The end of the year for some people is a time where they participate in debauchery and related idiocy as they are convinced that the arbitrary beginning of a calendar year absolves them of past mistakes and gives them the possibility to renew themselves without the burden of accepting reality. Those who don’t hide behind such comforting fallacies accept that this is a day like no other and that no actual changes will occur except for remembering to write 19 instead of 18 when it comes to paperwork. Metal has continued its sad and hilarious explosion to the top of the mainstream while pushing out less and less meaningful art. Rather than go ever end of the year lists as they are just useless and contain mostly salvaged junk with the occasional pearl. Here at DMU we shall analyse new compositional tools we would like to see implemented and which ones should be discarded.

First of all let us go ever a horse that has been dead for over twenty years but that some millennials can’t refrain from beating. The Swedish sound that bases everything on the texture of the BOSS HM-2 pedal! The number of these albums keeps increasing but the creativity has decreased even more. Most of this idiocy makes Disma look innovating in comparison as the same Nihilist riffs are hehashed by online bands that can somewhat reproduce that sound digitally while assembling various known riffs held together by cliches. At times this sounds more like an Entombed parody than a celebration of mighty Death metal. The only solution for this epidemic is for each Hessian to actively seek that revered pedal and then hide it or destroy it until a day comes when a band has the sufficient capabilities to innovate with it. Boethiah hold the distinction for being somewhat less retarded than their peers by actually making me want to listen to Carnage and Dismember instead of making me want to punch myself.

Necromaniac have produced the best record of the year with their two track EP and though it is short there is a lot of promise for future growth. Ectovoid and Dawnbreaker are bands who in recent times also released great records that can almost rival Sammath’s latest output. All of these artists aren’t innovating with new techniques or aesthetics of opening up new avenues with their albums but they are finding their own voices in an overly saturated genre without desperately crying for attention. By taking some of the ideas of their idols and pushing them even further they have forged their separate identities and remain in the listener’s mind. We shall continue watching over them at DMU and see whether they can reach their full potentials and rival the masters of the genre. Where excellency in metal was once achieved in the early to mid twenties, it seems that the optimum age is shifting to the mid thirties as there is more to understand and learn than there once was. Other bands should follow the examples set by their contemporaries in defining their own expression by analyzing what the greats did well and pushing those ideas even further without falling into the traps that have plagued countless other bands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SsRxaNhAAk

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Suffocation is mainly known for being the most aped and copied band in the history of Death metal and for spawning multiple idiotic genres that have helped in destroying Death metal in both the mainstream and the underground. Though no one has attempted in copying their long melodies that exist within simple diatonic major chord shapes while adding octaves,diminished fifths and minor seconds. Those were some of the best melodies of Death metal and if a band can find new ways of capturing Suffocation’s sense of melody without paying too much attention to their rhythms, then new possibilities that would make Death metal arise even higher can be found but those long melodies intertwined with Massacra’s unique almost classical like melodies within a Black metal framework that is simple yet grandiose enough like on Gorgoroth’s Antichrist where each composition reached towards a simple yet captivating conclusion, could possibly rejuvenate metal completely. Though these are theoretical ideas and may not work in reality.

One album that has captivated the imagination of many young musicians is Dissections’s Light of the Storm’s Bane. Possibly due to heavy metal influences and gratuitous virtuosity mixed with a genuine desire to make the best and most ambitious record that Jon Nodveidt could. Sacramentum though not as popular did display fairly similar ideas but that were exposed in a much more controlled and noble manner that made those ideas so grandiose and majestic. In Greece the hellenic trio of Rotting Christ,Varathron and Necromantia played upon other variations of such ideas to great success with Necromantia doing this with two 8-string basses and at times a saxophone. A story worthy of a whole set of articles to understand what they were doing. All these aforementioned took consonant harmonized ideas and pushed them so far that they become a completely different beast from what Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy initially envisioned. There is so much left to do with such a method and there are avenues like non-parallel harmonization that deserve to be fully explored or the use of more than two different voices. This cliched principle contains a well of almost infinite ideas to plunder for those persistent enough to draw from a very common idea and to adapt it for their own uses.

The war between the leftist PC hipster community and the rest of metal has possibly come to an end like the mainstream antifa movement. Not because of their adversaries constantly fighting back or finding other alternatives to continue playing their music without these idiotic annoyances, but like the antifa movement, due to cannibalizing themselves. When Metalsucks decided to attack Hot Topic metal heroes Behemoth and especially frontman Nergal, they quickly withdrew after he gave the standard Facebook response of denying any allegations. A completely bizarre move to attack one of your own and then to back off after the slightest bit of defiance. This shows that the leftist music media is desperate in gaining views even at the cost of destroying the bands they claim to enjoy because eventually they will return to their Indie rock either way. Even more recently is the backlash that Arch Enemy have been receiving which is even more asinine due to the singer’s gender which has immense political power in the PC era. This could hint at the death of Metalsucks and the like and should be treated as a victory for the underground in surviving a truly ridiculous storm of mental retardation.

As the New Year folly continues and the fake promises that will soon be forgotten among the vomit,hangovers and reoccurring mistakes of most people, it is best to continue doing what one would normally do on a Monday night knowing that most of us won’t be working or studying the next day. I decide to listen to some Intestine Baalism, grab a small cigarillo and go sit on my balcony while watching the trees and thinking about the best strategies to handle my objectives for January before going to bed, not because it is the start of a “magical New Year” but because it is the first day of the month like any other first day of any month and no “new me” day should distract anyone from the harshness and beauty of reality.

Tags: Antichrist, behemoth, Black Metal, Boethiah, Dawnbreaker, death metal, disma, dissection, ectovoid, entombed, gorgoroth, Intestine Baalism, Join US, judas priest, massacra, MetalSucks, Necromaniac, necromantia, Nihilist, rotting christ, sacramentum, sammath, suffocation, Thin Lizzy, varathron