[Heavy Blog Is Heavy would like to announce its newest writers, Gunnar (DeusExMachina) and Tim (Amnesian). We've already heard from Tim, who reviewed This Time It's War's Terror Plots. Today, Gunnar talks about how he got into metal. Welcome guys! - JR]

I’ve had a very long road down the path to extremely innovative and unique material. The bands I now enjoy include Periphery, Tesseract, Volumes, The Crinn, Son of Aurelius, Shining, Quartered, Between The Buried and Me, and Arsis. However, without the aforementioned bands, I’d still be listening to terrible rap music like I was back in the early days of my existence.

Finding All That Remains is what I really consider to be the beginning of my metal days. I discovered them when they released The Fall of Ideals, an album I’ve considered seminal ever since its release. That band helped me get into numerous other bands, including another one of my old favorites, The Black Dahlia Murder, whom Shannon Lucas had since left to play drums for. This helped me get into metalcore, death metal, melo-death, and black metal. And from there, it was a chain reaction of sorts. With that came Blackened Death, Grind, Mathcore, Progressive, etc.

Thank god I found these bands before All That Remains released Overcome and …For We Are Many.  Those albums disappointed me so much. But you know what? I bought them, even though I knew that they were not that good. Because you know why? I still support them. Every time I can. For two reasons.

1. I’m always hoping for a return to form. 
2. Because without them, I wouldn’t be where I am.

And that’s how it should be.

- GR