Long-standing Canadian technical speed metal band Voivod announced their latest album, Synchro Anarchy, for release on February 11 of next year. The label issued the following statement:
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Tags: Speed Metal, Voivod
Death Angel – The Bastard Tracks
When in the hands of a band accomplished at songwriting, you know it immediately regardless of genre; Death Angel make handily coherent and cogent songs out of a few hardcore and heavy metal riffs, but with a focus on the listener, have made these into enjoyable songs that avoid the amorphous fungible state of most metal releases.
3 CommentsTags: death angel, Speed Metal
Fathers, Brothers, and Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, and Anthrax by Frank Bello
Fathers, Brothers, and Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, and Anthrax
by Frank Bello
Rare Bird Books, 206 pages, $28
Almost all popular music interviews and autobiographies address the how more than the why which disappoints the teenage fan in all of us. Frank Bello attempts to express the why with his story of a broken childhood and how it partially led him to being in speed metal band Anthrax.
2 CommentsTags: anthrax, frank bello, Speed Metal
Hideous Death – “Remnants of Archaic Evil” (2021)
This demo mixes the anthemic aspects of 1980s heavy metal and melodic speed metal with the primitivism of early war metal, achieving a sound later than Venom but earlier than Slayer, while covertly working in techniques from underground metal for a hooky but self-possessed release.
No CommentsTags: hideous death, Speed Metal
Deceased – Thrash Times at Ridgemont High (2021)
Deceased and Doomstone, like Motörhead, represent a certain spirit in metal that combines enthusiasm and cynicism, although Doomstone tends more toward the imaginative early heavy metal era that wrote about goblins, witches, UFOs, and ancient gods. This album compiles some well-executed covers from bands that I mostly care little about.
4 CommentsTags: deceased, Speed Metal
Carcass – Torn Arteries (2021)
The Carcass guys never wanted to be grindcore; they wanted to be guitar fireworks speed metal, and on this album, they stick to roughly where they were on Heartwork: fast and intricate speed metal and power metal riffs based on established patterns with an ear for melody but linear development.
19 CommentsTags: carcass, Speed Metal
Metal Blade Reissues Classic Slayer Releases
Poised somewhere between speed metal and death metal, Slayer re-invented heavy metal by incorporating punk and classical structures with trademark raging speed, complex arrangements, occult and literary allusions, and intricate rapid-fire guitar solos.
17 CommentsTags: death metal, metal blade records, slayer, Speed Metal
Exorcizphobia – Digitotality (2020)
When a genre fails, its heroes dies as martyrs, their glory never dimmed by the entropy of time in which mistakes must be made and meaning slowly erodes through too many individualistic interpretations, revealing the weaknesses of individuals. When a genre succeeds? It labors in the shadow of the past.
3 CommentsTags: exorcizphobia, Speed Metal
Why Metal Fans Should Hate Pantera
Why do humans form tribes? If you want to break away from the rest, and not allow them to assimilate you, you must go your own way and militantly, bigotedly, dogmatically, and aggressively keep the others out, or they will try to draw you back into their dysfunction so they feel better about it.
49 CommentsTags: pantera, Speed Metal
Has Speed Metal Finally Become Assimilated?
From the flood of nonsense going through the news feeds, a sign that speed metal has gone mainstream:
A woman in New Zealand, refusing to bring another Mackenzie or Jack into the world, has named her three kids “Metallica,” “Pantera,” and “Slayer.”
Farrier reached out to New Zealand’s Registrar-General to inquire as to whether “there are any restrictions naming babies after band names, or albums.” He was told that there aren’t, “as long as the word used is not generally considered to be offensive or does not resemble an official rank or title.” This may rule out naming a baby after one of your favorite grindcore acts, but it did allow Farrier to verify the fact that Baby Metallica’s middle name is also—we’re not kidding—“And Justice For All.”
These kids will either have the best or absolute worst time in school, depending primarily on whether ‘80s thrash is currently cool with the youth—and whether lil’ Metallica has to deal with terrible classmates like “Napster” and “Decent Snare Drum Mixing.”
After nu-metal introduced chunky monkey riffs and gargled horse semen vocals to mainstream audiences, the percussive fast strumming riffs of Metallica, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, and their derivates (Pantera) probably seem tame, as do the later Slayer albums built around bouncy riffs and plaintively angry vocals.
When even Alex Jones uses Metallica songs for his interstitial music, and nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s has overwhelmed a Western Civilization looking at the post-Clinton neo-Communist NWO disaster at the same time that people are seeking music from a mentally less muddled time, speed metal has become the archetype of all heavy metal, and therefore, has been easily assimilated by industry and mass culture.
Perhaps this explains why so many of the original death metal and black metal bands chose proudly to be underground, figuring that a few years of musical and artistic honesty would beat out becoming a careerist in a corrupt industry only to morph into Dad Rock as their fans aged into complacent suburban wage-serfdom.
6 CommentsTags: metallica, new zealand, pantera, slayer, Speed Metal
