We should talk about dark organization in metal: whenever humans set up something thriving, it dies from within because individuals defer to the will of the herd, and also, under cover of that, individuals act against the goals of the group in order to advance their personal power interests.

In metal, this manifests as the same problem we see in every industry: lots of favorites touted with enthusiasm by a media that proclaims each one to be groundbreaking, stunning, brave, iconoclastic, and revolutionary, yet they never last more than a few days.

To get long-term appeal, you have to make good music, which means not just being able to play it and having production clear enough to discern it, but art: the music must evoke some experience of life or thought that leads us away from the tangible toward the transcendent and thus makes us appreciate life.

Really good art joins the body, mind, and soul. Slayer, for example, infuses us with great energy, a positive outlook of conquest and Lex Talionis crushing of the weak, as well as cerebral but visceral riffs that keep our little brains fascinated.

However, Slayer also brings about a sense of the mythic-historical and supernatural, in the sense that there is more to life than meets the eye. Funnily enough, science rediscovers mystery every now and again:

When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the “hole” where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area where it triggers a chemical reaction to make sugars for the plant.

Together, that traveling electron-and-hole-pair is referred to as an “exciton.” When the team took a birds-eye view and modeled how multiple excitons move around, they noticed something odd. They saw patterns in the paths of the excitons that looked remarkably familiar.

In fact, it looked very much like the behavior in a material that is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, sometimes known as “the fifth state of matter.” In this material, excitons can link up into the same quantum state—kind of like a set of bells all ringing perfectly in tune. This allows energy to move around the material with zero friction.

The science fiction future we desire has been surrounding us this whole time in the form of nature, which is smarter than us because it tests every detail over the course of billions of years, therefore has not only perfected but come up with technologies of which we can only dream.

When you think about it, our own technologies are sort of weak. Over half of the energy released by internal combustion engines is wasted, for example.

Using an engine cycle simulation which includes the first and second laws of thermodynamics, this study has determined the fundamental thermodynamics that are responsible for these limits. This work has considered an automotive engine and has quantified the maximum efficiencies starting with the most ideal conditions. These ideal conditions included no heat losses, no mechanical friction, lean operation, and short burn durations. Then, each of these idealizations is removed in a step-by-step fashion until a configuration that represents current engines is obtained. During this process, a systematic thermodynamic evaluation was completed to determine the fundamental reasons for the limitations of the maximum efficiencies.

Entropy wins at a crawl… heat is produced and dissipated, but the engine keeps cranking along consuming far more fuel than it needs. On the other hand, natural systems like photosynthesis and natural selection are low-waste systems, keeping efficiency and flexibility high.

The music industry could use a look at this situation. Currently, it is the engine of a ’93 Honda that has been improperly maintained. Its exhaust is as much unburned fuel as delicious carbon, and it can barely crank up to full power because so much energy is lost to its creaky frame and excess friction.

We could see the two models in application: natural selection rewards the good and filters the bad, but human socializing-based models like the music industry reward everything equally so that people feel good and allow the group to stay in power.

The problem with that is that then, like the review queue today, we have 250+ new options, almost all of which are garbage. No one is going to sort through this mess except some kind of benevolent autistic sociopath. Therefore, there are no favorites.

Without real favorites, hierarchy does not occur, and so genre cannot occur. When everything is equal, no new directions are found, but old directions are recombined endlessly, and everyone gets three days of fame before disappearing forever.

If you want metal to be healthy, you need the natural selection model. The garbage gets dumped, which means that listeners have fewer options, and as a result, they can choose the best, which then rises and creates new directions for other bands to pursue.

Looking back over black metal, it is clear that maybe 10-15 individuals essentially invented and perfected the genre, with some contributing and some finalizing, including Sarcofago, Bathory, Hellhammer, Slayer and all the first-tier Nords (Emperor, Burzum, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Enslaved, Darkthrone) and related bands like Beherit, Graveland, Havohej, and Varathron.

Those turned to a familiar wall in the sprawling house of dreams and kicked a hole in it, discovering a new world. They found some way to describe the world that seemed accurate, something to aspire to that was appealing, and some vocabulary — musical and symbolic — for conceptualizing that which was exciting.

You cannot have that in current metal. Any band that rises above the herd is going to end up last in the list because the hipsters will ignore it, people in competing bands will bury it, and the listeners will probably never find it anyway because they have 249 other bands that showed up that day.

In other words, we are seeing the music industry as a dark organization which is working toward what benefits its employees, namely having a constant stream of stuff to work on while they cash paychecks. We can see this type of pattern in any industry:

Over the past few years he felt the onset of the intellectual maturity that comes with experience, having run his own business for long enough to learn to spot patterns beneath the skin. A contractor who is evasive about timing, never has the right supplies, and frequently has to deal with emergencies is actually working for someone else, and using Randall’s company as a backup; he cut those contracts as quickly as possible. A supplier who suddenly never has anything in stock but is always willing to do cash deals has financial problems, usually drugs. A carpenter who does good work but never shows up on time actually hates his job and will be in an office within six months.

The music industry is on crack. As a result, it wants to see what can generate it quick cash now, not in the long term. That crack is the jobs it offers and, thanks to the success of black metal, it is bloated with people who are deskwarming while waiting for something better to come along.

Gosh, that sounds extreme, Mr Prozak. But we see the same thing in other industries too:

Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”

Google wanted profits right then, which required limiting the open internet. They did it first with Wikipedia by creating replacement search results for content that was not controlled by major corporations, then raised the cost of publishing with encryption and later, standards for search engine placement.

Why would we expect the music industry to do anything different? It is made up of employees. Those do not want adventures, quests, challenges, or big tasks; they want to show up in the office every day, do the same stuff, and take home a paycheck that goes up by COLA each year to their Monrovia townhomes.

At this site, we do not treat you like a mentally disabled person whose whims are important. We treat you as a piece of meat which might survive if it becomes sentient enough to adapt to reality, and give you the best options for accumulating wisdom that we can find.

In doing so we, are becoming further underground as a means of avoiding having to falsely affirm the consensual hallucination of objective, absolute, and universal truths, values, and communications:

In fact, there is virtually no evidence to support the claim that music causes crime. What research has shown is that policing music and musicians often criminalizes or marginalizes young people, particularly young people of color. It also pushes particular musical genres underground, away from legitimate venues.

We are not suggesting all music is suitable for all occasions. Most parents would want to keep their young children from watching horror films, just as they might not want them to listen to drill music.

If this website seems pointlessly offensive or tackling Big Issues that no one wants to talk about, it is deliberate. We want to drive ourselves underground so that we can talk about anything. We do not view that as being for everyone, however.

In nature, hierarchies form because some creatures see opportunities to adapt and seize them, and then others imitate. Eventually the imitation becomes uniform and then new opportunities must be sought, but in the meantime, a hierarchy of competence is created.

By the same method, in the early black metal years a group of fanatics with zines, radio shows, and tape trading circles selected the best of metal and pushed it forward, while mercilessly and cruelly mocking that which failed. This created a hierarchy of ability.

As time passed, that become canon, and soon the idiots knew exactly what to imitate in order to turn their third rate speed metal, indie rock, alternative rock, and fruity urologist lounge waiting music into total kvlt black metal.

That in turn prompted others to be the usual contrarian ironist protest music type from the 1960s and make anti-kvlt music which tried to be regular rock that mixed in black metal along with its honky tonk, emo, jazz fusion, and other dead ideas in lieu of inventing something new.

If these reviews seem intolerant and cruel, it is because now of all times, metal badly needs natural selection. Good to the good, bad to the bad, and indifference to the grey areas. Hail the strong, but the sick must die.

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The Bleeding – Morbid Prophecy: some albums feel like they were composed on reality television shows where bands are handed a riff and told to make a song around it using only a plastic ukelele and a Boss HM-2 pedal, so they start with a riff and write a chorus to match, then begin the guitar practice where they think of plausible directions to take that riff, but the song itself has no direction nor does the band, as is the case of this modern metal with lots of speed metal tropes and tricks.

Even in Death – My Salvation: imagine Iron Maiden riffs set into a pop-industrial format with rap-influenced vocals sounding like a Pantera influence lurking in the woodpile or uncle’s bedroom closet, using alternative rock style dramatic choruses set against tight metal rhythms on the verses, but never really evolving past that point, so what you get as the entry atmosphere is where you stay and at some point you wonder why not just go touch grass instead.

Unearth – The Wretched; The Ruinous: the modern metal formula on the metalcore side involves inverting nü-metal so that instead of melodic verses and angry choruses, you get angry verses and melodic choruses with underpinnings of guitar harmony trying to give music that is otherwise driven by vocal chanting for its rhythms and uses hip-hop drum patterns and inflections in its guitar strumming some kind of heavy metal edge, but here it is mostly just obvious and boring.

Brundarkh – Those Born Of Fire & Shadow: fairly standard power metal that shows the influence of worship music in its vocal melodies, this band uses swelling choruses in the modern metal style set against verses which feature grim chanting and more of a speed metal approach, but unless you really want MTV-styled “inspirational” music mixed into your heavy metal, this is probably best left for the churches and edgy clothing stores.

Jaodae – Tree of Ténéré: everything about this release is bullshit from the pretentious eccleticism of its title and backstory to the pretense of being related to metal at all, since this is basically a droning indie-emo crossover like everything else these days, throwing in jazz fusion riffs done up with metal aesthetics when it can, but never building songs from the interplay of riffs to produce a shifting context which reveals the hidden dimensions to the mundane, perfect for Tool and Opeth wankers.

Dark Fury – This Story Happened Before: simultaneously inept and the most competent release in this queue, this album consists of songs built from really basic rhythmic elements with a sense of keyless melody rising from these basic conflicts, allowing them to develop internally despite being mostly circular, ending up at a place of a gradually unveiling atmosphere, straightforward in approach but more like the old black metal spirit of uncovering mystery and rejecting the human consensual illusion of a moral universe.

Ropes Inside a Hole – A Man and His Nature: they updated the Sade vocal style for a series of tracks designed to appeal to Enya fans with the usual cliché lush vocals and bright guitar sweeps, lots of jazz fusion tropes but in a pop sensibility with an ear for the lite rock audience, while calling it post-metal to disguise the fact that this is nail salon music from 1996 with slightly upgraded production and more pretense.

Infernal Curse – Revelations Beyond Insanity: attempting to go hard on simplicity signals a withdrawal from the increasingly hide-bound tendency of bands to ape “progressive” adornments and get “deep” in concept, this band aims for slamming black metal with a grindcore edge in the Impaled Nazarene meets Sarcofago vein but oversimplifies to basic song structures, familiar riff forms, and minimal relationship between riffs, making for a listening experience of drone that even over-excited percussion cannot mask.

Malacoda – Our Special Place: basically alternative rock with some power metal stylings, this music operates in the linear style that becomes circular through extreme opposites sort of like the political system or opinions on store brands (personally I think Kroger, Target, and Costco are in the lead) but then can only be contrarian ironist in response to that, ending up with pretentious guitar practice that seems designed to support the ego of the vocalist, or maybe put me to sleep in the car with repetitive fragmentary themes.

Structural – “Your Damnation”: this subgenre seems unfortunate because it combines the neo-progressive stylings of Pestilence and late Death with bouncing Pantera speed metal and the offbeat jazz fusion riffing that Gorguts unfortunately introduced, but if you played these songs without the surfacing, they would fit very much within the melodic speed metal of the late 1980s with influences from emo, gospel, and alternative rock in the melodies, which means a heap of metalcore leading nowhere but to itself.

Elle Tea – Fate is At My Side: if you throw in too many random ingredients into your soup, you will end up with something that tastes like nothing, and here the incorporation of too much hard rock into heavy metal leads to something that sounds like an emotionally vulnerable honky tonk band that discovered Judas Priest and Pearl Jam on the same day, making something that like all normie rock is just there to occupy time and drive away feelings of the bourgeois revolution failing.

Ablösung – Deformität: this is what normies think lo-fi black metal should sound like, basically an industrial band doing quasi-tribal rhythms with heavily distorted vocals and guitars droning away on three-note passages in the background, with vaguely techno-influenced beats to make it easier to appreciate while you tell your friends how edgy it is, but this is basically normie rock hammed up for an audience the band undoubtedly detests.

Forced Hand – War: basically metalcore that uses the cadencs of alternative metal mixed with with some hardcore and older proto-death metal like Master or Possessed, this band falls into the same old trope of all bad metal, namely focusing on the vocals and using drums to lead those, so that the guitar has no internal dialogue and therefore cannot develop phrasal through-composed riff themes and ends up simply being droning repetition of very simple riffs and contrarian attempts to highlight them.

Vivisect – Barbaric Death: mid-paced old school death metal somewhere between Carbonized and the first album from Cianide, this band uses simple song structures and rushing grindcore-influenced riffs to keep up a mood of descent into a sensation of alien opposition, showing creativity in some riffs shapes and despite too much reliance on speed metal style stop-start rhythm fills at the end of some phrases, builds a steady sense of escape from normalcy.

Langsuir – “Occultus Mysticism”: re-released recently, this release from 1993 shows us a band in the grips of transition between bouncy speed metal and aggressive death metal, ending up with rock drumming behind a series of riffs varying from Pantera through Slayer level, producing an uneven listening experience that relies on fairly obvious basic guitar patterns without developing them into something other than the linear, causing massive glaze-over in the audience.

Válvera – Cycle of Disaster: old school heavy metal presented in the modern metal fashion with NYHC vocals amd some entertaining lead guitars, this album consists almost exclusively of verse-chorus loops with catchy choruses but little tying the tracks together except rhythm, which means that although these songs are not random they are also not particularly expressive.

Mortem – Deinós Nekrómantis: somehow this release never had the weight of early Mortem, and it is easy to see why because the fusion between raging death metal and speed metal comes down on the speed metal side here, with too much emphasis on vocals and fast formless riffs instead of riff complexity working together to unveil a parallax of changing moods that gives us some insight into darkness and rage instead of just acting it out.

Zlórtcht – Welcome To The Zlórtchterhaus: Australian bands generally do not finish their songs because they like most antipodeans are disconnected from the mother culture therefore can only present a statement to the pluralistic crowd and see if it sticks, with this band being no different with hardcore style riffs that drone through a verse chorus-loop, whole note shift, solo, and then… and then they end because they are waiting for a riot to start, cigarette and Victoria Bitter in hand.

Witch Ripper – The Flight After the Fall: if you want to kill anything, unleash the professionals on it, because like all careerists they will make a slightly unique version of what is already out there, and by competing in this way, be reactive to the immediate past but oblivious to the whole, as in the case of this alternative-influenced stoner doom which basically sounds like a slightly heavier take on Oasis but with Coldplay vocals and the Edge from U2 phoning in the guitars.

Macabre Demise – Awakening: what a shame to find that someone made an album about being in a band and making an album rather than something deep in their souls, because there are some fine riffs on this one, but they are stuck in songs that are bouncy Pantera-style speed metal on the edge of mödern metal, using a few death metal styled discursive structures but never developing riffs more than fitting into a song that sounds badass sometimes and otherwise fades into static.

Post Luctum – The Indifference of Time: I: it is sad when something goes from pioneering to a trend, but everyone wants his fifteen minutes of fame, so they churn out very similar products with no essential differences but lots of surface variation, and then wonder why we have a constant stream of new best-ever bands but nothing ever sticks, so all musicians end up equally ignored and humanity defeats itself again like on this emo and funeral doom crossover.

Extinction Agenda – Inter Arma / Silent Leges: although it borrows styling from many of the mid-1980s thrash bands, this recording has more in common with a version of early Sodom or Tormentor with more linear note choice, aiming for building energy to swing into infectious choruses with absurdist guitar solos reminiscent of old Suffocation or Demilich, but here kept in service to the immense forward drive to these simple songs designed to hammer home a point in voice and rhythm.

Pyrexia – System of the Animal 2023: this band re-recorded its classic takes in the modern metal style with more groove surrounding more rigid slam-style percussive offbeat riffing that is both jazz and speed metal but preserves the strengths of neither, making for an album that is indisputably “heavy” but also once you have seen the particular rhythmic hook of each song, entirely predictable and therefore skippable.

Cosmic Burial – Far Away From Home: these guys really like 1980s dark gothic and power pop that capped melancholy verses with bittersweet choruses and produced a type of wistful nostalgia and hopeful skywatching in the miasma of daydream, and here they make competent melodic heavy metal that maintains an atmosphere but does not particularly develop it, making this seem more like something that would play in the background during a Christmas rom-com set in post-apocalypse Ohio.

Summit – The Winds that Forestall Thy Return: all of these slick deep-profound titles sound like alternative bookstores, and this band combines post-metal with technical death metal to create a bouncy droning void that like an alternative coffeeshop feels slick until you realize it is just hipsters reselling Costco coffee, showing us how the people who wanted to succeed in the music industry just combined all the big commercial successes of the late 1990s, so you get alt-rock, indie, shoegaze, punk, emo, and lite jazz (Bare Naked Ladies and Phish) mixed together like a stew of things that killed at least fifty percent of the audience in the past, which is why today metal is as one-note and tiresome as punk was in the late 1980s and as empty of ideas as jazz became after it kicked out the Black guys and brought in Italian college students.

Cortege – Touching the Void: add metalcore vocals to bounding speed metal and Cannibal Corpse riffs, build them around a ranting vocal like Rammstein without the grace, add sing-song rhythms, then throw in absolutely symmetrical riffs and song structures, and you have the perfect album to torture people at Gitmo. A few hours of this and even the most die-hard al-Qaeda operative will be wearing a dress and drinking whisky.

Mercyless – The Mother of All Plagues: if this band was going to have “a moment,” it would have happened twenty-five years ago when people were hungry for death metal and speed metal hybrids, but now these circular songs built around whispered chant-vocals sound like something you find in the cassette player of the 1994 Impala that your grandmother left in the barn just in case the rapture came and she needed a quick jaunt around town.

Grave Next Door – Sanctified Heathen: stoner metal just sounds like 1960s road music with more distortion and has the same kind of pointless urgency and interchangeability to its songs, which makes any serious listener duck out, since the resulting atmosphere really does not vary much between songs, nor do songs convey anything but the free love, civil rights, cheap drugs, and pouty tantrum Boomer era sense that life needed more protest so maybe we could find a part of it that does not suck.

Alpinists – Corpses of the Universe: aesthetically a tribute to Dead Infection, this album suffers from singularity, meaning that each song has a very simple concept of a riff and a rhythmic breakdown and does not develop further, so for a few moments you get that feeling that the itch that Blood, Disharmonic Orchestra, Napalm Death, Ildjarn, or DRI used to scratch with a couple riffs that developed into an atmosphere will be scratched, but instead the songs fall short as if unfinished thoughts.

Pig Destroyer – Pornographers of Sound Live at St Vitus: most people consider this grindcore, but more accurately it is emo music given some grindcore technique, centered around feelz-heavy vocals just like a pop-punk band and specializing in breaking up rhythms to make a point or have a teachable moment of some kind like a Boomer forcing his kid to share his candy with the underprivileged (later he will tell him: “you never had any candy”) but tbh this is just mental spam to interrupt coherent thinking.

Cattle Decapitation – Terrasite: this band succeeds because it aims for a nü-metal style groove based on the downbeat instead of the offbeat and as a result creates the type of cadence people liked in old school death metal which was less delivered toward advertising fantastic positive promises but instead was more like the grim voice of doom and the commonsense reality everyone denies, but you have to like rap-like vocals, bouncy riffs, and songs that are complete in the first thirty seconds but go on for five minutes.

Various Artists – Metal! Live in Bahrain Vol. 2: these bands have probably been executed already, but they execute a well-produced live set which shows us the third world approach to metal, which is to compress fifty years of different metal genres into one and then to give it a local twist, with Hellionight offering speed metal in a death metal style, Ryth giving more of a hard rock and heavy metal approach with a unique mid-paced doom rhythm, Lunacyst delivering fast and frenetic melodic speed metal with death vocals and modern metal touches, Necrosin showing us more of a NWOBHM and punk take on underground metal, sounding a lot like Divine Eve, and each band sending up a few tracks of well-performed metal.

Nyogthaeblisz – Apocyphral Progenitors of Mankind’s Tribulation: disguised in a thick veil of noise and echoing vocals, this release comes to us from the Sarcofago, Blasphemy, and early Beherit school of chaotic fast rhythm riffing in thrash-like song structures which rely on verse-chorus within a larger pattern of styling the song to fit the riff, creating momentary glimpses of a dark vision of humanity that is mostly powerful for its loud and encompassing dynamic rather than melody or structure.

Sauron – Wara!: an odd hybrid of NWOBHM styled metal and progressive pop metal like Supuration with touches of alternative metal, this band ventures through fifty years of metal tropes in its own idiosyncratic way, making songs that are powerfully-driven like RAC but settle into the brain more like 1970s guitar rock, ending up with something that probably does not belong in underground metal but is probably too far out for the normies anyway.

Itzamná – Maldito Predicador: finally someone took late hardcore and put some life into it, even if the riff forms are mostly throbbing positional harmony like Crass or The Clash had going, and the rhythms are pretty familiar even if played at two to three times the speed of a hardcore band, putting these guys into Ratos de Porao and Corrosion of Conformity territory; it is so simple that you probably will not describe it as “good” or “bad,” just enjoyed in the moment or not.

Sunnudagr – Le Silence: a 1980s flashback, Le Car and Le Pen, comes to this band that combines folk and post-metal to mix it into a smidgen of hardcore and a little bit of black metal, but mostly this sounds like songs you sing to children after the fourth hour of diarrhea and vomiting when you just want the little obligations to pass out so you can snatch a few hours of sleep before another somnolent day of meetings and conference calls.

Póstuma – Moralis: melodic metal in the modern style which focuses on nice lengthy melodies built around minor scales and varies up its verse-chorus pattern with this, including return to introductory riffs and transitions, showing a greater competence with percussion than most bands, but designed to end its melodies on a pleasant and consonant note as if it were asserting some kind of scientific management planf or human happiness, ending up being fairly typical.

Black Mass – Feast at the Forbidden Tree: scratch the surface and you will find the same hightops and black jeans speed metal that dominated the late 1980s except now kept on a rolling drum track so that it does not pause at the end of each phrase, reminding me of Carcariass or other high-intensity bands, but the result is so internally similar that it becomes difficult to want to hear it repeated, yet repetition is most of what this release offers.

Various Artists – Purity Through Fire Promo Sampler 2010 AYPS: interesting archaeology provides us insight into how long metal has been cap in hand, starting with Irminsul who provide Renaissance Faire folk metal with Disney style exuberant leads, then Kroda comes in with a dressed-up form of basic black metal hopes wild instrumentation will cover for the hollowness, after which Vspolokh splays out a death-doom paced version of black metal that never really develops but stays coherent, followed by Myrd with droning mid-paced black metal that really goes nowhere but avoids randomness, La Division Mentale aims for a groove-oriented form of indie-metal with industrial overtones that is simple but fully developed, and CrystalMoors weighs in with melodic black metal at doom metal paces reminiscent of Varathron.

Savage Annihilation – Soumises À La Procréation: basic chugging death metal with fast choruses and verse-chorus songs, this band rapidly wears into repetition and its riff-writing seems to fit within the early days of the genre without much distinction or unique shaping to what are mostly purely chromatic riffs with a lot of rhythm work, vocal emphasis, and percussion coming alive on the fill to distract from how not very interesting this all is.

Embryonic Slumber – In Worship Our Blood is Buried: bog-standard post-metal, meaning shapeless riffs with lots of folk-style strum and drone, then vocals lead everything with anguished emo- or metalcore-style screams, and songs do not develop so much as introduce, then launch into, a mood in which they wallow until the user opts for euthanasia and blissfully exits the envelope of pointless sound.

Necromaniac – Morbid Death Rising: lots of good ideas mixed in with the familiar tropes (“clichés”) in an order that never allows any part to breathe and develop the type of strong presence from which one can build a contrast, then a dynamic, and finally the type of adventurelike storyline that plays out in the poetry of riffs and phrases talking to each other through an evolving song, so this one falls into background noise rather quickly.

Morticula Rex – Autumnal Rites: somewhere there is a Platonic form for basic death metal that attempts to use vocals to dominate where riffs should convince and therefore ends up with this bombastic and grandiose approach that by reverting the riff to timekeeper loses out on the ability to develop, so no matter what transitions they throw in, the band remain stranded in circularity, which is not terrible for the first listen but becomes unbearable tedium on second hearing.

Wooden Veins – Imploding Waves: mixing Eurovision pop, metalcore, and what is left of heavy metal with indie rock and some touches of jazz fusion, this band makes a unique version of the same old crap that everyone else has, including Coldplay styled super-emo vocals which aim toward a “heartwarming” feel, but in the end this is as unconvincing as advertisements on late-night television.

Supreme Pain – Divine Incarnation: there needs to be a word for this type of late-stage death metal that focuses on speed thrills and double-strum thumps but has no sense of internal continuity or contrast, therefore feels like charging into Walmart on meth just determined to get one of every sale item into your cart before the gong in your head starts to play The X-Files theme and if you have to punch a few security guards or grandmothers that’ll be okay too.

Konkhra – Sexual Affective Disorder: chugging more than pure percussive death metal comprises about half of this release, giving the feel of the slow days of aging speed metal before Metallica released a self-titled album and sank the genre into pink bubbling AIDS, this album aims for ultra-heaviness through lots of slamming alternated with soaring tremolo riffing, producing a confused approach where the incessant pounding feels like a headache brought on by low T-cell count.

Schattenwald – Der Winterkönig: following the Dimmu Borgir format, some flowing melodic black metal which sensibly avoids stop-start for the most part, this band nonetheless has two flaws, first its riffs being somewhat standard to the genre, and second a failure to intensify songs over the course of the album while relying on vocals to stitch together any anomalous riffs, sort of like joining a frat and getting handed a beer while people watch television and then nothing changes for four years.

Barús – Fanges: ever since Deathspell Omega followed Satyricon and Grand Belial’s Key in pulling the wool over the eyes of metalheads by convincing them that songs that go nowhere but dance around a lot in the middle are deep and epic like Opeth, bands have been trying this strategy of dressing up fundamentally boring music in emo and post-metal tropes in order to con a few suckers into buying the crap, but if you sketch it out on guitar (or kazoo) you find some very familiar blockhead riffs and no real correspondence or interaction between them, leading to random songs who hide their randomness behind cultivated aesthetics of the bizarre, leading to an intricate nothingburger.

Evilcult – The Devil is Always Looking for Souls: whether this band is South American or not, they make metal in the South American style, which is to combine heavy metal, hard rock, glam metal, death metal, war metal, and black metal into a type of thumpbing bomba music which like jello salad has moments of profundity floating in opalescent goo of indeterminate origins, with a heavy Iron Maiden influence here but ultimately painfully repetitive arc songs.

Obsecration – Oceanum Oblivione: if you write down all of your ideas over a few years, then come together for a weekend in the studio to stitch them together, you will end up with an album where individual instrumentals shine out over songwriting, and little cool bits float in a vast sea of relatively predictable riffs that were necessary to hold the disparate stuff together, making for a confused and tiring listen.

Sepulchral Voice – Evil Never Rests: standard speeding black/death with speed metal song structures, simple riffs based on rhythm more than harmony or melody, and circular song structures with a few diversions more than tangents which introduce competing themes and drive song evolution, this release is perfectly competent for what it is but it would be difficult to want to listen to it repeatedly now that such music is in abundance.

Mortuary Drape – Spiritual Independence: if you wanted a heavy metal album that alternates between galloping beats and mid-paced, almost doom metal passages, then this one might fit the need, but this album seems on the verge of coming apart from internal tensions between the different albums that it seems to want to be, and the black metal vocals seem only to highlight what could be described as a Venom and Manowar crossover that converges more on a mood of indecision than energy.

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Tags: AIDS, Black Metal, death metal, modern metal, smr