Ohtar at its best kills. Many know I operate Sarvilevyt store, but its basically focused on Finnish "audience". There is a lot of writing in Finnish being published through that, and one recent project was about sort of going "back to basics". A lot of store owners seem to be somehow jaded old men, who often appear as if they lost interest in everything else than business aspect of records. I thought that it would be better to kind of illustrate why store is doing what it does, and go through dozens and dozens of good metal song. Not albums. Not necessary items currently for sale. Not popular titles that are hot, but simply metal songs that I appreciate and what means something to me. A lot of songs can be decided instantly, but with some bands, it is way harder to evaluate what would be the best song of Veles, Graveland, Darkthrone, Exhorder, Rotting Christ, Goatlord, Immolation, Tiamat, etc etc. Some bands may not have amazing album, but they have some stand out track there that has been listened countless times. When making some evaluation, ended up listening more metal music than I have listened for long time. Many songs are indeed classics for me, that I can listen any time, as many times on repeat as I have time. And as record store, I do end up selling things I don't necessary personally like, but way way bigger focus is on stocking exactly those things I like and feel enthusiastic to recommend anyone.
When listening all your old or new favorites in metal, it quickly shows why a lot of metal doesn't mean anything to me. Someone sends link of older bands new album or some new project, and pretty much never recording quality or "timbre" of songs appeal to my taste and same could be said often for music. And most of all the meaning of the material doesn't often shine through - or lets say, it may be too obvious that material sounds like it would be done for contemporary online metal audience and even festival circuit in mind.
...and this quickly leads into thinking why I would spend too much time with listening things I do not want to hear, when I got like 50 meters of physical metal releases that get pulled out way too rarely compared to how good they are. So pulling out FULLMOON demo reissue may be vastly more interesting than seeing what popular black metal promotional channel have uploaded recently.
