Not self-pitying, just a warning about what it takes to do this job correctly. If you want to be an assassin, you can’t get easily distracted by compassion. Same for record reviewers: you must be ready to kill, rape, sodomize, and write accurately about the value of music in its own right and in context:

I wrote this in an email to someone whose opinion of me I respect, but wanted to be very clear about what my obligations can and cannot be in reviewing a submitted work. I figured I’d elaborate, because these words should exist somewhere:

This will sound like horseshit, but it’s not: a really good reviewer has no friends, and isn’t nice. He must be honest, brutal and quite honestly biased AGAINST most of what he or she hears. It’s not a job for people who like people, which is why I’m only partially good at it.

If you send anything here, keep in mind that it’s my job to be harsh

A good reviewer walks alone. If your dedication is to the music, a subset of art, and thus to the integrity of individual works and their genres, you have to be a real critic. That does not mean someone who is blanket negative, but someone who is able to look into the purpose a work serves and comment on it. Your job is to find artistic vitality only if it exists. 99% of reviewers do not understand this and either approve of everything (which makes them popular with labels and fans, who have short attention spans) or are poseurish negatives who hate everything even if it’s good.

The problem is this: there are many more good people out there than there are musicians who express something profound. Our time on life is short, and we only want the great music, because anything else is filling your time with something relatively inconsequential. Great art requires natural talent, discipline to get control of it, and finally, some stirring in the soul that gives you some content. What passion of life, what conflict and what love, do you express? Most bands express nothing more than wanting to be a band.

Even many good people just want to participate, and so make worshipful but contentless tributes to their favorite genres.

The above makes me sound like Satan or Stalin, but it’s all true. To be a good reviewer, you cannot be a friend to anyone. You must be a reviewer and you must be cynical. Most music is passing in its value, and will be forgotten before the ink dries… your job is to pull out the eternal, and in so doing, you need high standards, and in doing that, you will alienate almost everyone you know and become a leper-like pariah who wanders the earth alone, scorned even by his cats. – Facerook

An oldie but a goodie. It’s good of Blabbermouth to report stuff like this, because although it’s not the fanboy stuff, it’s interesting:

The following are the total sales figures for several of the genre’s forerunners, according to Nielsen SoundScan (all numbers include any DVD and VHS releases, where applicable):

CANNIBAL CORPSE: 558,929
DEICIDE: 481,131
MORBID ANGEL: 445,147
SIX FEET UNDER: 370,660
OBITUARY: 368,616
DEATH: 368,184
NAPALM DEATH: 367,654
CARCASS: 220,734
ENTOMBED: 198,764

The top-selling death metal albums of the SoundScan era are as follows:

MORBID ANGEL – “Covenant” (1993): 127,154
DEICIDE – “Deicide” (1990): 110,719*
DEICIDE – “Legion” (1992): 103,544
OBITUARY – “The End Complete” (1992): 103,378
CANNIBAL CORPSE – “The Bleeding” (1994): 98,319

Blabbermouth

We forget now that these bands also were the first into stores, back in the time before 1997 when suddenly you could get obscure death metal in chain stores. During most of the early 1990s, the only things you’d find in regular record stores were the Roadrunner releases. I’m surprised “The End Complete” outsold “Cause of Death,” but it was a bit more musically refined in a conventional sense. Doubly amused that 18 years on, these are the only albums I still listen to from that list:

MORBID ANGEL – “Covenant” (1993): 127,154
DEICIDE – “Deicide” (1990): 110,719*
DEICIDE – “Legion” (1992): 103,544

Blaspherian craft old school death metal (INCANTATION, ASPHYX, CIANIDE, IMMOLATION) from a few power chords and a deliberate, calculating sense of foreboding evil. Their doomy death metal stands out for being true to its origins but not repeating the past, and instead forming a new voice from the lexicon of the death metal ancients.

http://www.anus.com/metal/blaspherian/#infernal_warriors_of_death

While we love Motorhead, this needs commentary:

Never one to mince his words, Motörhead front man Lemmy Kilmister recently shared his views on the state of modern music with Atlantic City Weekly. When asked to express his thoughts on hip hop, the metal legend had the following to say:

“Why should I do that when it’s not music… There’s nothing creative about doing that [rapping] over music someone else created. They go out and take John Bonham’s drumming. I don’t call that music. You think they [rappers] could come up with sounds of their own, even some basic sounds and they can’t do it. Sad.”

Lemmy: ‘Hip Hop Is Not Music’

Not to offend one of the gods of metal, but:

1. We disagree: we think hip-hop is music. It is organized sound; it uses rhythm primarily, but also incorporates some melodic snippets. That it is borrowed and requires less musical ability is somewhat irrelevant. Compared to Beethoven or Mozart, who could improvise structured pieces with ease and even re-configure to change the emotional direction of the piece on the fly, we’re all just about that untalented and derivative.
2. The bigger point is that type of music determines the audience it attracts, and says a lot about them. People who like hip-hop are blockheads. They’re the same blockheads who were listening to disco in the 1970s, techno in the 1980s, grunge in the 1990s and nu-indie in the 2000s. They follow the trend because it’s “different” and have zero clue that the trend is actually just the latest manifestation of the same average stuff that people always chase. Hip-hop isn’t revolutionary; it’s no different than rock, if you replace the guitars with samples. Same song structures, roughly the same topics, even the same type of person producing it. These guys aren’t out there committing crimes and accidentally having musical careers; they’re committing crimes as a calculated status boost for their musical careers. They probably played first violin in high school band. It’s about the money.
3. Populist music sucks because it chases trends and thus has no depth. It’s all appearance, nothing under the surface. But that’s what is called for. If you want music many people like all at once, it has to be similar to other things they already like but so they don’t feel cheated, it has to appear to be “different.” You win the multi-million dollar lottery if you take yesterday’s songs and make them seem fresh and exciting today. Whether that music is rap, rock, techno, indie, emo, screamo, disco or hip-hop, it’s all the same crap. Metal is the exception.

Sensible people know that elitism in music means you value quality over quantity. If you want quantity, you chase trends and get more of the same old crap, tricked out to be new. If you want quality, you are very careful about what you listen to and keep the best around. This however means you’ll never be trendy, which is why metal is inherently elitist: we don’t want to be part of the trends not to be “different” like hipsters/poseurs, but because we want higher quality music so we have a more intense experience.

If you want to know why rap, rock et cetera are incompatible with metal, that’s a good place to start your thinking. Lemmy is kick-starting the process to warm over a little tepid controversy to sell Motorhead’s 415th album, which is due out next month and is titled The Argle-Bargle of the Whatdumacallit or something similarly gnomic.

In a tribute to the first Immolation album, the new BLASPHERIAN CD Infernal Warriors of Death sports a scene of demonic conquest over angelic realms. That will probably be tame in comparison to the music, which from the two tracks leaked so far, is punishing old school death metal in the style of INCANTATION, DEICIDE, OBITUARY and IMMOLATION.

Deathgasm Records now has the CDs and tshirts in stock and is shipping them as orders come in.

• CD $10
• CD+tshirt $27

Demonaz’ debut album “March Of The Norse” will be released April 1 (Europe) and May 17 (US).

The album will be available as a limited edition digipak, limited picture disc and regular black vinyl.

There will also be a limited mail order vinyl edition and a mail order box edition.

http://www.facebook.com/demonaz

Medical misfortune has befallen thrash metal progenitors Slayer once again. Guitarist/founding member Jeff Hanneman reportedly underwent emergency surgery on his right arm late last month. He was diagnosed with having contracted necrotizing fasciitis — kind of sounds like a Slayer song, actually — a rare yet serious infection also known as flesh-eating disease. – Exclaim

Hope he gets through this intact.