Various Artists
Monsters of Metal vol. 8

Who are these monsters? these monsters of metal coming out in several volumes on DVD, is it a movie series? actually it is a series of compilations released by Nuclear Blast who gave us the much by Hallowed praised Beautiful Voices compilation and probably more similar ones. This one has a guitar playing pumpkin on the cover which some artist probably spent five seconds working on. But it is a majestic list of songs, ninety of them to be exact and probably at least forty five of them are from bands on Nuclear Blast which makes it a great promotional piece for them, but hang on a minute, this collection of promotional videos cost a baffling €25 which is a lot of money for something you can find for free on the stupid google owned video service called youtube where the labels has put all these songs on there for you to watch for free. Sure the picture quality is better on the DVD and that might be worth something and after all it say that it is the ultimate metal compilation on the cover, that has to mean something hasn’t it?

Well it is musically no real point in describing how it sounds, much like there is no point in describing the bark on a pine tree facing in the general direction of a lake, there is just too much going on to easily describe it. However, I can state that it contains metal videos from many different sub genres of the quite all-encompassing metal genre, from the intelligence derived primitive extreme metal to the more sophisticated and intelligent progressive metal. I would also point out that that slight overweight towards the more extreme metal which is fine if you like all kinds of extreme metal and less so if you don’t as the progressive music for instance is comprised of something like two songs and from two very different areas of that sub genre while the Asking Alexandria type modern metalcore is at least comprised of three almost identical bands including Asking Alexandria. So the selection can be a bit debated I would say.

Looking at the quality of the film material most of the songs are real music videos, only the Grave Digger tune of war deviates from this and is a live recording. Even so there is quite the big variation in quality of these videos, some are of bands just standing somewhere playing while others are a real storytime. The videos are in 16:9 format and picture quality is generally much better than the horrible quality at youtube, although the quality of the Blu-Ray is a bit dodgy considering it is supposed to be full HD at 1080P but it looks exactly like on the DVD and the sound is the same in Dolby Stereo as well so the only advantage of the Blu-Ray is that all songs are on one disc rather than having to change disc halfway through, although the risk of you getting that far in one play without being bored is slim to none.

Sure there is something for everyone but at the same time just a few islands of quality in an ocean of boredom isn’t really my version of value for money, it is like buying an expensive car that only works some times and is horrible and dangerous and crashes at other times, that is not how I want a car to work and that is neither a good way for a musical collection to work. I see compilations like this as something of a marketing thing and Nuclear Blast has clearly figured that one out since their bands are clearly overrepresented on this collection of songs but rather than giving this away they charge a horrific amount of money for it, I would say that it would be worth at maximum ten euros although a fair prise would be something like five euros and that is five times less than it actually cost and that is some clever thievery as some people seems convinced that it is a good idea to buy this collection.

For me this is a completely useless release as it offers nothing of importance, nothing new and nothing that feels important and nothing that can really offer anything of interest for me. My main problem though is that it is too expensive for what it is and as the Blu-Ray’s only good thing is that you don’t have to change disc as it offers nothing else over the DVDs. Besides that the fact that no matter whatever you like there’s only a few songs that will fall in favour with you anyway and the rest of the six hours of stuff will feel like waste so why the hefty price? It is not like they spent more than five minutes creating the menus of the DVDs or the Blu-Ray and also, why didn’t they even add something to reveal which song you are listening to, I know all bands on this compilation but I am quite sure many of you don’t and should those people need to look at the box all the time to know what song is playing? I think that is something they must have missed but something I have missed is the point of this compilation and honestly promotional stuff like this should be given away not sold for a fortune.