Metal bands to love to hate

If you like anything, you hate what destroys it. The worst are things that destroy it from within. These usually pretend to be it, then use it for their own purposes, corrupting it. Like a cancer or disease.

The best example in our time of course is the hipster. The hipster is the eternal party of one: he or she does everything to make him or herself look good to others. They “like” music because they want to look like the image of that music. They then have to be a very big deal, so they make their own art or music which is shallow and surface-oriented, but they trick it out to make it look cool.

In metal, we have the equivalent. They come in many forms. Some like to think they’re smart, so they like dumb kiddie music tricked out like prog rock. Some like to think they’re cool, so they like angry pointless three-chord bands with weird names and gimmicks. Some like to be political, so they pick bands that are anarchists or Nazis. They’re not thinking about the music; they’re thinking about how cool it makes them look. The best music to make you look cool is basically the same crap you get on MTV, but with a cool image. They are a cancer on metal.

And they have some favorite bands. Not coincidentally, these bands are the worst depthless and pointless stuff to hit metal. Note bene: This list is about music I hate, not people I hate. Some people whose music I like hate me, and some people I hate make great music. Some people who I like also make terrible music. I can only tell it as I see it and hope the pagan gods sort out the fracas.

Here’s the list:

Dethklok

How can you hate a cartoon? It’s supposed to be funny. It makes fun of metal’s weaknesses. Ergo, by the passive-aggressive inversion, if you dislike this you’re afraid to laugh at yourself. And who likes someone who can’t laugh at himself? Except that joke bands have always been stupid, with the joke/hype/trend coming before the music, and Dethklok is no exception. Recycled riffs. Moronic pop song structures. TV commercial jingle-like melodies. And bad guitar playing that dumbs metal down to MTV levels. Let’s turn it around on them: who has a need to look like they can laugh at themselves? Why, people who cannot, of course. But they don’t want you to know that.

Cannibal Corpse

When I was a wee liberal, I never thought much of Cannibal Corpse until I read their immensely misogynistic lyrics. Then I decided to hate them. Upon reflection, however, what I really hate about this band is its falseness. They studied metal in the early 1990s, and came up with a pre-chewed version. Taking their style from Suffocation, and their songwriting from Malevolent Creation, they bashed out these simple hymns and instead of having an idea behind them like “only death is real,” they just tried to be offensive and gross. How junior high school! Even more, they have gotten more repetitive and grind-you-down-with-simple-stuff as they years have gone on. I couldn’t hate this band more. But, having met them and seen they are nice intelligent fellows, my only conclusion can be that this band is a pure money-maker — and they about admitted as much.

Opeth

Life isn’t fair to you. You have few friends. You haven’t succeeded at anything, school or otherwise. Even your parents think they consumed too much Bisphenol-A before conceiving you. But you’ve found a new weapon; you’re going to show everyone you’re better than them. Enter the fake progressive rock band. Opeth take very simple songs and dress them up with prog rock lite flourishes, and “unexpected” changes like ZOMG going from acoustic to distorted on the chorus, because they know that all you low self-esteem cases want a reason to seem smarter and more profound than the rest of us. Well, now you have it. Opeth “sounds like” prog even if it has none of what made prog great: real musical development, song structures that build upon themes instead of being random, and truly mindblowing chops. Instead, you get watered down Rush riffs and random songs, all with a lot of guilt and bleeding-heart sympathy because they, Opeth, know you are a loser. Stop comparing homosexuals and Mac users to Opeth. It’s an undeserved insult to homosexuals.

Meshuggah

I was talking with a Texas technical deathgrind master and he wrote a formula for me: Meshuggah = lots of clueless fans x lack of musical knowledge. If you have played guitar and learned theory, you know how trivial this band is. It’s basically a jazz percussion approach to metal rhythm guitar. Lots of offbeats within offbeats, if you know what I mean. No melody, no song development. In fact, song structures are linear in that they follow the sub-division of beats to a riff, expanding over time in a circular fashion. It’s really boring. But if you want to seem like you got the ultimate in technical metal, you’ll think you’re really cool for liking this distracted, random, artless band. Same critique applies to Necrophagist. They both attract people who want to be cool and smart, but have no knowledge of how the world works, which is why people are Meshuggah fans for exactly two years and then go on to liking Deerhoof and Yoko Ono.

Cradle of Filth

What’s the best new thing? Something that’s the old thing… but “sounds” new! You can make anything sound different with different production, playing at different speeds, using black metal voices or more distortion. And so if you take Iron Maiden, throw in some fast melodic death metal riffs, but keep it nice and tasty pentatonic, you’ll have the perfect product. People can be undercover conformists. They can look like rebels for listening to this angry sounding music, but underneath it, there’s that same old happy Iron Maiden that millions of people the world over like. Cradle of Filth is the perfect product and millions bought it, then immediately forgot them, to the point where you don’t hear about them at all. But this was a huge trend and basically boring music with a lot of drama surrounding it.

Ulver

In theory, I would like this band as they have a formal background in music and clearly know theory. However, they have no souls. They made the plasticine “Nattens Madrigal” by imitating black metal bands, but playing indie rock songs in the black metal style. Sweet, twee, poignant, ironic melodies and pop song structures defined that CD. Ever since then, Ulver has made a career out of being “different.” They make electronica that sounds like an angrier version of all other electronica! They make concept albums that sound like two indie rock CDs with the lyrics re-written! They make bold public statements and image changes like Bono of U2! What they don’t do, however, is understand metal and what makes it great. Instead, they try to make metal into the genre they belong in, which is indie rock, and dumb it down accordingly. Again, conformity disguised as non-conformity, because if you tell everyone you’re a non-conformist, you can’t possibly be a secret sheep, amirite?

Necrophagist

Musical illiteracy is a ripoff musician’s best friend. People do not understand how melodies should develop over the course of a song, and how technical playing without a goal creates chaos and fragments your consciousness, not builds on it. Necrophagist play melodies, all right. They play short blasts of melody over and over again, very quickly. Then the song jumps to something unrelated and obviously “different.” It’s like a sampler plate at a restaurant, a little bit of everything so you don’t have to choose what you want. Then it jumps back. And back again. And then it’s over. The vocals are like the chant of an auctioneer. The riffs are advancing guitar exercises. Drums are what you’d expect from a failed jazz drummer on tons of meth trying to cover Nine Inch Nails. The end result? A lot of distracting, directionless crap. But people like it because it’s more technical than what you are listening to, therefore they must be smarter. QED, muddafugga.

Baroness

If your douchey alt-rock band fails, throw on the distortion and play really slowly with obvious stoner themes. Now, thanks to the magic of record company marketing, you’re the latest metal trend! Work hard before your 15 minutes (or 18 months, at which point all your fans get promoted to head waiter) of fame evaporates. You’ll make money by making them feel like they’ve discovered the one secret rebellion that will really upset their parents. It’s like a giant tribe of stoners, descending on the world, man. They’re going to make everything right or at least feel all-right. Do you realize you’re listening to the same sad crap your grandparents grew out of in the 1970s?

In Flames

First there was At the Gates, who made The Red in the Sky is Ours, and blew us all away. Then came black metal. Then came Dissection. Then someone wondered what would happen if you took Dissection and dumbed it down, made it a little more like regular rock ‘n’ roll, and claimed it was new and exciting. I guess that person was a genius because people still take In Flames seriously, although at the time their first CD came out metalheads universally viewed them as clueless, wimpy and latecoming carpetbaggers. These guys are ripping off Iron Maiden on every album. They get away with it because their fans want to think they’re new and fresh and evil, not warmed-over 1978 heavy metal. These retreads from the mid-1990s keep puking out the crap and for some reason, people still discuss them.

Rammstein

Once there was a band called Ministry. They realized that no one had done IDM with guitars yet. So they made this style of really simple metal/punk/rock with industrial beats and weird background samples, and a huge audience went crazy for it. The same year, Nine Inch Nails made an album that was equal parts dance and hatred, with lots of keyboards and some buzzy guitars. Ever since then, people have been trying to recapture this audience because they’re still out there. Rammstein is the industrial hard rock version of Mickie Krause, with a heavy dose of Tool in the backdoor. They like to be shocking. It’s really a tiresome play that happens every generation as kids try to shock their parents and teachers. But you can’t shock the world at large because it doesn’t care. It’s more apathetic, cynical, nihilistic and cruel than any candy-industrial rock band is going to be. So Rammstein are in the big picture like greeting cards. They tell you a little bit of truth, put some flowers and kittens around it, and you pay a 1500% markup and go home happy, but confused. Just go listen to Ministry already.

Cynic

This band started out really well with a solid demo that sounded like it was one third speed metal, one third death metal, and about a third jazz fusion. No problem; we all want to be Atheist. But then immediately the neurosis started. First they tried to get more fruity sounds in their instrumentation, then they added the harmonized vocals, and finally, they just admitted they didn’t want to be death metal and quit, after a decent first album, Focus. Then in 2009 they decided to really ruin their reputations except among morons. They piled together a bunch of jazz cliches and metal cliches, and threw them at each other, then overplayed the rest. This is because they know their fans know little about music but want to seem like they do. If you take a few guitar lessons, you really want to show you’ve got that knowledge, so you start listening to Big Important Concept bands and genres like jazz, which is sort of like degraded classical music for people who need ideas pre-chewed. Cynic fans like to act outraged that anyone cannot see the greatness and complexity of Cynic, and use that to imply that the rest of us are stupid, when if they took the time to tab out these songs, they’d see that they are random bits stuck together with excessive guitar licks.

Wolves in the Throne Room

You’re at home listening to your new outrageous indie rock CD when your Mom comes home and catches you. It turns out she has the same CD. In the car. She and her friends listen to it, your Dad likes it, even your grandfather thinks it’s OK, because indie rock is the same crap they’ve made since 1952 or so, just with more wailing and self-pity (and minor chords). So you storm out of the house thinking, “I’ll show them!” You go to the record store and decide to skip past all the music for healthy people, you’ll get metal. And then you find Wolves in the Throne Room. It’s like that outrageous metal, but it’s safe. It contains safe moral opinions that people at your church and Democratic fund raiser would agree with. It’s basically indie rock, but they play it like it was black metal. And it’s totally boring, so you can have it droning in the background while you wonder if anyone ever anywhere has suffered as much as you have.

Boris

Wait — it’s Yoko Ono! No, it’s Deerhoof! No, it’s another chick wailing her head off with the coordination of a trisomy 21 patient. She wants us to think this is profound and progressive and new because normally, people don’t try to repackage SUCKS as SUCCESS. But that’s her gimmick, and the gimmick of most modern art. This is unusual because it’s illogical. If you don’t understand it, you’re little people — fetch me a sandwich. Only the enlightened pure and true understand our indie rock that we play (occasionally) as if it were black metal. Nevermind that black metal already existed. We want to remake it in our new and improved style. Which suspiciously resembles normal indie rock, but did we mention, there’s a chick wailing like a burnt Down’s syndrome kid? The fans can’t tell the difference because they learn to play guitars and basic music theory, but never think about what gives music meaning, because that would require they look into their own souls. And you can’t look into your soul, and still think you’re the whole world. Hipsters love this music because each one of them is a party of one and the rest of the world just doesn’t exist! So they call it brilliant. On and on, South of Heaven.

Sunn o)))

Stephen O’Malley is a fantastic person, a great artist, the world’s best stoner and truly, an insightful individual. However, he sold his soul to the devil with this hipster project. If you live in Austin, or are intimately familiar with the apps on your iPhone, this might be for you. It’s concept art. That means that they think up an idea that would be unusual, and make it in musical form, even if it’s boring, because it has symbolic value that us peons cannot decipher because we have tiny peon brains. So when someone plays a guitar really slowly for ten minutes and never develops a song out of it, you either get it because you’re a genius, or you’re an intolerant backward moron with a peon brain. They even get funky and throw in “found sounds” and sometimes have an orchestra show up and try to riff on the two notes allotted for each song. The word “sophomoric” describes people who take a little knowledge and use it to pretend they understand the world. It also describes all Sunn o))) fans.

Pantera

We’ve saved the best for last. Rocket back to the late 1980s with me. Your hair metal band just failed because you look gay even to homosexual rights activists, and not in the good way. In the supersonic stupid way. You’re out of money, and this band named Metallica has just raised the stakes for metal bands by being harder and faster. They’re harder and faster, while you’re prancing and pouting. So what do you do? Turn that fear of your masculinity outward, and become a tough-guy version of Metallica. This is what Pantera did with their first “real” album, Cowboys From Hell. Metallica riffs in simple songs with lots of ‘roid rage posturing. It got worse after that as Pantera added more trends to their faux metal charm bracelet, dabbling in death metal and blues rock, until their music ended up a mishmash of completely random influences. People like this band because it’s a good introduction to basic rock guitar. They can understand it, and it also appeals to their wounded masculinity. If you buy a Pantera album, the thinking goes, you’ll become more tough and angry like Phil Anselmo. People from the real world know that’s not true, which is why most of Pantera’s fans are skinny teenagers trying to figure out which fraternity will be most likely to help them score someday.

There you have it: a catalogue of fail. Or rather, fail that is highly praised by those who know not much of anything. Naturally, products designed for idiots that make idiots feel like geniuses are big sellers, so you’ll have to suffer seeing this bands around for a while yet. But as time goes on, it’s amazing how the crap gets filtered out and the really powerful stuff endures.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews 1-31-10

So much of what we do in life is politics. Telling people things they want to hear and making warring parties proffer the olive branch. But metal should not be about politics. Metal should be about pure spirit, both inside of us and in the world at large, meaning that we know ourselves and we know reality. With that kind of background, we don’t need politics. We don’t need drama. We don’t need to be flattered. We want adventure — musical adventure, preferably with tragedy and triumph, violence and vengeance, sodomy and satisfaction! Meet this week’s Sadistic Metal Reviews, where sacred cows get sodomized and we find satisfaction in the diamonds among the cluttering turds.

Fenriz’ Red Planet/Nattefrost – Engangsgrill

We’re going to talk about the first band here, Fenriz’ Red Planet, because Nattefrost is forgettable 1970s punk rock dressed up as early 1980s black metal. This band is a hybrid between doom metal, 1970s heavy guitar jam, and what they call stoner doom now but was recognizable in St. Vitus, Pentagram and Sleep for many years. The production approach and song style is closest to 1970s heavy guitar rock, like Cream or even Led Zeppelin, in that songs are verse/chorus works with a big fat diversion stuck in the middle that may run through a couple of riffs but comes back into key and rhythm so the cycle can spin again. But over half of the riffs are straight out of old school 1980s doom metal, and that would be St. Vitus and Pentagram but also late-blooming NWOBHM with a doom edge like Witchfinder General and Budgie. It’s not exciting; if anything, it sounds like a demo where the band hasn’t yet finalized direction and aesthetic. However, it is good; these songs have character and a spirit to them which you cannot get anywhere else. You can hear a few lifts from Fenriz’ folk/metal project Storm and one or two similar themes to Darkthrone, but this CD doesn’t need to namedrop to stand on its own. They named it “Engangsgrill,” which apparently is a type of disposable barbecue, which fits exactly the kind of sloppy rock/metal hybrid you have here: pickup trucks headed to the country with a keg, a bong and some friends, followed by a weekend of the best neighborhood bands jamming, society gets forgotten until on Monday morning you drive back with a mouth full of ash and the kind of diluted hangover that comes from cheap beer in constant consumption.

Baroness – The Blue Record

Oh neat, an emo/stoner metal hybrid with lots of indie and punk rock touches. If you can imagine Neurosis and Jawbreaker making sweet love with newer Sleep, and throwing in tons of stuff from the heavy metal and indie rock canons, you’ll have a good image of what this cheeseball release has to offer. From the way the labels and the big industry reviewers — who have about five minutes to hear each CD, and put them on in the background while socializing for two weeks, then forget about them — went on about this CD, you’d think it was the second coming of innovation itself. Instead, it’s stale and completely loses what’s good about metal and punk, converging on a mean that’s closer to your run-of-the-mill hipster band. This is awful.

Despised Icon – The Ills of Modern Man

Metalcore is rock songwriting with technical death metal technique, and a desire like punk music to string together radically “different” riffs as if it can surprise us, and since it’s random in structure, built around what’s left: vocal phrases that end on the expectation of the offbeat like a sales pitch. Despised Icon is as a result about 80% the fratboy-pleasing, gurgling, blasting, very simple riffs played in difficult time of technical death metal, like Immolation, and the rest is bouncy moronic rock music that I got into metal to escape. Consequently, it has no attention span and cycles like carnival music between different styles and tempos, then crams it all into a barely-disguised verse/chorus structure. What is the point of typing this all out? To point out how to fail at metal. This is the abyss of music and is every bit as stupid as your parents claim your music is. If you want to fail at life, try listening to this random accumulation of parts — each part is in itself OK, not great, but together they add up to a conversation made by borrowing a phrase from 30 works of literature — and as a result project a scatterbrained, neurotic, pointless and non-constructive view of the world. No wonder people hate metalcore; it’s the nadir of underground music.

Cryptopsy – The Unspoken King

This is what’s left of the band that made None So Vile? The neatly structured, compact death metal has been replaced with blasting metalcore. Metalcore, as you may know, is kind of a garbage plate for underground metal and punk. Based around the interpretation of technical metal into punk structures that Human Remains showed us, metalcore loves randomness in circular song structures, so you get ten minimally-related riffs linked by a breakdown and a few slow chants, and then the whole thing repeats, and then the song ends. It’s music for a fragmented mind and as a result, has the IQ of a headless chicken watching daytime TV. Cryptopsy utterly fails to make coherent music out of this style as their countrymen Neuraxis eventually did, and instead defecate this collection of random riffs based around an egodramatic vocal track. It’s total garbage for morons.

These Are They – “Who Linger”

Imagine Iron Maiden doing a simplified version of 1990s Demigod or Amorphis. This CD is unique in that it successfully applies both (a) the old school death metal style and (b) a heavy metal, harmonized-guitar, bouncy riff style — and does it by coming up with a melodic phrase and answer, and using these to make layers of verse and chorus. Play riff; play notes of riff in variation of rhythm; harmonize guitars and repeat, then cycle. The choruses do the same. Nothing sounds out of place, and the deep guttural voice guides it along, but it seems entirely out of place when the heavy metal riffs and trills come into play. In addition, the riff salad of death metal isn’t here; like rock or indie, this rides one pattern for verse and one for chorus, and much variation is not to be found, which probably places this out of the range of old school death metal fans. Still, these are quality riffs and excellent use of basic harmony, which makes this easy listening and because it is not random, a great improvement on the metalcore-heavy stuff we hear daily. For albums like later Bolt Thrower, which tried to make a heavy metal/death metal hybrid, this is probably the best so far.

Vreid – Milorg

Black metal was about writing unique melodies and building song structures to fit them. Vreid is about mimicking the past with more intensity in each riff, but relying on predictable melodic strips and linear song structures in circular repetition, resulting in songs that are binary like nu-metal: a softer part, then a harder part, then a response to that which softens the hardness, then a restatement at full blast, fade out and win. Most of these riffs come from the 1970s and 1980s generations of metal and get a “black metal” treatment, so end up sounding like rock music in its Sunday black metal evil clothes. The music is driving by a chanting vocal which rides the beat like the shouts of the drummer commanding the slaves to row. Every now and then they launch into an extended melody like a pentatonic version of early ancient, and they have the raw rhythmic power of an early Marduk or Zyklon, but it doesn’t add up to more than most rock music, and considerably less than the formative works of Nordic black metal.

Black Funeral – Az-i-Dahak

Throbbing notes rhythm a rhythm that then reverses, examines a portion of itself in detail, and then picks up in a new direction which dovetails with the old; the throb remains, like symbols etched in the air with a torch caught on the slower memory of film. In this way, Black Funeral achieves an odd ambience similar to that of Impetigo, where a higher note is strummed repetitively at an offset rhythm where most bands would hammer a lower note on the beat, but by the nature of the larger melodic structure of the riff, this throb does not bounce jauntily like a rock rhythm; it hangs, like a reminder of mortality. Vocals are chant-ish black metal rasps and the mechanistic pedaling of the drum machine fits this sound like a glove, getting further inhuman as it distances us from musical expectation and clean aesthetics. Like the humming beeps of an alien machine exploring the night, this album rediscovers humanity by removing it from the picture and showing us the empty space in which we must construct as inevitable death closes in. While most experts agree “Vampyr” is the height of this band — and who am I to disagree? — this perhaps less proficient album is more haunting and bizarre, yet fits it into a pattern similar to our reminiscences of isolated nights when the future angled away from us like the shadow of an unknown doorway.

Decrepit Birth – Diminishing Between Worlds

If the recombinant album name and band name didn’t clue you in, here’s the skinny: this band is totally postmodern, meaning that they fit together all sorts of random influences and then link them together with the basics of rhythm and harmony. As a result, it’s like a fast ride at Disneyland: constant changing stimulus of radical difference so much that after a while you lose any idea of where you are, and end up thinking you’ve come very far, when at the very end as the buggy slows you realize you’ve been circling around the same relatively small space. Unlike most bands of this type, which I’m going to call crypto-metalcore because it’s (a) without death metal’s style of organization, preferring instead the hardcore method of having riffs have as little in common as possible and no narrative (b) of mixed riff styles and (c) depends on rhythmic buildup/breakdown for tension because you’re not going to get it in contrast between riffs, Decrepit Birth is good — it’s like an Iron Maiden album hidden in Deeds of Flesh with Blotted Science and Negativa offering critique. However, I can’t listen to this carnival music; it breaks down concentration and replaces it with elaborate versions of territory trod long ago.

Funebrarum – The Sleep of Morbid Dreams

What happened here? Eight years ago — before old-school “revival” was even a blip on the radar — this band had the apparent potential to give proper life to archaic death metal form. Their first album/demo was a brooding, infectious and grimly cohesive piece of work, enough so to make this sound almost brazenly cheap by comparison. Toss in every imaginable death metal riff style coined between 1989 and 1993, lay them out on a rhythmic smorgasbord and put them through enough mood changes to make a pregnant teenager blush and you’ve come damn close to this; add enough embarassing Bloodbath-sounding material (listen to the opener) to something otherwise “authentic” and you’ll never want to hear “old school” again. – kontinual

Star Fucking Hipsters – Never Rest in Peace

There are some of us who believe that rock and roll music, instead of being a thing deliberately created, is an aggregate of what was left over when we tested everything else against a captive audience. Star Fucking Hipsters prove this by carefully absorbing everything they can into the great sponge of melancholy indie pop. These songs usually start off with fast punk or speed metal (Slayer) riffs, and then pass through a few exciting transitions borrowed from anything industrial, black and reggage or between, but then we get to the core: darkish, self-pitying, somewhat helpless indie pop. True, it’s in pop punk format like The Descendents meets Blink 182 with Jane’s Addiction advising on behalf of the emo CIA, but basically, it’s pop. And when we get to that point we see this album is like a confused and lonely person in the city, covering themselves with newspapers or whatever fashions they can yank out of the wind, hoping no one will ever get a glimpse inside. If that’s its goal, this is supreme art, but more likely it is the emoting of such people hoping we’ll justify their existence for them. As pop, it’s not bad, a little toward the “poignant” side of minor key melodies sliding into major key to give you a sense of hope. But it’s really the same old thing, or the latest incarnation of it in whatever styles have stuck over the past twelve years, and so I can’t imagine why you’d listen to this instead of any of the 100,000 other albums this “good” in the rock style.

Ahab – The Divinity of Oceans

Funeral doom of a style similar to Skepticism if merged with Esoteric, with a tiny bit of Paradise Lost or Sleep in the wings, Ahab is a studied take on the slow and depressive atmospheric music that many people seem to enjoy. Stylistically, it is probably the most advanced of its kind; musically, it is perfectly competent; artistically, it is not particularly compelling. Its melodies have less of a sense of mixed emotions than do those of Skepticism, and its songs develop in predictable cycles within cycles, leaving us with atmosphere by default once all else has been blocked out. Like American rock bands, Ahab also has to throw in that sense of “contrast” where any dominant idea gets a contrarian voice thrown up against it, where bands like Skepticism bear down with enhancement and variation inside their major ideas. Few want to be the voice to stand up and say this, but most doom metal is boring, and not just because it’s slow. Ahab, while better than most, falls under this umbrella.

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine – The Audacity of Hype

Purists will kill me for this, but this is Biafra’s best work — it’s musical. Where the Dead Kennedys sounded disorganized and messy without really building on that as an aesthetic, he’s slowed down to a pop-punk combo that uses hardcore riffs (Discharge, Exploited) to balance its melodic lead picking (Circle Jerks, The Plugz). That, plus Southern Fried guitar solos and lead guitar noise, forms the underpinning for a more interesting Biafra performance than has ever been heard before. On this CD, Biafra develops his vocal lines both melodically and in timbre, giving the performance of his life with verve and energy. You’ve heard these riff types before, and many of the note progressions are “pop culture” stalwarts that show up in movie soundtracks and commercials, but here Biafra and his band develop each into a song that’s half-rock and half-hardcore, creating a foundation that will introduce a new generation to the sounds of hardcore punk.

Akitsa – La Grande Infamie

Most of us love the idea of black metal: a few totally socially alienated people, armed only with the truth, pick up guitars one weekend and make a simple mind-virus that helps slay all of the vastly powerful illusions that make our modern world miserable. The problem is that this is far from the truth: most of the people who have made great simple black metal were expert players or at least savants who self-schooled themselves in a unique and powerful style, and their work is very deliberate and designed to make us enjoy life as much as convey some idea. But as in all things, each generation picks up where the previous generation appeared to leave off, so the source of the idea is always lost. Akitsa sounds like a cross between The Exploited and early Dark Funeral, with simple melodic riffs offset against sawing basic power chording; the melodic riffs are too candy-sweet and the power chord riffs are too much of a style we can get anywhere. “Silence” appears to be heavily influenced by “Thy Winter Kingdom” from the first Behemoth CD. The rest of the CD is alternating Burzum influences with later model droning melody. It is both not bad and not really compelling enough to want to hear again.

Orthrelm – OV

I wish this album were a joke, but like most modern and postmodern art, it’s an attempt to “demonstrate” an “idea,” and that idea has no correlation to the reality of an artist both entertaining and informing his listeners. Instead, you get a lot of fast chromatic playing over serial drumming with occasional breaks into jazz-style breakdowns that are either sloppy or misinformed about music theory. The result is a dissonant atmosphere after the band lulls you into contentment with repetition. Over time, the basic pattern increases in a period-doubling format, creating a linear expansion on a basic idea that resembles holy books that write about the universe expanding from a breath, except here the expansion leads to nothing but a reflection of itself. When Burzum did this with Det Som Engang Var, it built a mood that gained resurgent power of time; here it is purely deconstructive and fragments the listener’s attention span by forcing it through a narrow slit of musical awareness. People will like this because it’s unique, and talk about how genius it is because no one else “dared to be different” to such a degree, but as a work of meaningful art and a listening experience, it is worthless.

Blood Mortized – Blood Mortized

This band claims “active” status in the early nineties, with zero material to show for it. It may very well be true; current personnel have some of the more run-of-the-mill Stockholm bands to brag about in their ancestry. Excited yet? This falls somewhere between Amon Amarth and Dismember’s Massive Killing Capacity, smothered in the “soft” mimicry of the Sunlight sound that seems so common for these fence-sitting bands. The plod is painful and simple and the song development as bluntly screwball as the song titles, lending an air of crafted irony to the whole presentation lest somebody seriously stack it up against any of its predecessors. One wonders whence this stuff keeps coming — I’m wont to call this the “Swedish mid-life crisis” and leave it at that. – kontinual

Junius – The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist

What is post-rock? For most, it’s slow atmospheric rock beats with emo, punk, indie and noise riffs slowed down to provide texture. On this CD, Junius blend in a modern taste of the ancient with a Dead Can Dance influence. The result is like a river, winding around obstacles to rejoin itself, but only suggesting a topography. This music is comforting and melancholic, but not really exciting. It is pretty, but will find it hard to escape a lukewarm rock underpinning that reigns in its tendencies to escape for the outer limits. A reasonable comparison might be if Danzig decided to do a space rock album: you can appreciate it aesthetically, but sense how the voice isn’t really there, and how as much as these guys want to be ancient, they’re stuck in a modern paradigm.

Virus – The Black Flux

For the last time: if I wanted indie rock, I would have gone to a different part of the record store. Take your Sisters of Mercy gothic vocals, your bad indie rock open chord guitar riffs, and your basic song structures interrupted by dramatic outbursts, and put them there. I don’t want to fall into the old trap of saying “this isn’t metal,” because what I really want to say is that this is indie rock and should be integrated into that genre for the modicum of black metal stylings and ideas it still possesses. Sure, they’re going to call it a “post-rock” influence, but other than a little flexibility of rhythm, what’s going on here is the same stuff emo, indie and shoegaze bands were pumping out in the early 1990s.

Mefisto – The Truth

This CD resembles death metal in no way other than the vocals, which are the kind of reverbed whisper shout that made the first Sepultura EP so memorable. But the music… well, it’s stranded in the 1980s. Throw a lot of Metallica, Kreator, Slayer and Destruction in a blender — like every other band from that era — and you’ll get this mismash of riffs very similar to both the aforementioned bands and a huge heritage of heavy metal. To their credit, this band string them together well rhythmically but otherwise seem entirely random. Before someone convinces you this is a forgotten classic, ask them if classic means “good” or just that it was around in the early 1990s.

Sarke – Vorunah

We all want to love anything with the enigmatic Nocturno Culto on it. In fact, many of us were hoping he would pull off a Nemesis Divina where his skills converted an unexceptional band into a relative masterpiece. Not so on Sarke — his performance is phoned in, mainly because these songs are sparse, undeveloped, and entirely derivative of their influences in a 1989 way. In fact, the whole CD has the vibe of a collection of songs that have been kicked around since they got written in the 1980s, finally put onto vinyl years after the genre has passed them by. You’re familiar with these chord progressions and general rhythms, since many of them come out of punk rock and hard rock, and you’re probably not unacquainted — unless you’ve been under a rock labeled BLACK METAL GO HOME for the last two decades — with Culto’s interpretation of them. It’s all quite vanilla; nothing to really be appalled at here except how little you care about this flat regurgitation of the past.

Drautran – Throne of the Depths

We live in a time of fools. Given no real truths to chew on, they raise themselves on lies, and make competing lies so they can be heard. Then they tell us what metal bands to listen to, and they cannot tell the difference between good music and derivative shit. They will, for example, convince themselves that Drautran is folk metal, when really it’s indie rock songs dressed up in black metal chord forms with a little extra violence. Unlike metal songs, where riffs fit together and make sense, these are rock songs with some metal riffs dropped in between the sing-song verse chorus. They take their riffing inspiration from Enslaved’s Frost but none of the compositional coherence is here. Listen to this if you want to distract yourself, fragment your concentration and dull your possibilities of ever understanding the difference between good music and crap.

Moëvöt – Abgzvoryathre

Every now and then, people who lack direction in life and so pay attention to surface features more than anything else, hoping to use these to justify their emptiness, will try to tell you how good a band is because it’s unique and nuanced. Usually this includes some kind of infantilism, like extreme minimalism or incoherence. This tedious little recording fits the bill. People like it because it’s obscure, kvlt, whatever… the truth is that it’s melodically simplistic, goes nowhere in song development, and showcases no really unique ability except to waste your time. They try to eat up as much tape as possible with intros, chants, and very basic keyboard melodies, but basically there’s nothing here. Maybe that’s the artistic point — emptiness — but then again a blank tape would have been more effective, and pleasant.

Black Vomit – The Faithful Servant

Interesting approach by this Mexican band: take a more technical version of the full speed burst style semi-melodic black metal that Sarcofago made, and intersperse it with flowing keyboard-enhanced choruses in the style of countrymen Xibalba and Avzhia. The result suffers from the radical shift between two very identifiable poles, but the music although very basic develops gently through this style, and as a result is more credible than most of what we get sent here at the Dark Legions Archive Metal Reviews and CD Recycling Center. This is a band worth keeping an eye on.

Archgoat – The Light-Devouring Darkness

I’m convinced that a lot of contemporary death and black metal is music designed for children, because not only is it painfully simple and repetitive, but it also uses gentle rhythms of chord change — while playing at top speed. It’s like listening to a fan slowly playing an early Mozart piece. This album is similar. Sounds a lot like Blasphemy meets Impaled Nazarene, with the lower register production and slamming tempo changes of Belial. So as a retrospective of Finnish metal technique it’s great, but for anything else, it’s kind of a droning lullaby. What excuses it is that this CD shows purpose in its songwriting, and captures a mood, but for many of us the droning outweighs its significance.

Cruciamentum – Convocation of Crawling Chaos

During the past two years, underground black metal shifted from emulating the early 1990s — fast melody — to emulating the late 1990s, specifically Demoncy’s “Joined in Darkness.” The Convocation EP does its best to revive that sound, with an injection of Finnish death metal and possibly American doom/death like Incantation, Winter and Infester. Although it keeps its goals limited, which is appropriate for a demo, this release shows promise in songwriting in that (a) every piece works together (b) together they create a vision of some idea, experience or emotion we can recognize from life itself and (c) while a good deal of it covers known death metal archetypes, it does so without borrowing straight from one source and so gives us a sense of exploring these ideas from a new angle. Low rasp voices, downtuned rigid guitars, and drumming that sounds like it’s straight out of drone/hardcore punk fusion gives this CD a sense of growing out of the past toward something even more ancient.

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Declare Heavy Metal your religion

From Brokeback Island:

Nine years ago, during the last census, a grass roots campaign urged the British to list ‘Jedi Knight’ as their religion. Everyone was shocked, and not a few appalled, when 390,000 people signed on. According to census results, there are more Jedis in England than Jews. Jedi-ism is the fourth largest religion in Britain, after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Metal Hammer first searched out a face for their campaign. Biff Byford, the lead singer of Saxon, agreed to act as “World Metal Peace Ambassador.” Then they set up a Facebook page: ‘Heavy Metal for the 2011 Census’. One week in, they already have 10,000 fans.

Everyone who signs on is being asked to put “Heavy Metal” in the entry under ‘Faith’ in next year’s census.

The Star

You can join and support the Facebook groups here:

Get the word out!

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Pages of Pure Fucking Damnation: Zines in the Death Metal Underground

1. Introduction

2. Individual Thought Patterns: Apostles of Death Metal

3. Infestation of Evil: Chroniclers of Black Metal

4. Droid Sector: Information Networks and the Degeneration
 

Written by Devamitra with Alan (Buttface), Brian (Chainsaw Abortions), Niko (Hammer of Damnation), Timo (Fallen Pages) and Pete (Pure Fucking Hell)

Introduction

The violent, obsessive and obscurant phenomenon of death metal arose in the middle of the 1980’s from the minds of alienated and intelligent artists, writers and musicians while the powers of the world were engaged with the nuclear paranoia of the Cold War, while computer technology broke through to everyday life in Western societies, while preachers were fighting against Satanic messages in party-loving hair metal albums and while musicians in the vein of U2 were participating in massive events that attempted to bring world peace and end famine with decades old clichés of British rock music. NWOBHM and British punk were dying out, replaced by the tough street gang aesthetics of hardcore and the satanic postures of early speed and black metal. The public stances of groundbreaking bands were growing to be more and more incompatible with mainstream rock media, which since the demise of the “counterculture” had abhorred ideological consistency as a threat to the marketing forces for which it owed its livelihood.

Real metal fans tended to be smarter than the average mainstream rock fan and naturally gravitated towards more critical sources, written by fans to other fans. The success of bands such as Metallica and Slayer wasn’t founded on big corporations’ agencies of promotion. Active touring, circulation of demo tapes and word of mouth established the reputation of these non-compromising bands, along with independent heavy metal publications such as Metal Forces Magazine in the UK and Kick Ass Monthly in the USA. While these started out as photocopied zines, they soon became professional but continued championing the authentic observations of the editors, distinguished metal writers such as Dave Reynolds and Bob Muldowney (R.I.P.), for relatively small profit and a benefit to metal fans worldwide in search of ever more lethal developments of the basic ideas of heavy metal music.

Individual Thought Patterns: Apostles of Death Metal

Death metal in the 80’s was as avant-garde and extreme as metal went. In keeping with the independent spirit, death metal fans corresponded with each other and compiled newsletters that were at first minimal and crude, spreading the viral infection of an art form which was long abhorred by fans of classic metal and power metal. Thus, the crown jewels of death metal media originated perhaps from lands separate from the Anglo-American centers of youth subculture dissemination, where enthusiasm for the new style existed alongside speed metal and crossover interest: Metalion’s Slayer Magazine (Norway), Laurent Ramadier’s Decibels of Death (France), Desexult’s Blackthorn (Denmark), Headbanger Zine (Peru), Alan Moses’ Buttface (Australia), Streetcleaner (Germany), Isten (Finland) and lots of others with enormous local influence. Contemporary US zines that didn’t lag behind included, for example, Aggressive Metal/Screams from the Gutter, Ripping Headaches and Chainsaw Abortions.

Alan: I am into different extreme styles, so I did not want to limit my zine to one style – there was way too much good stuff across the board back then, and very little crap. It’s the opposite today. At first I just read zines , all of them from overseas, and the thought never came to mind to do one myself until I realized I had a lot of contacts by tape and video trading. There were no metal oriented zines in Australia in those days – and only few punk/HC zines – which really didn’t get distributed well here, and they just were not good. So I decided to combine my love for all the styles, and I had a partner who helped me get interviews etc. too – we combined our resources and became the biggest traders with the biggest and really only zine from here – Buttface. It worked exceptionally well because none of the bands we ever contacted back then had done anything with an Australian zine – so a lot of the time that worked in our favour. Barely anyone in this country ever saw my zine because nobody was really into the music as much yet, it would be years before the underground bands got a big enough following here.

Brian: For me, I think the idea for Chainsaw Abortions just came because I’ve always loved music, hearing new things and spreading the word about things after I discovered them. In those times doing a zine was the best way to do that. My only contacts when I started were the local bands here in Buffalo, then from letter writing and tape trading my connections quickly grew. Of the zines that I bought back then, I really liked Death Vomit from Virginia and Ripping Headaches from Florida, plus of course Buttface from Australia.

Alan: Haha, I noticed that Brian mentioned Buttface! I only saw Brian’s zine in 1990, which was good because it was a bit like BF, in that it had a bunch of different bands (despite the zine’s name implying more of a death metal zine it had variety). Personally my favourite zines were Blackthorn from Denmark (my friend Esben Slot Sorensen’s zine with his fellow Desexult guitarist Henrik Kjaer), Decibels of Death zine (DOD) by Laurent Ramadier who was also a trader of mine, and Ultimate Speedcore Dislocation zine (USD) which had a couple editors, one of them which was a trader of mine called Evil Ludo Lejeune – both those zines are French. In the USA without a doubt for me, Invincible Force (Bryan Daniel) and Ripping Headaches (Bruce Davis) both from Tampa FL, although there were other much older zines like Total Thrash and Uniforce which I loved getting my hands on when I could. I never purchased any zines pretty much except Blackthorn, it usually worked out that I got copies from the editors in trade or they were included in packages of tapes or shirts or records, as extra goodies you know? We always did shit like that, crammed photos or stickers or flyers into the package to make it cooler for whomever you sent it to. We all did that stuff pretty much – shit, a lot of us couldn’t stand to have blank audio tape in a trade, and we’d put filler music to highlight a band we liked to another person, or we’d send messages to each other on the cassettes to fill the space. That was always fun, to hear your trader’s voice, read their letter, check out all the cool music they sent you, then have a photo as well. You really felt special and connected to people, and you had to pay your dues.

With their down to earth, entertaining but always informative reviews and interviews the zines of the era opened for many ignorant small town kids the landscape of the underground, the indivisible fabric of ideals, images, and hard work by their intricate visual and literal presentation of the latest frontier of metal. Often black and white, cut and pasted by hand and then photocopied, the zines were constructed with care and attention to build an aura of mystery and power, laid out symmetrically with blasphemous figures and gory art, encasing the alien appearance of foreign bands in sheets of terror resembling an ancient tome. The DIY method had an invaluable asset in that it was relatively independent from monetary concerns and possible for basically any fan with the required intelligence, attention span and literary abilities. Actually many zines seemed to even manage without these.

Brian: Chainsaw Abortions was just photocopied, so my part time job paid for issue #1. For issue #2 my dad made the copies at his work for me because they had a copy machine that could handle 11 by 17 copies so it ended up not costing me anything to do, except of course postage.

Alan: I was going to college full time and had no job, but I was getting a student allowance from the government here, so 100% of that money went towards all my underground activities. In 1988 I got a very well paying job in a factory – so I busted my ass working 6 days a week, and many times 16 hour days. My parents were cool and didn’t ask for too much money from me, which left me with a lot to spare – I just boycotted Australian record stores though. They never knew what stock to get in and always overcharged (100′s of % overcharge). I went right to the labels (which were all underground mostly) or got the stuff from the bands if the released records themselves, and had things sent sea mail which took a bit longer but was so cheap, saving more money. Time management was easy, because I was a full time student back then, with no wife, no kids, not much responsibility and was well trained in making my time count that I could get the zine done with not much effort time-wise. I never paid to have my zine printed, it was photo copied, at my father’s job on weekends… but Buttface was thick, massively thick, with the best quality back then you could get by photocopying anyways. There’s no way I could have done a printed zine, you have to have a ton of money for that. Ronny Eide from Morbid Mag in Norway worked, plus later he started to distribute porn to pay for his exceptionally high quality zine. We also glued our stamps – there is a special technique to be able to reuse a postage stamp. It’s a federal crime of course, but we did it anyways saving $1000′s of dollars a year. I think I traded records with one of my many Brazilian contacts for 12 months by airmail and only purchased two sets of stamps – that’s a shit load of money saving, hehe!

Typically, when starting out, the editor of the zine was a young fan without widespread indoctrination to the scene in the sense of agendas, friendships and contacts, while of course being impressionable and receptive to new drifts and ideas. One accustomed to the 21st century neurosis which causes every black metal fan to consider himself an expert on religion and politics may note that the reviews in the old zines were sparse, usually a few sentences describing the style with a brief note on its perceived quality, while interviews tended to concern the mundane activity of the band in recording and rehearsal conditions, including aspects of everyday life. Far from boring and trivial, it was the sort of discussion the target audience could best relate to and helped the spawning of new bands, as fans realized that the masters of death metal mostly weren’t trained musicians or professionals of the business, but other fans and maniacs themselves who passed their time between school and work engaging in art, violation and a healthy distaste for conformity.

Alan: Too funny, I do not consider I was a critic, we had stupid funny questions and hell, it was fun but not a piece of journalistic work, heh!

Niko: I used to do tape trading in the late 80′s and more or less related to that I got my hands on some early issues of some Finnish fanzines, for example Isten and Axe. I found them very inspiring. At the time there was no Internet as we know it today and it was very difficult to find information about bands you were interested in, or bands you didn’t know even existed. So it all pretty much started from a personal obsession to find out information about bands and artists I was interested in myself. I didn’t have any contacts in the beginning, apart from a number of tape traders, but the flyer circulation was a very handy and effective way to learn about various activities as well as spread information about your own. It was all somewhat difficult in the beginning as I was young and obviously didn’t know anything about how to edit a magazine and have it printed, but once I managed to get the first issue of Hammer of Damnation out the ball started rolling.

Timo: Of course back then there was no Internet available, so it could take weeks to communicate the simplest things. There was also huge demand for information about bands from the audience and a need from the emerging bands in the scene to get promotion for themselves. So when in 1990, I was very young – and listening feverously to Morbid Visions by Sepultura – I felt a strong urge to be active in the underground scene. I was already friends with Sodomatic Slaughter from Beherit , so I was aware of the scene and as Black Crucifixion was only in its earliest pre-stage in the autumn of 1990, my way to act was to start a zine. I had already enjoyed reading some good quality early Finnish fanzines, my favourite was called Intestinal, so starting Fallen Pages was a natural step. The first issue was in Finnish and in A5 size under the name Damn Zine. The very first number along with bands like Beherit and Samael also featured thrash, speed, death, doom and punk bands. You have to remember that there practically was no “second wave of black metal” yet: Norwegians with the rare exception of Mayhem were mostly playing death metal with often humoristic lyrics, Swedes were all about copying the Sunlight sound, with the exception of the mighty Tiamat and even Beherit labelled their sound as “brutal death metal”.  After the first issue was received very well among the buying public and the “colleagues” in the scene, I decided to do the next issue in English. Holocausto Vengeance from Beherit suggested that I would change the name from Damn Zine to something more suitable for international market. So we came up with the name Fallen Pages of Damnation, which I then shortened to just Fallen Pages. I also got more ambitious with the layout and went for A4 size and very heavy glossy paper. The substance got heavier along with the outlook, as the second issue included mostly black and death metal bands. It was published in the 1991 and I was surprised by its reception as everybody seemed to like it. Maybe it was a bit ahead of time with its outlook and probably my pretty juvenile style of writing added something to the mix. The English language was still pretty much shambles, but by the standards of the time that didn’t matter, as some of my favourite foreign zines could hardly be recognized as being written in any language.

The limitation of resources and time applied to everyone working on a fanzine; they had no hope of creating profit from their publications without crossing over to mainstream press, as some of the early 80’s zines such as Metal Forces had done. The sheer amount of competing media also meant it was impossible for anyone to claim the status of “a death metal Bible” and retrospectively, this was valuable to the development and outreach of tangential, even opposing points of view. Xeroxed artifacts as an after school hobby guaranteed freedom of speech to an extent alien to major media prone to be manipulated by management and executives.

Alan: Almost all of the experiences in doing a zine that I had were positive. Perhaps the only negative thing was when customs would sometimes steal from me (money, t-shirts, tapes – really anything that took their fancy) or a band would rip you off and not send you whatever it was you paid for. I mean back then you had this nightmare of waiting for shit, and you had to just trust people and the most you could do to protect your ‘well hidden cash’ to wrap it in carbon paper to avoid detection by x-ray. Jesse Pintado did that to me infact, the shit, heh. I sent him $5 for a demo and never got it, imagine his surprise when I showed up in Tampa in 1990 for the whole damn ‘Harmony Corruption’ recording sessions, haha! It was OK though, on the last day there he said he was sorry, I told him it was OK. If I had stayed in Australia and never got to do all this stuff, then I would have been pissed off of course. My zine policy was that we would only review what we liked. I wasn’t going to waste space writing about what I don’t like about this band that I think sucks. So we stated that anything like that we would pay to return, you know, so the band could send it out to someone who could actually do something with it. A lot of people didn’t grasp the concept and would get mad. I mean, would you rather someone blast your band and lose you fans, or would you like them to shut the hell up and mail it back to you? That’s a damn no-brainer. There were one or two people that I met later down the road, even that I used to write to, years before, and we didn’t get along that well. I won’t name names. Most everything about it all was positive, I didn’t do phone interviews because of the expense calling from Australia then was insane. Now international calls from Australia are cheaper than calling someone on the same street I live on! But it was cool just to bullshit with my traders buddies, or Lori Bravo, Trey, David, Mitch Harris… there were a number of people I would call just to talk to and get news from.

Brian: I’m not trying to sugarcoat the past, but I can’t think of a negative experience that I had. Positive experiences were plentiful… I enjoyed doing phone interviews back then, because the bands were still small, it wasn’t a strictly business call. I interviewed Trevor Peres (Obituary) and after the interview we just kept on chatting about the scenes in Florida and Buffalo and just music in general, same when I interviewed Steve Digiorgio (Sadus) and Sharon Bascovksy (Derketa).

Niko: I guess it’s simply that if you’re enthusiastic enough you’ll find the time and money. Money was always a problem, but somehow I more or less managed to fund the printing from the sales of previous issues. As for time, the zine (Hammer of Damnation) and the band (Thergothon) were my main activities outside school, I had no interest in sports and other such hobbies. The most positive aspect was the opportunity to do everything by yourself from start to finish and finally have the printed zine in your hands. The most negative aspect was probably when something went seriously wrong in the printing process. I used to look into all kinds of mainstream, high-profile magazines, art and culture etc. and tried to use that kind of presentation in the fanzine/underground context and subject matters. Of course I still had to do everything by hand, with some help from a primitive computer, word processor and matrix printer. Luckily I knew someone who could screen the photos for me for free.

Pete: Well, the money was needed only for printing and time wasn`t an issue. There was no computers and such, I wrote the interviews for Pure Fucking Hell with typewriter and band logos & photos I got from the bands if they had any. Then I “designed” the pages, like where the text, possible photos and band logo goes and when all the pages were ready the whole thing went to print. If you knew a good printing place and used a bit of your brains doing the pages you could get a surprisingly good end result with that kind of procedure.

Timo: Time was a resource that most of the scene people back then had loads of. Although a lot of things were going on in the scene that kept growing rapidly, the pace of life was slower because there was no Internet or mobile phones. Most of us did not go around boozing and fucking. At least I did not. Not because we did not want to, but for example I lived in a very small town of Rovaniemi, in the middle of Lapland. There was not so much to do if you were a nerdy long-haired boy living away from town. And it was very cold and dark most of the year. So editing a zine and sending out tons of letters seemed like viable option. The first two issues of Damn Zine/Fallen Pages were actually funded in a surprising way: I managed to convince the city of Rovaniemi to pay for on the grounds of the zine being a cultural project. So the good tax payers of Rovaniemi are to thank. The third and final issue I paid for myself, but luckily the printing house sponsored it as well, even though their management consisted of very strict and devoted Christians! The devil works in mysterious ways…

Infestation of Evil: Chroniclers of Black Metal

The beginning of the 90’s was greeted by an explosion of death metal into mass media attention, MTV airplay and new fans. There were probably more death metal zines than ever, the likes of Balance of Terror (Canada), Biopsy (Finland), Fallen Pages (Finland), The Grimoire of Exalted Deeds (USA), Hammer of Damnation (Finland), Hellspawn (Finland), Putrefaction (Sweden) and The Requiem (USA) catering to the hordes yearning for information from the realms beyond Morbid Angel and Obituary who thrived at the peak of their fame.

Pete: There were a lot of great zines but I think Slayer (Nor) was the best. I don`t remember where the idea for making a zine came from, but there were a lot of people involved making the first issue of Grey Apple zine. We started from zero, put out the first issue and sold all the copies (100 I think) and then it was time to make the second issue and nobody else was interested except me, so I thought I`ll do it myself. I changed the crappy name to Pure Fucking Hell magazine and put out the second issue and it went from there. I don`t really recall any negative experiences, some bands didn`t answer to interviews though. All of the interviews for PFH were done by letter, so I didn`t meet the people in person. You got to remember in the early 1990`s it was all underground and the bands weren`t touring like nowadays. I think the only live interview was with Napalm Death in Lepakko on the Napalm Death/Dismember/Obituary tour in 1992, that was in the first issue.

Timo: There were many zines back then and surprisingly many of them were Finnish: Intestinal, Biopsy, The Untouchables, Hammer of Damnation and of course the mightiest: Isten. Slayer magazine from Norway was superb as well. I enjoyed many foreign zines but in 1990-1993 the Finnish ones were prime of the prime, interesting writing and good English skills combined in a fine way.

Niko: There were a number to zines that, similar to mine, attempted to think outside the box so to speak, trying to find new angles to things and featuring new, unknown, different artists. You know, trying to introduce things that the reader wouldn’t yet know he/she will find interesting! As for people, there were many great, intelligent and interesting people such as Marko (Beherit), Morbid (Necromantia), Euronymous (Mayhem), Roberto (Monumentum) etc. and naturally also a few assholes but I must say I don’t really remember any particular examples. Maybe because I pay more attention to works and ideas than persons, in general.

Timo: It was totally positive for me, I can’t truly name anything shitty about those years. I got to know great people from bands, witnessing new art being born and in my own small way helping to create a scene that will be interesting to research for anthropologists of the future. I could feature the bands I wanted and loved: Rotting Christ, Blasphemy, Beherit, Impaled Nazarene, Necromantia, Carcass, Nocturnus etc. and made great friends with some of those people. Fallen Pages was the second publication in the world to interview My Dying Bride, I thought that their demo had potential in it. I have to say that I could not see the careers that Burzum or Cradle of Filth would have judging by their early promo tapes they sent to me – I actually ignored them.

All the while, dark minds were brewing plots in their suburban chambers as the black metal militia was slowly starting to strengthen its grasp on the souls of puny mortals. The electrified web of contact across regions allowed necromantic, spiritual and evil traits of the emergent possession cover ground at vast speed. The influential Mayhem axis, gathering followers around Scandinavia, sought to spread fear amidst the normalized death metal culture, which had accepted a new generation of funny skateboarders who loved brutal music and extreme sounds. They were not alone in their dark aims, as the blasphemies of witchcraft surrounded Canadian, South American, Finnish and Greek death metal and black metal alike, but the obsessive quality and Euronymous’ media manipulation skills wrestled the attention from the faltering death metal community. Coupled with an era of artistic magnitude for Nordic black metal, the zine culture caught the bright burning fires of the churches, heralding the age of the final artistic statement of underground metal before Internet covered everything in ashes and the smoke of deceit. Fans of mid-90’s black metal often grabbed a copy of Cerberus (Finland), Descent (USA), Desecration of Virgin (Germany), Imhotep (Norway), I Return to Darkness (Finland), Kill Yourself (Finland), Nordic Vision (Norway), Petrified (USA), Pure Fucking Hell (Finland), Tales of the Macabre (Germany), Voices from the Darkside (Germany) or Wheresmyskin (USA) to accompany the nocturnal excursion, candlelit mutilation or a visit to the toilet.

Black metal coverage was also picked up by the mainstream press in the wake of the terror of those Norwegians they called the Black Circle. French bands of the Les Legions Noires community (Vlad Tepes, Belketre) and the Polish Slavic heathens around the Temple of Fullmoon sect (Graveland, Veles) added their own violent, occult and occasionally political statements to the chaotic melting pot of obscurity. Rhetoric was at a completely new level now compared to the death metal years. Defying any kind of reason and common sense, bands declared war on each other and society at large, used their anonymity and obscurity to suggest the presence of dangerous cult fanaticism and deliberately alienated every average death metal fan. While there is no denying the fact that black metal was a serious matter for these groups, and rightly so, the intensification of image eventually led to role play and narcissism.

The harsh attitude of black metal created an irreconcilable gap between death metal, now consisting mostly of the “melodic” offspring of the Gothenburg clique and the “brutal” bands who imitated Cannibal Corpse, and the romantics, nihilists and Satanists who sought things that were hardly descendants of American rock music. The traditional image of the headbanger was rapidly becoming obsolete, with black metal bands opting for a gothic or medievalist appearance, brutal death metal and groove metal assimilating items of hardcore or rap and people difficult to tell apart from the crowd invading in flocks.

Zines as the purveyors of in-depth interviews and archaic scene knowledge became more philosophical, influenced by the creativity and intelligence of black metal, ambient, neo-classicism and other weapons of the Nordic uprising against normative death metal. Issues of the kind were occasionally available at black/death metal oriented record stores and mailorders, but for those without access to them the alternatives were either the moronic mainstream press or the resurgent Internet.

Droid Sector: Information Networks and the Degeneration

A few metal obsessed hackers had spread information, news and reviews through phone lines before, but personal computers became a common household item during the 90’s and most of the mainstream users got their first networking and online discussion experiences in this era through the Internet, which grew radically during the decade, from a mostly college and university utilized serious information channel to a worldwide asylum of Babylonic proportions.

Engineers, housewives and Aspies alike accessed organized discographies, commentaries, discussions and news of old and new metal alike on webzines and portals such as American Nihilist Underground Society, BNR Metal Pages, Chronicles of Chaos webzine, Inferno webzine, Lost Souls Domain, Mega’s Metal Pages and USENET newsgroups. Never before had trading, correspondence and contact with underground metal fans all over the world been so easy. Today, in the era of Encyclopedia Metallum and similar databases it’s hard to imagine the work it had taken to find information and discographies of bands no-one at your local record store knew a thing about.

While webzines didn’t directly compete with printed zines because of their more limited readability and different approach in organizing information, the easy access to metal databases undoubtedly contributed to the contraction of zine culture, along with the reasons outlined earlier. Only entertaining, in-depth and unique zines survived in printed form, often published more infrequently than before. Jobs and families occupy the time of the old school and the new generation has many other options at their disposal beside the laborious DIY printed publication.

Niko: I grew tired of the whole metal scene in the early 90′s, partly because it all turned boring due to thousands of emerging bands sounding all very similar to me, and partly because I was discovering electronic and experimental music that seemed more & more interesting to me. I did go on with the zine for some time, featuring less metal and more other stuff that interested me, but after a while I put an end to it. I think what eventually killed it for me was that I was tired of having this “obligation” to review all the stuff I received, and to try to be analytic about music instead of simply exploring and enjoying it, etc. It was becoming an unpaid job, I didn’t find anything creative or enjoyable about it anymore. Actually I still don’t enjoy writing about music or trying to analyze or describe it, something about that process kills part of the excitement.

Pete: The bands got bigger and stopped doing interviews for smaller zines and the newer bands weren`t interesting. I think the whole zine culture somehow faded in the late 1990`s, I don`t really know why. I also had started buying recording equipment etc. so I didn`t have money to print the zine anymore.

Timo: I got very ambitious about the zine, wanted to make every issue more and more professional and at the same time my musical taste got more ambitious as well. Making just another issue of a metal magazine was not an option for me, so after some time passed other things took its place in my life. The three issues are all as good as I could make them during the time they were made. Soon my band Black Crucifixion would also transform into Promethean and I could express myself even more through music. One day I realised that there would not be a fourth issue. I didn’t have much material for it ready, maybe just one interview of Impiety that Holocausto submitted. So there is no “lost” Fallen Pages #4 waiting in my vaults.

Brian: For me it was a combination of things. I got a full time job so my time was much more limited and I didn’t want to do something that I could only put a half assed effort into. The other part of it was that the scene was changing and becoming trendy and it just got old fast, new bands would pop up and get signed when they really weren’t good enough to be signed and it just watered down the scene.

Alan: It took over a year between Buttface 1 and 2 coming out, it just kept getting bigger and bigger and we thought we’d do something odd and make this monster fat ass zine, heh! My co-editor was meant to keep getting material for it while I went to the USA and Canada for 6 months in 1990, but he didn’t gather any material and I ended up getting offered a job with Morbid Angel while I was in Florida. That killed the zine. If I had come back to Australia as planned and never went back to the US, then BF might have stayed around a few more years – but by ‘93 I might say it would have stopped because the music was overpopulated with garbage bands. And it’s got 1000 times worse by 2009.I did try to keep Buttface alive as Buttface Productions in Tampa, by financing the release of my friend Jan’s band Agathocles’ first flexi disc. But my partner in that turned out to be a cokehead and ripped me and the people who ordered the flexi off badly. Some got out, here and there, but the majority I kept with me all this time, and only sent the leftovers to Jan in 2009! Almost 20 years later!

The underground metal zine is not yet an obsolete form of media. Publications such as Baphometal (Argentina), The Convivial Hermit (USA), Cross of Black Steel (Romania), Crypts of Eternity (Peru), Dauthus (Sweden), Fall to Your Knees Pissing (USA), Funeral Maelstrom of Hate (Italy), Grievantee (Finland), Hellpike (Germany), Horrible Eyes (Germany), Kaleidoscope (Finland), Oaken Throne (USA), Psicoterror (Peru), Qvadrivium (Finland), The Serpent Bearer (Finland), The Sinister Flame (Finland), Strength Through War (France) and Womb (Finland) are equals to their legendary forebears in literacy, style and tomblike appearance. They publish in-depth interviews dealing with topics from philosophy and magic to science besides the actual recording process, whose nowadays sophistication is unmatched by the legends of the past. Even the most obscure of bands are frighteningly conscious about their image and aims. Yet, their statements remain inevitably in the shadow of their colleagues from past decades in terms of influence, not because of any fault on behalf of the writers, but in keeping with the cycle of life and death which, as we have sadly noted, death metal and black metal are not exempt from.

Timo: Fallen Pages gave me direction in life, I would not be sitting on this chair now had I not been able to see things in an international perspective from very early age. And having to handle schedules, layout, printing, writing and monetary issues. Back in 1990 Rovaniemi was very, very far even from Helsinki. And even further away from Europe. Now with Internet it is different for kids living in distant places, but looking at it now, it is weird that the small town produced people and bands like Beherit and Lordi. And Fallen Pages and Black Crucifixion.

Alan: I think the zine culture as you put it pal, it’s all about paying your dues, and showing the scene that you mean business, that you care enough about it to get up off your ass and promote the bands as best you are able. It doesn’t exist really anymore I guess, not on the level it did anyways. Instead of doing the work, today more people are concerned with ‘collecting’ Myspace official band page profile photos on their top friends list. You know? That’s gay to me.

 


 

This piece of death metal research was conducted with the help of the following generous individuals: Alan Moses of Buttface zine, Brian Pattison of Chainsaw Abortions zine, Niko Sirkiä of Hammer of Damnation zine, Timo Iivari of Fallen Pages zine and Pete Ilvespakka of Pure Fucking Hell zine. You can admire scans of some of their issues and many more of the period at the Deathmetal.Org Exhibits page. Alan and Brian have joined their forces recently to publish a recapitulation of the most important years of death metal, 1984-1991, through a collection of photographs and stories narrated by the bands and zine editors of the era. Niko pursues the wizardry of ambient and avant-garde soundscapes. Timo and Pete continue performing pure black metal with Black Crucifixion and Diaboli, respectively. Deathmetal.Org loudly hails all the participants!

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense

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Ascension of Sepulchral Echoes: A Finnish Death Metal Revival

1. Introduction: The Northernmost Death Metal
2. Those Once Loyal: The Last Stand of the Underground
3. Lie In Ruins: Swallowed by the Void
4. Devilry: Rites for the Spring of Supremacy
5. Slugathor: Echoes from Beneath
6. Deathspawned Destroyer: WarBloodMassacre
7. Sepulchral Aura: Demonstrational CD MMVII
8. Ascended: The Temple of Dark Offerings EP
9. Hooded Menace: Fulfill the Curse
10. The Lords of the Shadow Realm: The Future of Finnish Death

Written by Devamitra with Tuomas K. (Lie in Ruins), Ilmari Jalas (Slugathor), Lasse Pyykkö (Hooded Menace), Teemu Haavisto (Deathspawned Destroyer), J. Partanen (Sepulchral Aura), Juuso Lautamäki (Ascended) and Sir Holm (Devilry)

Introduction: The Northernmost Death Metal

 

Shattering the stasis of human evolution
Pioneering man of god-like stature
Erase and improve the temple foundation
Annihilate the meek, empty and inferior

– Devilry, Ouroborous Coiling

 

Some of us remember Finland as it was in my early youth; a humble country, tormented by Russia’s eternal presence, influenced by American dreams, taciturn men stubborn in idealism, tainted by alcohol and madness, working to preserve the ambiguous myths of freedom and independence while searching for truths in a society where the rules of piety and devotion did not apply anymore.

Out of the silence and the cold of wintry nights arose wolven howls, bestial growls and the electric screech of demoniac strings. Clandestine groups scattered across the lake-adorned strip of land which was too vast in area for the people to be in constant touch except by phone and letter, took to the newest musical movement to inherit the throne of the kings of headbanging and thrash: grindcore. Xysma from Turku played Carcass inspired devolved bursts of groovy noise with the mechanical straightforward approach upon which Finnish industrial corporations later built their reputation.

Abhorrence, eventually to be mutated into an exploration of battle and folk attitudes in Amorphis, was among the first Death Metal formations in the real Scandinavian style. Morbid demos from around Finland swarmed like an infestation of maggots. The next few years’ worth of offerings continue to mesmerize and awe fans of old school Death Metal worldwide: Funebre, Sentenced, Disgrace, Phlegethon, Purtenance, Adramelech, Mordicus, Necropsy, Demigod, Vomiturition, Convulse, Depravity, Lubricant, Cartilage, Wings, Demilich and others.

Tuomas K.I think it was a sort of tribute to our favorite bands in our case back when we started playing in 1993. We were heavily into the early 90′s Death Metal bands so it was kind of natural for us to give it a go, since we’ve had started trying to play our instruments only a couple of years earlier.  There were only me and Roni S. playing back then and we never really intended to find another member back in the 90′s. But if we should’ve wanted another member to play, I think it would’ve been pretty hard to find one, because I think we knew only a few guys that were into Death Metal from our neighborhood. Then again, when Lie in Ruins started “for real” in the new millennium it was easier to get a lineup together.

JalasI can agree on that this was the strongest period for the music and most of it died in the mid 1990′s when Black Metal music “took over” the underground. For me it is still a bit hard to analyze all this. I have always listened to what I want and when I want. I’m not saying that I didn’t have Black Metal seasons, but bands like Slayer and Morbid Angel were always there, lurking behind (both in my record player and as recording artists).

Death Metal as an item of fashion soon trailed away and the sonic temples formed by groups of school friends split up or moved on to styles better appreciated by their peers. Drinking alcohol in frozen woods and abandoned cellars while scrawling prayers to darkness and exhaling riffs of death was replaced by jobs, families and military service. Most of the cheap labels went out of business since B grade grindcore and Death Metal where not profitable anymore, dooming many of the aforementioned relics of the scene to obscurity until a partial resurrection through reissues and MP3 hubs.

PyykköFinnish bands got tired of playing Death Metal and wanted to be something that they really couldn´t master very well. It was quite embarrassing shit to watch in some cases.

Those Once Loyal: The Last Stand of the Underground

The chromatic, fiery madness of original Death Metal was too much for the glamour-seeking generation who caught glimpses of extreme metal through the media attention of Black Metal and the TV exposure of “Gothenburg” and gothic metal. Other fans disregarded the old groups for their lack of consistency and humorous appearance, complete with interviews that often read like a discussion of retards in a hangover attempting a foreign language. But as always, true spirit is elusive and the self-importance of the new scene was hardly a better choice in life.

Not many of the original Death Metal fans were enthusiastic about Children of Bodom’s sappy power metal infiltration of Gothenburg techniques or Rotten Sound’s mechanical drum clinic grindcore. Nevertheless, the next generation of longhairs were inspired by these bands who had mastered the latest techniques of production perfect for a violently loud catharsis in car stereo or as a video game soundtrack. It was escapist, but not the Yuggothian dreams of a Demigod. In this case, influenced by groove metal and speed metal, commercial Death Metal sought to act as a youth counselor, harnessing hate and psychotic religion into the individualism of I don’t give a fuck and the various related ethical systems of liberalism.

It is appropriate that while studio musicians’ and record label executives’ fake Death Metal from Helsinki was climbing the charts, the real good stuff started happening in the underground. Black Metal, as always, was an anti-social reaction to commercialization and the turn of the decade saw a resurgence of Finnish devil worshippers returning to the blasphemous sounds of Bathory and Darkthrone. The travesties at large left people wondering if Death Metal was truly dead and unable to bestow any more bloody and sacral offerings to the underground. This is where the morbid cults under our scrutiny enter the field.

JalasIn the beginning of Slugathor our line-up was the same as the one we had before we started to play Death Metal. But soon we dropped one guitar player and only had 4 members in the band for a while. Our original vocalist, an esoteric person, Nebiros, was an important member in the beginning and wrote really
non-typical more philosophical lyrics than was heard in typical Death Metal at the time. Also the universe, our seen nature and all experiences influenced us, besides the spoiled “metal scene” that was in the late 90′s, which was also indeed very influential in a way. Definitely I would describe our approach more
brutal than most of the other bands we heard from Finland. This is one of the reasons to start the band like this, besides ultimate passion and love for the genre.

HaavistoIn fact the birth of Deathspawned Destroyer was a mere accident. We had meant to just play any kind of metal, in order to have some additional instrumental practice considering our other bands and so we decided to play Death Metal or a related style with Kai Lehtinen. Death Metal was a rather obvious choice because of a our mutual interest in the genre and the aim was to sound alike to old Cannibal Corpse, Blood, Autopsy etc. without any ambition to create something unique. However we started to churn out a great amount of songs, one each new rehearsal. Then we decided to make up a name for the band and we found a good one from a Cannibal Corpse album title: Bloodthirst. That’s what we were called at the time we did our first demo “Reign of Terror”. The demo sounds exactly like it was supposed to and the overall sound is like we meant it to be. The vocals were supposed to be brutal enough and the sound had to be muddy. To the surprise of both of us someone wanted to release our album. At this point we noticed that there were a few other Bloodthirsts around so we decided to go for a name that no-one else would have for sure, ending up with Deathspawned Destroyer. Originally it was Deathspawn Destroyer but we are told that it’s grammatically bullshit so we added the “-ed”, which still doesn’t sound as good to me as the wrongly spelled one. But anyway the band was born by accident, me and Lehtinen totally agree on the spirit.

PartanenIn 2004-2006 I had been doing a few ambient releases and when those projects hibernated, I had a fresh vision back into the darkness of Death Metal magic. I don’t know exactly what the inspiration for Sepulchral Aura was. There was a vision which commanded itself to manifest through my fleshly vessel and I’m glad it happened.

LautamäkiBefore we got our singer Ascended played some kind of mixture of thrash and Death Metal. Things started to evolve towards traditional Death Metal when we started to discover Finnish gems like Abhorrence, Amorphis, Demigod, Demilich. The sound of those bands was very immense. It was dark, heavy and still maintaining some very mystical quality to it. The only thing left to do was to create and emulate same atmospheres like those records have and introduce our own vision of Death Metal to the world. The hardest part of completing the lineup was to get a decent singer. When Tommi contacted us and joined in it was clear after few rehearsals that the lineup was perfect.

PyykköThe idea to form Hooded Menace happened more less by an accident during our Candlemass jam sessions. Instead of melodic vocals we used Death Metal grunts. It was fun to play and worked pretty well so we thought why not to make our own band that would would combine the elements of Doom and Death Metal. I have been wanting to do something like this for a long time. So that three-piece jam session group became the lineup for the “Fulfill the Curse” album.

HolmOur guitarist Grave’s urge for self-expression and inexhaustible well of riffs is what ultimately inspired the birth of Devilry. Everything else is inconsequential and not of great importance at all.

The new millennium saw a legion of astute musicians interested in unleashing explosive, severe and gripping metal without taking part in the pretense of the new generation of Black Metal. In many ways, the sacred and primal integrity of old school metal had collapsed because widespread attention had created an unstable communal atmosphere of unclear and mismatched intentions. That is why most of what we hear in mainstream media regarding new metal is irony, jokes about “true metal” and meta-metal bullshit filled with endless self-references. Yet, a strong web of personal contacts, by letter, phone or Internet, fueled the fires of Death Metal, along with a fanatically devoted fan base.

Lie in Ruins: Swallowed by the Void

The veteran Death Metallers from Olari practiced and mastered their Scandinavia influenced art for 15 years before their first release on a label, the impressive “Architecture of the Dead” EP featuring older compositions. While this unique band seemed to receive very little promotion, disciples prayed for the day of reckoning when this constellation could bestow their malevolence in full force upon the wretched scene. The long, exhausting spell “Swallowed by the Void” was to be the definitive answer to these inquiries. Sluggish, conjuring and micro-melodic abyss anthems pay unyielding tribute to the likes of Dismember and Grotesque, aiming for an evil glory that betrays the way death metal lost the innocent meddling in dark arts prevalent in the late 80’s and discovered serious ideologies by the force of contamination and crossbreeding with Black Metal. Especially the progressive moods of the deadly closing track “Bringer of Desolation”, reminiscent of the Lovecraftian horror pathos of the longer tracks by Nile deserves an inclusion in the Death Metal canon of the decade. Serious catacomb dwelling fans of Repugnant and Necros Christos will feel completely at home with Lie in Ruins’ atmospheric, sacral method of composition which eschews fast and classical parts, but returns to the Sabbath-ian roots of primal death doom experience.

Devilry: Rites for the Spring of Supremacy

One of the most anti-social and least compromising commando squads from Finland in any musical genre, Devilry’s series of EP’s cumulated during the decade into an impressive demonstration of technical and lyrical ability that converted hordes of Black Metal listeners into old school Death Metal and vicious thrash. Like a less confused “The Laws of Scourge” era Sarcofago, Devilry abstains from long buildups to frame scenes of street violence and political upheaval in robotically symmetric percussion and inhuman, precise, spouting syllables of learned rhetoric. One of the fastest Finnish metal bands, at least in overall impression, Devilry quotes Slayer for a reductionist but holistic approach to songwriting which means that each song is built from a clearly defined set of riffs arranged to unleash the most powerful experience of intensity on the listener, while Sir Holm’s text praises the law and order of a reich that would be built according to the code of the warrior and rule of the naturally supreme. Essays could be written about Devilry’s interest in beauty, as despite the feral character of the music all songs are geometrical complexes with no loose parts hanging and even the cover picture is a serene, celestial scene incorporating Finnish functionalist architecture. Even the condemnation and hate that hangs as an eternal cloud upon the political rants of Devilry, are mostly posed as arguments of: what is not beautiful, does not deserve to be upheld, not even tolerated.

Tuomas K.It has been fairly easy for us to find contacts in the Death Metal underground so far. I think the communications are now way better compared to 90′s. It is easier to get yourself “heard”. The downside is that you also get a lot of these individuals or groups who want to get themselves heard, so you’ll have to dig a little deeper to find something worthwhile. In the end it’s still the music that speaks for itself, so that has to do a lot in order to get support or even fans of your work.

JalasI also think it was not hard to find contacts for people who are really into Death Metal. Just look at Tomasz (Time Before Time). Despite his young age, he has been long time in the underground and he actually was also one of the first constant contacts I found (I think back in 2001 or so).

PyykköNowadays getting contacts is very easy because of the Internet. It´s damn easy to spread your music over the Internet. Myspace is a very good tool for that. There´s an endless amount of crap but also lots of good stuff. The communication has become easier but then again there´re so many bands around that you have to be pretty damn good to stand out. I have found these times very good for metal. There is still a demand for a “real thing” and people around seem very enthusiastic and passionate. The old days won´t come back. The most exciting era of metal lies in the past but man, I´m having a blast today! Things could be much worse. I´m not a huge follower of the scene but it seems to be doing really fine. Metal is still exciting and fresh in a very rotten way though!

HolmDevilry has been such a solitary entity during the past few years that I do not have a clue about what goes on and where. I really do not even care. There is obviously support for our cause, else we would not exist in the public at all, but I am not interested in such trivial matters as finding fans and contacts.

PartanenFor Sepulchral Aura the response has been surprisingly good. I guess there’s support, fans and contacts out there at least for those who deserve, but I’m not that interested about that. But still it’s good to hear that some people have liked the CD and care to promote it and Sepulchral Aura in their own way. In general, people around me are not interested in Death Metal.

LautamäkiThere has been minor Death Metal scene rising in Finland and it has been interesting to see that we are not the youngest band around devoted to this art. We were also just recently interviewed by Finnish metal magazine Miasma so I would say that there is slight interest growing to this style inside Finland. Also gigs like Slugathor, Lie in Ruins and Stench Of Decay in Helsinki are helping the scene a lot. Many people don’t view Death Metal as an ideological and devoted music style such as Black Metal for example, but there has been so many Death Metal bands who have been loyal to their style and ideology for years and should be honored for showing such a devotion to this form of art. Also new genres like this so called Deathcore spawning from United States are distorting the views of what Death Metal is really about.

Slugathor: Echoes from Beneath

Slugathor is already a veteran of “new” Finnish Death Metal, having debuted in 2000 with the “Delicacies of the Cadaver” EP right when everyone else was concentrating in elitist Black Metal fantasies. The morbid, dirty, ugly and non-theatrical submersion to grinding but dimensional grave exhumations was initially scorned upon but eventually they even signed to one of the premier Black Metal labels of the world, Drakkar Records from France. By the time of the third album “Echoes from Beneath” Slugathor knows exactly how to manipulate intensity and the listening experience of both black and Death Metal listeners, opening cavernous vaults and passages through warped holes in time and space using mostly foreboding rhythm guitar chugging of patterns familiar from since the dawn of Death Metal, ethereal melodic background leads by Tommi Grönqvist and evil vocals by Axu Laakso that borrow technique from both Deicide and Demilich without sounding as extreme as them. Like Bolt Thrower, this band is all about heaviness, ambience and symmetry while all “display” type of elements of technical Death Metal are kept to a minimum. A special mention goes to Ilmari Jalas’ drum technique which borrows heavily from Doom Metal in building up groove to a climax where dynamics emphasize the rhythm riff so that the only possibility is to headbang convulsively.

JalasBolt Thrower influenced Slugathor really strongly in the beginning and always. Some people compare Slugathor also to bands like Asphyx or Obituary, but I would say that these influences are only minor and definitely more inspiration has flown, when we listened to bands such as Demigod, old Amorphis, Grave, Incantation and old Mortician. Definitely Morbid Angel also, but this was not heard so well on our music very much, I think. Also some bands, like Kaamos and Necros Christos at least influenced me in a way, because they had such unique concepts and ultimate feeling of death. Some more obscure names pop up to my mind, such as Bloody Gore (Indonesia), Darklord (Australia), all female band Mythic and so on. You know, it was all these 7″EP and demos we listened at the time besides full-length albums. Even demo-material of Dying Fetus, which could be a shock (?) to some because of their nowadays political message. But that band was brutal as hell when we first heard them. Also they were lyrically more into mutilation, etc. back then. Maybe we got into that because of teenage enthusiasm, but for some reason all this stuff still has very special place in our hearts, because they developed us to become what we are now.

The slow new resurgence of Finnish Death Metal was a joy to behold as the pieces of music were sincere, the young fan base was delighted to get rid of the obnoxious attitudes that had contaminated the feeling of Black Metal and many of the bands and their releases were still very much conceptually constructed with great care and attention. Devilry spoke of a militant order against degeneration, Khert-Neter conjured images of ancient Egyptian paths to enlightenment, Sotajumala and Deathspawned Destroyer delved into the sufferings of the Finnish soldiers and Hooded Menace used horror movies as absurd and illustrative symbols for the infinite darkness that surrounds the apparent order in the sequence of human lives.

Deathspawned Destroyer: WarBloodMassacre

Primitive but astoundingly direct, Deathspawned Destroyer from Huittinen (home of Vordven) has with their two full lengths established Finnish parallels to grindcore influenced bands such as Blood and even Blasphemy but remained widely unnoticed because of a lack of pretension and promotion. While “The First Bestial Butchery” album indulged in gore fantasies of Finnish rural winter madness, “WarBloodMassacre” logically continues to explore real world horrors that happened within the same fields and woods we inhabit here. The shades and violent ghosts of Finnish war history 1939-1945 are not haunted, prophetic or wise in the nearly brainless, stomach churning vision of Deathspawned Destroyer. This is music and lyric of the gut, the trenches and the perpetual dirt. It is Bolt Thrower if it was created by boozing Finnish woodsmen instead of punk influenced British soccer fans. The riffs would probably tell their story as well to men who lived 10,000 years ago, provided they were fighters with hate for the scourge of slavery and love for their home woodlands. The slower parts approximate the atmospheres of Amebix brand of ethereal hardcore. The band gets a chance to try its hand at epic length composition with the more than 10 minute “Doom Before Death” and why the simplicity of structure may make progressive listeners cringe, there is hardly a criticism to be made about the way the parts are elaborated by the cruel lyrics that detail the sufferings of a prisoner of war under torture. The relentless forward driving rhythm and ghoulish voice of the band might be borrowed from the old school, but the vicious, nearly cartoonish black-and-white history flashback is something that needs to be heard to be believed.

HaavistoOur lyrics were far from philosophy and deep meanings. The lyrics of “Reign of Terror” were almost completely taken from “The Diary of Jack the Ripper”, but edited enough to not be a clear plagiarism. On “The First Bestial Butchery” we built new lyrics almost by putting one harsh word after another and looking at the result. We did pay enough attention to lyrics to get one more sensible piece written by someone outside the band: “Autopsy Romance”. The cover art of the album was an idea we had in mind for a long time but had no suitable use before. The second full-length “WarBloodMassacre” was something completely different as the lyrics were entirely done by a person not in the band, with greater care and attention and with the war thematic. I think one can clearly see the main influence at the time being Bolt Thrower. I think the cover art was arranged for by someone at Bestial Burst and very fine they were, thanks for them. A special mention must go to the cover artist of the Bloodhammer/Deathspawned Destroyer split, as one couldn’t make a better representation of the old school spirit. The finest cover art ever.

JalasLike I said, Slugathor’s old vocalist Nebiros had quite philosophical lyrical themes. Some lyrics are easy to read, but not that easy to understand right away. They make you think. Well, after he went out of space and started to sing to birds instead of making brutal death noise, we had Axu in the band and he would be the right person to answer about the concept. I’m sure he had his own vision of what is a pure Death Metal lyric.

PyykköThe lyrical and graphic concept of Hooded Menace mostly comes from the 70’s Spanish horror film series “The Blind Dead”. That defines our name, the logo and the basic atmosphere of the band. All that slow motion and creepy, menacing mood of those movies are there in Hooded Menace. If you have seen the movies you know what I mean. “The Blind Dead” is the bottom line but there´s more to Hooded Menace than that. We have songs based on other horror films too and some lyrics come from the writer´s own imagination. That sleazy imagination is always strongly influenced by horror movies though! There´s no deeper philosophy to it. We are all about horror! That´s why I sometimes call us as a horror death/doom band. No horror, no Hooded Menace.

Tuomas K.Lie in Ruins is conceptually 100% dealing with death, darkness and all things related. After all, this is Death Metal, so the lyrics and the imagery definitely should reflect that.

PartanenThe nucleus of Sepulchral Aura could be the juxtapositioning of chaos and cosmos, life and death and their intertwined yet paradoxical counter-natures. If one knows the Gnostic text “Thunder Perfect Mind” it could be easier to grasp the drift here. The rest is basically visions and of course experiences transmuted into sound and words. No particular philosophy, but reflections of the path toward self-knowledge by illuminating the shadowed aspects within, self-discipline through warrior and mystic ideals and becoming a higher being.

HolmFor Devilry, National Socialism as an all-encompassing Weltanschauung is the foundation on which everything is built.

LautamäkiTo keep things simple I just say that we are influenced and inspired by a very universal subject called death. Western world has a very sick and unnatural attitude towards such natural thing as death. It is totally ignored or people pretend that it doesn’t even exist while media has demonized it to the point that there are people who really don’t understand that death is something one has to face sooner or later. Not only concerning individuals and families, but one should understand that every civilization and culture will face death as it is seen through history. Only death is real!

Sepulchral Aura: Demonstrational CD MMVII

Sepulchral Aura is not the first time that mastermind J. Partanen (Second Sun, Aeoga etc.) has picked up the guitar and the drums but it’s the first time he produced a minor classic for the underground to remember from this era of harsh and esoteric Finnish metal. Cryptic, obscurant and violent atonality bursts from Partanen’s figurative composing pen much like Ligeti had developed a passion for speed metal and Death Metal, far from the technical pretensions of the Cynics and Pestilences of the world. Whoever upheld the common misconception that Death Metal is not mysteries and occult metaphor, whoever thought we needed the Black Metal “kvlt” to make us interested in life’s hidden forces and spiritual darkness, had not heard the very dimensional experience Sepulchral Aura engages us in. Lead guitars are non-musical but clear and comprehensible like alien messages sent straight into the brain cortex, vocals are guttural and rasped voices somewhere between animalism and insanity, drums sound like a tribute to old Carcass except for some very idiosyncratic ways to use rhythm and nuance to underline the chaos god that devises the riffs. It is impossible to consider a discussion of this demo that doesn’t mention the legacy of Australian Death Metal and War Metal all the way from Sadistik Exekution to the furthest reaches of Portal and Stargazer. It is very much the resurrection of the sincere belief and primal energy that fueled Bestial Warlust, but in this case consecrated by the wasteland of the North instead of the haunted chasms in Down under.

PartanenIntent and improvisation played a major part in how the music itself turned out to be, so I cannot talk about conscious efforts of tributes to particular bands etc.

New Finnish Death Metal is not characterized by particular attributes in sound or can be fitted into one of the trends at large in popular Death Metal, such as fusion Death Metal, “melodic extreme metal” or hyperspeed brutal metal. Most of the bands perform intricate but non-pretentious variations on the classic Scandinavian styling (with lots of Boss Heavy Metal pedals around!), with an emphasis on accuracy and consistency of imagery and lyrics that has been newly found in the Black Metal wave of total art. Trey Azagthoth’s description of Death Metal as a feeling like serpents crawling in the amplifier is very apt in most cases. However, the Death Metal acts mostly wish to keep away from the personality cults and idol worship prevalent in other extreme metal and just keep the music fresh and intuitive.

HaavistoThat’s it. Death Metal is a feeling and when you find the right feel, your material starts to take form and develop and if it sounds a bit familiar already, who cares? It will be new because of the different sound and the feeling transmitted by the end result. It doesn’t need to be that new and special. “The First Bestial Butchery” had the most intense feeling because exactly the one I had about the resulting album was shared by many who listened to it.

HolmCreating something fresh, Death Metal or not, is utterly unimportant to me. I am more interested in just crafting good songs. Otherwise it should be difficult to relay anything through it successfully.

JalasWithout listening to any modern or happy shit, I think the variation becomes from small things, changing tempos, repeating riffs but adding a lead guitar. To be honest with these methods it is hard to invent something new, but there are still some ways to invoke the Draco.

Tuomas K.Actually that description from Mr. Azagthoth is pretty good one! Haven’t heard that one before. As for creating fresh tunes of death, I think it has to do with inspiration first. Sometimes you could have an inspirational rush and just write a whole song from one go. The second option usually is that you dig into your “database” and pick ingredients from here and there and combine those parts to a new song. One thing that is obligatory to play or write Death Metal is a very low tuning on the stringed instruments, at least in my opinion. As for distortion goes, we opt for the Boss HM pedal too, only we don’t use it exactly to get the legendary Sunlight-sound. Add some doomier parts and twisted melodies, and there you go.

LautamäkiOf those main ingredients listed above we only have the Boss heavy metal pedal which our bassist uses as distortion, so that’s the tiny bit of Swedish sound we have! We always try to deliver crushing and heavy songs which still aim to attach the mystical and ethereal feeling through dissonant melodies and solos inspired by mysteries of death and decay.

Ascended: The Temple of Dark Offerings EP

It seems sometimes like a wonder that so many Death Metal classics have been created by youngsters working on their first demo, EP or album but clearly it is a basis for less calculated and more intense statements of the primal truths these eyes have witnessed on their journey so far on earth. While the least experienced musicians on the list, Ascended from Pori prove not one bit worse in channeling the breath of exhumed grave into the nostrils of the expectant Death Metal fan. Simple but glorious, Ascended likes to keep it slow and groove onwards through melodies that recall old Tiamat, Slayer and even a bit of Black Metal. Much like Mystifier or Necros Christos, vocals intone an animated ritual chant to the dead in an almost numbingly rhythmic and non-varied manner. Sound is sparse and clear, with a surprising gap in the lower register lending the proceedings an airy, ethereal vibe of darkness. The foreboding calm of tracks such as “Wedlock of Lust” or the multi-part “Mesmerizing Stench” should be obligatory lessons for most of this generation’s Black Metal bands in what they have missed in pacing and atmospheres of evil. Technical ability and pages of morbid theology do not substitute for the realm of visions and subdued melodies that remind mortals of that which shall be over all too soon – the summer of life, clouded by the storms of the unknown, while the reaper grins to you in the horizon.

Hooded Menace: Fulfill the Curse

Perhaps no other themes in metal have suffered such an ugly abuse as those of gothic horror and its symbolic exploration of the unconscious, sexual and paranoid impulse within man. As plastic, theatrical and money-hungry hedonists swarmed like a pack of rats to invade Death Metal and Black Metal record labels, they left behind a legacy of fear which caused later audiences to abhor the careful and elegant treatment of the macabre that was the original intention of bands like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, before the same bands’ later development infused it with a homosexual taint. While Hooded Menace has not yet produced a work to outweigh the elders, it’s done more than its share in reviving hope in a form with plenty of potential. If there is one thing that has been sadly lacking in the last decade of Death Metal, it’s beautiful and clever melodies. Led by veterans from Joensuu’s progressive Death Metal cult Phlegethon, Hooded Menace pounds, thrashes and makes dramatic gestures of sweeping funereal melodies perfect for a Candlemass album while the lyrics are growled by Lasse Pyykkö (“Leper Messiah”) as absurdist anecdotes straight from 50’s B-grade horror movies.

The apparent cheapness of “Grasp of the Beastwoman” or “Theme from Manhattan Baby” is offset by the care and calculation which proves that Hooded Menace has a profound affection for its infantile source material. This trait establishes a profound link with the old school of Death Metal, the musical manifestation of the gore and trash movie obsessions of kids whose awareness of the relevance of death and morbidity to philosophical discourse was only intuitive and spontaneous.

PyykköWe owe a lot to bands like Candlemass, Cathedral and Winter. It´s not about paying tribute, it´s about making as good slow Death Metal as we can. It´s not a tribute for tribute´s sake, you know. This band is very natural thing actually. When I write metal songs I don´t try to be old school. I am “old” and schooled during the golden days of Death Metal so old school is pretty much what comes out whether I wanted or not. One reason why we decided to form this band was because we thought there weren´t enough decent Death/Doom bands around. We use the elements that we think will make the greatest slow Death Metal. This is our vision of how this type of music should sound at its best. Basically what we do is, I´m going really black and white now, recycle all those Candlemass and Cathedral riffs, throw in some creepy Death Metal vocals and spice it up with some horror soundtrack influences. We just know what elements there has to be in our songs… or at least we know what elements we definitely don´t want to include! It´s not hard actually. It all comes out very naturally. I bet you could tell if we sounded forced. The result is something that in some putrid way sounds fresh… at least to our ears it does, and that´s pretty much enough to keep us going.

The Lords of the Shadow Realm: The Future of Finnish Death

While most media continues to highlight the hyped up Heavy, Black and Doom bands from the Land of the Thousand Lakes, we at Deathmetal.Org wish to raise a mighty salute to the legions of blasphemy and resistance who are spreading evil Death Metal amidst the wastelands of the frozen North. Unique, demanding and powerful, these bands are not in the way to become the next big thing in Death Metal, but I have the sincere hope that each reader will find something in this diverse assortment that speaks to him in the voice of transcendental communication which is the reason we have been interested in this art for all these years. These hordes will either dominate the world or rule in shadows.

PyykköWell, you never know about the future. I´d be happy with ruling in shadows, haha! Hooded Menace will never be hugely popular anyway. My ambition has always been to beat myself. To keep on making decent music as long as it´s fun, passionate and exciting. You possibly have noticed there have been some changes to the lineup after the “Fulfill the Curse” album. The other guys left the city of Joensuu because of work and studies so now Hooded Menace is a duo with me on vocals, guitars and bass and Pekka on drums. Pekka was an easy and pretty obvious choice since I already play with him in Vacant Coffin. As long as we don´t want to play live we can work as a duo like forever but sure a bass player would be nice for the rehearsals. It can get a bit boring to rehearse the songs as a twosome. Our next move in “spreading evil” is of course to release our 2nd album. That should be out sometime in the first half of 2010 on Profound Lore!

HaavistoOnce Lehtinen quit playing after the second Deathspawned Destroyer album, it meant an almost complete stop to our activity. We did two promising tracks with our new member Tuomas Murtojärvi, but we didn’t really get it properly going so the band and the Death Metal spirit has drifted away. People tend to have so much other things to do and the most important band related people have moved so far from us that when we have the occasional practice we play something totally different from Deathspawned Destroyer. The modern day Death Metal people seem anyway to be in a different world and there doesn’t seem to be a demand for old school ruckus. At least not among the “metalheads” seen in the streets around here. I haven’t followed either the recent developments in Death Metal, because the new bands don’t interest me one bit and the old ones have been devoured through and through many times. Deathspawned Destroyer rests in the shadows and maybe one day will be back and do something worth listening to… maybe. We need a guitarist who has a regular commitment to the project and who cares more about the attitude than playing right. It’s certain that things won’t work out again with the original Deathspawned Destroyer duo, but there’s no strife related to it. Hails to Lehtinen and everyone else who supported Deathspawned Destroyer and were a part of our activity in one way or another!

Tuomas K.I think our ambition with Lie in Ruins is to create and release Death Metal which we find satisfying for ourselves. If there comes a time that I or we shouldn’t be satisfied with our work, I guess we should call it a day or at least take a timeout. If there should be any ambitions to create other kind of music, I think it should done under a different moniker, which I think that some of those old bands should’ve done as well.

HolmThere is no ambition in ruling in shadows. We already are. Supreme in the league of our own. That is where Devilry will stay too. Anything else would be doomed to fail.

JalasWe never even thought about making some commercial music with Slugathor. I’m now proud to end this band without wimping out or changing style of music. I think we had our share of influence in the younger generation of Death Metal. It is unbelievable to notice that some new bands have started to sound
exactly like Death Metal is supposed to sound (1989-1991 era), even though they were hardly even born when those old bands recorded their classic demos or debut albums. Slugathor’s last offering of darkness will be a mini-album, in totalitarian Slugathor style, no compromise here either. We have played our last concert in Semifinal, Helsinki with Stench of Decay and Lie in Ruins. The band will be put on it’s already open grave, after a decade. Actually now when Slugathor’s time is over, me and Antti have decided to work on some very obscure and dark Death Metal. We just can’t stop this. Also the rest of Slugathor memebers are going to work on with their own musical projects. Which suits me the best “to dominate the world”, or “to rule in shadows”? I would choose the latter option.

LautamäkiAscended’s next big move is going to be a full-length. The process is delayed because of military service, but in Autumn 2010 we should be able to rehearse again with full lineup and maybe record the material by the end of the year. There’s plenty of material already written up, but there is just no time to rehearse it. One thing I can still promise is that the album is going to be nothing else than honest Death Metal. The only negative thing I can think of is that it is very hard to organize rehearsals since we have 5 members in the lineup.

PartanenAlso playing alone creates some practical obstacles, but they can be surpassed. I would prefer a real line-up, but due to certain aspects of the nature of SA, it is better to continue this way, at least for now. It is to become one with the shadows. Next release will be in 7″, 10″, or full-length format, but do not ask me when. The worthy music is visions, dreams, thoughts, discipline, magic, feeling and intent. The rest is a physical act. If you can smell the stench of transcendental death while playing, at least something is right. If you can see death, even better. If you die, best!

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Hipster metal has officially jumped the shark

HIPSTER METAL
Hype Cycle: 2004–2007
Key Artists: Boris, Wolfmother, Dead Meadow

What It Was: Dave Grohl’s unexceptional Probot vanity project brought attention to avant-metal label Southern Lord, making it cool for the ironic-ringer-T-shirt set to share warm PeeBeRs with the denim-jacket-back-patch set. Soon, bands like the Sword, Priestess, and Saviours brought all the energy and aggression of metal without zitty geekazoid tropes like “chops.”

Creative Peak: Mastodon, Leviathan [2004]

Typically Effusive Praise at the Time: “If Sunn 0))) is the ZZ Top of experimental metal, with matching beards and Gibson Les Paul guitars, Boris might be the Kraftwerk, or the Ramones, or even the Jimi Hendrix Experience, depending on the album.” —The New York Times Magazine, 2006

What Happened?: For most people, standing through two hours of Sunn O)))’s fog machine and drone turned out to be “not really my thing.” Indie rockers started their own terrible metal bands (David Pajo’s Dead Child, Rob Crow’s Goblin Cock), and the burnouts nerds laughed at in high school resumed shaking their heads at us all. – The Village Voice

When even the Village Voice says hipster metal has jumped the shark, you know it’s official: both that “hipster metal” exists, which hipsters deny, and that it’s a dead played out trend, which is good news for people who like real metal.

Indie hipster music and metal cannot coexist. They’re coming at the world from opposite angles. Metal is about power, but indie hipster music is about sounding cool and ironic to pacify your friends. Power is war, pandering is pacifism. No pacifism in metal — only war — IF YOU ARE A FALSE…

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Best metal of the decade 1999-2009

The twee indie hipster ironists at A.V. Club put out their list of the 100 metal albums of the decade, forgetting of course that what we, the listeners, need is”quality over quantity.” We don’t have endless time, money, or even bandwidth to explore all the goofy stuff that seems nuanced and interesting to a reviewer who will listen to it twice in his lifetime, once to write the review and once before he shuffles that promo CD on to Half Price.

This list is not going to make me friends at big labels who want you to pick up the latest dreck by some indie rock band that started playing metal ironically. It won’t win you scene points with the kvlt and trve. It will surely not impress your friends with how open-minded, cool and different you are. What it will do is re-awaken your interest in some of the best metal made during this decade, even if it was so good there was no need to make drama about it, and so it slipped under our radar as the years went by.

Demoncy – Joined in Darkness (1999, Baphomet)

When black metal had just discovered keyboards and carnival music, this lo-fi roar straight out of hell cut through the fat and pared our ears to the bone. Sounding like Incantation and Havohej, its primitive riffs in archly elegant songs retain their power a decade later.

Profanatica – Profanatitas de Domonatia (2007, Hell’s Headbangers)

For a return later in their career, Profanatica took the primal riffing of their earlier albums and worked it into longer melodies like a Swedish death metal band, creating an enduring mood of occult darkness.

Antaeus – Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan (2000, Baphomet)

This album sounds like battle, with clipped rhythms and clashing riffs, but out of that emerges a sublime sense of melody in one of the last albums to really uphold the old school of early 1990s black metal.

At War With Self – Torn Between Dimensions (2005, Free Electric Sound)

Most technical metal is an oil-and-water separation, but At War With Self find a voice that smoothly wraps a progressive/jazz jam session around metal riffs and emotions.

Immolation – Unholy Cult (2002, Olympic)

Immolation achieve a rarity: technical death metal that doesn’t aim for highbrow technique, but a solid slamming songwriting technique that never leaves you in confusion, and on this album, the guitar fireworks match the fire of the stories told by these vivid, evocative songs.

Beherit – Engram (2009, Spinefarm)

As if attempting to sum up the past twenty years of black metal, Beherit makes an album in the style of early Bathory but updates it with quirk and insight, etching a complex sigil that requires repeated listening to decode.

Skepticism – Alloy (2008, Red Stream)

Funeral doom hangs drooping waves of distorted noise upon mortuary keyboards, dragging us through a dirge of misery, but Skepticism make it sound like an interesting mindset we could explore and even enjoy.

Ildjarn-Nidhogg – Ildjarn-Nidhogg (2003, Northern Heritage)

Ildjarn, with its minimalistic riffs and incessant high-speed drumming, is a band that people either love or hate based on how it sounds, but hidden in all that noise are transcendent short compositions that stroke the inner brain.

Gorguts – From Wisdom To Hate (Olympic, 2001)

Gorguts takes their subtly melodic brutal death metal and pulls it inside out to make mechanistic, complex song constructions that followed classical patterns and used multiple themes.

Summoning – Oath Bound (2006, Napalm)

To bring the sound of ancient Hobbit-infused landscapes into black metal, Summoning slowed it down but played at higher registers and faster than doom bands, interweaving keyboards and longer guitar riffs to create an ambient metal sound.

Blaspherian – Allegiance To The Will Of Damnation (2007, Blood Harvest)

Blaspherian prove underground old school death metal is not dead with this music in the style of 1991, but with the wisdom of years of atmospheric metal channeled into these riffs that resemble a subconscious thought with their eerily familiar rhythms and shapes.

Celtic Frost – Monotheist (2006, Century Media)

Returning from a recent history of false starts, Celtic Frost get back to their 1987 sensibility and modernize it, mixing industrial, gothic, speed metal and morbid death metal into an energetic but necrotic album.

Graveland – Memory and Destiny (2002, No Colours)

To be epic, black metal needs to transport us from The Now to the vast and lawless past, a frontier that Graveland opens wide with their martial, Conan-influenced black metal.

Cosmic Atrophy – Codex Incubo (2008, Metalbolic)

Just as metal gets codified, Cosmic Atrophy return to put the weird back into metal with a unique voice inspired by Demilich, Timeghoul, Voivod and all other metal bands from the other side.

Avzhia – The Key of Throne (2004, Old War)

Melding flowing black metal with militant fast drums, Avzhia take over where Emperor left off and throw in the new world sense of urgency and gritty, nihilistic, feral and crafty battle.

Legion Of Doom – The Horned Made Flesh (2008, Zyklon-B)

Like the roar of a hunting lion, this album makes destructive sound into a signal to attack, joining raw black metal riffs and melodic keyboards for a dreamlike listening experience.

Slayer – World Painted Blood (2009, American)

After long years of not having an artistic voice, and trying everyone else’s vision by their own, Slayer drop most of the “modern metal” influences and pick up where 1992 left off, in simpler songs that use rock-style pocket rhythm but keep the classic acerbic Slayer riffs.

Sammath – Triumph in Hatred (2009, Folter)

You might think black metal died and got so mixed with other styles it had no voice, but Sammath have mixed death metal technique carefully into their black metal songs, making a testimony toward aggression that sounds like Zyklon-B merged with Angelcorpse.

Motorhead – Inferno (2004, Sanctuary)

Motorhead have made a career of not changing their basic approach, and “Inferno” is no exception, fitting on the shelf next to the others but also being tighter, faster and darker than most of them.

Asphyx – Death… The Brutal Way (2009, Ibex Throne)

Performing the rare trick of coming back 20 years later with an album as good and un-diluted as their first, Asphyx bring you heavy basic riffs and lots of repetition, but song structures that emphasize the profundity of contrast and give these songs spacious atmosphere.

See a more detailed version of this list:

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Refreshing metal: Avulsion

Avulsion – Dimensions of Darkness

Production: thick and blurry like sound behind a curtain.

Review: As death metal diversified from its roots, a branch extended from those who made their death metal at slower paces. The cavernous impact of Avulsion emerges from the mental moment of this conception even if the music was released some years later: trudging, echoing, flattening sound that like a vortex of destruction immerses a listener in a sense of the vast before dissolving it with retrograde motion.

The most obvious influence on this album comes from Incantation, whose riff styles and tempo changes appear throughout the work, including the title track, but Avulsion develop their own style with a feral mixture of primitive death metal and the thunderous doomy styles that Obituary, Gorguts and Therion made into a language. This album broadcasts its American tendencies but also reveals influences from a panoply of metal bands worldwide.

Like doom metal, this music roars slowly into a medium pace with a compelling rhythmic hook, and then through a series of full stops and redirects builds up to a tempo change, after which it takes off only to decay, shift timing again, and then end in a complementary riff in the same rhythm. Similar to the interlocking passages of a maze, it unites itself through constant contrast.

Vocals rush over the microphone in a whisper-infused roar, and drums guide each song expertly with a wide range fashioned from simple techniques. Guitar composition favors harmonically localized riffs, giving these songs an ashen feel in the absence of melodic development, but makes up for it with motivational rhythm. In the old school death metal style, Avulsion makes complexity from simplicity and intriguing aesthetics from morbid droning.

1. Nocturnal Wrath (4:16) mp3 sample
2. Disgorged Entrails (4:09)
3. Skin Defilement (4:53)
4. Inexorable Suffering (3:44)
5. Near Death (4:07) mp3 sample
6. Dimensions of Darkness (3:54)
7. Desecrated Ground (3:43)
8. Gathered in Ashes (3:44) mp3 sample

Avulsion – Indoctrination Into the Cult of Death

Avulsion’s Indoctrination into the Cult of Death is a record that scratches the same itch that Blaspherian does: oldschool without being “retro”. It’s a very dark album that melds together the slow parts of early Carcass, spooky Finnish stuff like Demigod, and the doomier side of NYDM and Swedish death metal. The atmosphere it exudes is comparable to that of the first Demoncy album, which makes sense, seeing as the band features members of Demoncy. – Chapel of Torment

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Metalheads conquering the world

Because metal is an insular community, sometimes we forget that metal people have lives and are out there influencing the world around them — because when you think about it, if you tolerate stupidity, you’ll serve under it. So good people do things to make the world better not because it’s bad, but because without continual improvement, it will become a paradise for the stupid.

When Mike Strausbaugh gets in his car, he turns on Swedish death metal. Although the MU graduate student is studying classical guitar and music composition, he doesn’t always draw inspiration from classical music.

Strausbaugh, 38, is the latest winner of the Sinquefield Composition Prize for “Thermopylae,” a five-minute duet for guitar and cello.

Perhaps the biggest perk of winning the competition is the opportunity to write a separate work for one of MU’s musical ensembles. Strausbaugh is working on a one-movement guitar concerto for the University Philharmonic Orchestra. The piece, currently untitled, will debut at the annual Chancellor’s Concert on March 15, 2010.

Columbia Missourian

This guy’s ruling the world. We have no word as of yet on whether a recording exists of his composition, but it sounds like we’ll have to wait until 2010 to get his latest opus.

It was cheering to read this defense of the metalhead fanaticism for etymology and genrology:

But for those of us silly enough to split hairs and mire ourselves in metal’s notoriously splintered set of sub-genres, the subtlest variations can send the biggest ripples. Most listeners probably couldn’t care less about the differences between death metal and black metal, let alone the nuances that distinguish blackened death metal, but for an insular community of heavy music enthusiasts, these labels are immediately recognizable.

If all this sounds nerdy, that’s because it is. While often dismissed as meat-headed jocks, metal fans over their heads in the trivialities of the style’s finer points rarely actually are. Instead we’re comic book dorks and ardent video gamers. (Yes, many of us even grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons; Some still do.) While our mosh-pitting contingent is certainly the most visible, our hermetic Internet-abusers are largely the gatekeepers.

Anchorage Press

He did just call us a bunch of nerds, but since most of the great musicians, writers, inventors, generals and leaders have been nerdy and introverted and studious, I find it hard to criticize that. In general, my experience in life is one nerdy person off doing something from which everyone benefits, while another 99 people stand around talking about how nerdy he or she looks for spending all their time trying to OMFG change things. WTF, dude, LOL.

For a slight downer, the world is also warning us that the much-maligned (and beloved) style of singing known as “cookie monster vocals” after the Sesame Street character may indeed wreck your voice:

Though death metal generally started in Florida, the genre has spread wide enough that a medical center in the Netherlands reported a couple years ago that it was treating several death metal singers for vocal problems caused by Cookie Monster technique. Polyps and edema on the vocal chords are most common ailments.

“As the popularity continues to grow, I expect an influx of new patients,” a speech therapist at Nijmegen Radboud Hospital told the Netherlands newspaper Nederland Dagblad in 2007

Hartford Courant

While we’re hoping they find that pizza, beer, marijuana and listening to the quality Gothenburg bands eliminates that effect, it’s probable that modern science is just going to be a bore again and immediately classify everything fun as unhealthy.

There’s your metal news for today. Hope it inspires, enrages, emboldens… heck, anything but stagnation!

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Identity Construction and Class Demonstration in Modern Black Metal

1. Introduction
2. The End of the Millennium: The Collapse of the Integrity of the “Scene”
3. Priests of Black Metal: The Surrealist Medievalist Reformation
4. Warriors of Black Metal: The Militant Romanticist Reformation
5. Evil Pseudo-art and the Rise of the Hipster: Revolution or Death?

Introduction

Art must excite the imagination. This is a condition of aesthetic effect, and therefore a fundamental law of all the fine arts. But it follows from this that not everything can be given directly to the senses through the work of art, but only as much as is required to lead the imagination on to the right path. Something, and indeed the final thing, must always be left over for it to do.

– Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Inner Nature of Art

Black metal music is one of these great arts. There is no religion mixed with Black metal! When religions are mixed to music it result feeble feelings, pseudo-art.

– Wlad Drakkheim (Vlad Tepes)

Histories of early black metal are dime a dozen nowadays and by now you probably know how Mayhem and Burzum came about, if you are interested, and have figured out why the churches were burnt, if you are intelligent. However, what happened after 1995 is rarely put under reasonable scrutiny because as in politics, recent events contain too much unexposed lies and hidden agendas to bear daylight.

This article intends to take the bull by the horns and explain through an eyewitness’s observation the development of the philosophy of black metal from the first divide (the cultist vs. the crowdist) that occurred around 1996 to the second divide (the realist vs. the hipster) that occurred approximately ten years later.

The End of the Millennium: The Collapse of the Integrity of the “Scene”

When the blaze in the northern sky had died out and the geniuses of the previous generation were either rotting in a jail or in a pub, a new generation sought to rediscover the meaning of black metal as a lifestyle and as a Weltanschauung. The masses, representatives of mediocrity, had already found their way into black metal when most of the original acts had betrayed the ancestral trust by developing into a theatre of gothic makeups, glam rock attitudes and weak synth-based pseudo-heroic anthems.

The Internet grew into a unifying, though disputed and hated, medium for the black metal underground to bicker about trivialities, form projects and spread news and gossip. Forums and websites contained information about hundreds of new bands, far from the old realm of tape traders and fanatics who kept meticulous contact with friends abroad through letters and phone calls. Also, the beloved underground zine, responsible for establishing the mystique around the early 90s black metal scene, was relegated to minor status as an upholder of the cursed movement.

Because the crowds present were in no way contributing to the development of black metal, as opposed to practically everyone in the beginning of 90s who was interested, the scene started to show the same fissures that had obliterated punk, hardcore and a whole lot of other once-radical artistic movements to relic status. The scene grew introverted because the outside did not seem to be interested in participating in the original barbaric-Faustian quest for freedom in darkness, even if hoarding information and releases. The scene rotated around people who, despite their intelligence, were reluctant to break genre barriers because their attitude was commitment, not innovation.

Purity of intent became mangled in a scene setting; the desire to bring power and authenticity back, to solidify black metal fans into a commando force for opposing the democratic spinelessness of modern life, was mostly a disguise. The greatest psychological motivation was the worship of one’s own personality and identity and it’s separateness from others by self-aggrandizement, by wallowing in ideas such that one is extreme, unique and important. They were like the proud fallen angels but only in the surface aspects; the core was a youth subculture among many others who share exactly the same kind of attitudes and personality types.

The black metal underground adopted more and more extreme stances to make them impenetrable to the masses that were threatening to turn black metal into a parody and a freakshow. One of these positions was the National Socialist black metal, which had been already perpetrated in the early 90s by Absurd and Lord of Evil but failed to become a widespread movement until the end of the decade when the Allgermanische Heidnische Front and the Pagan Front along with, intentionally or not, Moynihan’s and Søderlund’s book Lords of Chaos promoted the mixture of national traditionalism and romantic black metal, to the disgust of the part of the scene retaining the leftist influence from grindcore.

For another segment of the underground, the message chosen was as corrupted, cryptic and vile as possible. Inspired by the first incarnation of black metal and of everything that was filthy and anti-social in the underground, satanic nihilists waged war on everything, as exemplified by the album titles Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan (Antaeus) and Kill Yourself or Someone You Love (Krieg). The actual message was hidden under the surface, for it utilized spewed vitriol for an introverted self-study, which was concealed as an attack. The Satanists and nihilists considered worldly things as folly, a curse imposed by God or nature upon the Faustian soul – all attachment and love in fleshly things was false figments of illusion, much like the Gnostic Christians believed.

Priests of Black Metal: The Surrealist Medievalist Reformation

The heirs of the nihilist black metal culture became known as the religious black metal scene, because in the original sense of the word religare, the artists sought to strip the world of its importance by detachment, perversion, self-flagellation and insanity to reach the transcendental quietude of the noumenalworld, perceived as a spiritual death. The ideal was modelled on characters like Dead and Euronymous of Mayhem, who were seen as the original martyrs of black metal.

The aesthetic defined by Mayhem on the classic De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, an amalgamation of the theological and the heretical, a re-interpretation of the sacred writings of Christianity, was given a full treatment by bands that musically attempted to find a balance between the creation of “experimental” black metal and “true” black metal (essentially two trends that had been around since new black metal became mostly home recorded and free of quality expectations).

The audience who felt more kinship with pagan ideals, heroism and warfare grew over the years to hate the depressive Satan-worshipping bands, not because they would oppose the best of their music, but because the scene concentrated into seeking whatever seemed most radical and hateful in the limited perspective of a Scandinavian middle class young man from an atheistic family. It was a very limited world and while some occultists were able to discuss their way around this problem, the limitation culminated artistically in satanic black metal bands going by hordes to the modern equivalent of Sunlight studios, the Necromorbus, to create endless similar sounding clones, many of which were pleasing listens but historically nothing more than footnotes.

The prime motivation to create this new style of theistic black metal was that newly found emphasis on production and melody that gave them a chance to try out their hand on professional musicianship combined with literate Satanism, and thus escape the falsely assumed impression of the last decade that you were either a capable musician or an extremist, not both.

The target audience, which was mostly composed of young, sensitive, intelligent and fragmented personalities with an emotional attachment to the mystique of Satan and Christianity, mostly liked it since the music was tried and true melodic black metal not far from that of the eternal crowd favorites Marduk and Dissection, with updated imagery and lyrics. It was also suitable to the retro-purist tendency to reject political developments in black metal on the grounds that such were not originally a part of it, despite the fact that they themselves introduced many aspects such as the Bible quotations and theological analysis which belonged to it even less.

Warriors of Black Metal: The Militant Romanticist Reformation

The pagan warriors fared a little better on the quest for Romantic, neo-classical black metal art. The core bands of nationalist pagan black metal, such as Totenburg, Heldentum and Eisenwinter, realized a synthesis of the street punks’ (through Oi and RAC) music with folk and heavy metal and some of the naturalistic black metal instinct of Ildjarn and Burzum. These bands steered clean from pleasing the public with melodic death metal influences or digital production standards, while many others such as Temnozor, Kroda, later Forest and Graveland, led their epics by vocal and folk instrument melodies, influences from symphonic soundtracks and recurring Hammerheart–era Bathory riffs, mostly in rock format.

Despite the extreme horror incited in some countries and scenes by the open admiration of the principles of Hitler and the SS, part of its power in the mind of the participants was also that it was positive: encouraging respect for ancient tradition, working for society and appreciating love and friendship.

Norway’s black metal had played ruthlessly upon a reputation of morbid obsession and criminal darkness, preying upon the minds of weak-willed individuals who were seeking a chance to submit to the will towards death. NS influences in black metal had been a natural development for many key practitioners from Darkthrone to Impaled Nazarene regardless of whether or not they ever admitted to anything more than a slight inspiration and a shock statement. It gave a chance to balance the darkness of witch-cults with the light of European virtue.

An esoteric nationalism, inspired by traditionalists Evola and Guénon and by philosophers Nietzsche and Bergson, also emerged, and was more sophisticated than the crude hedonism of LaVey or the superstitions of Elizabethan Devil worshippers. But when presented to the working class it meant believing that the sickness of the world is a manifestation of the plots of other races, particularly the Jews, for the subversion of the higher culture of the White Aryan.

In fact, only a small part of the fans of NSBM ever were devotees of pure National Socialism. The movement of nationalist pagan black metal was united by the opposition of globalization, multiculturalism, crime and vice perceived by them to be the import of African and Semitic races to Europe: drugs, rape, apathy and disrespect for the local authority, which a regular Scandinavian tends to trust implicitly. Additionally, communism and anarchism were seen as anti-national and anti-cultural forces that have the power to assume control in the media under various guises.

While many of the aesthetic ideals of NSBM, such as respect, healthiness, personal integrity, constructive activity and diligence in work, were close to being acceptable in mainstream European societies, in general the involved characters were dedicated individuals facing hatred and opposition in all directions and actively treating life as a battle-like challenge. The movement could act as a representation of the tradition and
will of any social class in Europe, so that both those with lower and higher education could find their own ways to see the core ideal: an agreement of a very common sense rooted resistance to multiculturalism, runes and the metaphysics of Wiligut and Heidegger.

The ideology did not encourage escapism through occult and religious experience, or delving deep into the decadent side of modern society. Nor did it deny any of the basic wishes and instincts of man such as having a constructive job, raising a family or having a good time with friends and warriors. But the stigma — and in some countries, criminality — of the symbology forced the adherents to always be careful, prepare for confrontation and face all the consequences of the living the worst possible implications of his ideal.

The youth took this by the face value and were excited about the chance to do something on the streets, be it simply dressing in camo pants and Dr. Martens or actually joining local skinheads or political organizations. Many of them were of the opinion that the virtue of the message and imparted “Aryan” aesthetics, and the right attitude (underground, intolerant, street credible) behind it are what makes black metal worthwhile, not intellectual satisfaction or beauty.

Evil Pseudo-art and the Rise of the Hipster: Revolution or Death?

The emphasis on action and practical message differentiated “Aryan” black metal from what has been the crux of the satanic black metal of the new millennium, which in the spirit of Emperor and particularly Dissection has been creating requiems and sonatas to Him from a more learned and encyclopedic background, quoting the likes of Dali, thus creating hipster-friendly amalgamations of styles that suggest intelligence and taste but only little activity and spirit, or in the words of Vlad Tepes, “pseudo-art”.

In nihilist, depressive and theistic black metal rhetoric, the most vile and offensive threats were brought upon mankind and society in praise of the Devil while concepts such as rape, abuse and suicide were glorified. In some circles it became a game of how low one can sink into the medievalist approach to Satanism, inspired by nothing so much as a Euronymous statement taken out of context: “We are but slaves of the one with horns.” But since the masquerade was obvious, satanic black metallers never seemed like criminals to society except in cases where the adherents actively sought participation in drugs and assaults.

It was one of the most two-faced cults seen in metal – extremely powerful symbolism and literature was abused by people who constantly admitted to failure and self-defeated feelings in the guise of a reborn Gnostic/Jesuit theology that denies the world having anything of value. Artists and philosophers gave long and explanatory answers in interviews that were too difficult for the majority to understand and thus ended up taken out of context. Many, though, considered this the natural way of “evil”: the weak and the stupid deserve to be corrupted, driven into suicide, fear and madness by the power of Lucifer’s light.

What seemed to make Devil worshipping black metal dangerous and potent was its mercurial nature; unlike in the nationalist pagan scene, one’s class and education completely determined the understanding of the given compulsory Bible, Bataille and Sitra Ahra quotations. A son of a religious family with no higher education would see the Devil worshippers’ theology in a totally different perspective from a university student of comparative religion or literature.

Especially through the down-to-earth, joyless Protestantism of Scandinavia, faith and belief in gods and the supernatural are approached with mania, neuroses and fetishism and the resulting phenomenon glorified anyone who committed atrocities in the name of primitive Devil worship. The educated middle and upper classes both loathed and envied the non-educated and thus “untamed” madman because he seemed more capable of spontaneous action and breaking free of the foulest captor of the middle class: the desire for comfort and to avoid suffering.

The will to join the masquerade, to choose for oneself the identity of a “pagan warrior” or “a Devil worshipper” has fed the black metal market for the last decade. Despite some achievements and innovations in philosophical and musical expression, it has contributed to the downfall of black metal in that it has been all too easy for the crowd to gather under the banners, to create redundant projects that copy the originals without understanding the message and to buy everything that conforms exactly to the imagery one wishes to associate oneself with.

If one is allowed to bluntly generalize, one tends to see on message boards nationalists expressing themselves with a crude, uneducated language reminiscent of trailer park fascism, yet having a solid idea worthy of being developed further, a meaning behind the words. On the other hand a Theistic Satanist can easily lecture you on the Blavatskyan concept of Ego as Lucifer, or on the problems of empirical science, but one is left quite unsure why it is important.

The best black metal of the decade has not been revolutionary in any sense, rather interesting explorations on encoding message into either a rediscovered sense of classical melody or the soothing but barbaric minimalism of ambient. A minority still tries to seek out the best amongst the piles of waste created by the attention seekers; many from the original scene have lost interest in practically all black metal created since ‘95.

Master purveyors of black metal have sought to describe a world of fallen souls and unremembered voices, as if they have brought to life the curses of our ancestors who scream in the Abyss their indictment of the world of man, which has failed to uphold ancient, heroic and traditional laws and to pay the proper respect to the spirits of death and of darkness.

If we could catch for an instant a glimpse of the might and terror of the pure universe, unfettered by the shackles of human perception, our paths would be revealed as singular paths of light amidst infinite space, strands weaving patterns of complexity and beauty, constantly changing nature through an evolution borne by the battle waged by opposing principles.

Written by Devamitra

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