Today's Purchases

Now I'm an avid cd collector. As much as I have downloaded in the past, I am much more of a fan of the actual CD, the overall package you get with it, and of course, I understand that extreme metal needs the sales to thrive. I remember when I saw Dead Man in Reno support Sikth in 06 in Glasgow, I bought their album and got the guys to sign it after a great discussion at the merch table. Now I'd never heard them before, but I was impressed by their energy and their music, and I felt they deserved their modest £8 for their album, which turned out to be rather good. But I'm getting away from my point. Today I went to my local and favourite record store, Avalanche, to make some cd purchases. They've got an excellent selection of new metal, and their second hand collection is second to none. That was where I managed to find three of my four purchases today. Tool's magnificent 10,000 Days was only £5.99, and for a progressive metal album of such unbelievable quality, thats amazing. I was an instant fan of Vicarious when I heard it for the first time last year, and the rest match the quality of this. Essential. I also managed to find Napalm Death's Smear Campaign for the same price, and the self titled debut from Melencolia Estatica. The former, everyone reading this should know, are the legendary death/grindcore band from Birmingham who are as essential on their latest as they were when they first tore the metal genre a new arsehole all the way back. ND are always reliable, I find, at just hammering the fuck out of you, and yet leaving you totally satisfied. The latter is a black metal band from Italy, an interesting prospect of being a one woman project dealing in sadness and depression (as if you couldn't get that from the title). It's great undergound black metal, laced with icy, melancholy atmospheres that surround the riffs and drag you down with them. Finally I got Suffocation's Despise the Sun EP. Suffocation are veterans of death metal, with their Effigy of the Forgotten album a bona fide classic of the genre, and this EP doesn't disappoint. It is their trademark mix of brutality and head spinning technicality, along with seriously deep growling. It'd be a perfect starter to their sound, short and sharp but head cavingly heavy.