Krev wrote: Thu Nov 09, 2023 11:34 pm Weirdest? Try Suppuration's The Cube. Also, there's no way that the best stuff comes from Australia.

M.H wrote: Fri Nov 10, 2023 3:59 am I'm down with a lot of the genre from about 87 to 94 / 95-ish.

By 87 you start to see a clear musical evolution - techniques and tones and arrangements that are a full step away from conventional music.

There was a similar spirt of evolution / revolution early on in thrash but outside of the best bands it just didn't go far enough to really turn into a radically new form of music like DM did. I like a lot of thrash bands, but outside of maybe Slayer I don't think much of it holds up today in terms of shock and aggression - normies can easily tolerate 'Master of Puppets' but I reckon you would still puzzle or even alienate a mainstream audience if 'Empathological Necroticism' was played on a sitcom.

I start to tune out around 94 as it became clear that there were very strict limits with audience numbers / expectations that sorta strangled the genre's development- I suspect I'm in a minority, but I find that slew of records that Colombia backed are ARTISTICALLY awesome - but when that all failed to sell (often those albums sold substantially worse than the previous indie efforts distributed via Combat) it killed any ambition and growth within the scene.

IMO the scene regressed back to the underground and often got very dull - sometimes technically dazzling, but handicapped by the core audience's cult-like aesthetic expectations. (You can hear this shift between different approaches and outlooks most clearly between Morbid Angel's Domination and Formulas Fatal to the Flesh.)

The chances of anything idiosyncratic or different breaking through seemed to vanish w/ every generation. Now it's a cosplay scene, bordering on parody, dull because we can easily hear the vastly superior source material.

I personally don't like Gorguts or Nile or Necrophagist at all, but I felt sad that these seriously advanced and visionary musicians were wasted in that ghetto scene. You have to follow so many aesthetic and contextual rules to play the game and that prevents 99% of people checking it out - very dispiriting vibes for me.