My Metal History Pt. 8: Law School

Why hasn't anyone told me I haven't done one of these in awhile?

Anyway, law school. Law school was a very difficult couple of years of my life, marked by lots of personal turmoil and doubt. One thing that did occur that was good was meeting my future fiancee. Of course, this is more about the metal I listened to.

The summer before law school, I bought my first albums by Meshuggah and In Flames. Meshuggah took a little bit to get into, but once I did, I was entranced by the riffs. Of course, the album that I picked was one of the band's earliest, back when they were more of a technical thrash metal band. In Flames was instantly interesting to me and I would pick up several of their albums over the course of the next three years.

While I was in law school, I was working in assets protection at Target. I witnessed the upswing in popularity of metalcore. Some of the bands I really enjoyed, but many I did not. I started listening to the likes of Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, Lamb of God, Bleeding Through, Trivium, and others because Target often sold them for cheap and they were fairly decent bands. I still enjoy the albums I picked up from those bands at the time, although they are not all bands I still listen to often enough to buy new albums.

I continued listening to many of the bands I previously enjoyed. Opeth, Dark Tranquillity, Metallica, Megadeth, and others were still favorites of mine. I also listened to a lot of Moonspell and Tristania, dark, gothic metal groups. I started listening to some more melodeath, spurred by the pickups of Dark Tranquillity and In Flames, I began listening to Arch Enemy. The female vocalist was the main impetus for this pickup. Soilwork was another melodeath band that I started listening to.

I would say that it was in law school that my interest in black metal became more apparent. Groups like Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth caught my eye, even though neither are well-received by the black metal scene anymore. But this was my first major exposure to the genre, having gotten glimpses of it in the past. Those pickups both occurred when I was first dating my future fiancee and I remember her being a little freaked out by them.

I did not have a lot of money to spend on CDs in law school, but I managed to discover a lot of new bands. I began scratching the surface of the more extreme genres, but it would not be until after law school, living on my own well away from my family and friends in St. Paul, Nebraska that my interest in metal would become an obsession and my collection would explode.