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I was fortunate to have my mother\u2019s musical tastes be passed down to me. We had cassette tapes of bands like CCR, Bread, Queen, the Eagles, the Beatles and Scorpions. For most of the early 90s, my primary source of music consumption was my mother\u2019s cassette tapes. This somehow changed with the introduction of cable television. With MTV and Channel V, I was introduced to the world of mainstream pop-punk bands like The Offspring and Greenday, nu-metal bands like Korn and Deftones and alternative bands like RATM and the Prodigy. I remember back in 1998-99, I\u2019d record songs off the television onto my tape deck, just so that I could have the songs readily available anytime for my listening pleasures. My friends did the same by acquiring seemingly rare songs on mixtapes and we would end up trading mixtapes of our favorite heavy songs. Those mixtapes were low on quality on account of being severely re-recorded but that definitely didn\u2019t deter me from spinning them on my walkman. Looking back at those days, I\u2019ll admit that this wasn\u2019t the uber kvlt tape trade movement that older metalheads speak of, but what it did for me was cement my passion for (heavy) music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Baptism in metal: A tiny dab of unholy water<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
After the summer holidays in 2000, I recall joining my friend, Jeff, and his older brother in their car for a listening session. Consider it like hotboxing sans the weed but with listening to music at an unhealthy high volume. Jeff whipped out a cassette with a ghastly looking album cover. He said that he had gotten it from a record store when he visited Thailand during the holidays. It was the most provocative album cover I had ever laid my eyes on. The album cover read out \u2018Cannibal Corpse\u2019 in red. Within short notice, the cassette was pushed into the car stereo and out came the most incomprehensible obnoxious sounds. I could never fathom vocals to be that gurgly and grotesque. Within moments of that jarring music being subjected to me, I felt like I was experiencing tinnitus and everything had come to a stand still – the kind that is portrayed when soldiers survive a grenade explosion and are just gathering themselves up. Deep down, I had an inclination for music pushing boundaries. I was looking for something heavier, something more extreme. The horrendous wall of sound by this band called \u2018Cannibal Corpse\u2019 was definitely extreme. Pfft, Korn had nothing on them. By the second song, I found myself mouthing to the vocal growling patterns in \u2018Mummified in Barbed Wire<\/em>\u2019 – the only track name I could remember on that cassette because of the visual imagery that the title gave off. It was etched in my brain forever. After that listening session, I felt this obsession to explore this genre deeper into the trenches. Could it get more extreme than Cannibal Corpse? What else was I missing out on? <\/p>\n\n\n\n A few months later, I discovered a music label in India called Music Gallery, which also distributed titles released on Roadrunner, Earache and Nuclear Blast records. This was monumental because that meant easier access to underground music. One of my first purchases was actually a soundtrack of the movie Faust: Love of the Damned<\/em>. This was sometime in 2002, when I was about to enter high school. I remember seeing the cover and it looked pretty ominous. Yes, I succumbed to judging the cassette tape by its cover. I could barely recognize any of the names on the track list but it was a gamble I was willing to take. And boy, did it pay off! When I was introduced to Cannibal Corpse, I felt a bit stunned from that aural onslaught. It felt like swallowing a whole turkey when all I wanted to do was start off by taking a few nibbles. With the tracks on the Faust soundtrack, I felt I was nibbling away at my own pace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The roster of bands on this soundtrack included Obituary, Deicide, Sepultura, Carnivore, Fear Factory, Machine Head, Soulfly, Type O Negative and many more. Back then, I had a cursory idea of the sub-genres and was still searching for that definitive sound that clicked with me. Obituary\u2019s ‘Chopped in Half<\/em>‘ blew me away. It remains to be one of my all time favorite death metal anthems. The pacy tempo and hilarious lyrics of Carnivore\u2019s ‘Sex and Violence<\/em>‘ made me a fan of the band right away. I also didn\u2019t think I\u2019d fancy the very low bass-y vocals in Type O Negative\u2019s ‘Everybody I Love Is Dead<\/em>‘ track. In the coming months since I laid my hands on the Faust soundtrack, I tried my best to procure full length albums of the same bands. Again, thanks to Music Gallery\u2019s sweet distribution arrangement, I managed to snag Deicide\u2019s Legion<\/em>, Obituary\u2019s Back from the Dead<\/em> and Machine Head\u2019s Burn My Eyes<\/em>. These albums formulated my tastes going forward and while they\u2019re gathering moss somewhere in my parents\u2019 home, they have been some of my prized possessions to date. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it was around 2002-03, after having dipped my toes in metal, that my curiosity wandered off on the interweb in search for more metal. Back in the early 2000s, the internet was a scarce commodity in my hometown, with limited speeds and it was also quite expensive. We had a 56 kbps dial up modem at home and there was a cap on the download limit per month. Nonetheless, I managed to browse websites of bands, record labels, the Brave Words<\/a>, the Blabbermouths<\/a> and other websites of their ilk. I also chanced upon metal chat rooms on IRC and on Soulseek (P2P sharing platform). It was also in these forums that I got to know what a \u2018poser\u2019 meant. Apparently I was one and it\u2019s someone who even mentions Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth. 🤷🏻♂️With that, ladies and gents, I was introduced to metal elitism 101.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tempelores.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Screenshot-2019-12-30-at-23.23.17.png\")
(Image taken from Google Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nBaptism in metal: A bucket o\u2019er me head<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Baptism in metal: Of full immersion and the interweb <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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