Saltiness Over Sadistic Metal Reviews of Sentimental Albums

Old Disgruntled Bastard, one of the few quality metal blogs around, accused Death Metal Underground of writing clickbait on Facebook for our recent Sadistic Metal Reviews of older albums our staff had noticed to be inferior to the best of the past:

To Death Metal Underground: Certain albums have endured – for musical and extra-musical reasons – across decades and among generations of metalheads of diverse backgrounds, and the least they warrant is treatment with the respect they’ve earned. There is no revelation to be made and there is no current of general perception to be reversed by “raping sacred favorites”. Clickbait is distinctly unelitist and pissing in the wind for the fuck of it isn’t terribly smart either.

(more…)

118 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lucky Charms Metal

Death Metal Underground has received criticism for our review of limp-wristed, warmed-over Swedish heavy metal act In Flames. Our staff called them the Swedish version of Christian glam rock band Stryper. However despite being hard rock, Stryper were actually heavier, more sincere in purpose, and more aggressive than the Comic Sans In Flames. Stryper and the speed metal influenced glam rock of Skid Row were at least far more musical than Fredrik Nordstrom produced melodeaf such as post-Alf Svensson At the Gates, Arch Enemy, Dark Tranquility, In Flames, and Soilwork. Stryper and Skid Row were at least well-versed in 60s and 70s riff rock while directly influenced by Metallica and Slayer:

(more…)

37 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Forteresse Announce Récits Patriotiques

French Canadian Gothenburg style metal band Forteresse announced a rehearsal album, Récits Patriotiques, today for all those who care about their boring Gothenburg material that sounds like early Amon Amarth with no tempo changes or variations for beer metallers who do not critically listen to music and prefer to just leave metal on in the background like a heavier version of smooth jazz they can ignore and check in on once every two minutes to see if the band did anything new or are back to scratching their asses. Récits Patriotiques will be released on March 18th, 2017 by Sepulchral Productions on 750 CDs for 750 fundergrounders or hipsters who want to crank frogified Davy Crockett metal to feel special about themselves like kale-flavored ice cream sandwiches. Preorder Récits Patriotiques here if you hate money and wear coonskin caps during sex.

(more…)

5 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sadistic Metal Reviews: Taste the Rainbow!

rainbow shit

Coming soon to a used CD bin near you!

(more…)

64 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tranquillizer – Des Endes Anfang (2015)

Sold to us by a promo company as “melodic” death/black metal, Des Endes Anfang by Tranquillizer (sic) is an ungainly fusion of In Flames type melodeath, Pantera flavored brocore grooves, and maybe a slight hint of extreme metal writing at times… by mistake. It occasionally amuses me to see a long-abandoned style of pop metal get some attention after years of neglect, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that this album is simply terrible. It’s so bad that I’ve decided to explicitly label it a bad album, in spite of my tendency to pass off most of the review subjects here at DMU as mediocre (medio-core?) and forgettable.

The songwriting here, admittedly, is only weak in a pedestrian fashion. If you were to strip away all the references to past forms of mainstream metal, you’d end up with just another set of random, generic metal riffs like so many albums before this; nothing actually worth discussing. To be fair, Tranquillizer’s “varied” influences give them a wide set of material to pull upon, similar to something like Children of Bodom‘s latest. I Worship Chaos is actually a decent comparison; Tranquillizer doesn’t have the neoclassical backing that helped contribute to that band’s popularity, but they do replace it with slightly more varied (albeit stupid sounding) vocals. In this reviewer’s opinion, that’s not a great trade, but it’s not like either point of comparison has any real merit.

While the substrate of this band is hollow at best, most of what I find contemptible in Des Endes Anfang is its immediately apparent, surface level stupidity. A clean, dry, sterile production allows the panderingly simplistic rhythms of this album to burst forth, as well as a dual vocal system of generic shrieks and vomited grunts. For our purposes, it should suffice to say that this is, at best, a modern rehash of older substyles. You could make the case that none of this is innately bad, despite its similarities to previous bad metal albums, but even if you did, it seems apparent that Tranquillizer doesn’t have the musical knowledge or aptitude to make this album come off as more than half-hearted worship of a warmed over god. Not that I should be raising our old whipping posts to the level of divinity, but the analogy is sound, and Des Endes Anfang isn’t exactly worthy of more precise flogging.

No Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z