Controversial Metal Opinions

[Juggz]

The interludes on Testimony are class, they fit the mood and pacing of the album perfectly.

Jugulator is an album ruined by pointless shit intros for every song which ruin the flow. There are great songs in there and I ripped it into protools to trim the intros off, it makes it a much more enjoyable listen.

[Carnage]

Agreed about Testimony, at least they were seperate tracks on the CD so I just excluded them. Resurrection's Embalmed Existence is the worst offender with that Krang-sounding bollox blathering between songs. Again, snipped them out when I ripped it. Aparrently they have a new album with the same shite on it.

[astfgyl]

Jugulator is an album ruined by pointless shit intros for every song which ruin the flow. There are great songs in there and I ripped it into protools to trim the intros off, it makes it a much more enjoyable listen.

Jugulator is a decent album. Haven't listened to it in a while but the sunshine always brings out the metal for me. Must give it another go.

On a  more controversial note I have a few questions for everyone: What is the heaviest music you know? I bet it won't be Metal for most. It also brings up the point again: What is it exactly that is Metal? The answers to that should draw up a bit of controversy. Are Godflesh Metal? Are 40 Watt Sun Metal? Are Nirvana Metal? And the answer is probably no, but why then do we all talk about them on Metal forums, and how do we decide what fits and what doesn't? Like I know Pet Shop Boys don't fit but what is the dividing line? Is it the guitar?

[Ducky]

Stuck on Testimony of the Ancients there as I haven't spun it in years and nope, want to frisbee it out the window with those utterly shite interludes

[Carnage]

Of course Godflesh are metal, what else would they be? 40 Watt Sun's first would be metal, haven't heard the second one, I believe they went a different route on that.

Heaviest thing I've ever heard would probably be early Swans or Neubaten, maybe Author & Punisher for more recent stuff.

[135150]

Heaviest thing I've ever experienced was the Prodigy live. They opened with The Day Is My Enemy and it was crushing

Honestly, it felt like being suffocated. The sheer weight of the bass and the general volume was complete sensory overload, it made Meshuggah's live show feel like Avril Lavigne

[Paul keohane]

Im not  mad about long intros before songs,but im a massive fan of Testimony and Necroticism,those intros are a huge part of those albums.

Yeah Prodigy live sound is massive,bass drum vibrating through your chest!

Stuff like early Godflesh and Pitchshifter were always put into the bracket of heaviest stuff around years back,i think its impossible to tell really.

[Eoin McLove]

As I understand it,  and I'm open to correction,  but Godflesh came out of the punk scene and many of its musical roots and even its ethos or thematic fixations are from there, too. JB grew up in a squat,  I think,  and was active in the punk scene,  notably with Napalm Death. Grindcore was a hardcore punk phenomenon but was influenced by death and thrash whereas industrial was purely a punk movement.  The likes of Throbbing Gristle came from the punk scene,  I think,  and was like a logical extension of the philosophy that anybody can be in a band,  even if you're ropey at playing an instrument.  They went further and didn't even really bother learning any technique and focused on the weird,  unpredictable noise side of it. Godflesh drew influence from industrial, and the harshness of grind too but slowed down to Amebix tempos,  and thus also Sabbath. They were growing out of the punk scene but the heaviness of their sound appealed to death metal and grind heads.

[Eoin McLove]

I think my point is that a lot of the harshness and extremity or heaviness tends to come in from the punk side whereas the actual musicality tends to come from the metal side,  which goes back to how the two scenes originally operated.  In this day and age the lines are very blurry but you can always follow the trail backwards.

[O Drighes]

On a  more controversial note I have a few questions for everyone: What is the heaviest music you know? I bet it won't be Metal for most. It also brings up the point again: What is it exactly that is Metal? The answers to that should draw up a bit of controversy. Are Godflesh Metal? Are 40 Watt Sun Metal? Are Nirvana Metal? And the answer is probably no, but why then do we all talk about them on Metal forums, and how do we decide what fits and what doesn't? Like I know Pet Shop Boys don't fit but what is the dividing line? Is it the guitar?

I'd assume there would be far heavier soundscapes among electronic music than among metal, but to achieve that level of heaviness in electronic music one probably needs to abstain from pretty much any other music quality as much as noise core did. I would rather question: does it need to be THAT heavy? That sounds to me like having a conversation with someone that SPEAKS LOUD ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE NOTHING IMPORTANT TO SAY.   

Nirvana were definitely not Metal. If one tries to define metal solely on music then he/she is already missing the point. In any case, they lacked the music features, the aesthetic and the attitude (not saying they didn't have an attitude, just not metal).  If it appeals to metal fans or if had been influenced either positively or negativily by heavy metal that's a whole other story. Opeth, Anathema, Alcest, Ulver, all these bands have both metal albums and non-metal albums and I personally suspect that they only appeal to metalheads today due to their members' metal background. I know zero bands that are as popular among metalheads playing similar music having no previous bonds to metal.

Personally I don't understand this pursuit of heaviness in the current doom or doom/death metal scene of today, it's as meaningless to me as Brutal Death Metal with machine drums playing flat blastbeats and linear fills from start to finish. A washing machine at work has probably more dynamics than the extreme of both those genres.

[Eoin McLove]

Couldn't agree more. I think some people take it personally when you say something that is heavy is not metal.  More often than not the ultra heavy stuff is coming from another source. Obviously there's a lot of mixing of styles that complicates matters but I think the influence of the ultra loud and ultra heavy phenomenon in death and doom to have crept over from the HC scene.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it's boring noise,  and that can depend on your own mindset at the time but generally over exposure.  If there's nothing behind the wall of noise it won't hold my attention for long (with one or two notable exceptions).

[Pedrito]

Im not  mad about long intros before songs,but im a massive fan of Testimony and Necroticism,those intros are a huge part of those albums.

Yeah Prodigy live sound is massive,bass drum vibrating through your chest!

Stuff like early Godflesh and Pitchshifter were always put into the bracket of heaviest stuff around years back,i think its impossible to tell really.

Agree completely about Necroticism. It really added to the whole vibe of that album, especially on tape.

[Mower Liberation Front]

The interludes on Testimony are class, they fit the mood and pacing of the album perfectly.

Absolutely.

[astfgyl]

The Doom thing of the last few years got very boring to me very quickly. It seemed to be more of a pursuit of tone than any musical thing and for a lot of bands, an actual good song seems way beyond them.

I've been listening to a lot of ambient type music lately and some of that can be very heavy, but still beautiful. I compare that then to something like power electronics which is heavy on the face of it, but only serves to annoy me for the most part. I find the "heaviest" stuff for me is generally to be found in electronic music of one sort or another but I can't find any joy in the very hard stuff like gabba or the other extreme types. The dubstep idea seemed like it had promise for 5 minutes but got old and derivative very quickly, with a distinct lack of actual good songs, much like the stoner doom thing.

Listening a lot to Moby's Animal Rights album recently and that is really great energetic stuff and I would call that very heavy even though a lot of it is more punk or new wave style than metal of any kind and seems very basic in some ways but it is certainly heavy. Something like Face It from that album is very crushing. October Rust is also very heavy to me, as heavy as anything else really but on the face of it, it seems fairly soft.

Edit: Had Depeche Mode - In Your Room on in the car earlier and it's as heavy as anything while I'm looking at it that way, but obviously DM don't make the cut for discussion in this section, even though they do use a bit of guitar at times. So again, what is the dividing line?

[mickO)))]

Im not  mad about long intros before songs,but im a massive fan of Testimony and Necroticism,those intros are a huge part of those albums.

Yeah Prodigy live sound is massive,bass drum vibrating through your chest!

Stuff like early Godflesh and Pitchshifter were always put into the bracket of heaviest stuff around years back,i think its impossible to tell really.

I always hated the way they only played bits and pieces of songs live and then also played versions that were different from the albums. Saw them a load of times live was good but never amazing then I saw that as Download 2006 in a tent and it was insane they had to stop playing at one point to tell people to calm down because the crowd was going crazy people were climbing up the steel columns holding the tent up then jumping off into the crowd.


The first 2 Berzerker albums also has the Necro Carcass style intos.