Any time, friend: you and I have very similar tastes (old black metal, martial/neofolk), and though it may be uncool to proclaim that newer bands don't hold a candle to the old masters as regards black metal (because it's so obvious and makes us seem out of touch and close-minded?), kudos to you nonetheless for doing so. I'd like to extend an additional set of kudos for not being afraid to listen to certain excellent bands from Poland and France despite their "scary" political views.

Thanks for the fav man

Damn just saw your comment on my list thank you very much for the nice words and the favourite :) Sorry I haven't replied sooner just been really busy with work and life in general. "Light of a Dead Star" truly is underappreciated they do a great job of not just being another one of the million boring Darkthrone clones with no creativity or originality sure they are heavily influenced by Darkthrone but have their own flavor too. I sure wish I had more time to discover more music these days.

thanks for the friend request man. It's nice seeing someone who still has a blogspot nowadays, makes me feel really nostalgic.

You're welcome. As I said, I gotta a soft spot for blogspots preferably ones that look abandoned since 2007. And if you really wanna turn back the time machine, change the font to Times New Roman, that will just ooze the good ol' days.

Thanks for insightful comment on my list! You know, the problem I keep running into when it comes to trying to have serious conversations about the state of metal is that so many people confuse elitism with hipsterism. Real elitists look for the best of the best, not just the most obscure or the most different. I feel like an old man when I talk about how much better metal used to be but the stuff that's been coming out for the past 7 or 8 years by and large isn't just bad, it's actively detrimental. Even taking it back further to 10 or 12 years ago, the flood of just absolute shit being blown out by Century Media, Peaceville, and Nuclear Blast was just awful, though for different reasons. That stuff was bad because it was almost all overblown attempts at copying "symphonic" metal in the style of Dimmu Borgir or Cradle of Filth, bad but nevertheless popular bands.

Metal that's bad today is that way because it tries to absorb all these outside influences that undermine the whole purpose of what constitutes the genre. It's bizarre to listen to something like Bathory's "The Return" or Immortal's "Pure Holocaust" and then turn around and hear something like Deafheaven or Alcest or (ugh) Woods of Ypres and have people seriously act like they're part of the same milieu or tradition. It wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it does if it weren't for the fact that these bands are claiming to be in some sense black metal and the hipsters just accept it because it sounds kind of like what they've read it should sound like but it's done in a style that you rightly described as safe for them. Even that doesn't bug me as much as all of the media coverage out there that exposes new listeners to this stuff as their first introduction to the genre and becomes the standard against which they judge everything else, which leaves good newer bands like Sulphur Aeon who don't bother with pretentious shit out in the cold in terms of exposure.

The bands have to be evaluated against the criteria that they've set down for themselves. If they want to use and lay claim to metal aesthetics, then they have to be judged by metal standards, and that's where they all basically fail. That's why I really enjoyed Gruesome's "Savage Land;" it makes no bones about being anything other than pure 80s death metal worship and I love it. Original? No, but I'll listen to that ten times in a row before I'll listen to something supposedly "new" and "creative" like Ghost Bath again.

hello
mildly enjoyable:
http://zetkinthrash.bandcamp.com/album/vanguard-ep

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. It's unfortunate that I could really only find about 20 newer metal bands that do anything for me at this point. Still though, for the ones on the list that you haven't heard yet, check them out...they're all worthwhile.