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: Revenant – Prophecies of the Dying World
While scarcely mentioned today, possibly because it has not been kept consistently in print as Nuclear Blast gives most of their attention to commercial crap in the vein of Dimmu Borgir and Children of Bodom, nothing quite like it has been heard before or since, a tremendously corporeal, yet intricate music rhythmically similar to both Cryptic Slaughter and Morbid Angel, also as melodically advanced and profane. Henry Veggian’s Revenant was one of the early death metal signings of Nuclear Blast Records (mostly a grindcore and thrash label until times got trendier for death mysticism) and a prominent formation where musicians of the caliber of John McEntee and Paul Ledney got their initiation into the cults of death. Lovecraftian shadow-worlds, proto-genetic horror and psychological violence merged in this amazing album from 1991, truly an old school death metal tour de force and the best that New Jersey had to offer besides Vicious Circle and Erik Rutan’s Ripping Corpse.
Eventful, evil and surprising, Revenant embraces its hardcore roots (Veggian used to play in the pre-Old Lady Drivers grindcore legend Regurgitation) without shame to incite the audience with aggressive and infectious riffs one after the another, rarely spending time with doomy lapses or elaborations of harmony, but rather attempting to overdrive the brain into an adrenaline rush, whereupon action ensues and through it, peace and realization. Tracks such as “Spawn” and “The Unearthly” weave intense coagulations of speed metal influenced phrases into a blind pulse of devastation, able to cause spasms of revulsion and headbanging in the listener. Lyrically the band reaches high, in movie and literature inspired metaphysical visions of landscapes that lie hidden behind the curtain of social reality and a frighteningly lucid dream of post-human existence, akin to what one would expect from a treatise on Hindu or Buddhist mythology.
Abstractions are elusive, reality confining
Illusions are redefining
As I approach my genetic core
As I approach the unearthly
Interview
Metal Side
[...] a less occult Incantation or Infester but are imbued with all of their insanities. Shades of Revenant appear in the shredding of more melodic riffs, whereby the rhythmical aspect is suspended above the [...]
Pingback by DEATH METAL: Death Metal News, Death Metal Music and Death Metal Culture at Deathmetal.Org — February 3, 2010 @ 03:24
[...] of John McEntee to a potent composer was hardly a surprise since he was tutored by Henry Veggian in Revenant and early on accompanied by Paul Ledney and Aragon Amori of the ground-breaking Profanatica; yet, [...]
Pingback by DEATH METAL: Death Metal News, Death Metal Music and Death Metal Culture at Deathmetal.Org — April 2, 2010 @ 17:24
One of my alltime favourite albums, this is simply one of those bands you know you’re the only one in town listening to, and the lyrical content, thematic changes and coherence in this work blows me away. I always try to show this album to death-enthusiasts when I get the chance.
Perfect article, I can link this to my Norse-tradition and use it as a superb and apt spiritual exercise in Kali Yuga-survival.
Comment by Reginhard — August 25, 2010 @ 23:34