We know the underground is dead. It has been dead for thirty years, and we have killed it, by accepting music that imitated the methods of the past without understanding of the why. And yet we soldier on, seeking the few exceptions.

We do so because the why pointed to something eternal: the need to embrace the parts of life that we fear and turn them into a source of power instead of moralizing/critiquing them like a neurotic apartment-dweller in an anonymous plastic city.

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Terrifier – Trample The Weak, Devour The Dead: paint-by-numbers 1980s backpack speed metal from this band keeps good forward momentum but cannot stop dropping into chant-grooves for the choruses, which basically kills the energy outside of this trope and forces dominance of the vocals, which are not bad but not interesting, and makes this feel more like a nostalgia piece in a tchotke shop than a jihad for perpetual conquest.

Helrune – Helrune: have we all become so pathetic that any songs which halfway hold together in the old style accelerate our pulses, keeping both the young trying to relive a past they will never know and the old drunk on nostalgia fooled for long enough that the brain turns off and fades into the sing-song vocals and shopping cart rhythms, with this paint-by-numbers revival that seems to be cloned from clones of the classic Darkthrone, Gorgoroth, and Ungod albums?

Ancient Malice – Accept the Vile Gifts of the Dead: this aims more for the early days between speed metal and death metal when the dominance of the rhythmic riff gave bands an edge, but the pounding out of a very similar patterns with a fast mid-paced pulse that has a tendency to turn the sound into a fungible flow in aggregate makes for a sensation of a loss of direction rather than finding a power in darkness.

Fermento – Acts of Blood: too much emphasis on vocals kills this album which works modern metal riff formations and black metal harmonies into rushing death metal, but never allows its riffs to develop form and converse with each other, so it resembles a shifting mood piece sort of like driving through Detroit in a pink jeep with a back seat full of Chihuahuas.

Rising Alma – Cracking the Moment: alternative metal with stoner doom riffs, post-punk rhythms, and indie rock vocals and song structures, this band are probably good at something but not something particularly relevant to people who want to escape the normal doom loop of pop trying to rock and ending up being sentimental, which leads to a sensation of being a normie buying sandals at Target.

Inner Shrine – Symphony of the Absolute Bulwark (Epic Version): can we just admit that symphonic metal is standard pop with more keyboards and occasional later Yes-style distorted bouncing riffs with slightly difficult time signatures, and because like this it is driven by female vocals, heads rapidly back into the same ghetto that most pop embraces?

Xoth – Exogalactic: take something like Fates Warning combined with Voivod, infuse it with contemporary technique, and you end up with this fusion of metalcore, deathgrind, and alternative metal that makes centerless music with a focus on clever but unrelated melodies and vocals that are expected to guide us like the voice over the bullhorn at struggle sessions.

Cronos Compulsion – Lawgiver: remember pornogrind? — it was a subset of deathgrind designed to hammer home Mortician style skull indenting riffs with catchy beats and incoherent vocals — this release may bring it to mind with its strobing, hypnotic and yet aimnless use of thudding passages of familiar intervals piled together with drum rushes and roaring vocals at half-time, creating something indistinguishable from every other B-level brutal death metal band since 3863 BCE.

An Autumn For Crippled Children – try not to destroy everything you love: the post-metal vibe here knits together with lots of 1980s gothic pop and attempts to make a My Bloody Valentine version of the same with distinctive songs, but the problem with this style is that like hip-hop it is basically sonic texture for background without internal development, so stays stranded in pop-land with first kisses, crushes, getting drunk on cooking wine, and failing the SAT.

Karlog Naar – Dark Metal: if you liked Master’s Hammer and later Therion, you might appreciate this epic 1970s heavy metal with keyboards and crooner vocal melodies, but mostly it seems like something that would be presented at one of those Harry Potter conventions where everyone shows up in costume and ends up chanting incantations on the roof until one of the tottering neurotics falls sweatily to the city below, leaving a massive impact crater.

Abigail Williams – A Void Within Existence: hard rock riffs given death metal textures at doom metal pace, this band probably delivers what Opeth and post-metal fans want, which is an atmosphere of mystery without anything particularly difficult to parse, and this makes it sort of like mac ‘n cheese, full of gooey fat but ultimately sort of bland.

Impious Throne – Suffering: this is typical avantgarde metal, namely lots of odd chording (or bending over the fret) with alternative rock riffs played with more accidentals, black metal highlights, and some basic stuff that is like Nirvana if done by a speed metal band, all driven by vocals which serve a role as rhythmic anchor but do not develop further, despite the band borrowing as much from Darkthrone and Satyricon as possible.

Trypanon – Through the Portal of Flesh to Achieve Divinity: this sounds a lot like a melodic take on Ratt but with more urgent drumming and lots of Swedish death metal style fills, but completely discoordinated from anything except the main rhythmic theme, leading to an album of familiar pieces in uptempo versions of familiar structures, which gives us utterly no reason to listen to it except for comfort after Stepdaddy visits our room at night reeking of beer.

Floating – Hesitating Lights: if you wanted pop punk with occasional Iron Maiden breaks and Slayer transitions, marred by post-metal broken rhythms and dissonant fills, you might imagine something like this band, but it provides proof that the exception strengthens the rule and oil on water only seem to mix at first, because eventually the drama ends and the pop punk riffs and indie-rock choruses come back, at which point, why bother with this incoherent pile floating in the bowl.

Tales of Destiny – Release Title: Ashes of Destiny: Judas Priest unleashed a turdfall on the world with Painkiller, a great album that inspired legions of imitators like this Queensrÿche and Metal Church infused knockoff which does nothing wrong but the parts do not add up to more than participation, at which point one wonders what we all did to be consigned to a world with power metal (named after a Pantera album they recorded at a proctology office).

Signs Of Algorithm – Sunchaser: ChatGPT, generate me a modern metal album with a power metal spirit and alternative metal choruses with hints of deathgrind and nü-metal in the riffs, then add a slight gothic flavor to the vocals and toss in random clean vocals and pignose reeeeing as appropriate, but make sure it expresses nothing but a vague sense of being lost in Hot Topic after those “bullshit” edibles finally kick in.

Sith’ari – Before The Dawn: after watching one movie about asteroids (Impact) the queue got submerged in hundreds of others, all of which were strikingly different in the surface and the same in the core, none of which had scenes that drove forward, more occupied a role necessary for an outline or checklist, leading to something like this mishmash of black metal and post-rock that radiates purposeless paint-huffing behind a public toilet.

Acerus – The Tertiary Rite: strong influence from Mercyful Fate and Judas Priest takes this album into traditional territory rather than the newer power metal neo-retro hybrid, enabling it to bring back the art of driving rhythmic riffs at a fast medium pace without fireworks distracting from the interplay of high vocals and guitars, with enough interesting fretwork and technically-precise riffing to keep interest even if this style leaves many of us wanting to crawl out a window.

Necromaniac – Sciomancy, Malediction & Rites Abominable: sounding like a mid-paced Paradise Lost emphasizing more of the death metal style, this band does great lead melodic riffs over surging basic power chord riffs that are not even particularly associated with the metal genre, but creates a good atmosphere despite suffering from too much emphasis on the vocal style which constrains songs to very basic development despite every element making for good listening.

Abraded – Ethereal Emanations from Cthonic Caries: before AI-written metal takes over, the bands honoring the past through too much devotion come forth, and this post-Hemdale project tackles a fusion of Terrorizer and Cryptopsy that like Hemdale makes songs faithful to format with variations on known riffs but its own style, however seems to rarely land the evocative mimesis of life and ambiguous challenges that the really big bands nail.

Deceased – March of the Cadavers – 40 Years of Death Metal From the Grave: listening to Deceased three decades after first hearing that EP that Relapse got into most of the metal stores, it comes across more as a hybrid between Seattle speed metal, Voivod, and adventurous heavy metal like WASP with more abundant energy but sometimes disorganized development, a good fun listen that gets more organized and less intricate over the years.

DARG – World Axis Turns As The Body Around The Spine: ritual drone music shaped around the process of realizing the inner self from intuition and the patterns of external reality, this strongly occult-referencing release showcases a fusion between numerology and feedback pulses synchronizing brain state to alienation from social indoctrination, producing a state of post-demoralization moral absence in the listener.

Battle Beast – Steelbound: this must have been a music industry wet dream, a fusion of techno and Japanese pop with heavy metal and punk to make a perfect pop product, arguably better than most because of its higher instrumental activity, but still the same basic stuff you find in video game soundtracks with extra bounding Swedish-style techno, maybe the revenge of Avicii.

Cardinal Sin – Spiteful Intents: ex-Dissection guitarist comes out with a heavy metal album that uses black metal vocals and ends up sounding a lot like later Sacramentum, making urgent forays into the world of speed metal without getting to the intense points of focus that Dissection achieved, making us feel like we are spectators at an Accept show where the vocalist has a sore throat.

Drofnosura – Ritual of Split Tongues: more tantrum music that focuses on the vocals with slow hardcore in the background and lots of noise, but no actual building of atmosphere except what the basics of amplification do for them, which converts underground metal from a mind-expander into a mind-limiter that pounds down excitement for life with an obligation toward desultory fatalism and aggressive egotism.

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WORLD FUCKING NEWS

Looks like dying Chinese vassal Russia wants to ban Satanists who enjoy heavy metal:

Russian heavy metal and goth music fans in Russia could face prison after Vladimir Putin banned “satanists”.

The Kremlin’s top court has outlawed the “international satanism movement” as an extremist and terrorist group – despite no such group existing.

The ruling from the Russian Supreme Court means that anyone who is alleged to be a member could face up to eight years in prison.

[Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill] added that Russian soldiers in Ukraine were fighting for values directly opposed to Satanic beliefs.

Of course, this site is banned in Russia for blasphemy, Satanism, Luciferianism, paganism, and death metal, of course. Since we are neither Right nor Left but realist, both Communists and Christians hate us, which is good because both groups must be holocausted for humanity to evolve further.

Every empire looks for a symbol — both talisman and scapegoat — to use to unify its population. For the Soviets it was class warfare, for the Nazis anti-materialism, for the USA muh rugged individualism, and for modern Russia, it is slavish adhesion to the primitive mysticism of Orthodox Catholicism.

That religion, unlike the Protestants which fixed up much of the half-Arab nuttiness in Christianity, is closer to banging bones together while chanting for the rain god than most people would like to admit. Russia has adopted it because it killed off everyone but the moronic peasants and needs an easy fiction to control them.

Speaking of control, it seems that proto-humans ate each other in Spain, which now uses a mixed economic system to achieve the same result:

The decapitated remains of an infant discovered at the Gran Dolina archaeological site in Burgos, Spain, may be the earliest evidence of cannibalism in Europe.

The child’s vertebra, dated to 850,000 years ago, clearly shows cut marks consistent with intentional decapitation, hinting the ancient human was cannibalised, researchers from the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution, or IPHES, say.

The latest findings point to a systematic process of human meat consumption by Homo antecessor who may have been ancestors of Homo heidelbergensis, who in turn gave rise to the Neanderthals, researchers say.

Of course, there are health benefits to cannibalism that modern people may have missed:

A tribe in Papua New Guinea has developed a gene that’s resistant to degenerative brain diseases – after years of eating their dead.

Women and children of the tribe, called the Fore, used to eat their deceased relatives’ brains at funerals as a sign of respect. Eating brains left members of the tribe regularly afflicted with a mad cow-like disease called kuru. At the epidemic’s peak during the 1950s, at which point the tradition of eating their dead was banned, the disease claimed 2% of the population per year.

But now, a new study by Nature Publishing Group observes that those years of cannibalism led the Fore to develop a gene that’s resistant to prions, the kuru-causing proteins that rip through its victims’ brains. They’re linked to other degenerative illnesses such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

As it turns out, popular culture has been in love with consuming each other for some time:

Turns out, cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books, and on television and film screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that that time is now.

There is “Yellowjackets,” a Showtime series about a high school women’s soccer team stranded in the woods for a few months too many, which premiered in November. The film “Fresh,” released on Hulu in March, involves an underground human meat trade for the rich.

“Lapvona,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel published in June, portrays cannibalism in a medieval village overcome by plague and drought. Agustina Bazterrica’s book “Tender Is the Flesh,” released in English in 2020 and in Spanish in 2017, imagines a future society that farms humans like cattle. Also out in 2017, “Raw,” a film by the director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau, tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat escalates after consuming raw offal.

If any of this stuff were not the Netflix standard of propaganda, it might be interesting. Speaking of thwarting the narrative, even influencers have figured out that Austin is a Leftist shithole:

‘It’s a horrible city without a soul,’ he told fellow comedian Whitney Cummings when describing his stint in Austin.

‘It’s not the live music capital of America. It’s three heroin addicts busking with guitars. There’s zero talent here in any capacity,’ he raged.

‘There’s three restaurants that are good and I’ve been to all of them twice.’

All the good restaurants are in Houston. Dallas restaurants have better table service however. Austin is a town run by carnies, for carnies, because everyone there is either directly or indirectly dependent on the government. It makes the libertarian case for microkernel government with ease.

Moving on to happier things, it turns out that music stimulates imagination in the sense that Varg wrote about decades ago:

Studies have found 77% of music listeners online, 73% of participants in the lab, and 83% of concert-goers report experiences of mental imagery during music listening.

Previous research has also found that what people imagine while listening to music often forms elaborate imagined stories. These share greater similarity among listeners with a shared cultural background.

One topic stood out: social interaction. Not only was it the predominant topic in participants’ reports of what they imagined, but it was also much stronger while listening to music compared to silence.

It also helps young people grow up to learn music since it gives people a realistic course of study which they can share with others:

The study identified three core well-being outcomes of music learning: individual, social and educational. On an individual level, students reported improvements in self-confidence, emotional regulation and personal fulfillment.

Dr. Goopy found that music helped students build relationships, develop communication skills and foster a sense of belonging, as well as enhance engagement and motivation to learn.

The big news of course was the loss of Ozzy Osbourne. It shocked all of us mainly because he seemed indestructible to the point that he might live forever.

However, it was myocarditis that finally brought him down. Do not trust the corporate big pharma vaccines!

Osbourne, who passed away on July 22 at the age of 76 — just weeks after his last concert — died from “acute myocardial infarction” and “out of hospital cardiac arrest,” according to the Black Sabbath legend’s death certificate obtained by The Sun.

The document also lists coronary artery disease and Parkinson’s disease with autonomic dysfunction as “joint causes” of the rocker’s death.

Ozzy generated what is perhaps the most epigrammatic epitaph of all time, a paean to the man and his larger-than-life persona written in the form of a paradox:

Having often admitted that his drugs and drinking should have killed him decades before, Osbourne might have finally succumbed to his extreme lifestyle. But he never was an ordinary man.

We should all be so lucky to have these things written on our graves. For historical context, check out some of the dirt on Sharon Obsbourne’s dad Don Arden:

His story begins in Manchester, England in January 1926. Born into a Jewish family, his original name was Harry Levy. [H]e showed interest in the entertainment business at his early age as he started performing as a singer at 13, and eventually becoming a stand-up comedian. In 1944 he changed his name to a more powerful sounding one – Don Arden.

Back in the pre-Led Zeppelin days when Page and Keith Moon were forming their own band, Small Faces’ singer Steve Marriott caught their attention and they considered hiring him. After hearing this, Arden sent a brief but effective message: “How would you like to play in a band with broken fingers?” They decided to look for another singer.

Must have been some tense family dinners. Then again, most criminals are mostly bluff; if you blunt their first attack, they run away like the parasitic cowards and liars they are. The same is true of priests, unions, communists, and insurance salesmen.

Someone worked up an amazing analysis of the Black Sabbath fonts and their relation to pop culture and horror movies.

Maybe the practice of music kept Ozzy from declining into walking senility like the rest of the Boomer generation:

As people grow older, they often experience a gradual decline in both sensory and mental abilities. These changes in how we perceive and process information are frequently linked to increased brain activity and stronger connections between different areas of the brain. This heightened activity, known as functional connectivity (the statistical relationship in activity across brain regions), is believed to act as a form of compensation. Essentially, the brain recruits extra resources to help older adults perform cognitive tasks more effectively.

Certain lifestyle habits, such as learning music, achieving higher levels of education, or speaking more than one language, can build what scientists call cognitive and brain reserve. This refers to the mental and neurological assets developed over time, which may delay or soften the effects of aging on the brain.

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What went wrong in the metal underground? What went wrong in the postwar West? What went wrong in Rome?

Funny how these are the same question, depending on how far out you scroll the zoom: decay, entropy, or just humans giving in to the usual lazy thinking and emotionally easy answers instead of looking toward the future and accepting our responsibility to make choices that make it positive in the long term.

What went wrong with the underground? It became a job (means-over-ends) instead of a quest in itself (ends-over-means). At that point, the imitators could triumph because they did everything right despite having no direction outside of riffing on the past.

Back in the day, getting into metal required thinking your way past the herd. Now it’s another lifestyle. Metal is a job now. Socializing is a job. Everything is for popularity, politics, and profit. No one is doing something for the sake of the thing itself.

Bad metal is like Netflix: another film where nothing is technically wrong with it, but there is no reason to watch it, not just because of the USAID propaganda, but because it expresses nothing about life itself.

Good metal informs us about the intersection between our intuition and the patterns of reality such that we see the wisdom of existence and how to maximize it through action that is both creative and aggressive; most people fall on one side or the other but not the intersection.

Our local church once had an award-winning choir, the work of one woman who made it her jihad-crusade to separate the good singers from the bad, to get everyone to practice, and to choose pieces that were harder to perform and more musically interesting than the usual feelgood hymns.

As soon as her choir got recognized and won and award, The Committee moved in. They had questions and complaints. Not everyone could participate; maybe she should include the lonely, lost, sad, and poor. How could elite hymns reach the common man? The church had to justify the money it spent.

The next time the choir rolled out, it had a lot more people including some terrible singers, and they were singing the usual feelgood stuff. It took about two years for the community to realize what had happened, and they dropped this choir like a hot rock.

The best part: the choir now had such a bad reputation for this bait ‘n switch that no one would invite them anywhere ever again, no matter how good they were. That was fine with the church elders; after all, in their eyes, the choir was a social group not a musical group.

The same thing happened to metal. It became more important for everyone to have fifteen minutes of fame than for anyone to have fifteen years of fame in which they did something which rose above the masses and found its own direction, which is a prerequisite to a band being good.

(There is a small carve-out for clone bands: if you truly love Carcass so much that you dream of them and make tributes to them, this may be your style (at least for that era of your life) and you can make greatness in it without innovating style or technique at all.)

Metal seems on the surface like it is a reaction to Boomers saying “I don’t want to hear it,” but in my view read, it is something far older: a caveman staring out at a world of beauty and death and trying to figure out why the two are enmeshed with each other.

To have life, we must have death; to have death, there must be life. The world is comprised of cycles rather than finite, tangible, objective, absolute, and universal objects or states. It must avoid lock-up and be able to renew itself through internal conflict in order to exist.

Our human logic does not take into account time. An equation, repeated over time, needs to resist both randomness and repetition. Nature is aware of this but humans are not. The only way to resist randomness is to have a goal; the only way to resist repetition is internal conflict (“gene drift” + natural selection).

Metal takes the negatives in our mental state — fear of death, misfortune, disease, insignificance, loss — and turns them into positives, namely an acceptance of conflict and emptiness as part of the core of life which translates for us into a desire to make something great of this condition.

Fear becomes striving. Noise is shaped into beauty. Class warfare becomes social Darwinism. Fear of demons and scapegoats turns into acceptance of the occult and pagan. Paranoia about nationalism becomes love of culture. Fear of the absence of God or gods becomes nature mysticism.

Metal makes noise into comprehensible patterns and creates beauty out of it, just like it converts conflict into a desire for victory and transmutes mortality into a worship of both life and death. It translates our crass consumerist corporate society into a distraction from the process of life itself.

The poor Boomers are products of democracy, television, and jobs. They see only methods-over-goals thinking; their means-over-ends reasoning has them value obedience and compliance in order to avoid conflict. But conflict is required for intensity, and intensity required for enjoying life.

Modern citizens find themselves trapped in a scapegoat/talisman cycle. The symbol of good is the talisman; the scapegoat is necessary to explain why the symbol is not reality.

This translates, like the primitive half-Arabic superstition of “good” and “evil,” into a means-over-ends avoidance of what is feared and a herd rushing toward what is presumed to be its opposite. This flocking behavior means people push others aside to get away from the feared.

In human society, this means people fleeing from dangerous concepts like Darwinism, inequality, monism, hierarchy, mortality, and nihilism. Everyone jockeys for positions far removed from the things that bring about unpleasant mental states, like thinking of our own individual deaths.

Almost all human evils come about from this pacifism, which is actually individualist, which requires externalization or the idea of being controlled by outside forces like Satan and God. An individualist never blames himself for his illusions, especially when the scapegoat Azazel is close at hand!

Individualists in groups form Crowds. Their unifying idea: nothing is our fault, therefore something influenced us. That evil snake convinced us to eat the goddamn apple! This requires suspending all that we know of reality and replacing it with a cartoonish middle eastern fiction.

Enough people hated the middle east to invent a secular version, liberalism, and its conservative counterpart, civic nationalism, to mean that there is no single source. But the real source is simply people in groups. They flee what they fear and embrace illusions to do so. It is entropy abstracted.

This is what Dualism and Leftism do: in the name of individualism, they preaches safety from reality through the power of the Herd. However, this makes us all slaves to the Herd and its illusion, which keeps us from being realistic, in turn making us delusional and ecocidal.

“You wanna turn metal into everything else that’s boring and soulless nowadays. Metal is not an accepting community, keep it dangerous and exclusive.” Metal accepts the mystery in life, and the necessity of horror for the mystery to be actual, and therefore, for life to be interesting.

When a human endeavor — metal, Rome, modern democracies, a clique, a corporate culture — rejects the need for life to be meaningful in itself, it rejects the why behind our actions, and we rationalize our personal desires as being manifestations of the talisman.

For too long, metal has labored as a form of social acceptance. We need to get weird, progressive, futuristic, and feral again by laboring instead for a why and an understanding of the world which makes sense will all the data, not just the data that makes pleasant mental sensations.

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Tags: Black Metal, death metal, music reviews, sadistic metal reviews, smr