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Trendkillers #3: Kill Metal Kickstarters

by Brock Dorsey on January 19, 2018

When riding the subway in a major American city one is likely to encounter a homeless person panhandling for money. There is usually a canned speech of sorts that may or may not sound something like this:

“Hi my name is Daniel. I am homeless. I lost my job, I am cold, and I am hungry with no food to eat. Please donate whatever you can so I can eat. God bless.”

When I see musicians and journalists advertising Kickstarter, Patreon, and other fundrasing campaigns I hear the same speech in my head. This speech sounds something along the lines of:

“Hi my name is Daniel. I am a musician. I have no job, I am cold, and I am unmedicated with no Starbucks Frappacino to drink. Please donate money so I can record a blatantly mediocre album that I will also charge you for. I will hate you if you do not give me this money.”

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12 Comments

Tags: hipsters, Kickstarter, narcissism, Paetron, poverty, Trendkillers

Ancient – “Eerily Howling Winds” (1993)

by Johan Pettersson on January 19, 2018

As previously pointed out by the editor of this site, metal demo recordings does not exist as crass commercial propositions with the sole purpose of advertising the market viability of the artist, but function — at least ideally — as independent works produced and distributed without further infringement from the recording industry. In spite of eventual shortcomings resulting from lack of budget, experience, and time, demo-level recordings remain a breath of fresh air because they oftentimes capture bands at a nascent and untempered creative stage.

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7 Comments

Tags: 1993, Ancient, Black Metal, eerily howling winds, norway

Victory Over Peace

by Hereweald Cola Algar on January 14, 2018

There are those who would make us think that peace is essential for life. They demand we must reconcile all manner of disagreements and simply live happily together. In reality, what happens in a real compromise (if indeed it is a compromise) is that every one involved gets a bit of what he bargained for. It is not unlike Celtic Frost, a.k.a. the failed post-Hellhammer experiment that tried going mainstream a step at a time. By the time the band released Into the Pandemonium it was clear that by trying to bring the monster of underground black/death metal into the light they only degenerated it into a joke that no one, except masochists, want to ever hear again. The reader may want to attribute the downfall of Celtic Frost to a host of other causes, but the decision was in fact simple: give in to niceties and benefits through a compromise, or keep on fighting, towards a transcendental victory.
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21 Comments

Tags: Black Metal, burzum, celtic frost, Editorial, hellhammer, Les Légions Noires, metal, victory

Demos and a Forsaken Future

by Brock Dorsey on January 6, 2018

“Dude, their demos were so much better” is one of the most obnoxious cliches of underground metal. Usually a sign of virtue signaling used to mask one’s insecurities about their knowledge or taste, many lost souls of a nostalgia-obsessed age will use this one as a pale attempt to one up their brethren. However in many cases within metal’s sonic sphere, bands that were truly fantastic on their early demos left much to be desired and ultimately left listeners unfulfilled. Whether it be a record company’s influence, a change in heart or band members, or a touch of genius quickly fumbled away, may bands throughout the history of metal have never quite been able to match the quality of their demo recordings.

With death metal built on an entire sub culture of tape trading, demos were more than a proverbial foot-in-the-door to a potential record deal. For musicians of the genre’s early days, the demo was the equivalent to having your record in the store- it was being shipped all around the world to fans desperate for something they couldn’t find in shops and to musicians hungry for new ideas. Furthermore, a band’s demo was untainted by the direction and input of record labels who, in those days, quite often suppressed what was deemed “too weird” or “too extreme” as death metal was often determined by the suits of those days. Tape trading death metal demos was an underground of its own, and your band’s demo tape wasn’t just a pathway to commercialization or musical success- but a often the start of new friendships in a rapidly globalizing world. Given all of these unique factors, it’s no surprise death metal was full of bands who could never quite capture the magic of their demos.

To offer a complete list would be a dishonor and disservice to the legions of quality works that fall under this umbrella. Therefore in today’s editorial, I will briefly offer a handful of my personal favorite death metal demos from bands that could never quite capture the magic. Though I pay little mind to what happens in our comment sections, this will mark a special occurrence where I’d be delighted to know what DMU’s readers would have on this list.

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50 Comments

Tags: At the Gates, celtic frost, death, death metal, Death Metal Demos, Demilich, demo, Editorial, entombed, Heavy Metal, hellhammer, my dying bride, necrophagia, Nihilist, Proto-Death Metal, Swedish Death Metal, Therion, vader

Trendkillers #2: Blast Beats Must Die!

by Brock Dorsey on January 5, 2018

The blast beat has had a very unlikely journey through its relatively young lifespan in music. Rooted in a jazz technique of an alternating bass drum/hi-hat and snare 16th note pattern (though played at much slower tempo in jazz music), it found a unique identity in the early 1980s when underground hardcore punk bands like Siege and Asocial began using it at aggressive speeds to enhance their violent bursts of rebellion. This made it a close friend of metal when the middle of the decade saw a fledgling death metal movement getting its hands dirty with hardcore punk speed and sound in an effort to push its own extremity. Over the next 15 years, several drummers would rise to prominence with their clever use of the blast beat to either push these combinations to extreme speeds or to utilize them enduringly for an effect similar to trance music. Suddenly, every metal band that wanted to play fast or play simplistically HAD to play blast beats, and we eventually reached a point where blast beats were the most dominant part of every death and black metal song’s drum composition.

For the future of death and black metal to establish themselves distinctively, they must abandon what has become routine and keep only what is necessary to preserve their underlying spirit. And with this understanding comes an unfortunate truth- the beloved blast beat must be laid to rest, so that new life in metal can grow.
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39 Comments

Tags: Black Metal, blast beats, cannibal corpse, conditioning, darkthrone, death metal, fenriz, metal, metal drumming, mind control, repulsion, sepultura, Trendkillers, trends

Venenum – Trance of Death (2017)

by Jerry Hauppa on January 4, 2018

Records praised as “innovative” have a first-mover advantage: we all take that assessment at face value, not having heard the album, and then can only see through it after a half-dozen listens, at which point the record stands revealed. These iconoclastic pioneers usually tend to be the opposite, wielding piecemeal structuring as a cudgel to mask songwriting pitfalls or a lack of overall message in general, and Trance of Death manages to dupe the listener on both counts at first.
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18 Comments

Tags: Black Metal, death metal, post-metal, rock-metal, venenum

Star Wars: Tie Fighter 1994 LucasArts

by Brock Dorsey on December 27, 2017

Throughout literature, film, and any other telling of the Arthurian legend there is usually a hard line stance taken on characters or ideas being indisputably good or evil. The heroes and villains are on conflicting sides of a fundamental and absolute morality despite reality often being much more complicated. The Star Wars franchise followed this school of thought- casting the Empire as the evil and soulless reflection of Western history’s teaching of the axis powers of World War II. It parallels the post-French Revolution narrative that all democracy is good and all imperial reigns are heinous and wrong.

It is because of this that we can remember LucasArts’s 1994 PC flight simulator Tie Fighter as such a refreshingly bold and surprising experiment in a world of video games where the narrative is always fixated on “the good guys.” In Tie fighter, you are- from start to finish- fighting on behalf of a faction that the movies portrayed as dark and merciless dictatorship that is completely void of humanity. No change of heart in your character halfway through (as in this year’s disastrous Battlefront 2), no surprising twist- you’re essentially waging war with all that is good and just in the galaxy. It’s one of the first and possibly few games that take this perspective, and – for one of the first times for a mainstream game of this caliber- Tie Fighter gives the player a unique chance to embrace the understanding that morality is often a form of perspective.

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13 Comments

Tags: authoritarian, Black Metal, death metal, imperial, jontron, lifestyle, lucasarts, metal, Star Wars, tie fighter, totalitarian, video games

The Relevance of Obsessed by Cruelty

by Hereweald Cola Algar on December 25, 2017

Article by Hereweald Cola Algar

It is not secret that old Sodom is well-respected around this part, if not at least thoroughly enjoyed, despite the precipitous downfall that the band suffered after the eighties towards an apparently never-stopping race to the lowest possible level. The reason for this attention, this admiration, for an obviously caveman affair like Sodom is that despite its used of underdeveloped riffs and its reliance on harsh rhythmic hooks, the same limitation forced the band to look for ways in which an enveloping darkness could be expressed. The result, at the band’s highest point (arguably at Obsessed by Cruelty), are proto-labyrinthic songs that return to strong riffs, and so do not loose either drive or become lost in an overly complicated search for more material to cram.
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12 Comments