When you start writing about metal, you rapidly find that metal connects to lots of other stuff. Not just by lyrics and imagery but by sound alone, since listening to metal seems to shape consciousness toward viewing reality differently than what The Herd wants: oblivion, free stuff, nudes, and donuts.
36 CommentsTags: ptsd, sadistic metal reviews, smr
When this site was started, back as an FTP server growing out of USENET and before that a collection of BBS g-philes, the paucity of information about underground metal was an issue. Now we have too much underground metal and too much information about it, almost all of it bad.
42 CommentsTags: aesthetics, ethics, genre, robert fripp, sadistic metal reviews, smr
We know there is broad cynicism toward religion here; after all the Abrahamic (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) religions seem awfully simple and emotional. However, there is a whole world of spiritual belief out there which is not metaphysical dualism, neoplatonism, or universalism.
77 CommentsTags: christianity, golden dawn, h.p. lovecraft, j.r.r. tolkien, magic, Occultism, Paganism
Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
103 CommentsTags: art, Black Metal, Heavy Metal, Satan, underground metal
Back in the 1980s, praising Satan or even talking about Him in any context other than condemnation put you in the middle of the culture wars. Unable to talk about demographics, conservatives backed themselves into the corner of fundamentalist religion and saw Satan everywhere.
96 CommentsTags: bad, bob larson, evil, good, humanism, luciferianism, Satan, Satanism, slayer, spin
Alternative rock got a bad name in the US because it was basically not an alternative, and just mixed a little metal and punk into Morrissey and Bruce Springsteen, making the whiniest genre ever created. These days we laugh about “alternative facts,” but maybe alt-rock had something to do with this.
136 CommentsTags: alternative music, alternative rock, progg, progressive music, progressive rock, Sweden
It should strike you as funny that humanity, Western Civilization, and metal face the same problem in parallel: steady decline from having lost of sense of goal because they lost a sense of the why behind the goal after the sense of the transcendent also eroded.
23 CommentsTags: death metal, smr
Today we mark the ten year anniversary of the death of Jeff Hanneman, guitarist and composer for Slayer, which along with Hellhamer, Sodom, Master, and Bathory contributed to the old school and modern death metal vocabulary and spirit.
28 CommentsTags: death metal, jeff hanneman, slayer, Speed Metal
Imagine a genre: it succeeds, so then all these lost people come in and make their own versions of it, trying every possible variation. Soon the field is so full of weird instruments and odd timings that all of it sounds just about the same, and no one can pick a good band from a bad one. This is heat-death:
56 CommentsTags: abysmal lord, act of impalement, analepsy, ashen tomb, conjureth, entropia, irae, maerzfeld, microgeneration, nocturnal departure, obituary, ofermod, penthos, rexoria, rigor sardonicus, satanic warmaster, skeletal, slayer mob, smr, thulcandra, vrag, witchmaster
What can we say about 2022? Late Stage Democracy hit terminal velocity in 2019 and in response to the flu erased three years with a panicked response. The wolves at the door from Asia and Eurasia as usual want to take over. Pop culture became an even more polished average product.
13 CommentsTags: 2022, abhordium, best of, blazemth, concilivm, deathsiege, disma, ehlder, mist of misery, ravenous death, reincarnated, rotheads, trenchant, unformulas
