The Boston Beer Company generally makes solid but unexceptional beers for a wide audience which isn’t surprising given that it is a brewery founded by a former corporate financier who was the son of a brewer to fill a hole in the market in the 1980s: domestic beers that could compete with mediocre European imports. Craft beer was just getting started and most of the big adjunct lager brewers had already diluted down the their product to the point where many wouldn’t even drink it. Jim Koch employed the same chemist and brewer who formulated Miller Lite to fine tune a beer an old family recipe he had been homebrewing for mass production. Samuel Adams Boston Lager is a genuinely good beer but what their Octoberfest eventually became in the 21st century is not. The first whiff and sip is dark fruits and toasted bread like a darker Marzen beer should be but then the unpleasantness hits you like an off-scented dashboard air freshener. The beer tastes like brown sugar and smells of artificial cinnamon and ginger. Sam Adams is hiding pumpkin spice bullshit in their Octoberfest seasonal for the Starbucks yuppies! Samuel Adams Octoberfest is one of those beers. The radlers, shandies, Zimas, pumpkin spice lattes, and mango IPAs for ex-sorority girls and effeminate homosexuals – wine cooler “beer”! The only positive attribute is that if you get this for free and drink the entire six pack, you will get drunk. Unfortunately, your excretate will smell like that of an unwashed obese man the day after Thanksgiving.
Some compare this to Mortician but to these ears, it sounds more like a Cathedral, Cianide and Asphyx crossover. Where Mortician adopted slowed-down grindcore stylings to death metal, Nothing Left bring a pure grindcore approach to the type of pummeling, rhythm-driven riffing that powers Cianide or Asphyx, and adds the droning doomy feel of later doom bands like Cathedral.
Kaeck have posted a live video of “De heerser wederkeert” off of Death Metal Underground’s 2015 Album of the YearStormkult from their performance at the Under the Black Sun 2016 festival in Germany. Regrettably, Oovenmeester (also in Noordelingen) was unable to provide his unhinged vocals so Ygethmor from Standvast provided more somewhat more conventional and staid black metal vocals somewhat too high in the mix for a ringer. The live version is still worth checking out in order to hear Chaos from Sammath‘s haunting guitar work in a less distorted live setting.
Brett Stevens‘ Nihilism: A Philosophy Based in Nothingness and Eternity has been published by Manticore Press. The book may be purchased from Amazon in multiple countries.
Summer weather of almost a hundred degrees Fahrenheit soaking your shirt through with sweat just walking to your car calls for a different drink than something for sipping by the fireplace. Coors Light pours the color of a well-hydrated man’s pee. It smells like pale malt, corn, with a very slight hint of rotten banana. The tastes isn’t half bad though if you don’t consider it a beer. Coors Light tastes like carbonated water and sourdough bread and finishes with a slightly metallic, aspirin-like hint of hops. It’s better than Bud Light and isn’t horrible but is clearly just a mediocre beer diluted with seltzer. All of Coors’ macho mountain climber advertising is just to convince men that Coors Light is more masculine than a vodka soda. Nobody should ever buy this over Coors Banquet despite the discounts if you buy two tallboys at 7-11.
Intolitarian is the work of a singular person who polemically positions himself as an artistic paragon standing on the opposite end of a polarity between retro-rehash, imported heaps of plastic and bad Xeroxes. Amidst such a landscape and armed with powerful rhetorical golden guns, he is able to churn out effort after effort which communicates nothing and everyone knows it. Like war metal, which similarly has nothing to say, criticism is parried through a simple maneuver: those who call this spade a spade simply cannot handle how extreme it is for it is certain that this work stands on the precipice of a new aesthetic era that will make death and black metal look like nursery rhymes. This defensive posture is of course a variation of the oft repeated, “You don’t understand” that is used by insular communities and critics to accomplish little more than convince the user of their own superiority where every induced eye-roll reduces to signals of ones own status as a martyr for good taste.
If there’s a pioneer band in the Spanish Death Metal scene, that’s NECROPHILIAC! Emerged in ’88, the band released various demos until ’92 when their classic album “Chaopula – Citadel of Mirrors” was released. After that, the band did split-up and it’s now when, after 6 long years trying to get this release out, Xtreem Music is proud to announce the release of a 2-CD containing this album with all demos, unreleased 7″EP’s and live tracks with unreleased tunes on it.
“Maze of Forking Paths” is a complete collection of the band’s studio & live recordings from ’88 to ’92, all remastered with the best possible sound and a killer booklet full of photos, liner notes, demo covers, lyrics, flyers, etc. This is a mandatory release to understand where the spanish Death Metal scene comes from!
Release date for “Maze of Forking Paths” will be September 1st through Xtreem Music on 2-CD format with limited T-shirts available at the same time. You can visit NECROPHILIAC’s official Facebook here: www.facebook.com/necrophiliacdeathmetal and listen to an advance song on the following links: