Time to tell the tale of my late-in-life conversion to metal...

Now I've always been a hard rock fan, but the more extreme stuff never appealed to me. Even though my first real concert was Black Sabbath, heavy metal wasn't something I could take seriously.

But I have always liked exploring unusual genres of music, and it was, I think, in 2010 that I was reading an article on the web about micro-songs, extremely short pieces of music. Mentioned there was the record holder for Shortest Music Video:



Well, OK, that was worthless crap, but it led me to wikipedia, down a rabbit hole of different subgenres of metal, and I discovered an article on Funeral Doom. That page had as a sample a clip from a song called "The Country Doctor" by a group called Burning Witch. Frankly, that cracked me up: "The Country Doctor", to me, evoked the image of a kindly old fellow delivering babies in a Little House on the Prairie small town, but I played the clip and...

...well, that cracked me up, too. A completely ridiculous slow screamed phrase over a chord and beat so slow as to be almost beyond any sensation of rhythm. But I was intrigued, and I wanted to experience the whole song.

So I went to a music streaming service and played it.

Still ridiculous. Rock needs to be fast. Who wants super-slow stuff like this? Not me!

But another day came, and I couldn't resist playing it again to marvel at how anyone could listen to it. And I listened to the whole album. And I did it again. And it got under my skin, so I started investigating who these guys were, and what other Funeral Doom bands were out there. With an interest in Lovecraft, I found several bands taking influence from him: Coliseum, Evoken, Thergothon, and I was really getting into it. From there, I found myself marveling at Ahab's nautical-themed Funeral Doom. I wasn't a heavy metal fan, but I think I really did like this slow stuff!

So I explored more from the guys who kicked this off. Burning Witch only put out a couple of albums, but two of its main creative force formed Sunn O))), who did ambient metal, which was another weird new subgenre to explore. And among that group's offerings was something called "Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)" supposedly a cover of a group called Immortal. But it sounded like a haze of heavy sound, and I wondered just how that could be a cover of a "real song", so I had to head over to the world of Black Metal to listen to the original.

Immortal's original bore no resemblance to Sunn O)))'s "cover", except sharing the same lyrics, which were almost indecipherable in either version. But now I was going through the same process as before: how could anyone enjoy this garbage like what Immortal was doing? So I had to listen to Immortal, and again, I was drawn to repeat the listening just to ponder why anyone would choose to listen to that...

...and wouldn't you guess, I got hooked on Immortal, graduating to their entire catalog and listening to it so frequently it became my main driving music for way too long.

I was sold, I was converted, I was a heavy metal fan, although I've kept a broad range of musical interests, even indulging at length in what may be heavy metal's polar opposite, the microgenre of mallsoft. But I'm never likely to outgrow Immortal, Ahab, Acid King, Evoken, Alestorm, Abbath, Burning Witch, and Thergothon.

I haven't had time to keep up with this thread lately (I wasn't expecting classiccomics.org to become a hotbed of metal, at least relative to the rest of the world. cool). Before this post gets too stale, I want to make clear that the joke was supposed to be on me in that post. I have a sense of humor that doesn't work well online (and maybe not much in real life). The joke was that I have a hard time being open to stuff outside my narrow interests. I wouldn't genuinely say that the music you (or anybody else) likes should die. Not that you were defensive, but I realized I probably sounded a little jerky.

I'll check out those videos later, and some of the stuff in other posts. To the extent that I was offering a genuine opinion in my last post about growly metal, it was mostly based on seeing one of those growly groups open for Megadeth, and I remember being starved for a decent guitar solo by the time their set was over. Luckily, there was a feast to be had when Megadeth took the stage.

I have to say, I've been less quick to dismiss the stuff I'm hearing from metal channels that are playing metal which isn't tailor-made for me, since this thread started. 

Not to be confused with Mandatory Metallica which radio stations did every day in the 90s at the same time, which I fully support!

Like metal, there is no need to arbitrarily need an excuse to justify getting ice cream. Ice cream justifies itsef.

Last time I went out for ice cream, I wore my Metallica shirt, and was approached by a fellow fan who was there for ice cream. We swapped concert stories.

Mandatory Metallica was downright inspirational to me in the 90s. It was vital in the pre-streaming era. I was exploring current heavy music a bit from the commercial period, but one night they played an 80s Metallica song and I went WHOA WHAT WAS THAT??? I NEED MORE!

Nerd out, man. As a musically-unskilled and low-brow kind of guy, I very much appreciate the perspective of yourself, impulse , and the other folks whose opinions are more grounded in in the technical aspects of the music.

Speaking of, what's everyone's opinion on the production quality of the first Sabbath record? I love the feeling of them being plugged in right there in front of me. The sound on that record is probably more out of necessity than the band trying to create that sound, though. I imagine a lot of people wouldn't mind if it had sounded more... polished.

A track for reference:

Favorite Sabbath album, favorite Sabbath song right there. Love the production and feeling of the whole thing as you said. Plug in and play, simple as that, I think it was perfect. "Behind the Wall of Sleep" is my other favorite track off of it, but again love the whole album.

Also, Tony was still tuning normally at this point and on the next album, and while the lower tuning that started on Master of Reality became the trademark, I think those first two albums were perfect as is.