¡So Woke! Decibel Mag Goes Full Soyboy

Decibel Magazine has miraculously erased three decades worth of credibility by posting the most embarrassingly tearful editorial that metal journalism has ever seen.  It is impossible to read damn the thing without formulating the mental picture of a balding, big breasted obese man in his 40s watching CNN with his even more obese tattooed wife as both cry their eyes out at the far-left propaganda being spewed out at them. 

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KILLJOY IS DEAD

One of death metal’s pioneering vocalists has passed away today.  Frank “Killjoy” Pucci of Necrophagia died this morning as revealed on the band’s Facebook page. One of the original tape traders of death metal, Killjoy’s legendary vocals on the phenomenal  Season of the Dead album (which predated Death’s Scream Bloody Gore by several months) paved the wave for the death/black metal technique and inspired some of the greatest artists in metal.
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VIKING BLOOD

Heritage, ethnicity, race, and culture is important because there is much you can learn about yourself from your blood ancestors.  For years I never understood why, as an Irishman, I was always fascinated with Scandanavian history and culture until a distant relative traced my family’s heritage all the way back to the 10th century.  It was upon learning of my distant relationship to Tomrair mac Ailchi, the viking king of Dublin, that I learned the truth of my savage tendencies- I was the decadent of vikings.  And perhaps it explains how, thousands of years later, I would serve as an editor of the most brutal metal website on the internet…
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#TWITTERPURGE: TWITTER SUSPENDS DMU FOUNDER FOR WRONGTHINK

Death Metal Underground founder and all time greatest metal writer Brett Stevens has been suspended from Twitter as part of their continued efforts to censor conservative voices.  Too dangerous and too masculine to be allowed to influence the masses, Brett joins a long list of censored and purged right-wingers that includes Baked Alaska, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Lauren Southern.   (more…)

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SUFFOCATION’S BASTARD CHILDREN

Some bands perfectly encapsulate a sound and an era through the appropriation and development of an existing idea. Van Halen fascinated the mainstream with his take on tapping and his twist on virtuosity which had existed for centuries on various string instruments. Iron maiden took the harmonies from Thin Lizzy and adapted them for their long narrative epics. Suffocation took the slow thrash metal staccato riff and completely changed its use by using them as breakdowns. While those three bands are heavily associated with their respective techniques that have been used by all sorts of bands, Suffocation has spawned multiple subgenres that are all terrible and are completely eluded by the original intention.

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FRANK MULLEN RETIRES

Aging Suffocation vocalist Frank Muller has officially announced his retirementtarget=”_blank” rel=”nofollow external” from music as the extreme metal retirement wave continues.  Spanning an almost 3 decade career exclusively with the same band, Frank had one of the deepest gutteral vocal tones of the early 90s and enjoyed an unusual amount of success in his later years when Suffocation’s technical death metal style became interchangeable with the deathcore fad of last decade.  Frank now plans on attempting an acting career but will probably end up giving up on it soon and opening up a pizza restaurant in Staten Island instead.

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ANALYSIS: DEMIGOD’S “AS I BEHOLD I DESPISE”

Hailing from Finland and one of the leaders of the short lived Finnish scene that delivered some of the greatest music to ever grace the twentieth century and that genuinely scared most “metalheads” as this was truly an intellectual movement that retained the essence of metal while completely deviating from the norm musically. It is very hard to regroup these bands into a specific style but the closest connection between them is their ability to complete deform common scales and patterns with strategically chromatic notes.

Demigod had a strong understanding of how to make songs with a limited set of complex ideas and how to convey themes of apocalypse and human decay and the role a strong individual within that apocalypse. “As I Behold I Despise” is the first track after the intro and sets the frame of mind of what’s to come after through it’s use of a recursive melody that is always changing, blistering tremolo riffs and hyper active drums that don’t steal attention but empower the guitars.

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Case Study: Death Metal Positive, But Only For Select Personality Types

A trio of Australian PhD researchers recently shared the results of an ambitious case study on death metal listeners.  The project, titled “Who Enjoys Listening to Violent Music and Why?” (Thompson et al., 2018), aimed to determine if there were personality differences in fans who enjoyed death metal and if lyrical content that involved inducing harm or death to individuals had any effect on the listener’s experience.  Examined were possible differences in emotional stimuli between death metal fans and non fans, genders, and participants who either were or weren’t given a lyric sheet.  The publication indicates findings similar to earlier studies that measured emotional reaction of music and personality bias as stated:

These findings are consistent with evidence that personality mediates preferences for music (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2011a, 2011b) and that, conversely, music preferences communicate information about one’s personality (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2006). Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) examined the structure of music preferences, as well as the association between personality and music preferences. They used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to reveal that music preferences revolved around four major types of music: Reflective and complex (classical, jazz, blues); intense and rebellious (alternative, rock, heavy metal), upbeat and conventional (country, pop, religious), and energetic and rhythmic (hip-hop, rap, soul, funk, electronic, dance). Preferences were also dependent on personality variables. For example, people who preferred intense and rebellious music – including heavy metal – tended to be open to new experiences, considered themselves to be intelligent and athletic, and showed no signs of neuroticism or disagreeableness.

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