Sadistic Metal Reviews mini-feature: Deathraid – Submit to the Will of Chaos (2016)

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Article by David Rosales

It is always amusing to watch one of these clueless bands take a stab at making an album that falls into the mythical yet non-existent genre of black speed metal. It does not exist for a good reason: it is only a creature in the imagination of those who cannot tell the two genres apart. It is probably also what Venom fans consider to be “first wave black metal”. You gotta have some compassion for these nitwits. Or not.

The music on Deathraid Submit to the Will of Chaos (originally released in extremely limited quantities in 2001) is typically messy, grindy and when it comes around to its most clear-minded, it sounds like a try-hard Hellhammer, without the ability to maintain atmosphere and therefore devolving into boring streamlined noise. From the modern perspective, it is just another variation of war metal stupidity or modern “atmospheric” black metal. Irrelevant as it is lame, this may just be what some of us were looking for – it’s the perfect music for goat love-making.

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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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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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Sacrificium Carmen – Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa (2015)

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Article by Corey M

Sacrificium Carmen have released some very generic black metal on this album, made up of moderate-to-fast-paced songs with lots of chunky speed metal riffs and admittedly impressive strained-sounding vocals. Overall, my impression of Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa is negative for two main reasons: Lack of innovation (meaning that the band makes no effort to develop and express their own unique perspective using the black metal template) and a disregard for the necessities that make traditional black metal an engaging listen (hint: it’s more than just grindy distortion and screamed lyrics).

Regarding the album’s merits: Sacrificium Carmen do well by avoiding any “post-black metal” trappings (some examples being forced “prog” tendencies, ominous chanting, and corny sound effects), and they steer clear of any “ambient” influences, which means the music is fairly lean and efficient. Each song begins and ends purposefully, rather than diverging into some ambiguous territory surrounded by extramusical showboating, as many contemporary black metal bands are wont. For this, Sacrificium Carmen deserve credit; the musicians rely on themselves and their instruments only, eschewing digitally-generated sound textures, operatic vocals, “found sounds” and so forth, to achieve their vision. Each song is generally through-composed, and all melodies are readily found in the Official Dogmatic Compendium of Black Metal Minor Chord Sequences™. All of the instruments are played proficiently (and the vocals are exceptionally aggressive), but the level of musical complexity is low throughout the album, so this details neither adds to nor detracts from the album’s quality.

This “less-is-more” approach is usually a good one for bands to take when playing black metal, because the best black metal is minimalist in that it does not have any bits of ornamentation to distract from the purpose of the music, which is to evoke in the imagination visions of spiritual horror in a world dominated by chaotic violence. This is where Sacrificium Carmen’s music falls short – invoking imagination. There is just no darkness or danger to the melodies, only all-too-human frustration, which sounds emotively impotent and discouraging to listen to. Most of the riffs in Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa would not be out of place on a contemporary punk album; just replace Sacrificium Carmen’s vocalist with some faux-gruff cigarette-smoke-choked burn out and have him sing with self-conscious irony about how stupid religious fundamentalists are, or how much he hates his landlord, and you’d have a product that would sell to clueless teenagers in the suburban Midwestern United States.

Melodies in Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa never reach a high enough level of tension to evoke any visions; they are too direct and sound self-centered. By this, I mean that any song’s series of riffs are actually static, whirlpool-like revolutions around the song’s own rhythmic and melodic center. The riffs anticipate a return to whatever was the last-heard rhythmic hook, rather than communicate through melodic contrast with the riffs that precede and follow. Early (and successful) black metal bands achieved tension by chaining together riffs in such a way that each segment of melody would act to destruct the preceding segment and, simultaneously, enhance the following segment, not granting the listener a chance to dwell on any one particular pleasantly hooky riff, but impelling them to take the current melody at face value and embrace the ephemerality of that melody. Because of this constant dialogue taking place throughout a song, coherence could be maintained, even while the song’s tempo or scale shifts and dynamics may even fluctuate wildly. Meanwhile, every song on Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa appears focused on a conclusion at all times, diminishing the immediate experience. Possibly as a result of this weakness, the dynamic range of any given song is quite narrow. This does not automatically make any songs bad, but given everything else that is going on (or not) in this album, it makes for a boring listen, unless you’ve always wanted to hear a punk band with a black metal vocalist.

In short, Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa is not a record that classic black metal fans will want to spend much time with. When judged as rock music in general, the album does not commit any irredeemable sins, and may be a fun listen while pounding beers or taking a drive with your girlfriend who hates Darkthrone. But when judged as black metal and measured against those albums in the black metal canon, you may find that the album has more shortcomings than can be excused.

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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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Obscura – Akroasis (2016)

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Akroasis stands proud as a representative of cracked out incoherent sugar high penguin of doom random technical “death” metal, and even has a cover that looks like various forms of congealed sugar melting together into a nutrition-free whole. It is truly the perfect product – a deceptively simplistic and potentially addictive recording with little in the way of more rewarding development. Obscura’s efforts on this album alternate between either random gibberish or surprisingly basic song constructions that don’t quite fit the apparent intent and would be shockingly obvious were they not surrounded by thousands of rapid fire notes like a swarm of flies around rotting meat.

One thing that makes reviewing Akroasis particularly easier is how the first track (“Sermon of the Seven Suns”) encapsulates so much of what Obscura is attempting to do. Much has been made of what this band takes from Death, particularly from their later traditional/death fusion works, but the most patronizing is the circular song structures. “Sermon of the Seven Suns” doesn’t have a lot of content, and after an intro arguably inspired by Cynic, it awkwardly rotates between its two major sections of rapidfire blasting and slow jazz fusion jams. The band uses some basic modulation techniques to disguise the repetition, particularly in the first section, but the overall structure does little more than hide the excessively basic structure. While the band’s apparent devotion to this on this track is vaguely admirable for how holistic it is (extending even to the lyrics), it doesn’t make for particularly compelling listening once the shock factor of Obscura’s instrumental proficiency wears off. At best, they’re slightly more creative than Chuck Schuldiner was with song structures – as an FYI, pretty much everything Death put out went main section -> bridge -> repetition of main section -> who needs a coda anyways?

The rest of Akroasis is more densely packed with content, but instead of employing the care and diligence required to shape these into anything coherent, it just falls into all of the typical metalcore traps, so it sounds less like an album and more like a checklist of errors. Besides what I’ve already mentioned in dissecting the first track, Obscura’s songwriting is full of aesthetic novelties (vocoders, non-metal instruments for no apparent reason) and they even incorporate a goofy breakdown in “The Monist” because apparently, metalcore musicians just can’t resist the temptation. Obscura would be a much better band if they could resist their vices, but were they to try and succeed, they would probably become completely unrecognizable to their fans. Why would they bother? The disorganized candy coated tech-death approach seems to be netting them enough fans.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews mini-feature – Infernal Curse – Apocalipsis (2016)

infernal curse

Article by David Rosales

When listening to most of these modern funderground bands, one gets the impression that a group of random guys eating hot dogs suddenly came up with the idea of recording a death metal album to give some variation to their Saturday afternoons in which they normally just discuss fantasy football. Is this derogatory? You bet. Is this accusation completely out of hand and unjustifiable? Not really, there are very clear reasons to say this.

For starters, a release like Apocalipsis by Infernal Curse amounts to nothing more than foggy noise, lacking any memorability but the memory of a passing metallic cloud of percussion and occasional chords. You might perceive this as being only the personal impression of the author, that it amounts to nothing more than another opinion on an otherwise objectively tolerable and enjoyable work of music. But nobody here is objecting to the idea that someone might enjoy this music. The point is that it is indistinguishable from anything even vaguely similar and devoid of its own character.

Apocalipsis is only the reflection of the disaster that war metal has been for death metal, a poor and superficial of what being an underground art movement is. This is usually the result of becoming self-referential, very much like university “revolutionaries” and other posers who confuse image with content. The trap is believing that through imitation of appearances you might somehow bring about the essence of what is being imitated. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and this piece of unrecognizable shit is just more ammunition for our poser-bashing posts.

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Folteraar – Vertellingen van een Donkere Eeuw (2016)

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Article by David Rosales

Folteraar’s 2016 release comes to us with a proposal that is very much in vogue in the current metal underground. To any wary of the pitfalls of following trends, this might ring alarm bells almost automatically. But we must not be hasty in this judgement, since even though the establishment and spread of a method may really be, in fact, taken up by a large number of hands who are not up to the task and will undoubtedly produce subpar results, this does not mean that we won’t also find those out there who have focus and vision to make use of pre-defined rules with a sober mind. A clear example of this is Condemner’s Omens of Perdition.

As much as we all yearn for another quality release, however, Folteraar exemplify the rule and not the exception to the avalanche of high-spirited but poorly thought out metal albums that make up the bulk of releases nowadays. Since there is nothing in particular to point out about Folteraar, as it has no particular value or fault but just repeats every cliche of the underground war-metal-noise-garbage intersection, we won’t spend too much time pointing out flaws that have been pointed out once and again in the past in this site. The duty still falls on us to point out the very particular approach Vertellingen van een Donkere Eeuw brings to the table as a representative of the most blurry instantiations of this line of thinking.

This brings to mind several influences that served to furnish the raw materials for the formation of early ’90s underground metal. These are primarily heavy metal of the so-called ‘doom’ stripe and hardcore punk. It is easy to appreciate a deconstruction of these in this music which seems to be violent for violence’s sake. Worse than that, it seems to ape so much at the tropes it has learned from the past that the music does not seem to build anything else. Folteraar’s music is just a sequence of cliches that build up to no content. Themes do not build up, in either melody, harmony or rhythm. This is just a sequence of loud screams; a hysteric madman in a padded room would make more sense.

Do yourself and the “community” a service and do not put this aside but actively campaign for a distinction between its utter nonsense and the codified communication that is achieved by its betters. The author encourages (and will keep doing so while releases such as this keep coming) the reader to return time and again to Condemner and allow it to rise in his consciousness, as its structures become more familiar and its development thereby becomes evident. Throw most, if not all, war metal such as Vertellingen van een Donkere Eeuw in the trash bin.

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Temple of Gnosis – De Secretis Naturae Alchymica (2016)

temple of gnosis

Article by David Rosales

After an unnecessarily long and artificially down-tuned spoken introduction, Temple of Gnosis’s De Secretis Naturae Alchymica introduces the listener to a “mean” sounding chord backed by some kind of disco beat which comes off as not only cheesy but out of place after the ridiculous introduction. It doesn’t work quite as well for Temple as Gnosis as it did for Gehenna on First Spell, but they do rescue the music by switching to a more sober midpaced approach.

The music here basically consists of a standard rock beat, as well a short, meandering tune that keeps coming back in the chords of the keyboard, the power chords of the guitar or the high notes of the lead guitar. The vocals keep blabbering on top of this simple motif that creates no expectation, intensifies nothing, is not designed for immersion and rather just serves as a mantle for “dark-minded” pretensions. It’s the sort of music teenage witches might listen to if they feel particularly evil. It’s not really convincing, and if it were actually scary or dangerous, they wouldn’t get anywhere near it.

The difference between meaningful occultism and the pop posturing that most people confuse with the former is a subtle one which may be very difficult to discern for profane minds. We may think of music in general as a good reflection of how the concept of occult forces and symbols interact, what it evokes in the eye of the mind, what it gets in touch with and how much content the symbol in front of us actually hides. That is, good occultism works when the seemingly confusing or encoded meanings in the symbols are layered with meaning, a meaning that is concrete and not only apparent, which is the hallmark of its posturing pop counterpart. This can be seen in good music in general, but to set a good example, we turn again to the music in albums such as The Red in the Sky is Ours and Onward to Golgotha where every aspect at several vertical and horizontal levels conspires to produce a collection of possible interpretations whose ultimate consequences mostly consciously imprinted in it. Projects such as Temple of Gnosis who are self-styled occultists in music only talk about being so in their lyrics, their paper-thin music being a living example of what is meant by “empty words”.

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Naðra – Allir Vegir Til Glötunar (2016)

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Article by David Rosales

It is hard to ascertain if it’s pretentiousness or merely a poor appreciation of classic minimalist metal that brings about all these very underdeveloped (or simply shitty) releases. It seems that most of these would-be musicians think that all it takes to put out a folk-melodic black metal album is to write a simple consonant melody in standard time signature, play it in with tremolo picking, use variations of blast beats and mid-paced double-bass drums and a combination of bark-scream-screeches and the now-fashionable “war calls”.

The result of this sort of thinking is, again, surface oriented and only manages to turn what was originally a unique expression that bubbled up from a deep feeling into a list of characteristics to be filled in order to sound appealing to a particular demographic of undiscerning music fans. Rather than beat up another mediocre artist of absolutely no relevance, we must also turn our muskets in the direction of the masses of uncaring metal fans who take no heed of who they “vote up” or what they buy as long as it is mildly pleasing.

It is you, the average fan, that decides what sort of projects receive support and that subpar music is put aside. The old excuse of supporting up-coming acts that may in time improve and write outstanding music is a poor one. Let them struggle, let them first earn their merit. Metal is no aristocratic art that needs spoiled kids to have their ego stroked so that they somehow become musical geniuses. No legendary metal album is the result of undeserved favors, they are all, almost invariably, the result of struggle, of blood and tears.

For the sake of metal itself, if not for the sake of your own mental health and nutrition, throw away and put aside all projects that stand on the same quality level as Naðra Allir Vegir Til Glötunar. This has absolutely nothing to do with production. This has absolutely nothing to do with monetary support for touring. This is about not only creativity but the perseverance, ability and knowledge or intuition to arrange convincing structures that amount to Dionysian calls from the inner man. Allir Vegir Til Glötunar is only dead weight for the metal genre.

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