There is so much to appreciate about this album, starting with its technicality, but most prominently extended to its sense of a notched lock between a good rhythm and a good melody. The problem is that this release is infected with the post-modern-metal fascination for the carnival music style of intense variation, which ends up creating a lack of narrative, which must be substituted with primitive means like repetition and hook, pushing these out of place. The result is listenable but too busy; it turns everything up to 11 and as a result, almost nothing stands out, and its careful inventiveness in riff and variation becomes textural background. However, like Neuraxis — to which it is a close relative — this is at least a listenable form of metalcore-influenced late death metal.

• Carcass “Symphonies Of Sickness” CD/DVD $9
• Cathedral “Forest Of Equilibrium” Limited Edition Deluxe CD/DVD Digipak $10
• Godflesh “Songs Of Love And Hate/Love And Hate In Dub/In All Languages DVD” 2CD + DVD Box Set $9
• Entombed “Entombed” CD $7
• Entombed “Clandestine” CD $8
• Morbid Angel “Formulas Fatal To The Flesh” CD $8
• Napalm Death “Diatribes / Greed Killing / Bootlegged In Japan” 3CD Box Set $9
• Napalm Death “Utopia Banished” LTD Edition CD/DVD Classic Series $9
• Nox ‘Ixaxaar’ CD $7
• “Worldwide Metal” Box – 5CDs + Earche Metal Racing PC game $7

Tell Phil we sent you.

Sammath Godless arrogance Folter Records Februrary 2013

1. Shot in mass

2. Fear upon them

3. Thrive in arrogance

4. Death (hunt them down)

5. This world must burn (hammer of supremacy)

6. Through filth and the remains of man

7. Nineteen corpses hang in the mist

Black Funeral – “Choronzon Blood Rite” MCD

From the storms which tear the earth, haunting the skies at night, empowering chaos and embracing vampyric magick, the cult USBM horde Black Funeral return from the abyss with this morbid spell of blood lust and darkness! Raw, vampyric & occult Black Metal.

Pre-orders “soon” at Dark Adversary.

Worm Gear Zine has officially relaunched, with 19 reviews and new interviews with Agalloch and Forefather! We know it has been a long time, but we are excited to have revived this stalwart bastion of extreme music. Expect more frequent updates and more of the quality writing you’ve always depended upon. We welcome all readers to this resurrected endeavor, and are eager to hear your thoughts and to get your participation in our ongoing discussion of the underground. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter as well!

From our original review of Worm Gear zine back in 1998:

Professional layout belies the depth to which this magazine sinks into the underground, asking up-front questions in a variety of reviews, features and interviews. Excellent coverage on an individual basis of those bands and individuals lucky enough to be featured in this solid zine from Michigan.

In the intersection between harsh industrial noise and blasting war metal/grindcore, Intolitarian carves a place for itself by being unique in its absolute inferno of abrasive sound. These two tracks contain rasping vocals over abrasive waves of noise that sound like a high-tuned bass played through a storm of distortion, spaced out with loudspeaker spoken word designed to evoke a futuristic totalitarian feeling.

The Orwellian nature of this music takes the listener away from the now with a dramatic surge toward the extreme. Drumming resembles some of the more adventurous drum and bass from the late 1980s, riding a wave of gated grinding power electronic noise while the incessant vocals enunciate like a martial arts competition over the top. It is like a news report from hell, or from a future time when all pretense of humanity and morality has been cast aside.

As an intensely reductive medium, this type of grinding industrial noise has almost no musical elements: it is pure rhythm, pure spoken word, and pure texture, but no harmony or melody. The spoken word portions are produced to sound like either 1940s radio or the off-world propaganda spaceships from Blade Runner, giving it an apocalyptic military urgency. Every syllable throbs with violence.

If war metal were to go in this direction, it would get closer to its own ideal. All meaning is destroyed except conflict and propaganda. This isn’t music; it’s mental conditioning, from that moment during the midnight air raid when the world is shaking with explosions and the ranting of state propaganda from a nearby loudspeaker is the only comforting sound. It encourages survival, to push onward, and a confrontation with nothingness.

1. Intolitarian – Weapon Of Revolution (21:10)
2. Intolitarian – Death Campaign (23:05)

Intolitarian, Berserker Savagery, S.S.P., $10 (Hell’s Headbangers)

What we’ve been saying for some time: music is communication. It reflects data in the world.

Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.

…

The authors define music as “creative play with sound.” They said the term “music” implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function. As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech. But babies begin by hearing language as “an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance,” Brandt said. “They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later.”

Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. “We show that music and language develop along similar time lines,” he said. – Rice University