Brutal yet melodic Dutch-German black metal fire team Sammath plan to unleash their latest album, Across the Rhine Is Only Death, during early second quarter 2019. This album extends their work on Godless Arrogance which took the grandeur of Strijd to its logical conclusion given the increasing viciousness and technicality of intervening albums.
17 CommentsTags: Black Metal, sammath
M8L8TH and Peste Noire’s Famine have joined forces in creating one of the weirdest movements to have ever existed in metal, Commercially friendly NSBM! Best of all was that the partnership released a whole load of ridiculous music and fashion items. Famine who represents all the worst French stereotypes imaginable and who has made a career of his first album that was essentially a well executed Burzum ripoff but with Rock elements to make the whole much more digestible. M8L8TH play metalcore/RAC with a few Black metal aesthetics in the riffs and pretty much consist of frontman Alexey known for killing a few immigrants and whoever is willing to write music for him to rant over.
Tags: Alexey, Avoid at all costs, Coup de Grâce, famine, Le Dernier Putsch, M8L8TH, Mental Cancer, Militant Zone, nsbm, peste noire, PESTE NOIRE - split - PESTE NOIRE, reconquista
Floating between between Floridian Death metal and Black metal in the vein of Emperor with a large dose of the more percussive elements from the New York style. Bal-Sagoth do manage to fuse these elements in a combination that remains mainly in the aforementioned black metal style. An important element that would dominate later releases is the spoken word of Byron Roberts. Obsessed with reciting his long lyrics inspired by the fantasy books that he was devouring, Roberts will at times create a hostage situation where the music is on stand by and loses all the momentum built up, so that he can ramble on and the compositions can’t progress until he is done. Though his perfect diction and deep voice do keep in line with the aesthetics provided here, they add nothing to the music and kick the compositions back to the droning political punk where the music was just the backing track for the vocalist’s tirades.
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Tags: A Black Moon Broods Over Lemuria, Bal-Sagoth, Black Metal, emperor, Floridian Death metal, Martin Walkyrier, nydm, Sabbat(UK), story telling
Kshatriya comes to us from that odd category of bands whose material would be great if they would just stop screwing around with the presentation, which ends up creating padding that while not terrible, detracts from the listening experience as a whole. Anyone who has sat through the first Impaled Nazarene album knows the pain of too much gimmick.
3 CommentsTags: Black Metal, Kshatriya
All of humanity exists as a conspiracy against the obvious but not fully pleasant truth. In reality, few things are absolutely good or bad; most are a mixed bag, which means that there are trade-offs between things that we like and things that we dislike. This bothers individuals, who want guarantees of 100% safety, and fails to excite groups, who love illusions because those make everyone in the group feel warm and happy, which strengthens the group as a parasitic artificial entity.
37 CommentsTags: alcohol, cigar smoking, drinking, pipe smoking, pubs, smoking, social life, tobacco
Progressive rock came out of jazz jams in which the goal was to see how long you could keep a song going by inventing variations on its internal structures. Having had high school education in classical music, European rock musicians threw those structures into the mix and tried to see how long they could keep the song together, or coherent.
9 CommentsTags: condor, folk music, Heavy Metal, progressive rock
Death metal necromancy involves the process of looking through the forgotten items of the 1990s to find those rare overlooked classics which might deserve a place on our microSD cards. As part of that quest, old demos like “Rancid Disembowelment” from Mortal Dread re-appear, which provides a mixed blessing because this is good stuff but probably remains forever at local band status.
5 CommentsTags: death metal, mortal dread
Death Squad – Split You At The Seams
Ever Rat Records, 1991
Speed metal — rising from Tank, Satan, Metallica, and Mercyful Fate — had a good but short run in the 1980s before enterprising poseurs worked rock and blues back into the mix, taking away the focus on riffs and song construction in favor of what were essentially pop songs with lots of muted E-chords. Split You At The Seams shows a late entry with roll-your-own spirit.
6 CommentsTags: death squad, Speed Metal
Primordial Offerings follows up on the first Kever which focused more on an intelligent form of percussive death metal; the second EP from this promising band attempts to invent a new style of atmospheric death metal without losing any of the intensity, sounding like a mix of Florida, Buffalo, and selectively melodic European acts like Fleshcrawl and Demigod.
8 CommentsTags: atmospheric death metal, death metal, kever
Chuck Schuldiner who once played crushing music that popularized Death metal before attempting to follow the mid 90s phase where every Underground band had to somehow rise to face the more rock influenced bands at their own game through whinier passages and trivial lyric matter. During that period his technical abilities increased but his inability to arrange worthwhile music become obvious rather as he relied exclusively on rock structures that culminated in a solo before repeating the whole process without any thoughts on progression, narration or momentum. This created the effect where some truly incredible melodies were juxtaposed next to some very mediocre sections derived from rock and other genres. This device was then taken by a large number of bands who have then used it to promote a singular idea over everything else and has contributed largely to the decline of metal in general. Let us look at a few moments where the Chuck Schuldiner syndrome was very apparent.
Tags: chuck schuldiner, Chuck Schuldiner Syndrome, death, death metal, grave, nile, Obscura, terrible, The Absence, vektor
