New Lord Wind: not metal per se, but metal in spirit, and it will be hard to beat this impressive CD that I’m already calling as “album of the year.”
- Lord Wind – Ales Stenar review with mp3 samples, etc.
Note new URL.
No CommentsDeath metal band saves cats from life on the street
Donald Tardy of death metal band Obituary and his wife, Heather, spend their spare time and most of their “spare” money picking up stray cats off the street and taking care of them. Their charity, the Metal Meowlisha, cares for 20 colonies of feral cats 365 days a year.
- Metal Meowlisha Facebook
- Article on the ‘Metal Meowlisha’ on Examiner.com
- Metal Meowlisha page on the Obituary site itself
Tags: death metal, metal meowlisha, obituary
Heavy Metal Genres
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Death Metal
Structuralist, atonal, modal metal that combines hardcore punk compositional technique with metal riffs and song structure. “Only death is real,” its guiding statement, pointed out that most of social mores and morals are illusory, and that we need to pay attention to the structure of reality instead. Its specialty is seeming random until you hear the piece as a whole.
Demigod – Dead Soul
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Black Metal
Lawless romanticism that praised isolation from the crowd, denial of individuality in the face of nature, natural selection, war and conflict, this genre used melody to construct atmospheric emotion. It guiding statement might well have been “the cut worm forgives the plough,” and its feral explosion left murders and mayhem across two continents.
Darkthrone – En As I Dype Skogen
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Speed Metal
Punk technique applied to neoclassical heavy metal with the use of muffled strumming made the most enigmatic heavy music ever, thanks to the use of the muted strum which produced a buffeting, battering sound. This was closest to heavy metal in composition but began the evolution of the phrasal riff as used in death metal.
Nuclear Assault – Nuclear War
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Thrash
Heavy metal riffs in punk song structures, with a combination of the epic view of history that metal favors with the punk anarchist criticism, resulting in one long questioning of the experiential value of modern society and its impact on people, especially teenage skateboarders (“thrashers,” hence the name). Many songs under thirty seconds; direct ancestor of grindcore.
Cryptic Slaughter – Nuclear Future
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Heavy Metal
Progressive rock, Celtic folk and heavy rock forged this genre from the ruins of pop music, designed to sound like a horror movie and shock flower children into reality. Its innovation was the moveable power chord riff, creating for the first time rock compositions made of phrases and not based around open chords to which vocals harmonize.
Candlemass – A Sorcerer’s Pledge
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Grindcore
Grindcore combined thrash, hardcore punk and death metal vocals to create a blur of intensity whose goal was to sound muddy, offtime, semi-coherent and like an ugly churning manifestation of the outsider underworld. Incorporating the organic post-political concepts of death metal, many grindcore bands expressed themselves through lyrics about gore, death and other limits to human control.
Blood – Linear Logic Intelligence
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Other Music
Other genres influenced metal as it evolved. Ranging from ambient music, horror film soundtracks, punk hardcore, industrial noise and progressive rock, metal’s many influences are documented here, with an emphasis on those that reflected a paradigm shift in their time and passed that on, through their music and ideas, to metal out of compatibility with the spirit of metal.
King Crimson – One More Red Nightmare
No CommentsThrash
Thrash combined the short, fast songs of hardcore punk bands with the more structured, architected and melodic aspects of metal riffing. Deriving its name from the skaters who listened to it, called “thrashers,” thrash was a true crossover genre in that it was not purely metal and not purely punk, which both caused it trouble finding an initial audience and made it almost universally accessible. Its songs, often under thirty seconds, blasted away at society not so much from ideological principles but to mock and criticize the end result of ideology, which was a numb utilitarian society oblivious to the passage of time or the possibility of meaning to human existence.
House recommendations: Cryptic Slaughter, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, dead horse and Fearless Iranians From Hell.
Speed Metal
After hardcore made music harder and faster, speed metal upgraded heavy metal by mixing hardcore speed and aggression with the architectural riffs of NWOBHM, and downgraded the reliance on pentatonic scales in favor of minor-key complex riffing. The technique that defines speed metal is the muted strum, where the palm of the strumming hands rests on the strings, making a short percussive blast of distortion instead of a ringing chord. As a result, speed metal sounded like the machines of the 1980s: blasting like factories, rattling like tank treads and chattering like computers and their printers.
House recommendations: Metallica and Prong.
Grindcore
A further evolution of the sound hardcore punk created and thrash developed, grindcore slams together abrasive riffs in order to achieve a release from intensity at the end of each song. Its name comes from that grinding, caused by fast alternation between chromatic notes and the contrast with rigid whole note patterns that lift the listener up from the directionless thrashing. Where purest, grindcore celebrates individual life and rejects social mores by reminding us that we are mortal, frail and the clock is ticking, so we need to cast aside the pointless and frustrating (grinding) in life and replace it with open spaces of our own imaginations.
House recommendations: Repulsion, Bolt Thrower, Carbonized, Carcass or Godflesh.
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Death Metal
Death metal uses tremolo strummed power chords in phrasal riffs, creating an internal dialogue of melody to project a narrative which takes us from a starting point through internal conflict to an ending radically removed from the start. This often complex music relies heavily on chromatic scales and solos that resemble sonic sculpture more than a reliance on scales or harmony, and use “modal stripes” or repeated interval patterns (such as a half interval followed by a whole) to maintain a mood. Inherently structuralist, death metal can be recognized by its “post-human” perspective, seeing the world through biology, history, warfare and mythology instead of the “I/me/mine” viewpoint of a modern society.
House recommendations: Morbid Angel, Slayer, Monstrosity, Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Therion and Vader.
BEST EVER
1. Massacra – Final Holocaust
2. Deicide – Legion
3. Morbid Angel – Blessed Are the Sick
4. Therion – Beyond Sanctorum
5. Sepultura – Morbid Visions
6. Incantation – Onward to Golgotha
7. Morpheus Descends – Ritual of Infinity
8. Necrophobic – The Nocturnal Silence
9. Obituary – Cause of Death
10. Suffocation – Effigy of the Forgotten
11. Atheist – Unquestionable Presence
12. Dismember – Like an Ever-Flowing Stream
13. Amorphis – The Karelian Isthmus
14. At the Gates – The Red in the Sky is Ours
15. Demilich – Nespithe
16. Asphyx – The Rack
2. Deicide – Legion
3. Morbid Angel – Blessed Are the Sick
4. Therion – Beyond Sanctorum
5. Sepultura – Morbid Visions
6. Incantation – Onward to Golgotha
7. Morpheus Descends – Ritual of Infinity
8. Necrophobic – The Nocturnal Silence
9. Obituary – Cause of Death
10. Suffocation – Effigy of the Forgotten
11. Atheist – Unquestionable Presence
12. Dismember – Like an Ever-Flowing Stream
13. Amorphis – The Karelian Isthmus
14. At the Gates – The Red in the Sky is Ours
15. Demilich – Nespithe
16. Asphyx – The Rack
COMPILATIONS
Projections of a Stained Mind (C.B.R. Records)
Harmony Dies Vol. 1 (Slayer Magazine)
Pantalgia (MBR Records)
Live Death: Vol 1 (Restless)
Sampler Volume I (JL America)
Deterioration of the Senses (Morbid Metal)
Book I: Induction (Hits Underground)
Reviews have mp3 sound samples for each album, coverscan, tracklist and label contact information.
2 CommentsBlack Metal
Black metal took the lawless extremity of death metal and added a greater use of melody, creating swelling surges of sound that sweep the listener away with raw emotion and then arrive in a wasteland devoid of inherent value. Songs fashioned from primitive elements end up telling complex tales, embarking on a journey where the greatest human fears — meaninglessness, predation and violence — end up being salvation from the frustrating world of entropy-bound stagnation. Thematically black metal represents an assault on the pillars of modernity, namely egalitarianism, consumerism and tolerance.
House recommendations: Burzum, Emperor, Ildjarn, Graveland, Summoning and Sacramentum.
BEST EVER
1. Burzum – Hvis Lyset Tar Oss
2. Immortal – Pure Holocaust
3. Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse
4. Darkthrone – Transylvanian Hunger
5. Graveland – The Celtic Winter
6. Bathory – Blood, Fire, Death
7. Ildjarn – Det Frysende Nordariket
8. Summoning – Dol Guldur
9. Gorgoroth – Antichrist
10. Beherit – Electric Doom Synthesis
11. Enslaved – Vikinglgr Veldi
12. Havohej – Dethrone the Son of God
13. Mayhem – De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
14. Sacramentum – Far Away From the Sun
15. Mutiilation – Remains of a Dead, Ruined, Cursed Soul
COMPILATIONS
Under the Pagan Moon (Cyclonic Productions)
Nordic Metal Compilation (Necropolis)
Firestarter Compilation (Century Media)
Reviews have mp3 sound samples for each album, coverscan, tracklist and label contact information.
Heavy Metal
Heavy metal started when Black Sabbath merged heavy guitar rock with the soundtracks from horror films. They did they by exclusively using power chords, which because they do not contain the notes that mark them as major or minor chords, lend themselves to moving in streams, like a melody played in chords. The result is that Black Sabbath structured their songs around the interplay of these melodies, instead of focusing on a transition between points of fixed harmony like rock music, and invented a new style of music that took nearly thirty years to grow into the musical ideal first suggested back in 1970. Lyrically, Black Sabbath rejected the flower love delusion of the hippies and replaced it with hard knowledge: the obliviousness of individuals creates a mythological form of evil that manipulates and destroys us.
House recommendations: Cathedral and Helstar.
Best of 2011
What were the best metal releases of 2011?
(See the followup article here: Best Metal of 2011.)
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