Judas Priest – Unleashed in the East (1979)

Article contributed to Death Metal Underground by George Psalmanazer.

Judas Priest started life as just another Led Zeppelin influenced band in the early 1970s. Quickly they became massively influenced by Black Sabbath and especially Thin Lizzy. Priest adapting the counterpointed riffing and harmonzied melodic guitar leads of Thin Lizzy into a mixture of progressive rock and the then new heavy metal of Black Sabbath but with operatic vocals instead of Ozzy “singing” the riff through his nose kicked off the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the late 1970s.

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Sanctuaire Readying Feu Sacré

French Canadian Viking-themed black metal/ambient band Sanctuaire announced on their Facebook page that they are in the final stages of mixing their upcoming record, Feu Sacré (Sacred Fire). Hopefully the band have continued improving their compositional skills which advanced from their oft pedestrian Helserkr demo collection to last year’s sometimes inspiring Le Sang sur l’Acier EP.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: 3-14-2017

These bands attempt to masquerade their GarageBand music fit only for arcades, pizza parlors, and high school dances as underground metal. They fail.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Mellow Destruction of Inferior Semi-Technical Trivialities

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.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: 3-9-2017

The Death Metal Underground staff subjects themselves to countless nights of toilet diving in order to bring you gems crapped out by the dessicated undead corpse of the music industry. These are what we left in the latrine.

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Sodomize The Weak


Since “sodomize the weak” has become the unofficial motto of this site, and we rarely make such things official because formalization leads to accelerated decrepitude, it makes sense to explain why these three words encompass the single bit of philosophy that every sane person needs.

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Metal Festers Eternal

Right now, above the metal underground there is what was coined, I believe originally by Pogrom from Arghoslent, the “Funderground”. The funderground consists of independent labels, sometimes mainstream distributed, releasing thousands of albums each year full of rehashed material or rebranded three-chord hardcore with different superficial aesthetics to fuel a bar show audience’s drunken moshing or make hipsters feel smart for liking an indie rock release with a dirty production. One can see this divide in most of the popular “underground” web forums such as those of Nuclear War Now! and Full Moon Productions. The most popular “underground” “metal” releases of each year are all older metal rehashed into pop-rock structures or rebranded hardcore. This divide is similar to what is felt in mainstream Western culture with the leftist “elites”‘ constant Marxist virtue signaling and branding freethinkers with various epithets for refusing to chant the praises of socialism mandated by the vanguard party.

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Crimson Massacre – The Luster of Pandemonium (2005)

Death metal folk wisdom tells that the epithet “technical” generally connotes music that is bad for a unique reason: it tends to get trapped in technique, including cute tricks from music theory, for its own sake, which in turn deprecates the art of composing memorable and relevant songs.

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