The music industry snags a clue

Friday 19 March 2010 at 11:15 am For the last five years, they've been sitting around wringing their hands saying, "MP3s are coming, what do we do?" In the meantime, many people buy MP3s but even more do not because they know that if the place they bought them from goes bankrupt, they'll have DRM problems and will not be able to re-download those MP3s if their hard drive crashes or a virus eats their operating system.

But now, the industry is back in fighting form:

The Universal Music Group could rewrite U.S. music pricing when it tests a new frontline pricing structure, which is designed to get single CDs in stores at $10, or below.

Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company's Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.

To accommodate the lower pricing, UMG labels also plan to step up deluxe versions of albums that can sell at higher prices for the more devout music fans and collectors. - Billboard

They used to blow off the internet because it's for nerds, but that changed, and now everyone uses the intertard. Completely weird. But I digress.

The old days of the record industry were big profits. They got these fat profits by signing foolish people like Elvis Presley, Britney Spears and Michael Jackson and having them produce a slightly more quality version of really dumbed-down music. Then they got millions of people to buy it, and reaped record profits. Now, recording is easier and cheaper; you can do it at home and have it sound like a studio. CD pressing is cheaper. Even advertising is cheaper. But there's piracy among those who want very simple things. That means mass piracy of Britney Spears that affects her record sales because her album is most valuable when new, but not much of an effect on a band like Deicide, whose album "Legion" is immortal.

The new industry will be more niche sales, cheaper CDs, and more extras. Bands will record to tour and tour to eat. It's less of the Brave New World of the 1950-2005 record industry, and more of a dose of reality that was there all the time.

Birth A.D. to destroy hippie music festival

Tuesday 16 March 2010 at 11:07 pm

Take old thrash bands like DRI, SOD and throw in a dash of The Misfits, and you get Birth A.D. from Austin. They write short songs with punk/metal riff hybrids. They're funny and insightful. Even more, they scorn your civilization. They are a mocking voice of discrimination against stupidity.

And now, they're going to help destroy SXSW, the music festival in Austin. They're going to overturn the overflowing portapotties! Smash the overpriced drinks! Disruptive the self-indulgent, navel-gazing indie rock tripe that passes for "profound" among the clueless! And probably sodomize some eardrums.

They'll be a Headhunter's on Saturday, 3/20 at midnight. For more information, see the SXSW show directory or read the Examiner article.

When in hipster-infested, poseur-ridden, hippie-aggrandizing, ego-centric, egalitarian and oblivious Austin, don't get AIDS (there's really nothing else to recommend there, except maybe seeing the FREE Voivod show).

Cosmic Atrophy - Montis Ex Dementia

Thursday 04 March 2010 at 7:22 pm Cosmic Atrophy near completion of their second full length concept album, Montis Ex Dementia. Based on the work At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, the album will be available soon on Dark Descent Records, which is connected to the band.

Previous Cosmic Atrophy work sounded like a hybrid of Timeghoul, Demilich and first-album Incantation. Montis Ex Dementia backgrounds those elements to inject a hybrid of Carnage and Cadaver, with a focus on tempo changes foreshadowed by internal rhythm changes, and melodic riffs that complement each other en route to thunderous conclusions.

You can hear a full length song at the Cosmic Atrophy myAIDS. There's also an interview with Cosmic Atrophy and album close-up.

Two DIY Metal Books

Wednesday 24 February 2010 at 7:39 pm

Brief thoughts on two recent metal-related books, both small-print-run, DIY affairs:



A Salute to Heavy Metal Band Name Origins by Blair Gibson

Remember that book that was a list of every heavy metal band name gleaned from MySpace and Metal-Archives? You can get the real deal here instead: author Blair Gibson went out there to active bands and asked them to describe the origins of their names. And he gets them, time after time, for a fascinating study of detail that also reveals quite a bit about heavy metal. For example, the number of bands who picked word lengths and vowel distributions to make a good logo, or the number of tributes to earlier bands. Some stories are just bizarre and show us how bands ended up with enigmatic band names that are meaningless to the rest of us. Others make perfect sense and show a systematic approach to finding names that fit multiple criteria. For the casual reader, this book is probably doomed to the coffee table because it's so easy to read if you pick up and start on a random page, or skim for favorite bands. However, it provides such a rich background of insight that it will fascinate die-hard metalheads and rock historians alike.



Glorious Times: A Pictorial of the Death Metal Scene 1984 - 1991 by Alan Moses and Brian Pattison

For good or ill, there is an obvious old-school revival afoot. Amidst all the vinyl lust and reformation mania, the hocking of the dusted-off thoughts and artifacts of the first generation of death metal 'zine writers was probably an inevitability. Glorious Times, then, makes Alan Moses (Buttface 'zine) and Brian Pattison (Chainsaw Abortions 'zine) the trendsetters in what could easily become a highly active take on the metal nostalgia game (see the forthcoming Slayer 'zine compilation and excitement surrounding it for proof).

Despite the "pictorial" label, Glorious Times instead features dozens of exclusive, band-submitted narratives and pictures supported by the authors' collections of rare photographs. The tales look to be included in the book warts-and-all -- editing, grammar and spelling -- as submitted by the contributors in text form, and were solicited from a number of closely-related US bands, with a few stragglers from Europe called on to fill in the gaps. This creates something of a thread to be followed: one sees several names and faces pop up throughout the book regardless of the focus at any given point, which enforces a sense of camaraderie and makes a lot of the tour horror stories and rehearsal anecdotes that much more personally appealing and amusing.

While the above makes for enjoyable casual reading, the layout is unfortunately disjointed, rendering the "pictorial" side of the book distracting from the literary effect. The photo subjects are mostly well chosen, and the originals of high quality, but many of the images are bafflingly distorted from their original aspect ratios, are confusingly labeled or are oriented hastily with little regard to their context in the space of the book. It's really too bad, as it undermines a lot of the documentary potential; a bit of caution with the aesthetic aspect, particularly for such an emphatically visual work, and this could have been legendary. Instead, it comes across as a fine idea with some haphazard execution that hurts its lifelong bookshelf appeal.

Burzum - Belus

Friday 19 February 2010 at 12:14 pm

ANUS came out a couple weeks ago with a giant defecation on the new Burzum. People immediately complained that we hadn't heard it, were being judgmental, and all sorts of silly stuff. What they didn't realize is that you can hear a lot of things without officially owning them or getting them from the label, but you're not going to do anything to hurt your sources. All of that changed last night, of course, with the official leak of the Belus master and 2LP version.

You want the tl;dr on the new Burzum? "Sounds good, soulless and disorganized." This album has no direction but Varg is so adept at making simple riffs pretty that you want to drink it down. Cold, sweet, vast in flavor like a Snapple -- but after listening to it a few times, you end up thinking: why am I doing this? This is no different than watching TV, going to a megachurch to hear about my immortal soul, or buying wallpaper. It's pretty but has no direction so it ends up being like all other drone albums: a basic theme that picks up detail as repetition increases, then trails off into nowhere.

If you want music to replicate the experience of watching cheerleaders attempt to act out Macbeth, this might be for you, but not likely. Riffs are based on simple harmony and well-composed, but go nowhere, incorporating at random influences from Russian black metal, Ukranian black metal, German speed metal, Terrorizer and random death metal. A good deal of this shows the tripartite influence of Swedish melodic death metal, Slavic drone metal, and the American style of black metal flavored indie rock. The first track "borrows" the melody from the title track of one of the keyboard albums. Two of these tracks are obvious Uruk Hai do-overs.

The final track sounds like Sunn o))) doing their version of Burzum. Makes me wonder if the label and his Russian handlers didn't sit him down with recent black metal blockbusters and try to get the trained monkey to make his own version. The musical ability here is precocious as always, but the raw material fed into the machine is gunk, so what's output is really well-adorned gunk.

When you hear it, notice how simple the riffs are relative to the fills, trills and decorations that space them. It's like dressing up a turd until it looks like a Faberge egg, from a distance. But when you get close, or listen to it a dozen times, you'll see the difference.

Thrash revival

Tuesday 16 February 2010 at 08:25 am

Most people don't know the story of thrash, or how in the 1980s, an unlikely group made some of the most vital music in metal. And as of last year, it has come back. With a vengeance.

• DRI


• COC


• SOD


• MDC


• Cryptic Slaughter


• Fearless Iranians From Hell


• Chronical Diarrhoea


• Dead Horse

Bands to keep an eye on as this art form surges back to life.

More on the Texas church arson-black metal connection

Sunday 14 February 2010 at 09:24 am

Nine churches have burned in Texas. The suspects have upside-down cross tattoos and long hair. Authorities aren't saying a thing. More black metal church arsons, this time in the USA?

Texas church arsons inspired by black metal

Metal on piano

Wednesday 10 February 2010 at 7:55 pm People always told me that I liked metal because of the sound. Well -- that was true; however, it wasn't the whole story. I liked the music too. When I got further into the genre, people would bring me the LATEST COOLEST THING EVAR and when I figured out that 99% of those were soulless shallow trash with some nifty quirk or aesthetic tacked on, I started telling people that good music was production-agnostic. You could play it on a kazoo, on a synthesizer, or on a tuba, and good music will still have whatever it was made you like it.

Here in my view is the proof -- complex metal classics played on piano, sounding like a progressive rock interpretation of classical music:

• Immolation - Close to a World Below


• Metallica - To Live is To Die


• Black Sabbath - Don't Stop (Too Late)


• Metallica - Orion

Although Varg Vikernes is normally a bad source for information about reality, he did tell us how he saw his music:

When forced to take a stand I say today that it's metal music. Metal with roots in classical music. - Interview With Raped Ass of Christ 'Zine

Metal with roots in classical music. Classical music, most like the Romantic and modernist kind, with its roots in traditional music and transcendental thinking. And you can hear the proof of it when you translate your metal to piano playing.

More Texas churches burn

Wednesday 10 February 2010 at 07:05 am Now we know what Varg Vikernes was doing when he was supposed to be making quality music:

The East Texas faith community is on alert again after two more churches burn to the ground. There have been nine suspicious church fires since the beginning of the year -seven have already been ruled arson.

"It could be one person, but we feel it's probably more than one," said Alexander.

"There are a lot of things that haven't been stolen that could have been," said Alexander…it's obvious that whoever's doing it, the intent is to destroy the church," said

"It's a Baptist, a Methodist, what type of church...black, white, it's a church and they're burning them," said Smith County Fire Marshal Jim Seaton.

KLTV

What they're alluding to is that many church fires occur to cover up thefts, for insurance money or to gain pity for the persecuted church or its congregation. This means that of all the church arsons out there, very few are actually ideologically motivated. This appears to be different.

El metal de muerte en Español

Tuesday 09 February 2010 at 08:22 am If you are a Spanish-language speaker, or want to improve your Spanish as a second language, consider these:

• Metaleros: Jairson Bathory translates and augments DLA texts in Spanish


• El Negro Metal: Flavio Belisario translates and updates classic DLA texts on black metal.

Please notify us of any others.