The debut album of Jess and the Ancient Ones now available for pre-ordering as CD and LP. Will be released on May 19 and shipped the day before. Featuring Antti Boman of Demilich and other talented stalwarts of the Finnish uebermetal pool. Rumored to be psychedelic/funeral doom crossover.
One of the oldest still functional speed metal bands still around, still making avantgarde arty speed metal, but they’ve updated the sound a bit to be post-modern-metal.
Prong Carved Into Stone CD
INCLUDES A DIGITAL DOWNLOAD OF THE RECORD ON TUE 4/24 at 12:01AM (Open your account and look in MY DOWNLOADS)
Tracklisting
1) Eternal Heat
2) Keep on Living in Pain
3) Ammunition
4) Revenge … Best Served Cold
5) State of Rebellion
6) Put Myself to Sleep
7) List of Grievances
8) Carved Into Stone
9) Subtract
10) Path of Least Resistance
11) Reinvestigate
Ceremonium “Dreams We Have Written” double compilation CD will arrive in a few weeks. I will get copies and ship anywhere. Send message to order and any interviews sent will be vomited back asap. There maybe flyers soon to follow…
Legendary English-Canadian thrash/death innovators SLAUGHTER have issued a 25th Anniversary two-CD set of their 1987 full-length debut Strappado. The release also contains their rare demos – 1984’s “Meatcleaver and Bloody Karnage” and 1985’s “Surrender or Die” – and unreleased live material from 1986 opening up for CELTIC FROST in Toronto. The limited anniversary release also features new cover art by Eric”Rot” Engelmann.
There is no “Houston sound,” but Houston bands are converging on a sound that is pure old school doom/death metal with a tendency to praise Satan. Part of it must come from living in the Bible Belt, surrounded by heavy refinery machinery and the incessant roaring of traffic. Another part may be that mythological hell is actually in Houston. Hell is described as a blazing hot place full of demonic beings, horrible stench and infernal rage. If you’ve ever driven on I-45 during a Friday afternoon…
Much like spinoff bands Blaspherian and Morbus 666, and fellow old school death metal worshippers War Master, Imprecation makes violent death metal that is not especially fast so much as it is varied in dynamic and tempo. These songs approach like a vaporous ghost, then enclose the listener and then clench them into tight sequences of dark cadence. Simple power chord riffs fit together like an apocalyptic Jenga puzzle and bring the listener through labyrinthine contortions to a place of inner clarity and, quite honestly, Satanic hatred.
With its use of selected keyboards to highlight the evil of particular passages, and extensive variation in riff shape not only between songs but through the life of each song, this style of old school death metal fits best with bands like Infester or Sinister who bent simple but twisted riffs into a language of their own. Nonetheless, the release has a distinctive middle-of-the-United-States sound, with broad open spaces and lurching trudge rhythms that sound like malevolent demons summoned to battle. These songs are carefully layered, with voices and lead guitar complementing the underlying action, but with the Malevolent Creation-style (think “Multiple Stab Wounds” off The Ten Commandments) interplay between vocals and muted chording that lures you into a delirium of hypnosis.
Released on the 20th anniversary of the recording of the first Imprecation demo, “The Order of Nine Angles,” this four-song testament to brutality will convince even cynical observers that an unspeakable evil exists in Houston. Luckily it’s also a highly listenable evil that may represent not only this band’s most mature work yet, but their most inspired.
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I am calling this new genre post-black-metal. It is the spirit and mood of black metal, the rhythms of 1980s EBM and industrial, the samples and collage technique of martial industrial, the atmosphere of neofolk, the sweeping epic point of view of soundtracks, and that sense of world music evoking the spirit of ancient tribalist folk songs from Europe that Dead Can Dance had going. Mix all this together, and you get a new genre which has a few members such as Kreuzweg Ost, later Burzum, Arcana, Lord Wind and even the Beherit ambient albums.
This is a natural progression for black metal. It admitted its 1970s synthpop and ambient cosmic music influences. Even more, it was influenced by Danzig’s Black Aria and other soundtracks like those from Vangelis and Basil Poledouris. Metal itself was influenced by the soundtracks to 1960s Italian horror cinema. Beherit put out two ambient albums, Burzum two, and Darkthrone released its Tangerine Dream tribute band Neptune Towers. Even Emperor released that keyboard version of “Inno a Satana,” and Ildjarn put out three ambient landscape music albums. It’s in black metal’s blood, and with the end of the innovation of the style itself in the mid-1990s, the bands turned to the next step. More instruments, longer songs, more modes, more complexity.
Rolling on the success of bands such as Blood Axis and Lord Wind, the newest entry into this field is Winglord, a Scandinavian produce that hopes to rebirth the ancient spirit of Europe through synth-piano music. As mentioned above, it’s poppy like old Ministry or VNV Nation, but it has more musicality going on, like a Dead Can Dance track. It’s easy to listen to and yet melancholy, yet brings forth a message of not “small hopes” in the way modern music is “uplifting” but does nothing about the larger crisis of living in an insane and dying society, but instead shows us a way we can conquer the disease of this time. First in our hearts, then in our minds, then with our hands. It’s inspiration not through external forces, but through a sense of power, which is where it is most like black metal.
These tracks are built on a foundation of martial industrial and industrial dance (EBM). Verse-chorus loops are broken by interludes; layers extend melodies with different conclusions and beginnings. Melodies themselves, in a manner much like the way Summoning expands its riffs into soundtrack-style phrases, unfurl from lush keyboard layers into linear variation which then outlines the themes of each songs. It’s highly organized however which makes the entire listening experience a controlled, evocative process.
The Chosen One is a huge improvement over earlier Winglord, and shows us one future for this genre. It doesn’t aspire at all to the trends and individualistic ego-drama of the modern time. Instead, it creates for us a vista of a land outside of time, in which eternal values obliterate all of our temporal concerns, and lets us get lost and swept up in this majestic wave of power. For those who like good music, and want to see some new motion in the underground, this is a vital and impressive undertaking to be enjoyed.
Winglord
The Chosen One
Arktos, 2012, 43 minutes, $17.
New IMPRECATION “JEHOVAH DENIED” now available through the band. 4 rites of pure blackened DEATH metal, strictly limited to 100 copies. This demo was recorded to mark the 20th year of the “Ceremony of the Nine Angles” demo release. The shirts are $15 plus postage. $9 USD (domestic) or $12 (international) gets the CD. This price includes the postage. Paypal at: slimelord666 -at- hotmail.com
Legendary cerebral primitive black metal cabal Beherit are on the move again. The new release, Celebrate the Dead, involves one song from the epic 2009 release Engram, and one song assembled from material prepared for that album. While information on it is scarce, rumor has it we see Beherit continuing the direction toward an ambient/metal fusion.
1. Demon Advance (13:13)
2. Celebrate The Dead (16:18)
According to Holocausto, who was harassed by DLA operatives earlier this week, this KVLT release is an exact copy of a demo he recorded himself in July 2008 in Helsinki and Bangkok. This demo was sent to Spinefarm records, who then agreed to release what became Engram. KVLT wanted to release the demo, and since Holocausto felt the demo versions were better than the final studio production, even though the drums on the demo were sampled, he agreed to this vinyl-only release.
Birth A.D. is in the final stages of producing their debut full-length, “I Blame You”, and they need your help! A good independent production isn’t cheap, so anything you contribute to assist in the mixing and mastering process of this soon-to-be classic of crossover thrash is appreciated.
Your donation will be commemorated with the inclusion of your name on the album’s thanks list, and you will be counted as part of the new Birth A.D. fan club, the Seven Billion Graves Brigade.
The Misfits had the Fiend Club, Voivod has the Iron Gang, and this is your chance to get your name immortalized as a collaborator and conspirator! Years from now when the band is huge, overrated, and not half as cool as when they started off, you can break out the album everyone really liked and say, “There’s my name!”
Pledge now, and CAUSE PROBLEMS!
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1. Overview
2. Corpophilia and Necrobiosis
3. Necropsy
4. Rippikoulu
Written by Devamitra
Midsummer’s sylvan possession will claim many lives tonight by drowning, stabbing, hanging and other morbid rituals that cloud the light of the greatest Finnish celebration. It can be said that the spiritual conflict between the barrenness of the Finnish urban life and the sudden plunge into the freshness of nature undertaken by most at this time of the year, combined with the gargantuan intake of alcohol, causes a temporary collapse of the veil of the civilization, when festivals end as festivals must. Under the deceptive tolerance of the society, dark depths boil and murderous impulses become sublimated thoughts. Some of these undercurrents were illuminated and analyzed almost as topics of transcendental philosophy in the dark contemplative statements of Finnish Death Metal, one of the strongest musical movements that ever arose from Finnish soil and also unarguably one of the strongest Death Metal scenes of the period. It is a testament to creativity that it’s still very hard to pin down a certain easily recognizable ‘Finnish sound’, but this does not mean a lack of mental images connecting them.
Among the first were the playful Death Metal / Grindcore crossover Xysma, the brutal Disgrace and the dreamier but less eloquent Funebre from the historic capital of Turku. In nearby Loimaa the discipline of Demigod and Adramelech formulated occult and mythological visions from these roots. The true monument of the early scene was created by Abhorrence from the modern capital of Helsinki, in their devastating demos that displayed the ferocity of old school black metal alongside articulate influences from British and Swedish Death Metal movements. Later the heritage of Abhorrence spawned into the more ‘professional’ folk influenced narratives of Amorphis des
pite the fact that the earlier band was far from amateurish itself. Besides Xysma, also bands from the wooded Birkaland county were heavily influenced by punk and thrash especially in anti-authoritarian spirit: Rippikoulu, Convulse, Purtenance and Lubricant. A counterpart were the quasi-Byronian melancholic poets of Ostrobothnia, heirs of the strict religious sects of the Bothnian coast: Sentenced, Cartilage and Wings. The same mystical traits combined with grindcore, Sarcofago and lots of booze in Beherit, Belial (“Wisdom of Darkness”) and Impaled Nazarene, who composed the classics of Finnish Black Metal contemporaneously (not successively as in the world at large) to the Death Metal movement. The promising Necropsy from Lahti released a strong split album ‘Unholy Domain’ with Demigod but never managed to release a full-length album back in the day, while the cryptic and absolutely unique one album wonder Demilich from thrash capital Kuopio set the bar for Finnish ‘progressive’ Death Metal extremely high on ‘Nespithe’; only Unholy from Imatra or Paraxism from Jyväskylä (who did not release an album) could compete in sublime weirdness. Mordicus from North Karelia also left a legacy of one quality album, ‘Dances from Left’, while fellow Joensuu mystics Phlegethon only released demos and one EP before some of the same individuals surfaced in the Doomdeath tribute band Hooded Menace. The quest to bring back moments of old school Death Metal majesty brought about by later bands such as Devilry, Slugathor, Deathspawned Destroyer, Ascended and Lie in Ruins is discussed in more detail in our article “Ascension of Sepulchral Echoes: A Finnish Death Metal Revival”.
We are proud to present a sequence of tracks collected by Fenno-American Death Metal connoisseur Benjamin Tianen in tribute to Finland and its strain of artists and conjurers. This compilation of obscure quality Finnish Death Metal is recommended for listening in the twilit hours of day, preferably in rather uninhabited locations as most of Finland is. If there is one teaching one must bring home from Finnish artists and Finnish school of mental exploration, it is that one must not love happiness as much as one loves truth.
Visitors remembers the Western shores of Finland mostly from their warm summer days, windstorms and chilly nights of Autumn. The dunes of the shore of Yyteriare unique in the whole Scandinavian region while most of the towns carry relics of past industries but have failed to establish themselves in modern or digital age, remaining secluded communities with little vital attractions to the youngsters. Thus it is not surprising that towns such as the historic Uusikaupunki, a weird silent nature-surrounded industrial port that has always baffled my spirit, gave birth to multiple demo level death metal insanities in the early 90′s.
Coprophilia described the twisted and tangled nature of woods, human remains and animal entrails on the four songs of their one and only demo, playing distinctive and intricate heavy metal influenced straightforward melodies to lend catchiness to songs that in their spontaneous clarity bring into focus the main influences for old Finnish death metal: heavy metal, Bay Area speed metal, horror music and UK bands in the vein of Napalm Death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAqI9V0cUtY&feature=player_embedded
More sarcastic, irritant and grinding, Necrobiosis pummeled a simplistic punk-o-rama riffspace almost like Blasphemy or Archgoat would have done it except using the concluding expectancy common to dual vocal grindcore so that the grunts and screams echo exactly the phrases played by the rhythm guitar. Lead guitars often recall metal guitarists’ introductory practice pieces in the vein of Iron Maiden and Rainbow, as was the case with not only Coprophilia, but also Amorphis, Sentenced and many other greats. Curiously for a word I had never heard before, Necrobiosis was also picked as the band name around the same time by guys a couple of hundred kilometers away in Riihimäki. You might know this band better by a name they thought of later: Skepticism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v_wYJOfJFM&feature=player_embedded
In an era when Finnish death metal was a freaky force of nature, punishing everything in its path, Necropsy from Lahti, Finland, was doomed to obscurity as many of their peers, the likes of Mordicus, Convulse, Funebre and Abhorrence. In five years (1989-1993) they created 7 demo tapes and appeared on one 7″EP and a split LP with Demigod on the infamous Seraphic Decay label. Thrashing and grinding, organic and brutalous death metal of this kind would freshen up the scene of today immensely and thus we welcome the rumours that Necropsy is staging a comeback in true old school spirit to show the weakened versions of Carcasses and Pestilences who still holds the true spirit of unholy death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfxdKxkg-Ao&feature=player_embedded
What force in the inner core of man gives birth to death metal impulse? Is it fear, hatred, obstinence, passion, paranoia, vision or celebration of power? “Rippikoulu” is Finnish for “confirmation school”, which is an institution partaken by Finnish teenagers in order to be educated in the rituals and tenets of the Lutheran church. Celebrated usually in a camp away from the city and the participants’ homes, it ironically has a habit of devolving into a minor orgy of sin while the sole motivation of attendance for most is the hope of the meager sums of money elderly relatives usually bestow upon one, after the confirmation. When small town death metal cults produced their blasphemic demo output, it’s not far-fetched to say that it was this kind of absurd experiences with organized religion that led them to deny and spontaneously analyze the hypocritical, indoctrinating social customs that lead a child or a man to accept Christ for the sake of community and convenience, while at the same time materialistically mocking the values of the spiritual tradition.
Valkeakoski was another boring town even by Finnish standards which used to smell like feces because of the paper industry, an example of climate perfect for original death metal. At surface, the most notable characteristic of Rippikoulu was their use of Finnish language for invocation, which has often been abused but at the right hands and in the right mouth withholds the tremendous syllabic power feared by Nordic warriors since the Bronze Age, as recounted in Kalevalan mythos. The stupendous music of Rippikoulu’s two demos, “Mutaation Aiheuttama Sisäinen Mätäneminen” (“internal rotting by mutation”) and “Musta Seremonia” (“black ceremony”), bridge the grindcore influenced ecstatic physicality of Xysma with earthen, suffocated sludge in contorted, space-and-time stretching rhythmic dynamicism reminiscent of Winter‘s and diSEMBOWELMENT‘s most psychedelic lapses. It gives the impression of a blind, tormented prophet shouting fragmented glimpses of pure vision to the darkened, apocalyptic world with barely any ears left to listen to human voice amidst the collapse of industrial infrastructure. In the slow, emotional leads one could hear Paradise Lost, but in its warlike sparseness and logic, even nihilism, it’s something closer to the most doomed moments of Bolt Thrower’s “War Master” while the almost ridiculously disembodied parody of gloomy gothic organ in “Musta Seremonia” brings to mind Unholy‘s drugged haze; Faustian sorrow and blasphemous sense of humor united in one single strangely reverent and innocent package which is without question another forgotten jewel of the olden Finnish death metal scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik4oNGK9cBE&feature=player_embedded
1 CommentTags: corpophilia, death metal, Finland, Finnish Death Metal, necrobiosis, Necropsy, rippikoulu, zine-articles
