1) Deathspell Omega Veritas Diaboli Manet in Aeternum: Chaining The Katechon (Norma Evangelium Diaboli)

2) Horna Sanojesi Aarelle (Debemur Morti)

3) Old Wainds Death Nord Kult (Debemur Morti)

4) Darkthrone Dark Thrones & Black Flags (Peaceville)

5) Ofermod Tiamtu (Norma Evangelium Diaboli)

6) Bahimiron Southern Nihilizm (Moribund Records)

7) Satyricon Age Of Nero (Koch Records)

8) Taake Taake (Century Media)

9) Cattle Decapitation The Harvest Floor (Metal Blade)

10) Khold Hundre ar gammal (Candlelight Records)

11) Capricorns River, Bear Your Bones (Rise Above Records)

12) Enslaved Vertabrae (Nuclear Blast)

13) Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague (Metal Blade)

14) Cynic Traced in Air (Season Of Mist)

The above list of fourteen metal/black metal releases (not in any particular order) popular with Amoeba folks is culled from the current Spring/Summer 2009 Music We Like booklet regularly published by Amoeba Music and available for free at each Amoeba Music store. The first listed release, Veritas Diaboli Manet in Aeternum: Chaining the Katechon, is a split EP by French bands released December 2008. The title Veritas Diabolo Manet in Aeternum is a work of two French black metal bands: Deathspell Omega (Chaining the Katechon) and S.V.E.S.T. (Le Diable est ma Raison).

1) Iron Maiden Flight 666 DVD

2) Metallica Death Magnetic CD/LP

3) Mastodon Crack The Skye CD/LP

4) Metal: A Headbangers Journey DVD

5) Nyktalgia Peisithanatos CD/LP

If, like me, you suspected that heavy metal music had been going through a bit of a renaissance in recent years and that the decades old genre born out of hard rock in the late 60's/early 70's seems more popular than ever these days, you would be correct, according to longtime metal fan and Amoeba employee Stevil. "The state of metal is healthier than ever. Plus it is more diversified than it has ever been," confirmed Stevil, who works at the San Francisco Amoeba Music, and who has been a dedicated metal fan since the early 80's -- a time when the genre, while popular with certain crossover bands, was generally not nearly as widely accepted as today. "It's cool and acceptable to like metal these days. That's good," said Stevil. He recalled the bygone era when he first got into the genre, when it had a certain "excitement and camaraderie" due to being a relatively smaller and more insular scene. "It was like a huge worldwide gang," reminisced Stevil, noting that, "Nowadays there's a lot of bands, a lot more bands, but with more and more fractured sub-genres" beyond the once standard classic, thrash, and black metal musical divisions which remain his personal favorite types of metal. "A lot of bands have come over from the hardcore punk scene, so there is a whole new fanbase to it, a wider fanbase than ever."

1) Iron Maiden Flight 666 (2009)

2) Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (2006)

3) Heavy Metal In Baghdad (2007)

4) Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2005)

5) Monsters of Metal Vol. 6 (2008)

The new Iron Maiden film Flight 666 is an excellent concert documentary directed by Sam Dunn & Scot McFadyen. The film was screened at several festivals, including SXSW in Austin a few months ago, had a brief run in theaters, and has been recently shown on VH1 Classics. Finally, it's now available on DVD with lots of bonus footage. Since it was released last week (Jun 9th) it has been selling extremely well at Amoeba Music's three stores. "We sold nearly every copy, way more than we expected. We've had to reorder it, it's so popular," reported Chris at the Hollywood Amoeba store, whose areas of specialty include music DVDs. So who's buying Flight 666? Iron Maiden fans of old or  music fans that have been newly converted to the legendary British metal monsters? "Metal head dudes of all ages are buying it up," said Chris, adding that others are too, including many curious to learn more about this legendary hard rock group, who have been putting it down for 34 years and yet still manage to blow away many metal bands half their age.

The movie was made in the classic concert documentary style, and it follows the band on last year's Somewhere Back In Time World Tour, during which the veteran metal musicians clocked 50,000 miles round the globe, playing 23 concerts on five continents over a 45 day period with stops in such cities as Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo, Costa Rica, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. The deluxe edition is a two disc set that includes the entire set from the 2008 segment of this tour on the bonus disc. Nice! The sound is crispy clean and passes the cranked up loud on a big sound system test, and while nothing equates the experience of being in the flesh at a concert, the live show footage on Flight 666 comes pretty close.