Sadistic Metal Reviews: Metal as a Service (Mucho, Mucho MaaS)

What happens when something succeeds? It fixates on that success because now it has something to lose. Forget all those stupid alt-right tropes about “hard times make hard men weak, weak times make weak men hard” because they are like most things Right-wing merely a prelude to the type of sodomy that Jesus does not mind. Metal reached its peak in the 1990s with underground death metal and black metal, but now the little people have come in to munch the carcass while loudly demanding attention.

So now we get all the people who really want nothing more in life than managing a Taco Bell, having diverse neighbors, living in a trendy zip-code, buying the latest air fryer, and sneaking away on the weekends to have dumpsex in an airport bathroom, but they also want some claim to having been original, insightful, wild, crazy, deep, and relevant. Like teenage rebels (who never really rebel) they wish to be iconoclastic, ironic, and contrarian to show how different and unique they are, like everyone else.

Our problem in metal is that through the double onslaught of the tryhard YouTube underground (analogous to the GOP) and emo hipster nerd infusion from collapsed hardcore (comparable to the DNC) metal became accepting of moronic stuff simply because it had the right surface characteristics, and in the process, it forgot how to recognize quality. Fast forward and now the audience has no idea how to discern any kind of quality, and focuses only on the surface traits.

At this point, metal is just spam. They hit you with so much from the firehose of wannabe rock stars that you end up accepting the bad simply from an inability to reject it all. Soon you get used to listening to the recombinant parts of former influences meshed in with alien genres like emo and blues, with high school jazz technique copped from public access video guides, spewed out with the appearance of conviction but nothing to say. It flows past like the sound of an air conditioner and you accept it all in pure pluralism.

With the dawning of the AI age, we will soon be able to offer Metal-as-a-Service (Maas) where an AI stitches together speed metal, hard rock, doom metal, punk/emo, heavy metal, death metal, jazz fusion, honky-tonk, and black metal into a constant stream of sound using the seven hundred most evocative words in English as lyrics while varying tempo enough that you perceive what feels like the difference between tracks.

In reality, it will be an unending nightmare. The system will track your eye movements to figure out what put you to sleep the least and then repeat it in an ongoing opus of recombinant repetition that will soon take over your consciousness, at which point the computer will pipe it directly into your brain through a neural modem until you become dependent on it in order to get sleep or defecate, at which point the monthly rate goes up and you cancel Netflix and PornHub just to afford your daily metal drone.

At some point, the system will apply advanced mathematics and find the quanta that generate the most nervous response, then optimize as AIs always do until you are listening to the sound of an idling engine with wind noises over it while some hipster talks about how he installed Gentoo onto his M2 and can now play Doom at the original frame rate while data-mining Twitter posts for mentions of Roe v. Wade in the background as his Hispanic transsexual midget femboy manletwife services him with a bollard from the original WTC site.

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Luna in Sanguinem – Global Bloodbath: classic death metal from Num Skull and Evil Incarnate personnel, this band aims toward the Malevolent Creation end of the genre which uses more of the speed metal styled muted-strum chord riding and less of the tremolo-sculpted phrasal riffs, but produces a sledgehammer blow of primitive riffs piled onto one another in a self-revealing journey, perhaps a bit too much reliant on chanted death vocals for a Master-inspired antigroove, but without the tendency toward surface dissembling like the post-emo/rap bands tend to use.

Nubivagant – The Wheel and the Universe: every few years someone decides to try the simple underground metal with high vocals and some emotional appeal trope but it always falls flat because they are combining contrary spirits, much like metal and rap never merged and metal and blues never made a hybrid worth hearing, since one direction pulls toward the sentimental with a focus on self and the other toward losing oneself in the power of structure shaped from noise and therefore obliterates self and herd in order to listen to the emptiness of the universe and its language of intensity over safety, and here we get the same thing, some good basic 1980s speed/proto-black hybrid riffing with too much vocal and a few Burzum ideas dropped in for cred but most cyclic repetition like filling out forms at the DMV but each time a wino seizes your paper and eats it and you have to start again.

Mosara – Only The Dead Know Our Secrets: really slow blues rock in the indie school that came about with sludge or the fusion between unenthusiastic proto-grunge like Flipper with the sounds of doom metal and the new emphasis on atmosphere (and stretching four tracks into an album) of late hardcore, so here you get the same riffs that glam and heavy metal bands used in the 1980s but much slower while some sped howls in the background as he gets raped by a teacher’s aid with blue hair and breasts dangling over his curved eight inch penis, but not much song development, nor any mood beyond what is established by technique, so toss this one in the sharps bucket with all other HIV-tainted things.

Eaten by Sharks – Eradication: just what the world needs, more metalcore, from this band with a hipster millennial name but an appeal somewhere in the range of all these Pantera, hardcore, and deathcore fusion bands that add emo choruses to their directionless chromatic riffing built around a vocal presentation that is nowhere near as effective as they imagine it is, with almost zero song development since all focus is in the lyrics like a commercial for a new hybrid SUV that has a dashtop computer that can automatically order your Soylent from Amazon while you drive through a national park noticing nothing except a misspelling on one sign.

Iron Wings – Ritual of Rage: people who have listened to hip-hop and Pantera cannot make good metal, since they build it around the vocals and cram in guitars playing 1980s clichés as an antipode, creating an atmosphere of listening to the loudspeakers play to empty streets when the latest Italian-style coup has taken place, followed by some melodic bluesy leads that contrary to their name go nowhere and have no direction, then more ranting while the drums pound the “brootality” straight into your head, and soon you are reflecting on how all the bands that did the pre-rap version of this melodic ranty-chanty vocal style lost sight of the riff and ended up looking at Metallica albums and saying to their fellow drunk methfriends on welfare, “we could’ve been huge man, we coulda been a contender” while the cops closing in looking for the perp who stole full diapers from the nursing home to feast on them like someone listening to this confused album.

Dust Prophet – “When The Axe Falls”: a decently executed hybrid of Candlemass and honky-tonk blues, this track brings out exactly nothing past its first loop despite a tantalizing solo, and survives solely on the basis of fitting together better than most of its contemporaries, but one wonders why listen to this when you could simply fit your ear around the tailpipe of a 74 Malibu and get roughly the same cycle from low to high in a pleasant and more energetic rhythm, but if you want your underground music in a “mature” (normie-safe blues rock) format this might entertain you for the five minutes it takes to find a recycling bin downtown where you can chuck the vinyl without guilt as you go back to making sculptures of your own feces (hint: eat cheddar).

Titan Rage – Into the Pit: like those who write sequels to popular movies or the second seasons of most television shows, Titan Rage compose by committee, namely they find something they think is the appeal and then fill in stuff around it based on ideas that seem trendy market-winners to them, ending up with something more spare parts than the weird soup they served at the end of the week in your school cafeteria that you know was just the boiled food that others left on their trays because you found a waterlogged piece of pizza in it once with a bite mark in it or maybe a retainer amongs the peas, finally producing something that seemed clever when they posted it on Reddit from a Macintosh but really is just a bucket of mental fug tied together with sentimental vocals and crammed into the same drum pattern.

Destrania – Divine Archaic Lore: seemingly inspired by mid-1990s Dimmu Borgir and late 90s Summoning, this band attempts to weave keyboards with guitars and drums but, while it has some good songwriting ideas in here, never takes them to fruition, and by the nature of mixing the guitar, bass, and overactive drumming to the background, ends up with what sounds like energetic dungeon synth over which someone is jamming, with drums forcing the rest of the composition to contort around them, when really what this band should do is drop everything but the keyboards and focus on simplifying these ideas then bringing them to fruition instead of making a sonic mural, since there is raw potential here.

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Consider this rare admission of the influence of classical music on heavy metal that lays bare how differently we think than the normies wanting their tape-loop emotional self-expression drama:

Willis also spoke to rock musicians including Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Scorpions guitarist Rudolf Schenker.

The two musicians share guitar riffs that became famous with only three to five notes — just like the opening motif of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” (“Ta-ta-ta-taaaa”), probably the most famous four notes in classical music. The motif is the mother of all rock riffs, at least in Europe, Schenker says in the film.

“We are shaped by classical music in such a way that we are attuned to a melody and a certain rhythm. Classical music is in our genes,” he says.

Metal follows the classical idea of being evocative of something other than a human emotional state directly. Metal shows you the adventure, and you have a natural response to this, at which point metal goes within the adventure and shows how our initial emotions often lead far away from the brutal, reductionist realism that guides us out of confusion. Metal asserts order out of chaos, beauty out of ugliness, and humanity out of inhumanism.

Classical takes a similar approach to that of metal by making music that is so much more massive than the humans involved that it dwarfs them and forces them to contemplate the infinite. These are not bracelet-style circular love songs to center you back into a human world, a social world, and a world of emotions and sensations. These, like church music or ritual music, take you outside of yourself into the broader implications of history, ideas, and the significance of life. They lift you up, and so does metal.

At least, the good stuff does. The bad metal seems to me to be LARPing as metal while being normie in its core, just like emo was not really punk hardcore, but an invasion of edgier pop music that disguised itself behind power chords and distortion. Normies would have you believe that if you played radio pop through distorted guitars and pounding drums it would be a form of “death metal,” but death metal is more than a style… it is a method of composition, a theory of music, and an artform with ritual and contemplative implications.

Speaking of pseudo-metal that pulls an Amber Heard in the bed of meaning, consider how some metal has aged like EAR-ONS and is a shadow of what it once was or could have been, despite being popular with the same people who think CNN and Fox are “pretty accurate” sources of news:

“I think of Metallica as being a pop band,” [Phoebe Bridgers] told Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich in 2020. “A lot of metal is just metal to be metal — but Metallica write real songs.”

Carried by an acoustic guitar, the slow ballad would certainly have surprised fans of one of the world’s biggest metal bands. But [its] melodic appeal also exposed the band to a much broader audience, and was one of the first power metal ballads to get commercial radio airplay.

“And playing on this track, I just couldn’t wait,” [Elton John] said. “The chord structure, the melodies, the time changes — it’s got drama written all over it.”

Watch normie pretense unfold. Write some schmaltz like they write, and they praise you; otherwise as they say metal is “just metal to be metal,” meaning that in their eyes it has no musical, artistic, or social relevance: it is simply posing. Isn’t that rich? The poseurs called us poseurs for not conforming to their vision of what should be on the radio.

And as the article goes on, we hear nothing from metalheads or metal bands, just pop stars, followed by the worst of all lies, the partial truth:

Like all rock styles, metal has its roots in the blues. The hard rock bands of the 70s, including Led Zeppelin (photo), Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, can certainly be described as the pioneers of the genre. They all played driving drums, psychedelic guitar solos and riff-based songs.

The blues was a forgery. Comprised of Scots church music and English folk songs as adapted for pub exposure, it spread into African-American communities where the German waltz beat was made constant. Prior to that, its drumming was more like that of jazz, varying in intensity throughout the song. Not so for the factory age: they made those drums sound like a machine, constantly going and adding layers and fills as if you were dropping in a new part or sending the finished product into a box.

Although people of all races played the blues and its song format originated in drinking songs from Europe, its simplicity made it a big seller, and so it got packaged up as Black music in order to make it seem edgy. The same European lagabout middle class people who used to idealize Bohemians and gypsies now found themselves fawning over a new foreign population, this time with pity involved, because it seemed simpler than their own and made them look edgy to their cigarette-clutching hipster friends.

Metal, if anything, walked music back four hundred years and then forward by a few centuries. It took out the constant drumming as a source of attention, and made all the instruments work together so that complex compositions could arise without having to mess with dynamics by dropping out drums for a keyboard solo, for example. It brought song structure back from the verse-chorus-turnaround of pop, rock, blues, and old nightclub jazz. It liberated scalar structure to be modal.

All of this freaked out the establishment. They recognized that, if given a choice, red-blooded American males would always favor heavy metal over the increasingly saccharine material that industry wanted to pump out because it was cheap to produce (buy low) and novelty-driven in terms of value (sell high). Metal would always dominate the charts, and this made it a threat to the money machine.

Consequently, industry spent much of its time trying to humble metal, telling us how we were bad instrumentalists, how the music was just posing, or how we were just teenagers raging at our parents. They even produced fake versions of metal from Pantera through nü-metal that were in fact as they described, then were amazed that those sold but not with the metal audience so much as the kids who wanted to give their parents a finger and would have been into punk a generation before.

During all of this, Metallica smoothly transitioned from speed metal to lounge music that incorporated a bit of country and metal. They made the perfect radio product and instead of having to suffer through as simply upper middle-class people, gained enough money that they can now sit in mansions being empty and wonder exactly what it all means, since they are now so removed from daily life that any sense of meaning probably involves a hedge fund.

Speaking of hysterical voices in media, the recent Right-wing Christian libertarian freakout over the After School Satan Club should go down in history as the result of one of the greatest trolls ever perpetrated on the thoughtless, guileless, credulous, symbol-driven, superstitious, and most of all, mentally lazy voter:

The Satanic Temple has been making a concerted effort to push into elementary and grade schools in opposition to Christian after-school clubs.

The Satanic Temple, which runs the program, said students would be offered activities such as science and crafts projects, puzzles and games — and that they would learn about benevolence, empathy, critical thinking, problem-solving and creative expression, too.

Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple spokesperson, told Fox News about the clubs, “I’m hoping that with our presence, people can see that good people can have different perspectives, sometimes on the same mythology, but not mean any harm.”

He turns their faith right back around on them: if they believe in loving everyone, good or bad, he wants to be bad and force that love to come forth, at which point it will either appear ludicrous to its followers or force them to re-assess the need to separate good and bad, even if the Christian theory is that by forcing the bad to behave as if they were good, you make them good (in fact, you just make them careful to do their bad stuff only when unobserved, and raise a generation of narcissistic psychopaths).

This was probably always the goal of Satanists. They believed that Christianity was caught between a symbolic belief system and a more complex reality, and neither extreme really worked that well. If Christians aimed relentlessly at the good, they went to war and all that pacifistic Good Samaritan stuff went out the window; if they aimed at tolerance, they found themselves slowly becoming evil. Satanism reflected at Christians what they feared.

In metal, Satan went from a negative representation as something invoked by human bad behavior (“War Pigs”), to a deceiver who consumed a rotten world (“The Number of the Beast”), and eventually became a personification of human individualism and Revolutionary desire for freedom (“The Antichrist”), but under death metal melded into a positive figure who liberated us from a rotted ideology based on human convenience to grasp the power of nature (“Blasphemy”).

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Gaë Bolg – Requiem: if you want good music for a Renaissance Faire or maybe to promote your gaming club, this keyboard album might deliver the right vibe but like most contemporary underground music it focuses on using form to create content, such that these songs use wandering melodies that riff off themselves but never develop an inner voice of conflict and resolution arising from some kind of order; instead, you merely have aesthetic that gets increasingly absurd as attempts to fill a full-length album go on.

Chaotian – Effigies of Obsolescence: plenty of effort went into this album to create new death metal patterns and work them together with enough variety to stand out but something is missing at the core like an ability to make interesting riffs that are evocative of something other than mid-90s Incantation, Suffocation, and Immolation albums viewed from the outside, and so these songs resemble a gingerbread house, with four walls of basic structure onto which riffs and allusions are glued with sugar, but the house never changes and soon you feel trapped within the four walls but guilty for not appreciating the obviously large efforts that went into making the confection.

Freikorps – The Best of: most RAC seems like nationalist movements themselves, obsessed by revenge and blighted with alcoholic sentimentalism and regret, never seeing a joy in life that should not be smashed for the fucking cause, but this seems like strong punk music that other than some diminished melodies and violently shouty choruses would pass even for normal listening, reminding you that you can reject the light of God and embrace the need for darkness without becoming a 300 lb Irish-German basement dweller.

Crosson – Ready, Aim… Rock!: this band took glam and gave it the energy of positive punk music, which translates into simple anthemic songs which provide the basics of rhythm and melody with surprisingly distinctive guitar solos, driven by a rolling bass; while the glam comes out in some heavy metal and hard rock style riffs, most of this just sounds like highly energetic rock with keyboards, but unlike almost everything in the heavy rock category today it holds up as integral songs and manages to make a point that it has simplified enough to be musical.

Eihort – Consuming the Light: from the random riffs and variations camp comes this release of riff practice which follows the idea that black metal is simply a container for all the random metal-like riff impulses one has and the songs do not need to mean anything, only cycle around while establishing “atmosphere” that then goes nowhere while the band hits lots of allusions to classic black metal as well as the newcomers of the post-90s disaster era, resulting in a true black metal feel without any of the meaning, leaving the listener wondering how to quietly exit.

Furis Ignis – Turm: more droning “black metal” that quickly falls into Pantera style riffs adapted with an NYHC vibe but ultimately throw so much randomness into a song that it breaks down into an utterly simplistic core of repeating a riff and then adding a melody which makes it seem lachrymose before dropping into more trudging warmed-over speed metal riff to support the vocals, which seem to be the point of the exercise, then finishing up in a flurry of black metal signaling in order to make you believe that you are not listening to anything but a band that like Lia Thomas could not compete in its regular category so decided to fight it out among the smaller, weaker black metal catboys. I assume most of these people are public school teachers.

Brutta – Brutta: the term “blackened death metal” seems simply to mean death metal which incorporates melody and mid-paced riffs which this band does but throws in a bunch of chromatic bounce riffs and unsubtle breaks that fail to disguise how these songs are simply circularity between two very similar riffs with random — i.e. riffs that do not converse with others to reveal a musical journey or poetic continuity within conflict — stuff thrown in the middle to add the accents they think will make this album qualify as good in the eyes of their peers, which it will as better than most, but it has nothing for posterity and you can easily keep enjoying oxygen without having ever heard a note of it.

Elliott’s Keep – Vulnerant Omnes: showing influences from Saint Vitus as well as Candlemass, this band tries for a clean vocal dominated type of hard rock and doom metal crossover but since they know how to write basic functional songs this can be forgiven, since these little loops of verse and chorus with some theatrical interludes make for decent listening even if a bit simple for repeated listening, and the band understands the mood of doom metal as an immersion in the darkness looking for light instead of a sad wallowing by boring people gripped in self-pity sort of like a fast food worker who keeps overeating between meth binges and wonders why he is perpetually single.

we do not call your band gay here because comparing homosexuals to this music is an insult to them, however we reserve the right to mock effete armchair idiocy masquerading as world-changing metal by referring to it as metrosexual since this conveys the appropriate milieu of iPhones, Soylent, tendies, Fleshlight, Peddit, dualistic religion, and self-pitying victimhood; nonetheless, this band might scare some people straight, since

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Very few know how to write metal anymore. Being rebels against the staid WASP Establishment by wielding Satan and death had relevance in the 1980s and early 1990s but faded as the Clinton years took over and a new diverse, pluralistic America decided that nothing was sacred or good anymore except equality, which is why black metal crusaded against that.

No one believes in those things anymore; Christianity is in free fall as numbers plunge with only the truly absurd fanatics remain, and no one but the luvvies pay attention to diversity anymore except when figuring out where not to buy a house. The 1980s order, the last gasp of the WASPs, has gone and been replaced by mostly Southern, Eastern, and Mediterranean Europeans running the show (badly) from within a non-culture comprised of products, ideological dogma, and Hollywood.

We are running out of things to believe in during Late Stage Democracy. Maybe you believe in capitalism, but that got mutated into market socialism by entitlements that use government money to buy votes. Maybe you believe in Jesus, but all of your church leaders are preaching thinly-disguised pluralistic, anarchic communism at this point. Maybe you believe in patriotism, but how can you be patriotic to a dying regime? Maybe you believe in race, but 98% of the “huwhite Nationalists” seem like angry losers who rape dogs.

Perhaps you believe in the liberal values, as I do, of understanding, compassion, free speech, and freedom of religion? You find out that most people are just fountains of idiocy who quickly smother any discussion about anything but symbolic good-versus-evil narratives. The Left thinks that Trump engineered a January 6 rebellion when all evidence points to a riot urged to get out of control, and the Right believes that Satanic lizard people pedophiles are manipulating our nation so they can have spirit cooking rituals.

We are running out of sanity. One side offers you equality and anarchy supported by free stuff, the other obedience and conformity in some mystical theocracy. Almost no one takes the Snoop Dogg view, which is that everything is about money, sex, drugs, and power. In my take, the Snoop Dogg view beats out everything else. The people in government are there because it is a job at which they can succeed and have rewarding careers.

To be in government means that you can do “favors” for other people and get favors in return. You approve a bill, and your kid gets placed on the board of a major corporation. Then they, too, can have a nice house in Maryland and a Mercedes-Benz. They can go to the hip restaurants and clubs where important people go. Their kids get private healthcare, go to private schools, have college tutors, and will become the next generation of wealth. You can do this as a Congresscritter or ordinary bureaucrat.

Everything is a job to everyone because that is how Worker’s Revolts and Capitalists both style society. They ignore culture and the human experience. They deny intuition, realism, and the inner self. To them, everyone else is a tool for achieving their ends, sort of like how Captain Ahab saw other men as his arms and legs. Politics is a scam because it is a job. Religion, no matter how well intended, bases itself on being able to control others, and becomes a job. We replaced culture with pop culture which, too, is a job.

Metal as a Service (MaaS) is just the latest incarnation of the job. Want to be a successful metal band? Here is a checklist. You have to master a few techniques. You must know some scales and harmony with emphasis on jazz modes. You need to be able to play quirky offtime stuff. Then, you have to aesthetically clone whatever succeeded since the last big upset (black metal) and hybridize it together. The finishing touch is a unique quirk in your biography, instrumentation, production, and imagery. Then you too can participate!

The music industry is driven by favors. If you praise the fungible generic crap pouring out of a label, they will mention your blog and you get more readers. If your blog or band succeeds, you can get a job in industry, or use your hip factor to work in media or the local coffee shop. Your cool tattoos and trendy band might even get you laid if you lower your standards enough. If you get hip, you can join the corporatist and Leftist media and get that free money for doing very little.

This illness has gone worldwide wherever democracy has gone. Europeans made this system work by tempering Christianity with the pagan texts and tempering democracy with social hierarchy or, in the case of America, lots of little rules that kept the mob from running wild. The mob found a way around these things so that gibbering idiots like Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi could have jobs. Everything is a job, remember. They care about their careers, not your life, your culture, your race, or your future.

In their view, which mirrors the Snoop Dogg view, the smart get in the system and get the money, sex, drugs, and power. The stupid pay their bills and taxes, hope for a better tomorrow, and go to church for a shot of hopium-copium. If they are not religious, they try to pretend that watching CNN or Fox and chanting the right slogans makes them “relevant” or “important,” just like kids go to rock ‘n roll shows to share in the fame and social power of the event. But air guitar does not make you a star, nor does being a warm body Useful Idiot for dogma.

Metal mirrors the world around it. Once an outsider genre, it failed as it has always failed, by getting public acceptance. Once metal gets on the radio or the equivalent (Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music) it becomes part of the normie world and therefore, a job. Your audience are morons who really do not care what they listen to as long as it is “new.” If you can fool them, the blogs and labels will carry you to success, which you can use to get another job. Almost no one cares about the music, art, or ideas.

At this point, metal resembles K-pop, which was designed to hybridize Motown, English 80s pop, hip-hop, disco, and club techno. It works because no one can tell the difference between bands or songs, so they go with who is popular as a personality. If Kim Kardashian hires a ghostwriter to make her a K-pop album, it will succeed even though she is not Korean because celebrity drives success at that job.

The genre succeeds because people want inoffensive, cultureless music. They want to run away from ideas and have a few moments of palliative comfort in the Hell-world we have made through bureaucracy, high taxes, red tape, fear, and domination of public opinion through media and the ranging mobs of bluehairs who destroy anyone who mentions anything realistic. K-pop is the Big Mac of music; take the real thing, add sugar and salt, then cheap out on ingredients while spending on advertising and you can succeed at your job!

When our review queue looks like a jeremiad against metal, consider that maybe almost everything is terrible and looking for diamonds in the rough is a pursuit of the abyss. That is, you may find a few, and even promote them, but you are a tiny group of people holding back the tide, while most of the new talent has fled to other genres to avoid being dragged down into the stagnant quagmire of people aping the successful in order to conform.

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Healing Magic – Restoration: this band goes back to the roots of metalcore before metalcore and digs out the idea of what is basically NYHC on the verse and basic speed metal with an Exhorder/Pantera use of groove on the chorus, infusing a small amount of melody into it, producing really straightforward songs with a few adornments that stick to order and not disorganization like metalcore tended to fetishize; it is not something that fits my personal tastes, but I would rather listen to this than the endless guitar wanking and scatterbrained symbolic vomit of your average metalcore band like a Redditor trying to explain the young boy with a bloody anus and cat ears in the basement tent where all Pedditors live.

Manegarm – Ynglingaättens Öde: why bother deny your true inner self? — if you want to be in a regular heavy metal band and appeal to the underconfident and overfed normie teens bloating the basements of the first world, why not just go full Def Leppard or Queensrÿche and be honest instead of donning black metal vocals, using bounce-riffs for your verses and shapeless melodic riffs for choruses, pasting together post-its of every occult, Nordic, and philosophical concept you can find, when your songs would be great as glam metal or even light speed metal like Annihilator? Manegarm ties in post-metal/emo vocals with this stew of financially successful influences to make an unlistenable song like a teenage suicide note that makes the parents say “well that figures” and wait four hours to call an ambulance.

Blue Cheer – “Summertime Blues”: lots of idiots tell us this is the origin of metal but really it seems to be the most visible instance of the use of distortion and power chords together, probably because everything else sounded like extreme violence, where this just sounds like rock based around a shuffle beat and e-chord rhythm noodling with extra noise, but nothing like the idea of metal with phrasal riffs exists, making this as the “origin of metal” another idiotic normie trope based on appearance and not structure; when do we get delivered from normies? This equal representation nonsense has made them arrogant. Purge the herd… I mean, thin the hred.

Megadeth – The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!: you know what we really loved about Rust in Piece was the way those riffs fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and built a great if interrupted mood, but this album focuses more on delivering a solid rhythm for the vocals, with fancy speed metal versions of the type of riding riff used on “Children of the Grave” or “Escape,” snap-assembling a basic song that then becomes a canvas for stacking other riffs and variations, as well as solos that seem to show great understanding of the scale in such a generalized sense that they are interchangeable, making us think nostalgically of old Megadeth but then remembering we live in a time where nothing has form because we are in the interregnum between democracy and hopefully something less obsessively idiotic (but it is not this album).

Void Rot – Void Rot: this basic death metal injects enough melody into doom-death riffs built around a charging rhythm and three-note mode that serves as a central motif to allow the sensation of its doom to proliferate and develop internal contrast, giving it a clear topography and depth, allowing the imagination to situate itself in this created world long enough to suspend disbelief and enjoy the primitive but evocatively lifelike twists and turns which rely not so much on phrasal riffing but harmonic contrast, something that would fall flat if the space was not already developed by the expansion of the primal theme; needs more phrasal riffing and variation, but otherwise strong.

Cathartarium – “Shining Horizon”: this band struggles at times with consistency since it tries to throw in too many contrasting influences, but its basic approach takes at atmospheric approach to the heavy metal, black metal, and death metal crossover that was proto-underground metal, aiming more for polished proficiency than noise and consequently, building a basic melodic riff in the center of energetic, clashing rhythm riffs that often approach the best of Slayer-influenced speed metal, running into some confusion as it becomes time to blend its black metal riffs with the death and heavy metal influences in order to bring the song to a conclusion, but remaining consistent enough that the mood develops instead of dissolves.

Shroud of Bereavement – A Beautiful Winter: the same maudlin, saccharine material that once infested doom metal has now crept outward, with keyboards and synth violins accompanying slow black metal technique in songs that are basically closer to Mercyful Fate or Ratt styled heavy metal than anything else, this material creeps forward with the type of emotional over-expression common to drunk buskers and third world politicians that remains anathema to quality metal, which requires an aggressive contemplative listening experience.

Torture Killer – Dead Inside: when your father ejaculates into the rectum of another man, some of the sperm make it all the way to the stomach, but some get lost in the bends of the intestines like this band which proclaims itself old school death metal but really is caught about five trends ago on late speed metal with some heavy metal touches and death metal vocals, for music that is not badly put together but simply not about as interesting as the half-digested meatloaf the winning sperm finds at the end of its journey.

Regnant – Transvisceral: building on a solid base of mid-1990s Napalm Death with basic death metal riffing built in within the framework of Massacre but given a bit more of a rock bounce, this band tends to throw everything it has at the wall to see what sticks, combining Pantera-style blues rock with grindcore and basic death metal with an absence of direct heavy metal riffs, giving this some potential before it collapses into too much stop-start like 5:00 PM LA traffic and you tune out to go listen to meth-heads raping watermelon for your daily dose of interrupted rhythms.

Putricid – Suppuration: despite owning all of the Superman merch released since 1949 and being able to easily slip into character, one can end up amazingly not being Superman, and this release while a loving and carefully curated tribute to 1990s death metal and grindcore does not understand the atmosphere of that time which both came to a conflict and went to a place beyond belief in tensions where the only goal was to find the magic of childhood again in undiscovered worlds beyond the corporate egalitarian cosmopolitan bureaucratic hell which otherwise swallowed up all life with “good” ideas that turned out to lead to old human evils pretending to be virtue. Putricid needs to let their riff ideas out of the cage, mature and begin decomposing, so that they can set up an actual parable or folkloric myth in musical form, because otherwise they end up with a Greatest Hits of The 90s with more abrupt rhythms inspired by the flickering of lights on routers and MRIs scanning the brains of anything but tendies and fiat currency.

Pulverazor – Swamp Demon Stomp: basically 1980s glam metal with a little bit more punk riffing and drumming that carries momentum rather than ending in fills which stop motion, Pulverazor seems like something that sounded like a good deal in the county holding cell at dawn but has translated into something competently done but moronic, sort of like the history of organized religion which proved itself to have a surface of infinite depth and core of none.

Fragmentum – Masters of Perplexity: if you wanted a mix of early Supuration and Prong you might enjoy this music based around heavy metal riffs, complex leads emphasizing different scales, and electronic percussion with samples and keyboards, which is relentlessly catchy and demonstrates the ability to fit songs together around a basic beat and a couple Iron Maiden influenced lead riffs and almost early Queensryche style power chord riffs, probably not for everyone and not musically ambitious but better as music than most of what slides across this desk.

Absentia Lunae – Marching Upon Forgotten Ashes: post-94 black metal is like the Black Eyed Peas song “Let’s Get Retarded” but taken literally as bands dance around the elephant in the room, which is how to compose music that conveys the listener past binary morality into a world of transcendental realism, and instead like someone hiding deep in the colon of Satan adorns itself with all kinds of half-integrated bits and pieces, resembling this highly symmetrical band that must be feeling very much like the citizens of democracy in how it moves from folk to raw ambient guitar noise back to simple droning guitar riffs, all without having any kind of unifying theme or direction, therefore always feeling like music you hear played from an upside down car as its owners bleed out on the streets from a one-car accident after fourteen wine coolers.

Trog – Of Vomit Reborn: this band make songs that hold together and most importantly are comprised solely of parts which relate to each other, and these develop in a circular structure with a couple deviations to disrupt theme, oppose it, and then return to theme, but too much reliance on heavy metal style bounce and punk-style three chord riffs that never form much of a shape makes this about as exciting as hacking into your garbage disposal by spamming it with transsexual midget porn from an iPhone in Beijing.

***

No one wants to admit it, but music is a form of neural programming:

Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.

Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintescence. Hence it arises that our imagination is so easily excited by music, and now seeks to give form to that invisible yet actively moved spirit world which speaks to us directly, and to clothe it with flesh and blood, i. e. to embody it in an analogous example. This is the origin of the song with words, and finally of the opera, the text of which should therefore never forsake that subordinate position in order to make itself the chief thing and the music the mere means of expressing it, which is a great misconception and a piece of utter perversity; for music always expresses only the quintescence of life and its events, and never these themselves, and therefore their differences do not always affect it. It is precisely this universality, which belongs exclusively to it, together with the greatest determinateness, that gives music the high worth which it has as the panacea for all our woes. Thus if music is too closely united to words, and tries to form itself according to the events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own.

Wagner library

Where words and visual images describe the nerve impulses that code for an experience, music duplicates the nerve impulses directly and not our sentiments or cogitation about them, therefore gets right to the core of what it is like to be in that situation. Note that Schopenhauer anticipated Pantera, where the vocal track must “forsake that subordinate position in order to make itself the chief thing” to keep the frat-boys and Walmart stockers nodding along with the hypnotically moronic music.

Maybe you can see the importance of music and in having good music when we reframe it in terms of control, pointing out that like many powerful things, music will be used to control your mind because those in power are never really in power and therefore must manipulate you like a herd of cattle or rodents:

Studies have shown that about 30% of consumers claim to care about brand ethics but a mere 3% translate their words into action. A similar number claim to care about green consumption but only 5% purchase green products.

“This attitude gap is a serious marketing problem because any exaggeration of consumers’ ethical concerns can distort the market, leading to oversupply. Our research suggests one way to bridge that gap is to use advertising music more creatively — specifically, to use up-tempo, major-mode music,” said Dr Haiming Hang of the University’s School of Management.

They know green products are horseshit. We know they know the green products are horseshit. They keep promoting them because we cannot attack green products — that is just like kicking a baby in the face with steel-toed Doc Martens! — and no one wants to actually fix ecocide by keeping half or more of Earth untouched for nature, so people would rather buy a noodlepenis Prius and drive it around while feeling superior to others who are actually, you know, enjoying life.

In my view the greatest hate for the Baby Boomers came from their political brainwashing. They would permit any kind of licentious behavior as long as it served the Revolution, Utopia, and Equality (RUE) but as soon as it was for the joy of life itself, or as part of a sane and normal existence, they began to hate it. People who were not enslaved to political dogma were viewed as suspect, and even to this day they would rather be ideologically correct than happy.

But if they can make you choke down the propaganda in the movies, then accept the moronic news articles, and finally have your friends brainwash you like stepping on an Italian’s enema bag by constantly chattering and bragging about their new green products, they can pop you into a store and play some power metal (very major key, whole tone) and then you will purchase the dogma hook, line, and sinker.

The bigger point is, if the goodthinkers have finally caught on to this, how have they been selling stuff for years? Listen to the music in the grocery store next time you go. They really blast powerful, positive music at you so that you feel empowered by buying tons of crap that exists in a cycle between you, the store, and the landfill. What about the music in movies, or the patriotic songs that go along with crime shows? Or even the sad maudlin whine of emo, indie, and post-metal?

Interestingly, music not only reflects nerve impulses, but those code for what cultures find valuable, making music every bit as much a “language” as anything else with emotional quanta. As researchers found, happy and sad in music change with the culture, meaning that music is cultural code:

Co-author Dr. Andrew Milne, Senior Research Fellow in Music Cognition and Computation with the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development says differing emotional perception of music, commonly thought to be a universal response to major and minor keys, may be due to familiarity and conditioning within western culture.

“Music is such a vital part of most cultures and features heavily in our everyday lives. It underscores milestone moments such as celebratory events like birthdays and weddings, while at somber events like funerals music has the power to move us, evoke memories or bring us to tears,” said Dr. Milne.

Culture is biological and genetic. Our coded language is written into our bodies. It also reflects what we are able to do. A rising society probably hears music differently than a failing one. A low IQ society like California probably hears music differently than a practical, realistic, and high-IQ society like the Anglo-Germanic parts of Texas. A society that depends on the rain may hear the sad pattering notes of a minor key as joy, knowing the crops will grow, or maybe hear Satan in the simple and dominating whole scale.

The organization of sound into music, reflecting a structure and discipline to our nerves, reflects the need for a need for order to calm our minds without instilling the false calm brought on by denial, dogma, and dualism:

Opera and classical music have meaningful, epic sounds and maybe that’s a kind of like reflection on music and certain songs.

I don’t like when bands just put out records to go back on tour. I don’t want to sound too artsy, but it should be a piece of art — it should be a statement that should be something that reflects your emotion that you have when you wrote the song.

What is art, poetry, or adventure? They fuse ambiguity and metaphor to make a life-like experience with enough greater intensity and streamlined simplification that it becomes memorable, like a symbol but instead of being a conclusion, it is the living struggle within the core of any experience. You do not get an easily packaged conclusion to make into your own thinking, like with dogma or religion; you get instead a series of questions, balances, and anticipated results.

When a piece of writing, music, imagery, or film attempts to tell you a conclusion to your thinking, what you have is propaganda. A great deal of music is self-referential propaganda, namely that it promotes itself, including all those albums about how cool it is to be in a rock band or living as a hip rapper. Some of it exists to promote a lifestyle, and some very subtly promotes products, using them as part of a lifestyle rant while accepting checks on the downlow like an Insta influencer.

Sometimes, the pure sonic power of the sound serves as a weapon for obscuring and drowning out the communication that is threatening, much like how teenagers turn up the stereo or headphones in order to block out the sounds of their drunk parents arguing or their uncle on meth raping them:

Photos from the battlefield confirm that the Russians mainly use Motorola, Kenwood and Baofeng radios. Walkie-talkies are too simple to maintain the necessary system of immediate voice communication about the whereabouts of the enemy and data exchange with neighboring units.

This makes it easier for the Ukrainian military to intercept their conversations. It even happened that the Ukrainian army drowned out the communication of the aggressor’s troops, broadcasting heavy metal music on the same frequencies.

Compare this to how the bloated first world, which unlike the third world bases social worth of the individual upon the good feelings it engenders in others in an attempt to control nature and remain in denial, decides to deluge communications that threaten it, namely with a tsunami of guilt:

She thinks social networks should “filter [comments] so it’s not just people being able to say something really horrible, that’s not even constructive criticism, to an artist.” She’s seen this blowback affect other musicians: “I’ll watch a really young artist livestream [while] crying,” she says, “and they’re saying that people are telling them really horrible things on the platform, and I’m like, ‘How do we make it so it’s not like this?’”

Only in a dying society are censorship, neutering, and emotional looping viewed as positive things. We all know that control only leads to more control. Suppress an “offensive” statement today, and soon you must separate all statements into one of two camps, offensive or inoffensive. When this control is phrased as defense of helpless victims, you know that guilt is being used to control you, and metal is an anti-guilt agent.

That gives it a power that appeals to those who also want to control, and they take over with MaaS as soon as the legends have faded away. Speaking of which, recently another tryhard funderground icon got busted for child pron:

Phillip Matthew Kusabs appeared at the North Shore District Court on Thursday after earlier admitting four charges of sharing child sexual abuse material and five representative charges of possessing similar videos and images.

Graphic descriptions of the videos were included in court documents. They involve children, as young as five or six years old, being sexually abused by men.

When police searched his phone, they found hundreds of photos and videos of children being sexually abused.

According to an RNZ article from 2014, Kusabs formed the black metal band Vassafor in the 1990s.

We care not for morality here at DMU; our only morality is realism and improvement of quality. Pedophilia like hard drug addiction, promiscuity, criminal behavior, and other defects of the human mind reveals a preference for insanity instead of realism. That makes it dysfunctional, like choosing to be both a retard and a three-hole crack whore, so it makes us wonder why so many of the nü-black bands are associated with poor mental health.

To my mind, the most likely answer is the duality of what they do. On one hand, they want to be cool and join a hip outsider occult anti-modern genre, but on the other hand, they know that their music is crap and therefore, that they are dishonest. At some point, this cognitive dissonance gets resolved by them rationalizing to themselves that making crap music is the best way to be black metal, and so they become hostile toward good music and embrace low-quality music.

Underground metal attempted to provoke christianity and the new old order into proving how worthless it was by forcing it to clutch pearls over “racism,” anti-Christianity, human rights, and natural selection just as the attempts to suppress these began failing. They saw that humans always seek safety, and in safety they become bigoted against reality, which leads to social decay whether done by a tyrant or the tyranny of the herd and its trends. That is too much for most who just want an excuse to listen to bad music and feel “cool.”

In other news of failing clown world, Peddit banned Metallica lyrics for interfering with the steady diet of feelgood copium, Soylent, jailbait pron, sex work, shoplifting fandom, and stans for lost microniche atomcelebrity causes that flicker up for their fifteen minutes of fame and then return to the Eternal Landfill of irrelevance:

A Reddit user was permanently banned for mentioning the title of an album by the metal band Metallica called Kill ‘Em All.

Reddit cited its rules against threatening violence.

The account was banned because of a comment in a post in the Megadeth subreddit. The post asked for opinions on the “Best Debut Album of the Big 4.” The banned account commented: “Kill ‘Em All was definitely what originally brought many people into the metal community. I’d say, from an objective standpoint, it would have to be Kill ‘Em All.”

Morons, we are surrounded by morons. Then again, for us to truly be equal, we must all become raving idiots.

***

Naked City – Leng t’Che:

Sounds like a cross between Pelican and Winter but with basic rock riffs that do not go anywhere, played slowly while drums distract with tribal monkey noises and feedback washes over everything, sort of like Sunn o)) on an oldies tour covering the best of englebert humperdinck for an avantgarde audience eating earthworm flambe off of artisanal quinoa biscuits salted with the tears of christ and the January 6th defendants. the point of this band is that if they bore you enough any zoo noises, guitar feedback, or screaming seems to intensify the music since you are already bored, and so you keep listening until the end and then conclude you liked it because otherwise what are you doing with your life son?

Hyperborea – Umbra: did you perhaps find yourself missing a Pantera album that mixed in some Immolation, Gorguts, and Cadaver so that it could claim to be death metal while in fact staying very much in the heavy metal world for its major parts? Then this album will still bore you because like most bad music it has no nuance to its path between two points, only an almost moral absolute duality of method, causing it to veer around in the randomness before doing the obvious and making it doubly obvious by getting intensity high to the point of making intensity itself a background hum, sort of like the threat of nuclear war or the Taco Bell and Modelo Especial you consumed last night that is now rumbling around in your gut while you stand cold sweating in a public place, hoping the bathroom is out of earshot of the femboys and catgirls you would otherwise be pursuing.

Clayshaper – Vampiric: like most bands these days, there is nothing to dislike here if you do not mind a fusion of post-metal and Depressive Suicidal Black Metal with nods from the lite progressive rock favored by millennials (they are called this because most of them should be buried in diabetic pig feces until the next millennium) but there is also nothing in the whole experience to like, just droning sonic wallpaper that reflects self-help positivity and navel-gazing alcoholic novel despair in contradictory but boring impulses. I suggest this artist forget about shaping clay and focus on making poo sculptures because that is the level of culture of this artifact of failing modern society.

Britof – Ruins: someone channeled Metallica covering Nirvana and ended up with this whiny but mostly predictable slab of sonic excretion which like most things in the heat-death of modernity neither strikes a wrong note nor a sequence of right ones, sounding more like 1970s lounge music updated for a new generation with its tendency to drone on in plaintive but self-righteous dirges of complaint and impotence which project an emotional response like watching the clock in a staff meeting at 4:31 PM on a Friday while hoping that the hangover that you hoped would vanish at noon will not manifest itself as profound vomiting of green Taco Bell remnants just as the staff roster is finalized.

Worldwide Panic – I Tried: the synthesis of metal with mainstream pop completed itself with this release of glam metal mixed with grunge and k-pop which features lots of artistically indeterminate but catchy songs with familiar riffs going over sing-song vocals in verse-chorus loops with the indie-electro habit of repeating the verse more slowly before the end, touched up by occasional guitar flourishes which sound like the lobby of Guitar Center just got a new infusion of donuts and AZT causing the inhabitants to momentarily rock out before the methadone coma kicked in and they all collapsed in a sweaty heap on the floor.

Nunslaughter/Blood – Split: following the roots of its renown, Nunslaughter offers up a cornucopia of interesting riffs but goes South American in its approach, mixing in technique from older heavy metal and speed metal with death metal riffs, keeping too much emphasis on vocals as a way of driving the song forward and as a result, losing the ability to make the riffs talk to each other even though they work together and songs are distinct; Blood, on the other hand, comes out raging with grindcore that carefully hides a technical edge but seems determined to try to mix in a little Metallica here and there, making each of these halves both representative of these bands and showing a more socially-acceptable direction.

Grand Belial’s Key – Kohanic Chambers: inevitably this band must be compared to Gridlink, basically a melodic metal band that likes massive internal contrast and textural complexity, but Grand Belial’s Key rarely complete songs, instead launching forth some promising melodic ideas that like the songs of Satyricon step off from their promise and fill in with obvious reactions to the direction already established, giving them both a wandering and blockheadedly obvious musical sense; while GBK have improved a great deal for this album, it still goes nowhere because the band is too infused with a message it wants to hammer out to allow internal doubt, ambiguity, mystery, mysticism, and conflict to make a multifaceted listening experience which leaves an impression of what is desired, making this listening experience similar to attending a corporate seminar or listening to NPR while driving through the ruins of America.

Disma – Earthendium: keeping with their approach of remaining suspended between old Incantation and Swedish death metal, Disma make another offering of primitive riffs which build through layers of melodic emphasis and internal contradiction into cavernous architectures of atmosphere based in faint melody rising against the inevitably churn of basic patterns emphasizing the raw sonic power of diminishing melodies gliding into raw chromatic charges, creating an old school death metal listening experience that attempts to work within the language of the genre to build a newer mood, perhaps one of doom-death witnessing the unintended arising of new growth within its gnarled appendages and twisted visage.

***

For kicks, visit our MP3 guide to classic death metal which provides a useful contrast to all the spiritless, mechanical, and soppily sentimental stuff creeping out of death metal these days. When the audience that can tell good from crap leaves, the crap wins out because it is easier to produce.

…cross turns upside down…
…stained glass windows black…
…blood flows from the altar…
…heavens turn to mud…

Until next time, when we share the blood of the innocent — no one is really innocent — in a chalice made from the skulls of those guilty of reality-denial and egoism.

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47 thoughts on “Sadistic Metal Reviews: Metal as a Service (Mucho, Mucho MaaS)”

  1. molestor says:

    Woah, that was like 4 posts rolled into 1. Some of those were hilarious.

    Think I’ll go back to that first Seance album after hearing “Necronomicon” in your list. Very cool track.

  2. gosta says:

    so the torture killer record, you like it?

    1. I LOVE FECES

      — Space Moose

      1. Disease says:

        On a side note, the youtube embed is from the previous album (Phobia).
        And no, the new EP is tired churning of the same stale dough.
        The band members other outings are much better, IE. Nerlich.

        1. T Malm says:

          you mean e.g. you bung pipe

          Nerlich is okay I guess

  3. Cherish Sue Gafford says:

    Your mention of Pedo-Phil Kusabs is enough to make anyone want to do bad things to anyone associated with that obese animal. His so-called punishment hasn’t even started. If you’re obsessed with music and entertainment, sometimes reality is forced upon you. Phil couldn’t deal with reality, now reality deals with him. Isn’t there a saying about the ones who laugh last. Blasphemy, Diocletian…get ready, reality is coming.
    Poor Phil’s daughters, something tells me that in the future, little reminders of who Daddy is are coming.
    He wanted Hell now he gets it. Game on motherfucker.

    1. It seems like a lot of celebrities are getting busted lately, even niche micro-celebs like metalheads. My guess is that pedophilia has finally hit insane levels, in parallel with transsexualism and e-thottery, forcing even brain-dead grubmint to act.

  4. Blinding Rays says:

    I agree that Metal hit it’s peak in the 90’s, but also Rock, Electronic and even Rap music. Why was the 90’s the last gasp of underground and mainstream music? I remembering noticing this around 1997, Black Metal and Death Metal was in a dismal state, compared to the glory of just 4-5 years prior. Post 2000 has been just a wasteland for music, film and even video games. Everything declined pretty rapidly.

    1. My guess: the industry became really profitable in 1996, which means there was lead-up to that, which means that music became all business. Underground metal got in a brief niche when people could still believe in something, where now people either listen to classical or just put whatever comes on Spotify through their ears and figure it’s all the same.

    2. Gaydolf Shitler says:

      One word: egalitarianism.

      1. There is also the decline of America. Clinton validated the 1960s and replaced WASPs with the diversity, mostly whitish diversity like Southern, Eastern, Irish, and Mediterranean Europeans, fulfilling the Lincoln vision of the 1860s. They all ran political machines, these grifters, knowing that they could take low-status voters like diversity and turn them into the basis of a power structure.

  5. Attendorn says:

    So, in this view, music is downscaled to mimic an impulse before it’s been formulated into an idea, while other arts are more of the pre-chewed kind.

    In my experience, however, the kind of bare structure found in music is just as predominant in some other arts. Visual imagery, for example, is only as good as its composition and how well it resembles an experience as an evolving set of emotions inside the subject (taking us on an enigmatic journey in our minds), rather than how prettily it manages to signal a preconceived “message” formed by various objects or events depicted (or by just being “pretty” or “beautiful”).

    Now, I may have entirely misinterpreted what you wrote, so I’d appreciate any feedback on this topic. :)

      1. Hey man, you can’t speaka da wop in here. Youse gotta go out in the alley, y’hear?

      2. T Malm says:

        FREE MY NEGRO

    1. YOU CANNOT SEPARATE THE 'GOOD' PARTS OF METAL FROM THE 'BAD' PARTS says:

      I don’t think you missed anything. Brett likes landscapes.

      Everyone knows that music is somehow more crucial than other forms of artistic expression. Can you imagine a world without it? But most people would never miss the Gemaldegalerie.

      1. pH 3000 says:

        “I don’t think you missed anything. Brett likes landscapes.”

        How the hell is that relevant?

        “Everyone knows”, “more crucial”, “most people”

        Got your argumentation skills from goddamn preschool?

        1. Anonymous Sassy Internet Person says:

          Brett isn’t interested in Picasso or Schiele. He likes paintings that demonstrate objective understanding and superior technique. So while I don’t think Attendon is wrong, I also don’t think the assertion that paintings and music are necessarily similar by virtue of their focus on creating emotion in the observer, is relevant. I think Brett values serenity in paintings. Which I guess could be construed as an emotion but I don’t think it’s what Attendon has in mind. In any case serene music will do more for the vast majority of people than a serene painting.

          So what I’m saying is that there’s a difference in taste happening. Which is more important than any kind of analysis, even for people who are capable of it. And that quality extends to music in general as it compares to other forms of art. People value music because it has meaning for them. A far smaller number of people value paintings, because they don’t have the immediacy and universality of music. Music just hits harder. It’s not rocket science. Look around you.

          1. It’s an interesting question. I think in a painting I like a naturalistic balance, something that shows what makes life so interesting and varied but consistent. Then again, I tend to prefer books. Music just hits harder because it shows up within you and then you have to react to the sensation of power in the world, struggling to find a place for your ego in this more intense world. One is overwhelmed by music because it has gotten past the gates of the ego. Visual stuff is too easily turned into symbolism, talisman, or other attempts to limit the world.

            1. Attendorn says:

              Music just hits harder because it shows up within you

              Does hearing then have greater access to the world than does sight?

              1. That which directly emulates nerve impulses will be a more eternal and essential experience, yes; the painting is more mired in time and space and individual recollections of events. Music touches something of our being. I prefer books to movies because there my imagination and recollections are joined, creativity and analysis coming together, but those too are more removed from the raw nerve impulses conveyed by music.

                1. Attendorn says:

                  But, in terms of directness, how does the perception of hearing a note from a French horn differ from seeing a green brush stroke?

                  1. If a painting does not represent literal reality, it may have psychological effects similar to those of music, but it is still processed through the eyes in the context of other shapes.

                    1. Attendorn says:

                      Isn’t that (processing a painting) analogous to how music is processed in the context of its structure? Or do you mean that the shapes outside the frame of a painting interfere with the structure found in said painting?

          2. pH 3000 says:

            The imagery of e.g. advertisement hits people pretty damn hard, immediately and universally. It’s not like the Walmarts only use music to make people buy stuff. Look. Around. You.

            1. boring and hostile says:

              I never said it doesn’t. But I did say that music hits harder. And the conversation has been more concerned with the impact of a given form in the context of what is distinguished as art as opposed to advertising for instance. Really bothers me that you would try to expand the scope of the conversation like that. It’s also kind of obnoxious that you communicate like you’re PMSing.

              Yes dear I said look around you because I think it’s obvious what I’m pointing out, although it’s also because of your bitchy reply to my perfectly mild initial statement. I’m not expecting a medal here. Would you rather watch Wal Mart commercials or listen to your favorite songs?

              1. That is the doom-grind album we have all been waiting for: a sonic representation of the nerve impulse experience of shopping at Walmart.

                1. Complimentary oil change says:

                  Depends. Did you steal absolutely everything you could?

                  1. No, I only steal from Ikea and Costco.

      2. Mostly because art has been unmitigated horseshit for a couple centuries now. Burn!

    2. Music parallels thoughts which (in the Germanic Idealist paradigm) also parallel Platonic forms in energy and matter. Composition in visual imagery may be important, but ultimately it is symbolic, where music is not at least until you get to lyrics. For example, if you could convey the sensation of fisting Jesus Christ directly, it is more immersive than showing the fisting, describing the fisting, or even portraying it in symbol form because all of those are outside of the perspective of the fister. With music, you feel yourself separating the puckered hole of the half-Arab Christ, smell the musty scent of punctured anus, then sense your knuckles sliding deep into a warm but tense digestive tract. Even movies, which like our dreams are visual imagery, and language, which mimics the sounds of the structures of events, cannot compare with this direct transmission of fist-raping the ass of the bastard Jesus Christ (and the bits of half-digested olive under your fingernails).

      1. Attendorn says:

        Composition in visual imagery may be important, but ultimately it is symbolic, where music is not at least until you get to lyrics. For example, if you could convey the sensation of fisting Jesus Christ directly, it is more immersive than showing the fisting, describing the fisting, or even portraying it in symbol form because all of those are outside of the perspective of the fister.

        But all of those aspects (symbolic, showing, describing) are the surface traits of an image. They are not unimportant, but relate to sensations as matter “itself” does to form.

        With music, you feel yourself separating the puckered hole of the half-Arab Christ, smell the musty scent of punctured anus, then sense your knuckles sliding deep into a warm but tense digestive tract.

        That’s just about exactly what I was trying to say about visual art in the second paragraph of my previous comment (although in less stimulating language).

        Visual art transports us beyond the literal, allows our minds to align with a structure and lets our emotions wander through the complex weave of dynamic components.

        Of course, 99.99999 % of contemporary visual artists are useless in this respect, making me wonder whether they’ve completely misunderstood their craft. They make stuff that’s attractive, impressive and full of useless symbols or they hide their empty souls in extreme minimalism as though they think they’ll never be exposed.

        1. I am skeptical about visual art. It shows us a scene and may invite us to explore it with our imagination, but too often becomes a substitute for imagination. Surface replaces cause/structure, in other words. This is why it is so easy for most visual artists to be decorators as you say.

          1. Attendorn says:

            Full disclosure: my eye is better than my ear at reading structure. That’s why it’s so frustrating to read Schopenhauer’s theory on music and then see him make it more or less exclusive to music, when it so accurately describes my experience of visual art. It’s like having an insightful musician describe Burzum as noise only for the sake of noise.

            1. I do not think it is “art,” but I like the Rothko Chapel for this reason. It needs no words, symbolizes nothing, merely confers a vague sensation of a state of mind.

              1. Attendorn says:

                Rothko’s stuff doesn’t do much for me personally. Although his works open up to a journey (unlike contemporary art), there’s nothing there. Those paintings are their own kind of superficial, in my opinion.

                1. They are, which is why I refer to them as calming decoration. The Rothko Chapel was the work he was here to create. It is there to suffuse the mind with a sense of pleasant emptiness opening to possibility. It has no genius, nor depth. But as an interior decoration project infused with psychological study, it has some greatness.

      2. T Malm says:

        we know you prefer an impassioned musical expression evoking the fisting of the King of the Jews over a visual depiction of the same because you have small fists

        it’s alright man you’re among friends

        1. Who would want to see a visual depiction of the anal fisting of Jesus Christ? Sounds like a good way to get monkeypox.

          1. T Malm says:

            Christians probably and Paul Ledney

            1. He really just needs a femboy Christ love slave.

              1. Stretched, torn & excreted says:

                Theres enough of those on the intershits to last you a hundred lifetimes.

  6. Nerd desecrator says:

    You’re a nerd.

  7. Madriiax says:

    Weeping Birth’s second album, surprised you guys never talk about that one

  8. Mr. Boner says:

    hey. HEY. _Leng t’Che_ is awesome.
    It is not metal but it is awesome.
    Naked City RULES.

  9. Hagel says:

    “It liberated scalar structure to be modal.”

    What does this mean? All modes are scales, and most scales are modes (the only exceptions are things that only have the same interval with every step everywhere, like the whole tone scale or the chromatic scale).

    1. With modal structure, the piece does not have to stay in the same scale to sound right, but adopts modes where they are the right fit for the leitmotif or atmosphere at a particular moment in the piece. Chromaticism does the same thing but the greater use of accidentals often crushes the ability to develop melody, or at least, is that way often in practice.

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