Albums for Eternity with Bottle, the Curmudgeon

I love Pantera, but i feel like we've collectively forgotten that they made 4 (believe me i counted as i listened to them) terrible Glam albums before they finally recorded the first actual Pantera album. That's not me being a smart-ass, even Pantera considered Cowboys From Hell the actual first Pantera album. The early Glam stuff was just blatantly copycat trend chasing. Projects In The Jungle has a special place in my heart simply because of the ridiculous mixed-metaphor allusion to Guns'n'Roses, but even i can't call it good. Cowboys From Hell, though, is really good, and probably the first official Groove Metal album ever recorded. Groove Metal, more ridiculously called Post-Thrash, is pretty simple to define. If it sounds like Pantera and/or White Zombie it's Groove Metal, no further elaboration required. Now let's just listen to it. It should go without saying, super groovy. Vocally, Phil Anselmo still punctuates phrases with squealy falsetto like he...

How's this for coincidence? After a terrible week at work, things breaking around the house, finding my few remaining chickens had been murdered by probably another raccoon, and a complete waste of a Saturday morning taking Ethan's car to a mechanic to schedule taking his car to a mechanic next Wednesday, Green Day has a new album called Saviors. Imma be real not happy if it's terrible. But first i need to replace the whole house water filter... ... well shit, the old one was 3/4 but the new one uses 1 inch fittings. Guess i'll eat lunch then go back to town... ... we'll just skip over all of the interveningly insane aggravation that plagued this particular process (there was plenty) and move on to the part of this cursed day that is Green. What in the world do we want from a Green Day album in 2024? For starters, i want the single quotes around the title to be sarcastically cautionary: 'Saviors.' Actual Punk sensibilities would certainly be welcome, but the...

Whoa whoa whoa. I know Jesse Leach is the now lead vocalist of Killswitch Engage, but i had no idea he was the original founding vocalist. I though Howard Jones was the founding vocalist. Shows how little attention i paid to late 90s Metalcore, or the moldy nougat center of Nu-Metalcore, for that matter. Stricly wrestling bears for me, at least when it comes to metalcore. But now it's 2024 and the ex-replacement bear wrestler has moved on to the even more genre-fluid Post-Metalcore with her band Spiritbox, so why not let's check out the first objectively successful Metalcore album, Killswitch Engage's self-titled debut, for nostalgia's sake? Actually, it's freakin' good. Lotta uvula torture-gargling, some terrible hardcore inspired talk-singing Mike Muir impressions, enough double bass drum thrashing to give me sympathetic shin splints, songs about shunning the mainstream and embracing your own existence on its own terms, not much to dislike, as far as i'm c...