Rolling Metal Thread 2010

No idea re grind, but I already know of two shows I'm going to next month: Monarch/Bloody Panda on 11/12 (though it's not listed on Cake Shop's website yet) and Blind Guardian/Holy Grail on 11/20.

Full BG tour dates:

11/19/10 The Trocadero – Philadelphia, PA
11/20/10 Best Buy Theatre (formerly The Nokia) – New York, NY
11/21/10 The Palladium – Worcester, MA
11/23/10 Metropolis – Montreal, QC – CANADA
11/25/10 Theatre Capitole – Quebec City, QC – CANADA
11/26/10 Kool Haus – Toronto, ON – CANADA
11/27/10 Royal Oak Music Theatre – Royal Oak, MI
11/29/10 Bottom Lounge – Chicago, IL
11/30/10 The Cabooze – Minneapolis, MN
12/01/10 The Garrick Centre – Winnipeg, MB – CANADA
12/03/10 MacEwan Hall Ballroom – Calgary, AB – CANADA
12/04/10 The Starlite Room – Edmonton, AB – CANADA
12/06/10 Showbox at The Market – Seattle, WA
12/08/10 The Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA
12/09/10 Henry Fonda Theatre / The Music Box – Los Angeles, CA
12/10/10 Marquee Theatre – Tempe, AZ
12/11/10 Sunshine Theater – Albuquerque, NM
12/12/10 Bluebird Theater – Denver, CO
12/14/10 Trees – Dallas, TX
12/15/10 Scout Bar – Houston, TX
12/17/10 The Orange Peel – Asheville, NC
12/18/10 The State Theatre – St. Petersburg, FL ***FLORIDA POWER FEST***
12/19/10 The Masquerade – Atlanta, GA
12/21/10 Lincoln Theatre - Raleigh, NC
12/22/10 Jaxx – W. Springfield, VA

Disappointed BG is skipping my city (open date and everything, aargh).

Meanwhile, it's becoming more and more apparent that the new Agalloch just might be my album of the year. It's growing on me something fierce.

Blind Guardian are like a step away from grind.

i'm looking for well known (not playing in arenas or anything remotely like that though) bands to play at a grind festival, if they are planning on touring the US already that usually helps immensely

I can ask around...drop me an email [pdfreeman at gmail dot com] with more info (date, location, etc.).

still rocking that display name, huh?

emailed you

Listening to Heaven & Hell's Neon Nights: Live in Europe now. It's a fitting capper to Dio's career: heavy as fuck, impassioned and powerful. Great set list, too, encompassing the whole catalog (three songs from The Devil You Know). I got the CD and DVD versions in the mail.

Today's successful auditions:
- Goth/black-metal/gloom-rock sweep of the Vision Bleak's Set Sail to Mystery, which I almost wrote off without listening due to the over-themed-looking cover.
- Gleaming speed-death romp from Dawn of Ashes, meaning I will try to make it to the Enslaved/Dimmu Borgir show on time to see them in their opening-opening slot.
- Very excited about the dark-folk compilation Whom the Moon a Nightsong Sings, albeit not on grammatical grounds.
- I'd written off Kamelot, Queensryche and Paradise Lost a while ago, but the new Kamelot album, Poetry for the Poisoned, is at least initially sounding to me like a combination of the things I once liked about all three.

Not so successful:
- Really liked the rawness of the music on the new Woe album; really hated the shrieky, monotonous vocals.

That Kamelot album is a good one, something I wasn't expecting. Their last couple didn't do anything for me.

Wrote about Blind Guardian on BurningAmbulance.com today; review of the new Electric Wizard coming tomorrow.

Don't be shy about interrupting me and EZ on the nearly-moribund Metal Listening Club thread, where I'm just going to keep posting stuff until somebody else cuts me off...

Today on BurningAmbulance.com, my thoughts on the new Electric Wizard album. (It's pretty great.)

Any word of a US release date on the ELectric Wizard? The import isn't too expensive (and it's downright cheap on iTunes), but if a domestic release isn't too far of I'll wait.

No idea. Figure early 2011, though.

I was hoping a date might have been in a press kit. Well, it's only a few bucks as opposed to double the price or something.

Just listening to the Mortemia album again. You know before you start it that's it's off-brand Sirenia, which some would claim was already off-brand Tristania, but I readily admit that I like Morten Veland's epicgothicdeathchoir thing a lot, and am perfectly happy to listen to him trying to perfect it in its own terms. In the abstract I'd have guessed I'd like it less without female lead vocals (the women are banished to the choir for this one, and he does all the lead croaking himself), but in fact that doesn't end up bothering me at all. This is an album of consolidation, not innovation, but I have time for that. I might even have a 2010 top 10 spot for it.

My inside source reports back that the EW disc is likely a January release through Metal Blade (they, not Candlelight, have the Rise Above contract now).

Thank you sir! Ordered the import this morning.

By the way, if for some reason you didn't buy the Judas Priest box set Metalogy before now, my local has it brand new on sale for $15.97. Yep, 4 discs and a DVD for that price. If you are interested and don't have a Bull Moose in your area, their website (bullmoose.com) has the same price.

Enthusiastic after-two-listens endorsement for folk-ambience-tinged battering Finnish black metal band Draugnim, whose new (second) album is called Horizons Low.

Also, damn, this Kamelot album is really good.

Today's BurningAmbulance.com review: the latest by Texas grindcore kings Kill The Client.

Listening to Wino's (mostly) acoustic album Adrift, released a couple of weeks ago on Exile on Mainstream. It's really great. It's actually more of a "drumless" album than an "acoustic" album, as quite a few tracks have overdubbed electric guitar solos, but he appears to be the only person on it. Shows that as awesome as his guitar tone is, he's not totally amp-dependent and is in fact a pretty damn good songwriter. It's certainly much less boring than acoustic records by, say, the Neurosis dudes have been.

I'm a little surprised to be saying this... but the new Disturbed actually isn't too bad. Got some pretty decent metal riffs and solos, and Rabbi Draiman keeps the awk-ing down.

Finally catching up and hearing the new Slough Feg album. I'm not as rabid as quite a few of you are, but I'm enjoying this well enough. I don't understand why anyone hates this stuff though, its kinda like hating desert. You can say you've heard better, but this stuff seems pretty difficult to actively dislike.

The Slough Feg really does have staying power, I'm enjoying it more now than a couple months ago. That Alan Parsons Project cover is killer.

And I actually like the title track off that Disturbed album.

I cancelled my subscription to Decibel last week. Since signing up in March I only received six issues - and three of those I had to ask for when they failed to show up many weeks after the due date.

I can't complain about the service of Mark at Decibel, he replied quickly whenever I contacted him and did whatever he could to help. But if I'm not getting my issues in the post, what's the point in subscribing? It's not like I'm in an awkward location - mail from the States takes only a few days to get here, usually less.

I don't know if this is a common issue for international subscribers, but in any case I won't be subscribing to Decibel again.

Finally catching up and hearing the new Slough Feg album. I'm not as rabid as quite a few of you are, but I'm enjoying this well enough. I don't understand why anyone hates this stuff though, its kinda like hating desert. You can say you've heard better, but this stuff seems pretty difficult to actively dislike.

― "I am a fairly respected poster." (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Herm Neuname ruined these guys for me.

I'm not going to be suckered into hearing another Disturbed album, I'm not going to be suckered into hearing another Disturbed album, I'm not going to be suckered into hearing another Disturbed album, I'm not...

It's good. But I like them more than most posters here.

I wrote about the latest Grand Magus album for BurningAmbulance.com today - they're signed to Roadrunner, but the album hasn't been released in the US and they're not even listed on the label's artists page...weird, right?

who did this agalloch "review"

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs909.snc4/72208_10150112133364816_663344815_7570148_1955142_n.jpg

someone on fb

man, just listened to the new agalloch. was all like, "this is a great agalloch record. nothing new but solid as hell" until the manuel gottsching delay pedal action kicked in!!

i refuse to listen until i get my own copy
that diagram is ridic

moody moog!

Thrones/Monarch/Trees was really great last night. Monarch's drummer didn't make it to the US, but Rob from Dark Castle is more than ably filling the spot. It was crushing.

Wow, Agrypnie! German elegiac melodic atmospheric black metal, with a vocalist somewhere between the customary black-metal rasp and the emotive howl of Lifelover. The new album is called 16(485) (with square brackets, but I suspect BBcode might screw that up). I can feel as tired of black metal as anybody else after a string of 9 or 10 gray-black blurs, but to me this is another striking example of somebody seeing "black metal" as a kind of sigil for the vast artistic potential of accepting the presence of darkness. Somewhere between 1349 and that last Nargaroth album?

not someone on fb, an agalloch posted it on his fb and i linked from that

Finally playing the Agalloch now. This as the Agrypnie go together pretty well, actually, although the Agalloch's version of "atmosphere" is more acoustic.

Winding down metal week at BurningAmbulance.com with a write-up on Interment, a Swedish death metal band that formed in 1988 but didn't record an album until this year.

BREAKING NEWS Lordi: the game for iPhone/pad/whatever free today /drudgesiren.jpg

And.....its predictably hilariously bad

Aesop found that diagram on RYM and posted it on his FB. And mine.

I have to listen more closely for that Nanotear Moog!

Enslaved live in Worcester: set too short, of course, but still magnificent. And I wonder whose doing it is that the house music while they clear the stage for Dimmu Borgir is all Dio? Crowd seems to be thinning a bit, but maybe they all just went to buy Enslaved shirts. Still lots of facepaint in evidence. If there were a table where you could make hats out of popsicle sticks or something, this would practically qualify as a kids' event. I feel bad that I left my 3yo daughter at home asleep.

"I have to listen more closely for that Nanotear Moog!"

There's 14 tracks of Moog for about 3 minutes in the middle of Blake Lake Nidstang. Hard to miss ;)

OK, Dimmu Borgir are pretty good live, too. "Gateways" is getting a pretty rapturous reception as I post, so maybe it wasn't a bad choice for a single after all.

Although I think the effect would have been way greater if they'd brought somebody to sing the female lines instead of playing them off recordings. And a couple violins, at least? One guy with two keyboards can sound like a symphony, but watching him isn't quite the same. Although he is wearing white pants, so obviously that's something.

It's like they're trying to be the black metal version of Angel.

http://www.heavyharmonies.com/bandpics/angel.jpg

Oh, nobody is going to mistake them for THAT. Polar opposite approach to grooming, for starters.

Also: driving home from the show, I had that Agrypnie album playing again. For the moment, at least, it seems like a serious album-of-the-year contender for me in a really strong year. Repeatedly and extendedly breathtaking in its scope. And I just saw Enslaved, and was playing Axioma Ethica Odini on the drive out, so it's not like they're rising out of a slush pile.