Graveland works around mass media, opens own store

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Despite being one of the premiere third wave black metal bands, Graveland have long been excluded from mainstream media and most distros as much for their esoteric music as their rumored controversial beliefs. Now, to work around that blockade, Graveland has opened its own web-store:

Graveland has also announced a split CD with droning fifth-wave black metal band Nokturnal Mortum. The band issued this statement: “After many years of staying as a solo project the time has come for some serious, epochal changes! Again, Graveland will be joined by other musicians that will be supposed to prepare the band for live performances. Working on two Gravleand tracks for the cd split with Nokturnal Mortum will be a little test for the cooperation within the new line-up. On the 7th/8th of March 2015 we have recorded drum section for both new Graveland compositions. The new drummer is no one else than previously announced Mirosław Rosiński (Mystherium, Horns, ex-Moontower, ex-Warfist). You can check the sample from the session below. In April we will record guitars again, later bass and vocals. Anna “Alruna” Oklejewicz also take part in those recordings, she is responsible for chello and medieval viella. Both compositions will be ready by the end of April. One of them will be also used for a video clip consisting of material recorded by Darken in Austrian mountains and forests.”

The first wave of black metal emerged out of the proto-black metal movement which appeared with the unholy union of Hellhammer, Slayer, Bathory and Sodom. From that, a second wave emerged in Norway starting with early Immortal, Burzum, Darkthrone and Mayhem. The third wave, led by bands like Ancient and Graveland, showed a willingness to refine this music into a more soundtrack-like and ambient form, going quasi-progressive in song structure as a way of evading assimilation by the rock music hordes. After that came the more mainstream revisitation of past black metal forms with the fourth wave, and finally the fifth wave of bands who reduced it to a form of droning punk music with minor-key motifs and black metal themes. After that, only retro and assimilation have remained.

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Morpheus Descends releases From Blackened Crypts compilation

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Early death metal band Morpheus Descends is back in the action, with future tours lined up and a re-issue of its complete recordings heading to stores. The compilation From Blackened Crypts combines the full-length Ritual of Infinity with the two EPs that followed, Chronicles of the Shadowed Ones and The Horror of the Truth along with other rare recordings.

The box set includes, in addition to the 2CD digipak, two new and unreleased tracks wich will see issue as a separate 7″ entitled From Blackened Crypts and a DVD entitled Visage of Malady which contains tons of live footage as well as interviews with the band, accompanying a 11×17″ double-sided poster and 24-page booklet. The tracklist is:

Disc 1
1. Oozing from the Urn
2. The King’s Curse
3. The Way of All Flesh
4. Corpse Under Glass
5. Immortal Coil
6. Trephanation
7. Proclaimed Creator
8. Accelerated Decrepitude
9. Submerged in Adipocere
10. Enthralled to Serve
11. Ritual of Infinity
12. Trephanation
13. Accelerated Decrepitude
14. Triformed Limbs
15. Stigmatic Crucifixion
16. Residual Kill
17. Cairn of Dumitru demo 93

Disc 2
1. The Cruciform Hills
2. Cairn of Dumitru
3. Autumn Bleed
4. Signs of Gehenna
5. Moupho Alde Ferenc Yaborov
6. Begging for Possession
7. Valley of Undead War
8. Shaitan the Unborn
9. The Horror of the Truth
10. Corpse Under Glass (Live Reunion-Martrydoom)
11. Accelerated
12. Trephanation
13. Triformed Limbs
14. Accelerated
15. The Cruciform Hills pre-release ’94
16. Residual ’91
17. Autumn Bleeds ’93

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Heathen Call – Volume IV

In the early 1990s, before Wikipedia and Metal-Archives destroyed knowledge by standardizing it, zine editors were like guerrilla truth-fighters. At their day jobs, they stood in front of copiers while a colleague nervously kept watch, running off thousands of sheets that they then stayed up until dawn stapling and preparing for mailing. Everyone who could be a fanatic took his or her turn firing off publications.

Heathen Call comes from that same spirit. Its goal is to write about heathen music, which is the intersection of folk and metal with sometimes ambient/soundtrack overtones that focuses on pagan/ancient topics and aesthetics. If the medievalism of Dead Can Dance or the Ren Faire seemed like fun, but with the vicious realist approach of metal, that would be the heathen underground. In this issue, Heathen Call covers long-running folk band Changes, black/folk metal band Gjhallarhorn from Ukraine, heavy metal band Akashah, and black metal band Grafvolluth. While this slants the content by weight toward the metal, the most interesting part is the Robert N. Taylor interview with Changes in which he discusses the challenges of staying realistic in a world dedicated to frivolous distraction to avoid seeing its inner emptiness. Changes formed in 1969 and in theory would have been included in the great folk music explosion, but they did not fit in with the flowers in the hair message of the age. Taylor brings forth not only forgotten history but more fully developed ideas on pagan, heathen and traditional culture than one normally hears.

This zine is spectacularly short and clean. The focus is clearly the content. With elegant but sparse graphics, black-on-white layouts designed for easy reading, and selective content of interviews with questions that get into the depth of purpose and motivation behind these artists, Heathen Call would not fit in with the “what amps do you use?” and “have there been many groupies this tour?” type writing that populist magazines aim for, nor the political dogma zombie recitation of the political magazines. As such, this is a rare animal. It would be interesting to see more interviews with people such as Robert N. Taylor and other thinkers in this area, and getting away from the also-ran black metal bands who are exploring a heathen area tangentially to being participants in the dead, bloated and off-gassing black metal scene, but as a content-based zine Heathen Call provides an interesting, quality read for those interested in this niche spanning multiple genres.

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Codex Obscurum issue #7 available for pre-order

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The seventh issue of New England old school metal zine Codex Obscurum has been completed and is now available for pre-order.

Featuring a list of bands including Deceased, Thanatos, Crypt Sermon, Dawn of Demise, Wastlander, Undergang, Blood Incantation, Magic Circle and Drug Honkey, the zine promises to be a continuation of the past concept of this hand-produced stapled and Xeroxed zine, which is focus on the music from a fan perspective without the nonsense and trappings of the music industry.

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Tau Cross releases first track “Lazarus” from upcoming album Tau Cross

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All-star metal/punk band Tau Cross — with members Rob “The Baron” Miller from Amebix on bass/vocals, Michel “Away” Langevin on drums, and members of Misery on guitars — has released the first single from its upcoming album Tau Cross. The single, entitled “Lazarus,” shows the style of this new band.

The band describes its sound as “the natural evolution of Miller’s work in Amebix,” and “Lazarus” bears this out — with one important detail that most forget. Amebix continued its evolution recently with Redux, which showed classic Amebix tracks with a Metallica Ride the Lightning treatment paired with atmospheric and ancient tribal sounds. Where Tau Cross picks up however is after Amebix Monolith, which sounded like old Amebix run through a filter of AC/DC and Motorhead. “Lazarus” returns to that point but brings to bear the full technical power and songwriting wisdom of these experienced composers.

Death metal fanatics may be hoping for a version of Amebix No Sanctuary or Arise with more technical instrumentation, but Tau Cross takes a more heavy metal approach but updates it with the high-intensity rhythms of punk and then a unique songwriting approach that can only be described as spirit or intent more than technique: a cosmic metaphysical outlook much like that of Tangerine Dream paired with a Celtic tribal feel that would make Absu drool. The problem that Miller and Away face in their “day job” bands of Amebix and Voivod is that those bands have already made a name for themselves in crust hardcore punk and progressive heavy metal already, and those expectations bestow too much baggage for material in another direction to be released under those names. So far, “Lazarus” is the only track released and it shows only a small slice of what Tau Cross will be, but there is promise in this continuation and outgrowth of the Amebix concept to a new level.

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Supuration releases cover image for Reveries…

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French progressive rock/death metal hybrid Supuration have released the cover for their upcoming album, Reveries…. Created by famed underground metal artist Dan Seagrave, the cover image displays classic death metal symbology in its gnarled and organic textures in a mythological setting.

Reveries… will see release via Listenable Records on May 29, 2015. Mastered by Dawn Swano (Edge of Sanity), the album “is a re_recording of old songs written during the 90s” according to the band. Perhaps the combination of their newer more aggressive technique, classic death metal imagery and their inventive songwriting will forge a new classic.

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Why do all SJWs look the same?

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For those who are not so narcissistic that they are oblivious to the fact that Western civilization is in full downfall — and only a few hundred years after we fixed everything with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — the events in politics and the news seem like frosting on a cake. We know everything is in dysfunction, and that our leaders were elected for being entertaining, and that the end is rushing up to meet us. Death metal knew this thirty years ago and black metal formalized it.

The question of “why?” is too big for this article, but it is worth mentioning that some think it is genetic decline. All of the weird stuff in your shampoo, chemicals in the air from strange factories, preservatives in your junk food, toxic carcinogenic truck exhaust, and your genome getting hammered by bad TV and other brain-busters… maybe it all adds up. Perhaps technology is a one-way ticket to doom for all societies, and we’re not the first to invent it, and we’ll die out like the rest.

In support of this theory, I present a series of SJWs. They seem to be cut from the same cloth:

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It is not just the glasses, the body weight or weird puffiness of the flesh, or even the fixed zombie stare that comes of repeating the same non-solutions in the face of your society coming apart at the hinges. No, it’s as if they share some kind of genetic similarity, a mutation like Down’s syndrome or Mongoloidism. Is it a virus? Or simply broken-down DNA?

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They don’t help by dressing in the most ugly unisex fashion that retains its ugliness on both sexes, or by doing their best to look intently like both victims and V.I. Lenin in that famous “forward into the future poster” at the same time, both assertive and hurt. But beneath all of that, it’s like they are an alien species among us.

marie_harf.

zombie_communist_lenin

The fanaticism is obvious, that’s certain. But so is a kind of doubt, as if saying “I’m beautiful” doesn’t actually make it so. The sort of doubt that comes when reality peeks in around the edges of ideology and says, “Peek-a-boo! All the stuff you’re saying… it won’t fix anything. And you’re miserable and drink yourself to sleep five nights a week, after pigging out on TV dinners and individually-wrapped bon-bons.”

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In these faces there is something horrifying. They are not happy. They are not even content, or halfway joyful about life. They are hurt, angry and resentful. They are on a mission to destroy. The world has injured them and they are chronically unhappy, grasping for power as if it will fill the void in their souls (that, alas, eating 412 pies did not fill). These people are a joke. They are miserable angry vandals screaming like monkeys in a desperate attempt to both avoid the obvious, and make themselves feel better about their utter insignificance in the face of it.

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Smile for the camera! Smile big and show us what’s inside! Oh wait, nothing but worms and bitterness. Well, then do your best to look like some kind of squash. People like squash. You want people to like you, don’t you? No, you want them to serve you. To bow at your every whim, and bring you pies and bon-bons when the inner weeping gets so bad that a gallon of box wine can’t put it to rest.

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Dredd (2012)

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Dredd takes 1950s noire themes and explodes them into a 21st century action film wrapped around a 1980s concept, but does so successfully and produces a thoughtful action film with a subtle but revelatory character study which makes it both fit together as a realistic drama and uphold the standards of its comic book origins.

The film takes place in a 24th century dystopian sprawl that is what remains of the USA. 800 million people live in Mega-City One, where over 17,000 crimes are committed daily. To keep up with the decay, police and courts have been combined into one forces: the Judges. Roughly analogous to medieval knights, these warriors roam the city and find criminals and administer punishment on the spot, including death. One detail that most fail to notice about this film is that in the poorest areas of Mega-City, just about every person is on welfare. In the Peachtrees Tower where most of the action takes place, 96% of the residents are on welfare. This gives Dredd a realistic take on dystopia, which is that it is a dystopia-utopia where good intentions and expanding humanity have led to an unstable situation.

Karl Urban creates from Judge Dredd the most believable film version yet, restraining verbal expression to the minimum but using pauses and body language to convey more nuanced reactions. Dredd follows the Judge as he takes a new colleague, Anderson, into a futuristic equivalent of the apocalyptic Section 8 housing in American cities today in pursuit of evil drug dealers who are terrorizing the helpless residents. This part of the plot feels like a 1980s holdover and my guess is that most of the people who took exception to this movie did so as a reaction to this aspect of the plot. However, the drug angle takes no greater significance in the plot than to introduce wealthy bad guys with infinite men to spare so that Dredd and friends have someone to fight that will result in a high body count which will disturb no one because of zero sympathy for the dead. The movie adds a 21st century comic book feel by incorporating technological and metaphysical aspects to the plot, expanding it from a pure adrenaline action flick to more of a science fiction hybrid, in a slightly less nuanced version of what Aliens and Terminator did, which is to create a realistic situation in which technology fails and bravery must prevail, and thus bring out some depth to the characters. Urban’s Dredd grimaces and gruffly commands his way through the movie but increasingly reveals the complex mentation required for someone to dedicate his life to thankless fighting of evil with certainty of ultimate death, giving us the most believable Dredd yet.

While not all of this film will appeal to those who find comic books one-dimensional, the filmmakers did their best to rein in those impulses while still delivering enough violence and terror to give this movie the impact it needs to be convincing. Eschewing the approach of the 1990s Stallone Dredd, Urban’s Dredd exists in a world that is more noire than superhero: dark hopeless human existence in which the Judges are more pathological authoritarians than happy heroes, and humanity is revealed as the mewling parasite that it seems to be. In the end, the film is both entertaining and compelling, giving this character fullness in an energetic retelling of a tale as much concerned with order versus chaos as the old Westerns and King Arthur era stories that surely inspired the creation of this one as much as its futuristic dystopian setting.

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Devil (2010)

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This film combines supernatural horror with the time-honored formula of detective stories, which is the “locked room” mystery. In this case, the locked room is an elevator in which five people are stranded during a power outage. As time goes on, and evil acts accumulate, it becomes clear that one of the people in the elevator is in fact working in service to darkness and impurity.

M. Night Shyamalan prides himself in making atmospheric films with semi-philosophical ideas lurking under the surface, but it is safer to say that Devil takes a Miltonian approach to expressing a religious message that ends up being more gnostic than the convenient externalization of Satan which with modern religion addresses evil. While the intent of the film is made clear, it strays far from the two thwarts to quality expression of idea in film, which are the blunt propaganda of contemporary religious cinema and the concealed satisfaction with deconstruction of all values — with the breakdown supplanting re-evaluation — that is the hallmark of Hollywood. In this film, Satan plays an active role in the judgment of humanity.

Locked-room mysteries tend to be research projects into either or both of the psychology of the people in the room or their pasts, looking for a bridge between characters. The sixth character here is an investigating police officer who struggles daily with the agony of loss of his wife and child in a DUI hit and run accident. Seen through his eyes, the presence of evil becomes less supernatural and more a case of human self-absorption causing negative results in reality as illusion collides with consistency. Locked outside of the elevator and many floors away, he investigates the people in the elevator with the help of telephones, the internet and other people, searching to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The result is less atmospheric than a fast-paced mystery or a mid-paced thriller, with enough gore and suspense to drive the plot forward and make solving the mystery seem an urgent necessity. Whether these actors are as good as their craft as it seems, or it is the fusion of director and actors, they achieve the greatest of all cinematic triumphs which is true suspension of disbelief: unlike most movies, they do not seem like actors, even stage actors as the more celebrated movies display. Instead they come across as everyday people who speak their lines more clearly and make their gestures more visible. Tightly edited, the film avoids the use of tedium to offset the suspense, and thankfully the script avoids any of the “instant replay” dialogue that more confused films used to replay complex plots. Instead, it moves along normally, with the tension of an observer who increasingly sees his task as more of a battle between good and evil than an everyday mystery. The conclusion is neither a baffling surprise nor as predictable as the average film, and continues the suspense until it can streamline into a sustaining emotional ambiance.

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Comments on the internet

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Sometimes, after a long day of seeing the utterly moronic, cruel and pointless comments that people type on the Internet, I have this dream.

In this dream I see a white panel van driving around town. It’s an old Ford Econoline from the 80s with sticker letters on the side that say FLORIST. It takes the out-of-the-way streets and the byways, circles around the areas that will not make it onto a postcard or the front page of the newspaper. In other words, it moves unnoticed among the rest of us… people like you and me. It drives slowly, its engine muttering and exuding a smell of hot oil.

This is the Eugenics Van.

Inside the cabin, the radio crackles with a new message.

“123 Maple Street, Unit Four. Some guy keeps posting Nickelback lyrics and unwarranted criticism to YouTube.” The driver looks at the navigator and they exchange nods. The EV picks up speed and halfway crosses town to the address.

A knock at the door rings out in unit four. “Just leave it outside,” croaks the voice of a bloated moron.

“Flowers for you sir,” says the person at the door wearing a khaki uniform with FLORIST embroidered on the name tag. He makes his voice nasal to seem meek and submissive. “Need your signature sir.”

He hears grumbling and cursing within as clothing is pulled over resisting flesh. The door opens and a standard modern lumpenperson stands there. The florist hands him the flowers, which are made of soft plastic. “What the?” says the dufus, but that’s all he says, because the florist has whipped out a silenced Ruger .22 and shot him through the eye.

The bullets are hollowed and filled with a potent neurotoxin which causes the retard to contort and flail as his central nervous system is eaten from within. The florist picks up the flowers which have bounced when they were dropped and punted by the spasmic death of the imbecile. He waves to his partner in the van who arrives, also wearing a florist uniform and carrying a rug.

They roll up the dufus in the rug, then search the house for a suitcase. They pack it with the wallet, phone, personal effects and enough clothing to make it appear that dufus has gone on a short trip. Then they take the rug and suitcase down to the van and throw them in the rear.

Once a day, the EV drives to a funeral home on the outskirts of town. There it backs up slowly to the incinerator and deposits a few dozen bodies. The foreman shrugs and pulls the lever, dropping them into the flames. The ash is crushed and scattered on the roses at the far side of the cemetery next to a rest stop known to be frequented by truckers looking for glory holes.

The cops get called to the idiot’s house and declare him missing. His family wail and flutter their tiny forearms lost in oceans of fat but since they are dysfunctional, it is assumed that this idiot is just another person lost. The file goes onto a shelf and idiot goes into the statistics. The EV is long gone, moved on to a new city.

Society goes on its merry oblivious way. Outside of its notice, the EV drives slowly through the everyday streets of our cities, stopping wherever stupidity disrupts the pursuit of life. It filters humanity of the useless so people who have a purpose in existing can finally catch a break and not be forced to constantly ignore the imbecilic among them. Somehow its victims are forgotten, unnoticed or ignored and absolutely nothing of even remote significance is interrupted by their absence.

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