I thought we could share the bands which we voted for, just for curiosity

EDIT: I'll post mine as soon as I've decided (I'm anal about this )

TOP 5 AGM ALBUMS 2009

1) Diablo Swing Orchestra - "Sing-Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious"
2) Madder Mortem - "Eight Ways"
3) Damned Spirits' Dance - "Weird Constellations"
4) Thy Catafalque - "Róka Hasa Rádió"
5) Amesoeurs - "Amesoeurs"

10 FAVOURITE AGM BANDS:

01) Unexpect
02) Polkadot Cadaver
03) Pin-Up Went Down
04) Diablo Swing Orchestra
05) Akphaezya
06) Stolen Babies
07) Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
08) Carnival in Coal
09) Dog Fashion Disco
10) Madder Mortem

TOP 10 AGM ALBUMS OF THE DECADE 2000 - 2009

01) Unexpect "In a Flesh Aquarium"
02) Polkadot Cadaver "Purgatory Dance Party"
03) Pin-Up Went Down "2 Unlimited"
04) Diablo Swing Orchestra "Sing-Along Songs for the Damned and Delirious"
05) Akphaezya "Anthology II - Links from Dead Trinity"
06) Stolen Babies "There Be Squabbles Ahead"
07) Unexpect "We, Invaders"
08) Dog Fashion Disco "Adultery"
09) Carnival in Coal "Collection Prestige"
10) Sleepytime Gorilla Museum "Of Natural History"

Such an effort to make these lists

decade:

1.Arcturus The Sham Mirrors 2002
No words needed for this masterpiece

2.Manes How The World Came To An End 2007
A turn after the middle of the decade: discarding all the rules and bonds

3.Mayhem Ordo Ad Chao 2007
Their best and blackest album yet, the most shocking one this decade

4.In The Woods... - Strange in Stereo 2001
A fading star at the beginning of the century, a requiem of prog rock and simple but deep dark atmospheres

5.Deathspell Omega Kenose 2005
The most compact work of mind blowing complexity

6. <code> Nouveau Gloaming 2005
retrogressive sepia dreams

7. Emperor Prometheus - The Discipline Of Fire And Demise 2001
The swansong of one of the greatest black metal bands of all time, showing their other face

8. Johann Wolfgang Pozoj Birth Of Pozoj 2006
Monumental and fragile sounds merging melancholy with a distant echo of crust

9. Virus Carheart 2003
A trail leading back to where the rainbow ends

10.Lux Occulta The Mother And The Enemy 2001
A new light that didn't continue to shine on, would be one of the greatest by now!

You're comment made interested in trying Arcturus again. Is this album very different from Le Masquerade?

EVERY Arcturus album is different. In fact, La Masquerade is the weirdest and most eclectic, if you ask me. I say every one and all are worth checking out. It's the best avant-garde metal band out there (with permission from Virus, who are more rock and less metal), it's norwegian's finest musicianship, it has Garm singing, Sverd on keys, even Skoll played in Arcturus! And Tidemann! Hahahah.

Nah, just check it out. Also, The Sham Mirrors is my first preference.

Oh, one song on Sham Mirrors features Ihsahn singing, too.

Thanks.

I'm listening to it right now. I don't find it... mind shattering (whilst more enjoyable than La Masquerade).

I've noticed that my tastes differ much from the rest of the forum. I think it may have to do with "musical upbringing" and personality. Or maybe I'm just deaf (I think I'm the only non-musician on the forum). I feel all alooooneeee

Probably you come from a different background, and fuck, you are not me, not anyone else on the forum, that's the good thing, everyone is just itself with its own tastes.

And yeah, Sham Mirrors is much more accesible than La Masquerade. Still, it has many details to be discovered.

Yupp different background:



are his fav. agm bands!

Definitly easier to approach (but not easy to absorb) than "our" bands.
Bear in mind that a lot of agm people entered agm trough black metal (my story) and there is a strong connection with the norwegian bm scene in a large number of bands.
In Rijeka (where JH comes from) as far as I know (have friends and a drummer there) quite a few people like bm, and when U find a typical BMhead he woun't give a shit for sth new!
So our frined here must have stumbeled upon the genre from the other side (the other continent) discovering "younger" acts"!

The Sham Mirrors is less wierd that LMI for sure but has a very arcturusy thing: all the music is based on the keyboards and that's what makes the band specific! True, this album has the guiter parts much strongly defioned (it has riffs!) than LMI; but it still has a string that makes it ... a hard egg to crack?no but it's kinda convencional but it's not...goddamn I gotta check the review can't think of the right words now!

I think The Sham Mirrors is actually more of a summing up exactly what ARCTURUS is/was about - star-ships, circus black metal, trip-hop, Samuel Beckett, Aleister Crowley, and a hell ov a GROOVE. more GENIUS on LMI, more clear APPROACH (goes with less experiments) on tSM.




Maybe, if you're not from a clear BM background. Wtih that background, like myself, Solefald, Arcturus, VBE, DHG etc feel much more natural than those ecclecto-weirdness-guys like UNEXPECT, SGM and DIABLO SWING ORCHESTRA. (now I saw that you wrote exactly that, Ulv - sorry for repeating your point!)
Anyway, each to his own record self. There is always new fascinating shit to discover around the corner, be it "post-BM" or whatevva.

Yeah, the metalheads here in Rijeka are mostly stubborn boneheads, people with whom you wouldn't want a philosophical conversation. Black metal here has to be fast and kvlt.

I never liked extreme metal (except a few exceptions - Metallica, Anthrax and some tech death bands; and folk, if they count as ext), I always felt it sounded "all the same". By this, I mean style wise. I listened mostly to nu and non-extreme bands I felt were unique and worth something (and still do, even though I don't listen to them anymore)
EDIT: though now, through agm, I appreciate them more(and every other musical genre, for that matter) , especially BM (through bands that in base or part are BM)

You know, it's interesting to think that the regional factor can influence your tastes in music. I guess you could connect it to the surroundings influencing your way of thinking (some more than others). Thinking of Scandinavia, you could think that there is a bigger probability of a child ending up as a metalhead than in some other regions of the world. You could connect that to the quantity and quality of music > and that could be connected to culture (how much freedom of thinking is "allowed" and research resources; education probably a little bit too)


I think the other side is better terminology(another wave/style perhaps) since 5 of those bands are north american(Unexpect being Canadians) and 5 European



You mean that at first sight it's more "mainstream sounding"(approachable) but that it has more elements (being basically a clusterfuck of genres) making it harder to "perceive completely"(absorb)?

EDIT: Agreed with Avoid. There is goodness in all kinds of agm forms

That's not my understanding of extreme "metal". Maybe extreme rock, through.



I really don't know what to think of it... for sure there is some truth to it because there is a lot more acceptance for the metal genre in, say, Scandinavia, also Pantera hit #1 in US (I think it was there) with Far Beyond Driven (their fucking best and heavier album - to me), and here in Spain everything outside of rock, flamenco and pure shit is almost satanic blasphemy that needs to burn in hell or be "censored" (although we don't really have a censorship like other countries), but we don't give grammies to even Dimmu Borgir... if you know what I mean.
But now with the Internet one can just look up whatever feels the strangest and most out-there thing and be like "I'm cool because I listen to the most unknown things"... so everyone could have access to the almost same although the culture of it all is probably different.
Metal in the eighties here had to be much more underground (I think) than in other countries... but maybe not that much. Anyway, for black and death metal, there's the tradition in Norway and Sweden, but history has given us hard rock and heavy metal bands from England, Switzerland, Germany... not just Scandinavia. Anyway, I think the amount has been siginificantly superior in the North than in the South countries, contrasting number of metal/extreme bands with population.

And about the backgrounds, yeah I come from extreme metal, mainly black metal, too. Although I started with all avantgarde metal about maybe 1997-98 when I first heard of it (although maybe I had listened to some albums before), and become more and more interested in it from 1999/2000 on. I didn't listen to VBE when they were alive, for example. But I lived the Evolving of the Wolves and Rebel Extravaganza, Thorns, 666 International, The Sham Mirrors... that's when I started to be aware of the thing so that's basically my background on agm.

Well I see why that sounded... silly (to say the least) but I was being technical in that thrash is extreme metal, and that at least "Kill 'Em All" was thrash. But yeah, not very extreme when looking at their whole discography. Hell, Kill 'Em All was probably the mellowest thrash I have ever heard



Yeah, the internet certainly helps with being more open-minded.
But, look at it this way. For example, *insert Norwegian name here* has been surrounded by metalheads, media and musicians that don't mind progress and diversity, while *insert Croatian name here* is surrounded by metalheads who don't like it(some could even verbally bully you; but thank god there are those who don't care or are even open-minded), a non-existing media that covers metal and uninspired musicians. Oh, and an couple of years ago (and it still happens once in a while) a guy(once even a girl) gets beat up if they wear something alternative(especially metalheads). In the same circumstances, they could have had the same charts on Last-fm, but here it's probable that the Norwegian guy is the only one listening to Ulver, VBE, Solefald etc. , while the Croatian is probably doing devil horns and listening to Slayer and Deicide. In this situation (if presumed they had the same personality) the only thing saving the Croat from being a sheep is a strong character and/or the habit of questioning every day/general life and norms

Btw I am kind of proud of having(liking) some music from Luxembourg, Mongolia, Indonesia and Chile . It would nice, one day, having at least a band I like from every country. Cosmopolitanism FTW!

In understand what you say. And you made me think of two things:
- there is a lot of weird experimental metal (and all genres music) coming from places all around the world, but talking about metal this time, a lot of them are not coming from Scandinavia or the US, and are quite innovative.
- the second one is related to the first. The more known and 'mainstream' metal there is in an area, the more probability of FAIL bands to come from there, too, as long as there is population and new metalhead generations. In Norway, there's uncountable black metal bands, but which percentage is really doing it right? And in other countries? I'm not the one who knows the most about this kind of things but I guess something true there has to be on it.

The thing is, there are gazillions of BM bands everywhere, the phenomena is world-wide, it's just that certain regions - like Norway - had a lot of innovators early on in the genre. The same with Swedish Death Metal: about 15 years ago, Dismember and Entombed where household names, appearing on Christmas events on TV and everything. Both Sweden and Norway are pretty open, liberal nations, extremely secularized (in Sweden, denominational Christians are a minority) - even though the BM bands weren't appreciated when they started killing & burning churches, they still became household names. Norwegian black metal, with Dimmu Borgir, Emperor & Satyricon up front, is not underground. It's a part - the biggest part - of their modern cultural heritage, there's nothing extreme in that any more. There is of course an underground scene with extreme bands (Fossbrenna Productions for example), but it makes things harder for new bands to come anywhere - when you have bands in your country like Satyricon or At The Gates or Opeth, you have to push a lot harder to be accepted (as a band that is) - you will always be compared with them.

Of course, when there are big and innovative bands from a country, there will be hundreds coming after, but when the dust settles after the hype, only the important names will be cared about (Carpe Tenebrarum anyone? Gardenian?).

Anyway, extreme metal is much mroe an integral & accepted part of Scandinavian culture, even though many thinks it's immature.

but a sweedish trademark that's still underground is sweedish D-beat (fuck yeah!)
U guys have a good point on the evolution from bm to agm in snacndinavia/europe!
PErhaps those 5 amercan bands have a completley different gensesis, which can be heard in their sound and in their "interpretation" of "avantgarde"

As for croatia I think the best bands here are doom and stoner bands, we really have some kickass names