I am been into metal for the last 19 year and have enjoyed all its flavours ranging from traditional metal to thrash, death to doom, black to nu-metal, hardcore to hair metal. During the early days I used to buy albums mainly on hearsay as a result I have ended up buying many albums I would not have bought. Then came internet to rescue, a world of metal sites which introduced me to all possible genres and all possible album recommendation.However with limited budget I could not buy all the albums and started cross checking reviews and asking friends before buying albums. Even though this helped me buy quality albums I still had to spend a lot of time cross checking reviews on various sites.
Following are some of the problems with metal review sites.
Some of the sites were biased to particular style
eg :
http://www.teufelstomb.com : Prefers it metal really heavy and biased towards Death, Grindcore etc. Apart from its bias this site is quite consistent with its review given that album belongs to the genre they like.
http://www.anus.com : Biased towards Black metal
Some of sites were not consistent with its reviews and rating. When I say consistent I mean that reviews end up being personal opinions of individual authors which is not much help because it does not tell if the album is really good in comparision to other albums on the same site. If some other author was to judge the album then he would give a very different review. I believe the site needs establish a set parameters and be neutral across genres while performing its assessment. Some examples of sites which suffer this problem.
http://www.metal-observer.com : ( though I like this site )
http://www.chroniclesofchaos.com/ : ( reviews here have definitely lost their consistency )
Some of the sites meet the above criteria, however their reviews and rating are not consistant with my liking. This means that I might like the album they don't and vice-versa or I just can't establish a pattern. Some examples of this are
http://www.seaoftranquility.org/ : Again I do refer this site from time to time.
http://www.rockeyez.com/ : Consistent but mainly features Rock / Hard rock ( not much metal )
So after all my search I have finally ended up with a metal review site which seems to satisfy all the above. The reviews are not biased towards a particular genre, they are consistent across all albums their site, they are consistent with my liking
So here you have it. The best metal albums review site is...
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