Goldi's Almostopster: Circle of Dust - Disengage

by Goldi on Mon, Mar 11, 2024

This week, it's a vortex heavyweight's turn to choose an album

My first memories of music are wishing it was heavier. Before I had internet access, I spent years quietly combing through my father’s record collection looking for something, anything, that had aggression, playing CD after CD of soft rock, CCM, pop, 80s dance, disco, and for years my precious treasure vault amounted to “Godzilla” by Blue Öyster Cult and “Hammerhead” by The Offspring and the handful of songs where Christian contemporary rock artists accidentally played something with balls.

almostopster

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Abso's Almostopter: Kase.O - El Circulo

by Abso on Mon, Mar 4, 2024

The yearly community project begins

The vortex has been running for nearly as long as it takes Carlos to type “I’m an overrater” and every year we’ve enjoyed a unique and often challenging project. This year we have the almostopster and it’s time to pick an album that’s so very close to being perfect and can actually see your absolutely terrible reliquary list, but isn’t allowed in. It’s reliquary adjacent: it can look but not touch anything.

almostopster

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Dissimulator - Lower Form Resistance and the limits of thrash revivalism

by Snyde on Mon, Feb 5, 2024

"The conscious present is an awareness of the past (...) which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show." - T.S. Eliot

“Thrash metal” as a scene died in 1991, its coup de grâce coming in the form of a little black square from the San Francisco Bay Area. In less than a decade, the genre’s customs, tropes and taboos were codified, calcified and cast aside. As a natural off-shoot, technical thrash metal met its demise soon after the main branch had withered. Of course, a scant few bands held fast to their stylistic roots in the ensuing years but, in general terms, any thrash metal album released after 1993 (but especially after 2000, when the dust had settled on mainstream music’s identity crisis) can be called ‘revivalist’.

thrash Dissimulator Voivod Sovereign

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Curta'n Wall - Siege Ubsessed!

by Planex on Wed, Jan 3, 2024

LARPing is cringe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw These losers wander out to their local park wearing halloween costumes and attempt to replicate a board game at scale. Often, I imagine, it devolves into saeying coole olde englisch medieval speak and trying not to whack your Burger King coworker too hard with your +1 longstick. The LARPers are easy to make fun of. But, put yourself in their New Balance greaves for a moment. How much fun could it be if everyone took it seriously?

Grime Stone Records Abysmal Spectre

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