Upcoming tours – Marduk, Immolation, Origin

marduk et al on tour

With the metal scene as it is these days, one out of three DMU-approved bands isn’t too bad. Marduk, Immolation, Origin, and a band named Bio-Cancer will be touring Europe throughout May 2016. While Marduk is headlining, their companions in general seem to have similar levels of notoriety; I wouldn’t dwell too much on the specifics of the headlines. I’m betting European fans of Death Metal Underground’s writing will treat this as a possible opportunity to see Immolation in concert. While that’s an optimistic appraisal, the band allegedly gives their older and stronger some emphasis when live, so if you can grit your teeth through the other material it could very well be worth your while. Otherwise, you’ll have to hope there’s good beer… and that there’s plenty of beer money in your pockets.

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Magrudergrind – II (2016)

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So famous that you might’ve just heard of them right now for the first time. Magrudergrind is back after a hiatus with an album that makes a potent case for keeping simplicity tightly under wraps so that we don’t risk every band with half a half-hearted interest in songwriting nabbing it from the medicine cabinet and hoarding it all for themselves.

I don’t exactly listen to much straight up ‘grindcore’, which adds to the holes in my listening experience, but II sounds pretty much like what I’d expect any half-proficient band in the genre to put out. It’s understandably a little slicker than most of the formative efforts in the genre (Napalm Death, Carcass, Repulsion, etc.), although from what I’ve heard this album trades in some of the bits of schlock comedy that “distinguished” previous Magrudergrind content from its contemporaries for more standard, basic, banal grindcore. On some scales, this is really a perfect 5/10 album; it’s exactly what I expected aesthetically, it does nothing particularly interesting, and it doesn’t even have the temerity to offend me even slightly lest I end up shaming Magrudergrind on the internet; does this sound like anybody we know? II is basically the equivalent of a blank cassette waiting to be recorded to for the first time, but like most albums of little musical merit, we can at least learn a few lessons from the circumstances surrounding it.

As I hinted at in the intro, Magrudergrind’s latest is a very simplistic album that isn’t far removed from the starkest, most deconstructive efforts in its genre. The problem working in such a limited palette is that most of the time, it’s only a sign of low effort; it takes surprising amounts of skill, ambition, or at least luck, to cut down your music and still retain some shred of coherence and communicative value. Grindcore, as a genre, is especially vulnerable to the dark side of these tendencies; once you reach maximum violence and intensity there isn’t much left to do in the confines of the genre. The various famous bands of the genre all found their coping mechanisms; I’m personally most familiar with Carcass’s rapid pivot towards pop music. Magrudergrind’s, on the other hand, was apparently to go on hiatus for a few years and then return when everyone had forgotten not only them, but also the very knowledge that they had forgotten about Magrudergrind.

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Karl Willets and other death metal musicians form Memoriam

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Memoriam is very, very, very early in its history, to the point that their Facebook page only showcases a few rehearsal photos  but it’s beginning to build up some buzz, at least for its membership. Besides the aforementioned Karl Willets (of Bolt Thrower) and Andy Whale (also formerly of Bolt Thrower), the current lineup also features members of Benediction and Cerebral Fix. Bolt Thrower’s studio output withered after the 2000s due to bandmembers not being pleased with whatever they wrote after Those Once Loyal, so it’s worth noting that this could turn into a venue for part of the band to write and release more material. No guarantees of quality, though.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews mini-feature – Alastor – Waldmark (2016)

alastor

Article by David Rosales

Playing a laid back kind of black metal, Alastor’s music supports simple variations of a central melody on drums that range from blast-beating sections to short-lived standard rock beats on thin-sounding drums. At first, Alastor seems to be building on tracks in standard ways, until one realizes that halfway through the song, the music player tells you that the next track has already started. This sounds interesting in concept, but in the case of Waldmark, nothing is coming out of this except the constant stalling of closing sections. Being able to finish songs effectively seems to be the bane of of most musicians.

On the other hand, this might just be a dick move, because songs do seem to “end” in the middle of tracks, only so that a different idea starts and plays through the boundaries of tracks. It might just be a cheap way of trying to make the listener sit through a whole album of samey music with little to none emotional or content variation. It is extremely difficult to distinguish different songs, endings and beginnings, middle sections in a climax-less, conclusion-less flat music, even for a dedicated listener of underground metal music. Variation does happen, mind you, but the close range at which the whole of them remain, and the fact that they do not seem to be structured to take you anywhere, makes breaks and endings appear entirely random. You probably shouldn’t waste your time on something this amorphous.

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Khand releases upcoming track off Crimson

If you’ve been following the site for a bit, you’ll note how Khand is a treasure trove for ambient/”cosmic” music lovers that has earned a nice reputation on our site for their previous studio albums. A few months back, this one man act mentioned it was simultaneously working on two albums for future release. Crimson, from which the provided track hails, is a science fiction concept album revolving around a hypothetical manned space mission to Mars. While it’s too early to say for sure whether or not this will live up to previous Khand albums, a teaser track is still an important milestone on the way to an official release.

Some of Khand’s work is available for download here.

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Reissue radar: Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning

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Metallica is releasing box sets of both Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning, possibly bringing new attention to their earliest and most virile content. Each box set includes several vinyls and CDs worth of material, ranging from newly remastered (and possibly brickwalled) versions of the albums to live concerts and demos of the albums’ tracks. While the mixture of vinyl and CD content and the frequently iffy nature of studio demos lead me to wonder exactly how useful these box sets are, the actual songwriting content is sound, and it could possibly help a new generation of metalheads learn crucial lessons about how to make metal; good foundations for more advanced studies like Slayer and Morbid Angel. The albums are available for preorder from Metallica‘s online store, and the official releases will be on April 15th.

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Triguna Releases New EP

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Last year we covered Triguna‘s debut (Embryonic Forms) with some enthusiasm, placing hopes on their amateur form of discernment and enthusiasm in the writing of progressive speed metal. The first album shows a band that is still a little awkward around expression but displays a latent vision for natural development and a holistic consideration of affairs. Their following EP, released officially on February 11, shows work in the same direction with a little more confidence. The evolution of Triguna’s style has not yet reached a stable point, and may still seem a little rushed or incoherent to the average listener, since they still need more practice in inserting their songs’ “progressive” sections. But these interruptions and twists don’t rob the songs of a coherent narrative, and the upcoming content seems worthy of further study and attention.

Embryonic Forms can be purchased at Triguna’s Bandcamp.

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Dream Theater – The Astonishing (2016)

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Article by David Rosales

Dream Theater never ceases to surprise you; not in a good way, but in how they can always reach the next level of selling out. Not that they were ever produced honest music, though one might excuse their progressive speed hard rock debut (When Dream and Day Unite), at least a little, I guess. Their brand of messy and random stitching of unrelated ideas in a mixture of hard rock and outright Disney pop has gone through a long series of transformations; a move to fool audiences with the typical “constantly reinventing ourselves” excuse that allows them to keep being random.
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Destruction to release Under Attack

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Destruction plans to release their next studio album, Under Attack, on May 13th, 2016; amusingly enough this’ll be their 13th album as well; at least if you count the especially disastrous mid-’90s lineup’s material. “Neo-Destruction”, as they call it these days, is especially important to understanding this band. Its studio work blew up so violently in their faces that it locked the band into the self-referential and especially formulaic route they tread today. Under Attack is unlikely to end that, and the trailer showcases little of the inventive riffcraft and melodic development that made the band influential and interesting in the ’80s, even though the rest of their songwriting eventually fell behind more advanced underground acts.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews mini-feature – Barbaric Horde – Gasmask Perpetrators (2016)

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Article by David Rosales

One of the greatest curses of the Internet age is that every kind of garbage can be marketed as “art”. Labels pop out of nowhere only to pump out bad excuses for music; albums not even the people who wrote them can remember a week after they listen to them. Barbaric Horde’s Gasmask Perpetrators is one such worthless package.

While we insist that cliches of music are themselves not the problem, as they only constitute solidified code words of an artistic circle or movement, these really do need to be used to express something unique. What good is a book that has no spirit of its own, no story of its own? What good is an album that plays the same old tropes in exactly the same way with nothing but a mere reproduction of what has come before it? If not for its overall air of mediocrity, Barbaric Horde should be reprimanded for wasting anyone’s time with absolutely nothing but empty statements and pseudo-underground statements. If you believe you are underground so much, then you do not try to be so by emulating the exterior of the sound of what today is known as classic “underground”. If you believe you are truly underground, you stay so by staying hidden, not by imposing your third-rate crap on all of our ears. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is at best a poser deserving of all your elitist contempt.

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