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

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.

i'm talking about stuff that was more commercially viable though. tiamat, moonspell, katatonia, gathering, etc. tons of bands making truly great albums that never made it out of metal-land. i usually don't care, but so many 90's bands deserved a wider audience that only money could buy.

It seems basically the same thing tho -- in the 90s, if a major label was going to sign a rock band, why would they opt for a metal band when they could get the next Live, or Toad the Wet Sprocket, or Soul Collective?

i swear i'll stop in a minute: at any other time the big labels would have signed all those people even if they didn't think they would make any money. that's my real point. they would hear some underground buzz and just BUY whoever was causing the buzz. just in case. but it didn't happen with any of those bands. whole scenes in europe! and yeah not every euro prog band got signed in the states either in the 70's. but by the 90's metal had a built-in diehard audience here. you'd think just owning back catalog stuff would be enough for the behemoths.

it just makes me wonder if they were even listening. i guess they were all still trying to catch nirvana in a bottle. and all their hair metal bands were suffering major diminishing returns.

i am not an expert, please forgive me....

Yeah, I mean I'm not trying to inject logic into label-think, just my two cents -- and there's also the notion that labels just got a lot more conservative in general starting the 80s. Once it became apparent that you could bank on huge stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, U2, it seems like the easy thing to do was just to gravitate towards stuff that showed potential for massive success. The only metal band that did this (and arguably, has EVER done this) is Metallica -- and my guess is that labels thought there could only be so many Metallica success stories out there.

lots of death metal bands got signed early 90s because of grunge. Not just death metal but bands like Fudge Tunnel etx there was a market for it but none of them broke out except for pantera and sepultura and by 1996 the major labels signed a load of nu metal bands and that wa it. All the stuff scott liked was ignored.

Nu metal coming along saying 'old' metal was old fashioned killed it for a decade unless they got a slot on fucking ozzfest.

pitchshifter got signed by geffen. maybe they were hoping for some helmet money.

pitchshifter also turned to absolute shite.

damnit fudge tunnel didnt get nominated for this poll did they?

fuck fuck fuck

Fudge Tunnel and Godflesh was my introduction to extreme stuff

never even heard of Fudge Tunnel until now, taking a listen -- very first impression is that is def very grunge-y.

man, death metal was such a godsend. no offense to satan. saved me from having to buy nuclear assault records out of boredom.

something bandnames something never listen

Fudge Tunnel were amazing. I think Skot is a fan

i used to make fun of pitchshifter for not being godflesh but i'm listening to them now on tape and they fit my mood.

yeah, fudge tunnel were fun.

Hate Songs In E-Minor would have been in my top 10 if it had been nominated. The other 2 albums would have been in the top 100

i have a bunch of sealed earache tapes here at the store. old deadstock. that will be my day of listening.

Desensitized by Pitch Shifter was terrific. When they changed to Pitchshifter they were awful. Such a sellout

sounds like you will be having a fun day scott

i'm not gonna listen to Dub War though...

i'm listening to desensitized now. that blend of ministry and godflesh...hey, they were good at it.

i might even crack open a copy of Swansong. which i haven't listened to since 1995.

also, i don't know if i need to crack open these Ultraviolence tapes. i don't know if i ever listened to Ultraviolence.

Old and Napalm Death and Godflesh and Scorn i will be listening to though.

hahaha oh god I used to have 2 Ultraviolence cds

Things aren't that much better today, have you seen what Ghost were up against at the Grammy's?

Fudge Tunnel were great. Creep Diets (the album they released through Epic) was their best album by far. I saw them on tour with Sepultura, Clutch, and Fear Factory in 1993 or 1994; Clutch went on first, Fear Factory second, and FT were direct support to Sepultura.

it's always a decade behind at the Grammys.

I love Hate Songs in E-Minor. They were a great live band, too.

I'd love to read a book about what ex-members of extreme metal bands do now. Like does Alex Newport work for a freight company, or does Alex Wank off Pungent Stench drive trams in Vienna?

Also: did Dropped by Mindfunk get nominated? I'm guessing it doesn't really count but I listened to it over the weekend and hell what an album (prompted by listening to Celtic Frost and remembering Reed St Mark was in Mindfunk. The Jason Everman/Reed St Mark Venn Diagram would make a hell of a book on its own).

Newport set himself up as a producer/engineer out in L.A.; he did the first Mars Volta EP, and has worked with a shit-ton of other people, too (link). I interviewed him some years ago when his post-Fudge Tunnel band, Theory of Ruin, was getting rolling. Interesting career-path fact: Theory of Ruin's drummer, Ches Smith, is now a highly regarded jazz dude whose first album for ECM is out this month.

scorn tape i was playing made me switch gears. going with bass all day today...

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtl1/v/t1.0-9/12743872_10154547370607137_8542257411910775027_n.jpg?oh=0a153cebab107d752c6f15e2a6171fb0&oe=576F4656

this is not really my forte and as such I have little to add except to say that I always liked Fudge Tunnel, they were great

does Alex Wank off Pungent Stench drive trams in Vienna?

Apparently he owns this music/occult shop: https://www.facebook.com/totem.records/

And as of 2010 at least was making this bad music: https://myspace.com/thetempter777

Right, I'm off pitching this book: 'Former extreme metal band members called Alex: where are they now?'

Anyone seen frobisher?

Frobisher is ill. He sent me a PM on facebook and gave me 20-11 results to post tonight for him and he thinks he will be better tomorrow to do the top 10. send him your good vibes and hopefully he will be ok

Get well soon Frobisher!

Get hell soon Frobisher!

have we had anyone say far too fucking low yet?

No, because you haven't posted the album yet :P

get well soon Frobisher! Poll has turned even more brutal than expected

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