Desecresy – The Mortal Horizon (2017)

The Mortal Horizon is Desecresy’s first album as a solo project of Tommi Gronqvist’s after vocalist Jarno Nurmi left to focus on Serpent Ascending. Picking up right where Stoic Death left off, The Mortal Horizon is band’s most percussive and violent yet. The album takes after the death metal debut Arches of Entropy but is set into the multi-layered, ritualistic minimalist narratives of Desecresy’s later career.

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Metal Is Not Rock

There remains a massive confusion in mainstream media, society, and culture regarding metal as a truly separate genre of music.  The mainstream media and leftist-controlled academia regard metal merely as a subgenre of rock music, rather than its own distinct genre. This is of course absurd. If metal isn’t its own entirely separate genre of music then jazz, folk, country, and blues are all rock ‘n’ roll too as they can all be played with the same basic set of modern instruments. Since this topic is well-documented in Death Metal Underground’s extensive Heavy Metal FAQ, in this article I will merely layout some basic musical differences between the genres and provide a few appropriate examples to hammer it down into the brains of the ignorant.

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Profanatica’s The Curling Flame of Blasphemy CD Released

profanatica the curling flame of blasphemy cd

The CD version of Profanatica‘s minimalist The Curling Flame of Blasphemy is out now on Hells Headbangers. The LPs and digital downloads will be released in late July.

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Kaeck reveals preliminary artwork and song

kaek

Dutch black metal band Kaeck have blessed us with a preview of the album in full song uploaded to Youtube and a treated us with a look at the album artwork.  Consistent with the symbolic anti-religious blasphemy with an occult atmosphere that longs for deeper knowledge and understanding of the world that goes beyond dogma and into the heretical, the artwork displays perhaps somewhat cliche yet nonetheless symbolic objects of mystic research that become the tools for the pushing of boundaries of permitted knowledge. It is both rebellious and underground, subversive and hidden — a quiet revolution of plane-wanderers, mystics and malcontent visionaries that realize that the world at hand cannot contain the ideals they are looking for, launching them in a quest for the truth that is a desperate and hopeful reaching-out for the future and simultaneously nostalgic of an illusory grand past .

In “Afgod”, Kaeck present us with a condensed and focused incarnation of these sentiments. A heavy use of repetition with slight variation in a minimalist piece that can only be crafted by the most expert of black metal composers — not musicians or artists. Every single part is significant and important, ingrained indispensably in the framework of the music in a way that its function is not only amplified locally, but that makes the piece as a whole enhanced so that when all these elements are together (the understated drums, the melody-carrying enveloping keyboards, the saturating guitars and the maddened vocals) a surprisingly layered result whose individual elements are engaging but have nowhere near the power and reach of the created entity born when the sounds are brought together. And on the timeline, no single riff, no single repetition can account for the effect of the total song.This is the hallmark of superior and successful minimalist black metal. Greatness in any music, such as this, lies in the unified journey and the coalescing elements: a vision encompassing the whole vertically and horizontally.

Edit: “Alfgod” was taken down, but a link for another song in the album was uploaded and linked below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8xLpfbe9bY&feature=youtu.be

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Infernal Execrator – Add Infinitum Satanic Adherent

INFERNAL EXECRATOR - Ad Infinitum Satanic Adherent - cover

An incredibly brief, foggy, quasi symphonic intro with Marduk-like vocals pronouncing some indecipherable gibberish, followed by minimalist and recklessly fast riffs could fool one into thinking this is precisely a Marduk clone. In truth, there are mid-paced sections interspersed here and there to mitigate the onslaught of the indecipherable and impetuously fast sections. This upgrades this release to a later Marduk clone. Although probably upgrade is not the most accurate descriptor here.

The best and undeniably valuable product of extremely fast, loud and unrelenting black metal has been contributed in the last few years by albums like Advent Parallax and in the veritable modern classic Godless Arrogance. Marduk, on the other hand, was always wild abandon to mindless, truly mindless, speed and minimalism for the sake of it and more importantly for the joke of it.

But while Marduk are explicitly joking about everything they write about while staying somewhat seriously offensive, Infernal Execrator manage to sound like a joke more easily acceptable among the Godflesh Apocalypse extreme metal crowd. The words Ad Infinitum Satanic Adherent themselves are more than enough warning that this should be placed besides the likes of Tol Cormpt Norz Norz Norz. The only difference is that Impaled Nazarene triumph in the same way that Sharknado does: by embracing the joke and being happy with it. These Singaporeans purport to be more (by calling posers out) while not being able to take themselves entirely seriously. Fans of the Marduk, Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse will find this release palatable and fashionable.

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