Death Metal Underground covered Undead Blood Enemy in the past, interviewing the band on their inspirations at that time, chronicling a band that makes a Master-style version of Swedish old school death metal (OSDM).
19 CommentsTags: death metal, Undead
It is now painfully clear that modern society has entered its endgame. Our agricultural miracle based on fossil fuels has reversed itself, no one trusts the sham elections, intelligent people are not reproducing, our infrastructure has rotted, technological development has stalled, most people have gone insane, and hope-cope has replaced solid thinking as we try to rationalize the decline.
10 CommentsTags: advent of fire, angelcide, artwork for the blind, beyond deaths throne, duskmortym, holocaustum, hrafnskald, intricated, kluizenaar, living inferno, mantiel, Necrophor, nocturnal prayer, ordinul negru, Osculum Infame, redemptor, second wind, smr, tine, Undead, warzy
More Sadistic Metal Reviews? Yes, yes, yes!
9 CommentsTags: across the burning sky, apofenia, arriver, beyond belief, black candle, church of disgust, dischordia, doomed, enemy of reality, Ghoulgotha, gohrgone, haar, insulters, kingdom, lascar, lucifer's cold embrace, lucifer's fall, maligner, myrkgrav, nuisible, paria, queen elephantine, ruin, sadistic metal reviews, sartegos, scalpture, sepulchral curse, tardive dyskinesia, the downspiral to hell, turbo shokk, uncoffined, Undead, ur draugr, voidhanger, warlord u.k., witchmaster, wolf counsel, Ysengrin
We recently reviewed the 2015 EP from Undead entitled Blood Enemy. This underground metal release combines the best of late 1980s speed metal with the architectural song transitions of Swedish death metal. Fortunately, the band were on hand to answer our questions about their music, approach and the art of death metal.
51 CommentsTags: death metal, Speed Metal, Undead
This one arrived in the mail some time ago. Apparently, it got held up in US Customs because our address is on the terrorist watch list. Looking beneath the skin, which is tasty gore-dripping old school death metal, this 7″ EP in fact owes its origins to the speed/death crossover bands of the late 1980s, sounding like a cross between Merciless and Sadistic Intent with Swedish death metal style elegant riffs concluding each song.
10 CommentsTags: blood enemy, death metal, Speed Metal, Undead
This is a “best of the month” list for this month, but making the title “Best of May 2015” sounds like giving too much of a spotlight for such a short span of time, and devaluating the word “Best of” somewhat, in my opinion. Therefore I chose a title to reflect reality more clearly: these are the only albums we heard of on this website this month that were decent enough to not be considered utter disgraces to the metal genre (those were in the SMRs or were ignored). The “decent” are those that show consistency in style, coherence, a direction and a clear artistic voice and goals. The “rescuable” are those that are still confused in their composition — unclear, or that seemed to be impeded from development by their own approach to music-making (or that of their own genre).
The Decent
The Rescuable
Tags: Anticosmocrator, Ascended Dead, best of May, Beyond the Red Mirror, Black Metal, blasphemic cruelty, blind guardian, Bureviy, Concealed Beyond the Space, Cosmic Horrors, Crucible of the Infernum, death metal, Dew-Scented, Doom Metal, Døden Læger Alle Sår, Exhumation, Exterminatus, False Prophecies, Intermination, Luciferian Rites, Maruta, metalcore, Necrophor, Nekromanteion, Opus Death, perversor, Remain Dystopian, Shroud of the Heretic, Speed Metal, The Advent, The decent and the rescuable, Undead, undergang, Unorthodox Equilibrium, Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, Wende, When the Light Dies
Undead plays a well-tried formula of simple, middle-paced death metal while achieving effective songwriting. At times we can hear a tinge of Scandinavian sound, while some other parts scream out early and straight up U.S. death metal like Obituary or Death in Spiritual Healing. This isn’t as complex, structure-wise, as Cause of Death (which isn’t very complex to begin with either), and so approaches Schuldiner’s ultra simplistic death metal much more. Having mentioned both bands, fans of James Murphy’s work in them will not be disappointed with the soloing in False Prophecies.
This album shows the perfect balance between variety of content and consistency in style with clarity of voice. Songs do not sound like they are based on a template (even if they are, the important thing is that they do not appear like they are, that is the final product), but you can easily recognize them as belonging together. As in any album with good songwriting, the mood and character of riffs from one section of the song flows and dives into the next, carrying the listener forward without the obstacle of forced expressions. This style is heavily based on introducing appropriate variations in riff character without deviating from the mood at all.
The weaknesses of this album may lie in individual riffs, which in the end does more merit to the songwriting abilities of these gentlemen. This is to say, if you make a boring riff, sound appropriate, useful, and driving because of its context, then you have succeeded in your task as a composer. Still, this minor complaint will be on the minds of metalheads as it is the nature of the genre to look forward to strong riffs, the muscles of metal, even more important in the straight forward style of Undead.
6 Comments
Tags: 2015, death metal, False Prophecies, Undead
