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.

The mainstream intrusion of emo, rock, lite prog, and jazz into metal was bad enough, but the underground came back with its own form of horror, a loyalty test to the “kvlt” by forcing us to like the latest three-chord band to fail to Finish The Damn Song because it’s “trve” to something that died thirty years ago.

In 2024, we have to remember that 1994 was a long time ago, and that was really the last time this genre was healthy. Other than a handful of bands since then, all we have are pretenders. For every Desecresy, Sammath, or Averse Sefira there are ten thousand Demented Teds, Grand Belial’s Key, and Deafhavens.

These faux bands vanish into the past and no one notices because they were never relevant. They are ego-projects for hipsters and raw churn that keeps an industry alive, but for what? This contributes nothing to humanity; listen to the old albums instead!

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Brüka – Death’s Promise: more Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) that combines death, black, grind, and a smidgen of heavy metal — but thankful minimal speed metal! — for a cross between the Pentagram demos and the first Revenge album, lots of stop-start with periodic melody and rushing grinding riffs, but songs express nothing other than that the requisite amount of riffs were found and the tape was cut, so despite some promising riffs this band goes nowhere like most Texas metal.

Liquid Flesh – Vestiges Abrutissants: very functional grindcore with some death metal riffing, songs assembled like a binary explosive in that the first part collides with the second and then something mostly unrelated happens, but it holds together enough to be enjoyable although perhaps not with any greater depth than the rhythm and sensation of collision.

Abhorration – Demonolatry: what does this communicate? chaotic/chromatic fast and furious war metal riffs collide with bouncy war metal styled sea shanty rhythms and consonant chord progressions, and while songs vary structure a bit, it speaks to nothing, nor do riff shapes, so you end up with a support system for the vocals which are boring B-grade ranting like we found in failed local legend death metal bands in the 1990s… there is no reason to listen to this.

Suicide – Devour the Fallen: this album breaks my heart because its mechanics are great but its artistic direction is ruined, since it incorporates the DSBM, emo, post-metal, and late hardcore emotions into what would otherwise be storming death metal, therefore ending the dominance of the riff and becoming a series of distractions that revert to very similar emotional passages of guitar sweeps and mid-paced drums, but at least thank Satan there is no goddamn speed metal.

Lucifugium – Instinct Prevelance: this 1999 compilation sees re-release this month, but the opinion of the past remains the same: a mashup of the first couple Graveland and Dimmu Borgir albums, it is purely on the level of technique, and misses the heart of black metal, which is a way of portraying the world that is naturalistic and Romantic without being infected with humanism, something that is useful for getting us out of our own skulls — like weed and beer — but does not exist in this album.

Schatten Muse – Schicksalsweg: drum n bass electronic percussion under gothic music that seems to be a backdrop for the vocals shows us potential but ultimately falls flat because there is not enough musical activity to make us enjoy the vocals, nor are the vocals so particularly compelling that we would listen to them alone, and songs are more like change in riffs as bookends to a middle part that is pure presentation like a PowerPoint on a big screen while eating rubbery chicken.

CMPT – Na utrini: this stuff reminds me of the kids who got As in elementary and middle school by writing down whatever the teacher had said and presenting it as their own thought; the little sociopaths knew how to manipulate stupid adults (and lots of them got taken to the cleaners in high school), and similarly, this release ticks all the boxes for “cult black metal” merged with atmospheric black metal, but these are songs about nothing but filling time, sort of like Beyonce with more reverb.

Metsän Alttari – Metsän Alttari: can we just admit that all folk metal is comical because the two genres do not combine since folk music is based on singing about stories and metal is based on the exchange of riff shapes to tell a story, thus we end up with carnival music that alternates between the two like the bands that play sea shanties, folk songs, and show tunes at the Disney castle while people eat rubbery chicken for dinner at $500/plate? Summoning/Enslaved was as far as this idea could go.

Baxaxaxa – Spells From The Crypt…: it is hard to conjure up much excitement for a band that starts with black metal riffs, then falls into trudge-metal with excessive vocals, stop-start, even some speed metal bounce, in order to nudge along these songs without direction, FFS this shit is as predictable as the work output of a normal San Jose desk job.

Paysage d’Hiver – Die Berge: putting trend-bands to rest requires seeing why they are uninspiring not where they deviate from orthodoxy, and in this case it is a band that maintains atmosphere through repetition but is basically monolithic with a few quirks to make us feel like An Event happened but really, it is just churn based on a surface formula like your average American television show, albeit a bit hipper and edgier.

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In news of the world outside of the human hugbox, consider the links between musical choice and life philosophy as expressed via ethics:

Specifically, musical elements like pitch and timbre emerged as crucial predictors for values of Care and Fairness, while sentiments and emotions expressed in lyrics were more effective in predicting traits of Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.

Classical philosophy held that ethics was a subset of aesthetics. That is, people chose ethical positions in order to make life more beautiful, and they were semi-arbitrary and derived entirely from human choice, not reality itself directly.

The dualists and egalitarians see it differently but as Saint Bud said, “I don’t want no commies in my car — no Christians either!”

Luckily people tend to group together by appreciation of genre, since it indicates similar aesthetic preferences and therefore, similar outlooks on the world itself:

“Genre is a kind of virtual community – even before the online age, right?” US journalist and music critic Kelefa Sanneh tells the BBC.

“It provided a sense that there were others out there listening to the same records as you, or making the same kind of music, even before the internet.”

Tribe up! You need to find the people like you. This is a combination of innate characteristics and elective characteristics. The former is predominantly social class and ethnicity, the latter lifestyle, artistic, and philosophical options like death metal and existentialism.

This makes sense when you consider musical monism that views each style as a series of aesthetic choices designed to trigger certain thought patterns:

The turning point in my musical, and I suppose personal, life was something like ‘music is one’. I didn’t hear separate categories, I heard music but as if it was one musician speaking in a variety of dialects.

Within that we have different devices or techniques which are derived from music theory itself:

If you look at natural form, you can have form which is generated arithmetically or geometrically. Arithmetic form is even: two, four, eight, 16—the mathematics of it are natural, you’ll find the mathematics reflected in crystalline structures, inert natural forms. The geometric progression—one to one, one to two, two to three, three to five, five to eight, eight to 13, and so no, the Fibonacci series—is the characteristic formal property of organic or living form. So within natural form you have organic and inorganic form.

In the pentatonic scale, the mathematics are derived from the Fibonacci series, and if you were looking at it in that sense, this tuning is organic—that is, it is vital. Another application would be rhythmically. You can apply it vertically in terms of harmony, and horizontally in terms of rhythm and melody. From a musical point of view, if you wish to create the impression of stability, you’d use an even meter: twos, fours, and so on. If, however, you wanted something to be vital, to keep you on the edge of your seat, you might use a five.

As it turns out, the ancients were aware of everything we have in music today. They wanted to express a different view of the world that corresponded to their culture at the time (technically speaking, culture barely if at all exists today).

It turns out that much of music has a ritual essence based on the rhythm of tension and release:

For example, the researchers found transition times between five and twelve quarter notes in various compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, while the transition times in various compositions by Mozart ranged from eight to 22 quarter notes. This implies that the anticipation and expectation of the musical progression tends to last longer in Mozart’s compositions than in Bach’s compositions, which offer more variability and surprises.

This like a primal dance corresponds to the needs of a culture, spelling out as if in Morse code the rhythms of its thinking. Music shows us a sense of an organized world that mirrors what we need to believe for our tribes.

As it turns out, other art is similar, and we can tell instantly when we see something organized versus chaotic:

To this aim, we compared aesthetic ratings on abstract artworks and their shuffled counterparts in a gist experiment. Results show that exposure times as short as 50 ms suffice for the participants to reach a stable and consistent rating on how ordered and harmonious the abstract stimuli were. Moreover, the rating scores for the 50 ms exposure time exhibited similar dependencies on image type and self-similarity and a similar pattern of correlations between different rating terms, as the rating scores for the long exposure time (3,000 ms). Ratings were less consistent for the term interesting and inconsistent for the term pleasing. Our results are compatible with a model of aesthetic experience, in which the early perceptual processing of the formal aspects of visual artworks can lead to a consistent aesthetic judgment, even if there is no cognitive contribution to this judgment.

Music therefore serves a role in imposing order not on the world, but on our minds, so that we do not impose the disorder and repetition of the naturally solipsistic human mind upon the world. Music frees us from ourselves, but also helps us mature as thinkers (independent from “maturity” as used in the vernacular to mean obedience and acceptance of soul-crushing adulthood as normal):

A person’s preference for popular music peaks around age 23, according to a 1989 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, with a 2013 follow-up in the journal Musicae Scientiae reporting age 19. A 2022 replication of the latter study in Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing found that a person’s music preference peaks as young as 17.

“It’s part of your identity,” Cutietta said. “During those years, we are developing so much (of) who we are, (and) we get attached to the music.”

The era of death metal is no longer with us; it was the dying days of an old order. We are trying to get back on track with that order, but that will involve doing things that most people fear. However, life is not about avoiding fear, but finding purpose:

Happiness (and the elimination of suffering) is in ultimate conflict with a life of purpose: one or other, but not both, can be the aim of spiritual life.

You either live for an order larger than yourself, even if only “common sense,” or you fall into the void of the ego and start living to avoid fear, suffering, and unhappiness instead of affirmatively trying to achieve something.

Metal today seems like mostly it is trying to make solipsists feel significant for a few moments before they go back to day jobs so boring that one wants to die just from contemplating them.

Tags: aesthetics, ethics, genre, robert fripp, sadistic metal reviews, smr