Nocturnal Metal

Slayer showed us the prototypical underground metal band, fusing together melodic heavy metal (Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Judas Priest) and high-speed hardcore to make a new voice for metal. It kept the metal spirit entirely, and turned up the volume on that, but also gave the music the voice of desperation amid dystopian decay where everything is broken and wrong that made hardcore so apocalyptic.

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Malevolent Creation The Ten Commandments Re-Issued

Peer into the intense fury of three decades ago when Malevolent Creation unleashed their powerful fusion of speed metal and percussive death metal, The Ten Commandments (1991). Full of nice meaty riffs cleated to pounding double-bass drumming, this album explored the side of death metal that stayed closer to conventional metal.

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Napalm Death Announces Spring North American Tour

Grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, now playing a hybrid of death metal, grindcore, and indie rock as they have for the past two decades, launch their Spring North American Tour 2020 with tourmates Aborted (April 17-May 16), The Locust (April 9-April 15), Nastie Band (April 9-April 15), Tombs (April 24-May 16), and Wvrm (April 17-May 16) for select dates.

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Supuration The Cube: Death Metal’s Most Unique Album

It is commonly assumed that the most unique album in death metal is Nespithe and while there is a very strong case for such a claim, Supuration’s The Cube has a stronger claim to such a title. Demilich have a large number of failed imitators while Supuration have none at all. The first listen to Demilich immediately shows the band’s intentions and dizzying whirlwinds of ideas in elaborate riff mazes. Supuration sounds like a rock hybrid that borders on modern metal but with much depth and just as unique but requiring many more listens to dig past the highly accessible aesthetics. Here are a few tools that Supuration used to create the most unique album in Death metal.

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OPHTHALAMIA – A Journey in Darkness (Avantgarde Music, 1994)

While primarily known for his work with black metal/noise-pioneers Abruptum and assorted non-musical activities in the – at least locally – infamous “True Satanist Horde”, it is the strange entity of Ophthalamia that remains as Tony “IT” Särkkä’s (RIP 1972-2017) greatest artistic achievement. Ophthalamia’s debut album A Journey in Darkness stood out in the early 1990s black metal-environment with its anachronistic and all-around peculiar mode of expression. In rough terms, the music can be described as a blend of black-, doom-, and heavy metal with the conceptual and structural trappings of 1970s progressive rock.

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Ultimate Analysis : Bathory – Twilight of the Gods Part IV

Part IV: The Spiritual Significance of Struggle and the Mountain

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.”

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