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Impaled Nazarene – Ugra Karma

Following up the band’s debut album ‘Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz’, Impaled Nazarene opened the silo once again to release their deadliest missile of truly Brahmastric proportions with 1993′s ‘Ugra Karma’. Roughly translating from the original Sanskrit into ‘bad actions’, the album’s title indicates the nature of this distinctive blend of Punk, Black Metal and other styles and sounds, as a dance of destruction atop the accumulated filth of the modern world. The updated artwork of a hooved, nuclear Nataraja performing this world-ending ritual over desecrated damsels and making occult gestures in front of an inverted pentagram takes this idea further in a profound hybrid of apocalyptic Hindu and Satanic imagery which also heavily underlies the musical approach of ‘Ugra Karma’. The deep, muscular bass-work in these anthems of armageddon give power to aggressive and militarised Punk-like guitar riffs imbued with a majestic, Black Metal sense of melodicism and pace. Their target is in sights, the riffs transform imminently like the complexion of a scene changing upon the arrival of Harrier squadrons from over the horizon, to rain hell on harmless victims! It’s these simple and incredibly conclusive narratives that give each song such a depth of expression, with the finality of a Vedic chant. Drums are overbearing and industrious in their sound, maintaining a constant beat that drills the blasphemous, mystical revelations of doom into the listener with a Nazistic authority, leading a new SS to purge the world of its undesirables. Impaled Nazarene present with all of their hatred not only the downfall of the world they despise, but the primal law which will bring that land of light and love to its knees, sodomise it and replace it with evil.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Incantation – Diabolical Conquest

Incantation will of course be best recognized for their debut full-length, the powerful, dark epic that was ‘Onward To Golgotha’, however seeing as having given this album several listens, it deserves it’s place as an overlooked classic of the death metal genre. A slight change recognizable but non-detrimental is the guttural bellow of Daniel Corchado, of Cenotaph and The Chasm fame, who also handles bass, additional guitar and makes some lyrical and songwriting contributions. This brings no drastic change to how the band sound on record, but instead brings about new experiments in harmony, melody and texture that didn’t make themselves as present on earlier releases. Production-wise the music is dominated by the thick, bassy atmosphere of the guitars, giving the same dark depth that is one of the key features of Incantation’s sound and appeal. Kyle Severn’s drums are also higher up in the mix, though his rhythmic playing conforms more with the stream of guitar, and sounds less juxtaposed than on earlier releases. More notable are the experiments with pace and tempo on this album, and is much more varied in it’s fast-slow polarity, only under the framework of tighter, less free-form musicianship that defines earlier work. This is a dark, precise and enchanting opus that adds further testimony to the excellence of one of the subgenres most overlooked and important bands.

November Reviews: Neutron Hammer, The Stone, Worship, Gehenna

Neutron Hammer – Extermination Kommand
A short and sweet five song EP by Neutron Hammer sees these young Finns tackle a simple, tried yet tested formula, typical of what we expect from retrograde black/death/thrash hybrids, seemingly with the only intention to rehash and rekindle lost memories of something many once saw as ‘true’. With a sharp and clear production that conveys great energy within the constraints of mostly verse/chorus song structures, Neutron Hammer often have a similar charge to their music not unlike Australian nostalgics Vomitor and Spear Of Longinus, though compacted to an catchy, anthemic mode that fits the early, primitive works of Impaled Nazerene and Beherit. Excellent work, and also worth watching if you can catch a live performance.

The Stone – Magla
Serbian black metallers The Stone create an epic work that resembles Texan act Averse Sefira, as both bands combine death metal riffing with Norwegian styled harmonies. The differences here are that the melodies are more obvious to untrained ears and we get much more variation in tempos. Amidst this framework there is a crepitating NWOBHM influence in the guitar work, laid beneath a sheen of violent, modern black metal phrasings. One of the best releases to come out of Eastern Europe since the turn of the recent millennium.

Worship – Last CD Before Doomsday
Reissued on CD format five years after being issued on cassette in 1999, Worship play in a funeral doom style that takes on the amelodic, sluggish, death-doom riffing of Thergothon and the suicidal themes and eclectic ambiences of fellow Germans Bethlehem. This lacks the sense of continuity that makes bands like Skepticism great, often losing its momentum in its search of unfathomable dirges of gloom, though this is no means to suggest it is a bad work, it still has its moments of quality.

Gehenna – First Spell
A minor classic of Norwegian black metal, Gehenna’s debut full length contains five songs that combine simple, punky chords and tremolo picked guitar harmonies amidst a backdrop of haunting, etheareal keyboards. Unlike most bands who have unsuccessfully tried to execute this ‘gothic’ variant of black metal, Gehenna clearly understand quality control, and whilst they allowed this aesthetic to play a key role in what you hear on the surface, it is kept in moderation and doesnt outweigh the artistic beauty on offer. If you are looking for something that triumphs where acts such as Cradle Of Filth handicapped their own potential, one should find it all here. Simple, imaginative, majestic and consistent, this is a highly recommended release.

The White God returns from the Underworld

It’s been 13 years since the last sonically black metallic beast from the most infamous Norwegian perpetrator of Germanic mysticism and spells of darkness. Post-produced while Varg was already enchained to the dungeons of Ila, Oslo, Burzum’s “Filosofem” influenced a decade of ambient black metal with its melancholic drone textures, mid-paced romantic metal on the edge of desperation and hope and slowly drifting synthesizer movements akin to Tangerine Dream. Within the next few years, the caged wolf defied repression by a series of neo-classical MIDI works, that essentially showed he still has deep music within him despite the obvious difficulties in his situation to get the end product he would like to. Yet, this was not a catastrophe for pieces of music that were about concept more than anything else. As a pioneer of narrative and ritual composition, Burzum was never dependent on the devices of rock or traditional metal to bring across the ever deepening spheres of twilight that still continue to confuse listeners of the early albums and create endless clones of “depressive” or “suicidal” black metal which fail to have anything to do with the special mood of the original works.

While loudmouths and troublemakers were proclaiming Burzum’s death on the basis of a multitude of (not unfounded) anti-black metal statements, Varg’s release from prison was accompanied by a promise to return to the scene, figuratively. While details about the forthcoming album weren’t revealed then, now there’s enough to give any real Burzum fan sleepless nights of anticipation. “Den Hvite Guden”, conceptually a drama on the trials of the White God of various European ancient traditions, will include a couple of songs written as far back as 1988, with of course lots of brand new exercises in purely mesmerizing runic metal as only Varg can do it, besides Odin himself! An album to crush the whole past decade of mediocrity in black metal, or another safe, lukewarm comeback? We shall all hear it with our own ears, in the season when the Sun returns.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Amorphis – The Karelian Isthmus

From the frozen battlefields of southeastern Finland to the misty moors where Britons quested for the secrets of war and mystic revelation, Amorphis have reaped imagery and values of better times to update their EP’s grooving Carcass influenced style to something epic and everlasting in scope. In its blue-eyed skepticism towards modern values, replacing social democracy with sons of kings scouring the nightly landscape by torchlight, I envision it as the soundtrack to the fortress island of Sveaborg, the domain of drunken death metal teenagers much like Tunnelbana subway tunnels were in Stockholm. Mostly paced like a battle march, the similarities to our previous album of the week, “War Master”, are more than co-incidental. Overall heaviness is somewhat sacrificed on behalf of a somber mood of wanderlust, but the simpler folk oriented pieces are well balanced by tracks borrowed from the band’s earliest releases and even the former incarnation Abhorrence, which could receive the credit for being the first Finnish death metal band pressed to black vinyl. Familiar, even comfortable, Swedish production, courtesy of Mr. Skogsberg, encases “The Karelian Isthmus” in a growling precision of steel, where leads and riffs neither screech nor howl but form symmetrical patterns like Celtic decoration. Iron Maiden influences abound in heroic themes showing the precision and excitement of nowadays-semi-guitar-hero Esa Holopainen in discovering the magic of abyssal neoclassicism.

Despite being an introductory, essential piece of death metal for many of my generation and ethnicity, the album has since been forgotten in the shadows of the more mainstream releases by this band, that despite unleashing a torrent of “progressive” melodies, forgot how to create the militant spells of heavy guitars and impeccable pacing, which contributed much more to the evocation of “Kalevalan” atmospheres than borrowing the poetry itself for lyrics and using mundane beauty in pop cliches as an attractor of business and popularity. The only minor gripe would be that this work does contain traces of the lightweight, subdued and escapist tendency to fill gaps with cute melodies and make friends through heavy metal influences; something that leads to the massively popular but somehow, irritatingly inconsequential, series of absolutely alike discs from Amon Amarth and Hypocrisy when not executed as elegantly as herein. Like Unleashed‘s early work, it creates “pagan metal” before the idea was called such, before it was possible to “do” pagan metal and it consequently became just another clique. It bestows an earthen heaviness reminiscent of life in tribal early civilizations.

Nile and Immolation go for a winter campaign

I don’t know if it’s the right season for war, but here’s a list of dates for you lucky Americans again. Go see them, as even the new Nile album “Those Whom the Gods Detest” has been growing on me, not the least because it has the best death metal use of the “allahu akbar“ phrase so far. Here’s the review by Mr. Stevens, for more information. Plus maybe Immolation will play something from the forthcoming album.

Jan. 15 – Baltimore, MD – Sonar
Jan. 16 – Worcester, MA – The Palladium (MA)
Jan. 17 – Philadelphia, PA – The Trocadero
Jan. 18 – New York, NY – The Blender Theatre
Jan. 20 – Cleveland, OH – Peabody’s
Jan. 21 – Chicago, IL – Metro/Smart Bar
Jan. 22 – Milwaukee, WI – Rave
Jan. 23 – St. Paul, MN – Station 4
Jan. 24 – Kansas City, MO – The Beaumont Club
Jan. 25 – Denver, CO – Bluebird Theatre
Jan. 27 – Seattle, WA – El Corazon
Jan. 28 – Portland, OR – Hawthorne Theatre
Jan. 29 – Orangevale, CA – The Boardwalk
Jan. 30 – San Francisco, CA – Slim’s
Jan. 31 – San Diego, CA – House Of Blues
Feb. 02 – Los Angeles, CA – Key Club
Feb. 03 – Las Vegas, NV – House of Blues
Feb. 04 – Mesa, AZ – U.B.’s Bar
Feb. 05 – Tucson, AZ – The Rock
Feb. 06 – Farmington, NM – Gator’s
Feb. 08 – Corpus Christi, TX – House of Rock
Feb. 09 – San Antonio, TX – Scout Bar
Feb. 10 – Houston, TX – Scout Bar
Feb. 11 – Dallas, TX – Trees
Feb. 12 – Tulsa, OK – Marquee
Feb. 13 – Louisville, KY – Headliner’s Music Hall
Feb. 14 – West Springfield, VA – Jaxx
Feb. 16 – Virginia Beach, VA – Peppermint Beach
Feb. 17 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade
Feb. 18 – Charlotte, NC – Amos Southend
Feb. 19 – Raleigh, NC – Volume 11
Feb. 20 – Charleston, SC – Music Farm

Winter – Into Darkness

In his cyclical conception of world histories, the German thinker Oswald Spengler likened the phase of decay that all civilizations eventually undergo to the seasonal onset of winter. In the post-Enlightenment western world, this is in part characterised by the rule of materialism and a corresponding inversion of traditional hierarchy, prioritising the dominant, consuming impulses of the era. What band then, could be more aptly named to reflect the cold and bleak visions of a world declining under even more advanced conditions of the organico-cultural decay that Spengler described, than the Death Metal cult of Winter?

Perhaps the slowest Metal music recorded at the time, Winter’s only full-length album is part crushing Doom of Hellhammer/Celtic Frost-inspired power-chord arrangements, and part ambient dirgewaves caught between broken transmissions of a shattered technocratic infrastructure. This distinct choice of pacing is achieved and explained by the guitar, down-tuned to the extent of coalescing with the register of droning bass-chords. Not the reverb-driven, existential heaviness of a diSEMBOWELMENT, Winter’s guitar tone has more of a hollowness to it, enough to let the bass pass through like a dying heart struggling to pump blood around cold-narrowed arteries, a fading will-to-live in an empty and broken world. The exploration of this particular aesthetic also gives rise to more of the ambient sensibilities that are present in the album. Slowly but inevitably shifting compositions open up to vistas of endless wasteland, picking up the ghostly electro-static interference left by a fallen metropolis, as guitars and bass are modulated in a manner more-or-less similar to Cliff Burton’s famous set-up on Metallica’s instrumental song, ‘Call of Ktulu’, and random radio frequencies are tuned in and out of.

Each element of instrumentation seems to impose itself on the listener in a different way. This is very apparent when being pummeled by Joe Goncalves’ overbearing bass-drumming, which is like Obituary in its restrained tempo but largely detached from such a comparatively conventional sense of tempo. Instead, drum fills cascade out of the distorted noise, as though the foundations upon which modern society were built are gradually crumbling away. The vocals present yet another side to the album, just as imposingly. The rich, guttural voice of John Alman is right in the foreground, sounding full of pure disgust but nevertheless resilient to barren environment in his midst. Lyrics are not complaints of a wounded soul hopelessly trapped within the system that is caving in on him, but observations of a world plunged into darkness and ignorance, in an allegorical, mythologised style that harkens back to an ancient, golden age. If Winter ever did read Spengler, it might be safe to assume that they were greeting a new cycle.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Bolt Thrower – War Master

Released at death metal’s prime time the third album of the British barbarians marked the new era for both the band and the genre. Leaving behind (but not completely abandoning) their hardcore origins, the members focused on rhythmical precision and harrowing atmosphere to bring forth a groundbreaking epic.

Unlike most early 90s death (and on par with Morbid Angel’s “Blessed Are The Sick”) War Master is quite slow, crawling from the sound clouds of “Intro/Unleashed Upon Mankind” down to the glorious bass loop at the end of “Afterlife”. The hammering midpace rhythmic structure allows for some thick measured riffing , which often acquires a major doom quality without getting overtly Black Sabbath-y (this feature crept into Thrower’s songs later on). The band sounds like one giant rhythm section, even Karl Willets’ voice adds to the pummeling . Occasional galloping speed bursts and angular guitar solos elegantly decorate this tombstone of heaviness.

The undisputed highlight is, of course, Cenotaph. The song boasts a beautiful melody woven into the merciless riffing and shows a perfect symmetry of composition – a characterizing feature of War Master as a whole.

Probably the most organic extreme metal album of its time War Master delivers a vast “grounding” feel, a strange comfort and certainty and is one of the first heavy metal works that successfully coupled ambient and metal without using keyboards.

New and old demo(n)s showing variations of death metal technique

Black Wolf – Death Shall Reign
Demonic and ambitious Buenos Aires death metal newcomer Black Wolf mangles souls with its intense array of sloppily executed, but essentially talented explorations of the catacombs of the mind. Borrowing uncanny neo-classical riffcraft from “INRI” and “Altars of Madness”, most of the songs initiate with a foreboding melodic statement, whereupon a string of variations and seemingly dislocated parts start decomposing the basic, traditional sequence into a sarcastic and violent image of a mind that is neurotic in the presence of death. The voices are deep, mostly rhythmless guttural incantation and sermonic chanting in the background utilized for a sense of profound unease. Drums are a programmed but innovative lateral web of digital percussion that resembles Morse code messaging or the sending of an infernal telegram at times. When the guitars burst into a wailing solo, the musical ability is nothing short of threatening and traces of the disembodied terror of the Mexican cult Shub-Niggurath creep to mind. Because of pure musical ability and an unexplainable evil seeping through, “Death Shall Reign” is an impressive demo from a one-man band that will be a forceful contender for South American thrones of death in case the technical surface aspects are honed closer to brutal perfection.

Into Oblivion – Into Oblivion
As the smoke clears and the violated shades of war wander amidst the frozen battlefield, ravens descend to pick the shreds of flesh from the dead. Into Oblivion from Toronto has concocted a potion of imagery which is all at once barbaric, defiant and filled with bottomless sorrow for the ignorant deeds of men and angels. Shreds of liturgies taught by Hellhammer and Angelcorpse are raised to the blackened skies. Dry and unliving analogue magnetic tape recorder production encases the compositions in a hardened block of concrete, which unveils skill and each minuscule error in performance in a quite confrontational manner. As in Havohej’s debut album, the dry croak and grunt, the uncompressed smear of drum holocaust and amp setting reminiscent of a swarm of insects, sound blasphemic, vile and rotten, fisting everyone who wants death metal to be safe and entertaining. While songs such as the Megiddo-ish “The Sepulchre” and the epic “Utter Ruin” (Into Oblivion’s “Triumph of Death”) seem like the works of an experienced band, some of this fountain of raw material could be trimmed off to leave a more consistent, approachable and direct war metal statement. In other words, I enjoyed the demo but maybe half of the songs went in one ear and out the other.

Death Symposium – Lunar Caustic-Mousoleum
Bludgeoning, senseless and intriguing, Death Symposium’s collection of dismembered anthems is among the very few Turkish death metal experiments I’ve heard. Recorded apparently in 1993, Death Symposium preserves as if embalmed the astrological-brutal mystery of early Greek black metal but the utterly chaotic and cheap performance turns into a parody of Cogumelo Records death thrash. Violent, anti-religious commands dominate the distorted soundscape while the drums approximate the beats of Chris Reifert and other old school masters of puncturing percussion. Consistent and reliable infernal death melodies weave in and out of these hilariously infective, obscure matrices of what is essentially band practice. Active, instantaneous and brutal metal experience doesn’t seem to need the modern band’s knowledge of hi-tech extravaganza or any kind of attainment of credibility on a professional musical level. Death Symposium’s mangled audial waste is better at channeling and communicating the essentials of the experience of underworld descent, morbid realization of life’s end and the possibilities of technical usage of early black and death metal principles than the stuff I refuse to name but tends to be voted as the best of current black metal.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Pathologist – Grinding Opus of Forensic Medical Problems

The memory of early 90′s underground Metal from the Czech Republic is dominated by an elite who channelled a uniquely primitive Black Metal style, best represented by bands such as Törr, Root, Master’s Hammer and later, Maniac Butcher. Other than the mighty Krabathor, not as many Death Metal bands were able to leave such a distinct impression upon the Czech soil as it turned from red to velvet. Spending some time in Prague recently was a great opportunity for listening to one of those forgotten death-cults, Pathologist – who reformed not too long ago. Although this band is easily identifiable as the spawn of Carcass, with ‘Grinding Opus of Forensic Medical Problems’, they offer a unique insight into this strand of Death Metal. If their first album can be placed between the style of ‘Reek of Putrefaction’ and ‘Symphonies of Sickness’, this second offering is more like a surgically-repaired synthesis of ‘Symphonies…’ and ‘Necroticism – Descanting the Insalubrious’. What’s interesting is not how Pathologist bear all the hallmarks of these highly influential albums faithfully and before it was quite as trendy to do so, but in the fine-tuning of these elements to convey a more philosophical approach than the immanent implications of Carcass’ humourous fixation on death and gore, and their twisted riffwork, now well established in the Death Metal musical language. As a result, this album resumes the course of Carcass’ early albums, taking them to their logical conclusion: expressing a Zen-like acceptance of death.

Guitars and bass combine to re-create that deep and muddy exhumation of distorted sound, yet each riff is crisply executed like a detached, Buddhist monk methodically dismembering decomposing corpses. Transitions between riffs are also more clear-cut, borrowing from the bouncier pacing of ‘Necroticism…’, but discarding all the novelty of trying to fit in with demand for a cleaner way of playing Death Metal. Instead, the processes of disease and post-mortis are illustrated with aural space – almost brief silence – for contemplating the mutations of brutal, recursive, grinding themes unfolding into complex and virulent riffs of decay. Infact, none of this is at all typical for such a Grind-heavy album, complete with obligatory cymbal-veiled blastbeats and inhumanly low, gargled vocals closer to Demilich’s Boman than any other Death Metal recording of the time. But for a band who have managed to grasp these inherited intricacies in such a way, this is an ultimate statement of death as our destiny, which must be accepted rather than distracted from.