Finally... The Top 200 Extreme Metal Albums of ALL TIME!(results)

Although I love Transilvanian Hunger despite some horrible racist lyrics, I'd never delved too deeply into Darkthrone otherwise. I've been listening to Under a Funeral Moon but I'm not sure that streaming it through my speakers does it justice. Probably needs to be heard on 32-bit FLACs through Linns to be appreciated.

i love Funeral Moon, though Blaze is my outright favorite.

think darkthrone need to be listened to on a broken cassette player in a hailstorm tbh

sund4r imo high quality audio is not going to help you appreciate Darkthrone. Under A Funeral Moon in particular is so shrill, it might actually help to hear it coming out of crappy laptop speakers. It's deliberately poorly produced, to evoke the same kind of lo-fi shrill-ness on the early Bathory recordings.

That said, what I liked about them initially, and what continues to draw me to them is that out of all the 2nd wave black metal bands, they retain the closest ties to traditional heavy metal. ie, their riffs (when you can make them out through the haze of terrible production) are from the school of Celtic Frost, Black Sabbath, King Diamond, Motorhead, etc etc. Above all, they're just a great *metal* band, regardless of how kvlt they were during their 90s heyday. So, if you're into that kind of thing -- boozy, adrenaline-provoking aggression/misanthropy/blasphemy -- you stand a good chance of being a Darkthrone fan.

Actually, I was being totally sarcastic. It's pretty obviously lo-fi.

I wonder what they make of it on the Steve Hoffman forums.

trolled!

sund4r could definitely have stood to conceal this unforeseen evil sarcasm ace for longer imo

Under a Funeral Moon is a must-have record for testing out high-end stereo equipment in shops. Sales clerks will respect you immediately and maybe give you deals.

I'm resigned to the fact that Filosofem will place probably - apart from any extraneous factors it's incredibly boring and responible for a million bedroom bm projects that mistake low fidelity and shit screaming for "atmsophere" and that's why I fucking hate it

"Under a Funeral Moon is a must-have record for testing out high-end stereo equipment in shops"

under a funeral moon and also brothers in arms by dire straits. those two are all you need in the hi-fi shop.

Play the blast beat on the MTV

Taking under a funeral moon in to a high-end stereo equipment shop should be mandatory just to annoy the staff into thinking something is wrong with their equipment

Btw I just listened to Obscura and I'd like to preemptively say that it belongs a further 20 places higher up my ballot

Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk so low at 42. Thought it would be at least top 20 for sure. Probably my favourite extreme metal album of all time.

^ Listening to this now. I can see why it's your favourite. So far it's managing exceptionally well to be both melodically intricate and completely brutal. It's great...

I'm listening to Super Furry Animals, but I suppose I'll switch to Emperor then *tuts*

xp i think it's the first black metal thing i ever heard. it totally confused me at first and i wasn't into it, but i kept coming back and really it's just THE big totemic BM album now. lots of trve kvlt fans will argue in the case of nightside eclipse, but this one has the perfect melodic/aggressive balance as you say, TT

I'm going to listen to it now as well. Whenever I need my Emperor fix, I tend to reach for their best of comp that came out c2003 and really does a great job of covering all bases. But yeah, first time I heard this album in a mate's smoky bedroom, I was convinced this music came from another dimension. I had no idea it was made by a bunch of Norwegian teenagers. They get the atmosphere down pat.

whoa this is excellent

Teenagers! You're kidding... I'm playing this aloud in an empty office overlooking London and expecting the sky to fully cloud over at any moment. The whistling sound on The Acclamation of Bonds was inspired.

they were really really young when they did the first album. Welkin is their second, so maybe they were about 18/19? don't quote me on that of course.

ihsahn was 21 when welkin came out, still fucking impressive

Ye Entrancepmerium does so much in 5 minutes. It's insane. As I say, when I first heard this album there was no question about it - this was ancient music made by vikings or demons or something - certainly not people who were only a bit older than me!

Yes, this was an amazing discovery!

Listening to Altar of Plagues' Teethed Glory and Injury now. Lovely dystopian atmospheres...will see how it progresses.

That's one thing that surprised me about extreme metal in general -- how young the bands were when they made their classic records. Most of the Swedish and Brazilian scenes were made of teenagers too, and the big American bands were in the early 20s or teenagers. It's weird how metal has this rep (outside of metal scenes of course) of being unintelligent music, because when you actually break down what these bands do compared to what you'd expect out of a regular old rock/indie band comprised of 20-year-olds, metal comes out way ahead in the complexity dept!

Does it still have that rep? Iirc, through some quirk of critic-logic, technical complexity was actually one of the reasons why classic critics used to regard metal as dumb. I definitely remembering reading scornful lines about "dumb virtuosity" or "the sort of song that boneheaded guitar mags would transcribe note-for-note" in negative reviews.

"classic" as in "older rock critics", not "classical music critics"

"I'm resigned to the fact that Filosofem will place probably - apart from any extraneous factors it's incredibly boring and responible for a million bedroom bm projects that mistake low fidelity and shit screaming for "atmsophere" and that's why I fucking hate it"

this album still sounds pretty amazing to me. and hating its influence is kinda like hating brian wilson for inspiring so much bad indie rock. unless you really do hate brian wilson, which is fine. i think burzum inspired a lot of GREAT stuff over the years. yeah, there is lots of boring bedroom stuff, but i think that DIY aesthetic was a quick and easy way for some talented people to make powerful music. especially if they lived in the woods and couldn't find anyone to play with.

filosofem also one of those albums where you can see what non-metal people see in it. compositionally, all kinds of musicians could get something out of what he was doing.

xp people confuse 'loud, fast and heavy' with 'dumb, meatheaded and aggressive'.

I definitely had a phase where I thought Anthems... was the better Emperor album but I've cooled on it a bit now. I still like some of it but the songs just don't have the impact they should for some reason, it sounds a bit too murky. I actually think the cover sums it up - looks more expensively-made than Nightside Eclipse but it's a bit hard to tell what's going on.

Does it still have that rep?

I think it does -- except that there appear to have been certain metal that gets a pass, like a lot of sludge/doom and new black(gaze) metal. Or, if it's not a stigma based on intelligence, there's still an aspect of traditional metal (whether heavy metal, thrash, death) that's treated as being outside of what most mainstream music publications would cover. And I'm not even sure that's a bad thing!

I blame Anselmo.

metal thrives on its own. like bluegrass. you don't read about bluegrass that much. and it was made by dumb hillbillies! but its hard to be good at it...also, see polka.

i like the living folk tradition that is metal. and rap too actually. you don't have to be a great innovator to make a great metal or rap album. or polka or bluegrass album...you are a vessel for the past. but still invigorating in the here and now.

I really hated Anthems at first. At the time it was the much awaited big comeback of Emperor after the a four year hiatus in whole arson/murder/incarceration/etc frenzy, and they replaced half the band. Their progress within two years from the demo to the EP and then ITNE was amazing, but out came something that was so similar to ITNE but with, inexplicably since it's the same studio and producer, much worse sound. The current remaster cleans it up a bit and I now kinda like it for what it is (some really cool riffs mainly), but it never had that impact that ITNE had, they did things that were never heard before. By 1997 there were already so many other bands that ran with the Emperor sound: Sacramentum Far Away From The Sun, Setherial Nord, Satyricon Nemesis Divina - which I all think are more interesting (and better sounding) records.

Reading the NME/Melody Maker growing up there was definitely a sniffy attitude towards metal/metal fans, the idea that it was unintelligent music was there but it seemed to be more about emotional intelligence? Like mocking it for dealing with 'immature' themes or for being angry teenager music. The musical complexity was dismissed too but more in line with the punk/indie thinking where displays of technical/compositional skill = pointless showoffery. I might be misremembering things though!

Yeah same Gavin. I remember Vox magazine c1996 starting a review with something along the lines of 'if you're one of those saddoes who stands at the back of the room in a black t-shirt moaning about "when are they going to play some decent music?" then this is for you'. Actually I think it was for an early Feeder EP, so pretty far from metal but this was peak Britpop.

The opinion back then was that metal wasn't just lucky, but desperately unfashionable to boot. I get the impression that at least the metal/gothic aesthetic has had a bit of a revival since then.

I'm amazed that Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Scum didn't place higher

I also think that IX Equilibrium is a damn good album

nobody dismisses metal like metal fans do. black metal is just 'angry and ugly', remember kids

Re: Burzum - I get too frothy sometimes. Filosofem is just one of those apparent classics that when I finally sat down and actually listened to it all I got out of it was "really? THIS?" I mean, without it a lot of my favourite music might not have existed but I found the bm half really tedious but I was crying out for the guitars to come back ten minutes into the casio ambience

...having got that out the way I'll refrain from mithering when it actually appears

xxp My mates hated IX Equilibrium when it came out. I think it rules. Prometheus is also great.

Well Vox/NME/MM could be forgiven as the mainstream metal of the day was unspeakably bad - the largely defensible representation of metal of the 80s (Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, etc - even big underground bands like Morbid Angel and Carcass) had been displaced from the top of metal festival bills by Pantera, 90s Metallica, Machine Head, Biohazard, Korn, Deftones, Tool - to casual observers, metal surely must've seemed like it was headed towards total retardation.

I guess by the time Limp Bizkit arrived on the scene, onlookers would have been surprised to find a braincell in the average moshpit.

i mentioned this before on here but what made me mad is that there was so much great metal in the 90's that COULD have been commercially successful but wasn't. mostly cuz it was on metal labels that didn't have the know-how/money to get it out to a broader audience even though by the end of the 90's you could certainly buy most of it at any mall chain store. in the 2000's this kinda stuff became more popular (goth/melodeath/etc) but the best albums by most of the bands still making it had already been made by then.

(i like to live in an imaginary universe where the gathering were bigger than tool though, so....)

Machine Head's first album was great. The next ones not so much

it just seems like in any other era the big u.s. labels swooped down on anything even remotely tuneful and pillaged smaller labels at will. if i were a geffen exec in the mid-90's i would have bought out half of century media/peaceville/earache rosters. just outright. not licensing/distro like the columbia/earache deal. just own it all. (this is my devil's capitalist advocate hat i'm wearing.) nobody here thought they could sell katatonia or at the gates to sad teens? it's a mystery to me.

There's a lot of stories like that in the Chasing Death and Swedish Death Metal books. Fred Estby from Dismember talks about how when Carnage split, they were shopping their demos to all the big underground metal labels of the day (Peaceville, Roadrunner, Earache). Even tho Carnage already had a name, and their style wouldn't change dramatically in Dismember, nobody was interested except Nuclear Blast. It seems labels were just really scared about signing stuff like this, maybe afraid it was just a flash in the pan, and nobody would buy much extreme metal over the long run.