If someone goes on this tour, make sure to hand Justin Broadrick a telephone to signify that this album has been phoned in. As the term implies, when content creators are no longer focused on making their work significant, an “it’ll do” mentality results. This fits within what Godflesh and related Broadrick-acts have done through their careers.
9 CommentsTags: emo, godflesh, Grindcore, hard rock, Heavy Metal, indie, indie/emo, Industrial, industrial grindcore, punk
Newer metal bands in the mid-2000s went one of few ways: the competition among users of extreme techniques caused a degree of one-upmanship that obscured the message of the music of “technical” bands, while the desire to get the audience to move caused the compositions of -core bands to be infiltrated by danceable open-note rhythms, and those left outside these groups grew more and more abstract in execution as if to rebel against conventional songwriting. The issue here is that all three avenues, despite the latter being the most declarative, require an aesthetic sleight-of-hand to mask the lack of authoritative message in composition while the music is steered with the effects on the listener in mind rather than coming from the innate desire of a composer to communicate. Portal, along with Ulcerate and Deathspell Omega, ushered in a style of metal that is entirely rooted in audience manipulation through a reliance on discordance that borders on desperation. A challenge in viewing bands like this objectively is that it is difficult to fully understand whether the intent is holistically realized or if the sound and execution is the result of having no spirit of communication beyond purely aesthetic virtues. Perhaps the evolution in sound was the understanding that metal did need to progress, and although there were surely undiscovered ways to do so, an analysis of all prior compositions reveal that metal was comprised of a multitude of expressions utilizing the same symbols: songs needed intros, various types of phrases that build tension, bridges, climaxes, and resolutions, and the catalog of conventional music that we have is constructed of various shufflings of these elements. So, although a new act could in theory have a unique approach to music, they were essentially draping a new skin on a tired skeleton. Metal, and music in general, had to go somewhere and it had to be led by someone that had a clear vision of something to communicate. And most importantly, it had to be done so without a reliance on the tropes that human nature has formulated with respect to the idea of song; ultimately, it needed to cripple it from within.
Is Portal the band to breach these waters, or are the efforts of the band a reflection of a lack of having anything to say intrinsically while still being able to coast on a formulaic command of discordant textures where fully realized phrases once guided the listener through a narrative journey?
21 CommentsTags: aesthetic, death metal, evolution, experimental death metal, Ion, Portal, review, songwriting, Technical Death Metal, tropes
Dennis Emmental hated being late because it revealed to everyone how little he wanted to be there. Slipping past the creaky back door, he took his place in the line at OptiFood. Orders came from the digital kiosk at the drive-thru and Dennis had twenty-four seconds to assemble the ingredients for the OptiMeal:
He and his cohorts were dumping ingredients in the short, stout, beaker-shaped commemorative plastic buckets used to serve the twenty-four ounce meals. The store was open twenty-four hours a day, and had a thirty-eight percent turnover rate at a six month interval. The owners were unconcerned; they had reached the point where it took a million bucks just to think about suing them, and everyone knew that most of their employees were retards and flakes and so just laughed off their complaints.
17 CommentsTags: cheese, evil, fiction, god, immortality, Satan, sodomy
Squandered potential proves a crueler disappointment than an outright bad effort in many ways especially when so few modern bands even remotely approach the mantle of the greats of the past, and the most recent EP from unfairly described “black metal” act Thantifaxath is as glaring an example of this scenario as one could imagine.
23 CommentsTags: Black Metal, noisecore, post-metal, thantifaxath
Tags: acrimonious, ande, anomalie, apostate viaticum, beneath a godless sky, black 'n roll, black alley lobotomy, boring, candle, consumation, crimson sun, Death Fortress, death metal, deathcore, deathless legacy, digir gidim, divine element, draugurinn, ekpyrosis, elevator music, eshtadur, falls of rauros, faytree, fen, fubar, gothic, harvest gulgatltha, in thousand lakes, jarnbord, kjeld, mean messiah, metalcore, nifelheim, norunda, NORÐ, resonance cascade, sadistic metal reviews, sielunvihollinen, skogen, spectral, tervahäät, the committee, the nightstalker, the ritual aura, thormesis, thybreath, unaussprechlichen kulten, weltesser, witchapter
Death Metal Underground finally has crowned a winner of our Real Sex with Social Justice Warriors Short Story Contest. GGALLIN1776’s morbid visions of bloody leftist degeneracy have been pounded into our staffs’ brains like a pistol butt cracking open a teenage thug’s skull:
40 CommentsTags: antifa, antifascist, antifascists, communism, communists, sjws, socialists, stupidity
These random, gimped releases are held in high regard by high-pitched “metal” critics and core pogo stickers. The Death Metal Underground staff takes it upon themselves to scorn and defile them in the name of all that is good in the metal genre.
28 CommentsTags: amon amarth, cynic, deathcore, dripping, fags, homosexuality, in flames, jazz fusion, lykathea aflame, melodeaf, metalcore, nu-metal, random, sadistic metal reviews, slam, techdeaf, tek-deth
Article by David Rosales.
The following is a short list of black metal releases (with a commentary on each) that would general fall off the edge of the usual stylistic lines that Death Metal Underground follows when looking at genre releases. These are all exceptional and form part of what could, in hindsight, be described as the lone wolves of an established and matured black metal genre — generally unnoticed or passed by without receiving substantial attention among the waves of excess of the 21st century; treasures hidden in plain sight for those with a developed sense beyond mere form.
49 CommentsTags: Abyssum, Black Metal, infamous, nekrokrist ss, RAC, rac/oi, riddle of meander, SVEST
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.
39 CommentsTags: black anvil, cash grab, de mysteriis dom sathanas, hellhammer, hipsters, Inquisition, mayhem, review, tour, US tour, washington dc
Everything you love is eventually butchered, emulsified, digested, and squeezed out by lesser life forms ranging from head hunters to bacterium to mediocre metal bands. Here are some Sadistic Metal Reviews for our readers’ pleasure:
54 CommentsTags: apologeth, ash borer, atila, bestial raids, code, dark sarah, dumal, enemy of reality, exophage, f.o.a.d, fides inversa, fight the fight, four star revival, haan, infinite earths, into the storm, kreator, l'homme absurde, pissgrave, sadistic metal reviews, taine, the drip, the vomiting dinosaurs, thrown into exile, twingiant, voodoo terror tribe, witchery, ytivarg, yugal
