When you start writing about metal, you rapidly find that metal connects to lots of other stuff. Not just by lyrics and imagery but by sound alone, since listening to metal seems to shape consciousness toward viewing reality differently than what The Herd wants: oblivion, free stuff, nudes, and donuts.

At some point, we all dodge the question, “Why would you listen to music that sounds like a guerrilla war in Hell with guitar solos?” because our normie (lizard people, NPCs, meat suits, human-shaped object) friends would rather bliss out to something tuneful like Pink Floyd or Tame Impala.

The answer is both a reaction to this world, and a desire for another world.

Consider how little we know about psychologically managing ourselves, and it becomes clear why we are distracted from any meaningful take on this issue as a species as a whole: prolonged exposure to negative circumstances psychologically depletes us, leaving PTSD zombies:

The number of combat fatigue cases in American fighting units in World War II was staggering. More than 504,000 troops were lost due to “psychiatric collapse,” an early term for reaching the breaking point. That was the equivalent of nearly 50 infantry divisions lost to the war effort. Far more men were rendered unfit for combat in World War II than in any previous war, primarily because the battles were longer and more sustained.

Some 40 percent of all the medical discharges in World War II were for psychiatric reasons, the so-called “Section 8s.” In one survey of combat veterans in the European Theater of Operations, fully 65 percent admitted to having at least one episode during combat in which they felt incapacitated and unable to perform because of extreme fear. One out of every four casualties in World War II was attributed to combat fatigue, with more cases reported in the South Pacific than in Europe. On Okinawa alone, 26,000 psychiatric casualties were documented. Overall, 1,393,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen were treated for combat fatigue in World War II.

PTSD will likely be discovered to be like diabetes, or one instance of a more general syndrome generally caused by environment. If war places people into a state of prolonged shock and exhaustion, what does going to a job every day do? Living in a collapsing empire? Commuting through urban wastelands?

Even more, what do the linked questions of the meaning of life and the question of mortality do to us? We are born without instruction manuals, unsure of our destination, or even if we should mourn our own temporality.

Metal says that this world is broken because it is a path away from what is meaningful, and that we can find a path to the meaningful by accepting the necessity of darkness as well as light. We cannot classify the world into good/evil, only pursue the good by pursuing power and what is real.

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Orbit Culture – Descent: this band is marketed as death metal but properly belongs to modern metal with deathcore verses, power metal choruses, two-riff songs with Black Sabbath style breaks, and melodic songs built around vocal harmony instead of riff shape dialogue (RSD = the core of death metal), so it has little relevance to us here but is better than average although about as unexceptional as a Cascada track in a heap of late-90s techno.

Masturbation with the Bible – Drowned in Holy Vaginal Fluids: this was better than one might suspect because they introduce about a quarter of the genetic material from groove metal (Pantera, later Prong, etc) into standard pignose deathgrind and as a result songs actually move albeit in a somewhat dual binary approach where there is a struggle between two forces, then a struggle between another two, and the victors meet up like one of those fantasy football elimination trees.

Mammoth Grinder – Undying Spectral Resonance: speed metal and punk hybrids used to be called “metalcore” in the 1980s, and lots of people were dismayed when DRI went that direction with Four of a Kind, but what we get here is the same basic fusion of hardcore punk verse riffs with metal choruses and leads based around a simple rhythm that is more cadence than hardcore will allow but has none of the complexity of metal, so you get songs centered on chanting that is remarkably similar between verse and chorus, like Soviet propaganda or an advertising jingle for 1950s soda pop.

Apocalypse – Pandaemonium: an attempt to fuse Bathory, modern black metal, and power metal presents some of the more interesting stuff to slide across the desk here but feels incomplete, mainly because focus on the vocals leads to speed metal style riffing with wide interval punk-styled choruses and too much dependency on bounce rhythms, getting away from its roots but possibly not the industrial and speed metal influences on this musician.

Terror – Hymni Belli Occultum: properly understood this music is grindcore, two riffs with variations looped around an interaction based on two takes of the same theme, resulting in a rhythm tearing against itself as a means of producing a mood of enraged futility and decay, produced here through above average riffcraft mated to music that makes guitars interacting with bass define rhythm while vocals tag along and stay mostly out of the way, creating an atmosphere of falling buildings under fiery clouds and propaganda broadcasts.

Mutagenic Host – The Diseased Machine: too much mid-paced chant metal mars this death metal album which otherwise shows some initiative with the use of long scalar melodies as the basis of melodic transitional riffs, but keeps falling back into what feels like the same song, the same mentality, and the same technique for rendering it, which moves against death metal’s language of riff shapes back into the trudge of speed metal or doom metal and this dominates all but the vocals.

E.T.D. – Nefarious Means: this band nails the classic grindcore format somewhere between Impetigo and Terrorizer, making songs that have an internal elegance despite simple elements, but overplays these because they ultimately seem to be cut from genre cloth despite all of their expertise, and as a result, really have nothing more to them than being a tribute to grindcore of the past without an expanded vocabulary or topics.

Suicide – Devour the Fallen: promising band understands metal riffing but verges into too much later Immolation use of dissonant chords and sweeps to end riffs that were in the process of becoming distinctive shapes, leaving songs feeling half-finished, a situation which is not helped by the tendency to write two-theme songs that circle around the same passages and never grow into a new synthesis or tangent.

Apostate – Elegy Of Phantom Pain: aspirational attempt to unite black metal and dungeon synth achieves oil-on-water effect with strobing formless riffs shored up by simple but direct keyboard riffs that emphasize atmosphere over evolution, leading to a pleasant listen that no one would ever select off a shelf because like in Congress, the only change exists to emphasize repetition.

Sarkasm – The Collapse: a collection of 1980s speed metal tropes which would have been at home on a Nevermore, Thanatos, or Necronomicon album but here are presented with death metal technqiue and songs organized around vocals, leading to a listening experience like hearing Fox News two rooms away while someone attempts to tune an air compressor using a dirty gold fork and a Double Dragon covered in cranberry sauce.

Seeping Protoplasm – Exhale Extinction: a slower take on the Krisiun and Grave style of raging ultra-simplistic death metal, this one loops through a few riffs but never does more than assemble variations on a theme, so the internal tension is both missing and misspent, which makes this a murky and ponderous listen without much hope of opening new vistas in the classic death metal style.

Luring Malevolent – Lycanthrophic Heresy: black metal is not rock music, nor is it late hardcore, and if you treat it like either or both, you are going to have a bad time as with this malevolent droning band that writes nice two-riff songs with enough melody to create a bittersweet emotion, but not enough internal variation or conflict between the riffs to tell a story, so you end up with music you could play at Home Depot and have people nodding along with it as they buy composted cow manure and LED porch lights.

Öldöds – Ölen Ska Ner: if you like Six Feet Under, this heavily repetitive trudge-metal with bouncy Pantera/NWA style dramatic pauses might scratch the itch, but its real problem (as usual in these reviews) is that “song development” consists of random contrast not any exploration of theme, so you end up with a collection of riffs arranged around a central rhythm which resembles someone trying to sodomize a stump grinder while downing a flagon of whisky imported from China that turns out to be half kerosene.

Iapetus – The Body Cosmic: reminds me of a Millennial-made movie, in that dramatic transitions occur between what is basically dialogue-driven navel-gazing endpointless discussion, without any real goal except going through the process and using approved methods to get applause from the crowd, so there is no sense of any consciousness expanding or experience being relevant, only a resonant solipsism which goes through recombinant randomness to try to feel alive for a few moments.

Fractured Insanity – Age Of Manipulation: deathcore elements intrude on melodic death metal with black metal accents that has some fine riffing but insists on chopping it up with percussive riffs entirely unrelated to what each song is expressing, as if two different songwriters were trading off parts without regard for each other, and in the end this makes the album a random listening experience which amounts to purposeless wandering among above average musicians at practice.

Sönambula – Estasis Interrumpida: slam metal and war metal come together in this tediously obvious and energetic but energyless pounding descent into human neurosis that tries hard to break up the monolithic mid-paced pounding and chromatic churning with little breaks and riff tangents but ultimately just ends up being one of those albums where the first pattern you hear in each song will dominate and eventually expire of lack of direction.

Toteslaut – Funeral rite in a night of evil: if you want to feel like you are listening to the lost Darkthrone and Acheron hybrid album that was never made, aesthetically this will do it, but those bands used droning chords to effect, where this band makes droning chords in basic progressions the focus in itself, at which point it has both lost the “underground direction” (might is right realistic transcendentalism) and also succumbed to moron-brain.

Mörk Gryning – Fasornas Tid: from the carnival metal genre comes this somewhat somniferous attempt to use melodic fretruns and singing to substitute for compelling riffs, producing something that feels more like Toto crossed with Dream Theater than a black metal band, and because it needs to constantly inject false emotion and energy, dopes out as pasted-together and chaotic in the sense of constant distraction adding up to a background hum of no relevance.

Unholdun – Fœhn: on the surface, this band works in the Darkthrone Total Death style but fails to produce any internal contrast or conflict, therefore fits more into the DSBM model of droning slightly sad music that develops very little but runs through the paces of classic riffs and rhythms, sort of reminiscent of the Blazebirth Hall bands from a few years back, but without any method of standing out.

Faggot – Moon Is A Leader: this band presents itself as a dungeon synth and black metal hybrid, but aside from the vocals, it is stoner doom metal in its bluesy glory with an excessive fondness for keyboards, would fit in great with a mix of Sunn o))) and Electric Wizard, but basically fails to hold interest aside from hot tub style metal, meaning that there is some riff dialogue until it slips into its atmosphere, then it wallows while covertly farting and smoking weed out of a pink one-hitter.

Onirophagus – Revelations From the Void: aspiring to be old school doom-death, this group of musicians get the pace and atmosphere right but like most doom metal, seem destined to revisit days of being bored and miserable in the back of some classroom, so they wallow in some dark riffs which are conveniently too slow to have much shape, then layer additional technique at random, producing a sense of disorientation and maybe needing a hall pass for the bathroom.

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The post-symbolic world rejects both Abrahamic morality and the perpetual fixation of crowds on making everyone happy so that each individual feels safe. They also like to feel that their society is succeeding because then their lives seem to be the best possible version of what is on offer.

The issue at hand is power. Normies fear power and reject it because they do not understand it. They fear it in nature, since they fear being victims, and similarly, they fear it being in the hands of others. Normies are happiest in groups where no one has power, wealth, or status beyond a minimum.

Most people live through social choices. Whatever makes the herd both happy with them and focused on them is good, in their view; they see it as power over their own fate. They will do whatever peer pressure, conformity, bullying, and groupthink demand.

On the other hand, those who seek power begin on an esoteric path of realism paired with a transcendental naturalism that appreciates that nature is what it is because it must be so according to the rules of logic.

In this world, even the things we fear like death and disease have purpose and are not personal. They simply happen in order to keep a vast machine moving, and it ultimately moves toward greater competence and refinement, even if when we are caught in its machinations things are not always so pleasant!

Once one embarks on this path, religion or something like it is indicated. That is, the machine has to be doing something for some purpose, and this implies an order beyond materialism and the type of emotional symbolism that manifests in dualistic religions.

So where do we go, when we find the dualism that is inherent to Christianity to be abhorrent?

For a quick review, metaphysical dualism is the idea that the Earth and Heavens play by separate rules. You can have symbolic perfection the Heavens: immortality, good/evil, pure and perfect inherent meaning, and all of reality exists to play out the plan of the deity or some other divine purpose.

In contrast, most people are materialists; they simply do not believe in the Heavens or anything beyond the tangible, comprehensible material world.

Some of us, following the ancient pagans, are monists. We see the Heavens as being under the same rules as Earth, although possible not the same scale. There is no inherent purpose to life except life itself; there may be an afterlife but it is not eating eternal donuts in Heaven; the gods are dispassionate to us and our fears.

This means that we are not materialists or dualists. We see the gods as an outgrowth of nature, nature as inherently hierarchical, and life existing simply for the sake of being, which is an enjoyable process in its own right.

Naturally organized religion will not agree with any of that, nor will the politics of our time.

In the monist view however, our physical reality is a part of a much larger system that plays by the same logical rules. There is no need for the mixed-race, mixed-caste mysticism of the middle east, nor the Age of Symbolism — this is the era of humanity in which we live — reliance on gestures and tokens.

This view does not promise an afterlife of eating donuts in a Heaven where the dishcloths never get dirty, but it offers us life before and beyond this one like the continuity of seasons. After winter comes a new spring. Nature wastes nothing, least of all consciousness.

It does not offer moral good and evil. It offers only what works better versus what works less. You can derive all of the Euro-Christian morality you need from this because most of that — no adultery, no promiscuity, no unlawful killing, no stealing — arises from common sense.

In my experience, humans tend toward extremes because humans like drama, which gives them power. But through the middle — not a compromise, not bipartisan, and not moderate, but the actual center of the issue as it is, not how humans discuss it — there is a sensible alternative.

When we consider spirituality, this involves the transcendental, which requires us to accept this world driven by power and not mortality, and most likely the metaphysical, but not in the symbolic form of the commercial organized religions.

Tags: ptsd, sadistic metal reviews, smr