Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20170901233307/@comment-3547390-20171025111727

Heh, sounds like fun :P

You know, that is pretty much what happened with Thief. "I cranked up the gamma, now it is just dark and whitewashed!"

Quake 1.06? Not really, no, but be careful about getting too close to them. They might just teleport somewhere else for some reason.

Tarja is indeed amazing, I enjoy operatic styles in metal. I shall have to check out Therion. I never knew you liked symphonic metal, one of my favorite genres. When I bother with a band, I tend to listen to their entire discography, so I am quite familiar with all the songs of the various bands listed unless I needed to stop at a certain point due to some connection to some game. I know what you mean by epic, it is one of the big things that makes it so amazing, so much music just lacks energy. It has the melodicness I feel tends to be lacking in death metal, even melodic death metal. I am not big at all into thrash, find doom boring, grunge has always been uninteresting, nu-metal depends on the band and feels like a mess of a genre, metalcore is horrible, grindcore is even worse, deathcore is death metal with grindcore. Basically, I find myself disliking most genres of metal and don't really like many other types of music. But symphonic metal tends to be a great place to hunt for new music.

After Forever is easily the most recommended of all the bands mentioned. Compared to Nightwish, they are more aggressive and powerful, while having a soprano singer that can sing higher and more operatic notes than even Tarja. Their first album, Prison of Desire, is the only album I can consider flawless. Every song on it I highly enjoy, not even finding a single one mediocre. Some are high energy, some are calmer, but all are amazing. Their second album is worth checking out since it is more in that style, but I found the manner in which most songs were sung to just be more boring, it felt like they focused more on the complexity and thus things dragged out more than they should. While I like female operatic voices, I also don't like tenor male voices from what I am aware of. After their second album their main composer left and their EP was relatively boring, but the third full-length album is actually quite good. Especially Digital Deceit, which I absolutely love. Some of the later songs started to drag a bit and there were some mock arguments that are highly cringeworthy, but as a whole the album is pretty good if not Prison of Desire level generally. Their final two albums are not the worst thing I have heard, but are pretty bad, it suddenly becomes Kelly Clarkson in a metal band as opposed to operatic and classical. The music lacks the energy, turning progressive rock, and it was essentially the death of the band. The post-band efforts are just as bad, HDK is your stock death metal band focusing more on brutality than musical sound, while ReVamp is late After Forever 2.0.

Nightwish is more spotty for me and I never listened to the post Tarja stuff due to one of my insane obsessions with linking everything. Oceanborn was easily my favorite period, I was not too big on the folkish period of their first album beyond Tutankhamen. Wishmaster was decent if weaker than Oceanborn, even though both albums I only liked two songs each (even at their height, Tarja made more quality over quantity pieces, I found most uninteresting for random reasons). Nightwish went bad when they started adding male vocals. "I wish I had an Angel" is possibly one of the most annoying symphonic metal songs out there. Nemo on the other hand is one song I enjoy like Digital Deceit. Her solo work is not recommendable for the most part, it definitely lacks what made her great in Nightwish, unless you are crazy enough to listen to 13 versions of Ave Maria. Her metal albums aren't too offensive, each one had one song I found decent, just nothing close to Nightwish quality.

Tristania is essentially what happens when you take a Tarja sounding singer, put her in a death metal band with highly classical influences, and have a gothic vocalist in the background (I am a sucker for gothic overtones). Needless to say, when it is good, it is absolutely amazing. Good Tristania is indeed something to recommend. The problem is that I found flaws that tended to make them scattered like Nightwish, but with an even shorter good run. Their first album was mostly doom flavored, so if you don't like really slow paced songs you might be bored until the end of the album, when it starts picking up with My Lost Lenore, which is the only song I really enjoy on that album. The second dumps that doom metal in favor of an extremely epic style, I highly enjoy Sequel to Decay and a couple others, but found most songs just tended to focus more on boring choruses trying to go for that death metal style. Their third album, World of Glass, essentially had them lose their main composer. Instead of failing, I feel they burned forth that energy with renewed vigor, creating something as good as their previous album, perhaps even better. Though they did have a tendency for slow word choruses that tended to annoy me. Death metal songs that sing like "I....went....to....the....store....to....beat...up....your.....grandMOTHER!!!!!" just tend to get old as they feel like an angry person with an asthma attack. Their fourth album, they suddenly went NIN sounding, except more annoying and more chaotic. Then they became more rock-like and less epic. Then they started to come back, but dumped their singer and went highly generic. They died for me with their third album.

As I said, the second album for Tristania was the last with their composer, because he went on to found Sirenia. That one isn't as good, On The Wane is the one song I find relatively enjoyably along with Lethargica to a lesser degree. A big part of it is the fact that Sirenia features pop singing instead of the classical styles of the others, meaning it just isn't as awesome generally. It does work for certain songs, but those songs are rare as said, and only on the first album. The second album is a lot like Decipher, more complex but more boring. They then became more pop oriented before turning back to symphonic metal. They also are known for being inconsistent with singers until their return from that pop phase. Of course, the music was still highly dull, and I can't even blame the singer as the composer also did another band called Mortemia which was just as boring without the singer. Around 2013 they started to sound more epic, like they were trying again, but the singer is really high pitched and really annoying to the point that she kills every song. Two albums later, she is ditched without reason and replaced with Barbra Streisand. The new singer for Sirenia sounds like a woman known on South Park for torturing people with her voice. If it wasn't for On the Wane, which I find rather enjoyable, I wouldn't even have shown the band.

Until this year I never really gave symphonic metal a chance, mainly because I heard Sirenia and thought it was all generic. Plus I have found Lacuna Coil entirely boring, didn't like anything on her first two albums (couldn't go later due to game ties) or Within Temptation's early work (also couldn't go later due to game ties). So After Forever is the main band I like, specifically the early stuff, while the others are more scattered but have different levels of awesome and tend to put out something I highly enjoy.

Yeah, sounds like a mess indeed, I have no idea how you manage to interact with others so well.

On the next episode of SH!T AUSTRALIA SAYS! - Watch as a guy yells out Crikey, another demands to use a dunny, and a third runs across some space aliens and neither understand each other. It is all fun and games while everyone dies due to the poisonous spiders. Tune in Sunday!