It does not matter what I write here because people no longer read articles. They read headlines and summaries, then skim for embedded media. Television finally took over through the computer. As usual, the voters/consumers are their own worst enemy, choosing the dumbest format they can find.

People in groups avoid known fears and ignore any chance of achieving adventure, mystery, growth, or holistic order because these things take effort and involve risk. Consequently they like little bite-sized pieces of reality dumbed down into cartoons and religious symbolism.

It is kind of funny that we are in 2024 and people still talk about “good” and “evil” in politics and society. Crime is not evil; it is the consequence of short-sighted narcissistic people doing what they are wired to do. Insanity is not evil; it is a machine breaking down. And so on.

You hear a lot about relativity from the safe-edgy set on the public internet. Is truth relative, or is it objective, absolute, and universal? As a nihilist I decline to accept the latter, of course, since it is an unfounded assumption based in (narcissistic, you fucken monkeys) human projection.

In my view, claiming that “truth” exists is to claim that it is objective, absolute, and universal when none of those things are true. We are fooled by the consistent attribute of reality which is that the observer is relative to the object, which means degrees of observation differ.

For too long, religions like science, middle eastern organized faiths, and egalitarianism have preached to us the One Truth that is supposed to unite us all, when really it is mere manipulation. One person wants to demoralize and control others, so he invents the One Truth.

We can see relativity in everyday life. For example, the challenge in metal is to separate material that is good relative to the nowadays norm from material that meets the standards of metal 1989-1994. We have lots of new favorites with “revolutionary” and “transcendent” in the bios, but no new classics.

No one wants to say it, but popular music is played out. It has no reason to exist except celebrity itself. No one trusts the ideological or religious stuff anyway, but even smarmy hipster life observations fall flat these days because they are a known and time-debunked quantity.

The time in which we live is socially-driven because we have given up on making things work in reality; in a decaying society, you are either a dissident who is ignored or a rationalizer who finds new ways to explain decay as victory to a raving herd.

Consider the latest trend in fiction, “dialogue-based narrative.” In this, books are basically conversations punctuated with Hemingway-style description of events. This is literature falling to a new low, but you get popular by explaining it as revolutionary, stunning/brave, and transcendent.

In these books and movies, every event is a committee meeting. You could do the whole story over Zoom. Characters meet, confront an obstacle, discuss it, and then agree like good comrade-voters on a course of action, which triggers the next conversation. It is not just boring but unrepresentative of reality.

Metalcore seems to be the same way, and now it has taken over the rest of metal, since the new audience is primed only for more of the revolutionary transcendent same. Metalcore, like late hardcore, gives up on making good hardcore and throws in lots of random influences to distract from the droning tedium.

Social media and metal: it is all vanity projects, all the way down. The normies wanted to be edgy and then hammered “edgy” into brain-dead conformity. The future belongs to those who make something better, which requires accepting reality and inventing an actual path to reality, sanity, beauty, and excellence while everyone else is self-expressing on Bluesky.

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Burning Creation – Sea of Dead Bodies: bog-standard deathcore which uses melodies from the emo-tinged side of power metal and alternative rock, this band is a death metal shaped object that despite getting past the worst sin of our time — “first draft metal” where bands put together riffs until they have the right minute count, then cut tape despite the parts having no meaningful relationship to each other — still manages to deliver absolutely nothing millions have not before; one must ask, “why bother?”

Terror – Hymni Belli Occultum: really basic riffs built around catchy pop rhythms bouncing constantly at a near-steady rate of speed with little riff shaping, the bulk of this release is both easily listened to and easily forgotten because it has no relevance beyond filling the need for some kind of new war metal that is slightly less chaotic than the rest and makes for easy listening to the basement record collector nerd set.

Thulcandra – Hail the Abyss: if you could not get enough of the second Unanimated album or middle At the Gates, you will like this melodic heavy metal dressed up as a speed/death hybrid which essentially rips through familiar patterns with added chromatic fills at high rhythmic intensity but makes songs about nothing, meaning that there is posturing and imagery but the riffs relate to each other only musically and express nothing greater nor particularly stand out from the herd in musical terms.

Old Wainds – Stormheart: welcome to black metal as a job, where you have to come up with new takes on old riffs, mix in subgenres deftly, and come up with something that sonically resembles black metal — a black metal shaped object — so that people who are listening with half a brain get those old feelings again and throw feces at the screen while blaspheming the unholy blasphemies and feeling melancholy like a 4chan user watching a gril go past as he strokes to anime.

Arkaist – Aube Noire: black metal that likes to work-up to mid-paced chanting sequences where we are supposed to nod our heads and pretend we are participating in a vital genre instead of another niche market for people oblivious to quality or even relevance, here just another form of “late hardcore style” black metal that imitates the genre from outside-in, resulting in a template like a subway map that goes in random directions to hide the void within, generating more landfill in the process.

Godkiller – The End Of The World: these “omnimetal” bands that combine heavy metal, hard rock, alternative rock, progressive-ish rock, death metal, black metal, and probably disco really strike me as completely directionless, and this one at least manages to put together songs, but their weakness is being both boring and grandiose which makes them irritating like circus music.

Orra – Glimmer of Hope: every press release touts the revolution in music that the band will be, and it claims to be progressive and far-sighted, but is merely play-acting in recombinant tropes from the WASP era which do not knit together into a coherent whole, nor break any barriers except for the contrarian “well you wouldn’t expect 70s prog in a metal album” yes you vapid communal fleshlights we would because early prog was part of metal’s DNA from the beginning. Mediocre, overblown, this release is bypassable.

Blasphemous – To Lay Siege and Conquer: how cute, a power metal album disguised as “blackened death metal,” with added drum frenzy to make you think you are getting the real OG hardcore metal experience when in fact you are getting a 1984 Motley Crue tape sped up and made a bit more wandering with Destruction and At the Gates lifts to make it seem energetic when the synchronized vocals/guitars make it sound like a commercial for incontinence products.

Detention – “Welcome to School”: thankfully this new Snorre Ruch helmed project avoids trying to be black metal and focuses instead on being traditional heavy metal with more downstrokes and cadence like death metal, but a slight groove like the modern metal stuff, managing not entirely predictable chord progressions and good song development, so it will be interesting to see more from this new formulation.

Barshasketh – Antinomian Asceticism: we call it “participation metal” because it means flogging the genre conventions and generating no unique viewpoint, a type of cowardice and pretender emulation that no one who likes quality can tolerate, and this band is just blasting through the template of melodic death metal with black metal influences but going nowhere.

Nogothula – Telluric Sepsis: most normies play the “safe edgy” game by taking something that sounds extreme and making it into a docile little lap dog that will not disrupt the status quo thinking at all, which since humans always revert to a conservative liberalism of accepting everyone and having no direction, is eternally the same thing, and this deathcore band mixed metalcore influences with some old-school citations in a purposeless stew of neurosis and imitation.

Violentor – Burn In Metal: transitional metal somewhere between punk and speed metal, this has many of the old-school tropes of 70s metal but a fair amount of 80s proto-death riffing and rhythms, similar to Onslaught or Necronomicon but at Venom/Motorhead speeds, producing a result that is not dissimilar to early Voivod in effect but because it is so internally similar rapidly becomes fungible (also: speed metal makes me want to eat batteries).

Crowen – Where The Darkness Falls: it’s 1982 and your parents finally took you to Disneyland, so you go to the Celtic ride and the band is playing stuff that sounds like this except without the occasional noisy rhythm riff that is there to let the vocalist puke out a whole bunch of incomprehensible words that are apparently important, so while basic songwriting remains intact the smarm, cheese, and dominance of aesthetic wreck any appreciation you might have had.

Insurrection – Exiled To Earth: standard melodic death metal that is basically heavy metal with crazed vocals that are attempting At the Gates but end up with a Downs Syndrome version of Grand Belial’s Key instead, and songs hold together more by being in the same key and having no riffs clash with the others, which makes this about as interesting as changing the oil in a minivan after drinking oven cleaner in order to avoid another marital argument.

Scitalis – Maledictum: turd-polishing is strong in metal now because to get accepted as one of the officially defined subgenres, you have to combine all the stuff that sold more than ten thousand records since 1989, which throws together lots of contradictory elements, and while Scitalis make a good effort, they are basically serving up stew made from obsolete dreams of the past which ends up falling back into sweeping mid-paced patterns from lack of direction.

Imaginal Cells – Purified: throw together a Rush cover band doing King Crimson covers with occasional exuberant heavy metal, and you get this vocal-based assemblage of techniques that sounds a lot like the last couple Judas Priest records, but has far less purity of intent and therefore, less of an effect because what it communicates is mainly variations on a template.

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Best of 2024: Judas Priest, Black Funeral, K.K. Null, Unholy Craft, Havukruunu, Inborn Suffering, Doomraiser, and Shores of Null.

Tags: sadistic metal reviews, smr