Mordy's Metal Listening Club - New Albums Every Monday

contempt def giving my thrash description a bit of a slap upside the head, but this feels all stonery (in a good way). this is a complicated album

even more so on fuel of hell. and then the alice cooper "billion dollar babies" drum intro quotation in the beginning of blood song, oh entombed you are treating me all too well.

which is the first real death metal vibe ive gotten from this, tbh

closing out the album with much heavier stuff is interesting, heavens die is def back to the thrashy vibe, and out of hand touches on the death metal thing again (and is great). really dug this, thx pfunk

not going to liveblog the mastodon, no energy left, but i will report back

ok so maybe i lied a little, although im going to try to limit myself to only a couple posts on this one. first 2 songs are great, and then out of tuney intro to song three pulled me totally out of the mood, and in fact that whole song had some sort of vaguely crap nu metal vibe that did NOTHING for me, trying to get brought back into the fold w/song 4 and so far its working, but oh man that song 3 was a bad bad move.

def getting back into this but that last song (where stride the behemoths) was sort of Mastudvayne or something and i did not like it at all.

track 5 is all noodly noodly noodly and then gets ok i guess. little bit of a slump here in the middle, and then burning man shows up and pulls me back into the album. so fucking tight and full on, digging this as much as the first two tracks, nice and compact and focused.

ok this is the best thing yet, but i am noticing that the next song is 7+ minutes and getting worried about it. OH NO chorused guitar, which is almost never a good sign in my book, although now some atonal stuff is going on that might save it? ok no wait, now we are done wasting time w/the intro and back into the good stuff. digging the song, but for the first time the vocals kind of suck (well they might have on track 3, but that whole thing was imo a fucking misplaced trainwreck so). riffy stuff is great here, but yeah these vocals are full on crap and are ruining the song a little for me. SHUT UP DUDE.

trampled under hoof makes me kind of feel that there are heavier bands that do this stuff better than you guys. vocals continuing to grate on this one. some sort of half-assed sevendust thing here, which i swear is not a description i have ever imagined before and also to be clear sevendust is not a thing to aspire to.

ugh weird more chuggy numetally stuff going on in the intro to trilobite what the hell? this band is better than this, and whenever there is a chance for the instruments to do their thing w/o vocals that is really clear - and dare i say it there is some math rocky stuff here with all the swirling guitar tempo stuff. also a weird precursor to the new high on fire in some spots on this album, but hof do it a lot better - not in general, but when i hear it here i feel like skipping tracks and listening to snakes of the divine. mother puncher is alright. elephant man is ahowy but noooooodly + long silence followed by white noise? why? and btw overall i am not bagging on this album, i think there are some really high points and great moments, theres just some glaring stuff that drags it down a peg for me, def no leviathan.

didn't finish it yesterday, so I listened to the mastodon during my commute this morning.

not a controversial opinion but the drums are, by far, my favorite thing about this one. a great rhythm section outweighs most any band's sings for me and I really get off on the constant fills thing in general, so dailor's playing on this album is a total treat. improves everything around him in every way. and listening this morning brought back fond memories of me driving around and playing steering wheel drums to it. (though, unfortunately, there was not a steering wheel in sight today.)

btw, this is 100% otm:

i think the dumbing-down of his drumming is the worst thing that happened to this band.

as for the rest - as I said upthread, there's some riff salad going on here. the songs really do sound like a bunch of riffs they liked thrown together but that's the modus operandi for so many metal bands that I can't really hate. I do like the little build-ups they do frequently where everyone plays more increasingly more aggressively over a few bars and then they all drop into a slow, crunchy part. again, the drum fills add a lot here too.

vox don't add much but they don't detract either. (as they often do on later albums.)

anyway, this is still my fave mastodon. but blood mountain is the only one I have no use for.

lol alan we have the exact same thoughts about mastodon. like, identical.

*high five*

john you didnt like Motherpuncher??

Since Mordy doesn't want separate threads can a mod still add the names of this weeks bands to the thread title?

haha mind reader

brilliant

i don't want to clog up my bookmarks with 52 new metal threads.

sry to ask a dumb question but why wouldn't you just delete the bookmarks for the old threads every couple weeks?

I like the idea of this metal listening club. It seems like there's a lot of metal knowledge floating around this board, and this seems like a good way to tap into it and fill the many gaps in my knowledge. I guess you could call me an occasional metal dilettante who's been getting more interested in it lately. Sure I owned Master of Puppets and liked the first Black Sabbath album when I was in college, but it was a very small part of my overall listening. I usually filled my appetite for noisy guitars with stuff like Sonic Youth or Fushitsusha. (Oh where have all the loud indie guitar bands gone? But that's a topic for another thread.) So anyway, I'll be listening along to this thread. Cheers.

pfunk i need to listen to mother puncher again (last night and upthread i said it was "alright", but in the light of day i don't know if that was supposed to mean "ok" or "OH YEAH ALRIGHT WHOOO!!")

Was always one of the live highlights along with Crusher/Destroyer and March Of The Fire Ants

commencing wolverine blues btw

live blog?

probably just here and there comments--it's accompanying some work i have to get done

wondering if i am the only one who gets the thrash vibe from entombed. note: i was accompanying my listening with beers so not everything i felt should be taken as gospel truth

i can't say i'm getting a super-big thrash vibe tho that is far from my area of expertise.

this is a great record

dude who told me on slsk to listen to it 5 years ago, sorry i didn't listen to you

although i think i like it now more than i would have then

the old drummer wrote the early albums, so I think you need to check out The Hellacopters (i only have some of their early albums but they are GREAT)

What about Grooveshark for those without Spotify? It's badly sorted, sometimes a pain to navigate -- but it certainly has all 3 of this week's albums.

Great idea, by the way.

been listening to a bunch of gorguts lately. we should totally do a gorguts week, imo. (the erosion of sanity / obscura / from wisdom to hate)

would be really fun to have lots of people picking these albums apart, and though they're all death metal albums, they all build on that foundation in different (and v. cool and interestin') ways.

of course, if you're not into gorguts, you're outta luck.

just my 2 cents.

I don't know if focusing on just a single artist in one week is such a good idea, as you said it just might leave some people with nothing at all to discuss. I'd rather have people be interested in talking about least one of them.

yeah, maybe a bit early in the game to go into that level of detail. but, personally speaking, getting really deep into the catalog of an inventive band that tweaks their formula album-to-album sounds really cool to me.

that mastodon album rules, but i haven't really liked their most recent stuff. i often chastise metal bands for refusing to inject a little melody and instrumental variety into their sound, and then mastodon goes and does it, and they are worse for it.

anyway, i saw mastodon live around the time remission came out and it was at this chuck e cheese arcade type place, and the band was surrounded by a giant ball pit that no one was allowed to get in :/

Mayhem would be good for that. Or judas Priest. Or paradise lost.

btw this entombed album kicks ass

gorguts week will be awesome, everybody will say how obscura is better than the erosion of sanity and I will get really petulant about how when enough people are wrong about the same question they get really certain about their wrongness

I think focussing on one band might put too many people off

Judas priest would be PERFECT.

guys there are plenty of weeks, we can do all these things

Since there was such popular demand (i.e., two people, somewhere back upthread) for me to do a week, I volunteer to take the helm for the second set on Monday. And please, everybody, before you pass the helm to the next person, just take a moment to wipe it off.

: )

right on!

are we doing only old albums (ie before 2010) or new albums too?

hahaha I think we're doing whatever the person that's picking wants to do!

at least, I hope so

well we will never agree on anything on here so you might be right. I bet someone picks the new High On Fire then.

Although it's gonna be funny when someone picks 3 , ltd to 50 copies of ,death metal tape demos from 1989 that don't exist in mp3 form. LOL.

I'll go after Glenn (week of 4/26-30). I promise to pick relatively easy-to-locate stuff.

on vaycay the week of 5/3 but I'll do 5/10 if that's cool.