Hello Heathens,

A lot of new metal on the show this week and it’s been pretty damn refreshing to be listening to new stuff. Visiting the classics is always nice when you are just in a mood for some good stuff. 2020 was a great year for metal, and 2021 also seems to be a good year for new metal. Some of these bands should be no strangers to fans of the show by now.

Stortregn’s new album Impermanence has seen a lot of plays this year, and I am sure that before the end of the year every track on the album will have been played at least once. Summoning the Lich was a band that I’m confident I’ve heard before, but I can’t tell you any songs I’ve heard from them. I was pretty pleased with their new offering United in Chaos and think this album is going to be seeing a few more plays on the show before the year ends. Witchseeker is a band I’ve been meaning to play on the show as I really enjoyed Scene of the Wild, but I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. DVNE has also been on a string of good releases and I had a great time listening to their new album Etemen Ænka and it’s a great follow up to their last release Asheran.

Lately I’ve been seeing rumblings in the metalworld about “Who is metal” and bands being labeled as not metal for being a -core band, or not exclusively releasing ONLY metal music. My general opinion on genres is they are a shorthand we use to communicate an overall sound for a band/album/song, but that there are limitations to how we use them. Genres suffer a problem similar to describing colors, where your definition and someone elses are different and trying to focus on what those exact definitions (genres or colors) mean feels like a pointless endeavor. Eventually you spiral downward to the lowest level of “Okay well what IS metal?” While getting into these semantic arguments can be fun online I wish that the metal community would move away from rigid adherence to dogmatic personal definitions of what IS metal. Categorization and hierarchies are useful tools, but even in formal science they have limitations and these limitations become amplified when we enter the realm of art.

I’ve made a bit of a return to gaming. Monster Hunter Rise for the Switch was a blast to play when it first came out and now it’s my “I have 30 minutes to burn” game. If you enjoy Dark Soul-esque style boss fights and grinding then it’s a game to consider checking out. The story is as bland as all the other entries into the series have been, but the whole point of the games is to kill big monsters to make better weapons and armor. Not exactly a genre that can tell an elaborate story considering the gameplay loop is about grinding versus exploration like Souls games.

The other game I’ve been playing (and finished) was Bravely Default 1 for the 3DS. I really loved this game and beating it for a second time was a lot of fun. The game is meant to be broken so experimenting with the job system to find combinations that can break combat or trivialize boss fights is a real joy in the game. Too often we get JRPG’s (Japanese Role Playing Game) where the games aren’t meant to be broken, but balance and playtesting always miss something. These gaps in playtesting and sites like GameFAQ, Reddit, Twitter, et al. discover some combination of job/classes/characters that result in a game breaking strategy anyways. It’s very refreshing to play a game that rewards you for breaking it, and encourages you to do so by hinting that some of the job combinations that will break it.

I’m most of the way through the newly released Bravely Default 2 for Switch and while it’s a good traditional JRPG, it doesn’t feel like it has the same emphasis on breaking the game with class combinations that the other two entries (BD1 and Bravely Second) in the series encourage. While I’ve had fun with the game it’s missing features (locking in an autobattle to speed up grinding, instant enemy kill attacks, turning encounter rate up and down, friendship link) make the game feel much more generic than it ought to be. If you are a fan of JRPG’s and have a Switch I’d recommend this game, but if you have a 3DS I’d say play Bravely Default 1 or Bravely Second before Bravely Default 2. All of the games are relatively self contained, so you don’t need to worry about playing them in order.

Keep heavy the Sabbath day.
5.11.21 Playlist