Avast young heshling! It is time to rise up, rise again! Take hold of the flame, the crown and the ring!
To guide the way and aid thee in thy quest, a powerful playlist of true heavy metal has been curated for thine journey.
19 CommentsTags: 1980s, 1990s, 2000's, Ambient, Austria, cloven hoof, Crimson Glory, epic, fates warning, Heavy Metal, lord wind, Lost Horizon, manilla road, manowar, playlist, poland, power metal, queensrÿche, Summoning, UK, USA, USPM, virgin steele
Heavy metal influenced sperg rock band Manilla Road have another record of what are sure to be repetitive bouncy singalongs sung by someone on beta blockers coming out on June 30th on Golden Core Records. The die hard edition of To Kill a King selling out is going to give every fat guy with a denim vest a heart attack if they cannot put it on a shelf with their sealed action figures.
15 CommentsTags: autism, glam rock, hard rock, Heavy Metal, manilla road, upcoming album, upcoming release, wimps
Old Disgruntled Bastard, one of the few quality metal blogs around, accused Death Metal Underground of writing clickbait on Facebook for our recent Sadistic Metal Reviews of older albums our staff had noticed to be inferior to the best of the past:
118 CommentsTo Death Metal Underground: Certain albums have endured – for musical and extra-musical reasons – across decades and among generations of metalheads of diverse backgrounds, and the least they warrant is treatment with the respect they’ve earned. There is no revelation to be made and there is no current of general perception to be reversed by “raping sacred favorites”. Clickbait is distinctly unelitist and pissing in the wind for the fuck of it isn’t terribly smart either.
Tags: Angel Witch, blood, classics, clickbait, cynic, dissection, diversity, gothenburg metal, kreator, manilla road, nostalgia, Old Disgruntled Bastard, sadistic metal reviews, salt, sentimentality, sodom, sodomize the weak
George Psalmanazar submitted a few reviews of albums he vehemently despises to Death Metal Underground. Enjoy!
39 CommentsTags: amon amarth, Angel Witch, arena rock, bedshitting, dissection, glam metal, glam rock, hard rock, Heavy Metal, judas priest, manilla road, NWOBHM, pop music, sadistic metal reviews, sell-out, stadium metal, stadium rock
Why write bad reviews at all? Good music is rare, and bad is everywhere, but if you do not explicitly identify the failings of bad, most people will find it appealing because it does not interrupt their steady stream of self-centered thoughts and is easier than seeking good. If you like good music and want more of it, you must bash as well as praise, as Machiavelli would tell you. And with that, the latest installment of the Sadistic Metal Reviews…
82 CommentsTags: acanthrophis, asperger's syndrome, coprophagia, Dead War, fetus logic, iron maiden, kreator, led zeppelin, manilla road, mental retardation, pantera, sadistic metal reviews, sunn o))), venom, Voivod
Manilla Road‘s unreleased “Mark of the Beast” album, recorded between Invasion and Metal, has been pressed to CD and LP by High Roller Records as Dreams of Eschaton. This is the highest fidelity version yet, pressed from a collector’s tape that originated from Mark Shelton himself as detailed on the Nuclear War Now! forum:
4 CommentsTags: compilation, Dreams of Eschaton, epic, epic heavy metal, Epic Metal, Heavy Metal, High Roller Records, manilla road, Mark of the Beast, power metal, Speed Metal
Article by Corey M.
Featuring several authors from many backgrounds including members of metal bands Manilla Road and Solstice, Swords of Steel is an exciting collection of short stories that are for the most part squarely rooted in the tradition of serialized weird fiction.
1 CommentTags: 2015, book, book reviews, fantasy, Horror, manilla road, pulp, science fiction, Solstice, Swords of Steel
Article written by Daniel McCormick
In James Howell’s 1660 Lexicon Tetraglotton one finds the proverb, “When thou hast made a turd leave it.” – advice not heeded by Manilla Road on The Blessed Curse. The biggest issues are twofold: length, and creativity. Yet, had brevity been a predilection, there’s little saving grace, even considering the august bloodline. I must admit that within the first minute thirty I was well prepared to hit stop and attempt to return my album. This is not to say that the music is performed sloppily, or that it’s lacking in merits altogether, but the substance of the music rarely rises above the common or generic, and it comes across more as embryonic than as a well crafted communicative device. It is as if this double album were a construct built from a month of jamming in a rehearsal room.
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Tags: 2015, american heavy metal, manilla road, power metal, the blessed curse
Triguna is a band that plays underground metal in that vague intersection between death metal, black metal and the phrasal speed metal of Slayer. Their independently-released Embryonic Forms is both an honest and musically-aware artistic offering that falls short for technical reasons. “Technical reasons” here should not be underestimated. The band’s instrumental skills are just enough to play he music they wrote, but it is the technical side of composition that is loose.
Technique in composition is believed by the populace to mean how many chord progressions and scale names you have memorized or how many contrasting sections you can pair up. In truth, what technical composition ideally affords is an experience and insight into musical forms, elements and their relations and effects along with historical reference points that help the composer distill the purest elements of music. Surely this can be derived by talented and innately perceptive musicians, but they are still building most things from the ground up.
To be fair, given Triguna’s apparent technical level, their decision to make varied yet deliberately dirty, simple and straightforward passages was a realistic one that allowed them to concentrate on the coherence of the pieces as wholes. So while individual sections, riffs or solos are not altogether overwhelming, the songs are solid, enjoyable and meaningful. Creating fulfilling whole music that is not minimalist, Embryonic Forms is a perfect example of the extreme case of a vision superseding technique to achieve a musical triumph. The album garners at least honourable mentions alongside the likes of Manilla Road or early The Chasm (not that I am equating them, just classifying them), and is very much recommended on my part.
14 CommentsTags: 2015, Embryonic Forms, manilla road, the chasm, Triguna, underground metal
Shadow Kingdom Records will reissue the seventh album from Wichita, Kansas, band Manilla Road, entitled Out of the Abyss on January 13, 2015. Originally release in 1988, this album shows the band in both fully-developed and archetypal form.
Death metal fans coming late to this album may note how it is a prime example of how to do everything right and end up wrong. Manilla Road write speed metal in the style of Judas Priest crossed with the post-Slayer high-speed riffing of bands like Atrophy. They do so with precision picking, a good knowledge of harmony and rhythm, and yet make completely boring music.
Part of reason for this boredom emerges from the style itself. This type of late speed metal emphasizes breaking songs into discrete modules composed of riffs, following the NWOBHM style, but they break rhythm between those which allows little buildup. Instead, it is a series of right angles. Further, in another NWOBHM influence, these riffs are fundamentally static in that they center around a chord and use fills composed of that chord or a matching scale, but do not develop melodically within the riff; as in rock, that is reserved for the vocals. The result feels a lot like a series of riffs in a verse-chorus pattern with a tangent 2/3 of the way through, guided along by vocals. It does not achieve the structural intensity of death metal.
With that being said, it is clear why many bands hail Manilla Road as an influence. Crisp and exact playing gives these riffs a militant technological sound, and whether from this influence or another bands like Deceased, Voivod, DBC and Obliveon have put this technique to good use. Subtle rhythms abound in addition to the obvious toe-tapping speed metal choruses and lead guitar, while very much entrenched in the domain of rock-style soloing, provides an example of technical excellence within that domain. Vocals sound like a more devious Rob Halford. All of these contribute to the power of this release, but it remains enmired in the binary riffing and somewhat static riffs of the speed metal days which were thankfully left behind during the transition to death metal.
This re-issue will give a new generation of metalheads a chance to appreciate the technical ability of this band and the compositional issues raised by this style. For example, should metal go the rock route of static riffs and build on that in the style of mid-period Judas Priest, or should it follow more of the death metal style of phrasal riffs and flexible song structures? Guitarists will enjoy the challenge of playing these riffs at speed and still making the change, and classic metal fans will delight in the whole package. Out of the Abyss does everything right to hit its target, but for those of us who are post-80s, it may be the wrong target.
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