Codex Obscurum – Issue Seven

by Brett Stevens on June 15, 2015

Having watched this zine grow from humble origins to the reliable source of underground metal feature stories that it is today, the metalheads who comprise the underground — including death metal, black metal, grindcore, and some speed metal and doom metal — now expect high-quality on-point content from this zine, and Issue Seven delivers with style. Now possessing the journalistic weight and audience to command high-profile bands, Codex Obscurum returns with wide-ranging interviews, reviews, features and editorials with adventurous literary fiction as well.

Interviews have always pushed this zine above the rest because of their conversational nature but tendency to explore the thinking behind the musical decisions made by the band, with little attention spent on the surface fluff, but some questions that bring out the personalities of the musicians and explain their connection to the art. In this issue, the biggest name in interviews is Deceased, but perhaps the most powerful interview belongs to Thanatos. Covering both Hail of Bullets and Thanatos, this interview with Stephan Gebedi is as detailed and congenial as death metal interviews get, and covers a lot of history. The Deceased interview will strike most as idiosyncratic because it covers much of King Fowley personally and recent news, with less emphasis on background, but this reflects the general abundance of Deceased interviews on the early days. This updates us on the status of the band including information new to most sources. Other interviews with Wastelander, Drug Honkey, FaithXTractor, Crypt Sermon, Magic Circle, Dawn of Demise, Untergang, Slaughtbath and Blood Incantation follow similar patterns of compiling biographical details and consulting on musical intent, with the Untergang and Crypt Sermon being most compelling. All of these are well-executed and constitute the backbone of this zine.

Issue Seven contains a number of features, one of which takes the form of an interview. Artist Tony Cosgrove gives his points of view in a story which interweaves his images with his words, creating the sensation of being a museum exhibit with slightly longer detail cards. A feature on asymmetrical board games offers a glimpse into a world that overlaps with metal but is too nerdly for the mainstream tuffguy websites to cover. A lengthy write-up of the Kill-Town death fest in Denmark follows, which captures much of the atmosphere without excessive detail, but also skimps on a few vital points and may be the least powerful part of the zine. Then again, fest writeups are nearly impossible because everyone is tired and/or drunk (and stoned) so what remains are hazy recollections and the ability to look through the heaps of scored merch. Possibly my favorite features lurks at the rear of the zine, which is a malevolent and tongue-in-cheek editorial about the nature of battle jackets and how they should be worn. This piece reminds me of the 1980s text-files that hackers used to pass around: it has an off-the-cuff feel to the writing, but the thinking seems refined over time, which creates an interesting casual intensity. One intriguing feature, to my knowledge unique among current zines, comes in the form of a short story. Like a condensed zombie sci-fi horror movie, “Evil Seed” (named for the Morbid Angel tune?) efficiently whips through a haunting mystery of an experience with a powerful organic metaphor. This story not only adds to the zine, but its placement dead in the middle creates a break like that when flipping over a vinyl album to hear side two.

Toward the rear of the zine festers another important section: reviews. For metalheads without much time to wade through the mountains of spurious and often spiteful opinions in online comments, or the completely idiotic sales jobs that mainstream zines and web sites put out in place of reviews, where every release is the greatest ever and will tear your head off or make you look intellectual to the girlies, zine reviews offer peace of mind in purchasing by offering better than even chances that a given release will be a match. This occurs both through qualitative assessment, and quantitative description, both of which are featured here. These take a conversational tone but know when to drop the one or two lines of most vital description, and then an assessment, separating observations from judgments enough that the reader can shop by the relative distance between the taste of the reviewer and their own. In this issue, the selection of reviews is a lot more strategic and covers all of the vital ground for what was released during the press period of this issue.

As Codex Obscurum has grown, so has its proficiency in layout. This is the most readable issue yet, generally sticking a band logo at the start of an interview and then being sparse with other images and keeping the text high-contrast usually of a light grey on black variety. This format works well and the use of distinctly shaped fonts also keeps this from falling into the trap of the illegible muddy blur of a xerox disaster that many zines are. Reviews are black text on grey background for added readability, and whether from rush or deliberation, the black-on-white table of contents is if nothing else clear as a bell. Writing standards have inched upward, too, with tightly edited pieces and almost no typos and spelling errors. All of the above make it easy to pick up this zine, which at half-page size can be handily carried anywhere you would take a paperback, and to relax and absorb the content. It would not be surprising to see someone whip this out at a university library, transhumanist rally or on the international space station, because it has that kind of density of information and yet casual enjoyment factor. It is good to see this zine getting the recognition it deserves and its growth both in size and technique for an intensely professional and yet familiar metal reading experience.

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Rito Profanatorio – Grimorios e Invocaciones desde el Templo de la Perversión (2015)

by David Rosales on June 15, 2015

RITO PROFANATORIO - Grimorios e Invocaciones desde el Templo de la Perversion - cover

Contrary to the modern northern predilection to either go with the “intellectual” or “sentimental” strain of black metal expression, Latin American bands seem more inclined to follow Sarcófago. Many of these, in my opinion, retain the “authenticity” while actually improving on the music of the Brazilian punk-minded godfathers. Following the comparison with the northerners, while these try to create “the atmosphere” itself, actually trying to force the music to become the effect or the feeling itself (something advised against through the Common Practice Period all the way to the end of the Romantic musical era as it destroys the music), the grind/punk primitive black metal bands like Rito Profanatorio focus on punching songs that make use of short melodic motifs, and concentrate on the continuity of the riffs, letting the music do its job and create atmosphere and evoke feeling in the listener.

That being said, the music on Grimorios e Invocaciones desde el Templo de la Perversión is not the best of its kind. While it nails powerful riffs and have clear “melodic contiguity” (thanks for the descriptive term, ODB), the main problem lies in where they take the songs. Development is smooth, sliding deliciously into different ideas that carry follow “logically” from the point of departure. But after this, the band starts to lose a bit of control, the song keeps going forward without an ending in view, and then it suddenly stops. What makes these endings more offensive is that they are cliche metal endings inserted haphazard manner.

While this is not particularly original and the transgressions are great, it would be worthy to highlight their name and keep an eye on Rito Profanatorio’s development.  Long live Peruan metal! May it develop and refine itself into something that contributes to a worthy future of metal as it has the authentic feel and musical (rather than technical) inclinations that seem so absent from the northern countries these days.

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Goat Semen – Ego Sum Satana (2015)

by David Rosales on June 14, 2015

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Following in the footsteps of Sarcófago without becoming their clone, Goat Semen play a form of primitive black metal with riffs bordering on grind death. The music here is of consistent style, but its coherence is more metaphorical than literal, advancing more through sequences of sections that make sense together in mood but not necessarily in theme or other basic music element. Good variety while keeping a clear concept and a traditional sense of beginning and ending to the songs balance the previously described loose musical coherence.

While fans of this particular style, such as myself, will enjoy this album thoroughly and will play it on repeat for hours, the loose kinks in its armor will be apparent to the discerning listener. For a more exemplary release in this vein the listener looking for musical excellence is encouraged to take a serious look into Exhumantion’s Opus Death. While Goat Semen’s music is exciting in its juvenile chaos barely harnessed by recognizable traditional gestures of music, Exhumantion’s is a study in solid musical composition with an enviable rigor propelling it to much higher levels of refinement, offering a more layered experience than Ego Sum Satana.

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Obsequiae – Aria of Vernal Tombs (2015)

by David Rosales on June 14, 2015

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On their first album, Obsequiae made use of very simple but consistent and creative melodies in a harmony emulating that of early western music from the late medieval period. Under the Brume of Eos consisted of songs that were essentially folk-heavy metal in the vein of Primordial with black metal vocals. Each few songs an interlude played in an acoustic instrument was inserted. The material was fine for the first fifteen minutes, after that it just boiled down to a collection of songs which were merely collections of riffs. Aria of Vernal Tombs unfortunately did not move beyond this same strategy.

It is important to go back to the just-mentioned style of Primordial. Primordial is one of those bands that is really ideology first, aura and image of the band first, and then music. The music itself is flat, only serving to carry a mood while the image that the listener has in mind (given by lyrics and song names — concept) is imprinted on it from the outside. Obsequiae work in a similar way, except that they take it a step further and actually make use of musical patterns that evoke the era they are using as theme. They also surpass Primordial in that in the short-term, songs are far more dynamic and in Aria of Vernal Tombs particularly coordinate wonderfully with the vocal pulse.

Obsequiae could still move beyond this “cool-riff” sequence approach and give us much stronger songs — and perhaps a conceptual album extending beyond the lyrical and well into the music. Inserting interludes is only the easy way to do this.  Metal bands like Blind Guardian, Rhapsody and even Morbid Angel (on Blessed are the Sick) have done this light and easy concept album arranging, each going further in different ways. Obsequiae and any band looking for using relatively simple yet self-contained and solid songs as the bricks for a strong concept album can look up to Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Until now Obsequiae have only given us scattered ideas in an obviously consistent and distinguishable language. And if music is a language of some kind, Aria of Vernal Tombs is one message in a loop of synonyms and like-words drawn from a thesaurus.

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Blasphemy – Fallen Angel of Doom (1990, 2015)

by David Rosales on June 11, 2015

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Bringing together the grindcore of Napalm Death and the primitive black metal of Bathory and Sarcófago into a death metal way of thinking, Blasphemy gave the world a solid although juvenile Fallen Angel of Doom. Racing in consisting grinding expression while going beyond the riff and into an atmosphere-inducing state as a result of the progression of riffs that is fitting of that primitive black metal, the songs in this album open a portal through which disturbing visions come to alienate us, inducing a feeling of aloneness, doom and  fear.

That strong evocation is accomplished from the fusion of these two genres, in my opinion, because they are not just smashed together but rather assembled in a different mold, that of death metal and made into one language. The other thing is that you do not hear interleaving riffs in different styles, although we do hear a good deal of flexibility in riff type in terms of rhythm, texture and note length. The riffs themselves are both completely fitting for grindcore, but it is the duration of their repetition and the effect of their arrangement that results in a similarity with primitive black metal. In order to achieve a stronger result coming from goal-oriented development, the structural-minded songwriting of death metal comes to round off and concentrate the raw energy of the other two genres.

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Nyseius – De Divinatione Daemonum‏ (2015)

by David Rosales on June 11, 2015

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While not profoundly insulting as most bands pretending to play black metal, Nyseius just plays very boring black metal. Now, this isn’t just an emotional remark, I have concrete reasons linked to the music’s construction to back it up and say what it is relevant. Nyseius is also rooted in the modern misunderstanding of black metal by its outer traits. Thinking that black metal consists in ad nauseam repetition of samey riffs to create atmosphere. And they get stuck in this word, atmosphere, as if it were music itself and not an effect of certain music. And thus they attempt to create that thing itself, mistaking it for music. This is the abysmal trap in which all metal that willingly identifies itself with that word falls into.

Arnold Schoenberg said that variation itself did not need justification, it was a merit on its own. He also said that this variation needed to be harnessed and guided by an equally powerful and balancing restraint and coherence. But in discussing De Divinatione Daemonum the first aspect becomes the most pertinent since this music lacks variation. Bent on forcing the creation and sustaining of this atmosphere, this featureless mass, this wall of same-length notes only seldom breathes in order to continue aimlessly towards oblivion.

The last factor that drives this into a wreck is that they have infected black metal with the superficial craving to be extreme. This is what drives them to this dissonance, and an ignorant use of dissonance at that. Dissonance not as a tool of tonal music, not even a dissonant musical language, it is just the use of single dissonant chords for their own sake, for the momentary and twisted satisfaction that it can bring to the human ear. Exemplifying yet another dead end of metal caused by a superficial appreciation of the classics or of music in general, Nyseius will gradually fade into oblivion as purposelessly as the notes they put together into atmosphere, not music.

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Névoa – The Absence of Void (2015)

by David Rosales on June 11, 2015

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The phrase The Absence of Void (or in other words “not nothing”) basically means the same as “something”. If we indulge in its mystic inclination, the phrase is not about pointing out that there is or there isn’t something but emphasizing the importance of having something. It is almost a description of the emotionally needy and it describes the music in this album very well.

As is common with all the uppity and profound hipster black metallers, they care little for the right tone and color in the genre and will paint it with brushes from indie rock and any other happy-dumby expression. This would not matter if they went all the way and just made indie rock, but it is the discrepancy between black metal and their post-metal penchant for happy and light passages that furthermore are only indulgences in the moments that do not build on the song that show this music for what it is: emotional neediness that just wants something, that just wants to not have nothing.

Although some, including the band, will probably try to claim to be related to metal, this is nothing but post-metal dressed as black metal. Once you get to the middle of the album the song “Alma” will completely dispel any doubts (on a separate note, this completely NOT metal song is probably the best song in the album, also the only honest one). So we shall judge it “on its own grounds” as some superficialists would say. Post-metal fails even on its own grounds. Music that only stagnates in an “atmospheric” moment and then introduces another stasis. It’s a different kind of musical masturbation from technical wanking. This is emotional wanking with sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLqXwj73f5I

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Gestalt – Infinite Regress (2015)

by David Rosales on June 11, 2015

More black metal from the people who do not understand black metal. This is in the now popular style of pseudo black metal that sounds like war metal trying to be progressive. This lot probably new about black metal through the profound music of Michael’s Pink Frothy AIDS. Incoherent as it is flat, Gestalt identifies itself as modern by the insistence on arranging awkward juxtapositions and superimposed elements that do not match in the least. Keyboards that were not there before jump into the fore with no warning only to disappear and never return again in the song. Maniatic blast beats that underscore nothing except the fact that they are trying to play intense music followed by macho man riffs, only to slide into quiet endings or bridges that seem placed there because they simply could not think of anything else to put there.

Even the average metalhead will know to stay away from this circus motley outfit pretending to ironically catch a pulp fantasy sort of occult imagery backed by equally uncompromising profoundness — or so their kind say in this sort of empty words. As the late bitterman (where art thou? we could use you) would say: Vapid. Avoid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBkgL498GPA

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Enslaved – In Times (2015)

by David Rosales on June 7, 2015

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Watching the greats fall is always painful. But watching Darkthrone go from Transilvanian Hunger to The Underground Resistance is not half as painful as seeing how Enslaved defile their name in a pseudo-prog mainstream pop metal album like In Times after knowing they were capable of something like Vikingligr Veldi. Even without drawing a comparison, the contrast-oriented sequence of scenes posited by the modern metal of In Times as an excuse for music is in itself enough to throw this out the window.

The sort of failure that an album like this represents is one of the most pervasive maladies that afflicts modern metal, but it was born long before the metal itself developed. The pseudo-prog musical fallacy of either stitching unrelated sections with disparate characters and contrasting ideas  or merely repeating riffs and similar ideas with no subtlety was born as soon as progressive rock became a “thing” and paper-thin rednecks like Camel and Rush were confused with the real-deal bands like Yes and King Crimson which require much more subtlety to appreciate. This is a sickness that metal has to overcome if it is to have an artistic future and if the absorption into mainstream pop music is to be staved off.

This absorption is always taking place, and there are always pockets of resistance. Enslaved is showing us the most dangerous example of this watering down. It is the most dangerous because it gives the superficial appearance of attaining greater complexity. But it is a trivial complexity. It is no real musical complexity as it only consists in stacking elements that sound appealing in passing much in the way Michael’s Pink Frothy AIDS constructs for the intellectual, sensitive hipsters. This music is painful to listen to for any discerning listener looking for coherence and meaning in art and should be avoided by any fan or musician looking for excellence except as an example of a common pitfall of the pseudo-intellectual metal movement.

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Deiphago – Into the Eye of Satan (2015)

by David Rosales on June 7, 2015

Deiphago - Into The Eye of Satan - medresx300

Playing a mixture between the primitive South American black metal of Sarcofago, the unrelenting and mindlessly simplistic assault that borders on comedy of Marduk and something of its own, Deiphago’s Into the Eye of Satan is both a highlight and representation of half-cooked modern nostalgia metal. The references to the influences are pretty clear for someone to see and even though Deiphago escapes them and proposes something of their own, the sections in which we hear the older voices are two transparent. Rather than an integration of influences, we hear quotes to other composers in the midst of Deiphago’s maddened ramblings.

These raptures proper of a madman that Into the Eye of Satan exposes us to are as endearing as they are nonsensical. It makes one think of the epileptic attacks that Colombian’s Parabellum subjected the listener to. The difference is that the Latin American savant band actually produced coherent music within the wild and often disorienting music that nonetheless had a clear large-scale plan. Deiphago on the other hand attacks the listener with pure chaos, subjecting it to passages that border on noise improvisation and structures that appear to  consist of haphazardly placed extreme-sounding sections. The theme here is chaos, the destruction of music and ideas themselves while the picture is not completely given up on. While not incurring in the sin of trying to become atmosphere itself nor becoming self-referential symbols, Into the Eye of Satan sadly still falls short of a year’s highlight due to what I perceive to be compositional laziness and/or lack of controlling musical notions in spite of a solid artistic vision.

 

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