Back when it was first released, I had it on cassette, and listened to it so much that I wore it out. I even bought all of the cassette singles, as they had kickass B-side covers of songs like Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy.” When I bought my first CD player in 1992, I got the black album from the library and renewed it constantly until I could afford to buy my own copy. (Hey, CDs were expensive back then!) Even though the band fell out of my favor in the late 1990s, the black album has remained the Metallica record I’ve listened to the most.

The black album was considered by the music press to reflect a more “mainstream metal” sound, but it didn’t bug me. Even though it was a slight shift away from the hard-driving thrash found on the previous four records, the record still had some serious fucking barnburners. My favorites included “Holier Than Thou,” “The Unforgiven,” and “The Struggle Within,” though it’s really hard to choose. Every damned track was awesome, if you ask me. I could do a track-by-track breakdown, but I don’t want to bore you. (I’m sure I do enough of that already.) Suffice it to say that I listened to the black album so damned much that every single riff on the black album is ingrained into my psyche like a stone carving. It’s very possible I’ve played this record more than any other, regardless of genre.

Even with metal on its way out of the mainstream in the early 1990s, Metallica was the one band that metalheads universally loved. As with other forms of rock and roll, there were always metal fans that only stuck with underground bands, claiming any band with some semblance of success was automatically a “sellout.” Metallica was a huge exception; I didn’t know a single headbanger that hated ‘em.

That is, of course, until Load showed up. Like every other metalhead on the face of the planet, I was stoked at the thought of a new Metallica record after the spectacle of the black album, and I actually cut class to run out and buy Load on release day.

Oh, if only I had known.

Saying I was disappointed is putting it lightly; I was fucking pissed. Yes, I was one of those kids who dubbed them “Alternica.” Load and its equally crappy followup Reload seriously dampened my fandom, and after the Napster debacle a few years later, I wrote Metallica off completely for a while. Yes, piracy is wrong, but that’s no excuse to insult your fans, which is exactly what some of the band members did. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield were such arrogant douchebags for a while that I couldn’t even stomach Metallica’s older material!

Even fans who stuck with Metallica through the Load and Reload era are hard-pressed to defend the abominable St. Anger. Metallica’s most recent album Death Magnetic was a marked improvement, but the poor production and awful vocals are still a far cry from what the band was once capable of.

As with most things, my stance on the Load era has softened with time. Even though most of those songs were just godawful, I’m no longer filled with rage over Metallica’s fall from grace; I just ignore their post-black album material, as I do with plenty of other bands’ less than stellar offerings.

Holy shit, I went off on a tangent. Let’s bring things back to the point. For whatever reason, I’ve been listening to the black album a lot lately. The songs still hold up, and brought back many memories of just losing myself in the riffs during my early teenage years. I remember watching the many videos from the album on MTV at the time; it’s strange to think that the bandmembers were younger at the time than I am now!

Strangely enough, I’ve heard a lot of retrospective black album bashing over the past ten years. Maybe it’s because post-black album Metallica has fallen so far, but I still don’t get it. The old stuff still stands the test of time. Speaking of which, the black album turned twenty this year, so it’s yet another thing that makes me feel old. Damn it!

Industrial metal exploded during that decade, and I sopped that shit up like a sponge. Skrew, Drown, Godflesh, Fear Factory, Sundown, Monster Voodoo Machine, Ministry, Rammstein, Treponem Pal, Pitchshifter, Snake River Conspiracy…you name it, I probably listened to it.

I’m guessing that the sound of industrial metal appealed me because I’ve always been a science fiction fan. The mechanical themes mixed with my preferred form of rock and roll was just a natural match. Grinding steel mixed with shredding guitars, distorted vocals, and oppressive piledriver beats? I was all over that shit like white on rice. Nine Inch Nails’ Broken was my gateway drug into the scene, and it remains some of the best material the style has to offer.

In the latter half of the 1990s, I fell out of the scene a bit. Although it was cool when other metal bands I was into experimented with industrial stylings (like Moonspell’s Sin/Pecado), much of the scene had moved more towards alternative rock and nu-metal. Some of it was okay, like Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, and early works from Rob Zombie, Static-X, and Powerman 5000. My interest in these bands evaporated quickly, though, as too much of their material got too repetitive or they rapidly changed styles to keep up with current trends. It was guilty pleasure music at best.

I’ve since taken to listening to some of the old stuff from the 1990s again, and holy crow, a lot of that shit’s horrible. It definitely hasn’t aged well at all. It didn’t seem to matter to me at the time, but cripes, what was I thinking? My only excuse is that I was young and stupid.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s any good industrial metal bands left out there; got any recommendations? You know how picky my tastes are nowadays.

(I should tell you that on a completely unrelated note, there’s a secret hidden in this post. See if you can find it!)

Katatonia did much the same thing, but further back in their history. They started out as a death/doom metal band, but infused some alternative rock-influenced sounds and switched to clean vocals after a few records.

Anyway, both bands’ live sets featured lots of new and old material, but no songs that included any death vocals. While the crowd overall had no problem with this, there were a few drunken stalwarts who continually shouted out “PLAY DEATH METAL!!!” in between every damned song.

I can understand many extreme metal fans’ resistance to vocal changes. I love death vocals as much as the next guy, and for most forms of extreme metal, that vocal style is absolutely necessary. More often than not, the switch to clean vocals doesn’t work, especially in tandem with a stylistic change. (Cryptopsy’s The Unspoken King immediately comes to mind.)

It’s more obvious in the case of Katatonia, as their old and new material couldn’t be more different. Fortunately, they did it to expand their own musical boundaries, rather than “selling out.” The end result worked out perfectly. Katatonia still has a hard, bleak edge, even if they’re not growling into the microphone.

With Opeth, some fans’ resistance really makes no sense, because as I’ve said…clean vocals have been there from the beginning. Not only that, so have other nontraditional musical elements rarely seen in death metal. Just listen to the song “Silhouette” off their debut record Orchid; it’s a classical piano piece!

We’re not talking about the glut of rock and metal bands that rapidly changed their genre in order to make a quick buck in the 1990s; this is a case where the band clearly evolves over time to solidify their own sound, and the progression is evident stretching all the way back to Opeth’s inception.

Hesitancy due to a vocal switch is expected, and often wise. But at the very least, give the shit a chance before dismissing it out of hand.

First of all, that’s not a euphemism, you sick bastards. I wanted to play a musical instrument as far back as elementary school, and you could start taking lessons and join the concert band in fourth grade, if I recall correctly. Originally, I wanted to play guitar, but my folks were having none of that. (Remember, this was around the time I started getting into rock and metal.) Saxophone was another thought, but then I started hearing jazz greats like Herb Alpert and Wynton Marsalis through my father’s record collection. Trumpet sounded awesome, so that’s the path I took.

I borrowed an old horn from a friend of the family, and began learning to play. We weren’t playing jazz in elementary school, of course. We were lucky to fudge our way through simplified arrangeents of classical pieces and film scores. I didn’t get my jazz fix until sixth grade, when I started taking private trumpet lessons; I had gotten braces that fall, which set me back to square one. My instructor was a longtime professional trumpet player, having played in classical orchestras, jazz ensembles, and even the seminal rock band Lighthouse. Not only was he responsible for getting me back up to speed and working around my orthodontics, he also got me into all manner of new music and playing styles. Aside from practicing scales and the assigned music from class, we also worked on basic jazz technique in order to expand my repertoire.

In seventh grade, I finally got to join a jazz band, as my junior high school had one. Junior high school was my first exposure to music festivals, where schools from around the region would descend upon a venue for a few days and compete. Those were an absolute blast, and aside from being a pretty cool getaway (complete with trips to amusement parks), the competitive aspect really pushed us to practice harder and sound the best we could.

After a few years, my borrowed trumpet wasn’t cutting the mustard anymore. In eighth grade, my folks bought me a Getzen 700 Eterna as an early birthday/Christmas present. Yes, I still have it.

Getzen doesn’t make that specific model anymore, but here’s their 700 Eterna II series, which is pretty damned close.

The difference in sound between that and the old one was like night and day. It did wonders to bolster my confidence, which I sorely needed; as a jazz player, I was expected to improvise from time to time, and I found that to be extremely difficult. I don’t like being put on the spot, and I almost always made mistakes. (The trick, I was told, was to learn to hide them.)

In high school, I didn’t get into either of the jazz bands (yes, we had two of them) until my sophomore year. At the same time, I discovered the works of countless other jazz horn players including Chet Baker, who remains my favorite jazz musician to this day. Our high school jazz ensemble even opened for Maynard Ferguson during my junior year, the first of many performances and clinics that the jazz legend would offer at the school.

The downside was that those overnight festival trips were off the table. For some inexplicable reason, our band director refused to let the concert or jazz bands attend them; the orchestra and choirs traveled every year, but we were never considered to be good enough. Most of us found this to be highly offensive, as we busted our asses all year! That kind of nonsense may have been one of the reasons why there were around thirty members of my freshman class in band…yet there was less than ten of us left by the time senior year rolled around.

Speaking of which, my senior year was undoubtedly the apex of my playing. The jazz ensemble got to play much more advanced material, plus I scored my school’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Award and a Judge’s Choice Award at the annual Berklee Jazz Festival. The sky was the limit, eh?

Well, not quite. I tried to continue playing once I moved on to college. I didn’t get much practicing done freshman year; I was too busy acclimating to college life, focusing on my studies, and dealing with some rather serious personal problems. By the spring of that year, I really tried to get back into it…but to no avail. There were no jazz bands nearby. Sophomore year I tried to start one myself, but got zero responses. Even with that ridiculous swing revival in the late 1990s, I found nothing. By the start of my junior year, I had given up. Practicing alone really sucks.

Maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but in my own defense, I was in college to work on my art degree first and foremost. I even dropped my acting hobby in order to further focus on my artwork. (That, and the actors there became insufferable pricks.) I have not played my trumpet since, yet I have no desire to start playing again, as strange as it may seem.

I look on those jazz days as another closed chapter in the book of my life. I would never say that I was a great trumpet player…just a good one at best, and a competent one at worst.

If the double-bass is so thunderous that you can’t hear the other instruments or vocals, then that’s a serious problem. Hell, sometimes you can’t even hear the rest of the fucking drums!

I’ve reviewed many a show for Musician Photo Journal and others where the overall performances were good, but the double bass drums were overpowering. In a few cases, it’s completely ruined a band’s set.

Too much kick drum does not sound “extreme.” It sounds fucking stupid. I’m there to see a show, hear some killer riffs, feel the low end through the floor, have my eardrums assaulted by some brutal vocals, all with drums providing the backbeat as intended. I’m don’t want to listen to nothing but a damned pulse generator. I can hang out by the countless road construction sites nearby if I want that.

Make no mistake; this is the way media is moving forward, and we are powerless to stop it. Unfortunately, it also really sucks. You know me; I’m a fervent proponent of physical ownership over intangible licensing. But the cloud model actually takes things an ominous step further.

With most digital distribution models, you pay to download the content, which may or may not have usage restrictions via DRM. If whoever you purchased it from decides not to offer that content anymore, or worse, closes up shop, you at least have your downloaded copy to enjoy.

Not so with the cloud model. Now, you’re not even paying for the content itself; you’re just paying for access to that content. Which means that whoever’s hosting your library can remove content at their whim. And if they go out of business? Your media is now gone, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

A split between the two models would be best; Amazon’s recently-launched Cloud Player works this way. You can stream stuff all day and night, but it lets you upload your own files and download files purchased through Amazon. Now you can have backups of all of your stuff, and still enjoy it on the go from any Internet-enabled device. (Apple will be launching something similar as part of iTunes.) That kind of setup I don’t have a problem with, and I can only hope it becomes the standard. The only downside is that you have to pay a lot more if you’ve got a large media library, and many of us do.

I know physical media’s on its way out in favor of content providers having much greater control and telling you exactly what you can do with your media, but damn it, I’m going to hold out as long as I can. Hey, if vinyl LPs are still around, I think my CD collection will be safe for quite sometime.

For further reading on this topic, especially as it relates to music, check out the following two pieces by Vince Neilstein over at MetalSucks:

• Amazon Beats Apple and Google to the Cloud, Launches “Cloud Player” Music Streaming Service

• Amazon Cloud Player to Record Labels: “Fuck Off!”

I’d also suggest that you read the comments on those pieces. Aside from the usual Internet flamebait and trolling, there some interesting discussion happening there.

At any rate, it was the stuff released in the late 1990s that made me think: music was in a very weird place back then. I was aware of the metal scene’s rapid-fire shifts at the time, and I’m not talking about nu-metal. (That stuff’s much closer to alternative rock and hardcore punk than metal, anyway.) But now that I think about it, just about every style of music was in a state of upheaval in those few short years, for reasons I cannot readily discern.

It’s like anyone and everyone was throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. This goes beyond experimentation or its opposite, “selling out.” It’s like artists just didn’t know what they were doing; there was no direction. What worked one month was a mess the next.

Did that rambling make any sense? Did anyone else even notice this, or am I the only one?

You’ll notice that I haven’t singled out the usual suspects like drunks. That’s because alcohol and other substance abuse crosses the social boundaries; anyone on this list, or not on this list, could become a raging drunk or stoned-out-of-their-mind prick at a show. I’ve seen it happen countless times, and so have you.

Anyway, today’s targets of my wrath are, in no particular order:

• Hipsters. You already know my strong opinions on these doucehbags. Fortunately, hipsters are a very rare occurrence at the extreme metal shows I frequent. Unfortunately, they’re just as annoying there as they are anywhere else. The biggest problem is that they won’t shut the fuck up during the performance. You’d think that loud-ass music would drown them out, but no such luck. I don’t need a goddamned running commentary about how “mainstream” you think the music is. Shut your trap. If you dislike it so much, then why the hell are you even there?

• Slam metal fans. You can see these clowns sporting wifebeaters, Affliction or Tap-Out clothing, and most importantly, flat-brimmed caps cocked slightly to one side. “Slam metal” is a mishmash of hardcore, metal, and sometimes rap. Many metalcore fans also fall into this category, and strangely enough, I still see them at any and all kinds of extreme metal shows. At any rate, there’s a lot of crossover between these guys and the hardcore punk crowd. Nowhere is this more apparent than their preferred style of moshing: hardcore dancing. This is when they windmill their arms around and strike angry-looking poses, hoping that someone else will come close enough for them to “accidentally” punch. I’ll let you in on a little secret: metal fans fucking hate that shit. For all of the circle pits and walls of death, metal moshers are just looking to push each other around and have a good time, not to punch someone in the face and start a fight.
• Emo kids. This is a tricky one. Normally, the skinny-jeaned bad dye-job emo kids tend to be wallflowers, hanging around the edges of the venue paying rapt attention to their cellphones. (Or the floor.) But when they drift away from there, that’s when the problems start. This social group is far and away the most likely to rudely bump into you, spill shit on you (yes, even more than the drunks!), and block your viewing angle with a raised cellphone. Part of this may be because emo kids are just that: kids, usually teenaged. However, that’s still not an excuse for such irritating behavior. (Thanks to my partner-in-crime Diana Guay for reminding me about these assholes.)

I’m all for having a good time, but sometimes other fans’ actions just grate on my nerves.

Like most kids growing up in the 1980s, my first exposure to heavy metal was whatever I saw on MTV or heard on the radio; in this case, it was glam metal (often called “hair metal” by modern detractors) and the occasional thrash metal band. My “holy trinity” of metal back then was Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Ozzy Osbourne. Laugh all you want, but through Ozzy I soon discovered Black Sabbath, who remain my favorite band of all time. While I quickly lost interest in other glam metal bands, Mötley Crüe and Poison remain guilty pleasures to this day.

Anyway, during my elementary school days, I was also being bullied and picked on quite often, so I rapidly turned to music for solace. I was learning to play the trumpet back then, so I was already musically inclined, but metal is where my true loyalty lay. It almost seems silly in retrospect that ridiculous glam anthems could make me feel better after being relentlessly teased by my peers, but to each their own. (Just imagine if I had discovered death metal at this point.)

Once I got to junior high school, I was able to broaden my metallic horizons a bit. This was when I started watching the original Headbangers’ Ball, and learned about other styles such as death metal and the burgeoning grunge scene. Even when the alternative rock explosion hit in the early 1990s, I stuck with metal, and as I moved on to high school, I actually found other metalheads. They were few and far between, but that’s better than nothing. This is when my interest in the genre took off; not only did I discover many more subgenres — progressive and industrial metal being the focal point at the time — but I also got involved in tape trading, which widened my interest even further. In addition, my musical training had also come quite a long way over the years. As such, I was drawn to more complex and unique arrangements when it came to metal, so I left many of more “generic” and bland bands behind.

I should mention that we had a solitary death metal fan in high school. Yes, just one. His antics were amusing to us back then, and we scoffed at much of his music; let’s be fair, there’s some really shitty death metal out there. Still, it wasn’t all bad, and I must give him credit and respect for kicking down the door to extreme metal for me. He was directly responsible for getting me into bands like Cannibal Corpse and Death.

At the same time, high school was the stage for all manner of new social torments, exclusionary tactics, and other thrills that made life a hellish experience for someone who was never part of the popular crowd. Once again, music was what I turned to in times of depression and anger as a balm for my mental wounds.

High school may have shot my appreciation for metal into the stratosphere, but even that was nothing compared to my college years. When I left for college in 1996, the real fun started. Headbangers were in even shorter supply than in high school, even with the rise of that godawful nu-metal. However, I had access to another method of finding new music that more than made up for my lack of metal-inclined peers: the Internet.

The World Wide Web of 1996 was a vastly different place than it is now. We didn’t have social media or any of that other nonsense, so much of my metal search was handled through record labels’ websites. See, I had just discovered independent metal labels such as Century Media and Nuclear Blast, and their catalogs were a veritable treasure trove of great music just waiting to be unleashed via my stereo. They didn’t even start adding MP3 sampler files until the tail end of the 1990s, so many times, I went the “blind” route when buying CDs. If a band got great writeups on metal websites, I sometimes just bit the bullet and bought their album without even hearing it! (Fortunately, I didn’t get burned often.)

As with high school and grade school before it, college once again brought forth many aggravating social challenges. The cliques of high school were practically irrelevant, but I still had my share of problems. When my newfound friends weren’t around to help me out, I had my precious metal to fall back on.

College is where I also began getting much more interested in extreme metal. I first heard Dimmu Borgir at this point in time, for example; I was only tangentially aware of black metal acts like Mayhem and Emperor in high school (thanks to the aforementioned death metal kid), but now I dove in headfirst. Due to my many years of studying music and theory, I realized the wealth of talent and skill found in many extreme bands that people without such musical knowledge would not notice. I mentioned that metal fans were few and far between in college, and when it came to extreme metal…I was it.

Even after I’d earned my degree and left college behind, my love of extreme metal only solidified and grew stronger in the years that followed. Like most folks, I settled into the usual daily grind of holding down a job, paying rent, and so forth, and hard-charging metal certainly helps to break up the monotony of daily life. In fact, I consider myself very fortunate to have a job where I can listen to any music that I wish in my cubicle, where it does not distract others. As such, metal is my soundtrack every day at work. You’d be surprised at how effective and cathartic death metal and the like can be when working in information technology. (If you already work in IT, then you’re probably not surprised. Grumbling and cursing like a demon is practically part of the job description.)

There’s another reason extreme metal rose to prominence within my life. Over time, I’ve grown more and more disgusted with the state of humanity as I see how people around the world increasingly mistreat one another. Seriously, extreme metal is about the only way I can process the endless stream of bad news we’re inundated with on a daily basis. No matter what form of media you prefer, it’s still an overwhelming amount of horrible and depressing news as our world circles the drain.

So, in order to deal with these headaches, more aggressive forms of metal were the order of the day. Black metal in particular became a favorite of mine, as it speaks to me in a way that few other forms of music can. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to start burning churches down or anything.) Even though extreme metal is my favorite branch of the genre, I certainly haven’t left my passion for less intense variants of metal behind; there’s plenty of progressive metal and older material that doesn’t fit into the “extreme” mold.

Finally, you know how I got really sick a few years ago? Metal was a driving force behind my recovery. I had a lot of downtime after being discharged from the hospital, so when I was resting, I tended to fill my brain with powerful music in order to make the healing process more enjoyable. (I must single out the three albums in particular that got me through it: Skeletonwitch’s Beyond the Permafrost, Ayreon’s The Human Equation, and Stream of Passion’s Embrace the Storm.)

In late 2009, I finally got to put my love of metal to good use, as I started writing for the aforementioned Musician Photo Journal. (I’ve also written a Dimmu Borgir concert review for They Will Rock You.) My goal is to eventually get material published in a magazine like Decibel or Terrorizer, but that’s a long ways off. All I can do is keep listening, and keep writing.

I may have too many hobbies, but metal has really become my primary one. Hobbies and interests come and go in waves for many people, including myself, but metal’s remained a constant for me. It’s been with me for nearly my entire life, and it’s one thing that will never let me down.

Now let’s get started. First order of business? Comics. In college, I was working on many projects related to the comic book industry. It was only natural that I eventually wanted to publish my own comics work; I wasn’t a good artist, but I had written up quite a few stories: a scifi/action series (Ground Zero), a scifi/horror series (Decon Squad), and a superhero series (Resurgence). I even produced an animated trailer for that last one!

I tried to get other artistically inclined folks on board. My efforts flopped, and in some cases, talented artists made no bones about telling me how awful my story ideas were. I ended up going the webcomic route a few years later, but real-world concerns shuttered that after three years (along with the fact that my art was crap).

From here, we can naturally segue into my piss-poor attempts at creative writing. I’ve had various science fiction and fantasy stories whirling about my head for over twenty years, but every time I’ve tried to commit them to text, I can never properly translate my ideas. Sure, I write blog entries here and there, and contribute to Musician Photo Journal, but that’s not the same. It’s also nonfiction, which I find considerably easier to write (as evidenced by what you’re reading right now).

Then there’s music. One of my biggest regrets was my failure to keep up on my guitar playing over the past decade. I lay the blame for this squarely at my own feet: I was lazy and easily distracted, and that’s all there is to it. I got my own guitar as a birthday present in the fall of 2000, which was my final semester in college. I played a hell of a lot in my dorm room, and my skills noticeably improved. (I’m also self-taught, so my definition of “improved” may vary compared to others.) Once I got out of school, I still played, but it fell by the wayside a bit once I got a full time job, moved out, et cetera. Even at my slow, self-taught pace, if I had kept at it over the past ten years, I’d be a hell of a lot better by now. I’ve been kicking myself a lot over this lately, and I deserve the self-flagellation. If I had stayed on target, I could’ve at least recorded an EP or something by now. (I don’t know any other musicians with similar tastes in extreme metal, but that’s what drum machines and GarageBand are for.)

Perhaps someday the creative impulses misfiring within my cranium might coalesce into something viable. But until that day comes, you’ll just have to suffer along with me as I write nothing but meandering blog entries.