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Death Metal Album of the Week: Order from Chaos – Stillbirth Machine

What do you obtain when you combine the violence of “War and Pain”, the temperament of “Blood Fire Death” and the malicious groove of “Symphonies of Sickness”? Well, amongst unexpected atomic reactions with statistical possibilities including the destruction of all cosmos, you will meet this deservedly cult Kansas City band whose heatwaves are still crashing against metalheads’ record players in the form of not only Helmkamp’s Revenge and Keller/Miller’s Ares Kingdom, but practically everyone who plays war metal or simply impudent, militant black thrash. The debut album “Stillbirth Machine” is an eternal favorite from this solid discography. It’s one of those albums that relentlessly crush for their entire playing time, grinding riffs convolving into spectral dimensions underneath the precise drum/vocals interplay. While sounding extremely old school despite the aggressive means borrowed from the blackgrind generation of Blasphemy and Beherit, Order from Chaos merges the Faustian essence of vectorized attack into pathless realms (best exemplified by the vocal chorus manipulation akin to a belligerent neo-fascist Kraftwerk and the absolutely crazy leads that sound like a neutrino storm at CERN shooting off) with a modern streetwise speed metal sensibility of using common phrases that elsewhere would be utilized for beer-thrash, but here the elité ambience is extricated much in the manner of Bathory classics to lead the brain onwards to serious contemplation of triumph, death and destiny.

We stand on a constant threshold of
A quantum hierarchy, universal and pure

Immolation – Majesty and Decay

The mind can’t erase what the soul can’t embrace

The most anticipated death metal release of 2010 (along with the upcoming Morbid Angel, of course) “Majesty and Decay” has everything to please any sophisticated fan of the genre, yet still doesn’t quite meet the impossibly high standards of the group’s past. The 2007’s “Shadows in the Light” while it seemed to have retained all the ingredients of the New York masters’ brew somehow failed to live up to spoiled listeners’ expectations. The unfortunate flirting with “nu metal” elements as well as almost complete discarding of drumming-based structure poisoned the arrangements and conveyed a bad aftertaste to the whole record. Still head and shoulders above any fellow North American squad Immolation has taken the prolonged break in order to revise their direction and yet again prove themselves the ruling kings of the genre.

The best news “Majesty and Decay” has to offer is Steve Shalaty’s drumming. The man has been replacing Immolation’s godly Alex Hernandez ever since 2005’s “Harnessing Ruin” but it is only here that he unlocks his true talent. Steve has surely developed his own musical language since 2007 and the band has finally regained its rhythmic “pillars”. Everything has fallen into place at last: blasting endurance, inventive drum breaks and mid-paced punishment. The “inverted” riffing – although not as all-pervasive as on, say, “Close to a World Below”, – stresses the drumming very nicely and allows for some smooth gliding down the interwoven landscape of melody. Indeed, what sets the album apart in the vast Immolation discography is the use of melody. While the band is still a riff-fed beast, the heavy metal melody injecting the solos and seeping through the riffs enriches the sound world of the group, introduces “humanity” to the demonic environment of their instrumentation. The songs are shorter compared to the classic 90s era material, more to-the-point composition-wise, and definitely more “human” than we have come to expect from these New Yorkers.

Vigna (wonderfully supported by Bill Taylor as usual) goes right after Shalaty in this album’s list of heroes. The tight, powerful riffing, the wild soloing echoing with sadness and despair – all of it enhanced by the tasteful and balanced production ensures a satisfying listen. Guitars are put to good use in both the “Intro” and the “Interlude”, which indeed set the atmosphere very well. Ross Dolan’s vocals have become completely decipherable on here without loosing the emotion and recklessness, while his bass is so elegantly put into the mix that it acquires percussive quality at times. All of the above perfectly reflects the lyrical themes of the album: the loneliness of modern man lost in the midst of colossal fight for world domination, the evaporation of values and purposes igniting intrinsic hells and leaving no hope for the spirit.

“Our threatened kingdoms
The world is divided
Trample ourselves
While we claw for the prize”

Still, the album comes with its share of flaws too. The band implements the tension buildup/release approach in some of the songwriting here and not only fails to achieve the desired effect, but sometimes looses momentum completely (most notably “The Purge”, “Divine Code”, “Power and Shame” ). The distribution of Immolation’s volatile energy here often reduces the impact instead of boosting it. This new trick is still very raw/unrefined and cannot fully replace the mathematic complexity of their 90s output. The classic (and eagerly awaited) “last song devastation” is also pretty much wasted here: next to all the best, epic songs scattered across the album “The Comfort of Cowards” feels pretty weak (while certainly not entirely filler) for a killing blow. The cover art is a disgrace. This computer game-like visual representation does justice neither to music nor lyrics. Also, the band probably needs to consider revising their logo after all these years of using a stretched font as one.

All in all, this is a mandatory purchase for anyone with at least a slight interest in today’s metal. It is entirely possible that Immolation’s return will be the finest mainstream death metal album by the end of the year (even with all the mentioned flaws taken into account) as this reviewer doubts Morbid Angel or any other competitor for that matter has the guts to top this material.

Daniel Ekeroth – Swedish Death Metal

Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth is an easy and enjoyable read that recounts the glory years of Swedish Death Metal told in large part through the mouths of those who actually lived it. Ekeroth presents the history of Swedish death metal, focusing mainly on the release of seminal albums and demos, and the means by which fanzines and tape trading played a role in the development and proliferation of the Swedish death metal genre.  This is definitely a worthwhile read if one is looking for a chronology of all of the important bands, namely Bathory, Nihilist/Entombed, Dismember, At the Gates, and Therion, that played an important role in the development and consolidation of Swedish Death Metal. Additionally, the layout of the book is such that it is easily navigable, making use of handy headings, subheadings and band headings, which also make this a great quick-reference text.  However compelling, it is a slight draw back that the various snapshots throughout the book interrupt the flow of the read, and are laid out in such a way as to provide a distraction.  One may be better off reading the book through and then returning to the snapshots at a later date.

In addition to analyzing the careers of many important Swedish Death Metal bands, Ekeroth indulges the curiosity of the reader and earns additional merit for mentioning important non-Swedish bands such as Master and Deathstrike, and for emphasizing the role of Morbid Angel in the overall development of Death Metal. Interestingly, the author seems at pains to make sure that the reader understands the relationship between Crustcore, Punk, and Metal and adds some welcome depth to his account of Swedish Death Metal by mentioning Discharge, whose strumming style and melody would influence countless metal bands. If you are looking for a chronology of the glory days of Swedish Death Metal, this book proves enlightening. Thankfully, there is little mention of “Slaughter of the Soul” and second rate Swedish bands such as In Flames and Soilwork that would later hijack, dilute and all but destroy this once living art form.

With that said, readers beware!  Ekeroth has a tendency to try and convince his reader that death metal was all about “fun” back in the day and tends to present the extracurricular activities, namely drinking and partying, as the highlights of many bands careers. Although Ekeroth’s goal was to tell the history of important bands, releases and tours, I believe this book could have been improved had Ekeroth attempted to explore the philosophical underpinnings of this genre and refrained from presenting Metal culture as simply an offshoot or replication of self-indulgent rock culture. New frontiers await those willing to explore this aspect of Swedish Death Metal and Ekeroth’s book may in fact prove to be a trailblazer. Time Shall Tell.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Morpheus Descends – Ritual of Infinity

The power of Death Metal as an esoteric form of popular music was perhaps never better demonstrated than by New York’s Morpheus Descends on their collosal debut album. These grotesque and violent mazes of deconstructionist composition are so ridden with diseased, downtuned guitars and seismic drumming, it presents a indistinguishable cacophony that somehow elucidates as much as it obscures the decaying riffs, like the rotten animation of countless maggots covering and consuming the matter of an otherwise soulless corpse. The guitarists’ manipulation of the lower extremities of their axes remains an unmatched exercise in brutal craftsmanship, with both rhythm and subtle melody pinned to a logical structure far greater than the sum of those parts, quite unlike even the more complex examples of NYDM such as ‘Pierced from Within‘. Also, thankfully disimilar to arguably the best from Suffocation‘s discography, the production here has been carefully engineered to retain a filthy sound with an appropriate amount of space between the instruments so that even the bass can stand out from the rumbling guitars, and the drums have a depth in the mix that enables a really tangible influence over the musical dynamics where the guitars, in their sludgy modulations, are largely unable to do so on their own. The content of this album turns away from another New York outfit, Cannibal Corpse, who would later even bear the influences of Morpheus Descends. Though caught in the stench of decomposing bodies and scenes of graphic gore, as the title ‘Ritual of Infinity’ might imply, there’s a profoundly mystical coordination to the music rather than the aforementioned band’s mere infatuation with graphic perversions or the morgue therapy of early Carcass. The multi-faceted burdens of mortality are stripped away as this album decomposes, with songs like ‘Trephanation’ reciting lyrics that sound like a kind of lobotomy as exacted on neophytes by a group of violent Vedantins in order to, we must imagine, negate the mind and its individuated, finite perceptions. As if possessed by the direct insight of an Aghori, ‘Ritual of Infinity’ is an intense meditation on the supremacy of death and the ultimate moksha that the corpse state represents.

O.D.I.R.

In anticipation of the profane rites of spring and summer

As the solar powers emancipate the winter’s icy grip, the pieces of art we hoped to dominate this year’s playlists are gradually fading to old news, not to spoil any upcoming reviews of efforts such as Burzum‘s pastoral “Belus”, Immolation‘s showy “Majesty and Decay” and Winterwolf‘s cheeky “Cycle of the Werewolf”. Insatiable death squads that we are, relentlessly lusting for the lower ethereal planes, our sights gaze upon promised treasures such as the debut album of North Carolina’s Anu, “Opus Funaerum” and the sophomore benedictions of Australia‘s Cauldron Black Ram and New York’s Profanatica; namely, “Slubberdegullion” and “Disgusting Blasphemies Against God”. The Anu CD is currently in press and will be available through Graveless Slumber Records and distributors worldwide, this Demoncy related band having already caused a stirring of unbenevolent underground majesties with its acrid and harsh self-titled EP and Myspace samples promising neo-ambient black metal hymnals dedicated to the darkness and quietude of night, in the profound manner of Sorcier des Glaces and Legion of Doom who know how to make the synthesizer sound archaic. The LP version will be out later on Werewolf Records, whose releases I generally find worthwhile to pay attention to. Cauldron Black Ram has hardly softened their sound over the years in favor of pirate maniacs scattered by the sinking of Running Wild‘s flagship, instead paying homage to Autopsy and Hellhammer with primi-syncopated drumscapes, poisonous grunts and eerily progressive riffing that gets at times, not that surprisingly, close to what compatriots Portal practice on galactic hyperspeeds, CD out now on Weird Truth Productions. Profanatica’s audial sodomy, out in summer through the hallowed Hells Headbanger Records hardly needs much explanation nor much can be provided, as Ledney remains the official high priest of evil USBM since more than two decades of non-compromising, pummelling, harsh and blasphemous black metal.

And while waiting for all these to intrude your mailbox as if it was the holy anus, check out some of the forthcoming gigs in your area and present yourself simultaneously as a brutal but intelligent metalhead, in order to raise the honourable status of this artform in your country. Hail and kill.

Dantesco – Pagano

The challenge of creating relevant but still traditional Heavy Metal in this current age where even the most commercial face of Metal has been changed by the extremity of the underground seems to be an almost insurmountable task. The most recent efforts of mainstream veterans like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest in continuing the genre provides little in and of themselves to enthrall the masses as they did with their once advanced, Romanticist art. There are also the countless Power and Doom Metal bands that have hijacked the older forms and do so with little to none of the magic that possessed the music of the seventies and eighties. Though the secrets of the grand, old tradition have been apparently condemned to obscurity, they can never be lost and befitting the nature of lost wisdom, have turned up in the least likely of places.

Dantesco hail from the small Latin American island of Puerto Rico and through their music, divulge a rich tradition of Spanish music and highly exoteric and vibrant Catholicism. Although chronicling the triumphant Heathen soul at war with Christendom, ‘Pagano’ conjures the sounds of the immanent culture and possesses it with a bestial inflection, as the vocals of Erico that dominate this album resemble a Latin black mass arranged with the magestic sensibilities of an European opera. Infact, the vocal style is as properly operatic as imagineable in Heavy Metal music, putting the high-pitched aspirations of a Rob Halford or Messiah Marcolin in their places, though still conveying a sense of extreme primality and visceral power rivalled only by the demonic throats of Black Metal vocalists. These sermons are conducted exclusively in the native Spanish tongue, which suits the guitars incredibly well, as the melodicism of the riffs is only supplemented by the Doomy heaviness of Candlemass influence, but really crafted with Spanish classical guitars in mind. This is where the music really comes alive, before there’s any chance of hearing the vocals as just a unique ethnic gimmick to fill space with. The compositions are constantly engaging, commanding narratives the scale of the epic title-track to Iron Maiden’s ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son‘ with attention to mood dynamics often passed over in favour of an intentionally one-dimensional wallowing by other bands who play this melodic, traditional and Doomy kind of Metal. All the techniques on show have been long perfected, and more recently, have even found their way into the mallcore slang of pre-teen alternative/hard rock bands (via. Gothenburg), but fortunately, it’s all found an orderly, emotive and inspiring expression in ‘Pagano’. The tight but hyperbolic interplay of vocals and guitar is a feast for those that love to follow several strands of ancient melody at once, as if transforming the old Hispanic anthems of Mexico’s Luzbel into rousing, harmonised hymns, tempered and then unleashed to invoke the spirits of pre-Christian warriors. True Heavy Metal, fit for contemporary ears, giving the current crop of extreme-influenced Pagan and Black Metal bands a serious run for their money.

Sarcophageous film on Finnish heavy metal culture

Promised Land of Heavy Metal is a documentary about the history and philosophy of Heavy Metal and how it became such a big deal in a small country called Finland.

The film is narrated by Kimmo Kuusniemi, a filmmaker, Sarcofagus guitarist and a forefather of Finnish Metal. Kimmo has lived in England for 16 years, and sees the current popularity of Heavy Metal as a strange phenomenon. He was the one who fought for the metal message 30 years ago! What happened in Finland in his absence?

One of our aims over the years has been to prove how the vital undercurrents of Finland produced cultivated metal sensations over the years from the earliest heavy metal days, best exemplified by the inimitable Sarcofagus, to thrash and the Finnish death metal movement, finally creating a discharge of consciousness that erupted in mainstream metal sensations all over the world, leaving most of the more focused and gloomy explorers to repose in the depths.

Kimmo Kuusniemi, the founder of Sarcofagus, the earliest Finnish metal band, has aggregated his unique vision into a documentary giving sporadic but meaningful glimpses into metal culture in search of the ultimate question: why?

Death Metal Album of the Week: Atheist – Unquestionable Presence

It would have taken a mad Nostradamus to predict in 1984 that the sprouts that grew from Hellhammer‘s and Possessed‘s gory and satanic fantasies would in barely half a decade bear fruits in bridging the arts of dark metal and effulgent progressive rock, even jazz, with a virulence unheard of. While Morbid Angel and Death were building Florida’s reputation for fiendish blasphemy, two bands specifically attended to the science of philosophy and the phenomenological realm of the mind. One was the thrashier Hellwitch, the other was the name to be synonymous with jazz influenced death metal; Atheist. Technical, baffling and impossible to headbang, despite their oddities the band easily captured the attention of open-minded metalheads bored of pop metal and hundreds of Slayer clones.

How did Atheist do it? While fans may argue for the technical aggression of “Piece of Time”, I find this album to be the key to the band’s unbounded ability to use syncopated percussive enthrallment, mathematical measures, subtle disharmony and a perfect understanding of tonality to show every formal musicologist that death metal is up there with other advanced musics of humankind. As the opening track “Mother Man” engulfs the listener to its helical and hypnotic guitar melody, Tony Choy, borrowed from Cynic to replace the tragically deceased fretless bass master Roger Patterson, unlocks the fluttering dormant quality of his instrument from the robust, minimal traditions of Geezer Butler and other heavy metal bassists. By the time we join “The Incarnation’s Dream”, it’s quite hard to recall we were supposed to be listening to death metal, as the eerie acoustic bliss takes us beyond Metallica’s “Orion” to what is the wildest dreams of symphonic rock á la Yes come life through the hands and mouths of irreverent Florida dropouts. Mental revelations induced by New Age literature and TV documentaries on UFOs and mysteries of the universe, or musical heirship to German classical idealist philosophy?

Death Metal Album of the Week: Atrocity – Todessehnsucht

Somnium timoris
Desiderum praeteritum
Maestitia praesentiae

Last week’s look at Cadaver’s mighty ‘…In Pains‘ album indicated an acute, tumultuous response to the human condition that was endured by a small number of tormented, Death Metal-playing souls during the early nineties. This largely-contained epidemic of mental afflictions very sharply scarred the minds of German band Atrocity, with their debut album, ‘Hallucinations‘ manifesting as an unrelenting commentary on the habitual ravages of the modern mind, exploring in particular one of it’s greatest banes: addiction. The music was technically inspiring, considered highly progressive in its day, and the subject matter was dark and disturbing in it’s pseudo-biographical recollections of fragility and fallibility. ‘Todessehnsucht’, the follow-up album would take both music and concept further, to create an all-encompassing opus of death and crucially, it did so on very Germanic terms. Far from being just another set of sociological observations, this work is painted on a much broader canvas, using the brushstrokes of a culturally-inspired aesthetic to illustrate something more spiritually aware.

Self-produced in Germany, far from the FLDM treatment given to ‘Hallucinations’ by Scott Burns at Morrisound Studios, Atrocity clearly had in mind to juxtapose the great past of their Fatherland with its failings under the weight of modernity. The liner notes in the booklet first prepares the listener for this journey, quoting the great pessimystic and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer‘s statement implying that the world is suffering, a view which he found to parallel Buddhistic teachings related to dukkha. A view which would enter into the music of Atrocity. Even the album’s title, translated to mean ‘Longing For Death’ (and released in America by this name) is evocative of Schopenhauer’s ascetic ideal, subduing the Will to live and halting the underlying motions that guide consciousness towards suffering. A variation of this idea develops throughout the album, from the basis that the modern world is plagued by all manner of self-absorbed and destructive vices due to a loss of spirituality (following the death of God in Nietzschean thought), but rather than withdrawing from this plane of despair to a state of solipsistic peace, Atrocity condemns and confronts it, to clear aside all the illusions that define the last age of man, ushering in a new era free from human ignorance and worldly attachment. The root of all ‘evil’ according to this worldview is not to be found in external structures like government or economy (although they serve only the mass delusion), but man’s capacity for avijja, to disconnect from reality and pursue the gratification of the ego. Hence, the rendition of Richard Wagner‘s funeral march for Siegfried from ‘Götterdämmerung‘ is not out of place on the introduction to ‘Sky Turned Red’ (as if it could be out of place on any Death Metal album!) as an epitaph to the pre-modern world, and that’s not the only influence the master of the Gesamtkunstwerk exerts on ‘Todessensucht’.

The music on this masterpiece of Death Metal seems to follow the progression of ideas in German musical thinking from the venerable Wagner to modern schools of Classical, engineering grand, articulate riffs of Wagnerian chromaticism to be compressed and transformed with mechanistic force and precision into twisted shapes of dissonance and hyper-extended fragments, referencing Arnold Schoenberg‘s emancipation of music from harmony. The guitars shred away at warped melodies and complex rhythmic patterns, technically similar to Florida bands like Cynic and Death but musically more reminiscent of Modernism, going further to evoke the nightmarish sounds of Dane Rudhyar or Bernard Herrmann, than Cadaver and possibly even Gorguts managed. This idea is explored as well by the sickening lead work of Röderer who embellishes the album with defining solos to the level that James Murphy achieved on Obituary’s ‘Cause of Death‘. Riffs often outrun standard timings and the drumming is well arranged to account for the added demands of energy or restraint. The bass is quite prominent and deviates very little from the main themes, emphasising the narrative context of the guitar riffs as they superimpose the restless dynamics. Alex Krull’s vocals are memorable, retaining only as much human tone in the guttural outbursts as an old man uttering his final words.

Before Atrocity lost interest in Death Metal, they were in the top tier of the genre and left behind a real classic that fell into relative obscurity due to the lack of re-releases issued by Roadrunner. This is an album that unveiled the futile attachment to mortality and found liberation in its demise.