Self-identifying as death metal on the “brutal” spectrum, Deathseeker actually playing something more akin to the groove metal of Lamb of God without engaging in the jumpiness and maintaining a stabler basis. Rather it is based on chugs and rhythmic tremolo-based bursts while vocals accentuate in unvarying and short phrases. While it is hard to call this death metal at all, it is closer to an industrial-influenced groove metal whose central focus is that of heaviness itself. As such it loses vision of musically constructing anything beyond immediate and banal pleasure.
Deathseeker has been in the making for some time already but the creation process has been a recent affair. Now the band is set to release a full-length album, even though they have not given a particular date yet.
Dutch black metal band Kaeck have blessed us with a preview of the album in full song uploaded to Youtube and a treated us with a look at the album artwork. Consistent with the symbolic anti-religious blasphemy with an occult atmosphere that longs for deeper knowledge and understanding of the world that goes beyond dogma and into the heretical, the artwork displays perhaps somewhat cliche yet nonetheless symbolic objects of mystic research that become the tools for the pushing of boundaries of permitted knowledge. It is both rebellious and underground, subversive and hidden — a quiet revolution of plane-wanderers, mystics and malcontent visionaries that realize that the world at hand cannot contain the ideals they are looking for, launching them in a quest for the truth that is a desperate and hopeful reaching-out for the future and simultaneously nostalgic of an illusory grand past .
In “Afgod”, Kaeck present us with a condensed and focused incarnation of these sentiments. A heavy use of repetition with slight variation in a minimalist piece that can only be crafted by the most expert of black metal composers — not musicians or artists. Every single part is significant and important, ingrained indispensably in the framework of the music in a way that its function is not only amplified locally, but that makes the piece as a whole enhanced so that when all these elements are together (the understated drums, the melody-carrying enveloping keyboards, the saturating guitars and the maddened vocals) a surprisingly layered result whose individual elements are engaging but have nowhere near the power and reach of the created entity born when the sounds are brought together. And on the timeline, no single riff, no single repetition can account for the effect of the total song.This is the hallmark of superior and successful minimalist black metal. Greatness in any music, such as this, lies in the unified journey and the coalescing elements: a vision encompassing the whole vertically and horizontally.
Edit: “Alfgod” was taken down, but a link for another song in the album was uploaded and linked below.
Urðun play a form of primitive death metal that is sufficiently competent to be pleasing to the fan of the style yet be utterly forgettable by virtue of its being both indistinguishable from its peers. But credit should be given where it is due. The band knows how to make clear beginnings, how to turn riffs on their head, create breaks, twists and introduce new ideas without destroying the continuity of the music. The coherence of the song is reinforced by bringing back main riffs in later parts of the songs even if for shorter spans of time than earlier in the songs.
Horror and Gore is the old school tremolo heavy-groove riff procession you might expect from a band like Urðun, but the songs are far from being riff salads. While some contrasting riffs are introduced as new ideas, most riffs obviously proceed from each other evolving in proper motif forms by maintaining one or more dimensions and altering others. Differing enough to be considered separate riffs (you would not consider them as derived from each other right away) but being similar enough that the idea is not broken.
As a demo, Horror and Gore is a modest triumph, but Urðun must, for a future full-length release, be able to refine their style, bringing out a distinctive identity in order to stand out. The way to find this identity is to start thinking about the riffs and this style is the end goal itself and rather to think of them as the tools for them to express what they want. Once they become a means to an end, the conceptual picture of something beyond the music can become the band’s focus, and when the listener experiences the music, he will be able to fall through the music, piercing layer after layer in subsequent repetitions of an album that is more than the sum of its parts and more than its musical structures.
Organ dealer play a brand of metalcore influenced by the sound of those in that genre who call themselves “technical death metal”, but excuse themselves from any responsibility to make complete songs or to make them coherent at all by claiming to be playing grindcore. While at some level there is a reason for this claim, Organ Dealer only fulfills the requirements of a grindcore outfit on the superficial level. That is, if one asked the general public to describe grindcore, Organ Dealer would meet the “requirements”. It is in the details, the realization and what we read in between the lines of music that the deception is identified.
While grindcore does introduce a mixture of frenetic passages and mid-pace groove that do not necessarily have concrete links between them, the emphasis of grindcore has traditionally been on the strength and trance that each section evokes arising from a certain clarity of expression, the modern metal nature of Visceral Infection place the emphasis on the contrast between them. Each individual section is more forgettable, usually lacking a clear image, the emphasis being on the brutality as a whole and their form usually channeling into the next incredibly contrasting section. In the first one is pulled towards each riff, in the latter one is led towards the intersections between riffs. The nature of grindcore is replaced by that of carnival modern metal.
Sounding like an Iron Maiden with the annoying voice from Queensryche’s vocalist from back in the day, Iron Kingdom make melodic heavy metal with the flexibility and propriety of conscious progressive rock. A very clear image of the character, lyrical theme and direction of the music arises through discrete but carefully-considered decisions to express the next clause with a literal musical change to match its change in words. (more…)
Aversion play black metal that floats in the area between the tendency of “pagan” bands to use a mid-paced, back-and-forth rhythm with a simple grooves and that of melodic black metal bands that submit every part of the music to the “will” or destiny of a main melody. Aversion also shows a preference for constructing songs in a “progressive” way, that is, looking forward, trying to take the song where it has not been before without looking back. The character of the riffs themselves remain in the general area between happy and slightly serious, while the whole does not feel unified enough to have a solid shape. On the positive side, Aversion keep strictly to one style and produce varied riffs that do not violate their initial proposal.
While that impulse for progression is not taken to the dangerous extreme consequence of jumping between styles or letting the musicality of songs fail through sharp contrasts in texture, it produces problems by becoming the foremost preoccupation of the songwriting process, instead of being the consequence of a deeper need. There are exceptions in which changes are a little forced, but these represent a minority in the album. The problem that Aversion faces from this progressive intent is that they have the tendency to accumulate new material, new events in the song, without necessarily attributing them any meaning. Not that riffs have precise meanings, but while an inside-outside process would produce riffs from a precise flow of feelings and an intended direction, in here, riffs sound good together, the musicians have used a criteria of appropriateness to decide whether or not a next riff should be included or not, but it has come from this outer judgement, and not from the impulse that would produce the riff as necessary from the inside. Thus parts sound good together but are not made indispensable, a common weakness in melodic black metal: the happiness of the melody line becomes ruler.
Aversion’s self-titled is still the result of a vague vision that keeps these musicians from looking beyond the surface while they stay afloat through sheer judgement of their own ideas after they have been produced. I posit that in their writing process, riffs are produced and then are considered for the song, instead of riffs being devised with a specific purpose in mind. This is one of the many subtle differences between producing from the inside or from the outside. It is also worth clarifying that there is no dichotomy, these characteristics are manifest in a gamut of degrees as I am sure Aversion are not oblivious to looking for some kind of character in their riffs, otherwise the constant style and character with which they infuse each section would not be as clear. If Aversion can look deeper and find a motivator, they may well give us a worthwhile black metal album in the future.
Swedish death-influenced gore/grind band RazorRape have scheduled the release of their upcoming album Orgy in Guts for August, 2015.
Tracklist:
1. Bonesaw Facefuck
2. A Beast of Human Waste
3. Holy Gory Glory Hole
4. Spinal Cord Impalement
5. Vomit Drenched In Mucus
6. Choking On Feces
7. Orgy In Guts
8. Black Flood Of Body Fluids
9. Bitch Butcher Boogie
10. Grinding The Dead
11. Rampage In Red
12. Rot In Excrement
13. Lady Gagball
14. Hey Whore, Let’s Gore
15. Tennis Racket God
Blues hard rock band Ramming Speed have released a new song titled “Don’t Let this Stay Here”.
The band released the following statement regarding the new song’s message:
‘Don’t Let This Stay Here’ is our reaction to the Edward Snowden leaks that confirmed the U.S. government’s saving of all our phone calls, text messages, emails and web searches in giant server farms. To us, that is fucking terrifying and unacceptable, and this is our rallying cry against it.
The citizens building the first top secret atomic bombs in Oak Ridge, Tennessee were told: ‘What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.’ This song is for the NSA employees that question what they are doing. It’s for the American civilians feeling betrayed by the breaches of privacy, and it’s for the people at our shows singing along and sharing our frustration. Don’t Let This Stay Here. Spread the word.
A list of the band’s currently confirmed tour dates appears below. More shows will likely be added in the coming weeks.
7/17 Eindhoven, NL – Dynamo Metalfest Pre-Party (w/ Gama Bomb)
7/19 Aachen, DE – AZ Aachen
7/20 Dendermonde, BE – JH Zenith ^
7/21 Bleibt-Pratteln, CH – Konzertfabrik Z7 (w/ The Black Dahlia Murder)
7/22 Bologna, IT – Freakout Club (w/ 7 Seconds)
7/23 Milano, IT – Lo Fi *
7/24 Rokycany, CR – Fluff Fest
7/25 Leipzig, DE – Zoro #
7/26 Koblenz, DE – SK2 #
7/27 Stuttgart, DE – Juha West # *
7/29 Bartislava, SK – Randal Club ^
7/30 Vienna, AT – Das Bach #
7/31 Chemnitz, DE – Killed System Festival #
8/1 Berlin, DE – Stateless Society Festival *
8/2 Dresden, DE – Chemiefabrik
8/4 Budapest, HU – Dürer Kert
8/6 Jaromer, CZ – Brutal Assault Fest 2015
8/7 Mannheim, DE – Juz
8/8 Brussels, BE – Garcia Lorca
8/10 Glasgow, UK – Ivory Blacks
8/13 London, UK – The Black Heart
8/14 Leper, BE – Leperfest
8/15 Thiex, FR – Motocultor Open Air
# with Deathrite
^ with DRI
* with Toxic Holocaust
Brooklyn-based black metal band Mutilation Rites have released a new video for their song “Contaminate”.
Dimmitt discussed the video’s creation process, stating:
Coming up with the concept for the music video for ‘Contaminate’ was quite simple. The subject matter of the song deals with impending doom of the apocalypse, radiation sickness, and the suffering that war brings about in general. We combined disturbing archival footage from atrocities committed in the last century with a live show we played at Saint Vitus, in Brooklyn, to create a visual aesthetic to match the bleak subject matter and overall feeling of despair that we attempted to create when we wrote this song.
Most metal journalism has a knack for identifying two particular things as “progressive”, none of which really are that. The first is incredibly messy music that obfuscates itself so much as to become an illegible carnival-fest of styles. The second is bands with tracks any longer than 3 minutes that deviates from pop format. My Hollow’s On Borrowed Time is a deathcore album that is experiencing the second of these two, using a strict rhythmic concordance as a restrictive chain that allows the rest of the musical dimensions to wander with a carefree liberty.
In deathcore, a heavily rhythm-based genre, the break-down-like passages lose their original meaning completely in a context that uses them for a completely different purpose than their original context intended them for. In the best moments in On Borrowed Time, My Hollow oddly attains a coherence through maintaining this rhythmic emphasis between different sections that can be either riff-oriented, melody oriented or pure-rhythm-oriented sections, successfully tying together otherwise disparate textures. This strict rhythmic concordance that becomes unbearable in most deathcore is used as an anchoring device that allows My Hollow to lash out with dangerously varied expression variety in the rest of the parameters that borders on the inconsistent.
When this strict rhythmic link is broken, the album degrades into a completely obscure incoherence all-too-common in this genre for pleasure-seekers with no attention span to speak of. When kept in check, the limitation it forces upon itself in its rhythmic component condemns the song to be a series of themes in wildly different landscapes akin to a collage of scenes with corresponding elements but no chronology or elaboration beyond the juxtaposition. Coherent tracks and spans of sections are unfortunately in the minority of On Borrowed Time, most of it descending into chaotic tough-guy feel-good nonsense.
