A new underground fanzine called “No Help Came” will feature interviews with the likes of Sammath,Condemner,Into Oblivion,Necronomicon and local Romanian bands should interest Hessians interested in what is going on beneath the funderground. The zine can be followed on Funbook by clicking on this link.
1 CommentTags: condemner, Into Oblivion, Necronomicon, No Help Came, sammath, underground, zine
Necromaniac hail from London UK which has become a wasteland full of terrible rock/metal hybrids catering towards young childern, and what was once the center for NWOBHM is now the home of mentally deficient hipster/indie music that seeks nothing more than to go viral before being replaced by the next thing. Necromaniac have avoided the toxicity of such a scene in the pursuit of something much more noble. The lost art of making the best music possible. The production is strong, retains the grit and the individuality of the performances while making every instrument listenable without castrating a single thing. Due to this EP only containing two tracks, each track will be analysed separately.
10 CommentsTags: 2018 highlight, Black Metal, death metal, Necromaniac, Subterranean Death Rising, underground
Ebay is allegedly facing their worst day in two years, with stock holders panicking because of the forecasted lower revenue. Also, eBay is conducting a “mass layoff” in the Bay Area, consisting of an estimated loss of more than 260 jobs. It is repeatedly reported that the company has suffered massive revenue losses, and we may hope it may be the death of eBay.
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Tags: ebay, mystery, underground
Wolf’s Lair Abyss was the first new proposition by the remaining Mayhem line up after De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and all the personal drama and loss that it signified. Needless to say, the pressure upon the band on the musical level- especially of music as a dark art, as Euronymous would have it- was quite high. Expectations after an Immortal album of far and wide reach were not at all encouraging. The remainder of the band had to find a way in which they could work from the solid basis of the past towards a unique development that did not come off as an insult or a betrayal to all that had been accomplished. The solution found by the band here was almost perfect, but it ultimately was only a transition whose eventual development would show if the full potential for growth would be adeptly exploited. Still, there is much to be said about the unique identity of this brief but memorable foray into chaos.
9 CommentsTags: 1996, Black Metal, mayhem, metal, underground, wolf's lair abyss
Underground occult metal blog Praefuscus Ferrum recently posted a piece entitled “Underground turned Funderground, and the Obscurantist Elite” proposing that what killed underground metal was widespress consumer access to new technologies such as the internet. These and the increased exposure to fans led artistically successful underground metal bands to pursue raw consumerism at the expense of writing transcendent music. D.A.R.G. points out that “the truest artists purposefully hide away from the profane eye” as the communication mediums the underground metal utilized (physical mail, tape trading, and BBSes) have been usurped by ones more accessible to laymen. He states the underground became the “funderground” in the blink of an eye as mainstream rock and pop fans who felt adventurous wanted rock and pop music with “black” and “death” “metal” production aesthetics, not actual death, black, or even heavy metal. Now the musicians actually writing novel underground metal compositions hide unbeknownst to the typical beer metaller in plain sight.
11 CommentsTags: Black Metal, consumeriam, death metal, demoncy, desecresy, funderground, hidden metal, infamous, metal underground, praefuscus ferrum, sammath, Serpent Ascending, underground, underground metal, underground music, underground never dies
Right now, above the metal underground there is what was coined, I believe originally by Pogrom from Arghoslent, the “Funderground”. The funderground consists of independent labels, sometimes mainstream distributed, releasing thousands of albums each year full of rehashed material or rebranded three-chord hardcore with different superficial aesthetics to fuel a bar show audience’s drunken moshing or make hipsters feel smart for liking an indie rock release with a dirty production. One can see this divide in most of the popular “underground” web forums such as those of Nuclear War Now! and Full Moon Productions. The most popular “underground” “metal” releases of each year are all older metal rehashed into pop-rock structures or rebranded hardcore. This divide is similar to what is felt in mainstream Western culture with the leftist “elites”‘ constant Marxist virtue signaling and branding freethinkers with various epithets for refusing to chant the praises of socialism mandated by the vanguard party.
32 CommentsTags: ananku, best of, Black Metal, death metal, elitism, funderground, Godless Arrogance, Heavy Metal, hipster invasion, james hetfield, kaeck, metallica, sammath, Serpent Ascending, Stormkult, underground, underground metal, underground music
Article by David Rosales.
A trend in the modern conception of anything has been that the newer something else, the better we expect or assume it to be. Experience in reality, however, has also given rise to another perception: that the new tends to be worse and not better. Attempts at rationalizing this drive the pseudo-intellectual, pro-sheeple crowd to say that times just change, but ratios of quality do not vary. This is not only unscientific but an obvious politically correct answer that has as its premise that everyone is equal, and hence, that the resulting products of these “equal” people must also be probabilistically equal. Impermeable external influence seems to them the only changing factor, with the internal being either infinitely constant or practically negligible. This is assumed and then possible causes are haphazardly and desperately pieced together, the answer is assumed and then anything is either positive evidence or brushed aside if too problematic to incorporate into the fairy tale. Ignorance compounded with pretense and emotional insecurity always results in capricious imposition of an arbitrary and dogmatic concepts and scale of values.
29 CommentsTags: Bathory, hell awaits, slayer, Under the Sign of the Black Mark, underground, underground metal, underground music, underground never dies
Occult-themed black metal that emphasizes its theme/ideology as its guiding light (as opposed to nu-black metal projects who can hardly be said to actually incorporate the ceremonial aspect into their music in any way besides their post-metal meanderings attempts at creating “atmosphere”) often fail for a variety of reasons. More often than not it is because they lose sight of what music is, and thinking only about their meta-presentation and try to justify poorly constructed music with the excuse that the goal lies outside music. In truth, good music is the goal itself, as a medium and experience. Rather than a gateway, it is the vehicle.
Necromantic Worship incorporates a very simple and almost rock-like repetitive black metal played with guitars that are barely set to override (not even truly distorted) and mix this with ambient-like passages that include the use of piano and synths, prayer exclamations and tremolo melodies. The best aspect of this three-song release is the latter. The simple and rock-like sections barely hold up musically, repeating for too-long with the only purpose of supporting the vocal track, itself only the medium for words. The verses that contain rapid-changing tremolo-picked melodies and soft blast beats are the only sections containing “singing” voice that can be rescued.
The sections that musically embrace the occult right and mix ambient and black metal are worthwhile and should be focused on by this artist in the future as his method has huge potential in its progressive bent. An alternative suggestion would be to learn motif-form variations in the black metal style from Varg Vikernes’ work with early Burzum. This, combined with a guitar tone that actually fills in the frequency spectrum of the audio would improve the overall experience.
Spirit of the Entrance Unto Death tracklist:
Tags: 2015, Black Metal, ceremony, Necromantic Worship, Spirit of the Entrance Unto Death, trve, underground
Colorful and dynamic, Adversarial’s brand of nu-black metal has many compelling moments and even long stretches of song, but overall falls prey to a combination of high-level meandering in search of an “atmosphere” while loose reign is given to the drums to fill in gaps with flare without any substantiation. In their defense, most of the instruments seem to work in a very directed manner, a direct result of the simplicity of the music, although this integration and interplay is not as clearly done or focused on a full musical-conceptual balance like Kaeck’s Stormkult.
Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of Death, Endless Nothing and the Black Knife of Nihilism is its delicious production. Everything is both pristine in the dirty and powerful way that violent death and black metal are mandated to be heard. Unfortunately, when one pays close attention to the development of whole songs, it is easy to notice that the songwriting does not rise above the level of, say, Peruan black metal band Goat Semen. In fact, given that Adversarial are more prone to that modern atmospheric meandering that is vaguely reminiscent of post-modern chord-hanging, I would rather listen to the forward moving and still related riff progressions of Goat Semen, although these also, in the end, do not amount to a clear picture of anything except the violence they produce outright.
While these will delight metal listeners that lie on the heavy and consistent pleasure-seeking spectrum, those in search of a balanced unification of images and respectable music construction will find nothing here.
4 CommentsTags: 2015, Adversarial, Black Metal, Death Endless Nothing and the Black Knife of Nihilism, death metal, goat semen, post-metal, underground
There are some records that achieve greatness through their studied and natural use of the musical language that our civilization has been building up for many centuries. Such a record was Close to the Edge, reaching immortality with its self-titled piece. There are other records that do away with everything that came before them and in an unprecedented bout of madness envision doors to previously undreamed of realities. The key to such a door was given to Parabellum and what they found beyond that wall crystallized into Sacrilegio.
Unique and meaningful in its expression, Parabellum’s music is hard to trace back to any defined subgenre at the time, perhaps even today. We know it is metal. We know it arises from the 1980s underground tradition and if we look very hard we may find traces of proto-black-death, hardcore and what can only be described as organized noise. At the same time, the band’s music cannot conceivably be cased into any of them, nor can it be wholly accounted for as a concoction of the same. Parabellum’s Colombian underground metal stands entirely alone and makes use of sounds, patterns and rhythms from its influences but is never defined by them.
While the compositions in it date back to 1983 or 1984, Sacrilegio was released in 1987 and is comprised of two tracks. Both of them, Madre Muerte (Mother Death) and Engendro 666 (Foetus-Abomination 666), are of relatively long duration by metal standards. None of them, however, feel overextended. While difficult to gauge here, this writer perceives no obvious loose ends, and no purposeless spaces in the pieces. Not interspersed, not interlocked, but breathing in living symbiosis with the extreme underground expressions we find silences, Azagthothean guitar solos together with painful, woeful laments.
Uncouth, savage and violent, Parabellum’s music also takes us through moments of passive dementia and ecstatic delirium. Together these propound stark, bleak and at points suffocating experiences of desperation resembling but going far beyond the misanthropic nature worship of Vidar Vaaer. If I could put my impression of Parabellum’s music in concise terms, I would describe it as what I picture is life as seen through the eyes of a mad epileptic.
3 CommentsTags: Black Metal, Close to the Edge, Colombia, EP, ildjarn, Parabellum, post-metal, proto, Sacrilegio, underground, Vidar Vaaer, Yes
