Most people who enjoy metal seem to mellow their tastes as they age, preferring music that still has a nice sound but a slightly slower pace to go with the pipe and slippers.
There are exceptions of course and I would have to be one of them. Rather than slowing down and relaxing I seem to need ever heavier sounds and faster pace. Music I would have trained to happily a few decades ago is now too mellow for me to be listening to while working. So the stuff I am sat at my soft air conditioned desk listening too is what most consider ear bleeding noise, while the stuff I am training to takes offensive noise to a whole new level. This might explain the fact I have injured the same place 2 years on the trot, in fact after around 15 years of no injuries I have now injured myself 3 times in under 5. Age brings sense and moderation my foot, I swear I am getting worse.
I think part of this is due to that marvel of modern society and mine of misinformation, the internet or world wide web.
When I was younger such tools were the stuff of science fiction so the music I could get hold of was limited to bands I'd heard about, could go see, or music at clubs. The metal scene in the UK wasn't quite dead but definitely in a coma many expected to be terminal. My travel around Europe meant exposure to some great bands singing in either English, surprisingly common, or languages I didn't understand by the time they were being screamed out at excessively high 3 figure decibels and beats per minute.
Don't get me wrong there is little to beat watching a live pub band from a few feet away, but there is a limit to what is available, and once back in the UK this became far worse.
Now we have YouTube which makes spectacular recommendations like Enya as you are listening to Fear Factory, I really wish I was kidding. Of course some of the suggestions are good but I would say the best thing about this is you can read the comments and find sounds that are similar suggested by people you will never meet. So relatively obscure bands like Strapping Young Lad become part of regular listening and the aural abuse continues.
Best of all we get to listen to these things free before buying their stuff and if they are rubbish simply move on Unless you are a bit dim-witted and post comments about the band members being too happy, gay, only to be abused by people intelligent enough to only listen to stuff they enjoy for any length of time.
So when I see people commenting on older stuff how they were born in the wrong era I tend to point out that they weren't and are likely getting to see more live music by the old bands than those of us old enough to have done so in person got too by a looong way.
I have tried a few online radio stations but some of their music matching is almost as bad as suggestions on YouTube. I guess it's difficult when you have someone who's less bothered by sub-genre and more by pace and sound.
The metal community is quite niche and many in it have picked up on the idea of being seriously pretentious. For them I will never be metal enough, I look very normal in an office, that's apparently as far as the normality goes, only have 1 tattoo and no piercings. I settle instead for actually enjoying a range of heavy sounding fast metal music from various sub-genres and artists.
Versions of heavy vary widely, to me it's a deep sound that your feel as much as hear and grabs your attention with both hands while a vocalist enters your mind with lyrics from the profound to the absurd or obscene. I am not a big fan of the full on deepest growling of some death metal but stuff like Heaven Shall Burn is perfectly good for me and some of the symphonic metal has a mix of operatic quality soprano with incredibly guttural death metal that just works incredibly well, though a lot of this tends to be a bit slower.
So a big thank you for the inventor of the world wide web, some random English guy who got nothing for it because in the UK innovation wasn't being encouraged, and the Americans for making it something for us all to play with.
Likewise thanks to all the people who upload music to YouTube for the world to see and hear and to YouTube for amusing me with some of their truly absurd suggestions and adverts, because of course having just selected some ear bleeding metal I am going to really enjoy sitting through a minute long ad for some production line rap or pop artist who has paid extra for an ad I can't skip after a few seconds.
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