Shane and Amy Bugbee, authors and entrepreneurs who helped organize the Milwaukee Metalfest and interviewed metal luminaries including Jeff Becerra and Gene Hoglan, also interviewed Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat.
The interview occurred as part of the year-long tour of America that forms the basis of their book, The Suffering and Celebration of Life in America, in which they basically traversed America hobo style.
Ian Mackaye and Minor Threat were part of the American hardcore punk scene which followed closely on the English scene of 1977-1983 that provided the formative basis for metal and punk after, and instrumental in both the founding of the straightedge (SxE) and post-hardcore (Fugazi, Rites of Spring) scene.
Earthen Grave casts doom metal with a twist: this traditional doom metal in a form very much like Black Sabbath, Pentagram (US) or Witchfinder General adds a virtuoso violin player and occasional touches of high-speed riffing in the style of death metal bands.
Dismal Times (if they named a newspaper after this album, I’d subscribe) powers itself with good ol’ 1970s metal riffs, appropriated detuned and given the mid-paced treatment that made early Cathedral so successful. They rock along, create a groove, and then into it drop dissonant sounds and a slow-down, imitating what it feels like to run into bad news.
The bad news theme continues throughout this album. “Relentless” rips along in the style of Slayer’s South of Heaven, but then stalls into a dark collision of melody, sounding like a day of ambition that ran full-tilt into a morass of oblivion. The violin of Rachel Barton Pine, renowned classical player and life-long metalhead, dips in and out of the music to accent a riff or zip in a quick fill, contrasting the slow churning riffs.
Vocals are of the higher register type that listeners may be familiar with from Pentagram or Witchfinder General. These work to great effect because the guitars are downtuned and slow, allowing the more able vocals and violin to dart around them and flesh out the layers of sound.
Dismal Times will satisfy metalheads because it is something old and something new; it is classic metal riffs, put together in songs with a mid-paced slightly upbeat feel, but it doesn’t lose what makes it doom metal. Instead, it amplifies it, and shows us that the bad news can be fun reading indeed.
As stated in our recent review of Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations, Pathogen craft fast and slashing ripping death metal from simple elements and add an uncanny dissonance and tributes to the last three generations of metal.
This riff-intensive high-energy package should probably be banned by the authorities here in suburban USA, but since it is not, we can enjoy it with its full brain-crushing intensity. We were fortunate to be able to speak to Pathogen mastermind Willie Desamero, who plucks both strings and vocal chords for this band that is gaining an increasing underground following.
Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations was originally recorded in 2009 and self-released, and only now is seeing the light of day on a label. Why did you decide to self-release and why or why not would you recommend that path to others?
After the release of our first album, Blasphemous Communion in late 2007, which has garnered a considerable amount of exposure from having been released on multiple formats from cassette tape, CD and vinyl LP on various independent record labels world-wide (not counting our own D.I.Y. version of it on CD-r prior to the release of the said formats) we planned the recording of our second album, Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations in mid-2008, things went downhill for the band. Both personally and career-wise, some band members had personal problems and many of the labels we once trusted turned their backs upon us because of the Blasphemous Communion dispute between two labels who released the CD version of it, namely Old Cemetery in the US and Dead Center Productions from Russia which has created quite a stir.
We went ahead recording Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations in late 2009 and afterwards, we got several record deals to release it on CD the first was from a local label, which I won’t name, but it didn’t push through, perhaps they have other plans. After that Inner V.O.I.D. Records from Tennessee wanted to release it, but that didn’t push through either, we then snatched up an offer from an obscure French label, Satanized Productions to release Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations tape in March of 2010. They made 300 copies of it, which actually sold out pretty quickly. After that we released it independently on a CD-r and then traded and spread them out to all fanzines, bands and maniacs world-wide. We also sent out many copies of it to other record labels world-wide for a proper CD release but nobody was interested-perhaps we’ve hit on what was called a “sophomore slump” which has afflicted one too many bands world-wide.
But anyway, we actively traded away Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations for the better part of 2010 to 2012 until we stumbled upon Bernd of Dunkelheit Produktionen when we did some trades for his band, Nacht. Initially, I didn’t know that he was running Dunkelheit until a little later when he offered us a deal to release Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations which turned out to be a very good company and very professional, too. He did everything he promised us. And that’s pretty much the entire story of our second album, Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations.
Anyway, it certainly is a good way to build your bands’ name and credentials in a D.I.Y./independent way. I would advice that to any serious new band starting out — to rely on themselves more. In this so called “music industry” these days, having talent and musical skills is not enough. You also need skills to promote your own music-which is relatively “easy” now in this hyper-connected world compared to 10-15 years ago. And one more thing you need is international cooperation. Get in contact and befriend fellow independent/underground bands and fanzines everywhere! There is no place for xenophobia these days. We’re living in a vastly globalized world for the past 15 years with the internet thing and such. I suppose those are the things that we held as an advantage to other local bands here. I mean we’re not the most talented band in the world and we’ve gone through countless ups and downs as well — “Spinal Tap situations,” if you will — and even if no label would ever sign us today we will still be releasing and spreading our own music that way.
This album seems very much in the fast death metal style of Angelcorpse, but there’s also a lot of other influences peeking in here and there. Which metal bands inspired you to take on this style?
I’m glad you noticed! Hammer Of Gods knocked me out of my brains first time I heard it. But there’s a lot more to it if you listen to the album very closely. Many of the fast parts are certainly Morbid Angel/Angel Corpse influenced but other fast riffs there are also influenced by European death metal, Swedish and German, in particular. I really like the haunting melodic edge and almost crust/punk-ish D-beat sensibilities of bands like early Entombed, Carnage, Dismember, Treblinka, Unleashed and the aggression of Morgoth and Fleshcrawl.
A lot of the slow and mid-paced parts of Miscreants Of Blood Lusting Aberrations are inspired by Asphyx, Autopsy and Celtic Frost. Many bands have shaped Pathogen’s sound and more often than not, we wear our influences proudly on our sleeves. From early Carcass, to Master, Winter and Nuclear Death — but we also have our roots planted firmly on the pre-death metal era extreme thrash and black metal bands and punk/crust as well-you know, the classics: Celtic Frost/Hellhammer, Venom, Possessed, Sodom, Kreator, Bathory, Voivod, Onslaught, Sacrilege U.K., Amebix, Hellbastard, Sarcofago, early Sepultura, early Napalm Death, Cerebral Fix, Deathwish… I could go on forever!
Those influences tend to rub off our songwriting. We don’t listen to one particular genre or metal style. We also dig classic heavy metal and some progressive rock stuff. A lot of people think of music is primarily a performance art — sure, performing and practice is certainly a very big part of it — but in reality, music is primarily a listening art. You have to listen to it a lot in order to play it, especially in this kind of genre. It practically feeds off itself.
No two bands are alike, but a few other bands from the Philippines have adopted a style similar to yours. Is this a local sound, that you all developed out there? Is there a “metal culture” specific to the Philippines?
Not really, I mean, metal is really not that big here unlike in other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Japan where there are really big logistical support systems set up for even the underground bands up to the big mainstream metal acts visiting from the US and Europe. Here in the Philippines, metal in a general sense are still very much an underground phenomenon. Fans or even bands themselves organize their own shows and release their own demos and fanzines and a few financially well-off groups can do tours to nearby and far-flung cities and provinces.
There are no metal festivals here and gigs are usually held in small bars and pubs with shitty equipment attended by mostly by the band members themselves. Davao City probably has the highest concentration of metal fans in this country. I’ve been told that even ordinary gigs there can rake several hundred people, unlike in Manila or here in our city (San Pablo) where gig attendance rarely reach past 100 or so, except when foreign bands are playing. There is no future for a metal band in this country that’s why we have invested a lot on getting our name known overseas.
Anyhow, yeah, there are a few bands here that have chosen the same path as we do, such as Toxemia, Servorum and Comatose — which are cool. But you know majority of Filipino bands that are known overseas are not death metal at all, Incarion, Deiphago, Korihor, Maniak, Kratornas are actually black metal bands while Paganfire is thrash.
You’re making metal that would fit in right into the middle of the 1990s, but it’s not the 1990s anymore. What made you decide to stay with the older style, and what advantages do you think it offers?
Well, it’s mainly because we really miss this kind of music. Death Metal or even Metal, in a general sense, from back then has a different vibe. They have more “feel” and atmosphere to the music and their attitudes didn’t seem to be fake and contrived. I mean, “death metal” to the newer generation is all about superfast drumming, million notes per second guitar playing, low, unintelligible vocals, overtly gory lyrics and such. While back in the 80s and 90s death metal was both the fastest and slowest musical form there is! They have an aura of darkness and evocative atmospheres, dismal haunting melodies and very intelligent lyrics that are rarely heard today!
And that’s what we are trying to achieve with Pathogen. Back then there wasn’t any competition for who can play the fastest — everybody was sort of doing their own thing about death metal whether adding thrash, black metal or progressive influences into the fold. Nowadays death metal seems to have a set of pre-determined norms and nobody is pushing the envelope or doing it with the kind of sincerity that the older bands have except for a few bands in the underground who can actually still re-create that old magic.
On “Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations,” you demonstrate two seemingly opposite techniques. You use a lot of dissonance, but also have a lot of melodic riffs keeping these songs going. What made you choose this style?
I personally like the contrast of having dissonance and countering it with a dark sounding melody. It’s good to have that balance, that variety, and not get the listener bored with monotony. When we do an album, we always think of a way to keep the listener’s attention on our music. For instance on the track “Uranium Messiah” almost the entire song is charging away with aggression and ferocity, and after a dissonant false ending, it opens the outro with this Maiden-esque dual guitar harmonies that fades away into oblivion. Those are some of the things that excites me when I listen to a record-hearing the unexpected and being somewhat musically adventurous. That’s the kind of vibe I get when I listen to old Venom or Iron Maiden records. And as I have stated earlier the reason we chose this particular style is we because we miss it. A lot of bands should put more effort into their songwriting instead of their individual playing.
With this signing, it looks like things are picking up for you as a band. What do you think your next move is going to be?
After a decade of hard work and self-promotion things are really looking up for us-for the first time in our careers. It was never easy considering the fact that we have no managers and no producers helping to create and promote our records and general lack of resources-but we always make do with what we have and make things happen for us. There are countless of times where we have gone broke and close friends, parents, relatives, girlfriends are all discouraging us to give up our goals and ambitions. But we kept on slogging nevertheless because our dreams are all that we got, you know.
We didn’t want to end up in obscurity like everyone else, living a brain-numbing 9 to 5 job and married to an ugly bitch that kept on fuckin’ nagging you. It would either be making a career out of playing metal, or die trying! Next on our agenda would be to find a professional management to finally help put us on the road and record our fourth album sometime this year. We got all the new songs readied and demoed since last year. We just have to scrape the finances to put them all together into a proper album.
Imagine that time zoomed back to the moment before Entombed came out with Wolverine Blues. It was inevitable the Motorhead- and Roky Erickson-loving Swedes would turn to death ‘n’ roll, but they lost the gnarly bassy power chords and distortion in the process.
Slaughterday fix this situation by making a hybrid between Motorhead and Left Hand Path. The riffs are crunchy power chorded and bouncy, and every three riffs there’s a melodic interlude, but the essence of this composition is a good racing beat (probably 2x as fast as Motorhead) and a chant-heavy chorus. Bluesy leads flicker in and out to give it some spice.
This isn’t quite death metal. It’s more like death metal influenced roadhouse heavy metal, and as a result, it doesn’t have the odd constructions and difficult mood passages that death metal has, but instead rocks along nicely like an older heavy metal or hard rock album, but graces itself with the dressings of older Swedish death metal.
If you like At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul but wish it had been a little more aggressive and violent, or wondered why Entombed went so civilized and tidy with Wolverine Blues, this demo might warm your dark heart. Its appeal is as simple and timeless as heavy metal itself, and the added Swedish guitar tone and riff technique just gives it that much more punch.
Tunnel of No Light has a foot in both the funeral doom world and the post-metal world, revealing that October Tide were way ahead of their time in predicting trends in music. These are lush, beautiful chord progressions with an ethereal sadness about them but a churning power-pop resurgence that gives you a sense of enjoying the process of survival in a dystopic world of sadness.
In metal as in biology, the development of an organism reveals its prior stages in evolution. In the case of post-metal, it seems to me it owes more of its heritage to great 1980s dark pop bands like Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division. The same stygian Gothic moods prevail, but it has the same sense of discovering a lightness in the midst of the storm which made those bands so compelling for high school cigarette breaks in the parking lot.
Unlike most funeral doom, October Tide changes the blueprint frequently, bouncing between churning Skepticism-esque doom metal riffs and open-chorded, nearly hopeful dark pop riffs that have the kind of proud doomed independence that made 1980s music so defiant and great. In addition, October Tide are comfortable with silences and spaces where melody alone carries the tune.
This is not an album for people who need constant distraction or guitar fireworks to hit them over the head, but is more of an album best listened to alone on an isolated island or when driving interstate after the death of everyone you know. Its moods vary and are not all hopeless, instead balancing each other in similar proportions to create a bittersweet sense of determination in the face of the void.
With searing death vocals chanting and rasping over this contemplative music, a listener might be tempted to lump this in with the death metal, but more reasonably it shows a continuation of what My Dying Bride was doing in the 1990s, with the added post-metal twist that brings in the best of 1980s dark pop and its lovely melancholic atmosphere.
Birth A.D., the “continuation thrash” band that picked up where DRI’s Four of a Kind and SOD’s Speak English Or Die left off and then took the style to new levels of insanity, will unleash its full-length album I Blame You on April 1, 2013.
However, you can make sure you get it as soon as possible by placing a pre-order ($10) with Dark Descent’s sub-label, Unspeakable Axe records, who will be sending this slab of vigilant virulence out to the stores and distros that get it into your sweaty hand.
In other words, get it from the source. Produced by legendary 80s metal and crossover producer Alex Perialas, this disc showcases the best of Birth A.D.‘s work to date, including some tracks from their killer EP Stillbirth of a Nation as well as new material.
Expect this to be out the door very quickly and taking over the world of metal-punk crossover music. Unlike the “retro” musicians who re-live the past by imitating it from a distance, Birth A.D. lives the past by bringing its spirit and technique into the future. The result is heartening for anyone who wanted metal to recover its intestinal fortitude and sense of honest humor.
The second album from Warbeast meets metalhead speakers with great expectations because the personnel involved have such a history of metal on the edge of mainstream that still retains the intensity of the underground. Destroy fulfills all of that promise.
Rigor Mortis vocalist Bruce Corbitt joins with four local musicians of renown to create a band that upholds the ideals of the past but modernizes its sound. On 2010’s Krush the Enemy, the band ventured more into a modern metal sound that verged on deathcore at times, but Destroy goes back to the roots and makes speed metal with the added pummeling technique of later death metal.
Destroy sounds more like Exodus crossed with Slayer and a few instances of the classic Rigor Mortis high-speed melodic sound. The choruses are dominated by the chanting aggressive voice of Corbitt, who sounds like the vocalist Philip Anselmo (who produced this album) wanted to be for Pantera. Choruses are less “spoken” and closer to death growls.
If this album has a fault, it’s that it’s too relentless, such that after a half hour songs start to run together because they are all turned up to 11. However, the appropriately vicious and complex guitar work provides enough depth to fill out these songs and keep the listener wanting more. The good things is that unlike post-Pantera experiments, this band doesn’t rely on groove or rock-style bounce, but on pure metal cadences and ripping speed rhythms.
Where many bands have tried to modernize the 1980s speed metal sound that made Metallica, Pantera, Exodus and Prong big names, Warbeast accomplish this through going back to the roots of metal and keeping it intense instead of trying to get bouncier or groovier. The result is an album that ties together past and present into a single extreme package.
Imprecation reveals the he second song off its long-awaited debut full-length which will be released on CD and vinyl through Dark Descent Records in Spring 2013.
The new album from Imprecation, Satanae Tenebris Infinita, will continue the legacy of dark ritual death metal that has seen this band rise from obscurity not once but twice, the second time being during its 2000s-era revival.
Cover art by the legendary Chris Moyen graces this slab of untamed and relentless death metal by members of Bahimiron, Adumus, Morbus 666 and other Houston death metal ancient ones. The past joins the present, and keeps on going where it was going in 1993, but even stronger and with more experience.
Traditional and yet untraditional, doom metal band Earthen Grave plan to unleash their first album, Earthen Grave, on Ripple Music for worldwide release on July 9, 2013.
Featuring ex-Trouble member Ron Holzner and classical virtuoso Rachel Barton Pine, Earthen Grave craft 1970s style doom with the addition of progressive touches and Pine’s elegant but savage violin fretwork. On top of this, the band modernize their sound with a throbbing intensity that is unique to their interpretation of metal.
Originally released in 2012, Earthen Grave was originally released on Claude + Elmo music (and can still be purchased here) but sees re-release with four new tracks and a cover of Dio’s “Stargazer,” complete with the violin talents of Pine, who plays a new type of violin-like instrument called “the Viper.”
In addition to the new album, Earthen Grave launches on a US tour with the following dates in addition to others soon to come:
Thursday March 28th: Chicago Ridge, Illinois w/ Red Lamb (Dan Spitz X-Anthrax)
If you were to combine the full military power approach of bands like Krisiun or Angelcorpse with the catchy and slightly dissonant songwriting of Master, the result might be like Pathogen. This band has its own personality however which comes out in this battle-force release.
Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations aims to be rhythmically compelling and to add some additional interest in its tendency to massage a maze of related riffs out of the midst of a riff salad so dense it would defy mapping. The result is like urban exploration: entering a building late at night through a forgotten basement window, and wandering in the dark with a flashlight and .45, until you find that one room that takes your breath away.
Pathogen hustle through songs that are a mix of death metal, heavy metal and war metal riffs driving toward a culmination in dissonance and chaos. Drums are mostly influenced by the speed metal bands of the mid-1980s, but vocals come from the recent school of high-speed rasp punctuated by deep gutturals. The result is very much a hybrid, but true to the spirit of its many influences and the genre.
Where this album gets confusing is that it is a riff-maze of familiar patterns and repeated types of themes, so it is best listened to as a kind of concept album formed of a snapshot in time when all of these different songs overlaid each other in concept and overlap in music. Infectious and warlike, Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations captures the spirit of high-speed metal and gives it a unique spin.
Imagine that time zoomed back to the moment before Entombed came out with Wolverine Blues. It was inevitable the Motorhead- and Roky Erickson-loving Swedes would turn to death ‘n’ roll, but they lost the gnarly bassy power chords and distortion in the process.
The second album from 
Traditional and yet untraditional, doom metal band 
If you were to combine the full military power approach of bands like Krisiun or Angelcorpse with the catchy and slightly dissonant songwriting of Master, the result might be like 
