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Metal!

So I mentioned recently that I did a bit of nostalgia/impulse buying on iTunes, but I didn't really elaborate on the purchases themselves.

In the ninth grade, I loved heavy metal music. To put a finer point on it, I loved Christian Metal. I didn't have a lot of access to secular metal, since all of my friends were of the same faith as me, so instead of cutting my teeth on Megadeth or Metallica, like my peers, I banged my head and pounded my fist in the air to bands like Tourniquet, or Deliverance. And yes, there was the occasional Stryper or White Cross album too. But mostly, I dug thrash, and progressive metal, and Tourniquet and Deliverance fit that bill pretty good.

I grew out of it, it was a phase, or at least I thought it was. By my senior year my tastes were more along the lines of Daniel Amos, Jacob's Trouble or the 77's - all great bands, but mellower. I'm sure my grandfather appreciated that too, since the volume of my cassettes was significantly lower during that time.

Anyway, I thought I had outgrown metal music. I guess if you factor in the death of metal courtesy of the Seattle Grunge Movement, I wasn't the only one. But now, neo-metal has hit a serious growth spurt in the last few years, and with that, came new albums from my two favorite bands of that era - Tourniquet and Deliverance. Hearing about this, I ended up not only buying new stuff from both bands, but their old stuff that I loved so much ended up in my iTunes as well.

And I've been listening to it all pretty much non-stop for the last couple of weeks.

I used to need to have a little bit of anger in me to enjoy metal music. It's to big expected, I think. It's loud, it's fast, it just SOUNDS angry. Before you all start planning an intervention, I'm not particularly angry anymore. I've begun noticing the nuances, both subtle and not so subtle, in songs I just "rocked to" when I was sixteen. It's elaborate, melodic in some areas, and deep.

And yeah, it still rocks. Hard. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis of sorts. I'm taking a look at my age, and shaking my rawk fist at it with fury and defiance. But I'll never, ever, look like this, again:

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