Nothing is less metal than accepting everyone and everything. Metal discriminates. Fundamentally, we recognize that most people have their head in their clouds and like craven mice prefer comforting illusions to even only moderately disturbing truths. In fact, over 90% of everything is simply disorganized garbage made by distracted mice. For this reason, we unleash our cruelty and separate the music from the squeaking with Sadistic Metal Reviews…
Arkham – “Demo 2014”
It may become necessary to invent a genre for this style because it shows up frequently. It might be called “narrative speed metal” for music that adds heavy metal and death metal into speed metal but fundamentally follows the vocal line for song development, as if narrated as background action by the lyrics. The dominant influence on Arkham seems to be Iron Maiden, whose harmonized riffing and song structures bleed through, but the band has chosen a death metal vocal and a basic speed metal verse-chorus approach with introductory riffs leading to change in the verse riff for each section of the song. Good riffs, and good sense of melody, but this band ends up being too linear in narrative and the chaotic vocals interrupt their melodic songwriting.
Bloodscribe – Prologue to the Apocalypse
Fairly standard brutal percussive death metal in the post-Internal Bleeding style that is essentially deathcore but with more internal coherence through simplicity. The problem with this genre is that, like Cannibal Corpse and the post-Suffocation clones that inspired it, it requires reducing itself to a catchy guttural vocal phrase and distracting riffs with lots of squeaks and squeals but very little put together into tremolo or complex textures. The result is that this is the musical equivalent of elevator music, just a lot more intense sonically and with far better technique. It misses (however) the mind-blowing aspects of death metal and replaces them with the toe-tapping, head-bouncing and brick-eating mental state of listening to someone force a jackhammer around a sewer line.
Gnosis – The Third-Eye Gate
This band of some local repute comes to us playing the style that some call shuffle metal. In this genre, the vocalist chants and the drums race to catch up while guitars strobe a two chord riff in the background. It has the gratifying tremolo sound of early Florida death metal but the vocal dominance inevitably makes this combination sing-song and thus the foreboding sense comes apart, replaced by the feeling that one is in a local pub, drinking a warm brew, listening to the local band whose songs are as familiar as backyard dirt at this point and while improving, never seem to get good. Interesting ideas appear on this album but never develop because they are too busy keeping the chanty choruses going for the Budweiser drinkers who are wondering if they should pass out or vomit first. If this band wanted to get good, they would lose the vocal hook and replace it with monotone until the guitars sounded good, then re-write vocals to fit the guitars.
Nameless One – Thousand Memories and Nameless Sword
Essentially Iron Maiden styled heavy metal with death metal vocals and riffs thrown in for emphasis, Nameless One achieve a reasonable fusion of the genres but cannot hide the sickly sweet pop music underlying their Iron Maiden tribute composition. It is catchy and elegant in the way Iron Maiden is, but everything wraps up too nicely and the result is a sense of listening to one of those pop bands that pop up and vanish overnight in the dance music community. All instruments are executed with aplomb and solos are highly professional, and no song drops into lower-quality riffs, suggesting these guys have good quality control. Riffs are cut from archetypes, and the fusion is a little goofy, but the real sin here is making Iron Maiden into a candy pop band and thus making it as saccharine form of the irritation of nails on a chalk board.
Winds of Genocide – Usurping the Throne of Disease
This album is hilarious. Imagine taking a standard hard rock album and trying to do it in the style of Blasphemy (yes, the Ross Bay one). Then add vocals which linger past the phrase or lead the vocals much like a pop band, and allow individual musicians to show off in the process. The result is unintentionally comedic as it sounds like Hollywood hired a bunch of Charles Bronson style tough guys to make Poison relevant again. In an attempt to hide the roots of this music, the band play fast and loud and layer it in vocals of several types, including the electronically processed chant and the barking chihuahua howl. For comedy’s sake they throw in citations to Sarcofago, Von and other ultra-basic bands, but no experienced listener will be able to get past the hard rock progressions and bouncy glam metal riffs even if played in detuned, double BOSS HM2 distortion’d power chords. Do not listen when stoned, as you might have a laugh attack.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? As you lie on your deathbed and look over life, you will divide everything you know into things you will miss and things you have forgotten already. Some metal is worth remembering, but the vast majority is just background noise. We hail the former and smite the latter, salting their wounds with our sardonic laughter…
Internal Bleeding – Imperium
After Suffocation got big in the mid-90s as the next big direction for death metal, lots of bands took the Cannibal Corpse hint and started imitating the easier parts of the Suffocation percussive death metal approach. Unfortunately, doing so creates music that is dumber than malformed concrete, and Internal Bleeding quickly distinguished itself as the death metal version of Pantera: brocore for bros who like to you know drink beer and punch their heads into walls. Checking in with them 19 years later, it seems little has changed. These songs are hook-laden and not fully random, but the hook relies on the most basic of rhythms and their expectation, sort of like watching a chihuahua chase its tail. The band tries to compensate for their basic and unexciting music with really active vocals and occasional melodic touches on guitar, but nothing changes the fact that these songs are based around extremely basic patterns designed to numb and erode the mind. The famous breakdowns are back and serve to break up some of the constant muted-strum chugging and ranting vocals that shadow the rhythm of the guitar riff, but even if they dropped occasional symphonic parts into this Internal Bleeding could not hide the fact that most of this music is designed to destroy brain cells or appeal to those who have already voluntarily obliterated their own minds.
Oppression – Sociopathie & Gloire
This band will be overlooked by many because the production on this album makes it hard to hear anything but bass, vocals and metals (cymbals and high-hat). However, what lies beneath the obscurity is a quality melodic punk album that verges on Oi and shows us what emo could have been in the hands of quality songwriters; you could compare this to the Descendents and the Misfits because this band write quality vocal melodies over melodically hookish riffs and rhythms, producing a sense of familiarity and yet a sense of weight like that of history or topics that pop up in every life no matter what age. Vocals alternate between a black metal-ish rasp and sung punk vocals, with the latter being more convincing. As with Misfits, the composition of these vocal melodies defines the song, combining old world melodic intensity with a casual punk sense that favors the simple and almost childlike. Touches of metal technique accentuate the harmonic space created by these rather open melodies, but generally, what you hear is punk that sounds as much like Blitz or Reagan Youth as something more recent. The result brings together the best of punk in its attempts to combine its energy with depth, and provides for a good listen, if the listener is able to hear past the abysmal production.
Steve Hackett – Genesis Revisited: Live at Royal Albert Hall
Among the 1970s progressive rock bands, Genesis is frequently mentioned but often forgotten. It seems to me that the reason is that its vocalist, not its guitar-keyboard duo, dominated the composition and thus it drifted closer to the regular-rock tinged Pink Floyd style of “light” progressive rock, without getting as populist and compact as Pink Floyd or Rush did. However, it would be a mistake to overlook the first few Genesis albums which were ambitious although steeped in a self-righteousness which seems more pretentious than the usual self-indulgent musically masturbatory egoism of progressive rock. On this live recording, Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett revisits the older Genesis material with the benefit of an extensive solo career and an entirely different band. The result makes Genesis sound more pastoral, with greater emphasis on vocals and mood in the style of later-1970s big radio rock bands, but also brings out some of the more aggressive guitar that got buried under keyboards and vocals on the originals. Vocalist Nad Sylvan manages a more soulful and less starchily self-referential voice than the original, and all accompanying musicians are excellent including a cast of highly talented players who, while not fully noticed by name in the mainstream, have demonstrated their abilities in complement to larger acts in the past. While all of this shines, the fundamental problem with Genesis remains the “oil on water” feel when it switches between something that sounds like Queen and a sort of extended figurative structured jam. While highly musical, Genesis often seems atopical and thus lost between its rock drama and its progressive underpinnings, and in many ways, having Hackett reinforce the role of guitar both reduces this gap and highlights what is left. For Genesis fans who wondered what this band might have been like with a different internal balance of power, these re-envisioned tracks will provide hours of exploration.
Wolf – Devil Seed
This album takes the speed and intensity of a speed metal album, adds in Accept-style power metal vocals, but underneath the skin is something more like a hybrid between the first albums from Motley Crue and Queensryche. The result is… well, there’s no nice way to say this, but: annoying. Highly skilled and highly repetitive, vocally demonstrative and vocally over-dramatic, catchy and infectious and yet cloying, it hammers out the earworm qualities of glam metal at the pace of speed metal with the production and sound of power metal. If this is your first album from this style, it might be interesting to own, but probably difficult to listen to on a regular basis because of the similarity of the tracks and the consistently high levels of sentiment and bounding energy. The 1980s varied moods of glam metal have been replaced with the aesthetics of techno or punk, and it just keeps going and eventually even drowns itself out. Musically, nothing here ventures outside of the camp of what has worked before and become established, although a few adept variations give greater power to the framework. As with most metal/rock hybrids, what brings it down is the need for vocals to lead which crowds out other instruments, in turn squeezing the space available for song development. While the vocals are impressive, when they become too predominant like this they lose some of their power; Halford or Dickinson (or Di’Anno) would have been more selective in the use of their full-bore intensity and emotional depth.
Vardan – Enjoy of Deep Sadness
This band combines “suicidal black metal” with the shoegaze/emo/indie variant that specialized in certain minor key chord progressions turning upward at the end of each phrase to convey a sense of misplaced “hope,” much in the way early 1990s emo-punk bands did. The result is merely a new aesthetic slapped on top of very ancient and pointless music, since the “mixed emotions” sensation has been popular in rock music since the 1960s and produces the type of emotions one might want in the background of a movie about losing your favorite race car, but apply not at all to any life with depth, where the emotions are more than mixed but intertwined in some way more than a balance of sadness/joy that seems like it came off a greeting card. This isn’t bad in execution; it’s soulless in intent. While the former is forgivable, the latter renders this music irrelevant to anyone who is here to live for the purpose of living, because to such a person confused self-pity and weepy “hope” is completely non-applicable. In the same way it is entirely possible to listen to this entire EP, nod once, and then read a book on database administration and be more thoroughly moved by its depth and emotion than anything Vardan will ever record.
Savn – Savn
Anyone else remember The Gathering? They had a female vocalist, a quite good one name Anneke something-impossible-in-Dutch, and she was not only adorable but also could sing. But that’s the distraction. The question of whether a metal band can have a female vocalist is never asked when the female vocalist goes the route of Doro or another high performer. It’s when the presence of a female vocalist changes the sound of the band that people start wanting to talk about that instead of the music. And Savn cleverly starts out with very black metal sounds, then the keyboards kick in, and then very pretty female vocals intrude. Excellent production. There’s even a harmonica, for the sake of Zuul. The whole nine yards. But if you stop hearing the distortion for a moment, you realize you’re hearing standard folk rock that has been 100% consistent from the 1960s through the present day. It fits the female vocal and range but even more, it fits the needs of people in boutique shops that sell crystals to feel vaguely empowered, slightly sad and yet charged with some kind of great Meaning that has lifted up their insignificant lives of watching television and answering phones at work to the focal point of some vast collision between human emotions that form the basis of the cosmos itself. You can imagine Jewel belting out this album, or Linda Rondstadt, or even Taylor Swift. Savn would do better to just run Doris Day vocals over old Burzum albums. I do not contest the assertion that they are talented, good players, imaginative, and that the production here is amazing. I just question what it has to convey. The answer is feeling good while you shop and pretend that the universe is not a cold empty place, and that somehow your emotions derived from pop music are totally relevant and might even determine the future. On an emotional and artistic level, this release is poisonous; on any other level, it is simply a product that doubtless will sell many crystals, possibly cube cars and haircuts too.
Provocator – Antikristus
Joining on the primitive black metal thread which bands like Von thrust to the forefront, Provocator crafts simple sawing black metal based on extremely rudimentary chord progressions that are nonetheless not pure chromatic, giving it a more accessible base of tones to expand upon. Like Acheron or Ungod, these riffs rely on building momentum and then redirecting it with quick rotational motion, but the repetition of this technique wears thin. Extensive demonic vocals crowd over the top but instead of giving this depth, simply distract from both the underlying guitar and the effect of the vocals to the point where it sounds like trying to listen to a portable radio in a busy train station. Nothing on this is terrible or misplaced, but it also provides no particularly compelling content and no reason to revive this style as a result. While it plays, the comfortingly familiar Sarcofago-style drone and chaos at the right BPM will make most black metal fans accept it without a further thought, but the real question with any release is whether you will seek it out again. In this case, nothing is offered that cannot be found elsewhere in a less repetitive form. Although this is no reason to choose an album, the blasphemous song titles and Blasphemy-style prison escape vocals add to some enjoyment but cannot compensate for the fact that this is like listening to a throttle test on a ’78 Camaro.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? The first metal album that you really connect with should be a magic experience, one that transforms your life. But a large group of people want you to apply that same feeling to their album so they can take your money, but their music is mediocre. SMR is the dividing line between the greatness and the forgettable, and we exult in the tears of the latter, for they are the sweetest of wines…
Solace of Requiem – Casting Ruin
A new epidemic trend grips metal, following war metal, which is the tendency to Angelcorpse — yes, that’s being used as a verb — a mixture of metal influences and tie the mess together with loud vocals. Fast guitars and overactive drums work for Angelcorpse, who clearly came along in the Fallen Christ vein of blasting streamlined death metal, but metal bands now are using that style like a tortilla to dump everything else into, wrap up the ends and make a metal burrito. While some bands that make burrito metal are able to keep interest, the problem with this style and the carnival music high contrast (read: randomness) aesthetic of bands like Behemoth that rose in parallel is that by turning the volume up to 11 for everything, it creates a constant flow of essentially invariant sound that possesses no dynamic and no real progression. It is thus easier to write; songs require no real internal contrast, and songwriters can stack bits of whatever they have on hand and stitch it up with some technicality. I find Solace of Requiem to be unlistenable for this reason. It is a barrage of noise that, if someone were to take any part of it and break it out into parts divided by its internal tension and then make a song of it, might work. But the whole burrito does not. The Solace of Requiem burrito includes more lead guitar and melody and some NYDM style technicality and sweeps borrowed from metalcore, but that does not differentiate its essential approach from all the other Behemoth/Angelcorpse hybrids. Like Taco Bell, it goes down quickly, is easily forgotten and leaves an unpleasant odor lingering in its wake.
Wombbath – Internal Caustic Torments
This is one of those bands that makes plodding rhythms catchy to the point that a listener will fall into the groove and not mind, but also will not seek it out repeatedly because of the sheer repetition without much of a direction. These riffs came straight out of hard rock, got detuned and had some quick fills added, but remain as predictable as listening to AC/DC covers at the local karaoke bar. The result is that Wombbath batters your brain until it gives up, then pours a layer of relatively obvious material over it, including songs that complete an arc but without any real doubt or tension in the middle, such that like the riffs, the structure of the songs themselves is duplicative and numbing. Nothing is done poorly and this band clearly shows mastery of the old school style, but what it lacks is a reason for a listener who is aware of the best of old school death metal to embrace this. Internal Caustic Torments expresses in many ways the worst of old school death metal and the tendency that caused the genre to collapse on itself, which was nailing the style and then using it to hammer out repetition like propaganda. This album could be improved overnight by introducing actual tension between the first and second riffs, then seeing where that leads and using it to reorganize these songs, because many of the raw elements are there.
Pilgrim – II: Void Worship
Stoner doom metal happened when 1970s jam music swallowed up doom metal and remains basically stuck in the 1970s, Slacker, That 70s Show, etc. mentality. In other words, it aims to dig out wonder in the smallest of things, much as stoners can find a universe in their toenails. In this case, it is not the “doom” aspect that is problematic, but the fact that this music seems designed to find the fascinating and earth-shattering in simple chord progressions that remind us of Foreigner and Journey releases but without the strong sense of harmony. Instead, it’s every stoner’s dream: just start plodding along, then jam over that until some sort of magic emerges. When you think about it, that is what the Grateful Dead did for decades, blarting out never-ending tuneless solos that incorporated every technique in the book but to no end, because there was no point, only a desire to keep the jam going for as long as possible so the audience and band could take more drugs, be more groovy, pose more in front of the flower-painted school bus and other activities for people who have voids in their souls and no purpose to their lives. Pilgrim are more musically adept than most bands which cross this desk, but they take it nowhere. Songs jam, build up, trail off. Solos and fills drop in competently but express nothing. The album has a big concept somewhere if you read the theory about it that they include with all releases nowadays — I never do — but it is not expressed in the music. Much like a recent failed indie-metal album about whales, the putative topic is not the subject matter, but a cover story for playing the same crap. Really, just go get the first Def Leppard album because it does everything that happens here but with a purpose. A vapid purpose, but no purpose is more vapid than no purpose itself. Flee.
Midnight – No Mercy for Mayhem
Warmed over NWOBHM with American glam metal glitz under a glaze of alt-death bands like Nifelheim or Gehennah. Remember when that stuff came out? It was 1998 and black metal had officially shot its wad, following death metal the dubious status of having a fully developed form but having expressed all of its relevant content three years or more prior. Thus bands thought, “Well, we have this new technology in the death metal and black metal styles, why not mix them and use them to encode the same old crap that bands were talking about in the 1970s?” You know, the safe stuff: alcohol, sex, partying and pissing off your parents. No one in a modern liberal democracy will argue with you for such an assertion of individualism and defiance of The Establishment. Thus it’s about as challenging and volatile as tap water, as controversial as feeding pigeons in a park, and the perfect product because it takes almost zero effort to make a few catchy hard rock songs with heavier vocals and more intense drums. Anyone can do it! Those were the words they used in the dying years of punk, also, which meant that anyone and everyone did do it, which ensured that the music became boring because it wasn’t about anything. Midnight isn’t about anything either. Its members are fixated only on being in a band and making some tunes that people like. That’s sort of like a chef deciding that he wants to make Big Macs instead of Filet Mignon because “people like it.” Like a Big Mac, No Mercy For Mayhem is soft and uniform in consistency and slightly sweet with a tangy sauce of rebellious high school rock. But it resembles an average of every burger ever made with the never-fail treatment of adding fat, salt and sugar, thus there is no growth, learning or evolution in it. It is simply an object, a product. And like all soulless things, it can only occupy your time, not enhance it, which means you stagnate, and you know what they say about stagnation.
Cemetery Lust – Orgies of Abomination
I suppose this is intended to sound like Autopsy, but it more sounds like the bad SOD and DRI clones of the late 1980s: really simple sing-song two-point riffs driven by the vocals to keep the rhythmic hook alive because that is basically all the song does. Rhythms are very similar to old DRI, COC and SOD as well. Lots of downpicking. Nothing is poorly done and yet this style, like all rap music, is just too simple to express much of anything especially with these entirely standard song structures. Each song consists of two related riffs, a vocal hook, and support from other instruments. The result is not exciting unless people playing stuff faster than normal excites you. Lots of tropes from middle-1980s speed metal and early death metal, but the songs never really get any momentum going and sound about thirty years old, out of date and without personality. Some things belong in the past and should be buried next to all the bands who didn’t make it because they sounded like watered-down versions of their influences. This band can join them.
Rippikoulu – Ulvaja
Funeral doom metal with death metal touches in the vein of Skepticism, Rippikoulu on this release create a convincing atmosphere that relies too much on texture of vocals and instrumentation but nonetheless is convincing. These songs begin with simple riffs and expand both depth and tonality, moving from minor-key intervals to more open intervals much like Ancient used to on its longer tracks, creating a sense of a moving target on a lengthy journey. Use of piano, strings and female vocals both soften the abrasive distortion and force more spacious dynamics, allowing other themes more room to move. While these songs clearly focus on atmosphere, the more important idea here is the change of moods like seasons, which gives them a grace and makes the distorted guitar seem actually jarring by way of contrast. Although this release is an EP and thus short, the mood created by this musical approach could be, like Summoning Nightshade Forests, the basis for a short escape from reality that reveals more about existence than direct confrontation ever could.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? When fans, writers, radio presenters and musicians get fed up with the exhausting flood of imitators and demand that music have a purpose, because only music that has content can express something of beauty or horror about reality and thus be relevant to our lives, because unlike the herd that seeks escape, we seek a means of understanding and glorifying life. Death to the imitators, drowning in a sea of angsty tears.
Edge of Paradise – Immortal Waltz
This jaunty take on a cross between burlesque music and hard rock with symphonic overtones seems designed to showcase the talents of vocalist Margarita, who layers her vocals in waves that create, along with the carnival horror show keyboards, a sense of being in some oddity of a dream. But this band really invites comparison to bands like Genitorturers and Marilyn Manson more than heavy metal; these songs are vehicles for the vocals and are designed to create a sensation of spectatorship more than have the music itself inundate the mind. Aesthetically, this will strike underground fans as cheesy; while not terrible musically, it also derives much of its compositional direction from riffing off known archetypes of the type of music it cites. That and the way songs are entirely driven by vocals places this outside the range of most expecting riff-based music, and the simplicity of its delivery ensures that it will sound like children’s music to most death metal fans. If this is symphonic metal, it is clearly not for me, but if you like the Marilyn Manson style spectacle and ironic deconstruction of cultural tokens, it might appeal.
Krieg – Transient
Krieg started as purely chaotic improvisational black metal, then organized itself into a ripping war metal variety, and finally detoured into indie/shoegaze. With Transient, the band returns to roots with a primitive type of death metal fused with a heavy amount of punk and garnished with varieties of its previous influences. The shoegaze influence is still here as are some classic black metal riffs but they are suspended in a gelatinous mass of punkish simple death metal riffs which keep an energetic uptempo charge. While it sculpts atmosphere with agreeable verve, most of modern Krieg consists of transitions into moods and then riding of those moods, which interrupts the frenetic energy this band once conveyed while simultaneously not building up to its transitions with enough groundwork to give them power beyond their own attributes. Black metal works its atmospheric magic by manipulating context and showing a progression between events like a battle scene, but this new style is more like visiting different rooms in a spooky hotel. That being said, Krieg is stronger in riff-writing and understanding of the dimensions of harmony and how to navigate them with a riff than other American black metal bands, and also beats the hell out of Sonic Youth.
English Dogs – The Thing With Two Heads
This punk band uses a lot of metal riffs and rhythms in that it likes to interrupt continuity with abrupt internal collisions in its music, and uses the muted strum in a style spanning the spectrum from speed metal to Meshuggah. Unfortunately, it also mates this with a rock style of offbeat leading phrases that make this music bounce just like rock or hip-hop, which kills any gravitas or building of intensity. There are some great speed metal riffs on here and some moments of pure punk energy but the whole is torn apart by musical discontinuities which result in what sounds like a train crash between the 1980s and early 2000s that never resolves itself into a voice that can express anything. If this band dropped half the riffs and focused on making songs that generate momentum and then channel it somewhere, it would hit like a ton of bricks but as it is now, it sounds like something that should be on in the background during an LMN late-night movie about kids hanging with the wrong crowd and ending up in an organ harvesting gang.
Horrified – Descent Into Putridity
This album shows a great deal of initial promise in its attempt to resurrect the old underground. It gets beyond the two-point riffs that hammer a rhythm and then answer it and go nowhere, preferring longer riffs that lead on to different points and at times in the Deathspell Omega way extend themselves into wandering melodies. Its combination of Swedish death metal and Autopsy power death metal worship works on the surface. But the nu-underground has never understood the purpose of death metal riffing which is to create subterranean structures that mirror what goes on in our subconsious minds; death metal is about looking beneath the surface to reveal structure and a subtext of motivation. Horrified in contrast has one layer, which is some riffy music on the surface that fits together nicely, but lacks a core of something which cuts between the mental state and the music. Thus over time this wears thin and repetitive at about the same time the listener starts noticing how many riffs are anchored with doubled downpicking and how few of these riffs, despite growing in their own right, amplify the subject matter of the song. Horrified come closer to the original than any others attempting this style recently but still miss the root of what makes the underground what it is, and so verge closer to the much more “face value” work of speed metal bands, at which point the repetition creates bad flashbacks of late 1980s metal and the repetition PTSD kicks in.
Xerath – III
The horror, the horror. Symphonic metal must be done gracefully but with aggression and force; Xerath approach it like hard rock and use it as a vehicle for over-dramatic vocals. This hurts to listen to because the keyboards drift, the riffs sound like a heavier version of Def Leppard, and the metal gets forgotten. Synthesizing two disparate things only works when a common ground and thus basis for a common voice is found, and otherwise what emerges is the oil-on-water effect that produces carnival music where random patterns contrast one another as if they were designed to accompany a cartoon and its wacky action. Xerath goes down all of these rabbit trails and comes out at a comical level. Distraction, deflection, recursion, confusion. Like Behemoth and other bands in this newer style, Xerath does great work at the level of detail, but when you add it up the only picture that emerges is confusion and haste resulting in an entirely random platter of stuff that is recognizable as metal but by depriving itself of continuity and context, entirely lacks the punch. It compensates for that lack by hammering extra hard on pounding rhythms and blasting passages which do nothing but highlight the sense of On Through the Night colliding with a roadside minstrel show on its way to play the outer reaches of Alaska and hope its luck changes there.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? When Hessians decide they are sick of every random person tagging along for the glory of metal while making the same dreck that big media pushes on us through the pop industry. Make art, make it violent and aggressive, be truthful… or go home as we enjoy your delicious tears.
Siftercide – Siftercide
Some time ago there was much ruckus in the press because people were using the word “retarded” as a synonym for “extremely stupid.” This died down when people realized that retarded people are actually extremely stupid, generally in the 60-70 IQ range which is typical for Congress but very low for normal people. Siftercide is retarded. The basic idea was to make deathgrind at fast grindcore pace and throw in a few dissonant chords to try to hide the fact that these riffs are boring, these songs are predictable, and this music will generate a headache not because it’s extreme but because it is like listening to a jet engine. Really, screw this. It’s not worth your time or mine.
Ormgard – Ormblot
Underground metal typically occurs at three speeds: the tempo set by the percussion, the pace of changing chords, and the iteration of tremolo strum. Ormgard makes black metal which frequently slows down the first two with the latter at full pace, creating the kind of atmospheric black metal that distinguished early Behemoth or Ungod. Much of this picks up the straight fast pace of classic black metal with relatively straightforward chord progressions that emphasize melody. Keyboards and howling possum in pain vocals accompany it; the album is sandwiched between two imaginative instrumentals that evoke the feeling of the ancient era. In mood, this album most resembles a less-Gothic version of the first Gehenna work, but picks up the energy like early Ancient to create a sense of conflict and desperation. While this breaks no new ground stylistically, that never struck most metal fans as important. Comparisons to Abigor will be hard to dodge, especially the Orkblut era, and while they are apt aesthetically, Ormgard spreads out further than Abigor for an approach more like that of the original black metal bands exploding from Norway in the early 1990s. Ormblot channels its power into a faithful exploration of this genre and while not strikingly interesting, holds the attention by being non-random and carefully manipulating mood to dark effect.
Nocturnal Graves – From the Bloodline of Cain
The term metalheads generally use for bands such as this is “straightahead.” Straight out of the 1980s but with black metal vocals, it is high-speed basic riffs and catchy but binary songs. If you did not get enough of Aura Noir, or have an urge to re-live Slaughter Lord in simpler form, this may appeal, but the fundamental lack of musical motion or depth makes this a hard sell for the experienced metalhead. While the aesthetics have changed somewhat, this style of really basic riffing and exuberant simple songwriting has not evolved in 30 years. Its attempts to become more high-intensity end up being repetitive and it flows by and is forgotten when silence returns.
Goatwhore – Constricting Rage of the Merciless
If you are not fully paying attention, this album might sound like a good thing. Its style is pure Angelcorpse mated with 1970s heavy metal and some Southern Rock; its approach is to pack in extra riffs to interrupt a verse-chorus loop that focuses on the vocal rhythm of the chorus. No flaws in musicianship, vocals are vicious, but the songs do not really go anywhere. Or maybe a better way to say this is that these songs sound like academic exercises, laboratory experiments or designs on paper: they relate well to their parts but the whole is nothing larger than the linear sum of the parts. The result is much frenetic pounding and guitar raging, hooks grasping at your ears, and then a sense of disappointment as songs drill toward an end that means nothing more than the start. As the album goes on, more of the 1970s hard rock and metal riffs come out to fill space but the result remains uncompelling. This band is more competent than any others in this style but the style itself lacks any grasp on matters of importance and seems to be the metal equivalent of late-night TV. The Hod album we reviewed recently is a better take on this style.
Colombian Necktie – Twilight Upon Us
Before Kurt Cobain shot himself in a heroin-induced haze, he was fond of saying that metal was out of ideas during the most fertile time in metal history since its inception. If he were around today, however, he would find metalheads buying him beers for saying that metal has run up the flag saying that it is out of ideas. Sludge, not really a hybrid of metal, happens when you mix stoner doom with slow hardcore and probably dates its innovation to the first three Eyehategod albums and slow Integrity songs. Colombian Necktie mix up the dirge-like rage-infused passages of those bands with ordinary Southern-fried rock played uptempo to keep your attention. Nothing stands out as horrible but the whole lacks any compulsion for a listener interested in content. You might as well listen to Huey Lewis and the News if you slow it down and run it through a distortion pedal, because in its core that is what Colombian Necktie and all bands in the sludge style seem to be heading for. If you read it cynically, it is another take on grunge music, which is basically hardcore bands making rocking music and trying to cloak it in metal aesthetics. If you look at any piece of these albums, it is hard to find fault, but if you listen to the whole, you will fall asleep standing up. Most reviewers get their albums free and hear them once and then give it a thumbs up so that the reviewers get promoted along the line by labels who love their spunky and wacky reviews. But if you look at music as a fan, anything you can only listen to one time and do not immediately want to hear again is off the menu, as it should be for Twilight Upon Us and its ilk.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? You are mortal; your time is short. Listen to the best and death to the rest! We recognize that music quality is an objective measurement, where “taste” is more subjective. Taste however is easily fooled and leads you and the genre to a place of mediocrity. Thus we select the better options and mercilessly destroy the weak… if you are a false, do not entry!
Abysmal Lord – Storms of Unholy Black Metal
Borrowing some ideas from the flowing columnar death metal fad/trend of last year, Abysmal Lord attacks this phenomenon from the opposite end, mimicking black metal like Demoncy, Beherit and Blasphemy but giving the music less of a “messy” aesthetic and more of a structured, hard-hitting death metal approach. Perhaps some would call this “blackened death,” but we all know what a waffle that phrase represents. Unlike most of the clone bands, Abysmal Lord merits a second listen for tight compositions and a strong understanding of how to fit together these riffs. Alas as the saying goes there will be nothing new here to shock you, but really what is new? Little: we find music that expresses an emotion and then go with that. In this case, Abysmal Lord creates a sensation like being part of a malevolent fog attacking a city of oblivious burghers with intent to rip out their souls and force them to face the emptiness of the lives they lead. While many riffs cite from earlier bands, the overall feeling of these songs stands on its own, although the band will want to renovate ancient sounds in order to move forward with its own progress.
Aratron – The Recovery
Aratron creates efficient death metal in the intersection of styles between Centurian and Aura Noir, with lots of high-energy rollover rhythms pervading the riffing. The songs come together tightly and each riff fits in to the simple song structure and makes it more powerful. Like many bands of this type it stays within high-speed and mid-paced tempi and performs most of its motion with guitars over relatively passive drums. Riff forms will strike no one as stunningly new but belonging to this band in a form of its own when heard together. Unfortunately the band possesses a great weakness in the vocals which use chihuahua-style rhythms and sometimes, assemble themselves around the simplest pattern derivable from the song and repeat it slowly without variation in timbre or tone. That subverts some of the subtlety of this work which aims to be full-ahead-go and yet avoid falling into the pitfalls of that style. Periodic melodic breaks are reminiscent of Black Sabbath and show the capacity of this band for building more complex songs even when at heart they favor full-energy riff-chorus loops with a few extra riffs to reinvigorate their momentum. Many of the chord progressions used sound like these guys really like early Mayhem.
Atara/Miserable Failure – Hang Them
Two grindcore bands comprise this split, Atara who are groovier and Miserable Failure who are more manic. Listening to these, the casual metalhead will recall that grindcore fizzled like a damp fuze in the 1980s not only because all the bands upsold into Led Zeppelin hybrids but because the genre itself is so limited. We get it: short songs, screaming, noise, havoc. But when does the cliché wear thin? When do we realize that we are making a parody of what elders said about our music for three generations? That riffcraft and songwriting take a back seat to novelty? Napalm Death was “cute” on Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration but they bailed out after that. Carcass moved on after Reek of Putrefaction, and even the mighty Repulsion left it at one album. Within a narrow scope, there is only so much to say, and so grindcore like the previous minimalist experiment in punk rock abolished itself. Atara manages solid songs with a bit of groove between the extravagant flourishes but songs are extremely similar; Miserable Failure sounds like more constant screaming with repetitive droning riffs going on in the background. In one of the great paradoxes of humanity, both are probably at the tops of their genre, and yet that is not enough for a second listen.
Integrity – Systems Overload
Bands like Neurosis and Integrity inspired the “sludge” revolution in metal by playing post-hardcore slowly and for atmosphere, but what attracted the industry was that as these bands gained experience they began sounding more like regular rock music. This allowed the simple calculus of all record labels: new thing / same old thing = new thing we control. This Integrity album shows the band pulling back from the punk and into the punk rock while keeping the aesthetic — the numerator of the fraction above — of hardcore, but adding in the raw structure (the denominator) of basic rock songs. You will recognize many of the patterns on this album from hard rock and classic rock albums, although to their credit Integrity have thoughtfully modified them and extended them, mixing the single items up across songs so that nothing sounds exactly like something else. In this, Systems Overload is one of the most professional albums to come out of punk; they worked hard on making every bit of this fit within the product range the audience expected but with a new aesthetic so it could be branded and a differentiated product. In that area this album is admirable, and it makes for easy and pleasant listening other than the strained and soar throat vocals, but otherwise it strikes me as music for the inexperienced that would be fun for a season and then discarded.
Nihilistinen Barbaarisuus – Väinämöinen
This two-song EP evokes the golden days of Bathory with a long and hypnotic track followed by an acoustic instrumental, but owes more to the Norwegian wave such as Burzum and Gorgoroth. Much as with the latter, it composes in the melodic minor scale, and borrows much of its sense of pacing and trancelike riffing from second-album Burzum. This creates a sense of being suspended in time while watching for action to occur within a scene, and the use of flowing tremolo suspends reality much as it did with Gorgoroth and Graveland, another background influence — by the sound of things — on this band. The first track expands to six minutes on a few short themes and develops internal counter-melodies to give them depth (a less-overused version of the technique in Borknagar), which avoids the lazy wandering of bands like Drudkh or Inquisition, and instead creates a deepening sense of mood. The second track uses acoustic instruments and creates a folkish aura for the first, developing similar themes as if shadowing darkness with light. Much like other faithful retro-continuation projects such as Woodtemple, this music maintains integrity and avoids the pitfalls of contemporary music. It may not be the most exciting owing to an internal balance that is not as savagely unbound as Burzum, for example, and to its arrival twenty years after these techniques hammered audiences for the first time. However, unlike almost all from the genre today, Väinämöinen understands how to make beauty in the darkest despair of the human soul, and from that find not a contrarian impulse toward “good” but a desire to resolutely wage war on all that is inferior and thus, raise the darkness to a higher level of clarity that approximates beauty.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? We enforce the reality the metal community runs in fear from: music can be judged objectively, but most people “prefer” junk. They want their music to make them look cool to their nitwit social groups, so they deliberately select moron music. Falses, don’t entry!
Triptykon – Melana Chasmata
You do not hire the Navy SEALs to remove your fire ant infestation. Similarly, there is no point telling Tom G. Warrior to “make an album like all those other ones.” It’s the wrong tool for the job. This album is atrocious because it relies on very familiar and predictable ideas with no density, and then Warrior tries to shoehorn some depth into it but achieves on oil on water effect, like someone trying to layer Beethoven over Pantera. The result just dumb and painful. Run like hell.
Lacuna Coil – Broken Crown Halo
This isn’t even metal. It’s the same smarmy cheesy shit that they sing in lounges for drunk bluehairs in Vegas, but they shifted from open chords to power chords. There isn’t even any particular focus on riffs here, just some blithe chord progressions shifting in the background while the vocals take it. But even worse, the music is entirely predictable. This is different from being “basic” in that it’s not derived from simplicity, but a generic version of the same stuff everyone else does. But that “everyone else” aren’t metal bands, and these entryists are trying to sneak that moronic garbage in through the back door.
Aborted – The Necrotic Manifesto
People are not bands. Bands are (composed of) people, but are not people. Even a band with good people in it can end up making music as interesting as poured concrete. “Oooh, look how flat it is!” But that’s kind of the problem here: Aborted is flat. It’s straight-ahead pounding death metal/grind hybrid that tends to like one- and two-chord riffs that shape themselves around a basic rhythm. Songs tend toward straight-ahead structures as well. The whole thing feels mentally hasty, like they aimed for a simple goal and then did one take and called it good enough. The highly compressed production just makes it excruciating to hear.
Kill Devil Hill – Revolution Rise
Some bands you don’t want to be noticed listening to lest people think you’re an imbecile. Kill Devil Hill is warmed over 1980s Sunset Strip glam “metal” (i.e.: hard rock) with some alternative rock stylings and occasional Rob Zombie infusions. That’s it, and the style tells you the content. In addition to mind-numbing repetition, like all rock music this dunce material focuses on the vocalist and some imagined fantasy mystical “power” to very cheesy vocals emphasizing very obvious emotions. It’s like watching Shakespeare done by a troupe of brain injury patients. Even the attempts to be “edgy” by working in oddball found sounds and minor techno influences falls flat because the whole package is so blindingly obvious and equally as plainly designed for thumb-suckers.
Blood Eagle – Kill Your Tyrants
At least this has some balls, but metal needs both a warlike outlook and an interesting musical development. The latter is where Blood Eagle falls down: too much downstrumming, repetitive riff forms, repetitive song forms and reliance and skull-shakingly basic rhythms that involve a slamming conclusion makes this music no fun to listen to. It is like hearing a constant pounding with Pantera-style angry ranting in a death metal vocal over the top, but the plot rarely changes. When the band gives itself a little room for melody, as in the end of “Serpent Thoughts,” we see how much better this could have been. Instead it sounds like road rage stuck on repeat on a forgotten late night TV channel.
Eyehategod – Eyehategod
The New Orleans hit factory just keeps cranking them out. WAIT — that’s not what you want to hear about underground metal. Could the writer be implying that this trivial drivel is actually just pop music? Yes, yes he is. Eyehategod started out with a slow punk/grind mix that was boring but kind of aggressive. Then they made it with great production for Dopesick, which was a mildly interesting record. Since then, they’ve gotten closer to the hipster zone. Eyehategod makes me feel like I’ve stepped back into the early 1980s. Punk had just lost direction and every band was recycling old ideas or trying to be “different” with tricks that amounted to little more than stunts. The emptiness was staring us in the face, and no one was talking about it. This album is stereotypical hollow man hardcore with a bit of southern fried bullshit and a couple metal riffs. Why not just go listen to the failed albums by burnt-out and aged punk bands, because they at least have more consistent. This is just an odds ‘n’ ends drawer with a high production budget. You can sniff out the hollowness by how many times they hit you over the head with their image, working in every southern trailer failure term they can, and then performing their party act of ranting vocals over hard rock riffs. It breathes staleness and marketing like a home remortgaging plan.
Day of Doom – The Gates of Hell
Metal bands should know by now to avoid the formula where the entire song is based around a vocal cadence, with guitars trying for a really basic pattern the vocals can play off of, and drums in perpetual fill mode. This means that the simplistic plodding patterns of vocals define everything else, which means everything else clusters around the lowest common denominator, and you end up with music whose sole (no pun intended) purposes is to make you tap your feet and wave your head to an undulating rhythm. This works great if you’re a sea anemone, but not so good for anything else. Day of Doom is one of those slow-strobing-strum bands that clearly intends for the whole audience to bounce at the same time in trope, but forgets that this is mindlessly boring when you’re not in a concert setting. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with these guys, but what they’re trying to do is wrong (as in unrealistic and stupid).
On Top – Top to Bottom
Mixed hardrock/punk, On Top has a clever name but otherwise is exactly as predictable as you might imagine. Lots of bouncy riffs, melodic choruses, angry vocals that specialize in repetitive tropes. If you derive a lot of value from doing the same thing others are doing at the same time, this might be your thing. It’s super-catchy like Biohazard or Pantera were, with plenty of syncopation in vocal rhythms to give them some kick, and songs even develop one level past pure circularity. It basically sounds like something you would expect the rebellious character to listen to in a movie as he drinks his whisky and drives fast. Other than this one-dimensionality, this is one of the few things in this review batch with any musicality. It’s just applied in such a way that people who aren’t drunk and sixteen will rapidly tire of.
Howls of Ebb – Vigils of the 3rd Eye
Howls of Ebb adopt an interesting strategy, which is to hide a Maudlin of the Well style quasi-prog in the midst of a dirty modern heavy metal band. At its core, this is heavy metal of the late 1980s variety, but this is carefully concealed under fast death metal riffs and whispered vocals which expand into dissonant chording and riff salads of the post-jazz-fusion era. The catchiness of the basic heavy metal riffing and the tendency to use tempo changes which fit in that model remain, but the weirdness accentuates it. If you can image Powermad adopting a bit of grunge and progressive metal, then slowing down half of its parts in a melodic jazzy style reminiscent of Absu crossed with Maudlin of the Well, you have the basic idea. The result is not only not bad but stands up to repeated listens. It will probably stay B-ranked in that its compositions make sense on a musical level but convey little else, and often the riff salads meander off-course enough to leave an impression but not a clear one. Still, this is more thoughtful than almost all of the metal at this commercial level and while it’s not underground, it’s much preferred to the usual tripe.
Personal Device – Microorganismos del Mal
First there was the faux 80s crossover thrash revival with party retro-thrash bands like Toxic Holocaust and Municipal Waste, then bands like Birth A.D. bounced back with actual thrash and reformed the genre. Now Personal Device take it a step both further and in a different direction by being a classic hardcore band that informs itself with early speed metal like the first Metallica and Nuclear Assault albums. The result is bouncy fast and precise punk like Ratos de Porao or even middle-period Bad Brains that is thoroughly enjoyable with riff breaks that resemble “The Four Horsemen” or maybe even “Live, Suffer, Die.” Their guitars are remarkably precise which creates an unusual sound for punk that by making it mechanistic makes it seem more inexorable than like protest music, and the result is a more testosterone-fueled and warlike approach. Mix that with the surging chord changes of speed metal and the fast repetitive chanted choruses from thrash, and you have a high-energy band. Its flaws are that experienced listeners may find this a bit too transparent, and that many of its rhythms are similar, but the band has administered its style with an editor’s red pen handy, cutting out any lesser parts, which gives it more staying power than all but a few albums in this stylistic range. This was a pleasant surprise to find in the review pile.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? The only path to metal glory is to make music that is metal both in form and content, and upholds the spirit of conquering the unknown and crushing the empty and pointless. Anything else fails and shall be mocked! Come for the impotent rage, stay for the occasional standout…
Vrolok – Void (The Divine Abortion)
After taking much, much too long to get started (by the way, the ‘tension building’ here is hitting an open E chord for 2 minutes), the first proper track begins with a drum beat that I’d expect to hear from GZA or Del Tha Funkee Homosapian. It only gets worse from there. This album sounds like someone took Burzum, Strid, xanax, and nu-metal and threw them all into a blender. The downright hilarious vocals are just as laugh-inducing as Nattramn of Silencer, and the bass drums sound like bongos. The tracks that aren’t overly long suffer from a lack of direction, and end much too suddenly. What a mess. No wonder this band has gotten much more exposure, they have all of the ‘eeevol’ ingredients that make their music sound scary to the tweenies, but to the experienced listener this is like hearing a group of circus monkeys play Aske.
Hirilorn – Legends of Evil and Eternal Death
As black metal became awash in a sea of imitators, distinguish quality grew difficult due to the sheer number of bands that were releasing albums in the post-1996 entropic period of black metal. Thus it is refreshing to discover a release from that time with spirit and wonder in its construction. Hirilorn’s first and only album is that kind of release.
In a similar fashion to Enslaved’s classic Vikingligr Veldi, this album consists of lengthy songs with subtle harmonies and adventurous structures. Unlike Enslaved, however, Hirilorn are a power metal hybrid but not in such a way that sabotages direction in their music. A particularly outstanding element is the lead guitar, which often plays variations on the melodies of the main riffs throughout the song. It is very much in the forefront of the mix, which is quite unusual for black metal, but here the melodies are evocative and compelling, so this approach works. Vocals are a consistent mid ranged shriek, but occasionally clean vocals are used (such as in “Through The Moonless Night”). Though they are a bit shaky, the result is similar to listening to Quorthon’s singing; it’s not very ‘good’ but it is honest and therefore has a distinct charm.
Where this album succeeds is in creating a world to journey to; these songs tell stories which one can envision easily upon several close listens. It is performed well, ambitious, and seeks to create something new from black metal’s framework. Its failures are a tendency to be overlong and as a result this album feels unfinished at times. Still, this is an interesting work which is a definite highlight of the creatively uninspired late 1990s period of black metal.
Stormhold – Eyes in the Eyes
Once you strip away all the layers of other aesthetic, this is metalcore of the melodic “death metal” type, like a hybrid between The Haunted and Dark Sanctuary, which is essentially very basic heavy metal with reliance on too much unison between vocal rhythms and guitars. Good metal leads with guitars and vocals follow, because that allows the most expression; bad metal sets up a vocal rhythm to make people feel comfortable and has guitars echo it, which ends up sounding like a TV commercial.
Ballgag – Getting Fucked by Life
Extremely middle of the road grindcore. It’s hard to screw up grindcore, since there are no rules. This band keep their songs compact, balance between punkish open rhythms and grinding riffs that crunch momentum. Vocals are incomprehensible which makes all of this into one uniform texture. It’s both quality and unexceptional. Maybe drop the pretentious name and try to be a Napalm Death style grind band. Essentially, there’s raw material here that could be good and more importantly, the will to pare down songs so that they’re not random, but the band are unwilling to choose a direction. The nonsense shock name and nonsense shock album title are clues here, but even more so is the utter middle-of-the-road choices the band makes in tempo and riff that obscure its contributions. Refocusing this band would involve a lot more guts and probably a great deal more glory than this innocuous release will garner.
Bane of Bedlam – Monument of Horror
This strong band is divided between trying to be 1980s speed metal and attempting to fit 2010s “modern metal” into that framework. The verses are rhythmic, single-chord muted strum playing with quick turnaround fills. Choruses use melodic guitar riffs and more expansive patterns to create a sense of space. Unfortunately the vocals tend to influence the music, both by forcing metalcore/post-hardcore guitar-chasing-the-vocals riff-writing and vocalizations of the emphatic type that modern metal uses, where the vocal rants out a beat and then relies on lengthy decay for the last few iterations. Waa waa waa, waa waa, waa waa waaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh. This in turn drives drums to play a catch-up role. The result is that this band’s strength in riffing and song assembly is buried under poor choices. They integrate radical contrast riffs into these songs like a 1980s speed metal band, and while they don’t do as many dynamic shifts in rhythm, they know how to avoid hammering a trope into the ground as well. If this band wants to get ahead, it’s time to drop the modern metal vocals and influences and focus on finding a unique voice in 1980s-style speed metal. Otherwise they’re going to get lost in the modern metal morass, which is producing ten times as many bands as it can sell, and find itself offering the same thing others do without being fully trendy and modernized.
Nasum – Helvete
If you’re someone that is just getting into grindcore, it’s easy to see why this release might appeal to you. It’s got a pretty good handle on riffcraft, good dueling vocals, coherent songs, and is very punk in spirit adn approach. However, Helvete quickly loses its luster. The songs are incredibly simple to the point where one can guess what will happen in most by hearing the first few seconds. It also gets too groovy (moronically so), throwing out a lot of the actual grind for this.
The fact that it is very punky is another shortcoming; a lot of this music is just that — hardcore punk with some blast beats and nu-metal inspired groove — with very little actual grind to be found. What is left is aesthetic only and that tires quickly. Many do not wish to give this band bad reviews on account of the tragically unfortunate death of the singer/mainman, but it would be an insult to the artist to not grade this honestly: a C/C+ at best. If one is really interested in this band, their first album and the material before it are much more compelling, but you could always just listen to Discordance Axis or Blood instead. Turd chunder.
Skeletonwitch – Beyond the Permafrost
This is like the soundtrack to some pimply-faced kid wherein he imagines beating up the bullies and emerging victorious; except he never actually does this and continues to get beat up because he’s a wimp. That’s what this album sounds like. Retreat into a fantasy world that is incongruent with reality, dress it up with some weak black metal shrieking and Gothenburg riffs, rinse and repeat. It’s no wonder this stuff’s so popular – it hits all of the right marks to endear it to the mall going young teen demographic. None of these riffs even sound menacing, most are major scale based. So you get weird happy sounding riffs in music that is trying to sound evil. This band even labels themselves ‘thrash’…..well if this is thrash then I’m the new leader of the DPRK. Someone call the US government to let them know we have new suitable music for torturing prisoners in Guantanamo.
Abyssic Hate – Suicidal Emotions
When bands claim direct inspiration from one other band in particular, one must approach this description with caution. Does said band actually take techniques/methods of their influences and incorporate them into new song structures? Or does said band merely try to sound as close to their influences as possible? For this album, it’s the latter.
There are some truly excellent, somber riff passages here. The problem is that instead of building up to a conclusion (such as in Burzum or Graveland, the two biggest influences on this recording) Abyssic Hate just drone on in repetition of the aesthetic influence. Three of these tracks could have had several minutes shaved off of each and they’d be no worse for the wear. The shortest track is the most complete, but that is only by virtue of it not being as overly repetitive as the longer tracks can be. If this group could develop its sharp riffcraft into more adventurous song structures, we’d be looking at something interesting. It doesn’t, so the end result is something that is atmospherically soothing, even a little eerie, but after a few minutes that wears off and you’re left with the sounds of a radiator buzzing for 40 more minutes.
Artists who produce great and powerful bodies of work leave behind less-noticed works that are by no means lesser. Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2 is actually his fourth symphonic work, and is relentlessly overshadowed by his more intense symphonies such as the lengthy and crushing Eighth, which produces a pervasive sense of inexorable conflict and restless destructive renewal.
The Second on the other hand builds quietly from a nearly pastoral origin to a peaceful state of mind that then like a dragon rising from the mist turns to fire and warfare in the tumultuous and restive finale. Beginning with a gentle interweaving of naturalistic themes, the first movement assembles them in a style not dissimilar to the riff sequencing of Celtic Frost or Incantation, a type of prismatic construction that excels in placing repetitive in sequences interrupted from within such that each recurrence is a return with new knowledge to a familiar theme and thus an expansion instead of a reiteration. These build to the two middle movements which reflect more of an inner state of mind, in which melodies are carefully organized into a developing sequence which shows balance and harmony. Expert organ improviser Bruckner shows his true power here in his approach to the sonic tapestry where resonant sequences gradually alter themselves and through negative space and absence generate a higher intensity of presence. These techniques expanded with his later symphonies but can be seen in a lighter application here as part of a focused series of techniques.
The finale rotates between nascent versions of several triumphant melodies, bringing each one out of primordial chaos so that it can develop, then detouring to another, then returning, so that these melodies complement each other and explode in a triumphant final martial processional followed by a meditative recapitulation of the mood and theme of the earlier movements. The result is a breathtaking dynamic that shatters not just expectations but the intractable egoism of humanity that renders them closed to the inherent adventure of life itself.
Listening to Bruckner always reminds me of the secret of life that hides in plain sight. These immersive and epic symphonies etch out a clue that all of life is pervaded with meaning and holiness, and we deny it only to feel “in control” which is nothing but pretense. I don’t care what religious tradition you come from, or even a negation of religion, because you can access this sentiment through any viewpoint. It is simply this: life is an intricate and balanced design of great beauty and thus, truth, and through this we learn why we endure, and even more, why we strive.
This outlook is always just below the surface of all that we perceive, but it hides from us, because we must be open to it to see what is potential, and thus, what is immanently real. Although most people choose death and control over being part of the great complex beauty that breathes incessantly around them, Bruckner reminds us that the option is always there to lose ourselves and gain a cosmos.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? When people decide that life is worth living, try to make good music. Unless they hope to make a quick buck, in which case they disguise bad music as “innovation.” We separate the good from the bad — with a machete. Come for the misery, stay for the occasional exception…
Divine Circles – Oblivion Songs
The mainstream assimilation of metal continues. This is basically coffeehouse femme-folk-rock like Jewel would have spun two decades ago when metal was still doing something relevant. Instead, it sounds like a Taylor Swift/Janis Joplin hybrid on piano while someone strums a lightly distorted guitar in the background and some bell-bottomed burnout bangs a cowbell. I can appreciate the similarity to neofolk bands, especially Hekate, or even the folk-rock tradition of the Americas. But it’s most similar to the goddamn crap they play in Starbucks or our local “alternative” (read: clean every other Tuesday) coffee shack. A girl sings about fanciful things, there’s some guitar and a lot of slightly exotic rhythm. But when you leave and drive home, you’re thankful for the silence. This has nothing to do with metal and should go back to the coffee shops.
Slipknot – Slipknot
For people who thought Korn was too musical, Roadrunner has saved the day. ANGRY MAN babbling over death metal riffs reduced 100 levels of complexity, with random vinyl scratching noises and sampling thrown in for…some reason. These riffs were lifted from a White Zombie album which lifted them from a Metallica album which borrowed them from a NWOBHM 7″ which probably borrowed them from the rantings of cavemen etched into sandstone near the local juvenile detention center. To these basic speed metal riffs, they have added abundant bounce and doubling the internal rhythm on the offbeat, which gives the illusion of complexity for about ten seconds, and they’ve wrapped them around rock melodies. Speaking of wrapped, why aren’t we calling this rap/rock? It’s obviously rap music sanitized for the people too uptight for even backpack hip-hop, thus it gets injected into rock and to disguise the obvious lameness of this combination they cover it in heavy metal stylings like melted chocolate poured over a corpse. Lyrics are moronic, riffs are moronic, album art is moronic…is anything in this band appealing to functional humans? If a vengeful god were to rain napalm on America for producing this album, it would be justified.
Éva Polgár & Sándor Vály – Gilgamesh
Art music faces one ultimate test: will people listen to it on a regular basis, in regular lives? I’m not talking about the heroin and cigarettes crowd in Williamsburg with their postmodern degrees from Brown, but normal people. Thoughtful, intelligent, realistic, well-adjusted people. Do they listen to it? Or is it something they think is neat, maybe would be good in a movie, and then politely clap and never hear it again? Gilgamesh qualifies as some of the better art music I’ve heard. It is an sonic backdrop to the famous tale, rendering in quickly played piano riffs while other instruments fill in background chording. This has more in common with industrial music and avantgarde jazz than rock, but each track creates a series of emotional sensations corresponding to its chapter of the Gilgamesh saga. It is artfully done and powerful but is too abrasive and repetitive for every day primary listening. Further, it is too arty and conceptual to find a place in the balanced life. It would make a killer soundtrack for a silent film however.
Fear of Domination – Distorted Delusions
Music designed to pander to newer listeners is often excruciating. First, it must have an obvious novelty in style that usually defeats common sense. Next, it must appeal to people whose first instinct is essentially disruption and chaos. As part of this, they favor weapons like repetition and garish aesthetics. This album will not disappoint on those points. Mixing clubby techno (itself suspiciously like disco) with metalcore and crowd-positive industrial like Rammstein, Fear of Domination spit out music that is essential keyboard-led but has background guitar and bass which are entirely obliterated by the harsh, chanty and repetitive vocals. There is not a single metal riff on the album. There is also nothing new to people who have experienced even Ministry, but a form with novelty gives this some of the appeal of more austere industrial bands. Still the repetition level and degree of obvious manipulation makes it excruciating for people who have heard more than a dozen albums.
Benighted – Carnivore Sublime
In the absence of Nu Metal, everyone is rushing to take over the territory of Limp bizkit or Korn. From bling bling tech-core band Despised Icon to recent Napalm Death to streamlined Unique Leader sounding Morbid Angel palm muting riffs, Benighted blend everything that’s hip and br00tal in the scene together as the perfect sonic weapon for the frustrated school kids. This whole album is full of preachy and overreacting jerking noise. The band’s new music video reflect all of these: attending school is bad and teachers are evil, the world is insane, so buying this album is the right way to the first step of revolution. The hilariously out of place cleared-throat howling choruses sound like any metalcore rather than death metal, they make me want to put on the Korn records instead. Nothing from Benighted’s album is remotely exciting to the ear of a longtime metal listener. The volume is louder than Grammy performer Metallica, but the music is just as bland. Benighted and their far relatives Insane Clown Posse and Fleshgod Apocalypse are definitely worth exiling from the metal world.
Fluisteraars – Dromers
What is problematic about post-metal/indie-metal, and rock music itself, is nto that it’s distinctive. Rather, like a good product, it’s created by audience surveys. What do they respond to? — put that in. What got bad response? — take it out. What was neutral? — reduce it. The problem is that you need all the colors of the rainbow to paint a picture, so just because audiences prefer blue over yellow does not mean yellow should be removed. In fact, it aims to create a monotone picture where all of it is the color audiences want in their living room and none is the less favored colors. But art is a communication of a mental journey between two points. It shows us someone emerging from a state to a higher realization and then acting on that for triumph. It reveals a mixture of emotions that signal an ultimate resolution, or at least a clarification in the mind. But what we call “modern metal” — itself a clone of the late hardcore, post-hardcore, emo and indie movements of the late 1980s through middle 1990s (Jawbreaker, Rites of Spring, Fugazi) — is like rock music designed to just be that perfect wallpaper for your life. The right shade of sweater, the right ironic frames for your glasses, the purse that makes you look like a wandering boho hippie who might just happen to have a degree in art history. It’s the cult of the ego, and the ego demands only what serves it in full and denies the experience required to get there. This is because the ego wants nothing to do with the external world, and prefers that which is “human,” namely itself and those it socializes with. Fluisteraars is 2/5 old school black metal like Enslaved and Darkthrone, and the rest the newer material in a dronining long form that uses multiple riffs derived from a single theme, like Pelican. The result is very pleasant to listen to but when it is done nothing has changed in your life. You are back shopping for wallpaper, ignoring anything outside of yourself, and consequently, missing out on anything that can be called soul.
Woods of Desolation – As the Stars
Most of people can’t tell the difference between shallow light-hearted commercial product and art, therefore the conformists can always make some metallic indie rock to troll the underground. Woods of Desolation is the black metal version of Explosions In The Sky; both of them use the highest notes of the guitar chords to outline the weary lie-down-and-die pentatonic melodies while songs build around the sweeping textures. Just like the prototype of this sub-genre Alcest, Woods of Desolation’s music is nice and sweet and flawless, it make one hard to criticize them. But the reality is, three months after the hype, those who praised it like hell initially would throw this album away for these spun sugars annoying them just as the morning wake up cell phone jingles.
Towers – II
Post-rock and post-metal generally mean attempts to recreate emo through expanded minimalist sound. Towers takes an approach more like Swans where they build a drone and then layer it with interesting textures. The result is rhythmically motivational, like a march, but ultimately can’t go anywhere because like the notion of “concept music” it can’t go anywhere but to its furthest extreme. Thus what we have is interesting, but not something you’d want to repeatedly listen to except in the background or as part of a movie soundtrack. It is not terrible in any part, and on the whole it is bland and inoffensive once you get past the “extreme” style. Arguably, Towers is the best example so far of how to make post-rock/emo into something that is not terrible. The problem is that listening to it feels like being driven over by Friday 5 pm NYC traffic, and so it’s unlikely that anyone will turn to this for repeated listens that bring out some positive aspect of being alive.
Sunn O))) and Ulver – Terrestrials
Background drone of distorted guitar vibratto and feedback. Foreground slow chords, standard post-metal. Melody slowly layered, then repeats. It goes on in a big loop. Any given second of it is inoffensive and seems like something cool might be happening, but then, if you listen to the whole thing, you realize its fatal flaw is that it’s boring. Nevermind that Lull and Fripp did this years ago but better. Nevermind that these bands were both wrecking balls to metal’s integrity. Just listen to the music: it’s repetitive, doesn’t development, and basically does nothing but establish a drone and a half of a mood. What would you do with it? Listen to it? No, this is music for you to explain to your friends. The point is that you know something they don’t and you can thus explain how profound it (and you) are. It’s no different than people going to rap concerts to pose at being gangsters or young girls who cry when Shakira sings about her hips. It’s just more pretentious.
Dodsferd – The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race
Despite the ideologically-correct title (for black metal), this band shows us the true death of black metal: it has been assimilated by punk music. This sounds, with the exception of a couple black metal open strum riffs, exactly like the same droning hardcore bands were pumping out in the early 1980s. That music was the source of the stagnation that launched underground metal. I’ve listened to this thing three times and it has no negatives. There is nothing wrong with it. There’s also nothing compelling about it; it’s just more void. Technically, it all fits together. It’s just boring and expresses nothing. It is essentially hardcore punk music from the early 1980s with better drumming and production, maybe a black metal riff every seven riffs. But if you already own Discharge and Darkthrone, there’s utterly no reason to listen to this. Even if you don’t, it makes no sense to try to listen to this instead.
Gris – À l’Âme Enflammée, l’Äme Constellée…
Oh wow. Titles in French, looks misanthropic, maybe Vlad Tepes has returned! Second coming of Loudblast, even? No, it’s emo. Riddle me this: if emo isn’t like the fat girl addicted with meth that you woke up next to in the basement and felt great shame for the next, why do people keep trying to hide it? This is the same droning yet bittersweet minor-key background noise that Jawbreaker put on their albums and before that, that emo bands kept trying to insert into punk. What is emo, after all, but the very basic tonalities of rock music translated over an upbeat groove into power chords with dissonant voicings? When you look at what can’t be used, you see what is left. In the same way that the blues scale is the classical diatonic major scale with the key-centric notes removed (and a blue note for color-note rhythm comp fudging), emo is what happens when you take all the life out of music and translate it into rules to keep an audience in suspense. It doesn’t ever go anywhere, just shifts between these same few interval progressions. And yet, there it is. And people who apparently know nothing about thinking keep buying it. This is very frilly, dressed-up, entertaining variety, but underneath all the stupid pet tricks and gaudy clothing is the same old tedium. This is the sound of a genre dying.
Frost Legion – Death of Mankind
Crossing punk and heavy metal styles with a black metal aesthetic of constant high-intensity drumming and droning riffs, Frost Legion make black metal that often sounds like it is assembled from spare parts but tries to keep a focus on the melody and savagery of black metal. Vocals are a constant rasp that varies inflection as little as possible, over active double-bass drumming reminiscent of later Ancient Rites. Riffs are often drifting melodic constellations formed of a few chords which work through permutations of loss and re-acquisition of a root note. Often the riffs are very similar to each other which causes an unsettling loss of orientation, and frequently they bring out melodies which resemble music from the 1930s, but the effect is to create a sense of longing. One thing this band could do better is dynamics; it uses nearly constant intensity most of the time which is exhausting. While song structure is essentially riff-based, these riffs may need to correlate to something else in order to make the composition memorable. The constant melodic riffing is reminiscent of Carcariass and bands of that ilk who are deeply invested in guitar creativity and sometimes lose sight of memorable songs. This is a good start and it will be interesting to see where these guys end up after they’ve had a chance to contemplate the results of listening to this album several dozen times.
Aethereal – Faceless Messiah
We walk among you. We are legion and yet can travel unnoticed in the midst of your cities. We are those who try too hard, and many of us ended up in black emtal. Aethereal brings many strengths but suffers from trying too hard. Coming from the wilds of the USA, the amazing thing about this demo is that it attempts to shape the melodic architectures of a European band. It seems caught between a more vicious Behexen-style assault and a traditional melodic metal attack shaped around Sacramentum, Dissection and perhaps even Sentenced. Most would argue this into the black metal camp on vocals alone, but it has aspects of many genres of metal. Technically precise and musically coherent, these longer songs more resemble the ambitious music before the Great Partition in black metal which set the classics in the past and brought a deluge of imitators to attempt to pollute the genre. The first track, “Scornful Skies,” launches from a battering assault of melodic chords resembling rainfall in sheets to a neo-Celtic style intricate lead riff, fading into a Dissection styled mood piece before evaporating into an interlude of gentle strumming without distortion and a return to a contortion of its origins. The second track, “Qliphothic Reflections,” resembles much more of the black metal of the post-initial era, with low use of dynamics and high intensity blasting with transitional melodic riffs leading us through a semi-circular structure. Both tracks show promise if developed. But again, the problem is trying too hard: looking at what all the great songs have, and trying to make your own version without knowing what connects them. If these guys trust their gut instinct and what they like to listen to rather than what they think they should be creating, they would do better. Take it from a guy who tries too hard in his biggest failures as a writer.
Asking Alexandria – Stand Up and Scream
If any of you were to discover that your testosterone levels were too high, and your doctor advises you to take estrogen injections: before doing that, consider listening to this album – in approximately 3 minutes, you will feel immediate results. An album like this could be created only by the results of a CIA project designed to make people believe malls are desirable. (Somewhere, Bill Hicks is turning over in his grave.) For the rest of us, upon hearing this we wish that we were in that grave. This band has the uncanny ability to not only make every song sound identical, but also every riff. Then again, most people listening to this are undergoing “spiral learning” – the repetition is something they’re used to. Please don’t listen to this. If you don’t have enough respect for yourself to avoid this, just go all the way: go to Starbucks, pick up a la- oh alright, that joke is overused. This band sucks. That’s all.
What are Sadistic Metal Reviews? It’s when we decide that good things should happen to good people and bad things should happen to boring music. Most music is either imitating a trend, or totally without purpose or content, and that makes it boring. We can find trends and purposeless noise anywhere, for free. We are cruel to the stupid, and periodically, find something worthwhile to hold up above the river of feces…
Adrenaline Mob – Men of Honor
It’s grandad’s heavy metal, kids, but with a rhythmic kick and Alice in Chains vocals. A Pantera influence in the bouncy riffing represents a modern retrospective on glam and heavy metal from the 1970s. Droning diminished scale choruses and a similar riffs stacked in a way that is both not random and not song development fleshes out the mix. Songwriting emphasizes the Big Pop Industry tendencies toward hooky choruses and distracting, somewhat aggressive verses with emphasis on stitching out the chorus rhythm in as many forms as possible, so in case you missed it the previous sixty times it will pop up again to remind you that you’re listening to “music.” People have made heavy metal version of power pop before (like Yes’ 90125) but they aimed for quality; this aims for conformity with someone snapping their fingers and being ironic behind the scenes. Warmed-over 1970s riffs 1990s influences make this a classic record company attempt to make the present generations worship the cast-offs of the past. Despite attempts to be edgy, this is a museum piece from the Hall of Boredom.
Disfiguring the Goddess – Deprive
There’s no death metal to be found on this supposedly “brutal death metal” release, nor any concept of songwriting. Choppy, percussive riffs are thrown next to nu-mu thudding in random sequences that do nothing but “groove.” It comes off as variations of rhythm guitar picking exercises played on an 8-string guitar and stitched together in ProTools. Like most of these rhythms, it’s only a matter of time before the “out there” becomes the predictable, so there’s no promise in these flights of fancy, only a return to something as mundane as the cycling rhythm of a diesel truck engine with a loose belt. Occasionally, an actual riff gets played for almost three seconds before more inconsequential rhythm chugging comes in to pacify the indie/Hot Topic demographic who use this stuff as a surrogate to nurture relationships with other idiots by sharing an interest in “wacky muzak” that makes them “different and unique”, but under the surface, is Korn with tremolo picking.
Alehammer – Barmageddon
Life is an IQ test. Your choices determine really how smart you are. If you picked this band, you failed. These guys should hang up the electrics, strap on acoustics and do children’s television. This is sing-song music for people without direction in life. Even when I was a clueless 14-year-old buying his first albums with grubby pennies I would not have considered this dung-heap of bad musical stereotypes. It sounds like the kind of stuff that characters at Disneyland would sing, or maybe a bad world music band from the background of a car commercial. It’s catchy vocal rhythms over guitars that basically serve as slaves to pounding out the catchy vocal rhythm, but it’s repetitive catchiness. It’s all hook to the degree that there’s no sweet spot, only cloying repetition. Most bands of this nature are basically bad heavy metal with jingle music at its core. Barmageddon is basically a grindcore take on the kind of simplistic fare that got called “Pirate Metal” recently. I propose a new name: Headshot Metal. If you get caught listening to this, you should be shot through the face with a high-powered rifle. It’s an insult to anyone in the genre who tries to get anything right.
Lamb of God – New American Gospel
Upon viewing this title, the prospective listener might be intrigued to ask “what is this new gospel?” Answer: the gospel of insincere mediocrity. Half-assed guitar riffs combine the worst elements of a moron’s interpretation of hardcore (autistic caveman rhythms) and speed metal (obvious riff sequences) with a fruity veneer of constipated teenager vocals. Tracks start nowhere and lead nowhere, with nothing connecting one moment to the next; a stream of irrelevance. Expect plenty of repetition which Lamb of God, like all metalcore bands, tries to disguise by being as random as possible. You know who else uses that strategy? Nu-metal bands. This is basically a kissing cousin to nu-metal anyway. It’s music designed for distracted teenagers to distract themselves further until it’s time for a lifetime career in something brainless to match their braindead approach to life. How anybody with above a single-digit IQ could enjoy this escapes me. Sadly for all of us, this title is accurate: the future of America is a populace that considers this a valuable piece of music.
Anal Blasphemy / Forbidden Eye – The Perverse Worship of Satanic Sins
Anal blasphemy starts off with three tracks of simple death metal with a strong melodic hook. It is however rather straightforward in structure which leaves creates a sense of uniformity. Riffs are very similar. The final track uses a melodic lead-picked counter-riff which adds some depth but ultimately these songs are one step removed from their beginnings, so despite the compelling rhythm and melodic hooks they might not survive repeated listens. Forbidden Eye produces a more lush approach to melodic metal which is clearly in the droning black metal camp, but avoids the pure sugar-coated repetition common to the Eastern European variant. Its weakness is that there is not much in the way of a unique voice; we’ve heard these tropes before and recognize the song patterns well. If you can imagine a Dawn or Naglfar approach with more intensive drumming that is roughly what you’ll get here, well-executed but undistinctive both melodically and stylistically.
Descend – Wither
The rock ‘n’ roll industry is a successful industry that attracts players who are highly professional. They know what the product is, and how to do do the minimum to achieve it; this practice, otherwise known as shaving margins, is based on the idea that the other guy will cut his costs to the minimum too in order to both lower price to make the product more competitive and maximize his own profit. If two guys make a widget, and one does it for five bucks less, that’s pure profit. In the same way, rock ‘n’ roll is based on fast turnover and following current trends so you can catch the media wave. I hear death metal is big now, like trendy. This album attempts a facial similarity to death metal with the whispery vocals of Unique Leader bands and lots of runaway blast beats followed by metalcore riffs, but after a while, they drop this and out come to the jazzy riffs based on a scale bent to a series of offbeats of offbeats in a complex pattern, and the soft-strummed ballad chord progressions and melodic hooks. The problem is that the guitar rhythms, like those of the vocals in hip-hop, are based on subdividing a rhythm and thus rapidly become highly repetitive, both internally and between songs. The result is that it all all fades into the background, as should this rather unambitious and directionless release.
Reciprocal – New Order of the Ages
A “thinking man” band name written in a sterile font and a “politically informed” album cover. Is this more metalcore in death metal clothing? You bet. While this band is claiming influence from Deeds of Flesh and other Unique Leader bands for legitimacy, this has more in common with Necrophagist or The Black Dahlia Murder. Mechanical groove riffs are “spiced up” with sweep arpeggios and generic Slaughter of the Soul riffs appear over blast beats for the “brutality”. This is boring music with nothing to offer. Perhaps musicians this good need a better concept to work with than shouting out Alex Jones podcasts over Guitar World lessons from metalcore guitarists played at 220 bpm. I couldn’t tell the difference between this album and any other modern tek-deaf release. If these guys were to spend less time on conspiracy websites and more time thinking about why people still turn to their old Morbid Angel and Immolation albums instead of these tek-deaf bands (or how to structure their music to not be a series of discontinuous parts), maybe they could create something useful. Otherwise, this is Origin with propaganda attached looking to steal some time from metal fans while keeping Xanax addled brofist D&B homeys (Rings of Saturn fans) satisfied with more inconsequential ADHD music which will be forgotten a week later.
Caliban – Ghost Empire
Occasionally I’m amazed that something actually got signed because it’s so terrible and then later I see it on the bestseller list. The taste of the herd will never fail to shock and amaze, mainly because what they like is simple: (1) the same old stuff but (2) in some radical new format that’s easy to see through so they can appreciate the sameness of it. Modern society is about anonymity and personal convenience, so why not music that you can project yourself upon, that requires you to know or feel absolutely nothing except the most transient of emotions? Caliban have it for. Ranty Pantera verses over djent-inspired harmonically-immobile riffs lead to sung alt-rock style choruses with lots of hook and lengthy vocalizations, but essentially no melodic development. As a result this is super-repetitive in that its song structure is circular to the point of linearity and the songs at their core consist of two-note clusters in riffs stacked up against four-note chorus vocal lines. Every now and then they get tricky and play rhythm games with riffs that were well-known before Metallica formed. The main factor that kills me is the repetition. It’s as if the whole album is a conspiracy of details designed to hide the fact that it’s basically the words of a drunk, repeating himself unsteadily and then doubling his volume and saying the same thing. This might be good music to listen while doing laundry or some other task that numbs the brain because the effect of this music is to validate tedium, repetition and simplistic pounding. Unless your brain fell out long ago, avoid this reeking turd.
Blutkult – Die letzten deutschen Ritter
I always wondered what would happen to the formal nationalists in metal. We knew that founding bands like Bathory, Darkthrone, Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal, et al were nationalistic in the sense of national pride and perhaps more. But it’s a leap from that to connect with the organized far-right parties and mentality, and for a long time, NSBM seemed like it would remain in that world. Then hipsters started like Arghoslent and Burzum and so now being a Nazi is a “lifestyle choice” like being vegan or buying a Prius… the hardcore nationalist music has changed too, as this album from Blutkult shows us. It’s a three-way split between the old Skrewdriver-styled sentimental punk music, Renaissance Faire styled Celtic-y noodly melodic music, and the droning of punk-influenced black metal such as Absurd. As someone of profoundly anti-racist and egalitarian character, I find this to be alarmingly catchy and emotional. Die letzten deutschen Ritter brings out feelings of hope in me, and I don’t like it. It’s like a surge of elegance and an old world emerging from the ruins of this one. But that makes me uneasy, as do the Wehrmacht soldiers on the cover, the black suns and the vocal samples that sound like the man with the funny moustache himself. Regardless, this is where Graveland and Absurd have been trying to go for years. If they got rid of the stupid spoken intros and just focused on letting the music rip, this might be a really compelling release.
Amoral – Wound Creations
While their current output is being lambasted for being radio friendly rock/metal, this “technical death metal” debut album is given unwarranted praise for being some kind of masterwork. Too bad this is just metalcore. Chugging groove riffs played in mechanical stop-start sequences make room for AOR “extreme” stadium metal melodies like Soilwork, and little else. While the playing is adept, the music is annoying and makes their latest album sound favorable by comparison for being honest commercial radio muzak that’s not congested with unnecessary ornamentation and fake aggression. If Nevermore made a mash up between Soilwork at it’s most commercial and Meshuggah at it’s most mechanical while Chimaira make MTV edits out of the recordings, you might end up with an album like this: sub-par music, but at least they know how to play. Too bad they sound like any other generic metalcore band signed to Century Media circa the 2000s with growl vocals (done in the metalcore faux-aggressive style). A terrible excuse for metal that without a doubt brings great shame to Finland.
Anal Blasphemy / Forbidden Eye – The Perverse Worship of Satanic Sins
