As the music world tries to deal with the effect of the culmination of heavy metal in black metal, the genre that went furthest from “normie” music and the most into the ancient and futuristic both, some of these documentaries prove rather interesting.
4 CommentsTags: Black Metal, Enslaved
Iron Maiden just released a new single, “The Writing on the Wall.” This longstanding band, known like metal itself for spanning Left and Right with its anarcho-realism, now introduces a new theme: all that we thought was good, was bad, and “good” evil won, so it’s time to… burn it all down.
10 CommentsTags: iron maiden, NWOBHM
Monstrous Dutch war metal with tinges of traditional black metal band Kaeck have announced their new album, Het Zwarte Dictaat (The Black Command) and released a teaser showing off a couple riffs for you to try to play during the seventh lockdown.
11 Comments
When a genre fails, its heroes dies as martyrs, their glory never dimmed by the entropy of time in which mistakes must be made and meaning slowly erodes through too many individualistic interpretations, revealing the weaknesses of individuals. When a genre succeeds? It labors in the shadow of the past.
3 CommentsTags: exorcizphobia, Speed Metal
Exploring the New Wave of Sentimental Black Metal (NWSBM) pioneered by bands like Fourth Monarchy, Black Funeral, and Infamous, Grandeur mixes a bit of power metal consonance and whole scale positivity into the end of its long riffs and melancholic dirges, but works within the late black metal template.
No CommentsTags: Black Metal, grandeur
Why do humans form tribes? If you want to break away from the rest, and not allow them to assimilate you, you must go your own way and militantly, bigotedly, dogmatically, and aggressively keep the others out, or they will try to draw you back into their dysfunction so they feel better about it.
49 CommentsTags: pantera, Speed Metal
Showing influence from later Immolation blended with early thunderous Florida death metal, Flesh Pit attempts to reinvent a genre by going back to its roots and carrying forward instead of changing paths. This produces a highly listenable demo that balances the primitive with the cerebral.
1 CommentTags: death metal, flesh pit
On the surface, this band aspires to be the next Primordial or Windir, but underneath the skin, the melodies resemble more of what Summoning, old Enslaved, and Infamous did, which is to take a sensation of ancient harmony and bend it into war songs for a modern youth raised on pentatonics and minor keys.
No CommentsTags: oscenrad, Viking Metal
From the flood of nonsense going through the news feeds, a sign that speed metal has gone mainstream:
A woman in New Zealand, refusing to bring another Mackenzie or Jack into the world, has named her three kids “Metallica,” “Pantera,” and “Slayer.”
Farrier reached out to New Zealand’s Registrar-General to inquire as to whether “there are any restrictions naming babies after band names, or albums.” He was told that there aren’t, “as long as the word used is not generally considered to be offensive or does not resemble an official rank or title.” This may rule out naming a baby after one of your favorite grindcore acts, but it did allow Farrier to verify the fact that Baby Metallica’s middle name is also—we’re not kidding—“And Justice For All.”
These kids will either have the best or absolute worst time in school, depending primarily on whether ‘80s thrash is currently cool with the youth—and whether lil’ Metallica has to deal with terrible classmates like “Napster” and “Decent Snare Drum Mixing.”
After nu-metal introduced chunky monkey riffs and gargled horse semen vocals to mainstream audiences, the percussive fast strumming riffs of Metallica, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, and their derivates (Pantera) probably seem tame, as do the later Slayer albums built around bouncy riffs and plaintively angry vocals.
When even Alex Jones uses Metallica songs for his interstitial music, and nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s has overwhelmed a Western Civilization looking at the post-Clinton neo-Communist NWO disaster at the same time that people are seeking music from a mentally less muddled time, speed metal has become the archetype of all heavy metal, and therefore, has been easily assimilated by industry and mass culture.
Perhaps this explains why so many of the original death metal and black metal bands chose proudly to be underground, figuring that a few years of musical and artistic honesty would beat out becoming a careerist in a corrupt industry only to morph into Dad Rock as their fans aged into complacent suburban wage-serfdom.
6 CommentsTags: metallica, new zealand, pantera, slayer, Speed Metal
