Who can dislike a movie about a Satanic cult that cruises around America, hunting down attractive women in order to kill them? Like all good horror films, Kristy addresses a subliminal fear, in this case of the capricious hatred of mobs of people united on the idea of resentment of those who have what they do not.
3 CommentsSvart Records Re-Issues Winter Into Darkness / Eternal Frost
Rescuing another long-out-of-print album from the dustbin of history, Svart Records re-issued Winter Into Darkness — with the “Eternal Frost” demo previously released as the Eternal Frost EP — on April 27, 2020, as a deluxe edition on 2CD and vinyl.
2 CommentsTags: death metal, death-doom, Doom Metal, goden, svart records, Winter
Deathsiege – Unworthy Adversary (2020)
Following up on Cannibalistic Patricide, Deathsiege explores further into the idea of war metal as a voice for contrast instead of simply pounding the user into oblivion with many similar riffs arrayed like the tines and lanes of a maze.
3 CommentsTags: deathsiege, Israel, War Metal
Tenebra Re-Issues Through Crying Souls I See What I Was On Cult of Parthenope
Italian late-1980s style proto-black metal (Morbid, Venom, Tormentor, Goatlord) at its core, Tenebra speeds up the process somewhat and incorporates 1990s black metal of the Teutonic and Nordic varieties, eschewing the traditional melodic approach of Southern European bands for an advancing front of sawing riffs, using these to produce the backdrop for the slow emergence of atmospheric melody which stays minor-key without getting maudlin.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, cult of parthenope, tenebra
Extreme Metal: Blood, Fire, Death: The Swedish Metal Story by Ika Johannesson and Jon Jefferson Klingberg (2018)
Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story
by Ika Johannesson and Jon Jefferson Klingberg
240 pages, Feral House, $19
As we get past the glory years of underground metal — roughly 1987 to 1994 — more histories are emerging such as Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story which came out two years ago and presented itself as a history of Swedish underground metal. It achieves that and more, but falls short of its ultimate mission, which is to explain Swedish death metal and black metal, world-renowned for their intelligence and intensity.
8 CommentsTags: Bathory, entombed, mayhem, Sweden, Swedish Black Metal, Swedish Death Metal, swedish metal, underground metal
Metallica Removes Problematic Language From Master of Puppets
Amid rising calls for racial justice in the wake of the George Floyd death at the hands of police, terms like “master” have fallen out of favor due to their associations with slavery and feudalism. Consequently, industry leaders like GitHub and the Houston Association of Realtors are discontinuing use of these terms.
145 CommentsTags: master of puppets, metallica, social justice
Deathsiege – Cannibalistic Patricide (2019)
Formed from the fragmentation of Kever, Deathsiege approaches extreme metal from more of a war metal background, melding the sounds of Angelcorpse and Blasphemy into a new voice that uses more atmosphere and contrast to give these charging anthems space to develop a menacing aura.
7 CommentsTags: deathsiege, War Metal
finiteCell – Liquor Store (2019)
Sometimes creativity emerges best from a limited palette, and finiteCell by generating its sounds via custom programming on an original Game Boy and then sampling the result, adding breakbeat percussion, and editing the outcome into songs, demonstrates the possibilities found by experimenting in a sandbox of restricted options.
7 CommentsTags: chiptune, finiteCell
Creature – Ex Cathedra (2020)
Metal needs a new sound and a new imagery ecosystem. 1970s metal had doom and warnings of the apocalypse, 1980s metal warned of collapse from within through choppy fractured sounds, and 1990s metal brought a fluid structuralism that emphasized pattern and order while embracing the evil that 1970s metal warned of and the chaos of the 1980s.
9 CommentsTags: creature, postmodern metal
Did Entombed Borrow Its Name From This Video Game?
Recent digital archaeology brought forth the paradox of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game from 1982.
17 CommentsTags: alcohol, atari 2600, entombed, marijuana