El Chupacabra

Pentastar remains the best, for me this is a 3.5. In the long run, it gets tiring unfortunately, while the previous ones had much more variety in style, here the tracks are almost all the same. They are played well but are by far less impactful than the old songs.

Superlative production but they absolutely offer nothing new; I consider it one of the very few missteps made by Southern Lord. Great chunky riffs, but already heard a thousand times and with little distinctive personality. An adequate album but not essential.

The best of all the Desert Sessions, which I have here in its original Man's Ruin still sealed :) A solid 5.

"a best of (I haaaaate best ofs)" <--- What best of and best of, it's 1 + the EP Dog Days, both out of print, not a best of! 5 for the record, really a great EP.

Beautiful songs, but goodbye dear psychedelia, unfortunately... definitely their least successful album.

Another album among my favorites of 2007, it’s really awesome, five out of five!!

@psycho: As much as "I know you," you've always seemed interested in the genre, but there's something off about how you evaluate certain bands. How can you say that Karma To Burn, Sleep, and OM suck or are boring? If you trash top groups like Sleep, who have clearly, no doubt about it, sparked the movement, then this is certainly not your genre. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. But to say that Dopesmoker "is a nice piece of shit" takes some serious guts... that bomb deserves a place in the hall of fame on scaruffi.com or ilprocessodibiscardi.it.

However, you could have put the cover right; it’s the black one with the red cross, if I’m not mistaken. The vinyl can be found on eBay, it’s not official but it’s available. The one you posted is the reissue of the split with Dozer. The album is clearly a great record, a solid 4.5. Nothing compared to Hermano, who only made a few good tracks from Only A Suggestion; I always recommend avoiding the rest.

Now that I read the review closely, it’s not really a 4; actually, I let myself be swayed by your good intentions to write something about this album, so I was a bit lenient, a bit too much, but well, it is what it is! The rating for the album, however, doesn’t change; I’ve been listening to it almost daily for a month, and it hasn’t decreased one bit, thanks also to Albini’s exceptional production.

@psycho: Free to think what you want ;) To be precise, among those records are stoner/doom/drone/heavy psych/space rock/kraut/sludge/southern rock and a bit of ambient and post-hardcore, which I don't view too favorably, except for rare exceptions like neurosis, early pelican, isis, and so on. I leave grunge out, otherwise the number goes up. If you look on stonerrock.com, the sold articles are almost 2400, but many pressed records are missing that can no longer be found; a couple of years ago, the available articles were about 4000, today they are all sold out and waiting for reprints. Of course, I'm also referring to singles, EPs, splits, compilations, but also to pressings with added bonus tracks, like Japanese editions, not just full lengths. I don’t see anything strange about it; I've been passionate about the genre for a solid 13 years. A genre that started a maximum of 18 years ago? Well, I wouldn't say so; there were already a ton of bands doing proto stoner/doom/psych before 1990, the same Sabbath were 20 years before, and Blue Cheer 22 years prior, along with various Hawkwind, Cream, Asoka, etc. Regarding objectivity, I can tell you that individually it's practically impossible to achieve, we all agree on that, but if hundreds or thousands of people specialized in a particular niche like this tell you that an album is a masterpiece or that it's garbage, statistically you get closer to the true value. That said, if someone (none of the present, to be clear) claims, for example, that Dopesmoker by Sleep or Dopethrone by Wizard are two pieces of garbage, well, that judgment is worth less than nothing. If instead someone says "no, I don’t like it" or "it’s not my genre," then things change, and I consider that a certainly better assessment.
@Bartle: ok, no problem, everything clear!