Summer is just around the corner, and you are no doubt thinking of your favorite Mexican beers — among the best in the world, like their death metal — to relax in the sun with. Do not drink Corona Light, of course, but the newly-minted Corona Especial in twelve-packs for the American market might bring out a smile. Alternatively, you can try a Modelo Especial Chelada.
12 CommentsTags: beer, beer mixture, chelada, Grupo Modelo S.A. de C.V., modelo, modelo especial
Listen to a track from the upcoming Hadeon from longstanding Dutch band Pestilence, one is immediately struck by the similarity to late-1990s Morbid Angel: the riffs are there, albeit a bit impatient and tightly circular, but the whole experience is not. What is missing? To understand this, we must go to the core of what made death metal what it is.
If you wanted to explain to a normal person what death metal is, looking at the core of its spirit, you might haul out Slayer Hell Awaits, Hellhammer Apocalyptic Raids, and Bathory The Return… because these influenced the techniques, composition, and spirit of death metal. From Hellhammer and Slayer, it got its song structure and aesthetics; from Bathory its themes and riff technique.
Death metal took the original idea of metal, formed when Black Sabbath and others began using power chords to make phrasal riffs instead of harmony-oriented open chord riffs, and developed it further. This is different than doing something “new” or “progressing” because it means undertaking the much harder task of developing an idea further at a structural level instead of just changing aesthetics.
With the rise of underground metal, death metal adopted chromatic riffing and made the interplay between riffs form a narrative to each song. This abolished typical rock song structure and, because the guitar served as a melodic instrument instead of a harmonic one, forced vocals, bass and drums into a background role. How well the riffs fit together and portrayed an atmosphere, idea, or sensation defined the quality of the music.
Pestilence came from a solid death metal background with Consuming Impulse but showed a speed metal styled approach on Malleus Maleficarum, and this tension has stayed with the band for its entire career. The speed metal style of verse and chorus built on a singular theme that is present in the music is easier to jam on and use harmony to complement, where death metal rarely explicitly states its theme, only silhouetting it in the interaction between its many riffs. With speed metal, bands can set up a chord progression and develop it in layers of internal commentary like jazz, and this puts vocals back in position number one among the lead instruments.
“Non-Physical Existent” is a two-riff song with both based on the same note progression. It creates its intensity through the clash between a ripping circular high speed riff and a slower chromatic riff that uses odd harmony to distinguish notes in an otherwise linear theme. The song breaks into a solo section over one of the riffs, and has a type of turnaround the drops into the faster riff as a return. But there is no real interplay nor any narrative.
From the riffs themselves, this is a good song, but unfortunately, it is not death metal. Nor will it last because essentially it is a closed-circuit video of itself, a riff commented on by another, without resembling any particular experience or emotion, therefore being a null journey, more like stasis in space while riffs loop. It is better than not bad, but still not of real interest to the death metal fan.
22 CommentsTags: death metal, jazz, pestilence, sodomy, Speed Metal
Dennis Emmental hated being late because it revealed to everyone how little he wanted to be there. Slipping past the creaky back door, he took his place in the line at OptiFood. Orders came from the digital kiosk at the drive-thru and Dennis had twenty-four seconds to assemble the ingredients for the OptiMeal:
He and his cohorts were dumping ingredients in the short, stout, beaker-shaped commemorative plastic buckets used to serve the twenty-four ounce meals. The store was open twenty-four hours a day, and had a thirty-eight percent turnover rate at a six month interval. The owners were unconcerned; they had reached the point where it took a million bucks just to think about suing them, and everyone knew that most of their employees were retards and flakes and so just laughed off their complaints.
17 CommentsTags: cheese, evil, fiction, god, immortality, Satan, sodomy
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.
14 CommentsTags: 2010s, 2018, bad music, Black Metal, Broadway Musicals, carnival, cash grab, clowns, crap, defecation, feces, hipsters, mayhem, metal, poop, posers, revenge, shit, Trident Wolf Eclipse, watain
With the fiftieth anniversary of metal music around the corner, forthcoming years will witness an increase of publications dealing with the history, legacy and defining characteristics of the genre. This could finally resolve the lack of consensus that still exists regarding the definition and origins of heavy metal.
25 CommentsTags: Ambient, article, black sabbath, cream, electronic, Genesis, hard rock, Heavy Metal, heavy metal history, heavy rock, metal history, origins of heavy metal, progressive electronic music, progressive rock, proto-metal, psychedelic rock, punk, tangerine dream, the stooges
Heavy metal was born in very late 60s and early 70s as a merger of heavy rock, proto-punk, horror film scores and progressive rock, carving out a new form of dark music that spelled out longer phrases than rock by using moveable power chords in complex riffs.
60 CommentsTags: 1973, article, composition, hard rock, king crimson, lark’s tongues in aspic, metal history, music theory, narrative, progressive, progressive rock, proto-metal, review, robert fripp, through composition
Some of the best of doom metal seems to originate as a hybrid of Shakespearean drama and medieval heavy metal, and Cromlech comes to us from the Candlemass-tinged depths of that mental state.T
12 CommentsTags: cromlech, Doom Metal, Heavy Metal, power metal, review
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal was the simultaneous, sudden emergence of hundreds of heavy metal bands in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early eighties. The NWOBHM was prompted by the collapse en masse of earlier hard rock bands and heavy metal originators. Led Zeppelin and other blues-based riff rock bands had collapsed into meandering stadium rock with only a couple listenable songs per record at best (“Achilles Last Stand” on Presence). Black Sabbath fell flat on their faces after Sabotage, making the meandering duo of Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die. Punk declined from almost-progressive works as the The Stooges’ Fun House to boy bands such as the Sex Pistols playing radio pop. Deep Purple regressed to playing what their former guitarist Ritchie Blackmore termed “Shoeshine music.”
21 CommentsTags: Angel Witch, black sabbath, Heavy Metal, iron maiden, judas priest, metal history, motorhead, NWOBHM, Satan
When one traipses through the country outside of the lock-step conformist big cities, it behooves the pipe smoker to look for those varieties of tobacco favored in the less “civilized” areas of the world. This might bring one to Brenham, Texas, where the Brookshire Brothers grocery store offers up a unique and wonderful American tradition: the drive-thru Tobacco Barn.
7 CommentsTags: brookshire brothers, burley, cotton bowl twist, pipe smoking, pipe tobacco, pipe tobacco blends, texas, tobacco, tobacco barn
Article by Lance Viggiano.
Deathspell Omega return with another uninspired and uninspiring record entitled The Synarchy of Molten Bones. Their last record, Paracletus, was built on a foundation of Voivod-lite chords executed with the alt metal sensibilities of The Dillinger Escape Plan. In an effort to build ambience, additional guitar tracks would attempt to produce a microtonal effect without actual production of microtones; just more dissonance. These techniques were then deployed over pop-leaning melodies which become pronounced should one decide to hum the otherwise atonal morass.
94 CommentsTags: 2016, deathspell omega, EP, france, metalcore, modern metal, post-hardcore, review, the synarchy of molten bones, wanking
