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Necrophagia – Season of the Dead

20 years ago, when Death Metal and Grindcore was saturating the underground, Necrophagia were often mentioned in the same breath as bands like Possessed, Necrovore, Death, Morbid Angel and Repulsion as being influential to the music and aesthetic of the bands advancing this style at the time. More recently – though this band’s early output is not quite as formative as the others’ – the impact of 1987′s ‘Season of the Dead’ seems to be somewhat understated. This may be due to the extensive mediocrity of their discography that followed, or the attention given to the highly popular Death’s ‘Scream Bloody Gore’ released in the same year, equally influential in that sphere of Metal. Looking back at Necrophagia’s debut album, we can hear purposeful, morbid music that takes the juvenile primitivism of their demo material to a better level of organisation. Sounding like a slightly one-dimensional Possessed regressing back to ‘Haunting the Chapel’-era Slayer, Necrophagia use a shivering up-tempo strum to frame old school riff contortions and schizophrenic solos within the ritualistic scattering of bones sound that the drumming evokes. Killjoy’s vocals are a tamer version of Jeff Walker’s, but nevertheless gurgle the maniacal rantings of a serial killer, indicting the modern world that has transformed him into this monster. A rendition of Mussorgsky’s ‘A Night On Bare Mountain’ reveals the height of atmosphere they were attempting to acheive, to create a relevant and very Metal soundtrack to scenes of amoral, post-apocalyptic horror. Almost resembling the germination of what would become the unessential ‘Eaten Back to Life’ by Cannibal Corpse, ‘Season of the Dead’ does more to render that album totally useless and help Necrophagia stand out alongside the other proto-Death Metal legions as one of the American founding fathers.

Forbidden – Twisted Into Form

A late addition to the pantheon of great Speed Metal albums, ‘Twisted Into Form’ salvages its importance from the dying days of the genre by pushing those exhausted conventions to their limits. The historical and ideological positioning of this album does render their musical ancestry quite prominently. Forbidden did not come from the same school of Metal that imported influences of more radical dissidence such as Hardcore Punk and Thrash as well as morbid and occult imagery. These are what contributed to separating albums like ‘Hell Awaits’ and ‘Seven Churches’ from the Speed and Heavy Metal world, laying the foundations for the more vivid and nightmarish Death Metal sound to come. Instead, ‘Twisted Into Form’ encapsulates and advances on the spirit of individualism inherited from music going back as far as late 70′s Judas Priest to Fates Warning and Metallica. The album itself is a relentlessly searching affair, a quest for mental strength and autonomy in a world of the blind acceptance of pleasant illusions. Melodies shift between different textural assaults, retaining an expressive sense of narrative from a maze of neoclassical shredding that fractalises its parts. This could have been dumbed down by the standard cyclic structure of many of the songs were it not for the mind-warping finesse that sits somewhere between ‘Master of Puppets’ and Gorguts’ ‘The Edge of Sanity’ via. an inversion of Voivod’s ‘Dimension Hatross’, being so typical of this cerebrocentric approach to riffcraft. The vocals play an important role in having the melodic acumen to bring some more direction to the music between and during choruses, which is crucial when it’s shifting so disorientatingly within a fairly simple framework that doesn’t always resolve itself instrumentally. Perhaps released a year too late, it’s still Forbidden’s best and most influential work, and an insightful, sincere and technically inspiring musical gravestone.

New hopes, hellish noises, hipsters crushed

Regardless of being the single output of the already inactive Injury To Eye, this one deserves being dug up and listened to with some heavy attention as it’s some of the most invigorating, startling and just flat out brutal music we have heard in a while. It’s been years, if not decades, since actual LP’s filled with songs as massive as the Carcass and Demigod inflected “Nailing Embalming Fluid” were put out by morbid, possessed, self-annihilating death metal groups. The transition between phrases is absolutely insane, the melodies convoluted, the soundscape altering between droning noise and explosive grind, acutely aware and progressing towards all directions at once, led by the fragmented guitarwork which crackles with hybrid fires reminiscent of, among others, British and Finnish styles of grindcore. Sometimes the music collapses into being dissonant and maiming with its full force and then loses some of the quality of composition because the themes can’t carry this weight – angry noise supercedes, such as in the spiteful “Mysteries” which builds a post-hardcore doom violence out of a sick voice sample and tortured melody utilizing noise. However, as soon as the doomy jam has taken over everything, they relapse the fast and beautiful convoluted chording before any impression turns wholly putrid. Imagine a concise and suffocating mix of early Asphyx jamming with stoners, including an atonal jazz soloist.

Death Maze comes across as a rudimentary demo level death metal band, not yet fully comprehensive in their ability to build quality first rate metal, but experimenting with the sounds and forms of the likes of earlier Dark Tranquillity and newer Dismember, including NYDM style brutal rhythm riffs but taking care to not use many heavy metal influences. That is a strategic choice though, because when these influences appear they drag the bunch down as in the too emotional lead melody that appears in “Cries of the Past”. Maybe best characterized as a prototype of the developments that happened in German death metal, like Kreator morphing towards Lemming Project, Death Maze thrash out simple melodies and conclude with tremolo variants, simple bridges from riff to another and rocking solos. And like most later German metal, the genius parts are brought low by confused arrangement, bringing across the absurd emotion of pain and desperation in the soul-shattering breaks and mental turbulence, but the general impression is weak. For example, the rock solo in “Din Sista Bon” was a bad idea and the minimalist riff in the song sounds really angry but the song does not carry out a story associated it so I must assume it is Weltschmerz. However, the sometimes black metal influenced melodies are good and so is the basic structure – instrumental and vocal performances, especially the higher pitched ones, could be more exciting, fleshed out and turbulent. Parts in “Beersong”, ironically their best song, sound like South American / Mexican brutal-death of chromatic simple riffs building an understanding through interlocking of spaces – good for headbanging!

Young CA neo-death metallers Logistic Slaughter amalgamate Slayer’s and Bolt Thrower’s characteristical high-speed metal-punk riffs with a few clever leads and the sharp clinical rhythmics of today’s mainstream death metal, or mainstream oriented tributes to old death metal such as Hail of Bullets or the Benediction-with-false-harmonics hybrid style of Denmark’s Iniquity. Except for machined drums that suck away some organicism from the sound, the band plays its game convincingly well as a collection of likeable but simple ground based death metal patterns, including some eerie meandering Neurosis death-jam in “Illusiverity”, not yet in the first class of material but destined for success if they work hard. It presents itself as an EP from which we can go to two directions: if they go for simple structure of the riffs, obvious rhythmization of vocals and rocking to the beat it can become modern neo-crap like Blood Red Throne but what they actually should look up to are the ever relevant works of mid era Napalm Death or maybe Malevolent Creation – this I have hope for because right now Logistic Slaughter is heavy, vital and filled with unrealized potential – all good attributes to death metal which is a process in discovery of itself. They possess a rudimentary knowledge of what makes death metal real and that’s what is important, right? While this is no Immolation it’s a whole lot better than the pseudo-progressive abominations we’ve been reviewing at times, since at least the fast Slayer-ish “Sanctuary of Hate” rolled over me like a panzer.

A year in Norwegian metal – a purgatory of recombinations

The new Osmose recruits Mord seem to have been actually born in Poland, then relocated to near Kristiansand, which is remembered as the location of a violent death metal sect in support of Varg Vikernes back in 1991 and the origin of Tchort (Blood Red Throne, Emperor, Green Carnation). Not quite living up to the bloody and progressive traditions of the area, Mord specializes in a cold, modern, thrashed-out black metal sound that could scientifically have been developed in a norsecore factory to create an endless amount of productive clones. Maybe because they are originally from Poland, they do seem to possess a better grasp of what makes Nordic black metal good than most Scandinavians around exhibit. They keep the album vile and to the point, imitating the blasphemous rhythm guitar of, besides Euronymous, Ivar Bjørnson during the phase of Enslaved when they dropped most of their classical influence and switched to riff rock. Later Ancient springs to mind in tracks such as “Opus II” which is essentially is a meeting of pop and black metal in a graveyard infested with drunked teenagers who wear makeup and like to flash stupid expressions in photos. It may sound bad but in fact, as guitar rock or something, it excels. It is simply lacking in the Romantic nature worship, warrior ideology and mysticism of Burzum, Ildjarn and the other greats. So while musically this has potential for an above average Norwegian black metal album (even though these ideas are 15 years late) it ends up as one more relic that brings black metal closer to mainstream acceptance and youth culture phenomena today, and no-one will remember it in ten years.

It should be obvious to anyone with even the slightest exposure to black metal music and ideas that while it’s arguable that he ever was a genius, for the last decade Satyricon has really gone far out of his way to create the most crowd pleasing, catchy, insipid rock’n'roll version of black metal. It sounds quite redundant to say in 2009 that this kind of music is abhorrent to “Euronymous’ ideals” or the Weltanschauung of the scene that existed in 1991-95 but I can’t help it. This is simply so far from anything that was great in old Norwegian black metal, what made me and so many others interested and follow the events and music with awe inspired by mystique. In this music there is no trace of passion, only of pure professional approach to musicianship and studio production, not even oriented to mastery of the style (in jazz sense) but to a desire to make money and gain profit. This sort of capitalist black metal makes for a new genre in itself. Mechanical, vapid and outdated, it mostly sounds like a collection of random groove metal tunes given a superficial black metal treatment (raped by the half beaten corpse of norsecore) for the mainstream listeners who want to get a piece of black metal’s evil but refuse to go all the way to possession. Precise riffs and metronomic drumming approach Rammstein-like monotony as they are arranged into the laziest sequence and development imaginable. Frost’s sometimes interesting drumscapes have been lost to the adult contemporary studio values and his fans are probably better off listening to 1349 or one of the other bands he plays/played in. Satyr is not trying to play Voivod riffs anymore (as he was doing in “Rebel Extravaganza”) nor can he duplicate the fast thrashy parts of “Nemesis Divina” – these new riffs by Satyr have a habit of getting old before the song is over.

While the gloomy shroud of 21st century black metal clichés weighs like lead upon Throne of Katarsis, a sense of ambition and greatness, the carefully followed tread of frozen melody including an airy vastness copied from “In the Nightside Eclipse” or early Taake and some elegant and progressive forms makes this rise above the level of total weakness. Like Isvind and Tsjuder, Throne of Katarsis explore the melodic territory in between Darkthrone and Emperor in an effort to replicate the impression of transcendent evil boiling in the depths. Fast percussion underlies the sonic depression of dubiously plodding, soaring but monotone and unenergetic low production (Grieghallen copy) guitars repeating spherical themes (rotating the minor chords “De Mysteriis” style during the slow parts over and over again to give the melancholic feeling) over to vastness. The best of the musical ideas are hidden by the desire to create a standard black metal album, as they probably succumbed to creating an album too quickly and thinking that it’s enough to put out cold and intensity-devouring two-penny riffs that have been overused for 20 years – bulk Norwegian black metal in good and bad.

I do remember the Apollyon/Aggressor duo Aura Noir as a high-energy, motor powered and tradition respecting black metal cult from the days of the bewitching “Dreams Like Deserts” MCD, never afraid to rock out nor experiment with unusual guitar and drum techniques – even cross-quoting with Ved Buens Ende material. Something really devastating has happened and I don’t know if it has to do with Aggressor’s falling down from a balcony or something, but they sound totally drunk, tired and old on this album. I mean, if you think that Darkthrone nowadays sounds like a lazy beer-swilling band from the pub, try this one! I can hear they are trying to play like Sodom, but I can’t hear any Germanic “raaaaaah!” mania. I can hear Autopsy, but I can’t hear the stinking amputated corpses rising all around to wreak their vengeance upon the societies of the living. I can hear hardcore, but I can’t hear the decisive violent power of wrath against conformity. So, what is there left? It sounds a bit Southern Lord-y – you know, ironic old metal fan hipster who likes to get stoned out of his mind and listen to feel-good old-times metal. By the way, the drum production sounds like MIDI – utter failure. If you want real speed/black metal power, go for the originals, this one is a weak joke.

It would be quite interesting to see if someone, somewhere in Norway, has during the year released black metal or death metal which does not a) try to duplicate the old Grieghallen soundscape with in the most generic no-sense-of-style manner, b) fill their album with a load of budget riffs called depressive black metal by the kids (which is actually C, D, E minor again… and again…). Anyway, while Celestial Bloodshed has ripped off these ideas from better bands, they are 50% better in their songcraft than Watain, Funeral Mist and other generic black metal of the era. Also, they have been able to create inner beauty towards the realization of the music in melodic intensity. Additionally, the fullness of the soundscape and the implications of the structure make this release more grim, oppressive and grinding than the mainsteam manipulations of Norwegian metal which can not be but a good thing. After a beautiful intro which sounds somewhat like one of the demos from Equimanthorn (Absu members’ ritual project) the album pounds into a lexicon of guitar techniques borrowed from a range of musicians from Mayhem to Enslaved, with a dynamic range from slow romantic soulseeking to blasphemous speeds, sometimes bridged with jarring changes, while death metal influenced vicious, likeable and personal (down to some insistent mannerisms) vocals pace like hammer upon an anvil the grim predictions of mortal future and the drummer operates battery like Faust and Hellhammer used to in the early 90′s. While all of this is not fully developed yet into pure communication, it speaks with instant, amazed, satanic impressions of life facing the darkness of Infinity – Celestial Bloodshed has replicated the old school with care, honesty and vicious intent.

Keep of Kalessin arouse my interest during their demo days, as 1997′s “Skygger av Sorg” repeated the style of old Satyricon in a series of simple, emotional song fragments that revealed a sad beauty lying underneath the grim soundscape. I had heard some less interesting newer material but it is truly shocking what they have submerged into now – an arrogant, over-produced tribute to the honor of Greek warriors through quasi-talented commercial death metal. Synth washes and expressive vocals (in the vein of Nergal when he’s really pissed off in the later Behemoth albums) fill this piece of plastic because they want to sound big and they want to play on a stadium. I am convinced that someone with their musicianship should be able to create a listenable and consistent album, but these super fast blastbeats and commercial heavy metal oriented song dynamics from quiet to loud make this just a faux extreme version of something like Spearhead or Deströyer 666, made worse by the angry shouter vocalist. The people interested only in dry technique and production standards will love this for being an emphatic and empty opera of sharp drumwork and the constantly shifting death metal type fast guitars and entertainment value. They are also happy that it lacks the primal natural force of old Norwegian metal, because it might be distrubing. The sense of space created should be one of a studio or a big venue, instead of a woodland crypt, right? This amount of polishing emphasizes the superficiality of the entire composure, down to metalcore action computer game synchronized by MIDI in “Kolossus”, where accurate but inconsequential fast drum beats follow cheap-ass tremolo melodies from the pits of norsecore Hell and the vocalist sounds angry at people at the nearby mall and emo pop chorus in “Ascendant” which doesn’t even fit the music underneath. Likewise the arabic solos in the middle part of “Kolossus” don’t seem to have anything to do with the metal riffs, nor do the “300″ soundtrack reminiscent bits with synths and tablas. Whoever has produced this must be a commercial minded jerk.

Tchort from Kristiansand was a newcomer to the death metal scene with his band Green Carnation right when the genre went out of fashion because of Euronymous’ hatefulness towards it and while that name was resurrected for Tchort’s progressive metal project he formed the neo-death metal group Blood Red Throne at the end of the millennium. While not having heard the early Green Carnation material, it’s easy to hear from this that some trace of early influence from excellent bands like Grave and Cadaver does exist, but none of their ability to turn basic riff structures into progressive and morbid magic. This type of song construction mostly resembles Cannibal Corpse and Deicide during the latter’s worst days of “In Torment In Hell”, filling songs with groovy mosh parts, faux-brutal growls and the drummer and bass player (from Deeds of Flesh) insisting wimpily on always playing to the beat of the riff. If this is the king on Norway’s death metal throne since Cadaver disbanded, it is quite sad actually. Most good (death) metal is memorable from its melodies, however convoluted and vicious they may be, but “Souls of Damnation” is mostly simple rhythmic phrases like guitar exercise patterns for introducing mechanical creation technique for sub-Florida death metal. Like all boring death metal, it severely underestimates its audience. I mean, many listeners do like death metal that sounds like basic no-frills brutal grind, but this worthless chugging goes too far. It seems like the whole album lacks even one interesting melody part or arrangement.

One of the newer Oslo bands mostly known from relentless and uncompromising fast black metal, 1349 surprise with their latest effort in refusing to conform to the rules of the flock. This time conjuring echoes of Samael’s “Ceremony of Opposites” and later Mayhem, 1349 composes suffocated, devilish and industrial tinged black metal sounds which despite being somewhat predictable, retain the doomy beauty of an industry of inferno. The loneliness of space as described in Moorcock’s trippy novel “The Black Corridor” and the classic fantasy movie “Alien” fill this Gigerian landscape of planets, threats and biomechanical blasphemies. Bodies twitch into contorted positions in a sea of light. The psychedelic feel is enhanced by a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of Sun” featuring Tom G. Warrior. Several tracks use minutes to unfold submerged ambient and experimental soundscapes, while there is some Red Harvest type digital manipulation featured in many of the metal songs too. The arrangement is dramatic and regal, with Frost’s drumming skills put to good use. Multiple vocal styles herald the theatrical nature. Some interesting lead guitars add desperate wails to the background. Some parts are in their wicked minimalism close to what one could also expect to, say, Beherit to compose if he were in a more commercial high budget recording project, making this one of the more worthwhile efforts from Norway last year in producing new vistas of black metal.

This little EP from Mare, one of the infamous Trondheim cults tends to sound a bit like “Live in Leipzig” era Mayhem recording in a sewer infested with rats and worms and the decrepit and rotten soundscape makes this one an aesthetically more attractive listen than most of the studio produced turds. Intuitively they grasp the idea of structuring long songs in the old Emperor vein so that while the bits and pieces are redundant, it is a journey through minimalist music themes into the realization and acceptance of the power of darkness. Slow, crawling, anti-logical repetition of simple melody (where the keyboards add a tasteful of old Enslaved) make it a bit of an un-musical experience – the composition seems to be mostly oriented to the fans of droning soundscape whereas the planning and calculation in the overstated reverb, vocal sound (while Kvitrim is good at pacing) and lack of invention in the riffs suggest seem to be aimed for the black metal consumer. But it is deconstructive, degenerate and deceitful music – for pure ideas, about as good as the best of the bunch reviewed here. An ambience and sense of space is reached, the Faustian concept of man as a warrior who travels and explores the universe, only to relinquish his individuality to the higher natural order – in death and rebirth.

Ur-Tod – on the birth of death metal

Something like the problem of transubstantiation for the church fathers, the birth of death metal, who did it and where, is one of the prime causes of contention of metal messageboards across the world. Some give credit to Venom‘s blasphemies and chaos that were basically Motorhead with less technique and more sluts, ca. 1981. Thomas Gabriel Fischer‘s Hellhammer, formed in 1982, was an extreme entity from Switzerland that explored the furthest reaches of negativity and doom, guitars tuned low and vocals devolving into grunts and screams. Around this time the same guys also started a fanzine called “Death Metal”, later to lend their logo to a 1984 compilation of Noise Records bands, including Hellhammer. Around 1983, still not more than two years after Venom’s “Welcome to Hell” and the same year Mercyful Fate and Metallica would debut, Kam Lee of Mantas (pre-Death) and Jeff Becerra of Possessed were utilizing growled low vocals from the bottomless depths of Hell and elements of death metal guitar (tremolo and chromatics) and drum technique (blastbeat) that are staple elements of what consist a normal death metal album today.

I went to high school with Jeff Becerra and Larry Lalonde. They actually recorded and released ‘Seven Churches’ when we were in school. I even had a copy of the demo. I read all the time people citing that album as one of the first Death Metal albums and that they helped start all that. I seem to remember those guys being really into bands like Destruction, Venom and Celtic Frost… but I guess Possessed took it a little further. At the time I didn’t think it to be the start of anything. -Mark Peters

The above quote from the Peacedogman forum highlights the essence: bands were taking the influence of the previous generation of bands into areas that seemed so natural to them that they were not thinking of going out of their way to create another “experimental” genre. Thinking about thrash and thinking about death metal in their pre-trend incarnations is mostly an invention of the historians – it’s best to focus on the organic development of metal over time and remember how people unrelated to each other stumbled across the same kind of approach independent of each other. To celebrate the diversity and energy of this formational period when speed metal bands were discovering the praise of death and invocation of satanic forces, one could do worse than listen to this old school death metal compilation created by Fenriz for Vice Magazine – it’s in fact a good supplement to our article on the history of Norwegian death metal, because it represents both the contemporary sound of Sweden and the various evil conjuring voices from around the world that these kids heard by tapetrading, thus influencing their sound.

Forgotten death cults from Finland: Coprophilia and Necrobiosis

Visitors remembers the Western shores of Finland mostly from their warm summer days, windstorms and chilly nights of Autumn. The dunes of the shore of Yyteri are unique in the whole Scandinavian region while most of the towns carry relics of past industries but have failed to establish themselves in modern or digital age, remaining secluded communities with little vital attractions to the youngsters. Thus it is not surprising that towns such as the historic Uusikaupunki, a weird silent nature-surrounded industrial port that has always baffled my spirit, gave birth to multiple demo level death metal insanities in the early 90′s.

Coprophilia described the twisted and tangled nature of woods, human remains and animal entrails on the four songs of their one and only demo, playing distinctive and intricate heavy metal influenced straightforward melodies to lend catchiness to songs that in their spontaneous clarity bring into focus the main influences for old Finnish death metal: heavy metal, Bay Area speed metal, horror music and UK bands in the vein of Napalm Death.

More sarcastic, irritant and grinding, Necrobiosis pummeled a simplistic punk-o-rama riffspace almost like Blasphemy or Archgoat would have done it except using the concluding expectancy common to dual vocal grindcore so that the grunts and screams echo exactly the phrases played by the rhythm guitar. Lead guitars often recall metal guitarists’ introductory practice pieces in the vein of Iron Maiden and Rainbow, as was the case with not only Coprophilia, but also Amorphis, Sentenced and many other greats. Curiously for a word I had never heard before, Necrobiosis was also picked as the band name around the same time by guys a couple of hundred kilometers away in Riihimäki. You might know this band better by a name they thought of later: Skepticism.