Sorcier des Glaces – Snowland Reprise MMXI

You could be dicking around with:

  • Faux old school death metal
  • Metalcore
  • Necrophagist style random “tech death” that is metalcore
  • Deathcore
  • “Open minded” black metal that sounds like REM on a banjo

Or, this track from Sorcier des Glaces’ re-envisioning of their aetheric black metal opus, “Snowland.”

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New reviews: BEHERIT, CIANIDE and Ejacula radio

Some new reading for y’all:

  • Beherit – At the Devil’s Studio 1990: more like the later EPs, a sonically-experimental take on these songs that were more Blasphemy like on The Oath of Black Blood but gained some power in their austere, minimal, aloof presentation on the second album.
  • Cianide – Gods of Death: A big improvement over Hell’s Rebirth; a more self-conscious album, this one deliberately merges their Motorhead, Celtic Frost and Master origins in a new, streamlined form of the oldest of old school.
  • Ejacula radio on KPFT 90.1: for those of you in Houston and awake from 3 am – 6 am on Friday mornings, this is the dark and shadowy metal show that has stalked this realm for 19 years.

These made it to Examiner to keep that source alive; despite having terrible software, distant editors and mostly celebrity content, Examiner is a great place to promote metal and make it into mainstream news.

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Half a mind

We live in a world that preaches dumbing down: be equal, be safe and mediocre, pander to others by making everything very, very simple and similar to the other stuff they like.

If you can imagine a long line of sheep, chasing each other through the night, and as the night goes on and starlight flickers across them, you see in their faces the features of wolves…

But one thing that cracks me up: the notion of quality.

Most people, dumbed down by this society and perhaps by their genetic code, can understand quality of tangible substance. For example, a jazzy beat. Good guitar tone. High speed chaotic songs. Really sick vocals.

They can even identify that it’s harder to play than average, or that it has “different parts,” like a melodic slow part and then an acoustic part, then some high-speed guitar, etc.

What they can’t do is string any of this together.

To them, a band like Necrophagist that plays fast riffs in a random order, and whose songs literally signify nothing, is just as good as a band like Camel who carefully string together melodies to tell a tale — and make sure it’s a tale that draws us in, has emotional and intellectual substance, as well as a good rippin’ gut-hitting theme, like the battle for independence or to find a holy grail of some sort or another.

These people literally cannot tell the difference between random riffs bands (Cradle of Filth, Cannibal Corpse) and well-architected, sensible patterns that tell a story (Massacra, Atheist, Incantation). To them it’s all the same, because the parts are the same.

It’s as if I build two structures out of plywood:

  1. A reproduction of the Palace at Versailles
  2. A standard suburban home

These people will walk up to them and say something like, “Well, that first one’s bigger, but they’re both made out of plywood. Over here, I’ve got a house I made from sugarcubes. That’s totally unique, dude!”

When we talk about modernity as a time of shallow thinkers…

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Thrashing Rage speed metal compilation

The lads over at A FIST IN THE ASS OF GOD have put together a compilation of undernoticed speed metal bands from the 1980s and 1990s. If you love this stuff, it’s quite good; if you don’t, it’s some of the more interesting edges of the genre so you can finally get “For Whom the Bell Tolls” out of your head.

Here’s the god-ass-packing tracklist:

1. Protector (Germany) “Protector of Death” (1986)
2. Morbid Saint (USA) “Assassin” (1988)
3. Soothsayer (Canada) “Build the Terrorism” (1986)
4. Burnt Offering (USA) “Power of Death” (1989)
5. Hobbs’ Angel Of Death (Australia) “Cold Steel” (1988)
6. Toxodeth (Mexico) “Black Doom” (1988)
7. Dolmen (USA) “The Ritual Night” (1989)
8. Pentagram [Mezarkabul] (Turkey) “Intro (Wreck)/Rotten Dogs” (1990)
9. Messiah (Switzerland) “Hyper Borea” (1987)
10. Ulysses Siren (USA) “Above the Ashes” (1987)
11. Infernäl Mäjesty (Canada) “Into the Unknown” (1988)
12. Sindrome (USA) “Rapture in Blood” (1987)
13. Anacrusis (USA) “Imprisoned” (1988)
14. Sacred Reich (USA) “No Believers” (1987)
15. Nasty Savage (USA) “Fear Beyond the Vision” (1985)
16. Lääz Rockit (USA) “Last Breath” (1987)
17. Demonax (USA) “Evil’s Cast Aside” (1984)
18. Holy Terror (USA) “Debt of Pain” (1988)

Download at this Mediafire link or visit the original blog post for more information.

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Metal contributes to language

Radikult, v., to engage in any grossly directionless, phenomenally incompetent and cosmically purposeless activity. For example: “We got there late, and at that point the only people there were fat neckbeards Radikulting on Segways, so we left.”

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Cianide – Gods of Death (2011)

We who still love metal walk a fine line between the sold out nu-hardcore stylings of metalcore, and the tendency to hop on the bandwagon of the old school too much; the previous Cianide, Hell’s Rebirth, walked too far on the old school side — when a band loses direction, they imitate successful techniques and patterns from the past without knowing what those patterns evoked in the listeners.

Despite pretending the contrary is true, Cianide is intensely emotional music. It brings on the spirit of doom and fate from old Celtic Frost, the fire-blooded desire to seize life by the throat and live the hell out of it of Motörhead, and from ancient death metal and doom metal a contemplative inner sense, a wondering where we fit in this big picture.

Hell’s Rebirth skipped the emotion for the equivalent of lots of songs about being in a death metal. Gods of Death, despite the less-than-promising self-referential title, is a quality mature effort from these veterans. It is not a concept album but a collection of songs that somewhat self-consciously attempt greater internal variation than previous albums, evenly mixing the “Metal Never Bends” style of bounding, energetic death metal of the type early Master did well, and the brooding drone of Hellhammer and the doom-death style it influenced. The songs are still simple; the solos still squiggles of graffiti on walls of unyielding tone.

If anything, this album reverts to the hardcore roots of death metal and eschews the “nu-hardcore” post-1980s prog-punk and pop-punk styles that are so popular in metal now. In both style and substance, Gods of Death is an affirmation of the past and a recognition that style alone did not define it; the spirit and the soul of the artist made 1990s death metal what it was, and they not only live on but move forward on this chunk of oxidizing steel.

-Brett Stevens-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUxpsvOtlEE&feature=fvst

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How to know your genre is being assimilated

If you needed confirmation the proles are running the show:

Like a stunning, stylized nightmare, Mike Hill’s first ground-rattling growl on Path of Totality is “CHAOS REIGNS.” It’s enough to conjure that memorable scene from Lars Von Trier’s controversial film, Antichrist, in which a self-disemboweling fox cryptically and prophetically utters these two words to Willem Defoe’s character. If anything, it sets the tone for a dark, fully absorbing listen on Tombs’ second album.

With Path of Totality, out June 7, the Brooklyn metal trio takes its disparate influences and distills an expansive palette using thick, controlled brushstrokes. The industrial sledgehammer of Godflesh meets the blast-beated darkness of early Darkthrone in “To Cross the Land,” while “Vermillion” intones a sinister psychedelic swirl over an impressive rhythm section preparing for war. The atmospheric Goth-rock of The Cure presides over “Passageways” and “Black Heaven,” as the dead-eyed stare of Swans — the members of Tombs are admittedly huge fans — lurks in unlit corridors. But while the band’s wide-ranging music libraries are on display, Path of Totality functions as something new, mostly because its extremity is tempered by a dynamic push and pull, accentuated by the spacious production of John Congleton, whose diverse clientele includes Explosions in the Sky, Baroness, Modest Mouse and St. Vincent. – National People’s Radio

Wow, look it has lots of different stuff in it. Translation: no direction.

Looks like a big-name indie producer made it. Translation: “post-metal” means indie with slow drums and distortion.

It’s on NPR. Translation: it’s OK by government and industry, thus as far from underground as you can get, no matter how underground it pretends to be.

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Terrorizer to release new album in 2012

From the Morbid Angel myspace:

TERRORIZER is back with a new album and the line-up consists of Pete on drums, Anthony Rezhawk, David Vincent on Bass and Katina Culture on guitar. The new album is in its final stage of production and will be out early 2012.

No word on whether they’ll do a 28 second cover of “Radikult.”

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