I too am intrigued by your description of Midryasi and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

Towlie—Powerglove is fucking awesome. They're one of the thousands of bands that do power metal arrangements of video game themes, but unlike most of them, they generally do cool and creative things with them, laying on harmonies and structuring their medlies in ways that end up producing original pieces instead of…

Failure's Conquest lays waste to most things.

Arsis
So the new one is whatever, but can we talk about how awesome We Are The Nightmare is? The first and last tracks on that album have to be some of the coolest melodeath there's been in years.

Holy FUCK, am I ready to rock
Fuck all y'all. I love Syx and Kansas and would happily endure Foreigner for the chance to see those two.

I fucking love the Onion.
Unfortunately, no articles that I identify with jump to mind (though i know there are quite a few) but this seems like as good a place as any to share my absolute love for the way the Onion treats Christian rock bands—my favorite being "Christina Rock Band Cleans Up Hotel Room."

There are a couple of good Supreme Court headlines. My favorite is "Supreme Court Overturns Car."

I've tried the Dark Side/Wizard of Oz thing. I swear to God it works, and I wasn't even high. I'm sure more than half of it is power of suggestion, but fuck is it cool anyway.

I love when pop singers try to "solo" by singing too loudly and throwing the same identical scale runs over everything. It's like the Yngwie-Malmsteen-after-the-first-three-albums approach to emoting.

I was sad, though not surprised, that VH was bad. If that concept had been done well it could have been fucking rad.
There are so many fucking actors in Hollywood. You really can't find one without a lisp for your Dracula?

Vampirates is a thing.
http://www.vampirates.co.uk/

I completely agree. And who decided to let a guy who's infamous for giving albums an unnecessary sheen near a fucking stoner metal album? SFTD is still good, but damn, I never thought I'd miss the stoner-metal fuzz…

"Go take your shirt off at a Throwdown show" made me so fucking happy.

My only complaint about Opeth is that some of their shit goes on too long. I have nothing against long runtimes, but it's when you literally repeat the same riff without drum changes or vocals for like 3 minutes that it becomes a problem. I'm thinking of Deliverance.

I could be completely wrong, but I know the title is a Hebrew word and I thought I'd read somewhere that Jewish faith was part of the band's whole thing. Maybe it's some other kind of Judaism (I know absolutely nothing about Jewish sects).

It should be noted that Bill Ward is not in Heaven and Hell.

There's a pretty bad death metal band called Daath who I think are all Orthodox Jews.

Sorry, that "formulaic"

Really, the difference is that power metal, being in general much more attuned to pop sensibilities than other metal styles, ends up getting really sappy and forulaic when it strays into balladry. It's not that ballads themselves are a bad thing-it's that too often power-metal ballads sound like they could have been…

Also, just started Rise—early 90s Maiden anyone? Even more so than most metal genres, power metal seems pretty steeped in hero worship.