Mayhem Tour, Washington, DC Stop Review


Article contributed to Death Metal Underground by Mike Alexander’s friend who is a Bill & Ted type of guy, you know.

I saw Mayhem play De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, the only album of theirs that actually counts of course, last week at the Howard Theater in Washington, DC so I wanted to tell my fellow Death Metal Underground readers what’s happening inside the ANUS of this tour. That was surely an ironic choice of venue the band made there. Playing a black theater in a historically black city was strange for a band whose drummer, Hellhammer, is a badass drummer who hits like a fucking beast like a German in a tank trying to conquer Africa back from his historic racial enemies, the Polish and the Africans and Hellhammer is Greek or something so how can these losers with nothing better to do claim he’s even racist you know? Also practicing under their swastika banners and shit like that they shouldve brought out to steam roll all the drunk hipsters instead of comic book covers to hide behind onstage. I had to check this shit out to see if some shit would go down. I wanted to see if the gig would rule or if any crazy shit from hipsters, communists, or any other idiot life forms that could come out of a UFO or something would be real you know and prevent Mayhem from pounding my face in you know.

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Visiting The Tobacco Barn (Brenham, Texas)

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.

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#MetalGate: The MetalSucks Manifesto

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Nu-metal and metalcore website MetalSucks posted the “The MetalSucks Manifesto” today, reaffirming their stance as communist social justice warriors. Donald Trump’s triumph in the 2016 United States presidential election apparently did not dishearten their leftist delusions. A neighbor to the MetalSucks headquarters in Axl Rosenberg’s Brooklyn tenement apartment has revealed exclusive insider information to Death Metal Underground about the activities of the MetalSucks politburo of Axl Rosenberg, Vince Neilstein, and Emperor Rhombus during the week following Trump’s victory.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews 10-20-2016

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Death Metal Underground receives a constant stream of inferior promotional materials like a child is given unwanted Apples, granola bars, and candy corn on Halloween. We toss them in the trash too.

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The Decline of the Compact Disc & Music Industry

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By the 1990s, the CD reigned supreme. As the economy boomed, annual global sales surpassed 1bn in 1992 and 2bn in 1996, and the profit margins were the stuff of dreams. The CD was cheaper than vinyl to manufacture, transport and rack in stores, while selling for up to twice as much. Even as costs fell, prices rose.

The popular music industry peaked financially in 1996 but had creatively begun bottoming out years before that. Digital file sharing of lossily (and later losslessly) compressed formats simply burst the bubble of the industry’s festering corpse the ignorant had mistaken to still be moving as the putrefying gases bloated body cavities.

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Insane – Wait and Pray (2005)

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Article by Lance Viggiano.

It’s ten thirty, you’ve just park your primer printed Ford Escort next to a mail box. As you approach the house party, you hear the faint but present rolling of open e rumbling which causes your fist to clench; unconsciously clamping the thirty rack of PBR you are carrying with heightened anticipation. As you approach the house, the scent of tobacco and descending drum fills leaks through the cracked garage door while brief phrases of frantic power chords begin alighting a fire deep inside… Insane fun awaits.

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Memo From Prozakhistan (07/11/16)

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Greetings, fellow metalheads,

Times seem grim. The orcs have taken Osgilliath and approach the gates of the white city. Western Civilization is still dying, accelerated by democracy and consumerism, but rotten to its core with a lack of hope. Metal once gave that hope by showing us an alternate morality comprised of effective realism and epic mythos. Many of us want to live in that time again, but it will not happen through democracy or consumerism. We must choose our leaders and then all of us participate in restoring and advancing the greatness we have known.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Fisting Female-Fronted Pseudo-Metal

goetz iron hand

Resistance fuels hatred and must be crushed beneath an iron fist.

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The Oath – The Oath (2014)
“Whoa!” – Keanu Reeves. These women are actually fairly attractive! Usually metal girls are fat, under 5’4, and have saggy tits. Or they love Slipknot. I can see why Lee Dorian is dicking the hot one. This at least has riffs even if most of the songs wear out their welcome fairly quickly. There are Cathedral albums more boring than this but most of these songs feel like Motorhead if they smoked dope instead of cranked speed. Motorhead if Motorhead were boring and the songs went on two minutes too long and had random riff salad bridges. If these two would actually get naked on the cover like the real Coven and separated or refined their compositions, maybe this would be more listenable. Hold it is that riff from Bad Company? Who steals riffs from Bad Company? What kind of degenerate does that? If this is among the more listenable grrrl metal…

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Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Arc (2016)
As ridiculous as their band name, Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s 2016 effort is a lazy mixture of stoner rock and deathcore. It consists of interleaved Black Sabbath-core grooves and pointless breakdowns accentuated by a menstruating screamo vocalist. By the very definition of those two genres, the reader should know this is but a string of feel-good moments with absolutely no point whatsoever.

One has to wonder if the band even knows what “agoraphobic” means, given their blatantly idiotic use in their band name. From there, we can easily tell how they would also try to use “fancy vocabs” from the metal terrain without even knowing what they are for, hence the constant groove with no beginning or ending. The meaningless breakdowns that do not necessarily make the stoner rock more bearable, but just emphasize what white trash trailer park music this is. It is an updated distorted-guitar redneck music.

Baroness Purple
Baroness – Purple (2015)
The most generic heavy metal rhythm guitar riffing possible clipped with too much compression and mixed with queer hipster rock for those who question their sexuality. I’m pretty sure the hairy girls in this band are in a polygamous relationship with the dude singing and blow roadies on the side. Kind of like how Carrie Fischer let the crew members of the original Star Wars rip the tape off her tits only with more Hepatitis C positive semen from people who tried intravenous drugs. This album sounds like my local modern rock radio station who plays Bush twice a day. Baroness is the most generic 2003 rock possible only maybe one of these girls’ brothers had Led Zeppelin and Metallica posters in her bedroom. Baroness should go back to VH1. Wait VH1 doesn’t air this crap anymore as even VH1 realized how terrible it is. VH1 is Rock of Love now.

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Wolvserpent – Aporia:Kāla:Ananta (2016)
Who knows why we ever receive these sort of promos that are not remotely metal, though perhaps some suppose there is a connection because the sound and procedure may remind one of the pointlessness of post metal/rock. At the center of Wolvserpent’s music is a violin playing repetitive music while the fringes are filled with synthesizers, bass and some kind of distorted noise to fill the space. I imagine this purports to be ambient, and it evidently takes cues not only from what we know today as classic ambient but from the old, more noise-inclusive and experimental one. At some point during the 40 minutes of this release, towards the approach of its middle section, a growl-screech appears and we become the audience of a post-doom-black nothingness that lasts for about 5 minutes. After this, the music tries to pick up by adding some synths to beef up the emptiness of the lame doom metal writing that approximates what Esoteric do most of the time (waste your time with largely content-less sections while pretending to have an ambient edge). This amounts to little more than piled up noise with some consonance. This melting away proceeds for about 8 more minutes, after which we are introduced to a 4-minute hum. This hum gives then serves as background for some 3 classical string instruments playing repetitive disonant arpeggios for 3 or 4 more minutes until only they remain and the music fades out to the sound of soothing, rolling, waves. Empty and boring. Throw this away

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Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner (2016)
Enya songs with randomly inserted post-metalcore sludge bridges. Are those bongos? Is this Arise? Who thought of this? Whoever thought of this should be shot in the back of the head by their local troika, have their children post-nataly aborted, and their women deported to the camps for wives of traitors to the motherland.

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Snake Tongue – Raptor’s Breath (2016)
Random stolen eighties metal riffs made into Entombedcore with gang vocals by Kurt Ballou. I think that’s a woman in the promo picture. Maybe it’s a man who is just confused that his baby dick is a big clitoris. Yeah they can get that big. Haven’t you seen Backdoor to Chyna?
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Necrosic – Putrid Decimation (2016)
These girls imagine what would have happened if in 1990 Autopsy had written songs entirely out of mosh riffs broken up by hardcore and shameless lifts from Slayer’s catalog. The answer is a metal band that would have only have been fit to play pizza parlors filled with 17 year olds too busy playing arcade games to pay attention. Anthrax if Anthrax decided to cash-in on sludge instead of nu-metal in the early 90s.

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Sacrilege – Behind the Realms of Madness (1985)
This is the sort of release that exemplifies that some releases were never meant to be heard, not to mention be re-released. To pretend this is some sort of hidden gem is to pander to the clueless audience’s sense of nostalgia in the most dishonest way. Sacrilege never amounted to much as their music was never much. What we hear in hear in Behind the Realms of Madness is the sort of simpleton’s generic metal any angry teenager could be writing and playing in his garage with his friends after huffing glue. Each of these songs is based entirely upon a single riff played ad nauseam while an angry woman shouts about how much she hates her father. There are random supplementary riffs here and there but they are just meant to provide some sense of dynamism to the propulsion of the main riff. The main riffs in every song are generic and almost indistinguishable, the vocals are identical (some angry British woman screaming about how she got fucked over by her dad who wouldn’t pay for her BA in Womyn’s and Sexual Identity Studies), and every single song has the same kind of poser-trudging-accross-the-mall-food-court from Hot Topic vibe about it.

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Sacred Few – Beyond the Walls (1985)
Another mediocre eighties heavy metal album with an annoying vocalist that deserved to be forgotten. Manilla Road this is not; the songwriting is generic, the riffs unoriginal, and the guitar tone too thin. This was only pressed to CD to cash in on idiot hipsters dumb enough to be deluded by Vice into believing that metal needs more dumpy women. I would rather listen to every Motorhead album I don’t remember even exists than this lame woman who drinks too much Budweiser again. This is retro-metal for cuckolded submissive males who think Steve Harris is Pogrom and jerked off to the blonde women in catsuits from The Oath instead of real porn. I’m going to crack open another Coors Banquet and use this CD as a coaster. Wait is the Puerto Rican  guy in the collar her slave?
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Lizzies – Good Luck (2016)
Judas Priest covered by Spanish pre-op transsexuals. Listening to this album makes me want to chop my leg off so my femoral artery will bleed out in three minutes. Two tracks in and I just put on Unleashed in the East instead. Let’s all listen to that classic instead of this crap:

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On The Music Of Timeghoul

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Article by David Rosales

Timeghoul’s short lived existence gave us two excellent demos in 1992 and 1994. These both display very distinct facets of the project, each with their own merits and limitations. Even if we see the second as an evolution of the first, the first stands very firmly on its own ground. You could in fact argue that the second is not so much an evolution, as a different overall direction for the band.

The first release, Tumultuous Travelings, had a much more suffocating feeling to it, but already showcasing Timeghoul’s distinct personality, setting it apart from any contemporary. This distinction, however, is one of language and not one of technique; so that the casual onlooker might consider this first work to be a typical release for its time. In reality, once we acknowledge its allegiance to the traditions of death metal, the particular traits of Timeghoul’s music (even on Tumultuous Travelings) are anything but typical.

In 1994 came Panaramic Twilight (sic), which boasted of more explicitly progressive intentions, giving it automatic recognition in the mind of the same simple metalhead who passed off their first demo as standard. Seldom is it recognized that Timeghoul’s “progressive” qualities were already present on the first release, which is a trend that itself fails to stand out as few recognize these leanings in even the most developed death metal of the early 1990s. Timeghoul’s most significant development on Panaramic Twilight was that they stepped up the drama and Wagnerian soundtrack-like constructions, which required longer silences, longer notes and a wider variety of expression.

Now, when constructing music, composers have to strike a balance between intelligibility and variety (a.k.a. outer complexity). Most metal musicians, however, seem totally unaware of this, and this is why bands who, out of a humble degree of proficiency, produce simpler music have a more enduring impression on the audience in general. Aesthetic variety will not keep your interest if the music that underlies it is incoherent, muddy, and lacking in clarity. However, mere clarity is not enough; the image remains blurry if the overall picture has not been built with enough concrete purpose.

This is where Timeghoul excels; coherent and concrete purpose in songwriting is their most meaningful contribution to metal. They have opened this door to a world of possibilities within their paradigm of dramatic and obscure (rather than gory) death metal that does not require a band to clone their approach to follow in their steps. In comparison, trying to learn from Demilich or Immolation often results in blatant plagiarism, unless your efforts and results arise from a detailed technical analysis and are applied only in an abstract manner. Timeghoul compensates for the silences, rapid-fire changes in rhythms, and the use of texture to enhance different feelings in their music by using a very limited range of techniques. This is comparable to what At the Gates did on their own album. The techniques themselves aren’t numerous; nor are they extremely advanced. The band chooses a lexicon of technique, and relies on it consistently within a harmonic/modal framework that lends each song their own “harmonic feel” (arising from the interplay with the vocal’s timbre as well, I presume).

The wide range of expression is achieved through the types of arrangements and the changes in texture and rhythm, which are not selected at random like we saw in the work of Crematory. Timeghoul is very clearly telling a story and each bit of music, each switch from blast beat to silence, from frenetic power chord torrent to slow, single-note melody lines makes sense as a narrative. Timeghoul’s approach is not one of riff-salad, but rather more akin to that of an opera. In short, the music of Timeghoul provides another healthy avenue for metal musicians to explore. What you can learn from this unfortunately short-lived project on the abstract level is of far more value than what you can imitate by simply trying to emulate their sound. It is their intuitional organization that deserves praise; the powerful narrative element of Timeghoul’s music is a rare gem.

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