Metal needs a new sound and a new imagery ecosystem. 1970s metal had doom and warnings of the apocalypse, 1980s metal warned of collapse from within through choppy fractured sounds, and 1990s metal brought a fluid structuralism that emphasized pattern and order while embracing the evil that 1970s metal warned of and the chaos of the 1980s.
9 CommentsTags: creature, postmodern metal
Recent digital archaeology brought forth the paradox of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game from 1982.
17 CommentsTags: alcohol, atari 2600, entombed, marijuana
Rap/punk/metal band Body Count, responding to recent race riots across the US, released a radio edit of its song “No Lives Matter,” which apparently is a commentary on the confusion and acrimony over the name of the National Bolshevik style group Black Lives Matter.
19 CommentsTags: body count, Crossover
Veteran doom/proto-metal band Black Sabbath decided to cash in on the latest media trend and released a riff on one of their classic designs changed to read “Black Lives Matter” instead of “Black Sabbath.” It is apparently hoped that this will extend their relevance for another six months and shift up to another fifty thousand units.
30 CommentsTags: black sabbath, money
Animate Records continues re-releasing compilations of tracks from classic Agathocles rare recordings as part of an eight-record series that reproduces a triptych from Hieronymous Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Each contains tracks from splits, EPs, singles, and other hard-to-find Agathocles music.
1 CommentTags: agathocles, animate records, Grindcore
Forensear come to us from the Argentinian scene, part of that wide South American envelope where the distinctions between subgenres blur, and sounds roughly like an early Testament playing death metal at moderate speed metal pacing, resulting in a trudging but energetic delivery.
1 CommentTags: forensear, Speed Metal
History will not remember war metal well, since it took aspects of black metal and intensified them but in doing so, missed the point of the atmosphere and sense of a world changing in parallax, where it drifts backward as time thrusts us forward, that black metal captured.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, castiga
Despite appearing to be from the Carcass school of grind, this band contains more death metal and modern metal than 1980s grind, although it mixes in a fair amount of bounding, aggressive grindcore from the Repulsion, Terrorizer, and Napalm Death early 1990s model. Nonetheless this band possesses its own style.
3 CommentsTags: Grindcore, putrid offal
The press release that came along with this album described it as being similar to Opeth, but a leisurely listen with one of my Connecticut wrapper mild cigars that taste like Nilla wafers reveals a more distant ancestor: Queen. This is theatrical rock music that borrows some metal riffs, but not metal in any meaningful sense.
4 Comments
Progressive-styled metalcore band Oceans Of Slumber announced recently that its latest album, entitled Oceans of Slumber, will be released on September 4, 2020, via Century Media Records. This follow-up to their 2013 album Aetherial, the 2015 EP Blue, and 2016 album Winter continues their merger of prog-rock stylings, hard rock riffs, and lush instrumentation.
22 CommentsTags: metalcore, oceans of slumber
