These are quick reviews of the stuff that didn’t make it to the next update. These reviews did not end up being all that stellar, nor was the material they were about in any way enduring, so they’re here for posterity — and search engines, in canse anyone is trying to do their Christmas shopping in February.
Black Crucifixion – Faustian Dream
This gothic heavy metal has some black metal stylings, but is about 75% Saint Vitus and 25% Gehenna. The rest is pure gothic rock with dramatic vocals, jaunty rhythms offset against doomy choruses, and all of the theatrical aspects you would expect. It is very simple and composed like rock music with a fixed harmonic frame of reference, and almost no phrasal riffs, but it’s not bad in that context although this style drivers your reviewer to hide under toilets. I’d infinitely prefer this total lack of hiding one’s inner goth to the artifice of trying to be as “hard man metal” as possible to disguise one’s inner eurotrash artfag. Still, I’ll never listen to it again.
Demonical – Servants of the Unlight
The first track on this CD struck me as interesting; it seemed to be evading its own conclusions, and so twisted itself into a sigil and then expanded upon it. It had a Middle Eastern-sounding melody and plenty of atmosphere. After that, the album degenerated into sped-up second-album Grave styled material with a few modern twists but mostly really predictable battering repetition that it seems to relish. If your short term memory is destroyed and you’re relearning to walk, this might be a great CD, but otherwise, get me away from here.
Earthless – Rhythms From a Cosmic Sky
The merger of doom metal into stoner doom/70s jam takes this genre back — in a disappointing way. We’re back at stupid rock music here, complete with the reliance on offbeat to make a rhythm even vaguely memorable, and the spongy way in that these bands noodle around repetitive series of similar patterns of notes, sounding “complex” only to those who have no idea what a scale is. Having no real content, they substitute with all sorts of annoying rhythmic flourishes and layering of instruments, as well as more bubbly drooling soloing. This has nothing to do with metal or anything but amusing the slower learners.
Equinox – demo 1994
If you like slightly cruise-y gothic death metal, this demo provided an interesting jumping-off point, perhaps similar to a more proficient Goatlord. Its rhythms are seductive but easy and so never go anywhere; it’s verse chorus with a few digressions, but otherwise falls into song format. Think Sisters of Mercy doing a doom/death take on Obituary. It’s not particularly bad, and has at least one really solid riff per song, but doesn’t add up to much interest for death metal fans.
Eschaton – Causa Fortior
Of all the trvlt — that’s an abbreviation for trve kvlt — releases out there, this one stands out not at all. Not one goddamned bit. Yes, vicious playing and fast rhythms, sort of like Discharge with more practice. And the melodies? Kind of candy, if you ask these ears, and definitely predictable. Song structures? Follow the development of the main riff through two cycles, one barely getting any airtime. End result: why bother?
Basilisk – A Joyless March Through the Cold-Lands
We’d all love to like this because it has all the elements of second-wave black metal: the Abigor/Emperor melodic drilling, the Abyssic/Negura Bunget vamping slow-strummed drift, and finally the Impaled Nazarene/Zyklon-B chaotic blasting. But it adds up to a whole lot of riffs we heard in the late 1970s with hardcore bands, and they don’t congeal into songs, more like an aggregate: when it’s left over, you’re looking for something or anything to really change. This is too predictably “safe” to be black metal.
Disillusion – Back to Times of Splendor
Great name, awful band. When impetus is lost, people revert. In this case, it’s like a cross between Sentenced and a metalcore band: fast, neurotic riffs that change randomly, then guitar trills and melodic rhythm leads, all in song structures as predictable as cereal commercials. Bands like this convert metalheads to religion just for the better music.
Anti-Cimex – Criminal Trap
Punk is so basic you don’t really need much to differentiate bands. This sounds like an uptempo Discharge with more conventional verse/chorus song structures and more rock/blues leads. Other than that, it’s about what you’d expect. I’d rate it among the top 20 punk bands, but you really have to love repetition to listen to this. I don’t care anymore.
Delve – The Dead Amongst
Imagine a cross between Slaughter Lord, early Grave and Grotesque: dynamic neo-war-metal riffs clashing at high speed and ramming into catchy choruses, with lots of fast drum work and messy guitar playing. The problem is that such a monolith approach ends up becoming predictable and boring after just a few listens.
Trimonium – Of warriors and heroism
Easily one of the more professional bands out there, Trimonium take the formula adapted on the first The Abyss album and wrap it around what is at its heart the kind of boisterous, melodic, bounding material that we find on power metal albums. Thoroughly professional in composition and playing, it is nonetheless the work of experienced musicians who are designing self-satisfying melodies like those of jingles, but in a style that bonds folk music with the bouncing exuberance of soundtracks to pirate movies.
Ender – Ender
There are those who make progressive rock by thinking of an idea, and then ad hoc-ing song structures and ideas to make it work. There are others who look at progressive rock and make a variation of it so they have an iron in the fire. This CD is sadly the latter, because it has potential. Crossing the later prog-punk and emo sound with atmospheric progressive rock, Ender make a very pleasantly floating musical tapestry that also means nothing, other than a manipulation of emotions in themselves, which creates a gentle transition between related feelings with no sense of broader significance. As a result, it’s a lot like watching a commercial for AIDS medication.
Epitaph – Seeming Salvation
Bad heavy metal that resembles Candlemass in its squirrely guitar leads, this CD seems to think because it has a bassy whisper of death metal vocals that it should be death metal. It should not be. Every musical element serves the production of songs that use heavy metal rhythms, aesthetics, song forms and content as their inspiration. Like many bands who make this mistake, Epitaph must be nuts to do it, since if they dropped the death vocals and got quality production, they would have met moderate success in any decade from 1974 onward.
Vociferian – Beredsamkeit
Nu-blackmetal can go a few different ways, and one is the candy of pure melodic sound. That’s what we have here. Through a combination of tuning, melodic intervals and sustain-heavy distortion, this band creates a wave of melodic sound — the affinity of notes for large gaps — without deviating from the basic melodic patterns of pop. It’s an engaging listen, but doesn’t last. If they want to gain real power, they’ll create songs about an idea and wrap the melodic riffs around that.
Athos – Crossing the River of Charon
Like most post-1996 black metal, this perfectly capable release is boring because it’s easy to anticipate and it focuses too much on trying to re-create the “black metal mood,” instead of like the great bands capturing the process leading up to it. There’s no way to nitpick; nothing is wrong except the CD taken as a whole.
Vorum – Grim Death Awaits
This appears to be a melodic speed metal album hidden with a black/death hybrid. The songwriting resembles something that would have come out of a Destruction/later Nuclear Assault hybrid, but it’s tricked out in aggressive rhythms and very basic riffs, with the high intensity chaos brought on by people hitting too many strings, drums and vocal chords at once. Thoroughly not bad but also probably not interesting to those who are more interested in an old school death metal/black metal style.
Arsis – We Are the Nightmare
This is a musical nightmare. Glam/hard rock style twee choruses between dramatic, bouncy blockhead speed metal riffs. Above it a voice howling, then a melodic riff and some fast drumming, all overproduced so it hits really hard and then beats you to death with repetition. CDs like this drive people to apocalyptic religions.
Vulture – Easier to Lie
From the Manilla Road meets Exodus school of choppy speed metal, Vulture make an interesting and experimental album with vast holes of idea in which are filled the dreaded Pantera-style catchy bounce riffing that goes nowhere because it has almost no harmonic motion. Some of the experimental stuff is intriguing, as it crosses low-tech rhythm guitar with jazz drumming and interesting lead guitar that drops into rhythm guitar figures when convenient to emphasize a change in backdrop. I like it, but it flags in intensity, so makes for an uneven listening experience in a style I abandoned years ago.
Vomit the Soul – Apostles of Inexpression
Would it be wrong to guess that this style of music is very subtly influenced by rap? The semi-recursive rhythms of the chortling, gurgling, guttural muffled shout vocals suggest a technique similar to rap. The riffing is glorified, via Suffocation, speed metal percussive strum but falls into that use of minimal melodic motion to make a nice bouncy groove into which they can drop build-ups, break-downs and even more, lots of chortling. It’s genre-typical: competent, not bad, but well past the glory years of this genre and probably only about half as interesting as a later Deeds of Flesh album.
Denial – Catacombs of the Grotesque
Another forgettable band, for all their technical skill in integrating the memes and techniques of twenty years of death metal into a single album. These songs lack subtlety because that they want to express is not subtle, and even more, does not expand from the initial appearance. They adopt from Krisiun the power-blasting technique of full speed ahead drums, with pauses to divide riffs, creating an overwhelming sense of motion even when little corresponds between riff and percussion. These are songs about violent destabilization and in the process of expressing that, they destabilize themselves into chaotic collections of riff unified by rhythm and vocals but expressing little other than a self-satisfied chaos.
Vermis – Liturgy of the Annihilated
Imagine early Grave with greater instrumental ability and a propensity to use Entombed-style slower melodic passages between the storming chords of thunderous rage. This is roughly where Vermis stands, with a few updated stylistic elements, and less of the flowing tremolo of older death metal so much as fast chord changes like a metal-stamping machine. If anything, the habit of picking a progression and working it through basic harmony split into three riffs wears old after a few songs, but not in a tragic way, such that if this band were able to pack more variation into their work, they’d have a killer. Probably especially appealing to fans of KAAMOS, NOMINON and REPUGNANT.
Coffins – Buried Death
Resembling a stoner doom band as executed by early Grave, this death metal act offer us no complexity and very little variation between songs, but they make them engaging and easily heard owing to their familiar rhythms that resembling walking, wrestling and other human activities. The chord progressions alternate between chromatic and comfortable hard rock intervals, giving this an over-the-top feel as if somehow Cinderella, Poison or AC/DC wandered through hell and came out chaotic. While none of it is offensive, and everything fits and feels second-nature, this CD also doesn’t do anything exceptional so it fades very quickly into the background. It gets an A++ for stylistic concerns, and a C- for content.
Unexpect – In a Flesh Aquarium
Progressive rock presents difficulties in tying together larger songs in a way that makes sense. If you want to take a shortcut, take a very basic song and trick it out, aesthetically. Add some fast scales to that riff; layer some voices; use a weird instrument; use strange time changes. Write a melody that is awkward or diminished, use relative scales. All of this can dress up a very basic song into something sounding quite complex that, when you sketch it out on a whiteboard or equivalent, is basically a pop song. Fans of Maudlin of the Well — if they played really fast with female and male vocals competing and Renaissance Fair style quasi-medieval melodies twisted into modern, almost grunge form — would like this mess, as will people who like constant distraction carnival music like Mindless Self Indulgence. For this reviewer, it’s an old dog still trying old tricks without having much to say.
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The early nineties was replete with Death Metal bands that are now legendary, contributing to the cult’s creative height, but largely from the now infamous concentration zones of northern Europe and across the Americas. This left several adjacent scenes with relatively little notoreity and condemned some first-rate albums to obscurity. Our review of Disaffected’s ‘
But in 2007, me and guitar player Sérgio Paulo, decided to reunite the band after 10 years of silence, and after a few meetings with the band members discussing a possible band reunion, the decision was “Let’s do it!!!”. A lot had passed with the band and the band members during these inactive years. Each had gone their own way in music and life. Due to the tragic accident of Sergio Paulo (guitarist) in 2004, all members got together again for the purpose of supporting a good friend. Sergio was lucky to survive a coma sleep of 2 weeks. His force of living had made him come back to us, and he had (literally) to restart his whole life, like being born again. He recovered most his abilities, and even his guitar mastery is back in 99%. A lot of things he had lost in his memory due to this accident, but he had never forgot DISAFFECTED music and his friends!
In 1994, I played bass guitar with a Jazz sextet featuring vocalist star Patrícia Fernandes, and we performed a show at Festa do Avante’94 (Seixal) in September of that same year. During the Summer ’97, I played bass guitar at Flood (Alternative Rock) as the support band of Santos & Pecadores Summer Tour ’97. In March ’02, in the aftermath of our Death Metal project Skinblade (1999-2002), me and drummer O decided to form a new band called Sybila, based on avant-garde style, and in December ’04, we entered Studio G22 (Feijó, Almada) with producer Paulo Vieira (Firstborn) to record the promotional song ‘Cycles’. The band split up in 2008 due to professional commitments of the musicians. 
Gião: Musically, we intend to continue with the style that characterizes Disaffected, trying to explore new levels of music, sometimes melodic sometimes dissonant. In this new album the lyrical context consists in two parts. Part 1 with dark and obscure lyrics, showing the route of the band from the stop until the meeting, and then in Part 2 we will try to depict the rebirth of the band with lyrics more encouraging and positive. We’ll sign a new label contract too, but for now, we have nothing confirmed yet.
With the advent of another grim Autumn, half of the world retreats into glowing boxes of warmth and comfort to preserve the sickly and feverish Summertime langour. In a time where the seasonal rituals of harvest survives only as a novelty for urbanites and other moderns, for the sinister few, this is the season to step out into the growing shade of night and harvest the souls of the damned for they will be reborn into a new, unholy dawn. Such apocalyptic ends have necessitated a gathering of gargantuan proportions and could not be more appropriately named as the third ‘Black Mass Festival‘ in Helsinki later this week. Nefarious and astralic cults known to Hessians the world over, like Necros Christos, Sadistic Intent, Cruciamentum, Neutron Hammer, Lie in Ruins, and Death Metal legends, Demigod will be devastating the city and delivering winter even earlier than the Arctic already experiences it. Among such legions and Deathmetal.Org personnel in devout attendance will be London-based Death Metal occultists, Grave Miasma, making a similar journey to myself, but before our paths would re-intersect on the shamanic land of ancient Suomi, I posed a few questions to their guitarist and vocalist, the acronymious Heruka C.C.O.T.N., who seeks to re-ignite the dying embers of Death fucking Metal’s true fucking spirit on the very soil of the wider genre‘s birth.
ObscuraHessian: Interest in more archaic forms of Death Metal is growing all around the world, as if returning to first principles and rediscovering our primordial selves. Consequently, as evidenced in your EP, the music is becoming esoteric like it used to be, wrapping dark and cosmic imagery in death-worshipping ‘theological’ statements. How important is esotericism in such a style and scene as Death Metal? Is it just a ‘thematic choice’ or something more?
ObscuraHessian: There’s a lot of sounds from ‘Joined in Darkness‘-era Demoncy that surface in the music of ‘Exalted Emanation’, which adds a Black Metal flavour to it. Is this a favourite album of the band or are you more into Death Metal? Who would you say are your biggest musical influences?
C.C.O.T.N.: To draw inspiration from my surroundings, I go out of London – often far indeed. Man is attuned with his surroundings, and living in this city is not congruent with the contemplation needed to collate this stimulation. I do find desolate urban areas during the dead of night to exude such sinister ambience, however. Whilst there are locations of Occult interest in the capital, other provinces of England are more relevant whether in regards to tangible brooding atmospheres or unseen power currents.
As much of the northern hemisphere is being overwhelmed by the onslaught of winter, the flames of Hell are rising to consume the south at summer’s peak. Still, the hardened souls of Black Metal warriors remain unfrozen, and Australia‘s Dis Pater from 
ObscuraHessian: The sound of the full-length is naturally better as there’s more space between instruments but you still managed to reflect an enclosed feeling which sounds like the music is passing through a million leaves and branches before it hits the listener. Did the demo receive any remastering before sent to be pressed for its forthcoming distribution?
