Another promising act relinquishes its potential to the roar of the crowd. Laceration released one of the more note-worthy albums of 2021 with their debut, Demise, taking the deft, speed-metal influenced rhythms of early death metal and placing them within the context of a dark ambiance reminiscent of Demigod.
9 CommentsTags: death metal, laceration
Every day, black metal tries to escape its past and get to the moment before that past when the why of black metal was clearer, because only from striving for that goal can black metal recapture its sense of beauty, melancholy, and transcendent balance of light and dark.
18 CommentsTags: black funeral, Black Metal
Moving through the underground without noticing Deceased over the past three decades would prove difficult, and many of us know this band as an early effort to bring heavy metal technicality to death metal at a time when the genre was still considered primitive.
74 CommentsTags: death metal, deceased, doomstone, Heavy Metal, hells headbangers
Although this album recently got released, the Committee got ahold of it and mucked up the production and changed the tracks. You want the original 1996 version which compiled demos from Vader in the years leading up to The Ultimate Incantation.
34 CommentsTags: death metal, vader
For years, our writers have enjoyed not just Zeni Geva but the subsequent outpouring of solo and collaborative works from Kazuyuki “K.K. Null” Kishino, who wrangles operatic emotional conflicts out of pure sound distorted, twisted, echoed, and stretched into plaintive sounds.
39 CommentsTags: joel gilardini, k.k. null, noise, zeni geva
Percussive speed metal and death metal hybrid Exhorder is cruising around the states for a late summer tour. You can catch them at the following dates.
27 CommentsTags: Exhorder, Speed Metal
Condemner offers us the most bare-bones death metal possible. We hear only a straightforward guitar. Simple, slow battle drums that press on the same emphasis points of the guitar riff. Traditional death metal vocals round off the bare minimum arrangement, with the occasional higher-register growl doubling for demonic effect at tactical points.
41 CommentsTags: condemner, death metal
Underground metal grew in part because it was unselfconscious. Its bands expressed notions both idiosyncratic and subconscious, so it was evocative at a level below the rationalizing mind. Mekigah attempt to resurrect that observational weirdness with a Godflesh, post-metal, and doom metal hybrid.
7 CommentsTags: Ambient, Doom Metal, Industrial, mekigah, post-metal
Noise gets less attention than it did back in the 1990s when everyone wanted to try new sounds with new gear that escaped the tyranny of notes and scales, but it remains a powerful force for voicing a union between texture, rhythm, and the basics of melody. K.K. Null has developed it into a voice of its own.
8 CommentsTags: joel gilardini, k.k. null, noise
Doom metal probably does not qualify as a genre, more as a descriptor, since doom stretches between old school heavy metal all the way through melodic death metal and even grindcore, but it requires a certain mood: a slow ominous urgency with a sense of gravity bearing down the futility of all existence.
23 CommentsTags: Doom Metal, doomraiser
