Megadeth releases music video from Dystopia

I mentioned Megadeth’s upcoming studio album a while back, and Dystopia is still on track to be released some time in 2016. The buildup continues, as Megadeth just released a music video for “The Threat Is Real”, a single that they admittedly pushed out about a month ago. This track reinforces my hypothesis that the upcoming album will be an “adequate facsimile” of previous Megadeth; it’s certainly appropriate given the band’s legacy, although the band would have to bust their collective asses (and brains) to displace their older works from your mind for more than a few months. The actual visual content of the video could be interesting as well, at least if you’re not put off by the odd style of animation employed.

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Destroyer 666 unveils new album

d666
The guy who went to Black Flames of Blasphemy VI seems to have liked them – Destroyer 666 is returning with a new studio album after 7 years of inactivity on that front. They’ll presumably continue to be a partial throwback to ’80s first-wave black metal on Wildfire, which is currently set for release on February 26th. The band’s frontman, K.K Warslut commented on the artwork his band has procured for this album, saying that he “…was after something very simple and very metal, being sick to death as I am with pseudo-occultniks dressing everything up in the garb of mysticism.” It’s probably not just him, although the local occultists here at DMU might take issue with that. After this album’s release, the band has a few tour dates lined up in Europe for 2016.

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Anthrax sets release date for For All Kings

Anthrax has always been vaguely relevant at best – selling not quite enough albums to be huge, but never really going away and always drawing some amount of media attention. Perhaps it’s lower expectations, but they seem to have aged more gracefully than most of their famous speed metal counterparts in recent years. 2011’s Worship Music must’ve paid the bills for a while, since the delay between that and the upcoming For All Kings is quite lengthy (albeit not as lengthy as the wait between WM and its own predecessor). So far, Anthrax has released the track “Evil Twin” as a single, which makes for an accurate if unnecessary imitation of the band’s past work. Anthrax has also promised that For All Kings will be “heavier” than its predecessor, perhaps due to the presence of Jon Donais from the metalcore band Shadows Fall. I wouldn’t stake any important bets on it, though.

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Obscure Oracle – In Death We Trust

obscure_oracle_-_in_death_we_trust

Sometimes, the 1980s seeks you out. Sounding like a cross between old Nuclear Assault and Forbidden, with hints of Iron Maiden, Obscure Oracle bash out In Death We Trust by using death metal tremolo riffing in a mid-paced speed metal band with melodic accents to its riffs and noisy guitar fireworks. Borrowing from the riff forms that picked up speed coming out of the NWOBHM years, Obscure Oracle fall into the comfortable pacing of later speed metal, and crown it with high-pitched but tense vocals that could come from Bruce Dickenson on a Monday morning. Songs fit together well, keeping a dominant rhythmic figure that can induce nodding and foot-tapping in even the most hardened audience. While the result could send the Tardis back to 1987 at a distance of fifty paces, this band keeps their own sound and lets their enthusiasm for the material carry this future-to-past melange to new heights.

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Metallica continues San Francisco Giants concert series


In the latest of what are assured to be profitable sporting events, Metallica will perform their 4th “Metallica Night” at AT&T Park on May 6th, 2016, alongside a baseball game featuring the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies. This ungainly combination of baseball and metal music is sure to make a lot of money. Now, stadium performances are a pretty common choice for bands of Metallica’s commercial stature, but they’re usually not interleaved between innings of baseball like this. Furthermore, the Giants host an enormous amount of special events to liven up their seasons, so maybe their acquisition of Metallica’s services isn’t so out of the ordinary. In the end, an opportunity for those who like both (they of exquisite taste), and the punchline of a joke that’s yet to be written for everyone on DMU.

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Gama Bomb – Untouchable Glory (2015)

untouchableglory
Review by Corey M

Having never heard of Gama Bomb before this album, after the first few moments of music I was afraid that I had gotten ahold of some sort of the modern-faux-thrash-revival that is somehow cool to people who don’t listen to thrash bands. But I was wrong; Untouchable Glory is not a forced revival or a rip-off; it’s just dumb music. This not to say that the guys in the band are dumb, because they clearly have practiced their musicianship and are attentive to the dynamics and compositional symmetry in their songs. But the result of what they do is still dumb, and apparently they want it that way.

The basis of Gama Bomb’s style is made up of high-speed two- or three-chord minor riffs over which a vocalist rants and chants cleverly cadenced lyrics with just enough emphasis that his voice never becomes a full-on yell but keeps up (barely) enough energy to avoid sounding bored. A typical Untouchable Glory song starts up at full-speed right out of the gate and rushes through a verse, then hits you with slightly bouncier, chunkier variation of the same riff you just heard (but transposed a few steps up or down) as the drums switch from dense d-beats to a sort of swaggering rock rhythm. After that comes the chorus, which is usually not made up of a more interesting riff but does have some very catchy vocal pattern that, coupled with the rapid-fire lyrics, creates a hook powerful enough to snag a whale. Some songs have guitar leads and these are mostly made of 16th-note blather with no discernible direction other than back and forth because that’s the extent of the movement of the chords. There are a couple of times where the chords underneath the lead shift unexpectedly and the lead follows (which undermines the purpose of a lead! Maybe I shouldn’t be calling the guitar antics “leads”…) and resolves the progression in a viscerally satisfying way. However this satisfying resolution is all too rare and the guitar leads rather serve as marks of distinction among the generally formulaic songs.

So far, I’ve only pointed out common failings of metal albums – probably more than 95% of all metal commits the transgressions that I’ve detailed above. So what makes Untouchable Glory worse than a mediocre album is the purpose mentioned in the first paragraph? Gama Bomb is made up of competent musicians, but they have no ambition. Every song sticks to the same method of structure and dynamic manipulation. Every lead begins and ends in the same way. The band must rely on their vocalist and his method of delivery, which does a great job to augment the repetitious rhythm of the guitars, but this only exposes the weakness in the guitar and drum composition, because the vocals never let up or give the music a chance to expand beyond its immediate template. Typically I’d refer to chord progressions when describing song structure but the chord patterns that make up the songs on Untouchable Glory don’t progress, they just recycle. This tendency in the composition reflects the band’s attitude toward metal (and presumably music) as a whole.

The ultimate failure of this album is not in its compositional shortcomings but in its intentional stupidity. Song subjects cover kitsch and cliche topics such as getting high, getting drunk, hating authority, burning witches, being a ninja, and being undead. That these topics are dealt with is not enough to warrant criticism, but the self-consciously ironic attitude that Gama Bomb takes towards the topics is what separates them from quality acts that they are aping. Metal and punk bands have been covering these topics for decades but they didn’t have their tongues in their cheeks while doing so. Since those topics were taboo, metal bands explored new methods of song construction to fit with such uncomfortable or repulsive themes and great music was created as a result (and I always refer the uninitiated to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” or Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” for an example of how musicality and lyrics support one another to establish and expand on a theme). Meanwhile, Gama Bomb have nothing new to say about any of these topics and so it would logically follow that they needn’t invent any new music to support their take on the topics. Thus all we get to hear is basically a parody of speed metal and thrash. If you think that type of music deserves to be joked about, then Gama Bomb might be right for you. If, however, you appreciate and honor the innovators who brought extreme subjects into popular music and brainstormed methods of expressing them musically and lyrically, then you’d best move along, because Untouchable Glory is an affront to honesty.

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Vektor releases new track from upcoming full-length

I found myself interested in Vektor after discovering their studio albums late in 2011. Essentially an extreme speed metal band that at times reminds me of a souped up Destruction (although their visual imagery is clearly patterned off Voivod), Vektor demonstrates great technical ability and knowledge, but more importantly writes coherent and well structured songs that allow them to effectively use their prowess to explore interesting musical ideas and to illustrate science fiction/dystopian themes. “Ultimate Artificer”, off the upcoming Terminal Redux, tends to favor the melodic and consonant side of the band’s work. It is still representative of their overall sound, and certainly should be of value to anyone interested in this genre or Vektor’s overall themes. Terminal Redux is currently scheduled for release on March 11th, 2016.

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Lugubrious Burial – “Rehearsal” (1989)

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This track calls to mind the more underground edge of the 1985-1987 period. Its roots lie in speed metal and hardcore crossover, with much of its riffing relying on the type of heavily-downpicked recursive patterns that Metallica would have used if they, like hardcore bands, wanted to quiver on the edge of dissonance. The trudging riffing picks up the pace and is balanced by full-on necrotic underground metal vocals, dropping into a mid-paced groove with lots of chromatic riffs with more abrupt changes that you would see in speed metal. The vocals tend to carry this with a full mucosal drip distorted as if shouts after a bombing raid as the city burns. Would like to hear more from this band.

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Enforcer – From Beyond (2015)

Enforcer - From Beyond (2015)
Enforcer has colonized 1983 and created an album that synthesizes much of that era’s above-ground metal, along with some careful additions from early speed/power metal into a coherent and musically proficient, if not particularly inventive whole. When you take into mind that there was just as much disposable crap being released then as now (at least by ratios), this probably pulls ahead of much of its inspirations for taking advantage of the historical perspective granted by 30 years of hindsight. Whether or not that’s enough to make it worthwhile is one of the questions I had on my mind as I evaluated From Beyond.
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Diavolos – You Lived, Now Die (2015)

Diavolos - You Lived, Now Die (2015)
Review by David Rosales

Band and album names often reveal the character of the music contained in detail, but the art of discerning or intuiting these things requires some experience as well as conscious and active attention to correlations. A tongue-in-cheek and mainstream-friendly name like Diavolos already conveys an ironic attitude towards the genre itself. A empty and virtually meaningless album name like You Lived, Now Die lets through the stink of missionless, anarchist fun.

All that said, Diavolos does excel in its technical application and configuration of riffs and riff compendiums as a progressions. But this is only skin deep and it is right after middle of songs that their lack starts to show in the need for solos sections that break off from the initial idea only to connect with a speeding outro. These songs are built and pieced together as IKEA furniture. Cheap and convenient.

Diavolos’ You Lived, Now Die will prove an entertaining listen to those with a weakness for eighties Teutonic speed metal, but will probably not be spun more than once or twice as it provides little that cannot be found in older bands. I am guessing that the bet of a label on this is just to keep presenting the same thing in a new package. This works only because most are too lazy to explore and actually listen to the music, which would reveal most of this second-rate vanity as completely redundant and even more importantly, unable to achieve valuable communication.

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