Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
Batty - top 5 metal bands from Florida?
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Damn it, a lot of these bands I mainly know from listening to one or two albums for the most part. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to really get into death metal and I'm a big procrastinator about listening to discographies.
5. Poison the Well - I'm throwing these guys back a spot cause they have one album I care about and the next has two, but
The Opposite of December helped get me into metalcore and is one of my top go-to's these days. The kind of album that gets a band on top 5 lists all by itself.
4. Obituary - Man do I love me some Obituary. Beyond their first two albums I can't really get excited, but their combo of rancid old school death metal straight from the crypt and doom metal that updates
To Mega Therion is one of the coolest sounds in all of metal. John Tardy is a ****ing monster of a vocalist almost literally.
3. Death - Was very lukewarm on Death for the longest, but as I get older they grow on me more and more.
Scream Bloody Gore is perfect death thrash,
Individual Thought Patterns is ridiculously savage, and
Symbolic and
The Sound of Perseverence prove that death metal can have class and not suck. And Chuck Schuldiner has some of the most esoteric solos that could ever be none-more-metal.
2. Morbid Angel - If they were more consistent they'd be swinging a haymaker at #1 and I don't know who'd win, but Morbid Angel just have too many albums that don't click with me for one reason or another. They just seem to sometimes decide to not be memorable or engaging but then turn around and release an album that must have been written by another band raised from birth to make memorable and engaging death metal. But
Altars of Madness,
Covenant, and
Formulas Fatal to the Flesh are enough to cement their place in my mind's Unhallowed Halls of Death Metal Godliness. Hell, it's been a long time since I've heard
Gateways to Annihilation but I seem to remember that being awesome too, so I'll have that as well.
Spoiler for Morbid Angel vs. Death rant:
I think the reason I put Morbid Angel above Death, other than nostalgic love from the age of 14, is that they connect with me in their aesthetic more. Death's early work is raw as ****, but not heavy on the atmosphere, whereas Morbid Angel are always very concerned with immersion for the listener and creating music that sounds like it should live up to such a ridiculous name as "death metal". Both bands also evolved a hell of a lot over the years, and while Death was more consistent and arguably more successful with their experimentations in many ways, those advancements were always in the service of making the music more sophisticated; this resulted in some insanely cool music, but with all due respect to Chuck it's not quite the idea I'd have had if I were in their shoes, whereas Morbid Angel sound like we would have got on like two peas in a pod.
Morbid Angel's occasional stumblings were I like to think understandable since they were going for something harder to put their finger on. They got way more complex, yes, but it was always so that they could more successfully sound like the apocalypse coming up through your floorboards, and there are very few death metal albums I can think of that succeed at the kind of abstract, Lovecraftian atmosphere that Formulas Fatal to the Flesh does with its oddball guitar work that always makes me think of non-Euclidean geometry.
1. Iced Earth - I don't listen to melodic metal nearly as much as I used to, but I've definitely given more hours to these guys over the years than any other Florida metal band, and Matt Barlow was my fav metal singer for a not insubstantial amount of time. They're a bit too polished to
quite connect with me the way they used to, but they still have more than enough bite to keep me coming back and mother****er do they know their way around a hook. Some of that cheese has aged like a fine wine too. Totally glad I got to see them live with Barlow.
Just started up
Something Wicked this Way Comes and OMG the fun is real!