by Charles Alexander
The remix of The Coming of Chaos addresses production difficulties with a late release by a classic band, but struggles to overcome the hybrid of black metal and speed metal that was in vogue for a couple years but ultimately muddles the amazing composition within this album.
17 CommentsTags: Black Metal, sacramentum, Speed Metal
Stick a bunch of Finns together in a winter war bunker with copies of Blood Fire Death and Under the Sign of the Black Mark, and you might get this imaginative band that stands astride black metal, speed metal, and epic heavy metal with an emphasis on changing atmosphere.
12 CommentsTags: Black Metal, havakruunu
Century Media has taken a classic album and improved it by giving it production more like the first Sacramentum full-length. From the teletype:
23 CommentsTags: Black Metal, death metal, sacramentum
Every day, black metal tries to escape its past and get to the moment before that past when the why of black metal was clearer, because only from striving for that goal can black metal recapture its sense of beauty, melancholy, and transcendent balance of light and dark.
18 CommentsTags: black funeral, Black Metal
As the world continues to burn itself through human arrogance, we turn to metal because we need a voice of an apocalypse that we would like to make triumphant. In destruction of the weaker, the stronger stands revealed. But first we have to remove the weak metal, which is why we have SMRs.
26 CommentsTags: Black Metal, clones, control, death metal, Nihilism, ramones, sadistic metal reviews, smr, social darwinism, sodomy
By the time black metal and death metal made it back, the actual inspirations — Slayer, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Bathory — were almost forgotten in a rush toward the new style that was birthed from combining their approaches. Now the history fleshes itself out a bit.
115 CommentsTags: Bathory, Black Metal, book, jose luis cano barron, pagan records
Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
103 CommentsTags: art, Black Metal, Heavy Metal, Satan, underground metal
Unholy Craft builds in the style of later Darkthrone with the pacing of Mayhem, delivering an enjoyable journey through melody meeting noise and pummeling d-beats and blast beats, which although somewhat fungible manages some unique riffs based in compelling rhythm accented by melody.
36 CommentsTags: Black Metal, unholy craft
Some shows define an era, and the assault of Sammath on Texas revealed where underground metal is going now: doubling down on what made it great, injecting new creativity, and fleeing from the dual pitfalls of three-chord nonsense and elaborate “progressive” stylings.
104 CommentsTags: Black Metal, death metal, haserot, houston, sacrocurse, sammath, trenchant, War Metal
Hybrid death, war, and black metal band Sammath is currently raging across Texas as part of its worldwide Texas tour. Clubs are 21+ but seem perfect for intense underground shows.
47 CommentsTags: Black Metal, sammath, texas
