ksbluesfan wrote:Thanks for the suggestions.
I love Burzum. I haven't heard the crap MIDI files he released as an album while in prison, but I love Filosofem. The songs "Burzum" and "Jesus' Tod" are two of my favorite black metal songs. I could live without the excruiatingly long ambient tracks.
The reason I like Burzum so much is because Varg doesn't try to sound like anybody else. When he released these albums, nobody sounded like this. Since then, black metal has turned into a million clones of Darkthrone and Mayhem. I'm glad bands like Negura Bunget are pushing into new territory, heavier on the atmosphere and with less emphasis in sounding evil. It's too easy to scream your way to evil. It's a lot harder to pull the evil out of the music.
Burzum does have a very original sound, and I love DSEV and HLTO because of it. I'm not as sold on Filosofem, and the last two he put out, Daudi Baldrs and Hliðskjálf (first two Burzum albums I ever bought...) are downright awful. The music in them is not bad, its just so damned boring that one can't stand to listen to it, and this is coming from someone who loves ambient metal.
ksbluesfan wrote:I picked up Baroness on a whim. I was browsing the list of Relapse artists and like what I heard from a few samples. They're somewhere between Isis and Mastodon. For all I know, they might be huge in the hipster scene (whatever that means). They aren't aggressive enough, and don't build to a climax the way Isis does, but they're pretty good. If Pelican had Dave Grohl doing death vocals as a singer, this might be what it would sound like. Maybe if Dave Grohl and Burton C. Bell from Fear Factory had a son, this is what he would sound like.
Isn't Baroness playing the show with High on Fire and Opeth? A friend of mine told me they were pretty good. But, just like the black metal talent pool has been diluted by copycat bands, as has the ambient sludge/post-metal (or whatever the hell it's called) scene, with a pissload of bands simply copying the Isis formula. There are some quality bands that have followed in their footsteps (i.e. Mouth of the Architect, who are going to be in town on September 5 with Behold... The Arctopus), or in the case of bands like Callisto, surpassed them.
Also, the "hipster" scene is getting big on that genre, as well as raw black metal, for some reason. I was reading on the M-A forums a few weeks back and they were discussing it. I guess its trendy for them, in an ironic way. Just so long as they don't try to dilute the talent pool further with pretentious, lackluster "artsy" efforts.
ksbluesfan wrote:I don't have a lot of doom in my collection, unless you consider Black Sabbath to be doom. I figured I would try a couple of bands that are considered to be giants in the doom genre -- Pentagram and Cathedral. I haven't listened to it yet, but I like what I heard from the samples.
I got big time into doom about a year and a half ago, most especially the doom-death part of the genre. As far as doom bands go, check out Candlemass, and the album "Watching from a Distance" by Warning. It may be the best standard doom album ever. In regards to doom-death, there are a lot of quality bands, most especially Anathema (Silent Enigma is a great album by them), Amorphis, early Paradise Lost, or Swallow the Sun.
