GIBSON IS DOOMED!

by Brock Dorsey on February 15, 2018

Gibson Guitars are on the verge of bankruptcy per an article in the Nashville Times.  The famed company is currently in a shitload of debt and its bondholders are panicking as their CFOs are abandoning ship. Despite bringing in a billion dollars last year, the prospects of Gibson are uncertain which begs the question: What future do high-end guitar brands have in a world that’s gravitating towards electronic music? And more importantly- is the death of electric guitar closer than we think, like many are claiming?

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Mastadon – Cold Dark Place Really Sucks

by Joe Slater on February 14, 2018

Bought an EP of Cold Dark Place by Mastadon, since the album cover looked cool, like a classic Aeternus. To my dismay, as I started track one, some horrible over-produced folk-rock attempt came blaring through my headphones, complete with horrible synced male and female off-pitched vocals.  Another track has a weird, crappy beat and Jane’s addiction styled vocals.  These songs are so bad that its hard to listen to more than fifteen seconds of each song before feeling violently ripped-off.
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Phil Anselmo’s Newest Solo Endevour Bombs

by Brock Dorsey on February 14, 2018

On a recent episode of “The Classic Metal Show” burnt out Pantera vocalist and famed roman-saluter Phil Anselmo admitted that his newest album Choosing Mental Illness as a Virtue was “only going to appeal to X amount of people, and that’s going to be a small amount of people.”  By X amount, Phil was likely referring to the roman numeral for the number 10 as that is about the number of fans his band of soon-to-be deported illegal immigrants has.  The album currently has a 46% score on Metal-Archives (already a low medium of standards) and virtually no one has professed a fondness for the album outside of the journalists who were paid to.

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“It’s Okay to be White” – The Metal Song

by Brock Dorsey on February 13, 2018

Political YouTuber Finntronaut has uploaded a silly new metal song and video themed after the “It’s Okay to be White” prank that violently triggered thousands of snowflake liberals earlier this season.  While the song is not exactly good, it’s a pretty funny take on how ridiculous this culture war has gotten lately here in the U.S.A.  Thematically the video takes no political position- it’s just a bunch of goofy satirical visualizations overdramatizing the racial/cultural tensions of this age.

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The Chasm – A Conscious Creation from the Isolated Domain – Phase I

by Jerry Hauppa on February 13, 2018

Daniel Cochardo loves metal. It is no question- from his tenure fronting The Chasm, his work in Cenotaph and his contributions to the last above-average Incantation album Diabolical Conquest that the man is steadfast in his dedication to extreme metal.  Throughout his impressive library of work, we haven’t seen any indication of a wavering of passion or hints of selling out in any way.  What we however have seen is a middling assemblage of efforts that come close to sublime heights but ultimately fall short of the metal ideal. Therfore The Chasm has always flown a bit under the radar, consistently releasing material that has a unique voice commanding the charge but a lack of cohesion giving the music a timeless appeal.  With CCI, The Chasm ends their longest drought between records with an assertive gesture in the form of an instrumental concept album, and although that may hint at a rejuvenated band that is hungry to finally make the profound artistic statement they have always fallen short of, unfortunately The Chasm has given us a release more puzzling than declarative.

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Control Denied – The Fragile Art of Existence (1999)

by Johan Pettersson on February 12, 2018

Control Denied was formed in the mid-1990s by late Death-frontman Chuck Schuldiner to cater to his desire to explore more traditional metal stylings.  Schuldiner, however, was still bound to Death’s contract with Nuclear Blast and thus agreed to record one more album under the Death-moniker before concentrating fully on his new band and musical direction.  As a result, songs originally intended for Control Denied were shoe-horned into a death metal context on The Sound of Perseverance (1998) which partly explains the lackluster, two-faced nature of the last and arguably worst Death-album. With contractual entanglements finally sorted out, Control Denied’s debut The Fragile Art of Existence saw the light of day in 1999.
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Analysis of Death Metal Vocalists

by Nicholas Vahdias on February 11, 2018

Guttural vocals are the only true vocal innovation in metal as other singing styles are derived from other genres. The growed vocal technique is a combination of multiple frequencies and is harmonically too rich to be treated in the same way as more tonal styles.  Since they are different to all that came before them they must be analyzed differently.  And as metal continues to be penetrated by the mainstream it is important to understand what should be expected from a vocalist and what each one brings to the table since as humans we are inclined to judge vocals first.

In the spirit of understanding the wide variety that the technique has to offer, take a look at some of the more interesting and/or well known vocalists that death metal has given us throughout the years:
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Weathering the Storm as a Republican Metalhead

by Brock Dorsey on February 10, 2018

November 8th, 2016.  Manhattan, NY.  Election night.  I was there.

Wading back and forth between a crowd of suits and red hats gathered outside the Fox News building on 6th ave and a similar group gathered a few blocks north outside the Hilton hotel where the soon-to-be President-Elect was present, I celebrated ecstatically as electoral college results came in showing my favorite politician on the cusp of capturing the presidency.  All of us were over the moon with excitement and bliss, particularly because New York City had seldom presented a place where support of the man the media branded as Hitler 2.0 could be expressed openly.

While walking home and passing virtually every media truck parked for a mile along the road where America’s next President prepared his victory speech, a young NPR reporter excitedly rushed over to me with her microphone and cameraman after seeing the ridiculous “Trump 2020” pins on my shirt.  I agreed to her request for interview and explained why I thought Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy and realist economic objectives would benefit the country’s middle and working classes.  Admitting her surprise to learn that I was a compliance director working near Wall St. and not the basic redneck Trump voter the media had branded us as, she asked if I was excited about the likelihood of supporting Trump being more socially acceptable now that he was president.  “Yeah” I said “It finally won’t be taboo now!”

We could not have been more wrong.
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