Sanctuary releases “Exitium (The Anthem of the Living)” from The Year the Sun Died

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During the 1980s, Sanctuary albums popped up wherever speed metal was sold but never quite found entry into the genre because of their reliance on a hybrid sound with the brainy radio heavy metal of the day. Like Queensryche, they embraced the dark rainy sound of the Northwest that later lived on in grunge which aims more toward presentation of intense vocal performances than a maze of riffs leading to detonation.

“Exitium (Anthem of the Living)” takes a doom-metal infused perspective on that style much in the style of Skyclad or Confessor, dropping into slower riffs to allow melancholy vocals to tie the song together. Song structure is simple and cyclic with flair but essentially exists to support vocals, so riffs follow a verse-chorus layout. The vocals sound a lot like Alice in Chains with more morbidity or Queensryche with more aggression, laying out a melody that is both hopeful and fatally self-contradictory. This creates an atmosphere of darkness with an inspirational tinge to it that seems almost like the band is exulting in self-pity.

The newest Sanctuary album The Year the Sun Died will walk among us on October 14. Fans of this band may find the changes unsettling and less intense than past works, but may appreciate the greater emotionality and connection to inner sensation that The Year the Sun Died appears to offer. As metal reaches toward rock in many directions, this somewhat overcast and isolated approach may work for Sanctuary as they try to forge anew their signature sound.

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Updated version of The Heavy Metal FAQ published

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Version 2.0 of The Heavy Metal FAQ exists within grasp of your browser. This update and addition to the sprawling work that first began in the early 1990s when a group of die-hard metal fans began writing to each other on USENET, first published in full form in 1996, now contains information on the metal years after the turbulent 1990s.

Running over 100 pages of print in length, The Heavy Metal FAQ covers the origins, history, philosophy and artistic purpose of heavy metal and its many sub-genres including death metal, black metal, NWOBHM, thrash, grindcore, speed metal and proto-metal. Its new and more detailed chronicle of the rise and proliferation of heavy metal reveals the development of this genre and its many offshoots.

Written by a former death metal radio presenter and editor of this site, the document aims to address the common questions that readers and listeners have about heavy metal, and then to go one layer deeper so they can see the motivation behind these artists and the social and historical significance of heavy metal. Not for the faint of heart, much like metal itself, The Heavy Metal FAQ could be a gateway to a lifelong habit of heavy metal reading.

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Cannibal Corpse – A Skeletal Domain

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The best-selling death metal band of all time, Cannibal Corpse maintains its audience by writing rhythmic hooks and cramming a half-dozen riffs into each song in a way that is memorable enough for the average listener. On their 13th album, A Skeletal Domain, Cannibal Corpse sensibly alter just about nothing to their winning formula.

If you can imagine the 1988-1990 period for Slayer and Exodus combined and turned up to 11, the basic idea of Cannibal Corpse will shine through the genre labels such as “death metal.” This music has little in common with early Morbid Angel, Deicide, Asphyx or other founders of the genre. If anything, it resembles 1980s speed metal given the death metal treatment with extremely distorted vocals, absurdist gore lyrics, and a higher dose of intensity in technique and speed.

Songs build themselves around either a chorus or a memorable riff, usually with hints of melody, and the rest of the time create a primitive groove based on an expectation of rhythmic satisfaction interrupted in sub-divided patterns that recombine the same few basic riff ideas. The guitars support vocals which take center stage in a monotone that foreshadows and echoes the dominant rhythms of each piece. Lead guitars sound straight out of the 1970s but played faster and more erratically, and bass while active and precise acts in a support role to guitars. The result delivers a compact sound that displays little internal variation.

When you listen to this album while distracted, after smoking a bowl, or while typing on the internet, it seems rather impressive. Each individual riff makes sense and the riff after also makes sense. The problem is that songs as a whole do not make sense. They fit together, but no internal tension or communication occurs, which leads to a very “postmodern” style where chaos surrounds an articulated foot-tapping chorus rhythm. The lack of relation and relevance between riffs and the whole of each song makes Cannibal Corpse seem like a stream of spare parts, even if linearly riffs follow in sensible order. You will hear a lot of Slayer in these riffs, which is always welcome.

Metal fans love this band and it is hard to see why they would not. It is catchy, extreme and chaotically hilarious. Its subversively discordant attitude toward all aspects of what most people accept as good and natural life makes it the surly kid who sneaks cigarettes into chapel. The best riffs are often the support riffs, which work in melody and challenging rhythms, and often sound like more intense versions of what second-string speed metal bands like Heathen, Atrophy and Assassin used to do. While I can praise what this album does well, and appreciate the ear candy attributes of it, there is no reason I would purchase this with my limited funds and listen to it on a repeated basis.

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At the Gates finishes recording new album At War With Reality

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Swedish melodic death metal band turned melodic speed metal band At the Gates finished recording its latest album At War With Reality and plans release on October 27th in Europe and October 28th in North America via Century Media Records.

Vocalist Tomas Lindberg issued the following statement:

We are very excited to finally have finished this new album. An album that we’ve been working on for over a year now. It’s by far the most challenging record that we have made, but it’s an honest album and I think that you will feel that it is faithful to the legacy of AT THE GATES.

We have, through the process of creating it, been true to ourselves and our art. From hearing the first demos that Anders presented to the band last summer, through the extensive stages of songwriting, pre-production, rehearsals, recording and mixing, we now finally got the finished album in our hands.
We are very happy to have managed to produce an album that we feel is truly ‘us’. Something we can all stand behind one hundred percent. I can’t wait ’til you all get to hear it!

Recorded with Fredrik Nordström at Studio Fredman and mixed by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, At War With Reality shows the return of the classic At the Gates lineup with their first new material since best-selling but fan-disappointing Slaughter of the Soul, which showed the band drifting toward Metallica Ride the Lightning era speed metal given the melodic Swedish metal treatment.

The band recorded this in-studio statement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0vkElvuk-c

Simultaneously, the band have announced an international tour for 2015. Dates are as follows:

AT THE GATES + support:
20.11.2014 – Tampere (Finland) – Klubi
21.11.2014 – Jyväskylä (Finland) – Lutako
22.11.2014 – Helsinki (Finland) – Nosturi

AT THE GATES, GRAVE, MORBUS CHRON:
27.11.2014 – Göteborg (Sweden) – Trägårn
28.11.2014 – Stockholm (Sweden) – Arenan
29.11.2014 – Malmö (Sweden) – KB

AT THE GATES, TRIPTYKON, MORBUS CHRON:
04.12.2014 – London (UK) – Forum
05.12.2014 – Manchester (UK) – Academy 2
06.12.2014 – Glasgow (UK) – Garage
07.12.2014 – Birmingham (UK) – Academy
08.12.2014 – Cardiff (UK) – Solus
10.12.2014 – Essen (Germany) – Turock
11.12.2014 – Hamburg (Germany) – Markthalle
12.12.2014 – Eindhoven (The Netherlands) – Eindhoven Metal Meeting
13.12.2014 – Leipzig (Germany) – Conne Island
14.12.2014 – Wien (Austria) – Arena
16.12.2014 – Aarau (Switzerland) – Kiff
17.12.2014 – Munich (Germany – Backstage Werk
18.12.2014 – Antwerpen (Belgium) – Trix
19.12.2014 – Cologne (Germany) – Essigfabrik
20.12.2014 – Berlin (Germany) – Postbahnhof

AT THE GATES – live 2015:
08.01.2015 – Istanbul (Turkey) – Jolly Joker
09.01.2015 – Athens (Greece) – Stage Volume 1
10.01.2015 – Thessaloniki (Greece) – Principal Club
31.01.2015 – Dublin (Ireland) – Academy
26.02.2015 – Oslo (Norway) – Vulkan Arena
29.05.2015 – Johannesburg (South Africa) – TBA
30.05.2015 – Cape Town (South Africa) – TBA

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Rigor Mortis previews “Flesh for Flies” from final album Slave to the Grave

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Before the untimely passing of Rigor Mortis guitarist Mike Scaccia, the band recorded what will become its final album. Featuring the same lineup as 1980s Rigor Mortis, Slaves to the Grave emphasizes the unique approach of this groundbreaking speed/death metal band as rendered with contemporary production.

To spur interest in the album, Rigor Mortis released a preview track entitled “Flesh for Flies” which demonstrates the new style. The same frenetic high-speed rhythm guitar makes its presence known, but with more of the melodic depth seen on later Rigor Mortis works like Freaks and Rigor Mortis vs. The Earth. Bruce Corbitt elevates his frantic vocals with death metal technique mixed in with his urgent shouts, and provides the kind of engaging rhythmic chorus that will ensnare any metalhead with a love for 1980s style speed metal. In addition, Scaccia injects a solo that attacks with a blitzkrieg undulation of notes that creates a texture from which a melody slowly arises. Gone are the longer song structures of Freaks, replaced by a verse-chorus approach that hammers home the powerful transition between the more death metal verse riff and the elegant melody of the chorus.

The song consciously targets the self-titled Rigor Mortis album that floored the metal community with its gore lyrics but powerful instrumentalism and abundant energy. For those who are looking for a re-creation of that first album, Slaves to the Grave looks to be both in that vein and enhanced with the more immediately impacting approach that band members picked up from subsequent projects. The strength of this track comes from its simplicity and directness which allows its viral payload to intrude directly in the consciousness of the listener, leading wayward brains to a dark and morbid place undergirded with the trademark Rigor Mortis absurdism and musicality.

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5 albums that ruined metal

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If you create anything of beauty in this world, people will be attracted to it. They will want what it has, but because achieving that would require them to change themselves, they will instead make a version of your beautiful thing that fits their needs. This will become popular and soon idiots everywhere will adopt their dumbed-down version of your beautiful thing, effectively ruining what you have created.

Over the course of metal’s lifespan, it has several times been afflicted with the curse of popularity. During the middle 1970s, bands began cloning what Black Sabbath did and mixing it with the more radio-friendly sounds of Led Zeppelin, Cream, The Who and Deep Purple. The result gave metal such a bad name it required an underground genre, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, to renovate it with punk energy and DIY spirit. Then in the late 1980s, speed metal bands started selling out and making radio-friendly jive that quickly destroyed the genre because no one wanted to associate with it anymore. Only a few years later in 1994, underground metal imploded as clone bands and outsiders began making imitations of the new sound that used songwriting conventions and “values” from other genres. Most recently in the 2000s metal became “socially acceptable” and became basically a cover story for lite jazz and indie/emo which now could claim they were groundbreaking and authentic.

But I digress. Let us look at a brief history of bands that helped ruin metal and see if we can figure out where their influences ended up in today’s milktoast hybrid metal.

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Pantera – Cowboys From Hell

Before this album came along, speed metal had a certain gravitas to it. Songs were about war, human moral conflict, literature and the apocalypse. Then along came Pantera and injected a bro-sized dose of personal drama into it. After Pantera, speed metal included talking about how angry you are, getting drunk and starting fights about whose jeans are out of fashion this season, and raging about your inability to retain women who are not covered in naturally-growing wool. It was a strike of Idiocracy against the intense music of Metallica, Nuclear Assault, Overkill, Testament, Anthrax and Megadeth that dumbed it down to the Belieber level, just with more angsty testosterone. Not only that but the complex songs got replaced by verse-chorus and lots of “emotional” vocals accompanied by softer guitar parts. The path to death for speed metal started with this watered-down, dumbed-down, ego-drama path to stupidity. Luckily after they had made their money, Pantera disappeared and the band members went on to more reputable projects.

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Cannibal Corpse – Tomb of the Mutilated

In the year that death metal reached its peak, Cannibal Corpse release an album that made death metal accessible and in doing so, made it a satire of itself. This is Dethklok before Dethklok. Borrowing from the percussive style that Suffocation innovated, Cannibal Corpse took out all the complex songwriting and replaced it with somewhat complex riffs in predictable format. It took away difficult rhythms and topics and replaced them with I-puke-blood style blockheaded lyrics. They also introduced Pantera-style songs about sexually mutilating women because women are difficult and sometimes all one can get is a brojob back at the frat house. This album crushed the growing death metal movement by putting a giant IDIOTS AND SYCOPHANTS WELCOME sign over the door to the genre and convincing people that songs with blockheaded gore lyrics and simplistic structures under grunting incoherent vocals were more “death metal” than the complex music of integrity that defined the genre at the time.

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Cradle of Filth – The Principle of Evil Made Flesh

Point your TARDIS back to 1994. Black metal was in full-swing, having just put forth all of its founding works and then exploded in a media-fueled inferno of murder, anti-Christian and politically incorrect sentiments. In come the “smart” people who figure they can make a buck off this new phenomenon. Their formula: make Iron Maiden style metal with the new screechy vocals and make it emo so that kids can feel like it sympathizes with their horrible lives where their parents just totally control them and stuff. Then mix in the usual “teen paranormal romance” rambling about vampires and evil and you have baby food for coddled toddlers. It took some brains to like black metal, but Cradle of Filth asks nothing so challenging of its listeners! Even more, this band introduced the “carnival music” style of putting radically different riffs next to each other so that the listener loses track of song structure entirely. These songs are basically advertising jingles and warmed-over Goth rock stuck into second-rate metal, but all the kiddies brought their sweaty dollars to Hot Topic because they felt it “understood them.”

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Meshuggah – None

Right in the middle of 1994 it became clear that black metal and death metal had left the building. They had said what they wanted to; people had to either top it or find some easier and sleazier way to do. Ripping off the percussive textures of Exhorder, Prong and Exodus, Meshuggah came up with a “new” style that consisted of over-extending ideas from previous and better bands. It’s worth mentioning that Meshuggah’s first album was 80s speed metal with death metal vocals, but that it was extremely boring. Meshuggah figured that if they just made their style more dramatic and used lots of choppy riffs with shiny new “complex” polyrhythms, they could fool a new generation into liking their stuff. Without fail, it worked, and now metal bands find it necessary to incorporate the worked-over 70s groove with two-chord texture riffs and claim a “djent” influence. At its core, this band remains the same bad 80s speed metal that failed on its first album.

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Opeth – Orchid

You can pitch a market one of two ways: on one hand, you can be “just one of us regular guys” and pull a Bruce Springsteen (or warmed over punk); on the other, you can claim that you are so far out and deep that only a few deep people can understand you. The best is to hide the former in the latter so that you are selling the “profundity” of sing-song music for children but it gives them a chance to pop on a Fedora and think they are really so deep, you know totally deep, that no one can be as deep as they are. Opeth sold itself on being “open-minded,” which is this message: we are different from the rest of metal because we use acoustic passages instead of just solid heavy metal riffs. What they choose not to tell their fans is that they are more like everything else that is not metal, so to like this stuff is to admit you fail as a metal listener and go back to pumping radio pap through your Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. But every underconfident basement-dwelling pretentious geek loved this stuff even though it consisted of a simple formula, soft verse and hard chorus, that is most famous for its use among nu-metal bands. Nonetheless, Opeth opened the door for people who wanted to signal to the world how profound and different they were, and now most bands are tinged with the same simpering pander that makes this music sickly sweet and an inch deep.

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Rigor Mortis to release Slaves to the Grave on October 7, 2014

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Acclaimed Texas speed/death metal band Rigor Mortis plan to release their fourth and final album Slaves to the Grave on October 7, 2014. The first 5,000 CDs will include a “making of” DVD. The album will also be available on iTunes, Amazon, and limited edition vinyl LP.

Recorded in Feb 2012 at Ministry’s 13th Planet Studios in El Paso, Texas, Slaves to the Grave returns to the 1988 original first record line-up of Mike Scaccia – Guitars, Bruce Corbitt – Vocals, Harden Harrison – Drums, and Casey Orr – Bass.

The CD will be released at a Slaves to the Grave release show featuring Texas thrash legends Dead Horse at the Curtain Club in Dallas, Texas on September 27, 2014! The surviving members of Rigor Mortis — lacking founding guitarist Mike Scaccia, who passed away on December 23, 2012 at the age of 47 — will perform a set of Rigor Mortis songs under the name Wizards Of Gore.

While Slaves to the Grave is fully recorded, the band are soliciting donations to reach a $20,000 goal to enable them to tour. For more information, see the crowdfunding page for the album.

Wizards of Gore, Dead Horse, Dead Earth Politics
Curtain Club
2800 Main St, Dallas, TX 75226
214.742.6207

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Massacra – Sick

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Our minds quickly forget the vapidity of the 1990s amongst the greatest that some bands managed to achieve. In particular, its hangover from the 1980s was so unmemorable that the mind gratefully forgets it. That hangover was the attempt by industry and musicians to cash in on the notoriety of metal and the accessibility of rock by hybridizing the two.

In particular, this appealed to record execs. Why? They were all Baby Boomers. Their world defined itself through a search for the next Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd. As a result they found death metal to be totally alien, black metal to be unlistenable, and even most punk to be incomprehensible. Why don’t they just throw in a flute solo?

Straight in the middle of this process Massacra release Sick in 1994. Everything about it screams middle-90s when computer technology hit the point where you really could do just about anything from a desktop, but not quite do it well. Thus everything hit the page in bold colors, funky font tricks, and so on. Looking back, it resembles the 1980s teased hair and bright colored clothing: technological convenience. Similarly, the style of speed metal erupting with Pantera represented technological convenience.

Recording studios finally grokked how to record heavy guitar sounds so that the precision of the muted palm technique could be heard, which encouraged bands to divide aggressive rhythms with internal syncopation and expanding recursion, so that one rhythm broke down into several internal rhythms all of which outlined a “bounce” or offbeat rhythm based on slightly delayed expectation. This mixed funk (arguably the roots of rap), rock and metal into an abomination uniquely suited for dumb obedient tools of the system who wanted to blow off some steam before another shift and another six-pack of watery beer.

Sick represents a higher intelligence approach to this tradition and cites freely from the speed metal world, including the album that almost every intelligent metalhead had in the early 1990s, Prong’s Beg to Differ (which along with Exhorder and Vio-Lence influenced the Pantera sound). The band make conscious attempts to be avant-garde, most of which consist piledriver series of riffs ending in non-distorted semi-classical passages. If you wondered, however, where Meshuggah got their sound starting at this time, Sick seems to be the place. The same polyrhythms, the same use of groove between aggressive passages. Sick came out in May, and None (the first EP where Meshuggah demonstrated its modern technique) in November. Even the production has similar coloring, but this tells you all you need to know the sound here: based on expectation, like dogs chasing laser pointers, lots of bounce, basically rock structures subdivided by a proliferation of related riffs using the same concepts.

Most modern metalheads will experience embarrassment upon hearing this record. Like most fads, the bounce-metal fad experienced only very narrow relevance within a certain time period, and now sounds dated and awkward. Worse still is that a band like Massacra, no matter what their record label thinks, possesses too much talent to successfully chase a trend. What you get instead is something split between the music that they are good at making, and the music that industry wishes they would make (rewarmed Hendrix and Zeppelin, themselves rewarmed blues, itself rewarmed country music, that in turn rewarmed European folk music).

The tragedy is that much of the innovation that late 1990s bands relied upon in connecting together musical passages of this nature came from Sick or the prior release. American fans may forget how influential Massacra was (and is) in Europe, and how many American musicians heard it even when fans couldn’t find it in stores or on MTV (then an important method for mainstream fans of finding metal). Among the riffs that our minds skip over because we have heard the archetype so many times, great riffs populate this album at a 1:3 ratio to the rest. Some of the soloing contains concepts we have not yet heard metal elaborate on, and clearly someone thought hard about how to structure these songs. Musicians might keep Sick around as part of their book of tricks.

As far as a listening experience goes, Sick falls short in the range somewhere between “fru-fru” and “embarrassing.” Most metalheads would not want to be caught dead listening to this album, which sounds like the underground finally adopting how the mainstream saw metal (i.e. angry groovy drunken rock ‘n roll). The irony of course is brutal. By the time 1994 rolled around, Shark Records had fixed its US distribution problems and was able to get a record into just about every store. This meant that American metalheads who had heard tape-traders raving about Massacra for years finally got a chance to buy some and found this turd of an album belching in their faces. This, and the thin production on the first two Massacra albums which bothered American metalheads more than Europeans who liked the mids-centric feel of Bathory’s Blood, Fire, Death, relegated Massacra to a ring outside the inner circle of famous underground metal bands. Hopefully that will change someday, but not through Sick it would seem.

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Massacra re-issues arrive

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Century Media’s re-issues of classic Massacra works Final Holocaust, Enjoy the Violence and Signs of the Decline have landed. Massacra began innovating its high-speed Slayer-influenced style of death metal in the late 1980s and refined it to a frenetic blur of sound and aggression.

Final Holocaust inherits an updated production without excessive compression; it brings more tone and some but not dramatic loudness to the picture, which will be perfect on both vinyl and CD without obliterating the original sound or distorting it. Greater bass presence lets this album compete with other acts from that time whose work was more physically heavy in addition to being musically heavy as Massacra has always excelled at being. In addition, five additional tracks from a 1990 live show somewhere in France and a deluxe booklet with interview, snippets of old zines, and complete song lyrics finish out the package. This live show reveals the most chaotic version of Massacra yet with heavier live guitars and more extreme vocals. The band show their unique ability to play together live with an organic flow that does not necessarily correspond to the types of rhythm one might expect from the more mechanical music to follow.

Enjoy the Violence experiences similar upgraded sound with similar attention given to the need to preserve the classic sound of these now-ancient assaults. Similarly, the lower registers have been brought out with power that complements the otherwise mids-intensive production. A lack of knob-fiddling preserves the period document while a crisper sound gives it a similar intensity to the modern styles without going overboard into compression hell. Five additional tracks follow the album from a rehearsal in 1991, showing songs from the first album at peak proficiency and maximum intensity. These tracks give a feeling for how the band joined past to future without being merely repetitive. Having them on the second album rather than the first creates a powerful contrast as the album ends.

Signs of the Decline shows Massacra adapting to the departure of Fred Death halfway through the album’s creation and simultaneously attempting to evolve in parallel with the death metal it helped create. If someone ever asks for the difference between old school death metal and “regular” death metal, point them to the break between the last album and this one. Gestures at technicality and even crazier more fireworks-laden guitars and more of a speed metal rhythmic sense, using chunky chords in geometric divisions to create an expanding recursion, alongside an impulse toward what would be called “brutality” guide this album. Many parts of it show similarities to Sepultura Arise and Incantation from about the same period. The band is simultaneously racing toward something like Morbid Angel’s Covenant, which seems to have felt some influence from this album, and a percussive polyrythmic speed/death inhabiting the spectrum from Kreator through Deicide. Two additional tracks from a live show in Germany the previous year showcase two tracks from the previous album in grinding loudness and yet fully proficient rhythmic work, but the contrast between the two styles jars the listener. The earlier material integrates more smoothly and demonstrates its own presence. The later material, more hesitant, tries to be in too many places at once without having yet made its conclusions about how each element of style should be used.

Massacra often gets cheated out of the credit it deserves because most people see that the first album was issued in 1990. However, the band had three years of demos before that time which showed an advanced vision of death metal in the old school phrasal style like Morbid Angel, Slayer, Vader, Mortuary and early Incantation. It avoided the bounciness of speed metal and instead created a rhythmic sense that propelled energy through its listeners, rather than stopping with them as it chopped its momentum into ever smaller slices with muted palm strumming. Seeing these classics ride again — especially since German Shark Records who published them the first time had terrible distribution in the USA — shows new generations how to rediscover the ancient but vital past.

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Dementium adds voice to Puerto Rican metal revolution

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As part of an ongoing revolution, Puerto Rico launches a quality metal band every few months. In this case, Dementium — featuring Organic Infest bassist/composer Jose “Chewy” Correa on bass — create a fertile mix of styles from the late 1980s, mixing majority speed metal material with death metal influences. However, the core of this album breathes the more intense varieties of speed metal like came from Exodus, Kreator and Destruction.

Using the tried-and-true German formula of fast verse riffs with periodic melodic insertions balanced against slower choruses full of rhythmic hook, Dementium stack riffs against one another in songs that generally conform to a verse/chorus structure. However, these solid constructions detour into related riff clusters like a person lapsing into daydream, and these variations prove to be varied and to enhance the mood. This kicks the band out of the strident chanting repetition that killed many of these bands.

Although the style comes from the past, a number of updates shine through. For example, percussion fits more into the later Metallica pattern of sparse but energy-inducing rolling beats. Riffs take advice from later death metal and Correa’s melodic bass underscores the compositions like a cross between Sadus and Iron Maiden. Vocals mix the Kreator shriek and the Sodom chant with the bouncy energy of later Exodus. It provokes a desire to see the style grow with this promising new band.

For more information, see the Dementium Facebook page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESl9S4yvmHU

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