Best of the Homeless Signs

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AMAZING Bands No Longer on Nuclear Blast!!??

Success Will Write Apocalypse Across The Sky (SWWAATS), Swashbuckle, Ex Deo (Kataklysm's alter-ego), and Annotations of an Autopsy are on the "former bands" list on Nuclear Blast, the one that confuses me the most is Ex Deo, because all except for one of the members are in the successful Nuclear Blast band Kataklysm, so wouldn't it be easier for everyone if Ex Deo was on the same record label? I would think so, if anyone knows anything regarding reasons for all of this please let me know.

Microsoft Zune 120GB

I have burned through dozens of Mp3 players. Mainly because I fill them up too fast and I end up having to get bigger ones. So the day finally came where the thought crossed my mind that I don’t want to keep spending my damn money on a new music player every 4 months, so I’m just going to get the biggest one I can find. So after naturally avoiding the Ipod, I went and got the (at the time) new 120GB Microsoft Zune. I had owned the 8GB Zune previous to my purchase of the big klunky Zune 120, so I was already pretty familiar to the software and user-interface. So knowing Microsoft’s experience and skill in the sound quality area, I was expecting good sound output. I will tell you this, I got my first Zune 4 years ago and I’ve had one ever since.

I’m going to start with the positives. Everything is huge! The size of the screen makes room for a bigger font size so I don’t have to strain my eyes while flipping through the bands list, the album covers can display in high detail for ultimate enjoyment, and it works perfectly as a mini widescreen TV screen for video watching. Even though it takes an hour or so to figure it out at first, navigating around the device is a breeze. One of my favorite things about the Zune that can’t be done on any other Mp3 player that I know of is that you can set a background. It’s actually pretty neat how you can put a picture on your Zune and then set it as the background.

The sound quality is amazing, but the thing that I noticed is that there’s no equalizer! You can’t add in that extra bass boost when needed; you can’t cut back on the treble when you’re listening to some older stuff. Even when I hook up some really nice headphones to it, I still don’t get as much of a bass kick as I have with other devices. I would imagine that since there’s an extremely detailed and customizable equalizer in Windows Media Player, that there would be one on a Microsoft Mp3 device.

It seems that all of the Zunes I’ve had except for my current one have been part of batches with factory defects. I mean come one guys, one or two bad batches is understandable, but when you’ve got dozens of bad batches that are being put on the shelves and sold and when you finally discover that tons of people are having the same problem and you don’t do a recall?? I mean they knew about all of these bad batches, but they didn’t say anything about them! And all of the customers (me included) had to send ours in and wait for almost TWO MONTHS to get our replacement back, only for a few of us (me included) to find out that the replacement we got was defective too!! That’s the one thing that has pissed me off. But without all of the bugs (which only a few of them have), they last a lifetime and satisfy you to the fullest extent. 

Overkill-Ironbound

It’s been awhile since my last thrash metal review, so I guess I’ll tell you about what is now one of my favorite thrash albums of all time. The 2010 thrash metal masterpiece known as Ironbound has had a great influence on my whole general outlook on thrash metal. I first heard about Overkill about a year or so ago when I saw a flyer saying that they were going to be playing in Seattle on their 25^th anniversary tour. If I had the time I would have gone, but unfortunately, one of my friends went without me. The next day he came to me and said it was one of the best thrash metal acts he had ever seen. But for some reason I didn’t bother to actually look up their music until about two months ago. And the first album that I got was Ironbound.

Now there is a huge dispute amongst metalheads over what thrash metal has turned into and if it’s still alive or if it’s turned into something else, as well as if it’s still any good or not. I tend to disagree with the people that claim thrash metal died in the 90s. But I love the 80s thrash metal era with classics like Reign in Blood, Pleasure to Kill, Master of Puppets, Welcome to Hell, etc. But I love a lot of more recent thrash metal bands like Bonded by Blood, Warbringer, and Black Breath. In fact, my favorite thrash metal band of all time is Havok, a band that formed in the 21^st century. But there are a lot of thrash metal bands that formed in the 80s and are still around that have gone more on the progressive side (Metallica, Death Angel, Megadeth, etc.). I guess if it was up to me, I would put Overkill somewhere in the middle. Because they’re not 100% traditional thrash metal, but they haven’t gone completely progressive like Metallica. I think this is a perfect place to be because Overkill adds twists of other kinds of music into their blazing thrash inferno.

The musicianship amongst the members of the band is quite prominent. The member that’s been with the band for the least amount of time would be the drummer who joined in 2005, right after the release of Killbox 13. I think that Killbox 13 was their first truly good album since The Years of Decay. And ever since Killbox 13, they’ve gone nowhere but up, so I think that their current drummer has had something to do with that. Bobby is one of my favorite thrash vocalists; mainly because he doesn’t have a super high-pitched voice. I don’t really know what it is about that but it kind of bothers me when thrash metal vocalists have a really high voice. Some examples of vocalists like that would be the vocalist of Destruction, Bonded by Blood, Megadeth, and Sodom. But Blitz has his voice at the perfect pitch; so that earns him a lot of points from me.

I’ve always wondered why I didn’t run into these guys earlier. I’ve been exposed to just about every other major thrash band, so why didn’t I come across these guys back in middle school like I did with Slayer, Kreator, Exodus, and many others? So overall, this is an amazing album and I would give it a perfect score. 

Wierd symbols in posts

I think all of you may have noticed that my old blogging site changed all of the apostrophes to these weird symbols, I'm going to tell you that I will eventually fix these annoying things but it might be a while before that happens. 

Acherontas-Vamachara

Black metal is one of those genres where I’m not easily impressed. Yes, I am a huge fan, but a black metal band has to be really good to get me to support them. And I think that a lot of you can agree with me when I say that out of all of the black metal bands in the world, only a couple dozen bands are truly at kvlt status. Some bands that I consider to be at that status would be Darkthrone, Ravencult, Dark Funeral, and Watain. And I can be especially picky when it comes to the traditional black metal area. Acherontas is a black metal band that has succeeded in impressing me.

The intro track really sets the dark satanic mood for the album, it’s well put together and just at the limit..any longer would be too drawn out. Overall this band is pretty traditional except for the 70s classic rock vibe the music has. It’s interesting because it’s not the actual mood of the music that sounds classic, it’s the feeling it creates in the listener. Because when you listen hard, it just sounds like plain old kvlt black metal, but when you just let the music flow, it sounds like the original Black Sabbath has gone black metal (not particularly Black Sabbath, just a 70s metal band). There’s nothing about any of the individual musicians that really stand out to me as being better than average. Not to mean that as a bad thing, just that it’s not the musicians that make this band unique, it’s the creativity behind the songwriting.

There isn’t too much variation in the songs, but they do a good job of keeping it interesting enough to make the listener want to keep going. It’s weird how every time I listen to this album I go into a black metal phase for the rest of the day, so if you want to get into the black metal mood, this is the album to kick it off with. This album gets 13/20.

Fiend-Before My Eyes...

Out of all of the albums that I’ve reviewed that were on the Reviewer’s forum, this is definitely so far the best one. This Russian powerhouse plays melodic death with nu metal and some industrial metal mixed in. The one thing that surprised me is that they pulled it off amazingly! Katalepsy, Taking Your Last Chance, and Xe-None are the only other Russian bands I know up, so I don’t really have a feel for what the general Russian metal sound is. There is one thing about this album that’s driving me crazy, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the music. The record company made a special version for reviewers to where every 20 seconds or so an annoying voice would say “Fivebyfive Records”. So I went out and bought the CD so I will be able to enjoy the album in its purest form.

Now something that is very important to me when it comes to an album is the opening track. First impressions are important. And if the opening track is amazing, I’m much more likely to find the rest of the album easier to enjoy. But it the opening track is less than impressive, I’m not going to be as motivated to keep listening. Now don’t take that as me being a “judge a book by its cover” kind of person, because I’m nothing like that. My opinions on things are just extremely influenced on first impressions.

So I play the first track titled “System Error”. The smooth melodic piano intro transitions into traditional metalcore style drum intro. Then instantly, the loud mesmerizing guitars leap out of the speakers to enclose you in a dark melody. Great first impression….check.

You will also get more industrial sounding songs like “Liar”, “Fade Away”, and
“Soundtrack to my Life” adding a really interesting twist that I’ve never seen before in the time I’ve been listening to melodic death. The songs that I find the most interesting are the songs with a really strong nu metal feel. It doesn’t seem like it should work, that’s why I was kind of uneasy about this band at first. But before you say it won’t be good, listen to “Drops of Time” and “Eclipse”. It’s amazing beyond what I imagined. The thing that they do with the screamed vocals at the beginning of “Drops of Time” before the singing…I don’t know what to call it. I guess they’re taking a clip of a scream and repeating it at an odd beat? Haha my point is though that that element reminds me strongly of old Primer 55 and Disturbed. But I would have to say my favorite tracks off the record are “The Moth”, “System Error”, and “Give Me”. This album is very impressive and deserves a lot of acknowledgement and credit. 19/20.

ROOT-Heritage Of Satan

The genre on Spirit of Metal says black heavy, meaning this band supposedly mixes black metal and traditional heavy metal. The only other band that I know that does this is “I”, the combination of Immortal, Gorgoroth, and Enslaved. I was blown away by their 2006 masterpiece (which I’ve also written a review on, and I’m also waiting for a follow-up since they’re still listed as active on Nuclear Blast). “I” had mainly Abbath’s black metal style vocals with fairly fast heavy metal music with a nice glaze of black metal to give it some edge. So after hearing Between Two Worlds, I made a lazy attempt to look around for other bands that had fused the two genres. And as my conscious had predicted, they all sucked. But apparently I had missed a surprisingly well-known band known as ROOT.

ROOT has a really sludgy sound to their music. And even though I am still fairly new to the whole sludge metal area of things, I feel I can generally point it out when I hear it. And that’s one of the things that makes this band really unique (and also probably what has kept them around for so long), which is that they have added some sludge metal and even some 90s style punk into their music. Mega bonus points for fusing four different genres and still making it sound not half bad! The song that really had a strong punk sound would be Legacy of the Ancestors.

Some of the songs that have a very prominent sludge metal sound would be the 8^th track (can’t figure out how to put some of the symbols in there haha) and In Nomine Sathanas. The 8^th track was the first song I ended up hearing on the album and with its really thick, heavy, slow sound, I was thinking they were adding guttural black metal vocals to sludge metal. But I was obviously wrong for making that assumption of the rest of the album because instantly after that, the powerful intro and the black metal song “Greetings from the Abyss” (my favorite song off the album) leaped at me from the speakers with pure power and very abstract vocals. Now I realize why Spirit of Metal put them as BLACK heavy.

Now let’s rewind the tape and take a look at the beginning of the album, because I’ve mainly been talking about songs that are at the end of the record. There’s something about this record that bothers me greatly, and that is that the intro track is over 5 minutes long. Now don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated by the spoken Satanic poem (which in fact I am a Satanist), but it was way too drawn out to be an INTRO track. I feel that intro tracks should be about at most ¾ the average length of the songs on the rest of the album. So my opinion on the intro track, it belongs either in the middle as an interlude or at the end as an eerie outro.

Overall, this album really isn’t half bad! It could use quite a bit of tweaking in some areas, but this is a nice thick black metal soup. 14/20.

Design the Skyline-Nevaeh

“The new album everyone is talking about! For fans of Attack Attack!, Bring me the Horizon, and Asking Alexandria” says the bright orange sticker on the case. I stumbled across this CD in one of the few Hot Topics in my home state of Washington. It had been awhile since I had last listened to some new screamo/metalcore bands, so I figured why not? For those of you who aren’t familiar with Attack Attack! and Asking Alexandria, they are some of the first bands to combine heavy screamo with poppy or melodic techno elements and synth sounds. Asking Alexandria is actually pretty damn good at it which makes them an extremely influential band. So I was expecting Design the Skyline to just be another one of the bands following in the trails of Underoath and Attack Attack! But I expected wrong….

In the first full minute of the first song, I thought I had accidentally bought a Chelsea Grin album. It kicked off with a slow, heavy Whitechapel/Chelsea Grin styled breakdown. I was expecting something poppy, not brutal like this! So it really took me by surprise. After the first minute, the mood turns soft and the chords are melodic with keyboards and synths with average-sounding singing. And alternates between those two sounds throughout the song.

Now let’s look at the individual musicians. First of all, there’s a lot of them, second, not much talent. Their drummer is below average; he overuses the splash symbol, his parts are uncreative and not unique at all, and his snare sounds horrible (probably not completely his fault). I don’t really have much to say about the guitarists other than that their lead guitarist is really good at writing solos and that everything else about them is completely average. The bassist is average, can really point out anything to say about him other than that I wish I could hear him better. I can tell that their vocalist screams and growls the wrong way, so it’ll only be a couple of years ‘till his throat goes down the toilet like Mitch Lucker (Suicide Silence) and Alex Koehler (Chelsea Grin). The singer’s voice is just plain annoying, but it does fit the music quite well in some parts of the album.

Overall, the album isn’t that bad. It has catchy songs, it has brutal vocals, but it lacks individuality and creativity. I don’t know where these guys will go, but their name will definitely sick around for a while in the metalcore world. If you look around on the internet, you get sort of that black/white thing with peoples’ opinions. There are a lot of people that are raving over this album, and there are a lot of people talking about pissing on and burning the damn record. If you are at all interested in listening to this record, look up the song “Crystal Swords Kill the Hordes”. For me, I would give this an average score of 13/20.

Fleshgod Apocalypse-Agony

Italian supermusicians Fleshgod Apocalypse finally release their second full length album. And not only that, it’s been released under the legendary Nuclear Blast label that seems to recruit the best and keep the amazing; which is the kind of place where Fleshgod Apocalypse belongs. Having been listening to these guys ever since the release of their debut masterpiece, Oracles, I’ve had a lot of time to watch these guys’ progress. And finally, not only was I able to buy their CD several weeks before its release, I got to meet the entire band and watch them perform onstage at the 2011 Summer Slaughter Tour. Prior to that, I had already watched their brand new flawless music video of The Violation, which was obviously the song that they opened their set with.

There are two characteristics about Fleshgod’s music that most people instantly recognize. The first is that they play their instruments at inhuman speeds. The second characteristic, which is the single thing that makes them the most unique, is that they have the sounds of an orchestra weaved into the sheer brutality of their music. And the keyboardist plays piano parts as well and I swear he must be the reanimated corpse of Rachmaninoff because he plays like him and is also bald like the classical composer was. An example of this pianist’s abilities would be the intro to the song Embodied Deception from Oracles. But it’s weird that they would be able to combine melodic symphonies with technical death, but somehow they do it. And they do it even more in Agony.

There are some new things that have been added since Oracles. One of those things was added in the Mafia EP, which is where their bassist sings [fellatto] lines that really add some tension to the music, mainly since the guitars are somewhat melodic whenever he sings like that. But I only heard that in two songs off the EP. But in Agony, you hear his high-pitched voice more frequently; not necessarily in every song, but more than in the Mafia EP. At first I cringed to the sound of his voice and couldn’t bear it. But it eventually grew on me, and although I don’t love it, I do feel that the music wouldn’t give the listener the feel that it does if bassist didn’t sing.

The second thing is that the keyboard-generated symphony is heard throughout the album; in other words it’s not just used as the intro or the outro of the songs, it’s played throughout all of the songs. Which I think sounds amazing, because the other members haven’t turned down the brutality and speed level of their sound one bit, so it sounds really cool. I don’t really know how to describe it, because you can obviously hear the melodic symphonic parts, but you can also hear the pure brutality of everything else, so they clash but it sounds amazing at the same time!

One thing I noticed the first time I listened to the album was that it’s similar to Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd in the fact that most of the songs blend into each other. Which kind of makes it seem like the album is all one song because there’s never a pause in the music. This is interesting because I’ve never heard this done in death metal; I’ve only heard it in progressive rock and some techno albums.

So this album is basically flawless. This group of classical composers that have risen from the dead have had an astonishing comeback and have nowhere to go but up. I would recommend this to EVERYONE. This gets a perfect score.