Suffocation – …Of the Dark Light (2017)

Review contributed to Death Metal Underground by Edward Colt.

Suffocation overreaches on this one. Favoring the pubescent Call Of Duty crowd, they have fully bent over and accepted that their last handful of albums are: video game music. With new artwork that looks like something out of Mass Effect, all …Of the Dark Light invokes is some strange ground between nerd-rage and ravehead drug bingers. The cover artwork could be the poster of some corn field sponsored outdoor rave event in your nearest rural area away from seemingly never-ending suburban sprawl.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Mellow Destruction of Inferior Semi-Technical Trivialities

These random, gimped releases are held in high regard by high-pitched “metal” critics and core pogo stickers. The Death Metal Underground staff takes it upon themselves to scorn and defile them in the name of all that is good in the metal genre.

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Deeds of Flesh Posts “Studio” Video

Deeds of Flesh posted a new video log to Youtube documenting how they are recording the guitars for their upcoming album. If you suspected that techno metal was recording in the bedrooms of pudgy action figure collectors with guitars directly digitally reamped into Cubase and Protools, you were right! Deeds of Flesh of course don’t pay for a real studio! This shit’s digital! The same chair and computer used for jerking it to BangBros is used for recording brutal tekdeathgrind! Guitar wank and actual wank in the same place! Hopefully Deeds of Flesh sidelines their recent ‘core tendencies to improve on the promising Portals to Canaan.

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Garroted – In the Court of Nyarlahotep (2016)

garroted in the court of nyarlahotep

Article by David Rosales. Occasionally our staff have differing opinions on unpristine works from upcoming or past their prime bands. The editor’s sobering take on Garroted – In the Court of Nyarlahotep was presented in Sadistic Metal Reviews: Taste the Rainbow!

A modernist acoustic guitar intro, an undefined progressive death metal tirade, cavernous vocals and death-grind guitar tones. An exquisite Old School written all over it, and yet, the young Garroted manage to avoid becoming guides in nostalgia trips. Like Colombian Condor, Garroted takes the tools from the past and forges a future strictly on the loyalty to those traditions.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Taste the Rainbow!

rainbow shit

Coming soon to a used CD bin near you!

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Hate Mail (#4)

it_goes_up_to_eleven

Article by Lance Viggiano

“T” left a comment on my recent Sadistic Metal Review of Xoth’s Hostile Terraforming :

Well, clearly you have no idea what a GREAT musician consists of. And you have no idea who these musicians are, how much they put into their performances and recordings, and how passionate they are. Pretty outrageous review. I don’t think I’ve ever read something so angry about a group of talented musicians. I’m curious… have you ever seen them live? Have you ever met any person in Xoth? I think not. Or you would have never written this disgusting and embarrassing review. (As in you should be embarrassed for writing something so dispicable).

The commenter couldn’t mount a defense of Xoth’s artistic merits; nor did it bother to point out where the review’s criticism was actually inaccurate. It makes me think that not even the band’s defenders think the band has any point worth pointing out. As usual, the responses are simply about the character of both the reviewers and the bands. “Xoth is a good guy who likes his music, therefore his music is good!” Okay, great logic T.

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Blood Incantation – Starspawn (2016)

blood incantation star spawn

Article by Lance Viggiano.

Blood Incantation give birth to a star which rapidly dissipates its vibrant material into a pale dwarf by exhausting concise songwriting early in its lifecycle to leave only the raw core of extended jam sessions which cause the dead to be grateful for their passing. Each proper song begins with a clear objective but rapidly loses focus through descents into ill-fitting random pastiches of mosh riffs, doom, beer horn ready chug or atmospheric atonal ambience. By and large, the latter half of these songs are used to adroitly drift in the vacuum of purpose wherein it makes its residence. Unlike Altars of Madness which similarly abuses the listener by stretching the limits of tolerance towards virtuosity, this group lacks the voracious songwriting that is necessary to avoid wandering by achieving focus to force the captive into loving punishing bouts of self-indulgence.

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Sadistic Metal Review: Xoth – Hostile Terraforming (2014)

xoth hostile terraforming

Article by Lance Viggiano.

Hostile Terraforming is the result of a lot of instrumental practice and absolutely no artistic or even musical ambition. Every moment is technically precise in the pursuit of puritanically banal phrases which fake variation by playing the same motif in a higher octave. Cyclical song structures allow the players to shred freely while never needing to establish an emotive core. The EP lasts only as long as it takes for the musicians to run through every show-off-in-a-public-space rite of passage stylistic flair which is recited in the most obsessively canned manner – essentially a musical diet of Doritos and Pepsi. Like all such outfits, the drums are produced to resemble a typewriter thus ensuring maximum clarity so the listener can hear every soulless tap and click as the performer slavishly follows the guitar around like a gimp-clad submissive. Yes, there are musical pauses to give the bass guitar its obligatory solo which has no purpose within a greater melodic arc of the song; not that the drunk dive bar crowd notices or cares.

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