BLOG/ 11/28/24 "SECOND HELPINGS"

This is something I would like to do from time to time to add more flavor to my reviews with uhm, retconning them? Also I don't know where the whole food theming came from but I fucking love it. This won't be long, thank god, but I feel they have a place to exist, somewhere.

Slice the Cake as a whole. So on the tier-list you'd see Slice the Cake is a whole C tier despite the 8/10 review I gave them and the whole big ass review. The thing about this band is that, they only really have The Odyssey to The West going for them. It is a phenomenal album that itches the part of my brain for Tumblrite music (god I miss pre-2015 tumblr), but their first album, The Man with No Face, pivotal for their magnum opus, but only has like, 2 good songs? That being the final song and also title tract, and also Of Gallows. Don't get me wrong they are great songs on their own, but every other song on the album are just so samey, and so long that it makes the whole album itself like a 4/10. Their other album Other Slices only has one good song in my opinion and hardly constitutes as a real album, which to be fair it kinda isn't? It's all just songs that were rejected or didn't have the legs to make it to a real album. So like a 2/10 but I feel weird about it. All in all a C-tier band with one thing going for them. This reasoning is also for why most of the C-tier bands are in their. We will talk about Opeth later.

DO THE WORK. Not all of these will be negative, for example here is another reason why I love Rivers of Nihil's The Work album. As stated in the main review the album is just about working an unfair job in New England, anyone who worked at fast food no matter where you are can relate no? But the kicker really is the level of "medieval mysticism" it has. What I mean by this stupid term is take a band like Enterprise Earth, where their whole theming is medieval without being Medieval Metal, but it gives their albums an identity, it'd be easiest for me to describe it in Yu-Gi-Oh terms as "raising the ceiling" what it means in the Yu-Gi-Oh context is adding an extra layer of something to make your deck better, albeit disruptions, removal, card advantage, but it the context of music it adds a layer of unique identity ontop of what they do best already. Enterprise Earth again, they're a great deathcore band, amazing vocals, lyrics that are edgy but not in the cringe way, guitaring that makes me fucking squeal with how cool it sounds, and ontop of that they have a theme with their whole play style and lyrics but just pushes it over the edge of a run of the mill Deathcore band like Alluvial. This concept of raising the ceiling applies to The Work because it has what everything Rivers of Nihil has, the varied points of guitar-play, the vocalist who can change his range on a dime, percussion that hits so hard, and like Enterprise Earth that fucking medieval theming which is standard for their albums but what makes The Work go over the edge is that relatability factor, like yes I feel like a peasant freezing to death in the mines making ends meat when I work my shitty job at Dunkin, hate to say this again, but it tickles the brain so fucking well in a way that not everyone gets? Most bands started out as bands but these guys worked a shitty 9-5 poop job like the rest of us and here's their retribution.

Caligula's Horse. I don't want to go into too much here because I am planning an end of the year Caligula's Horse review, but there's more to this band that I would like to say. My emotional state is strictly determined by the music I listen to. I don't mean like oh I listen to angry music so I'm angry, or I listen to sad music so I'm sad, but more-so the fact I look to music as support? In my reviews you'd notice I focus on lyrics a lot, because I focus on lyrics a lot, they tell you a story which is why I'm thiiiiiiiiiis close to making a book blog much like metalnightmare is to music. Anyway, I always found myself listening to Caligula's Horse because of this, the lyrics are vulnerable in a way that makes me feel accepted, the lyrics get into dark subjects but not in a harsh way like what Machine Head does a lot, for this reason I turn to Caligula's Horse a lot. A little known fact is I play guitar, and for the first year of college I was so down that I couldn't even look at my Gibson guitar, and this was before I was as big into Caligula's Horse as I was. Halloween passes and thats when I discover Bloom, my first album of theirs, my first review of theirs, and thats when it reignited my spark to play again, from bloom I found that guitars play just a pivotal point in human emotion as lyrics do, and I played, and played, skipped homework a few times but who hasn't. Everytime I'm down I play a song off of the Bloom album as it reminds me the beauty, the poetry in life, how everything falls into place where it needs to as every part in life, the bleak and the bright contributes to one beautiful picture.