Metal Reviews

thats the whole thing in a nutshell. for men their age its amazing they put out an album so good. when you take into consideration that almost all of their contemparies (with the exception of kreator and overkill) kinda suck now the fact that they put out a decent album makes said album so much better.

anthrax has never done it for me. this new album ehhhh. the only song that ill admit gets me tapping my foot is im alive. their music always sounded like it was missing something to my ear.

btw slayer is still slayer but the riffs have gone downhill. but they still have it live.

One album shits on another album, but they get very similar ratings? That's silly. I know bitching about scores is pointless, but I expect some kind of consistency at least at the individual level.

As for Testament, this album doesn't even come close to Formation of Damnation or whatever the fuck it was called. And Stefan has to be trolling me by putting this album over The Gathering or Practice What You Preach. If not, you're fucking ridiculous, dude. Ultimately, I found this album intolerable and taxing to sit through. I would be hard pressed to rate it higher than a 60/100.

And that cow photo might be the best thing to come out of this thread. Dude is fucking adorable. And the sacred cows that should be worshiped if any should be the albums, and not the bands. Fuck artistic intention; it's all about the art itself.

Not much I can do about it if Aleksie thinks The Dark Roots of Earth is worth 90. He's been around here long enough that he's earned the credit to give any score he sees fit.

All I can do is give Vektor the score I personally think they deserve, which is what I've done. If I had been the reviewer for this album, as I said earlier in the thread I probably would have given it around10 points less than what I gave Vektor.

I'm obsessed with stats, ratings and scores, thus my irrational love for baseball, and my hounding of Steve over his rating inconsistencies. Should I get a more productive hobby? Probably. But isn't the very essence of this website a review with a score next to it? I, for one, pay extremely close attention to ratings.

For years metalreviews has given high scores to albums that probably don't deserve it, and that shouldn't be a surprise for a host of reasons, just like it is at every review site. But consistency is absolutely essential to review sites, and, I would argue, dampening the temptation to give high scores.

That and giving "Sacred Cows" a high score just because. (I haven't heard the new Testament)

I'm not an idiot. That is my point exactly. Maybe I'm reading heavily into what you said but I don't know how a ten point difference (the difference between a 93 and an 80-85) equates to one album shitting on another. Maybe I'm a tad anal like ebd (I'm totally a stats freak and have an irrational love for baseball. I couldn't get enough of keeping up with Votto's batting avg prior to his injury. Will you marry me, ebd?) but ratings do matter to me and that they correlate to what someone says about an album is important. If you're bashing an album, but give it a high score, mention that your critiques are a minor issue or something like that.

However, the core of the issue is I don't know how anyone could be that excited about this album. The songwriting is awful, the overall sound might be decent but it needs massive editing in terms of trimming, and at the end of the day, Skolnick can't save an abysmal effort all by his lonesome.

You need to try to appreciate that some of us here think this is a really good album. You need to fit everything within a logical range.

Take for example the Prototype album I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was a very good album, albeit with a few pretty serious issues - so I gave it a 78, which I thought fairly represented both of those factors. You can have a look at my review and decide for yourself if you thought that was the right score for what I wrote down, but I think it was pretty accurate.

Now, I like the basic framework of this Testament album about as much as the Prototype album, but I think this one has fewer errors in the execution, and I will find myself listening to this album much more over the next couple of years, so I would have to score it higher than 78. Somewhere around 84 perhaps.

Which brings me to Vektor. It's a limited scoring range, dude. Everything falls somewhere between 0 - 100. I don't want to give Vektor 100 because it's not a perfect album, so I gave it a 94. Big gap between 84 and 94, anyway, if you ask me. Most people would say 94 is an almost flawless album, while I don't think anybody would say the same for 84.

(I'm a stats man, too, by the way. But over here we obsess over cricket stats instead of baseball stats.)

10 percent pig to be exact. Like if something cost a dollar, it would save you a dime that big? Or in your case ten pence off a pound, am I right? I'll drop it, though, guy. I really like you and I don't mean to be a prick. This is a bigger issue that has irked me over the years (oh my god I can see years as in all six of 'em. So weird.).

At the end of the day, it's all about reading the reviews and not looking at scores yada yada.

Heh. We have dollars and cents in Australia. Worth more than yours, too, thanks to our stable economy.



You're not being a prick, I don't mind arguing about stuff. It's fine. I'm not about to take any discussion about music and review scores personally, it's not like you're arguing against my religion (not that I have one, but you get what I mean).

I got Practise What You Preach when it came out, it sounded like Testament wanted a piece of Metallica's cake. It still does and that doesn't make for a very entertaining or efficient album, it's not bad, just heavily underpar when compared to The Legacy & The New Order.
The Gathering, I haven't listened since forever, didn't do much for me.

Try giving it another shot. Aside from lack of solos, fucking ripping album.

Lack of solos. In Testament. Poop.

In 20 years your dumb kid will be saying the same thing, only he'll have replaced Testament with Vektor and Vektor with whatever young "it" band is doing its thing in the genre.

Your kind of argument is utterly pointless.

So you are saying thrash is a stagnant genre? I agree.

Oh snap!

Well, I wasn't saying that, but I'd agree with it. =)

Also, imagine an emoticon shaking it's fist angrily.

I didn't really think you were, but projected my fantasies onto it, in the hopes of causing division within the ranks of the thrash army, which apparently I did. Victory!

haha that was funny!!

Dude, I love thrash, but it's a completely non-evolving genre.

I have to disagree. It has actually evolved in many different directions, more so than any other metal genre. The only reason people think that it is stagnant, is because the various things it has evolved into have all got different sub-genre names now. We only refer to "old-school" thrash AS thrash these days, but that is really not the case. There is practically no extreme metal currently existing that doesn't owe it's basic framework to Thrash, if you trace it back far enough. Death Metal, obviously. The entire framework is Thrash. Black Metal, to a lesser extent, but it's still there, especially if you trace it back to the late 80s. Thrash is also directly responsible for most the post 2000 genres like Metalcore. Bands like Trivium and Shadows Fall are basically an evolution of Thrash (a shit one, but that's a discussion for another day).

The way I see it, it's at least as much development as what Death and Black metal have been subject to. The only difference is that in naming the offshoots of those genres, in many cases, the word "Black" or "Death" has been retained in the name, like "post black metal" or "ambient black metal" or "brutal death metal" or "Deathgrind" This creates a direct connection to those genres, so you can still call them death or black metal. You could just as easily refer to Death Metal as "Downtuned, Distorted Thrash Metal" or you could refer to Metalcore as "Modern, groovy thrash metal" or some shit. The connection between thrash metal and those genres is just as strong as the connection between Death Metal, Black Metal and their respective offshoots.

Even if you disagree with all of that, which would be fair enough, whatever, bands like Vektor and Exmortus and Hexen are showing that there is still room for growth and evolution within the genre that we still refer to as Thrash.

My point, then, after all that blabbering: it is a genre that has evolved as much as any other sub genre.

I can't disagree with this. From my previous post I had deleted the line "those that have evolved are no longer thrash," so I get it.

But for what is considered thrash today, I really don't find it so different from the thrash of old. "Stagnant" is probably not the correct word to describe the genre, though.