Verinen's Almostopster: Code - Resplendent Grotesque

by Verinen on Sat, May 4, 2024

Let's hope the album is better than the cover

My pick stems from the same place as ferday’s. It stems from a time before I got caught in an insane Vortex of new listens that has me react to novelty with a shrug and a 5. Back then, things were easier, simpler, and new albums felt special. That’s right, in my case, I’m talking about teenage years. At that time, my musical landscape was a hodgepodge of whatever I came across.

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ferday's Almostopster: Scientists - Blood Red River

by ferday on Mon, Apr 29, 2024

A short album for once

It’s summer 1987. There are tradies in the house, a kitchen renovation as is the hazy recollection. They are listening to music on their Magnavox D8270, and they leave a briefcase full of cassettes behind each night, 24 in all. Music is all but banned in our house, thanks to the naivety of fundamentalism. Something drove me to explore those cassettes in the safety of my room at night, and soon I was dubbing over every open cassette in the house, replacing worship music with such classics as Master of Puppets, Pyromania, Bat out of Hell, and oddly the one that stuck with me the most, Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet’s Wow Flutter Hiss ‘86.

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Planex's Almostopster: Wolves in the Throne Room - Diadem of 12 Stars

by Planex on Mon, Apr 22, 2024

Yes, Planex listens to more than just slam

In my formative years of being a person on the internet with strong opinions on extreme metal, I participated a few times in a tradition known as Nothing But Black Metal November or NBBMN. I believe 2015 was my first self-imposed exclusively cold and frostbitten November, and I decided to try the experiment because I felt I had never gone beyond the surface of black metal. I knew some of the classics, but figured there was much more to see.

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meri's Almostopster: Swallow the Sun - Songs from the North I, II & III

by meri on Sun, Apr 14, 2024

A tough one to swallow.

Swallow the Sun are a band whose particular brand of melodic doom and gloom has always appealed to me. You can see this through my overrates in the discography run and the presence of their debut The Morning Never Came in my topster. My introduction to the band was through New Moon, around the time Emerald Forest and the Blackbird was released, when I was exploring a few different bands with somewhat similar sounds (In Mourning and Insomnium, from memory).

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