Trash Talk – S/T
Trash Talk Collective, 2008

When music runs out of ideas, it recycles old genres. When that happens, smart music fans look for the exceptions that give both style and substance some tweaks to make them compatible with the current time and its challenges. Where the retro-thrash movement has produced some imitators of no substance, Trash Talk comes crashing in with a punk-inspired, thrash-influenced offering that invokes elements of the underground that developed while music festered in nu-metal and metalcore. Although the band compares themselves to Cryptic Slaughter, and comparisons could easily be drawn to Municipal Waste, what fuels this mania is more akin to the suffocated rage and dissident misanthropy that made Eyehategod and Acid Bath favorites of the late 1990s. Songs are sludgy rants that explode into frenetic activity, then smash it all down again, like a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. It is as if Trash Talk enjoy beating on their audience, lulling them into a false sense of security such as they might enjoy from media, religious or government leaders, and then detonating the result in a searing diatribe. While people will compare this record to works from Discharge or DRI, it’s more like Eyehategod meets Crass with Neurosis in the wings. It’s fortunate to see punk hardcore given another chance with this acerbic testament to the enduring powers of resistance through surliness.

Trash Talk – Dig MP3
Trash Talk Homepage

Jesu – Why Are We Not Perfect
Hydra Head, 2008

Justin Broadrick demonstrated through his early works a desire for that moment of unitivity when the conscious mind and emotions synchronized. Through Godflesh, and later Techno Animal and Final, he showed a passion for bringing colossal structures to bear on moments of quiet contemplation. With Jesu, he resurrects his music outside the ghetto that extremist offerings can be, and melds into post-rock disparate influences from industrial, shoegaze, noisepop, and so forth. Jesu, protean as all Broadrick projects are, in turn twisted from more radiantly noisy to its current softer state. On “Why Are We Not Perfect” Jesu moves the slider closest to shoegaze and pop, losing much of the more complicated structuring and sound that made earlier Jesu challenging. This gambit may prove risky: many in the post-rock fanclub would like to leave behind what so rigidly defines rock and brings the moths to its one-size-fits-all dose, and “Why Are Not Perfect” drapes its nearly ecclesiastical encompassing layered sound over the exuberant shuffle beats of rock/pop. Song structures are not linear but follow a verse chorus pattern culminating in a serenity like the moment after a surf crashes on the beach when water lapses into absorbent, silent sand. Less jagged distortion and cleaner, plaintive emo vocals guide each song and sounds elide smoothly from abrasive feedback to silken, reminiscent of shoegaze classics like Medicine and My Bloody Valentine. While this EP satisfies as a taste, and an exploration, this reviewer hopes Broadrick abandons the past — and doesn’t relapse into his influences — so he can keep exploring the seemingly erratic, intense jigsaw song structures he served up on the self-titled Jesu debut.

When I write about metal, I often distinguish works — which I consider to, at their best, be art — by how honest they are. It’s fairly easy to tell, although most people find that unnerving. An honest work tries to communicate with you; a dishonest work tries to game you by convincing you it’s something it’s not, so that you do x, or y or z that benefits those who made it. It’s a virus, in other words.

Dishonest works are generally the product of The Hipster, which is any person who tries to be hip for the sake of their own ego, instead of having a useful function of any kind. Hipsters are parasites on the social scene in that they want attention for being unexceptional, and since they can’t succeed at life by being exceptional — including making good music, being people we’d like to know, etc — they become dramatic and draw attention to themselves with increasingly radical styles of dress and behavior. If you ever find someone doing something humiliating, stupid, freakish, or pointless while slyly watching you out of the corner of their eye, you’ve found the same psychology.

It’s not much different from parasitic religions that convince people to fail at life so they can succeed at the board game called “What God Likes.” I’m not saying life is about success, or material success, just that if you want to have a good life, you need to have some function and challenge yourself to do it well. Hipsters don’t do that. They want the reward without the work.

We have a hipster core here in Texas. It’s called Austin. Hipsters are fond of one of many modern illusions, a socialized liberalism — a well-intentioned emotion channeled into a fashion that pretends to be an ideology, but never achieves its goals, despite making a hash of things on its path — that like drugs makes us feel better, but doesn’t solve any problems, and strengthens rather than weakens its ostensible enemy, the total state. Hipsters are useful because they beat liberalism out of people who are still able to think.

When I went to Austin, I was all about tolerance. I was still clueless as to the problems of the world, mainly because I spent most of my time working.

When I saw the liberal paradise that is Austin, I realized that liberalism is basically parasitism. “If someone has x, and I don’t, I deserve it, and I’ll force them to share with social guilt”; after seeing that, and the complete social havoc — where good people were not only ignored but socially persecuted, and vapid whores predominated and suffocated art and culture with their lies — I left Austin and liberalism behind.

(There may be an honest liberalism. To me, when I was a liberal, it meant not allowing big pointless entities to rule over people in destructive ways. I’m thinking about all the people who got dicked over by their stupid jobs, all the toxic waste dumped into rivers, all the junk products that just ended up in landfills, all the overdeveloped areas where forests were sacrificed, etc. For me, liberalism meant restraining humanity’s appetite with common sense. I soon learned that if you oppose power, however, you soon get people who oppose power for power’s sake because they’re powerless. They have no power in life and no control over their own appetites, so they hate anything that resembles power, but since they’re weak, they don’t attack directly but through whining. I was a classical liberal, which meant treat people fairly. That philosophy however decays un-gracefully into revenge for the underdog, hatred of excellence, and desire to turn the world into one uniform Safe(tm) place. I realized quickly how this plays into the hands of our leaders. It distracts our best people and sends them off to defend those who have failed at life, and then the activists in turn fail at life, so they spent their time fighting for the right to fail. It’s a sick cycle but easily avoidable if you think it through: the problem isn’t power, but people in power without a clue, and they’re in power because all the failed people want pleasant illusions instead of reality. So if you’re an honest liberal, don’t take this column as a personal attack, or a political statement. I’m pointing out how liberalism commonly decays into self-importance, hipsterism and other problems, not trying to assault the emotional or psychological impetus behind liberal thinking.)

Austin is the hipster capital of the world, in many ways. I’ve been to Seattle and to San Francisco, to L.A. (Silver Lake) and to Mizzoula, MT, all of which are hipster-havens. But Austin hipsters have the city locked down. Under the guise of fighting the man, you’re supposed to be weird and freaky and do whatever the man doesn’t expect. But you go back to work the next day, having learned nothing. It’s a good town to work food service until you’re 42 and then become a regular, bitter writer on Alternet.org.

Austin suffocates every quality band who tries to set up shop there. Metal bands in particular suffer because, unless you infiltrate the social network and start behaving like a hipster, no one will attend your shows. People are too afraid of being un-hip to go see an unknown, unless that “unknown” is secretly an underground favorite. As a result, the best Austin bands are the ones that have nothing to do with the “seen” (Scene) there.

Emos, hipsters, modern primitives, trend whores, carnies, defiant minorities and lesbians, drug use theorists, mantra-chanting New Agers, feminists, body modification fetishists, coprophages, “witches,” faux artists of all variety, embittered defiant hippies, foreskin collectors, and other failures of all sorts cluster in Austin. They have failed at making something of their lives, so they are using cognitive dissonance, and making themselves a Big Deal in social/moral/hip circles.

When I seize power, it will be very unwise for anyone to spend time in Austin. The B-52 carries 27 tons of high explosive and, if unleashed on a city block, literally landscapes it into a moon surface of ceramicized dirt covered in the dust of charred, vaporized plants, animals, and buildings — this is a consequence of the TNT/HE mix used in modern bombs. The explosions are so loud that people up to a mile away will lose hearing for the next two days. Some of the fireballs approximate a quarter mile in size, and can be seen from nearby cities. A flight of B-52s, properly targetted, can erase a city so thoroughly that from space it resembles a desert, and this is without use of nuclear weapons.

That form of horror, visited upon Austin, will not cost the human race any geniuses. Nor will it diminish its artistic or social potential. Instead, it will increase our potential by removing the false and giving space to something new, like weeding a garden and dropping in seeds for non-parasitic plants. Don’t cry for Austin, because that entire town is one giant emo hipster cognitive dissonance passive aggression parasite. Its death in flaming vapor will be a great step forward for taste and beauty.

Metal music, like nature, is not about fashion. It’s not about being nice to everyone so they can feel good for being exceptional. It’s about results. About making civilizations that make people inhale sharply whenever they see their ruins for the next 10,000 years. About getting art, science, culture, etc. right. About doing things that matter because they’re not the same humdrum. Forging new spaces, destroying emptiness, making life interesting and giving us something to live for. Like nature, in metal life is struggle, but struggle for beauty and not the bloated, ugly, self-importance of an ego. Metal is anti-hipster, and anti-Austin.

(click for larger image)

Police on Thursday accused a Brazilian man of killing and dismembering his 17-year-old British girlfriend, taking pictures of her body parts with his cell phone and stuffing her torso in a suitcase.

One photo appeared to have been taken in a bathroom shower stall, showing Burke’s severed head placed on the chest of her torso along with a bloody butcher knife.
Man accused of killing, dismembering girlfriend

So she was dating a cocaine fueled maniac, probably oblivious, and he dismembered her and got a good laugh out of it. Life is nature, folks. There are predators everywhere. Watch your step, but don’t forget the lulz when you accidentally cut up a corpse and post cell phone pics.

Raised and homeschooled through high school by his parents on an isolated farm in Southern California, Adam played Little League baseball and participated in Christian homeschool support groups. As an adolescent he became very involved in the underground Death metal community. In 1993, he formed his own one-man band called Aphasia, releasing a few limited self-releaesed tapes.

This is one such tape, originally titled “DELIRIUM: 7 Hallucinatory Interludes, Op.2” A melange of experimental sounds and ambient passages, fused with occassional guitar interludes and drum machines bringing us into the adolescent mind of this future propagandist. Perhaps the final words of the last track, “Insanity,” summarize the character of this esoteric individual when he closes the album with the words: “I’m mad!”

Adam Gadahn – Aphasia Op. 2

For whatever reason, a lot of Swedish death metal seems to be created by the inordinately young, and often, the inordinately skilled for their age. Even before ENTOMBED released Clandestine, and at the same time that AT THE GATES was gelling its impulses, the members of DARK TRANQUILLITY, only 15 and 16 themselves, were putting together high-intensity death metal that was more melodic than the common offerings of the time, but whose stylistic bent would be adopted by hordes younger replacements within a matter of years.

The now-classics that emerged from Stockholm managed to channel their youthfulness into solid composition without succumbing to it as such. Unfortunately for DARK TRANQUILLITY, the band’s compositions of the period bear the weight of their ambitious minds rather poorly; seemingly decent ideas are too-far fractured to be remembered long, and what remains are riffs — often well-written riffs — but only that, parsed through series of confusing time signature changes and strange juxtapositions of melody. As demo material it is probably suitable, but its broader importance was over-inflated by the incestuous Swedish scene, as well as the playful dress-up of simpler ideas that became more conspicuously pursued by the band itself as time moved on.

This is just one tale among many of bands who were almost there, damned by any number of circumstances or peculiarities. It is interesting to reflect on them in the context of better things.

Neuraxis civilize metalcore by infusing it with heavy doses of progressive metal and technical death metal. Metalcore — known for its rapid changes between seemingly irrelevant parts equally borrowed from metal, nu-metal, emo and hardcore — grew out of the MTV culture where images on a screen tell an unfolding story, and each scene is mirrored by changes in the music. Neuraxis give the metalcore as developed by bands like Behemoth or Necrophagist a good run for its money by massaging a more listenable and more musical instrumentalism into it, creating a work that will stick with the listener longer than its genremates of lesser dimensionality.

This CD has more in common with Cynic or Gordian Knot in the way it is composed. Taking a page from the jazz-metal book, it loosely ties itself together with a clearly defined harmonic pattern, and then riffs on that, using rhythm and harmony to hold together lead riffs that are more harmony than melody but have a “melodic” effect. Its ability to turn a good riff and work within harmony should appeal to fans of Opeth. Vocals remind me of Dying Fetus or Behemoth; the death metal parts can be attributed to Immolation as processed through Deeds of Flesh, with plenty of quick short melodies played in power chords funneled past hard-stop barrages; solos are classic progressive metal and extremely well executed, and the only nu-metal influence is the tendency to periodically bounce — but this is limited more than elsewhere in this genre.

Neuraxis can grow by giving in fully to their progressive tendencies, and escaping metalcore’s tendency to write roundrobin songs that cycle around a harmonic pattern without developing it because they are too busy mashing together disparate elements. What defines this CD are the rhythm tracks which fall between leads and repetitive riffs, letting the songs grow organically at the same time they batter the listener into submission. I hope this band continue developing in this style and go beyond the conventions of metalcore to bring out in their music what is most promising, which is what has always made metal rise above the horde of noise: ripping riffs which also have some musical depth, combined in such a way as to make the listener wake up out of a daily stupor and wonder how to fit his or her brain around the flow of relentless sound.

Neuraxis – The Thin Line Between – Dreaming the End mp3 sample (45 seconds)

Akhenaton – Divine Symphonies

I like this: it’s martial ambient in the style of Lord Wind with distorted bass. But, it is very predictable. So very predictable. As a result, it is pleasant to listen to as background music. About track seven, it starts becoming gothic with guitars and lush keyboards and Sisters of Mercy vocals. I think they need to go back to the drawing board and put more music into this, because their heavy repetition (a) isn’t layered and (b) does not consist of melodies that are all that exciting.

Ancestral – Avowed

Varg, this is your fault. Yours. These people are following your lead. You made it look so simple and now, it is. Trudge beat, open strumming while power chords undulate, and you can trick out a pop song into being like Burzum. The underlying writing on this demo is a lot like later Krieg, but even more poppy, and so it seems very emo when it emerges in quasi-metallized form. Again, like all covertly negative reviews, this one must contain the words “not badly executed, but lacking direction.” This demo sodomizes a Macintosh.

Chronic Torment – Doomed

This isn’t A+ material, but it’s a solid B. Sounding like a cross between Merciless and Fester, it’s heavy-metal and hardcore-tinged death metal in the Swedish style, with an affinity for fast riffs. You will hear nothing new on this CD, but unlike most of these discs, it has an attention span long enough to bond together simple songs over the course of a few riff changes and a verse-chorus devolution. It’s not like the best of Swedish metal, which leaves the stupid rock’n’rollisms behind, but it’s quite solid, with the same aggression appeal that made Verminous fun until it gave you a headache.

Chronic Torment – Dream of the Dead

Gosh, does everyone need to follow Immolation and Hail of Bullets? There’s some completely great stuff on this album, but it gets ruined by the nu-MTVcore/metalcore trend of ranting, dead-on-the-beat chanting verses. These sound like a braindead zombie attempting to sodomize an iron lung, and have about as much musical importance to the listener as well. I think it’s good if you want something angry-sounding in the background, like in a movie. They’re very catchy, but mind-numbing. This CD reminds me of Comecon in that way: their heavy metal has blended into their hardcore, with no emo, but it’s so bouncy and simple that I don’t want to ever put it in again. That’s said because some of the Bolt Thrower-style speed riffs, with two chords strummed fast in the background and melodic rhythm patterns picked over them, are great. Still a Merciless comparison, if Merciless listened to a lot of later Malevolent Creation and The Haunted. What a promising work, but awash in stuff designed to pander to blockheads.

Stentorian – Gentle Push to Paradise

The best comparison I can make with this is Sentenced’s “North From Here” hybridized with Malevolent Creation. It’s big, dumb heavy metal riffs and some guitar noodling that goes nowhere, so much so that you forget you’re listening to something and it’s not a flaky engine idling in the background.

Sulphur – Cursed Madness

We want to be Immolation, but we want black metal cliche too. Yet life goes on, far away from the speakers and, …what was I saying? Oh, don’t buy this CD.

Troglodytic – Promo 2004

Hi, we’ve collected a ton of cliches and roped them together with Garage Band. Worse than shit, because at least you can plant shit in your backyard and grow flowers. This CD made me want to kill myself… but I threw it away instead.

Utgard – Thrones and Dominions

Dark Funeral and Watain are sitting on a bus while Darkthrone’s “Transilvanian Hunger” is playing, and it runs into the back of a garbage truck. Nice speed, good aesthetic, good mastery of Darkthrone through “Total Death,” but end result is totally pointless. What’s wrong with listening to the original albums that do this better?

Walknut – Graveforests and Their Shadows

Why does all of this stuff sound the same? Drudkh, Nokturnal Mortum and every NSBM band from eastern europe do this slow melody of three or four notes that’s half-lullabye and half-affirming, aerobic exercise music. It’s not bad; this is one of the better things to arrive lately, but it’s completely without character, which makes it unlikely I’d listen to this again. Vaguely reminiscent of Gehenna’s first album.

Wrath of the Weak – Alogon

This album was named after “a logon,” because it’s clearly destined for MySpace fame. These simple songs rely on a burly version of Burzum technique where layers of guitar and bass overwash, but unlike in Burzum, they’re not playing anything inspiring. The result is droning dischord that neither enlightens, clarifies or distorts the senses in any interesting way. If you can play drums while listening to a jet engine, the result is the same.

Aäkon Këëtrëh – Journey into the Depths of Night

Some people always thought black metal should sound like Abruptum, which to me sounds like art school rejects taking on John Cage under the influence of cheap drugs, maybe mixed with Bondo or Killz for added kick. Lots of theatrical stuff, really simple music, goes absolutely nowhere and seems to think it’s making a big splash by being anti-music. Well, if you’re trapped in Guantanamo Bay, maybe this would be acceptable listening but everyone else has something better to do. A boy’s choir from a home for the chronically retarded could do better.

Hail of Bullets – Of Frost and War

Do you like Verminous and Repugnant? This is similar: it claims to be old school death metal but it has more in common with metalcore tricked out with an extra dose of bad heavy metal riffs. High-intensity production and relentless attack makes this seem like it might be interesting, but then you realize that it goes nowhere when you subtract the effect these riffs had on you when the original artists played them, and that the constant drive/bouncy drums of a metalcore band make it both exhausting and tedious. Vocals are good, but CD is pointless.

Heresi – Psalm II – Infusco Ignis

They probably play this for suicide bombers. I could see blowing myself up to make this end. These guys can play their instruments, and production is good, and they’ve mastered the basic songwriting to make it seem good, but… and again, but… they pick very obvious patterns and then songs undergo no change except the basic demands of manipulating consciousness to make something sound good. “Now an uplifting part, then back to minor!” Just when you think we’re going black metal, suddenly the bouncy heavy metal riff off a KISS album appears, and then more parts barf up, regurgitated from metal genres past in no particular order… OK, please no. I would rather listen to the soccer moms of America trying to cover songs from the first two Destruction LPs than this vomitous horror of good-but-not-good-at-all. Nilla, please.

The Howling Void – Megaliths of the Abyss

Neat, a Skepticism clone. But without anything really unique going on. It moves forward so glacially that you forget what just happened, so all you hear is the simultaneous ringing of keyboards and guitar drone, with a snare-bass plodding in the background. Unfortunately, it is also all too predictable even if you speed it up. And it takes forever to end. Forever, forever. This CD is better than most but still unremarkable.

MP3s are an invitation to try before you buy. If you’re like me, and everyone I deem to be a good person and so desire as a friend, you listen for months or years and then you buy the CD when you can — if it’s available, which in metal is far from guaranteed.

Periodically, on a rainy afternoon, I go through the music as I do mindless tasks like fixing scripts and HTML. These mindless tasks are perfect because they put me in an ornery mood, at which point I have no tolerance for music that is more annoyance than beauty. Even ugliness can be beautiful in the hands of an artist — watch Apocalypse Now if you don’t believe me, or listen to the “defeat” sections of Beethoven’s third symphony. I’m not responsible for your tears that make you look like a girly man.

But it’s the right mood to consider something you might listen to for years in the context of a high annoyance situation like mindless tasks. It’s like being tired at the end of a day: you say exactly what you mean, uncensored. With music, you get in touch with exactly how little you care about stuff far from what you want, even if normally you’d be feeling obligated to listen to it because it’s musically advanced, some critic likes it, all your friends like it, etc.

I’ve been rooting out some turds. I take no joy in this, but I take great joy in having them gone. That’s less of my time thrown down a black hole of dysfunction and disorganization, the two creators of really bad music or worse — music that is halfway to bad, so completely ambiguous in its presentation. Most people are so cowed by the social factors mentioned above that they keep listening, bovine erotic, and never manage to articulate their own voice or even a moment’s sense and say, “Actually, this doesn’t suck, but it’s not good enough to fascinate me, so why not throw it out, with last year’s failed relationship and my old textbooks from classes I hated and my tax documents?” Get the crap out of your life and you have space for new things to do.

Arsis – A Diamond for Disease

Oh no, it’s the whisper-voiced rushing death/black assault. After a promising intro, and forty seconds of two-chord jazz-inspired rhythm riffing, suddenly we get the synthesized whisper and a break to a guitar fill that sounds like it’s from the book of minor pentatonic scale variations commonly used by jazz/fusion bands to distract audiences from that moment when an overblown, pretentious song really begins to fuckin’ drag… and that’s what this EP does, except at high speed. The problem is that there’s no concentration on songs or ideas as a whole, so you get these budget riffs made all technical and then little diversions, but nothing ever comes into its own. Nice try guys, but next time, use notecards to organize and concentrate on having a song make a difference to the listener, not just teach them fret muting technique.