Culture or decoration

Heavy metal is a culture because heavy metal is a unique spirit: a warlike desire for adventure and meaning, not safety and egodrama.

No mosh! No core! No trends! No “fun”!

Idiots continue to want to make heavy metal into rock music.

Rock music is based on individual drama — the same thing that makes people feel it’s OK to litter, vote for manipulators and then blame others, buy McDonald’s and then bemoan corporate domination. People are the problem. Not institutions.

We like to think we’re all equally capable, and so if something went wrong, it was a misfortune/victimhood. The truth is that most people cannot balance a budget, shop for good food, or avoid repeatedly doing self-destructive and pointless actions. Humanity is overrated.

Now we have idiots who want us to think that if we just relax our standards, everything will turn out just fine — like that worked for the hippies, Romans or other groups of deathbound fools:

A YouTube user named “iAMVyt” has posted a video clip online discussing the idea that metal elitism is causing the downfall of the entire genre, and that there cannot truly be an “underground” scene in the age of Facebook. Take a gander at the video clip, and feel free to share your thoughts on metal elitism and what it means to be “underground” in the comments section below. “iAMVyt” also commented on the clip:

“This is just a short video covering a couple of my beliefs about metal elitists. No, this is not criticizing everyone who enjoys metal. It is not criticizing everyone who identifies themselves as a ‘metalhead.’ It is not criticizing everyone who has a strong belief in anything involving music or metal.

“It is criticizing what I believe to be foolish views and opinions. If you do not agree with my opinions, that is FINE. If you are a metalhead and find that this video does not describe you… You are not a metal elitist.”

Metal Funderground

Elitism is the one thing that saved metal.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, metal was a scornful, fascist genre.

These bands knew they did not want to end up like the just-sold-out speed metal (Metallica, Testament, Anthrax, Exodus, Megadeth) and the mainstream heavy metal of the time, which was laughably bad hair metal and beginnings of industrial and alternative metal (Ministry, Faith No More).They had just seen metal get popular in the late 1970s only to die, then come back in the early 1980s, then start to die again.

The black metal bands were even more extreme. They realized that as long as they made music for beer-swilling know-nothings to tap their toes to, the genre would go nowhere. It would get re-absorbed by the mainstream and turn into the same horrible shit that infested both the radio and (in goofier, hipster form) the indie charts.

Elitism is the cornerstone of quality metal. When they abandoned it in 1994, a dearth of quality music resulted, with a few exceptions (later albums from BEHERIT, CIANIDE, ASPHYX, DEMONCY, AVERSE SEFIRA, SUMMONING and a few others). Those bands rose against the grain because they believed in quality over quantity. Whether they would call it “elitism” or not, it’s roughly the same animal: we want quality music, so we push away from the pointless, commercial or derivative.

Now this idiot tells us elitism is killing metal?

More like he means poseurdom is killing metal, as it always has. Poseurs are people who want to use the music to make themselves look cool.

Opeth listeners who want to show you how “open-minded” they are, Primus listeners who want to talk about how technical their music is, self-righteous Rage Against the Machine and punk rockers talking politics, and metalcore devotees who embrace the combined hipster/bohemian bourgeois lifestyle of over-emotionality and self-righteous moral indignation… these people then are the faux elitists — the poseurs — who are ruining metal.

Did he think of that?

No, because that would require him to admit that heavy metal is truly a different view of the world.

Although I listen to many different musical styles, including classical, jazz, blues and even bluegrass, my contemporary tastes lean toward heavy metal, hard rock and alternative. In other words, loud, aggressive songs with ear-piercing vocals, massive guitar solos and heavy bass and drums. The musical talent of these artists is undeniable, but the appeal is definitely an acquired taste.

Long story short, this isn’t your parents’ music. Unless your parents were long-haired, headbanging types who wore copious amounts of black clothing and makeup, that is.- National Post

We are a new generation that pisses all over the old. 1968 was hippies telling us the same crap that metalcore bands tell us today. If you want to be the musical inheritor of your parents’ or grandparents’ failed and stupid political projection, be my guest. You’ve just admitted you want to repeat the dysfunction of the past. Sounds like what an abuse victim would do.

For 2,000 years now we’ve had helpful morons to tell us that “all we need is love.” If it were that easy, it would have happened millennia ago. “All we need is asparagus” has similar relevance to the morally complex problems we face. In addition, unless you have your head up your ass, you can see how the human individual acting selfishly is a much bigger problem than whatever failings our institutions have had. We just like to blame the institutions so we can keep being selfish.

Trust nature instead:

Every sensible swimmer knows that avoiding a school of bait fish or immediately leaving the water if a cut started to bleed is ‘best practice’ when attempting to avoid a meeting with a shark.

But Eyre Peninsula’s Matt Waller has added another tip to the ‘don’t get eaten’ handbook with his discovery that Great White’s are much less aggressive when listening to ACDC – particularly ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.

{…}

“I started going through my albums and ACDC was something that really hit the mark.

“Their behaviour was more investigative, more inquisitive and a lot less aggressive – they actually came past in a couple of occasions when we had the speaker in the water and rubbed their face along the speaker which was really bizarre.” – ABCA

We’d love to know what the sharks think of DEICIDE and INCANTATION.

The self-obsessed rhythms and whining, self-pitying hooks of pop music would probably just make them attack the boat.

Similarly, poseur bands like MASTODON, KYLESA, GOJIRA, OPETH, etc. would have the same effect.

Lack of elitism is killing metal.

Elitism means tolerating only quality music. It’s like natural selection for heavy metal: keep the good, throw out the shit.

Metal is dying because it is flooded with insincere hipster bands, commercial trash and pointless rehashing of underground styles.

The only force that opposes that are the people who insist on quality control, a/k/a the elitists.

The opposite of an elitist is a poseur. Poseurs want to use the music to make themselves look smart, unique, interesting, different, etc.

When those people started infesting metal in 1994 or so, the downward spiral began. Now there’s only a few acts that aren’t as abysmally bad as the stuff on mainstream radio.
– Comment on the above “elitist bashing” article

Nature knows metal is a path of its own. It’s only selfish humans who keep trying to neuter it, so they can stop fearing it. Hail elitism!

No Comments

Exmortis – Darkened Path Revealed demos compilation

A MUST HAVE for any collector.

Songs featured on this release are as follows:

1. Winds of Hell ———————– Descent Into Chaos demo 1988
2. Lords of Abomination —————- Descent Into Chaos demo 1988
3. Exmortis —————————- Descent Into Chaos demo 1988
4. Pathogenic Silence —————— Descent Into Chaos demo 1988
5. Intermission One ——————– Darkened Path Revealed CD 2010
6. Immortality’s End ——————- Immortality’s End demo 1989
7. The Resurrection ——————– Immortality’s End demo 1989
8. Beyond the Realms of Madness ——– Immortality’s End demo 1989
9. Casual Killing ———————- Immortality’s End demo 1989
10. Immortal Outro ———————- Immortality’s End demo 1989
11. Intermission Two ——————– Darkened Path Revealed CD 2010
12. Dreams of the Dead —————— Fade From Reality 7 inch EP 1991
13. The Unforbidden ——————— Never Released Song 1991
14. Fade From Reality ——————- Fade From Reality 7 inch EP 1991
15. Intermission Three —————— Darkened Path Revealed CD 2010
16. Necrotic Visions ——- History of Things to Come – Underground Compilation CD 1994
17. Silence of Darkness —— History of Things to Come – Underground Compilation CD 1994
18. Lamenting the Flesh —————- Darkened Path Revealed CD 2010

* Orders are being accepted via PayPal from http://www.exmortis.us/darkenedpath.htm
.
* Shipping rates and postage are included:
* If you don’t have a PayPal account you can pay via credit card by clicking the “Pay with debit or credit card” beneath the “Log In” button on the PayPal site.
* Postal money orders are accepted but you must send a memo for detailed instructions on how to send it.
* All studio songs recorded by the band will be included on this release. It can’t get any better than this. Juan “Punchy” Gonzalez re-mastered this collection of songs.
* The Butchers of the Urban Frontier demo from 1993 is not included on this release because the owner of its content wanted it removed.

No Comments

Trends! Core! Mosh! Fun!

This is a soundtrack to the inside of most people’s heads:

Amor de Días – Late Mornings from Merge Records on Vimeo.

In the background, two uselessly predictable chords clang together, picked with a jaunty offbeat.

In the foreground, totally distracted, neurotic, indirect, confused and pointless vocals fill in the time, like doodles on a page of notes.

The agenda: me, me, me.

Repeated, infinitely, as the person goes through life — oblivious to others, oblivious to consequences, oblivious even to the quality of what they do. They are only thinking of themselves.

It is their God, their one Ring, their hope, their pride — all for something they did not create and cannot control.

These people are the real bigots.

They are bigoted against reality itself, and the science of the woodsman (figure out what must be done, find out how to make it harmonious, and leave as few traces as possible).

They are bigoted against higher standards, values, goals — anything that conflicts with the eternal me, me, ME.

Ultimately, their songs as their lives are one-note. But they will dress them up in frilly diaphonous vocals and try to conceal that from you, as long as they can.

Narcissists thrive in big, anonymous cities, entertainment-related fields (think reality TV), and leadership situations where they can dazzle and dominate others without having to cooperate or suffer the consequences of a bad reputation. “A narcissist monk would not be good, but to be Kanye West and a narcissist is fantastic,” notes University of South Alabama psychologist Peter Jonason, an expert on mating psychology and the darker side of human nature.

{…}

Narcissists’ language and demeanor is often geared toward one objective: to maintain power in an interaction.

{…}

Among a pool of college students, those reporting higher levels of entitlement tended to be the most popular students in the class. In a separate study, Back and his colleagues found that while students expected charming individuals to like others more, people with “self-centered values” actually dislike others more. – Psychology Today

Narcissists want to make you their servant. They want you to think only of them, as they do.

They will present you their music and make you think it’s hip and cool.

Really, it’s empty and one-note.

Like narcissists.

No Comments

The idiots are at it again

Black metal was unique.

Most people are “unique” but have no actual direction or ideas, so they fake it with surface artifice.

They hate things like black metal, and want to destroy them if not outright, with mockery.

Mark Ames (email him) tries his limp hand at it:

The rise of the Black Metal movement in Norway is a case of humorless dirtheads taking a joke way too seriously. The joke was Satanic rock, which Lords of Chaos skillfully traces from its early origins in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Coven (who transformed from performing black masses on stage to perpetrating the weepy hippie hit “One Tin Soldier”) to metal’s second big wave in the early 80s and the rise of kitsch Satan-rockers Venom. To our modern eyes, Venom looks the spitting image of Spinal Tap during their Smell the Glove phase, but to dirtheads who didn’t know any better, Venom was the long-sought embodiment of evil. It was from the Venom branch of evil-metal that all of metal’s more violent, “evil” forms descended, including Black Metal. – Exiled (all quotations from this article)

This charge could be leveled at metal lyrics in general, but this idiot doesn’t know his metal history.

Black Sabbath – War Pigs:

Now in darkness world stops turning,
ashes where the bodies burning.
No more War Pigs have the power,
Hand of God has struck the hour.
Day of judgement, God is calling,
on their knees the war pigs crawling.
Begging mercies for their sins,
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
Oh lord, yeah!

Old school heavy metal, like Black Sabbath and American speed metal bands: watch out, evil will destroy us!

NWOBHM, like Angel Witch and even Judas Priest: society is blown because moralism is false, let’s explore the occult.

This theme also showed up in progressive rock…

Had the author of this piece done even an hour’s research this would have been evident, but he thinks he’s being funny.

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks.

Straight out of 1980s teen movies. We know what research he did do…

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence.

You’ve got it backward. Death metal embraced all of this stuff first; remember the news stories about how a murder victim had been found lying on top of a copy of Death’s “Leprosy”? How many early death metal bands drifted toward actual occultism, and endorsing some fairly evil stuff?

Black metal just wanted to make it fully real.

For one thing, Black Metalists are incredibly pedantic–as laughably pedantic as the worst jerks you knew in the college rock/punk/hardcore scene, and pedantic about the very same stupid things: who is more “genuine,” “authentic,” “extreme,” “on-the-edge” and in metal’s case, “evil.”

Dummy, you just said it was an ideological genre. Of course authenticity matters.

Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes Perle’s and Frum’s pained, wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments, and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them.

Wow, straight up Crowdist dogma: it doesn’t matter how effective you are, be sure to be SOCIAL! That’s what matters!

Should Black Metalists cut their hair and vote Bush-Cheney ’04? Dude, I think the answer’s pretty fuckin’ obvious. In fact, thanks to these guys, America has become the world’s first Black Metal Nation.

A sub-intelligent finish to a downright retarded (yep, like trisomy 21 — retarded people are dumber than normal people) article.

No wonder he is so threatened by black metal.

No Comments

Metalcore explained

From the newswire:

Action is needed now to prevent nightmarish “Planet Of The Apes” science ever turning from fiction to fact, according to a group of eminent experts.

Their report calls for a new rules to supervise sensitive research that involves humanising animals.

One area of concern is “Category Three” experiments which may raise “very strong ethical concerns” and should be banned.

An example given is the creation of primates with distinctly human characteristics, such as speech.

Exactly the same scenario is portrayed in the new movie Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, in which scientists searching for an Alzheimer’s cure create a new breed of ape with human-like intelligence.

The report also acknowledges the “Frankenstein fear” that humanising animals might lead to the creation of “monsters”. – The Telegraph

Gosh, maybe Mary Shelley was a genius after all.

In all seriousness, this is easy to explain. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the CIA went in and extracted dangerous technologies so they would not fall into the hands of extremists.

They then gave them to the US Government… contradiction time, guys.

The Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy was the world’s first ever primate testing centre, revolutionary in its medical discoveries and responsible for sending monkeys into outer space. The institute which was once the envy of the West, is now a dilapidated shell of its former glory. On the edge of financial ruin, the only reminder of its prestigious past is the horrific noise and site of the left generations of monkeys caged and distraught, but this present day site is only a fragment of the institutes more sinister history: attempting to breed the first human ape.

The institute founded in 1927 was rumored to have come into existence, as part of Stalin’s disturbing plan to make legions of industrial workers that would be inhumane in strength, while mentally subdued. This would in theory, be achieved by inseminating female chimpanzees with human sperm from male donors, in order to create human-ape hybrids that could mindlessly build cities at terrifying speeds. – Environmental Graffiti

It’s all there: mindless repetitive motion, impulsive acts, fearsome strength and tiny brains.

Metalcore exhibits all of these things.

Undoubtedly, the CIA never thought this experiment would get out of hand. YET IT HAS.

Prepare yourselves.

No Comments

The Right Hand Path reviews Spear of Longinus

I enjoy this blog because of their deadpan, straight-forward, radical honesty perspective:

Spear of Longinus is an Australian Black Metal/Thrash Metal band formed in 1993 from Brisbane in Queensland whose lyrical themes are based on National Socialism, religion, philosophy and hatred.

The phrase “Spear of Longinus” is in reference to the spear that pierced Jesus Christ’s side as he was on the cross. It is told that who possesses the spear is granted immortality.
The Right Hand Path

Today’s to do list:

  • Fix the kitchen faucet.
  • Themes based on National Socialism, religion, philosophy and hatred.
  • Get milk.
No Comments

Published in Rivethead Magazine

Brett Stevens article in Houston’s underkvlt metal/rock mag:

During the 1950s-1970s we had bombers and cruise missiles, but in the 1980s we had supersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) loaded with multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) that blanketed cities like fission cluster bombs, erasing whole patches of the landscape. We were told we had seven minutes of warning

It was a terrifying time; people clung to dogma (“freedom” in the west, “equality” in the Soviet bloc) and tried to block any greater meaning out of their heads. Meaning started two world wars and could get you killed. Being really happy for blue jeans, cable TV and a fat paycheck was safer than bread. This vapidity produced a type of pop culture that was both saccharine and aggressive, emphasizing shallow emotions at the same time it pressed people onward to become part of the machine, to work hard and join the flow. Underground metal threw all of this back in its face.

United by the slogan “Only death is real,” underground metal as an artistic movement sought to remind people that all the crazy distractions, entertainment, politics and economics that filled our news and minds were distractions from the real agenda, which was having a meaningful and purposeful life. – Rivethead

Click the link to read more. Designed to offend numus and mellcores alike. And anyone else, come to think of it. Allahu ackbar!

No Comments

“A Day of Death” rebroadcast

One-time only rebroadcast of the streaming video of A Day of Death (July 16, 2011). Final chance to see the entire event. Whether you missed it or attended it and want to relive it for another day, you have one more chance to see Kam Lee join Druid Lord on stage, one more chance to see Kam Lee join Derketa on stage, one last chance to see Kam Lee perform “From Beyond” in its entirety.

$10 via Paypal to glorioustimesdeathbook@gma​il.com (no later than Friday, July 29 at 10 pm est) link and password will be sent via email approximately 1-2 hours before the event airs. Grab some beers, invite the friends over and enjoy this once in a lifetime event, some of the bands of the day will be available in the chat room throughout the rebroadcast.

Lineup:

  • Lethal Aggression (only part of their set was streamed)
  • Hubris
  • Seplophile
  • Resist Control
  • Sam Biles
  • Avulsion
  • Goatcraft
  • Druid Lord
  • Derketa
  • Rottrevore
  • Deceased
  • Insanity
  • Nokturnel
  • Kam Lee
  • plus a surprise or two thrown in for this special rebroadcast.

For more information, see the FaleBook page.

No Comments

Tags: , , , , , ,

Ayasoltec post new tracks

Remember how Sepultura tried to go tribal, Nile went Egyptian, Mictlatecuhtli revered the Aztecs, and Cenotaph created a death metal sound unique to Mexico?

Ayasoltec is carrying on that idea and doing it better with their Aztec metal which has a modern metal influence but even more, a rhythmic change from the cadences of death metal to the tribal, without “tribal” meaning “rock played on hand drums.”

New songs posted here:

Ayasoltec @ ReverbNation

No Comments
Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z