Metal month? Wow, I'm excited for that.

Lol.

You know... I've long known what the cover for Load was, and yet, the better part of fifteen years later, I just got the double entendre.

To be honest I don't know. There are only eleven --- sorry, twelve! --- months in a year and in order to make something special it has to be, well, special. If I were to make every other month a featured one, I think the novelty value would be lost. Add to that the amount of work that goes into these --- I've been preparing for Metal Month II since August, and before, if you count mentally --- and I just feel everything else I do would suffer as a result.

Naturally, my own preference would be for Prog Month (duh!) but then again, I feature a lot of Prog in my journals anyway, so maybe that wouldn't be necessary. Country Month could be interesting, but who would read that?

You know, there's nothing stopping you doing Psych Month or Folk Month or whatever: I don't have copyright on the idea (Copyright Trollheart Enterprises MMXIII, all rights reserved. Any copyright infringemnent will be vigorously contested in court) so anyone else is free to do it. Batty did a month themed around the likes of ICP if I recall. There is a lot of work though, and really once you start --- even once you announce it --- you have to see it through unless you want your readers to see you as a flake, so if you were intending to try it might I suggest an exploratory Week first? I had intended to do Metal Week originally but then decided I couldn't cover all I wanted to in one week, so extended it to four. But then, I'm clinically insane, as we all know, and a lost cause... ;)

So the short answer is no, I don't think so. I also want Metal Month to stand out each year, not get subsumed within a plethora of other features like Country, Prog or (God help us) Pop Month....

I'm pretty sure that only lasted about a week. I tried for a whole month, but aside from ICP's nineties material and a couple Twiztid albums, Psychopathic Records is ****. Just ****.

I dig ya. It might be something for me to consider down the road. And I just might give a couple metal songs a listen this month. Nobody and nothing has persuaded me to do that in a while.

Yeah but at least you tried. The point is, anyone can do it if they a) love the subject or are interested in it enough and b) are prepared to put in the hours to get the work done. And also c) be prepared for the total deafening silence that may greet their labour of love. People are not going to be showering you with praise, necessarily, and that's something you need to understand if you decide to attempt this. It may be a thankless task. But as long as you and even one other person enjoys it, I feel it's worth it.

All right. In terms of requested albums here's what I have so far:

Mastodon --- Blood mountain
Cavalera Conspiracy -- Inflikted
Sigh --- Imaginary sonicscape
Znowhite --- Act of God
Draconian --- Arcane rain fell
Cryptopsy --- None so vile
Dissection --- Storm of the light's bane
Arcturus --- La masquerade infernale
Mondstille --- Seelenwund
Urfaust -- Geist ist teufel
Gallowbraid --- Ashen elaidon
Conan --- Monnos
Metallica --- Load and Reload

THAT certainly prompted some "wrong spelling/unknown word" underlining! :rofl:

ALL of these albums will be reviewed, as you guys were first to the post, however Batty if I end up swamped I may have to cut down your tree, sorry three to one: which would you most prefer I listened to (as if I couldn't guess! Gimme a C! Gimme an R! Gimme a Y! --- is it coincidence that the first part of Cryptopsy spells cry..? :shycouch:)

I'm still happy to take requests but given that there are time constraints and I don't want to be doing ten updates a day (arf!) newer ones may have to be cherry-picked. But by all means keep them coming...

Honestly, if I wanted you to listen to one of them it would be Arcturus. They might be the only one who would actually be up your alley, but at the same time I don't know that I've ever heard you listen to anything like them, so I'm still curious. But after that, yeah, Cryptopsy. You never really listened to any "true blue" death metal last time and it just felt wrong. It doesn't get much more death metal than Cryptopsy though.

Yeah, that Sigh album is killer. I like the love its been getting in here.

I know I recommended a few last time, but for the life of me I can't remember what I did. So here are some of my personal favorites from over the years:

Chthonic - Seediq Bale
Megadeth - Rust In Peace
Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse

And I want to throw some new stuff at you as well.

Carcass - Surgical Steel
Pallbearer - Foundations of Burden

Those two are pretty far apart from each other in style, so if you want to ignore my other recs just do those two. I'd be interested to see what you think of either.

Link for last year's inaugural Metal Month...
http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...ml#post1370435