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About these Reviews
Some reviews are judgmental, and assess whether or not a band is good; these reviews are descriptive and attempt to convey in words an understanding of how a band's art operates. Our goal is not to describe exactly how something "sounds," because aesthetic conceals music; the real music is the composition: melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and structure. If a band is here, it is because it is important in some way and must be described. Will you like it? Beats the hell out of me, but it was important.
This does not actually reflect the "taste" of the reviewer but his ability to assess importance. There are bands here that have received excellent reviews that I will not listen to again because they conflict with my personal taste, and some of the bands described for all of their primitive glory and failings here ("negative" reviews) are personal favorites. I don't have logical reasons for liking certain music, but for every band here, there is a logical reason in the context of the history of this music why it is included.
Among other things, this makes the Dark Legions Archive difficult for people accustomed to the normal way of things to understand. I am not sure I want to mount an attack on the normal way of doing things, but while it works for connecting fans to current music of interchangeable importance, it does not work for describing an artistic genre and its evolution and more importantly, its relevance to our lives -- all art is a communication of experience, and through experience comes an immersive learning which has no counterpart in the linear world of academic study.
When you read William Faulkner, you understand not only what happened to the South but how something similar can happen in your soul -- history, psychology, philosophy and socialization are united in an experience of the type of structure described. A collapsing South is similar to a flagging self-confidence; a financial takeover of a time-honored position is similar to a loss of heroic motives in the face of asking a pretty girl to a high school dance. Most music is there to keep people amused and give them something to talk about between puberty and their first career promotion; some music is art. In the same way, most paintings are designed to make a room prettier, but a few tell us something eternal.
This archive treats underground metal, thrash (a separate genre) and its influences as an art form. This is done from a belief that these musics, among others, aspire to something higher than entertainment/distraction or amusement/decoration, and therefore, should be approached with an open mind for what we can learn from them. The majority of fans, of course, want us to stop this and to treat this music like television programming: a way to pass the time without noticing you're alive. Of course, the majority of fans, like the majority of people, lack judgment and personal honor, so anything such as this archive that asserts the possibility of such things offends them; what is more threatening than the knowledge that one's life could possibly be better, if one were to bestir oneself? -- such awareness points out where our own moral failings and no external force stand between us and greatness. It's easier, the crowd has found, to forget greatness entirely and simply accept the predictable because it doesn't threaten our moral selves. Lie back and enjoy it.
The Dark Legions Archive won't. From the early days of this music, it was apparent to us that this music was something different than the norm; this music is not all our reviewers listen to, but it's the only stuff on the playlist that needs this treatment. In these pages you will find descriptions of the different ways this overall aim has been interpreted, and a description of how it has changed and become more precise over time; that isn't to say that it has "progressed" (as if adding a flute and diva to death metal makes it of a higher consciousness than before) but that it has "evolved" -- and in many cases, devolved.
This project began in 1987 with the convergence of bulletin boards (the Metal AE 201 879 6668) and early metal newspapers like Rivethead (Houston, TX) in the minds of these writers; we realized a need for an academic, critical, emotional-psychological study of this music instead of the "buy this, it killz/iz brutal" type writing seen at the time. We recognize this site will never be the "most popular" metal site on the internet, nor will it be lucrative like the endless books about the glory of rock music. Our goal is to describe art and learn from it. That sort of reverence will never be as popular as an abusive attitude toward our world which allows us to belittle it and thus feel more important, personally, in comparison.
Our view is that honesty is a rare but essential component of life, and that those who are more honest display the potential to transcend those things that make life tedious and to achieve greater things. History tends to agree with us, in that most great artists, thinkers, and leaders have forsaken temporary enjoyment and ego-stimulus in favor of a transcendent view by which they celebrate higher values instead of trying to hide from lower ones. In a microscopic way, this archive is dedicated toward advancing that cause through the art of metal -- and to all who can see our path, we hail.
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Thursday 17 July 2008 at 10:45 am
Akhenaton - Divine Symphonies
I like this: it's martial ambient in the style of Lord Wind with distorted bass. But, it is very predictable. So very predictable. As a result, it is pleasant to listen to as background music. About track seven, it starts becoming gothic with guitars and lush keyboards and Sisters of Mercy vocals. I think they need to go back to the drawing board and put more music into this, because their heavy repetition (a) isn't layered and (b) does not consist of melodies that are all that exciting.
Ancestral - Avowed
Varg, this is your fault. Yours. These people are following your lead. You made it look so simple and now, it is. Trudge beat, open strumming while power chords undulate, and you can trick out a pop song into being like Burzum. The underlying writing on this demo is a lot like later Krieg, but even more poppy, and so it seems very emo when it emerges in quasi-metallized form. Again, like all covertly negative reviews, this one must contain the words "not badly executed, but lacking direction." This demo sodomizes a Macintosh.
Chronic Torment - Doomed
This isn't A+ material, but it's a solid B. Sounding like a cross between Merciless and Fester, it's heavy-metal and hardcore-tinged death metal in the Swedish style, with an affinity for fast riffs. You will hear nothing new on this CD, but unlike most of these discs, it has an attention span long enough to bond together simple songs over the course of a few riff changes and a verse-chorus devolution. It's not like the best of Swedish metal, which leaves the stupid rock'n'rollisms behind, but it's quite solid, with the same aggression appeal that made Verminous fun until it gave you a headache.
Chronic Torment - Dream of the Dead
Gosh, does everyone need to follow Immolation and Hail of Bullets? There's some completely great stuff on this album, but it gets ruined by the nu-MTVcore/metalcore trend of ranting, dead-on-the-beat chanting verses. These sound like a braindead zombie attempting to sodomize an iron lung, and have about as much musical importance to the listener as well. I think it's good if you want something angry-sounding in the background, like in a movie. They're very catchy, but mind-numbing. This CD reminds me of Comecon in that way: their heavy metal has blended into their hardcore, with no emo, but it's so bouncy and simple that I don't want to ever put it in again. That's said because some of the Bolt Thrower-style speed riffs, with two chords strummed fast in the background and melodic rhythm patterns picked over them, are great. Still a Merciless comparison, if Merciless listened to a lot of later Malevolent Creation and The Haunted. What a promising work, but awash in stuff designed to pander to blockheads.
Wednesday 16 July 2008 at 6:05 pm
People Can't Tell Surface From Essence
So as I travel the internet on random errands, I hear people talking about the new "underground" bands, which all sound like Blink 182 making atmospheric black metal. It's pretty sad, but these bands insist they're not retro while tossing together bits and pieces of the past, wrapping them around standard pop-punk, adding some emo and crust and a pinch of necro, and then thrusting it all forward with that bedroom blackmetal "truly too authentic to care" aesthetic. I've listened to well over a hundred such bands in the last week, and on every level -- musically, aesthetically, artistically -- they're close enough to identical. Even more, they have nothing of distinction about them, so why bother? "Metal for metal's sake" is a path to mediocrity.
Then there are people who love to bloviate on about the "undiscovered" past gems, which almost universally are third-stringers with no distinction. Their goal is to make you think they know something you don't. They think they get ahead in life by pushing others down, and not simply by achieving more, because the two aren't the same, even in a relative universe. One of these so-called gems is Fester - Winter of Sin, which I threw on a week ago and had to laugh at how consistent judgment can be. For a smart person, whether in 1995 or in 2008, this CD is crap.
It starts with heavy metal riffs done up like black metal, and gets worse from there. It's a salad of pieces from here and there with no real direction except vague Venom worship. Every bad cliche of heavy metal and death metal is in here, and there's no melody or structure to recommend it. What does it have going for it? To weak people, it seems like a good way to be important, knowing about this undiscovered masterpiece etc. Avoid.
Monday 14 July 2008 at 4:58 pm
Stentorian - Gentle Push to Paradise
The best comparison I can make with this is Sentenced's "North From Here" hybridized with Malevolent Creation. It's big, dumb heavy metal riffs and some guitar noodling that goes nowhere, so much so that you forget you're listening to something and it's not a flaky engine idling in the background.
Sulphur - Cursed Madness
We want to be Immolation, but we want black metal cliche too. Yet life goes on, far away from the speakers and, ...what was I saying? Oh, don't buy this CD.
Troglodytic - Promo 2004
Hi, we've collected a ton of cliches and roped them together with Garage Band. Worse than shit, because at least you can plant shit in your backyard and grow flowers. This CD made me want to kill myself... but I threw it away instead.
Utgard - Thrones and Dominions
Dark Funeral and Watain are sitting on a bus while Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger" is playing, and it runs into the back of a garbage truck. Nice speed, good aesthetic, good mastery of Darkthrone through "Total Death," but end result is totally pointless. What's wrong with listening to the original albums that do this better?
Walknut - Graveforests and Their Shadows
Why does all of this stuff sound the same? Drudkh, Nokturnal Mortum and every NSBM band from eastern europe do this slow melody of three or four notes that's half-lullabye and half-affirming, aerobic exercise music. It's not bad; this is one of the better things to arrive lately, but it's completely without character, which makes it unlikely I'd listen to this again. Vaguely reminiscent of Gehenna's first album.
Wrath of the Weak - Alogon
This album was named after "a logon," because it's clearly destined for MySpace fame. These simple songs rely on a burly version of Burzum technique where layers of guitar and bass overwash, but unlike in Burzum, they're not playing anything inspiring. The result is droning dischord that neither enlightens, clarifies or distorts the senses in any interesting way. If you can play drums while listening to a jet engine, the result is the same.
Aäkon Këëtrëh - Journey into the Depths of Night
Some people always thought black metal should sound like Abruptum, which to me sounds like art school rejects taking on John Cage under the influence of cheap drugs, maybe mixed with Bondo or Killz for added kick. Lots of theatrical stuff, really simple music, goes absolutely nowhere and seems to think it's making a big splash by being anti-music. Well, if you're trapped in Guantanamo Bay, maybe this would be acceptable listening but everyone else has something better to do. A boy's choir from a home for the chronically retarded could do better.
Hail of Bullets - Of Frost and War
Do you like Verminous and Repugnant? This is similar: it claims to be old school death metal but it has more in common with metalcore tricked out with an extra dose of bad heavy metal riffs. High-intensity production and relentless attack makes this seem like it might be interesting, but then you realize that it goes nowhere when you subtract the effect these riffs had on you when the original artists played them, and that the constant drive/bouncy drums of a metalcore band make it both exhausting and tedious. Vocals are good, but CD is pointless.
Heresi - Psalm II - Infusco Ignis
They probably play this for suicide bombers. I could see blowing myself up to make this end. These guys can play their instruments, and production is good, and they've mastered the basic songwriting to make it seem good, but... and again, but... they pick very obvious patterns and then songs undergo no change except the basic demands of manipulating consciousness to make something sound good. "Now an uplifting part, then back to minor!" Just when you think we're going black metal, suddenly the bouncy heavy metal riff off a KISS album appears, and then more parts barf up, regurgitated from metal genres past in no particular order... OK, please no. I would rather listen to the soccer moms of America trying to cover songs from the first two Destruction LPs than this vomitous horror of good-but-not-good-at-all. Nilla, please.
The Howling Void - Megaliths of the Abyss
Neat, a Skepticism clone. But without anything really unique going on. It moves forward so glacially that you forget what just happened, so all you hear is the simultaneous ringing of keyboards and guitar drone, with a snare-bass plodding in the background. Unfortunately, it is also all too predictable even if you speed it up. And it takes forever to end. Forever, forever. This CD is better than most but still unremarkable.
Thursday 10 July 2008 at 10:17 am
Classical music offers what everyone secretly wishes metal would: an unbroken cultural tradition untamed by the modern whore, untouchable by the mediocre tools who seem to thrive in our industrial cities.
Here's a few favorites:
1. Brahms, Johannes - Get your Romanticism on. Flowing, diving, surging passages which storm through tyrannical opposition to reach some of the most Zen states ever put to music. 4 Symph. (2CD)
2. Respighi, Ottorino - Italian music is normally inconsequential. This has an ancient feeling, a sense of weight that can only be borne out in an urge to reconquest the present with the past. Pines, Birds, Fountains of Rome
3. Saint-Saens, Camille - Like DeBussy, but with a much wider range, this modernist Romantic rediscovers all that is worth living in the most warlike and bleak of circumstances. Symph. 3
4. Bruckner, Anton - Writing symphonic music in the spirit of Wagner, Bruckner makes colossal caverns of sound which evolve to a sense of great spiritual contemplation, the first "heaviness" on record. Romantic Symphony
5. Schubert, Franz - A sense of power emerging from darkness, and a clarity coming from looking into the halls of eternity, as translated by the facile hand of a composer who wrote many great pieces before dying young. Symph. 8 & 9
6. Paganini, Niccolo - Perhaps the original Hessian, this long-haired virtuoso wore white face paint, had a rumored deal with the devil, and made short often violent pieces that made people question their lives and their churches. 24 Caprices
Sunday 06 July 2008 at 2:14 pm
Saturday, September 6, 2008
AVERSE SEFIRA (http://www.aversesefira.com/)
Necrite (http://www.myspace.com/necrite)
Blashyrkh (http://www.myspace.com/blashyrkhofficial)
Ancient Grave (http://www.myspace.com/ancientgrave)
@ The Black Castle / 855 W. Manchester / LA, CA 90044 (http://www.myspace.com/theblackcastleusa)
Sunday 06 July 2008 at 10:13 am
In 1992 Vikernes under the artist name Burzum released his first album. Now he has plans to release his seventh. The last album came in 1999. In addition, he finished writing the script for his autobiography. "It will work out a few new details about the killings," he said, "which were never focused on before. But I will wait to tell the story in completion."
Seventh Burzum Album in the Works
Friday 04 July 2008 at 5:43 pm
MP3s are an invitation to try before you buy. If you're like me, and everyone I deem to be a good person and so desire as a friend, you listen for months or years and then you buy the CD when you can -- if it's available, which in metal is far from guaranteed.
Periodically, on a rainy afternoon, I go through the music as I do mindless tasks like fixing scripts and HTML. These mindless tasks are perfect because they put me in an ornery mood, at which point I have no tolerance for music that is more annoyance than beauty. Even ugliness can be beautiful in the hands of an artist -- watch Apocalypse Now if you don't believe me, or listen to the "defeat" sections of Beethoven's third symphony. I'm not responsible for your tears that make you look like a girly man.
But it's the right mood to consider something you might listen to for years in the context of a high annoyance situation like mindless tasks. It's like being tired at the end of a day: you say exactly what you mean, uncensored. With music, you get in touch with exactly how little you care about stuff far from what you want, even if normally you'd be feeling obligated to listen to it because it's musically advanced, some critic likes it, all your friends like it, etc.
I've been rooting out some turds. I take no joy in this, but I take great joy in having them gone. That's less of my time thrown down a black hole of dysfunction and disorganization, the two creators of really bad music or worse -- music that is halfway to bad, so completely ambiguous in its presentation. Most people are so cowed by the social factors mentioned above that they keep listening, bovine erotic, and never manage to articulate their own voice or even a moment's sense and say, "Actually, this doesn't suck, but it's not good enough to fascinate me, so why not throw it out, with last year's failed relationship and my old textbooks from classes I hated and my tax documents?" Get the crap out of your life and you have space for new things to do.
Arsis - A Diamond for Disease
Oh no, it's the whisper-voiced rushing death/black assault. After a promising intro, and forty seconds of two-chord jazz-inspired rhythm riffing, suddenly we get the synthesized whisper and a break to a guitar fill that sounds like it's from the book of minor pentatonic scale variations commonly used by jazz/fusion bands to distract audiences from that moment when an overblown, pretentious song really begins to fuckin' drag... and that's what this EP does, except at high speed. The problem is that there's no concentration on songs or ideas as a whole, so you get these budget riffs made all technical and then little diversions, but nothing ever comes into its own. Nice try guys, but next time, use notecards to organize and concentrate on having a song make a difference to the listener, not just teach them fret muting technique.
Friday 04 July 2008 at 5:30 pm
Aarni - Bathos
People can't stop trying to be clever in lieu of having actual content.
I can't repeat that enough, but it's the pattern for everything gone wrong in this world. If you have nothing actual to state, other than that you want to use your music to get ahead, dick around with the aesthetics until you can trick out the same drivel and claim it's unique.
Aarni tries to do a minimalist-progressive implementation of the kind of music somewhere between Dweezil Zappa and Supuration: prog-ish, rock-ish, but contemplative music. Only Aarni doesn't have anything to complement but its own fist-gripped penis. So we can get wank. Pretentious wank. Lots of demi-acoustic interludes sliding into bad jazz-influenced rhythm riffing, like Meshuggah meets Barry Manilow at a Spirogyra concert.
I have a new suggestion for all these people who live contentless lives: silence. Go to your job at a bank. Life is better that way for all of us.
Sunday 29 June 2008 at 12:00 pm
Experienced underground metal guru Mike Riddick (Yamatu, Equimanthorn, The Soil Bleeds Black) has launched a for-profit MP3-based label that sells MP3s, and sends promotional MP3s to zines and radio shows -- but somehow, he's not worried about MP3s "ruining the music business."
Mike Riddick Interview
Saturday 28 June 2008 at 3:57 pm
Ajattara - Itse, Aepere and Kalmanto: this is like metal bands who have failed since time immemorial (or 1970, take your pick). It's a bunch of well-known riff forms stitched together with rhythm, and skinned in lush layered vocals, keyboards and samples. Musically, indistinguishable from 1970s heavy metal, even if it has a black metal and doom aesthetic. Reminds me of later Cemetary. I can't listen to this shit.
Anti - The Insignificance of Life: Great name, great album name, more black metal/rock combo. They have Gorgoroth-ish technique, but all polished and bouncy like later Ancient. It's hard to argue against as music, but as art, no presence and no direction.
Bergraven - Dodsvisioner: It's like Comecon mixed with later Samael, lots of interesting background noises, and stompy riffs. It's catchy but it has no soul. I am worried that all the metal with balls has died. Take Vicodin, relax. Bergraven still sucks.
Fanisk - Noontide: These guys get the Hitler sample in early, so you might feel obligated to keep listening. Like Dimmu Borgir, the best part is the keyboards between black metal parts, which remind me of Gorgoroth's "Under the Sign of Hell" -- a lot of blatant chromatics and basic melodic minor noodling. Do I fucking care? delete, delete
Forefather - Steadfast: Vikingish metal that reveals its roots in power metal. Lots of cool guitar parts that don't add up to much, a very cheesy aesthetic, and a style of fast flexible lead rhythm shifts that reminds me of Enslaved, In Battle and Kvist. More organized than most, musically the most impressive thing I've heard recently, but it adds up to an aesthetic pile of confusion that narrates itself on a wander and then comes back to safe ground, only to effectively trail off.
Gorath - Misotheism: How do they keep coming up with these plastic bands? They have no souls. This is paint-by-numbers rock-blackmetal, with lots of frilly adornments and absolutely no direction. Also sounds very emo-influenced, musically. It's like a carnival of distraction with a plodding heartbeat and an IQ test with more red ink than black on it. Yuck.
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