[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, Xiphos, I like your handle -- or should I get cute and say your hilt? It's, uh, Classical.

I'm wayyy too old for deathmetal now, though. I had a few early metal albums -- two from Black Sabbath -- and I think metal suits adolescent emotional makeup, but the charm of it begins to fade in one's twenties, and it's about wholly gone by thirty, as one's emotional development moves away from it. Have some other favorite genres to take its place when that begins to happen -- Wagner in symphonic music, or Mahler, or the Russian Romantics -- Mussorgskiy, Tchaikovsky, Rimskii-Korsakov, Rachmaninov like that. Likewise The 1812 Overture. Classical symphony music in that vein tends to be stuff that's accessible to metal fans.

One's taste in music becomes less simplistic than metal usually is as one's years increase. You end up thinking, "Big-ass thumping rhythm, yeah, check; been there." You find yourself looking for more subtlety -- something less like grain alcohol and more like wine, or brandy when you're feeling ferocious.

The music I've committed to doing with my life, and if you ask me, trying to make music is the thing that really gets you understanding it, is that of the Highland bagpipe. I enjoy music in the key of Celt and can happily sing drunken Irish war-songs and comic songs all night, but there is something in the craggy, rocky, Celtic music of the Scots that calls to my soul. So I practice my pipes from time to time.