Death Metal Album of the Week: Nocturnus - The Key
Album Reviews: Diocletian - Doom Cult
Live Reviews: July 21st 2010 - Inquisition in Vancouver, Canada
Book Reviews: Daniel Ekeroth - Swedish Death Metal
Film Reviews: Cannibal Holocaust
Essays and Research: Pyrrhic Victories - A Brief Study of Artistic Decline
Morbid Scriptorium: A Museum of Metal Zines
In order to establish a solid, even scientifical basis for the study and appreciation of Death Metal, we are collecting and digitizing diverse materials related to Death Metal history, such as zines, flyers and demo covers. The death metal zine reference center and the death metal art repository are at your disposal. If you appreciate the contents of these archives, please get in touch and contribute something from your own collections in order to preserve memory, information and knowledge and to save these rare gems from being buried by the sands of time: The Past is Alive. We also would like all our noble readers to stay active in their own productive manner and through their contacts spreading the word about all these projects, archives and analyses which ultimately achieve their meaning by the responsive awareness of the intelligent observers somewhere out there, who prowl as wolves among the sheep. Here are some Death Metal related flyers, links and banners you can spread like the plague in order for our hordes and communication networks to grow towards world domination and eternal victory.
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.
[...] salads; the doomy Wagnerian grandeur and slow movements reminiscent of historical battles in ‘The Karelian Isthmus‘ is stealthily exchanged with stoner rock and circular meditations that happen after a couple [...]
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