Undead – False Prophecies

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Undead plays a well-tried formula of simple, middle-paced death metal while achieving effective songwriting. At times we can hear a tinge of Scandinavian sound, while some other parts scream out early and straight up U.S. death metal like Obituary or Death in Spiritual Healing. This isn’t as complex, structure-wise, as Cause of Death (which isn’t very complex to begin with either), and so approaches Schuldiner’s ultra simplistic death metal much more. Having mentioned both bands, fans of James Murphy’s work in them will not be disappointed with the soloing in False Prophecies.

 

This album shows the perfect balance between variety of content and consistency in style with clarity of voice. Songs do not sound like they are based on a template (even if they are, the important thing is that they do not appear like they are, that is the final product), but you can easily recognize them as belonging together. As in any album with good songwriting, the mood and character of riffs from one section of the song flows and dives into the next, carrying the listener forward without the obstacle of forced expressions. This style is heavily based on introducing appropriate variations in riff character without deviating from the mood at all.

 

The weaknesses of this album may lie in individual riffs, which in the end does more merit to the songwriting abilities of these gentlemen. This is to say, if you make a boring riff, sound appropriate, useful, and driving because of its context, then you have succeeded in your task as a composer. Still, this minor complaint will be on the minds of metalheads as it is the nature of the genre to look forward to strong riffs, the muscles of metal, even more important in the straight forward style of Undead.

 

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Profezia to reissue rare debut album

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Rare and out of print for many years now, Profezia’s Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem debut is finally back in print via Moribund Records, set for international release on July 24th as a limited-edition A5 digibook. Originally released in 2008, Black Misanthropic Elite – Moon Anthem introduced this Italian black metal to the international scene. Tracks 1-6 comprise the Black Misanthropic Elite portion of the album, while track 7 and 8 comprise Moon Anthem, altogether making for stirring spelunking through medieval depths.

Tracklist:
1. Overture Psalm
2. Poem for the Black Misanthropic Elite pt.1
3. Under a pale veil of unconsciousness reckless
4. Interlude
5. Hatred
6. Poem for the Black Misanthropic Elite pt.2
7. Bewitched
8. Hungering

 

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Demoncy release promo video for special re-recorded version of Empire of the Fallen Angel

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Demoncy’s new release: Empire of the Fallen Angel (Eternal Black Dominion) is set for international release onJune 29th on both CD and vinyl LP formats via Forever Plagued Records. Although originally released in 2003 after years of mysterious silence, the renamed Empire of the Fallen Angel (Eternal Black Dominion) is an entirely new recording. Whereas the original 2003 album was recorded with a full band lineup, this Empire of the Fallen Angel (Eternal Black Dominion) was recorded solely by Demoncy founder Ixithra, with the first four tracks being entirely new compositions.

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War Iron – Procession of the Equinoxes

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War Iron released their first album in 2010 with the explicit intention of making pulverizing heavy music and creating bone-crushing riffs. If they accomplish the first of these is up to each particular listener to decide, the second is true by the very nature of slow-tempo, duple-time patterns played in de-tuned guitars with incredibly fat but clear distortion. But music with a profound and long-lasting repercussions, that is, with depth, relies on its concrete and intrinsic (rather than an external argument for possible) multiple levels of appreciation, which go beyond attributes of heaviness.

As the sharp observer of metal artwork covers may notice, the colors and penmanship of Procession of the Equinoxes are a fair warning of what this music is and what it is not. The lyrical topics are a cartoonish and theatrical representation of topics deemed occult and dark in popular culture. It is then no surprise that the music is consistent with these as well. Sludge (a slow counterpart to the vacuous Stoner) riffs march in procession. One by one they march. They do not talk to each other, they do not communicate anything. They do groove though. And they groove heavily. And then the album is over.

Fans of intense and heavy riffing, slow trudging music and a cool, and dark atmosphere that feels like the music accompanying a recitation of Evil Dead‘s Necronomicon will love this for its uncompromising devotion to heaviness.

 

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Is Progressive Metal Progressive?

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I got thinking about this while reading through some of the stuff on The Gabriel Construct’s webpage. He said he wants to make progressive metal progressive again. After thinking about this, I realized that this really strikes a chord with me. It is probably one of the reasons I’ve felt so uninspired by the stuff I’ve been listening to.

Let’s take as a case study: HeavyBlog’s top 12 of 2013 so far list (restricting to 2013 will not influence this discussion at all, since the best prog of 2012 falls into the same tropes) and pull the albums that can be labelled as “prog.” I actually like a lot of prog metal. You should remember this, because it is going to sound like a post in which I slam prog metal. Instead, this should be read as a sadness that such a promising genre has hit a stasis.

This is going to get hairy with putting bands into certain boxes, but as I see it the list is Tesseract (should djent actually count as a form of prog?), Persefone (is symphonic metal a form of prog?), Coheed and Cambria, Intronaut, Extol (OK, I haven’t actually listened to this one, but the list says it’s prog), Leprous, and The Ocean.

What do these bands have in common that makes them prog? They tend to have technical playing with technique that derives from classical skills of fast arpeggios and scale patterns than more traditional metal/rock techniques. The chord progressions tend to be less straightforward. This can mean jazz influenced or excessive chromaticism. The time signatures tend to be less straightforward and can even involve alternating time signatures and metric modulations. Lastly, the songs tend to be longer and more thoroughly developed and tied together with a common theme.

So what’s the problem? Well, at one point in time doing these things within metal was a progressive thing to do. They weren’t being done. It was interesting and new. It was moving the genre forward. Now it seems that these things that define the genre have become tropes. You have to have x number of time changes, y number of chromatic patterns, and z number of songs over 8 minutes long. Oh yeah, and we’ll praise you mindlessly if you make these numbers without actually doing anything original.

Instead of being truly progressive and trying to bring in new influences to make interesting and new music, it all ends up sounding similar. Just because you came up with a way to arpeggiate faster, using a “new” pattern, and you do more chromatic steps doesn’t mean you’re “more progressive” or even more interesting. It is more of the same pretending to be different.

Maybe I’m reacting to an over-saturation of prog lately, and I won’t feel this way after a break from it, but sometimes when listening to prog it sounds like a joke. It sounds like the band is stringing together a bunch of tropes in mockery of how derivative it all has become. Scale the Summit is unfortunately going to get my wrath, but I can’t listen that new album. It has such high praise all over the place, but I’m so bored by it. I mean listen to this. It is pretty, and quite impressive technically at parts, but how many times have you heard this?

No offense to Scale the Summit, I could have picked something off literally any of the bands listed above and some of those albums might even make my top 10 of the year. It is just a feature of the current prog scene. It has become static. There are the occasional minor details that are new, but overall, it isn’t progressing.

Progressive metal can become progressive again. To some people it may seem shocking. What more do I want? They are already employing all of the complexity you would find in any fully trained classical composer. I’d reply, well, yes, any trained composer through the 19th century. But this stuff is more than a century old now. You could incorporate tons of modern developments. You don’t have to write atonally, but you can incorporate interesting post-tonal techniques to make something progressive without losing your band’s characteristic sound.

Other than tonality, there have been tons of other innovations from play style (stop with the incessant arpeggios, please), to modern electronic filtering of sound in new ways, to how your band layers together its pieces texturally, to instruments used (thank you Hybrid for showing us clarinet can be used in metal), to more original genre crossover, and on and on. You shouldn’t have to be an Animals as Leaders or Dream Theater clone to be prog. I bet I could write a fugue a la Hindemith that would sound really good by a metal band. How about someone tries that for originality?

I know there are actually lots of bands out there doing this, but they immediately get labelled as avant garde and pushed out of the prog scene. As I pointed out last time, this term should probably be reserved for the really, really out there stuff. Incorporating these techniques subtly into your standard prog sound should still count as prog metal. We should embrace more experimentation to finally get out of this stasis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HKeuXQg5-Y

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Profile: Death Curse Productions (Germany)

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Death Curse Productions represents the new wave of smaller underground labels who are targeting niches within the mainstreamed post-underground instead of trying to drop out from the methods used by normals to exchange music. Despite offering some unconventional formats, Death Curse Productions keeps its offerings accessible to the world at large, as if daring them to look underneath the mantle of normalcy and discover the twisted, weird and alienated…

When did Death Curse Productions (DCP) get started, who started it, and what was your intent?

Death Curse Productions was founded in the year 2013 A.B. by two individuals who felt the urge to uphold the traditions of Black Metal.

The main intent behind the label’s activities was, is and always will be to create strictly limited pieces of music we approve to be worth the attention. DCP’s work concentrates on the production of quality releases in every way, be it musical, spiritual, visual or concerning design in general.

Mainly it’s quality above quantity, as nowadays the so called Black Metal ‘scene’ is all about putting out shitty releases of shitty sideprojects on a daily basis.

What type of music do you cover, and what do you do? Will this expand in the future?

We don’t determine an exact style as long as the music or the band matches our philosophy. In this case the essence of our philosophy is the glorification of death itself.

We canalize the music onto analogue media to preserve them against extinction. For now the focus is on tapes but that shall not set a restriction for what we do in the future.

In other words expansion is something we highly strive for.

Do you think underground metal is still relevant in the days of post-metal, indie-metal, jazz-metal and modern metal?

Today, in a time where those genres reached their peak of popularity, they managed to take the original values from the metal music itself and turn them into something completely depraved. The music was originally intended to be violent, raw, sinister and dangerous, instead people went forth and created something clean, peaceful and enjoyable, only in order to attract a tasteless mass of lambs and accumulate money.

Concerning the underground, especially Black Metal is declared to be dead by a lot of people, yet there’s a black flame still being kept burning by a small amount of certain individuals, who preserve the underground from being swallowed by trends and who put all their passion and devotion into creating music following the old path.

What are your favorite bands in the underground metal genres?

This is not a question we want to answer, as opinion-making is for the weak-minded, whose taste is defined by trends.

Of course there are undeniable classics everyone should be aware of, as well as some so-called newcomers who stand out in a way, they contrast from the common stuff.

If people are interested in what DCP does, where do they go for more information and/or how do they contact you?

Whoever is seriously interested in DCP, should contact us by mail.

For any updates visit the blogspot page or facebook.

Death Curse Productions 2014 releases:

DCP001 – KILL (Swe) “Inverted Funeral” tape

Yet to be released in 2015:

DCP002 – BALMOG (Esp) “Testimony Of The Abominable” tape
DCP003 – BALMOG (Esp) “Svmma Fide” tape
DCP004 – ILLUM ADORA (Ger) “Demo MMXV” tape
DCP005 – ACRIMONIOUS (Gre) “Purulence” tape

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Profile: metal trader Sean Clark

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Sean Clark has been a part of the metal underground trading and selling circle for a long time, hunting down CDs and rare vinyls across the globe. As he gears up to sell some of his excess to finance further purchases of rare Profanatica material, he was able to answer a few questions for a profile:

When did you start selling/trading CDs and why did you get into CD trading? Were you a tape trader as well?

I think that I started seriously trading music back in the mid-’90s when I lived in Australia. Mostly copying tapes and trading with local friends. I started trading CDs on a wider scale around 2000 once I moved to the USA and a friend of mine introduced me to newsgroups, etc…

What appeals to you about underground metal? Does the same thing still appeal to you? Do you listen to other music as well?

EVERYTHING. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about today’s metal scene… so I just mostly keep myself busy with the stuff that I enjoyed in the past (but still do check out new bands nowadays just to make sure that I’m not missing out on something). Today’s scene is too hard to keep up to date with though… too many new releases every month.

Yes, I do listen to other music as well, but underground metal is usually about 80-90% of my music library.

What was your first encounter with the DLA/DMU and how did it ruin your life?

I honestly cannot remember how I found out about DLA/DMU…. but it was after speaking to you… must have been back in ’97? Probably on the newsgroups. I think that you bought some cds from me once though… but I knew you before I started selling/trading. We’ve had contact through various platforms for a long time now.

What current bands make you excited?

I am not so excited about many current bands because they mostly just remind me of better bands in the past. I think that most of the bands that I get excited about now aren’t even metal (Lana Del Ray, for example).

If people like the CDs you have, where do they find a list and buy them?

Everything that I have for sale is on my Facebook page : www.facebook.com/CryptsOfTrades

Click on PHOTOS and then ALBUMS… there are several photo albums there with pictures of everything that I am selling.

Good luck, Sean and let me know if you find any killer Profanatica stuff.

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Blasphemy reissues Fallen Angel of Doom on Nuclear War Now! Productions

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Grindcore/proto-black metal band Blasphemy has announced the re-issue of its classic album Fallen Angel of Doom on Nuclear War Now! Productions for CD and vinyl, with Blasphemy official merchandizing arm Ross Bay Cult issuing a cassette version.

The band announces the “tentative” release date as June for teh CD and July for the LP. In addition, the band says the release with be perpetual: “Both the LP and CD will be kept in print for the foreseeable future to combat the endless stream of bootlegs from subhuman scums.”

Having owned and enjoyed the Wild Rags issue of this album for many years, and believing it to be the best output of this influential band, it is great to see this one ride again.

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Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni – Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni (2012)

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To make meaningful commentary on a band like Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni, or any other band walking the old death metal tightrope for that matter, one has to hear them in context with the specific niche in time that their sound occupies. Execute a bit of nifty time-travel in the mind and place the band concerned in the august company that it aspires to keep. Observe if it compares favourably with at least the spirit of the originals in terms of aspects like general coherency in songwriting, perpetual will to forward motion, and, above all else, that ineffable, visceral reaction that only the very best are capable of evoking. Originality in this cloistered paradigm is a disingenuous word; what the avid listener hopes for is a transmission of the same vitality that informed the heyday of this music.

Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni posits no claim to innovation but that is no crime in itself. Incantation, the bread n’ butter of modern death metal, is frequently referenced in the use of flowing tremolo lines plucked from the chromatic scale. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the use of atonality in death metal – it indeed comprises much of the bedrock of the genre – it also becomes something of a cop-out in the hands of lazy bands that lack the creativity required to compose tastefully and in accordance with tradition. Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni aren’t an especially lazy band and are perfectly capable of constructing riffs according to harmonic conventions as heard in the more black metal-inspired sections of this album.

Where Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni falls hard is in arrangement. Songs rarely build up to any kind of crescendo, even compromising whatever momentum may have been built up initially. While any topography consists of peaks and troughs, there appears to be no aesthetic meaning to Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni‘s contours. Riffs rise and fall like waves on the ocean but without any of nature’s geometry, and what results is an album that touts itself as Satanic death metal but feels curiously void of life’s irrepressible energy.

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Proxy (2013)

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The genre of psychological horror often gets ignored because it does not deliver the tangible impact that sheer horror does, but unsettles the watcher as in the coming days that person contemplates what he has seen. Proxy attacks psychological horror by combining Swedish introspective cinema with the type of suspense found in movies like Psycho, delivering what is ultimately a biting critique of modernity.

Without giving away the plot, this movie involves the tendency of people to project and transfer their own psychological drama onto others, centered around the idea of family. In this film, people treat others like objects of their own egos, which creates secondary consequences that render characters unable to stand themselves. Through prolonged psychological exploration, including an insight into the way the world appears to those who are intensely lonely, this film explores the sources of modern alienation and why this society starts us out as alienated isolates from within our own families.

Filmed with more of a sense of intense subjective awareness than an objectivity which the camera always betrays, Proxy explores the confrontation between detached and disaffected young women and their attempts to start their own families. It shows how people project, or live vicariously through others by assuming their role in a narcissistic conception of self, and then undergo transferrence, or conditioning their own happiness or sadness on the acts of others. These conditions like PTSD and other mental afflictions follow a binary progression, in that the person holds on to the reality they can parse for as long as they can but when it cracks, it does so violently and leads to a culmination of violence and emotion that are perfectly paired into poignant yet devastating circumstances.

Like any movie tackling the inner workings of the human mind, this film touches on subjects which many of us would rather not witness because they reveal too much to us of our own fears. In particular, it has a sense of being Generation X art, reflecting the wave of children who growing up under manipulative families tended to wall off huge areas of life and stick with only what they know and trust, probably because their own parents viewed them as accessories for showing off (or blaming) like owning a British motorcar. The characters in this find no peace and no contentment as they rage through life, tricking their own perception into creating what seems like what they desire, only later finding the hollowness within, and the rapid transition to danger caused by illusion and its collapse.

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