HOMOSEXUAL-THEMED PUNK BAND seeks guitarist and drummer

Bassist and rhythm guitarist seek second guitarist and
drummer for punk band heavily influenced by DISCHARGE
and ASSUCK. Must be reliable, no hard drugs, no police
records (we want to tour). Band name is
ASSCHARGE. Contact us Box 211

OLD SCHOOL DEATH METAL BAND seeks chumps

Hey you, remember when death metal was huge?
So do we! We bought the same gear, have the
classic sound, and we write songs like drug
addled teenagers. If nostalgia has you by the
balls, call us. Box 644.

BREADMAKER FOR SALE

If you remember the trends of the past, you know
these were hot little items in the late 1990s. Everyone
I know had one. Now I’ve got them all. Make an offer…
any offer. Box 665.

Instead of indie rock dressed up as metal, it’s punk dressed up as indie rock with heavy metal influences.

Definitely better than any indie metal from the last 10+ years

Just for kicks and contrast, some early Amebix too:

Paul Speckmann (ABOMINATION, DEATH STRIKE, MASTER) writes:

Looking for a guitarist drummer team in Europe to fill the position on the Abomination tour in November. Interested?
November 3rd until date unknown. 15 shows.

If interested, contact the Speckmaster through http://www.facebook.com/Speckmetal.

I can’t believe that, in a community of people who claim to be so tight and supportive, this hasn’t gotten more traction.

Nuclear War Now! Productions label head Yosuke Konishi logged on to KSFJ radio and recorded a six-hour live broadcast of his favorite metal tracks:

Playlist / Parts 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ 6 ~ 7 ~ 8 ~ 9 ~ 10

Mostly old-school stuff with some new-underground additions.

For your convenience, here are all of the shows in a single archive (635mb, Megaupload) so that you can download them with one click and happily listen away.

I have to say that Yosuke K. did an excellent job with these shows. The purpose of radio, like sampler CDs or written reviews, is to expose an audience to contenders for quality and/or insightful music. By providing a contrast between samples, the DJ shows his audience what he has learned (as an expert in the subject) and allows them to make their own choices about where they fit into that vision. More information from the man himself in this forum topic.

Inter-National Day of Slayer — June 6, 2011.

The Inter-National Day of Slayer is a worldwide holiday for metalheads by metalheads.

Slayer is an emblem of metal: fast, powerful, still alien to the mainstream after 28 years.

If every other religious, ethnic and political group gets their own holiday, we deserve one too.

Who is Slayer

Slayer is a band from California. Their music has come to epitomize Satanic speed metal music in the latter half of the 20th century. Their 1986 album, “Reign in Blood” is one of the single most influential metal albums of all time, typified by the modern classic “Angel of Death”.

How to Celebrate

• Listen to Slayer at full blast in your car.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast in your home.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast at your place of employment.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast in any public place you prefer.

DO NOT use headphones! The objective of this day is for everyone within earshot to understand that it is the National Day of Slayer. National holidays in America aren’t just about celebrating; they’re about forcing it upon non-participants.

Taking that participation to a problematic level:

• Stage a “Slay-out.” Don’t go to work. Listen to Slayer.
• Have a huge block party that clogs up a street in your neighborhood. Blast Slayer albums all evening. Get police cruisers and helicopters on the scene. Finish with a full-scale riot.
• Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.
• Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
• Kill the neighbor’s dog and blame it on Slayer.

Visit the Inter-National Day of Slayer website for more information!

Where to purchase Slayer albums

If you don’t already have at least one Slayer album in your collection, purchase from amazon.com:

• Slayer – Haunting the Chapel (review)
• Slayer – Show No Mercy – (review)
• Slayer – Hell Awaits – (review)
• Slayer – Reign in Blood – (review)
• Slayer – South of Heaven – (review)
• Slayer – Seasons in the Abyss – (review)
• Slayer – Decade of Aggression – (review)

Follow us on Social Networks

• Facebook: International Day of Slayer
• Last.fm: National Day of Slayer
• MySpace: National Day of Slayer
• Twitter: NatlDayOfSlayer
• YouTube: National Day of Slayer

Relevant Artists

If you like Slayer, also try:

• Massacra
• Mortuary
• Sepultura
• Bathory
• Vader

Thanks for reading!

– Inter-National Day of Slayer team

Here’s a sampling from his black metal project (1996-2007) called Benighted Leams:

Sounds like a Manes/Fester crossover.

Someone else pointed out what we know — mass culture is a product disguised as individual self-expression:

In the sphere of luxury production, to which popular music belongs and in which no necessities of life are immediately involved, while, at the same time, the residues of individualism are most alive there in the form of ideological categories such as taste and free choice, it is imperative to hide standardization. The “backwardness” of musical mass production, the fact that it is still on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one, conforms perfectly to that necessity which is essential from the viewpoint of cultural big business. If the individual handicraft elements of popular music were abolished altogether, a synthetic means of hiding standardization would have to be evolved. Its elements are even now in existence.

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”.

The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted (“Swing it boys”) — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization. – Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music

This doubly applies to nu-metal. The whole essay is worth reading.

I’m almost too cynical to think the news is anything but press releases, yet:

Donald Tardy has two passions.

His music – he’s the drummer for the death-metal band Obituary. And his cats – more than 140 of them.

They live in woods, behind shopping plazas and in dumpsters. They scrounge for food, scavenging rodents and trash, and fend off raccoons.

They’re feral cats, and according to the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, they’re among an estimated 200,000 roaming Hillsborough County.

Tardy tends to more than 20 colonies, some with as few as two cats, others with nearly 30. He carefully protects their locations; some people are capable of unimaginable cruelty, while others find colonies a convenient place to dump unwanted cats. Every day he checks on “my gang,” feeding the cats and, when necessary, getting them veterinary care. – TBO

This makes me feel better about the time I went on a bender and re-purchased all those old early 1990s albums (and the Judas Priest catalog up through 2004). Some things just get better with time.

Our old friends and comrades at Cursed Productions just interviewed one of the bands to take death metal mainstream, Amon Amarth.

While this band personally has no interest for me, being “too busy” as if trying to run away from life itself and sounding too much like a metalcore version of Dark Tranquility, seeing a quality metal journalist get some recognition is always a bright spot.

A reader writes in with one of the big difficult questions:

For more than a year, I’ve been into heavy metal. Being an atheist i listened to bands that mocked religion. As i don’t have any knowledge of structure or how a riff is good or bad, I listened to anything that whose lyrics read well, but soon nihilism struck me and I started losing faith in people and the mainstream. I felt a sudden urge for good art as an outlet of my emotions, but then my idea of art was shattered.

So my question is: what is art?

In 1917 Duchamp took a urinal and turned it over, signed it ‘R. Mutt’ and submitted it to an art show! His ready-mades weren’t meant to be admired in an aesthetic sense and because of this he challenged the belief in art as something holy and placed on a high pedestal, art as something distant and divorced from life during the dada art period

later in 1692 neo dada art was emerging,Duchamp did not agree with the attitudes and direction taken by Pop Art and Neo-Dada

In a letter dated November 10, 1962 Marcel Duchamp wrote: “This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblages, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

Why is one band better than other? How do I judge?

I’m badly confused which metal CDs I should buy; I also see that one thing you consider while judging a band is you learn the philosophy of the members and the environment they came from, but when the band is so underground the data of their members is not available, what is true metal?

1)one which is highly technical
2)or that maybe immature in technicality but have a strong…. philosophy…and what is more important or inspiring to you
a)lyrics
b)structure
c)or other things…

Is art just too overrated?

Let’s take them one at a time:

What is art?

Art is that which expresses a meaningful view of life; it is a communication from artist to appreciator (listener, reader, watcher, viewer). True cynics like myself view it as a dual natured beast, expressing both aesthetic enjoyment (showing that life has significance) and some form of philosophy, vision, emotional context or other worldview (the end goal that author found meaningful for that signficance). Art takes many forms, and there is no equality between forms or between artists or even between works; some express something that can be said through no other medium.

Which is the true metal band?

Technical, or philosophical? you ask. I respond with this concept: the band that is artistic, and exemplifies the spirit of metal (a Romantic yet warlike notion of transcendence through worship of power, not moral good) is good metallic art.

If the technicality is used in service to this goal, it’s great. But technicality for its own sake is boring, as 100,000 starving nu-jazz musicians in America can tell you.

Does the band need to have a philosophy? Not really — their music needs to show the presence of some organized thought (many would call that a philosophy) and to express it in a way that is artistic, and compelling. If it doesn’t do all of that, it may be art but I don’t want to listen to it.

Lyrics… I have forgotten about these, for many years. Some are inspiring. Most are stuff that rhymes and bounces in the right places with the right number of syllables. For me the archetype is Deicide: their lyrics “sound like” an occult vision of war in reality. Sometimes they’re incoherent. But they always sound awesome.

I don’t worry about trueness; that which is true turns out to be good, amazingly enough. So I pursue quality, because life is short and if you love metal, you want the best stuff.

I am probably an atheist; if God must be singular, anthropomorphic and moral, I am definitely an atheist and a blasphemer. (See my short monograph entitled, “If your human-like God can do anything, can He fuck Himself?”)

I am a nihilist. I believe in nothing but that which can be derived from observation and thought.

At the same time, I have seen more that I and science cannot explain than what it can… and my thoughts have led me to a kind of mysticism that is compatible with quantum physics, esoteric hermetic philosophy and even higher math. Others have found similar paths.

Unfortunately, this leads one to become a realist (in the vernacular, not philosophical, sense) or rather a consequentialist. Back to art above: life has significance. If so, we don’t want to screw it up. So we treat life as a laboratory, and keep the ideas that produce good results, and throw out the rest until we can test them.

This in turn should address your underlying question which seems to be: why care about what has quality over what does not? Why measure quality at all?

The answer is simply: if you love life, you want something that can complement it, and yourself, and that means you seek the authentic, the thrilling, the interesting, the beautiful and the amazing. And that is why, if you’re gonna listen to metal, throw out the shit and seek out the greats :)