Thorns – Thorns

by Max Schoenbach on February 4, 2018

Anyone hoping for a classic or revitalizing take on the black metal genre should take note of the path taken by the acknowledged co-creator of its infamous guitar style: Snorre “Blackthorn” Ruch.  On the debut album of his creation Thorns (delayed almost a decade by his misfortune presence at the scene of Euronymous’s murder), he finds himself aided by some of the genre’s most renowned musicians who, through their own bands, shared a similar direction themselves.   Although a careful listen reveals that Thorns S/T was able to surpass above mentioned bands on many levels, it is also immediately obvious that it is indeed part of the unfortunate route into industrial/electronics taken by many in the “extreme metal” genre during the early 2000s.  Much like their countrymen in Emperor, Enslaved, and Arcturus, Thorns found themselves on a strange journey that an old issue of Terrorizer magazine accurately described as “The Weirding of Norway.”
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[EXCLUSIVE] TRANS-OCALYPSE HERE: 1ST ALL-TRANS METAL BAND DECLARES WAR ON BLACK METAL

by Brock Dorsey on February 3, 2018

BREAKING:  On the last day of 2017, our editor predicted that a trans-gender wave of metal bands would arrive in 2018.  We are already getting our first dose of this a with “pink metal” pioneers PEOSPHOROS–  the world’s first all-trans metal band (excluding Cradle of Filth).  Destined to become the new face (and genitals) of metal and new heroes of progressive liberal metal scenesters everywhere, Peosphoros have immediately made their presence felt by declaring war on the most dangerous and anti-human genre of all: black metal.  It takes guts to take pioneer a foray into metal, the most masculine of all music genres, but how does Peosphoros’s trap-metal fare musically?

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SHAARIMOTH Temple of the Adversarial Fire

by Joe Slater on February 1, 2018

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

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Sin and Despair in Deathcrush

by Hereweald Cola Algar on February 1, 2018

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

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Mournful Congregation: The Incubus of Karma

by Nicholas Vahdias on January 30, 2018

Australian funeral doom Mournful Congregation return with their latest offering after a four year hiatus.  Initially demonstrating a style in the vein of overly melancholic eurodoom bands, this four piece have slowly shedded the lugubrious sound of their former works in exchange for a more pensive and maximalist vision. Developing the ideas from their last full length The Book of Kings, Mournful Congregation create musically literate and complex songs that dance on the line between being nostalgic 70s rock and accessible funeral doom.

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Kvedulf Gunnar Larsson The Alternative of Real Ecology

by Hereweald Cola Algar on January 29, 2018

The present book claims to be a presentation, an advocacy, but nothing more. It is not a discussion, a justification or the beginning of a debate, all of which are pointless and do not constitute the carrying out of actions that actually make a difference. Discussing, debating and justifying, argues Larsson, are within the realm of popular environmentalism, which is nothing else but a flavor-of-the-week, feel-good tapping on the back of those who claim to care for the environment but do not care enough to set aside the delusion of human privilege (including the trend in ‘Green’ products, and the necessity to pander to what is popular, rather than necessary or real). Despite a certain radicalism inherent to Real Ecology (‘radical’ by virtue of being ‘real’), it is clearly distinguished from so-called Eco-Terrorism, because of its completely ineffectual, short-sighted action that simply remains all-too-human: undecisive because of its avoidance of doing actual harm. Real Ecology, is rather the personal choice of non-contribution, as in the reduction of one’s eco-print to the minimum.

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The Importance of the Hessian Ideal

by Hereweald Cola Algar on January 28, 2018

The modern way of life has conditioned people to think and consider their lives a juxtaposition of ‘job’, ‘family’ and ‘hobbies’ along with ‘fun’. This is a model influenced by industrial mentality, which needs vast amount of automatons performing meaningless tasks for the sake of production itself, simply in order to protect the bottom line at the expense of individual quality and relevance. As a result, very few people, indeed an incredibly outnumbered minority, will see and live their job as a craft wherein they find aesthetic and spiritual meaning, and would rather be out the door as soon as possible as long as their salaries are not affected.

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Underground Record Labels in 2159 Ch. II

by Joe Slater on January 28, 2018

It was very late at night now. The moon was full, and the path had gave way to a blood paved street. Some very pale women and children with red eyes came out and played on the swings in the forest in the dark, giggling.  There was a shanty town, many huts, with a Gerry-rigged cathedral with Satanic stained glass mirrors in the center.  A small class was being held inside of one of the huts. he had heard of this place, a weird Swiss corporate enclave that had been on the route to Stoner Mountain since the early 1600s and which , strangely, still remained as part of Switzerland (formally), though it was in the middle of what used to be known as California, in the former USA.  Rumor had it that not far from this place, the tech titans had made a pact with the Satanic Illuminati (Octagon) to provoke nuclear war in order to further control the supply chains. From time to time, large amounts of cryptos had been reported (as having been dumped on the road) to GovCore.  People were likely harvesting DeathCoins out here, using biomechanical hydro power. Death coins stored up all the vitality of the people killed onto a tradeable digital coin.  Luckily, these people were more into the tech side of the system. They let the low lives and the scavs in other regions do most of the killing these days. Their killings were merely ritualistic at this point.
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