ANTIFA SHUTS DOWN TAAKE, THE HUMAN TROLL BAND

The emasculated remnants of America’s Antifa are at it again!  Now mostly regulated to a handful of stay-at-home activists, the boys at Antifa made enough calls to frighten a Manhattan art gallery into canceling a Taake show scheduled for next month.  While they likely believed Taake to be a weird performance artist after seeing pictures from that time Hoest’s host broke through his pants, the trust fund kids running (le) poisson rogue (not a typo, they’re apparently too cool for capital letters) were probably scared off by that time Taake wore a swastika in Germany.  Or perhaps someone just showed them those legendary dick pics.
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Crawl/Leviathan

Hipster celebrity and accused tattoo gun rapist Wrest from Leviathan returns with a new sidekick in an attempt to restore some underground credibility.  This is a common gimmick used in rap music whenever an artist has faded from the mainstream but wants to continue making money off the young kids consuming the underground’s newest flavors.  Unfortunately for Leviathan, they were never respected in the underground and Crawl displays very little potential to make any sort of impact.  The split is one twelve minute song from each artist that both manage to be terrible but for very different reasons.  Wrest promised “Aural Mizery” and has ironically maintained that promise.

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Troll 2 and (the Joy of) Miscategorized Metal

Tower Records and Musicland didn’t seem to have much the other day.  So I went by Camelot music instead. I was wearing my old green Slayer demon head shirt. I had built up points at that store, and they gave me a free purple shirt with their logo on it. I hated the shirt and donated it to Goodwill.  In the metal section was the cassette soundtrack to Troll 2. I was almost certain this was a mis-categorization.  I didn’t have the money to buy it that day and it sold out before I could get my hands on it.

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Sammath Releases “Godless” Live Track

Furious Dutch black metal band Sammath have issued forth a live recording of “Godless” featuring founder/guitarist Jan Kruitwagen on vocals. The band takes a high-intensity old school approach to this track, emphasizing the multitude of death metal and black metal influences on this band, but with technical aptitude making the song flow together in the style of later black metal.

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Metal Works as Stepping Stones

Until now, metal works (albums, EPs, pieces, etc.) have been regarded as products, even by those who would assume anti-commercial postures. Why this is so, why the underground metal community still sees albums as products and so judge them in that light, has to do with the history of metal as arising from the general rock business context. Black Sabbath as the foundational metal band followed this path and they were also the first metal band to sell out, though there never was much to sell out. In any case, they did not really know what they had and quickly devolved into rock-ized (standardized) “improvements” on the gold they had struck at first, instead of exploring those new sounds and ideas regardless of the commercial context, regardless of the business prospects (gigs, deals, etc.). We must understand, however, that the ideal of metal beyond rock, beyond trends and commercialism, only arose with the Mayhem cabal. Their commercial activities, it should be understood, were a means to something greater, as can be seen from the meticulous selection of albums that came under the auspices of Deathlike Silence Productions.

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Musical Dissection of Pestilence “Out of the Body”

Once upon a time Pestilence were a very capable death/speed metal band that would attain great heights with the their magnum opus Consuming Impulse. Leaving behind the speed metal of Malleus Maleficarum for greater freedom in melody and structure, “Out of the body” is by far the most popular track on this album due to its catchy main riff, guitar acrobatics and absolute intensity.

Those are only the surface traits of what makes this song and the album a bonafide death metal classic.

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GIBSON IS DOOMED!

Gibson Guitars are on the verge of bankruptcy per an article in the Nashville Times.  The famed company is currently in a shitload of debt and its bondholders are panicking as their CFOs are abandoning ship. Despite bringing in a billion dollars last year, the prospects of Gibson are uncertain which begs the question: What future do high-end guitar brands have in a world that’s gravitating towards electronic music? And more importantly- is the death of electric guitar closer than we think, like many are claiming?

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