Kjeld – Skym (2015)

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Kjeld tackles black metal by drawing a line through all of the bands to capture the concept through history and then pulling out the best and adapting it to a local sound, producing a band that alternates between mid-paced and high speed melodic black metal that balances its pleasant sounds with savage primitive riffing. The result introduces enough variation that melody serves as a technique within a palette, and brings out the implications of the phrases of the more chromatic riffing, allowing songs to mature into a clear perspective rising above the chaos.

The closest comparison to this band may come from second-wave bands like Kvist and Setherial, who shortened the longer melodies of Emperor and Burzum and focused on longer songs that brought forth the full melody later in it, more like the cosmic ambient music that inspired much of black metal. Similarly, Kjeld like to begin songs with a theme that develops in clash with more brutally straightforward riffing, then let it develop in order to be obliterated, then be reborn in its final form leading to re-interpretation of the initial theme. This effect works remarkably well as it allows songs to have the intensity of Zyklon-B (the band) with an endpoint like the flowing moments from Eucharist or Ancient, albeit in a style of melody that fits more in the local area from which this band came, much as the Sinister Diabolical Summoning brought forth a sense of if not ancestral at least familiar melody.

Skym maintains its intensity throughout the album mostly by varying tension internally in songs so that despite the high rate of fire the music never falls into a sonic wallpaper of uniform consistency that, even if intense, loses its power by becoming predictably so and relegating itself to a kind of drone. Instead, these songs develop as their own creations, and song structure varies moderately as a result, producing a series of listening experiences that put together create a power greater than the mere sum of their parts. Without putting itself in a camp or time period, Kjeld upholds the strength of black metal in both savagery and beauty, making this album the rare uncompromising listening experience that voices itself in a style fitting both its own experience and the ideal of the genre.

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Uncreation – The Great Delusion (2014)

Australia band Uncreation combines several underground metal styles: trudging death metal in the Immolation style, bursting speed metal like Artillery, and technical death metal for transitions. Avoiding explicit hard rock, it cycles between different ideas compatible with death metal, but focuses too much on trudging beats like the Suffocation clones of the late 1990s.

Technically adept, with highly proficient drumming, the band makes good work of these many styles and throws in some excellent riffs with an eye for transitions that increase emotional momentum even when slowing down. Vocals are of the raspy chihuahua-on-meth variety interpersed with the basement toad guttural that paces the beat during trudging parts. Within The Great Delusion is a promising album, buried under too much trope, with not enough emphasis placed on cultivating a mood and developing it instead of using it as a conduit to return to the trudge.

Apparently the band has disbanded after the untimely death of their drummer Rowley Hill, and has made this album available for free and legal download.

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#metalgate: SJW-controlled Metal-Archives.com censors realist reviewers

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SJW-controlled site Metal-Archives.com, famous for its desire to regulate what is “metal” and exclude non-leftist viewpoints from the site, has deleted user “bitterman” who gained notoriety for his realistic, masculinized reviews which expressed extreme intolerance of insincere, manipulative and mediocre metal. All of the writings of this person are now removed with no chance for the user to recover the hours of effort he put into the site.

Bitterman made a name for himself for thoughtfully but viciously reviewing the excess and stupor of contemporary metal, using a somewhat tongue-in-cheek “metal warrior” style as he skewered perpetrators of false metal like Watain. According to one commentator, “he paid the price for holding for-profit poseurs to the same standards as Onward to Golgotha and early Burzum” because of his vicious attacks on all that pretended to be underground metal and failed. Many of Metal-Archives.com’s staff are gamers who undoubtedly are aware of the SJW incursion into gaming that prompted #gamergate as well.

Wherever SJWs go, they censor all that is natural and right: masculinity, warfare, conflict, elitism, quality and excellence. Then they replace these with twee indie-rock metal hybrids and a policy of “acceptance” that rejects quality bands under the same excuse that Wikipedia uses, “notability,” while promoting the kind of hybrid dreck that 90s underground metallers would have thought belonged in the bin with Sonic Youth and Rites of Spring, not raging death metal and black metal.

Again we see the problem of allowing SJWs to infiltrate metal through media as, using that power, they change what it means to be “metal” while trying to purge metal of what makes it unique. At the end of this agenda, they will create a neutered form of metal-rock that will promptly collapse because it lacks all of what makes metal appeal to its audience, and the genre will collapse like the Soviet Union or Pol Pot’s regime. The SJWs will not care, because they got their 15 minutes of fame.

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Thantifaxath – Sacred White Noise (2014)

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The audience for this album are the same people who are fooled by magic shows at carnivals, speak in tongues at revivals, buy the latest iGadget sight unseen, and smoke in bed. If you claim to like this album, you are either not paying attention or merely a fool. Like every sell out, it is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator, which generally recruits idiots.
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Bands and labels, please put your stuff on YouTube

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Bands, labels and artists… we need to have a little talk about YouTube. Specifically, the absence of your official and legitimate releases on YouTube uploaded by you so that royalties go to the bands.

Like many of us, I work in an office. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I have a computer where I am expected to do work. But who is fooled? Most “work” gets done in a few hours in the morning, and the rest of the day is dodging meetings and doing paperwork.

While I have this sort of expensive computer, fat internet access, and these nice Harmon/Kardon speakers, I like to put all this high technology to use as a $4 radio. A $4 radio where I can choose what the DJ plays.

I use YouTube to find music, like many others. The reason is simple: almost no workplaces filter YouTube, and no evidence is left behind. I am not keeping pirated music on my computer and I am not pirating music. I am watching videos. True, these videos seem to feature only the cover image of an album while music (just coincidentally from that album) plays. But nonetheless, technicallyTM they are videos.

Many of you do the same.

I have a problem with this situation. When I want to check out, say, an early death metal classic, I type it in the search blank on YouTube. Then a video comes up. But it does not belong to the band, the label, the musicians, their family, dogs or friends. It belongs to some random guy named “BronyThugLife69” from Hoboken.

Why does this matter? As I type this email, the Deicide video I am enjoying has 132,068 views. At the royalty rate that YouTube pays, which is about 1/10 of a cent per play, that means BronyThugLife69 has earned over a thousand dollars for this video. He’s making bank for the simple act of pasting a cover image onto an MP3, uploading it to YouTube and not getting busted.

Now I click on BronyThugLife69’s profile. Oh look — he has not ten, not a hundred, but a thousand videos. It takes about five minutes to paste ten MP3s and a cover image into a video creation program, save to WMV, and upload to YouTube. If only a hundred people click on each of his videos per month, he’s making a professional salary.

Now, you may ask, why do I not simply upload my own versions of my favorite bands?

Unlike BronyThugLife69, I do not want to make money from someone else’s work. This band wrote the music, got a record contract, recorded the album, promoted it and toured on it. They deserve the money. I could always upload videos without receiving compensation, but that is a boring hobby and I get nothing from it.

Since YouTube is unlikely to go away in the near future, people like me will continue to use it. Bands and labels should, instead of blowing off this opportunity, upload their own albums and make sure the checks go to the band. If they are too lazy to do this, I will do it for them for a royalty of ten percent of their royalties.

This is not difficult. People will listen to your music either way. You can take it down, but that requires constant vigilance because someone else will in turn upload the missing Deicide video. If the band uploads it, the cash goes directly to them.

Is YouTube piracy? Probably, but not really. Most of us are checking out new music or listening to favorites we own back at home. We don’t care that the sound quality is not good. Most will use earphones, or these tiny desktop speakers, because we are in noisy environments or quiet ones and we have to hide the evil devil metal we are enjoying from our coworkers who might exorcise and eviscerate us if they knew.

If you bands and labels could get your act together and upload your own stuff, you would enable me to enjoy guilt-free listening to classics while I file these TPS reports. Me, and millions of other faceless workers at anonymous jobs in generic companies across the world, would really appreciate it.

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Maanes – Under Ein Blodraud Maane

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When a genre performs a postmortem on itself as black metal is about to do, it looks back through the years not only to find its peaks, but to find its forgeries. Like the first real black metal forgery, Ulver Nattens Madrigal, Maanes is an artistic fraud that uses the technique of black metal for its own sake, without having any idea of the underlying expression. It does not matter what that expression is because it cannot be policed with a list of rules, but the fact that it exists in actual black metal and not here is a matter of historical record.

“Sensitive guy” metal was nothing new when this was released. Opeth had already been mincing around the edges of the underground for a few years, following up on melodic softer death metal from Tiamat and Cemetary. Paradise Lost was huge and so was the idea of “crossover,” since everyone and their dog realized black metal had a narrow set of ideas that required exceptional people to implement, and that with those exhausted there was now a market for imitators. Maanes starts with the proposition that Burzum can be cloned, and to make that clone palatable to the kids emerging from the suburbs like spores from fungus, this clone could be hybridized with light progressive rock like Pink Floyd. The result is 90% black metal tropes laid out in mellow songs that develop seemingly independently of the melodic and corresponding artistic implications of the riffs, making an experience that is pleasant on the surface but leaves a gnawing emptiness from its failure to deliver the kind of profound transport and insightful revelation that black metal provided.

What makes this release hard to attack is that it is well-executed, well-produced and carefully concealed. Maanes are not amateurs; more likely, they are guys who got tired of having no success in other genres despite being better musicians than the people who were making the big bucks and getting their names in the newspapers. Like other Burzum clones of the era, most notably Abyssic Hate, Maanes make good use of Burzum sweep technique and even give a nod to Filosofem with the production. Using grandiose keyboards alongside somewhat obvious riffs capitalizing on known black metal patterns, Maanes keep up the black metal “sound” but these songs never go through the emotional process of discovering what lies beneath and so rapidly the listening experience becomes like hearing a front-loading washer finish up a duvet cover, if the washer had a good background in rock guitar.

The tragedy of black metal is that while it cannot be cloned it can be imitated, and so bands like Ulver and Maanes emerged to put a black metal surface on the same stuff they would have done with their Oingo Boingo cover bands a few years before. Interestingly, the technical competence as songwriters of these bands has declined over the years as nu-black has set its sights more on punk than on progressive rock. The approach remains the same and the effect similarly hollow, leaving listeners wanting more but not sure they want more of this. These sprawling songs carefully disguise how much they repeat their themes, often for seven minutes at a time, in what is essentially verse chorus songwriting that every two repetitions interrupts itself with a brief divergence. Newer bands do not even bother to do that, but make straight-up pop songs with black metal distortion and a few riff archetypes. Nods to Burzum, Darkthrone and Mayhem bubble to the surface throughout this release but it is unable to build context for its riffs to create the kind of atmosphere that those founding bands manipulated so well. The result is like every other aspect of modern society, ultra-competent on the surface and directionless within.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYP0mK9xVU

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#metalgate claims Pantera

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Despite efforts by nearly all parties to deny it, the underlying tension in metal that created #metalgate continues: the “new fans” who want music more like indie rock or punk versus the metal fans who want metal for metal’s sake. The metal fans realize that to be metal is to be an outsider to society and all of its rationalization for its own failure, including “reforms” and “revolutions,” while the punk/indie fans want metal to endorse some of those rationalizations.

The most recent victim may have been Pantera guitarist Darrell Abbot’s grave, which was referenced in an instagram post by the (ex-) vocalist of a crust/black band which embodies the worst of both veins of metal sell-outs, both the sensitive guy indie rocks who like crustcore and the tryhard war metal types who pose as being as hardcore as possible. According to the desecrator:

We paid douchebag darrell a visit, we spit on his grave, stole a pair of cowboy boots, and i wrote “FAG” on his grave… im not a homophobe but i hope all the panturrra fans see this and shit themselves with anger… FUCK DIMEBAG, buncha racist hillbillies

Only forty-eight hours later, the apologies were flowing forth:

The fact of the matter is I feel awful and guilty and this will stick with me forever, just like the Seinfeld guy using the N word… I can not express how sorry I am to Vinnie Paul and the Abbott family for the distress I caused, and the other members of Pantera and other acts Darrell was a part of. I owe everyone an apology for my actions because they were uncalled for, and horrible, despicable, and I went way too far. Some jokes are NOT funny and this is one of them. I took a joke way too far with a piece of paper and some hurtful words and as I’ve expressed, I don’t expect any sort of acceptance or sympathy…I hope at least someone will accept this and I hope for a better future for everyone…

What is shared between both of these sentiments? They are SJW ideas. He attacks Darrell because he thinks Pantera fans are a “buncha racist hillbillies” and excuses using the word FAG because he’s not a “homophobe.” This is SJW language here, first being concerned about policing whether or not other people approve of homosexuality and second in justifying violence or worse against those who are not pro-diversity, a.k.a. “racists.” When he apologizes, he uses the term “hurtful words” and compares his actions to “the Seinfeld guy using the N word” and then states he hopes for “a better future for everyone.” His motivation as a sensitive guy with social justice ideals is revealed in both of his statements.

I will not use his real name in this article, for the record, because public shaming can cause repercussions in this person’s real life, including career and social ostracization. No honest and decent person tries to do that because it is a passive but effective way at destroying the life of another. Nor will I name or link to his band, which has been utterly forgettable and forgotten from lack of any originality as well as blatant bandwagon-riding, because this like the sucker punch at Danzig is simply a publicity stunt that generated more notoriety than was expected. Let the media trick fail on its own.

But this leads us to an ugly point: a metalhead may well be divided by this event. It would be hypocritical for metalheads to start complaining about grave desecrations now after several thousand band photos in cemetaries. It is also nonsense to complain about damage to Darrell’s grave because, as noted by a number of sources, as with Jim Morrison’s grave the majority of the damage comes from fans of the artist and not enemies.

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At the same time, however, many metalheads do not feel all that great about this desecration. The reason is that the motivation behind it is wrong. Like the rest of the SJW incursion that prompted #metalgate, the desecration of Darrell Abbott’s grave was justified by SJW-logic: Pantera fans are (allegedly) racist hillbillies, and “homophobes,” so it’s not only OK but “good” (like, in the Church sense) to desecrate his grave because he and his fans are bad. This alone makes the desecration stand out as not wrong in a moral sense, but broken. Someone is using society’s logic against metal to justify making metalheads second-class citizens whose graves may be desecrated, at least for reasons other than the usual war/satan/death that make a good grave desecration. Like the metal fans who object to grave desecrations in general, or the metalheads who claimed that Pantera fans are “nationalist Juggalos”, I feel this misses the point. Society hates metal, and it uses terms like “nationalist” and “homophobe” to justify bullying metalheads, much like it used claims of Satanism and murder back in the 80s to do the same. Its goal remains unchanged: destroy metal.

We should also draw some parallels between Pantera and SJWs. Like the SJW incursion, Pantera was an invasion designed to sell-out metal so it could be assimilated by rock music, with profit for all. Metal sells well, but rock music that has the “rebellious” cachet of metal would sell even better, because rock music has been designed from its inception to be the most easily-digested and emotionally simplistic form of music ever created, like music made into baby food. It sells well because it is a compromise, both inoffensive enough that most people will tolerate it, and thoughtless enough that people like to project onto it their own emotions and needs. Rock music is basically 1950s advertising jingles set to guitars, and people buy it to stay “relevant” or to seem hip, when really it has always been and always will be a product from the same people who sell us junk we can barely afford to address problems we do not have in order to achieve an image we do not need.

The reason many of us detest Pantera is purely musical: it is part of the great Dumbing Down of heavy metal, trying to make it closer to rock/blues so that all the people in sports bars, hair salons, show-off gyms and cube farms can tap their feet to the beat just like they did every other form of rock ‘n roll. Pantera is heavy metal made into a lengthy television commercial, and in doing so, it solicited social approval in a way that is decidely against all that metal stands for and lives by. Pantera heard Exodus Impact is Imminent and Exhorder, maybe Prong Beg to Differ and realized they could make a bundle if they combined a tough guy/sensitive guy approach — a lot like what nu-metal did, come to think of it — and made the music sound a lot more like Bruce Springsteen or John Cougar Mellencamp, both of whom sold more albums than God and retired rich. That was the goal in Pantera: metal as product. For that reason, the Pantera guys abandoned their glam/hair metal and hard rock stylings, and went into Metallica style speed metal with Cowboys From Hell, giving it their Southern rock spin, and then upgraded their sound to angry brocore with the following albums before returning to a blues-saturated swamp rock sound. It worked and people bought it.

Metalheads tend to hate Pantera because it brought in the elements of society that we go to metal in order to avoid: the sleeveless shirt angry guys who start fights in cell phone stores, the blockhead rock fans who are faithless toward any ideal but their own gratification right now, and the musical circle of conformity that forms rock music. Pantera is the anti-metal disguised as metal, much like SJW music like the black/punk (lol) band who desecrated Abbott’s grave is. Pantera not just represents, but embodies, all that metal opposes and all that will destroy metal. If we look back on this story from the future, we will see how both Pantera and these grave desecrators came from the same movement, which is an attempt by the mainstream to destroy and then absorb the once-independent genre of heavy metal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo3Lkg8tIo8

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#metalgate: When bullies play victim

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#Metalgate began with a passive-aggressive attack: so-called “social justice warriors” decided metal needed to reflect the SJW ideology, and so moved into media, academia and bands to write metal that used their worldview like a propaganda weapon. Then they began complaining that they were victims of intolerance.

This was related to the previous issue with #gamergate, where SJWs moved into the gaming industry and when their mediocre “contributions” were not recognized, claimed discrimination was the cause. As usual, this was a power grab: under the guise of being victims, they claimed the right to bully others for not having the “right” opinions.

Now, it seems, the bullies are crying out as they are hitting us because feminist writers are claiming harassment from “the internet”:

Part of what’s different now is the existence of organized misogyny, with groups of men who are angry at feminism gathering under banners such as the Men’s Rights Movement and Gamergate, a diffuse network of video-game enthusiasts furious at attempts to curb sexism in the industry. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, “the mainstream culture of the media was more anti-feminist. That was when you had all that ‘feminism is dead, all women just want to get married’ kind of stuff,” says columnist Katha Pollitt, my colleague at the Nation. “But the men’s rights people, Gamergate, that’s new. There is this cadre of incredibly enraged men who have all found each other.”

As in #metalgate, these people have made a career of intruding where they are unable to compete, blaming other people for their lack of success, and then trying to cultivate an audience of other people who have failed. This is a typical strategy for taking over a group and it is known to parasites everywhere, most notably the “think of the children!” politicians and the advertising marketers who convinced people to like abominations like low-fat cheese, lite beer and tofurkey because “it’s healthier.” All lies, by liars, to seize power.

In the meantime, organized SJWs from Metal Archives continue to insult and belittle those who disagree:

At what point do people wake up and realize that #metalgate, #gamergate and the ongoing failure of our media have a common point of failure, which is the substitution of “social justice” for a detailed look at reality?

The only reason the SJWs and complaining, by the way, is that people are fighting back. Adria Richards heard a developer joke about a dongle and his friend make a joke about “forking” someone else’s project, and decided she was oppressed, so she snapped a picture and tweeted it with a typical SJW shaming/bullying message:

Her only complaint is that, as The Guardian reports, she got owned when people pushed back against her passive-aggressive victim-mentality bullying, instead of pitying her as she thought they should have:

Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.

‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’

They attempt to portray those of us who oppose them as “racist,” “homophobic,” bigoted, “sexist,” and other terms with no fixed definition, when really our statement is a middle path: we do not accept the reality-controlling language of either side of the debate. We look at reality as reality itself, or as close as we can get, instead of hiding it in all these neat little containers which tell us what we can think and what we must fear.

The more SJWs have made it into media, the more media has declined, mainly because it reports propaganda instead of what concerns normal people trying to live normal lives. As this image from the AEI shows, newspaper revenues are in free-fall:

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This is the same phenomenon we see in metal which is that while there is still a huge audience of indie/punk rockers who have showed up after 2001 to take advantage of this new territory to conquer, metal media is stagnant and declining, as are the new genres of metalcore and indie/shoegaze-metal/punk, mainly because like SJWs they are one-note shrill voices that seek to bully us and control our thinking, and have nothing to offer musically or artistically. Their message is always the same, and not surprisingly their music sounds the same, about like Christian metal or those annoying white power bands, come to think of it.

SJWs are death to metal and death to media. #metalgate has pushed back and now they complain about a victimhood of their own creation in the hope that uninformed people will take pity on them, fight back against those fighting back against the invasion, and by that act let the invasion succeed. Spread the word: SJWs are invaders and bullies whose complaints are hollow and whose every word is a lie.

For those who care about metal, it is time to stop supporting SJW-friendly Metal Archives, which has been distorting what is viewed as metal for over a decade in order to enforce its own agenda. A boycott is not enough; they have abused their position as journalists, and it is time for Metal Archives to be destroyed along with all other SJW media. These people are a cancer and they are bullies and until they are removed, we are all under threat of them attacking us.

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#metalgate zombies want you to like “Christian black metal” now

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The same SJWs in journalism and the media zombies who follow them want to destroy the black metal idea further by forcing it to include another genre of thought which conflicts utterly with its own, this time Christianity (in addition to the politically correct navel-gazing that provoked #metalgate). As reported in Metal Injection, Christian “black metal” is being mainstreamed:

Accuse me of not being kvlt enough, but I’ve always felt that black metal was better defined by the sound and not so much the message. We all know that black metal has signature sounds to it, and that both heavy and satanic music exists without being under the label of black metal. Having this mindset has let me into the world of unblack metal, and allowed me to understand and appreciate the goals of these bands. There’s just something intriguing about a group of Christians getting into a scene of music created with goals that specifically includes their persecution.

He says it clearly enough there: we know this is against what you believe, but we’re going to force your genre into generic status (“better defined by sound and not so much the message”) so that you are manipulated into accepting our propaganda. Whether it is Christian propaganda or SJW neurotic propaganda, the result is the same: the destruction of your genre by making it paradoxical.

I have a better idea. Let’s crucify some SJWs so their zombie political correctness gets recognized for the religion that it is, and then nail up the Christian metal bands so they can go to their holy deliverance and leave our genre alone. Then put the heads on pikes to warn others that we do not want your crazy world invading our oasis of sanity and refuge in which we can actually express a true thought without worrying about who it will offend. Fuck off!

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Dhwesha – Sthoopa

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Dhwesha create death metal with a large influence from classic heavy metal, sounding like a cross between the first Torchure album and a melodic Swedish band like first-album Sentenced or Desultory. Their bread and butter is the crossover between recursive downpicked rhythms like a speed metal band would use underneath melodic rhythm leads, and death metal riffs which re-direct these songs to more vicious ends.

Aesthetically a good comparison might be Monstrosity: drums, bass and guitar work together to create a powerful unison which hammers out a clear theme which corresponds to song title and vocal concept. But like early Therion, Dhwesha incorporates older heavy metal patterns and pulsing rhythms as opposed to the darker and more abstract death metal themes, which creates an organic heart of energy to this band which allows them to incorporate speed metal technique without it taking over songwriting. Songs generally cycle between verse- and chorus-like sections with a couple riffs each and a transitional section or two per song, focusing in the death metal way on the presentation of each. Frequently a lead-picked tremolo will outline a melody over a grinding but bouncy rhythm riff which creates a sense of a landscape shift.

Vocals take on the best attributes of Blasphemy, which is an incoherent shout so hoarse it sounds like the wind or a wild bison charging on an inattentive traveler, giving the music a feral air. All musicians show great proficiency but avoid showing off, which makes Sthoopa move like a single entity. Unlike many of the recent death metal attempts, Dhwesha show no desire to incorporate modern methods but homebrew their own instead, but also unlike death metal, this band seems content to exist in the late 1980s ambiguity between death metal and heavy metal. The result has the sentiment of Desultory with the earth-moving power of a more explosive act, but by balancing the two creates more of an atmosphere than one might expect from a band on their first album.

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