Morbid Angel – Altars of Madness Full Dynamic Range Edition

by Daniel Maarat on July 3, 2016

Morbid Angel - Altars of Madness cover

Morbid Angel recorded what was supposed to be their debut album in 1986. Compositionally excellent and novel, Abominations of Desolation was a Manhattan project of death metal as a truly musically distinct sub-genre. However, band leader Trey Azagthoth and then producer Dave Vincent were unhappy with the recording. Azagthoth quickly fired drummer/vocalist Browning and bassist John Ortega, and shelved the album, which Ortega later released as a bootleg. Vincent and Azagthoth had a point though: Browning’s drumming was shaky and he sounded like a wimp. His drumming lacked power, never making use of blast beats while his vocals could have come out of a whiny fourteen-year-old.

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Аспид – Кровоизлияние Released on Bandcamp

by Daniel Maarat on June 27, 2016

aspid cover

Аспид’s (Aspid) lost early 90s technical speed metal album, Кровоизлияние (Extravasation), has been released as a pay as you go, CD-quality lossless FLAC digital download on Bandcamp by Metal Race. Prior to Metal Race’s recent CD from the original DAT tape of the mix supplied by the band that was hard to get outside of Russia, Кровоизлияние was only available on the extremely limited original LP and a horrible sounding CD from a secondary source that was slightly sped up. Listeners worldwide may now enjoy some of the best post 1980s speed metal, resembling a more progressive Destruction.

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Sorcier des Glaces – Snowland MMXII

by Daniel Maarat on June 14, 2016

snowland mmxii

Artistically bankrupt metal bands typically rerecord their early material after milking the revenue streams dry through reissues, remasters, anniversary tours, and boxed sets. While the original recordings typically aren’t pristine productions, all charm is lost in the sample-replaced, quantized, digitally-reamped, and phase-butchered retreads shat out by an obsessive tinkerer’s digital audio workstation. All enthusiasm in the performances is butchered by years of alcohol abuse and aging journeyman musicians collecting just another paycheck, e.g. Sodom’s The Final Sign of Evil, Manowar’s Battle Hymns MMXI, and Bolt Thrower’s “World Eater ‘94”. Snowland MMXII is one of the few exceptions to this rule of rehash.

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Sadistic Metal Review: Sovereign – Nailing Shut the Sacrosanct Orifice (2014)

by Staff on June 13, 2016

sovereign nailing shut the sacrosanct orifice

Article by David Rosales.

More Ghost Scooby-Doo music mixed with random Deathspell Omega retardation than cohesive and nuanced terror, Sovereign Nailing Shut the Sacrosanct Orifice presents yet another example of the many failures of modern black metal: pretentious in lyrical orientation, vacuous in concrete musical content, mediocre in the putting together of structures that form an intelligible narrative. The lyrics themselves, in any case, will appear cursorily written, superficial, and sensationalist for anyone that has delved semi-seriously into the subjects.

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Taco Bell – “DoubleDilla”

by Cory Van der Pol on June 9, 2016

taco_bell_-_doubledilla

The concept is simple: take an ordinary steak or chicken quesadilla and make it twice as big for $1.20 less than you would have spent on buying two quesadillas. In my view, this is a long-overdue recognition by Taco Bell that the quesadilla alone is not a meal, and yet it is just a mite too pricey to be treated as an a la carte item like the smaller tacos and burritos.

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Space Rock Special: Hawkwind (1971-1973)

by Staff on June 4, 2016

Hawkwind

Article by Johan P.

The stylistically inclusive nature of progressive rock allows quite a lot of stretching of the genre’s musical boundaries. This part of Death Metal Underground’s 1970s Progressive Rock for Hessians series looks into the early, classic period of the English group Hawkwind – a group of sonic shaman-warriors who transgressed more than one genre border right from their inception. Well, almost. Their unconvincing 1970 self-titled debut album can rightfully be dismissed as a failed attempt at improvisational psychedelic folk rock, with songs that sound too much like flawed byproducts of the flower power era. Luckily, the following years saw the band re-forge their sound on In Search of Space (1971), articulate it on Doremi Fasol Latido (1972) and finally push their newfound style to its limits on Space Ritual (1973).

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