Post by reigninbloodygore on Jan 14, 2021 0:06:27 GMT -5
Just a fun topic I wanted to bring. For those of us who still can remember the feeling and what it was, sometimes thinking back to those early days of metal fandom is a great feeling.
My first metal album was a blind purchase in a way. I had not yet begun listening to music yet, and was about 11 or 12 years old (hard to remember at this moment), and my mom had taken me to a pawn shop in town one day to browse. I remember not really knowing much about anything except for video games, and I had just recently got my Playstation One. A recent discovery was that the Playstation can also play CDs. So while the store did not have games, it had a huge shelf of CDs, most priced around $2 or so. So I asked my mom if I could buy some CDs. She limited me to two. One of them I picked up with Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, which I also did not know anything about and chose simply because the cover looked cool. While I liked the album back then, it was nowhere as significant an impression as the other album I picked, which was FEAR FACTORY's album, Obsolete. I definitely did not know what I was getting into with this one, and the cover for the album simply attracted me to it.
I cannot express clearly the feeling I had when I first put the Fear Factory album into my Playstation, as it was a burst of mixed feelings. It was loud, crunchy, noisy, and the vocals were gruff and ugly. I remember the cleanly sung vocals on the songs were unattractive to me. He sang with clarity, but also with a very weak and thin quality. To this day, I just don't value the clean singing he did on those albums. But anyway, the first track was "Shock," which had a title that matched with my feelings from first listening. When I finished listening to the whole album, I could not remember a damn thing about it except for how atrocious it sounded to me, and yet, I felt a desire to push the play button again. It must be my most played metal album, partly due to how many times I played it being my only metal album for quite a while, as well as having revisited it off and on over the years.
The standout tracks on the album for me now are the same ones that I developed an affinity towards after multiple listens, which are "Shock," "Resurrection," and "Timelessness." However, I had the special Digipak version, and it had some cover songs on it which I found to be true stars of the show. They covered Gary Numan's hit song, "Cars," which at the time I thought was so good on this record that I did not realize it was a cover. I thought this version must be the original, as it is just so well done, and blows Gary Numan's out of the water. In addition, the following bonus track, "0-0 (Where Evil Dwells)" is my favorite track on the whole album, despite being a bonus track, and cover of a song by Wiseblood. Why this song is my favorite? It's simply the darkest, most dark and atmospherically unsettling track on the disc. The lyrics are captivating enough, being centered around the Casso Killer, but also the vocal performance and programming and instruments all just worked so well in this slowly growing intensity that made it a highlight, despite being extremely low on musical content. It was more rhythmically driven than melodic.
I revisited this album hard last year and listened to it straight for a week. While my current tastes tell me this album is not that special, or even not that good, nostalgia is a factor here, and allows me to get some pretty good mileage out of this album regardless. Other Fear Factory albums just don't excite me at all, and are a clear indication that if this album was not my first intro to metal, probably I wouldn't care about this album either.
I seem to feel the next several albums I got after this was extremely forgettable apparently, as I can't recall what metal albums I got next. But I accumulated a lot of great albums which I did not appreciate initially, and came back to love, such as the first Black Metal album, Morbid Angel's Altars of Madness, and a few other random blind purchases I made. Album artwork was certainly a motivator for buying albums back in those days, eh?
My first metal album was a blind purchase in a way. I had not yet begun listening to music yet, and was about 11 or 12 years old (hard to remember at this moment), and my mom had taken me to a pawn shop in town one day to browse. I remember not really knowing much about anything except for video games, and I had just recently got my Playstation One. A recent discovery was that the Playstation can also play CDs. So while the store did not have games, it had a huge shelf of CDs, most priced around $2 or so. So I asked my mom if I could buy some CDs. She limited me to two. One of them I picked up with Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, which I also did not know anything about and chose simply because the cover looked cool. While I liked the album back then, it was nowhere as significant an impression as the other album I picked, which was FEAR FACTORY's album, Obsolete. I definitely did not know what I was getting into with this one, and the cover for the album simply attracted me to it.
I cannot express clearly the feeling I had when I first put the Fear Factory album into my Playstation, as it was a burst of mixed feelings. It was loud, crunchy, noisy, and the vocals were gruff and ugly. I remember the cleanly sung vocals on the songs were unattractive to me. He sang with clarity, but also with a very weak and thin quality. To this day, I just don't value the clean singing he did on those albums. But anyway, the first track was "Shock," which had a title that matched with my feelings from first listening. When I finished listening to the whole album, I could not remember a damn thing about it except for how atrocious it sounded to me, and yet, I felt a desire to push the play button again. It must be my most played metal album, partly due to how many times I played it being my only metal album for quite a while, as well as having revisited it off and on over the years.
The standout tracks on the album for me now are the same ones that I developed an affinity towards after multiple listens, which are "Shock," "Resurrection," and "Timelessness." However, I had the special Digipak version, and it had some cover songs on it which I found to be true stars of the show. They covered Gary Numan's hit song, "Cars," which at the time I thought was so good on this record that I did not realize it was a cover. I thought this version must be the original, as it is just so well done, and blows Gary Numan's out of the water. In addition, the following bonus track, "0-0 (Where Evil Dwells)" is my favorite track on the whole album, despite being a bonus track, and cover of a song by Wiseblood. Why this song is my favorite? It's simply the darkest, most dark and atmospherically unsettling track on the disc. The lyrics are captivating enough, being centered around the Casso Killer, but also the vocal performance and programming and instruments all just worked so well in this slowly growing intensity that made it a highlight, despite being extremely low on musical content. It was more rhythmically driven than melodic.
I revisited this album hard last year and listened to it straight for a week. While my current tastes tell me this album is not that special, or even not that good, nostalgia is a factor here, and allows me to get some pretty good mileage out of this album regardless. Other Fear Factory albums just don't excite me at all, and are a clear indication that if this album was not my first intro to metal, probably I wouldn't care about this album either.
I seem to feel the next several albums I got after this was extremely forgettable apparently, as I can't recall what metal albums I got next. But I accumulated a lot of great albums which I did not appreciate initially, and came back to love, such as the first Black Metal album, Morbid Angel's Altars of Madness, and a few other random blind purchases I made. Album artwork was certainly a motivator for buying albums back in those days, eh?