Most popular music memoirs fall into either criticism or worship of the phenomenon of popular music itself, focusing more on the fan response and megalomania of musicians than the reasons behind the creation of this music. The Serpent and the Pentagram takes a different approach.
2 CommentsTags: aris shock, Black Metal, necromantia, the magus
For years many of us have told death metal bands that instead of trying to mix hard rock into their death metal, it makes more sense just to cast off the underground metal aspersions and go full hard rock. With a mix of Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC plus their own melodic and prog touches, Xysma do that.
76 Comments
Death metal followed a standard distribution like everything else. At first, a few pioneers patched it together out of what they had at the time, then a generation of bands emerged who solidified the style, followed by others who tried to make sense of that strong lead, before the imitators came.
15 CommentsTags: death metal, eulogy, Florida Death Metal, New York Death 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
Bands do cover songs to learn from them, to show their ability to nail it as well as the original, and to expand upon what have become classics of the metal culture. It is one thing to play a song, and another to deconstruct it, analyze it, and reassemble it to show an understanding of it.
29 CommentsTags: Abyssus, birthy of depravity, bones, Carnal Blasphemy, cursed blood, flashout, gorilla panic, Grindcore, mass defect, progress of inhumanity, psychotomy, ripped to shreds, sacrovore, sarkast, skullsmasher, soulskinner, stheno, terrorizer
In its earliest incarnation, Blood created crafty riff-alert grindcore like Disharmonic Orchestra and Carbonized, other European grind that took a backseat to the UK and US versions, despite playing more with song structure and phrase. This origin has now almost entirely been swallowed by death metal.
7 CommentsTags: blood, death metal, hells headbangers, incantation
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
Everything that rises must converge with the Earth, whereas that which remains at the earthy level can endure for many eras if not forever like other aspects of nature. In my view, our natural world produced us so that we would take its other plants and creatures to new planets.
7 CommentsTags: cenotaph, death metal, eucharist, fourth monarchy, smr, unformulas
As the world continues to worship 1960s anti-heroes who lived egotistic lives while hiding behing altruism, the wisdom of Mark David Chapman continues to resonate long after he shot ex-Beatle John Lennon to death outside the Dakota in New York City.
68 CommentsTags: hipsters, john lennon, mark david chapman
It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Issei Sagawa, perhaps one of the foremost experts in dealing with The Human Problem during the twentieth century. While he is gone from our physical world, he remains forever in our hearts.
57 CommentsTags: cannibalism, ecocide, eugenics, natural selection
