from the dark tranquility's albums i heard so far,i liked fiction the most.  it's the most melodic imo.     
omnium gatherum's "red shift" and insumnium's "above the weeping world" albums are the best melodeath i heard in general. what can you do..?the finnish rules melodic stuff.
these days i listen to agathodaimon a lot..very nice progressive with black metal vocal.

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rockopera8 said:

 
No,  but I watched the new video of the song "Gateways". Didn't care for it that much, and it was kind of weird. Is the rest of the album similar? I really haven't been keeping up with the band, I mainly like their older stuff.

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Ignore the video and band pictures. DB looks so facepalm worthy in those.
 
Yeah the album is similar, but of course all different songs.
 
 
My verdict is that this album is a surprise. Despite its utterly hilarious name, this album is best DB has putted out for a while though this is no masterpiece of course (waiting another EDT or Stormblast from dimmu is pointless anyway). Orchestration is fantastic, production is also very good (Andy Sneap usually delivers good stuff). Songs overall are average but none of them annoy me, though I HAVE heard much better pseudoblackmetal / symphonic extreme metal lately like Vesania. If you like symphonic extreme metal, definetly check this album out. Still, no song really stands out and overall album is easily forgettable minus the orchestra.
 
Also I can help but be dissapointed by the lack of ICS Vortex. Through the songs there are so many spots where his vocals could have been sweet and subconciously I was constantly waiting for them only to be dissapointed, so to speak. About their current session bassist/clean vocacils Snowy Shaw from Therion, he is just like what I predicted: just another clean vocalist. Really, his vocals do not add anything worthy to the couple of songs he is in. This actually blows my mind! If they really needed few lines of clean vocs without need for any "special talents" (like Vortex's operatics and so on) other than just singing well, why the hell go all the way to hire someone from Sweden!? Doesnt Norway have clean singers that could have filled that role, perhaps even better than Shaw? I just dont get it...

I thought Fiction was a little generic sounding. My faves are probably the Gallery and Skydancer

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maza said:

Also I can help but be dissapointed by the lack of ICS Vortex. Through the songs there are so many spots where his vocals could have been sweet and subconciously I was constantly waiting for them only to be dissapointed, so to speak. About their current session bassist/clean vocacils Snowy Shaw from Therion, he is just like what I predicted: just another clean vocalist. Really, his vocals do not add anything worthy to the couple of songs he is in. This actually blows my mind! If they really needed few lines of clean vocs without need for any "special talents" (like Vortex's operatics and so on) other than just singing well, why the hell go all the way to hire someone from Sweden!? Doesnt Norway have clean singers that could have filled that role, perhaps even better than Shaw? I just dont get it...

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Yeah, the weakest parts of the album are definitely the clean vocals. They actually remind me of Septic Flesh a bit, which is somewhat jarring coming from Dimmu. I understand the dilemma though, obviously you don't want to hire a clone of Vortex, so you have to go for another sound even if it doesn't fit as well. Still, at least it's not as bad as Scar Symmetry, where their two new vocalists managed to be worse at both kinds of vocals than Christian Älvestam. I actually would've preferred if they had just used Agnete Kjølsrud for all of the clean vocal parts on the album, rather than just in Gateways. She at least adds something unique.

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davebsc said:

Yeah, the weakest parts of the album are definitely the clean vocals. They actually remind me of Septic Flesh a bit, which is somewhat jarring coming from Dimmu. I understand the dilemma though, obviously you don't want to hire a clone of Vortex, so you have to go for another sound even if it doesn't fit as well. Still, at least it's not as bad as Scar Symmetry, where their two new vocalists managed to be worse at both kinds of vocals than Christian Älvestam. I actually would've preferred if they had just used Agnete Kjølsrud for all of the clean vocal parts on the album, rather than just in Gateways. She at least adds something unique.

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Yeah! Actually if they would have used Agnete more I think it would have been a very good change. Her vocals at the end of Gateways are surprisingly catchy and hearing more of her would have been quite interesting. Only problem is that Dimmu has so many songs with clean male vocals now that without some kind of replacement for Vortex live gigs will be severely handicapped. But then again those old songs might actually sound really fresh with female vocals now that I think about it!
 
 
*edit* Oh, about clean vocals in Abrahadabra, I completely forgot Garm. Probaply because he is only in one song, Endings And Continuations. And honestly he should have done ALL male clean vocals on the album. While I prefer Vortex over him, Garm has clearly superior voice than Shaw if you ask me.

Can anybody recommend more bands/albums like "Scream Bloody Gory" by Death? 
 
(I know that is a classic but still....)

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donunus said:

I thought Fiction was a little generic sounding. My faves are probably the Gallery and Skydancer

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Same

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trogdor said:

Can anybody recommend more bands/albums like "Scream Bloody Gory" by Death? 
 
(I know that is a classic but still....)

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Massacre - From Beyond
 

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trogdor said:

Can anybody recommend more bands/albums like "Scream Bloody Gory" by Death? 
 
(I know that is a classic but still....)

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Not necessarily similar, but worth checking out when it comes to classic death metal
 
Pestilence - Consuming Impulse
Unleashed - Where No Life Dwells
Gorguts - Erosion Of Sanity
Gorguts - Considered Dead
Benediction - Trascend The Rubicon
Massacra - Enjoy The Violence
Possessed - Seven Churches (the forefathers of deathmetal together with Death and likes)

I haven't listened to the new Dimmu yet, but a friend that has it described the new clean vocals as sounding like something you would hear on a Creed album.  That is far from encouraging.

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trogdor said:

Can anybody recommend more bands/albums like "Scream Bloody Gory" by Death? 
 
(I know that is a classic but still....)

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Not same in sound but definitely classics. If you know them , discard this post
 
Dismember - Like An Ever Flowing Stream
Entombed - Left Hand Path
Demilich - Nesphite
Bolt Thrower - The IVth Crusade
At the Gates - The Red in the Sky is Ours
Immolation - Here in After, Close to a World Below
Necrophobic - The Nocturnal Silence
Demigod - Sumber of Sullen Eyes
Morpheus Descends - Ritual of Infinity
 
As for stuff more suited for your rec:
Revenant - Prophecies of a Dying World
Obituary - Cause of Death
Morbid Angel - Altars of Madness, Blessed Are The Sick
Massacra - Final Holocaust
Morbid Saint - Spectrum of Death
Luciferion - Demonication (The Manifest)
Merciless - The Awakening

If anyone has Machine Head - The Blackening can you tell me if your copy of the cd sounds like it was recorded like crap?  (other than the machine head sound lol...)  
 
I hear a strange buzzing which is driving me nuts, and I'm not getting it from any other cd I own.  

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vulgardisplay said:

If anyone has Machine Head - The Blackening can you tell me if your copy of the cd sounds like it was recorded like crap?  (other than the machine head sound lol...)  
 
I hear a strange buzzing which is driving me nuts, and I'm not getting it from any other cd I own.  

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Do they have some tracks from it on their Myspace page? I was hearing a high pitched whine in the background of Kalmah's 12 gauge, so I checked their streaming tracks and it was in those too. Everybody I asked about it seemed to think I was crazy, but the album is completely unlistenable to me because of that weird whine. Not that it's a big loss.

I havent heard that whine on my copy of 12gauge that you always talk about. Are you talking about the sound like what you get when converting files from 48khz to 44.1khz? That scratchy ringing of converted files? Actually it would be cool if you can try a file conversion of a 48khz file to 44.1khz with dbpoweramp or something of that sort just to check if we are talking about the same thing
 
Oh by the way... That ringing of conversion I'm talking about is very typical for youtube/myspace files

I'm listening to lossless files that I ripped from the CD I bought, and there is a constant crackling/buzzing going the whole time.  It's driving me crazy haha.  I hate bad recordings so much.