Hailing from North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany, Evoked issues four savage compositions of blistering mid-paced death metal honoring the early days of the genre on their demo “Return of the Dead.” This demo came out in 2014 and uses Swedish-style blistering production but actually hails to an earlier era.
In the style of bands such as Possessed, Grotesque and Slaughter Lord, Evoked creates standard format songs stacking three riffs against one another, one each for verse and chorus and a transition, and based them around the kind of fast mid-paced rhythm with very tangible stops that speed metal bands used. This music harkens to the era of transition 1985-1989 when metal was abandoning the speed metal legacy and transitioning into death metal, and so calls to mind early Morgoth, Death, Pestilence Malleus Maleficarum and the like. What makes it stand out is that it holds enough content to pique the interest of old-school metal enthusiasts.
While a four-song demo gives little insight into the future of the band, Evoked show absolutely no inclination to deviate from this classic style, which has the advantage of being highly comprhensible. While the band shows no sign of taking this to a simpler and more mob-pleasurable sellout place, it also clearly panders to the tryhard audience with a demo that would have been amazing in 1989 but in 2015 is just adequate.
Mourning Mist use the increasingly popular approach of making underground metal music without explicitely subscribing to any particular subgenre. Unlike many of the clueless out there, they do know that despite the positive aspects of such an open approach, a basis must be chosen on which to serve as foothold.
For this they choose a death and black metal amalgam that ultimately has more of the latter and is only sprinkled with the technique of the former. Stylistically, the rest wanders a little into a sort of Euro-pop/rock, or at least this is how I can describe it in my little experience with that kind of music. I found myself thinking of Moby at one point. A more superficial element that contributes significantly to the atmosphere of the record is the solo violin which spurs in avant-garde manner which brought memories of Jean Luc Ponty, even though the actual music connection might be weak.
One can grow tired of mentioning and pointing out the same mistakes that seem to plague most musicians in general. It must be part of the mediocrity which is just part of the average. This band does not escape this and while there are moments in which their light bulb obviously lit up (there is a commendable build up in the 5th track which lasts about 4 minutes and culminates in that Moby moment), these are drowned in wallpaper filler. This is especially prominent towards the end of the album. It’s almost as if the band started with good ideas and they had solid content to drive the music. But as the minutes go by, as the first, and second songs finish, they start to increasingly rely on the contrasting styles rather than actual content to move the song forward.
The bad parts indirectly affect any good effect the content-rich parts might have because from the integral point of view, each part contributes to a whole, but if the whole is greatly composed of meaningless filler, the content itself seems either diluted or even confused. Mourning Mist’s album ends up with the latter
effect, like someone speaking while a gag is wrapped around his head.
Finnish funeral doom metal band Skepticism performed their yet-unreleased fifth full-length album, Ordeal, in a live recording at Klubi in Turku, Finland on January 24, 2015. The event was also captured on film for an accompanying DVD to go alongside the album, in shades of what Empyrium did last years with their first performance in nearly a decade.
The band describes the new songs as “emotion-laden, crushing, and yet beautiful, more than ever before.” Visitors to the historic recording event received an exclusive re-issue of the band’s first 7” EP which was originally released in 1992. Ordeal will be released on Svart Records in May 2015 as a CD/DVD bundle and a LP/DVD set.
Skepticism commands a loyal following who want doom metal to fall neither into the nearly tuneless grinding of some doom-death or warmed over rock stylings of stoner doom, but prefer atmospheric and melodic music that creates a contrast within dark moods and can develop songs for a sense of being transported. The band formed in 1991 and since 1995 has released a stream of quality releases which remain enjoyed by a devoted cadre in the underground.
Death metal tends to get described in terms of its influences among the classic bands, and in the case of Abysme it makes sense to mention Entombed, Autopsy and Dismember when describing the style that cloaks the music of this band. Using the brawny Swedish distortion at full intensity, Abysme creating brooding prowl riffs like Autopsy and put their songs together much in that vein by carefully leading up to a moment of unleashing the riff that defines each song, but that riff quickly mutates into a style of melody like Dismember with the boxy but expressive riffing of early Entombed.
This is a Left Hand Path vision of Entombed, not anything later, and most closely corresponds — in its seeking of obscure moods and labyrinthine, backdoor entrances to the major themes of each song — to the songwriting template of Autopsy, but also has its own voice which is more gearing toward a deepening of moods within a dark mantle. The atmosphere of morbid despair generating an impulse to destroy becomes an assumption and within that framework, Abysme create different moods that transition from relatively understandable basic gut-level instincts to submerged existential questioning. Riffs achieve a voice of their own with a protean tendency to twist on themselves and emerge as a new form which evokes but does not echo the old, solving the mathematical symmetry problem that so many death metal bands find themselves becalmed in. Abysme like to vary between doom-heavy slower riffs that use single chords to hold space and the more phrasal riffs of classic death metal, frequently transitioning into single-note picked riffs to shadow and overlay major themes. As a result, from within a familiar style emerges a new voice.
Sometimes the vocals are overdone and sound more like a guy shouting himself hoarse at a biker rally than a musical instrument but for the most part they provide solid rhythmic backing to the change in guitar riff which is only loosely contexted by percussion, which alternates between doom-death quasi-groove to full-on blasting in rapid succession, managing to avoid leading the change within arrangements while still foreshadowing it and following it closely, like a covert sniper tracking a target among the artificial hills and valleys of an abandoned city. While some riffs originate in extremely basic chord progressions, the theme expands over time and develops into an entity of its own. Abysme create music on their own terms in tribute to the past and show an ability to understand death metal as the unusual but articulate beast that it is.
German death metal band Torchure has re-issued its second album, The Essence, on Vic Records. The album was produced by S.L. Coe of Scanner and Angel Dust and comes with very special liner notes, rare pictures and two re-mastered unreleased tracks as bonus.
Torchure formed in 1985 and released three demo tapes before unleashing their debut album through German underground metal label 1MF. Their debut, Beyond the Veil (1992), showed a style of death metal with origins in heavy metal that nonetheless managed to be both intense and moody. Torchure toured Europe to support Sepultura and Pestilence. After the tour founding members and brothers Andreas (guitars) and Thorsten (bass) Reissdorf died in a car accident. The band decided to go on and found two new members who were also brothers and with this new lineup recorded their second album, The Essence (1993).
Vic Records re-issued the Torchure debut Beyond the Veil in 2013 as reported previously. The reissue of The Essence seems to have received much the same treatment with bonus tracks, expanded booklet and a jewel case CD instead of digipak. The reissue can be ordered from Vic Records directly.
Perdition Temple, a band composed of Angelcorpse and Immolation members, will release its second album The Tempter’s Victorious on Hells Headbangers Records on March 24, 2015. The album shows the band refining their militant high speed slamming phrasal riffing in a style of death metal similar to Vader and Fallen Christ.
In many ways the underground’s response to the technical metalcore currently in vogue in the above-ground “underground,” Perdition Temple crafts songs from high speed strumming and extensive fills. On the new album, the band intensifies this approach and adds chaotic lead guitars which give it an oddly occult flair.
Simultaneously Perdition Temple announced that the band is slated to play Hells Headbangers’ forthcoming Hells Headbash 2 label anniversary festival on September 4-6 in Cleveland, Ohio (USA). The band will join other such Hells Headbangers-affiliated bands as Profanatica, Archgoat, Deceased, and Cianide.
Texas subterranean death metal band Blaspherian recently announced the planned release of a new album in 2015, tentatively titled Reborn through the Black Flames of Lucifer. According to songwriter/guitarist Wes Weaver, the band has already written four tracks for the new release. (more…)
Through the years of scanning endless lists of metal albums one gradually develops an intuition that links band name, album name and artwork to the general nature of what will be heard. Seldom does a tongue-in-cheek name correlate with quality music, since the band designed itself as a stunt. While some serious-sounding names result in pretentious self-important music, most bands with confidence in their ability to produce valuable music choose a straightforward self presentation.
The following question measures heavy metal: what is quality, and how is it measured, including what standard we use? Our answer begins with the often-used but seldom explained (and hence little understood) terms superficial and transcendent as opposite poles in a spectrum. Through the ages philosophers, theorists and artists themselves have made used these terms and in only a handful of instances have they tried to explain them in any way beyong what is deemed self-evident. The young Nietzsche provides us with a useful term and its explanation which can be used to separate the concepts in a way that if not empirical enough at least can be understood as a general concept. The Dionysian, it is said, allows for a connection for the unchanging, eternal oneness. This can mean many things, but guiding ourselves by Nietzsche’s explanation in the context of Greek tragedy and the nature and significance its chorus, we can see that the Dionysian is a subjective measurement requiring the person in question to look beyond the cycles of history and recurring social trends that are a result of the human race constantly altering its surface appearance but not actually “growing” in the sense of improving. Once in touch with this, the artist can represent the essence of things as they always are, not as they appear at this moment in time. On the other hand, being trapped in the temporal interpretation of how something is at this moment, or how it appears to be in its current incarnation is the hallmark of the superficial.
For us to make the distinction between transcendent and superficial in a work of art, we must isolate any insight of human nature that the work expresses. Because all of reality is the same cause, all paths if followed with vigorous examination lead to the same truth. Acquiring the insight that the transcendent artist possess does not mean we ourselves need to have his artistic talents as well. These are abilities of a separate kind altogether. As Nietzsche tells us in the same writing, while the rest of us must use abstractions and complex explanations to arrive at an objective picture of the work of art, in his subjective vision, the artist contemplates the images of his expression clearly and in unexplainable simplicity independently of its degree of superficiality. We can analyze that vision according to what it communicates and whether that address the transcendent, the superficial or the “fake out” of superficial transcendence.
With all this in mind, a first glance at Terror Empire’s album cover and album name is enough to raise some red flags. The cover artwork does not relate to the title. The title further shows a tendency toward cliché and a “cute” manipulation of it. This lack of originality is then reflected in the music itself. The album shows an diversity of approaches ranging from early songs which incorporate related but meaningless constructions with abundant technical acrobatics to late songs which are basically “thrashy” chug-based generic speed metal songs. The former are meaningless in the context that the writers themselves put them in. They make structural premises, but then do not follow them or conclude them structurally. As in many mediocre examples of music, songs end suddenly without being taken to any sort of climax, deviation to a clear point and return. The latter part of the album fails by being an imitation of speed metal (aka “thrash metal”) tropes seen through the modern lenses of retro-thrash.
This book can be judged by its cover, which the band apparently views as attractive to the type of person who will not realize how completely pointless The Empire Strikes Black is as a metal listening experience. Those who seek novelty tend to find it. In the spirit of the master, Bitterman: Vapid. Avoid.
Mut presents us with a perfect a sample of a band becoming completely irrelevant by taking the world personally and as a result becoming entirely self-referential. Code never hides its true colors and you know what to expect right from the very beginning: sure-footed, emotional, but ultimately pointless meandering rock music. If the reader wants a reference for what to expect here, you can find it in Muse or everything Cynic put out after Focus, especially their last album.
Let’s start nicely with what this band does know how to do. The musicianship is undeniably professional. This album creates atmosphere by expanding one idea and letting it grow like a vine, always seemlessly. This is done so expertly that while the idea of the song still holds, their extension of it is truly delightful. The guys also have a keen ear for textures and harmonies that are never out of place. The album could well become an academic study in refined harmony for indie metal. The indie component is especially prominent in the type of dissonants they introduce.
The indieness of it all oozes a post-something feel in a blend that makes it very whiny and monotonous. And this last point is what brings us to the main problem this music faces: it never moves on from the initial idea. In every song, Code presents us with an episode and then whines about it at different volumes and with different layerings. There is no movement, no direction, no development. If you are picky, you could also hint at the extremely commonplace and almost tongue-in-cheek use of Arabic/Spanish motives, but in my opinion this is more a matter of preference and it is not as big as a blemish as the complete lack of development.
Code is obviously formed by accomplished musicians who are unfortunately not clear-minded composers with a goal outside emotional self-expression as is required to make great art. Concept always guides results. This band at least has a center. But they need firmer land, more fertile soil and somewhere whence they can contemplate visions of possible destinations, and not remain crying inside a dark cave in which they can only see the same humid wall.
Dark Descent Records announced the pre-order of a CD/DVD box set of classic underground death metal band Morpheus Descends (formerly Morpheus) featuring two CDs and a DVD including all past material from this formative act which influenced Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse and many other death metal bands from the early 1990s.
The box set will include, in addition to the 2CD digipak, two new and unreleased tracks wich will see issue as a separate 7″ entitled From Blackened Crypts and a DVD entitled Visage of Malady, as well as a 11×17″ double-sided poster and 24-page booklet. The tracklist is:
Disc 1
1. Oozing from the Urn
2. The King’s Curse
3. The Way of All Flesh
4. Corpse Under Glass
5. Immortal Coil
6. Trephanation
7. Proclaimed Creator
8. Accelerated Decrepitude
9. Submerged in Adipocere
10. Enthralled to Serve
11. Ritual of Infinity
12. Trephanation
13. Accelerated Decrepitude
14. Triformed Limbs
15. Stigmatic Crucifixion
16. Residual Kill
17. Cairn of Dumitru demo 93 Disc 2
1. The Cruciform Hills
2. Cairn of Dumitru
3. Autumn Bleed
4. Signs of Gehenna
5. Moupho Alde Ferenc Yaborov
6. Begging for Possession
7. Valley of Undead War
8. Shaitan the Unborn
9. The Horror of the Truth
10. Corpse Under Glass (Live Reunion-Martrydoom)
11. Accelerated
12. Trephanation
13. Triformed Limbs
14. Accelerated
15. The Cruciform Hills pre-release ’94
16. Residual ’91
17. Autumn Bleeds ’93
For more information, see the pre-order page at Dark Descent Records.
