сука блять! When I first started working on the philosophy of parallelism, I saw a way around the modern fixation on singular cause-effect. It is more complex than polycausality, more like pattern causality, because many things have to be in place for a touchstone event to formalize what has already been in motion.
For example, the classic philosophy teacher (fuck these guys) example of a boy kicking a ball can be stated as monocausality: agent (boy) + action (kick) + object (ball). This appeals to our human sense of being in control, and our natural tendency to treat everything we encounter as if it too were human and thought like us.
In a polycausal view, we can talk about how the Earth is rotating so the ball is actually rushing toward his feet, or some nonsense of this nature, but in pattern causality we see things which must be present in parallel: the extra energy, the sense of safety, the need to self-expression as an outpouring of Schopenhauerian Will, and finally, the ball and field and the window the object in motion will soon smite.
Parallelism describes how we think. We have multiple impulses, and if one does not beat out the others (ex: “omigod! a bear!”) then we take a middle path through the rest, both being moderate and hedging our bets while edging toward what we think might, gambler-style, bring us a big payoff.
For example, when you encounter a pretty girl (or for the modern metal audience, a trans catboy) all sorts of impulses flow through your mind. Your fear impulse is to avoid appearing like a 4chan sweaty basement NEET with an anime collection, your social impulse is to portray yourself as harmless, and your hedging and edging tells you to make a neutral comment, then say something nice and see if she smiles, at which point you can ask for her phone number without being a Redditor.
What is the pattern causality on the Ukraine war? Draw a line through the middle of these parallels — imagine them like the readout on an EQ, little vertical measures of intensity, with you aiming for the sweet spot above the midpoint but not to the pain threshold — and find the outcome: unstable Chinese regime, allied to unstable Russian regime, opposing a bloated and pointless West, while everyone is convinced that the coming instability means war. So: declare small war in advance, then see how everyone reorients.
The most complex pattern causality on this site of course will be the question of what killed metal, and my answer will be that many things had to make a pattern to spell its doom, but ultimately we treated metal like another human. We figure other humans have intent, and always try to discern that for the friend-or-foe 4Fs (fight, flight, feed, or reproduce) question, and with metal, we imputed an intention to it but got tripped up by relativity.
That is, we knew the most recent appearances of that intent, but never got around to tracking the whole in parallel from beginning to future with all the parts inbetween being consistent. Instead, we just looked at what happened right before, and rationalizing from that precedent, made another version of that. Genres decay this way because they accumulate long lists of stuff to include and develop but never have a sense of purpose except, like in democracy, being an equal member of the group. Entropy wins!
Breakaway genres, like death metal and black metal once were, on the other hand cast aside all of the precedent and hone in on a few methods of expression, then explore those. This works until the initial momentum dies, at which point a new generation starts building from where the old left off, emulating the outer form but never understanding the inner form, the why not the how.
To understand a genre, you need to accept the “hidden side of relativity” which states that objects are known only as relative to each other and to the whole context, or all actors in parallel including elemental forces. That is, there needs to be a continuity from its founding to its future wherein certain whys or elements of spirit are found, and those must become the inner impulse, with the outer prone not to “progress” and “change” of bringing in outside influences, but orchestrated by the inner need to express ideas.
Black metal, after all, was about ideas. In the happy 1990s, full of Friends and Seinfeld and our choice to go consumerist-communist since regular Communism just shat the bed harder than National Socialism, we embraced pluralism, pacifism, diversity, and other notions of not picking a choice but simply including everyone and making happy feelings so we could all go off to our corporate jobs together, buy meaningless garbage, and pay esurient taxes so that we could subsidize the inbred White and minority underclasses.
Metal died when it lost its sense of idea. If the standard review is “it’s like everything else with a twist, and okay if you like that sort of thing,” then the new review is, “nothing is wrong with the parts, but they add up to nothing more than form,” and it is the death-knell of a genre. Our musicians and producers are more competent than ever, but most of the music they crank out is worse than anything before.
As a result, you see the usual quirky ironism emerge where bands try to differentiate themselves by doing the unexpected and different with the outer form, but like postmodern novels, these musical works load so much onto the surface that there is nothing left for the core, so you end up with airy blather about transcendental meaning and the divide between life and death on top of songs that are not different than your usual indie rock.
I have always believed that metal, like all human groups, forms an ecosystem. We all have different roles. The gushing soyjacks who endorse just about anything are an anabolic force, or that which expands and synthesizes, where this site forms a catabolic force, or that which kills the bad and thrusts the good into the limelight. This is why most of the industry hates us: we uphold standards.
A light switch has two positions, but you have three potential choices when you encounter one. You can turn it to on, turn it to off, or do nothing. For metal, we want to flip the switch to on for what is good, slam it to off for what is bad, and for those in the middle who are struggling to get to good, do nothing except reveal them as they are. It is important to encourage new and inexperienced bands to be the best they can be, knowing that one in ten will make it, like newly hatched sea turtles racing to the deep sea and safety, despite the predators and undertow that kills most of them.
Ironism happens when equal people need to stand out, so they do the opposite of what is realistic in order to draw attention to themselves. If happiness, success, sanity, health, beauty, arete, and wisdom are thus off the map, like political correctness they filter out the real and focus on the attention-whoring, so you get some kind of acedia-laced quirky personal drama which eventually becomes a recognized sound.
Schellenberg did a totally different study. He analyzed more than 1,000 songs — every Top 40 hit from 1965 to 2009 — in terms of tempo and whether the song was in a major or minor key.
Though there was plenty of dark music in 1965, Petula Clark’s “I Know a Place” is pretty typical of that year. The tempo is upbeat, and like every other Top 40 song of 1965, it is in a major key: “All [Top 40 songs] published by Billboard, every single one was a major-key song,” Schellenberg says.
But through the 1980s and ’90s, the dominance of the major key in the Top 40 began to shift, slowly at first and then quite radically: “By 2009,” Schellenberg says, “only 18 out of [the Top] 40 [songs] were a major key.”
That means that the majority of the Top 40 songs, 22 of 40, were in a minor key — the official sound of complexity and sadness.
As societies go on, they drive themselves further from reality into complexity that defeats all solutions so that people can keep being individualistic. Entropy wins, again. They also embrace the sad as a way of attracting pity, because in a society dedicated to equality, whoever earns the most pity deserves the most subsidies and achieves the greatest popularity, at least in the short term, and it is hard to argue that popular music is the zone for long-term thinkers.
A few housekeeping items: first, this abortion of commercialist terror for the most pro-Communist band out there. Self-parody is not dead; it is not even getting started as we surge deeper into the heart of Late Stage Democracy, where everything is token, signal, symbol, or number and almost nothing considers the qualitative dimension. It has been twenty-six years since Napalm Death last made a good album, although they have “good bits” on every album, you know a cool transition here or tempo change there or a striking riff in the middle, and the rest of what they have done amounts to landfill, unless better bands steal those good bits. One wonders what would happen if Napalm Death locked themselves in a Cotswolds cabin for six months and took all the good bits out of the last couple decades of their work and assembled them into a real album. Bet it would work like musical Jenga.
Next, a brief reminder to attend the Destroying Texas Fest because there will be fun quasi-neo-Nazis there:
They sent Scott west, as part of an undercover squad, to the Destroying Texas Fest that summer. Black-metal bands with names like Satanic Goat Ritual were playing at a club in Houston; several Atomwaffen members would be there.
What you tolerate, you get more of. Any audience adapts any idea to the needs of the audience (The Metallica Effect). Put these together, and what do you get? Take a genre and over time the Crowd will break it down into the same old stuff, then project on it, and soon you have boring droning angry music for people who have given up on everything but getting entrapped by the FBI on interstate weapons charges.
Finally, consider the potentially largest voting bloc out there, people in the grips of evil:
We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents. A person who has during all time maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order.
OK, now put on your scuba suit because we are about to dive deeply into the feces, forever searching for golden nuggets of corn among the onslaught of sludge…
***
Disordered – Carnal Materialism: this band tries to work newer melodic metal and deathcore stylings into a Slayer-inspired speed/death act and for the most part succeed, making songs that hide their melodic aspects of construction well while emphasizing the melodic phrase that comes about every third riff, but ultimately these are driven by the vocals and drive toward a poignant moment where the melody crosses over its basic harmonic structure to find a simpler reductive pattern, something that repeats enough to detract from its effect on this highly metal-literate release which brings out a number of unique and personalitied versions of classic death metal and speed metal riff styles.
Satanik Goat Ritual – An Ending in Blood: when any subgenre disintegrates, it devolves to its simplest influence, and some years ago black metal reverted to being hardcore punk music with fewer offbeats and more riffs, producing stream of consciousness like this Havohej, Beherit, and Blasphemy influenced string of riffs that show good ideas but barely relate to each other and do not develop a song into anything but a sonic wallpaper of angsty discontent with everything except for Satan, which makes me think they tried playing this in Gitmo but it made more inmates convert to Islam out of desperation to escape the trivial trend-driven society that excreted this.
Immolation – Acts of God: the usual idiots were strong with this one — “it’s just like their first two! a return to form!” — but nothing could be closer to the truth, since Immolation are still caught in the idea of creating grooves and riding them in what are essentially two-riff songs with a few variations tossed in at the end for a turnaround and almost zero thematic evolution, cutting out what made the second album their BOAT (best of all time) and gave us hope for their future; these songs sound tired, obligatory, and propagandistic.
Effluence – Psychocephalic Spawning: noisy squealing deathcore for those who like sump pump vocals and hammering-square-pegs-into-round-holes basic rhythm riffing, Effluence throws in some variations on known riffs and has roughly the right rhythmic ratios in each song, but never gains and manages momentum, so each song feels like a series of breakdowns with riffs which are both related and random competing with each other for a diminishing share of attention, and the free jazz chaos lead guitars do not build this up substantially.
Varathron – The Lament of Gods: “so that’s where it all went wrong,” one might exclaim upon hearing this re-issued 1999 EP, where Varathron decided that “atmosphere” (trans: slow arpeggios, keyboards, whispers) was more important than writing cryptic but evocative songs which brought out a nocturnal spirit in the otherwise befuddled and buzzword-spammed modern mind, basically turning themselves into a Doors tribute band, although the “Sarmutius Pegorus” demo gives a glimpse of early 1990s Varathron attempting to expand into more musical directions, albeit not enough to avoid being somewhat aimless.
Autokrator – The Obedience to Authority: an early Incantation clone that blends Revenge-style war metal in with some Immolation and blistering noise-based drone, Autokrator specialize in pounding verses and pain threshold grinding power chord riffs with drums that chase after their own beats like a technical version of Sarcófago, producing songs that are not intended to go anywhere, only appear like riot police out of the fog and beat everyone senseless, then retreat in noise, chaos, fire, and the wailing of newspaper anchors as their trucks get stolen and their camerapeople anally burgled, this band manages to be aesthetically interesting but does not command repeated listening.
Come Mierda – “Demo 2021”: if you can imagine basic hardcore with periodically imaginative takes on classic riff forms, embarking on about half its work at the pace of Crowbar or EyeHateGod, you have the essential elements of this reasonably listenable but busy punk release that avoids most of the serious errors of underground music and stands above its contemporaries in quality but might not really merit knocking those Cro-Mags and Minor Threat albums off the shelf quite yet.
Recipients of Death – Final Flight / Recipients of Death: purposeful speed metal on the edge of thrash, comparable to Nuclear Assault or later Cryptic Slaughter, Recipients of Death slash out the anthems with a focus on speed metal verse riffs building up to hardcore-style chorus riffs, with enough internal dialogue through riff change along the way to like a miniature progressive rock anthem build up to the point before the final thematic evolution, making it gratifying like pop only because the listener has dug through all of preceding material, which even though it is driven too much by chanting vocals, keeps interesting high with its streamlined and hard-hitting style in which songs become who they always were without starting on an entirely different pattern nor repeating the dominant theme.
Insipidus – Banal Apathy: this seems to be one of those postmodernist metal-selfaware type things where a band makes satyrically bad music in order to rupture a genre while drawing attention to itself for being witty like the loudest voices at the Irish pub, but really this collection of heavy metal and jazz tropes roped into deathcore songs which minimize repetition but maximize randomness until the parts are barely related except by key delivers nothing of enjoyment for death metal listeners, although it will delight Opeth and Anal Cunt hipsters.
Sotherion – Schwarmgeist: the title translates to “spirit of the herd” and that reflects this music, which on the surface is the grittiest underground French-sounding black metal you can imagine, but combines later pop-punk style melodic lead riffing with stalled out chromatic rhythm riffing that deprecates riff shape in favor of a surprise hook ending, leading to noise that fits together reasonably well as songs but neither evokes nor expresses anything but itself like most of these narcissistic solipsistic hominids we call humans.
Massive Assault – Mortar: excellent mastery of Swedish death metal production albeit from the post-digital years marks this album of what are basically heavy metal and speed metal riffs given the cadence of the first Carnage and Unleashed albums, but despite some clever twists never really developing in a song beyond falling into a contrast groove which emphasizes the offbeat only in contrast, resulting in a listening experience that is more nostalgia and cope-hope than belief that this is actually good despite moments of frisson when it seems like the mighty Swedish death metal has returned.
Warloghe – Three Angled Void: take me back to 1997, three years after black metal bedshat and suicided, when people were still busy ripping off Darkthrone Panzerfaust with Burzum technique but before Depressive Soydomatic Black Metal took over by making bad hardcore and bad shoegaze into mates if played in a minor key with Celtic Frost rhythms, back when the music was better but still boring because it had nothing to say except that we should keep holding up the flag of black metal for reasons unknown to everyone, and you get this release of unrelated riffs crammed within the same vocal and drum rhythms like a Google AI emulating black metal while running on a Mac IISE with a glitchy hard drive.
Profanity – Fragments of Solace: technical death metal which is basically deathcore with lots of jazz and progressive inspired riff forms thrown in randomly throughout, missing the real point of Gorguts Obscura which was to knit together the dissimilar in order to find a shared hidden them and bring it forth, this band manages a lot of detail but no complexity and seems like a prolonged conspiracy to distract the listener enough to fool them into thinking they are listening to music instead of charted guitar practice.
Apolion – To Rot or Decay: band attempts to make mostly instrumental album but suffers from writing very boring riffs with no challenge in them only the type of dissonant-consonant or minor key to major key signature notes shift that made indie rock so bittersweet and yet banal once you heard enough of it, leading a listening experience that is both easy to sing along to and enjoy but forgotten when it is gone because nothing was transacted between listener and band; you expected generic black metal, and you got it with a twist, but it was as memorable as listening to ringtones on the subway while some homeless guy strokes out in front of you from fentanyl, meth, and 3,186 STDs acquired through promiscuous back alley anal sex.
Twilight Force – Dawn of the Dragonstar: new bands should pay attention to the quality control and streamlining that this band does, since each part relates to the rest and there is a central theme that is at least challenged and has slight evolution before returning to the chorus, but otherwise you should stay away from this travesty which uses circus music conventions including unsignaled key changes and gangstalking the melodic minor scale like a lovestruck incel not for musical reasons but artistic ones, since like Reddit or Disney soundtracks this is both artistically empty with a spirit of pacifism and egodrama and cheesy like all commercial products since it is designed to make self-pitying life failures feel a moment of emotional reaction and think they are deep, reducing your testosterone and making you want rape vegetables by inserting them into your own anus.
Defechate – Unbounded: gurgling deathcore of the older style meaning that it moves along like an uptempo primitive version of early death metal in chromatic glacial mass while the vocals lead with contrast to the dominant rhythm of the riff, with guitars, bass and drums playing parts of the same pattern, leading through a verse-chorus loop with a few surprises like occasional heavy metal riffs popping up but essentially relying on boring you into chanting along with the catchy vocals, managing to be both pop and sonic wallpaper at the same time.
Constraint – Between War and Terror: if you thought Slayer and Sepultura could have taken their early 90s albums further and focused on writing militant speed metal with bouncy choruses, this could be your bag, since it nails the powerful verse-chorus interplay and aims for little else: songs appear, develop into their loop, then charge ahead with it until it comes time to break it and reverse course before repeating to the end, but the speed thrills of early speed metal with the more proficient riffs of the later years come together into a compelling package even if like Possessed or Destruction the songs exist to self-assert even when traversing their own themes in opposition.
Tundra – The Darkening Sky: vocal-driven relatively boring black metal that moves between punk and something that sounds a lot like English post-punk without ever having the internal dialogue that makes metal strong or the epic shifts in perspective that make any drone or ambient music interesting, Tundra despite having the best name of recent note achieve little other with this late Darkthrone clone than a participation trophy and maybe some vaccine-induced AIDS.
Sulpur – Embracing Hate and Beckoning Darkness: really good art tells us the obvious but denied in an interesting way that connects it to both existential meaning and external patterns, creating a unitive sense of bonding with our world, but really bad art just states the obvious in such a way that we cannot refute it but also have no need for it like this collection of practice of classic black metal riffs melded to a simpering mid-paced rhythm designed for normie socialization not violent Galtonian eugenics applied with a flaming sword and (rented; no point paying for blade sharpening) wood chipper.
Cryptum – Vile Emergence: if your heart lies in speed metal, do not bother mixing in death metal except as occasional technique because the two use entirely different techniques and mashing them together makes music that plods between incongruous parts, such as this emminently boring band who like lots of bouncy downstroke riffs like Exodus but try to meld it with early death metal, ending up only with circular repetition of their inability to choose a path.
Balvanera – Courses of Action: we all hoped that our scenes in the hacker disco would sound like this, stripped down future techno with a 1980s style emphasis on diminished melodies in vocals curving through this like acid in a vat of blood, staying danceable but keeping enthusiasm in check so that it seems more like an echoing rant of an insurrectionary radio broadcast set to beats and disconnected keyboard riffs that play together as if parts of the same vine running up the crumbling sides of an abandoned church, perfect as background music for those who miss Kraftwerk and Joy Division while dropping brown acid in a urine-soaked stall at Numbers somewhere near 3:00 AM on a Tuesday.
Grave Next Door – Sanctified Heathen: “stoner metal” simply means boring blues rock played slow with the bounding riffs of bands like Sleep and Pentagram but using fewer chords, adorned with urgent vocal rhythms that end on an offbeat so they click in the brain, but going nowhere ultimately except around and around a like a stoner locked in his apartment wandering between fridge, bong, and noose in the shower.
Affection – Remnants: in the eternal quest for modern metal that is actually metal Affection makes NWOBHM-tinged speed metal sort of like Metal Church covering Judas Priest Jugulator and layers it in clean vocals — this is a good thing, getting us away from the now overused and hackeneyed death vocals which serve no purpose except to sell Listerine and chamomile — which are more like the Dead Kennedys or The Clash, with not emo but a bit of plaintive lost boy rock in there, making for a reasonably palatable listen that if missed would not be terrible unless that meant you had to listen to the other crap reviewed here.
Helwetti – Helwetti: everywhere I go, the idea of “togetherness” dooms us as people encourage me to do things to keep the group together instead of pointing out what is crap and what is not, but luckily this band falls between crap and not, some good riff ideas and songs that seem to have internal relationships, but like most late blackmetal, this is more like general impressions of an emotion from a dream paired to a decomposing architectural feature once seen in a textbook and there is nothing inspirational to be derived from it, not to mention far too many intrusions of other metal subgenres and even random themes that sound like they came from anime spank mags found in an abandoned crack house.
Demonos – Asger the Collector: this band attempts to combine modern metal with deathcore to achieve a more interesting sound with some space for melodic composition, which although it sounds like Bullet for My Valentine or Panic! At the Disco serves to break up what would otherwise be overwhelming bouncing muted strum rhythm technique, and makes for listenable songs although they go circular very rapidly and depend almost exclusively on a melodic hook with one break or counterpoint at the peak of each song.
Black Sin – Solitude Éternelle: make a circus out of Burzum, Gorgoroth, and Immortal riffs in songs that gesture at some inner meaning but only do that, hint and push, then fall back into familiar black metal tropes as if playing to a half-attentive live audience in the local foodie gastropub who want to hear some pleasant minor-key individualistic fatalism while they consume their barbecue flavor tofu kushikatsu tendies on spelt baguettes with local haba&ntild;ero flavored goat cheese.
Aviterne – The Ailing Facade: one year I went to summer camp and one of the counselors, a weird guy named Jim, used to rape all the boys so we would gather at the ice machine to salve our ruptured anuses with packs of ice melting in the hot summer sun, and we would lean against the ice machine and moan, listening to the motor run and feeling safe for a moment in the all-encompassing sound, and the sub-sub-genre from which this album comes reminds me of that, basically comforting rhythms spelled out in tremolo tugging riffs trudging along with predictable, safe patterns and motions but the only way you know a song is over is when there is a long silence because it is incoherent and like the ice machine will fix nothing and only stave off the pain for a short while.
Haiduk – Diabolica: speed metal riffs made into mostly instrumental music which alternates like later Samael albums between post-rock styled high sustain open chord strumming riffs and rushing single-picked chromatic momentum riffs but really goes nowhere except in fast circles, gradually intensifying without really distinguishing parts as having any meaning, achieving the musical equivalent of a trip to LAX where you find out at the last minute you are the wrong terminal and race through turnstiles and security checkpoints while screaming incoherently only to arrive at the right terminal to find your flight is canceled and you are on a watch list anyway.
Eucharist – I Am The Void: adulthood means you write to spec — that is: you have a particular task and make something which fits those parameters, then worry about everything else as an afterthought — and you do not have the seemingly endless hours of youth to contemplate your emotions and their depth and try to wrangle them into something semi-coherent but aesthetically attractive which gets you outside your conscious mind, which is why older bands have trouble, but Eucharist make a good album that relies too much on songs as little puzzles based on a riff idea developing from foreshadowing to theme and evolution, perhaps with too much concern for vocals as well, going uptempo for much of it to make a good listen that will not make the black metal canon but is still better than just about everything else out there.
Exodus – Persona Non Grata: perhaps Exodus tired of making high-intensity speed metal like Impact Is Imminent and got seduced by the post-Pantera attitude that metal bands should have groove, basically the same cruising rhythm that Sunset Strip glam made famous but given the precision of later metal and a similar reliance on the one-note riff with fill that Slayer used on South of Heaven but without the context, which leaves the band essentially making updated glam which was itself NWOBHM with more of the pace and rhythms of radio rock and 70s AOR, which even though the songs hold together offers very little interest for a metal fan who is not obsessed with novelty and currency.
Tags: buttchrist, eucharist, Exodus, smr
“Immolation – Acts of God: the usual idiots were strong with this one — “it’s just like their first two! a return to form!””
It’s like a slogan or a political catchphrase. Anytime a once decent band releases something new, there’s always at least one person to claim it’s “ARETURN2FORM!!!!”… it always happens, and it gets even more hilarious with the very prolific bands (Darkthrone, Sewer, Cannibal Corpse) because, basically, the same writers keep writing the exact same phrase at every new release.
2019 – I know the last few albums were somewhat disappointing, but THIS ONE is where XXX finally gets it RIGHT. A TRUE return to the roots of what made them GREAT!
2020 – I know the last few albums were somewhat disappointing, but THIS ONE is where XXX finally gets it RIGHT. A TRUE return to the roots of what made them GREAT!!
2021 – I know the last few albums were somewhat disappointing, but THIS ONE is where XXX finally gets it RIGHT. A TRUE return to the roots of what made them GREAT!!!
2022 – Okay, I know I’m running low on credibility (they never admit this, btw), but THIS ONE is where XXX finally gets it RIGHT. A TRUE return to the roots of what made them GREAT!!!
It’s like political pundits who are always wrong, but know no shame, so they always throw their opinions out like monkeys throwing their fec…
At least in Poker, when you go all in and you lose, you have to exit the table. Not in the political – or music review – world. No shame :)
Hail Mother Russia!
These bands are in the same loop at Western Civilization: they were great once, but forgot why. They always want to return to form becuase it is what will get both their old and new fans really jazzed but have no idea how to do it. “Yeah, I dunno why they dislike the new material. Back then we were clueless kids, living through our emotions, squatting in an old bunker and spending all our time in the recording room obsessing over metal and occultism, and we basically just played our songs a few thousand times and thought we were cool, revising them all the time… anyway, we should talk about it on Wednesday at 2:30 when we get together to write the new album in its entirety before dinner.”
Brett if you could have ONE superpower what would it be and why?
I am confused, but not aroused.
If you ever get aroused by Naked Lunch, it is time to check in to a facility.
Who the fuck reads journalism, especially music journalism!?
Most normies, and many normal people.
What is the DMU’s opinion of Windir?
I heard the tractor album back in the day and cannot recommend it.
Immolation are so disappointing. I heard the first 4 at various times last week and that’s still some of the most epic thunderous death metal ever made. It’s just sad to see them milking and soiling their legacy like this.
With almost all death metal bands, if they start making simpler music, it means they just want to jam out to their influences. Immolation clearly wants to be Mercyful Fate or Exodus. I think they should just do that. Either that, or become a doom-death band. They could rock those, and the audience is coming around. No point sticking with a genre once you have lost the joy in it.
In Immolation’s case I know back in the 2000’s they stated that they just wanted to be able to live strictly (i.e. comfortably) off their music.
Understandable and admirable, but that comes with a price. Especially for them after that giant span between the debut and the second album. By the time they pursued a reliable and plentiful fan base death metal was in major decline and they had to start pandering to some degree in order to stay afloat.
I’ll always love the first two releases, and there’s some cool stuff in the following three, but they kind of abandoned what made them great in an attempt to get music videos and social media likes in hopes of making it big.
Don’t get me wrong – Ross and Bob are great guys, excellent musicians, and passionate about what they do. However I think they simply want to be more mainstream than they’re willing to admit but don’t want to lose the core fans.
Unfortunately you can’t have it both ways with this type of music. It comes as no surprise that the result over the past 20 years has been pretty tepid material, as they’ve attempted to have a foot in both scenes.
All true. This leads me to ask: why bother being any part underground? If your heart is not in it, forget it; go on to make commercial music and go big. Be Slipknot or Mercyful Fate.
I had always heard that they were comfortable having regular jobs and not wanting to compromise in any way despite the money they bring.
Regular job = too worn out to make an album except every five years. There’s a reason most musicians are on welfare until they die early of preventable medical disorders.
Very Cool
Is Old Disgruntled Bastard no more?
Looks like WordPress deplatformed him or something. That sucks.
He hadn’t posted in a long time before the site went down. He may have just stopped writing stuff and didn’t renew the domain. Shame for sure though.
The new Eucharist is okay, which somehow seems more disheartening than if it was complete shit: like a family member on life support.
Although on the plus side, I’ve never wanted to put a carrot in my ass so badly as when I listened to Twilight Force.
It is going to take bands a bit of time to find their way back. The real problem with older bands is that they reduce the problem to a few parts and then solve for those, but miss out on the broader experience for the listener. They also have far less time and somewhat less energy.
I just get drunk and listen to 80’s pop music these days, because metal bores me to tears with it’s try-hard bullshit. I might pop the odd old Emperor/Darkthrone album from time to time, but the fire is just gone.
Basically true. There are a few exceptions (Kaeck, Deathsiege, Infamous, Desecresy, Fourth Monarchy, Condemner, Death Reich, Pharmacist, Undead, Putrid Offal, Grandeur, Angantyr, Kshatriya, Serpent Ascending) which are worth holding up against the constant flood of trend emulation, and we exist here to do that as well as mock the emptiness of the dead shit floating on the airwaves around us.
Undead did a full-length by the way:
https://undead.bandcamp.com/album/existential-horror
Did that second Fourth Monarchy album ever actually come out?
That’s still a lot of metal to listen to and take in. With all the classic stuff from the best years in constant rotation, how much new music do you really need in your life, especially as you get older and have to split time between various other spheres of interest/responsibility? I’m quite selfish that way I’m afraid. I am set and I’d think so are most other metalheads who internalize the music and its meaning and aren’t in it solely for the purpose of compiling year-ending lists.
Beyond the bourgeois view, there is a question of keeping a meaningful genre alive. I like discovering new music and find good things all the time, although mostly composers and conductors these days.
Brett, have you listened to Nostradamus – Vanitas Vanitatum et Omnia Vanitas? https://nostradamuspl.bandcamp.com/album/vanitas-vanitatum-et-omnia-vanitas
Sadistic Metal Review: nobody wants to buy your gay shirts!
Brett, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of writing to know whether your writing is shit or not, but you have demonstrated a very sadistic creativity throughout the years and I’m wondering if you have ever written stories, a short novel or something of the sort in this way, full of sardonic observations and focusing on the absurd mess that is the modern human mind. Perhaps at anus.com? I’m not well acquainted with the site as it’s prime was before I discovered DMU and the DLA.
Eugeneics van is a good one, I’m sure there are others.
Some of this will arrive in the near future. For now, I tend to mark posts with the tag “fiction” on both this site and the other one.
I just remembered “The Haarslev PB30/60 As Big As The Ritz”. It was good. I’ll go and read “Eugenics Van”. BTW Brett, I’m a youngster and I’m as in love with Metal as I am with old tech. Do you have any good stories to tell, perhaps your first experiences with BBS’s and the like? You seem to have been partial to older Apple computers; do you have any favorite games or any stories with them? (I already know about turning Apple II’s into bongs). I (and I hope others) would enjoy such things from you.
I started out on Apple ][ machines and some of the earlier gear including mainframes and the usual smatter of VIC-20s and PETs. Being in an oilfield town, it was not hard to come by access to DEC and HP pro gear either, which was nice. BBSen at that time were mostly AEs or stuff like it, basically dial-up single user file servers. Messaging existed, but it took awhile for people to standard messaging, files, chat, and user accounts into one piece of software. I will think on some of the better stories. Most of them are online lore, so not that exciting.
Since were I live personal computers of the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit era are almost non existant now due to the ones that did arrive were for low quantity specialized use, and most of the more interesting stuff has been scrapped over time, I have had most of my limited experience with the IBM compatible Windows 9x beige box. Some minor experiments in networking and repair of optical and magnetic drives, trying to figure out a mysterious and obscure problem with an apparently functional hard drive, going back to CRTs and experimentig with resolution and frequency rates, searching high and low in dark corners for drivers for an odd chipset, discovering the unbeliavable fluidity of double buffered 320×200 that emulators simply cannot reproduce, etc.
All of the knowledge I have of 8 and 16-bit computing mostly due to a lack of availability and prohibitive import and currency exchange costs has come from videos, blogs and articles. It is unfortunate that I have to leave this behind by force as this is not the time to be inmersed in the dark past but to find what worked and what was good then and extrapolate what of that can be useful for best results in the future and then to go on forward, hoping fortune to be at our side.
Maybe if the right people, the needed people come together and properly manage their goals, their organization and their plans, and execute them with ruthless efficiency maybe there could be a time for that in the long term, and for developing systems that are functional and precise, and if possible, beautiful, and not the chocolate dildos of a technorrheic “elite” that we have now. Current developers would benefit from studying products of a more diverse yet mor techno-eugenicist time in which the mind-shit of imbeciles did not rule the direction of “progress”, but the constraints of a harsh, quickly evolving environment with limited spaces and resources of both market and computation. Done correctly, by the correct people, what made some of these things good and when and why they stagnated will be found.
The forced essentialism of a survivalist is always superior to the dysfunctional strategic engorgement of blind and deaf (yet with highly sensitve skin) serfdom-addicted hedonists.
I know the few that are interested will enjoy exploring and learning the specifics of these undiscovered (by them) regions. And maybe it could be an oportunity to talk about some of the old anus related content, which I personally just started looking into recently.
By the way, the spacing was lost on the previous post, I don’t know why.
Thank you for the kind words on this, by the way. This message started me thinking: what would sadistic horror be like? After all, the movies are fun. “Saw” et al. didn’t even scratch the surface.
The full extension of sadistic horror will be realized when BCIs become reliable and the “normie” will finally see what they are, were they are and what their place and space in reality is. Suicide rates will be the proportional inverse of the Baby boom, or more. This will be called the “Baby Doom”. Soft eugenicism.
I thought your whole schtick was you review the actual music, but every other point of derision is something extra-musical about the bands. “The worst part is he’s a hypocrite…”
Every other point?
The second Helwetti demo was way more focused than the self titled album. Disappointing
Musical notability aside, is it safe to assume all these highlighted bands aren’t comprised of sjw members?
I don’t know anything about them, generally. Best way to write reviews is with no biographical information.
Any chance you or anyone else on the site could do a feature on non-leftist bands (who are decent at least) in the future? Prefer not support those who hate me with my time, let alone money.
We have never focused on what the bands think, only what they put into their music. Nor do I really have any idea what alignment each band has.
I think your idea is good, and maybe we need a list somewhere, but I think it will leave out lots of moderates or non-politicized bands who do not hate you.
I also have an allergy to “Movement White Nationalism” and its music, since the assumption is — like on the Left and in punk — that you praise it because you like the lyrics. I would rather focus simply on music quality.
On the old days in USENET, someone would have come up with a list of Non-Shitty Right-Wing Bands and pasted it everywhere.