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Re-engaging vital elements – Combustions in underground demonolatry

Desecration Rites – Hallowed Depravity

As if poisonous arachnoids had woven a sticky web around a hermit of the desolate Pampas, the multitude of savage Angelcorpsean riffs blasts from Desecration Rites’ rehearsal room with hardly any control or structure for the confounded listener to immerse in. The Argentinian blackened death duo did not have the time to execute all matters properly here because of unfortunate circumstances, and it shows in the deprecated, spastic rhythm of machine, the hysterical frequency and bouts of unclean guitar work all over the place. If something is keeping these dogs of sequences under leash, it is the deep, rumbling voice of Wolf intoning Faustian misery from the bottomless depths of darkness, occasionally unwinding power lines of similar effect to Craig Pillard’s majestic demon voice in the eternally classic “Onward to Golgotha”. For the modern death metal fan expecting a digitized, synthetic robot surgery there is probably no more horrific sight than this deluge of an album, but internally it is far more hypnotic, intricate and deadly than one could hope for. Just listen to the freezing pseudo-Nordic moments of “Death Sentence to an Agonizing World” or the ethereal, solar and jarring interlude of “Carnal Dictum” and you might just get a slight moment of hope in the future generations after all.

Wiht – Wiht

This British debutant lets loose the heathen wolves of war with a triumphant fanfare akin to Vlad Tepes’ famous “Wladimir’s March” before leading us to a journey of mountainous black metal landscapes, Graveland-esque meditations, ancient English fire-lit caves and Zoroastrian philosophy. The same sort of extended pagan tremolo epics (18 minutes of length at worst) that made countrymen Forefather and Wodensthrone veritable trials to sit through are pretty close at hand here, but the sparkling energy of youth helps a lot; there is a wildness and intrigue that contributes variation in sense even when there is none in content. Much of the logic of the songs seems to be emotionally stringing disparate sequences into a journey or a fictional narrative, which is essentially never a bad choice but some of the material here could be cut off to be brutally honest. Sound quality is the pseudo-spatial vacuum of too much reverb common for demo-level bands, but the instruments are clearly audible and the mid-rangeness is efficaceous. Unmoving and halfhearted chants and throwaway happy riffs are the blight of heathen metal, but Lord Revenant possesses sufficient pathos to allude to traces of occult evil and memories of ancient war at the same time; while this effort is not enough to coin him as a master of British metal, it would be a disappointment to hear these same songs performed by a more professional, disinterested voice in the future, or see him disappear without a trace after such a promising start.

Into Oblivion – Creation of a Monolith

More than one and a half hours of harsh, pummelling death metal is neither a mean feat to compose nor to listen. As if Wagner, Brahms or even Stravinskij decided in the otherworld that these wimpy rock/metal kids have had it too easy and possessed various souls to spend hundreds of nights writing progressive Romantic/Faustian death metal partitures, 20+ minute pieces such as the title track or “On the Throne’s Heavenward” lumber and crush with such interminable weight that it is hard to not feel like attacked by a divine hammer from above as designed by Gustave Doré. You can forget about them mosh parts, since this is material about as brainy as anything by Atheist, with slow-moving adagios and creeping crescendos more familiar from Brian Eno’s ambient music or Esoteric’s hypno-doom than anything in satanic metal realm. Vocals are sparse and it feels like about a half of the album is purely instrumental and this creates a strange calm suspension which might even feel uncomfortable; but compared to The Chasm’s mastery of technique, it still does feel like an essential emotional counterpoint or rhythmic pulse bestowing element is missing, and when the cruel vocals suddenly rip the air, it might even be perceived as a disturbance to the solemn atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is probable that they are going for exactly this synthesis of the intellectual and the primal; the emotional and the physical. So fortress-like, rational, calm and measured that it is hard to connect its spirituality with its death metal origins (even the previous Into Oblivion release), it is certainly an important statement while the cumbersome nature and certain academicism in construction (perhaps “filler” in metal language, the problem of the previous album as well) makes it a bit of an unlikely candidate for casual listening. Anyone interested in the future of Death Metal cannot afford to miss it, though.

Bloodfiend – Revolting Death

Heirs to the bludgeoning power of Escabios and other ancient compatriots, this recent Argentinian sect wastes no time with progressive anthems, intros nor filler in this concise EP of Autopsy influenced memoirs of early 90’s scathing death metal savagery. If the band has capacity for a challenging composition or a range of emotion, it’s all but hidden in this conflict of vulgar and intense demo taped riffs that could originate on any scummy cassette dug up from your older brother’s cardboard box vaults. Even most crustcore bands could hardly resist the temptation to fill the gaps out with something more liberal, but I am glad Bloodfiend do not resort to any loose pauses in their old school attack. The band is not yet quite there in the top ranks of death metal resurgence, but possess more than their share of contagious energy that will make for a good live experience and raise hopes for a more dynamic album.

Exylum – Blood for the Ancients

Brutal death metal cliches abound but also tasteful dashes of improvisational riff integration as California youth Exylum strike from the bottomless depths with a manifest of fragmented ideas like old Cannibal Corpse, Finnish death metal and newer black metal in a blender. Weird effected voices cackle, pinch harmonics abound, chugging is all but industrial metal, drumming provides a solid backbone and the ululation of the lead guitar harmonic reaches a hysterical plane of existence when the band lets go of identity expectations and go ballistic as in the end of “Worshiping the Flesh Eating Flies”. The worst thing on this demo is the tendency to fill space with something simple and stupid like the endless low tuned one note rhythmic hammering towards the end of the title track. When the band is in a more chaotic mode, as in the older recording “Ritual Crucifixion”, the confusion serves to imbue the composition with more blood and action.

Logistic Slaughter – Biophage

As persistence is the key to cosmic victory, it’s gratifying to see that this recent Californian cluster is not giving up in their quest to build a maiming death metal experience which was approached with streamlined Bolt Thrower and Cannibal Corpse tendencies in their last year’s EP. First threatening edges noted by the listener here are their improved musicianship with plenty of rhythmically aware palm-muting and tremolo NY style rhythm guitar riffs interlocking like the paths of ferocious large insects on flight while in the new drummer Kendric DiStefano they have a redeemer from the abhorrent pit of drum machine grind, even though his style tends to approach the robotic at times. The moments where this EP shines is when the brutal backbone operates at the behest of melody conjured by the leads of Mike Flory and Daniel Austi, such as the gripping mid-section of “Exit Wounds” and the Nile-ish mad arab string conjuration in “Litany of Blood”. I’m still reluctant to call this a total winner because there’s a lot of random chugging around as in generic bands from Six Feet Under to Hypocrisy, but there are also subtle technical flourishes such as the lightly arpeggiated bridge in “War Machine” that still keeps me liking this band and following its movements.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Dismember – Like an Everflowing Stream

Intricate, violent and permeated by northern lights in the form of Classical and Romantic pre-Gothenburg melodic influences, the debut album of Dismember, arguably the master of Stockholm death metal scene, took the world by storm and was instantly imitated by many a musical wanderlusting soul breathing the ether of the early 90′s. As an eagle flying through a blizzard, consonant themes interact in a matrix of suggestion while the guttural vocals emphasize the active, garage born hardcore ethic in electrifying the music with moments of relentless harshness and distortion to offset the aching beauty of the severed spinal cord strings of David Blomqvist’s and Robert Sennebäck’s threatening and archaic phrasing. The powerful alienated wails brought by the “whammy wizard” Nicke of Entombed bear mention as a non-trivial element in this journey of gloomy souls from the Candlemass-meets-Slayer traditionalism of “Dismembered” to the outrageous moshpit destroying hysteria of “Skin Her Alive”, which matches every proto death metal moment of “Reign in Blood” or “Master” in directness. What makes Dismember‘s debut one of the most elusive, underestimated and permanent death metal albums from the Nordic kingdoms is their uncanny ability to match the beauty of solemn dirges with the intoxicated riots of Stockholm’s torn-jeans-and-baseball-caps Tunnelbana punks, mostly realized in troubling and uncomfortable juxtapositions, such that often make for more meaningful art than perfectly resolved and consistent style and aesthetics.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Miasma – Changes

The Germanic nation of Austria has not churned out much in the way of quality Death Metal over the years, seemingly annexed from the rest of western Europe such that interesting bands like Disharmonic Orchestra and our summoned entity of the week, Miasma, never really got much exposure beyond the scene that belonged to them and their contemporaries. Nevertheless, their proximity to such nations as Germany and Switzerland has tangibly impacted the music of the unsuspectingly titled ‘Changes’, with the necromanticism of Celtic Frost storming the Alpine borders and charging the album with the same energy levels as the classic ‘To Mega Therion‘. Infact, Miasma launch straight into the opener, ‘Baphomet’ as though they were resurrecting the old Celtic Frost that created majestic, story-telling structures from simple patterns of power-chords, although this introductory instance of Warrior worship serves only as a reference point for the advancements of this form that ensue. Bringing the rhythmic coherence of bands like Celtic Frost and Autopsy together with the exploratory, winding sequences of German Death Metal and even a touch of the Dutch like Asphyx, gives a better picture of ‘Changes’ as an album that holds true to it’s name, demonstrating the symbols of metamorphosis and makes up for the poorly phrased, broken English of the lyrics. Also similar to what Celtic Frost achieved on ‘To Mega Therion’, Miasma break the illusion that the aesthetics of Metal causes the consicion of simple but brutal phrasing to appear more simple (blockheaded) than examples from Classical music, using some twisted variations on the opening motif of Beethoven’s 5th symphony as a point from which to progress into some intelligent and thoroughly morbid riffing, as in ‘Schizophrenia‘. Leading the listener from one perspective to another is a sign of good art and ‘Changes’ does so on a journey through history, through life and through our thoughts, crushing all those inherited, death-fearing assumptions along the way.

Death Metal Album of the Week: Atheist – Unquestionable Presence

It would have taken a mad Nostradamus to predict in 1984 that the sprouts that grew from Hellhammer‘s and Possessed‘s gory and satanic fantasies would in barely half a decade bear fruits in bridging the arts of dark metal and effulgent progressive rock, even jazz, with a virulence unheard of. While Morbid Angel and Death were building Florida’s reputation for fiendish blasphemy, two bands specifically attended to the science of philosophy and the phenomenological realm of the mind. One was the thrashier Hellwitch, the other was the name to be synonymous with jazz influenced death metal; Atheist. Technical, baffling and impossible to headbang, despite their oddities the band easily captured the attention of open-minded metalheads bored of pop metal and hundreds of Slayer clones.

How did Atheist do it? While fans may argue for the technical aggression of “Piece of Time”, I find this album to be the key to the band’s unbounded ability to use syncopated percussive enthrallment, mathematical measures, subtle disharmony and a perfect understanding of tonality to show every formal musicologist that death metal is up there with other advanced musics of humankind. As the opening track “Mother Man” engulfs the listener to its helical and hypnotic guitar melody, Tony Choy, borrowed from Cynic to replace the tragically deceased fretless bass master Roger Patterson, unlocks the fluttering dormant quality of his instrument from the robust, minimal traditions of Geezer Butler and other heavy metal bassists. By the time we join “The Incarnation’s Dream”, it’s quite hard to recall we were supposed to be listening to death metal, as the eerie acoustic bliss takes us beyond Metallica’s “Orion” to what is the wildest dreams of symphonic rock á la Yes come life through the hands and mouths of irreverent Florida dropouts. Mental revelations induced by New Age literature and TV documentaries on UFOs and mysteries of the universe, or musical heirship to German classical idealist philosophy?

Death Metal Album of the Week: Atrocity – Todessehnsucht

Somnium timoris
Desiderum praeteritum
Maestitia praesentiae

Last week’s look at Cadaver’s mighty ‘…In Pains‘ album indicated an acute, tumultuous response to the human condition that was endured by a small number of tormented, Death Metal-playing souls during the early nineties. This largely-contained epidemic of mental afflictions very sharply scarred the minds of German band Atrocity, with their debut album, ‘Hallucinations‘ manifesting as an unrelenting commentary on the habitual ravages of the modern mind, exploring in particular one of it’s greatest banes: addiction. The music was technically inspiring, considered highly progressive in its day, and the subject matter was dark and disturbing in it’s pseudo-biographical recollections of fragility and fallibility. ‘Todessehnsucht’, the follow-up album would take both music and concept further, to create an all-encompassing opus of death and crucially, it did so on very Germanic terms. Far from being just another set of sociological observations, this work is painted on a much broader canvas, using the brushstrokes of a culturally-inspired aesthetic to illustrate something more spiritually aware.

Self-produced in Germany, far from the FLDM treatment given to ‘Hallucinations’ by Scott Burns at Morrisound Studios, Atrocity clearly had in mind to juxtapose the great past of their Fatherland with its failings under the weight of modernity. The liner notes in the booklet first prepares the listener for this journey, quoting the great pessimystic and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer‘s statement implying that the world is suffering, a view which he found to parallel Buddhistic teachings related to dukkha. A view which would enter into the music of Atrocity. Even the album’s title, translated to mean ‘Longing For Death’ (and released in America by this name) is evocative of Schopenhauer’s ascetic ideal, subduing the Will to live and halting the underlying motions that guide consciousness towards suffering. A variation of this idea develops throughout the album, from the basis that the modern world is plagued by all manner of self-absorbed and destructive vices due to a loss of spirituality (following the death of God in Nietzschean thought), but rather than withdrawing from this plane of despair to a state of solipsistic peace, Atrocity condemns and confronts it, to clear aside all the illusions that define the last age of man, ushering in a new era free from human ignorance and worldly attachment. The root of all ‘evil’ according to this worldview is not to be found in external structures like government or economy (although they serve only the mass delusion), but man’s capacity for avijja, to disconnect from reality and pursue the gratification of the ego. Hence, the rendition of Richard Wagner‘s funeral march for Siegfried from ‘Götterdämmerung‘ is not out of place on the introduction to ‘Sky Turned Red’ (as if it could be out of place on any Death Metal album!) as an epitaph to the pre-modern world, and that’s not the only influence the master of the Gesamtkunstwerk exerts on ‘Todessensucht’.

The music on this masterpiece of Death Metal seems to follow the progression of ideas in German musical thinking from the venerable Wagner to modern schools of Classical, engineering grand, articulate riffs of Wagnerian chromaticism to be compressed and transformed with mechanistic force and precision into twisted shapes of dissonance and hyper-extended fragments, referencing Arnold Schoenberg‘s emancipation of music from harmony. The guitars shred away at warped melodies and complex rhythmic patterns, technically similar to Florida bands like Cynic and Death but musically more reminiscent of Modernism, going further to evoke the nightmarish sounds of Dane Rudhyar or Bernard Herrmann, than Cadaver and possibly even Gorguts managed. This idea is explored as well by the sickening lead work of Röderer who embellishes the album with defining solos to the level that James Murphy achieved on Obituary’s ‘Cause of Death‘. Riffs often outrun standard timings and the drumming is well arranged to account for the added demands of energy or restraint. The bass is quite prominent and deviates very little from the main themes, emphasising the narrative context of the guitar riffs as they superimpose the restless dynamics. Alex Krull’s vocals are memorable, retaining only as much human tone in the guttural outbursts as an old man uttering his final words.

Before Atrocity lost interest in Death Metal, they were in the top tier of the genre and left behind a real classic that fell into relative obscurity due to the lack of re-releases issued by Roadrunner. This is an album that unveiled the futile attachment to mortality and found liberation in its demise.

Windham Hell – South Facing Epitaph

Darkthrone managed to conjure something far more stimulating to the imagination when they were inspired by horror and science-fiction movie soundtracks to create vast journeys of cosmic Death Metal. Windham Hell’s first album also follows from the deeper recesses of popular culture and cinema, fucking with the senses and expectations of the Metal listener through this Lynchian maze of psychological horror and ominous mortality. The first thing that’s evident about the musicians at work here, particularly the late Eric Freisen on guitars, is the uncustomary level of formal training demonstrated in these pieces, which bear close stylistic resemblance to the famous concertos of Antonio Vivaldi. The riffs that make up the bulk of actual Metal songs on this erratic album are nothing spectacular or unconventional but formed with the lead guitar in mind, acting much like the movie samples and vomitory vocals do to provide a kind of ambient feeling of suspended horror and panic that the leads then magnify through their virtuoso performances, building on the looming fear with sporadic outbursts of mental excitation. The rest of the album is a feast for those who would enjoy the subversion of popular culture through a post-modernist cutting and pasting of morbidly curious voices bridged with Classical flourishes, although may lose the attention of others. There is enough tastefully executed technique on show to keep this as engaging as possible, and a far superior album to the following ‘Window of Souls’.