Metal died of democratization like everything else in the post-1990s world. Thanks to the internet, globalization, and mass media, nothing could remain obscure or beyond the reach of the hipsterized cultureless grey race masses for long.

And so, metal became another brand, like Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and Jack Daniels, used to sell products when they needed to be “edgy.” Even black metal got taken over by corporates and communists, who seem to be more similar than they are different.

We see again that any time someone builds something great, it attracts all the people who no direction except themselves, and they promptly drown it until it decides to take advantage of a millionfold increase in audience and democratize itself back toward the mean.

Even the goat horns are not safe from HBO:

Hogan Gidley, former White House Deputy Press Secretary before serving a similar role in his re-election campaign, said that he knew Zelensky was done for when Trump was seen pointing two split fingers at the Ukrainian president.

The visual of Trump looked eerily similar to Paul Gualtieri, aka ‘Paulie Walnuts,’ from the seminal HBO mafia series The Sopranos.

Just what we should idealize in our final days as a civilization: criminal activity by the mixed-race remnants of the failed Roman Empire. Sort of like our admiration for Communism, and how some seem to like Hitler a bit too much like a fetish, we admire Christlike failure and self-destruction.

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Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere: rebranded 1970s prog with jazz fusion as the dominant theme and an utter lack of melodic development and key experimentation, making it basically a crash between a metalcore album and the music you listen to at the cell phone store while waiting for them to transfer over all your contacts and the porn you hope you successfully hid in a folder marked “Tax Spreadsheets.”

Vlkoslak – Infernum Vagus: coming from that era of hybrids of 1970s metal with the nascent death/black movement — think Onslaught, Necronomicon, Venom, and Master — Vlkoslak crafts bold conflicts from basic riffs and then builds songs around the resulting contrast of theme as final statement and the verse riffs that explain too much in words and not enough in music, but avoids randomness and keeps consistent.

Slimelord – Chytridiomycosis Relinquished: the secret to this type of release is that it opposes continuity, much like rap loves the off-beat as a way of artificially managing expectation, so you get riffs based on strategic dramatic pauses, which forces songs to be structured around smashing down any continuity of thought or practice, resulting in music based on constant distraction and shapeless rhythm riffs. Slick aesthetics though if you like grungy plastic.

La Maison Dieu – Gang Signs at the Center of the Labyrinth: most noise and found sound music ends up being nonsense because it starts with a random sound, then tries to hit it with more randomness to make it important, and ends up being a uniformity of distraction that creates a noise-like experience even when musical, but La Maison Dieu (French for “Fuck France”) works in textures with what appear to be ritual rhythms often in expanded fibonacci and poisson sequences, essentially creating neural programming for being unable to think normie thoughts for a blissful eighty-eight minutes.

Vale Of Pnath – Between The Worlds Of Life And Death: they want to call this death metal but more accurately it is slowed-down speed metal with borrowed riffs from death metal, black metal, heavy metal, emo, and hardcore, resulting in something that structurally resembles theatrical rock music more than any kind of metal, and because of this, it has no inner conflict in the riffs, only through vocals and dynamics, making for a very equally dramatic and therefore boring listen.

Brutal Carnage – Butchery: standard deathcore aims to distract with fills but then returns to relatively plodding riffs played at high speed to disguise how little shape is actually there, which means that the drums lead and everything else fills in, especially lots of acrobatic bluesy leads that barely fit the song, but the songs hold together better than most “first draft” metal where they cut tape once they have enough riffs to fill the length of a song.

Illusions Play – Empire of Desolation: funeral doom metal built on the pop side of things, with elements of “modern metal,” but ultimately seems to be vocal-driven pop created in the doom metal template, and it never maintains the doom metal mood for long as a result, sounding like someone took stoner doom and dropped the alternative rock in favor of 1980s synthpop as the core, which makes this an interesting oddity but painful listening for metal fans (but probably not synthpop fans).

An Axis of Perdition – Apertures: fairly bog-standard metalcore dressed up as black metal with token industrial influences, namely slight groove and more emphasis of the drums in leading, which thankfully deprecates vocals somewhat but still gives this band nothing to work with except cycling between extremes in the hope of finding something connecting them, and rarely getting anywhere with that side quest.

Unholdun – Fœhn: how to make black metal into homework by slavishly emulating the tropes of the 1990s without uniting them under any sense of metaphor or interplay, this album shows us the crisis of modern black metal, afraid to leave the past and too prone to treat the genre like a wallpaper pasted onto other genres that are entirely unrelated, ending up in the middle with generic rock given black metal flavoring that satisfies no one.

Dysangelium (Germany) – Exxekratus: aesthetics in search of a reason to exist, this band combines Zyklon-B with RAC and the artier side of war metal, but ends up with songs that are random bits in conflict that never achieve a direction, therefore constant vocal and drum drama is required to distract from the circular wandering and riff association heat-death, which makes for a listen a lot like hearing an old school radio that changes channels every forty seconds.

Eigenstate Zero – Shape of God Thought of Sun: this album shows us exactly what people hate about “prog lite” namely random technical riffs balanced against fast fills of odd scales until the crooning vocals come in with all sorts of pretense and half-thought theories, but songs do not add up to a whole with a synergy of its parts like in King Crimson or Genesis, instead you just get suspended time as chaos rages and smirks until its energy runs out.

Kryptan – Violence, Our Power: every cliché of post-90s black metal comes alive in this album of random starts, sudden stops, divergent patterns, and lots of mid-paced sweeping through the classic patterns of melodic death metal given a slight black metal vibe by borrowing lots of technique, but on repeated listens this band seems to be making carnival music for the circus exhibit about black metal.

Tigguo Cobauc – Fountains of Anguish: more music based around chanting in death metal vocal style with formless riffs churning behind it and songs that are entirely linear, leading to a sensation of boredom that makes death seem preferrable to this constant stream of repeated 1990s and 1980s tropes with all of the testosterone of a chunk of tofu left out in the sun with an iPhone on top of it.

BTK (Bind Torture Kill) – Sauvagerie: grindcore based around jump scare stop/start riffing and vocals derived from late hardcore that aim more to try to express an emotion in their texture than nail a rhythm that accelerates the music, this band is just boring, and there is no nice way to say that, but grindcore seems to be in the exact same slump as black metal is, imitating the past and mixing in random influences to cover up the lack of anything meaningful to say.

Cadaver – “Maltreated Mind Makes Man Manic”: pre-release song shows us Cadaver still trying to do modern metal and incorporate oddball Scandinavian rock influences, but the strongest parts of this song happen after the rhythm riffs get out of the way and we get some classic Cadaver riffing with supporting melody that makes the song expand nicely, even if it develops to a point of conflict and not much further.

Pressure Points – The Island: expansive sound from minor key riffs exploding into open intervals makes this goofy like Coldplay, and despite some compelling lead guitar, basically a collection of random elements produced by those with extensive musical education but apparently no concept of how to make a song that produces a consistent mood or anything identifiable outside the atmosphere of a hairdresser next to a railway substation.

Ruttokosmos – Apoteoosi: in theory this should be pleasant, with direct Burzum lifts and a mid-paced melancholic atmosphere like Mutiilation, but you can always listen to those, and while this band actually writes songs, they seem to go nowhere except to establish contrast for the main riff to which the band returns, and so there is no growth and in fact a harsh lesson in the second law of thermodynamics despite the nostalgia-tinged 1990s vibes.

Edelweiss – Night of the Long Pipes: despite having the keyboards and metal/punk vibe of Mortuary Drape or early Gehenna, this band has more in common with pop punk acts like The Descendents, just with an aura borrowed from doom metal hybridized with stoner doom that keeps formality in the picture but disguises what is ultimately rather repetitive pop which is neither bad or good, just sort of there for awhile until the channel changes.

Pezz – More Than You Can Give Us: nicely low body fat pop-punk with metallic overtones in the riffing and choruses that fuse emo with early melodic punk like The Descendents or The Germs, making a pop-powered but powerfully nonstandard exploration of feeling outside looking in and alone in a crowd, made of layers of contrasting internal musical elements as well as vocal melodies, giving it more endurance than the norm from this genre.

Groin – Paid in Flesh: they call it powerviolence but really this is more like pre-emo hardcore with an emphasis on broken rhythms and antipatterns drawing conflict out of otherwise droning material, recalling 1990s powerviolence and grindcore, probably without any epic revelations but at least a sense of its own style and through it, an expression of a musical deviation from the current emo- and shoegaze-influenced hardcore.

Profanatica – Wreathed in Dead Angels: it seems to me black metal forgot what made it great, which was the changing texture of dark atmospheres revealing a will to fight in a naturalistic sense, instead of just repetitive high-speed blasphemy with very similar riffs droning on as if broadcast from speakers on a military base during the future war against the Abrahamists.

Abyssum – Abismales Tinieblas: it seems that Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, Pure Holocaust, and Transilvanian Hunger took over black metal although this tends more toward The Celtic Winter in its choice of melodies; slow-building layered music around a central riff and contra-figure makes this song work, although it ends up being more like an intro and atmospheric mood piece than a journey.

Rotting Christ – Live in Lycabettus: this band became chant-oriented heavy metal with pagan themes as its career advanced, and this retrospective mostly brings out the recent material, but has a few nods to the past as well, and provides pleasant listening although the newer material is unlikely to attract underground metalheads and is geared more for the modern metal audience, albeit the edgy ones who like ancient rituals.

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In other news, physical media seem to be returning albeit at ten percent of what streaming is doing as far as music sales:

U.S. music streaming services surpassed 100 million subscribers in 2024 while industry revenue hit a record $14.9 billion, up 4% from the previous year, according to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Physical media sales outpaced digital growth, with vinyl records increasing 7% to $1.4 billion, outselling CDs ($541 million) for the third consecutive year. Digital downloads plummeted 14.9%, now representing just 2% of industry revenue.

They do not tell us what genres are involved, but a safe guess is that mainstream genres account for most of the streaming and physical media is disproportionately geared to the former obscure and underground genres.

This calls to mind the importance in many cultures, tribes, and locations of the importance of ritual of music listening.

[Non-traditional activities that might not be immediately recognized as social] are known as social surrogates, which can buffer against loneliness, isolation and social threats, like rejection, just as well as time spent with others.

Parasocial relationships, such as the one-sided bond between fans and celebrities, immersion into the social world, and reminders of others, are all social surrogates.

“Listening to music alone operates as a social surrogate along all three of those pathways,” says Paravati.

In other words, something that makes you feel connected to goodness in life makes you feel less lonely, alienated, and frightened. Throwing on your favorite music grounds you in the goal of life, which is to survive and thrive by pursuing the good instead of being fixated on the bad or pointless.

Not surprisingly, metal introduces mental stability that translates into, besides a bunch of dope-smoking and beer drinking, into relatively well-behaved metalheads:

Although metal scenes and middle-class print media usually have been conceptualized as separate social fields due to mutual detestation, Florida’s death metal bands were not met with pure refusal, but rather launched a slow rethinking: While bands such as Deicide, Death, Obituary or Morbid Angel had been loathed by the non-initiated in the middle of the 1980s, ten years later they had a few more fans in the mainstream, but were rather perceived as a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the cultural diversity of the Tampa Bay or Ft. Lauderdale areas. The local population had learned how to deal with the vibrant youth culture, and (with the exception of some church officials and PMRC-supporters) had understood that violent lyrics did not accompany corresponding acts in everyday life. Hence I presume that the connections between the extreme music scene and the public were not as obscure and exclusive as believed.

Most people seek mental stability through indirect stimulation, such as buying a new Honda in order to feel prosperous and stable, or adopting the Christian religion or humanist ideology in order to feel wise and in control. Music-listening gets directly there by connecting to what we love about life.

Interestingly, listening to music forms a ritual, which can be highly dependent on procedure as is the case of one group’s love of the lowly cassette:

While the music is increasingly available on digital formats, many Kashmiris say that it’s best heard on cassette tapes.

“There is something unique about this machine that for me plays recordings of spiritual guides,” said Abdul Ahad, a carpet weaver. “It is a sacred ritual in itself to press the play button of a cassette player to listen to a song on spiritual moorings.”

“It is a different experience to listen to music on a tape recorder,” said Abdul Hamid Khan. “Tapes are smooth and you can feel the sound of every instrument, you don’t get that feel in these new players.”

Perhaps the same is true of this ritual: go to the garage or basement, turn up that 1970s analogue stereo, slip a disc on the player, and sit back in your favorite orange-and-green easy chair with your old faithful bong and a six-pack of Lone Star.

In less salubrious news, former Carnivore guitarist Marc Piovanetti got himself chalked up for a sex assault in addition to his other woes:

Marc Piovanetti, a guitarist with Carnivore and Crumbsuckers in the 80s, was arrested last week with his 50-year-old wife, Jennifer Piovanetti, after the girl was found in their New Jersey home, prosecutors said.

The 58-year-old musician was already a registered sex offender when he met the New York girl — who was between the ages of 13 and 16 — on TurnUp, a music-related dating app, NJ.com reported.

Authorities eventually located the child at the Piovanettis’ home on Feb. 23 after she started using the former rocker’s phone, and NYPD detectives were able to ping it, NJ.com reported.

You wanted guys living on the edge slashing out music about the hard streets, well, you got it, and so did this poor clueless girl.

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I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To kill something is the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife. – Z

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It seems the outrage over antisymbols continues to roil modern democracy:

A Kansas bishop claims a group of Satanists stole sacred wafers and wine to use in a “Black Mass” they’re holding at the state capitol — but the unholy hell-raisers claim their body and blood of Christ merely came from “Pope Amazon.”

Stewart also brushed aside virulent reactions that his group’s plans for the March 28 Black Mass — a sort of inverted Catholic service he described as “a cathartic expression of sorrow, rage, and healing” — have inflamed.

“You’re going to see a book get torn, a cross get broken, a cracker get crunched, and wine get drunk, and that is the scariest bit of what we were planning to do,” Stewart said.

Formed of dual pillars of hubris — a humanist morality of sacrificing the essential so that individuals feel good, and a political ideology of equal importance to coopt lost people into the social group as labor — modern society, primitive and neurotic, fears symbols of the darkness.

As the current symbols fail, people will cling even more tightly to the old talismans and scapegoats, but at some point, the symbols invert: when proven to be incompatible with reality, the symbols of “good” and “evil” change places.

We are entering a new Satanic millennium, which is why so many of the current bands are trying for “trad” Christian approaches, but as always, the cracks between categories and the space beyond binaries holds what is most likely: a scientific paganism and a morality of celebrating only the useful.

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Tags: Satanism, smr