Malaysian label Afterlife Productions has restored and reprinted Southeast Asia’s first black metal zine, Thy Invocation of Hell. It’s packed with interviews from tons of legendary bands, all conducted in their early and formative years, before wannabe rockstar egos and commercialism took hold. Buy it. From the label’s Facebook page:
3 CommentsTags: 1995, afterlife productions, Asia, Black Metal, Interviews, malaysia, reissue, repress, thy invocation of hell, underground zines, zine, zines
Kronet til Konge shows what happens when a genre overshoots its inertia. Everything labeled “Norwegian black metal” with “that sound” was selling like hotcakes, which is a rare position for metal to find itself in. The fans, labels and magazines howled for more, which is always a sign that the quantity-over-quality groupthink has arrived. This band pasted together a bunch of riffs and called it an album.
The result shows us how important metal songwriting is: it’s not just about the riffs. Good metal comes from arranging riffs so they talk to each other to create “heavy” moments which feel like realizations (or provoke them). Normal rock is designed to distract you or get you lost in a sea of bittersweet conflicting emotions. Metal builds up illusions and tears them down, then inverts the whole structure to show you a hidden truth. This is the mythological nature of metal.
Dodheimsgard are talented musicians. They have about one good riff idea per song, and are musically adept enough to cook up the other riffs and bits necessary to tie it together into a song, but these are addressing the riff itself and not some underlying topic or feeling for the song. As a result, these songs feel random and convey nothing, although it’s hard to come to this conclusion when caught in a quality riff. But the sum has to be more than the total of its parts and that leap to greatness is not made here.
5 CommentsTags: 1995, Black Metal, dodheismgard, Norwegian Black Metal
As part of Peaceville Records’ holy mission to rerelease every shred of music they can, Dødheimsgard is releasing a vinyl pressing of their debut album on December 11th. I haven’t actually listened to Kronet Til Konge, but it’s apparently a fairly standard work of Norwegian black metal perhaps most notable for showcasing one of Fenriz’s many performances. It also predates both Dødheimsgard’s brief flirtation with the small black-thrash ‘movement’ (read: Monumental Possession) and their evolution into a goofy experimental metal act. This repress also contains the usual sort of additions – contemporary photographs, new liner notes, and other biographical material for the sake of added value.
Tags: 1995, Black Metal, Dødheimsgard, fenriz, kronet til konge, peaceville, rerelease
It feels like we’re doing a great deal of anniversary mini-features these days, but Scarlet Evil Witching Black, at the very least, is particularly deserving of notice. Released on November 15th, 1995, Necromantia’s second album continues the band gimmick of dual distorted bass guitar arrangements. More importantly, it favors some melodramatic and perhaps overblown composition styles I am personally fond of, and serves as an admirable blueprint for how to effectively and tastefully incorporate symphonic and other relatively “normal” musical elements into extreme metal. Definitely a high point of the Greek black metal scene, and a markedly different experience from not only the better known Norwegian works, but also the midpaced stomp of a Rotting Christ or a Varathron.
Tags: 1995, anniversary, bass guitar, Black Metal, Greek Black Metal, necromantia, scarlet evil witching black
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.
Tags: 1995, Austrian Black Metal, black ambient, Black Metal, minas morgul, Summoning
Formed in 1991, Horgkomostropus was a death metal band hailing from the unlikely land of Honduras, in Central America. Unlike virtually every other band coming from that the area, this band actually proposes something of other own. This music is not only several pegs above the vast majority of music in Central America, but it is also, in my view, a strong contender in the death metal world of the 1990s. That is not to say I would place Horgkomostropus besides a Morbid Angel, but perhaps above a Demigod and below the Amorphis of The Karelian Isthmus in terms of its artistic (merit in composition, in part) weight.
The style displayed on Lúgubre Resurrección (or Ingubre Resurrecciòn?) is akin to that blood-dripped death metal that slurs in a development of motifs thematically related and played through tremolo passages and power chord statements. Perhaps best described as an original and distinct-sounding follower of the styles in which Paul Ledney excels, this album strikes one as something that Gorguts’ Considered Dead could have been if it were not only the tongue-in-cheek musically-compelling banner of death metal it is.
There is something to be said about the place and time in which this work arose and what we can infer from it in terms of the band’s seriousness, commitment and perhaps its correlation with talent. During the 1990s, Central America was practically without the means to professionally produce music in general, let alone publish metal. Any metal band that would remotely hope to publish its music had to reach out for Mexico. To someone from a developed nation, this may seem like no big deal, but considering the Internet-less “Third World” of the time, this is cannot be taken lightly. In such inhospitable climate, how did a Central American death metal band get their demo/album out there? I am guessing this people had to be in the “mailing” circuit of the underground.
The band was able to get their first demo, Lúgubre Resurrección, out through Line America Productions, from Mexico. Needless to say, in these conditions, the commitment of the band against adversity and the complete lack of any possible material compensation reflects a disinterested sacrifice for art with a deeper meaning. Furthermore, given the limited resources and the difficulty of communication and publishing for death metal at the time and specially in the geographical area, the degree of talent needed to catch the attention of one of these very small labels that only supported very specific acts with equally uncommon mentality and faculties was by no means something to be overlooked.
Horgkomostropus’ Lúgubre Resurrección is an esoteric work that in later projects by the band leader and lead guitar player, Fernando Sánchez, would turn to purposefully veiled occult affairs like Aria Sepvlchralia. As has been proposed before, a clear theme or belief that a project holds as its ideal usually lights a candle in the dungeons of the mind that one has to walk in in order to bring together a composition. Most bands we hear out there are zombies who are still wandering there, too deluded and trapped in their own minds to even recognize their condition.
Lúgubre Resurrección shines forth dark light in a mixture of demonic-bent death metal with a black mentality influenced by the local styles of street-dirt heavy metal that prevailed in Latin America at the time, themselves a pure expression of the violent, desperate and decadent situation that was being ignored by Christian wishful-thinkers and hypocritical morals-mongers. Beautifully perverse thematic development occurs in these songs with such a strict adherence to a clear motif that it allows for a greater flexibility in the textures of the riffs, which are always kept in the style of early blasphemous death metal that emphasized a dirty sound, not on the level of production only, but the musical statements themselves: not atonal, but tonal phrases just given the necessary twist for an aura of perversion to be perceived encroaching on everything from above. This is the natural world before us, but there is a supernatural transgression taking place over it.
(P.S. Special thanks to the guy from Metal Honduras blog for keeping a profile and mp3s of the band that would allow me to discover this, if I may so myself — a recently converted and now fervent fanatic, invaluable gem. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Metal-Honduras/217812037969)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qu423QTtL0
The following is
10 CommentsAn orchestral piece based on “Lúgubre Resurrección”, originally written by S:E:Nctvm for Horgkomostropus (Death Metal) in 1996.
Performed & Arranged by: S:A:Ph with insight from S:E:Nctvm (2011),
Tags: 1995, 2015, Aria Sepvlchralia, death metal, Fernando Sánchez, Horgkomostropus, Ingubre Resureccion, Lúgubre Resurrección
