Varg Vikernes released another black metal history video on his ThuleanPerspective Youtube channel. Want to know about the Satanic practices of Mayhem, Satyricon, Immortal, and Burzum? Let’s find out:
61 CommentsTags: Black Metal, burzum, mayhem, metal history, norway, Satanism, varg vikernes, youtube
Enslaved‘s debut 1994 album Vikingligr Veldi is out on vinyl for the first time for all the crazy collector hipsters out there who need a CD on wax courtesy of Norse Music. The 2x LP comes in a gatefold sleeve and features a new layout designed by Zbigniew Bielak (Mayhem, Zom, Ghost).
55 CommentsTags: Black Metal, Enslaved, Norse Music, norway, reissue, Vikingligr Veldi, vinyl
Varg Vikernes uploaded another black metal history video to his ThuleanPerspective Youtube channel. In A Fatal Acquaintance (Euronymous, April 1991 – August 1993), the Burzum creator summarizes his relationship with Euronymous prior to their fatal fight on August 10th, 1993. Varg explains how the Mayhem guitarist was a fat Communist who stole the money used to preorder Burzum records and sunk it into his money pit Helvete record shop in Oslo.
25 CommentsTags: Black Metal, burzum, Euronymous, mayhem, metal history, norway, varg vikernes, video, youtube
Varg Vikernes has started posting a series of black metal history videos on his ThuleanPerspective Youtube channel. “About a day in 1993 that changed Black Metal forever” summarizes how Euronymous was completely unfit to run a business as a communist, bungled the release of the Burzum self-titled album, and how Euronymous’s clownishness ended his reign as the media’s go to spokesperson for the Norwegian black metal scene follow Varg’s arrest in connection with the church arsons.
64 CommentsTags: 1993, Black Metal, burzum, Euronymous, mayhem, metal history, norway, varg vikernes
Fenriz posted the opening track from Darkthrone’s upcoming album Arctic Thunder.
38 CommentsAllright folks, this here is the opening track on the album. The first riff came to me when I was out camping with the oldtimer that took the photo of me here. – f e n r i z:
Tags: Arctic Thunder, Black Metal, darkthrone, Heavy Metal, new track, norway
Article by David Rosales.
A legendary time and place for underground metal, the Norway of 1993 is an esoteric landmark (1994 being the exoteric) in time and space in black metal history. It saw the rise of a mythology of its own, the mythology of black metal, and an eventual catastrophic demise worthy of a saga of its own.
25 CommentsTags: 1993, Black Metal, burzum, darkthrone, Det Som Engang Var, gorgoroth, norway, pentagram, Under a Funeral Moon
Tagged as a death/thrash sort of cross-over band, Amok, at least in the present album, sounds much closer to hardcore stemming from the tradition of Discharge Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing and filtered along the line of Amebix Arise!. Some gestures of 80s heavy metal show up but only briefly and not prominently enough to turn this into one of the many kinds of so-called “melodic death” bands out there. In Necrospiritual Deathcore a healthy, coherent mixture of different punk and metal expressions collide to form an enjoyable album.
Like any hardcore album worth its salt, we find fragments of speech taken from television or radio, snippets of urban audio, coughing, among the rough scream-barks of the vocalist. All this, combined with the great pains to which Amok goes to give this album musical variety despite the fact that the music is primarily percussive (and simple in its percussion). Commendable are the smooth tempo changes in the album that are never abrupt even though they change the music drastically. Voice and instruments conspire so that the “line” is never broken when going from a faster speed to a slower one. When it comes to accelerating, though, the punks show themselves.
On the other hand, given the simplicity (and I mean real simplicity) of each song and the fact that the album is a song-collection (rather than a concept album, or a greater work, or a set of variations), the staying power of this kind of record is very limited. Sounding like a more single-minded, less flexible Amebix, Amok Necrospiritual Deathcore will please and entertain, but there is little reason to continue listening to it when there are albums like Arise! lying around. All in all, it is a refreshing hardcore album with heavy and death metal colors done by expert musicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBosT9rPRPk
No CommentsTags: 2015, amebix, Amok, arise, discharge, Hardcore, Necrospiritual Deathcore, norway
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.
www.facebook.com/deathseekerfromnorway
No CommentsTags: 2015, death metal, Deathseeker, groove-metal, norway
When a genre becomes buried under layers of confusion, people identify it by what it lacks more than what it is. A more sensible approach understands such a genre as having a spirit or other indefinable center that holds the rest together. Such is the case in death metal, which is relevant as Execration clearly aspire to an old-school death metal style that incorporates sounds from newer hybrid-metal genres.
For example, Morbid Dimensions makes greater use of the open strum as a harmonic fill between riffs, and prefers that its phrases end in rhythmic suspension, allowing them to use such fills to keep the music from becoming too violent. While they do not incorporate blatant sweeps, Execration enjoy putting riffs with clear influence from punk in with the metal, creating an oil on water effect. The band explores the textures and rhythms of the smarter edge of metalcore, stoner doom metal and the post-metal era, but works them into songs which aesthetically and compositionally hail the old school underground metal approach.
In that general mission, Execration succeed triumphantly: Morbid Dimensions presents an album of mid-paced doom-death songs which touch on favorite riff archetypes without becoming derivative, although in fairness this band sounds like Dismember playing Desecresy while taking advice from Hypocrisy and Unleashed. Riffs combine to form highly textured and thoughtful songs with a melodic basis, but the target here is clearly the post-metal model of long slow simple melodies unfurling rather than a charging desire to fit riffs together into brain Jenga about the imponderable. To break up the melodic mood domination, Execration vary the pattern with both Black Sabbath-sounding riffs and classic mid-paced death metal riffs. Like modern metal however, emphasis rides on the vocals rather than guitars, which creates more of a recognizable song format to rock listeners.
At their best, Execration manage a better version of the old-school sound than the twin evils of those who make imitations without soul, and those who make hybrids without sense. Despite this being a competent album, the inclusion of too many of the newer influences prevents Execration from using old school songwriting alone, and so sometimes they end up with riff salad. Several of these songs include one or two riffs that have no real relation to the content and suggest either hasty songwriting, or an argument between creators that is resolved by pacifying everyone and including whatever each person wants to throw in. For raw ability, Execration ranks up there with recent doom-death tyrants Desecresy, and if they can keep the randomness and post-nu-metal influences out, they might make a crushing album out of these raw materials.
No CommentsTags: doom-death, execration, norway
If you bought Immortal’s Pure Holocaust the day it was released, and conceived a child in the ensuing fury, that child would be entering college age today.
Our review, written in the year of this CD’s release, captures much of what makes this album great. There are two levels to its greatness, stylistic and content, and while related they cannot be made equivalent.
Stylistically, Immortal on their second album saw the ambient and atmospheric tendencies of black metal and developed them. First, they used lightning fast chaotic drumming that quickly reduced the drums to a background timekeeper, allowing riffs to change phrase freely without being trapped by a specific rhythmic pattern. Second, they upgraded the speed of their guitars and level of reverbed distortion to create a sonic tunnel of sound that from a distance, sounds more like a synthesizer with heavy sustain than a guitar.
In content, Immortal focused what it was to be black metal: naturalism. Like the creatures of nature, or its mercurial winds and storms, black metal is not “rational” and “moral” in the human way, but practical in a way that humans — even non-Christian ones — are often afraid to understand. However, it is a method that a forest creature or great tree would understand, a cross between Zen buddhism and the feral antagonism of a wandering predator. Incorporating previous themes of occultism, tribalism, cosmicism and warfare, Immortal fused the ideas of black metal into a singular concept. As such, this album defies all categories of logic or music, at least the human ones. To a wolf or jaguar, it would make perfect sense.
The result was a blaze of noise and musical terror that swept black metal into its second age. Pure Holocaust, along with Transilvanian Hunger (Darkthrone) the following year, moved black metal beyond the framework established by its 1980s origins in Bathory and Celtic Frost. Now it was something new, something emotional without being self-pitying, some cold and element floating above the clouds. Something that could not be tamed.
While most popular entertainment fades away after only a few years, and with good reason, Pure Holocaust remains strong two decades later. Without having heard it, or any black metal, a music listener can take this off the rack and throw it on the player — even if that means double-clicking — and be lost in an entirely different world, and inspired to try to create that here on modern earth.
No CommentsTags: anniversary, Black Metal, immortal, norway, pure holocaust
