Demilich merchandise re-printed and available

From Antti Boman:

You once requested to be notified when new Demilich stuff is available. Well, a new batch of Demilich shirts is ready for sale at Record Shop X ( http://www.recordshopx.com/artist/demilich/ ). Currently there’s the classic design in T-shirt, long-sleeve, and for the first time also in zipper hoodie! When the sales start rolling, I’ll also order more of the other styles, and patches + other shit.

This also means Demilich stuff moves from An Entity Shop to Record Shop X, completely. The good thing is that you’ll be getting your stuff a lot quicker, the bad thing is that it costs more now. I’ll try to keep the prices as low as possible, though.

If you want to get info on the future Demilich releases (new merchandise and the compilation CD/LP), please add your email address at http://www.anentity.com/demilich/merchandise.php

If you don’t want to hear the news, just ignore this. I won’t be using these email addresses again, unless you signed for notifications on the compilation CD/LP at http://www.anentity.com/demilich/discography.php .

It’s hard not to love this progressive death metal band from way before this was a trend. Ignored for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, the band experienced a renaissance in 2005-2008 and has been returning slowly to the fore ever since. Frontman Antti Boman now plays with Jess and the Ancient Ones.

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Osmose: Ildjarn / Hate Forest split forthcoming

Cold minimalist black metal got a bad rap back in the 1990s when people figured out that it had basically taken Darkthrone’s techno-influenced Transilvanian Hunger and recombined it with the thrash from generations before.

Ildjarn in particular sounded like an occult nature mystic version of DRI, complete with the idiosyncratic songs made of tear-off riffs. As black metal devolved, more bands tried the brutal short fast and minimalist approach, but none quite achieved the pristine chilling isolation of Ildjarn.

Now Osmose Productions has announced a split between Ildjarn and one of the bands it undoubtedly influenced, Hate Forest. This slab of forest metal, called Those Once Mighty Fallen, presents past unreleased material from both bands, which are now both non-practicing.

Here’s the official announcement:

From the cold blackened graves their shadows rise…. Osmose Productions releases unexpected ILDJARN / HATE FOREST split CD/LP, called “Those Once Mighty Fallen”. Both dead bands are presented with their lost and forgotten recordings, accidentally found not so long ago. ILDJARN’s songs were created in the dark year of 1994 and HATE FOREST’s during cold winter nights of 2000-2001. Now, carefully re-mixed and re-mastered this audio- terror is available first time. A real epitaph to sincere, true black metal. No release date yet to communicate. – Osmose on FacePlant

As a total Ildjarn fanboi, I’ll be seeking this out with bells on. For more interest, read our interview with Ildjarn from back in the hazy 00s.

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Heavy metal fans: brighter than you think

A new survey has found that “metalheads” are more athletic, socially successfully and musically literate than fans of other genres.

According to The Australian, one of the largest surveys of Britain’s metalheads discovered that metal is considered “an overwhelmingly positive force in the lives of those who love it.”

The article categorizes metal as “escapist,” meaning that it helps its fans through hard times. Nearly three quarters of the respondents to the survey said metal had helped them through a tough period in their lives, and 79% said they felt “energized” after listening to metal.

Its most interesting factoid came from Spinefarm managing director Dante Bonutto, who counterpointed the idea of metal as escapism with a note on its practicality. “[Heavy Metal] defines itself against the mainstream, the ‘short-term’ music fans that don’t play or think too much about music…Metal defines you against that shallow form of music,” said Bonutto.

Conducted by the British Phonographic industry, the survey asked 3,600 visitors of participating metal labels, metal magazines, and music industry sites about their listening habits.

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Birth A.D. releases title track from new album “I Blame You”

Thrash band Birth A.D., who seem to be a continuation of later 1980s thrash like SOD and DRI, have released a streaming track from their new album, I Blame You.

The new album has been recorded with 80s metal guru producer Alex Perialas and includes re-recorded tracks from the first Birth A.D. release, Stillbirth of a Nation. Much like early DRI albums, this will give fans the band’s entire oeuvre in an updated form.

According to Blistering.com, the new album is “angry, fast, catchy as hell.” Should be a contender for album of the year if nothing else.

Thrash was a hybrid between extreme hardcore and extreme metal that arose in the early 1980s with bands like DRI, MDC, COC, Cryptic Slaughter, Fearless Iranians From Hell and Suicidal Tendencies making short, fast, punk-structure songs with metal riffs.

Currently most people refer to the genre as “crossover thrash” in order to differentiate the term from “thrash metal,” which was a 1980s teen metal name for “speed metal,” and comprises the range of music from Metallica through Destruction.

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Immolation recording new album

NYDM founders Immolation are in the studio and preparing work on their ninth full-length album, according to apeshit zine.

According to the report, Immolation are in Sound Studios in Milbrook, NY with veteran producer Paul Orofino with Zack Ohren behind the mixing desk. The band state the album will be “one of their strongest yet.”

Starting out in the late 1980s as a speed metal band with death metal vocals, Immolation morphed in death metal and then technical death metal with 1996’s Here In After, regarded by many as the apex of the band.

After a long absence, they returned with a series of late death metal albums like Unholy Cult which used a simpler but more streamlined style of death metal.

With 2010’s Majesty and Decay, and later the Providence EP, Immolation went in a more commercial direction, taking the simple songwriting of radio metal like Slipknot and adding to it death metal and speed metal riffs.

As long-time fans, we’re hoping they’ll return to death metal because they do it so well, but we’re not so delusional as to forget that death metal very rarely pays the bills. Good luck to this long-running NY band.

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Music has gone Emo over the past 50 years

Boo Fucking HooA lot has happened in the last 50 years.

A whole cultural revolution took over, starting in the 1960s, that combined the post-war “Me generation” with the progressive theories of the 1930s. Birth control, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, better quality marijuana, educating women, white flight to the suburbs, the EU, a radical decrease in traditional values and religion. We’ve been weaving in and out of that great cultural change ever since.

Generally, we think of modern pop music as the “counter-culture,” meaning it opposed the culture of its time. Many consider metal counter-culture, still others (paying attention to the early words of Black Sabbath, who claimed they were there to rain on the hippies’ parade) see metal as a counter-counter-culture or a subculture.

Either way, metal’s roots are in pop. Pop music is as eternal as the wind; millennia ago, it was the folk songs of isolated people who sang them to each other in their small towns. In the cities, these became High Art through theatre and later specialized music. But roughly the same idea remains: catchy tunes that make people think of important things in life in an offhand, slightly cynical, humorous and casual way.

During these last 50 years, pop has changed quite a bit as it has become more introspective, less complex and more minor-key:

In the 1960s, 85 percent of the songs were written in a major key, compared with only about 40 percent of them now. Broadly speaking, the sound has shifted from bright and happy to something more complicated.

When the researchers analyzed the beats per minutes (BPM) of each song, they found a decrease from an average 116 BPM in the 1960s to approximately 100 BPM in the 2000s. Songs in the 1960s tended to run under three minutes, whereas more recent hits are longer, around four minutes on average.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is that our current favorites are more likely to be emotionally ambiguous…studies in the past have linked music preferences to personality traits, such as a preference for sadder music being tied to more empathy, openness to experience, and less extroversion.

This points to an interesting facet of our culture during this time.

We too have become “tied to more empathy, openness to experience, and less extroversion.”

We’ve also become more alienated, and more likely to retreat to familiar experience.

Part of this can be explained by the sheer terror of the times. With nuclear missiles ranging around the skies, and non-stop internal turmoil and war abroad, we can’t be blamed for wanting to stay in the basement sometimes.

But even more, we’ve become Emo. Emo music is self-indulgent, a bit more depressed than melancholic, but most of all, it is self-pitying. It is music of the hopeless, kids who’ve given up and so they cut themselves to feel alive.

Our whole society has slowly gone Emo. People talk about their feelings and want someone to make it right for them. If something is difficult, people throw up a half-hearted stab and then run off to the TV or pub. We pity ourselves and idealize being a victim, because then others will take care of us.

In short, we’re an exhausted culture and our music, too, is exhausted.

Where does metal fit in? It’s usually minor key, but also chromatic. It throws the “complicated” emotions out on their ear and replaces them with fervid, warlike, and muscular riffing that fits together into a story.

If Emo is the disease, metal is the cure.

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Punk: caught between protest music and poetry

It’s worth quoting Greil Marcus at length in this regard:

“[I]n the beginning, punk was indeed a sort of secret society, dedicated not to the guarding of a secret but to its pursuit, a society based on a blind conviction that there was a secret to be found. Was it that once the secret was seemingly discovered, once punk became an ideology of protest and self-expression – once people knew what to expect, once they understood just what they would get when they paid their money, or what they would do to earn it – the story was ready for its footnotes? In the United States, primitive enclaves had formed across the country (nightclubs, fanzines, record stores, a half-dozen high school students here, a trio of artists there, a girl locked in her room staring at her new haircut in the mirror) though perhaps less in response to the thrill of hearing $10 import copies of the banned ‘Anarchy in the UK’ single than to newspaper and TV features about London teenagers mutilating their faces with common household objects. Real discoveries were taking place, out of nothing (‘The original scene,’ said a founder of the Los Angeles punk milieu, ‘was made of people who were taking chances and operating on obscure fragments of information.’).” – Souciant

Punk was unformed but searching.

Then later, it became streamlined.

It struggled to escape its rock heritage as protest music, and reconnect with its inner poetry, which wanted more than what life offered.

Punk was initially an orgasmic, messy, uncategorizable cultural explosion of mutually contradictory tendencies. Visually, dayglo pinks and greens (X-Ray Spex) collided with fascist and communist imagery (Sex Pistols) and stark black military surplus (Crass) – or bondage — gear. Meanwhile, guitar-driven rock and roll (Ramones) mixed weirdly with androgynous, keyboard-driven experimentation (The Screamers;) and also, inflammatory and reactionary sentiments (Black Flag’s “White Minority,” or the original version of Siouxsie’s “Love in a Void”) were combined confusingly with Marxist and anti-capitalist motifs (The Dils’ “Class War” or anything by The Clash.) That was why punk was so genuinely scary to the public at large. It was a mess of conflicting imagery and sentiment, all of it intentionally provocative.

After punk died, metal carried on this spirit.

Instead of being confused, it went in a literary direction: aspire to the poetic and epic in life.

For this reason, it is less social, political and concrete, and more spaced out. Hobbits, aliens, zombies, knights and wizards.

It’s worth noting that now metal is trapped between the protest music (Gojira) and that which still aspires (Demoncy).

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After Mayhem metal radio show

“Christian metal,” Led Zeppelin the person, lack of good tour packages, and Benjie’s top 10 EPs. We talk about upcoming possible interviews, lots of gas, and lonely old Benjie after Sawyer graduates. We talk giant bruises, phone attacks during the show, and our upcoming Halloween special. Enjoy this little nugget until we return on Oct. 27th. Keep it METAL!

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Thevetat – Disease to Divide

Two of the most epic styles of death metal were the aggressive flood-of-noise NY style exemplified by Incantation, and the melodic style demonstrated by bands like Asphyx or Demigod which added a melodic superstructure to a series of vicious riffs. Without losing its distinctively New World character, Thevetat joins the abrasive and inhuman sounds of early Incantation with an occult melodic sound.

A mystical death metal experience results. While on the surface this music sounds like a train rushing past in a subway tunnel (preferably during total warfare) its underlying mood is that of hidden potential, arising from violence to show us not a structure within a structure, but a structure enclosing the visible structure we see. Its occult nature derives from this ability.

Guitars tend to follow the surging stream of power chords that defined Demoncy and Profanatica as much as Incantation, and the staccato muted-picking rhythms more like what Immolation or Revenant were using during the classic days of death metal. The result varies itself enough, between its raw side, its melodic elements, and its hookish rhythm riffing, to keep its consistency from being overwhelming.

What is impressive about its consistency is that these songs hold together and make sense, unlike post-modern style “death metal” which uses what’s essentially carnival or cartoon music that attempts to string together radically “different” riff styles to keep the groundlings amused, these different riffs flow together to show us an expanding vision of what the song is trying to communicate.

Personnel on this album played on Ceremonium (Thomas Pioli) and Immolation (Craig Smilowski) albums of the past, and not only does the competence show, but so does the influence. The earth-moving forward thrusting riffs and aggressive attack of Immolation are mated with the somber and emotional moods of Ceremonium, then shaped into something of its own direction with the overall personality of the band. While this three-song CD is just a start, expect good things from this new/old band.

1. Lifeless

2. Transmigration of Souls

3. Nihilistic Doctrine

“Nihilistic Doctrine” and the other two songs can be heard on the bandcamp page for this EP.

Buy the CD

You can acquire this pro-press CD EP from its distributor, Dark Descent, for a moderate $6.

Learn more about the band on Thevetat’s Facebook page.

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