TOP 50 ALBUMS OF THE 90s: Part I

I love big fuckin' lists.  I've done a similar list like this for the 2000s four years ago, and I had a blast doing it.  Most of you may know that I run the big month-long Album of the Year poll at the Metal Archives, and this year I've decided to introduce mid-year polls with broader categories.  The inaugural one this year is on this particular subject was going to be the best of the 1990s before the pre-poll decided to do a genre poll instead, but I mapped out a potential 90s list anyway just in case and decided that my top ten wasn't nearly broad enough to give a full scope of how excellent metal was as a whole during this decade, so fuck it I'm gonna do another Top 50!  Metal was arguably in its most fertile creative period during this era, with the advent of extreme metal truly taking off and seeing huge advancements in death and black metal, power metal finally truly coming into its own and breaking fully away from the more nebulous speed metal of the late 80s, thrash was in its waning years but the more traditional acts released some of their absolute best during the early years of this period (and those who didn't were busy getting more and more extreme and turning into death metal), etc.  More traditional metal may have taken a huge hit this decade, but the variety is off the charts and extremity was explored in ways that the 80s could've never dreamed of.  This is fun because there's a lot more hindsight involved here than with the aughties list, because I was born in 1990 and very few of these albums are things that I was into at the time they came out.  And so with that in mind, we're going to take a trip down my own path here, look through my eyes and see what I consider to be...

THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 1990-1999

You guys know the rules by now.  Full lengths only (which sucks because Suffocation actually landed with TWO EPs in the top 50 when I first did this list and Blind Guardian released the best live metal album of all time during this era, but it's an arbitrary distinction I always give myself so you'll have to deal with it), and metal only, because nobody reading this cares about how much I also love dumbass Fat Wreck skate punk from this era.  Anyways enough metashit, let's get on with it!

50: Iniquity - Five Across the Eyes (1999)  

I know that their 96 debut, Serenadium, is generally considered these brutal Danes' zenith, but there's some intangible quality about Five Across the Eyes that I don't think I'll ever fall out of love with.  Part of this is purely nostalgia, because this was one of the first ultra-dry tech death albums that I ever really heard and I was instantly hooked all those years ago.  Those of you who are the perfect age to remember those early flash videos of the early 2000s might remember one that made the rounds on Ebaumsworld and such under the name of "Death Metal Karaoke", where it was just some goofy joke where gibberish lyrics flew past the bottom of the screen while death metal played.  Well the track used for that was "The Bullet's Breath" from Iniquity's third album, Grime.  I wasn't really into extreme metal at the time apart from a few scattered bands, but something about it hooked me, so I fired up the old p2p networks and grabbed a bunch of random tracks from the band.  The ones from Five Across the Eyes are the ones that really stuck with me, and to this day I can't help but feel a rush of nostalgia from one of the first death metal bands I ever loved.  Apart from the nostalgia and the extremely dry production actually adding to the mechanical mania of the technical wizardry that this album revels in, one of the big things that helps this stand out to me is simply the fact that this features Mads Haarlov on vocals, who I have been saying for years is one of the absolute best death metal vocalists on the planet.  This guy is insanely underrated, carrying one of the most inhuman and beastly roars the genre has ever seen.  Most other great death metal vocalists at the very least sound like a human being, but Haarlov really doesn't.  There's something completely feral and bestial about how his incendiary voice punches through the music.  It all just adds to how little human element is present in this album, and that's something that would usually be a negative, but these guys make it work, and I'll always love it for that.  Also, side note: "Inhale the Ghost" is one of the raddest fucking song titles ever written.

49: Nocturnus - The Key (1990)  

It's easy to forget just how wildly ahead of their time Nocturnus was.  Death metal barely knew what it was in 1990.  Morbid Angel had only just codified how to truly divorce death metal from thrash the year before, most classic bands in the genre had either just barely gotten their debut out, and even if they did there's a solid chance there's still a lot of Slayer influence left over since the transition was still being hashed out at the time, but somehow in the midst of simply figuring out what the genre even stood for and sounded like, Nocturnus was busy upending all of the conventions and buttfucking all of the rules before anybody even knew what they were.  The Key still stands out today for sounding like almost nothing else.  It was already unheard of within the genre for the drummer to also be the vocalist, not to mention taking a style meant to be as brutal and primal as possible and adding in a full time keyboardist.  But not only did they do it, they did it better than anybody who has tried doing it in the years since.  On the surface these things can be kinda gimmicky, since Mike Browning doesn't sound all that different from most DM vocalists at the time and the keys don't really ever take the lead with their own melodies and instead just play swelling chords in the background for atmosphere, but that atmosphere added so much to the unending brutality of the riffs themselves.  These blasts were almost Sandoval-esque in a time when he was one of the only guys who could truly call himself the best in the genre, and the forward-thinking rule-fucking helped pave the way for tons of bands in both the prog death and tech death scenes in the future.  Context certainly matters when judging this album, sure, but even with the context of the time stripped away, this is just incredibly written and perfectly performed death metal that became a cult classic for a damn good reason.

48: Skyclad - Prince of the Poverty Line (1994)  

Skyclad are rightly known as the forefathers and flat out inventors of folk metal, and for my money, their undisputed peak of their career happened in 1994 with Prince of the Poverty Line.  They were extremely prolific during this decade and have tons of great albums, but all of them are flawed in some way, usually the simple fact that they have great beginnings and ends but mediocre middles, and honestly Prince of the Poverty Line is no exception.  Simply put, this one has the strongest strong songs and the least boring weak songs out of their entire career.  I'm not kidding when I say that this could easily land a whopping thirty points higher if every song was as good as "Civil War Dance" or "Cardboard City".  The former is quite easily my favorite song of their entire career, featuring one of the best build-and-release moments in the entire scope of heavy metal in general in the intro, some of their downright meanest riffs in the chorus, and some of the most venomous and evocative lyrics Martin Walkyier would ever pen.  I've heard Skyclad described as "the most aggressively British band ever" and this album is a great example as to why.  There's so much downtrodden, filth-caked urban misery just oozing out of every second, with a stiff, biting sarcasm permeating the record.  At this point in history, Walkyier hadn't adopted the more melodic voice he'd champion around Irrational Anthems, here still carrying the biting snarl and bitter snark he had in Sabbat, and it works so well with the "brown" feeling this album couples with pure righteous anger.  The fiddle finally became an inescapable aspect of their sound on the previous album, but here the interplay with the nasty, dirty riffage is simply the best it would ever be.  This is that perfect nexus in time when they were both folking and rocking instead of just folking.  They weren't going to tackle a song as heavy and menacing as "Gammadion Seed" ever again in the future, and if you want to know what truly pure folk metal sounds like, this is 100% the album I'm going to point you towards, every single time.  "Take your partners for our civil war dance / Open season on the underworked and overpaid".

47: Motorhead - Overnight Sensation (1996)  

One thing that should surprise nobody is that Motorhead is going to make more than one appearance, and I'm not even worried about spoiling that the other entry is going to be Bastards.  Everybody should be able to see that coming.  My internetical pseudonym for the past 14 years is "BastardHead" and what the fuck do you think that's a reference to?  Lemmy and crew were definitely on fire in the 90s, with no less than four albums that easily deserve a place and their classic canon alongside their 70s and 80s material, and Overnight Sensation is easily one of the best of the post-classic lineup era.  This one stands out for several reasons, one of which being that this is the album that finally ended the decade long experiment of the band having two guitarists, finally bringing them back to the power trio format that made them famous in the first place and solidifying the lineup of Lemmy, Phil Campbell, and "The Greatest Drummer in the World" Mikkey Dee that would persist until Lemmy's death nearly twenty years later.  The other being that this is probably the purest and best blend of the band's sleazy Little Richard influenced rock n' roll and their pure molten heavy fucking metal.  Lemmy has always been of the mind that Motorhead is a rock n' roll band first and foremost and all of the punk and metal influences are secondary, and honestly most of the time he's not wrong.  But for a brief period in the 90s, there was absolutely no denying their titanic heaviness.  Listen to the high speed assault of "Civil War", the monumental "Shake the World", or the actual-goddamn-Motorhead-trying-thrash of "Them Not Me" and tell me that they hadn't fully embraced their place in the metal pantheon by this point.  There's plenty of old time rock sleaze here still as well, with the title track, "Murder Show", and "Crazy Like a Fox" being the standouts in that regard, and "Eat the Gun" mixing the two styles in such a way that it sounds like Chuck Berry joining a metal band.  Basically every song is a standout and a perfect example of why Motorhead was so fucking good at what they did.  People complain that they just wrote the same song over and over again, and anybody reading this should know better than that by now, but there's no denying that they had a signature sound regardless, and Overnight Sensation is just another in a long line of examples as to why they never really needed to stray too far from the path they had beaten.

46: Demolition Hammer - Epidemic of Violence (1992)  

Demo Hammer is simply one of the most brutal thrash metal bands to ever exist.  It's barely even a contest.  I'd say with little hesitation that Epidemic of Violence is the closest that thrash can get to becoming death metal without actually stepping over the line.  Seriously, the first minute of "Skull Fracturing Nightmare" alone is likely to snap your goddamn neck based on soundwaves alone.  Almost nobody else can throw such a veritable whirlwind of riffs at you for as long and as incessantly as these guys can without blurring into a white noise of brutality.  The amount of hooks that this beats into you with a steel hammer is fucking unreal, there are so many memorable riffs and songs that it's almost unfair.  Honestly I could probably describe this album best by just listing song titles and letting you fill in the blanks.  "Skull Fracturing Nightmare", "Orgy of Destruction", "Pyroclastic Annihilation", "Omnivore", they all just feed into the fact that this album is a purely destructive force of nature with no real motive other than the wanton destruction of anything that finds itself in its path.  Pure chaotic neutral metal.  It's here to destroy and that's all it needs to do, for better or worse.  Probably the best part of this is that it fixes the muddy production that holds their debut, Tortured Existence, back from being almost exactly as good.  This'll probably be the shortest entry in the whole series because I really don't know how else to describe this beyond "it's complete destruction in musical form".

45: Type O Negative - World Coming Down (1999)  

This is honestly a really, really hard album to listen to and talk about.  It's so bizarre to think that Peter Steele has been dead for almost a decade now, and how he seemed to be doing better than ever before at the time when his past drug abuse finally caught up to him and killed him, because World Coming Down absolutely sounds like the last gasps of a dying man who gave up on living long, long ago.  The band famously refused to play anything from this album live because it reminded Pete of the worst time in his life, and listening to it really hammers that home, because World Coming Down is just pure fucking despondent hopelessness at every turn.  Type O was also famous for their sardonic wit and black humor they'd inject into every album, but this was the one time where they seemingly went fully mask off and just gave the fuck up.  Any humor present here is presented similarly to how a suicidal man on the edge of a bridge would dryly chuckle when a well meaning onlooker would tell him that life is worth living.  Of their entire oeuvre, nothing is more hopeless than World Coming Down.  This is just dirge after dirge after dirge of ugly, meaningless, destitute misery, broken up only by short interludes meant to mimic the last minute of somebody fucking dying.  I can't source it right now but I feel like I've read somewhere that Pete had to leave the room after hearing the finished version of "Lung" for the first time because it was such a horrifyingly realistic portrayal of a man's last desperate breaths while surrounded by his wailing family.  I believe it.  If you've ever suffered through depression, a lot of this album sounds familiar, even if you've never heard it before.  It's ugly and empty, just long stretches of downtrodden nothingness with extremely brief flashes of beauty that are almost impossible to appreciate when mired in the bog of self loathing.  It's like laying half-submerged in a landfill, lungs on fire, consciousness fading, and then looking up and seeing the northern lights.  I know I'm going to make this really long, but there's a section of Noktorn's review for this album that just perfectly encapsulates what makes it so great much better than I ever could, so bear with me here.  "...depression is much more an abstract, featureless misery than it is something beautiful. The riffs flawlessly express this: amorphous, languishing collections of lethargic, dissonant notes, with just a fragment of minor key melody to give a trace of emotion to it And that's all there really should be, as that's all there is during periods of depression: a trace of emotion, more a memory of what it's like to feel than any feeling itself. But the more incredible thing they're able to do is in the openly melodic segments, with their bittersweet beauty that fits the New York goth style and allows us all to look into it. This beauty isn't a celebration of a depression, but a celebration of beauty in ugly places. It's the beauty in natural disasters, in inevitability, and most importantly, in the fact that you, yes, you, will not be remembered after you're gone. Type O Negative celebrates our insignificance, how non-existent the footprint each one of us leaves on our world will be. This is the musical equivalent of standing on the edge of the river at night and looking longingly at the city before you, surrounded by people, and yet the loneliest person in the world. That is beauty." 

44: Running Wild - Pile of Skulls (1992)  

God damn do I need some levity after that.  And luck would have it, one of my all time favorite bands makes their first appearance at this point.  This is another one that's completely unsurprising if you're familiar with my writing, but yeah Running Wild is definitely going to show up more than once as well.  I've long said that Pile of Skulls is actually one of their weaker albums from their classic period, but they were so fucking good from 84-95 that even one of their weaker efforts from the time is good enough to find itself ranked as one of the best albums of the decade.  I call this one of the weaker ones purely because the token "just okay" tracks this time around are probably the least interesting of their career.   The title track could've been a total stunner but it feels like the chorus is just empty, like it needed more backing vocals or bigger chords in the back or something, because as it stands the simple palm mutes hold it back.  And don't even get me started on "Roaring Thunder", which is easily the lamest butt rock track they ever crammed into a raucous speed metal album.  I always thought "Uaschitschun" was a big misstep on Port Royal and I like a third rate copy of it even less.  So if I've got bad shit to say about the album, why is it even on this list?  Well the answer to that is simple: the good songs are among the best they'd ever write.  The combo of "Chamber of Lies" into "Whirlwind" is one of the best album openers they'd ever pen, "Fistful of Dynamite" is one of the best hard rock songs they'd write, "Lead or Gold" seemed to perfectly predict the Thilo Hermann era with it's wild gallops and triumphant lead lines, and "Jenning's Revenge" is one of their catchiest and most underappreciated tracks of the era.  But really, you know the real reason this album is held in such high regard.  It's not a surprise at all, but "Treasure Island" is arguably Rolf's absolute peak as a songwriter, with every single second of its 11 minute runtime being fucking iconic.  Even the corny spoken word intro is inseparable from the main song, which itself features some of their best riffs, potentially the best chorus they ever wrote, and one of the most impressive extended soloing sections Rolf ever laid to tape.  "Treasure Island" really is the quintessential Running Wild track.  Every single thing that makes them one of my all time favorites is found here in spades, from the infectious hooks to the wailing solos to Rolf's hilariously thick German accent mangling every third word (turns out "toad" is pronounced "twahwd").  I can't recommend it enough.  Just like Skyclad's entry up there, the good songs here are so fucking good that if everything was as good as them, this would rank like thirty spots higher.

43: Napalm Death - Harmony Corruption (1990) 

And now we're back on the brutality, because fuckin' hell is Harmony Corruption a menacing album.  This is another one that I tend to forget came out as early as it did, because it sounds like it came fresh from the heyday of death metal instead of the first year that anybody other than Death and Morbid Angel knew what the fuck they were doing.  The fact that Napalm Death found their way to death metal via grindcore instead of thrash gave them a very distinct character that most of their contemporaries lacked.  They already employed blast beats as a standard part of their repertoire, they were already used to the wildly chaotic pace and structure of these songs, they already tackled pure extremity from a slightly different angle.  They didn't get here by playing Slayer or Kreator faster and faster until they finally crossed the threshold, they got here by taking one of the angriest and most filthy styles of music and simply made it heavier and more hellish.  It helps that this helped usher in the stable lineup the band would more or less run with for the rest of their career barring this being the last album Mick Harris would drum on before being replaced with Danny Herrera (and also Jesse Pintado leaving fifteen years later but nobody replaced him and Mitch has been the sole guitarist ever since so it's barely a difference really).  This newfound cohesion would really shine through in how tight these songs are despite their inherently chaotic nature.  I think the real glue that helps this stand out as much as it does is the introduction of longtime vocalist Barney Greenway, whose incredibly deep and vicious growl was leagues away from Lee Dorrian's frantic shouting, pushing them even further into full on death metal and helping them become the enduring legends they became as opposed to the flash in the pan originators of a different style.  The immediately recognizable touch of Morrisound Studios and Scott Burns also helps the push into clear death metal.  I'm probably making this sound like this is good solely because they shifted from grindcore to death metal, but that's not what I'm getting at here.  What I mean is that they entered death metal when it was a burgeoning scene and immediately stood out for having a sort of dutch-angled left-of-center madness that their contemporaries could only dream of.  This is a very hurried, frantic, and chaotic whirlwind of riffs and aggression that has easily stood the test of time as possibly their best album in a career loaded with great albums.

42: Sodom - Better Off Dead (1990)  

I know the conventional wisdom is that Sodom's peak in the 90s was the unfairly brutal Tapping the Vein or their initial comeback of Code Red, but for my money, their peak was actually Better Off Dead, the one that's more or less unfairly forgotten thanks to being sandwiched in between two of their most popular albums (Agent Orange and the aforementioned Tapping the Vein).  I always joke that the 80s ended in 1992, and this here is one of the reasons I say such a thing, because this is ironically one of the most unabashedly 80s albums Sodom ever wrote.  When most thrash bands were either getting more technical or more groovy, Sodom bucked the trend by, oddly enough, just sorta regressing back to the early/mid 80s for inspiration.  While Megadeth was busy shredding our faces off, Sodom instead reached back to more simplistic inspirations, namely Tank and Motorhead.  There's a lot of punk and hard rock influence to be found here, most notably on their covers of "Turn Your Head Around" and "Cold Sweat", the enduring classic "The Saw is the Law", "Resurrection", and one of their most underappreciated classics, "Stalinorgel".  That's not to say these lighter influences completely usurped their trademark manic thrash, not by any stretch.  "An Eye for an Eye" stands right up there with "Nuclear Winter" or "Agent Orange" in terms of opening cookers, and I'd put "Shellfire Defense" and the entire b-side on equal footing with anything else they ever wrote.  This is without a doubt their most underrated album, and I sometimes consider it to be their best album period.  It's just the perfect amalgam of all of their influences.  It's got the insane thrash they rose to prominence with, a heightened punk sensibility (which admittedly they've always worn proudly), plus heaps of Motorhead and early 80s NWOBHM.  It's the musical manifestation of not giving a fuck.  Angelripper clearly didn't give one single shit about keeping with the times and instead just indulged himself on his old favorites and did what he did best.  

41: Gamma Ray - Power Plant (1999) 

I've actually softened on the Scheepers era of Gamma Ray quite a bit in recent years, but there's still no denying that when Kai Hansen resumed his rightful place as the singer, they took off in a way that few power metal bands ever managed.  Their streak from 1995-2005 is completely fucking unreal, with all five albums encompassing that span being stone cold classics, and their three albums that were released in the 90s stand out a little bit ahead of their 2000s counterparts simply because Kai's infuriating habit of stealing riffs and melodies left and right hadn't really started yet.  I struggle to rank this trio of albums sometimes, because they're all fairly similar in their strengths and weaknesses.  Power Plant, like the other two, runs a little bit too long and has a filler track or two that I could really do without (this time being the too-dorky-even-for-me "Heavy Metal Universe" and "Hand of Fate", which has a phenomenal chorus but the rest of the track is pretty meh (and also has one of the earliest examples of Kai ripping off his heroes with the first verse being a dead fucking ringer for "Dissident Aggressor")).  But like always, their good songs are so fucking good that it just flat out doesn't matter in the end.  The a-side is pretty much flawless, with "Anywhere in the Galaxy" being one of their most bombastic and intense openers, "Send Me a Sign" being one of the most achetypical power metal anthems, "Gardens of the Sinner" being one of the most epic openers to not actually open an album, "Razorblade Sigh" having one of their coolest soloing sections, "Short as Hell" being an awesome groovy experiment that works perfectly, et cetera forever.  Special shoutout has to go to "Armageddon", the closing epic that was actually the first power metal song I ever heard, if you can believe it.  That fucking chorus is on a whole other level, and the fact that they were able to keep up the pace for nearly nine solid minutes and never once get boring is a feat unto itself.  Without a doubt one of the best power/speed metal albums Germany would ever crank out, and that's with the knowledge that the scene is going to be represented a few more times as this list goes on.  It was a really fertile time for that scene, without a doubt.

And that's all for part one!  I'll be doing this the same as I did the 00s feature a few years ago, so check back in two days from now for the next installment!

Forlet Sires - Holy

Nothing else can stop Meteor

Honestly I feel like the main reason Forlet Sires hasn't caught on the same way Tchornobog has in recent years is purely because they lack Markov's innate ability to relentlessly promote, because this Swiss quartet is playing more or less the exact same idea with a very similar level of quality and yet seems to be pretty widely unknown, and that's a shame.

Holy isn't my usual jam, but there's a lot here to like regardless.  It's a bit of a double edged sword with its succinct length, being only 40 minutes long (which is a perfect sweet spot for metal in general but this particular type of stretched out atmoblack/doomdeath usually lends itself well to a more expansive experience) so it never wears out its welcome and it always feels like it's not much of an investment to give it a relisten, but there are surprisingly few standout sections despite the consistently high level of quality, so each relisten is breezy and simple but leaves little distinct impact beyond "the whole thing is pretty good".  And even then, that's not a bad thing at all, it means the entire experience is consistent and well done, but it does make it hard to write about and articulate why it resonates with me so much.

I think what it is is that there's a very boomy, bassy feel attached to these songs which would typically be presented in a much more thin and atmospheric way, similar to one of the things I like so much about Tchornobog.  That's not to say that atmosphere is diminished as a tradeoff for riffs and heaviness, merely that the ethereal spaciness of the songs work extremely well in tandem with the tumbling percussion and morbid tremolo riffs.  The vocals help as well, never screeching and instead sequestering themselves to a low growl, adding in more of that gruesome morbidity that keeps the songs from floating away.  There's a lot of give and take, with the two longer tracks indulging in the  post rock influence intrinsic to all bands of this style and the two shorter ones spending more time being crushing and doomy, but the two influences play off of each other very well and spend most of the runtime working in perfect harmony.

There's very little to dislike about Holy, it twists and turns through inspiring soundscapes and the crushing inevitability of death.  Like how Chrono Trigger feels like the most epic RPG of all time but actually only takes like 12 hours to complete, it's both expansive and truncated and crams a lot of ideas into a short amount of time.  If there's any problem here, it's really just that it flies by so quickly and leaves surprisingly few lasting melodies and sections in its wake.  I've found myself returning to it multiple times over the last week or so though, so clearly it's doing something right.  Count me as impressed.


RATING: 89%

Golden Ashes - Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer

I really like this band name okay?

My first thought upon hearing Golden Ashes was "I feel like this is trying to be Summoning but actually black metal."  My second thought was "No actually this just sounds like fuzz trying to gain sentience."  My third thought was "This has to be a one man project, no way several people signed off on this lazy piece of shit."  My fourth thought was "Huh actually I can't stop listening to this even though it's objectively super fucking basic."  My fifth thought was "Oh shit wait this is the guy behind Gnaw Their Tongues."

Now, I'm not familiar with Gnaw Their Tongues really, at least not beyond the incredibly basic knowledge of knowing that the name is super cool and that the dude behind the project (Mories, going by his real name here, Maurice De Jong) tends to focus on experimental noise in a black metal context.  Golden Ashes here is a bit more straightforwardly black metal, but it retains both the "experimental" and the "noise" by simply being mega lo-fi and distantly atmospheric.  There are synths that carry the melody throughout each song, but they really just play one chord for a whole note each measure and change up two or three times each section while the drums tick away meaninglessly and the guitars occupy some completely inconsequential space in the background as featureless distortion. 

That's really all there is to say when it comes to the music itself.  It's very basic, almost offensively so, just ultra-green lo-fi atmoblack with no real outside-the-box thinking behind that.  But despite that, I'm actually kind of enraptured by it.  Every song sounds more or less completely the same, they're all just blasting at the same tempo with quiet BM vocals and random buzzing guitar lines with prominent synths in the foreground that don't play anything beyond one or two notes at a time, but it's just constructed and presented in a way that I can't help but find endearing.  "Drifting Slowly Through the Portal of Sorrow Towards the Void of Death" stands as the only song (to my memory at least, I could be wrong because though I do like this album, it kinda lacks staying power) that stays purely ambient the whole time, and as such it's pretty clearly the best one simply because the soundscape isn't cluttered with shoehorned-in metalisms.  What this sounds like to me is if somebody had Summoning described to them poorly and then tried to emulate it, like an ESL speaker who can write with perfect English grammar but misspells every third word.  Like, it's got the basic aesthetic idea of Summoning down perfectly but something got lost in translation and ol' Maurice here thought they were still a metal band and tried to just kinda cram black metal tropes in along with the epic atmosphere. 

Regardless, it's well done despite how brain dead simple it is.  I think that speaks to how good of a songwriter De Jong is, because he took basically three basic building blocks and crafted eight entrancing songs out of them.  I said this lacks in staying power somewhat and that's certainly true, but I mean that mostly in the sense that I don't catch myself humming these melodies outside of actually listening to it, but I can't deny the magnetism that's drawn me back to Gold are the Ashes of the Restorer more than a few times over the last few weeks.  There's something here that I can't quite articulate, but it's something that I definitely really enjoy.


RATING: 79%

Concrete Funeral - Ultimum Judicium

STAB-STAB-STABBED

Thrash is an artistic dead end, we all know that, that isn't a hot take by any means.  All of the best thrash riffs have already been written (90% of them were written by Slayer at that), so if you're going to plant yourself firmly as a "thrash band" without veering into too much outside influence, the only way to really stand out nowadays is by just being as frantic and intense as possible.  And in that regard, the lads from the Texas of Canada excel in that regard.

Concrete Funeral is a new band, made up almost entirely of fresh faces in the scene, and if it weren't for vocalist Devin Schrum, they'd probably be completely pointless.  Musically there's nothing wrong with this, but if they had any average thrash vocalist they'd be just another rando in a scene that's both overcrowded and clearly dying.  They play extraordinarily heavy thrash in the vein of newer Testament or Sodom with drums that are ten times louder than usual, and they keep the pace as high as they can as a general rule.  So really there's nothing much that makes this stand out on its own, but it's quite competent and a fun listen every once in a while.

But like I said, they have the X factor with Schrum's vocals.  I don't know if I've really made it clear before or not, but I absolutely fucking adore when thrash employs vocals that sound almost inhuman in their venomousness.  More or less the only thing that keeps me from completely writing off Havok nowadays is just how completely manic and insane David Sanchez's vocals have gotten over the years, and Schrum hits basically that exact same plane of complete insanity with his voice.  He utilizes some absolutely savage lows, recalling some of the more beastly ideals of out-and-out death/thrash like The Crown, but his true ace in the hole is his mid/high range voice.  He sounds fucking feral, like he's biting his own throat out of his neck and vomiting it directly onto your face.  The sheer vicious acidity of the vocals absolutely knock the album a full several pegs above where it would sit with a more generic vocalist and add so much to the latent intensity of the riffs themselves.

Unfortunately, while the vocals do carry the album, they don't make the album completely amazing on their own.  Musically this is a very "ok" album, hitting all of the thrash tropes in the exact order you'd expect to hear them, and no amount of flashy solos or double bass can really break this out of the hole it dug for itself by simply playing by the rules of thrash.  I've said before that we as fans of metal have unfairly moved the goalposts for thrash over the years, and I still believe that.  Something can play by the rules and still kick ass at it, and Ultimum Jucidium is a great example of that, because I do think this is a good album and definitely something worth listening to, but I'd be lying if I said the brazen lack of innovation wasn't a bit of a disappointment, and the fact that there are only three truly standout tracks and two of them are at the very end ("Drown", "Carnival of Contradictions", and "Stabbed to Death") is a also a bit of a bummer.  I'd say this isn't worth skipping by any means, and is definitely something I see myself coming back to as the year grinds on, but I don't see it ever truly breaking out and becoming a clear favorite on the year.


RATING: 77%

Horizons Edge - Let the Show Go On

The missing apostrophe is driving me fuckin' nuts

I told myself that since I'd been shoveling all of my power metal promos into my dump-feature lately, that the next one to roll through would get a full review in order to keep things balanced, but Horizons Edge's third album here is making me regret my decision somewhat, because this is, in a way, wholly indicative of my overall problem with modern power metal nowadays.

What I mean by that is that the individual parts here are all excellent.  I have absolutely zero qualms with how these songs are constructed and performed.  Let the Show Go On is a very proggy take on Stratovarius styled power metal, with loads of pummeling double bass that frequently break into odd, off-kilter rhythms, wild and flailing keyboard solos, frequent shifts in tempo and mood, and soaring vocals that also act as a punch to the gut.  On a surface level, everything is on the up-and-up.  There are some real bangers here like the opening barnburner, "A New Day Will Dawn", "In a Moment", and the ever-popular cover choice, Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero".  It sounds like Lost Horizon, Angra, and Dragonforce all got together for a supersized writing session, and that's awesome.

But of course there's a catch, and I've said it a thousand times by now, but Let the Show Go On falls victim to the Achilles Heel that seemingly all but one or two power metal albums per year have fallen into ever since Gamma Ray and Rhapsody fell off their games.  Once again, modern power metal routinely delivers great tracks hidden in mediocre albums.  Those tracks I mentioned are all very good, but the rest of this album is just a blur of meaningless noise.  It's very, very dense, with a metric fuckload of things going on at any given moment (this is where the Dragonforce influence comes in), but like the Star Wars prequels, what the hell is the point of any of it?  Pick out any given ten second snippet here and you'll likely be floored with fretboard wizardry and keyboard whirlwindery, but it never actually feels intense.  It's just emotionally empty, a veritable avalanche of proggy riffs and hooks that routinely fail to land.  It's merely sound that evokes nothing at all, easily fading into the background and doing fuck all to grab you outside of the handful of good songs.

The one and only consistently interesting thing is Kat Sproule's vocal performance.  She takes a very androgynous approach to her voice, completely eschewing both of the typically "female" styles that saturate the style.  She bucks both the operatic cooing of Tarja Turunen or Simone Simons and the throaty ferocious wailing of Doro Pesch or Noora Louhimo.  Nah, instead she just sings in a very typical power metal style, her femininity becoming a total non-factor in the band's identity, instead presenting themselves as a solid, cohesive power metal unit instead of having her emulate one of the two most influential women in the style and making her vocals louder than everything else by a magnitude of sixty.  And this works solely because she has a great voice.  She's very reminiscent of Timo Kotipelto, and this is exactly the kind of band she belongs in.  Make it heavier or more symphonic and it just wouldn't work.  She's by far the highlight.

Unfortunately she can't save the boring instrumentals, and on the whole Let the Show Go On is simply not worth seeking out.  There's a lot of stuff here but almost none of it lights the fire in my belly that the best bands in the genre do.  Certainly doesn't help that, like apparently every power metal album must be by law, it runs nearly an hour long.  I just do not understand the incessant need to cram in as much material as humanly possible on every album, because this shit does not hold interest well enough to justify the length.


RATING: 48%

Orbstruct - Phobos Rising

Big meaty groovy death metal

This one threw me for a loop right at the start.  "Venus" opens with a quick vocal passage before the music starts, but I could've sworn I was about to be treated to a fucking massive breakdown based on those vocals.  I find myself here encountering trouble articulating what the fuck I mean by that, but I guess the vocals here just sound kinda deathcorey at times, and I realize now that I have no words to describe how that's different from regular old death metal vocals.  They sound... I dunno, more lung and less throat?  Does that make sense?  Either way, I'm not meaning this in a negative way, I think the sound of Orbstruct's debut, Phobos Rising, is fucking massive, and the vocals are just one component of that.  I can't seem to find a whole lot of info with regards to where this was recorded or who was responsible for mixing/mastering/producing the whole thing, but I give a lot of credit to this album's effectiveness to whoever was behind the knobs on this one, because this is a gargantuan wall of sound that just falls on top of the listener with the weight of an ocean. 

Beyond how simply fucking huge Phobos Rising sounds, it's equally effective in it's simplistic nature.  This is by no means a "stupid" album, as I'm so fond of referring to shallow releases, it's just single-minded and uninterested in technical complexities.  This gruesome twosome from Ukraine waste no time with jangly atmosphere or mindbending theatrics, preferring instead to just waltz into the room and headbutt everybody to death.  This is the sort of death metal that I always kinda hoped Obituary would've actually sounded like with their heavy emphasis on groove (instead of just being slow and boring for like 25 straight years).  This isn't overtly doomy like the slow sections in Autopsy or Asphyx or something, here the groovy elements are much skippier and full of vigor.  There's a very pugilistic sense of directness with these tracks.  Check out the intro of "God's Gun" or "East of You", or the fucking wicked breakdown section in "Utopian".  This is still death metal to the core, no bones about it, but many sections are presented with such a barbaric, single minded focus on one-note chug-savagery that I just can't help but feel like these guys are bloody-jawed cavemen. 

That's not to say the tropes of traditional death metal are eschewed entirely here, there are numerous sections of frantic blasting and Vader styled tremolo riffs, they just tend to shine the brightest when the reign in the tempo without losing focus on ferocious intensity.  It's at precisely this moment that I remember who Orbstruct reminds me of, and that's the Dubaite Nervecell.  While Nervecell tended to be a pretty stock and merely decent band on the whole, they had one huge standout moment on their sophomore release, Psychogenocide.  The last 45 seconds of the last song on that album were among the most underappreciated seconds of all 2011.  The outro of "Nation's Plague" was fast, simple, and heavy.  Just pure brutality in a simplified form that devastated me from the first listen and became the only reason I even remembered that fucking band eight years later.  Phobos Rising is like a full album of those 45 seconds.

The only real problem with this album is that it's kinda samey on the whole, and the only real standouts have already been mentioned.  "God's Gun" and "Venus" are excellent songs, and "East of You" isn't too far behind, but I still have trouble recalling the rest of the album.  But honestly that's not really a gamebreaker, because on the whole this is a very good album that I can definitely see myself revisiting more than a few times as the year goes on. 


RATING: 85%

Necrotombs - Embalmed with Rotten Flesh

SNORE

This is pretty much the perfect example of the okayest album ever.  Necrotombs is the solo project of Xerberus, currently the bassist of Stigmhate and the ex-bassist of several other bands you've never heard of.  His second album here, Embalmed with Rotten Flesh is perfectly serviceable and by no means bad in any way, but it's also completely unremarkable and completely not worth listening to. 

That's pretty much all there is to say about it, which is sad because that's only three sentences and two of them barely have anything to do with the music itself.  It's just that there's so little here worth commenting on.  This is orthodox death metal with no new ideas executed perfectly competently.  I can't really give a whole lot of praise to any particular aspect of it.  There are moments of interest here and there, like the heightened thrash influence of "Born from a Corpse", the back of of "Emptiness of Solitude" where the vocals break from the traditional deep death metal growls and switch to an insanely loud yell, there's the relentlessly heavy grooves of "Frozen to Be Eaten", but all of those moments are barely more interesting than the moments surrounding them and even so they're not particularly great.  If there's anything that might sum up what this album sounds like, it's that it sounds like everything and nothing at the same time.  The first time I ran through this, I got a lot of Cannibal Corpse vibes, the second time I realized I was mistaken and it was actually much more akin to Entombed, then the third I was convinced it was more early Pestilence I was hearing, then the fourth I realized all of those were wrong and it was actually Autopsy, and then et cetera forever.  This isn't because Necrotombs takes the best elements from all the best classic bands and utilizes them all in a way that's so seamless that it sounds like something else entirely.  No, this is because this album is so fucking bland and faceless that it can sound like whatever you want it to sound like depending on where your mind is at at any given time.

There's nothing to talk about here.  This is regular ass death metal with no defining features and no excitement.  The riffs are all bog-standard entry level thrashy death metal with Obituary styled stomps, the drums hit all the usual beats you'd expect for a band of this type (though they're not particularly blast heavy, though that could be because Xerberus simply isn't a drummer), the vocals have a throaty van Drunen approach, and hey this all sounds great on paper but in practice it's just wholly forgettable.  If anything, the one thing that truly stands out as different are the two instrumental tracks, which are significantly longer than the rest of the songs and contain riffs that could've easily gone on the rest of the songs without anybody noticing.  They don't feel like songs that are instrumental for any artistic reason, or like these riffs were written with that express purpose, or like these songs were finished but so unconventional that vocals just wouldn't fit anywhere.  Nah, they just sound like collections of riffs that the dude didn't know what to do with so he just hucked 'em all together with no vocal track and called it a day.  There's just no reason to listen to this, competent as it may be.


RATING: 50%

Black Kirin - Nanking Massacre

War is not cool

I don't like Sabaton.

I know that's a really weird way to start a review for an extreme metal band out of China, but hear me out, I'm going somewhere with this.

Beyond the obvious problem of their songs just not being very good, it's the grand philosophical approach of Sabaton that grinds my gears.  Mainly, I just don't fucking like war and I like the idea of turning it into a bouncy pop metal institution even less.  Warfare is an easy enough topic for metal bands to cover, and if you're a band like Sabaton it's indeed quite possible to choose specific subjects that fit the atmosphere of your music.  The Battle of Thermopylae?  Hell yeah, you can easily make a rousing metal song out of an ancient conflict that spawned an underdog story that persisted for nearly 2500 years.  The problem is that Sabaton doesn't stick to that, and instead they very frequently reach to much more recent conflicts with nothing cool or badass about them.  It feels like such a fucking slap in the face to look at horrible crimes against humanity, excessively grimdark stains on human history like The Great War, The Invasion of Normandy, or the fucking Final Solution and turn them into pulsing major-key 80s aerobics metal anthems.  I don't want a god damned Disney version of the fucking Holocaust holy shit are you kidding me?  One of their only genuinely good songs ("Ghost Division") is a rousing, triumphant, fist-pounding jam about motherfucking Rommel rolling the tanks into Paris.  They're constantly blasting this happy-go-lucky and completely uncritical soldier worship and these ultra-jingoistic battle anthems and it's made them unwitting icons for the Wehraboos and DEUS VULT shouting racists of the world.  I hate their tone deaf bouncing idiocy and I hate their stupid shitty songs.  Fuck them, seriously.

I bring all of that up so I can contrast their proud dorkery with Black Kirin, a band that tackles the horrors of war from a much more appropriate angle.

Nanking Massacre is the complete tonal opposite of the kind of shit I was just raging about, because this is bleak, nihilistic, hopeless, mournful, and just god damned painful.  This is obviously a concept album about The Rape of Nanking, easily one of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed, and the fact that the band hails from the country that was on the receiving end of this tragedy (instead of gee I dunno rockstar Swedes or something) gives this a lot of extra weight.  There's a sense of genuine sincerity in the total hopeless anguish that permeates a track like "Da Qu" or the mournful reflection of "Thousand Years".  I understand that art is subjective and always open to interpretation, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the correct way to go about such a subject.

The album begins with an ambient intro, the kind of thing I normally hate because it's just a timewaster 99% of the time, but "1937" is a rare example of when one works.  Opening on air raid sirens and wailing children is cliche, sure, but it so perfectly sets the stage for the horrors to come.  I think it was kind of brilliant to fade that intro track out into another quiet section, because "Da Qu" doesn't really start the carnage.  No, there's another minute or so of suspense, and I think that works so well in the context of trying to put the listener in the shoes of the victims of this horrible tragedy.  The warnings came, the civilians retreated to the safety zone, and then came the tense, petrifying quiet as they awaited the Japanese army to take the city.  The first minute of the song sounds like an album outro.  It's over, the battle is lost, the city is in ruins, and the innocent are left to pick up the pieces.  But then, when 1:08 hits, Code lets out this fucking horrifying screech that stretches out over 25 seconds while the music picks up and gets more and more frantic.  The thing here is that the song never fully makes it to full on riff-salad savagery, instead staying mostly midpaced in the riffs with the drums occasionally picking up speed entirely disconnected from the riffs, while the strings and mournful clean vocals soar over the top and occasionally break down into discordant squealing.  It doesn't represent badass metal, it represents violent and destructive chaos.  For the citizens of Nanjing, the end truly was the beginning of the real horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese war.  It was done, Nanjing had fallen, the only ones left were non-combatant civilians who wanted nothing to do with slaughter, and what followed was a month and a half of inhuman torture, rape, and murder.  The way the album starts perfect represents that tentative calm after the initial bloodshed, only to be later hit with a flood of violence that seemed to never end.

This is also the only track on the album where the most controversial aspect of the band's debut returns, the Huadan vocals.  For the uninitiated, Huadan is a role in Chinese opera meant to express a young, innocent girl, and they were just really bizarre and out of place on National Trauma (an album that was otherwise Album of the Year material but severely hindered by their inclusion), only truly blending in with the music on like two tracks.  Here though?  No, they sound accusatory.  That voice traditionally meant to represent flowery innocence only pokes through for a few seconds during the most intense section of the song to spit fiery condemnation upon the war criminals currently turning the capital of China into a bloody crater.  It feels weird and wrong because it is weird and wrong, and it's here to remind you how weird and wrong this whole terrible venture was.  There's something similar on "The Song" but it's less obvious and feels less like the band is intentionally trying to conjure up the image of childhood innocence being ripped away in the midst of a whirlwind of inhumanity.

From there the album ebbs and flows until it mercifully ends on a mournful aria punctuated with occasional twangs of an acoustic instrument.  It perfectly encapsulates the uncertainty of the chaos around them at the time.  There are several extended ambient sections, both segregated into their own tracks and intruding on the few metal tracks as well, reminding you that the whole thing is a senseless, chaotic hellscape of nightmares that nobody was ever sure was going to end.  There are only three traditionally metal songs here ("Da Qu", "The Song", and "Wangchuan River") while the remaining four are fully ambient mood-setters.  Of the metal songs, "The Song" is probably the easiest to swallow for people who aren't here for the full experience and just want to hear kickass songs, because that one is by far the darkest and heaviest.  It features two extended ambient breaks but the other parts are so intense and pummeling that it almost defies description.  It's blasting, chaotic, hellsoaked barbarism expressed through the most death metally riffs the band would ever pen (contrasted with the more epic black metal that occupies the rest of their work).

Obviously though, I'm not quite as interested in simply headbanging my troubles away when listening to Nanking Massacre.  I'm here for the fully enrapturing atmosphere, and to that end "Da Qu" and "Wangchuan River" are far better.  Even so, all three of the traditional songs work incredibly well for what they represent.  The first perfectly showcases the panic and confusion of the terror as it begins, the second showcases the inhuman barbarity and the sheer extent of the war crimes committed on the Chinese innocents, and the third highlights the helpless destitution in the wake of the carnage, and the all-too-real fear that it may not even be actually finished.  And that's just the metal songs, the other four tracks are all sombre instrumental dirges in between the madness that always gives way to even further destruction.  In fact this is one of the only metal albums ever where I never have any intention of skipping the instrumental interludes, because without them the true feeling of panicked uncertainty wouldn't truly shine through.

I started this off with a small rant about Sabaton simply because they're immensely popular and most of my readers are surely familiar with them, and because I feel like Black Kirin is the complete polar opposite of them.  For Sabaton, they uncritically celebrate the heroics of warfare, the celebrity of valor on the battlefield, regardless of which side is conducting these campaigns (hence their occasional tone-deafness with making the Nazis the good guys, which come the fuck on dudes).  Black Kirin instead showcases the true human element of these wars.  Nanking Massacre isn't about battlefield heroics, it's about the mass slaughter of innocents once the battle is over.  Once the conflict has subsided and the chest-beating Bad Boys have their run of enemy territory, it quickly devolves into inhuman, callous destruction.  The true lasting effects of war have fuck-all to do with the superhero dogfighters and tank commanders, it's about the helpless innocents who wanted nothing to do with the senseless violence and get caught up in the crossfire, eventually becoming targets themselves as their lives are destroyed en masse.

With one of these approaches, you're looking at smiling heroes and ticker tape parades.  With the other, you're looking at thousands of naked innocent women and children casually dumped in a mass grave.  Maybe it's just because of my personal politics, but I think the making millions of dollars off the former is fucking insulting to the memories of the latter.  Nanking Massacre is a triumph of pulling back the curtain and screaming this is what you dumbasses are celebrating.


RATING: 95%

Skeletal Augury - Bless of Destroyed, Raped, Dismembered Flesh

Bloody raw

I had a plan a while back to do a sort of series where I'd choose countries that are notable in terms of population but have comparatively very little impact on metal at large (so basically everywhere except North America, Northern Europe/Scandinavia, Japan, and Brazil) and dive into their metal scene and see what it's like.  In doing research, I've found it's not quite as interesting as I was hoping, so I'm like 90% likely to just not bother with the idea at this point, but because of that research period, I've collected quite a few solid metal bands out of China that deserve some actual coverage.  Skeletal Augury is one of those bands, and god damn is Bless of Destroyed, Raped, Dismembered Flesh a ripping experience.

This album's main strength is also it's greatest flaw, and that's that it's very by-the-book.  Skeletal Augury play black/thrash and follow all the rules while doing it.  On one hand, this is a surefire way to be at the very least "good", since black/thrash is a hard genre to fuck up as long as you don't try to get too cute with it, so at the absolute worst this could've wound up just being boring.  Luckily, despite playing along to all of the genre tropes to the letter, there's enough energy and ferocity to keep it fresh and interesting the entire way through.  It takes a bit to really grab me, but from "Lord of Damnation" until the end it is just fucking dominant.  This revels in the primitive slop of the old masters like Hellhammer and Sodom, with an equal helping of the razor-sharp edge of slightly newer (but still old) champions like Nifelheim. Special mention has to go to Li Bai's drumming, which is surprisingly tight for how raw and nasty the album is on the whole.  Check out "Barbaric Realm", he's on another level compared to the rest of the guys on that one.

But like I said, all of this is a bit of a problem as well, because for most of the runtime this isn't particularly distinct when compared to most bands in the genre today.  Bless is a very shallow album with no twists or nuance in the songwriting to help it stand out as anything other than barbaric and vicious.  In fairness, that's all it needs to be, and it succeeds at what it sets out to do very well, but it does struggle to keep your attention at times thanks to how samey it is.  There are very few standout moments here.  "Black Hydra" sports a ridiculously frantic main riff that serves as the highlight of the entire album in my eyes, and "Stench and Twisted Lust" sounds like a lost Slayer track from around the Haunting the Chapel/Reign in Blood era, but apart from those and the few sections pointed out in the previous paragraph, this all just kinda does what you expect it to do and then dissipates in the sunlight.  It's a shame because I like this a lot on the surface, but it's not deep enough to really enjoy beyond that.

Despite that, this is a serious barnburner when it's on, and I've found myself going back to this an awful lot since discovering it.  I've probably made it sound worse than it actually is but that's simply because I find it's hard to really go in depth with this style.  It only really hits one note but that's all it really needs to do, and I'm not about to fault a band for kicking ass at the only thing they need to do.


RATING: 79%

Terrific Verdict - Wheel of Fortune

zzzzzz

As much as I may dislike so many bands from the country, I think you'd be a fool to not put Finland just outside the top five most important countries when it comes to metal.  Yeah they have nothing on their Scandinavian neighbors, Germany, US, or the originators of the style as a whole, UK, but like... they're right there.  In terms of classic and innovative bands, who else besides those previous five are in the running?  Japan, Brazil, Canada, and...?  They may be a punchline at times for so utterly saturating their country with shitty corsetcore pop metal but that only really proliferated in the first place because they gave the world Nightwish, ya know?  They pretty much have three entirely different subsects of melodeath that all spawned out of there, depending on whether we're talking about the style pioneered by Children of Bodom, Insomnium, or Wintersun, and if we mention that last one we can't leave out Ensiferum being one of the biggest folk metal bands ever.  I haven't even touched on the more gothic stuff like Sentenced or whatever the fuck Amorphis is, or Reverend Bizarre with their very distinct brand of doom that also spawned legions of imitators.  And if that's all too melodic and lightweight for you, they also have huge quality scenes for the more extreme subgenres like black metal (Sargeist, Horna, Satanic Warmaster, etc) and death metal (Demigod, Adramelech, Convulse, and of course, Demilich) as well.

It seems like the one and only area where Finland has always lagged behind has been thrash metal, and if you wonder why, just give a listen to Terrific Verdict.

I'm not gonna lie, the intro is probably going to be longer than the actual review here because this is so fucking boring and dumb that I had to distract myself by thinking of a dozen other bands before even getting to this one.  At its core, Wheel of Fortune is just super basic bay-area styled thrash with nasally snarly vocals and precisely zero good riffs or hooks.  Terrific Verdict are victims of the recent nostalgia craze where every old band that existed in the 80s thinks they have a shot at recapturing any glory they missed out on in the pre-internet era, and once again we have another band that left no footprint whatsoever during their initial run (only producing two demos) and came roaring back as a bunch of dudes in their 40s or 50s trying their best to channel their youth and instead just sounding like the metal version of a washed up pub band. 

"Washed up" is really just the best way to describe how this sounds.  All of these riffs and ideas are just shriveled husks of what could've been a decent mid-tier thrash release 30 years ago but instead are just clearly past their prime now.  Like check out the first riff on "Too Late to Love or Hate".  There's nothing wrong with that on its own.  It's pretty basic, but it's quick and it moves well enough, but it just feels like it repeats a hundred times and then it turns out that almost every riff sounds like that one.  They basically have two riffs throughout the whole album, that one and the main one on the title track.  A fast one and a midpaced one, every fast and every midpaced riff sounds the more or less the same, and I just don't want to fucking listen to this boring, derivative, ultra-green shit anymore.  Even the handful of bonus tracks of rerecorded songs from the demo era are lame, and I'm sure they actually smoked back in 1988 but thirty years later they're just neutered and uninteresting.  Almost every song is like three minutes long and they all feel at least twice that just because they're so repetitive and bland.

Actually ya know what?  Fuck it, I've listened to this thing twice now and I don't want to sit through it any longer.  I'm just gonna cut this short and post it anyway because I want my headache to subside.