Back in 1992 or so, Suffocation was the hot commodity and pretty much everyone in the death metal community wanted more of that sound. Ironically, it borrowed as much from Bay Area speed metal as death metal, using the percussive muted strum in ways faster than Exodus or Metallica could have imagined.
Explore those turbulent days with the re-issue of the Pyrexia demo “Liturgy of Impurity” as Liturgy of Impurity, a new ten inch vinyl from Ten Inches of Deathcult, a subsidiary label of Xtreem Music. As the label says:
Track list:
– side A –
1. Abominat
2. Demigod
– side B –
1. Liturgy of Impurity
2. Infernal AscensionDescription:
Official re-issue on 10″ vinyl, only available through the Xtreem Music mailorder, of the Demo ’92 “Liturgy of Impurity” by this legendary New York band that, together with SUFFOCATION & INTERNAL BLEEDING, are the main exponents of that scene. The insert includes lyrics, original demo cover, photos, flyers, show posters… and a 4-page booklet in A5 size with an interview from ’92.
Vinyl is limited to:
– 100 Orange wax with black splatter
– 100 Clear wax with orange splatter
– 100 Classic black wax
Tags: death metal, Pyrexia
I’m willing to be the man on an island here: I never really felt Suffocation. I won’t argue that Effigy of the Forgotten and Pierced from Within weren’t great albums (from a technical perspective), but they didn’t resonate with me like Onward to Golgotha or even Failures for Gods did. All of these albums are the same style of death metal, yet so different in the spirit they convey. Not taking anything away from Suffocation and their contribution to this genre; just stating that for me, they’re not on the same tier as Immolation and Incantation.
That’s because Suffocation sucks production wise, the Human Waste EP rips your ass in half with it’s rawness and then you have the dull, clicky, lifeless sound of Effigy. You can feel your skull crushing when you hear first Incantation or Immolation, but with albums like Effigy no matter how far you push your speakers it always feels empty. Production really matters, I look those Morrisound-style albums like great educational pieces in several ways, but in terms of feel the don’t have anything to offer.
I partially agree with you. While the sound is an aspect which plays a part in the experience, there is more to it than that. Some of my favorite albums have subpar production and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Case in point, compare the studio version of Napalm Death’s Scum to the unvarnished rough mix available on the fdr CD released by Earache. The rough mix is leaps and bounds better due to the fact that it channels the feral atavistic qualities of the band more effectively than the polished studio release did. When I listen to music, I take Schopenhauer’s approach: I’m more interested in what the music makes me feel rather than how it sounds. This is an important distinction. You’re correct in your criticism of Morrisound recordings; some of them did have a tinny din that could be somewhat grating. That being said, the energy transmitted on some of those recordings was nothing short of divine. I still get chills when I think about the first time I listened to the first two Atheist albums and the first two Deicide albums. They were not only sonic juggernauts, they were aural masterpieces that tapped the infinite. In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to state that the fact that I’m a Floridian has no bearing on my opinion. I would feel the same way if I was from Iowa or North Dakota. Real art transcends geography and stands the test of time.
I, too, prefer communicated nerve impulses over surface aesthetic.
If production values are only surface aesthetics then why bother writting about it on the DLA? CYFAWS got recognition not only for its unpretentious frontal assault but also because it sounds like an unbearable storm of razor wires. You can make the same record with different production, but matching the spirit with the right output is the way you become an undeniable force.
The relationship between composition and aesthetics is like that between IQ and education: a good education can make the most of a high IQ, but without that high IQ, all the education in the world will do nothing.
I haven’t listened to CYFAWS in a decade. It is strongly personalitied, but ultimately, I just went with Massacra.
I Totally agree, all the surface & no substance breeds cancerous acts like Deathspell Omega.
Can we talk Deathspell Omega for a second? I haven’t messed with them much, so I just brought up “Si Monuvmentvm Requiris Circumspice” or whatever the other day. I’m aware that many people were fawning over “OMG they have Russian Orthodox Chants, they have a ‘prayer’ opening each side of the LP, they’ve done ONE interview, they worship ACTUAL Satan, etc!” so I’ve homed in on a more standard song: ‘Sola Fide I’. It reminds me of Mayhem ‘DMDS’ and then Immortal ‘Pure Holocausts’. It seems pretty good, intriguing me enough to go back to a few times.
Am I retarded?
yes brother you are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAZomFRhKLk
Let’s listen.
The Brett review method involves giving things a listen until they would normally be boring.
The real question is, does the song go anywhere?
Satyricon, for example, has all of the elements of good black metal (including longer melodies, like Ancient) but never manages to bring things to conflict and conclusion.
Now that you mention it, “Si Monvmentvm Reqvires, Circvmspice” sounds a lot like “Nemesis Divina” taken to the highest level of pretentious nonsense, even Satyr vocals on ND are vastly superior to the 101 generic diarrhea vociferated by that fucker from DSO.
Art rock tends to be this way: good on idea, but never translates it from aesthetic to substance.
We could say the same about most post-modern novels… contrast “White Noise” to “Cloud Atlas” for a stir.
I liked the idea of Satyricon, but thought the music incomplete. Solid thinkers though.
Surface aesthetic is fleeting; it’s the initial draw, but it doesn’t hold you. Great music transcends the superficial by connecting listeners to the eternal. When you hear music that resonates with you, an immersion occurs that goes beyond the limitations of language. You’re receiving impulses that draw on the primal self; the part of us that predates our ability to speak or write. I truly believe that you don’t choose the music you love, it chooses you. As a determinist, this makes perfect sense to me. There is a reason why at age 41 I dress like I did at 16 and listen to the music I did back then: I’m a hesher. REAL heshers never stop being heshers. Once you start the ride, you’re on it to the grave.
I agree. Amplifying: connects you to attributes of reality and makes them beautiful.
I mean, being in a war probably has a duality: it is both thrilling and negative (terrifying, uncomfortable, horrifying, flatulent).
Then Beethoven comes along and writes “Eroica” or Bathory does “Hammerheart.” Well, fjuck — they unified those experiences. Suddenly the horror and thrill make sensese as two sides to a singular experience that is both aesthetic and real, reflected directly in nerve impulses as Schopenhauer says. That is transcendence, and that is the purpose of art.
I think that’s a very important point: if it was true to you once, you either reject it as a lie, find a better expression of it, or continue with it.
However, we should apply our aesthetics rule to it: it doesn’t matter what you look like, you must uphold the metal spirit… the metal philosophy… the metal outlook.
Metal is like conservatism, a folkway, but it is invisible, or detached mostly from aesthetics. Heshers live by what is both real and great, epic, momentous, interesting, exciting… it fuses the hedonic and realistic at a cerebral level.
You can be a hesher as a short-haired nerd wearing suits, but you have to live it, not use it to adorn your life so you look cool to your friends. That to me is the death of metal… it is poseurdom, and if the metal philosophy has an inverted Satan, it is the poseur, or anyone who uses image to manipulate the effects of substance.
https://darklegionsarchive.neocities.org/metal/about/metal/assimilation/
It always amazes me when people use “assimilation” in a positive way, when it basically means phage behavior.
I would like to state for the record that I detest the reply format of this message board. It would be VASTLY improved by adopting the Amerika site format. There are many great points in your reply that my reply will address (albeit in a clunky manner due to the limitations of the aforementioned reply format). Criticism aside, I really dug how you compared the duality of war to music. I would have used Wagner’s Gotterdammerung and Enslaved’s Vikinglir Veldi rather than Beethoven or Bathory, but I know EXACTLY what you mean. In these works, horror and thrill are writ LARGE. You have the struggle of life manifested in war and conquest juxtaposing the sweetness of life/victory bridged by participating in the former to achieve cathartic release in the latter. Intoxicating stuff! Great black/death metal leaves you a little exhausted after you listen to it; this is because you can’t passively take it in. It requires the listener to actively engage it and take a journey beyond the corporeal realm. Your physical senses are used as a conduit to transcend the very world they are grounded in. Similar to how my Celt-Iberian forebears wielded a Gladius or Vikings wielded an ax as an instrument to vanquish their foes and ascend to victory as well as immortality through remembrance in our genes.
You’re correct that metal must be lived and not relegated to mere sartorial poseurdom. This being stated, there are a few issues that must be discussed:
1. As Hessians, we are soldiers in the Hessian army. Soldiers wear uniforms. As with everything in life, there is a time and place for everything. I’m not suggesting you go to a board meeting or wedding in camo cargo shorts and a Morbid Angel T-shirt, but if you don’t own ANY band shirts, I consider you suspect. We have protocols and violations of these protocols can be construed as treason.
2. I myself have short hair and don’t perceive it as contrary to the Hessian aesthetic. Ihsahn, Trym, Varg, Maciej “Capricornus” Dąbrowski, Ildjarn, Hendrik Mobus, Christofer Johnsson, Piotr Wawrzeniuk, Robert Vigna, and Frank Mullen all had or have short hair. No one can convincingly claim that any of them are poseurs.
3. Substance ALWAYS trumps aesthetics. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. To say that how we present ourselves has no bearing to what we purport to be, well, that flirts with sophistry of the poseur variety.
PS On a personal note, I want to thank you for creating this website. Sometimes I struggle to articulate what I feel after hearing certain works. It’s cool that I can come here, read what you write and use it to align my thoughts and feelings. Not to mention the wealth of music that I have discovered reading your posts and reviews. Your commitment to metal is not lost on me.
Disqus? It’s probably an overdue change.
It’s something that I saw also captured in a William Langesweiche article and Apocalypse Now: people dig warfare, the challenge and being tested. It’s intense in a way that nothing else seems to be. It is also terrifying. Coincidentally, so is life: to be mortal and yet to have choices that define us.
I agree. All good music is this way. The subtlest form is Baroque music, which seems less engaging but subtly reworks the brain. A good morning of Locatelli and Bach can set someone to right for days.
To my mind, these are mostly mental, but I take your point. Someone asked me why I was always wearing a green shirt at one function, and I said, “It’s my uniform and the symbolism is sort of obvious.”
Thank you for reading and coming to visit. Someone once said, “Write about what you fear,” and to that I added, “write about what you love as well.” It’s hard to deny the joy and terror of metal music.
The willingness to outsource conmments to some 3rd party is DEEPLY disturbing.
(This prostrate has been marked as spam)
I have a knuckle ring for marking prostates.
From one fisting enthusiast to another, its always good to practice on thyself.
It depends on what your standard for “bad production” is, I believe the production of an album should reflect the content. Brutal music digitally processed doesn’t make sense to me. That said, I have a “tolerance meter”, some records are perfect, others could have a more representative production, and others only serve me for educational purposes. Some times things go the other way around, look at Covenant by MA, Sandoval drums never sounded better but that record lacks the spirit and compositional madness from its predecessors.
We agree. His point was that a somewhat shit production brings out the essence of hardcore-derived music, including black metal, and I tend to agree.
Production can make something good more intense, but it cannot compensate for the lack of “good.”
In fact, there is a trap there. Listen to d00fus music with great production (Lja, Slipknot, Opeth, Pantera, Gojira, Mastodon, Motley Crue) and you will program your brain with stupidity just because you like the production.
As bands go on, they have less time to focus on thinking about the release, and spend more time doing it.
Sort of like how there was a filter on rock ‘n roll similar to that on Nigerian immigrants… at first, the market was small so only the good succeeded… as the market bloated out, you got the dumpster smorgasbord of 70s rock, then punk pushed back against that, but doing so only made the bar lower, so then you got a brief counter-reaction under Reagan (ironically, the best of 80s music even if Leftist in belief is conservative in approach) before everything went into the toilet in the 1990s with grunge (warmed-over punk and heavy metal riffs, basically: the anti-punk, while appearing punk) and hip-hop.
Now music is like a turd from an insane person with a recent head injury… just not shaped right. The audience cannot tell, so the machine marches on.
I can’t express how many releases slide across my desk and I’m like, “Really? This is just obvious garbage.” But when you have enough morons spending their JCSA stimulus checks, they’ll buy anything, forget about it a week later, and rationalize the purchase as “well it was fun for a time but I didn’t care anyway.”
Under aristocrats, you have people who hold up the few good works and consign the rest to the dumpster. That’s how we got Mozart and Bach. Democracy brought us Kanye and Linkin Park.
Maybe an obvious example, but the first thing that comes to mind as far as material that would’ve sounded ridiculous with good production is Necrovore.
Works as well as the example of early Napalm Death. Production that enhances the musical experience works out well; doing a Yes album with the same production would have had bad effects. But some things should sound necrotic and evil…
I don‘t even mind the production of Folkloric Necro Metal.
Effigy is one of those albums that doesn’t seem to work on half the equipment it is played on. Took me years to discover the guitar lines within the songs, but much appreciated when they were.
Agreed. Some albums back in the day were mastered for jam boxes / boom boxes, which concentrate sound naturally in a way that a better stereo will not. Others go the opposite way. In the Nightside Eclipse was incomprehensible on one of my stereos; you could not hear chord changes, just a wash of swelling sound with keyboards and drums wailing away in the background. Still sounded pretty cool.
It’s interesting how cover art usually matches the quality of an album, although one occasion where that didn’t pan out was Breeding The Spawn. It ended my Suffocation purchases, but it’s still a worthy listen at least compared to the crowd pleasers of today.
Another hasty album. The band has said it was effectively unfinished but they had to fire it out the door. Too much time spent touring, dealing with labels, partying, managing girlfriends, getting evicted, etc.
Look at 2nd Monstrosity cover art, it’s laughable but the music is monumental. It’s funny, I know the cover on that one is shitty but I like it, I have a soft spot for old school primitive digital art, actually I find it even more pleasent than modern day digital art.
I’m in the same boat regarding Suffocation… I don’t think they moved far enough away from speed metal unlike their contemporaries