SHAARIMOTH Temple of the Adversarial Fire

by Joe Slater on February 1, 2018

Well crafted and nicely produced, Temple of the Adversarial Fire by Shaarimoth , appears to be a nice mixture of 90s black metal fun.  This is more in the epic vein, rather than underground sounding.  Lets face it: the first two songs are great.  There is a nice mixture of riffs and beats, with short phrasing.  It is a bit heavy on vocals. They can get tiring at points.  Bands I hear as influences here include Emperor, Morbid Angel, early My Dying Bride, and Bal Saggoth. Making my way through the album, song 3 leads with annoying vocals (minus 1 star), over a slower heavier riff.  In song 4, am waiting for the album to get its mojo back. It does, with a European blast beat that has a sick lower grinded guitar counterpart. A fun, evil Samael style rock riff emerges from that. Some of the vocals still are iffy, but the guitar playing is growing on me. Why is the album so choppy though?

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Sin and Despair in Deathcrush

by Hereweald Cola Algar on February 1, 2018

At the truest heart of metal lies a voice embodied, somewhat childishly, somewhat ineptly, but no less clearly and latent with potential, by Mayhem’s Deathcrush. The re-inversion of all values that metal enacts starts with the embracing of what modernity would see as its sickness unto death. The despair and sin of sickness unto death become vital active elements in the morbid minds of those who would vanquish dogmatic preconceptions in the Sky God Religions and their secular humanist counterparts.  Being, in essence a way of connecting back to itself, the ideological blockages set up by this dead-end society had to be faced head on.  Herein lies the relevance and meaning of the present album.  Despair is converted into pure energy, the rules disavowed, the road of sin is tread fanatically as a method of purification —a negative unity of evil towards the beyond, away from human-ness in its modern form, away from mundanity.  For the burgeoning underground, as seen from Mayhem’s perspective, primacy would placed on being and its dark discovery of self, against the presumption of knowing, and the oppressive, futile impositions from above.  All knowing, all value of music, would come from this ‘being’, from a dark exploration of the soul possessed by a cosmic force of destruction.

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The Imperial Reign of Emperor

by Brock Dorsey on January 26, 2018

The most technically and musically gifted band of the Norwegian black metal scene, the legendary Emperor are also the most well known outside of the documentary-level engagement that plagues most who know of Burzum and Mayhem.  Formed in the small rural town of Telemark Norway as a side project to a soon-forgotten death metal band, the group overcame the imprisonment of 75% of it’s lineup to deliver the most grandiose album of early 90s black metal.  Though Emperor’s career was far from perfect, it made a profound impact on the young genre and ultimately proved it’s limitless developmental possibility.
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Mayhem Grand Declaration of War

by Jerry Hauppa on January 25, 2018

A common theme you hear in critiquing music is the need to separate the art from the artist for the most objective analysis possible.  This all sounds good on paper, but we are all human, and the flaws that imbues in us make our understanding of all concepts skewed by perspective.  The metal path is one of social outcast and self-discovery through a grasp of the larger whole, and as such we are left with the purest essence of form and function, but still we allow our humanness to cloud our judgments inevitably.  We won’t give the time of day to a record made by some stretch-lobed lumbersexual even if he might have accidentally produced the next necessary evolution in metal, and we like it that way.  We have been proven right long enough by lousy records and “evolutions” of our favorite artists but although we may have erected a necessary safeguard for quality control, we need to analyze if it is constructed of statements and proofs of inherent positive musical traits or our own hubris instead.
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Brett Stevens Nihilism: The First Lecture

by D.A.R.G. on January 24, 2018

In Brett Stevens Nihilism, the author introduces an article consisting of a series of twelve lessons which he describes as an awakening to the reality of life.  A tinge of morality seemingly colors the lessons, but upon closer look, the prescriptions given are described in a way that one can see them arising from causal, qualitative observations.

In all this, there is, of course, the singular opinion of the author.  In approaching a discussion and description of said ideas, the latter will be kept in mind, opting to expand, interpret and focus.  Also, in order to respect the integrity of the book wherein these appear, they will not be spelled out either in their titles nor in their original exposition.
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The Haarslev PB30/60 As Big As The Ritz

by Brett Stevens on January 20, 2018

Dennis Emmental hated being late because it revealed to everyone how little he wanted to be there. Slipping past the creaky back door, he took his place in the line at OptiFood. Orders came from the digital kiosk at the drive-thru and Dennis had twenty-four seconds to assemble the ingredients for the OptiMeal:

  • Chinese: steak|chicken|fish, Szechuan sauce, noodles, lettuce, pepper, peanuts, onion
  • Mexican: beef|chicken, cheese 1, Picante sauce, lettuce, pepper, Guacamole sauce, sour cream
  • Italian: beef|chicken, Diable sauce, noodles, pepper, lettuce, onion, cheese 2
  • Thai: beef|chicken, cheese 1, noodles, Picante sauce, Szechuan sauce, pepper, onion
  • Murican: beef|chicken, cheese 2, Diable sauce, bread 11, Gaucamole sauce, cheese 1, lettuce
  • European: steak|chicken|fish, lettuce, pepper, sour cream, cheese 2, onion, bread 11

He and his cohorts were dumping ingredients in the short, stout, beaker-shaped commemorative plastic buckets used to serve the twenty-four ounce meals. The store was open twenty-four hours a day, and had a thirty-eight percent turnover rate at a six month interval. The owners were unconcerned; they had reached the point where it took a million bucks just to think about suing them, and everyone knew that most of their employees were retards and flakes and so just laughed off their complaints.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Incineration of 2017 Metal

by Brock Dorsey on January 17, 2018

2017 was a shit waste of a year when it came to metal music.  Yet with a whole generation of useless neckbeard millennials frantically trying to pursue a career in metal journalism via a desperate pursuit of vindication from that $40,000 of communications-degree student loan debt we have hundreds of “best metal albums” lists every year. 

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Power Trip – Nightmare Logic (2017)

by Nicholas Vahdias on January 16, 2018

Every year we are treated to an endless amount of ridiculous lists.  It seems that any individual with the ability to express their opinions is obligated to share their Top 10 or top 20 metal releases that more often than not echo the same three websites.  The bands that enter such lists tend to come in two varieties: veterans rehashing the same ideas in a more streamlined fashion and those who trick their audience via the use of gimmicks and presenting a familiar product with slightly different aesthetics as the next big thing.  In these last two years, speed metal has conquered the number 1 spot of most of these lists.  Last year Vektor’s Terminal Redux ruled the metal lists by far with it’s melody derived from Voivod and the phrasings from Destruction’s Eternal Devastation all held together in long sloppily composed epics… ultimately resulting in an above average album but a strong move for the funderground.  This year, Texans Power Trip succeed in winning the “funderground 2017 award” with their second album Nightmare Logic.  The Speed metal revival movement has finally found its idols to guide it’s path of remaining in the past and offering the most faithful reproduction of late 80s speed/thrash.

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Decapitated Proven Innocent!

by Brock Dorsey on January 8, 2018

As I predicted a few weeks ago with 100% accuracy all charges of rape, kidnapping, and sexual assault have been dropped against the four members of Decapitated.  The collateral damage done to the band is going to remain however as this news (published on a Saturday when little mind is paid to the news cycle) will surely receive significantly less buzz than the breaking story of their arrest, or the subsequent leftist metal media narrative that a guilty plea should be expected based on a ridiculous interview with some dingbat attorney who had absolutely no access to any of the evidence.  This will therefore result in many of the fans who have disowned them to continue believing them to be heartless rapists.  The band can expect extradition back to Poland soon, having very harshly learned a tough but important lesson.  This story is an important lesson to metal concertgoers and even more so to young metal musicians who will be touring or playing shows soon.  Let’s briefly examine how this story was treated by the liberal MSMM (mainstream metal media) and its fans, take a deeper look at the takeaways that can be learned from this unfortunate experience, and conclude with an open letter to the members of Decapitated I once shared a bottle of vodka with some years ago…
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Somber Lands: The Harmonic Minor Scale

by Brock Dorsey on January 3, 2018

Dark, brooding, and long cloaked in obscurity, the harmonic minor scale is a compelling collective of notes that has historically been used as an accent to minor key compositions.  For centuries only a handful of pieces had been written within its bounds as composers instead opted to weave in for a number of measures before an eventual progression into the natural minor scale.  From there it appeared again in a few folk songs, took a strong spiritual presence in Islamic culture, and later became an integral part of horror movies when they progressed into the frightening mediums they became in the 1970s.  But it wasn’t until the musicians of the early Swedish death metal scene discovered how to fully harness the scale’s potential that lengthy songs and even the majority of some albums began being composed within its bounds.  A truly grotesque wedlock, the scale gave he who wielded it the power to craft the most sinister and foreboding compositions possible within the laws of music.  It is for this reason one could attest that the minor harmonic scale has found a home in heavy metal that no other genre of music could provide.
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