As the world continues to burn itself through human arrogance, we turn to metal because we need a voice of an apocalypse that we would like to make triumphant. In destruction of the weaker, the stronger stands revealed. But first we have to remove the weak metal, which is why we have SMRs.

Very few people understand the importance of music in culture and biology. It helps humans bond, but even more, like the tshirts we all wear, identification with certain types of music reveals if we are hamsters like most of humanity:

And more than 40 per cent of hamsters enjoy hip-hop and rap beats. A spokesman for record label Rebecca Downes Music, which conducted the poll, said: ‘It’s official – pets love music as much as humans do and different animals have their favourite genres which they react to.

Bacteria probably love hip-hop and pop as well. Simple organisms like simple music. They are not interested in structure or melody, only rhythm and harmony. All their “melodies” are variants of the same idea; pop music is a perfect product like that.

This helps with the great dumbing down so we can democratize art as we have democratized power, wealth, taste, and socializing:

The authors found that, in general, lyrics have become simpler and easier to understand over time and that the number of different words used within songs has decreased, particularly among rap and rock songs. However, they also found that the number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs since 1980. They suggest that while the use of longer words has increased in rap songs, general increases in the repetitiveness of lyrics across multiple genres have led to lyrics becoming simpler overall.

A few centuries ago, artists created for the higher IQ bands in their societies, namely those with wealth and leadership skills. (Our current cope is to claim that this wealth was inherited, therefore these people were stupid and useless, but historical data suggests otherwise!)

When you create art for the best, you end up with Mozart and Beethoven instead of Cardi B and Cannibal Corpse. As art becomes democratized, however, it aims for lower standards but then becomes indistinguishable, so you end up with trends on a flat plain instead of a topography of hierarchies.

When Cannibal Corpse outsells every other metal band, all upcoming bands emulate Cannibal Corpse, and as a result anything else gets ignored. Egalitarianism always starts with competition but eventually becomes its absence and a steady degradation to a descending norm. This is collapse.

To rise from this, people need aim not toward “higher” goals (which are cloned by idiots just like every murderer in prison has found Jesus, a higher goal) but toward greater utility through art and music having a role in daily existence:

That being said… the process of “art” in music is the formulation of that interaction between nature, artist, and audience.

Listening to Mozart for example enforces the idea of an orderly world in which every piece has a place and the whole makes sense. This has utility in daily life by connecting the eternal to the immediate. It makes us into more of who we are.

Art after all seems to be a language through which we express values, and those values form an aesthetics and identity that creates culture:

The brain’s bias toward simple integer ratios may have evolved as a natural error-correction system that makes it easier to maintain a consistent body of music, which human societies often use to transmit information.

Values may be as simple as preferring ketchup to mustard on hamburgers, but they express a sense of the group having a shared purpose and making choices that reflect its inner composition. Art communicates information, and that information reflects adaptation to reality.

Higher values and other notions based on free will miss the point that will exists only for its objects:

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.

Some people make it past this reflexive state, but usually only through great effort, such as through meditation, martial discipline, transcendent prayer, or massive amounts of THC. For most however, life is hand-to-mouth and the “thinking” that goes on is merely rationalization.

So much for humanism.

The essence of Crowdism is noticing that we, as a species and as large groups, are not good. Groups in fact produce the oppressors that people blame, like tyrants and corporations. The selfishness of individuals in groups makes for a parasitic and destructive species.

Humanism has two prongs: (1) a religious side in which third world religions emphasize the equal value of our souls to the divine, and (2) a secular side in which egalitarians insist that all humans are equally important, so that we can act in a “me-first” way which in a group makes us a destructive force.

As a wise man once said, “I don’t want no Communists in my car… no Christians either!”

As it turns out, rejecting rationalization (which is what rationalism is: rationalizing from assumptions, starting with the idea of our free will) leads to recognizing the human disease for what it is:

There were irrationalists before the 19th century. In ancient Greek culture—which is usually assessed as rationalistic—a Dionysian (i.e., instinctive) strain can be discerned in the works of the poet Pindar, in the dramatists, and even in such philosophers as Pythagoras and Empedocles and in Plato. In early modern philosophy—even during the ascendancy of Cartesian rationalism—Blaise Pascal turned from reason to an Augustinian faith, convinced that “the heart has its reasons” unknown to reason as such.

The main tide of irrationalism, like that of literary romanticism—itself a form of irrationalism—followed the Age of Reason and was a reaction to it. Irrationalism found much in the life of the spirit and in human history that could not be dealt with by the rational methods of science. Under the influence of Charles Darwin and later Sigmund Freud, irrationalism began to explore the biological and subconscious roots of experience.

Irrationalism means rejecting the idea that there is an objective consensual shared spaced of tokens, ideas, truths, facts, morals, and communications because interpretation is in the eye of the beholder and we are not all equal. Egalitarianism exists to deny that we are not “all one” mind.

People complain about nihilists — we refuse to affirm the existence of this shared space of absolute, universal, and objective truths, values, and communications — but our view is beyond rationality and closer to naturalism. Whatever it is, it is what it is.

We reject the Age of Reason; we reject The Enlightenment™; we reject humanism. We favor natural selection and an ascendant pursuit of the transcendent good, an esoteric ideal which can be neither defined nor fully attained. We do not need it to all make sense in human terms.

Speaking of humans, the human comedy of today comes from eel abuse from somewhere in the Vietcong paradise:

Vietnamese doctors removed a live 2-foot-long eel from a man’s abdomen — that had chewed through his intestines after he shoved it up his anus.

Doctors attempted to remove the foreign object through the man’s anus — but they discovered a large lime that he had also inserted blocking the way.

As Plato says, “enough of this.”

Back to rationalism, it is simply another form of Control, or the human desire to beat external reality — including other people, but mostly nature and logic — into submission through torment:

When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will (motivation) and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally. The concept of suggestion as a complete technique presupposes that control is partial and not complete. You do not have to give suggestions to your tape recorder nor subject it to pain and coercion or persuasion.

Are you thinking of Nietzsche’s “slaves and masters” riff here? You should be: the master is nothing without a slave to whip, and only by whipping the slave, does he feel in power. But this illusion; actual power is in the potential not the exercise and rarely involves needing others.

A king for example leads his nation through the power of tradition and offers participation in this success. Those who do not or violate its sanctity are simply exiled. The king does not force his subjects to behave; he rewards those who behave well, and downranks or exiles the others.

While human logic embraces “good” and “evil,” nature is more like the bell curve: some things are good, some are bad, but most are various shades of grey, a mixture between good and bad. Reward the good, yeet the bad, and ignore everyone else. They will either act toward success or fade away.

Of course, that is too much Social Darwinism for the Leftists, and too much nihilism for the conservatives. Again: “I don’t want no Communists in my car — no Christians either!”

Speaking of transcending the mundane, which includes Crowdism or the tendency of human groups to pick collectivized narcissism as their ideal, consider how much metal and classical fans have in common:

“The general public has held a stereotype of heavy metal fans being suicidally depressed and a danger to themselves and society in general,” Adrian North, a Heriot-Watt University professor who studies genre listeners, told the Guardian. “But they are quite delicate things.” In fact, they’re exactly like classical fans.

Heavy metal appeals to the sensitives, or people capable of discerning more layers of detail in reality, because they need life to have meaning. This requires converting the lust for power into a creative force that seeks to make sense of everything and ascend transcendently through naturalism.

The armchair Reddit pegboys will not like that one!

It turns out that metal and classical fans have a lot in common, including patience:

Followers of bands such as Iron Maiden show commendable understanding when faced with delays in getting into concerts, accepting a 46-minute wait calmly. Those who prefer the likes of Beethoven turn stroppy with stewards after just 32.

The average rock fan wants to participate in a concert because he thinks he can borrow its glory and make his life meaningful as a result. All mass culture is this way; Leftism also falls under this heading, as does your average megachurch.

Most of them are insincere people with the attention span of gnats, sort of like people who read conservative websites. They want instant gratification, something that makes them feel better about their situation so that they do not have to change.

However, something happened last year: the world began to shift more toward realism.

It seems that many things which promised grand results had been tried long enough and taken to their extremes, and so the naked lunch was seen on the end of the fork: beneath the concepts, emotions, peer pressure, symbols, images, and manipulation, the grand visions were the usual human narcissism.

At this point, the world is drifting back toward function. Not surprisingly, CD sales are coming back as people realize that streaming is bunk like the rest of Silicon Valley:

Sales rose by 11.7% to 5.9 million units, increasing for the 16th year in a row, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade group.

Cassette sales also did well, topping 100,000 for a fourth consecutive year.

While more than four-fifths of recorded music is consumed via streaming, vinyl has made a huge comeback, with fans seeing it as more collectible and having better sound quality.

What happened? Streaming promised a Utopia, and delivered democratized music, which means a flow of too much bedroom black metal for any one person to sort the good from the bad. That means that the talented musicians held back since they would be unrecognized.

The cornucopia model failed because music does not sell by the pound, but by the cut: quality matters over quantity, at least to the few who have the brains enough to shape waves of coming taste. They are turning back toward physical media and away from the point-click-stream model.

If you think metal has it bad, other genres are suffering too, and more importantly, book publishing is experiencing exactly the same symptoms:

If the figures are to be believed, there has never been a better time to be a publisher. In 2022, British publishers sold 669 million physical books, the highest number ever recorded. Last year was tougher for many, with the post-Covid bump in book sales finally coming to an end. Even so, according to Nielsen BookScan, in the week up to Christmas alone £92.3 million was spent on books, the highest such figure for 16 years.

The Bookseller, the publishing industry’s trade magazine, is regularly filled with publishers lamenting the state of the industry. In its pages we hear tales of woe about the number of books published each year (too many), the sales of individual titles (too few) and the ability to compete for space on the bookshelves (too hard).

In the editorial meetings where what is published is decided and why, the most enduring effect has been the dominance of the “comparable title”. Comps, as they are known, are the system whereby newly acquired titles are judged by reference to the sales of older, similar books. Although a long-standing practice, it wasn’t until the introduction of BookScan in 2001, and with it the ready availability of accurate industry-wide sales figures, that they gained a new kind of dominance.

What this system has led to, at its worst, is a homogenisation of the industry and the kind of books that are published, in the larger publishing houses more than most. It would take a truly determined or exceptionally risky editor to force through a book that is wholly new in form or content, or whose only comps are books that have flopped. Instead, one success is followed by a string of imitators – think of the post-Richard Osman boom in “cosy crime”, or the endless run of similar blobby multicoloured book covers on the shelves of WH Smith. The result is the dominance of sterile, trend-following middlebrow fiction, and identikit and insipid nonfiction.

As reported here before, publishing industries of all kinds are dying because a few big items generate all of the income, everything else is basically a participation award, and this creates a cycle of emulation that dwarfs even glam metal in the 1980s.

Consequently, the publishing industries are hitting The Wall:

Shares of the most powerful music company in the world tanked on July 25 after its executives were honest about their revenue shortfall.

Translation: Streaming is slowing down. Apple and Amazon in particular aren’t signing up a lot of new customers.

This isn’t really news. The industry has known streaming was slowing down for at least a year. But saying it out loud still spooked Wall Street. Investors fretted that the music streaming boom is over and tried to sell their stock at the top of the market.

There is this nice pocket between the promise of what they offer and when we see what is at the end of the fork. In that pocket, profit is made; after it, the trend dies and the madding crowd runs off to another talisman or flees another scapegoat.

Industries die by competing themselves into oblivion. Everyone must ape Game of Thrones, Onward to Golgotha, or Harry Potter, and then suddenly everything is about the same. Technicality goes up, quality goes down.

As Mr Evil himself says:

The business right now really needs people with personalities. All the greats are dying off and we need more people who can go out there and shake people up. There was a moment when there was too much music to be consumed, and there’s so much out there that really you can’t separate anything.

We have a massive shortage of personality in music because content is rejected in favor of emulation of outward traits. As a result, every new thing is a recombinant clone of everything that succeeded before it, and that leaves no room for it to have an internal structure.

Perhaps the tide is turning as people turn on conformity algos which aim to pick the “winners” out of what the herd likes:

A U.S. judge ruled on Monday that Google violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world’s default search engine, the first big win for federal authorities taking on Big Tech’s market dominance.

Google started with a simple idea: rank higher the pages with more links to them, therefore reflecting back at the audience what it already likes. When you have no answer, fill in with Wikipedia pages and listings of products on Amazon. This made the modern internet.

As it turns out, many of the best simply aimed for an idiosyncratic expression of what they had seen of the world, being “cameras” as Burroughs called it:

Johnny — The Drill Sergeant. Born John Cummings on October 8, 1951, on Long Island; a veterna of military-academy life whose damn-the-torpedoes temperament was a crucial factor in keeping the band alive at its lowest ebb. Johnny contends, to this day, that he had no influences whatsoever as a guitarist. He picked up the instrument, belatedly, at 22, purchasing a $50 Mosrite in January 1974 on a trip with Dee Dee to the Manhattan guitar emporium Manny’s. He learned only what he deemed essential to make his desired music: “PUre, white rock ‘n’ roll, with no blues influence. I wanted our sound to be as original as possible. I stopped listening to everything.” – Hey Ho Let’s Go liner notes, p 26.

Perhaps metal would do better to discover itself than try to relive the past or invent the future.

***

Dissociate – Derealizer: this is basically a standard ambient/techno album with noise going in the background; the latter is not disturbing, but the former is fairly generic post-autechre electronica, so the two do not add up to much other than a not unpleasant listen that has a bit more distortion than normal, but like all things made for form over function it passes and is forgotten without a desire appearing to find it again.

Werewolves – Die For Us: remember that style of “modern” death metal that Hate Eternal and then Behemoth pioneered where the vocals tie together random riffs rushing against each other, creating an almost Catholic duality that dissolves into chaos and then repetition, which seemed like death metal but underneath was just speed metal riffs adapted to Slayer and Suffocation techniques? It grew up a bit but is still random so please do not make me hear this again.

Nighthämmer – Land of Fear: when Dødheimsgard released Monumental Possession, it was clear that a form of black metal adjacent heavy metal had emerged which combined later Darkthrone with early Slayer and later Venom to form a type of Britney Spears black metal: catchy choruses, melodic rhythm lead lines, circular songs with layers of rhythm technique, and most of all, broad open riffs featuring lots of pulsing strumming, and Nighthämmer continues this trend with an energetic maze of linear circularity.

Deteriorot – The Rebirth: something leads us to suspect that this band, like various psycho killers, can only appreciate life under three conditions — they do something wrong, we know it, and we can do nothing about it — because they like making songs out of essentially four notes and then repeating ad nauseam like they are having the best joke ever putting this over on the moron metal fans, but conflict, atmosphere, mood, transport, and development never happen on their albums.

Krypticy – The Non-Return: the Malevolent Creation influence is strong with this band that likes its versions of 1990s riffs with a bit of deathcore influence, resulting in a release that is crammed together and never gives any riff chance to breathe and develop, leading to the feeling of being pummeled by a constantly-changing environment in which the parts minimally relate to each other.

Pestkraft – Ancestral Sounds: this takes me back to the worst of late-90s and early-00s black metal, when the “Burzum strum” became popular and depressive suicidal black metal ruled the airwaves, mainly because people were out of ideas therefore riff ideas, so they emulated a black metal trope and then reacted to it like guitar practice, making general black metal with less variation and adaptation to the mood of the song than the original had, like this random collection of black metal-ish ideas.

Acid Bath – Balance of Power: every few years this one floats around and we all try hard to like it, but instead of a smoothly integrated type of technical or even progressive death metal, we get a mixture of speed metal, heavy metal, and nascent death metal that barely holds together because its parts have no relationship to an atmosphere or adventure of the whole, so it feels like driving a golf cart at top speed through the Ikea as the little fake rooms whip past in discordinated contrast.

Gjendød – Livskramper: At Judeo-Christian Media Inc, Steve Ymoods pitched the new plan: “We dress it up like Dimmu ‘Stormblåst’ but underneath it we put good old-fashioned 1980s speed metal, and if anything gets bad, throw in some weird Voïvod dissonant stuff; the kids are so stupid they’ll eat it up.” The committee voted; the decision was made. Metal never had a voice.

Serpentheir – Hypernature’s Vines: later Dimmu Borgir has a lot to answer for in this style of high-speed chihuahua-vocalized rushing collection of tangentially-related riffs with lots of keyboards and almost no song development, which seems to be the model that Serpentheir adopted on the advice of their financial advisers, but it makes for music that is both too anxiously neurotic and distracted to really take any kind of viewpoint much less explore one, leading to abrupt boredom.

Artach – Sgrios: more industrial metal that is basically re-branded speed metal with an emphasis on choppy abrupt riffs in the Exhorder or Meshuggah style but without the grace of a Prong or later Voivod, with more emphasis on vocals than guitars and song structures that wrap around a verse-chorus pair with a kind of non-confrontation faceoff in the middle before dropping into the lulling antigroove that bounces along like Boomers looking for life purpose.

The Shiva Hypothesis – Faustian Restlessness: some Homesar in the industry demanded that this one be sold as death/black metal but really this is pure alternative metal in the Supuration and Voivod style with more focus on underground techniques and aesthetics, but a core of wanting to make sourdough bread out of the bittersweet emotions in indie and alternative rock, re-charging those minor key diminished melodies with some martial energy like a sci-fi band, although the result is too busy to achieve clarity.

Doomraiser – Cold Grave Marble: if you wanted a version of Candlemass with an infusion of Nevermore around the vocals, this band uses Black Sabbath style broad riff structures and focuses less on groove than on a strong sense of inertia, which gives the band a heaviness that comes from the internal clash despite the relatively positive vocals, allowing these songs to bear past their somewhat heavy metal origins and produce an actual sensation of only partially sardonic doom.

Nihilect – Tapestry: “technical death metal” once meant musicians with skill, now it means memorizing positions from YouTube so that a simple pop trope can get dressed up in distractions which are designed to deflect from any sense of theme and hide the aimlessness of it all, which makes for a listening experience of confusion and a return to mundanity which echoes what one finds in the constant egodrama of trends influencers on social media.

Mages Terror – Damnations Sight: this odd hybrid mixes together old heavy metal with archaic punk riffs and death metal technique, but relies mostly on bounding verses and standoffish choruses, creating a sensation of being trapped in a mall fistfight that never quite starts but never relaxes because the french fries at the McDonald’s were too old and now everyone is wating for a new batch.

Mother of Millions – Magna Mater: why is this in the metal queue? A warmed-over 1980s pop band periodically uses distortion and therefore they claim it is metal? This is less metal than Duran Duran or Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, but it is not as good, and generally goes through tired pop melodies with a distracted air and lots of distracting drumming as well as formless riffs, making one wonder whether its audience even bothers to listen to anything but the singing.

Isle Of The Cross – Faustus The Musical: progressive rock means tying together a number of themes to make the central theme stronger, but in the hands of the internet-metal audience, it means having a simple song and then layering it with instruments and rhythms that do not work together so that the audience confuses the lack of order with a brilliant hidden order (I blame Dan Brown and “The Matrix”) which ends up in a pile of smarmy boredom like this over-inflated rock opera of interchangeable parts.

Hail Spirit Noir – Fossil Gardens: now we are pretending to be black metal by stretching a few Dimmu Borgir emulation riffs over crooner pop in a random enough order to seem “edgy” to the fat heritageless entry level tech workers who must listen to this stuff, which only exists because record labels are terrified of not hopping on the latest trend even though no one really likes this corporate pablum.

Hipoxia – Fragmented Revelations: a band can suffer from its style, namely that if it has too much power in that style, it can make it hard to write music that fulfills the experience, and so the band can become lost; unlike most bands here, Hipoxia seem like they have honest intentions with this hybrid of Winter, Disembowelment, and Godflesh that almost writes itself and therefore makes it hard to develop songs except in lush reverberating layers of guitar, distorted bass, and vocals.

Stillborn – Netherworlds: this band combined Sisters of Mercy and Black Sabbath but added an affection for using distinct instrumental introductions to unify songs, yet still manages to essentially fall into the verse-chorus loop with little development, which means yet another band taken over by the vocalist and run into the ground because we never get to see where these instrumentals could go. This review is unchanged since their 1991 release.

Spacecorpse – Shapeshifter: metalcore vocals-driven rock dressed up in lots of adornment and decoration from the “progressive” image-based side of things, this band is at its core terrible deathcore that has simply been coated in a nice layer of sugar frosting, and leads us to wonder whether the people making this stuff actually like metal at all because it sounds more like hardcore kids trying to be metal fans.

Deceased – Children of the Morgue: the band adopts some modern vocal influences from later black metal and some speed metal technique, but basically stays true to making its classic heavy metal, something which is actually weakened by the insistence on death metal vocals, but if you liked the last few, you will enjoy this mid-paced romp through horror movie, true crime, and heavy metal tropes with some exceptional 1970s-style guitar pyrotechnics on the leads.

Necronomicon Ex Mortis – Your Friends Are Dead: Game Over: nostalgia is crucifixion; while around here the Slayer and Sepultura are on the turntable (mp3 player) on the regs, it is recognized that while eternal these bands are also from a time, and now we need something else in addition to the momentum they have gifted us, but this band basically replays old Slayer and Sepultura (“Arise” era) tropes while blarting out something about horrors movies, for a “not bad, not good, really just there” type of review.

Devolution – Deceiver, Believer: crossover between metalcore and power metal with alternative rock and worship music melodies, basically very happy music that is about as threatening as a “Live Laugh Love” sign with a Punisher sticker on it; songs tend to follow the vocals in circular patterns with some surprises but nothing deviates much from repeating those sweet vocal hooks because the band has little else.

Orpheus Omega – Emberglow: a power metal band that confuses itself with a reliance on over-active drumming, double-stroke shredding, and ranting Dimmu Borgir vocals, this band does an OK job of the type of sweet emo pop that power metal favors, but fails on maintaining a groove or building interesting songs, and doubly fails on style, ending up with a noisy chaotic mess that sounds like music for kids who drive minivans but have prison records.

Carnivora’s Feast – Teufel: this stays within the alternative rock framework and adopts a Voivod style of dissonant chords and spidery angular scalar fills, but uses more of a groove in the style of Filter or Alice in Chains, which makes this music oddly hummable while it tries to be as jarring as possible while still having some pop appeal, and the result is not bad and not uninteresting, which puts this band ahead of the rest of its genre.

Spectral Wound – Songs of Blood and Mire: we have a new name for this, we can call it NGO metal because it has money behind it for production but is basically a mashup of Norse black metal influences made emo by a lack of conflict, only a sort of meandering travel through riffs related only by being centered on the same note in which nothing develops only elaborates like the endless corporate buzzword salad speeches about productivity and social justice.

Darkmoon Warrior – Graveyard Planet: basically a merger of Immortal Blizzard Beasts and At the Heart of Winter with some later Absurd and the midpaced quite honestly boring works of the German underground, this band makes a compelling style in the moment but fails to reach levels of expression that would make a seasoned fan reach for this over any of the classics.

Nifelheim – Unholy Death: this early compilation shows this band still trying to make relevant material, sounding very much like a mash-up of Merciless, Grotesque, and Sodom instead of the later faux-retro speed metal mold in which it crammed itself, this release is more listenable than most of what comes along but also falls short of what it imitates so there really is no point to listen except a simultaneous need for consumerist novelty and fatalistic nostalgia, neither of which are interesting.

Primal – Humachine: bouncy later Exodus-style speed metal with early Judas Priest vocals, Primal bashes out a strong representation of genre without trying to push any boundaries, and unlike most of what rolls across this desk, the songs hold together, match key, are in proportion, and seem to have conscious thought and choice applied to what goes in them, but you have to really like this early form of a power metal and speed metal hybrid.

Tantrum – No Place For the Damned: a strong Judas Priest and Manowar influence marks this power metal album which focuses on harmony in powerful choruses and NWOBHM flourishes but keeps an uptempo muted-strum without a gallop beat, making speed metal into something closer to the dance industrial bands that followed in the wake of Killing Joke, so although the end result is metally it does not deliver a sense of heaviness so much as a vaguely epic sensibility that mostly dissipates through repetition.

Autumn’s Eyes – Grimoire of Oak and Shadow: they pitch this as Gothic metal, but really this is straight alternative metal with smarmy vocals and Pantera riffs, achieving an atmosphere more like radio pop than anything dark, and since songs are basically layers packed on top of one riff and one vocal hook in the chorus, nothing really goes anywhere and even extensive lifts from 1980s dark pop fail to give this any distinction or power.

Eye Eater – Alienate: all of this “modern metal” stuff — death metal is more than just vokills, but a musical language of its own — strikes me as variations on Ministry and Fugazi, but without the continuity or riff-shaping, so you lose the through-composed narrative that is essential to death metal, and instead you get an emphasis on vocals and the change in otherwise consistent rhythms, but if that was what was needed, we would just listen to late hardcore or put on that dusty SRV boot in the corner.

Sekoria – Seelenwanderung: music like wandering through a hotel where something unrelated is happening in each room and you see it through the open door as you keep walking with a sing-song rhythm heading toward the elevator, knowing that you are going to the lobby to eat something huge, but for now you want to feel sorry for yourself and listen to repetitive recasts of early black metal riffs in a non-confrontational way so you can keep the thoughts in your head safe from colliding with reality for another few minutes.

Cryptic Hatred – Internal Torment: if you take a deathcore release and mix in some older Swedish and Finnish riff styles but keep the metalcore-styled vocals that guide the song so that riffs are there as backdrop, essentially supporting a voice which like propaganda over a PA system in wartime is designed to shape your thinking to avoid noticing of the flaws in the big agenda and its narrative, somehow makes distraction into a narrative and through that ties together the unrelated into a temporary army without a mind.

Kvaen – The Formless Fires: too much leading vocals in this melodic metal project that focuses more on momentum riffs than on riff shape, and therefore sounds a bit like a jet engine run through autotune with lots of emphatic ranting from the vocals and song structures based around the verse-chorus with a moment of indecision in the middle of the repetition to make us think something has changed when really the sonic wallpaper keeps unrolling.

Eternal Drak – Imprisoned Souls: after a bunch of talk about being the future hybrid of black metal and other genres, this is basically speed metal straight out of the early 1990s with extra bounce and groove, but a bit more melody, however is still focused on the vocals so you end up listening to chanty ranting while some guitars chug in the background, which makes this both familiar and gratifying but not as good as Sacramentum The Coming of Chaos or Immortal At The Heart of Winter.

King Zog – Second Dawn: did you want MTV alternative metal with plaintive vocals and groove metal riffs in bluesy format with punkish rhythms slowed down for the living room set? — here you get the 1990s public music revisited, sort of a cross between Filter and Alice in Chains, but with booming simple riffs of well-known forms, so this is not unpleasant and might make great soundtrack music but is otherwise possible to overlook at no loss to your existential, mental, emotional, or sensual futures.

Afsky – Om hundrede år: if you want that black metal feeling with more happy notes and less inner turmoil, as well as less reference to anything but comforting feelings inside your outer self and the pubs you frequent, this peer pressure metal sounds sort of like the 1990s version but instead paces itself like late hardcore around repetition of cheerful and empty struggle-less material like they play to the kids in the yellow-painted rooms where everyone wears cushioned helmets and eats paste.

Yob – Our Raw Heart: one goes seeking doom metal that manages the atmosphere of contemplative melancholy that serves as the useful basis of doom because it reins in the hybris and marketing for a few moments, but this band sounds like a slowed down alternative band which has adopted a few metal riffs in the midst of its hymns of self-aggrandizing self-pity and songs do not develop so much as react to the optics of having lost direction, then drone on further.

Dysmorfic / Glauco – Finnfest: Dysmorfic adds jazz bass to impulsive grindcore that specializes in oddball riffs tied together into a roughly coherent narrative that lacks the dimension of expanding mood, so is purely musical, like Carbonized but with more designs on the coffee; Glauco is fast punk songs with jazzy breaks that mostly depend on dynamic jump scares for effect; together these make a portrayal of a genre so dead it digs up the past and rips it off in “new, ironic” ways rather than writing songs.

***

Thus endeth another edition of the Sadistic Metal Reviews. We hope you enjoyed or at least suffered.

Tags: Black Metal, clones, control, death metal, Nihilism, ramones, sadistic metal reviews, smr, social darwinism, sodomy