Mixing together the sounds of Incantation, Demigod, and melodic Swedish bands like early Unanimated, Concilivm create a thundering atmosphere of descent with a strong forward energy and songs where the riffs relate to each other and a theme, developing slowly in rolling conflicts.
While this might seem uptempo of Desecresy and Bolt Thrower, A Monument in Darkness nevertheless employs the same clash of textures over a trudging beat that produces a cavernous doom metal sound within a death metal context while keeping a martial energy without being monotonous.
Riffs start with crashing patterns balancing each other in inverse mirror image, then rise into melodic versions of themselves, gradually becoming what was always nascent in them as they twist and mutate for a final revelation, keeping the classic death metal intensity high all the way.
Tags: concilivm, death metal
I hear some riffs stolen from Cianide. For example, at 1:23.
Quite possible. Then again, I do not mind stolen riffs if they are repurposed in a productive way…
Good point. Borrowing from (and also celebrating?) key influences while figuring out how to build off that source material is a lost art.
80s Slayer always comes to mind as a prime example when this concept comes up.
Two paths branched out of hardcore: stuff like The Exploited, and stuff like Discharge.
The Exploited chose violent rhythm riffing with a percussive root, while Discharge preferred drone tremolo.
Slayer picked up on both, choosing the Discharge approach and offloading the Exploited into the vocals.
Then they seized on the last generation of successful metal — Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Judas Priest, Angel Witch — and synthesized that with the new style.
That was the 60% of what they did; the remaining 40% was homegrown insight into what metal was — epic power worship, mythology, agnosia through sound, rejection of good/evil in favor of underlying stochastic infrastructure — and channeling it through sheer gumption.
Underground metal was great because for a few short years, Generation X and near cohorts decided to take one thing seriously in life and slack off the rest.
Interesting take on that. I’ll have to re-listen to some hardcore with that perspective in mind. The only addition I would add is Motorhead.
I’ve gotten by just fine over the years simply enjoying their greatest hits releases here and there, but there’s no mistaking that they clearly had a massive impact on what blossomed into full-fledged speed, thrash and black metal. (I’m admittedly not sure where the apex of death metal fits in…)
I can imagine Lemmy being told who he influenced. After a long drag of a cigarette and in a wheezy, tobacco-cured but unmistakably friendly voice: “Heh, well isn’t that something. I guess as long as they’re landing tour dates and getting the crowd up and moving who the fuck cares what their influences were?” *Takes another drag from the cigarette and looks away with watery whisky eyes*
Motorhead was a huge influence on hardcore, just like the Stooges and a bunch of 60s and 70s noisy bands. They wanted to get out of the blues-rock format however, and were partially successful.
Hey Brett, what do you think about Kauan – Lumikuuro?
Will give it a look-see.
Brett, a while back you replied to a comment I made about Spheres and wrote the following:”It was clear back in 1993 that metal had reached its ultimate evolution in death/black, and that the future involved dropping the vocals entirely and going to something instrumental, sort of like King Crimson or Paganini. However, this requires a compositional attention span beyond most fans and uninteresting to most bands, so the genre has stagnated.” Whenever I listen to contemporary albums like Concilivm album, I can’t help but notice how metal is spinning its wheels and producing nothing new. Worse, it seems that even the best modern bands are hyperreal impersonations of better music from 30+ years ago. Why would I listen to this shit when I can listen to the original, real version? I think that you are right about metal having reached its ultimate evolution back in the early 1990s and further progression of the genre being too much for fans to take. My question for you is whether another genre of music has by your estimate taken up the torch left by metal, or has all of Western culture stagnated to the point that no contemporary genre is capable of embodying the romantic idealism inherent to metal? I feel as if some of us are waiting for a metal revival that will never occur, and that whatever metal once stood for will only be rekindled after a major paradigm shift sweeps through the West.
I agree. It will take the revival of Western culture, currently dying under individualism, market socialism (neoliberalism), democracy, diversity, dualism, and equality. We lost our sense of purpose. Underground metal comprised a few brief years where Gen X got it together long enough to really give a damn about expressing something well, and after 1993 or so, it was basically toast. There are some good exceptions and we keep it together for them, but as I was just thinking in the car, “these aren’t Morbid Angels or Burzums.”
I agree to the general idea – what can top Burzum or Morbid Angel indeed? – but I wonder how much of this is simply informed by sentiment – age & nostalgia – rather than objective measures.
Even on the rare occasion that I do hear contemporary metal that peaks my interest compositionally, it is always ruined by god awful production as a result of the loudness wars. And no, I am not merely nostalgic for the 1980s seeing as I was born in 1992.
You don’t have to have been there to be nostalgic about it. All you need is a preference for a perceived past. In any case I don’t think you appreciate the amount of creative activity that has taken place since the inception of our beloved art form. For every release in Brett’s metal museum there are a hundred if not more from the same year that either suck or don’t suck but sound like shit. Nothing has really changed.
It seems to me that in the past, the highs were higher and there were more good releases relative to bad. Since 1994 or so, almost everything has been bad, and the “good” are rarely even as good as the fourth Morbid Angel album. Stuff we would have thrown out and forgotten in 1987-1993 is basically considered pretty amazing these days.
Metal without vocals completely sucks and no amount of prog will improve it.
There is no evolution remaining. It has fully matured. I would argue that this is the case for all art given our current level of technological development. When was the last time you heard a symphony more interesting than anything created at least 200 years ago?
Every day, I listen to new shit, and old shit that never got any attention, but it is worth hearing once or twice. Then I let it go forever. Occasionally I find something worth holding onto. Same now as it ever was.
The point has always been to be an outlet. A way of life. And then you die.
I was about to suggest the same thing. Black metal was the final piece. Now, while people can work within the old styles, there is very little innovation genre-wise and so the creative impetus has ebbed. I think any future innovations will be toward prog or electronic but they will be less “metal” (at least aesthetically) than what has come before. I also don’t see the fire really burning in that area currently. That being said, I’m gonna go do the bellend bop.
I don’t agree. From a thirty thousand foot view, all of underground metal is a variant on what Discharge did, and that is more of a technique (tremolo strum replaces vocals as lead rhythm instrument) than anything else. There is plenty of room here to innovate; the problem is that a huge audience grew up around the underground, and it rewards idiotenmusik like Opeth, Tool, Pantera, Disturbed, Rage Against the Machint, Obscura, Gojira, Krallice, droning Slavic “black metal,” Cradle of Filth, Cannibal Corpse, Deafhaven, Ms. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, etc.
The problem is the audience.
Everything is a market.
What does the metal market reward? Tool music for Plebbitors and other Fedoras who want to feel deep and meaningful before they give in and go off to work eighty hours a week as SharePoint administrators.
What did the underground reward? Active, sensitive, aggressive, and realistic people.
That sort of person is not wanted in the new metal industry that sprang up after black metal got popular in the mid-1990s.
Did the genre shoot its wad? Yes. Black metal did not exist meaningfully until the first Immortal demo, and died out with the third Burzum album.
That’s a bigger problem, in my view. It has said what it came to say. We need to find something new to say. I have written it, but it will take another dozen years for people to start wrapping their heads around it.
https://www.o9a.org/2022/03/metapromotheanism/
I’m not saying there’s no room for creativity, just that you’re not going to see the kind of rapid development that occured from 1983-1993 which cemented the basics of the form. Like how jazz started turning into weird prog and ambient music after the 60’s so as to be totally distinct from bop and free jazz, yet people continue to make interesting music in that (bop/free) vein while fusion as a listening experience is largely a niche left to nerds and neophytes.
You’re right that the key ingredient in great metal is the attitude, and yes, since metal has gone mainstream this attitude is harder to find when you’re sifting through new releases. But the underground still exists. You’re just not going to find it sitting in your gaming chair.
I disagree.
I have heard this for years, probably from people who realize how much they are belittling my work. I have pursued all of the bands that they recommend. Hint: they all suck. Even the exceptions do not make it past the Morbid Angel Domination test.
What does this tell us?
No musician is coming into a dead genre to try to get noticed. He will be unnoticed, like how myself and a few others write the best conservative analysis on the net, but it gets overlooked because someone else is telling people that there is an easier, more convenient answer.
Your comment is in fact the armchair lazy view: “you just haven’t looked hard enough.”
Form is not content. Some bands, like Sammath and Desecresy, are still making top notch content without changing form.
My thesis explains this: the audience rewards mediocre crap, so most of the good musicians stayed away.
Listen to how you affirm my thesis here: the bop and free jazz audience got overwhelmed by hipsters and other mediocrities, so people left for other genres.
Those genres in turn collapsed as the audience followed.
I do not think it is attitude, but spirit, a way of viewing the world.
Keep posting that mediocre “true underground” so I can shit all over it :)
I am not trying to belittle your work. I really appreciate your dedication and the resulting library of releases that really is all one needs if they just want excellent metal to listen to. But that scene you grew up on is gone. I’m not saying that ‘true underground’ is all great stuff but just like in the old days, there are creative and intelligent people out there who don’t care about fame and just want to express themselves, and do their part in creating a way of life with other people that doesn’t fucking suck. My point is that the world gets much larger when you get away from your computer. I can only speak from personal experiences entailing travelling from squat to squat, show to show. People in that environment tend to at least be honest. It’s not about looking harder, it’s about making a choice to live by an ATTITUDE that honestly reflects your SPIRIT and embracing the journey that it takes you on. You will hear things on the way and grow attachments to those things that no one else has. Why would I post them online for you to shit on them? Sometimes I do want to share something I care about with others, and this usually happens in the third dimension. But I couldn’t care less what you or anyone else thinks about my personal taste in anything. That whole trip is for people with nothing to do. People are drawn to this site because they care about heavy music, and I’m drawn to those people, and I want to let them know that there’s more to it than bitching on the internet about the decline of western civilization.
This trope again? Lots of people have said this over the years, and then when probed for these “true underground” releases, have listed a bunch of stuff that’s about as good as anything else.
Since everything is net-accessible now, and most people are using phones, the trope has even agaed badly.
You have nothing, confirmed.
That’s your hipster cover story. “I’m enlightened, unlike the rest of you mongs worshiping the past, haha.”
Doesn’t work around here. You are drawn here because you want to tear down the higher and replace it with more shitmusik of people of your caliber.
Dissimulation by recombination. It stole the hearts of Williamsburg, I am sure.
Great. Who?
You sure do make a lot of assumptions. I’m not trying to tear down anything, in fact I agree with you about the classics and I think that it’s an admirable thing to strive for the quality of expression and composition contained in them. I already aknowledged the quality of your analysis there as well as that of the new material that gains enough popularity to reach your ears, and all but flat out explained that I’m emphasizing the importance of the subjective experience of internalizing this music and making other valuable connections to the wider world as a result of that process. Yes, it is the social aspect of this music that I speak of, but it’s important, because completely alienated people are ineffective and unhappy. No man is an island, I’m sure you would agree. Yeah, your snarky canned responses attacking my character really come off as an appropriate and thoughtful rebuttal to my simple assertion that there’s more to this metal thing than endless criticism of the world that you don’t have a choice about inheriting, and I didn’t even say that the criticism is unfounded or useless. But there are other things you can do, like getting off your computer and getting involved with like-minded people. Some people need to hear that, particularly if they are very young, because if you were to judge from the content of this site, you’d think there’s nothing left to do downtown if you’re not driving to the tobacco shop so why not just get a job behind the wheel of an amazon van so you can at least listen to good music all day and just thank your lucky stars you weren’t born in Somalia. I know that’s not your intention but the overarching message reeks of cynicism, and that’s bullshit, and so is the pissing contest you’re trying to rope me into. Truly I have better things to do than watch my attempts to impart some hard won wisdom and perhaps discuss things with other readers be smothered into a TLDR by your angsty shitlording.
This is a cope trope. It has no actual meaning, but serves as a placeholder in conversation. It is not “wisdom.” It is hipster jive.
The answer is to keep standards high and stop lying and suggesting that “somewhere out there in the real world man, not the armchair, but I won’t mention the names” is good death metal.
Music wants to be heard. Right now, we are hearing the bad. The sooner you and the rest man up and face this, the sooner it can be acted upon.
Somalia is not nearly as bad as the GAE wants you to think, dont trust the media lies
Maybe you should just read a book or something, idk just felt like posting this.
I love a good book. Unfortunately most of them are not good. It is a parallel to metal at this point. Literature has kind of shat the bed. And no, I didn’t like Cormac McCarthy.
What genre did the great metal musicians flee to? Where are they now? If I’m understanding your thesis correctly, there should always be a musical vanguard that hasn’t yet been discovered by the masses. Where does the Geist currently reside?
I think most of them just quit music altogether, a bunch went into classical, and some adapted to other genres like country and jazz. Just like most of the classic underground had other skills, I think the talented fled to other types of expression. The same seems true of mainstream pop. 1996 was in theory the peak of the music industry, and it seems to me that since that time, the generic worldpop sound — 40s jazz, 50s rock, hip hop, motown, Euro-disco, and Japanese video game music mixed — has taken over and everything sounds roughly the same and has literal internal textural variation to convey anything. My guess is that for kids growing up now, music is like TV was in the 1980s: something to stay current with for social purposes, not an inspiration surely.
It all became a semi-liquid, half-digested mush for easy consumption.
Good point: it’s baby food. Gerber’s Underground Metull.
Combing through the growing mountain of new releases is definitely tricky and time consuming. Luckily PBS Newshour has a fearless correspondent who gets right in there and finds answers and insight we’re all looking for. Here she is reporting from a listening party celebrating the launch of Opeth’s latest album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKaYyl2Uraw&t
So there you have it: coverage of these new releases is still articulate and thriving. You just have to know where to look…and remember to bring goggles.
With the wisdom of experience, I now see people over age 25 who are single and looking for boyfriends/girlfriends as really missing the point. You are either aiming for marriage, or just wasting time waiting for your disorganized life to fall apart. This girl reminds me of so many people I have worked with, women and men, who are constantly finding new girlfriends/boyfriends but never having lives, just a series of disconnected experiences. Reminds me of the review queue. Same scattered, egotistical mindset.
Thanks Brett, I think you are right. I learned the other day that this generic Gerber mush you describe now has a name: “City Pop.” Fuck that shit.
Anyway, I appreciate what you’ve done with this site. It’s been an invaluable resource to me, as I’m sure it has been to other metalheads who never lived through the golden era. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for appreciating what I and others do here. “City Pop,” eh? Like we needed more reasons to hate cities.
I thought it described adult contemporary muzak with a tab of carnival and pachinko arcade afterglow.
I think your “thirty-thousand food view” is overly reductionist and I disagree about the genre having plenty of room (while I wouldn’t say none) to innovate but I’d heartily welcome being proven wrong. In fact I’m glad you agree that the genre shot its wad and I look forward to the coming reinvigoration of metal via your verbal Viagra.
Seriously, though: whether the genre has room to innovate or not, the creative impetus has largely been lost. Maybe not individually, but I don’t see a collective push toward greater heights like (name a scene before the turn of the century) happening and it’s been awhile. Music overall has become even more of a lifestyle accessory and obviously this is indicative of more fundamental problems with Western culture in general, so I do not see the phoenix rising from the ashes anytime soon. I see “real” metal continuing to exist as popular music for decades until some other form of art comes along and it ignominiously dies off, while concurrently continuing to have its aesthetics assimilated into the interchangeable mass of shit that is popular garbage as the diehards in the underground continue to make niche stuff for an older crowd that, while devoted, becomes smaller and smaller as time goes on.
Again, I’d love to see myself proven wrong, though.
Mostly because it expressed itself, but then the market needed many rehashes so all of the Hot Topic and Spotify kids could catch up. At that point also, hip hop had become part of the normal music landscape, where previously no one with an IQ over 70 embraced it unironically.
What we need now is for the fake audience to fade away because no one is going to bother writing Burzum class material for a bunch of clowns who want later Dimmu Borgir.
Form is not content. There is plenty of room to innovate in classical, for example, even within form. And yet no one does it; why? It turns out that having to cater to a prole audience instead of a few grant-writing aristocrats kills quality dead.
Same is true in metal. Jazz got popular, jazz died. Rock got popular, rock died. Did they run out of combinations of notes? No, they ran out of rewards.
No musician wants to be unheard. With metal now, good music is unheard and directionless crap gets praised because it sounds like Incantation, Fugazi, and My Bloody Valentine had a lovechild.
I have used all my power and I have seen the future:
Brett wins $800 million in cash. The money funds the famous Sadistic Awards (nicknamed the Bretties), where Brett constitutes the jury.
The prestigious awards motivate the artists of the metal genre to push its songwriting to unprecedented profundity. Metal music matures and becomes a highly esteemed genre, the go-to subject of music theorists and intellectuals everywhere. Classical musicians seek its guidance.
As a consequence, Western civilization is jumpstarted. Philosopher kings are installed. The weak and stupid are sodomized and ground to fertilizer, enabling the growth of lush forests where were once urban heat islands. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Russians – even the Irish – venerate the Western world and follow its example, decimating these populations considerably.
Humanity ultimately prevents ecocide, evolves into a higher species and explores the universe. Bell Curve Day is celebrated biweekly.
It’s less improbable than democracy, equality, and pluralism turning into Utopia.
By the way of stealing, when will there be a section of the clone Band?
Hell-o Thulcandra jajaja
If this thread has taught me anything it’s to look out for the upcoming release of Opeth’s “Bukkake Night” LP.
Mikael Åkerfeld’s lips have been sealed shut and crusted over ever since the pre-release listening session blew up in everyone’s faces and orifices, but based on the review above it can be assumed that the track list is roughly as follows:
1. Going in a Bukkake Girl (Intro)
2. Walking into D Soup
3. Apparently Women Bring Goggles (instrumental)
4. …So They Can Get Sprayed with Men’s Juices
5. Friends with Benefits (feat. Dan Swanö)
6. The Guy Like, Liked to Worship My Ass
7. Come to my Window (Melissa Etheridge cover)
8. Apparently I squirted in the Middle of the Club
9. I left a Bukkake Woman (outro)
04:09:50
Planned Parenthood and SI China Manufacturing CO. have already partnered with them to take on pre-orders. Can’t wait!
Wow this looks like Opeths longest and most explosive release yet!
stained connective tissue, eventually picking the shards of bone out of the mottled flesh, which still hadn’t yet begun to wilt. I could see the old tattoo under it all.
He stood in the window a moment, his hairy back turned to me, softly knocking his unlit pipe against his teeth. Finally he turned, blankly registered my broken body where he had a mere hours previous made passionate love to his wife. My breath came in hot and shallow. The pain was indescribable. I wouldn’t be caught listening to Slugathor twice in one day again anytime soon…not until I was ready, anyway.
You have talent kid, you and me together could make a lot of money