Monstrous Dutch war metal with tinges of traditional black metal band Kaeck have announced their new album, Het Zwarte Dictaat (The Black Command) and released a teaser showing off a couple riffs for you to try to play during the seventh lockdown.
11 CommentsWhy Metal Fans Should Hate Pantera
Why do humans form tribes? If you want to break away from the rest, and not allow them to assimilate you, you must go your own way and militantly, bigotedly, dogmatically, and aggressively keep the others out, or they will try to draw you back into their dysfunction so they feel better about it.
49 CommentsTags: pantera, Speed Metal
Has Speed Metal Finally Become Assimilated?
From the flood of nonsense going through the news feeds, a sign that speed metal has gone mainstream:
A woman in New Zealand, refusing to bring another Mackenzie or Jack into the world, has named her three kids “Metallica,” “Pantera,” and “Slayer.”
Farrier reached out to New Zealand’s Registrar-General to inquire as to whether “there are any restrictions naming babies after band names, or albums.” He was told that there aren’t, “as long as the word used is not generally considered to be offensive or does not resemble an official rank or title.” This may rule out naming a baby after one of your favorite grindcore acts, but it did allow Farrier to verify the fact that Baby Metallica’s middle name is also—we’re not kidding—“And Justice For All.”
These kids will either have the best or absolute worst time in school, depending primarily on whether ‘80s thrash is currently cool with the youth—and whether lil’ Metallica has to deal with terrible classmates like “Napster” and “Decent Snare Drum Mixing.”
After nu-metal introduced chunky monkey riffs and gargled horse semen vocals to mainstream audiences, the percussive fast strumming riffs of Metallica, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, and their derivates (Pantera) probably seem tame, as do the later Slayer albums built around bouncy riffs and plaintively angry vocals.
When even Alex Jones uses Metallica songs for his interstitial music, and nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s has overwhelmed a Western Civilization looking at the post-Clinton neo-Communist NWO disaster at the same time that people are seeking music from a mentally less muddled time, speed metal has become the archetype of all heavy metal, and therefore, has been easily assimilated by industry and mass culture.
Perhaps this explains why so many of the original death metal and black metal bands chose proudly to be underground, figuring that a few years of musical and artistic honesty would beat out becoming a careerist in a corrupt industry only to morph into Dad Rock as their fans aged into complacent suburban wage-serfdom.
6 CommentsTags: metallica, new zealand, pantera, slayer, Speed Metal
Biosphere – Angel’s Flight (2021)
Biosphere started out with songs that roughly followed a looping pattern, adding different sounds in layers, but with Angel’s Flight, aims to use themes more thoroughly, building each song around a melody and multiple counterparts in both sound texture and other phrases.
1 CommentIn Search of a New Model For the Music Industry
When underground music came about, it addressed a simple problem: rising costs had forced market concentration in the music industry. This produced six big companies that owned all the content, paid all the people who promoted and played it on radio, and therefore shaped the listening audience.
6 CommentsTags: money, music industry
Macanudo Inspirado White
One of these came down the pipe, and proved worthy of analysis. Macanudo, which is like the Heineken of cigars, makes a quality product but designs it for right at the middle of the audience, which means that their cigars lack the flair of the indie and artisan brands but rise above the average.
4 CommentsSkepticism – Companion (2021)
Funeral doom came from Skepticism, Winter, and Thergothon as bands took a death metal approach to the ultra-maudlin doom metal of Candlemass and Saint Vitus, giving it a new grandeur that mirrored what the brainier death metal bands were doing, and slowing it down as a form of even greater extremity.
4 CommentsTags: Doom Metal, funeral doom, skepticism
Pestilence Streaming Exitivm
The band that brought you Consvming Impvlse has now become a progressive deathcore band for its ninth album, Exitivm, which you can hear in full streaming from giant corporate megadouche entity YouTube:
9 CommentsTags: deathcore, pestilence
Varathron – Genesis of the Unaltered Evil (2012)
Hear a tale of the long chronicle of releases of Varathron demos and rarities.
2 CommentsTags: Black Metal, varathron
Necronomicon – Necronomicon (1986)
Certain releases provide useful waypoints, or nodes on the mesh through which history navigated a path, and Necronomicon with its self-titled shows us where 1986 had left the underground edge of metal: adopting technique from the new proto-underground, but still keeping a foot in bouncy speed metal land and unwilling to go fully to the tremolo style of Slayer or the epic song structures of Hellhammer.
No CommentsTags: Necronomicon, Speed Metal