Among pipe smokers, the Virginia/Perique genre retains a perennial appeal because it mixes the sweetness of Virginia varietals with the tangy fruitiness of fermented Perique, creating a unique flavor that provides a nice transition from the monolithic sweetness of aromatics into the world of natural tobaccos.
16 CommentsTags: burley, nicotine, perique, pipe smoking, pipe tobacco, tobacco, va/per, virginia
Brutal yet melodic Dutch-German black metal fire team Sammath plan to unleash their latest album, Across the Rhine Is Only Death, during early second quarter 2019. This album extends their work on Godless Arrogance which took the grandeur of Strijd to its logical conclusion given the increasing viciousness and technicality of intervening albums.
17 CommentsTags: Black Metal, sammath
M8L8TH and Peste Noire’s Famine have joined forces in creating one of the weirdest movements to have ever existed in metal, Commercially friendly NSBM! Best of all was that the partnership released a whole load of ridiculous music and fashion items. Famine who represents all the worst French stereotypes imaginable and who has made a career of his first album that was essentially a well executed Burzum ripoff but with Rock elements to make the whole much more digestible. M8L8TH play metalcore/RAC with a few Black metal aesthetics in the riffs and pretty much consist of frontman Alexey known for killing a few immigrants and whoever is willing to write music for him to rant over.
Tags: Alexey, Avoid at all costs, Coup de Grâce, famine, Le Dernier Putsch, M8L8TH, Mental Cancer, Militant Zone, nsbm, peste noire, PESTE NOIRE - split - PESTE NOIRE, reconquista
The NWOBHM movement defined the basis for what both underground and commercial metal would become, everything was present from the gallops, the harmonized melodies, unconventional song structures and the reverence for the riff above all else. The movement struggled with commercializing itself and so even the more vicious bands were obligated in selling out and writing a ballad or a mid-paced rock song in hopes of being picked up by a major label as there was at that time money to be made. The micro-genre eventually burned out due to two main reasons. First was that the door to mainstream success had been closed permanently for the British bands as the media loved Def Leppard and the like. The second reason was that there were far too many bands releasing the same rehashed material while bands elsewhere were exploring unventured paths and the standards were on average raised as the pub rock riffs of most of the NWOBHM were simply not up to par. Enter Deep Switch, a band that appeared in the scene after the death of the genre and were set to make some of the most bizarre NWOBHM imaginable but falling to the same pitfalls as their predecessors.
3 CommentsTags: Deep Switch, end of an era, Nine Inches of God, NWOBHM
Since Metallica defined the use of palm muting in metal and made a motif of using the technique to add more emphasis to the rhythmic potency of their music, less creative bands have followed this route to the point where in modern metal melody has taken a secondary importance. Where metal was once about creating the best melodies and exploiting their full potential through arrangements, it has now become music to be listened to with the feet and other parts of the body. Bands seek to make people want to headbang through catchy Jazz like rhythms. By using one note riffs that eschew melody in favor of complexity and groove, metal has become a literal joke. All it takes now is proficiency with the right hand in playing combinations of triplets, single notes and sixteenth note with decent precision so that the sound engineer can readjust everything to a thousandth of a millisecond. Rhythm when used well is an expressive tool that can convey emotions just as well as melody as long as it is used in conjunction with a well formed melody. Let us see two examples of rhythm that have made fantastic songs even better.
13 CommentsTags: Blizzard Beasts, de profundis, immortal, rhythm, vader
If we had to concoct a subgenre that would be a form of Spinoza Ray Prozak Vijay Prozak Brett Stevens sonic Hell, it could well be slam: a death metal influenced continuation of what Pantera and Meshuggah did to speed metal, giving it a bit of groove and lots of chromatic fills based on rhythmic expectation. Internal Bleeding pretty much pioneered this subgenre.
Tags: internal bleeding, pantera, slam, unique leader records
Its name translating to “Black Ceremony,” Rippikoulu’s legendary demo was released only on tape at the time before being reissued by Svart Records seventeen years later, allowing for the democratisation of this powerful release for those would endure such a bludgeoning. Clear yet rumbling production allows for distinctly Finnish melodies in a simple death/doom form that is derived from the grindcore available at the time. Though this could be qualified as being a second or third tier Finnish record, very few are able to muscially evoke physical oppression as well as Rippikoulu.
6 CommentsTags: death metal, death-doom, demo, Doom Metal, Finnish Death Metal, finnish death metal scale, rippikoulu
After keeping a low profile for the last few years, Oakland-based dark metal act Mefitis recently published a three-song single in digital format as a precursor to their upcoming debut album.
9 CommentsTags: Black Metal, dark metal, mefitis
Elegy Records, the second oldest and longest running USBM record label, is closing its doors after 22 years due to social justice warriors lobbying to get them kicked off of credit card processors. The entire webstore is having a 60% off sale resulting in many classic and hard-to-find releases being available for around $4.
46 CommentsTags: Apocalypse, ben umanov, censorship, credit card processors, elegy records, fascism, matt goldberg, metalgate, MetalSucks, moribund records, no colours records, paypal, sjws, USBM
Like many of us, I discovered black metal as a young teenager. Back then, this relatively new form of music still retained some of its initial mystique and one could sense a scope and magnitude that went beyond previous conceptions of what metal was or should be. What initially won me over was not so much the heavy distortion, Satan/sodomy or spectacular extra-musical activities of individual musicians, but the evocative potential of the music. Its ability to create mental gateways into places normally out of reach, or as Mr. Vikernes once put it: “to stimulate the fantasy of mortals.”
16 CommentsTags: Dor Nu Fauglith, French Black metal, good french metal, Osculum Infame
