The world faces massive change. Automation will replace massive numbers of workers, so the quest for warm bodies has been replaced by a jihad for migration. War threatens, especially over water, and global pollution has reached the point where half of us are going to die of cancers.

On top of that, we have a Republican presidency in the USA and Christianity, despite being promoted by delusional Right-wingers, is in retreat. This is a good time for metal: the proxy enemies are falling and we can look into what has gone wrong with humanity and our civilizations.

That leads us to ask, of course, what went wrong with metal? Welcome to Sadistic Metal Reviews.

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Imperishable – Swallowing the World: the future of underground metal seems to be power metal with deathgrind mechanics and the song dynamics of modern metal, losing the groove (finally) that Pantera injected like AIDS semen in the anus of a young goat, but since power metal is halfway to melodic death metal anyway, it ends up becoming 1980s heavy metal with more intense technique but the same problem in being too geared toward making safe the unruly, which makes it about as interesting as a Neil Young live album.

Infernal Thorns – Christus Venari: metal replaced melodic vocal lines in rock with phrasal riffs communicating outside of verse-chorus structure, and in doing so, created a new art form with more room in it, but bands keep wanting to walk back down the evolutionary ladder like this release that is heavily dependent on vocal rhythms for hooks and reduces guitar to melodic decor in the background.

Organ Dealer – Visceral Infection: very linear grindcore that alternates between raging blast and extended spidery fills, creating an atmosphere of trapped direction rather than opening up new worlds, so while there is nothing wrong with it, there is also no reason to listen to it.

Apocalyptic Society – Instinctual Self-Slaughter: a tragic hybrid between death metal and deathcore with frenetic tek-def elements including offtime pig squeals and wheedly solos, this band simply does not grasp the death metal genre and ends up like most Reddit metal, a pile of dramatisms united by a simple rhythm but the efforts required to hold each song together obliterates any coherence or clarity.

Malhkebre – To Those Who Forged Us: French black metal post-y2k made black metal into a slow take on what Gorgoroth used to do, where songs built up to an epic moment that then extended itself, but like millennial horror films, these are slow developing until they get to that point and then merely repetitive, with too much focus on vocals and formless riffs; it is like very arty late hardcore, but you cannot build a genre on drama alone.

Cemican – U k’u’uk’ankil Mayakaaj: although it uses metal riffs this fits more into the folk rock camp but avoids the world music silliness by using its “cultural” parts as layers on its hard rock tunes with occasional speed metal riffing, building a great momentum around melodic and rhythmic hooks working together with help from the various flutes, pipes, drums, and ancient calls used to add atmospheric layers.

Edoma – Immemorial Existence: this release seems to confuse grindcore, heavy metal, and melodic death metal because while it attempts a hybrid, it simply shifts between them, and then repeats everything again, producing a sensation of being wheeled through a music store in a grocery cart while the understaffed public mental health officials try to get you back to your padded room and Home Depot toilet bucket.

Lilou & John – Black River Butcher: straight up folk music with a noisy edge calling to mind the far outsiders of the 1960s who never made it to Woodstock, this album is sort of a libertarian anarchist naturalist rebellion against slickness in music and aims to be a delivery vehicle for the soulful and disturbed vocals reminiscent of G.G Allin doing Roky Erickson.

Dying Remains – Merciless Suffering: strobing e-chord deathcore manages rhythmic transitions like a turbine with gradual increments but ends up having little to unite its songs other than the chorus rhythm versus verse rhythm, which creates a manic environment of pointless disturbance while communicating nothing of the reasons for this perception by the artists.

Impurity – The Eternal Sleep: so very close, this album clearly loves Entombed “Clandestine” and does a faithful job of exploring that universe of riffology and dialect pattern metaphor, for which we are grateful, but falls short on the last few percent that lets songs resemble some mental or physical process as metaphor, and organizing them around it, making this a really good version of a really bad cloning of classic Swedish death metal.

Paradise Lost – Ascension: if you really like pop albums this is OK, but it is basically slower Def Leppard with more gothy elements.

Daytripper – The Alchemist: Sludge music is basically the crossover between lounge music, hardcore punk, and doom metal. You get compelling hard rock riffs on the chorus, verses that stretch out a couple chords into a hook and little else, then a doom metal pace and atmosphere mixed with some fratboy rock like Sublime or Pantera. This band fits into that pattern and does a better job than most but it is difficult to imagine wanting to hear this again.

Ritualhammer – Grand Pestilential Flame: the new Aura Noir, Carcariass, or Dødheimsgard unveils itself, with very poppy choruses following driving verses which make you want to go extra hard on the StairMaster before another great night of watching “Dexter” in your suburban box home while UFOs and hypersonic missiles cross the sky, but basically has little to offer other than fast riffs, melodic fills, and chanting.

Isen – Zaklínání poslední zimy: bland: this adjective comes to mind for most nowadays black metal, and Isen while putting forth a good effort follow in this pattern, trying to re-flog the past while missing what it hoped to express, so that instead of the ambiguous brooding apocalyptic determination of black metal, you get left adrift in melodic riffs and dramatic transitions that communicate nothing more than a trip to Target with a stomachache.

Concubia Nocte – Mohyly: careful blending of pagan-branded sweeping black metal with the more spacious use of harmony from Swedish melodic black metal and death metal gives this album a potent style, but it is a mixture of rehashing known patterns in null context with far too much sing-song guitar melody and focus on vocals, making this like most bands were in “late hardcore” a competitive entry but not a memorable one.

Maquahuitl / Ifernach – Awaken Spirit: black metal failed when it became pop because that eliminated all of the conflict within and thus all of the warlike melancholy of someone separated from the herd, and returned us to the herd instead, as is this case with these two sing-song bands, the first of which is more mid-paced death/black and the second of which is flowing black metal than would fit better on an alternative rock album than in an underground genre.

구룡 – 백두의 소환: raw black metal with the inelegance of hardcore focuses on tight songs which are both unambitious and uncompromising in staying on point, letting each — sounding like an Exploited/Darkthrone crossover — blast out a basic verse-chorus loop with a few surprises, but mostly just establishes a guitar-dominated drive toward a dark but positive energy that channels alienation into autonomy.

Barren Path – Grieving: a tour de force of grindcore riffing at high speed, this album delivers intensity but minimal development, and as such, quickly resembles listening to a faucet no matter how inventive the individual riffs are, although one appreciates the old school aesthetic of trying for intensity instead of self-pitying melancholy and quirky attention-getting personality self-expression.

Doedskvad – Hymnos Á Satanás: surely you wanted someone to turn Gorgoroth into a homogenized product, complete with lots of tropes you recognize and the trademark vocals, because that way you can listen to it like a soundtrack to your life without interrupting your browsing of eBay for vintage bobbleheads while watching the latest season of The Diplomat on Netflix and eating quinoa-kale chips.

Terror Corpse – Ash Eclipses Flesh: Mid-paced death metal with deathcore elements, this band focuses more on addictive cadences than riff shape, and the result is that riffs have little internal conversation in each song, although to their credit the songs despite being somewhat monolithic express a unique character of the band, although without internal riff dialogue the songs remain rather cyclic.

The Magus – “Pseudoprophetae”: too much focus on the presentation of vocals makes this a revolving door of set-pieces which are compelling in their own right but do not work enough together to get the voice they deserve, despite being better than everything else in the review queue.

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In our inspection of the parallel downfall of underground metal, human civilizations, and the human species itself, we should first look at the importance of novelty as a principle that erodes learning:

Other arts can live outside the tyranny of the present. A painting from 1965 can still find first-time admirers. A novel, decades old, can meet new readers without losing impact. Many songs, though, are tied to the moment that birthed them. They carry the slang, codes, and rhythms of their era like genetic markers. When that era passes, they shift from a living force in the culture to a vessel of memory.

Fine art can survive on small circles of loyal patrons, but popular music relies on mass appeal, and mass appeal skews young. Record labels see aging acts as assets in decline, radio avoids artists whose core audience has moved on, and streaming algorithms reward the instant hit over the slow build.

This leaves established musicians facing an impossible choice. They can reinvent themselves, risk alienating existing fans, and likely lose their place in the market entirely. Or they can repeat successful formulas, ensuring new work will be received as faded fragments of past glory. Most choose repetition. The result is albums like I Beat Loneliness — professionally crafted but spiritually vacant.

Music focuses on what is going on right now in an attempt to find future trends that fans can ride to increase their own social standing. From the hipsters who knew something before it was cool to the thronging herds at large concerts, everyone wants “their share” of what is new.

That deprecates whatever came before and, since patterns are based in that, leads to erosion of the art form. Whatever is new needs merely to be distinct from what came immediately before, which emphasizes doing things “wrong” or in some “quirky” way, not clear expression.

Every now and then someone breaks through by being underground and marginalized, at which point hipsters seize on it in order to have something unique with the cachet of cool that comes from being contrarian to what everyone else is doing. Contrarianism values the new because it is not what is already successful.

Success breeds failure in the next iteration. Consider how trends that succeed become dominant:

Uematsu compared the situation to the game music industry back in the NES era of the 80s. Back then, few composers had their eye on making music for games, but that has changed dramatically over the course of Uematsu’s career.

According to Uematsu, the industry has gone from giving game composers little attention to stifling composer’s creativity or pushing them toward a narrow type of sound (often a John Williams style). As a result of that, Uematsu added that, “Frankly speaking, there’s less ‘weird things’ now.”

This calls to mind The Blair Witch Project, the first of the “found footage” trope of films, which succeeded as a wildcat therefore, industry coopted it and made ten years of found-footage movies which were usually terrible because they were imitating method and not content or goal.

In the same way, your average hipster band these days imitates the techniques and exciting moments of past music, but having no understanding of why this was done, has interrupted the cause-effect chain and instead is rationalizing from what is successful and fitting itself into that framework.

To stand out, however, it must be quirky, so randomness gets thrown in, and callously, these bands realize that the audience mostly likes to be unchallenged, so they imitate the past successes in a mixture that leads to total randomness, then wonder why they are just one of many competitors.

Actual music — made by people with souls, of whom there are 144,606 on Earth — focuses on relating an experience to a clarity about its relevance:

Above all, it makes them feel — either their own emotions or someone else’s. That’s why music is such a potent medium for those looking to manipulate people into choosing a particular product in the supermarket of ideas and trinkets that defines the welfare state.

For us, it’s always been natural that music should reflect people’s own emotions. Granted, we’re speaking to rather introspective critics of civilization who despise the industrial-grade manipulation that constructs people’s filter bubbles.

Music, then, is one of the fundamental forces that directs human emotions either inward — toward themselves and their own needs — or outward — toward those who manipulate their emotional lives.

If today’s music industry is a colossal web of manipulative threads, it’s clear that a change is needed if people are to become the individuals they were born to be. This change must happen at the deepest level—in the archetypal notions that shape our understanding of the world.

Let’s say political pamphlets with catchy slogans create a ripple on the surface. Then let’s say a deep dive into the psyche stirs a storm beneath it.

I disliked Fight Club when it came out. It is teenage fatalism. What is their solution in the end? Blow up everything, but less elegantly than “The Final Silence” (Unleashed). It is what happens when you have all the parts but no overall structure, like a belief system, even one of negation, like nihilism (nihilism is a lack of belief in belief, a type of skeptical hard realism, but it goes beyond materialism, much like the Luciferians or Platonists do despite being the hardest of hard realists).

A nihilist is a zen master who chooses what lives and what dies, logically. He is not emotional like the herd. Our fight is a revolution against the domination of group emotion and the symbolism, categories, tokens, images, etc. that it requires. We are resisting the empathy of the tragedy of the commons as it applies to culture.

We are a few Morbid Angels fighting against many Panteras and White Zombies (these two bands are basically the same thing, proto-nu-metal). The pattern language of these bands is distraction; that of death metal and black metal is contrast in a larger structure headed toward a transcendent realism.

Funnily enough, music has universal aspects and may have been our oldest form of communication, since it turns factual stuff into a poetry in which we seek to achieve victory:

In all 50+ languages, the rhythms of songs and instrumental melodies were slower than those of speech, while the pitches were higher and more stable.

Speculating on underlying reasons for the cross-cultural similarities, Savage suggests songs are more predictably regular than speech because they are used to facilitate synchronization and social bonding.

“Slow, regular, predictable melodies make it easier for us to sing together in large groups,” he says. “We’re trying to shed light on the cultural and biological evolution of two systems that make us human: music and language.”

In our modern time, we need to convert many struggles into song so we can see a positive side to striving instead of mere resentment and drudgery. Like ancient songs about fighting saber-tooth tigers, our music now is either about running away from our problems, or embracing them to defeat them.

The latter is where art and underground metal come from; the former is pop and all the other disposable plastic distractions. Songs about sex and being cool are good if you are a fatalist who believes no problem can be solved, and you just want a few minutes thinking about something easy instead.

Metal also explores dark tourism by confronting the horrors of life to make sense of them:

Scholars have come to call tourism to places like the Führerbunker “dark tourism,” which refers to sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Think of the millions of people who visit the Auschwitz concentration camp or the 9/11 Memorial or the Salem Witch Museum or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site. This form of tourism — and the estimated $30 billion annual industry around it — is the subject of a rather sizable academic literature.

Humans have been fascinated by death for basically forever. Some scholars have compared dark tourism to Romans watching gladiators die at the Colosseum or to the spectators of public executions during medieval times. They suggest this type of tourism may be driven by a kind of voyeurism, which leads people to get excitement or pleasure from getting close to death or horror while not really experiencing it themselves. There is something in human nature that causes us to do things like rubberneck when we pass car crashes and be more captivated by news stories when they involve blood.

As diversity and democracy collapse in Europe, the UK, and the USA we sense that after the war all of us should have done a better job of exploring the why behind WW2, but we slammed a Christian moralism of evil on it instead and as a result, ended up in the same place.

Everything is 1933 again.

As Lovecraft once intuited, life offers a few paths to sanity and many paths that lead to horror, which forces us to try to contrast the two:

Horror films work on the same principles: We experience fear within a safe environment, whether seated on the sofa in our living room or in a plush cinema seat.

The horror genre is more than mere entertainment, however. US movie director Wes Craven (1939-2015) regarded horror films as a “boot camp for the psyche,” a sort of psychological training.

“In real life, human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers, events like [school shootings]. But the narrative form puts these fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears,” he once said.

The distraction people want a “manageable series of events”; the realists want to figure out what went wrong and why, which in a time of Crowdism, usually means figuring out what the herd, committee, electorate, or social group are afraid to confront and therefore, are avoiding and pursuing distractions instead.

If you make a list of topics that pop music avoids, you have a good idea of what is actually important in life if we want to not just survive but thrive. The third world survives; the first world at least originally aimed to thrive and rise above the animal state of the average directionless human.

Underground metal in this way is far worse than Nazism. It embraces the low biological quality of humankind, the need for natural selection, and the urgent demand to purge the stupid, incompetent, insane, retarded, criminal, and otherwise distraction-oriented.

Naturally the media fears this and sniffs out Nazism in black metal, missing all the other stuff that is more dangerous, like rampant eugenics, Darwinism, and rejection of both herd motion and religious/ideological symbolism:

A number of these bands, it turned out, weren’t just provocateurs with a flair for the macabre. They trafficked in something darker: coded fascist imagery, explicit Nazi sympathies, antisemitic allusions. Some had links to actual hate groups. Others sang odes to racial purity in archaic languages or quoted far-right ideologues beneath layers of rune fonts. Graveland and Nokturnal Mortum – bands I had once prized for their “atmosphere” – were now impossible to listen to in the same way. Graveland’s founder Rob Darken often expressed white nationalist views and aligned himself with pagan fascist ideas. At the beginning of their career, Nokturnal Mortum had strong ties to the National Socialist black metal (NSBM) scene; band members gave interviews endorsing neo-Nazi ideologies. What we’d thought was merely transgressive turned out, in some cases, to be ideologically clear – and its ideology was ethno-nationalism, fascism and white supremacy.

We like to imagine that we are the authors of our convictions – that ideology arrives through argument and reason. But often it slips in sideways, piggybacking on aesthetics, community, taste. When you’re young, especially, belonging can matter more than belief. You pick up codes and allegiances without even noticing. You mouth things before you mean them. And the more you repeat them, the more you become them.

The dangerous stuff is where growth occurs because it assembles all that we fear, such as death, and asks where these feared things are appropriate instead of merely scary. We are terrified of the return of Kings, that we might be found unfit and perish, and that there would be a social order larger than the individual.

Of course, morons take it to a bad place, like the ritual murders committed by fourth-tier death metal bands:

The three boys had their own death metal band called Hatred, with one of their favorite groups being Slayer, a thrash metal band from Huntington Park, California famous for dark, occult-laced lyrics, including one song about sacrificing a blond, blue-eyed virgin and worshiping Satan.

At a parole board hearing 30 years later, Delashmutt, now 47, said after the group got high, he put a belt around Pahler’s neck, strangling her while Casey held her arms down and Fiorella stabbed her. The boys, he said, then took turns stabbing her with a 12-inch blade, first in the neck and then in her back and shoulders.

In his parole board hearing, Casey, now 47, noted that he delivered the final blow to Pahler, stomping on the back of her neck as she cried out for her mother and Jesus.

This activity was similar to that of nu-metal fans, who are known as bloody wankers for good reason:

As Korn was playing their tune “Blind,” fans seated on the 200 level spotted Scornavacchi allegedly pleasuring himself at around 7:30 p.m. — and recorded him in the act with their phones.

Even as women gasped in disgust, Scornavacchi kept on going.

Footage shared to TikTok shows he only stopped after being punched in the head by an enraged and unidentified male concertgoer.

Maybe Trump will deport this guy? We can hope further that he would simply deport all nu-metal fans and probably most of the slam, deathgrind, and modern metal fans, too.

Metal has some hilarious uses in that because it sounds like predation and warfare, it scares wildlife away from tasty beef:

For millennia humans have tried to scare wolves away from their livestock. Most of them didn’t have drones.

But a team of biologists working near the California-Oregon border do, and they’re using them to blast AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” movie clips and live human voices at the apex predators to shoo them away from cattle in an ongoing experiment.

If they blasted emo or Deafhaven at them, the wolves would shrug and conclude that humans are too weak to resist, then munch down on those bovines with extra zeal.

Music functions as a type of stimulus, ideally either metaphorical for life or playful in a way that evokes the spirit of life. It can also save brains from falling prey to the entropy of directionless neuroticism:

A research team from Monash University analyzed data from more than 10,800 older adults and found that people in this age group who regularly listened to music experienced a 39 percent lower likelihood of developing dementia.

Those who both listened to and played music on a regular basis had a 33 percent reduced risk of dementia and a 22 percent reduced risk of cognitive impairment.

In positive music news, ancient songs ring clear once more:

They first caught the attention of the Peter Wollny, a researcher of the German composer and musician, in 1992 when he was cataloguing Bach manuscripts at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels.

The organ works – the Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179 – were undated and unsigned. Mr Wollny spent the next 30 years working to confirm the identity of the pieces.

They were performed at the St Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach is buried and where he worked as a cantor for 27 years.

This dilutes the hipster incursion into metal, which has reached such Reddit levels of hysteria that now a hipster grocery chain has adopted the iconography:

Tennessee-based graphic designer Connor Dwyer made an Instagram post in July showing off metal-styled designs he’d dreamed up for an H-E-B tee, featuring red and black shirts with a gothic typeface. The tees even sported slogans like “here everyone belongs” and “we are a people company we just happen to sell groceries.” In the video, Dwyer said the video was part five of designing metal tees for grocery stores until one of them agrees to a collaboration.

H-E-B further indicated its plans to sell the metal tees by responding to a comment asking for the shirt. “Something tells us you have some good news on the way,” H-E-B commented in response.

If you go to HEB, first you will notice that prices are really good on anything that comes in a box, bag, or bottle; next you will notice that the people there tend to be individualists, or me-first self-centered and self-impressed people of the type that burn down genres. Sarin gas for all!

These are contrarians, or people so individualistic that they want to reject reality, so they embrace anything contrary to reality. At the furthest extreme, that includes followers of a half-Arabic gibberishreligion which specializes in counter-symbols:

As Mayhem’s fame spread, an Australian musician who recorded under the name Horde made an album inspired by the band’s raw sound. But Hellig Usvart (‘Holy Unblack’) contained a twist: its lyrics were vigorously Christian. On tracks such as ‘Crush the Bloodied Horns of the Goat’, Horde sang about eviscerating a symbolic representation of Satan.

The album scandalised black metal fans and reputedly inspired death threats against its record label. Was this, as the Norwegian press suggested, a parody of Mayhem, or was it a sincere expression of Christian faith? The album’s creator came forward to explain that he wanted to shine a light into the ‘bleak, dark, hopeless, lifeless and negative void’ of black metal. Horde had inadvertently created a new sub-subgenre, known as ‘unblack metal’, ‘white metal’ or ‘Christian black metal’, often sonically indistinguishable from the original.

That was the background against which Lundin underwent his conversion. In 2014, his band Reverorum ib Malacht released the album De Mysteriis Dom Christi (‘Of the Mysteries of the Lord Christ’), in a pious nod to Mayhem. After he became Catholic, Lundin feared he might be killed by an aggrieved metalhead. In reality, he faced no backlash. This suggests that, despite its violent overtones, black metal is more genuinely inclusive than many a liberal campus.

Notice how the entire enterprise seems to be a commentary on black metal. Black metal bad! Jesus good! This is all they have to offer, apparently.

In other news, a documentary on Laveyian Satanists seems to have dropped and aims to baffle just about everyone with trolling disguised as metaphysical nonsense:

However, it seems that with the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, the world has rediscovered his relevance as a counterpoint to both hippies and suits:

The music that made Ozzy and Black Sabbath famous in the 1970s was loved by many working class Gen Xers as it spoke directly, and convincingly, to the conditions of our lives. It was largely morally conservative and populist, though you would never know it by listening to the accounts of nearly all American media.

A lot of us were mistreated by our parents, the Boomers, who partied and carried on as utter narcissists in the spirit of the 1960s—divorcing in record numbers and leaving our families shattered, emotionally abandoned, and by and large on our own. They did not seem to care much what became of us. We survived anyway.

The populist vibe is usually this: some people are functional, put them in charge; herds of people avoid hard problems and converge on easy ones, so you cannot trust the experts, democracy, large corporations, organized religion, or media. They have a point, since these are all products.

Seems that even evil Big Daddy Trump was an Ozzy believer:

In the voicemail, Trump said: “Hi Sharon, it’s Donald Trump and I just wanted to wish you the best and the family … Ozzy was amazing, he was an amazing guy.”

“I met him a few times and I want to tell you he was unique in every way and talented. So, I just wanted to wish you the best and it’s a tough thing. I know how close you were and whatever I can do. Take care of yourself. Say hello to the family. Thanks, bye.”

Maybe he will finally hear us about the National Day of Slayer, since metal needs recognition as the counter-countercultural movement that it is.

Since Hessians like to party, it makes sense to mention here the long history of alcohol among us featherless bipeds:

Wild chimpanzees have been found to consume the equivalent of a bottle of lager’s alcohol a day from eating ripened fruit, scientists say.

They say this is evidence humans may have got our taste for alcohol from common primate ancestors who relied on fermented fruit – a source of sugar and alcohol – for food.

Some suspect that alcohol kills the weak brain cells. I suspect it is merely a powerful reset from whatever mental loops we were in that substitutes an enjoyment of life for worry about life, and as such, liberates us to function again, which is why governments pretend to hate it but love it.

***

Consider how we are forever caught between the tragedy of the commons and the problem of incompetent leaders following novelty-trends instead of pursuing the eternal. This leads us to two new theories of human failure:

• The Metallica Problem: Since most people want dumb stuff, whatever good stuff you have will be dumbed down so that it is acceptable to them.
• The Pantera Problem: Whatever succeeds by being dumb will then be injected into everything else lest they lose potential customers.

You can explain most of the modern world with these two. Culture is a commons; The Metallica Problem describes how a tragedy of the commons eats away at musical quality. The Pantera Problem describes how that becomes normed out of market forces. This is how civilizations die.

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Last but not least, one of the few metal bands to do anything interesting, Sammath, has just introduced a series of remasters of its classic work:

This follows related project Kaeck which has just introduced its latest opus:

Tags: death metal, sadistic metal reviews, smr