Kaeck‘s Stormkult, The Best Underground Metal Album of 2015, is coming to vinyl courtesy of Heathen Tribes. The vinyl LP will feature remastered sound with a little less mud and a tad more room overhead. The LP will come in gatefold packaging befitting the lyrical and compositional themes. It will be strictly limited to 200 copies. If you are a black metal analog fanatic and miss out, you will be sorry for sure.
The original CD master of Stormkult was ridiculously filthy. The incredibly fat guitars turned the rest of the mix to mud on most consumer setups or anywhere where additional mud could be added like car stereos meeting engine noise. Listening to the album on standard closed back studio headphones or soft and warm tube amps required listeners to give the music their utmost attention to perceive what was actually being played. Stormkult was unlistenable on heavily bass-boosted ghetto blasters, car stereos, and consumer headphones like the Audeze, Beats, or Shure brands. Even warmer audiophile headphones from respected brands like Sennheiser and AKG such as the HD 650 and K 712 turned Stormkult into a no man’s land of distortion.
Kaeck composed and recorded an album that demanded to be listened to on an professional or high-fidelity setup much like Incantation – Mortal Throne of Nazarene or Immortal – Battles in the North. Otherwise the CD would just degenerate into a furious storm of mud and noise The Oath of Black Blood style. Like Beherit‘s debut, the melodic guitar riff would quickly become inaudible on lower-fidelity rigs, leading listeners to latch onto certain leads, vocal lines, and keyboard embellishments rather than being able to hear the excellent compositions as a melodic whole. The LP will enable those with mediocre digital rigs but properly set up, decent turntables to experience Kaeck’s vision on Stormkult.
Tags: Black Metal, Dutch black metal, Heathen Tribes, kaeck, remaster, the netherlands, vinyl
This band sucks. Best of 2016 and 2015 are worse than 2008 and complete crap compared to mediocre tier mid-90’s metal releases. 200 copies which will probably be sold at a premium for quick drug money. Their live show looked like a goth club after the downers took effect, nothing metal about that. The cover art also looks like a Covenant ripoff.
Stop promoting mediocrity.
Stop pretending like your opinions have any value…
yours really stand out though
This album is boring: go listen to Haydn.
Being that the reviewed albums are scaled relatively to others, and not necessarily in terms of static quality, something can still be the best of the year, without being that good (which is usually the case nowadays). Still, after sorting through thousands of albums that are borderline to absolute trash, this is pretty refreshing after a myriad sordid hours in the looking for a single of ore in the near-exhausted mines of metal.
Go listen to something else then, you cuck.
Well, because there’s this idea. It’s called “contribution”. I sort through thousands of mediocre metal bands to try to find a few of the good ones, that have been lurking in obscurity, but deserve greater recognition for their outstanding quality. Then I would like to write of reviews of them, or if I don’t have the time, send them to another intelligent reviewer.
Many of the commentators do not like that Death Metal Underground does not judge music merely based upon how it relates to the listeners past aesthetic experiences, i.e. nostalgia. The best metal records of 2015 were easily Kaeck, Desecresy, and Tau Cross; Motorhead phoning it in was still better than almost the entirety of what “the underground” produced and the only album that could potentially move from the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve category is maybe Kjeld but Skym was clearly worse and less memorable than most of the other records on the brief best list.
For, 2016 Serpent Ascending was just the best metal release by far with maybe the Mortalized compilation being the next best thing you could purchase as you get about a hundred or so good riffs in very short punk and heavy metal songs even if they’re not as good as Gridlink.
The commentators just do not like that Kaeck does not really sound like any other black metal band despite being influenced by Zyklon-B, Summoning, and of course Sammath so they can’t really relate to it. Serpent Ascending sort of sounds like other Finnish death metal bands but he doesn’t compose in riff mazes, preferring heavy and speed metal’s “verse and chorus” riffs progressed forward but he layers on extreme amounts of death, black, and speed metal influenced harmonies culminating in a giant wall of guitars like Metallica’s Orion if they had heard black metal and took it a lot further.
I’d have to agree in reference to nostalgia, certainly the impact of a band that is not the reflection of past triumphs the genre is generally given less attention, especially if the virtues of the release are more subtle, rather than something immediately impactful. I’d also add that the reprehensible metal out there (or music in general) has exhausted the patience of many a hessian, such that many people who would gladly spend hours listening to albums in their entirety in the early 90’s, now seem to have only enough forbearance to listen to maybe a track or two, before passing judgment and moving on. The subtle substructure that separates great music from average music is rarely gleaned from a single listen.
Indeed, unless Kaeck happens to influence the sound of other bands, in which case people will probably start turning more an ear to it.
I don’t expect Kaeck to influence anything soon but future Sammath records.