DEATH METAL GENERAL: I DON’T NEED ABBATH EDITION

Immortal is back!  Well… sort of.  Halfway there.  Right? In name at least?

You see, Demonaz- Immortal’s original guitarist during the 90’s, lyricist during the 2000’s, and now vocalist/guitarist and lyricist in the 2010s- is back with drummer-on-some-albums skinsman Horgh.  Wait, actually, the two have only played together on one album (out of twelve) so can they really “be back?”  Anyway, Demonaz and Horgh have out-lawyered the band’s drugged out drunken cornerstone musician Abbath, who played every instrument except for guitar when Demonaz was in the band and then played guitar over 9000 times better than Demonaz once the latter got a case of tendentious.  With the name locked down and a healthy Nuclear Blast Records budget, the duo get ready to make a seriously play for the wallets of misguided fans.

But wait, the tendentious that crippled him for a decade is suddenly gone?  Can he still pick at the rediculous guitar tempos of Blizzard Beasts? Can he even play at all?  There’s a lot to unpack in this one, so let’s get trolling as we recap the story of the band who turned black metal’s creepy aesthetics into the hair metal of the 90s…
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Meditations on the Death of Wishful Thinking

To be a writer, if you are any good, is to be a blasphemer. Humanity is an entropy engine because each person decides on what view of the world makes them look the best, and so the constant weight pushing down on us is that of the herd, of a group of individuals united only by selfishness, come together into a mob for the purpose of asserting their right to be different and unique, constantly leading away from an understanding of the world around us and any meaning that can be found in it.

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Upcoming Sodom Demo Collection

Floga Records are publishing an upcoming anthology of Sodom‘s demos on September 1st. Demonized compiles both the Witching Metal and Victims of Death demos onto one disc. It will be available on LP, cassette, CD jewel case, and CD digipak. Get the jewel case of course if you are a Sodom fanatic and In the Sign of Evil / Obsessed by Cruelty still was not filthy enough for you. Demonized may be pre-ordered here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncM2gRtGoBk

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Saltiness Over Sadistic Metal Reviews of Sentimental Albums

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

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

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Metal Will Never Die

Online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever (nice job stealing the 1980s advertising slogan for the then new CD format) recently posted a piece entitled “Metal For the New Millennium” by an idiotic hipster named Cam Netland who said that metal was a limited music genre as result of being a “as an offset of rock music”. Netland claims that metal became “more hardcore” as a result of the “radicalization” of other genres in this period citing staid examples such as Bad Brains (softened hardcore punk for idiotic affirmative action multi-culturalists) and Public Enemy (rap made into pop music with tough street gang lyrics to make suburban white jocks feel good about their short penises). He goes onto claim that metal is divided into many “micro-genres” and that the new millennium has seen the rise of many new ones such as what Neton terms Babymetal‘s grass-eater Japanese pop music, djent (random post-hardcore jazz fusion) Deafheaven‘s “blackgaze” (screamo pretending to be tough that is neither black metal nor shoegaze), and Vektor‘s random techno speed metal idiocy. Netland cites such turd non-metal albums as MastodonLeviathan (alternative rock), Converge – Jane Doe (post-hardcore math rock), and System of a Down – Toxicity (nu-“metal” which is in actuality of course rap rock).

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Sodom – Decision Day (2016)

sodom-decision-day
Article by Anton Rudrick.

Now that a thorough overview of Sodom’s career has been completed, and a short analysis from that overview has provided us with new insights, we can be more confident in our evaluation of their new album, Decision Day, in a way that allows us to tentatively explain the origin of its strengths and faults. This becomes especially useful with an album displaying averageness on all levels, showing no prominent ideas that distinguish it neither in the abstract nor the actualized, and furthermore, certainly not being more than the sum of its parts. The situation is one in which all that remains are the references that these streamlined and pre-fabricated pieces meant in their original contexts, and how this commercial product attempts to play on them for maximizing revenue.

Sodom has earned a solid reputation among the metal crowd through the years. Most fans of the metal underground will probably have heard about Sodom, or that of Tom Angelripper, and will express respect at the mere mention of either name. Their newest album displays traits which one would associate with their own brand of speed metal (a.k.a. thrash metal, incorrectly dubbed), but these seem filtered through mannerisms borrowed from styles acquired over the last two decades and a half while Tom Angelripper explored the mainstream side of metal. Decision Day is catchy, and every step and turn is a hook optimized for comprehensibility and mass consumption.

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Sodom In Context

sodom-1985-moe-ax
Article by Anton Rudrick.

To be fair, one must approach judgement of a legendary and veteran band such as Sodom, with care, so that their present actions are seen in light of the road they have tread. In this spirit, it is appropriate that we go over the band’s career, taking a brief look at each step of their evolution so as to get a picture of how the band came to be as we see it and hear them today on Decision Day. If we are to start from the very beginning, we have to look back to their very first demo released in 1984, Victims of Death, which stands in an area between MetallicaKill ‘Em All and Bathory’s self-titled debut album. Sodom’s first step is closer to contemporary hardcore punk than speed metal, which affords them a certain street credibility.

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