Why do humans form tribes? If you want to break away from the rest, and not allow them to assimilate you, you must go your own way and militantly, bigotedly, dogmatically, and aggressively keep the others out, or they will try to draw you back into their dysfunction so they feel better about it.
49 CommentsTags: pantera, Speed Metal
From the flood of nonsense going through the news feeds, a sign that speed metal has gone mainstream:
A woman in New Zealand, refusing to bring another Mackenzie or Jack into the world, has named her three kids “Metallica,” “Pantera,” and “Slayer.”
Farrier reached out to New Zealand’s Registrar-General to inquire as to whether “there are any restrictions naming babies after band names, or albums.” He was told that there aren’t, “as long as the word used is not generally considered to be offensive or does not resemble an official rank or title.” This may rule out naming a baby after one of your favorite grindcore acts, but it did allow Farrier to verify the fact that Baby Metallica’s middle name is also—we’re not kidding—“And Justice For All.”
These kids will either have the best or absolute worst time in school, depending primarily on whether ‘80s thrash is currently cool with the youth—and whether lil’ Metallica has to deal with terrible classmates like “Napster” and “Decent Snare Drum Mixing.”
After nu-metal introduced chunky monkey riffs and gargled horse semen vocals to mainstream audiences, the percussive fast strumming riffs of Metallica, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, and their derivates (Pantera) probably seem tame, as do the later Slayer albums built around bouncy riffs and plaintively angry vocals.
When even Alex Jones uses Metallica songs for his interstitial music, and nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s has overwhelmed a Western Civilization looking at the post-Clinton neo-Communist NWO disaster at the same time that people are seeking music from a mentally less muddled time, speed metal has become the archetype of all heavy metal, and therefore, has been easily assimilated by industry and mass culture.
Perhaps this explains why so many of the original death metal and black metal bands chose proudly to be underground, figuring that a few years of musical and artistic honesty would beat out becoming a careerist in a corrupt industry only to morph into Dad Rock as their fans aged into complacent suburban wage-serfdom.
6 CommentsTags: metallica, new zealand, pantera, slayer, Speed Metal
Most extreme metal bands would be happier just reverting to speed metal, since that lets them mix in Cirith Ungol or Atheist riffs without breaking the integrity and continuity of the work, and Black Mass acknowledge this by unabashedly crafting speed metal that borrows freely from other subgenres and genres by translating those ideas into speed metal orthodoxy.
4 CommentsTags: black mass, Speed Metal
Certain releases provide useful waypoints, or nodes on the mesh through which history navigated a path, and Necronomicon with its self-titled shows us where 1986 had left the underground edge of metal: adopting technique from the new proto-underground, but still keeping a foot in bouncy speed metal land and unwilling to go fully to the tremolo style of Slayer or the epic song structures of Hellhammer.
No CommentsTags: Necronomicon, Speed Metal
Pummeling speed metal band Vio-Lence return, with Overkill guitarist Bobby Gustafson on the team, with a new variation on their death metal tinged Bay Area assault metal, planning a new EP named Let The World Burn for release during early 2022 on Metal Blade Records.
2 CommentsTags: Metal Blade, Speed Metal, vio-lence
Imagine that someone went back to that brief period of time when music like Merciless, Devastation, and Sarcofago hovered between speed metal and the underground metal to come, and then approached it with the high-intensity styles of war metal and black metal.
2 CommentsTags: nuclear revenge, Speed Metal
Good speed metal either tends toward the progressive rock and punk side, or heads more toward something like fast AC/DC with more riffs, and Amnessia Eterna bridge this divide by mixing the Slayer and Exodus styles of speed metal with a little bit of AC/DC, coming up with a foot-tapping but brainy mix.
No CommentsTags: amnessia eterna, Speed Metal
Maybe you wish that Sodom had kept cranking those nice mature metal albums like M16 that had less emotion, but also more focus, so you could follow one ripping tune after another, and maybe recruited the guys from Vader to execute this vision. Militaria steps into this void.
4 CommentsTags: militaria, Speed Metal
Solfernus succeed at what many bands did after the collapse of black metal, which was to reintegrate the genres of metal from the early 1980s onward into a hybrid style. In this case, they focus on the era of speed metal with black and death metal influences from the late 1980s.
No CommentsTags: solfernus, Speed Metal
Exploring a modern side of metal that keeps one foot in the past, the latest Pestilence will draw comparisons to Testimony of the Ancients, but to my mind goes back to Malleus Maleficarum even more, balanced with metalcore, progressive metal, and jazz fusion.
No CommentsTags: metalcore, pestilence, Speed Metal
