Recently, a friend of ours who regularly visits this site gently criticized us for almost never posting a negative album review. He wondered if we’d ever heard an extreme metal album we didn’t like.

The answer to that question is “Fuck, yes!” We just (usually) choose not to spend our limited time verbally peeing all over hard-working bands because their music doesn’t favorably impress us or because their dreams exceed their talent. We get more satisfaction from supporting bands we think are deserving and from suggesting music we think our readers might find worth their time.

Maybe that’s a bad decision. Maybe we should spend more time warning people off craptastic metal. After all, that is what music critics generally do — they praise the good and they criticize the bad.

Except we’re not really music critics. We’re just a bunch of goof-offs who happen to really love extreme metal. We write about it because we dig it, and so it just comes naturally to talk about what rules instead of what sucks. Besides, you can find lots of sites whose writers just can’t wait to tell you what sucks.

There have been times when we’ve had misgivings about this, when we think our credibility could be enhanced by mixing in more scathing commentary along with the panting adulation.

We’re certainly capable of it, but so far we’ve chosen to reserve our invective for select company — not for the struggling bands who are doing their best to create new music because they love it (even if it’s bad), but for the the self-important, the self-indulgent, the overly dramatic. In a word, for the Axl Rose‘s of the metal music world. (more after the jump, if you’ve got the stomach for it . . .) Continue reading »