Textures wasn’t as good as good as latter albums, although still much better than the yawn inducing chuggfest of Meshuggah, anyone who cant tell the difference between the pair needs their hearing checked, I liked Textures more when their sound was clearer and less beefy though.

Opeth was weak, too many cleans and not enough Åkerfeldt layrnx torturing growls for my liking. Not dark enough. All That Remains just turned into rubbish, as did In Flames, weak melodies – which both bands are usually excel at. Trivium and Unearth were the same standard middle of the road that I’ve come to expect.

My picks for this year would be After The Burial’s Rareform, a terrific album, great guitar work, although the drums sounded fake and the bass needed turned up. Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh, not as good as FMTS I thought, but still a very solid album and finally Psycroptic and PTH’s offerings.

Still a very very weak year.

I’m not going to bother replying to all of it, just to summarize: I like plenty of stuff that isn’t “mainstream” and that may in fact be liked by “elitists”, but as Sammy said, I see no reason to eat staples just to prove I can eat staples like you.

I like to call it at least attempting to be an individual, you know, liking things because you find them appealing for what they are, not because other people find them appealing?

I don’t find Vince or Axl or the contributors via comments here to be elitist. I do, however, find many of them to be extremely narrow minded. Brutal (br00tal) for brutal’s sake is just as bad as sappy for sappy’s sake.

Some of the commenters here seem to have the belief that the second a band goes from selling 10,000 copies to 10,001 they’re immediately mainstream and therefore shit, just because they appeal to a wider audience.

I guess with the internet we could have bands writing to an audience of one. That un-mainstream and counter-culture enough for ya?

the only thing you enlightened me on is the that you listen to very popular, easy to digest bands. As for “counter culture”, have you walked around in any city in America? We live in neon sewer, fucking A I’m counter culter. It don’t change the fact that you listen to shitty rock radio bands. Maybes it’s just because you are too lazy to find new bands you like? Or is is that the genre has passed you by and you’re bitter no one sounds like the bands you listened to while growing up?

Hey Vince, I have an idea, since all this douche nozzle does is defends Disturbed and list how every other band he doesn’t like is only liked by “elitists” or “counter culturalist” how bout a 3 month hiatus from Disturbed stories?