Furious melodic black metal band Sammath, who meld elegant melodies with unrelenting aggression in the style of Immortal Battles in the North, will release its most recent album Godless Arrogance on pro-tape in the USA through Sylvan Screams Analog. Starting next week, copies of this legendary black metal revivalist album will make their way into stores and mailboxes across the New World.
Comments Sammath mastermind Jan Kruitwagen: “Three months after the CD and vinyl release via Hammerheart and a few weeks after the European tape release, Sammath proudly anounces Godless Arrogance on tape in the USA via Sylvan Screams Analog.” For more information about Sammath, visit the Sammath website.
Sammath first battered its way into black metal with the 1999 album Strijd which immediately turned heads for its archly inhuman beauty and crashing violence. This album expanded upon demos from several years before which were slowly refined before release, leading to a fully mature first album, which Sammath followed with three more albums before perfecting the fusion of its progressive, melodic and primal aggressive elements in Godless Arrogance.
Sometimes great albums happen. Multiple forces converge — influences, musicians, leaders, ideas, opportunities — and everyone involved becomes more than they are. They rise above their mortal lives and create something profound enough to live in, a musical world we want to inhabit and take up its struggles and make it turn into the full potential we see nascent within its objects.
Streetcleaner falls into this category. After a stylistically-inspiring but somewhat deconstructive first EP that never really created a direction of its own except aesthetically, the three individuals who comprise Godflesh returned with a new energy. They combined influences from their fledgling industrial grindcore, indie rock and death metal, and came up with an album resonant with layers of potential. Instead of aiming to destroy melody, they built it from the smallest elements so that it could only be seen when those overlapped and only then often by implication, creating a haunting album like an ancient mansion full of unexplored pathways and secret rooms.
Slowing down their attack, Godflesh carved time into a space through the selective introduction of sounds which then received an ecosystem of other sonic fragments with which to interact, creating an atmosphere that also had form and narrative. From indie rock they borrowed melancholic but affectionate melodies, from death metal complex song structures, and from industrial the sound that genre had always desired to express, namely a machine crushing human hope like a Charles Dickens novel. Together these influences formed a sound like Killing Joke accelerated into apocalyptic nihilism with the raw sonic experimentation of death metal.
Streetcleaner came together like an impossible dream. It borrowed from many musical traditions but the band kept both its own voice and a style specific to the album. What really distinguishes this album however is the content. Streetcleaner captures a range of human emotions in response to the disaster of human emotions that creates our modern world: individualistic selfishness leading to herd behavior empowering vast evils. In putting this into sound, Godflesh opened a dialogue with the darkest parts of our souls and the reason those souls are dark, which is that we know the possibility of light.
The band never concentrated its energy in such a way again. The following album, Pure, went back to a higher concept version of their first EP, but never managed the emotional intensity that the interwoven melodic streams of Streetcleaner brought out among the crushing noise and abrasive battle robot rhythms. They swung back the other way toward indie rock for a few more albums, but those went too far into face-value emotion and lost both intensity and honesty. Eventually the band faded out into a series of projects pursuing influences as most senior underground efforts do. However Streetcleaner remains as the apex of industrial music and the album every dark topics band wishes they could make, as well as a profound influence on the rising black metal movement and the second wave of death metal.
Back in the chaotic early 1990s, most death metal bands were racing to catch up with albums like Morbid Angel Blessed Are the Sick and Deicide Legion. Bands increasingly experimented with complex rhythms and riffs but eschewed the radio-friendly sound of the last generations of metal, including the melodic harmonized guitar attack of Iron Maiden.
Enter Sentenced. Like At the Gates before them, this Finnish band decided to work with melody in addition to complex riffs, and to do so began to work with lead-picked single-string melodies. After their first album of Swedish-inspired primal death metal called Shadows of the Past, Sentenced improved musically and artistically and took the leap into melodic metal. At this point, almost no bands would touch this style as it seemed an anachronism held over from the 1980s where death metal was forging ahead with chromatic riffs and difficult tempi.
Sentenced took the Slayer approach to songwriting with verse-chorus songs interrupted by transitional riffs for emphasis wrapped around a lyrical concept and added to it the Iron Maiden style harmonized guitars producing a melodic effect. Following a lead from At the Gates, the band also allowed melodies to evolve over the course of a song, creating an immersion in similar sound in which slight textural and phrasal changes could take on greater effect. Along with other bands like Unanimated and Cemetary, Sentenced forged a different path which succeeded because it kept the alienated and dark sound of death metal.
Just a few years later, this sound would explode as bands like Dissection mixed more of the NWOBHM melody and even more abrasive death metal and black metal technique into the mix. After that, clone bands like Dark Tranquillity and In Flames took this style further toward radio metal, but for a few years, this small group of melodic death metal bands revealed the potential of this style. North From Here much like its iconic cover transports the listener to a consciousness beyond the everyday in which union with the empty cosmos and the potential of transcendence of the everyday propels the mind through not only darkness but into a sense of magical light which rediscovers life as a visionary journey. Without losing any of the intensity of their earlier album, Sentenced layered emotion on top of aggression and produced a lasting and unsurpassed testament to the power of this genre.
Twenty-one years after the Fuck Christ tour ravaged North America, the Fuck Cancer 2 fest will hit Houston, Texas. On August 23 and 24th a passel of death metal bands descend to tear out eardrums and possibly other body parts with the proceeds going to medical costs for cancer patient Calan Cazares.
HEADLINERS:
12:00 Uncleansed
11:00 Behelit
SUPPORT:
10:00 CEREBRAL ROT
9:00 Entrenched Defilement
8:15 Desecrate The Faith
7:30 CloudShift
6:45 Sever the Silence
6:00 Eviscerate the Proletariat
5:15 Irreconcilable Suffering
4:30 Avaris
3:45 Malignant Rot
3:00 FleshEater
According to Blocked!, an Open Rights Group keeping track of content filtering in the United Kingdom, one of the bigger UK national ISPs blocks deathmetal.org. We’re not sure if this is for our embrace of openly Satanic bands, our bad language, the Profanatica picture or our utter flippancy toward society in general.
Either way, it goes to show you that metal — despite acceptance of its tamer forms — has a long way to go before it is accepted as it is by society at large. We’re contacting Sky to see if they have any comment on the matter.
Cosmic ambient band Khand keeps deep roots in the metal community. Unknown to most of its fans, the compositional power of Khand was forged long before the first synthesizer tracks worked their way into the minds of listeners. Like most things related to this mysterious project, these metal roots remain incognito.
The band first emerged in the mid 2000s and began recording a series of demos which it release through a Creative Commons license via information-wants-to-be-free label HiArcTow. Gaining audience momentum for its journeylike compositions with a total lack of the usual smarm and pander of ambient music, Khand raised the skull chalice with its 2013 release, The Fires of Celestial Ardour. Since that time, the obscure project has kept its silence but recently, broke that quietude with a new teaser and new interview.
For those who dislike ambient music, Khand avoids the pitfalls of a genre where it is only too easy to lay down a beat and layer odd sounds over it until it feels “deep” enough for the greeting card buying public to swoon. Khand takes advantage of the depth of range and texture available to electronic music and uses it to produce unearthly compositions that take the listener on an adventure far from these mortal, material zones.
Metal comprises both a concrete format and an idea. That idea, like pollen on the winds of a tempest, spreads far beyond its original home and takes root in other landscapes. One venturer in the recent hybrid style of metal-influenced cosmic ambient is Khand, whose shadowy personage spoke to us through an encrypted Skype communication over a private anonymous “darknet” network within the internet.
Where does the name Khand come from and what does it symbolize to you?
The name Khand comes from The Lord of the Rings. It is a mysterious land southeast of Mordor. Tolkien didn’t say much about Khand so my interest was piqued. Given the frequent usage of The Lord of the Rings band names it was refreshing to see one that had not been used at the time. Out of the whole universe Tolkien created, Khand still remained mysterious. That notion is also influential on the mindset I take in creating Khand’s music, regarding fantasy and science fiction.
What’s the name of this upcoming Khand release and when will it be out, and where will we be able to get it?
The name of the release has not been decided yet. That is usually the last thing I come up with after everything is recorded and mixed. That said, the song titles are completed for this release, so once they are finalized and ready to go, it will give me a better general idea of what to ultimately call the whole thing. The release will be available to download for free, most likely on the wonderful HiArcTow creative commons page that has supported myself and others throughout the years. Beyond that, I ultimately hope to release this on some sort of physical format… whether it be cassette again, CD, or even vinyl.
Will there be any differences to past Khand work? How do you see the band evolving with this release?
There are a number of differences with this newer material. I have always felt that this project has lacked some sort of direction and organization; it was as if the past two releases were a bunch of random songs thrown together with no real end in sight. With this release, I have decided to focus on one idea only. The release will be a chronology of events that take place during humanity’s first trip to Mars. It seems that we will most likely see this venture at some point in our lifetime, so the imagination runs rampant with all the possible scenarios we may face. Musically speaking, I have upgraded my equipment and have decided to use some newer synth sounds for this release. Everything will have a “spacey” feel per se, taking the listener on a trip with the crew to Mars. These recordings will not have any medieval/fantasy inspiration like some of my past works, though I am currently working on a few songs in that regard which may end up being used as a demo or split release of some sort.
What other artists are you listening to / reading / watching / observing during this time?
Art exists all around us; you just have to look for it. As an inspiration for this release, I am obviously looking up to the night sky, imagining what the future holds for the human race. There is no greater influence to me than that of nature and science itself, as it is the only real constant we know of. We are mere peons on this bloody planet, yet our potential is limitless if we free ourselves of bonds. I’ve always felt that artists and musicians see the world differently than most. During this time, there have been a number of artists or musicians which have been inspirational. The biggest influences for the music of this will be that of Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Varg Vikernes, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, John Carpenter, and Vangelis. Though not really a prominent influence on this release’s music itself, I also feel certain classical music has a profound influence on our perception of the emotions that coincide within music, so there has been inspiration there as well.
Do you think there’s a strong community for metal transplants into ambient and atmospheric music with epic themes?
Yes and no. It seems there should be more of a community than there currently is though it certainly feels like it has started to pick up steam. In my opinion, there is a strong correlation between ambient/ atmospheric music and metal. Both have the ability to create worlds within worlds, something more than most other kinds of music can say. They dig deeper into the human psyche than your average pop song. The possibilities with ambient music are endless. Like metal, there are many different styles and takes on the sub genre. So as one door opens, another swings open. I always tell people that it is good to start with the classics. Like those of metal, the forefathers of ambient music had laid the foundation and built the canvas. It is our duty to pay them respects and listen to the worlds they’ve created and find inspiration in their limitless contributions to the music we know and love.
Dark Descent records unleashed the cover art for the upcoming Blaspherian/Imprecation split 7″ recording. This will combine the power of the two bands, including Blaspherian vocalist Daniel Shaw who drew the intricate and necrotic cover. (more…)
Shane and Amy Bugbee drove across America for a year-long epic road trip spent producing some 200 short videos featuring interviews with classic American figures, including metal- and punk-related ones such as Jeff Becerra (Possessed), Ian Mackaye (Minor Threat) and Averse Sefira. They called this project A Year at the Wheel and have released the extensive interview footage to the public.
Their footage has been featured on syndicated news shows, and even in the Peter Jackson documentary West Of Memphis. They financed their project with no grants, no sponsors, and not even a credit card, and began with only $180 between them. Since that time, their YouTube videos have received over 1.3 million views and they have published a 534-page book called The Suffering & Celebration Of Life In America including their interviews with the above musical figures.
In response to popular interest the Bugbees have made their archive available to others through Archive.Org. The footage can be not only viewed, but used by other filmmakers and journalists in their own projects. Subjects include internationally known photographer Joel Peter Witkin, anthropologist William H. McNeill, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Attorney for the American Atheists Edwin Kagin, punk icon Ian MacKaye, the Godfather of Death Metal Jeff Becerra, American Indian Movement activist Dennis Banks, the black metal band Averse Sefira, and eyehategod’s Mike Williams.
Following a reunion show last year in which most of the original lineup of Dead Horse took to the stage and the success of the Dead Horse/Dirty Rotten Imbeciles side project Pasadena Napalm Division, the Texas thrash band has released its latest work in an EP entitled Loaded Gun.
Dead Horse made a name for itself in the late 1980s by continuing the DRI/COC/Cryptic Slaughter/Fearless Iranians From Hell tradition of skateboarder punk/metal hybrid music called “thrash” but adding the surly growling vocals of death metal. With their debut album, Horsecore: An Unrelated Story That’s Time Consuming, the band launched itself to fame with short idiosyncratic songs that displayed more internal variation than most thrash of the era.
As the band ventured into the 1990s, it combined thrash with death metal possessing progressive overtones on the 1991 album Peaceful Death and Pretty Flowers, which showed longer songs with bigger themes and more use of harmony. After that, the band released a series of EPs and then fizzled out in the late 1990s after the departure of founding member Mike Haaga.
Those who attended the reunion shows claimed a revitalized Dead Horse took the stage, finally sure of its mission without Haaga and in a new musical world order where the raw extremity of early Dead Horse might get it overlooked, not noticed. We look forward to seeing what this band might render in the future, starting with Loaded Gun.
