Gorguts – Pleiades’ Dust (2016)

by Jerry Hauppa on January 11, 2018

Gorguts is a band that for a majority of its career has resembled an act that is at war with itself artistically.  After a serviceable debut comprised of purely death metal notions and peaking with its most dense and progressive release in The Erosion of Sanity, the band chose to scale back its arrangements while imbuing its approach with a discordance that may have laterally trespassed its prior unsullied metal constructs but at the same time gave Gorguts an identity all their own.  With regards to their contemporaries, you cannot currently say a band “sounds like Gorguts” without indirectly focusing on the sound created on Obscura, and the band’s own knowledge of that most likely has controlled their writing ever since — to the detriment of their overall intents in each record from then on…

(more…)

23 Comments

Tags: , , ,

Somber Lands: The Harmonic Minor Scale

by Brock Dorsey on January 3, 2018

Dark, brooding, and long cloaked in obscurity, the harmonic minor scale is a compelling collective of notes that has historically been used as an accent to minor key compositions.  For centuries only a handful of pieces had been written within its bounds as composers instead opted to weave in for a number of measures before an eventual progression into the natural minor scale.  From there it appeared again in a few folk songs, took a strong spiritual presence in Islamic culture, and later became an integral part of horror movies when they progressed into the frightening mediums they became in the 1970s.  But it wasn’t until the musicians of the early Swedish death metal scene discovered how to fully harness the scale’s potential that lengthy songs and even the majority of some albums began being composed within its bounds.  A truly grotesque wedlock, the scale gave he who wielded it the power to craft the most sinister and foreboding compositions possible within the laws of music.  It is for this reason one could attest that the minor harmonic scale has found a home in heavy metal that no other genre of music could provide.
(more…)

19 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Ritual Chamber – Obscurations

by Brock Dorsey on December 28, 2017

Hidden in plain sight, there is some fine metal being released- even in recent years.  Nestled in the convoluted release schedule of one of the most popular indie rock labels (although in fairness, Profound Lore has gotten death metal right before) is a rare foray into dissonant death metal grandeur that is certainly worthy of praise.  The newest solo project by Numinas/Crom/Dario Denerio, whose well-ventured resume also includes Infestor, Khrom, and Evoken,  Ritual Chamber’s 2016 full length debut Obscurations (to Feast on the Seraphim) masterfully imports the lost wisdom of classic death metal spirit into a contemporary flesh of sound and production.  Suffering from poor marketing through mainstream channels and tired aesthetic trends that mask its originality, this cultured release flew well off the radar of the audience it was most suited for and was not digestible enough for the retro/rehash death metal crowd of hipster swine it mostly reached.  But although it initially evaded the underground’s most trustworthy mediums, Death Metal Underground’s undying commitment to unearthing the best in the genre now gives us a late opportunity to acknowledge a great work of elegance.
(more…)

19 Comments

Tags: , , , , , ,

Morbid Angel – Kingdoms Disdained (2017)

by Brett Stevens on December 9, 2017

There are twelve notes. There are twenty-six letters. We can form them into combinations/patterns. The ones that stay with us are the ones that communicate. This takes us above the level of riff (metal), harmony (jazz/rock), and into the realm of melody, which uses phrase and harmony as means of strengthening the expression of a melody, or a unique combination which resembles the psychological sensation of a certain experience.

(more…)

21 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Fashwave

by Brett Stevens on August 5, 2017

During the tumultuous past few years, a new sub-genre appeared that combines elements of several existing genres. Fashwave is synthwave with a darkwave sensibility and occasional metal-inspired riffs that sound very much out of the canon of Beherit or Burzum, but simplified to fit within the more synthpop-oriented rhythms of fashwave.

(more…)

37 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Autarcie, Black Death and Other Sicknesses

by Max Schoenbach on July 30, 2017

Autarcie could be easily dismissed for being assembled from the elements we expect from narcissistic yet generic post-black metal or “modern metal.” Instead, it presents to us a transition between black metal and either assimilation or a new form which is organic and local, and yet while the band does more with the elements of modern metal than that genre, its failure to conquer the modern mindset within precludes it from achieving the ancient sensibility and sensation of black metal, leaving it as identifiably “post-metal” in spirit but second-wave black metal in form.

(more…)

4 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Bill Steer Admits Making Arena Rock

by Daniel Maarat on May 7, 2017

Bill Steer, the guitarist of sell-out grindcore legends turned butt rock turkey Carcass, did an interview with hipster social justice warrior rock website Vice Noisey last week where he ranked Carcass’s albums in order of his favorites. Bill Steer admitted that Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious was pretentious death ‘n’ roll instrumental wank and that continuing in that style would not have provided any future for the band so they started writing heavy metal for arena rock fans on Heartwork as only about three hundred people at every big show Carcass played actually liked death metal at all. Bill Steer finally dropped all pretense of Carcass’s later material being traditional heavy metal and admitted it is actually written as arena rock in order to please the most people.
(more…)

13 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z