe it will grow on me, maybe it won’t. Only time will tell…

Nothing much happening currently for me metal-wise, work has been keeping me busy and have barely listened to anything.

On the up side, my pre-order of Opeth’s new album, Heritage (Special Edition of course, and hopefully I got in early enough to get the limited edition brass coin), should be in my sticky little hands sometime early next week as it is due to be released on Friday. I will be hammering my ears with it quite a bit and will let you know the results.

Then I should have Machine Head’s new one, Unto the Locust (once again, Deluxe edition all the way), in about two weeks time since it is due out in 12 days. Once again, much hammering of the ears shall follow.

Well, I am sitting down right now having just listened to Ministry’s Dark Side of the Spoon for the first time.

Now, before I get right into it, I would like to say that I am a huge Ministry fan, but, and this is a big but, sometimes they have gotten it really REALLY wrong. Pre-Land of Rape and Honey they have a couple of decent tracks, but most of them suck, personally. Filth Pig took me a while to get, but even now I don’t think it is one of Reverend Al’s greatest achievements.

But of all the Ministry albums since Psalm 69, I would have to say Dark Side of the Spoon is hands down the worst. For an album that was meant to be dedicated to former guitarist William Tucker who had committed suicide earlier in the year (the year being 1999), it sounded flat and in some places unfeeling. The attempt to diversify into jazz and melodic elements sounded like an abortive remix of Mr. Bungle meets the then-unwritten Animositisomina.

After listening to it, all I can say is how grateful I am that since then Al has released Houses of the Mole, Rio Grande Blood and The Last Sucker.

Having been listening to a few of Al’s albums recently, I am both looking forward to, and dreading, the upcoming album Relapse, which is currently slated to be released before Christmas. He is now clean, sober, vegetarian, and apparently writing music heavier and crazier than anything he has done previously. I guess we’ll find out more in a few months time…

Taking my first listen of a 2009 album called The Ichthyologist by Giant Squid.

Interesting stuff to say the least. At times reminiscent of Mastodon, Black Sabbath and Kyuss with a rolling thunderous groove, at other times mingling Jethro Tull, Faith No More, System of a Down, Alice Cooper and Lard, and then at other times mellowing into ambient orchestral.

Also of interest is a guest appearance by Anneke van Giersbergen (previously talked about here for her work on the Devin Townsend Project album Addicted!) on track 6.

With a sound so hard to put in a box, to sum the band up I would have to say they are like a stoner-doom version of Trinacria with a hit of Mike Patton inspired craziness.

Taking my first? (maybe I heard a track somewhere and that’s why I got the album?) listen to Xerath’s debut album from 2009 (funnily enough, entitled “I”, as in the Roman numeral 1).

An interesting mix of death, tech and symphonic going on from these guys, swinging at times from orchestral movie soundtrack, to Meshuggah, to Therion, to Mushroomhead, and yet (for the most part) holding a cohesiveness that defies their range. Gotta say, I’m kinda hooked. And having only made it through to track six out of a total ten on this album, I’m already inspired to grab their second album (even more funnily, entitled “II”, you know, the Roman numeral 2).

And just think, there I was bitching last week about nothing new impressing me. Gotta say, it feels awesome to be proven wrong.

It’s been nearly 10 years now since I’ve had a decent surrounding of metal friends. I still have a couple around the place, but most of my metal buddies moved on in life, so I don’t really have that much chance to get into bands I haven’t heard before, whether new or old. As lame as it sounds, most of my new-found music comes from Facebook ads or hearing a track during a movie.

These days, the only way I have to really expose myself to something different is through the Fear Candy CD’s that come with Terrorizer. I tried Metal Hammer a few years back, but they felt a little too mainstream to me. Now to my disappointment, Terrorizer is getting harder and harder to find around my area. There are still a couple of places to get it, but they are well out of my way.

So, I’m sitting as I type this listening to Fear Candy 94, and thought I would share with you all (OK, I am rubbing my ego a bit there, there’s no-one out there but me) what I thought of a couple of tracks I heard, a couple of articles I read, and generally just waste my time.

Anyways, I (once again sounding quite lame) have finally heard some Arch Enemy. Not bad I must say. Also liked the Dark Castle and XII Boar tracks. But of all the tracks I listened to, I think Subversion were the stand-out. I only figured out the other day (via the Terrorizer I am reading right now) what djent was (more lameness from me, despite having listened to a number of bands who supposedly fit the genre), and as one reader stated “Whatever the djent scene is doing in 2021, Meshuggah will be doing in 2013″. On the flip-side, sometimes the greatest flattery is through plagiary. Anyway, back to my point, Subversion have now had the incredibly great honour of making it on to my “Must Check Out” list.

Now, since it looks like I am about to go off on a complete tangent and waste even more of your time and mine, how about I sign off instead, and let you do something much more productive, like Google your own name, or pick lint out of your belly button.

Devin Townsend is a musical genius, I am sure many would agree with me. But geniuses can go astray like the rest of us, and sometimes they fuck up, and sometimes they pull sheer awesomeness out of their asses, Devin Townsend included.

I am a huge fan of his work with Strapping Young Lad, even if their self-titled album felt a bit rushed and flat at times, and The New Black felt like Devin was contracted to do another Strapping album, but wanted to do something else entirely. I love the heavy emotion of Ocean Machine. Physicist was awesome despite Devin himself believing it to be the lowest musical point in his career, and although it took me a couple of listens to enjoy, Terria is a beautifully slow but crushing album, too. But then, there was Devlab (I still haven’t actually made it all the way through, I tune out far to early for that).

With his new set of four (five? Ghost II is on its way) albums, he has (for the most part) proved his genius yet again.

First of all, Ki. The beginning of the album has an insidious creepiness to it, feeling almost like Devin wrote a set of crushingly slow and heavy tracks (much in the vein of Terria or Goat from Heavy As A Really Heavy Thing), and recorded them unplugged-style. Then, sometime around Ain’t Never Gonna Win…, the album flips from creepy to relaxed (Lady Helen, Quiet Riot) to a very country moment in Trainfire. The title track has a slowly growing, soaring beauty, and with its technical guitar work and, personally, some of Devin’s greatest clean vocal work, makes for quite a standout track.

Addicted! was something different altogether. Featuring the amazing vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen (who has worked previously with so many diverse and interesting acts, including Napalm Death on Smear Campaign) and an uplifting pop-metal combo that I think only Devin could make work, Addicted! would have to be my most listened of the DTP albums. If I had one complaint for the album, it would be that van Giersbergen is under-used. I think a few more tracks could have benefited from her taking more of a vocal lead instead of just adding backing vocals.

Then there is Deconstruction. This album felt like it should have been called The New Black II, hearkening back in more ways than one to the SYL album that sounded like it was trying to be more than a SYL album. For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be an album more crushing than the hardest moments of Heavy As A Really Heavy Thing and more deranged than Alien after watching some of the “making of” videos posted at hevydevy.com, but then on finally listening to it, the album comes across somewhere between Ziltoid-style rock opera and what little I have heard of early Therion. It still may grow on me yet, but so far I am not convinced.

Last but not least in the series we have Ghost. Ghost has an amazingly beautiful earthy ambiance to it, and while it sounds furthest from what I would consider a typical Devin Townsend album, he manages to pull it off quite well. The album feels in some ways like a partner to Terria, but where Terria is the embodiment of mountain and earth, Ghost is the musical voice of the forest floor. I am certainly looking forward to Ghost II (due out next month) which will be another nine tracks of Ghost-style material, albeit slightly darker from all reports.

Well, here I am at a beginning: the beginning of my adventure in blogging, the beginning of me as a social entity instead of a private person, and also the beginning of me going on about things that most people probably couldn’t care less about.

For those who want to know a little about me, I’m a professional web developer (and sometime programmer), I live not too far from Sydney, Australia, and I am into music, especially most things heavy (you’ll get to know what I do and don’t like soon enough).

Now, on to my point. The title of this post holds a double-edged sword. If you know your stuff, you have already guessed that this is in reference to a particular Mudvayne EP, or, for the point I am trying to make, more specifically the era in which it was released.

This era saw the rise of a treasure-trove of awesome bands: System of a Down, Skinlab, Spineshank, Coal Chamber, Mushroomhead, Incubus, Powerman 5000, Mudvayne, Sevendust, Rammstein, Deftones, Static-X, (hed) p.e., Taproot and there are probably a few I missed. And for those getting scared that most of those bands are “nu-metal”, just remember that at the time that particular moniker hadn’t gained momentum (at least in Australia) during the very late 90′s to mid 00′s. As far as I am concerned I don’t listen to nu-metal, however, I do listen to a number of bands that were wrongfully cast into a meaningless genre, or who have since moved themselves there.

Skinlab, Static-X and Coal Chamber, for example, are metal, no questions asked. Mudvayne I will admit have more recently moved themselves into the nu-metal firing line, but their early works were classics of the era. Limp Bizkit’s first album was a killer, but from their second onward, Durst’s ego seemed to grow far larger than their music. Incubus started with an early Red Hot Chili Peppers infused funk-rock/metal and now stand steadfastly in the world of hard rock. (hed) p.e.’s first few albums were blasting rants of rap infused metal with some seriously infectious tunes until label pressure made them tone it down, and where Limp Bizkit suffered from their lead singer’s ego, Jared Gomes’ ego seemed to fuel Broke and Blackout far beyond what their self-titled album even hinted at. Mushroomhead, despite rumours of piggy-backing the success of Slipknot with their mask-wearing antics (despite the band having been established, with masks, two years before Slipknot were to come together), achieved much with their dual-vocal attack, let down only after Jason Popson left and was replaced by a vocalist with a much weaker voice.

But this era also signified an end to the greatness of metal. Most of the new (and/or nu-) metal bands then and since just haven’t cut it for me. Killswitch Engaged sounded like a cheap knock-off of Soilwork. Marilyn Manson had a couple of OK tracks, especially their work on the Resident Evil soundtrack, but most of what they were about was too blatantly media-hungry for me. What I have heard of Trivium sounds far too familiar but doesn’t add anything new to the style.

The bands I find now are usually established bands that I had not been exposed to earlier on such as Killing Joke, Opeth, Acid Bath, and Porcupine Tree, or are bands that have promise, but are short-lived like Five Pointe O, or Trinacria.

In my search for more I started buying Terrorizer magazine a couple of years ago. Through them I found some more great and interesting bands: Kiuas, Sotujamala, Venomous Concept, but now it is becoming harder and harder to find in my area, so once again I’m left in ignorant musical darkness. Still, I hope there will be a day when a new band gets me excited, not because it is a super-group or a side-project or a solo effort or an old classic reforming, but an actual new band where no-one knows any of the members and they just have some new kind of awesome freshness.

Anyway, enough of my rambling for now, I hope I don’t bore you too much in my musical rants and reviews, and look forward to hearing your opinions when you have one to give.

Til next time…