Rare among doom metal bands, Convocation knows how to create a sustained mood with slowly crashing chords under rising gentle lead-picked melodies, building a contrast within each riff to which the gritty hoarse vocals provide a rhythmic anchor, drums drifting tangentially to both keep time and suspend it.
1 CommentTags: convocation, Doom Metal
As a television turned to a news channel blares apocalyptic warnings nearby, Marion Allen keeps her focus on something more immediate: carefully cooking the thick strips of pork-like meat on her outdoor grill. “Everyone was so divided, by politics and race and class or whatever, so we decided, why not just eat them?” she says brightly.
3 CommentsTags: antifa, cannibalism, law enforcement
Despite incorporating some modern metal ideas, Shezmu remains entrenched in the style of old school death metal and hardcore, focusing on simple atmospheric riffs that emphasize structure more than melody or harmony, sounding not dissimilar to Abomination, Miasma, or Baphomet but with more focus on bounding, energetic punk-style riffs.
No CommentsTags: death metal, Hardcore Punk, shezmu
As a recognized founder of the war metal genre, the band Blasphemy represents martial conflict and infinite blasphemy. Now it may be the progenitor of future generations of war metal through its latest offering, a war metal starter guitar kit named “Initiation of Confliction” that includes all the necessities for creating a war metal project band.
3 Comments
Rescuing another long-out-of-print album from the dustbin of history, Svart Records re-issued Winter Into Darkness — with the “Eternal Frost” demo previously released as the Eternal Frost EP — on April 27, 2020, as a deluxe edition on 2CD and vinyl.
2 CommentsTags: death metal, death-doom, Doom Metal, goden, svart records, Winter
Following up on Cannibalistic Patricide, Deathsiege explores further into the idea of war metal as a voice for contrast instead of simply pounding the user into oblivion with many similar riffs arrayed like the tines and lanes of a maze.
3 CommentsTags: deathsiege, Israel, War Metal
Italian late-1980s style proto-black metal (Morbid, Venom, Tormentor, Goatlord) at its core, Tenebra speeds up the process somewhat and incorporates 1990s black metal of the Teutonic and Nordic varieties, eschewing the traditional melodic approach of Southern European bands for an advancing front of sawing riffs, using these to produce the backdrop for the slow emergence of atmospheric melody which stays minor-key without getting maudlin.
1 CommentTags: Black Metal, cult of parthenope, tenebra
Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story
by Ika Johannesson and Jon Jefferson Klingberg
240 pages, Feral House, $19
As we get past the glory years of underground metal — roughly 1987 to 1994 — more histories are emerging such as Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story which came out two years ago and presented itself as a history of Swedish underground metal. It achieves that and more, but falls short of its ultimate mission, which is to explain Swedish death metal and black metal, world-renowned for their intelligence and intensity.
8 CommentsTags: Bathory, entombed, mayhem, Sweden, Swedish Black Metal, Swedish Death Metal, swedish metal, underground metal
Formed from the fragmentation of Kever, Deathsiege approaches extreme metal from more of a war metal background, melding the sounds of Angelcorpse and Blasphemy into a new voice that uses more atmosphere and contrast to give these charging anthems space to develop a menacing aura.
7 CommentsTags: deathsiege, War Metal
Sometimes creativity emerges best from a limited palette, and finiteCell by generating its sounds via custom programming on an original Game Boy and then sampling the result, adding breakbeat percussion, and editing the outcome into songs, demonstrates the possibilities found by experimenting in a sandbox of restricted options.
7 CommentsTags: chiptune, finiteCell
