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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Simone Appolloni Has Many Opinions
 
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Imagined
Feb 2, 2007
 Who the hell is Simone Appolloni? I have no idea, beyond noticing his terrible opinions through the User Reviews he's left on seemingly every hard rock and/or metal album on Allmusic.com. By my count, he's made over 7,000 reviews, every one seemingly willfully contrarian, in an insufferable, faux-authoritative tone as if his thoughts were issued on stone tablets, and stilted english-as-second-language while trying to sound like an intellectual. Maybe this isn't worth a thread, but I have a feeling there's some gold in all this poo poo if we crowd-source enough to dig through them.

Samples? His 1.5/5 star review of Metallica's Kill Em All:

Simone Appolloni posted:

Chaotic, messy, ridiculous and extremely boring. Pass it up.

Or his 2 star review of Black Sabbath's Paranoid:

Simone Appolloni posted:

This noble album, often treated as it was product of the president of the United States, God, a bunch of musicians or any kind of persons you could think is absolutely not what people say it is. It's not heavy: it's even more polished than Black Sabbath's first album. No true experimentation, no mood changes, no life-sounding jams, no acoustic passages: the presence of "Planet Caravan" feels more like case selection than progressive ambitions. In Paranoid we found the silliest Black Sabbath song: they try to be punky and sleazy (a fulfill they could master only on Nevers Say Die), but ultimately sound pretty generic (the proto-punk "Paranoid" was nothing innovative: you already had Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown") and extremely childish ("Iron Man"). After the worst, you got even two blasphemies in your repertoire: the sleepy "Electric Funeral" and "Hand of Doom", whose bridge is the only thing it works, and not pretty well. Finally, there's the classic album filler jam "Rat Salad": Billy Ward could be a jazzy drummer, but not a soloist, as evidenced here.

And the presence of these repulsive songs sound painful, considered the monotone, but ultimately more convincing three remaining songs: the generic anti-war Blues sounding "War Pigs", whose bridge seems endless; the elegant yet cathartic "Planet Caravan" and the true highlight, the truly sleazy stoned anthem "Faries Wear Boots", sung by Ozzy in an incredible convincing manner (and that's say a lot, considered his vocal abilities).

So, it's incredible how people call this album the Heavy Metal statement forgetting anything Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and The Jimi Hendrix Experience had done before. And if it wasn't enough to convince you, take a look to the lyrics inside ("Havy Boots of lead/ Fill his victims full of dread/ Running as fast as they can/ Iron Man lives again!", "Politicians hide themselves away/ They only started the war/ Why they should go out to fight?/ They leave that role to the poor", "Take your written rules/ You join the other fools/ Turn to something new/ Now it's killing you"). They speak for themselves.

So what does Simone like? Well, Helmet's Meantime gets 5 stars:

Simone Appolloni posted:

If Helmet came out to make some noise, Strap It On meant their objective was reached. But somehow Helmet made it. Meantime, their second album, became an atom smasher and went selling over two milion copies by today. Yeah, it isn't a great result, for a rock band. But for a band so impossible to resist as Helmet, that found them closer to the Black and Death Metal universe than before, it surely was an accomplishment. Meantime's music has its point trough chords, but doesn't sound monotonous (unlike the sorrounding albums Strap It On and Betty) because, even if longer than the first album, is stronger, funkier, catchier. The syncopated drum patterns mean a lot to the sound (thanks of John Stainer, even without double bass), but the dropped guitar and the mournful bass create a sound texture it get nearly lost trough his bleakness.

Apart of the useless noisy Slayeresque solos, the nine tracks flow in a hollow sound where chaos is the only law known ("Earth tone suits you / So give it a smile / If I could hold your feet down / Get to know for awhile" from "In the Meantime"). The combination of Black, Death and even some Doom Metal elements with the groovy sound of early Seattle Scene makes tracks like "In the Meantime", Ironhead", "He Feels Bad" and "FBLA II" absolute monsters, And even if the others elements are less effective, especially the childish vocal harmonies of the training song "Unsung" and the forced complex patterns of "Turned Out", Meantime really deserves the faem it got, even if only the so-called "Alternative Sick People" could remember it (without really enjoying it). Time proved Helmet could even improve their songwriting in future albums.
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Simone Appolloni Has Many Opinions