French progressive/indie/death metal band Supuration has posted a new video, “Ephemeral Paradise,” from its upcoming album Reveries…. This showcases the firm blend between alternative rock of the indie variety, death metal and grind, and progressive notions of concept albums and harmony that has propelled this band since its inception, and its peak with 1993’s The Cube.
1 CommentTags: death metal, indie metal, supuration
On the heels of the recent kerfuffle involving Deiphago and SJWs hyping an incident into a politically-driven media event, Hells Headbangers Records has released a statement about the incident. It reads, in part:
In regards to the Deiphago incident, rest assured that Hells Headbangers, the Agora and everyone else involved in bringing you this event are very upset and disappointed. There is NO excuse to justify Sidapa’s action – he fucked up hard. An incident report was filed and the victim declined to press charges. Although the new Deiphago LP is due to arrive soon, this incident will undoubtedly have a negative impact on its’ sale and the bands reputation has permanently been scarred. Such a shame! Further ramifications will be dealt with internally.
Although the label was just trying to do what it thought was the right thing, this statement reveals the core of SJW: it is driven by commerce and designed to signal safety. Just like big corporations spend millions to show that their cars, vacuum cleaners and toxic foods are safe, metal bands, labels and media are trying to expand their reach beyond the “scary” realm of the underground by making it “safe.” This was the same thing that selling out did in the 1980s, which was to take all those dangerous violent heavy metal bands and channel them into glam metal, which was offensive but not dangerous. There was nothing there that would sidetrack your child from going to school, getting good grades and going on to a career. Sure, he might have a bit more sex, and the bands took tons of drugs, but there were no ideas there that fundamentally challenged the bourgeois view of the world.
In the 1990s, death metal and black metal were far from safe as well. They rejected the dominant ideology of their time, committed actual crimes and more importantly, embraced political and philosophical viewpoints that are incompatible with democratic society and bourgeois existence. Forget the petit rebels of hip-hop and heavy metal, black metal bands actually scared people, and by doing so they upped the ante for what a band had to do to actually rebel. In many ways all heavy music has been stagnant since that time because no one can figure out how to be more extreme, and so they sigh and content themselves with being merely outrageous. “Selling out” meant that process where a band stops trying to have authenticity in its music and outlook on the world, and instead settles for whatever brings in a consistent audience.
In our current time, SJW is the method of selling out. If you go SJW, you will offend no one. People feel comfortable around businesses who promise that they are motivated by ideology, not profit. This also seems to guarantee that everyone will be accepted. Of course it does none of those things, being like all public relations exercises a series of cheap promises whose compliance can never be verified, but people like to be told comforting things. It calms them down and then they feel complacently optimistic when shopping at that store. This is why companies — again with shades of SJW — will fire controversial employees, hire private security, put up spikes to drive away the homeless and put up happy signs talking about diversity and how the uranium they use to flavor their food is 100% organic. Safety sells, or rather, lack of safety precludes sales.
Just like glam metal in the 1980s was preferred to hardcore punk, thrash and early death metal by parents who were afraid it was unsafe for their precious snowflakes to hear, and might lead them to a life lived in a van down by the river, precious snowflakes now want to be safe in their music. They want to be rebels… well, no they don’t. They want to appear to be rebels and at the same time, incur as little actual risk as possible. That way they can talk it up at the water cooler at work about how wild they are, and still not have to pay the price for wildness, like endangering their easy transition into the middle classes. It is not surprising that as metal has sold out in the 2010s with SJW, quality has plummeted. Who can make good music about such insincere topics?
Luckily a backlash has commenced. Using the tag line “Make Metal Great Again,” a small group of metal musicians have declared their intent to drive out SJWs by indirect methods, namely by demanding higher quality metal. Sell-out metal is poseur metal, which means that it is both fake and replaces real metal. Metal thrives when it replaces the fake with the real. That could in fact be metal’s mission statement. Poseur metal is fake because it is designed to signal “safety” instead of opening the can of worms of truth, realism, history, violence, disease, horror and existential doubt. Labels love poseur metal because it has high margins: cheap, without risk, and easy to clone, it returns on investment every time even if less than an out of the ballpark hit like a really great band can be. Magazines love poseur metal because they can re-type the same story every month. Web sites love it because no review is ever wrong when all the music is the same under the skin.
If you wonder why metalgate has hit such a nerve, it is that it has threatened the profit model of the entire industry. Metal ca. 2015 depends on a constant flow of mediocre poseur metal bands to make sure that all the journalists, label people, PR people, bands and studios get paid. The market has shifted from the smaller, more agile environment it was in the middle 1990s. Now metal is big business, and like Microsoft or Apple, it’s in middle age. It aims for conservative successes that do not alter the formula and will not take the risk on anything outside of the norm. Since the music is crap, the labels need some other way to sell it to people, and they came up with “safe rebellion”: it looks all leather and motorcycles, but in fact it is a PC nanny who will tell you that everything is fine so long as you keep buying SJW products and ignoring the obvious signs of impending social collapse.
There’s a lot of pushback out there against those who push against boundaries. This is to be expected, but you can tell who are the cowards in the room by the people who won’t call it what it is. It is resistance by those who are growing fat and lazy off of the easy money chain formed by mediocre metal. It is no wonder they get nasty. This is why David Ingram has a temper tantrum when other people commit the grave sin of failing to agree with him. It’s also why Viranesir, the band banned from BandCamp, found itself on the receiving end of quite a bit of vitriol:
In theory, SJWs and the like would be above such behavior. But that is the key to understanding them: their political opinions are advertising, not something they actually believe, just like what businesses say in television commercials are things designed to make you buy the product, not truths. The advertisements lie and SJW is an advertisement. This is why SJWs are so hell-bent on controlling what others see, hear and think. It would be a corporate wet-dream to have mind control, but with SJWs, they have a type of advertising that simply takes over like a virus or plague. Is is to surprising that many SJWs have connections to racist and fascist groups? As authoritarians, they appear to have switched sides, but really what they have done is changed their justification from ideology to commerce, and are now getting paid to advertise for their new corporate masters.
7 CommentsTags: false metal, gamergate, metalgate, poseur metal, poseurs, profit motive, sell-out, selling out, sjws
This live split contains two lengthy songs from Nan Elmoth and five more conventional ones from Maldicion. These two bands could not form a greater contrast: the prog-oriented, folk metal informed Nan Elmoth with long discursive songs, and Maldicion with fast gripping songs like Mayhem meets Terrorizer.
Nan Elmoth kicks the set off with “Unleash the King of Wolves.” This lengthy song shows what is good about this band and what it needs to work on. Nan Elmoth is confused in both genre, and trying too hard. This song mixed Graveland with folk metal and power metal influences, then tries to cram it into a lengthy death metal tinged song. Perhaps a better approach would be to synthesize those voices into one of the band’s own, and then to not use method as a substitute for content; let the content lead you to an epic song or lengthy instrumental if it can, but forcing it creates a disconnect. These songs hold up well with rhythm and repeated motifs, and stand as some of the more deliberately “pushing the envelope” in extreme metal at this. The next iteration may bring more fluidity and allow them to breathe a bit. Nan Elmoth covers wide ground on riffs and themes and pulls them all together in this song, and a longer second song, “Nan Elmoth,” in which the variation sometimes seems pro forma but some excellent riffs stand out. This fades out into somewhat repetitive violence and then segues into Burzum “The Crying Orc” for a hint at what the past wrought.
Maldicion takes over with its songs which are dark like Mayhem, and feature periodic powerful internal collisions, but mostly seem to be more in the vein of fast death/grind. The result generates a lot of energy, gives it mystique, and then leaves it hanging about half the time. Songwriting is more proficient than most of metal but it could use some editing to determine the parts sufficiently relate to one another. Nonetheless, the raw aggression and vitality of this band outpaces most of what underground metal is doing now. Together, these bands create a set that is varied and strong, and point to future evolution of their sound that could push them farther in the world of underground metal.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, death metal, maldicion, nan elmoth
The Scandinavian countries have always had disproportionate metal output; Finland’s continues with this debut album from Sacrificum Carmen, an occult-inspired black metal band. Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa is set to release on October 30th and showcases a more melodic sound than is stereotypical of the country’s black metal output.
Saturnal Records issued the following statement:
2 CommentsHailing from the fertive Finnish black metal scene, Sacrificium Carmen both embody their home country’s prevailing underground idiom and offer a unique, diabolical twist to it. Founded in 2009 by vocalist Hoath Cambion and guitarist Advorsvs, the band draws their inspiration from the areas of occultism and Satanism exclusively. Sacrificium Carmen became active in 2012 with a full lineup, and soon released their debut demo “Sanansaattaja” in 2013 via Finnish underground label Spread Evil Productions. After the demo’s release, the band excelled in the areas of live shows and split releases, which all spread well around the underground scene. In 2014, Sacrificium Carmen started working on a debut full-length album, and the demo recordings led into a signing of a record deal with Finnish record label Saturnal Records for the release Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa.
Sacrificium Carmen plays black metal with a melodic and atmospheric touch where all tendencies have been directed into very aggressive and sinister output, where Finnish black metal sound meets murky death metal sound as witnessed with orthodox black metal acts. Across the eight tracks of Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa, the listener is dragged to the sulfurous depths, with vapor trails of hypnotizing melody lingering above the tar-thick sewage. Exquisitely filthy yet exceptionally well-recorded, Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa presents Sacrificium Carmen as a serious newcomer, a contender to be reckoned with in the years to come, as the band continue to propagate live rituals to increasingly rabid audiences.
Tags: 2015, Black Metal, Ikuisen Tulen Kammiossa, press release, Sacrificium Carmen, saturnal records
Many do not understand why MetalGate and GamerGate have so determinedly resisted the SJW incursion. There are several reasons, but the first is that if you do not resist invasion, you become replaced as SJWs have tried to do to metal fans. The second is that most people are inert and will simply allow it to happen. The third is the most troubling: SJWs and people like them destroy the lives of innocent people, just so that SJWs can get popularity points on Tumblr.
For example, consider the case of UK scientist Timothy Hunt:
In 1983, the British biochemist Timothy Hunt discovered cyclins, a family of proteins that help regulate the life of cells. Eighteen years later, in 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Between June 8 and June 10 of this year, the 72-year-old Hunt went from being a universally respected and even beloved figure at the top of the scientific establishment to an instant pariah, condemned everywhere for antiquated opinions about women’s role in science that he does not, in fact, hold.
In only 48 hours, he found himself compelled to resign his positions at University College London and at the august Royal Society (where Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke once fought petty battles) after being told that failure to do so would lead to his outright firing.
But what were these “antiquated opinions”? (“Antiquated” seems to be an easier way of getting rid of things than disproving them, so it seems one of those suspicious terms that indicates lazy reasoning). Ah, here’s an explanation from the petition to have Dr. Hunt reinstated:
His jocular observation, at a conference in Korea, that men and women tend to distract one another when working together in laboratories:
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls… three things happen when they are in the lab… you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry!”
Source: The Guardian, Article by Robin McKie, 13/06/2015
He then continued: “Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”
Source: The Independent, Article by Heather Saul, 24/06/2015
Aside from the jokey, self-deprecating context, another deliberate irony everyone seemed to miss was that Sir Tim met his own wife whilst working in the lab! Not to mention the broader picture: “No one seems to mention his main speech in Korea in which, according to the ERC President, he was ‘very supportive towards women in science and he said that he hoped there was nothing that barred women from science” (Dame Athene Donald).
His crime: a joke about falling in love with his wife in a science lab.
His punishment: total destruction of his career with no trial and no chance of re-admission. In short, exile.
How was this done? SJWs raised a hue and cry which was then picked up by journalists, a group which overlaps significantly with SJWs because they have the same audience — people who cannot stop themselves from buying products and clicking “like” on Facebook if social guilt is involved.
As the original article observed:
The Timothy Hunt affair represents more than the gratuitous eye-blink ruination of a great man’s reputation and career. It demonstrates the danger of the extraordinary, almost worshipful deference that academia, government institutions, and above all the mainstream media now accord to social media. It is yet more evidence of the way moral panic and (virtual) mob rule can be accelerated and intensified by the minimalism of Twitter, with its 140-character posts and its apparently inherent tendency to encourage snap judgments, prejudice, and cruelty.
Fortunately, the story did not end on June 10. In the weeks following the initial assault, some of Hunt’s most ardent persecutors have been exposed as liars or blinkered ideologues, abetted by cynical hacks and academic rivals on a quest to bring him down or use him as grist to a political mill.
Across our society, people who have slept through the past three decades of thought-crime being used as a reason to destroy someone’s reputation, career, family and friendships are waking up and opposing the cancer of SJW-style persecution. In metal, the same thing is happening: we are realizing that SJWs are not helpful voices but immoral enemies who take joy in destroying the lives of innocent people. And we are pushing back.
14 CommentsTags: gamergate, journalism, metalgate, Science, sjws, timothy hunt
SJW journalist Kim Kelly, who was just yesterday talking about “signal boosting” outrage over alleged actions by Deiphago guitarist Sidalpa, is now backpedaling and claiming she was only “commenting on a couple friends’ Facebook posts” even though we all know that “signal boosting” is an SJW dog whistle for joining into an attack mob via that armchairest of armchair activist zones, the internet.
Like many SJWs, Kelly hides behind her role as a journalist and its overlap with her personal life as a way to claim that her actions were innocent, when she was participating in group calls for violence, boycott and public defamation of Deiphago and anyone who defended their right to a fair examination of facts. Kelly, fitting right into the SJW mindset, knows that her strength consists of summoning many perennially unhappy internet people to attack and use guilt to cow and browbeat others into submission.
Needless to say, normally SJWs can get away with it, but they have pushed too far. Many on the internet are making a similar observation to the following:
The point is that before we go destroy someone’s life, we should make sure they in fact did what they are accused of and that there are no mitigating circumstances. According to SJWs, demanding actual facts and legal process is fascism, racism, sexism and other Very Bad things.
SJWs swarmed at first to attack Deiphago, and then got the predictable vague apology, but the band later removed it after realizing that the SJW monster had become defanged. First it became common knowledge that Kelly and other SJWs have faked news stories to advance their ideological agenda, and that at least some SJWs were previously trying to be toughguy internet Nazis before realizing there was an audience out there who is afraid to not eagerly support any article, band, or person who wields guilt as a weapon.
The pushback has been gratifying. Metalheads are tired of the invasion of SJWs, who bring both their doctrinaire politics and their bad indie-rock derived metal-flavored (but not metal) bands, and are starting resistance by doing what should have always been done: making fun of SJWs for the self-perpetuating victims them are, and openly mocking their presumed legitimacy and their dishonest and manipulative attack. One user posted the following which seems to summarize the situation:
Tags: censorship, gamergate, guilt, Kim Kelly, metalgate, sjws
Chris Whited, from mainstream metal band King Conquer, allegedly got jumped in the pit by some adversaries at a recent concert. But what has attracted attention from the reality-blind SJW journalist camp is what he said afterwards:
So I Moshed last night for adaliahs last song because it was there last day with us, and some pussy got butthurt and scooped me up from behind and slammed my face on the concrete(which knocked me out) then 4 other pussy ass faggots decided to kick me in the face while I was on the ground already knocked out, and then none of them would fight anyone one on one. And then they all lied to the cops about what happened. Long story short, I woke up in the hospital with no clue about anything that happened. Crazy, that’s never happened to me before.
In particular, it seems his use of the term “faggot” — used in different contexts by men around the world to refer to both homosexuals and men they dislike — has attracted the Language Police who want us all to feel guilty for not outright attacking him. Nevermind if you think his use was bad form; you are bad, and should feel bad, if you do not outright condemn him and join the other people without lives who gather on the internet nightly to fetishize outrage.
Metal Insider leapt on the SJW bandwagon with its shrill-voiced preaching about how terrible this all is:
There are two regrettable things about this: that it happened and that Whited feels the need to throw around the word “faggot.” Granted, he’s understandably angry in light of a cheap shot, and it’s cowardly to literally kick a man when he’s down. And if the venue had no security that would take care of any pit violence, that’s an amateur move on their part. And the police doing nothing about it likely added to the frustration. That being said, he lost a lot of sympathy as soon as he wrote that word not once but twice. Even if it was in the heat of passion, there’s no need to be homophobic about it.
The problem for them is that his thinking does not conform to what they view as “social justice,” which is both their hobby and their way of being better than you. Where humans once went to church and bragged about how many Hail Marys they had said, now they get onto Tumblr and brag about how morally correct they are by being politically correct. Same psychology, different era.
In the meantime, realistic and reasonable people are wondering: what is wrong with simply not engaging in the behavior? In other words, who cares what he said — fix yourself, first, and that is not limited to the easy method of changing your language for ideological reasons. We all have our own failings, but it is easier and feels better to attack someone else for something trivial they did, even if it may make sense in their local community, culture or friend group. Or even as an artistic statement of some kind. But SJWs are not about thinking, freedom of speech or even friendship. They are about control, and controlling you through guilt, no matter how many lives it ruins.
4 CommentsTags: censorship, chris whited, gamergate, king conquer, metalgate, sjws
Inspired by the buzzing Boss pedals of the Swedish death metal scene (and even featuring a cover of a track by Grave), Bloodstrike from Colorado has announced that their full length debut In Death We Rot will be released to the public on September 25th. Samples suggest a fairly basic, hardcore punk inflected recording that might come in handy at house parties. The band released the following press statement:
Combining the putrid licks & groove of early 90s Stockholm with the dark and cryptic delivery of early 90s death metal in the Midwestern United States, Denver, Colorado’s Bloodstrike are showing us what it means to truly redefine darkness with their first full length LP. Grave, Entombed, Dismember with a smattering of Bolt Thrower and early Obituary are all present here, so If you are searching for an old school sound in 2015, Bloodstrike is the answer.
After a head spinning (and splattering) demo in 2014, the quintet of metal veterans (having spent time in Silencer, Moth, and Havok to name a few) will not stop until the piles of rotten bodies their brand of death metal harvests, blot out the sun. If you prefer the ominous and rawer end of the death metal spectrum rather than what many of today’s studio wiz kids have to offer than look no further, Bloodstrike will be the best addition to your hall of suffering!!
Ryan Alexander Bloom | Drums
Artwork courtesy of the legendary Mark Riddick
“Soulless” written by Grave & released by Century Media Records 1994.
Tags: 2015, bloodstrike, death metal, in death we rot, modern metal, press release
War metal was born when worship of Blasphemy, Zyklon-B, Sarcofago, Impaled Nazarene and Beherit merged with the newly-simplified post-Nordic black metal, but many of us noted that Blasphemy and Sarcofago in particular had more in common with their punk and grind ancestors than black metal as it evolved. Trench Warfare cuts to the roots of war metal by making grindcore with metal rhythms and intensity, and by breaking out of the stop-start patterns of most war metal produce an unrelenting assault that bears down with the intensity of full-bore death metal.
Perversion Warfare consists of three tracks which build high-energy primitive riffing in the Blasphemy style and expand to more traditional grindcore and death metal forms, commenting on the riff that forms the bulk of each song with a series of complementary and oppositional motifs that keep the momentum rolling through rhythm and pattern. Layered on this are urgent martial drums that comment extensively on the change in material, sort of like Destroyer 666 given a technical tune-up, and chanting defiant vocals which resemble a cross between Blasphemy, Blood and early Mika Luttinen. Songs do not relax the strident attack but do come to clear peaks and have a form shaped around that, which avoids the formless grindcore glaze-over that occurs with many bands attempting this style.
Three tracks do not give enough of an impression to tell where this band will go in the future, but it provides an insight into how they intend to make war metal both interesting and militant. Riffs here evoke Napalm Death and Immolation as often as Vulcano or Conqueror, and the way riffs comment on one another to build songs is more death metal than war metal, despite the general approach to riff-writing being more welcome to acknowledging its roots in grindcore and expanding upon them. The result is surging combat energy which creates a narrowed and critical view of the human experience, reducing our social pretense to the practicality of open battle, but infuses into that a delight in survival which — as with all good metal — gives life new meaning through darkness merging into light.
No CommentsTags: death metal, trench warfare, War Metal
Kim Kelly, the SJW journalist caught faking stories for metal magazines, expressed outrage that DeathMetal.org would do basic research about her and publish an article forcing her to be accountable for her past statements and activity. You can see the full Twitter drama here including white knighting by internet tough guys. Notice how research becomes “stalking” when someone else does it, but it’s “research” when Kelly does it.
Kelly, who has no criticism for her fellow Vice NSBM-wannabe-turned-SJW-journalist Neil Jameson, has made a career of using lack of compliance with SJW issues to tear down careers of musicians. That is, of course, after she broke herself into the business as PR flack for notorious provacateurs Anal Cunt. MetalGate — inspired by GamerGate — was the first coherent resistance to the SJW invasion of heavy metal.
It is typical for SJWs to be hypocritical. For them, ideology is social and also how they hope to attract an audience which will feel guilty for not listening to them, therefore will feel a compulsion to buy SJW propaganda, like Chinese under Communism buying the Red Book or even a Czech grocer putting a sign in his window. This is about audience, and replacing the metal audience with a new group, which is why SJWs get upset when called out on that. They are not here to bring accountability. They are here, like any other lobbyist or corporate group, to sell products. And they really, really do not want you to look behind that curtain.
8 CommentsTags: censorship, gamergate, journalism, Kim Kelly, metalgate, neil jameson, sjws
