YouTube Censorship Begins Targeting Musicians

by Brock Dorsey on January 16, 2018

It’s here!  YouTube’s rapidly accelerating censorship committee has finally begun targeting musicians with their Orwellian “hate speech” laws.  Pandering to the advertisers that have quietly bought the operations of Silicon Valley tech companies and the souls of all Silicon Valley employees, YouTube has begun a fascist campaign of censoring any videos that may cause trouble for any company that may accidentally place an ad on it.  So far this has primarily targeted vloggers for (conservative) wrongthink- videos portraying horrifically offensive hatred such as statistics, scientific research, or biological facts.  Yet strangely, the first band in the greater sphere of heavy music that YouTube has gone after is a modern nu-metal/rap rock band who, in all honesty, looks pretty leftist….
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Graveland Announces 2018 Tour, Releases Video For Re-Recorded “Thurisaz”

by Brett Stevens on January 16, 2018

Ethereal second-wave black metal band Graveland will be touring across Europe in 2018, continuing a series of selected dates in Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. At these shows, the band will be playing songs from its compilation of re-recorded Graveland songs with the classic feel but without the “old days” bad production, 1050 Years of Pagan Cult, which is available through Heritage Records.

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Power Trip – Nightmare Logic (2017)

by Nicholas Vahdias on January 16, 2018

Every year we are treated to an endless amount of ridiculous lists.  It seems that any individual with the ability to express their opinions is obligated to share their Top 10 or top 20 metal releases that more often than not echo the same three websites.  The bands that enter such lists tend to come in two varieties: veterans rehashing the same ideas in a more streamlined fashion and those who trick their audience via the use of gimmicks and presenting a familiar product with slightly different aesthetics as the next big thing.  In these last two years, speed metal has conquered the number 1 spot of most of these lists.  Last year Vektor’s Terminal Redux ruled the metal lists by far with it’s melody derived from Voivod and the phrasings from Destruction’s Eternal Devastation all held together in long sloppily composed epics… ultimately resulting in an above average album but a strong move for the funderground.  This year, Texans Power Trip succeed in winning the “funderground 2017 award” with their second album Nightmare Logic.  The Speed metal revival movement has finally found its idols to guide it’s path of remaining in the past and offering the most faithful reproduction of late 80s speed/thrash.

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Watain – Trident Wolf Eclipse (2018)

by Brock Dorsey on January 15, 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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Victory Over Peace

by Hereweald Cola Algar on January 14, 2018

There are those who would make us think that peace is essential for life. They demand we must reconcile all manner of disagreements and simply live happily together. In reality, what happens in a real compromise (if indeed it is a compromise) is that every one involved gets a bit of what he bargained for. It is not unlike Celtic Frost, a.k.a. the failed post-Hellhammer experiment that tried going mainstream a step at a time. By the time the band released Into the Pandemonium it was clear that by trying to bring the monster of underground black/death metal into the light they only degenerated it into a joke that no one, except masochists, want to ever hear again. The reader may want to attribute the downfall of Celtic Frost to a host of other causes, but the decision was in fact simple: give in to niceties and benefits through a compromise, or keep on fighting, towards a transcendental victory.
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Last Sacrament – Enantiodromia (2013)

by Jerry Hauppa on January 13, 2018

Florida’s Last Sacrament are one of the rare contemporary bands that successfully captures the essence of old school death metal while developing a voice of their own in the process. While initial full length Enantiodromia has a few juvenile kinks to work out — the members are shockingly young — the record as a whole is a striking, confident foray through classic metal.

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PCU‘s Dark Forecast

by Brock Dorsey on January 12, 2018

A few times every decade, a work of literature or film comes along that astonishingly predicts the future with unbelievable accuracy.  Back in 1994, we were given a dead-on glimpse of the social climate that we’re currently living in across modern western civilization through a seemingly harmless silly, good times college comedy, as it advertised itself to be. But instead, PCU showed us the world we would be inhabiting twenty years later.

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Gorguts – Pleiades’ Dust (2016)

by Jerry Hauppa on January 11, 2018

Gorguts is a band that for a majority of its career has resembled an act that is at war with itself artistically.  After a serviceable debut comprised of purely death metal notions and peaking with its most dense and progressive release in The Erosion of Sanity, the band chose to scale back its arrangements while imbuing its approach with a discordance that may have laterally trespassed its prior unsullied metal constructs but at the same time gave Gorguts an identity all their own.  With regards to their contemporaries, you cannot currently say a band “sounds like Gorguts” without indirectly focusing on the sound created on Obscura, and the band’s own knowledge of that most likely has controlled their writing ever since — to the detriment of their overall intents in each record from then on…

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Underground Record Labels in the Year 2159

by Joe Slater on January 10, 2018

It is the year 2159. All the world’s capitols have been obliterated- save South America and Africa (the only continents free of nuclear weapons)- and humanity is no longer able to reproduce due to the over-manufacturing of sex-bots.  There had been three nuclear wars already, first of which involved USA and North Korea and the most recent involving Britain and Iran.  EMP’s and cyber-hacks had taken out the grid long ago, leaving only a strand of humanity left whose bodies could physically adapt to life without WI-FI.  Most of the main bands in the US which were based out of major cities perished as urban conditioning caused them to starve with no wherewithal to survive in the wild.  All that was left were rag tag bunches of malnourished but darkly inspired bands of street trash scavengers who roamed the land with metal detectors seeking alkaline batteries to power their equipment (though these were also needed to power their sex-bots).  Guitarists went back to using hand cranked Pignose amps, with vintage EV megaphones held in front to further amplify the vocals and guitars.
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Abigor – Höllenzwang (2018)

by Nicholas Vahdias on January 9, 2018

Abigor are back with their 9th album, which is sadly a continuation of the ideas on Leytmotif Luzifer.  Hailing from Vienna in Austria, Abigor definitely have the style and look associated with their hometown but even in arguably their last bad work : Nacthymnen ( From the Twilight Kingdom) they have always lacked substance in comparison to the greats in the European black metal style.  Leytmotif Luzifer was Deathspell Omega worship with the remnants of what could be qualified as generic second wave black metal. Here they continue in that substanceless yet somewhat more refined method of songcraft….

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