Sadistic Metal Reviews – Anxious Mediocre Gopher Edition (End of 2015 Series)

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Leftist political science grounded on Marxism does not go well with metal. The first is a bunch of illusions and mental fiction for emotional weaklings to feel empowered. The latter is the art of the realist, the nihilist with an eye in the transcendental. Besides, only a self-styled hipster would pair up Immortal’s picturesque character with Leo’s most iconic work. The reader is encouraged to take any strong endorsement from this fiasco as a warning of superficiality or weak hipster appeal.

 

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1. Wilderun – Sleep at the Edge of the Earth
There is a reason why movie scores are not written by artistically illuminated composers, but by shrewd businessmen who know how to gauge the audience’s momentary craving in a modern society where every vice is promoted as a freedom and discipline is marked as obsession. Wilderun really does play like a popular soundtrack. It cannot stay on topic for more than thirty seconds and each of the sections is not only forgettable but the whole makes absolutely no sense. In an excellent work which draws influences from a wide variety of sources, the differences are mostly superficial and are used as different vocabs, but in here, these ultra-thin music without a true structural backbone merely places meaningless expressions one after another only to keep the most stupid of audience members hooked. Burn this insult to music composition.

 

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2. Trials – This Ruined World

Ah, yes, riff worship in metal. The genre’s curse makes us subject to many a mediocre would-be songwriter who thinks he can embody Pantera 2.0. Of course, because the latter were the embodiment of groove-based glory according to the Homer Simpsons of metal. Trials write the sort of songs that are utterly devoid of distinction and clear train of thought. Any riff would go well in any part of any other song in the album. Not to mention that these riffs are little more than thickly produced fart streams. Go home, Anselmo.

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3. Barren Earth – On Lonely Towers
More darko-depressive, diva rock pretending to be metal. While definitely showing some potential in its paucity, the candy it hands out reveals that the reason for this is not a carefully controlled composition of deep taste, but the superficial sensuality to be found everywhere. However, Barren Earth do succeed in achieving some manner of quality, however distracted their slick transitions are, how whiny and long-drawn operatics are and how annoyingly bluesy their leads are. Listen to this if you derive a moment’s masturbatory pleasure from half-cooked, bland music.

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4. Beaten to Death – Unplugged
If you consider an album good because it makes you look good in front of the hip kids and because it appears to be offensive. Then you are little more than an overgrown teddy bear trying to wear spikes to resolve its puberty. In case Napalm Death was too much, you can have Beaten to Death for a softened but still “edgy” dose of some of the worst deathcore pretending to be grindcore made nicer by some gay rock clean guitar picked passages. Leave these to the IQ-85-or-less crowd of gluttonous dipshits who saw no mental development past the 11-year mark.

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5. Crimson Swan – Unlit

Onto the false subgenre of “doom metal”. Although a very few albums do seem to venture into a style of its own that is more than just slow heavy metal, most bands like Crimson Swan, are just playing a much slower version of detuned and melodic-oriented heavy metal. Crimson Swan fails catastrophically in the same way that most music by Esoteric: it stagnates in its harmony, only deviating a little and quickly returning. Its thinly veiled worship of middle-period Skepticism (the worst of its periods, only superseded in vacuity by their latest installment) is laughable. When anyone the terms “melody and feel” to describe why an album is good and calls it a day, it goes a long way to say how little music as an art is understood.

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6. Steven Wilson – Hand. Cannot. Erase
The fact that Steven Wilson is eerily akin to a Marylin Manson without make up should give the listener a clue of what is coming. The music reflects the character of a harmless and sexless being completely lacking in any kind of self-assertion. Bombast ala Ghost, combined with some Pink Floyd-gone-80s-pop sensibilities and the most cliched 90s indie gayness, Wilson manages to make mindlessly boring music into an inadvertently comical series of forgettable pictures. Fodder for the mentally lazy who have the emotional need to be acknowledged for an intellect they lack.

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7. Gloryhammer – Space 1992: Rise of the Chaos Wizards
If there is something that hipsters love more than cuckold rock music by androgynous minds is metal nobody can take seriously. Why? Because it is not only inoffensive, but as it lacks any content of weight, it cannot in any way represent a challenge to the listener. Hipsters avoid challenge. But they love the illusion of challenge. They like to seem smart, but not actually stress their minds beyond the safety limits created by the society they claim to be at odds with. Cool-aid power metal for the mentally retarded.

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8. The Gentle Storm – The Diary

More boob-flashing from the opera whore club for naive, high school and college virgin nerds. Not only does this lack the solidity of Mandylion but is an obvious attempt at pushing another plastic product in the vein of bombastic metal pop acts with Victorian bimbos for faces. No amount of alacrity can turn this into good music. Just ignore this release, please.

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9. Nechochwen – Heart of Akamon
(Editor’s note: Haven’t we already given this one the sadistic treatment? Guess it’s really that bad.)
More Alcest than Graveland, this candy-ass folk-themed headache full of terribly clumsy transitions and tired, boorish leads calls the attention of those incapable of paying close attention to worthwhile quality. More like a trailer of commonplace ideas without development, this album plays more like a disparaged sequence of TV ads.

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10. Angra – Secret Garden
No, Angra’s new album is not surprising in any context. Except if you mean, you could not imagine they could disgrace themselves in a more sellout manner, even bringing in mercenary Fabio all the way from Italy. What the common rabble calls “staying power” is merely the hip-moving hooks they get from everyday radio-listening. What pseudo connoisseurs of metal call good songwriting is merely streamlined mediocrity.

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Symphony X – Underworld (2015)

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Review by David Rosales

Symphony X has quite a following in the progressive power metal scene and has had such mainstream success in the technical musicians camp that almost each of the individual members of the band has his own little cult going on. In its very beginnings, the band leaned towards the so-called neoclassical stylings of ’80s melodic heavy metal. A few albums later, a clear progressive music orientation had crept in. All the while, the band retained a relatively original voice centered in Michael Romeo’s signature licks and Russell Allen’s distinctive vocalizations.
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Master to release An Epiphany of Hate

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It’s hard to browse DMU without finding at least one reference to Master’s influence (and more generally Paul Speckmann’s projects) on death metal. DMU’s ability to follow Master’s evolution has generally been better than my own, but I’m hoping that their upcoming albums will change that. An Epiphany of Hate will release on January 29th, 2016, presumably making it a superior purchase to other metal albums releasing that day, like Dream Theater‘s latest. Without any known teaser material out, I’d guess this album will follow up on the style of Master’s previous full length (The Witchhunt), but regardless of substyle this will be one to keep an eye on.

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Behemoth to enter the studio in 2016

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Nergal of Behemoth recently conducted an interview with Rock Sverige in which he revealed his plans for the band and other musical endeavors. So far, a new album from Behemoth isn’t confirmed, but Nergal claimed that the band would enter the studio in 2016 and that he thought “…it would be really smart and good to have a new album out in 2017”. He also mentioned some side projects outside of metal and an interest in the works of David Bowie. Needless to say, if the band releases further confirmation for a release, it’ll probably go on our radar. Behemoth has apparently sold enough albums to live quite comfortably, and that’ll probably continue for many years.

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Tranquillizer – Des Endes Anfang (2015)

Sold to us by a promo company as “melodic” death/black metal, Des Endes Anfang by Tranquillizer (sic) is an ungainly fusion of In Flames type melodeath, Pantera flavored brocore grooves, and maybe a slight hint of extreme metal writing at times… by mistake. It occasionally amuses me to see a long-abandoned style of pop metal get some attention after years of neglect, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that this album is simply terrible. It’s so bad that I’ve decided to explicitly label it a bad album, in spite of my tendency to pass off most of the review subjects here at DMU as mediocre (medio-core?) and forgettable.

The songwriting here, admittedly, is only weak in a pedestrian fashion. If you were to strip away all the references to past forms of mainstream metal, you’d end up with just another set of random, generic metal riffs like so many albums before this; nothing actually worth discussing. To be fair, Tranquillizer’s “varied” influences give them a wide set of material to pull upon, similar to something like Children of Bodom‘s latest. I Worship Chaos is actually a decent comparison; Tranquillizer doesn’t have the neoclassical backing that helped contribute to that band’s popularity, but they do replace it with slightly more varied (albeit stupid sounding) vocals. In this reviewer’s opinion, that’s not a great trade, but it’s not like either point of comparison has any real merit.

While the substrate of this band is hollow at best, most of what I find contemptible in Des Endes Anfang is its immediately apparent, surface level stupidity. A clean, dry, sterile production allows the panderingly simplistic rhythms of this album to burst forth, as well as a dual vocal system of generic shrieks and vomited grunts. For our purposes, it should suffice to say that this is, at best, a modern rehash of older substyles. You could make the case that none of this is innately bad, despite its similarities to previous bad metal albums, but even if you did, it seems apparent that Tranquillizer doesn’t have the musical knowledge or aptitude to make this album come off as more than half-hearted worship of a warmed over god. Not that I should be raising our old whipping posts to the level of divinity, but the analogy is sound, and Des Endes Anfang isn’t exactly worthy of more precise flogging.

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Interview with Brian Parker of the San Diego Metal Swap Meet

sdmsm_logo_exportPreviously, as part of our lifestyle coverage, we featured Brian Parker’s guide to hand-rolling cigars. As mentioned at the end of that article, Brian has hosted the yearly San Diego Metal Swap Meet since 2009, giving metalheads in the southwestern corner of the USA a chance to socialize and purchase goods outside the context of a live concert or festival. Since this sort of thing creates a great deal of opportunity for everyone involved, we figured we’d get back into contact with Brian Parker and get his thoughts on the event he’s created.

1. You’re the creator of the San Diego Metal Swap Meet. What is a metal swap meet? Is it limited to metal, or certain types of metal?
The San Diego Metal Swap Meet is a social gathering for fans of metal. There are over 20 vendors selling all types of metal merchandise like CDs, LPs, cassettes, posters, shirts, patches and stickers. We also have booths from local artists, showing and selling their jewelry, paintings, leatherwork, sculptures and other various types of art. During the event we have metal tunes playing, we close out with a metal band, a beer garden for those over 21, and food for sale.

2. You were working at a record store when you started the swap meet. How hard was it to get the event started? How did you do it?
Actually, I started the San Diego Metal Swap Meet about 2 years after the record store closed. It was called Blue Meannie Records. Most people in San Diego County considered it the headquarters for metal. I felt that the closing of the store left a void for people to buy and sell metal related merchandise. There also was a void of a place for people to meet up. I met a lot of friends at that store, and I wanted other people to still be able to experience that, even if it’s just once a year. It was not difficult to do. My buddy Israel Pelayo and I organized the first one in my driveway. We had about 12 vendors, they set up, and it had free entry. We had over 200 show up to this modest event, and we knew we had to have a proper venue, if we were going to do another one.

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Photos from San Diego Metal Swapfest’s Facebook photostream

3. The meet is now in its sixth year, soon to be seventh. What has changed over the years? How do you hope to see it grow in the future?
It has grown every year. We now have around 25 vendors, a live band, and about 450 attendees. From the cozy event in my driveway, that was more of a yard sale, to having bands playing and Derek Riggs appearing. It’s come a long way. I would like to think that it has kept the same small business feel as the first one, and the record store had. In the future, I am hesitant to make it a full on “Metal Fest”, with tons of bands playing all day long. It seems that term gets thrown around and really doesn’t draw the excitement that it used to have. I’d like to evolve the event into a little more of a heavy metal convention… by convention, I mean having a way for people to meet musicians, artists, lessons, and art being made during the event. These are things I’d like to implement, without taking away with allowing vendors to sell at a reasonable price.

4. What is unique and important about a metal swap meet? Do metalheads need their own institutions like this, or can they coexist with regular rock music?
It’s unique because it’s really the only metal event that’s not centered around a live show. It’s centered around metal merchandise, memorabilia, and art. I do believe it’s important for them to have their own event. Sure, we coexist with the rest of society, but I think it’s unique to have an event where everyone has a common interest. This event is also unique as it’s a family environment.

Major record labels have displayed interest in the swap meet

Major record labels have displayed interest in the swap meet

5. What do you do the prepare for the meet, and what’s required for after the meet and the rest of the year? Was it hard to find funding?
First off, we reserve the date with the venue. This year, as well as the past 5 years, will be at the Queen Bee’s Art and Cultural Center, in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego City. The funding is not hard. We put down a deposit on the venue, then we are able to sell vendor spots for the tables. The money from the tables takes care of a lot of the expenses. We then need to arrange who will be volunteering, and what they will do. The volunteers are crucial. We have had the same base of volunteers, who know what to do, and really believe in the event. We also have things to do like hiring security.

6. What inspires you about heavy metal?
The diversity is probably what kept me around it so long. From listening to Black Sabbath as a kid, to thrash of Kreator, then death metal of the 1990s of bands like Dismember, then black metal bands like Abigor. I can find enjoyment out of nearly all metal sub-genres. I also like how I’ve made so many good friends from metal.

Merchandise abounds, including musical instruments

Merchandise abounds, including musical instruments

7. Do you listen to multiple metal genres? What attracts you to a specific album, if not genre? What makes a top-notch album for you?
As stated in the previous questions, I do enjoy multiple metal sub-genres. What makes a top-notch album for me is it breaks some sort of boundary. When I listen to the insane, psychedelic vocals of Bethlehem’s “Dictius Te Necare” or the neo-classic melodic riffs of Dissection’s “Storm of the Light’s Bane.” I am looking for an album that adds something new.

8. How did you become a heavy metal fan? What led to you working in a music store? Were the two related?
I was raised on hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. It was a natural step for me to move to thrash and then death metal. I used to buy all of my music at Blue Meannie Records. I got to know the crew that worked there, by being a customer and I got a job there when there was an opening. Unfortunately, the crash of the music business forced the store to close it’s doors.

9. What should people bring to a swap meet, and what should they expect?
If you don’t have a table, you can still bring in some things and try to trade them with vendors. You will want to bring some cash for merchandise, food, and beer. If you are in a band, feel free to bring in stickers, promo CDs and anything else that you would like to give away. We have a table of free stuff for anyone to take. Expect to explore 3 rooms, filled with metal vendors and artists. This is a social gathering, and there are crowds, so don’t expect to get through it real fast.

A family-friendly environment

A family-friendly environment

10. When is the next SDMSM, and how should people stay on top of news about it?
The next San Diego Metal Swap Meet will be on Saturday, May 7th, 2016 from 11 AM to 5 PM at Queen Bee’s Art and Cultural Center, 3925 Ohio Street, San Diego, CA 92104. The best way to keep updated at the moment is to like our Facebook page.

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Fleshgod Apocalypse releases first single from King

Today sees the release of “The Fool”, which is definitely the first single from Fleshgod Apocalypse’s upcoming King, and apparently the first time they’ve ever released a promotional single. It certainly seems to cast the band’s music in a poppier light than you’d expect from the rest of the marketing material; consonant orchestral sections and generic melodeath progressions alternate in rapid succession with occasional clean choruses making for an especially basic experience. It seems as if Fleshgod Apocalypse’s modus operandi is to shock and awe potential customers with the novelty of their sound and the clear technical and organizational aptitude that it takes to perform it. If you end up converted and purchase the entire album (which you should be able to starting on February 5th, 2016), don’t be surprised if you tire of it after only a few tracks.

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Xibalba to release Ah Tza! EP

Xibalba performing at Black Flames of Blasphemy

The post-Christmas malaise has set in worldwide, but there’s still time for the occasional pre-2016 release and/or news story.

After what was apparently a pretty good performance at Black Flames of Blasphemy, the Mexican black metal band Xibalba is releasing a short three song EP. Entitled Ah Tza!, its first track is already available through Bandcamp due to the services of the band’s current record label (Nuclear War Now! Productions). The other two will be available on December 31st. As of yet, there’s not really enough information to figure out what this shortalbum will sound like, but the first song at least conforms to the musical language of black metal; not that such is exactly difficult.

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Sadistic Metal Reviews: Dark Symphonies Special

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Many lost “gems” have been reissued to capture undiscerning millennial money. Most never found a market as they weren’t up to par. The Death Metal Underground hopes that readers were not gifted any of these on the Unconquered Sun’s birthday.

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Hydra Vein – Rather Death than False of Faith (1988)
Raining blood, from a lacerated sky! What? This isn’t Slayer. What the hell is this? Did Tom Araya have too much to drink? Wait this idiot’s British and doing drunken Motorhead karaoke and Kerry King air guitar solos at the pub. The cover looks like a ten year old’s Clash of the Titans fan art. This album is a fifteen year old’s Slayer fan art. Maybe if I drink half a bottle of whiskey my  brain will think Hydra Vein is actually Slayer. I could just turn it off and play Slayer.

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Morpheus – Son of Hypnos (1993)
Morpheus (no relation to Morpheus Descends) was an early nineties musical project put together by four residents of a Stockholm group home. The vocalist sounded like Sylvester Stallone imitating Glenn Benton, the guitarists idolized the Hoffmans, and everyone attempted to cover Kreator. During the recording sessions, the band members expressed situational homosexual behavior by prostate massaging one another with their genitalia. The orgasmic screams of these disturbed sodomites echoed jungle fowl being rended by monkeys. Son of Hypnos makes for an amusing pornographic soundtrack.

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Bloodstone – Hour of the Gate (1996)
Hour of the Gate was produced by Tomas Skogsberg and Fred Estby at Sunlight Studios. I hit play and instead of crusty Swedeath my ears hear Incantation’s “Profanation” breaking down into Necrophobic riffing. Then Gothenburg leads and more Profanation. That lick’s from Megadeth. How many salads were tossed here? The shit-buttered anus of death metal was licked right well and clean. I need to get a drink. I blacked out listening to this turkey. This CD was not repressed as history wanted to black it out too.

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Sacrificial – Forever Entangled (1993)
The sound of groove riffs ‘cross the glade,
Heshers cover your ears in horror.
This death trash is rather staid
Chugging along into the gutter.

Sacrificial, Sacrificial
Pantera meets Destruction
Sacrificial, Sacrificial
What a horrible production

Vocals are just way too loud.
Matti Karki would not be very proud.
Many metal songs are raped.
Their holes torn apart and gaped.

Sacrificial, Sacrificial,
Watched Blackadder the Third.
Sacrificial, Sacrificial
Another reissued turd.

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Upcoming tours – Venom Inc, Necrophagia

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According to the folks at Earsplit PR, the “Prime Evil” lineup of Venom is joining Necrophagia on a tour of the United States this January. This tour was initially planned for fall of 2015, but was apparently postponed. Venom Inc. (as the lineup is called) is to be distinguished from the current official line up of the band, which revolves primarily around Conrad “Cronos” Lant and spends its days touring and releasing the occasional forgettable album. Band bashing aside, if you’ve ever felt the need to see one of Venom’s more polished and mainstream lineups touring with god knows what Necrophagia is up to (outside of promoting 2014’s WhiteWorm Cathedral), then you’re a far more specifics driven person than I am.

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