The Legacy

J: MUSTAINE: Seems Like BLABBERMOUTH & ROADRUNNER Are Only People Who Don't Like Me Or MEGADETH - shut up, dave!

M: srsly. he's embarassing himself and everyone else, he's only going to isolate himself from the bbmouth/roadrunner people - who like i said last night, are the only people that care in this much detail about him...soon enough there'll only be people who've never heard of this debacle, or the people who have, who hate him :/

J: yeah, srsly, he really is making himself look like a chump. blabbermouth is the most read metal news on the net, though people make rude comments on their all the time, it's the whole internet tough guy thing, because they have a screen to hide behind, it's not like they'd say that to dave's face! it's just their outlet to say that dave's acting like a twat about the whole thing - every one can see that - apart from him

M: and instead of realising these are the only people that care about metal enough to read about it all the time, and thus the people he should go some way to ingratiating himself towards - he makes them hate him more and more!

>internet tough guy

maybe someone should tell him about this - they don't mean it, its just internet speak for them being unhappy about it, you're right

J: dave should just stfu and enjoy his holiday coffee :)

M:
LOL :D

J: i wonder if his daughter'll be as annoying as him...

M: i imagine so, i bet she's one of them pushy celebrity kids - she's already done tv and stuff. and she's called electra :/ (dunno if dave knows it, but in psychology terms, electra is the female version of oedipus...)

J: she's gonna be the 14 year old attention whore that dave already is, except she's female, which makes it over 9000 times worse!

M: LOL i bet you, when she's a bit older, she's gonna get interviews about how her dad used to be in metallica - we have another 80 years of this shit, it's just gonna continue through the generations XO

J: yeah, true that, she might take over his legacy of moaning about it.... oh god ;O

M: srsly, i reckon that's so gonna happen - first time she gets interviewed by anyone who has a clue about metal - she's gonna get asked about it. if she's sensible, she'll tell them to fuck off - but i bet it'll start a whole new legacy of whining, her and the hetfield kids together (or not, as the case may be)

J: you never hear about the hetfield kids :)

M: there's a couple youtube clips where he gets his girl up on stage - they sing her happy birthday one time....but apart from that, no. i don't think they're now minor celebrities in their own right like dave's kid - they're growing up in secrecy behind that giant wall he built (james, not dave) :)

J: yah, that fucking wall :)
whereas dave's kid is a child presenter for some kids tv network :D

M: exactly XO

J: aren't james' kids called something weird, like hercules, or is that
his middle name :?

M: it's cicero or something roman ish.

> Cali (June 13, 1998), Castor (May 18, 2000), and Marcella (January 17, 2002).

wiki solves it all :) castor is def roman*. well, his name is, not the kid haha.

J: Castor, that was the one....
Virgil is his dad, that i think is who i was thinking of :) i knew it was the name of one of the Thunderbird characters :)

M: yeah, that's the one :) james' middle name is ALAN :D

*Continuing my rants about all things Roman - all the Hetfield children have Roman names, probably because of James Hetfield's father's name - Virgil. The name Marcella means 'dedicated to the god Mars'. The name Cali is from the name Calista, which was common amongst Greeks and Romans. Castor was another common name - one of the Gemini, Castor and Pollux, Castor was also the god of the Praetorian Guard. The son of Tiberius was nicknamed Castor for this reason.

mihi non placet.....

Although I don't think I've mentioned it on here before, I make no secret of the fact that I'm a total nerd for the Romans. It's pretty much my favourite subject and I've always wondered why Rome doesn't turn up in metal subject matter more often. Greek mythology is everywhere: Symphony X's The Odyssey, Iron Maiden's Flight of Icarus and Manowar's Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy to name but a few.

Which is why, when I first read about Ex Deo, it was with a certain amount of curiosity and anticipation - here was the possibility that someone might blend my favourite music, metal, with my favourite subject area, Rome.

The disappointment is thus crushing. They suck. They really suck, their music SUCKS. It doesn't sound any different to any other generic death metal-lite band that I don't want to hear. The guitars are muddy, the synth only goes further to destroying the guitar sound and the vocals are really, really fucking horrible. The solos are weirdly paced (too slow) and mis-placed (they just don't seem to fit in the right places) and the drums have some very strange tones. It's embarassing.

Not wanting to put a downer on the whole thing: lyrically, I think they're getting there. Apart from over-hyping the Battle of Actium (although I suppose that's what Augustus always wanted), they get some nice lines in. Massive points for fitting "circumvallation" into a song and including lyrics in Latin (now that's what I'm talking about!).

However, why stick to the obvious stuff? I know Julius Caesar is famous, but wouldn't Hannibal and Scipio make for more brutal subject matter? Or the Aeneid for some extreme epic? Or the achievements of Pompey, Vespasian or Trajan? Of Marius or Sulla? There's more to Rome than Antony and Cleopatra, believe it or not.

J will probably say I'm being too high brow about it. But it seems to me that if you're going so far as to make a Rome-themed metal band, you should do it properly and do it justice.

You might notice that the Metal Archives review is a great deal more generous towards this band than I. If you look at the reviewer profile however, he's blatantly a twat. His notion that "In the middle ages and during the reign of the Roman Empire, if you lived in Northern Europe and wore long hair, you were a free man, if you had short hair, you were a slave." isn't really true at all. This was the case for early Greek civilisations, but by the 6th or 5th century BC shorter styles were more common.

Even in Classical Greece, "long" wasn't even that long: just look at all the statues of Apollo, Herakles and Zeus. To be honest, whether you had a beard or not was considered much more important.

In the Roman Empire, short hair was particularly favoured - especially in the style popularised by Augustus. Through the middle ages, it really depended on exactly which part of Northern Europe you lived in and on what religion you adhered to.

So bollocks to him and his shitty review :D