Varathron – The Confessional of the Black Penitents (2015)

Varathron - The Confessional of the Black Penitents (2015)
As half original work (a short EP) and half live document, The Confessional of the Black Penitents seems more compilation than unified album at first glance. I wouldn’t be surprised if the live tracks were added in an attempt to increase the supposed ‘value’ of this EP, but this is one of those cases where the commercial intent of a tracklisting decision seems less important than its overall effect on how I engage with the tracks themselves.

Varathron does admittedly stick to the stereotypical “Greek” aesthetic on the original half of this EP – in this case, a combination of contemporary black metal technique and production with elements of older metal and rock. After an extended intro, the two lengthy tracks that form the core of this half tend to explore this by alternating more overtly extreme sections with slower sections similar to older works and frequently interspersed with melodic guitar leads. These tracks showcase a strength of organization and a tasteful, limited incorporation of modern metal elements in a fashion similar to that of the band’s previous album. Based on this, and compared to other bands in the Greek scene, Varathron has aged gracefully, avoiding the contrasting pitfalls of endless repetition, excess streamlining, or overextension in the name of artistic progress or even just diversity.

The live half of this recording could serve as a general survey of Varathron as reinterpreted through the band’s modern lineup, although it is lacking in the band’s 2000s output. With three of its four tracks sourced from the band’s earliest days, it showcases the often slower and sparser approach of the band’s earliest days. Even the faster, blasting components showcased on the original tracks here make some appearance, so the main difference appears to be that in their ‘classic’ era, Varathron focused more on the rhythmic and percussive elements of their music. The other live track comes from 2014’s Untrodden Corridors of Hades; this rendition does much to render it closer to the older material in sound, which helps highlight the similarity of their songwriting. The production also helps to unify these tracks – while rougher than a proper studio environment, it’s still intelligible and in some ways more polished than that of the original material.

The new studio tracks, at the very least, make The Confessional of the Black Penitents a fine purchase. Fewer will go out of their way to acquire this EP for its live component (although it is apparently Varathron’s first official live release), but it too has value, as it provides an introduction of sorts to the band’s older material.

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Diesel – Unlimited Maduro 6×60 (2015)

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The Diesel Unlimited Maduro is an extension of the very popular Diesel cigar line by master blender AJ Fernandez. Mr. Fernandez has quite a dedicated following with full-bodied cigar lovers, as he is known for using potent tobaccos in his blends. Popular cigars such as the Man O’ War Ruination and the Diesel Unholy Cocktail are extremely strong, meaty and flavorful. The Diesel Unlimited Maduro follows in this tradition and is a welcome addition to his ever-growing portfolio.

The Blend:

Wrapper: Connecticut seed broadleaf maduro1
Binder: Mexican San Andreas
Filler: Nicaraguan and Honduran ligero2

Appearance and Construction:

A mottled, chocolate brown wrapper covers the cigar. It has a rustic appearance, with a slight tooth and a dull sheen of natural oils. It is firmly rolled and feels well constructed, with no lumps, hard spots or other imperfections. I’ve had many boxes of these cigars and they always seem to be a bit on the dry side. That doesn’t mean they are “dried out”, I just think that they aren’t as oily or moist as many other cigars. With that said, care must be taken when handling as the wrapper can flake or crack if you’re not too careful or apply too much heat all at once when lighting.

Pre-light Impressions:

The cigar has a fairly strong tobacco aroma along with an undertone of what can best be described as barnyard — a mixture of straw, grass, dirt and manure. This is in no way a negative — as a matter of fact the barnyard aroma harmonizes quite well with the tobacco.

Smoking Experience:

Because the cigar contains a good dose of ligero tobacco, The Diesel Unlimited Maduro benefits from a long toasting of the foot to warm up the head of the cigar. Once lit, the cigar burns even and true, with a grey flaky ash that can, at times, create a mess in your lap or on your clothes. The draw is quite good, producing a nice mouthful of smoke with each draw.

The smoke has a pleasant mouth feel to it — light and very flavorful with no off-putting qualities. What’s impressive is that although the smoke is very light in your mouth, it has a strong character to it that really makes you take notice.

Initial mouth flavors are wood, leather and straight tobacco and through the nose it’s mostly spice with a touch of bitter cocoa and black coffee. The finish is clean and very dry with lingering sweet chocolate and burnt wood notes.

This is by no means a complex cigar, as the flavors remain the same throughout — from initial light to the last inch. It never smokes too hot or too cool and provides a good hour and a half of smoking enjoyment. Its bold flavor profile and ramped-up nicotine content is not for the beginner, but veteran smokers will certainly appreciate the consistent blast of flavor and kick in the pants this smoke provides.

The Diesel Unlimited Maduro fits well into the Diesel cigar line, rounding out an already impressive grouping of smokes.

Terms:

  1. Maduro: This is a fermentation process that uses intense pressure and heat to extract more sugar from the tobacco leaf than standard tobacco aging.
  2. Ligero: The top-most part of a tobacco plant. This is the strongest type of tobacco, because it receives the most sunlight and has a higher nicotine content than other parts of the plant.
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Summoning’s Minas Morgul turns 20 this week

Summoning - Minas Morgul (2015)
On October 16th, 1995, Napalm Records released Summoning’s second album, Minas Morgul; it is arguably the first release by the band to showcase their signature sound. Minas Morgul is heavy on repetition, ambiance, and cheap keyboards, but in spite of its minimalist elements (or perhaps because of them), it’s a surprisingly sophisticated work. On full display here is Summoning’s ability to convey an overarching mood or idea without resorting to extreme aesthetic shifts or overstuffing their tracks. In the process, Summoning often leaves behind conventional black metal technique but never abandons the themes at the core of their music – war, wandering, fantasy, triumph, and so forth. The band’s next album (Dol Guldur) refines much of the technique and production surrounding this approach, but Minas Morgul is still an excellent album 20 years after its debut.

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Announcing the Opeth erotic short story contest

Promotional picture of Opeth from 2014
A while back, DMU ran an erotic fanfiction contest in response to a small incident involving Pantera and the community around them, much to our fans’ joy and pleasure. As part of our initiative to grow the site (and because of the potential for controversy), we’re going to try our hands at another.

Opeth has long been one of our prominent targets for their inept aping of progressive rock forms in a paper-thin guise of death metal. Their popularity seems to have waned in recent years as they lapsed more overtly into ’70s prog worship, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give them the occasional dose of mockery to lighten up their mood and possibly incite them to heights of passion that might lead to better songwriting if we’re enormously fortunate. Thusly, Death Metal Underground’s second erotic fanfiction contest is going to be about Opeth and its members.

The rules are similar to those of the previous contest.

  1. Your story must be between 500-5,000 words and involve the members of Opeth in intensely sexual and/or erotic situations. It’s up to you to determine which perversions and fetishes you want to involve, but the more depraved, the better.
  2. References to bandmembers’ side projects (like Steel and Bloodbath) are permitted, as well as references to other bands appealing to a similar demographic. However, your work must primarily be about Opeth.
  3. Your story must be your own work. You are allowed to quote Opeth lyrics for effect, but don’t crutch yourself too badly by overusing them, lest your work be rendered underwhelming.

Submit your entries as comments on this post. You have until 11:59 PM EST on November 30th, 2015 (we extended it) to write a story for this content, so let your imagination and libido run wild.

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Megiddo returns with The Holocaust Messiah

megiddo-thm-flyer

Canadian one-man band Megiddo, who back in the late 1990s ushered in the transition of black metal to a war, black, death and speed metal hybrid, have returned with a new album The Holocaust Messiah to be released on Iron Pegasus Records for Halloween, October 31, 2015.

Sounding much like old Sodom, Blasphemy and Profanatica in a blender but built around the rhythms of punk and simpler song structures of older speed metal, Megiddo burst forth in the middle to late 1990s with two demos, “Hymns to the Apocalypse” and “The Heretic,” which have now been re-issued by Iron Pegasus as Hymns to the Apocalypse / The Heretic.

megiddo-flyer-kl

In addition, you can read the writings of composer and lyricist Chorazaim in our archive of Larm: The Fourth Reich of Reviews, a review site which popped up a few years after the DLA and covered black metal releases that were current at the time with an inimitable style.

https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwjUVkccKdM

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In praise of plugs

Images courtesy of StLuisRey.

Images courtesy of StLuisRey.

Modern society is addicted to convenience. Let me expand on that: over time, as anything succeeds, its challenges decrease and it focuses on absolute convenience so it can bore itself to death. Old companies, stale friend groups, even churches and heavy metal bands fall prey to this. At some point, everything becomes easy and everyone becomes bored, and quality plummets. Life is an existential process after all that benefits from the search for pleasure, adventure and intensity (“a repo man is always intense”) more than stability, convenience and the other stuff that goes into Excel spreadsheets when users answer surveys.

For pure convenience, nothing beats the cigarette. Buy a pack and a lighter, then throw them out when consumed. The more intrepid seek a greater intensity of flavor from cigars and pipes which burn cooler and are absorbed through the cheeks instead of the lungs, so require a bit of a slower pace. Even with those fields a variety of conveniences exist. Some cigars are designed to burn evenly over any other factor, and many pipe tobaccos are meant to target the holy trinity of easy lighting, mild flavor and cool burning. For those who seek to push past all barriers, and to exceed past sensations, the more difficult realm of flakes, twists and plugs awaits. These were traditionally tobaccos for those who smoked pipes as away of avoiding expensive cigarettes, and who were busy with their hands and bodies and so were not sitting comfortably in an easy chair sipping on a pipe. They smoked all day, and they liked tobacco like their lives: rough, durable and strong. Coincidentally they usually had at least one pocketknife on their persons and were accustomed to using manual dexterity at a moment’s notice. For such a person, dragging an aged twist from an inner pocket, brushing off the lint and slicing it into shreds was a matter of course.

In our current time, convenience (and entropy) has just about won out, as has the belief that jobs which involve sitting inside cubicles in the glow of multiple screens are the desired lifestyle. When we can smoke, it is in our homes away from the prying eyes of society and the databases of law enforcement and health insurance (many of us smoke with our rifles and tricorner hats close at hand for this reason). Tobacco blends have kept up with this and now come mostly in tins with elegant labels and fine cuts. While those have their place as well, and are very enjoyable, many of us are turning toward the older forms of twists and plugs for the power of that form. Not only are they stronger, reminding us that smoking like life is a struggle against the forces of nature, but they bring back the ritual of an older time. The focus, dexterity and precision are as much a part of this as any other aspect. Slicing layers of pressed tobacco, then rubbing it into strips, and packing a pipe not for an armchair smoke but for walking around in the world, interacting with it and moving with purpose, this provides a different sort of enjoyment.

Take for instance the Peterson Peterson’s Perfect Plug. Easily available across North America and Europe, it is relatively low-cost owing to the predominance of the Peterson brand, which is currently manufactured by Mac Baren. This makes it a great plug to start with since it is neither exotic nor unduly expensive and in its abundance, allows enough material to experiment with. The plug comes in a tin, beneath a layer of cardboard surrounded by a ruff of tissue paper, and is then sealed inside a plastic bag. Slicing apart the bag and tossing the cardboard, one finds a brick of pressed tobacco leaf which resembles a very dense brownie. Since the tobacco is layered, the plug is sliced in thin flakes from the end, much as flake tobacco is made with much larger plugs at the factory. You control the width of this flake and that is where some of the magic of plugs originates:

  • Slice it thin for a lighter and shorter smoke with more sweetness. If you cut to the width of a postcard or narrower, the soft feathers of tobacco rub out into something closer to a shag which burns quickly, delivering predominantly the notes of sweeter tobaccos with more natural sugar like Virginias.
  • Cut it thicker for a dense-burning long smoke that emphasizes the savory flavors. This lets it smoulder and melds the nuttier flavors of the Burley with the denser flavors of Virginias that come out with aging and slow burning.
  • If you want to experience the toppings alongside the slower flavors, since this plug is lightly flavored with a fruit and anise mixture, cut thick flakes and then cut them the opposite direction into 1/4 inch cubes. Rub those slightly, let them dry and pile them in the pipe for a long-burning melange of flavors.

It is my feeling that the original smokers of plugs used them in each one of these different ways. They sliced thin for the first smoke of the day to wake themselves up, and cut rough during the day for hourlong pipes while they worked on whatever they did, and may have done a variation on the two or a cube-cut on weekends and after work to wind down. The versatility of the plug enabled it to be many tobaccos at once by emphasizing different flavors, speeds and volume of smoke. Being familiar with mechanics and some chemistry, the original smokers of the plug naturally adapted to this usage, in addition to enjoying a hardy piece of tobacco that could be tucked in a pocket alongside a knife for a no-frills but slightly inconvenient use.

Thanks to the resurrection of pipe smoking by the internet and its ability to join scattered people into groups, pipe smoking has experienced a revival and with it many old blends have returned as new ones have sprouted like the flowers of spring. This audience rewards intensity as it is united not by the convenience of the local tobacco store and friends to smoke with, but interest in something that is more than a hobby and less than an addiction. It is both a fascination and a lifestyle choice, a relaxation and intensification of life at the same time it is a way of dispensing with modern habits to gain appreciation for the timeless. One way to spin it faster is to go back to the revered and cherished form of pipe tobacco, the plug. Naturally, that adventure goes best with the music of open frontiers and wars in the heavens, Celtic Frost.

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J.R.R. Tolkien on pipe-smoking

j_r_r_tolkien_-_pipe_smoking

Metal derives many influences from literature, but H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien appear near the top of any list, while philosophers like Friedrich W. Nietzsche and authors like Louis-Ferdinand Celine linger in the background. Tolkien captured the essence of a dying society without purpose and a contrary invention, which is the medieval-styled worlds of myth and magic from his middle earth books. This appeals to metal which both hates mass society and loves violence, conflict and mythology.

Tolkien saw modern society as a horror and argued for a return to older ways by violence, a lot like Varg Vikernes and even the more cynical Black Sabbath songs:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remain obstinate!…

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people…

The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

This mirrors the story in his epic Lord of the Rings cycle, which seems to borrow both from the Nibelungenlied and Plato’s parable of the ring of the Lydian Gyges, where a force of evil seduces men through their egos and the quest for power and control embodied in a mystical ring.

His stories inspired many pieces of fan art, including this animation by Ulla Thynell which has been floating around the internet for the past few years:

pipe_smoking_gandalf

In contrast to the LARPers to follow, Tolkien saw himself in the hobbits, including their love of pipes and Nicotiana (called “pipe-weed” or “tobacco” in the novels):

“‘I am in fact a hobbit,’” Carpenter quotes from Tolkien, “’in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food, but detest French cooking. I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms; have a very simple sense of humor; I go to bed late and get up late. I do not travel much.’”

Thematically, this fits, since the theme of his book is for the degraded remnants of an ancient order to, despite their puny size and lack of self-esteem, rise up and be heroic against the evil encroaching on them. To any who feel like midgets compared to the ancient Vikings, medieval Knights, or even Otzi the caveman, this is an appealing message.

capstan_blue_-_pipe_tobacco

Tolkien smoked Capstan Navy Cut, a Virginia flake known for its sweetness and long-burning. On the other hand, his characters in the Lord of the Rings film were actually smoking Peter Stokkebye Nougat aromatic tobacco to give them the feel for being real Hobbits.

He explained his own pipe habit and the portrayal of smoking in his books through a letter to a fan:

I think that the prologue says enough about Hobbits and their art of pipe-smoking. I do know people want more – but I think that covering the story in mysteries is a good thing, if not a necessary one. It also helps to replicate real history.

Regarding the taste, I’m inclined to answer that I do not know myself. The hobbit leaves surely made for very good flavoured pipe-weed (I would not say brand, as there’s no question about commercial products here) but I’ve not given much thought to that until now – or if I did, my old memory is failing me somewhat. However, I do imagine that most pipes were primarily simple in design. Their shape would look similar to the the large half bent Billiard or Dublin shapes, but often much more long-stemmed.

Regarding the material, I think that Hobbits, if they could not grow suitable briar in the hills, would use hardwood like beech or oak – or perhaps even a type of wood I do not know about. These are details that, when writing, do not come to mind and that must be thought out later, if at all. I must admit I’m always hard put to give out so many of them, and in the end I often favour giving only a partial answer, lest the flavour of authenticity I try to give the story completely disappears. Indeed, I see my job primarily as that of a translator, not an encyclopedist!

The mythos lives on, perhaps in a cloud of bluish smoke.

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On writing negative reviews

jill_melford_-_record_player

Back in the days of information scarcity when metal fans found bands through fifteen-generation tapes and xeroxes of pasted-together fanzines, I made the decision to focus on bands of quality. People needed more than anything else a shopping list when they wrote to Wild Rags or Relapse with an order form; as Relapse mailorder grew and essentially became the center of the underground mail order scene, the copywriting got more exuberant and people became even more confused. They needed solid information in the form of “reviews” that actually assessed the material and came up with solid reasons why it might be worth listening to for more than a few months. Looking down a list of of releases with two-line descriptions that ended with “it’ll tear your head off!” gave people nothing, and in the limited hours they had for finding new metal, they needed descriptive writing that could show them what stood out above the rest.

For that reason, I wrote positive reviews and ignored the bands that did not strike me as interesting enough to hear for repeated listens over the years. As Karl Marx reminds us, time is money and conversely, money is time, exchanged by working hours for what can then be spent. Money spent on the wrong bands damges fans. It also damages the health of the scene. Worse, it creates a Darwinistic negative effect where bands are rewarded for slapping out some haphazard or soulless material but getting a good cover, signing to the right label, or having solid promotion, and then getting rewarded for this mediocre content but good marketing. Quality reviews enforce natural selection on metal where the best rises.

Over time the market shifted. With the rise of big metal magazines which would cover the underground, and then the internet, there was no longer a shortage of information. The opposite problem presented itself: we were literally drowning in information. Magazines published thousands of reviews, most of which described some of the surface attributes of a band and then praised it as the next best thing. Internet websites emulated them and became cheerleaders more than critical voices. People now had so many options that they needed not only a list of things to look out for, but defenses against the hype and promotion. They needed solid reasons why some bands were just promotion and aesthetics with no content.

I wish that during this time I had written more critical reviews. I should have been shouting from the rooftops that the first Opeth was warmed-over hard rock made in a cryptic pseudo-progressive format to give basement dwellers some reason to think they were more “deep” than their friends. I should have screamed at the first Slayer to deviate from their unbroken quality, Divine Intervention, and pointed out that the band would have kept its old audience and new by not imitating the past, but keeping up the quality and compositional style of the past instead of going toward vocal-driven hard rock. I should have called out every band of the two types that make metal fail, the false-authentic “tryhard” bands that imitate the surface of past greats, and the “open minded” bands that borrow from old genres and call the hybrid a new thing. But I was stuck in the old mode of trying to find the good in a stream of so-so.

The problem with this approach became obvious over time: there were few gems, but a constant stream of news, and by dropping out of that news stream, I failed to comment on what people were seeing on their screens and pages. They needed guidance from experienced hands who could say, “Nope, seen this before — it’s Bruce Springsteen riffs tricked out as jazz rock with some metal flourishes.” Or, equally important, to ask why it was that a band sounded exactly like Celtic Frost or Blasphemy but the songs had none of the personality and variation of those bands. With the information overload, metal needed mean voices to provide counter-arguments to the excuses and trends offered in the promotions.

For this reason, in the latest incarnation of this site we launched the sadistic style of writing metal reviews. We take the highly-hyped and show why it is hollow, empty and meaningless. The point is not the band itself, but the series of tropes used by labels and magazines to sell this band. If they claim it is open-minded, we need to show how it is merely an imitation of the past in an older genre than metal. If they claim it is trve, its utter lack of ideas and simultaneous aping of the past needs to be revealed. People need mental weapons against the onslaught of advertising coming from both big media and thousands of little over-enthusiastic blogs.

Those of us who write do so — if we are good — to convey some kind of information, usually the type of learning one gains with experience. We can peer beneath the layers of production, marketing, trendy chatter and hype and get to the real question: is this music interesting enough to listen to for months and years, instead of another passing fad? This helps keep metal healthy by ensuring that the good releases get rewarded and the bad forgotten. For many years, I failed you all in this capacity, and I hope to rectify it with well-placed cruelty laying bare the essence of this music.

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SJWs force Disma from Netherlands Deathfest

netherlands_deathfest

SJWs have doubled-down on their campaign to force Disma out of the death metal scene. The band, who play non-political death metal, are under fire because one member of the band used politically-sensitive imagery in a side project ten years ago, and has refused to humble himself before the allegedly superior knowledge of SJWs by apologizing and rejecting his former work. Instead, Disma have stuck to the statement that they are not a political band and want nothing to do with either side of the issue.

Since they operate as a type of internet lynch mob, and their power is in generating controversy that causes bands to be ostracized for not joining the SJW hive mind, SJWs in the Maryland Deathfest staff twisted arms to get Disma removed from the Netherlands Deathfest, as shown by the following announcement:

Disma are no longer playing NDF 2016 and have been replaced by Funebrarum.

This is the first time in 14 years of putting on festivals that we’ve been put in such an awkward situation, and in the end, just like a member of Disma who recently quit the band, we’ve decided to distance ourselves from the drama surrounding the band lately.

For the record, nobody “pressured” us into making this decision and the decision is solely ours, but it should be stated that the billing would look drastically different if Disma remained on the bill, as at least 10 bands have said they do not want to play the event if Disma remains on the bill.

We acknowledge that Disma are nothing more than a death metal band (who once played Maryland Deathfest) and it’s unfortunate that their fans cannot see them for what they know them as, but all things considered, there would’ve been far too many negatives than positives for us to deal with by leaving them on the bill. We thought the situation settled down slightly when the admin of the Disma FB page made a statement about a month ago claiming that the band member in question “made mistakes in the past”, but that post was quickly erased and the drama fired up again as a result.

We feel that Funebrarum is an adequate replacement to make up for this, but if for some reason you purchased a Sunday ticket to see Disma, you may request a refund.

This news will surely create a debate that we don’t wish to get roped into the middle of. We’ve always been about putting on a celebration of music and nothing more. Let’s all just try to get along and enjoy dozens of great bands at this festival.

As some savvy observers noted, this statement makes no sense. They claim that nobody “pressured” us into making this decision but also say that we’ve been put in such an awkward situation. This means the situation is of their own making, and their Let’s all just try to get along means not that we all get along, but that we exclude bands so that the Maryland Deathfest organizers feel their own political demands have been met.

If they wanted to be honest, they would not take this action since by their own admission, no one has asked them to do it. The “drama surrounding the band” is entirely made by SJWs, and is a non-issue given that it remains unclear whether this side project was anything more than political provocation, like Craig Pillard dressing up as a Nazi comandant in a Bill Zebub movie and demanding that a character “kick me in the balls” in a Hollywood German accent.

SJWs specialize in concern trolling, or disguising their own political sentiments as public services, and then using that power of guilt to remove all voices but those compliant with their own. This form of totalitarian mindset is far more threatening that even an outright Nazi band, since it expresses a sentiment that a minority of people would agree with, and echoes the sentiments of witch-hunters from centuries past who feared that witches might “infect” others with their “seductive” ideas.

For people who claim to be open-minded and progressive however this viewpoint is not new. Over two millennia ago, the citizens of Athens convicted Socrates of “corrupting the youth” with his ideas and sentenced him to death. They were defending the progressive regime in Athens which had become unstable due to its unrealistic ideas, and instead of fixing its problems, wanted to censor its critics so the citizens remained oblivious to the disaster approaching them.

So it is with SJWs, the Maryland Deathfest, and in fact most of our society. In the 1960s when people were so unnerved by the signs of collapse of our civilization that they turned to the type of “peace and love” ideas on finds on greeting cards and under dreamweavers in gift shops, Black Sabbath showed up to confront them with the “heavy” realities of the world as it exists outside the collective human feelings of the hive mind. Now Disma does the same, and to their shame, some of metal’s institutions are attempting to destroy them.

Edit: for kicks, you can watch SJWs looking for a target to boycott in order to make themselves important. No, really.

mdf_-_vitamin_x

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Glenn Danzig accused of kicking fan in head, but accounts differ

neil_dalton_-_glenn_danzig_-_face_kick

Aspiring indie-metal photograph Neil Dalton has accused longtime metal creative force Glenn Danzig of assault after a concert in Montreal. According to Dalton, Danzig hit Dalton while Dalton was being held by security guards:

So I went to Danzig last night. Including the 100 dollars I spent on his merch plus the tickets time of work and traveling to Montreal to see him this is the price you pay for taking a photo of Danzig. He called me up on stage got got his pussy security guards to rough me up and held me back me back so he could hit me himself. Cops can’t do fuck all because we’re both not Canadian and they did it off camera and said I fell .could all my friends please share this because I want the world to know what a pussy the guy is.superjoint fucking ruled tho

A number of problems immediately come to mind here: first, it is unlikely that a performer would call someone on stage to publicly beat them when they could dispatch security to beat the person in the dark; second, public accusations are usually nonsense unless a police report has been filed, because people honestly victimized usually go to the police first and attempt “trial by media” later, but most people who attempt trial by media first are trying to work around the lack of evidence; finally, that Canadian cops would fail to arrest someone simply because he is not Canadian stretches credibility since they arrest visitors every day, usually for not paying the $50/ounce Canadian tobacco taxes.

The usual voices on social media started getting weepy and white knighty, and then, someone who was also there spoke up:

After about ten minutes of arguing with the bodyguard and being pushed around by him, Neil finally took off. [Neil] re-entered the venue after being told not to come back. That’s when things got ugly and sure enough Neil got tossed back out this time bloodied up and shoeless. He kept instigating the security and bodyguards by yelling names at them and not leaving like he was told.

Right after the show ended, Glenn came running out and engaged Neil and threw a kick to Neil’s ribs, and connected. He also swung a couple punches that missed before security got Glenn on his bus. Glenn kept calling Neil a motherfucker

Just as in #DeiphagoGate, we see the importance of getting both sides of the story. This one remains unresolved, but to an experienced concert goer, the second narrative is plausible while Dalton’s version of events has numerous holes in it. Again the pattern emerges that those with legitimate grievances go to the police and file a report, while those who are partially guilty themselves go to social media and try to whip up an SJW internet army to administer a false justice.

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