The All-Purpose METAL thread

[Amlux]

Metal. It's my favorite genre of music, bar none. I love just about every sub-genre (and fully speak the language of sub-sub-genres like "funeral doom metal" and "slam death metal" and "depressive black metal" that sounds like complete gibberish to outsiders!). All of them are beautiful for their own reasons. If we have any other metalheads here (or just casual fans of the genre to any extent really), I would like to hear from you and have you discuss anything and everything about the genre. I'm not going to gatekeep much either. Maybe you like the most extreme, crazy shit where the vocals sound like dying animals or maybe you just like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. That's fine, it's all metal. I'll start with some simple questions that hopefully open up interesting discussions:

1. What do you like about metal?

2. How did you get into metal?

3. What are your favorite sub-genre(s) of metal and which (if any) can you not get into?

My answers:

1. What do you like about metal?

Sounds like a simple answer but in one word: the extremity. I love that it is challenging, almost intentionally so, to the listener: "Yeah, we DARE you to listen to this shit and like it, pussy!" As a genre, it is always at the complete edge of what could ever be considered proper or tasteful: From the early days when it was just being provocative by being Satanic and anti-religious to songs with names like "Rage-Induced Infant Assfuck" by Artery Eruption. I love metal because it is an entire separate world where the norms and accepted goals are so alien: Create music that is disturbing, uncomfortable, provocative, ugly, evil, you name it. In some ways, it reminds me a lot of anime/manga for that reason. In anime/manga, you either are filtered by all the panty shots and fan service and ridiculous plots and genuine disregard for EVER trying to look "cool" or "normal" to the world around you, or you just learn to embrace it and go HELL YEAH. And in metal it's similar. You look at a video like this:

And either go "That's the silliest thing I've ever seen" or go FUCK YEAH DUDE and start curling your hands into an evil chuuni claw and headbang along!

On top of that, I think metal is uniquely resistant to being "normified" in a way that a lot of other hobbies like anime or video games are not. People have tried again and again. There were the glam rockers in the 80s, the nu metal crowd in the 90s, the metalcore guys in the 2000s, and now there are soy black metal hipsters. The next big thing will probably be those who attempt to filter out anything vaguely "fascist" in it (even if it results in the absurd re-writing of history that would force you to exclude figures like Varg Vikernes). It always fails. It gets mainstream, but there's always a subset who think that shit is gay and turn the other way and make stuff that has the most intentionally disgusting/offensive album covers full of pictures from crime scenes. And those who like it for the right reasons always follow what embodies the real spirit there.

Now, I haven't even touched that much on the music itself underneath, but I love that too. Either there's stuff that just fucking rocks and gets you headbanging from the infectious grooves or there's super minimal but hypnotic and atmospheric black metal tremolo riifs or there's super in-depth technical/prog-inspired spazzy death metal... there really is something for everyone and so much to appreciate.

Even the part that filters the most people, the vocals, are infinitely interesting. It makes you realize just how limited the range of vocal styles we generally experience in music is. You can't experience death metal growls or black metal shrieks in most other genres. I also just ask people: Can you really imagine this music with different vocals? As off-putting as death metal growls may be to some people, the music underneath would really grating and just WRONG with any other vocal style I think (and not the GOOD kind of "grating" and "wrong" that we look for in metal). Sometimes it's good for them to be a little "one-note" in fact as a counterplay to the music, though I do love death metal with weird, unorthodox vocals. A band called Psycroptic is amazing for that, although I think the music actually is outshone by the vocals enough for them to not be one of the very best:


2. How did you get into metal?

Short answer: The soundtrack to a movie called Gummo. It's one of those amazing cult films which is really one of the most weird and unique, but strangely perfect and masterful films ever made. I could talk about Gummo another time but it really is one of those movies that just feels like a bunch of forces in the universe coalesced in a way that could never ever be replicated. But yeah, its soundtrack has a ton of amazing black/doom metal cuts like Bathory, Sleep, Burzum, Absu, Eyehategod, Mortician, Mystifier, Nifelheim, Brujeria, Bethlehem... I got into a lot of it through that movie. Then on the Criterion Collection forums there was an amazing poster named krakpot who loved a lot of metal like this (and the drone metal legends like Sunn O))), Boris, Earth, etc.) as well as noise rock like Boredoms, Melt-Banana, Lightning Bolt, etc. So I followed his recommendations to help round it out. But that was still mostly hipstery black/drone metal stuff (I say that with love of course! Some of these are still my all-time favorites.) I later had a guy I followed on another movie forum who had a bunch of metal favorites where I expanded to like death metal and doom metal. I would later learn that most of his favorites were copy-pasted from Piero Scaruffi and ANUS (laugh all you want, it's a site that stands for American Nihilist Underground Society that has been a pretty influential force in the metal space... they managed to snag anus.com too which is pretty impressive and shows they've been around forever). Another member was really into depressive black metal, drone metal, and generally minimalist and hypnotic stuff, which really became my jam. From there on I eventually got on RateYourMusic where I followed some influential tastemakers like tzimisce, Noktorn, and TheTrueMithrandir and got into the most nasty and retardedly amazing stuff like slam death and goregrind. It's been a never-ending journey of joy!

3. What are your favorite sub-genre(s) of metal and which (if any) can you not get into?

Fuck, I really am not exaggerating when I say I like it all. You can find me listening to everything from Black Sabbath (the grand-daddy of it all) to depressive stuff like Trist to hipster post-metal fare like Neurosis to the ugliest and gnarliest shit like Devourment to stuff that is barely music like Last Days of Humanity to stuff that is basically pop music in (unconvincing) metal drag like DragonForce. But I guess the stuff that I feel the most "personal" connection to is very droning, minimalist black metal, especially of the "depressive" genre. Stuff like this, basically:


I guess the only stuff I really could never stand was the "blackgaze" movement. For those who don't know, it's essentially black metal mixed with shoegaze. On paper, the idea kinda makes sense because both have sort of similar "wall of sound" guitar work and slow, hypnotic riffing. But in practice it just makes me wish they leaned more on one rather than the other. I liked the first breakout Alcest album, Souvenirs d'un autre monde, but even there I thought that album was strongest the less black metal it was. And the big names that followed like Deafheaven I always thought were trash. It doesn't help that this style completely cannibalized the Burzum-inspired slow, hypnotic, sorrowful style of depressive black metal which is my very favorite. Some great bands in that style just took the blackgaze pill entirely... I'm looking at you, Woods of Desolation...

I also don't like the most "wank" heavy technical death metal (think Spawn of Possession) and have never really gotten into "Djent," outside of liking some Meshuggah stuff here and there. And I hate a lot of the more fiddly prog metal like Dream Theater, though there are several other prog metal bands I like a lot. I just need them to have some BALLS, y'know? Also could never get into Opeth...

[Amlux]

I'll also give special attention here to a user named Noktorn who had a big influence on my attitude towards metal, towards music, and really towards art in general. I first found him on RateYourMusic but would start following him on Metal Archives and his now-defunct blogspot as well. Sounds strange, but he was one of the guys who probably had an influence on me accepting everything crazy and weird about anime as well because I basically applied a lot of his philosophy about metal to it. Think the whole "for weirdos by weirdos, fuck outsiders" mentality. I love how much he would describe stuff as "stupid" and "braindead" and the like and mean it as a GENUINE COMPLIMENT but without a DOSE of sarcasm or irony. It really taught me a lot about how to appreciate this stuff, and most of my love for anime follows a similar train of thought. You can love artsy, weird stuff as much as you love "lowbrow" stuff. It's the authenticity and passion that matters most.

He was ahead of his time about a lot of this stuff. I remember back in the early 2010s everyone in metal hated deathcore (stuff like Despised Icon), but Noktorn was one of the few "true" metalheads to think a lot of deathcore bands were sick and he basically just pointed out a lot of hypocrisy and illegitimate hatreds. Though Noktorn had a lot of weird compulsions that I thought were frankly ridiculous at times and sometimes seemed just like purely hating on something because "hipsters" liked it (his bizarre hateboners for Deathspell Omega, Nile, Sunn O))), Agalloch, and later Darkthrone always seemed silly to me), I respect what he stood for a lot.

I want to highlight some of his (very in-depth!) reviews here that I think are excellent, because they are really just great pieces of writing (they are often very very funny). But they also have some gems that I've highlighted that I think are worth noting (with links to the music). If you aren't into extreme metal but are curious, maybe read these and you can have an idea of what I see in it. I've highlighted sections of the review that I think stuck with me most. I have to split them into three posts though because otherwise I hit the 60000 character post limit

Reviews about death metal and grindcore in its most "uncivilized" forms:


Cannibal Corpse - Butchered at Birth (1991)

Any so-called death metal fan who claims to dislike this album should be ostracized and ignored. 'Butchered At Birth' is not only the first pure death metal record by Cannibal Corpse, it's one of oldschool death metal's finest hours in history. It's death metal distilled down to its basest and most hideous elements, and on that note, it's not surprising that many outright reject this music for being 'uncivilized'. Of course it is, it's death metal! It's as ugly and antisocial as it should be on this album, and thus manages to be one of the best death metal albums ever released.

While some level of thrash influence is apparent (at no point in Cannibal Corpse's career is it entirely forgotten), this is the first Cannibal Corpse album that I would refer to as essentially a death metal record. Blast beats make their first appearance; they're few in number and fairly slow, but they're certainly more than just fast thrash beats. Barnes' vocals are no longer a slightly guttural death/thrash shout, but a full-fledged and impossibly deep growl that defines death metal 'singing' as we know it. There's no gang vocals ala 'A Skull Full Of Maggots', no fundamentally thrashy riffing, and absolutely no melody anywhere- it's the very essence of oldschool death metal, and makes no concessions for anyone who would be bothered by this notion.

'Butchered At Birth' isn't really packed with Cannibal Corpse classics- and maybe it's for this reason that I love it so much. None of the songs are as inherently catchy as 'Hammer Smashed Face' or as technical as the material on 'The Bleeding', and none of the songs particularly stand out from each other as being amazing and unique. Instead of being a 'normal album' composed of a few great and memorable tracks surrounded by filler, 'Butchered At Birth' is one massive, indigestible block of black, horrendous death metal. This is the music you hear in your mind when you think of the term 'death metal', and the beauty of it is found in how pure and uncompromising it manages to be. Few death metal records even today are as triumphantly amelodic and staunchly barbaric as this seminal release.

In many ways this is the opposite of modern death metal: while in some ways newer extreme metal has become enamored with pop conventions such as catchiness, hooks, and cleanly cyclic song structures, but this flies in the face of all this. 'Butchered At Birth' carries itself as almost an antagonist to the listener, daring one to try and hear this music and survive, much less enjoy it. It's a sheer face of brutality communicated at every level. Riffs are tight combinations of atonal power chords or streams of tremolo notes, and the way the riffs interchange are extremely tight with a fill erupting in the space of a breath before a new set of notes begins to grind itself out. Drums are rigid and unyielding, hammering out sequences of snapping thrash and blast beats or lurching rock drums. The loss of the thrashy vocal style of the previous record shows an embrace of the antihuman and supremely brutal, like the band is trying to remove any and all traces of 'normalcy' from their music.

In short, this is exactly what I think death metal is supposed to sound like. It's not supposed to be a step further from thrash. It's not supposed to be preening and melodic, nor exceedingly technical and progressive in nature. It's not supposed to be music for 'normal' people with 'normal' tastes in music, and in many ways it embodies the sort of elitism and arrogance that the black metal scene so loves cultivating, and I love to see a death metal album without the high-fiving bro aesthetic that's so infected the scene. These elements make some people uncomfortable, mainly those who think that death metal should be angry sounding regular music for you to headbang to in the car on the way to your white-collar job. And so they are bothered by hearing this: one of the ultimate and hateful faces of true death metal, appreciated by the few who understand what the genre is about.

Mortician - Hacked Up for Barbecue (1997)

This is Mortician's first 'official' full-length album, and probably their best, although all Mortician albums are great (excluding the live one which even I can't excuse). It's the most atmospheric of them all, it's got great, thick production, and apart from the great, memorable songs, the unmemorable ones are still great while they're being played. All in all, it's a great death/grind record that I listen to constantly due to its unbelievably consistency. It's a great album, and Mortician are a great band.

I'm not entirely sure why so many people criticize Mortician, because everything you say to theoretically criticize the band can be refuted by saying that, well, it's Mortician, and you can't criticize them for what they are. The songs are just mindless blasting and tremolo or stupid chugging? No shit, it's Mortician. The bass is just noise and the vocals are completely indecipherable grunting? No shit, it's Mortician. All the songs sound the same, the band uses the same riffs over and over, and they don't even seem to try to make actual songs? No shit, it's Mortician. How can you really attempt to criticize the band for this stuff? THAT IS THE BAND. The whole IDEA of Mortician is mindless brutality and a horrific atmosphere, and anything above and beyond those two elements is a bonus. Insulting Mortician for the way they sound is like going up to a champion pole vaulter and getting on their case for not being awesome at synchronized swimming. They're there to vault pole, dumbass, not to swim, so stop being retarded.

Okay, so if you don't know Mortician, the average song is made of a hyperfast, hyperobvious drum machine, insanely downtuned tremolo riffing, noisy, tuneless, ultra-distorted bass, and similarly ultra-low growls from Will Rahmer. There are other songs which revolve more around slow, chugging riffs and slower (but still really obvious) drum machine, and everything else is the same; generally it breaks into a blast at one point anyway, so there's little difference. There's a stock horror movie sample at the beginning of nearly every track. Riffs are reused CONSTANTLY and are really more useful as another layer of noise than they are at communicating any sort of melody. In general, the blasting sections are really more noise than anything, as it's just a collection of drum machine rattling, indecipherable tremolo riffs, and churning vocals. They're there to be brutal and nothing more, just as the samples are designed to introduce atmosphere and nothing more. There is nothing multilayered about this album.

The riffs that Mortician use are not death metal riffs. I'd say they're pretty much grindcore riffs minus the punk. The slower sections are very death metal influenced (and have older influences like Celtic Frost as well), but all the tremolo riffs have not a trace of metal in them. However, it's more that they don't have a trace of ANYTHING in them. If you look at a tab for a Mortician song in its blasting sections, you'll clearly see riffs that have NOTHING to do with death metal. They aren't composed with any purpose; they're essentially random notes strung together because they needed a riff (because they need the guitar noise) and you won't be able to tell the melody anyway under the blast beat. This is why you see meaningless, tuneless 4-3-2-1 riffs throughout Mortician's catalog; it's because the band doesn't care and they're completely unimportant anyway.

The blasting sections are just used as filler between the slow and mid-paced bridges, and THAT'S where Mortician comes into their own. Consider the blasting sort of a necessary evil to give the mid-paced sections the gravity they need. Slow Mortician tracks are some of the most crushing metal songs ever made, like on 'Fog Of Death' or 'Witches' Coven', which both pack insanely brutal and heavy riffs into essentially meaningless song structures. They're not really groovy, just punishing, and you really can see the influence that Mortician has on later brutal and slam death bands on tracks like 'Inquisition', with probably the most convoluted chug riff on the album. They get you headbanging, but not moving. The music is just completely brute force from square one to end. If you can't appreciate brute force, though, you're just not going to enjoy it.

In actuality, it's hard to communicate any real description of the music on this album because it's so brute and innate. You could kind of say that this is death metal stripped of the 'metal' part; unlike other bands, you can't really trace Mortician back to Morbid Angel or Possessed or any of the extreme thrash bands, or even to Napalm Death or the oldschool grind artists. They just sort of came out of nowhere and have been perpetually existing since then. There's such a sharp delineation between when the band is actually trying and when they're not that it's impossible not to notice; you can tell by how much more coherent the riffs and drum programming are in the groove sections, where the blasting and gore-polka stuff ala Cock And Ball Torture are just there to be there and give more meat to the music. It's practically death metal dadaism, because Mortician proves that you only need to try where effort is a necessity.

Every track on this album sounds essentially the same. How can you criticize that, though? It's unbelievably mono-dimensional, as it intends to be, and as it SHOULD be. There is atmosphere; there's a primitive brutality that's genuinely ominous, and actually gets communicated as much through the mindless brutality as it is the more written chugging. It seems to reflect a sort of creepy, psychotic, utterly emotionless feel that isn't replicated anywhere else, where death and gore are sought for death and gore themselves. I can't even say that this album is primitive, because it almost seems like a glimpse into the future, at death metal's ultimate endpoint: a pure expression of brutality with no thought or philosophizing getting in its way. I don't even know why they bothered to write lyrics.

This album is perfect at what it is supposed to be. It's beyond criticism on the terms of any 'normal' music, because this isn't normal music. It's Mortician, and it has to be judged as such. Listen to it if you get it, but don't complain if you don't.

Lowbrow - Sex. Violence. Death (2003)

This is total Neanderthal death metal, which makes it awesome. It's just pure Obituary worship from top to bottom with maybe a little Malevolent Creation and I'm pretty sure most of the music on this album was generated through the sound of knuckles dragging through dirt. This is for people who feel that Six Feet Under is just too fancy for them and wish they had a better soundtrack for their trailer park shenanigans.

All the riffs are slow tremolo or thrash-based and taken directly from the 'Cause Of Death' mold. It switches regularly between double bass passages and stomping rock beats, with vocals that are simply a lower version of John Tardy's grotesque howling. It's utterly simple and devoid of even a hint of subtlety. 'Sex.Violence.Death.' actually sets death metal back a decade whenever it's played. Never has a chosen band name been so horribly appropriate.

And all those reasons are why it's AWESOME! Lowbrow is absolutely devoid of pretense on this release, just cranking out simple, heavy-as-fuck oldschool death metal with sick vocals and excellent riffs. This is the logical album for every fan of Jungle Rot's stupid, stupid music, or those that think early Death was pretty much the pinnacle of human art. This album's entirely composed of slow, rocking grooves and growls about utterly generic death metal subjects. If you've heard 'Cause Of Death' you LITERALLY KNOW what this sounds like. There's nothing more to it! It's oldschool death metal!

I love this because it's so intentionally dumb and most people will probably hate it for the same reason. If you like your death metal to sound like it's composed by a special education classroom, this is the most amazing thing you'll ever hear in your life.

Artery Eruption - Gouging Out Eyes of Mutilated Infants (2005)

Artery Eruption might just be the most hated band in the already hated genre of slam, substyle of already hated style brutal death metal in the arguably hated pantheon of metal as a whole. It's not merely that non-fans of slam hate Artery Eruption; the majority of people in the slam scene itself hate them. Sometimes it's for their abysmal production values, sometimes it's for the very questionable technical skill, and other times it's because despite all that's wrong with them, they've managed to get consistently released on Sevared Records, one of the largest labels in the slam scene.

The people who hate Artery Eruption are most commonly known as pussies, and I feel it's my job to tell you why this band is in fact awesome.

Artery Eruption can only sort of play their instruments. The slam riffs are the most retarded and brutal thing in the world this side of Cephalotripsy. The songwriting is almost completely random; look at the enormous slam breakdown in 'Stimulation In A Rigormortified Whore', where the drums spastically roll and fill for a full five repetitions of the riff (with three of solo guitar beforehand) before then going into a slightly more conventional double bass pattern for even more repetitions of the EXACT SAME RIFF. It is perhaps some of the dumbest music in the world. The instruments are consistently barely on time with each other, half of the album sounding like they're playing completely different songs. This makes the Colombian scene sound like Dream Theater.

The band has, throughout their career, specialized in only the purest variety of filth-caked, shit-smeared slam death specifically designed to piss people off. Half the time the drums are blasting the guitars are still obstinately plugging away at the same tiny handful of low, dissonant chords ('Jackhammer Headcrush' being the greatest and dumbest instance of it), and the production is as such that the guitars are pushed way into the background so any tremolo riffing is reduced to completely meaningless, unintelligible notes ala Mortician. Vocals are a wet slurping sound only kind of like anything else in brutal death mixed with the occasional pig squeal. It's easy to see why this band is so massively hated.

What Artery Eruption has, however, is atmosphere: the completely maniacal, senseless nature of the band's music is amazing for replicating the exact sort of deranged sexual violence described in their lyrics. I mean, do we want a song like 'Asexual Virgin Killer' to actually be on time? Do we want precise guitar playing and machinelike drums? Of course not, anyone who gets the music wants exactly what the band provides: a huge amount of chaos, song structures that you have to piece together in your own mind because the band is clearly not replicating the tracks very accurately, and an overall bloodsoaked and demented performance that is the very epitome of what the most underground of slam should sound like.

This is a band that will absolutely not prove anything to those who hate the style, nor will it even sway fans of the style used to a more refined version of it espoused by bands such as Devourment. No, this is for the people who listen to this between rounds of Sarcófago and Deathpile, the sort of stereotypical metalhead who actually hasn't bathed in a week and spent all his food money on 7"s by Malaysian grind bands. It is, in essence, the ultimate replication of the slam style in its purest, most sickening and retarded form. I love this album.

Vulvectomy - Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation (2007)

This is without a doubt some of the dumbest music I've ever heard. Vulvectomy is the Paris Hilton of slam death: they're setting everyone back ten years in progress. This is the most archtypical slam I can think of; really the sort of thing you hear in your mind when you think of 'slam death'. Totally deemphasized blasting sections, massively thick guitar tone, song structures ENTIRELY based around slam riffs, and just about every other typical slam element you can possibly think of. The only thing to slightly set Vulvectomy apart is the presence of a drum machine... which is programmed exactly like any slam death drummer anyway. They've even used slammy samples for each of the drum voices!

All the music here is very typical Devourment/Cephalotripsy/etc. worship, but it's made even more binary than any of those bands. There's nothing in the way of 'evolving' song structures: they just barrel in a totally straight line down these simple tremolo/chunk riffs. Growly gurgles and an oppressively heavy production job do that much more to reduce any concept of 'variation' to somewhere around zero. While listening to 'Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation' you get the impression that the guys in Vulvectomy are slam fans and slam fans only; it's like they haven't heard even a trace of any other style of music or metal, for that matter. It's the distilled essence of the genre into a single album; I guess that's what happens when you start making things within the paradigm of a genre intentionally.

For instance, you notice how all the earliest funeral doom bands like Skepticism and Thergothon don't really sound much at all like the typical funeral doom band today? Well the same thing essentially happened with slam. Devourment and Soils Of Fate don't sound a great deal like Vulvectomy, because slam, like funeral doom, sort of decided for itself what the 'ground floor' of the genre would be. Well Vulvectomy isn't just hugging the ground floor, they actually have a shovel and are digging a hole in it in hopes of getting lower. This music is the anti-Amputated Genitals or Septycal Gorge; other bands are trying to push slam death forward, but Vulvectomy are reveling in every ounce of absolute regression they're able to summon up.

It's helpful, though, that the guys in Vulvectomy really understand how to make good, painfully straightforward slam death. They've done their homework on how to compose a massive slam section, and some of the tremolo riffs actually aren't boring (the typical pitfall of most slam bands). The drum programming is deft and feels natural (apart from the absence of fills) and allows for very natural transitions between blast and groove. While the seams of songwriting between fast and slow are still visible, they're not really awkwardly or thoughtlessly done; the music on this album has a feeling of fine-tuning over a pretty significant period of time. The opposite of, I don't know, Artery Eruption in that respect. Vulvectomy gets stoned AFTER the writing instead of before, I guess.

So while it operates TOTALLY within the traditions of the genre, I really do love this album. It's enormously catchy, fantastic driving music, and skull-crushingly heavy slam death for big fans of the style like myself. This will NOT change the minds of anyone who hates Devourment; this is pure Italian thug slam that's only missing a sideways baseball cap and some lyrics about (non-eviscerated) hoes before it's rap music with heavy guitars. If you love slam, there's no reason you shouldn't own this already! Invent a slam right now, and it's in this album: CHUNCHUNCHUN CHUN, CHUN-CHUN, CHUN-CHUN, CHUN CHUN! It's fun! Start your day the slammy way with Vulvectomy!

Cephalotripsy - Uterovaginal Insertion of Extirpated Anomalies (2007)

Perhaps the only proper way to review this album is drunk beyond all recognition, so I consider this the proper night to describe my feelings on it. In fact, after a few good shots of (terrible) brandy after an already long night of drinking, let me put it on right now to see if it hits the spot like it does any other night.

Yes, it does, even moreso than usual (were that possible).

Now this is understandably a naturally divisive album. Not simply because it's a slam death release; I mean, that being divisive enough comes with the territory, even among typically bro-like and unified brutal death fans. Cephalotripsy is somewhat divisive, however, even within slam itself. If I might make a dangerous comparison, Cephalotripsy is essentially to slam what Emmure is to deathcore: taking a subgenre known for taking its parent style to its logical extreme to ITS logical extreme, thereby driving away all but those completely infatuated with the most barbaric and ignorant elements of a genre. Only half-jokingly dubbed as 'funeral slam' by a friend of mine, Cephalotripsy is, in essence, what happens when you divorce a slam death band from any of its traditional death or brutal death leanings. This is actually a slam album defined by its non-slam portions rather than its slams because they are so unbelievably few in number. The points where this rises to blast speed can probably be counted on both hands without trouble.

I'm sure this has already driven numerous people away. Have at it, we don't need any more crybaby opinions from those who need thrash riffs everywhere to feel secure.

I tend to have a very high opinion of such pitilessly base and hateful music as this, but even then I must say this album stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of execution. As I've said for other albums respective stylistic descriptions, when someone thinks of the term 'slam death', this is probably the imaginary music that plays alongside such a description; it's just mildly surprising, much like Rigor Sardonicus, that someone has actually put such unbelievable music to disc. Cephalotripsy's music resides in double-digit tempos almost exclusively; the occasional blast or double-handed snare roll will pop up, but for the most part this band glides from slam to slam like some syncopated vampire bent on draining you of your will to avoid slow, mildly sensuous headbanging. The band's ability to continuously come up with new, novel rhythmic and melodic patterns for a segment so heavily used as the slam breakdown is commendable on its own, but the fact that the band manages to pace its slams so well and incorporate them not just into the body of the music but as the body of the music itself is what makes them remarkable. At no point does Cephalotripsy feel like they resort to the slam pattern as a simple lack of creativity, but simply because it's what they enjoy most.

Vocals are primitive, inhaled gurgles and pig squeals, the drum sound is almost offensively trashy, with heavily triggered bass drums and Fisher Price, and the riffs are hardly the height of creativity; it is, in essence, the sort of basement album you would expect from people far too infatuated with Devourment to be worth your time. And yet, here it is, almost demanding that you try to impose a sort of stylistic imperialism on it. 'Uterovaginal Insertion Of Extirpated Anomalies' doesn't reject stereotypes or labels; it wholeheartedly embraces them as sees nothing wrong with slam, and indulges in the most overused tropes of the style from snare strike to popping snare strike without a hint of self-consciousness. It is hideously overindulgent, excessive, and corpulent in every way: in short, it's exactly the sort of flagship that slam death requires.

This isn't to say that the worth of this album is purely symbolic: it's one of the best slam albums ever released. The thunderous grooves of the title track are instantly memorable, as are the sinister slam patterns of opener 'Excavation Of Encystation'. But it must be said that, like Emmure is deathcore for deathcore fans, this album is slam for slam fans, with absolutely no concessions made for people who only enjoy the album with wringing hands and various qualifiers. The almost complete lack of tremolo riffing and 'normal' death metal tropes is bizarre to some and offensive to others, but then again, 'Uterovaginal Insertion Of Extirpated Anomalies' was never branded as an album to redeem the style or somehow propel it into mainstream acceptability; it dives headfirst into the most odious elements of the genre without a care.

What metal really needs is albums like this: not necessarily in genre (though more slam is always appreciated), but in releases that absolutely bend to no one's concern or opinion on how something 'should' sound. It is wholly its own beast, and for better or for worse, is an example of what extreme music should be: uncooperative, bestial, and intelligent in its ignorance.

Noktorn was the one who introduced me to the idea of "gorenoise," when it wasn't even accepted as a genre on RYM and wasn't really well-known by anyone.


Last Days of Humanity - Putrefaction in Progress (2006)

And here... we... go.

If there was anything accessible about previous Last Days Of Humanity releases, it's been violently stripped away here. This didn't necessarily 'invent' gorenoise; the primordial workings of that style stretch back to the mid-'90s. But this and the new projects of Last Days Of Humanity members after that band's dissolution absolutely canonized the basic elements of the style: insane speed, insane distortion, and almost nothing replicating actual 'music' as we know it. This is Last Days Of Humanity's masterpiece, and it makes sense that the band broke up after its release; I mean, what the fuck would top this?

When examining this album, you can't really critique it as you would anything in the typical extreme metal or goregrind field; that's all piteously mainstream and gentle compared to this beast. What you're in for is the most violent and extreme material of earlier Last Days Of Humanity taken to a wholly new level. The vocals don't just roar, they scream from the very gut of Erwin De Groot, and they'd be horrible enough alone, but the band feels the need to process it through every level of pitch-shifting and distortion known to man, putting them out the other side of the mike as something almost unrecognizable as coming from a human throat.

Guitars? Are there guitars here, or just fifty distorted basses all playing something completely different? There's no memorable riffs here; the distortion is so massive all you hear is a wash of insane, ultra-fast, occasionally undulating noise in the background to the point where the very idea of doing a cover of one of these songs is laughable. The riffs are so fast and probably so technical that they're not even a melodic instrument anymore. You forget that guitars are supposed to play notes and chords and that sort of thing on this album. And the drums? Well, the drumming performance on this album might be the most extreme I've ever heard provided entirely by a human; it sounds completely untriggered and perhaps the most consistently fast and brutal performance I've ever heard not supplied by a machine. To say this album is one long blast beat punctuated by fills and the occasional pausing snare hit would be entirely accurate; the very fact that the drummer doesn't pass out halfway through 'A Divine Proclamation Of Finishing The Present Existence' is a testament to human endurance.

You don't listen to this album as much as you undergo it; the songs are almost randomly structured, with long strings of tremolo riffs and blasting suddenly stopping, two solitary snare hits echoing out of the speakers before the band dives back into the madness, not even giving the listener a chance to collect his or her (but really, his) thoughts before erupting into another insane blast of noise. Despite how crazy and seemingly improvised this music is, you can tell it's very carefully structured: everything seems to be perfectly on time, the sudden rhythms stops and starts are very precise, with single chiming ride cymbal strikes and suddenly muted chords coming out just too perfectly to be on the fly. Because of this, it might be one of goregrind's most complex releases; hell, I can barely call it goregrind or gorenoise since this sort of thing really seems more the purview of John Zorn than anyone in a Gut t-shirt.

This is of course barely music; I mean, occasionally a track will come around like 'The Beauty Of Perfection In Sensible Cruelty' which seems to hearken back to 'The Sound Of Rancid Juices Sloshing Around Your Coffin', but I don't think that will comfort those bearing all the other tracks, which are nothing more than maelstroms of complete blood-drenched chaos. That being said, there's clearly a method to the madness; you almost wonder WHY this music is so careful and precise given its nature- I mean, would anyone notice the difference? Perhaps not, but therein lies the genius: the complete nerve and single-mindedness and terrifying certainty it takes to make 'music' like this is a representation of what extreme music SHOULD be: wholly uncompromising, entirely insane, and very far beyond anything we'd call 'human'.

Anal Birth - Aborted Artifacts and Re-Animated Remnants (2008)

So this is the beginning of gorenoise I guess, which is very hard to believe since it manages to predate "Putrefaction in Progress" by about a century (or a decade, anyway.) No one really suggests that "Putrefaction in Progress" is the first gorenoise album- it's not really a proper gorenoise album anyway- but it's the single album that seems to have inspired more deranged social rejects to start idiotic tape projects than any other. Without that album, there is no gorenoise; it was a necessary building block for Last Days of Humanity's followup projects to establish gorenoise from: Biocyst, Urinefestival, Tumour, you know the drill (well, you probably don't.) But hearing Anal Birth, with its first releases ostensibly dating back to 1996, shakes all of that up. It seems so far ahead of its time that it's basically impossible to justify its mere existence. What the fuck was Adam Rotella doing? On a long-abandoned Myspace page, he says that Anal Birth was intended to basically be a mashup of all his favorite goregrind bands, but Anal Birth goes so fucking far beyond what any of them were doing at the time (or, indeed, since) that it seems completely ludicrous to use that as a justification. In my less charitable moments, I'm inclined to think it's a Nargaroth situation: completely falsified. Stuff like this didn't, COULDN'T, exist back in 1996. What the fuck was the market for it then? Then again, what's the market for it now?

Harsh noise people listen to gorenoise and think of it as a random, tertiary hanger-on that isn't really affiliated with the noise scene proper, which is true, except for the fact that it's not hanging on at all. No one behind any of the myriad of gorenoise tapes I own has probably ever bothered to study Merzbow's electronic slash-and-burn composition; the style comes from a much more feral and primitive place than any of the high-minded buggery of the noise scene. Even calling it a natural elaboration of Anal Cunt or The Meat Shits stretches the bounds of logic so far they nearly break; try as I might, I can't see the logical connection between those bands and stuff like this. Gorenoise is as depraved and sexually scatological and disgusting as the worst, dreariest parts of power electronics or noisecore, but seems governed by neither, lacking both the socially conscious pretense of the former or the youthful joy of the latter. It's just ugly and hateful; at no point do you get any sense of fun out of gorenoise. Even in its most self-effacing, humorous moments, the jokes seem empty and pointless- mean-spirited barbs that would be designed to shock if anyone who listened to this sort of thing could be shocked by something. It's empty, hollow, disgusting stuff that spits on the idea of "art" and offhandedly rejects any attempts to analyze it for greater meaning.

From my personal experience, the people who make gorenoise tend to be shitty people: drug addicts, unemployed losers, and even the occasional authentic sociopath. On that same aforementioned ghost town of a Myspace page, Adam Rotella mentions how he can't mail out a bunch of CDs on his tradelist because he got evicted from his apartment and had to shack up at a homeless shelter until he found a new living situation. The only job I've seen him mention: janitor. If you have something to give the world, you don't make this kind of music. If you make gorenoise, chances are that you're human garbage and you like it that way. Actually listening to it doesn't make you much better. This isn't a judgment- just reality. I have no qualms about saying that if you have any connection to this style of music, there's something fundamentally wrong with you.

"Aborted Artifacts & Re-Animated Remnants" is a cassette compilation of some of Anal Birth's work. A couple demos, a full-length, something like that. It's stuff, and that's really all that matters. Despite the sheer ferocity of this music, there's a certain apathy to it which extends itself towards the listener- does it really matter what releases this material came off of? They all sound identical apart from changed (not "improved") production quality. Supposedly there was going to be a second one of these to compile the other half of Anal Birth's material, but it never happened to my knowledge and I don't think it ever will happen. It doesn't matter. It's a totally pointless labor of love by sick people and the only people who buy this cassette are people who've never heard of Anal Birth before, like me. The more I listen to it the harder it is to give a shit. There's a sort of hopeless, inherent pointlessness to this sort of thing which saps your energy after the sixtieth untitled track of frenzied, grinding noise.

If this contains the first gorenoise ever recorded (and I'm forced to conclude it does in the absence of compelling evidence otherwise,) it provides a good archetype for what the style is. A drum machine set to spastically blast; it's hard to tell if it's actually programmed since it sounds like it's falling down the stairs a lot of the time. Distorted bass so low and rumbling it's rendered sort of inaudible due to the shitty, degraded tape sound. Roaring, howling, massively distorted vocals which just sort of scream over everything without rhyme or reason. Most of the tracks are untitled and for the most part the different musical voices blend into a borderline indistinguishable mass of fuming distortion, from which only the snare drum and vocals manage to escape in any real way. There's no melody, no structure, no meaning- just anger and chaos from the most absolute gutter level of American society.

Some points of note, which actually point to '96 as a possibility for the oldest material here: while this is still a giant leap away from The Meat Shits, you can hear a certain noisecore pedigree at work. It's rather secondary- more the product of a noisecore influence in the goregrind bands Anal Birth emulates than a first-hand influence itself- but it's distinctly there in the rhythmic chaos and grind-oriented vocal performance at work. Rather than muddy and pounding, the sound of this stuff is more midrange and spastic; while a lot of modern gorenoise attempts to drown you under a tidal wave of distorted sludge, Anal Birth is more about ripping the listener apart from multiple directions with constantly shifting drum programming, demented gasping-for-breath vocals, and a sense of entropy so complete that it's impossible to tell what's going on at any given time- not that something in particular is going on. If typical gorenoise drowns you in a sewer, Anal Birth engulfs you in an avalanche of viscera and dismembered limbs, leaving you unable to tell which way is up to dig towards safety and oxygen. It's tense, stressful music despite its sloppiness and incoherency; rarely does gorenoise sound this unbelievably angry.

Of course, what few appreciate about gorenoise is the fact that the music itself is secondary to a more intangible "experience," within which are a million self-contained parts. Listening to this music isn't just a matter of putting the tape into your player. Part of it is tracking the tape down via next-week-dead links on obscure Geocities pages and navigating terrible site design to find an email address to request the release. Part of it is the crude, vaguely self-made cardboard packaging that you receive it (and likely two dozen other tapes) in. Part of it is just looking at the blearily Xeroxed layout that tells you nothing and offers no contact info. Part of it is throwing it on a pile of other, similar releases and not bothering to listen to it for three weeks after you acquire it. Part of it is listening to it for the first time when you've stayed up until five in the morning on bad liquor and worse memories. Part of it is the one time you listened to it while driving and felt tense and confused while trying to get to the store. Part of it is ripping the tape to your computer and separating each and every untitled track individually for no reason other than your own obsession. Part of it is fast-forwarding to a random part of the tape to listen because which song you hear is so completely irrelevant. Perhaps the most important part of it is wondering what the fuck you're doing at every preceding point in this paragraph.

Part of it is giving up and hating.

[Amlux]

Noktorn was a master at capturing the feeling of albums in words, especially in their darkest nuances. Sometimes it was almost to a point of absurdity, but that made it even more awesome:


Darkthrone - Transilvanian Hunger (1994)

There are few albums in the metal scene more stripped, examined, and dissected than Darkthrone's seminal 'Transilvanian Hunger'. Every person who has come in contact with black metal, fan and detractor alike, has heard and most likely commented on the qualities or lack thereof in this LP. Is it the extreme polarity of opinion that drives listeners to make their views heard? Or perhaps it's that aesthetic, that ultimate purity of black metal expression that pierces the darkness, shrieking all the way. Either way, this is an album that has been at the center of stormy controversy for thirteen years now.

I wouldn't be a misnomer to say that 1994 was a crossroads for black metal. The genre seemed on the threshold of a great change, one that might make or break the genre. Irony, always the amused commentator of this musical community, decided to step in and make everyone disagree with whether the making or breaking had actually occurred. This was a year that many claimed carved the epitaph for black metal as a genuine form of musical expression, while others say that it was indeed only the beginning of a new era. Albums such as 'Pentagram', 'De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas', or 'In The Nightside Eclipse' all seemed to be a natural evolution of previous works, yet oddly distanced, as if emerging from a world removed from Dead's suicide and church arsons. Not to say the music was any less spiteful; just, like Darkthrone's 'A Blaze In The Northern Sky', even more disconnected from the average and mundane. Indeed, one could also say that this was the root of the split between raw and melodic in the black metal community; the latter being represented by Emperor's debut LP, and the former by this piece here.

It's not so much that the sound of 'Transilvanian Hunger' is so unbelievably raw; much more abrasive material had been heard on Mayhem's early demos, for instance. It's more that 'Transilvanian Hunger' exposed so many people to this level of production, as well as being one of the first albums to postulate that a degraded level of recording could be a boon to the atmosphere and quality of the music rather than a detrimental coincidence. I can't actually imagine the music here with 'quality' production; the static shimmer and murkiness adds a layer of otherworldliness to the proceedings that's so necessary to Darkthrone's work. In a similar form of distance, it goes even further against their death metal roots, with such bands attempting to gain higher and higher fidelity in their music. On the same note, only two of the tracks here possess English lyrics, as if Darkthrone was intending to distance themselves from the predominantly English-driven music of the time.

To put this album in perspective: around three weeks ago I was spending time with a couple prospective band mates. We were discussing how to create atmosphere in music, and while he was speaking, I was idly playing the main riff to 'Transilvanian Hunger'. He immediately stopped and said, "You see? That gives the feeling of being on a frozen Norwegian mountain." After asking about his reaction later, he stated that he had never heard the song. And herein lies the quality of this album; the ability for every person that hears and understands it to identify with the thoughts and feelings that went into its creation. While all music requires more or less interpretation to determine meaning, 'Transilvanian Hunger' is an entity of such absolute purity in form that each and every person that hears it can inherently understand the meaning of such a work.

Indeed, that first track is easily the best on this record. I would have no qualms with someone who stated that it was the peak of black metal as an artistic form. It is an entity of complete, heart-wrenching beauty and simplicity that will be forever remembered by the metal scene. Six minutes, four riffs, and one drum beat, and Darkthrone instantaneously conquered everything that black metal had done, was doing at the time, and ever will in the future. Most of the songs here are structured in the same way: Riff A alternates with riff B, while riff C acts as a bridge. And despite the repetition and simplicity of construction, it is still potent due to the incredible beauty of the music. Each riff peels off and spears through the echoing soundstream, bringing an entirely new vision to the proceedings. Songs like 'Skald Av Satans Sol' are entities of absolute steel beauty.

Numerous people complain about the album for its low technical skill and recording quality. However, this is exactly the same thing as criticizing, say, Psyopus for NOT having those same qualities. When one stops viewing technicality or fidelity as linear entities, where there are only directions up or down, one can much better grasp the objective of this disc. This is music purely based upon atmosphere and melody, and to judge it for qualities that it has no intention to pursue in the first place is a foolish and ludicrous idea.

'Transilvanian Hunger' is an eternally timeless record. It stands as being possibly the greatest achievement of black metal, and cannot be properly justified through words alone. One must listen to it, and soak in the grandeur of night skies and deep forests.

Skepticism - Stormcrowfleet (1995)

An unmoving view of an island, densely forested and with narrow beaches but completely devoid of all animal and human life. The view is as if provided by a camera, because you, as a human, are not even there; there is no sentience anywhere in this land, and there is only the slightest motions in the water around the island. You can see other islands off in the distance but with no detail or definition. It is stark and lonely.

Without warning, it begins; a looming storm on the horizon, more enormous and darker than what one could ever imagine, with clouds so thick and dark they nearly eclipse the sun entirely. It envelops the entire horizon as it moves ever so slowly towards the island in your view, ominous yet eerily beautiful, and the very air of the island seems to sit perfectly still in dreadful yet enrapturing anticipation of the oncoming storm.

It hits and no level of imagining can prepare one for its intensity. Massive gales strike the island, nearly ripping the enormous trees from their roots, shaking the very limestone foundations of this lonely isle, threatening to tear this land from the earth (or whatever mysterious dimension this is) itself. But the gales are just the beginning, and this massive onslaught of nature has only just begun.

It seems that with each new feature introduced by the storm, it's unimaginable that it could be any more enormous until the next element hits. First are the enormous, wracking thunderclaps that threaten to cave the sky itself in; like massive drums played in caverns reaching to the center of the earth, they explode across the skyline, breathtakingly deep and arduously slow, each one illuminating the dark landscape to nearly that of day, cracking the clouds and warning of possible lightning striking the land as it hovers so dangerously over the island.

The gales intensify and have a nearly musical quality, like an enormous and desolate organ, delicately (or as delicate as something so massive can be) carving out entrancing and triumphant yet mournful melodies from the air itself. The ground itself begins to shake; not from force of the gales or the thunder, but of its own power, a tremendous earthquake nearly shattering the forests and soil of the island into thousands of broken pieces, adding to the symphony of the wind like great guitars, impossibly deep and rich in tone, echoing the wind's simple melodies and adding even more crushing intensity to the storm.

And then, in a brief moment of peace before the storm explodes yet again, it begins; the growls of a creature nearly beyond comprehension. Not even a shred of it is visible upon the horizon, but its world-shaking calls are tremendous nonetheless, a throaty growl that seems to propel the storm ever onward. It comes from a beast so enormous that one couldn't be sure they'd even recognize it if they saw it; it's of an enormity beyond any scale one would know.

These natural forces form a choir of sounds and wrench beauty from the agonizing force. Some calm is almost found in the near destruction of the island, where the intensity is so great it nearly manages to stand still due to its achingly slow beating of the landscape. The sounds are enormous and crushing yet fragile, slow, simple melodies unfolding and evolving over what feels like millennia, with the impossible depth of the sounds reverberating for long seconds after each note is struck. Occasionally, and only very occasionally, the guitar-like shaking of the earth will pierce through the other torrents of sound with an ever-so-slow set of tones, a bittersweet melody emerging from nothingness before descending back into the earth.

And finally, after what might be minutes, what might be endless aeons, the storm departs, leaving only its whispers of infinite glory and destruction behind it. The landscape is battered and crossed with deep scars gorging into the earth; and yet the forest is alive, perhaps more alive than ever, now burst into even more glorious color and beauty than could be imagined. This is 'Stormcrowfleet'.

Silencer - Death - Pierce Me (2001)

It feels to me like everything everyone has written about this album is unbelievably incorrect. It almost feels like everyone's listening to a different album from me- all the wrong (and generally most obvious) aspects of it are emphasized, and not the elements which really make it an enduring piece of art that I still obsessively listen and re-listen to years upon years after hearing it initially. It mystifies me how people can arrive at the same general conclusion about this album- that it's an amazing black metal release which stands tall among the greatest the genre has produced- and yet still so massively understand the aspects which make it incredible. I hope I can evade some of the same pitfalls while writing about it.

I'd like to preface everything by saying all the stories surrounding this album, and Nattramn in particular, are completely irrelevant to its character. Nattramn could be a fucking mailman for all I care and this release would be equally amazing. The thank you list of pharmaceutical drugs, the institutionalization, Nattramn's hospitalization and rebirth as Diagnose: Lebensgefahr (a massively inferior work to this) are all unimportant, and I'm not going to dwell on these aspects after this paragraph. It's a shame that, like so many classic black metal releases, 'Death - Pierce Me' has been reduced to a collection of stories and rumors instead of an artistic piece in and of itself. The only thing that I can hope is that eventually enough years will get between new listeners and its release so that they can listen to it with open minds, not clouded by the celebrity-obsessed metal scene and their love of gossip and drama. Anyway, we're already giving too much time to these elements by even mentioning them.

Have you ever felt depressed? More properly, have you ever 'had' depression? Have you had months-long periods in your life that you can barely remember because they were mostly absorbed by sitting in your bedroom, trying to figure out how to leave and be 'normal' for a moment? I'm not talking about a brief period of intense depression caused by the death of a loved one, of a long-term relationship falling apart, or any other transitory factor: I mean the sort of pathological bleakness that starts in your brainstem and travels down to your soul, to the point where there's brief periods in the day where you know (don't think, know) that suicide is the only answer. Days where the temptation to leave a corpse for others to find and the very act of looking in the mirror is so primally revolting you can barely do it. Days where you sicken yourself just by existing and when sitting in your car you want to start pulling off strips of skin simply because you can't be yourself and exist anymore. It's hard to describe what something like this feels like to someone who's been fortunate enough not to feel it- the very idea that the self no longer makes sense and you spend most of your time in a dream world of total, all-encompassing self-hatred and suffering.

I ask all these questions because Silencer is one of the only bands that I've heard who capture depression as it actually is. Not a romantic sorrow, not something passionate and artistic, but the greyness of living in that mental state, where sadness eventually gets overwhelmed by sheer tiredness, resignation, and regret that you ever existed. There's a potent mixture of insane rage and equally insane self-destruction in this music that I think only really resonates with people who have been there before (and not even all the time, at that). It's a product of a very peculiar mixture of neurological chemicals and environmental suffering, and Silencer captures exactly what it's like to feel it. Not really sad, not crying, not even wishing for another life, but just sitting on the couch, knees pulled to your chest, looking out the window, and not thinking because it hurts too much even to think. It's horribly negative music that I have no doubt has inspired more than a few desperate bids for salvation at the bottom of a pill bottle.

Let's get the most obvious and least important element out of the way quickly: Nattramn's vocals are what they are. He shrieks like a little girl, wheezes, feebly grunts, and sounds weak a lot of the time. He's not a particularly good vocalist by any traditional measure, but he's appropriate for the music and is good, if you listen with an open mind, at putting you in the sort of mental state that this music was likely composed in. He sounds desperate and pathetic and self-pitying and tired- in short, he doesn't sound like a black metal vocalist typically should sound like. He has no breath control, no real understanding of how to deliver lyrics, and no real concern over impressing anyone. He sounds exactly like you feel in the depressive state: just weak and defeated. It's perfect for what it is.

Much more important than any of that, though, are the instrumental compositions which seem to get shrugged off so easily. Silencer's music is at once inspired by Bethlehem (owing to drummer Steve Wolz) and not even remotely similar. While Bethlehem tried for a lurking, almost occult look at mental illness, Silencer's goal is a lot simpler, and the music reflects it. It could be said that Silencer is sort of a rough prototype of what bands like Nyktalgia would later create: long, meandering songs filled with rote blasting, droning, bleak tremolo riffs, and insane, wailing vocals, but there's a certain intimacy and subtlety to the compositions on this record that can't be understated. Nyktalgia is a band created when depressive black metal has already been codified- while they're excellent at it, they have a playbook to follow. Silencer has no such playbook, and because of it is a much stranger beast.

A lot of the standard tropes of depressive black metal are here: fast blast beats become slow because they go on so long, and the bleary, red-eyed tremolo riffs are hazy and not particularly sharp or insistent due to the inherently misty guitar tone. At the same time, there's a lot more rhythmic and melodic play on this record than many give it credit for: careful listening reveals a lot of sinister, quiet counterpoint melodies between the two guitar tracks and even the surprisingly audible bass, which almost acts like a quiet, whispering voice in the background, answering 'yes' to all the questions the guitars ask. The riffs aren't depressive in today's established sense of depressive black metal riffs; they tend to sound more grey, confused, and alien, with 'Taklamakan''s opening riff a particularly unpleasant and clear example of it. Hints pop up of Sterbend, Nocturnal Depression, all the big names the depressive black metal scene would later turn out, but Silencer tends to reside in less obvious and more desolate melodic avenues. They display rainy days in an urban environment, jobs lost because you just stopped showing up for work, and an empty stomach because you can't bother to go grocery shopping. They're not supposed to be catchy or fun, and they don't accidentally run into either.

Beyond that are the surprisingly nuanced drums of Wolz, who despite the relative rhythmic simplicity of the music does all he can to provide a more lush, organic feel to the music. His skills most obviously come out on the numerous piano or clean guitar passages that dot the album, where he's given free reign to play with the boundaries of rhythm, adding subtle, dynamic accents to the stillness of the melodic instruments. Even within the more conventional beats, he always finds time for abrupt, off-kilter fills, sudden cymbal switches, and quick trills here and there which let you know he's still breathing despite the deathlike stamina he displays on the long songs. He provides a welcome bit of variation to what is, at its core, fairly still and static music, and with a lesser drummer, the album wouldn't be as effective.

The structuring of this release is interesting, and I definitely think there's a story being told, as abstract and unconcerned with precision as it clearly is. The first and last of the black metal tracks are clearly more straightforward in their sadness than the middle tracks- they're the catchiest and the most obvious to associate with the album. It's the middle three which really make it what it is, though: the wistful, almost contemplative and sardonic 'Sterile Nails and Thunderbowels', the unspeakably ugly and depraved 'Taklamakan', and the grim, seemingly neverending 'The Slow Kill In the Cold', given even more austere beauty and finality through its bookends of simple, ambient synthwork. These are the songs which really define the album for what it is; it would be easy to shrug off the other two as just unusually unhinged depressive black metal tracks, but these songs give 'Death - Pierce Me' its unique and immediate character. There's no reprieve in these tracks from the all-consuming self-destruction the album practically encourages. Much like all the other tracks on 'Transilvanian Hunger' after the title cut, they're the songs which truly make the album what it is.

There's many small elements apart from the black metal which help set this apart: resigned music-box piano and clean guitar work, droning, haunted synths, and even small stretches of dark ambient and industrial that pop in to provide variation as well as reorganization and context in the long (and intentionally long-feeling) songs. These are some of the only places I've seen these elements used well in black metal- where other bands use clean guitars and piano almost as a necessary evil, or to flatter a pretense of sophistication, Silencer's application of them feels much more natural. Their inclusion is almost arbitrary but also necessary- they're the pieces which keep you anchored to the songs, rather than just drifting in a seemingly endless sea of grey tremolo riffs and blast beats. The focusing nature of these small pieces are powerful, as is the incredibly bleak, death-march closing piano piece 'Feeble Are You - Sons of Sion', where hope is completely and irrevocably lost. This is an album that absolutely must be listened to all at once- it loses almost all meaning when split into individual tracks and is very clearly meant to be consumed as a whole.

Silencer's album really might be one of the most misunderstood pseudo-classics of black metal- while there's an absolute plethora of elements to talk about regarding it, most seem content to just dredge up the same, tired handful of aesthetic aspects that really have little impact on the music in general, or have an impact that's felt in different ways than the listener would typically anticipate. I don't expect anyone new to appreciate this simply because I've written about it in this manner- this album is a love it or hate it affair, and the initial impression almost never changes- but I feel a need to give it some much-deserved context and dissection that it's been missing for a long time. After all, this disc is the story of a lot of days in my life. It only feels fair to give them some justice.

Goatsblood - Drull (2003)

Goatsblood's music has to be described in simple words; words given a greater intensity via their simplicity. I can't say that Goatsblood's music is hideous, or horrifying, or deformed. It's just ugly, profoundly ugly in a way most other bands only dream of attaining. Ugly is good because it's a simple, blunt hammer of a word which simultaneously does nothing to truly describe the music yet encompass it fully.

There's almost an irony in calling Goatsblood's music ugly, because the only way that word conveys the sort of breadth I'm talking about is if it's spoken by a Vietnam veteran with a string of ears in a footlocker in his attic. Goatsblood's music is ugly in the same way that watching your family get executed one by one via gunshot to the back of the head could be loosely described as 'ugly'. This is the sort of music that comes from the blackest, most utterly negative part of the human heart and mind, and it's an experienced that really cannot be missed by anyone who claims to enjoy dark music.

In essence, one could say that Goatsblood is a natural extension of the Eyehategod breed of noisy, screamy, bluesy ultrasludge, but that's about as accurate as saying that 9/11 'kind of sucked'. Where Eyehategod's music was intense but based off themes that are generally pretty easy to grasp (broken homes, substance abuse, self-loathing, etc.), Goatsblood appears to come out of fucking nowhere with music that's the essence of the void that is the soul of the most dead that are still walking about. Infusing the incredibly atonal, seemingly random at times sludge with bursts of frantic, desperate grind makes the experience that much more gripping, with unpredictable shifts in tempo and rhythm occurring without remote notice, tied together only by the drowning-in-a-tar-pit screams of Blair.

As is frequently stated, Goatsblood possesses a surprising but decidedly unflashy breed of technicality. There's never a scale run or an arpeggio, but there are numerous changes in time signatures, making the music that much more lurching and nausea-inducing when combined with the ragged, stunningly harsh sound of the band as a whole. There's not a lot of 'riffs', really; the guitars motion everywhere and nowhere with an almost complete unwillingness to adhere to a conventional metal chord shape, only occasionally bursting into a fragment of blues melody such as at the end of 'Ashtray Cunt Eyes'. These aren't really any reprieve from the utter negativity of the music; they just make it seem that much more sad and decrepit, like ghosts in a distant swamp somewhere.

This album is horrible, horrible, horrible 'music' that's really only good for inducing a bad trip, I absolutely love it.

Bloodaxe - Raping the Ancient (2004)

Back in high school, during the winter months of my sophomore and junior years, I would often arrive at school quite early, before anyone else had arrived, indeed before the sun had even risen. Like many of the students there, I had an MP3 player to keep me company while I was busy learning absolutely nothing. During those cold, lightless, solitary hours, I could often be found huddled on the ground, back against a light pole, listening to Bloodaxe's 'Raping The Ancient'. I can't think of a better soundtrack for that. It's cold, it's dark, it's lonely, it's this album in physical form.

It's almost inconceivable to me that this music could come from someone living in a populated area. The country of origin fits completely: the realm of Vinland is certainly the sort of land that such raw, frigid and oddly beautiful music would come from. But the region makes little sense; Thunder Bay, Ontario? With a population of over a hundred thousand? Impossible. This is the sort of thing that must have come out of the frozen northern tundra of the region, with a population per thousand square mile ratio about as low as the temperature. It's such pure outsider music, almost exclusively designed for listening alone and introspectively, that any real contact with another person would simply ruin the ambiance of the album. I can't imagine a better soundtrack for wandering for days alone in the snow.

Bloodaxe plays a very raw form of viking black metal that I've never quite heard anywhere else. I and a number of other people I know have expressed complaints over what the name 'viking metal' is attached to. We personally find it quite absurd to think that the vikings would have been listening to Falkenbach if given any choice at all. Bloodaxe, on the other hand, is most certainly something that should be called viking metal, presuming the term didn't carry the connotations that it does. As you could probably guess, there's not even the barest trace of folk influence apart from the two acoustic guitar pieces that act as bookends to the album. Even these, like the rest of the instrumentation on the album, are kept short and minimal. The music on here is essentially the exact opposite of, say, Ensiferum: the music here is not only some of the coldest I've ever heard, but some of the most desolate and barren as well. You will never hear a keyboard, a violin, a chorus, or any other sort of embellishment on this album.

Did I mention that 'Raping The Ancient' is fucking frigid? Well, it can't be overstated. It's truly music from the Tundra; dry, glacial, and remarkably unforgiving. Some of the songs here rival 'Transilvanian Hunger' in simply how enormously dark and merciless they are, and nearly best it on a number of them. Every sound on this album has had all the sonic moisture sapped from it, leaving every instrument hugely dry, windy and raw. All the melodies are simple, short, yet full, and the riffs are all fully functioning despite how bare-bones they may be, ranging from the somewhat complex ('Superior Winds') to the devastatingly primitive ('While You Lie Bleeding'). Some of the riffs here are composed of just two chords, with only the somewhat audible bass providing a bit of depth to the melody. Such dedication to minimalism would hurt many bands, but it only enhances the heartless, polar atmosphere of 'Raping The Ancient'.

The guitar tone is viciously beautiful. The vast majority of the riffs are tremolo-based, with distortion hopelessly overdriven to make them even more distinct. The guitars and bass actually sound like keyboards more than stringed instruments at times, simply because there is essentially no semblance of rhythm to be found in the guitar or bass. You can't hear individual notes on most of the songs on the album: only the gradual shifting of tones, gently scooping out these melodies with a sound that is at once soft yet razor sharp, the flow of notes changing like wind or water. Drums are almost exclusively relegated to blasting patterns apart from some rock beats on the later songs, and their sound is similarly agonizingly dry. Bass is a dull throb in the background, always audible but never at the forefront of the compositions, creating a sort of intangible heartbeat for the music to rest on. The voice of Lien is possibly the most heartless element of all, with black metal rasps that seem devoid of all humanity and mercy, like the very voice of winter itself. The occasional venture into clean territory is really no reprieve: such a sound is a monotonous and atonal narrative more than any actual singing.

The album is nearly like a wintry landscape itself, neatly divided into two essential halves. The first of these is the brutality and harshness of nature, taking the form of the first seven tracks on the album. Even the intro, 'Midvinterblod', is testament to such a theme, name being a dedication to the viking rituals of hanging slain game in the trees as a sacrifice to the gods. The next six tracks start and end without warning, short, two-minute bursts of violence that all resemble each other greatly. The tempo for each is almost identical, as are vocals and drum patterns, leaving only the riffs to really distinguish each piece from the next. Each track begins without any sort of dynamics and ends just as abruptly, as Bloodaxe sees no real reason to toy around once the story has been told. There's an unbelievable savagery to these compositions, a sort of devastating indifference towards human life that most black metal bands could only wish to represent in their music.

The next half is quite a different story. This section seems to be more dedicated to the rugged beauty of nature, despite its deadly and often cruel nature. Starting with 'Drifting Of Ull', the pace remains the same, but a clear change overtakes the music. Lien's lyrics are no longer venomously spit out in fits and starts, but rather delivered nostalgically with bits of improvised rhythm. The melodies, too, are like the Aurora Borealis in the Arctic sky: cold and dark, but unbelievably passionate and beautiful as well. The riffs at the end of the next track, 'Thirteen Oar's Of Misfortune', follow suit with a similarly majestic tone. This is perhaps the most 'viking' of all the tracks on the album, at least in the sense that most metalheads know it by: more willingly epic than the other tracks, and with double bass patterns generally taking precedence over blast beats, adding an element of militarism to the atmosphere. 'While You Lie Bleeding', however, is the clear centerpiece of the album: the longest at over seven minutes, it represents 'Raping The Ancient''s sole move to a tempo below fast, instead opting for a steady, mid-paced trudge to move the song forward. The drumming is more dynamic and the strange, shamanistic vocals of Lien stretch over wide swaths of time, with the riffs relegated to a droning background piece, a tad more conventional than the rest, but similarly frostbitten in tone. Its slow fade before outro 'Gammellandet', perhaps the most 'normally' beautiful track on this disc, is one that never ceases to amaze me with its endlessly powerful construction.

Bloodaxe will never be a very popular band. The music is stunningly harsh, and possesses a beauty carved from pure ice. It's music that offers no warmth or sympathy whatsoever to the listener, instead marching ever forward in its neverending quest for savage violence and perhaps even more savage beauty. For those few of us that would revel in the unbelievable harshness of the music here, though, it is an instant classic, worthy of infinite listens, with an aesthetic that only grows more impassioned with time. Beyond highly recommended; this is very nearly mandatory.

Animus - Poems for the Aching, Swords for the Infuriated (2005)

'Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated' is an album that can never be replicated. Even if you get the same person with the same precise instruments, same recording, same emotions and thoughts, the results will not be the same, not by a long shot. This is an album of such fragility and such unmitigated brilliance that it required a single moment in time to be harnessed for its creation. There is nothing like this LP, nothing like Animus.

Animus is a one-man project out of Israel. The music reflects it: utterly single-minded, it couldn't possibly be the creation of multiple entities; it's simply too pure to be so. There's certainly nothing like the unnamed man behind Animus. While flickers of other bands might be apparent in a purely aesthetic dimension, the core of Animus is intoxicatingly unique and rises above a sea of clones and imitators like some sort of blackened phoenix. And though you might think such an album would spawn a massive ego, the exact opposite is true. The man behind Animus is extremely humble and sees himself as a tool to discover music, not as a godlike creator. This is such distant music, so separated from the rest of art that it almost seems like an entity unto itself that can't really be pigeonholed into such a category as music. The sparse linear notes, which feature no lyrics, song titles, or member names, say it better than I ever could: "Animus is none and nothing but sheer artistic devotion. No words, no musical notes -- emotions."

One might describe Animus' music as black metal, but upon further examination that's a woefully inadequate genre to apply to such a creation. It is easier to describe in relation to artists such as Summoning or AOC, where one can see that there was a connection to black metal at one point that is now a mere trace in the band's music. A more accurate phrase would be 'blackened music', which comes closer to grasping the vastness of Animus. One could even say that it is a reinterpretation of traditional rock music in a black metal aesthetic, yet driving the artistic expression of both genres further by it's mere presence in the medium. I cannot stress this enough: Animus is far, far beyond the vast majority of music today, both sonically and conceptually. The chance of someone being able to write songs more advanced than those present on 'Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated' is slim at best, at least in this point in time. The music is pure energy; not to say that it is 'energetic', but that it speaks to a holistic design rarely seen and even more rarely mastered to such a degree.

The music present is hugely minimalistic, making 'Transilvanian Hunger' seem like 'Focus' in comparison. Songs from six to thirteen minutes might have two or three melodies at the most. Vocals are harsh yet soothing rasps with the occasional Mutiilation-style wailing scream. The quality is raw, rawer than most, and it perfectly suits the music. Guitars are reduced to background noise, melody is concentrated in sparse keyboards, and only the snare and crash cymbal can be easily heard as percussion. And yet it strikes me that this is the only way such an album could be made. Any more clarity would destroy the passion and beauty that defines this album very much through it's brazen, fearless devotion to simplicity and elegance. Let it be known that this is not music for those that wish for something aesthetically pleasing on a normal level, but for those who will stare into the abyss with no fear to its returning gaze. This is music for those that want to be empowered; ironically, despite how it only somewhat resembles such music, 'Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated' may very well be the closest music to the ideology and philosophy of black metal that the world has ever seen.

The opening track is a reasonably succinct description of the rest of the album: binary drumming, harsh rasps, a background of guitar fuzz, and slowly shifting synths. All the melody is concentrated in the latter instrument for most of the tracks, mostly due to it being the only melodic instrument that can be consistently heard. Atmosphere changes dramatically from song to song: here it is murky and unsure, an internal battle filled with concern and doubt. The next track is possibly the most 'black metal' track here, with a particularly venomous vocal performance (entirely sung in ancient Hebrew) and Burzum-inspired melody. Here is when one begins to notice that the tracks on this album are not whole songs, but mere fragments of music that could go on for eternity. I'd imagine if such things were possible, Animus would be writing twenty hour songs, such is the timeless quality of such music. It almost feels as if you're getting a brief window into the immortal consciousness of the world; a brief peek into what will never end.

And yet, the most sublime and emotional performance is yet to come. The third track stands as one of the heights of music as a whole. This is possibly the most emotionally naked piece of music I have ever heard. Composed only of a lonely guitar and accompanying vocals, this is an unbelievably, heart-wrenchingly honest slip into a soundstream. Words can't describe the emotions that one feels as this enters you; Animus here ceases to be music and becomes a part of you as a person. At this point, there is no separation, no 'listening' to this album: it is now bound with you in an impossible, unquantifiable way that very, very few records can match. Once again, Animus very nearly separates from 'music' and becomes an entity of its own. This soon shifts into track four, the climax of the album, where the emotions of emotional pain and sorrow leave and are replaced by inner fire that other bands could only hope to match in conviction. This is epic music, not crafted by over-tracking vocal lines and arpeggios, but by an innate understanding of being a small part of a huge world, where one can only become a hero if you believe and do true battle with the expectations of the universe, through true assertion of the self.

The remaining to tracks function as a denouement of sorts after such emotionally taxing tracks as the last two. Five is a slow, perhaps doom-influenced track, while six is the final, bombastic closer where the drums can be heard in full and a mere two guitar riffs occur throughout its thirteen minute span. And a conclusion is reached. It is one full of fear and doubt, but it is a strong, deliberate one without remorse for its beliefs or actions. Animus has no apologies for it's music. And it should not.

This is music that must be listened to in full and in the correct state of mind. To do otherwise is to insult the perfection of such art. Animus with 'Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated' has made a piece of music lightyears beyond what most of us will ever be able to achieve. Animus has made their masterpiece with a handful of desolate chords, one drum beat, four organ notes, and the conviction of ages.

Music for sunsets over isles, music for communion with nature. Music for those of us that when the end comes will smile with the knowledge that we have won.

[Amlux]

Lastly, some space has to be left for Noktorn's negative reviews, which are masterclasses of angry, superlative, pissed-off ranting. Going to spoiler links to the music because I haven't heard most of these so can't vouch if they're actually good or not but they all sounded pretty bad based on a cursory check. I miss this "genre" of review which has been replaced by nerdy, soy, gutless "analysis" these days:

Nokturnal Mortum - Nechrist (1999)

Spoiler

I don't think words currently exist in the English language to adequately describe how unbelievably fucking shitty 'NeChrist' is; merely describing it as being like the Holocaust would be a misnomer simply because at least the Holocaust was efficient, whereas Nokturnal Mortum go through one of the most convoluted and intricate processes I've ever seen to effectively put shit onto a CD. I would think that making music this terrible would require some insane Rube Goldberg contraption to harness the power of pure fucking tastelessness with which to drive their instruments, but perhaps even more remarkably, all evidence points to Nokturnal Mortum figuring this out ALL ON THEIR FUCKING OWN, which means both that they are geniuses and that they are possibly the worst people that have ever existed barring Kim Jong Il spawning progeny in the near future. This is completely, incalculably awful music, the likes of which not only shouldn't have been recorded, but shouldn't have been thought up in the first place. I imagine 'NeChrist' being described in a Lovecraftian manner: it's so horrific and so beyond mortal comprehension that one can't even BEGIN to describe it. You have to be fucking Yog-Sothoth himself and exist in seventeen fucking dimensions to grasp the absolute end of the shittiness of this record.

It's very bad.

It's certainly not the only flaw of this album (not by a long shot), but it's certainly the most horribly fucking egregious one: the folk sections. Nokturnal Mortum's music has always been folk-influenced to some degree, but it's only on 'NeChrist' that it blooms like an AIDS-infected flower all over the music. In an amazing turn of events, it turns out that shitty Ukrainian folk music sounds a great deal like shitty southern American folk music, you know, the sort of mind-bogglingly white trash shit you might hear while purchasing jugs labelled 'XXX' from a man with negative six teeth. Yes, 'NeChrist' is, in essence, a black metal hootenanny, with multiple exclamations of, I shit you not, "Yahoo!" to be heard on several tracks on this release. I don't care what beautiful cultural legacy Nokturnal Mortum is attempting to capture with this music: it's without a doubt some of the worst shit I have ever heard associated with the term 'metal', and its mere presence on the earth shakes my faith in humans being intrinsically good creatures to the very core. These folk passages aren't just bad, they express the sort of malice towards the listener that I thought was reserved by Slogun.

Above and beyond the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad folk passages, though, the symphonic black metal is completely atrocious and manages to be utterly devoid of all the qualities which make the previous two Nokturnal Mortum LPs good to great. The riffs are completely plastic, forgettable, and when not forgettable, unbelievably awfully arranged. Many of the riffs are completely melodically incoherent, as are the overlaying synths, which are applied almost randomly and with no logical sense of songwriting. The synths and riffs absolutely refuse to fit together, arbitrarily grinding against each other because the band couldn't be bothered to assemble them in a pleasing way. The drumming is more restrictive and not nearly as organic and catchy as what was found on albums like 'Goat Horns', instead resorting to trite sets of thrash beats and double bass so as not to scare the listener with anything unpredictable (already failing due to the shitty variety of unpredictability practiced by the melodic instruments). Even the vocals are somehow worse than before, weak and gurgling without the declarative tone of previous albums.

I would honestly be inclined to think that 'NeChrist' was a bad joke was it not so well-received by so many people. If everyone agreed with me that this was terrible shit, I could write it off as a silly joke that went too far and ignore it. But much to my chagrin, there's people who actually like this stuff and think it's quality folk black metal. Please, whatever you do, don't believe the (occasional) hype: this is a pinecone down the urethra in musical form, and quite possibly one of the worst things to ever be turned out under the guise of heavy metal. I want to shoot Varggoth in the fucking balls for this.

Silent Voices - Infernal (2004)

Spoiler

If you've read any number of my reviews, you can probably determine that I've spent a lot of time and energy on sculpting my musical taste in such a manner as to portray myself as an exceedingly tough and cool dude. I've conditioned myself to the point where if I find myself accidentally tapping my foot to an Evergrey song, my immediate response is to draw the blinds, loop "Molesting the Decapitated" and play simultaneous side-by-side videos of Nicaraguan guerrilla beheadings and black-on-blonde gangbang pornography until I feel my Sweet Bro reservoirs have been sufficiently replenished. Much to my chagrin, the majority of power, prog, and other effete sorts of music I've been listening to (anything that does not fall into the Bolt Thrower/Lil Jon paradigm, basically) have been surprisingly enjoyable lately out of what I hope is sheer coincidence or perhaps a drug-fueled neurological chemical imbalance. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually went to a Blind Guardian concert last year and enjoyed myself. I proceeded to masturbate myself raw while eating porterhouse steak until I vomited. I felt redeemed- but just barely.

It should come as no surprise, then, that on the increasingly rare occasion that I manage to stumble across an album like "Infernal," I'm overjoyed at the opportunity to grant it the merciless, Nanking-style rape it so richly deserves. Playing a style of music that I've come to charitably refer to as "Finnish shitfuck," Silent Voices excretes a blend of turgid, unbelievably laborious prog and vacuous yet paradoxically self-assured power metal that's as shamelessly mediocre and artistically vacant as it is pointlessly yet insistently irritating like a moth fluttering around a room's only lightbulb. I can't immediately recall an album that I've felt so overtly angered by and resentful towards. Its mere existence is somehow an affront to my presence, which is truly remarkable considering that I've reviewed and survived albums by both Fall of the Leafe and The Agonist. On a very primitive, unconscious level, I want the members of this band to be attacked by a pack of wild boars. Perhaps the only credit I can give "Infernal" is that the texture of my hatred for it is remarkably different from my average simmering rage towards the world around me.

Most unspeakably mediocre albums like this have a frustrating, obnoxious quality where it feels like the band themselves are half-assing their performances, as though they're intrinsically aware that what they're recording actually sucks. After listening to this album, though, I'm starting to see that level of self-awareness as a blessing, because "Infernal" displays the alternative: an incredibly mediocre, unlikeable album which contains the sort of cocky, self-assured instrumental performances I once thought were reserved for "Hot For Teacher" alone. Even more infuriating than this, though, is that the smirking cockiness isn't actually tied to any sort of effort; it's more like the members are firmly aware of how little time it took to write this music, but are so massively convinced of their own genius that they figure even a half-assed effort on their part will easily dwarf the competition. To be completely fair, I've been up for about a full day now, so sleep deprivation might be coloring my impressions, but at this particular moment this album basically sounds like the gay baby of Pol Pot and Kanye West.

But beyond my own weird personification of the music, I can absolutely say that the content itself sucks without any mental gymnastics. The best shorthand I can think of to describe it is as though Symphony X was demonically possessed by the horrendously egotistical and mind-numbingly dreary soul of Iced Earth. Frankly, to articulate the style of this music as "power/prog" is misleading, because both of those ideas are far too distinct for what goes on here. It's more like Silent Voices took a Venn diagram of the two genres and only included in their music the elements that were in the middle. There's bombastic soloing, long songs, piano interludes, soaring clean vocals, occasional double bass or tough guy chug riffs... and seemingly nothing else. While this album is well over forty minutes long, I'd be at a complete loss to describe what the fuck actually happens at any point during its running time. It's music so audaciously lacking in personality it truly amazes me it managed to find its way onto a label to begin with.

A depressing majority of the riffs on "Infernal" are composed of the open chord chugging which seems to have taken precedence over actual riffing in power metal over the past decade, while the remainder are the sort of aimless, furtive, metal by way of Jethro Tull noodling that satisfies absolutely no one, or bombastically held chords that might as well not even be there for all the gravitas they give the music. The synths, amusingly enough, are fairly buried in the production, and tend to simply provide backing root notes or simple replication of the riffs, and as a result are so tertiary an element that they have essentially no impact on the music apart from signifying it as a prog and/or power metal band. The vocals are in much the same boat, though I must begrudgingly admit possess a talent in delivery and arrangement which, while basically unremarkable in any other circumstance, is so far in excess of the rest of the music that it might as well be the divine fucking voice of Christ itself through its heady juxtaposition.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm more offended by: the dawdling, awe-inspiringly phoned-in power metal passages, or the sneering, self-indulgent prog rock. The former are frustratingly boring through their sheer pointlessness and utter inability to convey any sort of feeling or motion, but the latter are more overtly antagonistic in their preening, "bet you don't remember THIS" ripoffs of every major prog artist that anyone reading this can probably recall. Really, though, it's the combination of the two which makes this so unspeakably odious, because the razor-sharp delineations between the prog and power metal infuse the album with a perpetual sense of false hope. When the band so clunkily and abruptly shifts gears between power and prog, you can't help but think it's going to offer a reprieve from what's already been going on, but all you find is a different but equally excruciating variety of torture. There's not a single moment on this disc that represents any sort of creative glimmer or even coincidental bit of charm. It's almost staggeringly consistent in just how much it manages to fucking suck throughout every moment of its running time, to the point where I'm almost forced to conclude that this is a deliberately designed "fuck you" to any potential listener. It's quite literally Occam's Razor in action. The mind fucking reels at the implications.

The truly reprehensible part about this album, though, is that despite the venom I've unleashed on it over the past six paragraphs, it actually doesn't deserve that sort of energy. "Infernal" manages to suck horribly in that incredibly distinct yet wholly abstract way that defies any sort of legitimate explanation. I can't point at anything in particular; it's just a systemic failure at literally every level of the album, all the way down to the bullshit, slapped-together cover art. Over the years, I've come to despise mediocre music tremendously more than actively abhorrent music; the abhorrent is rarely arrived at out of laziness or a lack of creativity. "Infernal," though, represents what is in essence the nadir of a person's possible artistic output: the opportunity to create something of import squandered in favor of cliche and convenience. I'm going to buy a gun and put it in my fucking mouth.

Fall of the Leafe - Aerolithe (2007)

Spoiler

I... don't even know where to begin. Fall Of The Leafe's 'Aerolithe' is so horrifically embarrassing an album that it literally makes me grimace with shame while listening to it. Having never heard the band before this, I can safely say that I would murder every man, woman, child and farm animal in the world with my bare hands in order to never hear this again. 'Aerolithe' is the sort of album that would, upon being played for a priest, make him lift his rosary high into the air and then cast it to the ground, his soul shattered with the confirmation that there in fact is no god. In most circumstances I would find this to be a pleasing reaction, but this album has made me question my very purpose on earth and ask myself whether I am willing to go on in a world with things as horrible as this. The very presence of 'Aerolithe' in the world casts a cold, dark shadow on all that is good, causing the eyes of children to boil in their sockets and dogs to spontaneously combust in pure, unbridled terror.

If I was forced to attribute a single adjective to this album, it would be the word 'gay'. Fall Of The Leafe's music, at least on this album, is spectacularly, enormously, monolithically gay in ways described only in scrolls thought to have been destroyed in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. I have no idea how anyone in their right mind could call this heavy metal, or even significantly influenced by the genre. Even the most abrasive moments could easily appear on your average rock radio station. This is poppy to an insane degree and it makes even the most tame and accessible heavy metal look like Vlad Fucking Tepes in comparison. The only hint of 'metal' on this record is occasional double bass, some (very) brief tremolo riffs, and mildly harsh vocals that are more palatable to the musically conservative than your average Linkin Park record. The vast, vast majority of the music here is pure, poppy radio rock that would offend essentially no one, so tepid are the tracks on 'Aerolithe'.

Now, unlike many metalheads, I don't have a problem with rock music on principle. I like a great deal of it, grew up with it, go to rock concerts, etc. However, there's a thin line between rock music that is dramatic, emotional, even feminine, and what we have here. As stated before, 'Aerolithe' is fundamentally gay in stunning fashion, and overblows every display of emotion into a mockery of whatever the root feeling was. The guitars play riffs more sugary and accessible than Nightwish (and composed of even more hopelessly predictable chord structures), the drums are basic rock beats 'spiced up' with the addition of a second bass drum, and the keyboards (omnipresent and lurking like a great faggy vulture in the sky) mostly echo the guitars or use terrible 'electronic' effects stripped from the latest awful eurobeat single. However, none of this even remotely matches the utter humiliation that stems from the vocals of the war criminal known as Tuomas Tuominen.

No, he's not 'bad' in the traditional sense, but nothing on this record is. The agonizing hilarity of his vocal performance stems from the incredible melodrama that he inserts into every single line of cheesy-ass lyrics. Imagine, if you will, bleeding to death from a massive puncture wound in your thigh on the side of the road, and in the few brief, precious seconds of your life, a Band-Aid truck passes by. The final hacking, sputtering, bitter laugh that escapes your lips in that situation is the only sound that accurately describes Tuominen's performance. Every word has some level of absurd rock vibrato, and the content seems to alternate between emulation of Bon Jovi, Eddie Vedder, Sully Erna, and a moocow. Yes, a moocow. Tuomas Tuominen, for the record, at points on 'Aerolithe', sounds like a fucking moocow.

The music is catchy. Yes, many of the melodies on this record are pleasing and stick with you. But you see, the simplest pop melodies really are good regardless of whether it's quality music or not, so having a few pleasing moments of such hopelessly populist music really has no reflection on the band itself. Additionally, the concept of something being 'catchy' is something that needs to be reevaluated. Simply because something manages to be catchy does not represent any sort of quality. Case in point: the Macarena. Numa Numa. A dozen offhand Simple Plan songs. The Ebola virus is extremely catchy, but it is DISPLEASING, regardless of how well it sticks to you while it liquefies your organs. So, yes, Fall Of The Leafe is catchy, but instead of liquefying your internal organs, it merely does it to your brain and possibly any male genitalia you may so happen to possess.

'Aerolithe' is unbelievably awful and unbelievably gay. Please, for the sake of all that is good about heavy metal or music in general, don't listen to this album. If you feel the need to buy it to complete your Fall Of The Leafe collection, feel free, but don't listen to it. Simply do whatever you can to avoid exposing yourself to this ridiculous, soul-crushing album. I took one for the team so you don't. Excuse me while I go nail myself to the fucking cross.

Total Death - Desolate Recollections (2007)

Spoiler

I am forcibly REVOKING Total Death's name. I am revoking because there is nothing Total nor Death about Total Death. Partial Life would be a more appropriate name. This is far too half-assed to be Total, and far too wimpy to be Death, and it's not energetic enough to be Full Life, so Partial Life it is. 'Desolate Recollections' is gay gay gay gay gay and I have no idea why American Line Productions, well known for carrying excellent death and black metal artists like Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis and Yaotl Mictlan, would actually choose to release an album as dumb, awkward, unmetal, and embarrassing as this. There is no rational way that they can justify SUPPORTING this kind of thing, even if it will probably sell a trillion copies and be heralded as progressive genius and blah blah blah it still sucks.

Okay, so the most metal parts of this album make Nightwish look like fucking Dying Fetus in comparison, that's how soft they are. By the most UTTERLY liberal stretch of the imagination, you could ALMOST call the heaviest parts of this melodic death (they feature double bass and unclean vocals that are slightly lower than conversational), but the vast majority of the album is softer than that. Now I'm not going to sit here and say that heaviness is a prerequisite for metal (well, yeah, I will when it's supposed to be DEATH METAL, but still), but you go waaay too far when half the material on your CD is, no shit, soft rock and roll. I'm not kidding. 'Out Of Here, Near You' is a soft rock song with about 30 seconds of double bass and somewhat harsh vocals. 'Pleasure Remains Pain' is the same way. 'Insolent World' is just some electronic beats with a POWERFUL POLITICAL STATEMENT in the form of George W. Bush samples. And beyond this stuff, the rest of the material is an incredibly soft, boring breed of modern heavy metal.

I suppose the most amazing thing is that a lot of the incredibly soft material on this record doesn't even manage to be tuneful. Half the riffs seriously make no goddamn sense on any melodic level, which is kind of a problem when you're playing cuddly rock/metal. I wouldn't have nearly as much bitterness towards this if the band was actually competent at writing soft rock. Soft rock isn't bad. There are plenty of pop artists who, despite their inherent gayness, can write a catchy tune and make it stick. They can write songs that manage to be good regardless of what your tastes typically are. Partial Life CAN'T EVEN DO THIS. So let's see what Partial Life CAN'T do. One: They can't play any particularly extreme breed of metal. Two: they can't play gentle, cuddly metal. Three: they can't play soft rock. So what CAN this band do? I have no idea, because whatever it is, it never shows up on THIS CD, so I'm pretty sure it's entirely absent if the best outro track they could think of was TECHNO BEATS AND A GEORGE W. BUSH SAMPLE.

This is terrible and American Line Productions should be ashamed. I have a huge feeling that this was some bid at mainstream success for both band and label, and that the band originally played extreme metal. Or at least something more extreme than this. This album is terrible and every single copy of 'Desolate Recollections' should be impaled on stakes and arranged around the country of Ecuador as a warning to all.

The Agonist - Once Only Imagined (2007)

Spoiler

The psychology of the metalhead is a curious one indeed. We have a culture that is at once completely sure of its superiority to every other and is yet completely hypocritical when it comes to this concept. The fact is that metalheads are pretty stupid as a whole because people are pretty stupid as a whole; the average metalhead is MAYBE two IQ points above the average person in general. And yet nearly ever metalhead is completely convinced of his mental triumph over every other person in the world, despite how frequently and brutally his delusion is proved to be otherwise.

And then comes the curious issue of women in metal. I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that metal is almost assuredly the most overwhelmingly masculine genre of music currently in existence. Additionally, I doubt anyone would disagree that at least some level of misogyny is accepted as a standard component of the community. These combined factors makes being a woman that is a fan or musician of heavy metal a more difficult prospect than it probably should be, forcing such a woman to 'prove' herself as a true fan of the music. It is a struggle for many of these women with a legitimate love of the music to display themselves as serious fans and artists, and not merely in it for a grab at fame, cash, or trendiness.

Now, I wonder how many women think that they'll be accepted into the community with creatures like Alissa White-Gluz, vocalist of The Agonist spearheading such an entry. Yes, women in metal want to be respected for their artistic contributions, not looked on as objects or novelties. So why, then, do the female metalheads of the world not cry out when they see something like this: (http://www.live-metal.net/pic_agonist.jpg)? Surely, a picture and article like this completely remove all credibility from such a band that would so obviously use physical features to attract fans; and yet, the women of the world stay strangely silent when they see this parody of femininity being paraded about as something 'new' and 'edgy'.

Let's break down the personality of Alissa White-Gluz into the series of meaningless attributes that she possesses.

First: she is ostensibly straightedge and professes to be playing in a 'pure' heavy metal band. I'm not going to say such a thing is impossible, but straightedge, most certainly a community with a decided foothold in the hardcore community, is most certainly a dodgy thing to be in the metal scene.

Second: she's the lead vocalist and plays no instrument. We've seen dozens of these in the metal scene, lending their 'angelic' clean vocals to bands that would be otherwise completely ignored. We, meaning the collective metal scene, are completely tired of clean female vocalists and would prefer never to see one again. The aesthetic has been beaten more severely than the very deadest of horses, and most of the time these vocals are poorly employed (like, say, on 'Once Only Imagined' by The Agonist, fronted by Alissa White-Gluz).

Three: "It is extremely rare to find an up-and-coming metal band taking strong political stands, much less one that’s led by a dominating, beautiful, edgy female. But it is exactly this unique dynamic that led Century Media Records to sign Montreal’s THE AGONIST (formerly The Tempest) to a worldwide deal. This quartet delivers introspective, scathing lyrics, and their debut album Once Only Imagined, which is set for a summer release, will definitely catch people’s attention.

Vocalist Alissa White-Gluz’s vegan roots fuel her need to promote the protection of the planet and its inhabitants, and she does so through this outlet. Along with guitarist Danny Marino, bassist Chris Kells and drummer Simon McKay, each member brings their own rich musical backgrounds to the table, creating the perfect expression of melody and madness. Make no mistake, this is a straight-up metal band that holds nothing back with one goal in mind: to make music that is as catchy as it is heavy; as sweet as it is loud; and as angry as it is melancholy." -The Agonist's official Myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/theagonist

I have a powerful desire to let these words speak for themselves, but I fear I must add my own input. Apparently these days the best way to express your political and philosophical views is to sing in a shitty metalcore band signed to Century Media. Of course, why would one think that there might be a better way to gain people's attention on important environmental and societal issues than by playing terrible, mediocre metalcore on a major record label! What sort of madness have I been thinking? Yes, 'Once Only Imagined' is most certainly the album that will cause every Amazonian rainforest-clearer to stare incredulously at their bulldozer's and finally say, "Hey, maybe we've been doing the wrong thing here!"

This band, this album, and most importantly, Alissa White-Gluz, is completely and utterly full of self-important shit. Alissa White-Gluz appeared on Canadian Fucking Idol. That should tell you everything in one sentence.

I feel no pity for those stupid enough to actually believe any of the retarded tripe that this bitch (I dare not use the term 'woman', as that conveys some level of respect) spews out on all possible forums. The Agonist is a marketing gimmick, using just another mildly attractive female vocalist to titillate the fourteen year old boys of the world to open their wallets (and their zippers as well, most likely). There is nothing even remotely genuine about this release; every aspect of it is completely and utterly artificial and should be condemned by all those that respect heavy metal, hardcore, rock, or any of the genres that this fetid CD draws from. This is a fraud on the most profound levels, an exploitation of women, metal and truth in every possible aspect. The Agonist is a blind, idiot mockery of everything artistic, genuine and unique in the world, and for the sake of the music and way of life we love, their condemnation must be screamed from every rooftop and message board possible.

Activism does not take the form of a handful of Myspace banners. The 'activism' that The Agonist espouses is false and a complete scam, designed merely to make the band appear more genuine and 'edgy' to the metal-buying masses. Yet I have no doubt that the majority of people out there are just idiotic enough to buy this music, whether it's to masturbate frantically over the liner notes, to 'support the cause, man', or to actually listen to this and pretend to enjoy it in some pathetic bid to appear 'open-minded'. Nothing that this band says or does reflects anything even remotely tethered to reality; it is all carefully planned out by the marketers of our friends Century Media.

In addition, in case the above reasons are not enough, The Agonist plays terrible, shitty music. It's a tepid combination of Flyleaf-style alternative rock, mallcore, and some nutless breed of metalcore, and the overall fusion is begging for forcible euthanasia. The riffs are all stolen from a thousand other generic metalcore bands, the drumming is utterly sterile rock beats with the occasional sprinkling of double bass, and the vocals are a combination of irritating cleans and godawful attempts at the emulation of Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy. Song structures are agonizingly simplistic verse-chorus affairs that do nothing new and nothing well. The production is clean. Isn't that wonderful.

The simpering attempts at 'breakdowns' convey only the most pathetic and stale form of 'intensity', the kind that thinks boring 16th note patterns and 'growls' (if you can call them that) make the music 'heavy'. The lyrics are idiotic. The melodies are forced. Every element of this album is designed to sell to stupid, stupid people, and I have no doubt that it will succeed in an incredible way to ensnare the feeble-minded of the world into buying it. This is complete, unmitigated trash, with literally nothing to recommend for it on any conceivable level. It has no heart, no passion, nothing but an endless zombie march in the pursuit of more cash from the unwitting consumer.

Prove me wrong, metalheads. Refuse to buy this music. Show its lies to the public. Keep your friends from buying it, keep random people in record stores from buying it. Do everything you can to prevent the success of this band and the defeat of all the things we love about metal and artistry in general. Credit this review as being originally written at www.vampire-magazine.com and repost it in every conceivable location: you have my express permission. All I ask is that you do your best to prevent this band from spreading their offal any further than they already have.

Death to false metal.

[Ilya3000]

1. What do you like about metal?
I simply like metal in itself, the sound of riffs and blast beats, these things make me resonate physically, no other genre does that to me, not even dance-whatever. The somewhat problem is that I'm oftenly unable to listen to metal songs that don't do that to me, or even worse, that try to put me to sleep, so, overall, audible catchiness (but not exactly hi-fi), is a #1 thing.
I like that in this genre, unlike many others, songs more often tend to progress in time, rather than when song ends the same way and mood it started (not that it's REGULAR, but I have a feeling that other genres don't really have this at all).
I like themes and aesthetics that bands in this genre arise. I'm not a real fan of MUH PROTEST in metal, music more often needs to be about something, rather than against something. I know that some people react (positively or negatively) to MUH SATANISM or MUH GORE, but I just ignore these things, if the music is good, if it's not, than it's just another minus to the pile.

2. How did you get into metal?
My father showed me Rammstein, then I've found other bands that I've thought are industrial metal, but later found out that in reality that's called NDH, then I've just started to listening to everything else available to the general public, and I mostly do that to this day, and still, there are tons of tons of things I've yet to listen, for example Metallica discography (or any other classic band in its entirety), it's mostly due to me listening to the same things until I start to bleed, then I take a break, and then start anew, so my discoveries often appear in these breaks. It's a rare treasure if I like entire band's discography, or at least entire albums, rather than individual songs.
I didn't really listen to extreme subgenres of metal, that I've considered noise, until I've got into university. I don't remember how exactly, but I've stumbled upon this album, in the time keller synth genre came to existence, and through it I was introduced to black metal, death metal, and so on, I've finally understood them as music.

Since then, I remain a huge fan of black + electronics, though many kvltists consider presense of keys impure. Maybe that preference is formed due to a lot of Rammstein in my early days.

3. What are your favorite sub-genre(s) of metal and which (if any) can you not get into?

#1 of all time is black with keys/keller synth. I really do find classic (trve) black metal boring too often than I may be should, but the whole thing of being deliberately primitive and unlistenable is not for me, after all, I think music should contain at least some kind of melody. And the addition of keys/electronics perfectly fixes that issue! Tracks with keys become alive, and progress over time regularly, the author has very little temptation to smack 2 riffs on a 6 minute track and call it a day.

Spoiler

#2 of all time is NDH (industrial metal). I could say that it's like #1, but lighter. However, the real advantage, that is not available in #1 is a coherent vocal. I do think that most of the time, all screams and growls sound the same, no difference between bands. And while NDH is still metal + electronics, vocal is a game changer, no matter the language, english/german/finnish.

Spoiler

What I can't digest to this day no matter how I try is anything amelodic. This has 2 extremes: first is drum cacophony (whatever-grind) and whatever that tries to be noise/power electronics. The second extreme is everything where tracks consist of 1 note per hour: doom, stoner, or, god forbid, drone. I do know people that seriously listen to this on a regular basis, but I don't understand it at all, the first extreme makes my ears physically bleed, and the second puts me to sleep with extreme boredome.