French Canadian black metal band Sorcies des Glaces announced that the band is heading into the studio this summer to finish the recording of North, its upcoming LP. The band also released the cover image above.
Known for its flowing black metal in the style of old Immortal and Graveland, but an idiosyncratic twist of its own, Sorcier des Glaces graced a number of the “best of 2014″ lists floating around the internet including our own. Hopes are high for the new material.
The German zine Legacy – The Voice From The Dark Side plans to release a death metal compilation entitled Death Is Upon Us featuring cover artwork by infamous death metal artist Mark Riddick.
The first 14 tracks from this compilation feature bands from Dark Descent Records:
Thevetat
Morpheus Descends
Horrendous
Blood Incantation
Spectral Voice
Grave Ritual
Divine Eve
Father Befouled
House of Atreus
Imprecation
Blaspherian
Weregoat
Ritual Necromancy
Ghoulgotha
Death Curse Productions represents the new wave of smaller underground labels who are targeting niches within the mainstreamed post-underground instead of trying to drop out from the methods used by normals to exchange music. Despite offering some unconventional formats, Death Curse Productions keeps its offerings accessible to the world at large, as if daring them to look underneath the mantle of normalcy and discover the twisted, weird and alienated…
When did Death Curse Productions (DCP) get started, who started it, and what was your intent?
Death Curse Productions was founded in the year 2013 A.B. by two individuals who felt the urge to uphold the traditions of Black Metal.
The main intent behind the label’s activities was, is and always will be to create strictly limited pieces of music we approve to be worth the attention. DCP’s work concentrates on the production of quality releases in every way, be it musical, spiritual, visual or concerning design in general.
Mainly it’s quality above quantity, as nowadays the so called Black Metal ‘scene’ is all about putting out shitty releases of shitty sideprojects on a daily basis.
What type of music do you cover, and what do you do? Will this expand in the future?
We don’t determine an exact style as long as the music or the band matches our philosophy. In this case the essence of our philosophy is the glorification of death itself.
We canalize the music onto analogue media to preserve them against extinction. For now the focus is on tapes but that shall not set a restriction for what we do in the future.
In other words expansion is something we highly strive for.
Do you think underground metal is still relevant in the days of post-metal, indie-metal, jazz-metal and modern metal?
Today, in a time where those genres reached their peak of popularity, they managed to take the original values from the metal music itself and turn them into something completely depraved. The music was originally intended to be violent, raw, sinister and dangerous, instead people went forth and created something clean, peaceful and enjoyable, only in order to attract a tasteless mass of lambs and accumulate money.
Concerning the underground, especially Black Metal is declared to be dead by a lot of people, yet there’s a black flame still being kept burning by a small amount of certain individuals, who preserve the underground from being swallowed by trends and who put all their passion and devotion into creating music following the old path.
What are your favorite bands in the underground metal genres?
This is not a question we want to answer, as opinion-making is for the weak-minded, whose taste is defined by trends.
Of course there are undeniable classics everyone should be aware of, as well as some so-called newcomers who stand out in a way, they contrast from the common stuff.
If people are interested in what DCP does, where do they go for more information and/or how do they contact you?
Whoever is seriously interested in DCP, should contact us by mail.
For any updates visit the blogspot page or facebook.
Death Curse Productions 2014 releases:
DCP001 – KILL (Swe) “Inverted Funeral” tape
Yet to be released in 2015:
DCP002 – BALMOG (Esp) “Testimony Of The Abominable” tape
DCP003 – BALMOG (Esp) “Svmma Fide” tape
DCP004 – ILLUM ADORA (Ger) “Demo MMXV” tape
DCP005 – ACRIMONIOUS (Gre) “Purulence” tape
Yes, this is a metal blog, and yes, this is a punk album and also yes, people who try to be ironic are annoying. Nausea Condemned to the System is worth your time if you enjoy energetic and powerful music of any kind. Born out of a punk album, this half-hour terror extends to grindcore and the type of speed metal touches that influenced later 80s hardcore. Unlike most hybrids of this nature, Nausea fuses its influences into a singular voice.
Condemned to the System distinguishes it from thousands that wish to be like it by maintaining a high degree of internal contrast, dialogue between riffs, and compelling tempo changes in songs that develop from a central conflict and by doing so avoid the dual extremes of riff salad and endless loop that make many minimalistic albums as boring as listening to a diesel engine idle. Instead, these songs launch into verse chorus pairs shaped around a central conflict with discursive and transitional material allowing the central loop to take more form. Grindcore-style layering of riffs and instruments gives these songs additional power.
For punk purists, there may be too much emphasis on muted chords used to end phrases, and for metal purists, there may be too many straight-up punk riffs of the 1970s style, but when looked at from a distance, the singular voice of this band emerges. Tempos stay high and vocals incoherent, keeping the guitars and drums as the center of the band with guitars leading and drums producing a pulsing violence behind. Avoiding technical playing entirely, Nausea focus on paring down their songs until a unique form emerges, then playing it with full intensity. The result is an album of short glimpses of life portrayed with the manic intensity of a paranoiac on a four-gallon coffee break, capturing the alienation of punk without self-pity and the willpower of metal without posturing.
In 1998, a few black metal musicians — many of whom faced legal troubles in their home countries — came together to make a recording. The result, Asgardsrei, captured black metal in transition: its epic past, its roots in punk merged with Oi, and its tackling of unpopular subject matter, in this case out-of-the-closet NSBM.
This form of music differed NSBMTM that was to follow which meant exclusively Drudkh-style droning sugar-substitute melodies and battle-related titles with neo-Romantic lyrics:
Alone I wander
Wastelands of the soul
Among the corpses and ash
A single flower rises
Kill the Jews with fire
Absurd back in the day combined a poetic style that might be called “immaturism,” a wide-ranging complaint with the modern world, and yes, some rather violent ideas. It defied categorization. Their debut album, Facta Loquuntur, sounded at times like ultra-simplistic punk with lyrics from a child’s point of view, pointing out not policy failures or physical breakdown in Western society, but its completely backward spirit and denial of all existential importance. Always on the edge of black metal, Absurd both increased the discernible Oi/RAC influence and put together more black metal style riffing, creating a hybrid that kept both voices without allowing the extremes of either to take over.
Fast-forward to 2012. Absurd — now with none of the 1999 members — re-issues Asgardsrei in a new form. As it is arguably the most musically interesting album from Absurd, combining the raw forest metal (this is the band that wrote “Green Heart” after all) with greater proficiency and alertness, it could be a big seller for this band. Unfortunately, they decided to under guise of a re-master actually alter this album. First they turned up the guitars and turned down keyboards, background sounds, etc. They replaced the subtle intro with patriotic bluster and industrial percussion. Then they either modified or added drums to give the album a constant kick-happy Oi beat. Finally, they modified vocals to sound more like the recent Oi/metal hybrid the band has been putting out. The result crushed all subtlety and made this album very much the exact thing this band in its original form would have recoiled at.
Thuringian plain, deep dark forest
Evil dwells on there in the woods
Snowcovered hills, cold winds blowing
Romantic place, is it understood ?!Evil in the forest in Germany’s Green Heart !
Hateful savages, strong black minds
Out of the forest, kill the human kind
Burn the settlements and grow the woods
Until this romantic place is understood !
Approaching deathcore like a doom metal band, Castrator mix invariant riff-chorus pairs with extended solos over slower riffing and hybridize the chromatic riffing of their influences with Judas Priest style hard rock riffs. The strength is the melodic soloing which, while very much cut from a conventional metal/rock mold, guides the slowly looping slow-paced riffs to make an interesting atmospheric piece. Their death metal riffs however both conform strictly to archetypes and achieve no variance, so that a wall of extremely similar sound gives way to a solo, then repeats briefly and fades away. Many of these riffs stick to fixed patterns at a single note, which produces the kind of droning that made post-Suffocation clones excruciating. The vocals perhaps provide the strongest point of focus for this band, but that in turn becomes a weakness, because vocals alone cannot unite a loop of similar verse/chorus riffs with breakdowns into a song. The gruff monotone vocals keep a bass-heavy pulse going that drives songs forward with aggression and anger. While the band write catchy songs, the low internal complexity and archetypal riffing detract from the desire to hear this again.
What is a novelty band? A band chosen for anything other than its music. Common topics include bands with: women, female singers, minorities, retarded people, gay people, transsexuals, unusual instruments, drug use, JPOP girls and children. Record companies love novelty bands because the media fawns all over them, then the hipsters do, and it sells hype quickly and bypasses the normal metal fans, who are critical of quality instead of being driven by novelty.
The latest novelty comes to us from Vice Magazine who want us to read about Al-Namrood from Saudi Arabia. While it is true that this band may be risking their lives to perform, it seems like they face roughly the same amount of struggle that bands behind the Iron Curtain did back in the 1980s, which means they can circumnavigate authorities to exist, record an album, shoot a video, and be feautured in American media with their faces in the video and not get killed.
As with all novelty stories, this will be short-lived. There have been many tales of heavy metal bands from the Middle East and after the media blitz, these bands have gone nowhere. The quality test is what matters. If you cannot pass the quality test, you are SOL. Al-Namrood will be the latest to fail the quality test because their output is only nominally black metal, not aesthetically distinctive and indeed a bit awkward, and finally, the songwriting is not that memorable at least by metal standards.
“Bat Al Tha ar Nar Muheja” consists of fast melodic riffing in the style of Satyricon Nemesis Divina with a Middle Eastern influence on the choices of scales used. The vocals, on the other hand, sound like something from more recent Absurd albums. The song seems put together in the style favored by Behemoth, where riffs relate marginally to each other and the main point is to follow the vocals and rhythms to a big break and a melodic interlude, after which point the band returns to blasting fast single-picked riffs. While it is not terrible, it is also not exceptional.
The MetalGate Band group produces a series of podcasts where informed participants in the movement against censorship in music meet to talk about issues of the day. If your Mom is in the room (for modern metal fans) or your children are (for underground metal stalwarts) you might want to keep the mute button handy because there is frequent, copious and gleeful use of obscenities.
Every episode has its own topic, and some high points which may be related. The peak of this episode seems to be the discussion about the difference between making media solely to make money or be popular, and those who want to be popular as a means of getting their music or movies out there to express an idea.
War metal bands Black Witchery and Revenge issued their new release on tax day, April 15, with each band recording three new songs of their trademark sound, which their biography eagerly informs us is inspired by Blasphemy and Sarcofago. With excellent and intriguing cover art, and raw but clear production, this release should appeal to fans of the genre.
Black Witchery tear into their three tracks with a studied recklessness and noisy attack. These shorter songs use the standard circular structure with a final detour, but the band inserts rhythmic breaks throughout — the war metal equivalent of a breakdown in deathcore — to build intensity. Most riffs follow the rock/grindcore paradigm of a static chord, possibly with a chromatic offset, establishing a rhythm to which a fill is added. These riffs resemble faster version of punk hardcore riffs in minor key with lower tuning and faster, more precise playing. This shows a heritage with more in common with Napalm Death than Immortal and a lack of the atmosphere and uniquely shaped songs that made the Blasphemy proto-black metal grindcore hybrid work well, as well as an absence of the melodic structuring of the Black Witchery demo. The relentless aggression of these songs will make them popular but they will not be as memorable as Blasphemy or Sarcofago. If this band wishes to improve, their first step will be to worry less about being intense enough and worry more about shaping that intensity so that at the end of each track, a profound shifting of mood and idea leaves the listener in awe. This was the standard Blasphemy achieved on the best moments of Fallen Angel of Doom and the direction Sarcofago indicated their material should take with songs like “The Black Vomit.” Of these three tracks, “Curse of Malignancy” is my favorite for its directed power that forcibly enacts a concise regimen that achieves the feeling of warfare at least in concept.
Revenge takes a different approach to war metal through riffs longer in duration which use the same surging technique but depend on active drums to break pattern with accents and spur the riff on to change. This technique can rally the attention of the listener and is often used in marching bands. It however creates a reliance on the drums, which although it makes the surge tremolo riff technique less important, also relegates guitars to a secondary role and creates a type of static riffing that resembles doom metal sped up to grindcore paces. Much like Black Witchery, this music is almost exclusively chromatic, which gives it the primitive and violent feel prized by fans. Revenge also tackle Bathory “Equimanthorn,” but in imposing their own rhythmic standards they enhance the jerky and sing-song nature of this tune (comparable to Mayhem “Deathcrush”) and add nothing to the original, so it stands out barely. This band has always been one of the more technically proficient voices in war metal and while their music is enjoyable in a single listen, the songs are too similar in approach, topic and technique for prolonged listening. “Revenge” rounds out this three-song EP and may be my favorite track on this side for its compact, solidly focused assault.
Late model black metal features many of these entries: as much borrowed from the days of speed metal as black metal, keeping a constant “jazzercise” style constant tempo and intensity, and while there are some sweet riffs, they are marooned in a sea of throwaway budget riffs and patterns from 1987 Exodus clones. Infernus has great rasping vocals but essentially, doom their album with highly predictable note progressions in the riffs and a constant, incessant droning style of composition. Many heavy metal touches pervade this album, suggesting that like early Gehennah and Nifelheim, this is heavy metal dressing up as black metal and equalizing all of its riffs to the same speed to hide their hard rock, speed metal and heavy metal origins. While the fans of the band will defend it on the basis of irony or some nostalgia, the result is musical tedium because of a failure to come to point. This is like watching the 5,000 slides of the vacation your neighbor just took, except that now the slides are old riffs and old tropes.
Based on my research, back in the 1980s this video caused quite a stir. Back then, America wanted to be a Christian and socially conservative country, although it leaned toward right-wing foreign policy and left-wing social policy. Neurotic, perhaps, but that was the political fad at the time. As the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and others saw this video, it represented the intrusion of wild bohemian values that would disrupt a socially conservative nation.
Fast forward to the age of #metalgate: now we are a socially liberal nation, where most people believe in great 1960s stuff like gay marriage, legal pot and socialized healthcare. What a change! The guys who were The EstablishmentTM back then are now The (tame) Opposition, and the guys who were the radicals are now in charge. Back then, this video was bad because it offended conservative morals; now, it’s bad because it offends liberal morals.
If you aren’t laughing at our joke of a society by now, you’re not paying attention.
What makes this interesting is that we are in a time of historical cross-over. Back in the 1980s, the Reagan conservatives were the hardline authoritarians trying to keep us from enjoying our music. Now, the hippie liberal SJWs — and government, and media, and wow, big corporations too — are the authoritarians trying to keep us from enjoying our music. The sides have flip-flopped because a different side is in power, and this offends them for different reasons.
This does not change the fact that their reasons for opposing this video are wrong.
In the 1980s, heavy metal was a scapegoat. The real problem was most likely rising divorce, social instability, the Cold War and a nation which basically lost its purpose and goals. In the 1990s, it is also a scapegoat: SJWs blame metal because it is convenient for them to have an enemy which justifies their takeover of the genre, and they intend to use guilt to force you to get out of the way or — watch out! — the witch hunt will come for you.
Some opine that it is unimportant that SJWs are invading metal. “Just listen to what you like!” they say. They would not say that if government were censoring metal, but SJWs are censoring it, too; they have just changed tactics from the ineffective government means of the 1980s to the highly effective method of organized boycott. No business wants to be considered racist, sexist, anti-homosexual or otherwise inegalitarian, just like no citizen in Revolutionary France wanted to be seen as a Royalist. Your business and life will be destroyed and government will do nothing to protect you, because it approves of that act of censorship. Government gets to reap the rewards without taking on the risk of doing the censoring itself.
It is sexist to oppose this video. In fact, sexism itself is sexist. Men are men and women are women, just like every species known to humankind has sexes, and they have differences. To oppose “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” is to deny what men are: we are angry beasts that make war, make love and raise hell. We like to fight, fuck and otherwise demonstrate competence. This is how we know we are men. We also appreciate beautiful women.
On the flip side of this, and part of the same outlook, we also see ourselves as protectors of wives, daughters, sisters and mothers. If the guys from W.A.S.P. showed up and wanted to put a female member of my family into this video, I would punch them in the nuts and probably show them some real intolerance they never would forget. But the women in this video apparently do not have dads or brothers and chose to be involved of their own free will, in exchange for buckets of money. Why should I oppress them by claiming their choice is bad?
SJWs have confused the word for the deed and the tool for the goal. Instead of trying to make women, minorities and gays/transsexuals safer, they have scapegoated not just men but masculinity itself as the source of all their problems. They do not want “equality”; they want to destroy anyone who is not as unequal as they are. We have a term for that: bigotry. And until you call the SJWs on their bigotry, they will continue to invade your genre and re-write history to hide everything they have scapegoated.
Opeth made a career for themselves out of making death metal that was not death metal. Instead, it was rock music that dropped in death metal riffs during the choruses, kind of like how a nu-metal band plays quasi-acoustic and whispers so it can explode into angry dad-hating rage. This allowed the audience to feel like outsider rebels while being low-risk conformists.
Over time, the Swedes in Opeth found their original inspiration, which was to be the Dave Matthews Band for the vegan chocolate Tumblr set, and stepped aside from being death metal-flavored entirely. Never fear! The labels have brought you Tribulation which is essentially the Opeth sound updated with some hints from Enslaved about how to be metallish without using metal riffs and, thankfully, uptempo and catchier songs.
Tribulation is what Opeth always should have been. Essentially hard rock, using somewhat linear but expanded song structures, they create the atmosphere of a Gothic band with the guitars of heavy folk rock, making atmospheric and pleasant music that keeps the hoarse whispering vocals of death metal. For fans of Cradle of Filth, Opeth, Tiamat, newer Paradise Lost and Pyogenesis, this is a perfect fit.
Marduk attempts to return to their past of blasting melodic war-themed ultra-simplistic black metal, evoking Panzer Division Marduk more than the mysterious album which preceded it, Opus Nocturne, which remains arguably their strong point. The band incorporates some elements of tribal-industrial hybrid rhythms, but stays on point with short riffs. Arguably this mature form of Marduk offers more variation in tonal construction and riff form than ever before, but its tendency to use similar song structures and nearly constant exercise-video style tempi wears down the power of this release.
Like later Vader albums, the attempt to make the album fully intense creates a wallpaper effect where all of the intensity flows together because lack of internal variation deprives it of the context to make a truly great impact; in addition, riffs use a very similar vocabulary of rhythm and pattern, which makes songs hard to distinguish. Where Marduk excels is in, while avoiding the standard MTV form most metal bands use, orchestrating a rise of intensity that explodes into a clever use of melody and tempo change to produce a dramatic impression. The theatrical side of this band creates moments of impressive songwriting throughout the album.
Black metal vocals of the type that approach a chant more than a howl decorate this album and while much of listener focus is anticipated to be directed at these, they stand back when the guitars lay forth a mix between sawing rhythm and gentle lifts of melody, much like early Dawn albums or their militant spin-off Niden Div. 187. Frontschwein shows Marduk at their best in recent memory, and in modern warfare they have found a new inspiration, but the whimsy and mysterious nature-mysticism of Opus Nocturne was closer to black metal than what we might call this, ‘melodic war metal,’ and as a result like most rock projects it fades into repetition that becomes distinguished only by vocals and lyrics. Nonetheless good material appears throughout this album.
Tracklist
Tour
EUROPEAN HEADLINER tour with Belphegor (special guest) and two support acts
19.02.2015 HOL Rotterdam / Baroeg
20.02.2015 HOL Eindhoven / Effenaar
21.02.2015 HOL Sneek / Het Bolwerk
22.02.2015 BEL Vosselaar / Biebob
23.02.2015 UK Plymouth / The Hub
24.02.2015 UK Manchester / Academy 3
25.02.2015 UK Glasgow / Audio
26.02.2015 UK London / Underworld
27.02.2015 FR Paris / Divan du Monde
28.02.2015 CH Monthey / Pont Rouge
01.03.2015 FR Toulouse / Dynamo
03.03.2015 SP Madrid / Caracol
04.03.2015 SP Barcelona / Apolo
06.03.2015 ITA Turin / Cafe Liber
07.03.2015 ITA Brescia / Circolo Colony
08.03.2015 SLO Nova Gorica / Mostovna
HATEFEST 2015 with Six Feet Under, Vader and Hate
02.04.2015 DE – Leipzig, Hellraiser
03.04.2015 AT – Wien, Gasometer
04.04.2015 CH – Pratteln, Z7
05.04.2015 DE – Essen, Weststadthalle
06.04.2015 DE – Saarbrücken, Garage
07.04.2015 DE – Lindau, Club Vaudeville
08.04.2015 DE – Ludwigsburg, Rockfabrik
09.04.2015 DE – Hamburg, Markthalle
10.04.2015 DE – Geiselwind, Musichall
11.04.2015 DE – München, Backstage
12.04.2015 DE – Berlin, Postbahnhof
Kjeld tackles black metal by drawing a line through all of the bands to capture the concept through history and then pulling out the best and adapting it to a local sound, producing a band that alternates between mid-paced and high speed melodic black metal that balances its pleasant sounds with savage primitive riffing. The result introduces enough variation that melody serves as a technique within a palette, and brings out the implications of the phrases of the more chromatic riffing, allowing songs to mature into a clear perspective rising above the chaos.
The closest comparison to this band may come from second-wave bands like Kvist and Setherial, who shortened the longer melodies of Emperor and Burzum and focused on longer songs that brought forth the full melody later in it, more like the cosmic ambient music that inspired much of black metal. Similarly, Kjeld like to begin songs with a theme that develops in clash with more brutally straightforward riffing, then let it develop in order to be obliterated, then be reborn in its final form leading to re-interpretation of the initial theme. This effect works remarkably well as it allows songs to have the intensity of Zyklon-B (the band) with an endpoint like the flowing moments from Eucharist or Ancient, albeit in a style of melody that fits more in the local area from which this band came, much as the Sinister Diabolical Summoning brought forth a sense of if not ancestral at least familiar melody.
Skym maintains its intensity throughout the album mostly by varying tension internally in songs so that despite the high rate of fire the music never falls into a sonic wallpaper of uniform consistency that, even if intense, loses its power by becoming predictably so and relegating itself to a kind of drone. Instead, these songs develop as their own creations, and song structure varies moderately as a result, producing a series of listening experiences that put together create a power greater than the mere sum of their parts. Without putting itself in a camp or time period, Kjeld upholds the strength of black metal in both savagery and beauty, making this album the rare uncompromising listening experience that voices itself in a style fitting both its own experience and the ideal of the genre.
Australia band Uncreation combines several underground metal styles: trudging death metal in the Immolation style, bursting speed metal like Artillery, and technical death metal for transitions. Avoiding explicit hard rock, it cycles between different ideas compatible with death metal, but focuses too much on trudging beats like the Suffocation clones of the late 1990s. Technically adept, with highly proficient drumming, the band makes good work of these many styles and throws in some excellent riffs with an eye for transitions that increase emotional momentum even when slowing down. Vocals are of the raspy chihuahua-on-meth variety interpersed with the basement toad guttural that paces the beat during trudging parts. Within The Great Delusion is a promising album, buried under too much trope, with not enough emphasis placed on cultivating a mood and developing it instead of using it as a conduit to return to the trudge. Apparently the band has disbanded after the untimely death of their drummer Rowley Hill, and has made this album available for free and legal download.
Formed of five of seven Jess and the Ancient Ones members including Deathchain/Winterwolf guitarist Thomas Corpse as primary songwriter, The Exploding Eyes Orchestra explores a different side of garage rock which merges the nightclub chanteuse sound of the 1940s with the expansive atmospheric sound of 1970s heavy rock. The result has high emotional intensity, compelling vocals, and much of the darkness that keyboard-assisted bands like The Doors wrought from rock music.
The Exploding Eyes Orchestra launches its debut album, simply titled I, on June 12th via Svart Records. According to Thomas Corpse, the band channels material which was incompatible with the Jess and the Ancient Ones concept. Lengthy recording sessions in Kuopio, Finland during the winters of 2013 and 2014 produced two albums of material, the second half of which will be released as II in 2016, also via Svart Records.
The band prides itself on its “strong, carefully planned compositions” with classic rock influences and strong female vocals. The Exploding Eyes Orchestra has released a first track, “My Father the Wolf,” streaming below. For more information, seek out the band at the The Exploding Eyes Orchestra Facebook page.
Seminal heavy metal/doom metal band Paradise Lost will release The Plague Within on June 1, 2015 in Europe (June 2 in USA) through Century Media Records. During the early 1990s, this band inspired death metal and black metal bands to experiment with layered melodic lead rhythm guitar over distorted power chords, and to this day holds a position both close to popular music and using underground technique.
Paradise Lost comments: “Check out the first track from our new album ‘The Plague Within’. ‘No Hope In Sight’ was one of the first tracks we wrote and it reflects a blend of styles. From death metal to gothic to classic rock. It’s like all eras of PL wrapped up into one track. We hope you all like it!”
“No Hope in Sight” follows a familiar format, which is as much Iron Maiden as Black Sabbath, using melodic hooks contrasted by slow bass-heavy chord progressions in an extended pop song format that made its debut back in the early days of MTV. The result is infectious and on the lighter side, but dark enough in spirit to attract Gothic and metal fans alike who enjoy well-composed straightforward music.
PARADISE LOST live:
29/05/2015 – Rockavaria – Munich – Germany
30/05/2015 – Rock im Revier – Gelsenkirchen – Germany
18/07/2015 – Castle Party Festival – Bolkow – Poland
15/08/2015 – Summer Breeze – Dinkelsbuhl – Germany
Century Media Records has recently re-issued the death metal classics Obscura and From Wisdom to Hate by Canadian band Gorguts. The 2015 editions of these records were created in close cooperation with guitarist and songwriter Luc Lemay, who describes the history and context of these releases in accompanying liner notes. The re-issues are dedicated to the memory of former members Steeve Hurdle (R.I.P. 2012) and Steve MacDonald (R.I.P. 2002).
GORGUTS Obscura (Re-Issue 2015)
GORGUTS From Wisdom To Hate (Re-Issue 2015)
To order:
From a recent interview with our editor:
You and the other reviewers are notorious for having incredibly harsh reviews. What would you say are your favorite metal albums of all time?
These metal albums have stayed in weekly rotation over the years:
The reason my analysis is different than that of other metal sites is that populist writers prioritize surface novelty and underlying similarity to mainstream rock, where I look at metal as a form of art in its own right. It should be measured by the quality of its internal organization and ability to artistically represent a vision of power. The popular “best of” lists specialize in bands that will be forgotten in a few years because when the novelty is gone, they are the same old stuff you could get anywhere else.
I keep a copy of Sepultura Morbid Visions/Bestial Devastation in every room in the house. I dislike being too far from one at any given time.
What contemporary bands should we be paying attention to?
In music as in all things, I am an elitist. This means that I want the best music available because time is short and there is no point wasting it on the trivial. Keep an eye on Demoncy, Sammath, Blaspherian, Kjeld, Desecresy, Kaeck, Blood Urn, and Kever.
Some accuse your site of manufacturing a controversy with MetalGate but the SJW infiltration of political correctness in metal has technically been going on since the late 90s. Do you think metal can actually be tamed by leftists and what is your perspective on the attempts to make metal safe?
SJWs are incapable of understanding the aesthetics of metal, which is why all leftist music tends to be metal-flavored riffing wrapped around rock or punk. Metal music sounds the way it does because its outward form represents what its composers wish to communicate. Ignoring lyrics and imagery, which are entirely secondary to composition much as production is, the music itself conveys an abstract and distant sound that makes beauty out of ugliness through a respect for power. In metal, what is powerful creates excellence, and from within that comes the elegance of form and portrayal of reality that makes great art.
Rock takes the opposite view. It is basically intense repetition with an ironic twist at the end, which means that it differentiates itself through “message.” People love catchy lyrics that embody some idea they find appealing at the time, but these are always experiences based in the individual, which is why almost all of rock music is love songs or “protest music” that wails about how inconvenient it is that some complex idea stands between the individual and a good time. You cannot both be pro-nationalist and listen to rock music.
Metal came about when Black Sabbath wanted to interrupt the hippies — what they called SJWs back when they opposed The Establishment — with some “heavy” (hippie slang for intense, epic and terrifying) realism. The West was falling apart, and the popular movements insisted that if we just focused on peace, love and happiness, all our problems would magically vanish. This focus on reality makes metal appear right-wing to leftists. It embraces consequentialism, worship of the ancient, distrust of the narcissism in the individual, and the idea of conflict itself, so that those who are strongest win. This inherently clashes with the individualist groupthink of the left, which seeks to avoid conflict and manage people indirectly through guilt.
When SJWs make metal, it ends up sounding like punk rock or rock because those forms of “protest music” reflect the individualist and yet group-oriented mentality of the SJW. Like the Christians with their “white metal” in the 1980s and the many times commercial record labels have tried to launch rock bands disguised as metal to capture the metal audience, social justice workers (SJWs) are trying to force entry by liberal ideas into metal so they can take over the space of culture that it dominates, and its audience, and indoctrinate them in leftism. Both media and labels support this because it is cheaper to make rock bands than metal bands.
Metalgate rose to resist this conspiracy and call it what it is, which is an attempt to control our minds through propaganda in music, as well as a gambit to replace what we know of as metal with a “safe” version based in indie rock. Most people do not know it, but metal generates a lot of income because metal fans are loyal to the genre over the course of their lives. Record labels could make a lot of money if they could sell the same old pap with metal flavoring. Luckily metalheads are resisting as they have resisted every attempt to assimilate their genre into rock ‘n roll, break its spirit and make it repeat the same dogma that exists in every other genre of music.
Hammerheart Records will re-issue Swedish black/heavy/death metal band Grotesque In the Embrace of Evil plus the first release of the band which shortly succeeded it, At the Gates Gardens of Grief. These will be released on vinyl on August 21, 2015.
Grotesque, like Merciless, Morbid, Slaughter Lord, Tormentor (Hungary) and Sarcofago, represented an interstitial state in black metal where bands still in the style of older speed/death like Possessed moved into a sound that approximated black metal without the musical developments of the full genre as came bursting out of Norway shortly afterwards.
When members of Grotesque moved on to form At the Gates, they took their music more in a direction of melodic black metal, starting with their first EP, Gardens of Grief, which showcases their unconventional approach to songwriting and solid melodic development.
A recent article on Gene Simmons observed the following:
Rock star Gene Simmons says that when it comes to making money he is like a great white shark.
And that despite being worth more than $300m (£200m), he will never stop wanting to make more.
…”I’ll never stop hunting more money, I’ll never have enough.”
On the other hand, many excellent metal bands are probably clearing $300/month in royalties or less. At that point, we tend to call the making of metal a hobby and talk about their day jobs. The advantage to that approach is that the metal can remain un-tainted by commerce and with consumerism, the need to appeal to an audience by jumping on trend bandwagons or otherwise showing them what they already know they like, sort of like how baby food is ground-up vegetables.
Looking at the other side, it must be nice to be worth $300m and to have the power to do great things with that. Maybe Mr. Simmons has done so. But one might think that at some point, the money becomes more important than the music, which turns metal away from its mission of brutal realism and makes it a friendly, happy, warm and fuzzy product like your average American beer or hamburger.
Perhaps a middle ground exists, where fewer metal bands make $300m but also fewer worthy metal bands subsist on $300. Most metal musicians would be very happy with $60-80,000 a year. They tend not to be materialistic, except for collecting vinyl and guitars, but in the grand scheme of things those aren’t very expensive.
SJW-controlled site Metal-Archives.com, famous for its desire to regulate what is “metal” and exclude non-leftist viewpoints from the site, has deleted user “bitterman” who gained notoriety for his realistic, masculinized reviews which expressed extreme intolerance of insincere, manipulative and mediocre metal. All of the writings of this person are now removed with no chance for the user to recover the hours of effort he put into the site.
Bitterman made a name for himself for thoughtfully but viciously reviewing the excess and stupor of contemporary metal, using a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “metal warrior” style as he skewered perpetrators of false metal like Watain. According to one commentator, “he paid the price for holding for-profit poseurs to the same standards as Onward to Golgotha and early Burzum” because of his vicious attacks on all that pretended to be underground metal and failed.
Wherever SJWs go, they censor all that is natural and right: masculinity, warfare, conflict, elitism, quality and excellence. Then they replace these with twee indie-rock metal hybrids and a policy of “acceptance” that rejects quality bands under the same excuse that Wikipedia uses, “notability,” while promoting the kind of hybrid dreck that 90s underground metallers would have thought belonged in the bin with Sonic Youth and Rites of Spring, not raging death metal and black metal.
Again we see the problem of allowing SJWs to infiltrate metal through media as, using that power, they change what it means to be “metal” while trying to purge metal of what makes it unique. At the end of this agenda, they will create a neutered form of metal-rock that will promptly collapse because it lacks all of what makes metal appeal to its audience, and the genre will collapse like the Soviet Union or Pol Pot’s regime. The SJWs will not care, because they got their 15 minutes of fame.
The audience for this album are the same people who are fooled by magic shows at carnivals, speak in tongues at revivals, buy the latest iGadget sight unseen, and smoke in bed. If you claim to like this album, you are either not paying attention or merely a fool. Like every sell out, it is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator, which generally recruits idiots.
Thantifaxath combine trivialist “progressive,” minor key black metal riffs, and indie rock to make what they call “depressive suicidal black metal.” Songs start with basic black metal-ish riffs, but instead of featuring a varied internal texture, these are uniform with an equal number of strums per chord and chords generally changing on the beat, creating a drone effect. The band then play “progressive” riffs that amount to showy but not all that complex guitar and sonic technique used as distraction, and then get to the main point, which is minor key indie-rock riffs that feature the hook to the song. If you can imagine LSD guitar practice plus a basement black metal band ending up in a cover of someting off Daydream Nation, that is the sum total of Thantifaxath.
While the sin committed by Sacred White Noise is insincerity, its musical failing comes from being essentially contentless and relying on fireworks or pop techniques to fill in the void. What does this album communicate? According to people who claim to love DSBM, they find an emotional rush from this in realizing how horrible life truly is. But how is that different from emo? Late 80s emo achieved the same thing but it kept the pop more visible, so it could cry through the tears, as the saying went. This band wallows in its sadness and then plays random music over the top to distract from how fundamentally simple it is.
Thantifaxath use questionable “black metal” riffs. The riffing is essentially static such as that which bands like Nile or Necrophagist used, where the point was to play a chord in a certain rhythmic pattern and then add an extended fill so it seemed like a death metal riff, despite having more in common with Elvis or Lynyrd Skynyrd than death metal. These parallel the “progressive” playing, which seems to focus on finding a whacky guitar technique (whacky: odd, ironic, rarely used — because it is useless for expressing anything but musical confusion) and repeating it at different notes quickly and erratically. Sometimes this becomes comical when these patterns resemble familiar phone numbers or radio jingles. Its indie rock is clearly its heart, because the full melodic hook comes out here, but it does not distinguish itself from thousands of other bands in this area.
In summary, Thantifaxath create directionless melodic wandering at a slow pace with a hookish atmosphere in three styles, doing none well and fooling only those who have no particular ability to pay attention for prolonged periods of time. At its best, its melodies resemble the wandering style that Celestia brought out, but this style owes more to lack of purpose than to any idea or feeling it communicates. An astute observer will notice that for all of its supposed variation, this album expresses only one mood and it never changes — only is interrupted by distraction — and that it applies technique uniformly to create sonic wallpaper from even the most “different” pieces. To its audience, who apparently are so deep in self-pity that “depressive suicidal black metal” seems important, I have a word of advice: cut harder.
In response to recent questions, I present the following (brief) history of the Death Metal Underground:
The predecessor of the Death Metal Underground, the Dark Legions Archives, started as the project of a hacking group back in the 1980s of which I was a member. Most people did not use computers and saw them as “totally uncool” and for nerds only. A loose network existed of bulletin board systems (BBSs) which were accessed by using a modem to dial over phone lines and connect to another computer. These offered information in the precursor to web pages called “g-files” or “text files” which were ASCII documents containing information cribbed from other sources or written from personal experience. Many of these were of a hacker nature, describing the workings of the phone systems and different computer systems, but others focused on music. Crossover between the hacker community and the metal community occurred frequently since many middle-class kids had access to C-64 or Apple II computers. I describe this event in my article “Hacker Metal”, which talks about how a lack of information prompted hackers to share files about metal.
Free speech became an important issue. BBSs were individual property and system operators (“sysops”) often deleted messages or users that disagreed with them. This was my first glance at the tyrant present in ordinary people and how even the best rules failed to prevent it. For example, some sysops formed an alliance of free speech boards, and their first act — before the digital ink was even dry on the words “free speech” — was to determine what speech was acceptable and what was not. The vast majority of users simply saw the words “free speech” and took it at face value.
This hacking group appeared one evening through the work of a small group of people. We wanted to make a force for free speech and rebellion against the choking society of the 1980s, which was caught between its 1950s commercialism and its 1960s libertinism. While contemporary writers often focus on the political aspects of the 80s, the real story was in the massive social conflict going on at this time. We ran a series of boards on which you had actual free speech. We let anyone post anything. This meant that perfectly ordinary political discussions overlapped with the release of hacked information and any number of radical theories, including anti-government sentiment, violent atheism and blasphemy, racialism, Satan-endorsing metal lyrics, Communism, and holocaust denial. It was like getting launched into the roughest crowd that one can imagine, where self-described intellectuals rubbed shoulders with complete society dropouts who lived under bridges in the light of their monitors. We were fortunate to have as users not only members of one of the most thriving hacker communities in the world but also students from nearby universities and advanced placement style high schools. This was a brainy bunch but they were not prone to following rules. Since that time, I have viewed this kind of “free speech” as essential to actual communication, and it has made me wonder how much privileged information actually needs to stay secret.
The files that I had been writing since the mid-1980s on topics ranging from anarchy to hacking to heavy metal had attracted an audience back in the BBS days, specifically on a type of single-password BBS called an “AE” (for Ascii Express, the software that allowed the standalone mode required to achieve it), continued to find an audience. A site named the “Metal AE” was a world-wide HQ for metalhead hackers back in the day, and I started posting them there. As technology proliferated, I moved the files to an anonymous FTP site, then a Gopher site, and finally to a web site. At first it was a simple server running on one of my computers, but later, it moved to commercial hosting. At this point, the “free speech” notions of our group began to conflict with the need of commerce to control its public image by avoiding the type of “offensive” material that it hosted. For the next decade the site moved constantly as complaints drove us off ISPs and free hosts.
As time went on, I saw that people were reading the philosophy writings as much as the metal ones. I had pioneered “e-zine” or electronic zine publishing, combining 1980s g-file culture with the rising indie music zine scene, with a literary publication called “the undiscovered country” during the early days of the 1990s, but now, I began publishing in a style that would later be assimilated by web logs. I wrote small essay-screed hybrids and posted them to the web site. The essay form took inspiration from early French and American writers who put together pamphlets and newspaper articles in which they argued strongly for a mixture of political and social changes. As a result, these essays did not resemble the kind of conversational material that most people posted to their internet sites, in which they intermixed personal events with political or social analysis, and that enraged people even more, which encouraged me to work with more extreme ideas. This is why the Dark Legions Archive in the early 1990s was a bizarre mixture of occultism, death metal, trolling, blasphemy and realist philosophy.
If you, Dear Readers, have further questions based on the above, feel free to ask them in the comments.
