Death Squad – Split You At The Seams
Ever Rat Records, 1991
Speed metal — rising from Tank, Satan, Metallica, and Mercyful Fate — had a good but short run in the 1980s before enterprising poseurs worked rock and blues back into the mix, taking away the focus on riffs and song construction in favor of what were essentially pop songs with lots of muted E-chords. Split You At The Seams shows a late entry with roll-your-own spirit.
6 CommentsTags: death squad, Speed Metal
Celtic Frost planned to release a three-part requiem starting with “Rex Irea” which saw the light of day on Into The Pandaemonium in 1987. Now, Celtic Frost continuation band Triptykon plans to perform all three parts at the legendary Roadburn show in the Netherlands on April 12, 2019.
3 CommentsTags: celtic frost, classical music, hellhammer, roadburn, triptykon
Lynx keeps a foot in both worlds: the mysterious atmosphere of the classic material, and the more emotional nature of post-metal, but without the self-pitying dwindling melodies of emo. In this way, it keeps what black metal delivered alive, but leaves out some of the technique and structure that made songs the original genre distinctive and expressive.
39 CommentsTags: Black Metal, nachtlieder, post-metal
Primordial Offerings follows up on the first Kever which focused more on an intelligent form of percussive death metal; the second EP from this promising band attempts to invent a new style of atmospheric death metal without losing any of the intensity, sounding like a mix of Florida, Buffalo, and selectively melodic European acts like Fleshcrawl and Demigod.
8 CommentsTags: atmospheric death metal, death metal, kever
We all miss the glory days of black metal, especially those who were not there to experience them the first time. That urge has spawned many bands who tried to uphold the original style and spirit despite the inevitable tendency of foolish humans to “mix it up” with other genres and random bits that are inarticulate to the purpose of the genre.
5 CommentsTags: Black Metal, clandestine blaze
Metalheads hate civilization, or rather what civilization inevitably becomes: people forget why things are as they are and recede into a human only bureaucratic world, like a cult built on peer pressure, where they affirm reality-denial in favor of things that make humans feel good about being afraid of challenging themselves.
18 Comments
Uppity hipster Big Tech monolith PayPal recently informed Moribund Records that PayPal would be restricting its account for content-related violations. (more…)
12 CommentsTags: big tech, censorship, internet, moribund records, paypal
Deserted Fear – Dead Shores Rising
Century Media, 2017
Living after the age of vitality of a genre, one becomes accustomed to the process of decay that happens as knowledge of why things are done becomes lost, and people instead fill in with the usual stuff that they do anyway. Humans are experts at dressing up the mundane as the exceptional.
5 CommentsTags: death metal, deserted fear, Old School Death Metal, Swedish Death Metal, tampa death metal
Monstrosity – The Passage Of Existence
Metal Blade Records, 2015
Working within an establishment genre presents a challenge to the musician: the major patterns are known, and the audience has been inundated with an abundance of bands who can play the style of the classics note-perfectly, meaning that musicians have to either add new aesthetics to attract a lot of fans, or play a subtle take on the older for those with some knowledge.
5 CommentsTags: death metal, Heavy Metal, metalcore, monstrosity
Azazel – Witches Deny Holy Trinity (2015)
Werewolf Records
Black metal finally clarified traditionalism for me. There is an inner spirit to things, like a shape that unifies form, and then there is an outer appearance, which is more like material properties and methods. The inner spirit is how you assemble your mind to understand something and roughly how it fits into the broader pattern of the universe.
13 CommentsTags: azazel, Black Metal, traditionalism
