SMR – Dispelling the Magic of the Pretenders

O Mars! God of War! Infernal battles and bestial devastation have ensued on this week’s Sadistik Metal Reviews! Unholy wars between the true and the pretenders, the golden race and the plastic one. Which shall prevail?

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Hardcore Heavyweight Exposes, Humiliates the Blastbeat Network

A storm is brewing against the BlastBeat Network and its founder, Ben Umanov of MetalSucks. While the tabloids of MetalSucks and Metal Injection have long lost journalistic credibility and have become known as little more than an obnoxious joke, they’ve in recent months made a reckless overreach that has sparked a number of vicious uprisings against them. In threatening Behemoth front man Nergal, they provoked a pre-emptive strike that saw legions of Behemoth fans come against them (in a rare move, they refrained from publishing the story). Their direct involvement de-platforming of Elegy Records and other labels has turned Elegy into a martyr and free speech icon, featured in Breitbart News and drawing the ire of many on the radical right. And now they find themselves again on the receiving end of a brutal savaging, this time from a very well known name in hard/grindcore – Todd Jones, who has performed in Nails, Terror, and the outstanding Boston-style hardcore band Knife Fight.

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End of Year Reflections on Metal


The end of the year for some people is a time where they participate in debauchery and related idiocy as they are convinced that the arbitrary beginning of a calendar year absolves them of past mistakes and gives them the possibility to renew themselves without the burden of accepting reality. Those who don’t hide behind such comforting fallacies accept that this is a day like no other and that no actual changes will occur except for remembering to write 19 instead of 18 when it comes to paperwork. Metal has continued its sad and hilarious explosion to the top of the mainstream while pushing out less and less meaningful art. Rather than go ever end of the year lists as they are just useless and contain mostly salvaged junk with the occasional pearl. Here at DMU we shall analyse new compositional tools we would like to see implemented and which ones should be discarded.

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Forces of Satan Stumble

The consensus seems to be that Christ does not belong in metal.  Well, neither does Satan.  Rigid patterns of thought are not conductive to the creation of transcendental metal music.  The failure of NSBM stems from the rigid ideology into which the music was forced like a Procrustean bed.  The two Christian metal bands worth a shit have been covered on this site: Paramaecium and Antestor.  The only NSBM bands that are not terrible are the bands, like Graveland, that preceeded the creation of the subgenre and were only lumped in with the scene later… Gontyna Kry seems to be the sole exception to NSBM sucking.

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/smr/ Sadistic Metal Reviews: Massacre of Death Metal’s Mainstream

Yesterday, we gave you the 10 most popular death metal bands of all time.  Now one by one they will face public execution as we absolutely massacre their most recent release.  No mercy will be shown- orders are to kill everything that moves.

Did you fucking soy metal nu males really think they would get off easy?  This is Death Metal Underground- the most savage music site on the internet!  Death to soy metal, death to sellouts, burn and die all falses!  Mayhem- war- sadism- brutalization!  No death metal band should have 1 million Facebook likes!  No death metal band should be on Facebook at all!  Pussies!  Behead the corpses, throw them into the streets- the Templar way!

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The Most Popular Death Metal Bands- Who is #1?

Who is the most popular death metal band?

It’s one of those esoteric questions that wanders in and out of the mind without a quick Google search to offer a definite solution.  But today it dawned on me that if I don’t try to find an answer, it’s unlikely any one else will do a decent job at doing so.  And given the fact that deathmetal.org is the number one site that comes up when you Google “death metal news,” I believe we have a journalistic duty to present the world with this information.

Since where to draw the line on what’s “true” death metal or not is a matter of opinion moreso than concrete fact, I determined that anything labeled “death metal” would be fair game whether it truly was a pure death metal band or not.  Therefore I’d consider melodic death metal, black metal, and even deathcore in an effort to find who had conquered the greater sphere of death metal.

Unfortunately, the Nielsen record sale tracking data is not public and often does not identify how well an album has sold for many years after its release.  Thus, I determined that the most accurate metric for mining this data would be to measure by Facebook likes.  Yes, I know it’s not an exact science- many fans aren’t on Facebook, and many people click a band’s like button without really listening to them.  But still, it was as good as I would ever get to finding who the most popular band in the greater bounds of “death metal” truly was.

I expected to see the favorites of the 90’s metal press and MTVX dominate- Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Decide, Death, and probably In Flames take the number 1 spot.  Imagine my shock, that only one of these bands even cracked the top 5!  I had always heard about Morbid Angel and Deicide had the highest album sales, but it appears neither band has been able to conquer the internet age.

So again, this list was populated within very forgiving boundaries (bands loosely considered death metal, whether or not I believed them to be), and the best metric I could come up with.  Also, DO NOT FUCKING EVEN THINK OF CONFUSING THIS AS BEING A LIST OF THE BEST DEATH METAL- IT IS QUITE THE OPPOSITE!!!  And finally, if there are any bands you think I missed please let me know in the comments below and I will gladly do a live update and give you credit- maybe.

Without further ado, here is – for the first time in history – a list of the most popular bands that people considered to be death metal, and an explanation to why I would endure the immense visceral hatred for even considering them:

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Fake And Gay: Nergal, Halford Want BM Supergroup

< Famed Judas Priest singer and gay fashion icon Rob Halford has been recently vocal about starting a black metal supergroup.  A longtime fan of the genre, Halford has named Ihsahn of Emperor and Nergal of Behmoth as potential collaborators, with the latter jumping at the opportunity to use his cartoon-black-metal brand to pocket even more mainstream metal dollars.  Unfortunately for Halford and anyone dumb enough to be duped into thinking something like this will be good, Nergal will not have much to offer in terms of a black metal supergroup as he has not played black metal since 1994's Sventevith despite masquerading around in corpse paint whenever it’s time to roll out the red carpet.

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