Vacation’s Over

Ass-tier beta male hacker Tulio Baars ran out of money to keep knocking Death Metal Underground offline. Tulio, you feminine slab of loserdom, that’s all ya got? All that “special Google and NASA training” for a couple weeks of 404? Was it really worth destroying your career for that, as any future employer will google your name and see the related pictures? Did the Brazil trucker strikes knock your village’s power offline, did you get starved off by the lack of food? Will you be taking a helicopter ride once the Third Empire of Brazil is instated in the Chilean fashion?

Tulio, my man, I’m disappointed. I was really enjoying my vacation time, got some beach time in with my hot trad waifu, even got to try that new Mediterranean place down on 66th and 2nd. But now thanks to your technical shortcomings, it looks it’s back to work for me and the DMU staff.

Thanks to all our readers for your patience, with full assumptions that you had better shit to do than to keep entering deathmetal.org into your browsers every few hours. Also, thanks to everyone who visited us at our DMU in exile 8chan board at www.8ch.net/deathmetal/ and went ruthless with the shitposting. Perhaps we will keep it up, and make some rounds there. Barring any more whiny techfag meltdowns, DMU will be back to the usual sadism and destruction tomorrow with an immeasurably stronger resolve and more beta male smashing mayhem. Lefties, soy metallers, fake metal news outlets, and social justice warriors on suicide watch!!! Sodomize the weak!!!

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Pestilence Attempts Comeback But Forgets What Makes Death Metal Great

Listen to a track from the upcoming Hadeon from longstanding Dutch band Pestilence, one is immediately struck by the similarity to late-1990s Morbid Angel: the riffs are there, albeit a bit impatient and tightly circular, but the whole experience is not. What is missing? To understand this, we must go to the core of what made death metal what it is.

If you wanted to explain to a normal person what death metal is, looking at the core of its spirit, you might haul out Slayer Hell Awaits, Hellhammer Apocalyptic Raids, and Bathory The Return… because these influenced the techniques, composition, and spirit of death metal. From Hellhammer and Slayer, it got its song structure and aesthetics; from Bathory its themes and riff technique.

Death metal took the original idea of metal, formed when Black Sabbath and others began using power chords to make phrasal riffs instead of harmony-oriented open chord riffs, and developed it further. This is different than doing something “new” or “progressing” because it means undertaking the much harder task of developing an idea further at a structural level instead of just changing aesthetics.

With the rise of underground metal, death metal adopted chromatic riffing and made the interplay between riffs form a narrative to each song. This abolished typical rock song structure and, because the guitar served as a melodic instrument instead of a harmonic one, forced vocals, bass and drums into a background role. How well the riffs fit together and portrayed an atmosphere, idea, or sensation defined the quality of the music.

Pestilence came from a solid death metal background with Consuming Impulse but showed a speed metal styled approach on Malleus Maleficarum, and this tension has stayed with the band for its entire career. The speed metal style of verse and chorus built on a singular theme that is present in the music is easier to jam on and use harmony to complement, where death metal rarely explicitly states its theme, only silhouetting it in the interaction between its many riffs. With speed metal, bands can set up a chord progression and develop it in layers of internal commentary like jazz, and this puts vocals back in position number one among the lead instruments.

“Non-Physical Existent” is a two-riff song with both based on the same note progression. It creates its intensity through the clash between a ripping circular high speed riff and a slower chromatic riff that uses odd harmony to distinguish notes in an otherwise linear theme. The song breaks into a solo section over one of the riffs, and has a type of turnaround the drops into the faster riff as a return. But there is no real interplay nor any narrative.

From the riffs themselves, this is a good song, but unfortunately, it is not death metal. Nor will it last because essentially it is a closed-circuit video of itself, a riff commented on by another, without resembling any particular experience or emotion, therefore being a null journey, more like stasis in space while riffs loop. It is better than not bad, but still not of real interest to the death metal fan.

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The Haarslev PB30/60 As Big As The Ritz

Dennis Emmental hated being late because it revealed to everyone how little he wanted to be there. Slipping past the creaky back door, he took his place in the line at OptiFood. Orders came from the digital kiosk at the drive-thru and Dennis had twenty-four seconds to assemble the ingredients for the OptiMeal:

  • Chinese: steak|chicken|fish, Szechuan sauce, noodles, lettuce, pepper, peanuts, onion
  • Mexican: beef|chicken, cheese 1, Picante sauce, lettuce, pepper, Guacamole sauce, sour cream
  • Italian: beef|chicken, Diable sauce, noodles, pepper, lettuce, onion, cheese 2
  • Thai: beef|chicken, cheese 1, noodles, Picante sauce, Szechuan sauce, pepper, onion
  • Murican: beef|chicken, cheese 2, Diable sauce, bread 11, Gaucamole sauce, cheese 1, lettuce
  • European: steak|chicken|fish, lettuce, pepper, sour cream, cheese 2, onion, bread 11

He and his cohorts were dumping ingredients in the short, stout, beaker-shaped commemorative plastic buckets used to serve the twenty-four ounce meals. The store was open twenty-four hours a day, and had a thirty-eight percent turnover rate at a six month interval. The owners were unconcerned; they had reached the point where it took a million bucks just to think about suing them, and everyone knew that most of their employees were retards and flakes and so just laughed off their complaints.

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In The Age Of Ideology Dying, The “Political” Album Also Dies

Growing up, I always detested “political” albums because people were ranting to me about partisanship from an adult world that I knew had already failed. It really was shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic to demand one failed version of the current order over another. It also violated what I felt was sacred about art: its abstraction, metaphor, and connection to the naturalistic experience.

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Coincidence? I Think Not.

Metal has two basic ideas: death worship and crowd control.

The first involves the notion that death is necessary not just to purge the weak, but to give meaning to life, and that by opposing it, we are fooled into retreating into an illusory human-only world formed of self and social group, and that by doing so we self-destruct, instead of discovering the beauty of darkness and the excellence within power that are necessary to understanding existence.

The second addresses the nature of humanity: any good idea is taken by the crowd, dumbed down to the point where they can digest it, and then destroyed because the adulterated version is weak since it lacks whatever made the idea good. This cycle persists throughout human history, and even in our interpersonal relationships; we are talking monkeys with car keys forever striving for clarity and realism.

Blasphemy is our only salvation, because what most of us think is true is always a lie.

Death worship means, more than an appreciation of death itself, a delight in the joys of humanity itself. Death is where we become powerless; perhaps we should be powerless in other areas, because our choices reflect the desires of the human body, and not the inner self of who we actually are, or who we might become, if we were brave and followed the path laid out for us by the demands of life itself.

Consider the nature of the phrase “holy asshole.” It suggests a unity between what is least entrenched in life, and its most basic biological reality. In this phrase, naturalism and idealism are joined; the biological and Darwinistic find unity with the sacred and reverent. It is transcendence itself.

Luckily, art shows us this unity:

Narrator: All of you stick your hands into the holy asshole and when it lights up you’ll have found the one.1

If paired with:

Rip the sacred flesh
Sodomize the holy asshole2

Coincidence? I think not.

Emptiness and destruction are with us always. The path of the cakravartin belongs to those who can make the darkness serve the light, or perhaps the meta-light, which is the state of existence itself, a somethingness always striving to overcome nothingness and make meaning out of the vastest of voids and most depleted of empty spaces.

Metal is more than music. It is a philosophy of life: how to accept imperfection, and through it, realize that perfection is a human perfection, and that what we perpetually need is a constant struggle for imposing beauty through darkness, instead of fleeing what is dark to what appears to be light, only later discovering that it was illusion.

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Meditations on the Death of Wishful Thinking

To be a writer, if you are any good, is to be a blasphemer. Humanity is an entropy engine because each person decides on what view of the world makes them look the best, and so the constant weight pushing down on us is that of the herd, of a group of individuals united only by selfishness, come together into a mob for the purpose of asserting their right to be different and unique, constantly leading away from an understanding of the world around us and any meaning that can be found in it.

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