Progressive war metal

There’s a new style that’s rising which combines progressive metal with the True Metal styles that emphasize a warlike outlook.

While progressive metal has neat instrumentals and all, it’s generally caught in an effete urban altruism and disconnected from Machiavellian reality.

These progressive war metal bands are fixing that with epic, Nietzschean and complex compositions that challenge the status quo of “progressive” metal!

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The Chasm “Procreation of the Inner Temple” re-released

VIC RECORDS has signed a license deal with the longest running and most respected Death Metal act from Mexico THE CHASM and LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS for the European releases of the reissue of their legendary Procreation of the Inner Temple debut album from 1994.

The CD will also include their complete 1993 demo, rare pics and extensive liner notes from Olivier ‘Zoltar’ Badin. In addition, VIC RECORDS will release a new exclusive repressing on digipak of their very well received and most recent album Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm, which was originally released on a limited edition by LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS in 2009 and mainly available in North America and sold out for close to 2 years.

VIC RECORDS will also release the second album of Mexico’s most underrated occult killer act SHUB NIGGURATH! Their second full length album A Deadly Call from the Stars comes also as an exclusive limited edition digipak. Previously released on THE CHASM’s front man Daniel Corchado’s own label Lux Inframundis Productions in 2011, it was limited to 500 copies, and sold out in 5 months.

The cooperation between LUXINFRAMUNDIS PRODUCTIONS and VIC RECORDS will also lead to the release of the second solo album by THE CHASM’s vocalist / guitar player / composer Daniel Corchado: MAGNUM ITINER INETRIUS, this new album will be conformed of 12 compositions of epic 60+ minutes of atmospheric, experimental yet dark and melodic instrumental metal!

Finally some words from THE CHASM founder and front man Daniel Corchado (ex-CENOTAPH (Mex) and ex-INCANTATION):

“I’m proud to announce and confirm the license/cooperation deal we have signed with long time The Chasm believer Roel and his label Vic Records (responsible for releasing early classics by bands such as Hammerfall, Katatonia, Crystal Age, October Tide…) for the new limited pressings of Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm, Procreation of the inner temple and Shub Niggurath’s A Deadly call from the Stars, this new venture was mostly planned and materialized with the European supporters in mind, based in the Netherlands, with the network and distribution VIC posses, this releases will available in a more practical and easy way for those believers looking to add this albums to their collections. In related news, the new Magnum Itiner Interius album will be released in Europe by Vic Records as well, Luxinframundis will be in charge of the American edition of this epic instrumental caravan.

Chicago, May 2012.”

For more information and ordering, contact VIC RECORDS.

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Prong – Carved into Stone released

One of the oldest still functional speed metal bands still around, still making avantgarde arty speed metal, but they’ve updated the sound a bit to be post-modern-metal.

Prong Carved Into Stone CD

INCLUDES A DIGITAL DOWNLOAD OF THE RECORD ON TUE 4/24 at 12:01AM (Open your account and look in MY DOWNLOADS)

Tracklisting
1) Eternal Heat
2) Keep on Living in Pain
3) Ammunition
4) Revenge … Best Served Cold
5) State of Rebellion
6) Put Myself to Sleep
7) List of Grievances
8) Carved Into Stone
9) Subtract
10) Path of Least Resistance
11) Reinvestigate

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PROFANATICA – Sickened By Holy Host / The Grand Masters Session announced

This oddity features an all new 39 minute mini-album plus the “The Grand Masters Session” Box Set on CD for the very first time. Nearly 80 minutes of true blasphemy & perversion.

PART #1 features 5 new songs plus 2 old classics written and recorded by Ledney with a session member. The performance on this work is much like their primitive NECROVORE-ous atrocities committed in the early ’90s and allows for safe assumption of what could have been heard on their long-lost album, “The Raping of the Virgin Mary.”

Meanwhile, PART #2 features the same titles but written and recorded by Gelso alongside the same drums & vocals performed on part #1. The execution of this session continues in the more musical direction showcased on their first 2 albums and incorporates soundscapes sonically compiled by the late Aragon Amori. The end result is nothing short of devastating, and the vast contrast between these two sessions takes on the form of an album in itself that is sure to appeal to both old & new devotees of the black cult.

Finally, “The Grand Masters Session” previously available as a vinyl-only 8″ Box Set, is a raging 2008 “live in the studio” recording showcasing many of the classics, a few newer hits and an exclusive medley (a conglomerate of 5 songs).

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Handy reminder about hearing protection

I’ve seen this a lot:

I have tinnitus and hearing loss from my rock and roll drumming days. It’s no joke. It never goes away. I have major sleep problems but it’s not because of the tinnitus. In some ways you can learn to ignore the constant noise or hum or …sound, but the worst park is getting up in the middle of the night when all around you is quiet and the hum or hiss ruins the experience. The same for being in a quiet forest or natural setting when you want to hear the forest sounds and the hum persists. I know other people with tinnitus and one of them says that if there was one thing in their life that they could change, it would be to be tinnitus free. Two friends got it from being in the military in Vietnam because of various weapons or ordinance detonations. Many rock musicians have tinnitus and hearing loss because of loud music. I think current musicians may have better hearing protection now, but not all. With some musicians, it’s a macho thing to play it at 11. Being in a loud restaurant with friends is a drag because I can’t understand much of what they’re saying. If you’re playing loud music, going to concerts or firing weapons, use hearing protection, you’ll be glad you did later in your life. Tinnitus is a total drag. – Gary Reams

Especially when firing guns at fleeing protesters, or burning churches in the dead of night, wear hearing protection! You’ll thank me as society implodes.

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More mythos, less propaganda

Forbidden to be seen
Spirit of the elder gods
Are dead but must live on
Still to life and yet they breathe
Dead but dreaming…..
DEICIDE

When metal opens imaginations, it is a source of power.

When it gets too preachy (Napalm Death, nu-Burzum) it becomes constraint.

When it cares too much about the 75% of popular music fans who are transient, it gets fake too.

Do it for the 25%: future warriors and thinkers. Allahu Ackbar!

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Jeff Wagner – Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal

Human progress will forever be linked to those most primal memories of our species, wherein there emerged that intrepid curiosity that formed the crux on which history could be built. Moreso than the will to merely survive and subsist, it was the will to forsake the paradise of safety and pursue instead the harsh, untamed dusklands of the unknown, where intense tribulation could reveal the fiercest potentials of the few that could overcome. Within the realm of music — that most iconically Romantic of arts — this sentiment persists as a striving to expand the capacities of willful expression into an all-encompassing whole, swelling into symphonic full bloom during the 19th Century. But now, in the dreary modernity that constitutes post-World War II planet Earth, Metal music has proven to be an improbable successor to this upward-climbing composing ethos, and its 40-year history itself resembles less some linear development than it does the genealogy of a warrior race: evolving as one from troglodytic Rock origins, but then splintering into variegate subdivisions as established kingdoms become ever stiflingly overpopulated. If it is those most radical of subdivisions commanded by wildcat eccentrics, hermitic technicians, and sadistic savants that best define the nebulous label that is “progressive metal”, then ‘Mean Deviation‘ — the new and exotic pet project of Metal Maniacs veteran Jeff Wagner — is the one book ambitious enough to fasten a historical yoke around such a chaotically polymorphous Metal strain.

It’s a ridiculously exacting task to try and chronicle the entirety of a musical subgenre that isn’t really a subgenre, and whose content cannot be readily identified by formal analysis alone. And yet Wagner, being the dauntless historian that he is, enters the Nocturnus Time Machine® with naught but the earnest objective of highlighting whichever works were exceptionally bizarre, brainy, or both. Placing his starting coordinates in the late 1960′s when progressive rock and early ambient music had already begun to explore more neoclassical avenues, Wagner narrates the concomitant emergence of heavy metal, and oversees its unprecedentedly rapid appropriation of prog complexities. The most non-canonical, wildly erratic career choices of Black SabbathKing Crimson, and especially Rush receive extensive coverage, and upon this foundation of classic radio giants, Wagner uncovers many of the grandiose intellectual motivations that would plant the seeds of ambition in the burgeoning ’80s underground — an explosive era that Wagner veritably lived and breathed throughout.

From this point is of course where the bulk of the book begins and where divergent paths are most numerous and dramatic, starting with an initial divide between what is now commonly known as Progressive Metal proper — Fates Warning, Queensrÿche, Crimson Glory, and [must we mention them?] Dream Theater as examples — and the more abrasively progressive styles that were set in motion by speed metal aberrants WatchtowerVoivodCeltic FrostCoroner, and a small conglomerate of other leaders whose names consistently haunt the chapters further on. The subsequent outgrowth of extreme metal within the following decade then takes the spotlight for what seems like a third of the book, and the magnitude of its proliferation logically finds Wagner having to document deviance on a steady, region-by-region basis. But in this manner, he is as remarkably thorough in his examinations of familiar prog-extremists as he is with some of the more impossibly obscure names, reliably identifying which recordings showed noteworthy marks of ingenuity. A study of Finland, for instance, seizes Demilich by the tentacles and takes special interest in Beherit‘s darkwave transmogrification. Norway’s chapter highlights Mayhem‘s early adoration of Swedish prog band Änglagård and of course German synthpop and kosmische musik, and goes on to investigate the growth of Manes, Burzum, Enslaved, and Neptune Towers. Continental Europe reveals a constellation of luminaries ranging from Supuration to Atrocity, whilst the melting pot frontiers of the Americas yield regional anomalies as diverse as Gorguts and Obliveon up in Québec to Atheist and Hellwitch down in Florida. And, wherever possible, Wagner takes great efforts to cite any intellectual influences or achievements on the bands’ parts; tellingly, Classical and ambient music is a frequent subject here, as are academic degrees in a surprising array of fields.

It is surely impossible to write a “progressive metal” book that will be accepted in all circles of the culture, as controversy and even widespread disapprobation seem to be taken for granted in the music itself. But for the particular minority who identify themselves as hessians, it is certain that many will lose interest as the final hundred pages close in, simply because almost all of the so-called cutting edge Metal bands of the late ’90s and onwards fail to contribute anything significant to the genre; but in Wagner’s defense, there are many instances where he does bring attention to the growing problem of entropy. The more philosophical among us may further object to the very grounds for Wagner’s criteria for “progressive-ness” — that is, how much the work in question defies convention and expectations. To build from an early example, Wagner argues that Voivod’s ‘Angel Rat‘ — an album widely lambasted as a sell-out for its regression to verse-chorus, consonant indie stylings — is in fact a progressive step for the band because it was so utterly unlike any of the albums that preceded, or anything else in the scene at the time. But this is nothing if not the most prostrate kind of optimism, which accepts an undesirable antithesis — in this case, total artistic decline into meaninglessness — as a necessary part of a dubious process towards some ideal of absolute artistic freedom or whatever. It’s true that to speak of “progress” we need to postulate an objective or end of some sort to move towards, but externalities like novelty and individuality alone are insufficient; something more intrinsic to Metal’s being must be identified, otherwise you allow for a flood of the same self-obsessed, irrelevant music-as-product to garner the association simply because it’s clever enough to imitate the distorted aesthetic. Therefore it is best to assert as an axiom that for the subject to be Metal, it must have as its essence that visceral if rather elusive-to-define spirit of vir, whose amorally creative will to power is partially outlined in the introduction to this review. From here, determining progression in Metal is only a contextual (and decidedly more limited) matter of whether the subject meaningfully transmits its central motivation using methods previously unexplored, for any number of nuanced reasons ranging from technical breakthroughs to conceptual maturation to ingenious angles of arrangement; of course, the ironic consequence to progressive forms is that they are often seized upon by the majority and ossified into standard forms over time. So, based on these tenets, you would have to re-evaluate progressive-labelled, impostor Metal bands like Opeth as actually not effectively progressive as a band like Morbid Angel, who were significant not only for innovative technique, but for using their talents towards representing death metal philosophy with hitherto unheard-of imagination and perspicuity. Take this same critical hammer to the “progressive eras” of Enslaved, Amorphis, Death, and all related corrupted prodigies who allowed themselves to be domesticated into entertainers, and suddenly ‘Mean Deviation’ is chiseled down from a bloated tome to a slim pamphlet.

Now it’s apparent that ‘Mean Deviation’ surely has its points of contention, but then again the book’s stated aim isn’t to illustrate a concrete and ontologically-sound definition of what progressive metal is, nor is it out to namedrop every single band that may have garnered the label through whatever happenstances of popular delusion. Essentially, the book’s aim really is as simple as what its title conveys: to reevaluate the Metal timeline with a specific interest in whatever was outstandingly highbrow and/or shunned by the hypothetical average headbanger. It is a scholarly, well-referenced, yet personable inquiry of metallurgical innovation, which harbors aspirations towards objectivity and acceptance amongst society’s intellectual elite, but never mistakenly reduces the art to a mere science. Rest assured that trivia in abundance is here to tantalize the reader’s inner nerd; just remember to take it all in with a sizable grain of sodium chloride.

Written by Thanatotron

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The proof and the expiation

Grunge is indie rock — look at the years:

In fact, grunge’s roots can be traced back to the 1980s, if not further.

“Deep Six,” the 1986 compilation on Seattle label C/Z Records, is recognized as the first record to document this burgeoning regional sound. It featured a half-dozen local bands: Soundgarden, Green River, the Melvins, Malfunkshun, the U-Men and Skin Yard.

The Melvins, who have essentially never stopped touring or recording with 20 studio albums to their name, were friends and mentors to Nirvana’s Cobain and Krist Novoselic, who hailed from the same rural part of Washington state. As Novoselic once said of the sway Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne held over him: “Buzz was the preacher, and his gospel was punk rock.” The Melvins sonic influence on Nirvana’s first album is unmistakable. – CNN

Punk gave rise to post-punk and then emo (Fugazi).

At the same time, indie rock arose: part punk, part folk, part 60s revivalism (Pink Floyd, 13th Floor Elevators, etc.)

Their goal: to reduce angry punk and metal to humanist, sociable, feelings-oriented music.

With Nirvana, then Opeth, then modern metal, they succeeded.

KILL

(Also see Faux culture.)

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Cursed Productions interviews Amon Amarth

Our old friends and comrades at Cursed Productions just interviewed one of the bands to take death metal mainstream, Amon Amarth.

While this band personally has no interest for me, being “too busy” as if trying to run away from life itself and sounding too much like a metalcore version of Dark Tranquility, seeing a quality metal journalist get some recognition is always a bright spot.

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