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.
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.
Filed under: Death Metal Music Reviews — Tags: Heavy Metal, Speed Metal, Technical Death Metal — ObscuraHessian @ July 24, 2009 23:03 — Comments (0)
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