New Nevermore came out this week…
It rocks as Nevermore always does. Especially the song Obsidian Conspiracy.

Don't see it happening ever. Marty loves Japan too much and has a good thing going over there. Menza actually was re-hired back in 2004 and got fired again promptly after. Broderick is a great player, though, and did a great job on Endgame. I like him better than Pitrelli and Drover as Megadeth guitarists.

The RIP tour is coming near me, but I'll be on an airplane at the time. I can only hope for a video release.

Testament and Overkill are two bands I've yet to see live. I'll be seeing Testement in August with Megadeth and Slayer, but Overkill and a four hour radius around my home just don't go together apparently.

2 other things
Overkill released Ironbound on Tuesday and it's their best album in years.

Definitely not playing to the conservative crowd, this one.

"This all coming from a guy that has an In Flames name/picture."

I'm definitely not a boo the band (or even worse, throw stuff at them) while they play type of person. More of a watch the clock and hope they only have a half an hour.

I don't get the Converge love around here…
A horrible horrible band. Just brutally bad. Saw them on the Mastodon/Dethklok tour and just about everyone we talked to was in agreement after the show that they were basically unlistenable. (Outside of one socially awkward guy who talked 1,000 miles an hour and liked to…

I think Slayer is great, but there's nothing to hate in what you said. Marty Friedman and Skolnick are in a whole different league.

Moral high ground
I thought the AV Club lost any stance on movies from a moral high ground after the GI Joe review.

"King has sole writing credit on most of the songs on Christ Illusion."

Overkill, Fear Factory, Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris, Flotsam and Jetsam, lots of metal bands have really great lyrics. Are they sometimes bad? Yeah. But not everything has to be some revolutionary mind-bending experience.

Also, I don't want to sound like one of those fans who pidgeon hole metal so much that "Swedish Black Power Metal from the Fjords" is the only TRU metal and I refuse to listen to anything else especially the terrible Finnish Power Black Metal from the Icy North" I think metal categorizes way to much and splinters fans.

I think it's a matter of timing for me. Slayer was really contemporaries with the bands I would think of as the birth of death metal. By the time Slayer would have been "influential" those bands were already multiple albums into their careers. (Or close to disbanding like Carcass.)

I was just reading your first metal box…
and I totally disagree that Slayer was somehow the start of death metal. Venom, maybe? I would consider bands like Possessed and Death (how can Death not be mentioned?) more of a start of what people consider death metal.

Elephant
What about the high school in Elephant? Pretty high body count in that one.

American Beauty, Big Fish, Brother's Keeper
Most recently, the scene in American Beauty where Annette Bening's character is hugging Kevin Spacey's clothes in his closet. Only because my dad passed away in January and I know exactly that feeling.