Sepultura’s Sons

Hessians were always searching for anything heavy back in the eighties. Digging deep into the import section or buying blindly from catalogs or zines were the only ways to hear anything that could be heavier outside of rarely engaged in underground tape trading. Slayer was the heaviest mainstream metal ever got. Sepultura was one heavier.

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Acquiring the Taste : A Tour Through Progressive Rock, Part I

Since progressive rock first arose out of British and North American psychedelia, it has crossed every boundary that it could identify, which makes it like metal more a question of a spirit than a concrete set of musical or extra-musical traits. We can identify a few aspects of this spirit: a desire to make unique song forms which fit the shifting demands of their content, a passion for exploring melody and harmony, an obsession with the unconventional, and a chameleon-like ability to explore other styles and adopt them as its own.

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Impermanent Self

Life as a test is absurd. It depends upon there being something to judge after death, namely a self or a soul. But what we are is a heap: consciousness, form, perceptions, mental formulations, sensations. There is a sixth, in Eastern thought considered to be the soul or self – awareness (subject, first person perspective, watcher). The first five are given the adjective empty to denote their lack of intrinsic properties as they stand in conjunctive relationships. The sixth, citta in Pali or nous in Greek, deserves the adjective empty as well.

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Immolation, Azarath, Melechesh Live In Poland On September 27, 2017

Immolation fiercely maintains its reputation as both innovator and creator of a long run of relevant albums in the death metal genre. The band appeared in Poland on September 27, supported (besides opening bands Sincarnate and In Twilight’s Embrace) by Melechesh and Azarath. In every case the sound was at least good and with their performances they all have made great impression.

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Atmospheric Dendrophilia

Recently, I found a Youtube channel called “Atmospheric Black Metal Albums” devoted to what hipster urban lumberjacks have termed “atmospheric black metal”. We must call attention to the horrible Youtube, supposedly “black metal” sub-genre festering right under our noses for it is wholly different from the Eastern European flowing varietal.

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Arghoslent – Arsenal of Glory (1996)

Arghoslent hailing from Virginia, USA are another one of those so-called “melodic death metal” bands with hardly anything in common with death metal at all. Rather Arghoslent play plain old heavy metal. Unlike their lame contemporaries from Gothenburg, Sweden, Arghoslent were once an effective heavy metal band who initially continued the work of their idols that past European power metal bands had merely emasculated. Arghoslent themselves would eventually stumble into these same stadium rock sins but not on Arsenal of Glory.

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Strijd: Black Metal Götterdämmerung

Underground metal was rapidly dying by the mid nineties. The more musically successful death and black metal bands became disenchanted with their resulting limited financial success as the hordes of poseurs poured in through the gates of Byzantium, creating commercial rock that merely imitated the tones and texture of the monumental statues of the metal greats. The more popular death metal bands tried and failed at becoming rock stars while many of the more luminous minds in Norwegian black metal bands were dead or imprisoned.

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Meditations on the Death of Wishful Thinking

To be a writer, if you are any good, is to be a blasphemer. Humanity is an entropy engine because each person decides on what view of the world makes them look the best, and so the constant weight pushing down on us is that of the herd, of a group of individuals united only by selfishness, come together into a mob for the purpose of asserting their right to be different and unique, constantly leading away from an understanding of the world around us and any meaning that can be found in it.

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Roots of Evil: The Origins of Metal

With the fiftieth anniversary of metal music around the corner, forthcoming years will witness an increase of publications dealing with the history, legacy and defining characteristics of the genre. This could finally resolve the lack of consensus that still exists regarding the definition and origins of heavy metal.

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