Czech black metallers Root have a new album coming out next month.
4 CommentsTags: agonia records, Black Metal, Czech black metal, Heavy Metal, Root, upcoming release
Sadistic Metal Reviews 10-20-2016
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.
36 CommentsTags: abigorum, akem manah, asguard, autokrator, bloodrain, construct of lethe, cryostasium, dead end finland, death courier, demonomancy, dimension darkness, door into emptiness, eufori, far beyond, gods tower, karg, Khors, kozeljinik, netherbird, nuclear war now! productions, nwn, peter grusel und die unheimlichen, pragnavit, regler, rich davis, sadistic metal reviews, skeleton of god, soliloquim, Urfaust, veld, Vietah, vola, witchcraft
The Decline of the Compact Disc & Music Industry
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.
19 CommentsTags: 1990s, assimilation, compact disc, false metal, History, music industry
Futile Exercises in Futility
Article by Anton Rudrick.
Mgła provides us with a perfect example to round a trio of examples that together shape the main misunderstandings as to what black metal is through their misrepresentation of it in either carelessness or ignorance. While modern Watain plays a completely undefined mixture of incoherent tropes around a stomping heavy rock that never condenses into anything original, and modern Behemoth is a shock rock outfit with sterile tekdeaf (modern technical “death metal”) techniques, Mgła is the one that closest comes to black metal by its purposely limited form closely resembling it. However, at best it could be said that they are a musically poor black metal band devoid of the traditional character that fuels the adversarial music, and at worst it could be classified as a post metal band experimenting with close variations on a very simple theme.
26 CommentsTags: 2015, Black Metal, boring, exercises in futility, Mgła, poland, post-hardcore, post-metal, re-review, review
Mail Call: Infamous and Kshatriya
Metalheads love going to the post office. This is established fact; we are either sending off dubs or trades, or going there to receive a package full of music. Like most anti-social types, we do not trust centralized authorities like iTunes or major labels, so mostly our music comes in physical form. We like it that way.
27 CommentsTags: Black Metal, eremita produzioni, infamous, Kshatriya, solitudo, solitvdo, vsque ad sidera vsque ad inferos, warnungstraum
Sodom – Decision Day (2016)
Article by Anton Rudrick.
Now that a thorough overview of Sodom’s career has been completed, and a short analysis from that overview has provided us with new insights, we can be more confident in our evaluation of their new album, Decision Day, in a way that allows us to tentatively explain the origin of its strengths and faults. This becomes especially useful with an album displaying averageness on all levels, showing no prominent ideas that distinguish it neither in the abstract nor the actualized, and furthermore, certainly not being more than the sum of its parts. The situation is one in which all that remains are the references that these streamlined and pre-fabricated pieces meant in their original contexts, and how this commercial product attempts to play on them for maximizing revenue.
Sodom has earned a solid reputation among the metal crowd through the years. Most fans of the metal underground will probably have heard about Sodom, or that of Tom Angelripper, and will express respect at the mere mention of either name. Their newest album displays traits which one would associate with their own brand of speed metal (a.k.a. thrash metal, incorrectly dubbed), but these seem filtered through mannerisms borrowed from styles acquired over the last two decades and a half while Tom Angelripper explored the mainstream side of metal. Decision Day is catchy, and every step and turn is a hook optimized for comprehensibility and mass consumption.
18 CommentsTags: 2016, decision day, German Speed Metal, hard rock, mainstream metal, pop metal, review, sodom, Speed Metal
Sadistic Metal Reviews 9/24/2016
Some sorry schmuck has to shovel it into a hole and set it on fire.
32 CommentsTags: Altered Perceptions, Amphisbaena, Anal Blasphemy, Aum, black 'n roll, Black Tomb, Celestial Grave, Chine, crypto-indie, deathcore, Faustian Dripfeed, Gespenst, hammerheart records, Hellbringer, hells headbangers, hipster bullshit, Hoath, Ill Omen, Iron Bonehead Productions, Mare Cognitum, metalcore, Rebaelliun, Rest, Saboter, sadistic metal reviews, Seventh Xul, Shadecrown, Shataan, Shokran, sig ar tyr, Sol Sistere, Soulwound, Summit, The Black Twilight Circle, The Hell's Decrees, The Last Band, Vlad in Tears, War Metal, Warpvomit, Wyruz
Blessed Are the Sick: Morbid Angel’s Last Advance
Nirvana’s Nevermind turned twenty five yesterday but since we at the Death Metal Underground condemn pop-punk Boston worship, we will celebrate a different anniversary today. Morbid Angel‘s Blessed Are the Sick was released twenty-five summers ago. Blessed Are the Sick was the last Morbid Angel record focused on inwardly improving the music rather than compromising it for commercial appeal to a mainstream market. The band had been obsessed with refining and expanding upon their compositions since Trey Azagthoth shelved the release of 1986’s Abominations of Desolation and fired then drummer/vocalist Mike Browning.
93 CommentsTags: 1991, anniversary, blessed are the sick, david vincent, death metal, Metal Curmudgeon, morbid angel, neoclassical, neoclassical metal, pete sandoval, richard brunelle, trey azagthoth
This Ain’t No Fantasy: A History Of Punk’s Most Iconic Band, The Misfits
Metalheads tend to be wary of punk, recognizing it only for its role as an influence on metal. This attitude obscures the fact that the best of punk is worth exploring on its own terms and merits, starting with perhaps the greatest influence of punk technique and heightened aesthetics in that genre, hardcore punk‘s The Misfits.
49 CommentsTags: Crossover, Earth A.D., glenn danzig, Hardcore, Hardcore Punk, punk, punk rock, the misfits, Thrash
Interview with Undead
We recently reviewed the 2015 EP from Undead entitled Blood Enemy. This underground metal release combines the best of late 1980s speed metal with the architectural song transitions of Swedish death metal. Fortunately, the band were on hand to answer our questions about their music, approach and the art of death metal.
51 CommentsTags: death metal, Speed Metal, Undead
