Sadistic #Metalgate Review: Bestial Evil – Infectious Cross (2016)

bestial evil infectious cross

This promotional contribution from the Social Justice Warrior-ridden Baltimore metal scene is terrible; it sounds like Pig Destroyer meets Christian metalcore. The anonymous local supplier bravely contributed a shocking report of a recent Bestial Evil show in Baltimore.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Fisting Female-Fronted Pseudo-Metal

goetz iron hand

Resistance fuels hatred and must be crushed beneath an iron fist.

the oath
The Oath – The Oath (2014)
“Whoa!” – Keanu Reeves. These women are actually fairly attractive! Usually metal girls are fat, under 5’4, and have saggy tits. Or they love Slipknot. I can see why Lee Dorian is dicking the hot one. This at least has riffs even if most of the songs wear out their welcome fairly quickly. There are Cathedral albums more boring than this but most of these songs feel like Motorhead if they smoked dope instead of cranked speed. Motorhead if Motorhead were boring and the songs went on two minutes too long and had random riff salad bridges. If these two would actually get naked on the cover like the real Coven and separated or refined their compositions, maybe this would be more listenable. Hold it is that riff from Bad Company? Who steals riffs from Bad Company? What kind of degenerate does that? If this is among the more listenable grrrl metal…

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Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Arc (2016)
As ridiculous as their band name, Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s 2016 effort is a lazy mixture of stoner rock and deathcore. It consists of interleaved Black Sabbath-core grooves and pointless breakdowns accentuated by a menstruating screamo vocalist. By the very definition of those two genres, the reader should know this is but a string of feel-good moments with absolutely no point whatsoever.

One has to wonder if the band even knows what “agoraphobic” means, given their blatantly idiotic use in their band name. From there, we can easily tell how they would also try to use “fancy vocabs” from the metal terrain without even knowing what they are for, hence the constant groove with no beginning or ending. The meaningless breakdowns that do not necessarily make the stoner rock more bearable, but just emphasize what white trash trailer park music this is. It is an updated distorted-guitar redneck music.

Baroness Purple
Baroness – Purple (2015)
The most generic heavy metal rhythm guitar riffing possible clipped with too much compression and mixed with queer hipster rock for those who question their sexuality. I’m pretty sure the hairy girls in this band are in a polygamous relationship with the dude singing and blow roadies on the side. Kind of like how Carrie Fischer let the crew members of the original Star Wars rip the tape off her tits only with more Hepatitis C positive semen from people who tried intravenous drugs. This album sounds like my local modern rock radio station who plays Bush twice a day. Baroness is the most generic 2003 rock possible only maybe one of these girls’ brothers had Led Zeppelin and Metallica posters in her bedroom. Baroness should go back to VH1. Wait VH1 doesn’t air this crap anymore as even VH1 realized how terrible it is. VH1 is Rock of Love now.

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Wolvserpent – Aporia:Kāla:Ananta (2016)
Who knows why we ever receive these sort of promos that are not remotely metal, though perhaps some suppose there is a connection because the sound and procedure may remind one of the pointlessness of post metal/rock. At the center of Wolvserpent’s music is a violin playing repetitive music while the fringes are filled with synthesizers, bass and some kind of distorted noise to fill the space. I imagine this purports to be ambient, and it evidently takes cues not only from what we know today as classic ambient but from the old, more noise-inclusive and experimental one. At some point during the 40 minutes of this release, towards the approach of its middle section, a growl-screech appears and we become the audience of a post-doom-black nothingness that lasts for about 5 minutes. After this, the music tries to pick up by adding some synths to beef up the emptiness of the lame doom metal writing that approximates what Esoteric do most of the time (waste your time with largely content-less sections while pretending to have an ambient edge). This amounts to little more than piled up noise with some consonance. This melting away proceeds for about 8 more minutes, after which we are introduced to a 4-minute hum. This hum gives then serves as background for some 3 classical string instruments playing repetitive disonant arpeggios for 3 or 4 more minutes until only they remain and the music fades out to the sound of soothing, rolling, waves. Empty and boring. Throw this away

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Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner (2016)
Enya songs with randomly inserted post-metalcore sludge bridges. Are those bongos? Is this Arise? Who thought of this? Whoever thought of this should be shot in the back of the head by their local troika, have their children post-nataly aborted, and their women deported to the camps for wives of traitors to the motherland.

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Snake Tongue – Raptor’s Breath (2016)
Random stolen eighties metal riffs made into Entombedcore with gang vocals by Kurt Ballou. I think that’s a woman in the promo picture. Maybe it’s a man who is just confused that his baby dick is a big clitoris. Yeah they can get that big. Haven’t you seen Backdoor to Chyna?
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Necrosic – Putrid Decimation (2016)
These girls imagine what would have happened if in 1990 Autopsy had written songs entirely out of mosh riffs broken up by hardcore and shameless lifts from Slayer’s catalog. The answer is a metal band that would have only have been fit to play pizza parlors filled with 17 year olds too busy playing arcade games to pay attention. Anthrax if Anthrax decided to cash-in on sludge instead of nu-metal in the early 90s.

sacrilege reissue
Sacrilege – Behind the Realms of Madness (1985)
This is the sort of release that exemplifies that some releases were never meant to be heard, not to mention be re-released. To pretend this is some sort of hidden gem is to pander to the clueless audience’s sense of nostalgia in the most dishonest way. Sacrilege never amounted to much as their music was never much. What we hear in hear in Behind the Realms of Madness is the sort of simpleton’s generic metal any angry teenager could be writing and playing in his garage with his friends after huffing glue. Each of these songs is based entirely upon a single riff played ad nauseam while an angry woman shouts about how much she hates her father. There are random supplementary riffs here and there but they are just meant to provide some sense of dynamism to the propulsion of the main riff. The main riffs in every song are generic and almost indistinguishable, the vocals are identical (some angry British woman screaming about how she got fucked over by her dad who wouldn’t pay for her BA in Womyn’s and Sexual Identity Studies), and every single song has the same kind of poser-trudging-accross-the-mall-food-court from Hot Topic vibe about it.

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Sacred Few – Beyond the Walls (1985)
Another mediocre eighties heavy metal album with an annoying vocalist that deserved to be forgotten. Manilla Road this is not; the songwriting is generic, the riffs unoriginal, and the guitar tone too thin. This was only pressed to CD to cash in on idiot hipsters dumb enough to be deluded by Vice into believing that metal needs more dumpy women. I would rather listen to every Motorhead album I don’t remember even exists than this lame woman who drinks too much Budweiser again. This is retro-metal for cuckolded submissive males who think Steve Harris is Pogrom and jerked off to the blonde women in catsuits from The Oath instead of real porn. I’m going to crack open another Coors Banquet and use this CD as a coaster. Wait is the Puerto Rican  guy in the collar her slave?
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lizzies cover
Lizzies – Good Luck (2016)
Judas Priest covered by Spanish pre-op transsexuals. Listening to this album makes me want to chop my leg off so my femoral artery will bleed out in three minutes. Two tracks in and I just put on Unleashed in the East instead. Let’s all listen to that classic instead of this crap:

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Actual Death Metal Band Booked to Play Maryland Deathfest 2016

deathfest speedoman

Incantation have replaced Australian beer metal stalwarts Deströyer 666 at Maryland Crustfest 2016. The social justice warrior-ran parking lot sludge fest has attempted to branch out into the hipster, Coachella festival mainstream in recent years, abandoning its death metal roots and highlighting the divide between metal and the mainstream’s attempts to co-opt it. A band such as Arghoslent would present the perfect compromise between melodic speed metal catchiness and underground credibility to please both crowds. Hopefully, the Sludgefest organizers will not find out that Craig Pillard was once in Incantation.

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#Metalgate: Napalm Death Cancel Blastfest 2016 Set

barney greenway andrei agassi

Grindcore band Napalm Death have pulled out of Blastfest 2016 presumably due to the booking of the politically-incorrect to Barney Greenway’s white liberal socialist worldview black metal band Peste Noire. The Norwegian festival’s organizers should be commended for not catering to the socialist reactionaries by canning the less-mainstream artist. Napalm Death have once again proved themselves irrelevant since the Eighties.

 As we see many have been speculating about on our page, you were right. Napalm Death has decided to cancel their show at Blastfest next year. We are about the music here, and we welcome everyone with pure intentions to come and have fun in Bergen, but we do respect NDs decision, and welcome them back for another year of course. More bands will be announced soon!

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Dystopia revisited: The political trap

megadeth

Metal journalists are yet again falling into to the trap that of believing that the differences in their political opinions and those of the bands they cover are somehow a valid criterion for judging the overall merit of the music they’re listening to. It happens every day when a prospective metalhead first learns about Burzum, and it more recently has permeated how we interact with the horde of propaganda bands out there who never let a good song get in the way of a good slogan. Megadeth’s latest full-length (Dystopia) wasn’t quite that heavy handed as a mouthpiece for Dave Mustaine’s politics (and indeed, I found it to be a banal and sterile experience compared to the band’s more ambitious early work on its musical elements alone), but it expresses enough of an opinion through its lyrics that it stung a few dissenters.

Illustrating this neurosis today are two reviews of Megadeth’s latest that are more concerned with David Mustaine’s politics than his musical efforts. First, a writer for the AV Club had to stress that even though they enjoyed the music, they were also certain that “…there’s simply no room in our already fear-laden culture for any more xenophobia”. Another review hosted on Cisternyard Media is more critical of the music, but is otherwise similar in its condemnation. Interestingly, they explicitly mention a similar level of political fervor in Megadeth’s earlier works, which doesn’t exactly attract their vitriol, and therefore helps to illustrate the writers’ specific beef with their positions.

These reviewers’ criticisms read like a poorly written tutorial on how to be the perfect social justice warrior, railing against the injustices that are clearly inherent in Dystopia‘s lyrics that therefore requiring immediate shaming and censorship, and then making lasting friends with other like-minded people in the process. The other major problem with these reviews is that they discuss the actual sound and execution of the music in an exceedingly shallow manner at best, instead choosing to be seduced by Megadeth’s technical wizardry. Given that they’ve already rejected Dystopia for not being politically kosher, I’m not expecting them to attempt more advanced topics, such as “Does Dystopia‘s songwriting effectively complement the themes Dave Mustaine is trying to convey?”, but that is a venial sin at best, given that your average metal critic cares little for musical analysis. If they continue to pursue their political vendettas, though, the odds of them writing anything significant on these subjects is nil.

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How #MetalGate affects DMU and you too – Advertising

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Google has informed us that they threaten to remove advertising — how we pay our writers — from our site because of controversial content. Since Google is a monopoly on search engine technology and internet advertising, it can act much as a government would to censor content that it finds objectionable. Much like a government, that places control over what you can see, hear and read into the hands of a few bureaucrats with no concern for the needs of free speech.

Listen to the safe spaces rhetoric: “Google does not allow the monetization of content that may be sensitive, tragic, or hurtful.” This vague description makes makes abuse of violation reporting a trivial task, especially given that the sheer reach and volume of Google’s customers forces some degree of automation into the process. Given how metal is under attack by SJWs constantly through abuse reporting mechanisms this forces sites to censor themselves and keeps that censorship — unlike that by governments — entirely invisible.

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In the meantime, #metalgate has gone into full war mode with the disinviting of Phil Anselmo’s band Down from FortaRock festival in the Netherlands. This response to Anselmo’s allegedly ironic Nazi salute at a festival reveals a perfected form of censorship: by convincing businesses to censor your content or otherwise cut off its revenue stream for fear of potentially harmful content, SJWs can destroy content that does not agree with them and face zero recognition or accountability.

A metal festival is one thing; what about the collected knowledge of humanity which had entrusted to the internet? If Google drops advertising, and eventually starts redirecting “dangerous” searches to counter-propaganda, as the company starts to seize more power this type of censorship will only gain more power. It has its fans among the usual power brokers who want to put people in jail for merely visiting questionable websites. This means we have a monopolistic company that has the power of a government to prevent you from seeing whatever material it deems as bad, and instead of using a clear filter for this, Google will continue to use the nebulous “offensive” tag to remove information.

This denies the human nature of truth which is that truthful information goes through a long period of opposition and censorship before it is accepted:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. — Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788 – 1860)

Google possesses the perfect way of keeping truth caught in the “violently opposed” stage so it can never be accepted as self-evident. By being vague about what is “offensive,” and putting the burden on sites like us to figure out what they object to and remove it, they ensure broad content removal of controversial topics. Given that five large companies control the internet, your right to speech is governed entirely by their desire to provide a “safe” product. Government never needs to get its hands dirty nor the companies officially admit they have censored anything. In their view, they are merely providing a safer product. And somehow, government seeks OK with Google’s attempts to stay on top through underhanded deeds.

While we detest Pantera, and generally think ill of Anselmo and his many antics, and have personal reasons to detest neo-Nazism and all associated with, at DeathMetal.org we are aware of the history of censorship: it starts with ideas no one will defend, like Nazism and pedophilia, and then expands to include anything that those in power — including rich companies like Google and the other Big Five — find threatening. This is the censorship of the future: removing anything that makes people feel uncomfortable, which will quickly produce a circle-jerk that repeats the same accepted opinions to itself and fails to notice uncomfortable realities. In metal, we face uncomfortable realities head-on because they are still part of reality and throughout history, humanity has thrived where it accepts reality and failed where it denies it. Google, FortaRock, SJWs and other “safe spaces” types are leading us into failure as a species by making denial into a moral good, even if they do it “in our best interests” with the most benevolent of motives.

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Metalgate news – Phil Anselmo wavers on racist statements

Phil Anselmo put a sour taste into the mouth of Dimebag Darrell and Pantera worshipers worldwide by making some white supremacist signs at the end of Dimebash 2016. Much to my amusement, he immediately backpedaled and insisted that these remarks were his idea of a joke. Like most of these incidents, the importance is not so much in what Phil Anselmo actually believes, but in how the people around him react. As a general rule, you people have overreacted. For instance, the good folk at MetalSucks (always a bastion of… well… something) struggled to reconcile their simple belief that racism is bad with their other simple belief that Phil Anselmo’s musical efforts are worthy of their time and attention.

Here at DMU, we’ve learned to deal with the fallout of our idols’ actual, provable crimes, such as the arson and murder of the Norwegian black metal scene to the point that we’re perhaps desensitized to thoughtcrimes, especially since we can’t yet peer into Anselmo’s head and accurately determine whether he’s a racist, or trawling for attention, or some combination of both. What matters is that we don’t jump to conclusions based on the unknowable. Besides, we have enough evidence of Anselmo contributing to Pantera.

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Myrkur frontwoman receiving death threats

Myrkur promo pic

It doesn’t take much time to notice that we’re not big fans of Myrkur’s music, to the point that I tend to drop a link to my review of the act’s full length debut when something displeases me in modern black metal and its descendants. Other parts of the internet are rather more vitriolic in recent times; a few days ago, Myrkur’s Facebook page disabled private messages in response to a torrent of death threats. Amalie Bruun promptly followed this up by claiming the problem was American in origin.

myrkur drama

In a more hyperbolic world, the internet would explode. In ours, it still triggered many of Myrkur’s fans and critics alike; even now, metal enthusiasts worldwide are trying to score social points by writing editorials about how sending death threats is bad (m’kay), and near-battles are almost fought over an issue that probably shouldn’t have been publicized in the first place. You don’t want people making threats against you to feel like they’ve accomplished something of value, have you? The more cynical part of me thinks all this is going to do is build up further buzz, attention, and record sales for Myrkur, as if her upcoming tour alongside Behemoth wasn’t enough of an opportunity. Still, responding to Myrkurphobia with xenophobia is not the answer we’re looking for here at DMU.

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#Metalgate: SJW accidentally admits real reason for censorship

safespace_jihad_worriers

Safespace Jihad Worriers (SJWs) generally insist that they are metalheads who are not in favor of censorship. Those statements however include two lies, which are only tolerated because they are indirect: first, SJWs are in favor of censorship because they intend to exclude everyone who does not agree with them. Second, they are not metalheads, although they are pretending to be metalheads, as the following somewhat neurotic article shows:

The heavy metal fan-base also has a problematic history with race. While many bands (including those within the Big Four) contain people of color, more often than not, the heavy metal audience in the West is mostly white. Bands that are solely comprised of people of color, like the Bay Area’s Stone Vengeance, have reported that labels would be interested in signing them based on their sound. However, when the labels saw a photo of Stone Vengeance, they would backpedal, saying the band did not have the “right look.” Some great discourse is arising around this subject, with scholars and journalists such as Laina Dawes raising their voices to unpack issues of race, as well as gender, within the heavy metal music scene.

As a burgeoning heavy metal academic, I have attended several academic conferences on heavy metal. Heavy metal academic conferences that I have attended have consistently had a high percentage of women presenting. This stands in stark contrast to conferences I have attended that are dedicated to other fields of study, in which women are less represented. Some conferences, like the latest one I attended, the inaugural Legion of Steal Metalfest and Conference in Berkeley, California, was organized solely by women.

So, to my heavy metal colleagues and friends, thank you for fostering discussions on gender, race, and sexual orientation in heavy metal music that make me a better feminist.

The usual SJW agenda is here: the one-sided, unsubstantiated accusation; the implication that no good person could disagree with the agenda; and finally, the calling together of the group for action as one. And in that, there is an admission: this writer is feminist first, and only secondarily a metalhead. She wants to conquer metal and make it into a subset of feminism because feminism is where her loyalties lie.

SJW incursion into metal became noticed when people pointed out that these “new metalheads” were not very much into the classics of the genre. Instead, they listened to only SJW-music: late hardcore, indie rock and other SJW-leaning genres. Of course they found metal not to their taste, and it had nothing to do with politics — these people do not actually like metal, but they like the idea of being metal so they can act cool in front of their friends, and thus they claim to be metalheads… if the metal is SJW-correct, and sounds a lot like indie rock.

Dual loyalties never really work for anyone. You can be a metalhead and listen to lots of other types of music, and think lots of other types of thought, but when your agenda becomes a mission to replace how metal thinks with how those other groups think, you are no longer a metalhead. You are someone who wishes to destroy metal and replace it with something more like the rest of the drivel out there. And that is indeed a problem.

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SJWs launching coordinated attacks on anti-censorship Facebook accounts

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#Metalgate explodes in full bloom as the gloves are off: SJWs, who call themselves “Social Justice Warriors” but are more accurately referred to as “Safespace Jihad Worriers,” are using mass messages on Facebook — and secret, anonymous profiles — to coordinate to mass-complain about anti-censorship Facebook accounts.

During the last 48 hours, accounts belonging to Brett Stevens and Richard Corbin, founder of the Anti-Censorship group Make Baltimore – NO PLAY ZONE!, have been deleted by Facebook after receiving hundreds of complaints coordinated by Safespace Jihad Worriers (SJWs). The Baltimore group has been under a lesser form of attack as SJWs have swarmed it to post negative messages, memes and pornography in the hope of getting the group banned. Facebook, which itself vigorously supports certain kinds of censorship and nagging nanny content restrictions, has complied despite these accounts not having anti-immigrant speech at all.

In particular, Stevens’ account was attacked for his posting of a feminist article about positive body image. Although no other users complained, and although Facebook can see the secret group from which all complainers were coming, Facebook rubber-stamped the deletion because of its policy of censoring content that might offend someone somewhere, mainly because it wishes to create a “safe space” free from controversial news items and images. This is in addition to censorship where Facebook works with repressive regimes to remove content contrary to the official propaganda. Internet users have compiled a long list of privacy and censorship violations by Facebook.

Others have pointed out that Facebook’s nebulous content censorship policy permits abuse of the type that is happening here. Certainly, it seems odd that Facebook would allow secret groups to form lynch mobs against pages on its own site. Then again, Facebook censors mentions of its competitors as well as blocking trending news stories that contradict the political leanings of its administrators. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has rated Facebook a censorship risk that has failed EFF’s censorship test, and many in the moderate wing of the tech industry have expressed doubts about Facebook’s intentions. Some have even started watchdog groups to track Facebook censorship and political bias.

In the meantime, rumors about as to who is the mystery “MAS” or “ALS” who coordinates the hidden group, which is reminiscent of both the JournoList scandal and the foundations of #metalgate. In the meantime, SJWs such as Mary Spiro, whose daughter reportedly dates Bestial Evil guitarist Shawn Rucker II and who book shows in Baltimore with rumored political intent, can be seen justifying the mass attacks via Facebook:

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