Well, like so many 10-year-olds in the mid-90s, my first metal band was Metallica, and they were my favorite until I was 12, when I ordered Pantera's Official Live 101 Proof from a magazine. That was really where it started. I started by getting familiar with all the stand-bys like "Walk", "A New Level", "Five Minutes Alone" and "Becoming". But it was only a matter of time until I was blasting "Suicide Note Pt. 2" and "Sandblasted Skin" at full volume on my Discman everyday going to school and back. Occasionally I would hand the headphones over to some unexposed kid and say, "Hey! Listen to this." Good for a laugh.
It wasn't until high school that I was officially introduced to Slayer through some friends from New Hampshire. They also had this Death Metal comp disc called Death is Just the Beginning. It was strange. There was a Death Metal band with a flute player and it was the first music I had ever heard with blast beats except for Cannibal Corpse, who actually turned me off from that style for a long time.
So back to Slayer. My friends and I used to get high and have debates about who could kick whose ass in a fight: Pantera or Slayer. You know, kids' sh!t.
From then on, in a rough chronological order, my progression into extreme metal went something like this: Pantera to Slayer to Sepultura to Hatebreed to Six Feet Under to Slipknot to Fear Factory to Scar Culture to Superjoint Ritual to Opeth to Pig Destroyer to a whole world that includes the likes of Between the Buried and Me, Burnt By The Sun, Car Bomb, Psyopus, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Despised Icon, Behemoth, Nile, Dimmu Borgir, The Red Chord, Strapping Young Lad, Darkane, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Braindrill, The Faceless and Gojira.
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