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It's interesting that Somewhere In Time is coming out as a firm favourite for many these days, I have vague notion of it being maligned/poorly thought of in general until very recently. It was the very first Metal album I EVER got, so holds a special place in my heart, but I will say that "Sea of Madness" & "Heaven Can Wait" don't rate very highly for me.

For me best is either Piece of Mind or Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

I think the only clanger on Piece of Mind is "Sun and Steel" - total skipper, hate the chorus - would have been a perfect album if they'd dropped it. I love "Quest for Fire" & "To Tame A Land" - top drawer Maiden for me, they've got it all. Outside of the just the tunes, I think the overall atmosphere, cover art and band promo photos all just capture that early 80s Heavy Metal vibe perfectly - before it became somewhat mainstream.

Yeah, while I enjoyed Belfast, it definitely wasn't the best show they've done here.

Kicked off well, but somewhere just past the mid point it started to slide and by the end i was bored and glad for it to be over. We did get a new song which was cool and i'm looking forward to hearing it on the new album, but it was after that point in the set that they lost momentum. Would have loved to have fortunate son or red alert for a bit of energy in the last half.

I'd say Limerick will be killer though, that end of week vibe.

Caught this in Belfast last night, was decent - really enjoyed Space Shepards & Cosmic Dead, but Cosmic Dead were far too loud - had ear plugs in (ER-20s) and my hearing is absolutely destroyed this morning, so attend at your peril.

That was my first time there (both attending & playing), thoroughly enjoyable and fantastic event with loads of great people. The sense of community and friendliness was unreal - just something you don't really seem to see in places like Belfast or Dublin.

Will definitely make the effort to get down again, even as just an attendee!

Anyone pick this up?

Pretty disappointing first couple of listens, Pepper's lost his voice and there's no real killer riffs to speak of.

It came back on in my car on my way home yesterday and I forgot I was even listening to CoC and thought to myself is this Monster Magnet or something?! Overall feels like the worst bits from Keenan-era rolled into one double album. Not sure why it needed to be a "double" album - bands seem incapable of trimming the fat these days and I don't think there's anyone orbiting around these legacy bands to actually tell them the truth. Not surprised Mike Dean walked.

I do really love 1990s CoC, but between the last show here in the Academy and the recent recorded output, it's tough to remain positive about them.

Enjoyed the show last year, they played Into the Lungs of Hell, 502, Mary Jane & In My Darkest hour from SFSGSW - just great to hear Young play those solos. I do rate his work on that album - he lent a George Lynch quality to the material and has the unfortunate timing of being sandwiched in between Megadeth's 2 best lead players.

I'd need to know the "theme" of these gigs before shelling out again, they've been doing some shows in the states with Chris Poland which would be absolutely unreal. 

Yeah, great show, Blaze in top form and super positive. 2 hours - you can't beat that. The whole Belfast matinee set-up was perfect - show started at 3pm, over at 5pm - I was fed and home for just after 6pm - it was amazing.

There's plenty of Sunday gigs i've never bothered with simply because the doors were at 8pm and the headliner not on until 9:30 - just can't do it with work early on a Monday- wish more promoters/bands did it like this!

Dire cover art altogether, whoever okayed that needs a slap.

The song itself is OK until the 'solo'/outro, fucking woeful. Holt's paid a bit too much attention to King's coasting in Slayer. I like the extended intro but the body of the song itself is very short stuck between that and the outro.

Yeah, agree with that - intro certainly was interesting, but it just descended into a stock Exodus "micro song" - if the track had been written with more of an expansion of the intro and the Pantera inspired Psycho Holiday outro section (2:35 onwards) it would likely be better. Dukes voice is just so generic it strips the whole thing of any personality.

Incidentally just finished Holt's book - didn't realise just how much he, Hunolt & Hunting hit the skids in the 90s/early 2000s - absolute depths of grimness.

But the book itself was pretty boring, a whistle stop tour of his life events, scant on any real detail or musical depth, candid about the drug use - but not much else worthy of note. Didn't even mention his failed auction for Machine Head. 

While I've always enjoyed a decent portion of the Exodus catalogue, they're more of an "ideal/embodiment of the Thrash Metal spirit" than renowned for their tunes - so there's a fondness for what they represent, "didn't get big enough to sell out/remained underground".

On the theme of nearly joining a band.

Back when RJD originally left Sabbath and was putting the original DIO band together, Jake E. Lee was in the mix to be the guitar player - they had some rehearsals, but when the opportunity arose for Jake E. Lee to join Ozzy Osbourne's band, he ended the collaboration with DIO and went with Ozzy.

A potential next in line for the DIO band was ex-Tygers of Pan Tang man John Sykes, though once RJD discovered that Sykes had unsuccessfully auditioned for Ozzy - he wanted nothing to do with him and went with Vivian Campbell.

Years later, when Def Leppard we're looking a replacement for Steve Clark, both Sykes and Campbell (along with Iron Maiden's Adrian Smith) auditioned for the spot, with Vivian Campbell being successful.

Given Campbell replacing Sykes in Whitesnake and playing in a later incarnation of Thin Lizzy, I've always wondered how the 2 felt about each other.

Similarly, according to Adrian Vandenberg - Vandenberg worked with Thin Lizzy for about a week in 1982, before leaving and Sykes joined. Funny how "incestuous" the scene was back then.

Don't think there's been any chat on this one yet.

It really did seem like for a while that either here, or on the aul MetalIreland, that there'd be a new Ulver thread every couple of months from someone who'd just discovered them.

I haven't seen any chat or hype about this new record anywhere, I've given it couple of spins over the holidays, and really just can't fathom why Rygg bothers anymore, or who this stuff is even for. I keep checking out the new releases and each time my enthusiasm diminishes a little more. I don't think there's been a decent full album since Shadows Of The Sun, I maybe enjoy a track or two on subsequent releases and I really feel like Childhood's End was the turning point. On paper some of the stuff has potential, like Scary Muzak, but the execution is weak and there's simply other people doing that kinda stuff better. Surely there's at least one decent full album left in the tank?

I get it, they're evolving, they're making challenging music, they're not a Metal band - but at this stage, it's just not very good music, it hasn't been for quite some time and I think the lack of any chat/hype around this new release is testament to that fact.

Were these guys ever relevant beyond the pages of MH?

Absolutely. They had a short, but intense run for about 4 years, Arc'Tan'Gent is an absolute cult classic and one of the best British Metal albums of the last 30 years - in ways they were way ahead of their time.

Yeah, magazines loved them , but they were one of the few bands who's material has actually stood the test of time when you revisit today, unlike nearly all their peers - go listen to Arc'Tan'Gent or the Omega EP - they should have been huge, all it would have taken is a few dates tour with someone like Tool/Deftones/Korn or a tour with an underground band with a bigger profile but similar sound, like Neurosis. There were trying to make a go of it in the pre Myspace era (back when Cannibal Corpse couldn't even draw 100 people in Belfast), the "old model" was still very much in play by the time they split in 2002.

The Off Kilter Enhancement album, with it's Neurosis Punk Metal vibe, pre dates the Post & Sludge Metal boom of the early 2000s and could easily pass for something released today. These guys had 3 albums out before the likes of Mastodon & Kylesa had even formed and were pursuing a sound like The Ocean, Amenra & Cult of Luna before those 3 even had put out an album.

The crowd at the Belfast gig was a veritable "who's who" of guys that have been playing in bands here since the late 90s. No doubt in part to the effort Et9 made to play here twice in their short late 90s/early 00s stint (when there were fuck all gigs up north), but also likely to do with the fact their output is genuinely groundbreaking - go spin Off Kilter Enhancement and remember it came out in the summer of 1999.

The hype was justified, I just don't think the wider UK/IE audience was ready for it at the time.

I hit both Dublin & Belfast. What was the numbers for Dublin? It only looked like about 30-40 people to me! Belfast was easily 70 or 80 in the room.

The difference in the 2 shows was astounding, basically the same performance, but the difference the crowds energy makes, not even to mention a decent lighting rig and proper/decent sound, is unreal. I did enjoy both gigs, Dublin was like watching a private performance in my living room, while Belfast was a proper underground gig - I think not having a bass player with them did make it slightly less of an event than it should have been, it wasn't noticeable after a whil, but it just would have been better.

I think Belfast was a fitting end to the tour for them and hopefully gave them a bit of hope after the previous 2 shows.

While I really enjoy their new stuff, I feel it lacks a bit of groove and atmosphere when compared to the Arc'Tan'Gent stuff - I'd dstill go see them again. and I'd love to hear some of the Omega EP material live.

Times for Belfast, Sunday 14th December @ Voodoo:

Doors: 7pm
Burner: 7:30-8:15
Earthtone9: 8:45-10pm

I'm keen to see Dublin times, as I reckon I'll drive down and catch it too!

For me, "Hell Awaits" is top 3, maybe even my favourite - my only small issue would be the production, I like the reverb and the separation of instruments, but overall its a little thin and lacking the punch/heaviness/depth it deserved, especially looking at their peers and what was out in 1985 - what they were competing with sonically. It suffers in the same way that "Killing Is My Business..." did until the recent remix/remaster.

"Haunting The Chapel" sounds better and you only have to listen to "Decade Of Aggression" to see how ferocious it should have sounded - but the riffs, themes, lyrics, darkness, all somewhat compensate. But Slayer have never really been a band with top drawer production/mixes.

Conversely, I've never understood any of the criticism levelled at "Divine Intervention", production/mix could have been better, but it's not particularly jarring/offensive and the material itself is like a distillation of everything that preceded it, the only real difference is that it's light on the Satanic type material, but they'd have been laughed out of the hall for entering into the realm of Satan in 1994!

It's mind blowing to me that a guy like Dez Fafara (Devildriver/Coal Chamber) has had a career at all, nevermind one spanning nearly 30 years. Coal Chamber, a combination of all the worst nu-metal cliches combined in a one unlistenable band and then the utter generic dross that was Devildriver - 14 albums the lad has put out, all dog shit - yet he's been a relentless fixture "on the scene".

A lot of the old timers are definitely guilty of just releasing for releasing's sake, as mentioned: Megadeth, Annihilator, Overkill, Testament, Exodus, Saxon - and there's plenty of others, all straying into that territory... they've productised the sound and settled into a release/tour cycle - I think when the amount of bad albums outweighs the good (see Megadeth as a prime example) it's starting to tarnish the legacy a little.

What's Overkill's magnum opus? Years of Decay, Feel the Fire? Because they're just grand.

Yeah, I'd say "Years of Decay" and "Taking Over", anything else I could live without - few good tunes here and there, but hardly essential.