We write; you complain; everyone else ignores us. Later on, the world catches up, and everyone hides how they read it here first. We call the metal trends by looking at reality instead of social influences, and this makes people feel like the small puny slave power bottoms they really are.
Attempting to create continuity between older and newer works, Pestilence re-recorded a selection of “greatest hits” that leans hard on the more recent albums, as such compilations always tend to do. This proves an intelligent idea since it creates an album that sounds internally consistent and gives the band a chance to give these songs a more aggressive edge.
Levels of Perception features two songs from Testimony of the Ancients, two from Consvming Impvlse, and the rest from their last few albums. Not surprisingly they leave off Malleus Maleficarum, because on re-recording the Destruction-influenced sound of the new tracks matches the rough direction of that album.
In the end calculus the problem here is that the newer material is all very similar in theme where the older material bends the musical rules, and so despite attempts to conceal the jarring difference in the history of this band, this album simply makes me want to listen to Consvming Impvlse again.
Before the moniker Goat found me, friends called me Sven because after a few bonghits my conversation tended toward praise of Swedish death metal. The Swedes perfected death metal, working in melody as structure and turning rhythm into a primitive but nuanced weapon.
As our longtime readers know, this site started out in the hacker days of the 1980s as a type of free speech protest designed to expand the various Overton-style Windows through shocking, disturbing, blasphemous, gory, apostatic, and sodomitic propaganda. We dislike censorship.
What is our purpose? Resurrecting a dead genre via natural selection, which means promoting the good, smiting the bad, and ignoring and accepting everything else.
Judas Priest came out of the era that melded Black Sabbath with Led Zeppelin and came up with some of the most creative guitar riffology in history, raising the standards by which any new album will be judged, and Invincible Shield tries to balance their past with multiple career peaks.
The news filtered down through the grapevine the other day that Yosuke Konishi of Nuclear War Now! Productions had entered into a new venture named Helios Press which will manufacture vinyl records in Brady, Texas. This hopes to serve the rising vinyl market which has not only not fizzled but continues to gain strength:
Some shows define an era, and the assault of Sammath on Texas revealed where underground metal is going now: doubling down on what made it great, injecting new creativity, and fleeing from the dual pitfalls of three-chord nonsense and elaborate “progressive” stylings.
Hybrid death, war, and black metal band Sammath is currently raging across Texas as part of its worldwide Texas tour. Clubs are 21+ but seem perfect for intense underground shows.
As if to acknowledge that Chuck Schuldiner died of AIDS on Valentine’s Day, the official merchandisers for Death have introduced a new line of Death merchandise featuring pink and kittens.