Trivium released an album last year ? :/

If you're talking about In waves, yeah I agree..It felt like a half hearted effort. Ascendancy and Shogun were just fantastic imo...

And I agree that metal has a shitload of sub-genres and everything... I was just a little annoyed by Xen...thought he was one of those really annoying people who think screaming your ass out = good metal.

Anyone looking forward to the new machine head and mastodon albums set to release this year ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jGZJxnJk-4&ob=av3e

I like Helloween a lot, but let's just say that they are strongly influenced by Iron Maiden.

I loved Metallica from Kill 'Em All up until and including ...And Justice For All.  After that, I haven't liked anything that they've done.  Megadeth and Iron Maiden definitely have had there ups and downs later in their respective careers, but at least the stuff that they were playing is metal.  I don't known what Load, Reload, and several of Metallica's albums can be listed as, but it's not metal.  Also, it's well known that Dave Mustaine wrote a lot of Metallica's early stuff.  For example, Seek and Destroy's intro riff definitely sounds like something that he would have written.

Yeah, after "... And Justice for All" I stopped listening to Metallica.  I know that their self titled album (the black album) was their most popular (bought in abundance by non-metal heads and frat-boys everywhere), but I never liked it at all.  Having said that however, that album is Mozart compared to everything they did after that.  I'd rather listen to Ashlee Simpson than Load, Re-Load or St. Anger.  

Also, about Dave Mustaine's former Metallica writing, the main riff in "Four Horsemen", which Mustaine helped write, is used in the song "Mechanix" on Megadeth's first album.  And you can totally hear "The Call of Ktulu" in Megadeth's "Hangar 18".  

But you could take all of Metallica's best songs and put them on one single album and it still wouldn't equal Megadeth's "Rust in Peace", IMHO.  That was the first Megadeth album to feature Friedman and Menza, and their collective talents really came together on it.

Did someone call for an old metalhead???

Anyone else excited for Anthrax's new album next month??

Eh, I don't know... maybe during the Walls of Jericho/Keepers era that everyone seems to like best, but I really think their strongest influence is Priest (with some Scorpions thrown in). That may amount to six of one, half a dozen of the other, but Priest is what Kai Hansen cites as his influence and that's what they'd have grown up listening to. Maiden dropped their first album only three or four years before Walls came out.

Then again, I think Derisoween >>>>>>>>>>> Kiskeoween, so what do I know?

You are awesome for including Rage. Peavy has the voice of God, and Victor Smolski may be God.

True to a certain degree, the Helloween (and Gammaray after keepers), were influenced by Priest but not Scorpions, other equally important influences were 70s  melodic hard rock bands  like Rainbow and Huriah Heep also Deep Purple and Dio in a minor way. If you like Power Metal of the 90s I suggest you to listen to these bands.

Yeah, I don't disagree. But really, you don't hear a Scorpions influence? "He's a Woman, She's a Man" has always sounded like a proto-Helloween song to me, and when they covered it for Metal Jukebox, it sounded like it was theirs all along.

The fact you mantioned Kai Hansen has gathered my attention to him and their first albums, jukebox came out when he have already left the group. Yes, I'm not wanting to say that Helloween weren't into Scorpions after all they were the most popular german rock band for at least a decade, what I mean is at least first albums, their way of playing was mainly derivative from those other bands. Probably their more recent albums have more point of contact with Scorpions as you said. Another thing to consider is that bands like Rainbow and Deep Purple were so influent that also Scorpions were to a certain degree influenced by them. Awesome band by the way.