It was in the context of your "screaming at me" comment.

I definetely think longer tracks work best when you've been eased into the style and sounds of the band. Get me in the mood, then start noodling.

I wasn't sure which way to take the comment. Still not quite sure, actually.

Old metal has just as ****ty production as modern metal. The styles have just changed.

Yeah well... it's different, which leaves room for personal preferences. I have much more tolerance for the most common bad habits of the 80's (thin sounding mixes, phoney sounding reverb), the 90's (bad triggered kick drums, odd mismatched mixing where the drums don't sound like they're in the same room as the guitars, for example) than I have for 00's and 10's bad metal production trends (crazy compression, obnoxiously loud growls, snares and kickdrums, plus weird over the top snares that sound like frigging gunshots).

The 00's we specifically dominated by a lot of awful Andy Sneap production and too many Andy Sneap wannabe producers. I'm not a fan of that dull ass production sound.

To be fair, there's some really great sounding modern metal records around. I'm just talking about the general worst tendencies. If I go after the best examples instead, I'd probably put modern metal over the 90's and 80's...

General statements are tricky.

Exactly. You gotta sell me on whether you make good **** or not earlier on. Noodling isn't the best advertisement. Once I hear the cool first song, then I'll invest into your noodling.

The thin production is much more noticeably bad to me than the overcompressed modern production and I don't think loud growls are always a bad thing, but I get your point a little better now.

One man's noodles is another man's steak.

No probably not, but it really does annoy me how the nuances of the music can become really hard to appreciate on so many albums where they are obscured behind a layer of constant abrasive screeching. Many bands have really one dimensional growls combined with interesting guitar playing. Seems like such a shame to give so much priority to the least interesting aspect of your music.

The problem is that when you're dealing with music as extreme as brutal death metal and Norwegian black metal there's often no room for non-extreme metal vocals unless it's some kind of experimental metal. At what point would you include melodic vocals in Cryptopsy and Darkthrone?