I’ve been listening quite a bit to the new BEHERIT. I’m on an oil rig, have almost none of my belongings (this is a rush job), and need desperately to entertain myself. For music, all I’ve got are the speakers on my netbook and two albums:
Beherit – At the Devil’s Studio 1990
A random death metal comp I made a few years ago
I made the death metal comp to try to explain to other people why I — normally a classical listener, around 75% of my listening, with another 15% being Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Lord Wind — love this music. It captures the (cough) true diversity of this music and its imagination. It also captures what the music tries to embody: many different views of the same spirit, a feral but principled aggression that seeks to like a warbound king set all that’s wrong to right and to smite the weak, sniveling, boring, pointless, craven and ugly from this earth.
This brings me to the new old Beherit: I’ve come to love this thing. It has what The Oath of Black Blood has, which is reckless noise and pure energy. It also has what the following album brought, which is a sense of evil not as some stumbling error, but as a deliberate force — a conniving, undermining, dark and pervasive force that seeks to overthrow the light which converts the rich diversity of life into simple symbols and moral concepts.
As the gunfire in Norway fades, and the crumbling of the USA’s rotting edifice of spoiled entitlement brats begins, this is the appropriate soundtrack: all that in the cosmos which we have banished because it is disturbing returning with sublime intent, overthrowing our oblivious pleasant notions and anthrocentric delusions, and replacing them with the savage but ultimately logical order of the primordial forest at dawn.
CIANIDE premiere track from new album, their first in six years, set for release tomorrow!
Widely revered Chicago death metal cult CIANIDE are premiering a new track, “Dead and Rotting,” today at Metal-Army.com alongside an interview with the band. “Dead and Rotting” comes from CIANIDE’s brand-new album on HELLS HEADBANGERS, the appropriately titled Gods of Death, set for release tomorrow worldwide. The link to the track premiere can be found here: http://www.metal-army.com/?p=22698.
Already, CIANIDE’s Gods of Death is being hailed by the international metal press, even landing the band a covetted feature in next month’s issue of Decibel. Here are some snippets of the buzz currently circulating around Gods of Death:
• “Will make peers like NUNSLAUGHTER or JUNGLE ROT weep” – Terrorizer [4/5 rating]
• “Death metal at its most primitive, primeval, and downright punishing, ugly as sin and reassuringly predictable. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – Decibel
• “Exactly what it is intended to be: a well-done homage to early Celtic Frost” – About.com [B+ rating]
• “Comes from the oldest style of death metal…will confirm that the underground isn’t dead; it’s just overshadowed by the drama of the emotional-like-emo people” – Examiner.com
• “Cianide stay the course and leave an even longer trail of corpses” – Blabbermouth.net [8/10 rating]
• “Monstrous” – Popdose [10/11 rating]
• “Death metal as it should be, at its ferocious, bestial zenith” – Metalcurse.com [10/10 rating]
• “Proves that Cianide still has what it takes to be one of the more important driving forces of the underground metal world to date” – Apochs.net [9.5/10 rating]
• “For those who prefer their metal keeping its direct link and inspiration all the way to the glory ’80s, Cianide is one of the most obvious answers” – Dead Void Dreams webzine [9/10 rating]
• “A worthy effort from a band whose return is most welcome” – Metalreviews.com
• “Lots of bands are now jumping on the bandwagon, but these guys have been doing old-school since old-school wasn’t cool” – Wormwoodchronicles.com
• “This is the way death metal was meant to be: thick, groovin’ and brutal” – Brutal Control webzine
• “A superb death metal album that delivers exactly what you want: no-frills deathliness with no fancy trickery on the production or mix” – MetalTeamUK.net
• “Operate in a space between BOLT THROWER’s chugging surety and the more ominous, cavernous resonance of INCANTATION…one of our most devout, unsung US death veterans, and worth experiencing if you want nothing more than to ball your fists up and feast on human misery like a streetfightin’ troglodyte” – From the Dust Returned webzine
About Metal Army: Metal-Army.com is the new number-one online destination for the metal community! Featuring all of metal’s latest news, reviews, etc and guest writers that include Oderus Urungus (GWAR), Rob Dukes (EXODUS) and UFC fighter Dan Hardy (amongst others), Metal-Army.com is home to the best that metal has to offer. Metal-Army.com also hosts monthly bar nights across the country where metalheads can go to hang out with fellow metalheads, have some drinks, and see some of their favorite musicians spin their favorite metal songs during special DJ sets. Past DJs have included members of White Zombie, Exodus, Testament, The Cult, Neurosis and more! The next Metal Army Night is scheduled for August 9th at Idle Hands Bar in New York City at 9PM!
Heavy metal is a culture because heavy metal is a unique spirit: a warlike desire for adventure and meaning, not safety and egodrama.
No mosh! No core! No trends! No “fun”!
Idiots continue to want to make heavy metal into rock music.
Rock music is based on individual drama — the same thing that makes people feel it’s OK to litter, vote for manipulators and then blame others, buy McDonald’s and then bemoan corporate domination. People are the problem. Not institutions.
We like to think we’re all equally capable, and so if something went wrong, it was a misfortune/victimhood. The truth is that most people cannot balance a budget, shop for good food, or avoid repeatedly doing self-destructive and pointless actions. Humanity is overrated.
Now we have idiots who want us to think that if we just relax our standards, everything will turn out just fine — like that worked for the hippies, Romans or other groups of deathbound fools:
A YouTube user named “iAMVyt” has posted a video clip online discussing the idea that metal elitism is causing the downfall of the entire genre, and that there cannot truly be an “underground” scene in the age of Facebook. Take a gander at the video clip, and feel free to share your thoughts on metal elitism and what it means to be “underground” in the comments section below. “iAMVyt” also commented on the clip:
“This is just a short video covering a couple of my beliefs about metal elitists. No, this is not criticizing everyone who enjoys metal. It is not criticizing everyone who identifies themselves as a ‘metalhead.’ It is not criticizing everyone who has a strong belief in anything involving music or metal.
“It is criticizing what I believe to be foolish views and opinions. If you do not agree with my opinions, that is FINE. If you are a metalhead and find that this video does not describe you… You are not a metal elitist.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, metal was a scornful, fascist genre.
These bands knew they did not want to end up like the just-sold-out speed metal (Metallica, Testament, Anthrax, Exodus, Megadeth) and the mainstream heavy metal of the time, which was laughably bad hair metal and beginnings of industrial and alternative metal (Ministry, Faith No More).They had just seen metal get popular in the late 1970s only to die, then come back in the early 1980s, then start to die again.
The black metal bands were even more extreme. They realized that as long as they made music for beer-swilling know-nothings to tap their toes to, the genre would go nowhere. It would get re-absorbed by the mainstream and turn into the same horrible shit that infested both the radio and (in goofier, hipster form) the indie charts.
Elitism is the cornerstone of quality metal. When they abandoned it in 1994, a dearth of quality music resulted, with a few exceptions (later albums from BEHERIT, CIANIDE, ASPHYX, DEMONCY, AVERSE SEFIRA, SUMMONING and a few others). Those bands rose against the grain because they believed in quality over quantity. Whether they would call it “elitism” or not, it’s roughly the same animal: we want quality music, so we push away from the pointless, commercial or derivative.
Now this idiot tells us elitism is killing metal?
More like he means poseurdom is killing metal, as it always has. Poseurs are people who want to use the music to make themselves look cool.
Opeth listeners who want to show you how “open-minded” they are, Primus listeners who want to talk about how technical their music is, self-righteous Rage Against the Machine and punk rockers talking politics, and metalcore devotees who embrace the combined hipster/bohemian bourgeois lifestyle of over-emotionality and self-righteous moral indignation… these people then are the faux elitists — the poseurs — who are ruining metal.
Did he think of that?
No, because that would require him to admit that heavy metal is truly a different view of the world.
Although I listen to many different musical styles, including classical, jazz, blues and even bluegrass, my contemporary tastes lean toward heavy metal, hard rock and alternative. In other words, loud, aggressive songs with ear-piercing vocals, massive guitar solos and heavy bass and drums. The musical talent of these artists is undeniable, but the appeal is definitely an acquired taste.
Long story short, this isn’t your parents’ music. Unless your parents were long-haired, headbanging types who wore copious amounts of black clothing and makeup, that is.- National Post
We are a new generation that pisses all over the old. 1968 was hippies telling us the same crap that metalcore bands tell us today. If you want to be the musical inheritor of your parents’ or grandparents’ failed and stupid political projection, be my guest. You’ve just admitted you want to repeat the dysfunction of the past. Sounds like what an abuse victim would do.
For 2,000 years now we’ve had helpful morons to tell us that “all we need is love.” If it were that easy, it would have happened millennia ago. “All we need is asparagus” has similar relevance to the morally complex problems we face. In addition, unless you have your head up your ass, you can see how the human individual acting selfishly is a much bigger problem than whatever failings our institutions have had. We just like to blame the institutions so we can keep being selfish.
Trust nature instead:
Every sensible swimmer knows that avoiding a school of bait fish or immediately leaving the water if a cut started to bleed is ‘best practice’ when attempting to avoid a meeting with a shark.
But Eyre Peninsula’s Matt Waller has added another tip to the ‘don’t get eaten’ handbook with his discovery that Great White’s are much less aggressive when listening to ACDC – particularly ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
{…}
“I started going through my albums and ACDC was something that really hit the mark.
“Their behaviour was more investigative, more inquisitive and a lot less aggressive – they actually came past in a couple of occasions when we had the speaker in the water and rubbed their face along the speaker which was really bizarre.” – ABCA
We’d love to know what the sharks think of DEICIDE and INCANTATION.
The self-obsessed rhythms and whining, self-pitying hooks of pop music would probably just make them attack the boat.
Similarly, poseur bands like MASTODON, KYLESA, GOJIRA, OPETH, etc. would have the same effect.
Lack of elitism is killing metal.
Elitism means tolerating only quality music. It’s like natural selection for heavy metal: keep the good, throw out the shit.
Metal is dying because it is flooded with insincere hipster bands, commercial trash and pointless rehashing of underground styles.
The only force that opposes that are the people who insist on quality control, a/k/a the elitists.
The opposite of an elitist is a poseur. Poseurs want to use the music to make themselves look smart, unique, interesting, different, etc.
When those people started infesting metal in 1994 or so, the downward spiral began. Now there’s only a few acts that aren’t as abysmally bad as the stuff on mainstream radio.
– Comment on the above “elitist bashing” article
Nature knows metal is a path of its own. It’s only selfish humans who keep trying to neuter it, so they can stop fearing it. Hail elitism!
The rise of the Black Metal movement in Norway is a case of humorless dirtheads taking a joke way too seriously. The joke was Satanic rock, which Lords of Chaos skillfully traces from its early origins in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Coven (who transformed from performing black masses on stage to perpetrating the weepy hippie hit “One Tin Soldier”) to metal’s second big wave in the early 80s and the rise of kitsch Satan-rockers Venom. To our modern eyes, Venom looks the spitting image of Spinal Tap during their Smell the Glove phase, but to dirtheads who didn’t know any better, Venom was the long-sought embodiment of evil. It was from the Venom branch of evil-metal that all of metal’s more violent, “evil” forms descended, including Black Metal. – Exiled (all quotations from this article)
This charge could be leveled at metal lyrics in general, but this idiot doesn’t know his metal history.
Black Sabbath – War Pigs:
Now in darkness world stops turning,
ashes where the bodies burning.
No more War Pigs have the power,
Hand of God has struck the hour.
Day of judgement, God is calling,
on their knees the war pigs crawling.
Begging mercies for their sins,
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
Oh lord, yeah!
Old school heavy metal, like Black Sabbath and American speed metal bands: watch out, evil will destroy us!
NWOBHM, like Angel Witch and even Judas Priest: society is blown because moralism is false, let’s explore the occult.
This theme also showed up in progressive rock…
Had the author of this piece done even an hour’s research this would have been evident, but he thinks he’s being funny.
The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks.
Straight out of 1980s teen movies. We know what research he did do…
The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence.
You’ve got it backward. Death metal embraced all of this stuff first; remember the news stories about how a murder victim had been found lying on top of a copy of Death’s “Leprosy”? How many early death metal bands drifted toward actual occultism, and endorsing some fairly evil stuff?
Black metal just wanted to make it fully real.
For one thing, Black Metalists are incredibly pedantic–as laughably pedantic as the worst jerks you knew in the college rock/punk/hardcore scene, and pedantic about the very same stupid things: who is more “genuine,” “authentic,” “extreme,” “on-the-edge” and in metal’s case, “evil.”
Dummy, you just said it was an ideological genre. Of course authenticity matters.
Indeed, every sad word of An End to Evil oozes Perle’s and Frum’s pained, wasted 60s youths: wasted in yellow sheet stains, wasted studying maps color-coded with spheres-of-influence, wasted memorizing German armaments, and college years wasted playing Risk in their dorms while the socially successful hippies frolicked and fucked all around them.
Wow, straight up Crowdist dogma: it doesn’t matter how effective you are, be sure to be SOCIAL! That’s what matters!
Should Black Metalists cut their hair and vote Bush-Cheney ’04? Dude, I think the answer’s pretty fuckin’ obvious. In fact, thanks to these guys, America has become the world’s first Black Metal Nation.
A sub-intelligent finish to a downright retarded (yep, like trisomy 21 — retarded people are dumber than normal people) article.
Brett Stevens article in Houston’s underkvlt metal/rock mag:
During the 1950s-1970s we had bombers and cruise missiles, but in the 1980s we had supersonic intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) loaded with multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) that blanketed cities like fission cluster bombs, erasing whole patches of the landscape. We were told we had seven minutes of warning
It was a terrifying time; people clung to dogma (“freedom” in the west, “equality” in the Soviet bloc) and tried to block any greater meaning out of their heads. Meaning started two world wars and could get you killed. Being really happy for blue jeans, cable TV and a fat paycheck was safer than bread. This vapidity produced a type of pop culture that was both saccharine and aggressive, emphasizing shallow emotions at the same time it pressed people onward to become part of the machine, to work hard and join the flow. Underground metal threw all of this back in its face.
United by the slogan “Only death is real,” underground metal as an artistic movement sought to remind people that all the crazy distractions, entertainment, politics and economics that filled our news and minds were distractions from the real agenda, which was having a meaningful and purposeful life. – Rivethead
Click the link to read more. Designed to offend numus and mellcores alike. And anyone else, come to think of it. Allahu ackbar!
One-time only rebroadcast of the streaming video of A Day of Death (July 16, 2011). Final chance to see the entire event. Whether you missed it or attended it and want to relive it for another day, you have one more chance to see Kam Lee join Druid Lord on stage, one more chance to see Kam Lee join Derketa on stage, one last chance to see Kam Lee perform “From Beyond” in its entirety.
$10 via Paypal to glorioustimesdeathbook@gmail.com (no later than Friday, July 29 at 10 pm est) link and password will be sent via email approximately 1-2 hours before the event airs. Grab some beers, invite the friends over and enjoy this once in a lifetime event, some of the bands of the day will be available in the chat room throughout the rebroadcast.
Lineup:
Lethal Aggression (only part of their set was streamed)
Hubris
Seplophile
Resist Control
Sam Biles
Avulsion
Goatcraft
Druid Lord
Derketa
Rottrevore
Deceased
Insanity
Nokturnel
Kam Lee
plus a surprise or two thrown in for this special rebroadcast.
I personally don’t want to label metal ‘underground’. I try to get my friends interested, but for one reason or another metal was meant to hold a limited audience. Which is fine because it has remained resilient through the years with such support. Exclusivity has become a defining pillar of the scene, the implications of which look dismal for the future of the genre.
{ snip }
My problem is not with ‘who likes metal’ but rather why they like metal and what the implications are for the genre.
Hipsters tend to take the honesty out of music because of how they rationalize their choices. People who respect their taste in music do not listen to bands because they are underground; they listen to them because they make good music. If a band gets too popular, they let it slide so long as said band remains honest. If said band loses their integrity, say Metallica, for instance, then one abandons them not for crossing some unspoken popularity threshold but rather because they have betrayed the trust of their fans. This is a powerful bond not easily broken by the likes of the mainstream press.
Hipsters, and I’m generalizing here, define their musical taste by what is unpopular; I’d even venture to say it is a defining pillar of hipsterdom (whatever that means). Metal has rare bouts of popularity but is unlikely to achieve mass appeal anytime soon, especially given the rigid parameters of top-tier saleability in the music industry. These impossible conditions leave metal with one possible future. Since the genre will not likely be rising to the mainstream popularity which could save it from a skinny-jean-clad audience (though I must admit that is pretty thrash) it is only a matter of time before the genre is completely saturated with hipsters. In San Francisco, metal culture has dwindled to only a handful of bands. – Sons of the Atom
The principle of hipsterdom is being different/ironic/”unique” through surface changes.
The hipster is at heart a very normal person, usually working a do-nothing job and living a boring life. Most are SWPLs.
They have, however, embraced failure. They aren’t doctors, lawyers or architects; they’re not even rogue programmers. They’re not real writers or artists. In fact, they’re not very good at anything. So they socialize and try to be “different” to stand out, since they’re not going to stand out for being good people, or smart people, or talented people. They’re faking it.
This is why they like music that’s basically bad: anyone can do it. If you trick it out enough, you get famous for it.
This is why they like ruined social scenes, failed things, and obscurity: they can take over.
They took over metal in 1999ish and have truly wrecked it, because metalcore is noomoo for underground hXc kids, and as a result it’s insipid trash.
Hardcore died in 1987 or before, and really has never come back. The hipsters want to think otherwise. Metal died in ’94.
It’s important to realize that hipsters are a sign of the end of all good things. They are the parasites who are trying to justify themselves into importance.
Supporting the war against hipsters is to support:
Substance over appearance.
Reality over social reality.
Art over personal drama.
Idealism over individualism.
All good things come from crushing the hipster, which is a force of decay.
Apple sold 9.25 million iPads and 3.95 million Mac computers. Gross margin for the quarter came to 41.7 percent.
Shares of Apple have emerged from the limbo they had fallen into after Chief Executive Steve Jobs took leave last January for unspecified medical reasons. – Reuters
Capitalist banksters, ganksters and toadies love hipsters because they will buy a bog-ordinary product with a special label and quintuple the margin on it. They are ideal consumers: morons who think they are right and can be easily led to buy something if it makes them feel unique and special.
Allah ta’ala will reward all those who give service in crushing the false (who don’t entry) and raising up the honest. Immortality and righteousness await all those who smite hipsters.
The last couple of years have seen a artistic renaissance of a genre that throughout the best part of the mid- to late 90′s, and the early reaches of the millennium, was perceived to be a ghost that had long outlived it’s most glorious moments of artistic clarity. Great quantities of ‘gore’ and ‘brutal’ Death Metal acts have over the last two decades, dumbed down the mystical perversity that gave a genre the likes of Blessed Are The Sick, Legion, Cause Of Death, Onward To Golgotha, Imperial Doom, has in years past given way to acts that aim principally for shock value, sidetracking any of the compositional and dynamic attributes that were the essence of what made Death Metal so vital in it’s 1989-1993 heyday.
It’s great that Autopsy should record such a gem as this, as it serves to vanquish the plasticity and dross that once great acts such as Morbid Angel and Deicide have spluttered forth. Not only does it filter out these negatives, but it also does great justice to many artists who embrace an archaic yet craftsmanlike and refreshing interpretation of Death Metal.
In addition to having put out the excellent ‘The Tomb Within‘ EP last year, Autopsy have eschewed the notion of ‘re-recordings’ or filtering previously released material onto this new record. Instead what we have is a colossal, quite lengthy record, lasting greater than an hour but never straying from momentum and vibrancy.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that in terms of intricate song structuring, Autopsy have perhaps even upped on what they originally achieved on Severed Survival and Mental Funeral, with a more obvious sense of grandeur. This exhibits itself on tracks such as ‘Bridge Of Bones’ and ‘Sadistic Gratification’, which sound somewhat like a logical conclusion of what was being hinted at on their second album. Eric Cutler’s riffs and modes are the usual tritonal, Black Sabbath meets Hellhammer-esque death dirges, which occasionally recycle patterns and forms familiar in early material, yet also giving the album a renewed sense of consistency. It is this grasp of orthodoxy within the metal genre which always makes for contributing to the collective framework of the artists work, which Autopsy fulfill here.
This is however not to say that there are flourishes of ‘experimentation’. Luckily the band have played a good hand of cards, and have not fallen into the ludicrous corner of ‘evolving for the sake of it’. Particular songs on ‘Macabre Eternal’ show the band using greater song lengths than before (‘Sadistic Gratification’, ‘Sewn Into One’), and also display a greater sense of direct melodicism (‘Dirty Gore Whore’). Whilst Autopsy have never been associated with playing at fast speeds, large stretches of this album are more uptempo.
Chris Reifert is on top form as a vocalist. His ability to evoke majestic visions of dismemberment and perversion seem to contain a greater dynamic than usual, as to suggest that nearly fifteen years of prolonged absence has only allowed his strengths to re-accumulate.
Though certainly not a complaint on behalf of the reviewer, what may potentially put off some fans of earlier material is the production, which is undeniably modern in tone. Whilst Chris Reifert’s drumming is still top notch the only minor complaint being that the compression on his drumkit seems to somewhat nullify the sense of ability, flair and aggression that a more analogous production would bring out. Whilst Macabre Eternal possesses all of the right atmosphere and conviction worthy of great death metal, the more aesthetically orientated listener will notice that the overall tonality is not as analogous as what was committed to tape in the 80′s and 90′s.
In spite of this minor specific, this album is superb, and rightly deserves to be considered a beacon of the revivification of a dark and morbid art form that until the turn of the new millennium, was considered a dead horse. Hail the new dawn. Not only in terms of structural and grandiose perversion does this album triumph, but fragments of it’s lyrical scope only serve further as to compliment the metaphysical and transcendental nihilism that death metal eternally symbolizes.
“Under the sign of a skull faced moon
We rise from abysmal embryotic doom
Existence as torment, yet locked in a grave
A sick fragile cycle from which no one is saved”
Within the recent decade, this is the best ‘comeback’ release that has emerged from any of the elder practitioners of the genre. Undoubtedly, this shall also be a worthy contender for being the best album of the year.
Black metal was unique.
Chris Reifert is on top form as a vocalist. His ability to evoke majestic visions of dismemberment and perversion seem to contain a greater dynamic than usual, as to suggest that nearly fifteen years of prolonged absence has only allowed his strengths to re-accumulate.
