We have a special episode for you this week. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we decided to do a “Love Metal” episode and review the entire catalog of HIM.
No, of course we didn’t do that! Geez…who do you think we are? Revolver? Valentine’s Day is the most useless holiday*, so we took a different route. We did the opposite and reviewed three Black Metal albums and one OSDM album That’s “Old School Death Metal” for those uninitiated. While doing this, we also analyze why Nick once despised Black Metal by picking the sub-genre apart and looking at what he likes and dislikes. We also have two new song previews! Oh, and we hope you did’t get two used to Kyle because he followed through with his threat from last week and is absent for all of this.
Reviews: Acrimonious – Sunyata; Fen – Dustwalker; Necrowretch – Putrid Death Sorcery; Saille – Ritu
Preview: Portal – “Orbmorphia”; Sockweb – “Bullies are Mean”
*It’s useless because you and your significant other should be showing your love for each other all year, not just on one day by blowing a bunch of money on a special day because Hallmark and Kay told you to.
Necrowretch – Putrid Death Sorcery
Acrimonious – Sunyata
Fen – Dustwalker
Saille – Ritu
Sockweb – “Bullies Are Mean”
Portal – “Orbmorphia”
The Sideshow Podcast 
Hey, while it’s cool that you got a comment from one of the bands that you reviewed, did you have to delete my comment as well? It’s not as if I said anything bad about Saille. I only said stuff about Kyle not wanting to join you if you weren’t reviewing Coheed and Cambria.
Yeah, I saw that it got removed, but I have no idea why. I know I didn’t manually do it. Sometime on 2/20, I noticed there was another auto-Tweet for the show post (like what happens when we initially post them), so I wonder if WordPress got a glitch or something, and reset the post. I honestly have no idea.
However, I did find your original comment in our email, so here it is:
So Kyle doesn’t want to join you if you aren’t reviewing Coheed and Cambria, is that it?
As for Black Metal, I never got into it. My perception is that you had to live in Norway in the early 90s to be into it. But the truth is that I just haven’t gotten around to giving it a chance. As you pointed out regarding some of the attributes of black metal, there seems to me to be a vast difference between early Venom and symphonic Dimmu Borgir.
Since you mentioned Alcest, I will tell you that I recently bought and listened to their 2010 album Écailles de Lune and I can tell you that it is not really black metal. It’s more of the same as their 2012 album Les Voyages de L’Âme, which I like a lot. Maybe there is one song on Écailles de Lune that features slightly more black metal-y vocals, but it is primarily the shoegaze style of My Bloody Valentine (who I never really liked but for some reason I like Alcest).
One further thing I seem to have noticed about black metal is how so many bands that started out as black metal have evolved into something different. Alcest apparently evolved into shoegaze, Dimmu Borgir evolved into symphonic metal, Enslaved evolved into progressive metal, as did Emperor and Ihsahn. Burzum moved on to ambient.
Hey ! Dries here from Saille (pronounced Sal-yeh by the way 😉 )
Thanks a lot for the review, first audio review we’ve heard from our album “Ritu”
We’ll definately promo this on http://www.facebook.com/saillemetal
\m/