We live in an inauthentic era because we have no reference points in common except mass culture, therefore most of what we do consists of throwing a dozen aesthetics in a blender, coming up with a unique combination, and using it as the basis for our careers, health of the genre be damned.

Some call this postmodernism, but that was really about the idea that there was no longer a single perspective that defined objective reality, more of a need to capture things from all angles and see it into the sum total and how that worked out as an aesthetic.

After all, this is what we do as humans: we gather a bunch of data, try to find the “sweet spot,” and then within that framework look for what might make life less bleakly irrelevant and discoordinated for a few palliative moments of pleasure before the droning and crashing of the herd takes over again.

In this “psotmodern” time, very little makes sense… and even less is worth keeping around. “The sky is blue” will always be true, for some definitions of sky, is, and blue; however, that is a partial truth, and the full story is that the sky changes color but is not consistently green like most living grass.

Psotmodernists find a green sky and proclaim that it is grass, or that grass is undefinable so we should send the whales to Mars and wallow in pacifism and egodrama. They see some dead grass or spray-painted grass and conclude that grass is also sky, so nothing matters except love and, er… well… idk lol.

***

Brujeria – Esto Es Brujeria: sing-song chanting over basic grindcore and hardcore riffs with lots of rhythm work to try to build intensity, this band is doomed by its relationship to songs for children and advertising jingles, but at least keeps melodic coherence between the riffs and makes verse-chorus songs that hold together without too much pretense, even though this results in essentially boring Pantera-style aggressive vocals boring post-hardcore rock.

Smokeheads – All In: basically smarmy Coldplay/Oasis style lounge rock with a touch of the Barenaked Ladies on the expansive chorus, designed in the pop format with distortion on what the keyboards would normally play but now on guitars so they can claim to be “progressive metal” (drink Soylent and update your Pinephone here) despite being neither progressive nor metal.

Porta – Nigra Weltende: this band adopted the aesthetics from Blizzard Beast and Panzerfaust but then wrap them around the same chanty stuff that is driven by vocals and shifting almost formless riffs in the background which, despite deviations from verse chorus form, rarely gets far enough away or makes enough sense between its parts to come across as anything but an atmosphere of dysfunction.

Dehiscence – Colony: where some bands suffer from every instrumentalist doing their own thing, this band sounds like a late-1990s movie where a group of characters go through an experience together but are basically cardboard cut-outs to represent the many colors and flavors of Benetton so instead you get a chorus effect with each character displaying its quirk in unison, resulting in a bunch of storming noise with a clear narrative and agenda but no entertainment or artistic value.

Deaf Angel – Heartsick: this sounds like church music or country music sung over guitar noodling, most of which is modern metal style speed metal bluff riffs which are both formless and in their nu-metal inspired rhythm, so predictable they make an experienced listener want to tune in to the loose engine belt of the car next door, but the band put most of their effort into the vocals, making for what will be a great alt-country act when they get into the right genre.

James and the Cold Gun – James and the Cold Gun: the problem with alternative rock was that it dressed up 1980s radio rock as some kind of punk and hard rock aesthetic but in doing so calmed it down and made it more emo, adding a bit more riff-driven activity like 1970s AOR but not enough to remain interesting, and this hybrid of Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden is easily listened to and professionally (i.e. books from the bookstop “songwriting for experts” section) written, but hard to care about because like most rock, it is repetitive and droning, but like alternative rock, it is a recombination of greater things that went before into a new fake anti-fake aesthetic.

Last Dying – Emptiness: one forgets how much bands like Gojira simply recycled black metal technique in alternative rock, but this band inspired by such acts sounds more like a late 1990s Burzum clone without vocals that adds in the soaring Kyuss style sonic sprawl as a basis for lead guitar, but ultimately it backs away from what makes metal into its own genre, which is the interplay of riffs as we see from Black Sabbath through Burzum.

Majesties – Vast Reaches Unclaimed: wow, people are fooled by this, proving the Dunning-Kruger Effect to not only be right but suggest that it should be the basis for future eugenics, maybe terminating everyone under 115 IQ points so humanity can finally move on, but this album is like Sacramentum and Unanimated for people who are still coloring in superheroes in newsprint comic books, basically melodic hard rock given a death metal aesthetic update without any of it sticking, creating aggro-Muzak for hairy defecations.

AcidBrain – The Lust Murders: did nu-metal take over deathgrind? well, they are near ancestors… so yes; here you get lots of bouncy Pantera-style verses that are right on the edge of Korn or the Deftones and include the rap-style version of chanty speed metal vocals, then some death metal riffs for the chorus, so basically this has more in common with Slipknot than Carcass and this makes me really glad that this sentence is about to end and I can delete this shit off my hard drive.

The Devil’s Trade – Vidèkek vannak idebenn: post-metal was just a lazy way of importing normal vocal-driven pentatonic-minor shifting pop into metal while maintaining some of the cachet of cool that comes with music that is actually outside the consumer chump bubble, throwing in heavy riffs like sitcoms show characters drinking Jack Daniels to demonstrate they are upset or making floral arrangements to demonstrate contentment, making this only slightly less manipulative than a Costco upsell coupon flyer.

Exiled Hope – Apocrypha: lots of effort went into the instrumentals here, but they serve as backdrop to the darkened lounge vocals, and mostly focus on old heavy metal tropes mixed with Disney music, resulting in a listening experience of constant distraction which never assembles into the type of clarity necessary for conflict to exist, instead just goes on and on with some kind of personal expression drama that is better confined to places where vanilla cucumber lattes are sold.

Cassetta – Swallow the Sun: metalcore is either NYDC doing nu-metal or emo doing melodic metal, and this comes to us from the former approach, which has potential to be good grindcore but instead goes for the vocal driven approach based around bouncy syncopated not cadenced rhythms, and as a result it is all “bounce bounce wait bounce” and has little listening durability for anyone but the congenitally moronic who will hear it in the echoes of their capaciously void souls.

Lords of Salem – Summoned Them From Their Graves: industrial vocals, both gritty and clean, over basic hard rock riffs played more like Helmet might have with internal rhythmic offsets, but ultimately, just a groove and two riffs that deliver vocals, making this both not terrible and not particularly interesting, much like how one can drive through California and think how entertaining it is that people pay to live there.

The Rite – The Astral Gloom: they probably pitch this as some kind of black metal but really it is doom metal from the heavy metal school with black metal vocals, somewhere between The Obsessed and Goatlord, maybe a nod to Necronomicon and older Gehenna, which is not bad but not different enough from the rest to seek out, and not varied enough from basic guitar practice to want to keep listening to, even if nothing is particularly egregious among its parts.

Punebre – Ang Nasa Dako Paroon: this has more in common with thrash (“crossover thrash” to Millennials) and might be compared to Ratos de Porao if mixed with something a bit more ominous like Technocracy era Corrosion of Conformity, using lots of good solid punk drumming and hybrid metal-punk riffs in short direct songs that focus on verse/chorus with a couple breaks and transitions but some efficient layering.

Voyager – Fearless In Love: this sounds like Coldplay and later REM decided to break up their expansive emotional rock with occasional Morgion and Gojira riffs but never quite made it stick together, so it sounds like a metal band trying to cover a normie rock track with some hipster on vocals, making for something that is about as progressive as the soundtrack to a Nickelodeon movie and about as metal as peaches singing “Tonight, Tonight” through a Boss HM-2.

Up For Corruption – “Hate”: this single mixes in some speed metal with its chunky alternative rock that has some metal aesthetics, but underneath you get the same old focus on singing relatively obvious melodies without much development, leading to utter boredom that even a bit of foot-tapping cannot quench, which seems an unfortunate use of the talents on display here.

Deadly Carnage – Endless Blue: we used to get really stoned and alternate between Godflesh and Enya, which is about what this sounds like, lots of normie singing with occasional guitar riffs between the folk-style strumming, but this will not save it because these are formless shoegaze riffs with no particular relation to each other, so you end up with atmosphere in search of a purpose while lost in a sea of its own egodrama, might be good for Sci-Fi or LMN soundtracks.

Mercenary – Soundtrack For The End Times: power metal sounds like all Millennial music, basically remixing the aesthetic of the past because pacifists who flatter each other in order to keep matriarchal-bureaucratic order cannot tolerate conflict, which means that you end up with very similar themes “clashing” through the use of technique despite the composition not catching up, at which point the alternating high-pitched squeaky male vocals and death vocals duke it out in this alternative rock and speed metal hybrid.

Sonic Tides – Six Sided Square – 6th: hipsters merged with nerds once it became clear that hipsters were sad losers who needed to play up their autistic ineptitude and maudlin victimhood in order to make themselves seem interesting, and they produced music that mixed alternative rock, emo hardcore, jazz fusion, big normie rock like Oasis, and bad 1960s protest music because they are all commies, and this wailing boring rock is no exception.

Nervosa – “Endless Ambition”: straight up wacky packages speed metal with a slightly dark transitional riff or two thrown in, this band plays on the chanting, foot-tapping side of speed metal that is gratifying perhaps to unstable homeless children but just seems tedious to the rest of us since it is about as musically interest as clapping while standing in front of one of those cool natural gas generators that you really should get for your suburban tract home during hurricane season.

AmongRuins – Land of the Black Sun: adding post-metal influences to bog standard melodic death metal does not make it more interesting, just makes it more adrift between the far-off storms of its influences, and this band has more in common with the late hardcore emo bands melded with alternative rock than it does with death metal, and the utter refusal to come up with anything less than symmetrical and standard pop progressions makes this an excruciating listen.

Mental Cruelty – Zwielicht: at least this band stays true to the Dimmu Borgir second album aesthetic, albeit with subtler keyboards, but it is the usual circus music, based around the vocals with guitars performing very similar riffs in the background in a verse-chorus format with a few “epic” interruptions that serve as aesthetic transition but add nothing to melodic development, resulting in a very complex static take on what should be continuous much like the approach of organized religion.

Spectral Wound – A Diabolic Thirst: if you crave the form of black metal, this band touches on every trope at least twice, but these songs really have no direction, being set up with oppositional riff pairs to get to a kind of culmination that includes both in a compromise like a committee might do, allowing them to keep kicking the aesthetic of 1998 down the road without getting controversial.

Laster – Andermans Mijne: supposedly avant-garde metal, this is merely modern metal that uses melody and groove, but in its defense, at least keeps rhythms in a metal sense of continuous, energetic forward motion although song development is so circular that it is hard to want to repeat listen to this hybrid of Gehenna, Supuration, and Voivod that uses all the right techniques at roughly the right time but basically integrates conscious, deliberate quirks into simple rock songs with mostly formless riffs.

Restless Spirit – Afterimage: who let the normies in? this is basically smarmy radio rock with a Bryan Adams style sentimentality that mixes in a few doom metal riffs and slowed punk dirges to try to give itself character, but really, the songs are based around the crooning, and that is not all that distinctive or interesting, so you end up with lots of fuss where aesthetic is used to conceal just how basic and familiar all of this alternative rock stuff is at heart, which means why bother listening.

Gridlink – Coronet Juniper: this band continues its solid front of riffs that work together and gesture at some meaning, but on this album, the material has been simplified, more punk-style open riffs have emerged, and the fascination with “post-metal” topics like space, whales, and Spongebob Squarepants make it seem like an album for Redditors and other people who want surface irony and — because they are NPCs, since hipsters are the worst bourgeois-bots and have no internal dialogue, personality, or attachment — an absolute blank slate within upon which they can project, which makes me want to nod at this one and move on from what is basically a technical war metal and metalcore hybrid.

Calico Jack – Isla de la Muerte: the type of people drawn to Reddit over the past decade have for the most part been people smart enough to be local Linux legends or experts in hipsterdom, but are essentially weak soulless normies clamoring for attention to their pasty and sweaty little nerd lives which are lived only as a substitute for having personality or purpose, and this Disney music with a few nu-metal riffs is great for nerd-hipsters who like sea shanties but pointless for anyone who is actually alive.

Vorst – Burn the Priest: the MBAs call it “blackened heavy metal” but really this is just a Venom/WASP hybrid that uses well-established riffs to make simple verse-chorus songs that allow an emphasis on vocals, which means that this goes nowhere as far as the transcendent or illuminating experience of art, but might keep you busy chanting along with the Hollywood Satanic rantings of the lyrics, although if you look too deeply you will simply fall asleep.

Deteriorot – The Rebirth: people like plodding death metal, something Deteriorot achieve with layered riffs balanced against each other but never really leading anywhere else, so you fall into the heavy cadence and get losts in the staggered variations, but then not much of anything happens, so you sort of wallow and then the song comes to an end, which is sad because this band has potential and this album is their best to date.

Lipoma – Odes to Suffering: some releases sound like guitar practice, and this album seems to consist of basic rushing deathgrind riffs paired up with meandering melodic expositions on four-note themes, but since these do not relate to each other in any sense other than iterative recombination, the effect is like listening to a really basic riff pattern interrupted by someone who just got told “no ‘Stairway'” lighting up a room with fingerwork on a simple melodic idea unrelated to the riffs.

Black Pestilence – Hail the Flesh: basic punk ‘n roll mixed with some aesthetics from black metal, this band makes really simple songs that emphasize catchy vocals but use riffs that hammer out themes that are old because they are obvious from the starting point of a whole interval after a half one, meaning that you are basically listening to a fourth-generation distillation of stuff that bored your grandparents but hey, shiny new aesthetic.

Mass Punishment – “God Less America”: lots of bouncy riffs, quick interruptions, and ranting vocals in the hardcore style over basic groove riffs with the elegance of Pantera meeting Slipknot, this band essentially snowballs everything that succeeded in commercial metal for the past twenty years and has made a more insipid version that does nothing wrong but does not do enough in an organized enough fashion to make for interesting listening.

Carnosus – Visions of Infinihility: basic melodic death metal mixed in with occasional deathcore but mostly just verse-chorus driven by chanted and whispered vocals, with fill riffs taking the place of potentially more interesting material that could expand on this, making us wonder why people like such boring music or if anyone is even paying attention instead of just throwing on something new-sounding while they browse TikTok and Wayfair.

Excarnated Entity – Mass Grave Horizon: if you wanted a slower, less organized, and more melodic version of Revenge, look no further, but the weakness of this band is that they start out with a riff they like, then invent placeholders until they can repeat it, and throw in variations and abrupt stops as a way to distract from this fundamental plodding nature, resulting in music that would be excellent to sleep to except that it has no spirit or organizing principle so is the musical equivalent of a car alarm while your neighbor defecates on the front lawn after eating too much Taco Bell and drinking Modelo Especial until he hit blackout drunk again for the fourth time this week.

Quiet Man – The Starving Lesson: ok so “sludge” is just basic doom metal riffs played with punk rhythms and post-metal vocals designed to distract from the fact that NOTHING HAPPENS IN EACH SONG but if you call it drone maybe the stupid kids will fail to notice and you can hype this crap into a career in sound production or maybe selling tshirts for a band that writes actually evocative riffs, but like all things from the postmodern era, it resonates with the echo of hollowness like drunk driving just to pass the time.

Fossilization – Leprous Daylight: we are the mimic men of the new world, those who come along now and try to recreate the past without knowing what motivated its actors or animated its spirit, trying to introduce shocking music into a world where everything is pure aesthetics emulating some ideal or recombination of them, and in this we get lawn-mowing dirge riffs mixed with fast charging attacks on stability that have undertones of melody, but nothing relates to each other enough to say anything, much less hold together.

Ceremony of Darkness – The Lesser Key: if you cannot stupefy yourself by drinking carpet cleaner and ramming your head into the wall, this band might do it, since they balance bouncing heavy metal riffs against teenpop levels of drama in melodic doom riffs for the convenience of clever vocals which restate the greatest hits of alternative rock and edgy goth industrial, trying to makeup-camouflage the complete lack of direction in this band like a mental patient lost in a museum of famous delusions.

The Way of Purity – The Order of The Deep Roots: decent noisy power pop with female vocals, this band manages to keep verse-chorus loops interesting with adroit turnarounds and melodic interrelation between the parts, but other than that it is like most pop, you turn the tap and something pours out which uses the same half-dozen color notes around a triad and then riffs on that, which is fun for awhile but the mind tends to wander like Joe Biden in a Walmart full of anime girls.

Crown Solace – Animus: power metal with modern metal breaks under a falsetto vocal, this music is bog standard down to the vocal melodies, so you end up with something people listen to for its freaky characteristics not its substance, making me think even more than the low-T trace admixture participation award generations have no basis for understanding metal and probably are too ruined to make it in any meaningful form, only aping the past with more narcissism and ironism injected.

Exmortus – Necrophony: this album really does not belong on a death metal site because it is essentially Fates Warning styled melodic heavy metal with a focus on lead riffing mixed with some galloping speed metal riffs that would do Dissection and Exodus proud, nothing really you have not heard before but executed with an ear for musicality and interest despite being B-level, which makes it good for pleasant background listening but not really focal and, other than the vocals, 100% unrelated to death metal.

My Lament – The Season Came Undone: if you want 1980s goth/industrial back but with hard rock guitars in the background, this band at least stays true to aesthetic and develops songs, so it probably has some potential despite really not being relevant to metal listeners despite having metal aesthetics filtering in, and on the plus side adds to 1980s gothic some of the raging sound that it needed for its aggressive melancholy to be taken seriously, but really this is hard rock plus EBM with gothic vocals.

Pacrona – Sun God: Nordic bands have been exploring this style recently which takes modern metal back from the bounce and vocal-driven chant-heavy rhythms and instead focuses on the basics of guitar melody in riff, with vocals taking more of an industrial role in the background, leading to some interesting patterns; there is too much heavy metal revivalism here and not enough cohesion, but this is more interesting than all but one percent of the review queue.

Dying Fetus – Make Them Beg For Death: the secret to this music is the predominance of horse-riding rhythms, like a horse at a mellow trot going through a pasture as its rider sways from side to side as the whiskey filters through his liver, then a squirrel runs out and the horse panics and suddenly drunk guy is holding on for dear life but — check this — he is still in the pasture, so the horse slows down and the whole thing repeats in this deathcore band with ultra-simplistic riffs and tek-def lead rhythm guitar touches; this is not death metal, but a parody of it designed for people to be able to listen to nu-metal without admitting that this is what they are doing, despite all the Suffocation riff lifts.

***

²⁹I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe.
³⁰I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, ³¹ but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me. – John 14:29-31

The bourgeois mentality has always been solipsistic. The goal is to stop thinking about anything you do not want to think about, like the dark sides of life, and instead to suppress them with happy thoughts about how everything will turn out fine because we have “solutions.”

This leads to a predomination of clutter because of things undone because they involve dark thoughts as well as illusions pursued, one after another in a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round, to distract the self from the dark sense of emptiness and irrelevance caused by denial of life.

We have filled our lives with garbage and the irrelevant in order to fill the void of the irrelevant, when really the time-honored solutions — culture, myths, legends, demons, natural order, sprites, kings, spirits, wraiths, honor, pride, heritage, and tribalism — provide the meaning we need.

In our scientific search for objective truth, we found that not only was it not very clear, but it might not exist. Like esoteric entangled particles, we attract that which is relevant to us, and it varies with the individual. Some are born to be kings, some to be slaves, especially wage-slaves with iPhones.

Now we are drowning in a sea of objects that as Marie Kondo might put it, do not “spark joy.” They are obligations to others, obligations to illusions, obligations to precedent, and most of all, time-fillers to keep us from seeing the vast emptiness expanding toward us from below.

This leads to certain neurotic modern habits like Swedish Death Cleaning, which is not as much fun as Swedish death metal:

Swedish death cleaning is a well-known concept in Swedish and Scandinavian culture, where you work on eliminating unnecessary items from your home, so loved ones won’t be burdened with the task after you pass.

The thorough organizing method involves editing everything from furniture and clothing to the ever-growing piles of documents that’s been difficult to control over time.

However, death like night is required for life like day, because with the compression of our time into a finite state, we are forced to choose between one thing or another. A person with infinite life might be found dozing at the center of a dusty mound of gadgets, books, toys, papers, and empty tins of Spam.

Sometimes, one wants to take the Kondo-Döstädning approach to the record collection. Toss out the mediocre, leave the good, and learn from that. Even more: exist in a state of beauty, even if the glimmering moments of possibility and power are fading into the darkness.

Even more, one wonders what life would be like if we pursued the best life as Plato encourages, and by doing so, dropped everything which was not relevant to the process of adapting, maturing, thriving, and discovering the universe through the intuition within ourselves?

When I look at the record collection, some things stand out. Early Slayer, Massacra, and Sepultura will always bring a resonant sound of clarity and potential to whatever space surrounds me, just like Ildjarn is perfect for rainy days and Suffocation for long road trips.

How well does the review queue stack up? One does not ask that it replicates these things, or even that it is as eternal as they are, only that it takes the same approach: discovering life through exploration of spirit, as all good art does, uniting reality and soul by linking creativity and analysis.

Most music veers off into psotmodernism instead. This is music about being in a band, or being of a genre, or even just being cool at the local hipster pub so that when you swill a nine-dollar IPA, you can be sure that people know you as the NPC with the cool band, not just any NPC.

Metal inspires people because it lets us take all the dark of the world and sculpt it into something that could be if not Light and Utopia, at the very least natural and real, therefore empowering, and therefore full of potential.

A brief moment should be observed for Hoek’s Death Metal Pizza:

Under the same name, the food truck opened within the food trailer park at 1606 East 6th Street earlier this month.

Presumably, the same menu of simple pizza slices and pies will be available — cheese, pepperoni, or a combination of the two — as well as the same fondness for metal music. When the brick-and-mortar existed, the food truck had been used for events.

We live, breathe, and even eat by metal music. Some die by it. I know all you Republicans and the antiwar hippies will not like this one, but it is interesting, so we should check out the Volodymyr Zelenskyy Death2Russia playlist:

Asked what music he favors, Zelensky said: “I like AC/DC and Ukrainian music. Of course, I like Ukrainian music a lot because Ukrainian, that’s native language. That’s why you understand not only music, you understand words and etc.”

The 45-year-old former comedian-turned-president sheepishly admitted that while he did not “understand all the words” in AC/DC’s songs, he liked “the energy” in the Australian rock band’s hits.

Even native speakers have trouble figuring out what either of the AC/DC vocalists were singing. Perhaps it is good music for escapism in between drone attacks, minefield injuries, cluster munition fireworks, and artillery barrages.

Music draws us to it, which in an esoteric sense everything in life does, but this takes on a new dimension when we consider the power of choosing what music to put on, instead of letting the MP3 player cycle to the next album:

Under the great algorithm in the sky, our choices are shaped and directed by artificial intelligence and mathematical calculation. This is particularly true with music today, as platforms, playlists and channels push derivations of each other, as if part of a single musical family tree. That’s in stark contrast to the more human ‘90s approach that did not have these tools.

My collection provides a tangible and tactile reminder of this more analog time — even in a digital format — when purchases were driven more from word-of-mouth, life experiences, cover art and sometimes simply throwing a dart and seeing where it landed. The result was music I pulled toward me, not that was pushed on me. With the pull comes a closer connection and greater meaning, enriching a listening session with more soul than the algorithm can ever provide.

Fungible music fills our players now. We never listen deeply because the flood is too much, so instead we pick up on surface traits and listen with half an ear as we work, work out, watch television, troll and shitpost social media, shop, flirt, and bury our dead.

In other news, the National Library of Norway has a black metal exhibit designed to try yet again to figure out what it all meant:

Norwegian black metal explores the dark side of human beings and nature, and is thoroughly uncomfortable. If you dare to approach the discomfort, it may have something to offer each and every one of us.

Today, the unique sound of Norwegian black metal is famous all over the world. From its humble beginnings in childhood bedrooms all over rural towns of Norway, as a voice of opposition to safety and establishment, black metal has grown into a worldwide, close-knit counterculture.

Black metal embraced the darkness instead of trying to manage it, deny it, or destroy it. It embraced the beast in humankind, the link between love and murder, and the need for natural selection to thin the herd. It is everything society feared, so they turned it into a product with post-metal.

Tags: marie kondo, Norwegian Black Metal, smr, swedish death cleaning