People Can’t Tell Surface From Essence

So as I travel the internet on random errands, I hear people talking about the new “underground” bands, which all sound like Blink 182 making atmospheric black metal. It’s pretty sad, but these bands insist they’re not retro while tossing together bits and pieces of the past, wrapping them around standard pop-punk, adding some emo and crust and a pinch of necro, and then thrusting it all forward with that bedroom blackmetal “truly too authentic to care” aesthetic. I’ve listened to well over a hundred such bands in the last week, and on every level — musically, aesthetically, artistically — they’re close enough to identical. Even more, they have nothing of distinction about them, so why bother? “Metal for metal’s sake” is a path to mediocrity.

Then there are people who love to bloviate on about the “undiscovered” past gems, which almost universally are third-stringers with no distinction. Their goal is to make you think they know something you don’t. They think they get ahead in life by pushing others down, and not simply by achieving more, because the two aren’t the same, even in a relative universe. One of these so-called gems is Fester – Winter of Sin, which I threw on a week ago and had to laugh at how consistent judgment can be. For a smart person, whether in 1995 or in 2008, this CD is crap.

It starts with heavy metal riffs done up like black metal, and gets worse from there. It’s a salad of pieces from here and there with no real direction except vague Venom worship. Every bad cliche of heavy metal and death metal is in here, and there’s no melody or structure to recommend it. What does it have going for it? To weak people, it seems like a good way to be important, knowing about this undiscovered masterpiece etc. Avoid.