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That’s some excellent analysis, JaPaBo. I can’t argue with the math!

What I can say, however, is that I don’t intentionally go against the grain per se. If anything, I try to avoid groupthink and keep an open mind about albums I’m going to listen to. The payoff comes in those moments when I find myself saying, “You know, this new Winger album is pretty good!” The cost, of course, is anything David Draiman is up to (but even then, I’m perfectly prepared to love it if warranted.)

In this way, I find myself fairly often disagreeing with other established metal organizations (which I’ll start calling Main Stream Metal, or MSM for short), both about albums they promote and works they dismiss out of hand or otherwise overlook. There’s a weird dysfunctional logic to the way that MSM tries to reach outside predictable selections. How else can you explain MSM’s inclusion of Slugdge, the (quite excellent) blackened sludge space-worm-themed band, who as far as I’ve been able to tell is only available via Bandcamp…. in the light of their simultaneous exclusion of Haunted Shores, Misha Mansoor’s side project (which beats the pants off of either Periphery release last year)?