Shadow Kingdom Records has signed a deal to reissue the first three Death SS records with the original sound intact as per the band’s wishes. Fans should keep a lookout.
No CommentsTags: Death SS, Heavy Metal, Italy, reissues, shadow kingdom records, Speed Metal
Resistance fuels hatred and must be crushed beneath an iron fist.
The Oath – The Oath (2014)
“Whoa!” – Keanu Reeves. These women are actually fairly attractive! Usually metal girls are fat, under 5’4, and have saggy tits. Or they love Slipknot. I can see why Lee Dorian is dicking the hot one. This at least has riffs even if most of the songs wear out their welcome fairly quickly. There are Cathedral albums more boring than this but most of these songs feel like Motorhead if they smoked dope instead of cranked speed. Motorhead if Motorhead were boring and the songs went on two minutes too long and had random riff salad bridges. If these two would actually get naked on the cover like the real Coven and separated or refined their compositions, maybe this would be more listenable. Hold it is that riff from Bad Company? Who steals riffs from Bad Company? What kind of degenerate does that? If this is among the more listenable grrrl metal…
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Arc (2016)
As ridiculous as their band name, Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s 2016 effort is a lazy mixture of stoner rock and deathcore. It consists of interleaved Black Sabbath-core grooves and pointless breakdowns accentuated by a menstruating screamo vocalist. By the very definition of those two genres, the reader should know this is but a string of feel-good moments with absolutely no point whatsoever.
One has to wonder if the band even knows what “agoraphobic” means, given their blatantly idiotic use in their band name. From there, we can easily tell how they would also try to use “fancy vocabs” from the metal terrain without even knowing what they are for, hence the constant groove with no beginning or ending. The meaningless breakdowns that do not necessarily make the stoner rock more bearable, but just emphasize what white trash trailer park music this is. It is an updated distorted-guitar redneck music.
Baroness – Purple (2015)
The most generic heavy metal rhythm guitar riffing possible clipped with too much compression and mixed with queer hipster rock for those who question their sexuality. I’m pretty sure the hairy girls in this band are in a polygamous relationship with the dude singing and blow roadies on the side. Kind of like how Carrie Fischer let the crew members of the original Star Wars rip the tape off her tits only with more Hepatitis C positive semen from people who tried intravenous drugs. This album sounds like my local modern rock radio station who plays Bush twice a day. Baroness is the most generic 2003 rock possible only maybe one of these girls’ brothers had Led Zeppelin and Metallica posters in her bedroom. Baroness should go back to VH1. Wait VH1 doesn’t air this crap anymore as even VH1 realized how terrible it is. VH1 is Rock of Love now.
Wolvserpent – Aporia:Kāla:Ananta (2016)
Who knows why we ever receive these sort of promos that are not remotely metal, though perhaps some suppose there is a connection because the sound and procedure may remind one of the pointlessness of post metal/rock. At the center of Wolvserpent’s music is a violin playing repetitive music while the fringes are filled with synthesizers, bass and some kind of distorted noise to fill the space. I imagine this purports to be ambient, and it evidently takes cues not only from what we know today as classic ambient but from the old, more noise-inclusive and experimental one. At some point during the 40 minutes of this release, towards the approach of its middle section, a growl-screech appears and we become the audience of a post-doom-black nothingness that lasts for about 5 minutes. After this, the music tries to pick up by adding some synths to beef up the emptiness of the lame doom metal writing that approximates what Esoteric do most of the time (waste your time with largely content-less sections while pretending to have an ambient edge). This amounts to little more than piled up noise with some consonance. This melting away proceeds for about 8 more minutes, after which we are introduced to a 4-minute hum. This hum gives then serves as background for some 3 classical string instruments playing repetitive disonant arpeggios for 3 or 4 more minutes until only they remain and the music fades out to the sound of soothing, rolling, waves. Empty and boring. Throw this away
Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner (2016)
Enya songs with randomly inserted post-metalcore sludge bridges. Are those bongos? Is this Arise? Who thought of this? Whoever thought of this should be shot in the back of the head by their local troika, have their children post-nataly aborted, and their women deported to the camps for wives of traitors to the motherland.
Snake Tongue – Raptor’s Breath (2016)
Random stolen eighties metal riffs made into Entombedcore with gang vocals by Kurt Ballou. I think that’s a woman in the promo picture. Maybe it’s a man who is just confused that his baby dick is a big clitoris. Yeah they can get that big. Haven’t you seen Backdoor to Chyna?
Necrosic – Putrid Decimation (2016)
These girls imagine what would have happened if in 1990 Autopsy had written songs entirely out of mosh riffs broken up by hardcore and shameless lifts from Slayer’s catalog. The answer is a metal band that would have only have been fit to play pizza parlors filled with 17 year olds too busy playing arcade games to pay attention. Anthrax if Anthrax decided to cash-in on sludge instead of nu-metal in the early 90s.
Sacrilege – Behind the Realms of Madness (1985)
This is the sort of release that exemplifies that some releases were never meant to be heard, not to mention be re-released. To pretend this is some sort of hidden gem is to pander to the clueless audience’s sense of nostalgia in the most dishonest way. Sacrilege never amounted to much as their music was never much. What we hear in hear in Behind the Realms of Madness is the sort of simpleton’s generic metal any angry teenager could be writing and playing in his garage with his friends after huffing glue. Each of these songs is based entirely upon a single riff played ad nauseam while an angry woman shouts about how much she hates her father. There are random supplementary riffs here and there but they are just meant to provide some sense of dynamism to the propulsion of the main riff. The main riffs in every song are generic and almost indistinguishable, the vocals are identical (some angry British woman screaming about how she got fucked over by her dad who wouldn’t pay for her BA in Womyn’s and Sexual Identity Studies), and every single song has the same kind of poser-trudging-accross-the-mall-food-court from Hot Topic vibe about it.
Sacred Few – Beyond the Walls (1985)
Another mediocre eighties heavy metal album with an annoying vocalist that deserved to be forgotten. Manilla Road this is not; the songwriting is generic, the riffs unoriginal, and the guitar tone too thin. This was only pressed to CD to cash in on idiot hipsters dumb enough to be deluded by Vice into believing that metal needs more dumpy women. I would rather listen to every Motorhead album I don’t remember even exists than this lame woman who drinks too much Budweiser again. This is retro-metal for cuckolded submissive males who think Steve Harris is Pogrom and jerked off to the blonde women in catsuits from The Oath instead of real porn. I’m going to crack open another Coors Banquet and use this CD as a coaster. Wait is the Puerto Rican guy in the collar her slave?
Lizzies – Good Luck (2016)
Judas Priest covered by Spanish pre-op transsexuals. Listening to this album makes me want to chop my leg off so my femoral artery will bleed out in three minutes. Two tracks in and I just put on Unleashed in the East instead. Let’s all listen to that classic instead of this crap:
Tags: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Baroness, crust, Crust Punk, crustcore, crustfundies, Cult of Luna, deathcore, doom, Doom Metal, entombedcore, hipster bullshit, idiots, Julie Christmas, Kurt Ballou, Lizzies, metalcore, metalgate, necrosic, nuclear war now! productions, nwn, post-hardcore, reissues, relapse, relapse records, Rise Above Records, Sacred Few, sacrilege, sadistic metal reviews, scantily-clad women, shadow kingdom records, sludge, Snake Tongue, Speed Metal, The Oath, Wolvserpent, women in metal
Shadow Kingdom Records will reissue the seventh album from Wichita, Kansas, band Manilla Road, entitled Out of the Abyss on January 13, 2015. Originally release in 1988, this album shows the band in both fully-developed and archetypal form.
Death metal fans coming late to this album may note how it is a prime example of how to do everything right and end up wrong. Manilla Road write speed metal in the style of Judas Priest crossed with the post-Slayer high-speed riffing of bands like Atrophy. They do so with precision picking, a good knowledge of harmony and rhythm, and yet make completely boring music.
Part of reason for this boredom emerges from the style itself. This type of late speed metal emphasizes breaking songs into discrete modules composed of riffs, following the NWOBHM style, but they break rhythm between those which allows little buildup. Instead, it is a series of right angles. Further, in another NWOBHM influence, these riffs are fundamentally static in that they center around a chord and use fills composed of that chord or a matching scale, but do not develop melodically within the riff; as in rock, that is reserved for the vocals. The result feels a lot like a series of riffs in a verse-chorus pattern with a tangent 2/3 of the way through, guided along by vocals. It does not achieve the structural intensity of death metal.
With that being said, it is clear why many bands hail Manilla Road as an influence. Crisp and exact playing gives these riffs a militant technological sound, and whether from this influence or another bands like Deceased, Voivod, DBC and Obliveon have put this technique to good use. Subtle rhythms abound in addition to the obvious toe-tapping speed metal choruses and lead guitar, while very much entrenched in the domain of rock-style soloing, provides an example of technical excellence within that domain. Vocals sound like a more devious Rob Halford. All of these contribute to the power of this release, but it remains enmired in the binary riffing and somewhat static riffs of the speed metal days which were thankfully left behind during the transition to death metal.
This re-issue will give a new generation of metalheads a chance to appreciate the technical ability of this band and the compositional issues raised by this style. For example, should metal go the rock route of static riffs and build on that in the style of mid-period Judas Priest, or should it follow more of the death metal style of phrasal riffs and flexible song structures? Guitarists will enjoy the challenge of playing these riffs at speed and still making the change, and classic metal fans will delight in the whole package. Out of the Abyss does everything right to hit its target, but for those of us who are post-80s, it may be the wrong target.
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Obscurity bias arises from our desire to discover hidden essential influences in the past. In metal, it is the search not only for concealed gems but for lost ancestors of our favorite music.
This thinking is a variation on our perpetual quest for more alternatives. We look at what’s there and think we want something better. This ignores the basic rule of life that usually what’s wrong is a lack of quality, not need for another alternative.
When we look back for historical alternatives, we are seeking to avoid the obvious historical truth: there are few ancestors because few necessary steps lie between 1969, when Black Sabbath recorded the first proto-metal record, and today.
Metal, punk and prog evolved in the 1968-1969 period in parallel, and since then have been trying to find a hybrid equilibrium that preserves the heavy worldview of metal, the intensity of punk and the complexity of prog without falling into the bluster, one-dimensionality and incomprehensibility that are the downfall of each respectively. With underground metal, arguably the last genres with any intelligence in metal, we ended up with metal riffing, punk strumming speed, and progressive rock song structures with underground metal, and that worked pretty well.
What happened after the initial invention was a hiccup. The music industry invented proto-glam by trying to make Deep Purple/Led Zeppelin bands “heavy” enough for the new Black Sabbath audience. What happened was that they made rock-metal, and while it was popular, it didn’t satisfy the core audience. After the hiccup metal retaliated with NWOBHM, most importantly Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. The next generation combined those to make speed metal; the generation after that mixed in the punk that arose after Motorhead, hardcore punk, which was far more extreme and less musically related to rock music than anything which had come before.
In 1982, Discharge released Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing. The following year, all hell broke loose. Metallica unleashed their first album, starting speed metal. Slayer took off on a separate tangent. While both these bands were partially inspired by Venom, it was more in an aesthetic sense than a musical one, because if you remove the rough playing and bad production, Venom is basically Motley Crue. Slayer in particular took more from the punk side of things and made chromatic riffs and elaborate internal song structures where Metallica followed more of the rock format harmonically and used fairly standard song structures, except for their prog-influenced instrumentals.
Thus by 1985 we had Slayer, Hellhammer, Sepultura, Bathory and Sodom making proto-underground metal; by 1986, Morbid Angel had formalized the style. If anything, the Death and Deicide assault of the next two years brought death metal back toward the speed metal — Metallica, Exodus, Prong, Nuclear Assault, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Anthrax — of the previous five years. Death metal took on a life of its own when it escaped that with releases like the first Incantation, Massacre, Morpheus Descends, Massacra, Carnage and Pestilence releases with the turn of the decade. These brought metal back to its Slayer-Hellhammer-Bathory nexus, with tremolo strumming and labyrinthine song structures, and away from the more speed metal song structures of Death and Deicide. Black metal grew out of the melodic death metal bands who started structuring their songs using melodies, not riffs alone, and thus needed less of a drum-dominated approach. That brought them closer to the original punk sound, but kept the metal method of making riffs.
So what’s with the search for missing ancestors?
Black Sabbath creating proto-metal in 1969 was no accident. The band sought to find a new sound. They also realized the hippie movement was in the process of grossly selling itself out, having gone from a form of protest to a lifestyle of dissolution through mental obesity. It was time to kick over that false figurehead and do something new. Coming from a prog-tinged background, they invented something that sounded a lot like progressive rock, if it weren’t addicted to a dark and foreboding approach.
The message of Black Sabbath more than anything else was that truth is staring us in the face. People make a lot of noise to cover everything in flowers, sex and brotherhood, but really underneath it all a darker reality threatens. Most people are crazy. Most ideas form mass delusion of the herd. And these people have nuclear weapons, and control of economies, and other methods of taking these screwups to an exponential level. Every teen rock ‘n’ roll band sings about how the world is crazy, in part because it is crazy. Punk bands expanded upon this with an outlook of total nihilism at first, and later a kind of comfortable anarchism combined with genteel progressivism. These outlooks helped drive the evolution of genres to express a sound that was more rootless (punk) and more apocalyptic (metal) as time went on. This made it clear to each generation what the next would sound like.
The scary fact is that we can navigate metal based on a few nodal points. First, Black Sabbath, King Crimson and Iggy and the Stooges; next, after the proto-glam years, the NWOBHM triad of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Motorhead plus the punk music that simultaneously wracked the UK (Discharge, Amebix, The Exploited) and US (Cro-Mags, Black Flag). Death metal would have arisen from these alone, but Venom accelerated the process aesthetically, although took a step back musically toward the bad old days of proto-glam. It was natural that death metal bands would experiment more with melody, and so black metal was an obvious outgrowth of this.
All of that leads me to today’s topic: Terminal Death, whose 1985 demo and other recordings have been released as Terminal Death by Shadow Kingdom Records. Their press release states:
TERMINAL DEATH: One of the first DEATH METAL bands 1985!!!!!
When you talk about the earliest Death Metal bands, we think of SEPULTURA, DEATH, POSSESSED (all stemming from VENOM) right off the top, but there were a few ripping bands that quickly fell into obscurity and TERMINAL DEATH is one of those bands. This is not just an obscure band; they could have been a HUGE Death Metal band if they were signed to the right label back then. They certainly had all of the talent the aforementioned bands did. Their 1985 Demo tape screams with energy and intensity! This is a re-mastered collection of their complete and very short-lived career. The CD booklet is massive with a very in-depth and lengthy interview done by Laurent from Snakepit Magazine. There aren’t that many Death Metal bands can come close to how amazing these songs were. This collection is another snapshot of that amazing early Slayer-esque Death Metal. Co-founder Shaun Glass, whom also co-found SINDROME later joined the more well known classic Death Metal band BROKEN HOPE in the early 1990’s. Shadow Kingdom Records teamed up with Hells Headbangers Records to release this lost gem as a Double LP. If you’re into vinyl, keep your eyes peeled for it will be a glorified presentation.
Let’s look at this historically. By 1985, the big three of death metal — Slayer, Hellhammer and Bathory — had already recorded. Then we listen to Terminal Death. For the most part, this is simplified speed metal at a punk pace, more in common with early Sacrifice than the death metal to follow. Not only that, but Deathstrike had already beat it to the punk/metal hybrid of that era. OK, so what? I don’t consider that important, other than that it somewhat contradicts the marketing. Let’s look at the music. It’s not terrible, but it’s also not very inspired. Lots of chromatic riffs, drums kind of struggle to keep up, and heavy repetition with standard song form. There’s a reason this band took a back seat to the other influences on the rising death metal movement. It’s not bad, but it’s not great.
The DLP doesn’t look bad, but it’s unnecessary. It’s basically the 1985 demo plus three unreleased songs and several other versions of the demo songs. It might make more sense, since the album is appealing to people who want early proto-death metal, to release the 1985 demo with the three unreleased songs for a CD that presents this band at its best. Hopefully SK will do that in the future. But the question for metalheads now is why to buy this. Its historical significance is not really that great, and the music is not exceptional either. With that in mind, I’d say Terminal Death is something we can bypass.
11 CommentsTags: broken hope, death metal, History, metal history, shadow kingdom records, terminal death
