What is the essence of metal? Inversion of an inversion: most pursue a stable mental state by denying that which we (often rightfully) fear. They deny the fear and become contrarians, which makes them addicted to falsely optimistic surface cheer. Metal brings dark reality instead.

The fact is that you cannot love this world without loving all of it, and that means the bombed Palestinian children, dysentery concentration camp victims, car crashes, cancers, dementia, and sodomized babies. Its order is random but statistically, over time, leads to good things.

Like natural selection. In the instant, it seems random, and it may be in the sense of there being no predetermined order to it. However, its function is not random, and over the whole set of interactions, leads to a better outcome. It is more statistical than specific.

Interestingly enough this order is designed around some interactions being failures. Sometimes, the smartest bunny in the meadow gets eaten by a hawk in freak chance, but if most of the other smart bunnies survive, the next few generations will catch up to where that one outlier was.

This means that in nature the trivial is inseparable from the whole. That which forms a peak or valley is normalized over time to a cycle that itself resembles a sine wave, avoiding consistency for the sake of achieving latitude and distance.

In the human world however the trivial can become a symbol and motivate people as if it were a whole. For example, considering ourselves morally “good” can outweigh concerns for the results of our actions in reality. Owning an Opeth tshirt can be confused with an identity, purpose, or lifestyle.

Metal rejects the trivial through its big picture view. It looks at the world through myth, history, natural selection, pattern, and a long-term perspective. This separates it from the trivial and makes it inscrutable to normies, which is good because it completely rejects their artifacts of faith.

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Imperishable – Revelation in Purity: deathgrind mixed with Behemoth style “epic” melodic sections, Immolation breakdowns, speed metal momentum riffs, and emo/post-metal chord progressions with hippity hoppity bunny stop-start transitions, this band manages to kill its reasonable mid-paced death metal by dressing it up in so many distractions that the utter linearity of these songs pops rather than fades.

Kaivs – Horrend: really basic death metal that uses charging chromatic streams in the Death style for mid-paced bombastic material that incorporates minimal melody, relies on vocals too much, has no musical surprises, and yet is catchy as hell but because its methods are so similar tends to operate like a bludgeon against the listener not a participatory bludgeoning experience with the listener.

Sodom – The Arsonist: better than most post-1980s Sodom albums, this new offering streamlines and edits the Sodom style but still sticks within the 1980s speed metal hybrid they adopted instead of going into their thrash-protodeath early years, where they had less musicality but more raw energy and evocative riffing, something we miss in this running board ride of repetitive strumming.

Mourniaty – Musta maa: other than doom metal affectations and a slower pace with the use of funereal keyboards this band achieves vocal-driven completely generic black metal that handles a verse-chorus loop well but slips into repetition as if the atmosphere is somehow blowing us away, but without any textural variation or thematic development it sounds like a background soundtrack from an episode of “NCIS.”

Atomic Witch – Death Etiquette: imagine Deceased with more bounce and Judas Priest styled vocals, and you have the surface, but the inner core of this band is strictly postmodern, namely too many disparate elements for internal compatibility which requires extensive workarounds, but when the band gets to its true personality, which is fast and jazzy versions classic heavy metal riffs, they seem to fit in with the third Pestilence album.

Primigenium – Intolerance: in many ways the most focused effort from Primigenium, this album shifts from pure flowing black metal to an emphasis on more rugged riffing in the style of later Immortal, but works in a handful of impressive melodic ideas that develop on the promise of earlier works by this band, with song structures that resemble early Bathory for a stripped-down cyclic style.

Beheaded – Ghadam: merging melodic metal with modern styles and a touch of deathcore, this band picks up where The Haunted left off with a less complexity-dense surface but the same satisfying melodic hooks in songs that expand their themes nicely despite arriving in very similar places to where they started off, probably from that turn of the millennium need for closure as society fell apart.

Harvested – Dysthymia: fairly bog-standard melodic deathcore, these songs plunge into fast rhythmic groove and then degenerate into repetitive loops which periodically break away to high contrast riff salad that seems unrelated to previous riffs, creating a sense of having wandered into the Clearance section at your local office supply store where overpriced pink HDMI cables hang out next to Buddhist-themed paperclip trays.

Mantah – Antidote: the bittersweet melodies expanding into whole scale choruses show how the origins of modern metal are equally in alternative rock and the MTV metal of the previous generation, aiming for a strong dramatic presentation that emphasizes a major rhythmic theme designed to drag and shove you into a mental torpor so that when the ads come on you might decide you need an LED projector (1080p/4k) after all.

Mutant Sex Demon – Cutting Through: imagine G.G. Allin in the hands of experienced musicians who wanted to create a good compelling rhythm and then layer it in vocals and chop it up with interludes before returning to a strong assertion of theme and chorus like an Irish pub band, and you have the basics of this punk-infused rock that sounds more like Oi meets Gwar than anything metal-related.

Abyssalis – Adaptation: sounds like about everything else in the spectrum of metalcore through deathgrind which emphasizes the vocals through bouncy riffs and self-referential melodies in the chorus, creating a bubble of thought based around a small palette of rhythms, featuring constant snare pounding which seems designed to make people jump in front of subway trains or into wood chippers.

Bloodletter – Leave the Light Behind: were you hungering for the late 1980s where bands combined Forbidden and Dark Angel into chug-heavy uptempo energetic material that emphasized head-nodding choruses in the European style but stacked up tuffguy American riffs on the verses to build momentum which got channeled into a few breaks and turnaround, then dissipated into thrashing chaos before wrapping up with the first riff? This may keep you busy for awhile.

Visualis – Rites of the Eclipse: no matter how much bands like this attempt to evade the jazz fusion within, it comes out after exactly two metallish riffs which run the gamut from deathcore to Motley Crue, and you end up with convoluted attempts to disguise the nature of each song with lots of hysterical Disneyland halftime entertainment from lunch at Cinderalla’s castle type vocals and jazzy guitar riffs which hit as hard as a mosquito drunk on Mad Dog.

Deadguy – Near-Death Travel Services: this band pioneered the NYHC/emo hybrid that uses emo rhythms to present what are otherwise slamming riffs of the late hardcore style but done fairly well in catchy indie songs that sound like REM having a drunken tantrum in the elevator of the Dubai Hilton, which means that this is a variant on your basic pop song format with some metal mixed into the riffs that are mostly formless and there to support vocal rhythms.

Noise Trail Immersion – Tutta La Morte In Un Solo Punto: the idea of post-metal is that of the California roll, combining Mexican cuisine with avocados and Vietnamese sauces with Chinese eggroll filler, basically hitting you with so much stuff at once that it hopes to baffle you with bullshit, but these are not even songs so much as a tortilla of a basic rhythm, contents of mixed contrasting riff salad, and sauce of pretentious vocal screechings.

Demoncrusher – Borrachera de Los Muertos: faithful hybrid between Metal Church, Anthrax, and Nuclear Assault focuses on vocal-driven verse-chorus writing but captures the chanting-and-nodding cadence groove of middle period speed metal, making catchy songs that also manage to hit, especially the first one about drunk zombies that uses a nifty classical guitar break.

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Metal grips the nature of life so intensely that it refuses to even stop for the encroachment of death and disease:

Taking to the stage, Ozzy appeared overwhelmed by the support from the cheering crowds as he thanked them in a touching message and poignantly admitted: ‘You have no idea how I feel.’

Their final showdown comes amid concerns for Ozzy’s health after he has undergone seven surgeries in the past five years, including a fourth spinal operation in 2023.

Ozzy, who has also been battling Parkinson’s disease since 2003, plans to keep recording music but is saying farewell to live music in what was a poignant night.

Interestingly, great music seems to motivate people more than the mundane, as we can see from the Beethoven road strips adopted by one town:

For drivers coming into Fujairah, the rumble strip initially looks like a larger, rectangular version of the dash lines separating the three-lane highway. That’s until you hit the first block, and the grooves of the road combine with the speed of the vehicle to make music.

Driving over each block sounds out the best-known parts of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — the final movements known commonly as the tune “Ode to Joy,” or in its more modern form, the official anthem of the European Union. Al Hefaiti recommended motorists hit the blocks at around 100 kph (60 mph) to get the tune just right.

The alternative to the non-trivial seems to be the solipsism of the modern time which leads to individualism, psychosis, and eventually, paranoia and megalomania:

Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He’d turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had “broken” math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight. “He was like, ‘just talk to [ChatGPT]. You’ll see what I’m talking about,'” his wife recalled. “And every time I’m looking at what’s going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t.”

Perhaps this is why it has become such a target for cancel culture:

Opposite the festival’s main entrance, demonstrators held signs questioning whether Tuska was the right platform for “Russian propaganda” and asking why the festival was giving space to “Russian patriots.”

According to the organisers of the protest, Slaughter to Prevail supports the Russian state in multiple ways.

Of course, this is a deathcore band so they should have been blocked for other reasons.

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I’ve never believed that humans are meant to live on top of each other like this. All the cities are crowded, there’s way too many people. When things get so diverse that pretty much nobody gets along, it just creates stress that I don’t need. I don’t think anybody does. – David Vincent

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Talking with AIs gives a useful perspective because these machines are the ultimate categorical thinkers. Ask one about death metal because you enjoy death metal, and it reads off the Wackypedophile definition and says, if you enjoy pounding drums, screaming guitars, howling vocals, and songs about death and dying that are edgy in a cultural context, you will love Cannibal Corpse and Cradle of Filth.

It misses the questions of quality and spirit. Namely that not all songs, riffs, or albums are the same, even if they use the same methods and intensity therefore are in the same category, and that the genre has a spirit of its own which does not map to technique, method, and appearance alone.

Our entire society thinks this way. AIs terrify us because they are solipsism machines that mirror our own thinking back to us, and we see how controlling and shallow this thinking us, but also, how much our own consciousness is not the miracle we think it is. Most of us are just meatsuit AutoCorrect machines thriving on chaos, crisis, and conflict in order to avoid looking into our souls.

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Tags: black sabbath, deathcore, ozzy osbourne, sadistic metal reviews, smr