Pants On Fire
Ok, so we may have lied to you all a little, albeit accidentally. I believe last week we claimed that we would have all new tunes for a while. Well, we only have one 2016 release this week, though we are willing to bet that these albums are all new to you. We also said (I think in 225) we wouldn’t review the Dropout album. As you can see, that statement also did not hold true. We’re pretty sure you’ll thank us for changing our minds on that one though…
Reviews:
Aborted – Termination Redux EP (Century Media)
Cetus – The Remnant Mass (Dullest)
Dropout – Turn Away from the Light
Aborted – Termination Redux
Cetus – The Remnant Mass
Dropout – Turn Away From The Light
The Sideshow Podcast 
A blizzard, a work trip, and a vacation jeopardized the streak but you guys have somehow been able to keep it alive for 227 weeks, which is quite an accomplishment!
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me as though Aborted released their last album more recently than they did because I get them confused with Abiotic, who released an album last year. So if I get Aborted and Abiotic confused and they are both on 2 year release cycles then it seems like they release one album a year.
I must disagree with your sentiment that nobody cares what you guys think of the big releases of albums that many people are going to buy anyway. What you might think that everyone is going to buy might not always be the case. The example of Lamb of God that you brought up is the perfect example to illustrate my point. Before VII Sturm und Drang came out last year, I was seriously on the fence as to whether or not I was going to buy it. Lamb of God had been on the downswing with their previous two releases, Wrath and Resolution. If that downward trend continued, then I wasn’t going to buy their latest album. How would I know if the downward trend continued? Reviews. I consult multiple sources of reviews to get a general consensus among the metal community on these types of things. Since the reviews for VII Sturm und Drang were positive, I decided to buy the album. If people across the board were panning that album, I’d have passed on it. Another recent example was Iron Maiden. I didn’t even listen to their previous album, The Final Frontier, even though I am a huge Maiden fan. Why not? In general, there wasn’t much buzz about that album and it got lukewarm reviews at best. But last year’s Book of Souls had those who reviewed it saying that it was Maiden’s best album since Seventh Son. So I bought it and found out that those reviewers were right.
Am I going to agree with the metal community’s general consensus all the time? Of course not. The metal community goes gaga over bands such as Triptykon and Deafheaven and I just don’t understand why. But I generally believe in the idea of Metacritic – that there is value in aggregating the opinions of people who specialize in a field in order to evaluate art and entertainment (even if I don’t use Metacritic specifically because it’s not really a metal focused source). While you are part of the bigger picture known as “the metal community”, one of my biggest sources of reviews and opinions is that of The Sideshow Podcast.