Bringing the unrelenting pace of war metal to death metal, Ascendency make stripped-down death metal with melodic chorus riffs and confrontational chromatic rhythm verse riffing in the Scandinavian style. This results in a booming attack and soft upward drift toward organization emerging from chaos.
3 CommentsTags: ascendency, death metal
Riff-driven punk-based music that nonetheless focuses on instrumentals more than vocals, The Sacrifice might remind us of The Process of Weeding Out from Black Flag or later Carbonized releases, albeit more harmonically-pleasing and perhaps organized than either.
4 Comments
In art, no shame attaches to specificity, since that is better than trying to be everything to everyone and ending up as the same old thing since nothing pleases all parties. Ehlder make a type of atmosphere black metal based around stomp beats and droning guitars with angular riffs gilded with cryptic melody.
5 CommentsTags: Black Metal, ehlder
The fine line between “quirky” and eccentric proves hard to spot, but with this NWOBHM revival with added melodic punk touches and yet a very old school sense of melody, Dead Express makes itself eccentric in a way that the quirky hipsters probably cannot appreciate, but might discover some quality music if they did.
No CommentsTags: dead express, Heavy Metal, punk rock
Punk rock came about to make rock without the cruft and convention that had clogged it, since labels and bands tend to accumulate a collection of whatever has worked in the past, meaning that by the 1970s rock had become a fruit salad of folk, progressive, disco, blues, and country tropes that had no relation to a whole idea.
No CommentsTags: death metal, melodic hardcore, obituary
Sounding a lot like a hybrid between South American metal and Chicago death metal, Bleedskin make old school death metal with lots of heavy metal and some speed metal influences, but keep a unique perspective through what could otherwise be pure riff salad.
1 CommentTags: bleedskin, death metal
Good things in life usually arrive in messy form. The bad things are simple and seem harmless; the good ones tend to be ambiguous, and only reveal their value over time, where you can see plusses and minuses to their operation but good results in the end. Such is also true of much of underground metal.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, nekus, War Metal
Doom metal really went into the toilet in the late 1990s when the labels got ahold of it and decided to make it into “slow Led Zeppelin” with a stoner theme. This hit at the same time that Slacker and other Boomer-worship propaganda filled the airwaves, and people thought it was “progress.”
No CommentsTags: Doom Metal, early moods
Old school doom-death with a strong tendency toward bounding grindcore riffs, Pazuzu understands how to make a riff salad talk to itself and how to use enough internal contrast to keep the unfolding story that results interesting. Like a good horror movie, Revenant Of Blasphemies alternates between suspense, terror, flight, and violence.
1 CommentTags: death metal, doom-death, pazuzu
Industrial music means pounding machine-like rhythm and city noise, but to that Shibalba add keyboards and ritual patterns to make a disturbing but pleasant soundtrack for all of your anti-modern experiences. This is both the strength and weakness of this music: it makes for good but sparse listening, better as background than focus.
No CommentsTags: Ambient, Industrial, Ritual, shibalba
