Much as I love Miles, Mingus would be my pick as the one jazz guy I simply couldn't live without.

The studio tinkering was indeed a big component of the critical abreaction.

"Porgy and Bess" is mentioned on page 3, under "Miscellany".

That's part of the reason Miles and Mingus were such great bandleaders — people were afraid to say no to them.

I'm not a huge fan of jazz vocals either. My favorite vocal track is Stan Kenton's big band doing a Robert Graettinger arrangement of "Everything Happens to Me", with poor June Christy trying to sing it straight over the atonal clanging horror. About halfway through the song you can clearly sense that she's all,…

"Something Else" is a great one.

"Porgy and Bess" is mentioned on page 3, in the Miscellany section. There's even a video!

To each his own, but characterizing Gil Evans — who's right up there with Miles himself as a jazz innovator — as a "square white dude" doesn't give your argument a lot of heft.

I have often thought of "Kind of Blue" as the working definition of what "talented musician" means. Those guys just got together one day and MADE that. Just like that. Pretty much nothing in the way of preparation or rehearsal. They just sat down and did it. That's what talented musician means.

Yeah, the amazing thing is that for almost everything I wrote about, they all sound ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. I think a lot of us who review pop music over-reward bands for changing up their sound a little, when here's a guy who was radically changing his sound every year or two. He was just operating on a whole different…

I don't hate Decibel. It's just that their tastes in heavy music have always been…well, put it this way: if UMD here is a 10 on the scale of undergrounditude, I'm probably about a 6. Decibel has always been around a 3. So it's somewhat shocking to see them championing the likes of Father Befouled and Encoffination.

Super Nintendo, I'm happy in my little metal ghetto. Adding more people to the main best-of list might lead to a too-many-cooks situation, and since I'd be the only one voting for metal albums, they wouldn't make the list anyway. And as for the non-metal stuff I like, not to sully my reputation or anything, but most…

I've been playing the shit out of OFF! lately. Great stuff.

As noted elsewhere, Decrepit Birth almost made the list. If I'd have gone to top 30 instead of 26, they certainly would have been on here.

Lot of great stuff there. The ones that came closest to making my list were Hooded Menace, Decrepit Birth, Bastard Priest and Father Befouled.

Definitely Bison B.C. for me, too. Those guys absolutely murder it live.

That's another one that almost made it.

I liked it, but as you hint at, I thought it fell so heavily on the punk side of things that I didn't really consider it metal. It's a fine record, though.

There is a feeling, not entirely unjustified, that I dwell too much on accusations of hipster-metal.

Interestingly enough, in the very early (Bob Kane-era) Joker stories, he almost never had henchmen. He was sort of in it for the money — he'd try and steal some famous gem or other — but he seemed to enjoy the murder aspect the most, and there were these gorgeous drawings of him, all alone in some dark, creepy…