This amusing list has been making the rounds:

One of the real delights of listening to truly great music is the capacity it has to continuously surprise an attentive listener. Great music makes itself known, in part, by the ways in which it yields up its secrets: slowly. In a sense, great music never “gets old” because each experience of it reveals new insight, allowing us to approach it as if for the first time.

The corollary to this, of course, is that while genius manifests itself in infinitely variable ways, all bad music is pretty much bad in the same predictable ways. Error was always thus: it cannot grow, it cannot meaningfully change, it can only, like a virus, reproduce itself in hosts who have not previously been exposed (which is why, to the experienced and attentive listener, each new iteration of bad music becomes more easily identified symptomatically while the inexperienced and/or stupid listener is likely to fall for FAILS that their more competent brethren spot from a mile away).

A Taxonomy of FAIL

Carnival Music

Symptoms: Like a carny barker or a snake oil salesman, many bands try to distract listeners with novelty or wild stylistic gesticulations designed to steer attention away from the underlying emptiness of what is being offered. Often, this will take the form of superficially “innovative” gestures like adding flutes, “technicality,” exaggerated, cartoonishly executed additions from “surprising” outside influences, or maybe just really long songs.

Classic FAIL Archetypes: Opeth, Dimmu Borgir, Deathspell Omega, Necrophagist, Cynic, later Therion

Sonic Wallpaper

Symptoms: Most often associated with black metal, this FAIL is typified by a failure to grasp the dramatic, narrative aspects of metal. As a result, these bands make music that is often pleasant, inoffensive and even impressive in its constituent parts, but devoid of meaning, spirit, passion or lucid organization. It may work as background music, but it cannot stand on its own merits when listeners pay close attention. Basically, when you find yourself hitting the snooze button four minutes in, you’ve stumbled on this brand of FAIL.

Classic FAIL Archetypes: Ulver, Drudkh, Negative Plane, pretty much anything involving Stephen O’Malley

Metal as Mainstream Pander

Symptoms: Most often spotted in the wild among established bands who have depleted their creative fire and genre tourists with no established connection to metal, this FAIL can be easily spotted by the way it apes mainstream music while superficially applying metal technique. Often includes elements of either Sonic Wallpaper, Carnival Music or both. Comes in both “high brow” and “low brow” versions.

Classic FAIL Archetypes: later Metallica, later Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room, post-Hell Bent For Leather Judas Priest

Angst for Autistics

Symptoms: FAILS of this sort reveal themselves by an emphasis on dumbed down rhythm to the near total exclusion of all other traits, usually accompanied by some sort of superficially “shocking” or simply mind-numbingly aggro lyrical content. Basically, they exist to mollify the angry impulses of speds, emotionally crippled jocks, JNCO-sporting malltwats, meathead bigots and assorted other human defectives.

Classic FAIL Archetypes: Pantera, Cannibal Corpse Origin, later Deicide, pretty much all metalcore, deathcore and NSBM

From a user named Dylar114.

Someone finally explained heavy metal in terms simple enough for the nodding nobodies to comprehend:

Biff Byford, lead singer of 1980s heavy metal behemoths Saxon, is preaching to convert the non- ferrous among us to his cause. “Heavy metal is a tribal music and everyone is a member of the tribe,” he explains.

A wistful look passes across the features of a man memorably described by one critic as “the dray horse of heavy metal”. “The music’s not about love,” he adds, warming to his theme. “Our songs are more about Richard the Lionheart, steel trains and thunder. But when you do click with a big audience, it can be quite an experience, a massive connection… I suppose you could say it is a religious experience in a way.” – The Independent

As some people have been saying for years, metal is the one true alternative in pop culture — most of pop culture is about the individual and its desires, and the ethic of convenience that accompanies them. Don’t do the right thing — do what feels good! Ignore history, we’re inventing a new regime! One for the people, by the people, about the people. And when we gain power, and throw out those bad old fuddies with their social standards, everything will be totally awesome!

Heavy metal is the opposite. It minimizes the individual, and reduces you to the role of one in a tribe. It de-emphasizes the now, and replaces it with a broader view of history. It makes desires secondary to quests, goals and heroic struggles. It’s the anti-pop-culture, or the counter-counterculture. It’s a war against all of the illusions that allow our modern time to be corrupt. You can’t fight a corrupt society with flower power, pacifism and universal tolerance.

You can fight it by taking a look at reality for once, which is what heavy metal does. And because we’re the oddballs, we are the tribe of those who drop out of the “consensual reality” created by media, social pressures, advertising, government propaganda and what the crowd is talking about. We look at hard reality, fire and iron and blood, instead. While we may look like the other drop-outs, space-outs and individualists from the outside, we are in fact made of different stuff.

Hayaino Daisuki – The Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell, or Did You Mean Hawaii Daisuki?

Although this band is hipster fodder because everything they do is ironic, and it’s out-of-the-closet postmodern in that method of finding narratives in randomness that has been trendy since Joyce, I find it excusable because their music resembles the ranting of an abused child. No, in a good — well, maybe not good but a mixed bag — maybe in a way that’s half good and half horrible.

I don’t want to listen to it again because it’s screeching and annoying, but I think it valid as music and art, and you shouldn’t care what I think, anyway. The really good record reviewer is not a personality engine but as close to transparent as you can get, by using their own personality as an obvious, visible, repetitive filter and thus one you can Photoshop out of your mind to get the gist of what you want to see in each record.

But back to the record: on the surface this is blister speed grindcore with some of the comic circus of random influences that made bands like Mr Bungle and Fantomas so annoying, but here it’s moderate. Most of this is straight ahead grindcore, or I should say, in grindcore format. Underneath it are nursery rhymes and children’s songs, in this case hidden (think steganography) within the fertile ground of 1980s sentimental metal like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest or Queensryche. Except here, they’re played at sixty times the speed.

That speed ruins drumming as an instrument, and backgrounds bass most of the time, and reduces vocals to a timekeeper with some nuance, which lets the guitars sing. And the guitars are singing a song of a child alone who has maybe thirty minutes a day when he listens to Iron Maiden and dreams of being on stage, or maybe of being a powerslave in Ancient Egypt or being a WWII flying ace. Escapism collides with an unyielding, high intensity, too-fast-to-be-anything-but oblivious reality here.

The riffs are good, by the way, like what a creative child might do; they’re cut from archetypes you recognize, mostly NWOBHM and speed metal, but with enough of their own interpretation to be quality. They fit together. Songs masquerade as chromatic blasting chaos but underneath a melody sneaks out, like a fantasy you dare not name.

And as your civilization crumbles, as you go off today to another boring job and to spend time with insincere frenemies and business associates who wouldn’t dust you off if you died, through streets of glowing neon hawking products for morons, you should think: is humanity the kicked child? How would its inner voice of clarity gain retribution, or breathing space, as the world presses on ever faster because it’s in denial and never wants to slow down and face the obvious.

The kind of thing a child would see, a kicked child maybe. Maybe it’s irrelevant in this case that hipsters like this band to be ironic; a big part of me thinks the joke is on them and big, ugly and mean in a way they will never understand. I hope they play more of this on the radio because it throws back at our time exactly the kind of crap it throws at us every day, except someone snuck in a counter-virus, and this one is the hope of a youngster for the moments of beauty and clarity found in the stadium heavy metal of years past.

Metalbolical Compilation Volume 1

1. Equinox – Night of Churchyard Watcher

Florida death metal with a tiny bit of groove, like a cross between Massacre and Cadaver, this track grows from a a verse/chorus loop with infectious chant-rhythm vocals into Exodus-style speed metal. The rather straightforward nature of these riffs may make it hard for this band to carve a niche for themselves.

2. Seeking Obscure – Battle of the Undead

Reminiscent of a slower and more brooding Deicide, this one-man band writes strong but non-distinctive riffs that would echo the infectious vocal rhythm, but this in turn reduces internal tension between instruments in the song and consequently, development of the song itself over time.

3. Waxen – I Claim Your Throne

This unabashedly sentimental heavy metal cloaks itself in death metal, then black metal, and finally brings out its true soul, a Dissection/Judas Priest style band with lots of lead rhythm guitar riffs showing off chops that get lost in a song that does not develop much beyond its initial ideas. Add to that the vocals that resemble a chihuahua with a head cold and you can see how confused this approach is.

4. Unburied – Domicile of flesh

Coming to us from the death metal styles of the mid-1990s, this song is half bouncing riffs reminiscent of a more organic version of what Six Feet Under does, and the other half is charging two-chord riffs. If you can imagine a sped up, groovier and more porn/gore-obsessed version of Mortician, the essence of this band takes form in your mind.

5. Archaic Winter – Colors of Despair

This band is at its peak when it sticks to fast death metal riffs that come in clusters of two complementary phrases and a melodic fill, and while the song structure doesn’t evolve much, it varies just enough to bring the mood to a closure. This track suffers from some confusion as to how to stick to the style at which this band is best.

6. Toby Knapp – Polarizing Lines

If you took Joe Satriani and Dissection and put them together in a goofy, over-the-top package like Iron Maiden, you would see the essence of shredder Toby Knapp’s style (he’s also in Waxen). The entire song is like a solo divided into a series of motifs that evolve briefly and then repeat, leaving us without the sense of vast emotional conflict and resolution that made Satriani’s solo albums reviewer favorites. Knapp might do best with some supporting musicians to help shape his raw energy with less musically precise riffing.

7. Dyngyr – Scourge

Reminiscent of other carnival metal bands like Tartaros, this raw black metal with keyboards band manages to keep a basic surging rhythm but throws in too many divergent impulses to tie them all together, creating a riff salad that because its riffs are so similar in rhythm, represents a rotation through different views of the same basic idea. The result is a fun roller coaster that is not particularly memorable afterwards.

8. Onward – Beyond the Strong

As if anticipating that only a few years later, men would stand on stage in tights with guitars and sing about Odin as part of the folk-metal movement that birthed out of black metal, Onward get out there with the old school NWOBHM and speed metal riffs and a soulful, bittersweet vocal track. This is well composed and unabashed in its worship of metal past, like a more hopeful version of In Battle but too pouring out its soul for most power metal listeners to take at face value.

9. Serpent Son – False Hope for Survival

This credible death metal offering aims to throw out many different riffs without them becoming divergent, in the style of bands like Demigod or Pestilence, and succeeds to a degree although many of its melodies use too many connecting notes to unleash their inner atmosphere and subtlety. Instead of throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, they need to refine what they have so its interplay keeps the song intense and growing throughout.

10. Fetid Zombie – Pleasures of the Scalpel

Reminiscent of where Deceased took their music, this band works hard to disguise old school British heavy metal as American guttural goregrind. It’s pounding, chortling, gurgling, burping, crepitating madness until you realize the underpinning riffs are jaunty melodic middle fingers at common sense, similar to Gwar.

11. Nepente – Red Suns

Raw riffing meets interesting combinations of those riffs to make a dark atmosphere that submerges us in repetition made unexpected by changes in context. If you ever wondered what a hybrid of Von and Mortem might sound like, this is a good candidate.

12. Unearthed Corpse – Stench of your Decayed Blood

Ultra-basic death metal in the older style like Master meeting Malevolent Creation, this simple but catchy song uses a few riffs to good effect, pounding out a very similar verse/chorus pattern and then opening a sonorous transitional riff like a wormhole. Reminiscent of early Insidious Decrepancy.

13. Killing Addiction – Thresholds

This theatrical take on the mayhem of old school death metal combines slow necrotic riffing of the style Morpheus Descends made with the upbeat variations of post-Suffocation percussive death metal bands, challenging themselves with tempo changes that remind me of cats leaping between vehicles moving in different lanes of a superhighway. Like their undernoticed “Omega Factor” from 1993, this track has potential but suffers from dominating vocals and messy production.

14. Unit 100 – Bring Me the Circular Time Collapse

Of all the Toby Knapp projects in existence, this one provides the most interesting outlook because it mixes metal genres so fluidly, pacing Fallen Christ style chromatic riffing against avantgarde stylings reminiscent of Supuration. It’s enjoyable to see how the band hold them together and then blend them, creating a confusing musical experience that lingers in the mind after it has passed by, even if aesthetically the mix of stadium rock, Iron Maiden, death metal, crossover and progressive rock is too much of a buffet and not enough of a main course.

You can get this comp for $2 from Metalbolic Records. This is an older compilation, and volumes 2-3 are now available as well for the same price.

Many of you know Ray Miller from Cursed Productions, Metal Curse zine and the death metal band Adversary:

Bloodbath is very pleased to announce Ray Miller from Elkhart, Indiana, USA as the winner of our Bloodbath over Bloodstock t-shirt competition. Blakkheim and Mikael hard a real hard time picking the winner out of so many great submissions but finally managed to come to a decision. Blakkheim had the following to say: “The reason why we picked this design to be the winner is simply because it looks like it was dragged out of a closet that hasn’t been opened since 1990! It pays tribute to rest in festering slime after the bloodbath over bloodstock!!!!” – Bloodstock

Congratulations, fellow old-schooler. May many a corpse be sodomized in the presence of this tshirt!

Hell’s Headbangers Compilation Volume 3

1-2. Destruktor – Embrace the Fire/Nailed: At the core of this band beats a heart of NWOBHM sensibilities, although it is enwrapped in a melodic death metal influenced power metal shell, like Seance covering Helstar covering Holocaust.

3-4. Shackles – Coiled in Sin/Iron Crosses: Continuing the NWOBHM theme, this band come have come straight out of industrial England during the mid-1970s except for the fast strumming and death metal vocals; these are anthemic, heavy-hitting tunes that are easy to hum. Fans of Judas Priest’s “Painkiller” take note — this band uses a similar mix of fast riffs and dramatic anthemic choruses.

5. Trench Hell – Southern Cross Ripper: This track could have come off a Diamond Head record, and shares a more intense version of the sensibility that band shared with Metallica and Blitzkrieg, in that this is high speed NWOBHM with melodic underpinnings and lots of fast strumming like the first Metallica album.

6-8. Dishammer – Bomb In the Womb/Smoke Of Death/Wish Of Suffering: No compilation would be complete without a Discharge tribute band, and an unusually metalish one here. The first track uses the same riff that graced not only Discharge but vaulted Disfear to prominence as the premiere track on “Soul Scars,” and other tracks are similar, probably best described as Discharge with small doses of Carcass and Autopsy in the rhythm section.

9-10. Manticore – Our Will Is His/Feast Of The Beast: This speed metal/black metal hybrid exceeds most USBM by keeping true to an idea per song, but gets lost in developing those ideas, so you end up with circular songwriting like the waning days of bands like Destruction, Artillery, Assassin and Nuclear Assault.

11-12. Profanatica – Black Cum/Christs Precious Blood Poisoned: Backing away from the more complex and melodic style of “Profanatitas de Domonatia,” Profanatica attempt to relive the days of their split with Masacre by reducing their music to its bare elements, but in doing so, lose a lot of their momentum. We don’t love you for making basic offensive statements, Mr. Ledney, we love you for making idiot savant metaphors of great clarity, both musical and lyrical.

13-14. Havohej – Kembatinan Premaster/Pious Breath: These tracks continue the Havohej experimentation from “Man and Djinn” that involves sampling noise to use in lieu of guitar, by using it like guitar. The difference isn’t great from standard black metal attic production of intense distortion, but the songs while ritualistic are mostly repetitive and never achieve the distinctive song structures of early Profanatica.

15-16. Arphaxat – Potrait D’un Pretre Debauche/Le Pacte Diabolique: This band makes another attempt to approach black metal as if it were a 1980s genre, taking a hybrid of Angelcorpse and Funeral Mist and giving it the distinctive percussion and catchy choruses of middle 1980s speed metal like Sodom.

17. Hunters Moon – A Light In the Abyss: Seemingly inspired by the first Immortal and second Burzum albums, this track consists of a trudging part, and a sweeping melodic part that resembles both “Call of the Wintermoon” and “Snu Mikrokosmos Tegn.” It’s not bad but the song doesn’t grow from this state, just cycles until it works itself up enough for a small explosion and foot-tapping, fist-pumping final chorus.

18-19. Atomizer – A Song to Swing To/All Disfigured and Blue: One of the more unusual things to cross my desk, these two tracks sound like The Smiths doing their version of a tribute to later Bathory; on both the vocals lead each piece like a small opera, with black metal and heavy metal riffs duking it out for support. Not everyone will like the style but this is a far more sensible direction for an indie/metal hybrid to take than the wishy-washy metalcore-cum-shoegaze/emo crap they’re pumping out of the US Northeast.

20. Atomic Aggressor – Bloody Ceremonial: During the early days of death metal, there were more bands that took this approach where a chanting hoarse voice entirely guides the music, so that an infectious rhythmic chant organizes the guitars and drums around it instead of being an instrument supporting the guitars. The problem is that this reduces music to a chant and compresses the development of the rest of the song.

21-23. Nunslaughter – Born In Hell/Power of Darkness/You Bleed: Nunslaughter is basic death metal with a heavy punk influence, a lot like Master but uptempo and charging like the first Death album. These tracks seem to be taken from different recordings and vary in quality, but expect ripping two chord riffs and hummable choruses.

You can get this CD from Hell’s Headbangers Records for free with any order. In their words, “FREE CD IN EVERY ORDER (included upon request – only valid for orders containing CDs, Vinyl, Shirts & Tapes). Simply add it to your shopping cart, you will not be charged any postage cost.” In addition, all Hell’s Headbangers compilations are streaming free online at the HHR website.

Deathgasm records, like most old school labels before it, puts out a low-cost compilation of the bands on the label or distributed by the label. Their sixth volume of the series contains some of the newer and more exciting metal in the old school style.

Various Artists – Destruction of the Heavenly Realms: Volume VI

1. Diabolic – Evil in Disguise: This is charging death metal that most resembles a cross between Mortem and Vader; the song has two main riffs with budget riff variations, a blistering solo, and doesn’t vary its high intensity drive.

2. Infinitum Obscure – Messenger of Chaos, I: Combining Dissection/Sacramentum style melodic metal with instrumentally adept American power metal like Helstar, Infinitum Obscure come up with a winding, pleasant tune that still manages quite a few martial rhythms.

3. Azarath – Invocation: Blending ripping fast-forward war metal of the Angelcorpse variety with bluesy solos and high speed fills like technical modern death metal bands, Azarath keeps the approach of an older speed/death metal band like Destruction but with updated technique.

4. Nominon – Undead Beast: Despite all the death metal trimmings, this track is basically later Sodom — complete with ultra-catchy chorus and noodly solos — updated with a bit of the slick pop trimmings the Swedes do so well, which makes it easy to listen to but hard to want to hear again.

5. Avenger – The Birth of Muse: Unsung because of low drama, Avenger created the template that all Slavic droning black metal uses, and like a better version of Drudkh or Nokturnal Mortum this song cruises through abrupt riffs and high-contrast, loping beats with fluttering melodic riffs to match. Good but not exciting.

6. Kult Ofenzivy – Jaky jsem nalezl Duvod?: High speed simple melodic riffs under a croaking black metal vocal like Immortal, with songwriting like a simplified Gorgoroth or Emperor, this band makes pleasant noise that varies little between start and finish.

7. The New Plague – Welcome to the End: Fast melodic black/death with riffs that pick a basic chord progression and then work around it with longer phrases to escape the inevitability of such an obvious approach; as a result, this seems to be evading whatever truth it wanted to convey, although its competent songwriting includes humor.

8. Semargl – Cult of the Crucified: People compare this band to Emperor, but it makes more sense to say they’re a lot like Kreator with keyboards and black metal riffs, but a bouncier, less furtive version. Many of these riffs have been a staple of melodic death metal bands for fifteen years and haven’t gotten better.

9. Quinta Essentia – Formative Evasion: This odd melodic band chose to incorporate many elements of power metal, including a chanted/cleanly sung passage that’s intriguing yet too pop to keep going for long; it reminds me of Pyogenesis merged with Blind Guardian.

10. Abominant – Evil Inside: Abominant is the ultimate anonymous band. Their CDs pop up everywhere but no one can remember what they sound like. A start — Fallen Christ with every other riff being a melodic fill stretched to carry two rhythms at once, with the frenetic drumming of Krisiun and bombast of later Vader.

11. Cystic Dysentery – Parastic Demise: Blasting frenetic deathgrind in the Unique Leader style, this track shows good judgment in its pacing and a powerful balance between melodic riffs and purely percussive ones, but like most of this style is often too overwhelming in lightspeed repetition of similar ideas for regular listening.

12. Manticore – Praising the Whore…On the Altar of Darkness: Generic death/black metal played at high speed of drums and strumming but relatively mid-paced speed of chord changes and transitions, this track is sticks to a basic verse/chorus style with a few chaotic deviations, reminiscent of Krieg.

13. Nominon – Night of Damnation: The retro-Swedish death metal bands are expert at taking a standard pop song and dressing it up with death metal techniques so that you think you’ve found another Carnage, but on repeated listens, you realize it’s the same generic heavy metal that’s been around since 1974.

14. Nex – Exit: This wanderlust instrumental conveys a sense of melancholic adventure through careful shifting between different forms of a handful of melodic riffs, each riff shape becoming a repeated figure on a chord progression, slowly building a mood. Whispered death vocals guide it.

You can get this compilation at Deathgasm Records for $5.