Watain – Trident Wolf Eclipse (2018)

Grammy-award wining artist Watain has shamelessly assumed the mantle of “most embarrassing band masquerading as black metal” previously shared by Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth. Where the downfall of those two bands was an overdose of gothic and groove influences, Watain has managed to outdo both in both parody and bastardization of black metal with their previous album’s venture into country musical territory.  With a career built on celebrity guest spots from more capable underground metal musicians, necrophiliac 1st era Bathory Worship mixed with a second rate attempt to mimic Dissection’s concluding album, and a ridiculously cartoonist theatrical performance worthy of a Broadway musical, Watain’s legacy has been secured to forever be “the band that bent over farthest to inherit the phallus of commercialization the deepest” and has effectively decimated any hope of legitimacy the sub genre might have had in the post-90s.  With a brash new attestation in the form of Trident Wolf Apocalypse the truth could not possibly be more clear to any listener with knowledge of black and death metal: Watain are the biggest joke in all of black metal history.

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Glorious Times team produces Jill Funerus benefit show on October 17, 2013

jill_funerus_mcenteeAs you may have read on this site, recently Jill Funerus (bassist/vocalist for FUNERUS) who is also the wife of John McEntee from Incantation ran into a spate of health problems. In addition to battling neuropathy and diabetes, she suffered a heart attack and related kidney dysfunction, but has pulled through.

We congratulate her on having survived such an intense health challenge. However, neither she nor her husband have health insurance and thus, they’re facing some intense bills for the surgery, medicine and several days she spent at the hospital.

The metal community is banding together to help them. Through the hands of Brian Pattison, one-half of the Glorious Times team, a benefit show has been established with 100% of the profits going to Jill Funerus’ medical bills.

Jill Funerus Benefit
Thursday, October 17 at 7:00pm EDT
The Forvm in Buffalo, New York
4224 Maple Rd Buffalo, NY 14226
(716) 831-3271

If you can’t make the show, like many of us who are thousands of miles away, you can send money via paypal to info@funerus.com. If you are from a metal band or have something else you can donate for sale/raffle at the benefit, please message the Glorious Times team via glorioustimesdeathbook@gmail.com. See also the Facebook event listing.

List of bands supporting the Jill Funerus benefit:

  • Abnormality
  • Abolishment of flesh
  • Abysme
  • Autopsy
  • Barzakh
  • Bernd Backhaus
  • Black Bear Printing
  • Blood Coven
  • Brutality
  • Buried
  • Butchered Records
  • Cannibal Corpse
  • Cardiac Arrest
  • Capathian Funeral
  • Chuck “Patchmaster General” Parsons
  • Cianide
  • Circle of Dead Children
  • Dark Descent Records
  • Darkapathy
  • Deathcrawl
  • Deceased
  • Deformity
  • Demented Dream States
  • Dismemberment (OH)
  • Druid Lord
  • Embalmer
  • Emblazoned
  • Fleshbound Productions
  • Full Blown A.I.D.S.
  • Glorious Times
  • Grave Descent
  • Gravehill
  • Gutter Christ
  • HPGD
  • Horrormerch.com
  • HRA
  • Immolation
  • Impetigo
  • Insanity
  • Jaymz Delisle
  • Jeff Standish
  • Legacy of Death Productions
  • Liquified Guts
  • Low Road Revival
  • Lucertola
  • Malevolent Creation
  • Malignancy
  • Manticore
  • Master
  • Mat Romero
  • Mausoleum
  • Mike Browning (Incubus)
  • Misery Index
  • Music Matters
  • New Order Records
  • Nokturnel
  • Nokturnel Eclipse
  • Pathos Productions
  • Prime Evil
  • Radiation Sickness
  • Randy Kastner
  • Repulsion
  • Rottrevore
  • Sacrific
  • Sam Biles
  • Sathanas
  • Seplophile
  • Signature Riff
  • Soulless
  • Splatterreah
  • Stevo (Impetigo, Tombstones)
  • Tainted Entertainment
  • Vile Records
  • Visions of the Night
  • Wehrmacht

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Emperor reform to play shows with In the Nightside Eclipse lineup

emperor-in_the_nightside_eclipseNorwegian black metal band Emperor have announced that they will be participating in 2014’s Wacken heavy metal festival.

In addition, the band will have the participation of Bard Faust, the drummer notable for his role on the In the Nightside Eclipse album. Along with Ihsahn and Samoth, this concert will be a reunion of the core lineup that produced the band’s most notable release.

As of now, the band has announced no future plans beyond that point. Ihsahn strongly expressed his disinclination towards a future album, stating that the interests of the various members have diverged too great an extent. That is probably for the best, as the last Emperor album was far removed from black metal and suffered from stylistic confusion.

The earlier Emperor albums were epic, narrative tales featuring overt symphonic influences. The band formed a landscape of sound, in which melodies would crystallize before melting away underneath a crushing rhythm track that took the focus again. Stylistically, they presented a sense of solitude, through which allowed the listener to appreciate the beauty hidden around him. If the band can carry across that original spirit two decades later, they have the potential of inspiring a new generation with their music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpa5yR2r42I

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Album covers: In the Nightside Eclipse

emperor-in_the_nightside_eclipse

Inspired by Bosch, Dürer and Caspar David Friedrich, Kristian “Necrolord” Wåhlin has painted album covers for shiploads of underground bands since the early 90s (Therion and Dissection among others), but his most important and most striking contribution is probably the cover of Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse (1994).

altdorfer-battle_of_issusSome of its style and composition takes me back to Albrecht Altdorfer’s anachronistic oil painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529), but true to the bleak genre of black metal the cover of ItNE is practically monochrome, which is rather typical of Wåhlin’s paintings at large (as seen in his paintings for Sacramentum’s Far Away From the Sun and Dark Funeral’s The Secrets of the Black Arts).

Wåhlin nevertheless manages to capture much of the grandeur sought by Emperor in those days. He allows us to delve in a detailed landscape of rugged forests, cold mountains and an army of monsters seemingly popping out of the ground in a setting of strange angles and charmingly inconsistent perspectives. High above, emanating from a crack in the clouds, Death sweeps his scythe across the sky, resonating the lofty keyboard phrases in the music of this album. The whole scene is awash in the light of the moon, gazing at us like a gate to eternity (try to outstare it during the finale of Inno a Satana …). The incorporation of Death seems to have been a way of providing a sense of iconic continuation, referring back to Emperor’s début EP which depicted a section of Gustave Doré’s engraving Death on a Pale Horse (Revelation). (The use of old engravings – especially those of Doré – seems a favourite means of visual expression in the universe of Emperor.)

kupka_resistanceI always assumed that the otherworldly castle and the winding path leading to it were reminiscent of that of a certain bloodsucking count. This is probably no coincidence: have a look at the lyrics of the song Beyond the Great Vast Forest. Not only does it refer to Werner Herzog’s film Nosferatu (1979); parts of the story of the over-the-top film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – which was immensely popular around the time of ItNE’s inception – had also found its way into the lyrics, and the solitary structure of that film’s castle and its inspiration, František Kupka’s The Black Idol (1903), somewhat parallels the idea of the castle on display here.

Ultimately, the cover of In the Nightside Eclipse confirms the nature of its music as slightly cheesy yet chillingly sincere, a satisfying visual representation of one of the best albums of the genre.

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Get Thrashed! (2006)

After spending years analyzing political propaganda and bad philosophy, you might think that manipulation reveals itself like flatus in an elevator, but it does not. You get lulled in, doze off in your inner critical faculty, and then suddenly wake up screaming once the horror becomes too real.

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Sadistic Metal World: Sacred Words of Praise (Hail Satan)

Musicians today have barely a chance in Hell of creating underground metal because they do not understand the cause before the effect. The music was the effect; the cause was a chance in thinking (throughout human history, the sane adapt or change their thinking to match reality; the insane demand that reality adapt to them, making external changes in order to regulate their internal mental state).

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Trenchant Releases “Yellow Cross Orison” From Upcoming Commandoccult

After Emperor peaked with In The Nightside Eclipse, its side project Zyklon-B got more attention. Like Niden Div 187 and Impaled Nazarene, it offered the punk side of black metal over the heavy metal, soundtrack, ambient, medieval, industrial, and progressive influences, blasting out short songs aimed at disruption and encouraging violence.

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