Summary: a good rock album, a bad metal one.

http://image3.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID10472/images/immortal-all_shall_fall.jpg

This album is really good for what it is, but it's in a genre I don't really like. That is to say, it's no longer black metal; it's more like dark indie rock, maybe a little Nick Cave mixed in with your Sisters of Mercy with more punkish riffs.

The vocals are as raspy as ever, the tempo changes and transitions are still breakneck intense, and the melodic sense of an unfolding landscape is there, but in the small. It's both not bad and not good enough to be Immortal…

From The Realist Party homepage:

The Realist Party

We are not conservatives or liberals. We are people who think there are patterns to reality we should pay attention to. For this reason, we want politics guided by adaptation to reality and not debate over what "ought" to be.

* The root of all environmental problems is land overuse. If we want our environment to be healthy, we need to use one-third of the land and leave the rest in an unbroken, unfenced state for nature.

* While capitalism is not ideal, we need some kind of system that rewards those…

When you're talking about music with your friends, you want to know the meanings for the words they're using. Without going overboard, we can recognize a handful of genres within heavy metal. Here are audio samples and descriptions for each of these metal genres.

An easy guide to heavy metal genres

Bands we talk about include:

King Crimson
Iggy and the Stooges
Blue Cheer
Black Sabbath
Led Zeppelin
Deep Purple
Cream
Judas Priest
Iron Maiden
Motorhead
Venom
DRI
Cryptic Slaughter
Fearless Iranians From Hell
Metallica
Exodus
Slayer
Prong
Hellhammer
Sodom
Bathory
Deicide
Morbid Angel
Possessed
Incantation
Emperor
Immortal
Burzum
Skepticism…

Bitch, a feminist magazine, published the article "Horning In – The case for feminist metal" in their fall 2008 issue. It talks about famous women in metal and why women should play metal, as well as the parts of metal that are pro-feminist.

Horning In: The Feminist Case for Metal (Download, 8mb, JPG)

If someone asks you if you know any true goofballs among your human acquaintances, you can now answer loudly and proudly that you do.

With the creation of this group, I qualify, but I think it'll be a lot of fun:

http://www.last.fm/group/Allahu+Ackbar!

Say it out loud. You don't need to pack an IED, fly a plane into an overpriced skyscraper, or even be Muslim to appreciate the wisdom and beauty of this simple statement.

Reality is still out there, and you're in here. With me.

Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal, "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman. In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted…

http://www.anus.com/metal/dirty_rotten_imbeciles/dirty_rotten_imbeciles-dirty_rotten_LP.jpg

Thrash is crossover punk/metal with short punk songs using fast simple metal riffs. Good examples are Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (DRI), Corrosion of Conformity (COC), Cryptic Slaughter, Birth A.D., Suicidal Tendencies, MDC, Dead Horse and Fearless Iranians From Hell. Sometimes called skatethrash, crossover thrash, crossover, thrash or thrash metal.

http://www.last.fm/group/Thrash

Join today!

http://www.anus.com/metal/about/interviews/fearless_iranians_from_hell/ayatollah_khomeini.jpg

Do you want to piss off your parents, teachers, co-workers and authority figures? The only way to make someone that angry is to violate something they hold sacred because they're afraid of the alternative. The industrialized world is scared shitless of Islamic fundamentalism because these people believe so much in their religion that they're willing to die for it. We can't compete with that – we're too eager to get back to the sofa, Wii, cable TV and pizza you can order through the internet.

http://www.anus.com/metal/fearless_iranians_from_hell/fearless_iranians_from_hell-foolish_americans-holy_war-die_for_allah.jpg

Back in the late 1980s, there was this band from Texas that said…

Nowadays death metal – really, deathcore – is a truckload of AIDS headed to the sewage treatment plants of hell.

An either inhale or exhale variation of "screaming" used to signify pigs going to the slaughter. This is also known as a pig squeal. They are performed by vocalists in deathmetal/grindcore bands (As Blood Runs Black, Skinless, Job For a Cowboy, Arsonist Get All The Girls etc). The pitch of the squeal can vary. Deathmetal bands tend to keep squeals lower. Grindcore bands usually have them higher. The sound of the squeal refers to its name "bree".

Urban Dictionary: "bree"…

Someone brought to mind a recent thread about Nihilism and "fascism," by which modern people mean any system of government that motivates people to act in some way other than for their personal pleasure and wealth:

Faustian Nihilism is the optimal nihilism Nietzsche aspired to conquer its peak. And according to him, he accomplished that task - for has overcame nihilism to become the first actual nihilist. It is a life endorsing Nihilism, that accepts life as a whole, life as comedy, unholiness, and tragedy - in Goethe's spirit. It calls for action, overcoming logical and meditative complexities and for…