H E I D E N L A R M

Metal E-Zine

Issue 1 / Number 1 
November 8, 2002

info: prozak@anus.com 
web: www.anus.com/metal/zine/

This is the first issue of Heidenlärm E-zine, in which we explore
death metal and black metal alongside ambient music, hardcore punk,
and other forms of alienated music. This can be downloaded in text
form or received via email (send a request to prozak@anus.com to be
added to our list). Our goal is to continue the mission of the Dark
Legions Archive in reviewing underground music in an analytical
fashion, except on a more timely basis. 

Contents:

Editorial 
Interviews 
Music 
Other Voices 
Playlists

Editorial
---------

Black Metal Proves Its Own Dogma

An amazing and horrifying aspect about life is how it will allow a
genre to prove itself correct through its own destruction, as if the
ultimate sacrifice somehow conveys a sense of having demonstrated the
totality of the point. The black metal genre has recently committed
suicide within a process describe by the conceptual framework in which
it began, illustrating without doubts the reasoning behind its
initially rigorous and elitist expression.

When the genre first split away from the normalcy of most metal music
in the middle 1980s with Bathory and Celtic Frost and Sarcofago, its
goal was to avoid what dragged most metal away from its highest
aspirations and turned it into generic party music of the
directionless hedonism and pointless conflict inherent to rock music.
From the start, the idea of a more extreme, rigorous and cold attitude
toward socialization and convenience was apparent. An austere
aesthetic; a relentless churning beat and primitive, gnarled riffing
defined the music, while topics such as Satan, war, Vikings and death
suggests a return to less socialized values in which death and life
had equal prominence.

This was not lost on the metal community of the time. Most of the
normal people into metal like Nuclear Assault, Metallica or Anthrax
found the early Bathory and Celtic Frost releases to be abhorrent,
while some years later even those into the nascent death metal music
derided black metal for being "too primitive" or "untalented" or
simply anti-social. I remember one gentleman from a metal concert who
told me in confidentiality that while he liked bands like Possessed
and Slayer, they weren't "serious about that Satan stuff like the
black metal bands."

When the 1990s dawned, black metal found its stride in the midst of a
worldwide liberal revival and a nearly total loss of hope as the
second decade of 1980s-style convenience-based living set in.
Technology had become accepted, and with computers and audio-video
systems becoming the norm, a new mindset dawned on the first world.
Media and entertainment took priority over even reality itself,
something soon to be amplified by the media. Black metal struck back
with a gritty, distorted sound which emphasized the unquantifiable
aspects of instruments (artificial chaotic harmonics from distortion)
and the human voice (a rasping howl of discontent).

Further, black metal brought with it troubling new ideas. Where
previous generations of metal had endorsed hedonism and leftist
beliefs like the breakdown of social hierarchy and reduction of
tradition, black metal embraced an anachronistic viewpoint, ancient
values such as blood sacrifice and combat, and for the first time in
the metal genre, brought national socialism (nazi) politics and
related ideas into the music. Before that time, any "Nazi metal"
created had been made by outsiders to the genre, like "Christian
metal," but now from within a meshing of anti-social ideals like
racism, Nazism, Satanism and proactive eugenics gushed through the
genre.

When these views were taken in their own context and applied as part
of the history of the metal genre and its evolution, they were seen as
threatening and completely against the trend in counterculture music
since its inception. Defining itself in opposition to the "culture,"
or dominant social values system of the time, the "counterculture" had
been a deconstructive force throughout psychedelia, punk rock and 70s
rock which espoused values of equalization and anarchistic power
distribution. Metal had up through the era of death metal given these
values primacy; black metal at its minimum deviation did not see them
as important, and at maximum disagreement, denied them with
contervailing beliefs. 

As the 1990s waned however, black metal's initial pantheon had given
their efforts and for the most part, vanished into the haze. Where the
initial boom of 1991-1994 had thrust forward a great effort and a
hazily-defined sense of what the music was as style and ideal, in 1995
and 1996 what followed were a series of second-stringers either
converting from death or heavy metal, or getting into the genre as new
aficionados. The result was that the style of the music was
genealized, and emulated, but the complex reasoning required to want
to make that style of music was absent; thus, this new music embraced
the same values of the older music black metal had originally hoped to
avoid.

After this breakwater, namely the releases of Satyricon's "Dark
Medieval Times" and The Abyss' first album, the formula for making
black metal was clear, like that of hardcore music twenty years before
it. The deluge commenced, and was relatively restrained up until about
1998, when the combination of net access and easy production utilities
convinced thousands of previously uncommitted people to start creating
their own black metal. Further, since black metal was at this point
getting the height of its media coverage for its unconventional views,
two groups of people rushed ino the genre: those who wanted a more
alienated social pose, and those whose social pose involved taming the
"negative" elements of society, and thus who found a place in
provoking an antagonizing the black metal community in general. 

The consequence of this new accessibility was a democratization of
black metal to the point where it inundated itself with repetition;
the "melodic horizon," a measurement reflecting to what length metal
bands could string together notes in coherent phrases, suddenly fell
to a limit of three notes. Because this shortened the compositional
vision of the genre, it became essentially rhythm music, because with
three notes no distinctive melodies can be produced and thus what
differentiates bands is purely phrase and cadence. While this keeps
churning out "new" music, most of it does not differ substantially
from one release to the next, creating novelty but no lasting
listening pleasure. This in turn affected the audience, and converted
them into faddish buyers of repetitive droning music who are required
to invent complex justifications for liking something essentially
genericized.

With this, black metal had come full circle to its point of origin,
punk and heavy metal. Like those genres, it became an insular musical
style in which its own rigorous "open-mindedness" and populism had
reduced it to lowest common denominator musicmaking, taking what was
once a diverse genre musically and transforming it into a nearly
homogenous genre, musically, with varied finishing touches put on the
music. One can change the distortion, vocals, and even add instruments
or funky breakdowns from other styles, but if the black metal
underneath doesn't change, there is no advancement. Stagnation and a
state of entropy have been reached.

This would be merely another story of a genre which was initially
promising and then became poisoned by the vast greed of the herd for
"a place in the scene," were it not for the comments of bands such as
Bathory, Darkthrone, Burzum, Mayhem and Emperor against the
democratic, populist, lowest-common-denominator worldview that
prevailed in the dying death metal scene at the time of black metal's
birth. Right now many people are celebrating the newfound "diversity"
of the black and death metal movements - remember that in their best
intentions, they're steering the genre into total conformity.

Interviews
----------

Deteriorate: Treading on Divine

Heidenlarm: deteriorate "rotting in hell" came out near the end of the
death metal boom, right before black metal became predominant in the
eyes of many listeners. what was it like at that time to contemplate
the styles in which you could compose?

Personally I was seriously into black metal since the begining...in
fact if you noticed the change in styles between "Rotting in Hell" and
"Gather the nebbish/The Senectuous Entrance" you can see my influences
shining through out the whole cd; I wrote nearly half of the music on
"Gather/Senectuous" around 1994...I was so saturated with old
black/death metal like Venom, Bathory, Eestruction, Voivod, Slayer,
Sodom, Kreator that it just flowed naturally in any riffs I would be
writing...I mean I saw Kreator's first US tour[I believe] at City
Gardens in Trenton NJ with Voivod I think it was "Pleasure to
Kill/Killing Technology" tour - this fucking show was so fucking
brutal, I was blown the fuck away, it still to this day had to have
been the most influential moment in my life, as I watched them play
flawlessly I said to myself that's what I want to do and I'm going to
do whatever it takes to get there...so I played everyday for years
until I was 17  formed my first band it was called "randomdraw" a
hardcore/metal band we sounded like cromags vs rage against the
machine...anyway after a few years of other bands and stuff I joined
Deteriorate which is a long story in itself!...so my goal with them
was to take it to the next level get so into the music and just
fucking go apeshit and I think it all worked out perfectly.....

Heidenlarm: it seems to me that death metal has always had two
opposing sides, one of which emphasizes fast tremolo picking and
relatively few emphatic pauses, while the other side uses muffled
strumming and a morse code of pausing and pounding to spell out its
riffs. what made you gravitate toward the faster metal side?

When I started playing guitar in '82 I thought that metal had a
missing element that hardcore bands seemed to emphasize on "speed". So
I started playing as fast as I could thinking that it would make me
more talented as a player...so I would write these riffs and put them
together with my younger brother Justin and we would play these
blazing fast songs full of 'squeals' and violent solos like Slayer or
Cryptic Slaughter...but after some time speed wasn't good enough so I
added into my style harmony&melody...I wanted something different say
warmer tones, so I got into Malmsteen alot and Voivod, Black Sabbath,
Ozzy, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, Celtic Frost 'morbid tales'[my
favorite guitar sound ever], Exodus, Violence, Metallica, Megadeth,
Bathory, Anvil Bitch, Dominance, Faith or Fear, Flotsam and Jetsam,
Death & tons more...I started going to 2 to 3 shows a week it was so
intense there were lines down the street; as I saw these bands perform
in the early mid 80's I was blown away it was so intense my world had
become near perfect! At the same time I was extremely jealous, I
thought to myself why can't I do that? There was one reason why
---drummers---there is such a shortage of  quality drummers that could
do blaast beats or grind or doublebass let alone afford a decent
kit...I was so into technical metal that it made it even harder to
find someone.

Heidenlarm: there were fewer people involved with death and black
metal in that time, unlike the current scenario. what do you think are
the differences in a musician's experience between the two?

Nowadays its more open to all; the styles combined, there are a
thousand times more muscicians that are dying to play...equipment is
far more affordable and more directed towards metal hard rock
players...the nu-metal styles are bringing more people to wards
heavier music especially women! I always thought that if you could get
women into your band then men would follow hence bringing your numbers
at the door up at the club you're playing...

Heidenlarm: what to you makes a series of chords and rhythms a "riff"?

I'm always looking for something different or catchy or "hook"
riffs...riffs that make you say "hell yeah that rips" and your hair
stands up on your whole body...or like in the 80s the introduction of
the word "mosh"or "not" where anthrax introduced to me the true pit
styles I actually went nuts at every show we all our own style of
moshing or dancing,or the dive kings, we tried every kind of dive you
could think of it was a contest to us to see how long you could stay
on stage or how long you could wave ride...it was the best years of my
life it was so fresh new different and the normal people didn't even
notice any of these bands we were such a minority back then, I was
always saying in school that Metallica will be the biggest band ever
and 10 years later I was damn near right...I was the only kid in my
juniore high with an earring and a denim jacket with death metal
patches all over it...

Heidenlarm: do you compose by riff assembly, or is there a pattern
into which riffs fit first?

Actually I have an odd style of writing I usually number the riffs
along with names for each part and write it all down,so if I forget I
have notes...in Deteriorate I played bass but I wrote the riffs on my
7string and brought my guitar to practice where I showed them the
riffs...my newer bands I play guitar and sing on almost everything...I
write all the music and vocals and let my drummer mike trush write the
drum parts...I usually write all the music in my head at work and then
go home and play my ass off...

Heidenlarm: many of your songs on "rotting in hell" preserved a casual
but intense atmosphere of using little introduction and tearing into
the material on hand immediately. was this a reaction to the
riff-salad-heavy metal songs of the time, which often took half of the
song just to get cooking?

Actually I didn't play anything on "Rotting," although I was in the
band months before the recording sessions, I was asked to play on
"Rotting" but it didn't feel right playing songs on a disc that I had
no part in writing so I declined...if you asked me about
"Gather/Senectuous" I would have to say they were flowing and
melodic...

Heidenlarm: lyrically, the band also played at least two sides, having
some "gore" topics and a fair number that could have been interpreted
as more gothic, romantic or moribund. what inspired the lyric writing
on this album?

As far as "Gather the Nebbish," I sang 3 songs and wrote a major part
of the music, my lyrics were directed towards my hatred towards a
society that hates people like me...I would first get into a raging
pissed off mood then write the music then the lyrics would just kind
of "bleed" to me,you know what I mean?..I went in the studio and
basically freaked out in the vocal booth screaming my heart out
jumping around like a fucking lunatic,..in fact 2 of the songs I sang
on "Gather" came about on the spot, I did the vocals on one take not
even rehearsing them once: Evaporated Battleground/Ode to a Mortal" my
good friend Trevor Schaible donated those 2 sets of lyrics and I took
them in the studio and ad libbed the songs it just so happened they
came out pretty good in my opinion total chaos!!

Heidenlarm: after "rotting in hell," deteriorate took a break. what
happened during this time?

We went through some member changes and more of my writing came into
effect, we really spent a lot of time rehearsing doing shows and
getting more professional about ourselves and we said to ourselves
what can we do to make this band better and more brutal and so we did
just that...

Heidenlarm: after this break you released, "the senectuous entrance,"
which in my view is two albums put together - one that could be
described as emperor-style gothic black metal, and another that was
more heavy metal/punkish. what brought about this dichotomy?

I basically came into the band  with alot of the ideas already to go,
I brought to the band my musical background and it took over I
guess...I never really heard any of the newer black/death metal bands,
which bothered me when people said we are  a rip of of Norweigan
bands, its totally not the truth, I was doing this type of music inthe
early 80s I was playing the 3rds minor this dissonant that you name it
..if you notice "Rotting" has none of the harmonies and minor chords,
I brought that to the band and we took off with it, I was in bands
prior to that which had similiar traits...

Heidenlarm: your songs convey as much energy as any other band out
there. how do you do it?

I tend to think to myself if I was in the crowd or a listeener what
would I want to hear and I do it...energy is the first priority
nowadays in my band "Treading on Divine" I do simpler arrangements but
it works for me, there is more flowing riffs and catchy hooks...

Heidenlarm: the band has been around since 1991. how do you think
metal, or death metal, has changed over the course of that time?

All the genres have improved with the times...certain bands keep their
styles others evolve into something different I think both scenarios
work,it gives fans an oppurtunity to hear something new therefore
creating another rip in the timeline for a new genre..

Heidenlarm: how has deteriorate as a band integrated those changes
into its music?

Currently Deteriorate is rehearsing for a new release in the future
but Mike Trush and myself are quite busy so it takes some time to get
it together...other members are in Krypton or not doing music at
all...

Heidenlarm: your songs are convoluted in the logic that produces
continuity between their riffs, enough that they must be heard through
once fully before being interpreted. how do you think the awareness of
this process in the listener affects how you compose?

It gives me a flowing feel to it, I can sit and bob my head
continuosly from start to finish, I can only assume that our fans or
listeners do the same thing...it has that warm feeling about it...the
5 unreleased songs have a brutal chaotic war type sound to it, but we
still incorporated the Deteriorate flow and sound to it...

Heidenlarm: when you are composing a song and have two directions in
which it can go, how do you select which one should prevail?

It was always a band vote or else we would just open jam and if it
went in some new direction that sounded cool we would work with
it...it's truly iemportant to find muscicians that you can openly do
unplanned jams ,its usually where you find a truly nwew and original
riff,where as when you are at home there is no drums or band influence
there to strengthen the song or give you a nod or an added riff
between another riff....

Heidenlarm: you seem to be a non-political band, as far as lyrics are
concerned. do you have any political or social change views that you
keep to yourself, or are you detached from the entire process of
politics and ideology?

Personally I try to incorporate politics or truth in my lyrics, these
topics enrage me making my songs come out even more chaotic, I try to
let the lyrics influence my choice of riffs after the song is written
of course, the lyrics might change a part into something different or
brutal...

Heidenlarm: the USA may be about to wage holy war on iraq and the
middle east. is this a metal topic to discuss?

Yes and no...I feel it's all a front to keep americans intrested in
the politics of this country...the president has to do something to
keep his people supporting him...with all the things like snipers,
Iraq, WTC and racism, he can shift the peoples attention away from
starting a war with Iraq, he made everybody shift their attention from
Iraq to the snyper atacks, getting everyone pissed off, so now the
people are hungry for some desruction somewhere other than here, and
to make it work even better the one snipers last name was
Muhammad...it worked, he's got the ok to wage a war on Iraq, I'm not
suprised and I do support this war...these people need a leader that
has enough brains not fuck with the most powerful country in the
world, us!!!

Heidenlarm: do you think that music conveys values based upon what
positive beliefs are affirmed in the music, even in simply its sound
which resembles facets of the outside world?

It does...music has been the center of attention since the beginning
of its creation...it can take you out of reality or define reality and
it seems that both work very well...I mean people take a cd put it in
then something happens, almost chemically in their brain and it feels
good,others feel bad or angry or something, its amazing how this
works...I always thought that you could totally control or program
people of all ages through certain notes played in precise actions in
the brain, when I hear certain notes a feel it all over my body its
really quite remarkable [I hope this made some sense to you, I think I
understand what I just said hahaha]

Heidenlarm: is it possible to be a musician without sharing some of
your views through music?

Definitely... I'm really into Burzum, Varg does an excellent job at
creating a soundscape, it's total headphone music, which is one of my
favorite ways of listening, Varg uses his feelings and beliefs through
beautiful music, but yet you can still understand his anger and
pains...Mortiis does similar work but his feelings tend to be fantasy
like or dungeons and dragons theme music, both are excellent...

Heidenlarm: you're now working on new material with a band called
"treading on divine." this title seems to have more metaphysical
implications than the gore-metal-ish idea of "deteriorate." what is
different about the music and outlook of "treading on divine" as
compared to "deterioriate"?

"Treading on Divine" is a project that I started around 98 right
around the breakup of Deteriorate myself and joe gorski were fed up
with the scene in Philly so we moved to south florida and started
playing...he was on drums and I played and sang..eventually we grabbed
my brother [who is the best guitarist I've ever seen] and Conrad
Eddings on bass...we had 3 songs and so it was born...down the road we
fell into the party scene down there 3 of us worked in nightclubs so
if we weren't working we were partying thus the band suffered...I had
also another band with the samme members except Chris Dino plyed drums
that was called 'twitch' it was really good stuff....so eventually we
after 2 years parted ways I moved back north and started the band with
other people, Thorous-lead guitar, Mike Trush-drums, Chris
Berwind-bass and Alex Davis-guitar....we rehearsed about a year and 2
of the members didn't progress so I let them go, now it's myself,
Trush and filling in on bass Jason Hildebrandt from Funeral Mask,
Cemetary Earth, Hazarax...we're ready to record a EP..full length soon
the title is "thy only god"..the difference between Deteriorate and
treading is I write all the music and arrangements, they're more
flowing and basic riffs...it has black,
grind,melody,harmonies,thrash,death styles...in Deteriorate the riffs
were all voted on whether I liked it or not so alot of good riffs got
trashed, since I saved these riffs and used them now,so some of these
songs are quite old...we do one song called "Viral Gore" which is from
1988; some are from 89, these are more thrashy,...the "Treading" songs
have "hooks" that make you say hell yeah! As far as the lyrics
"Treading on Divine" is based upon my hatred towards authority, I
don't like being told what to do, ever! Not by anyone including my
girlfriends....this is the topic I have been griping about forever...i
get political on some sogs others are about my nonreligon
attitude...being my own god and all that...

Heidenlarm: what bands are you listening to now?

Voivod-Deathrow-DBC-Burzum-Devil Doll-Elend-Marilyn
Manson-Ozzy/Sabbath-Golden Dawn-Entombed-Dismember-Fantomas-Mr.
Bungle-Thorns-Abruptum-Mayhem-Behemoth-Venom-Destruction-Kreator-Sodom
-Vond-Ulver-old W.A.S.P.-Metallica-Megadeth-Slayer-Darkthrone-Mercyful
Fate-Celtic Frost-Belphegor-Tartaros-Tomahawk-Jimmy
Rodgers-Sabbat-Immolation-Exodus-Emperor-Autopsy-Laibach-Bloodstorm-Se
rvants of Hate-Funeral Mask-LiveSufferDie-Ministry-Christian
Death-Violence-Anthrax-Forbidden-Abigor... I could go on forever!

Heidenlarm: it appears the downturn in the US and world economies has
affected metal. are you able to find a label at this point in time?
are you going to self-release this upcoming album?

Actually Philadelphia has so many labels here...I am talking with a
few labels none that I want to name just yet but I have made mistakes
with labels in the past and I don't want to lose money and touring
again. When I first joined Deteriorate we had tons of touring offers,
some with morbidangel for 40 dates but our drummer had a custody
battle going on so he couldn't do the tours, eventually that was why
we replaced him with Darkwoods, Rich was a great drummer though...

Heidenlarm: how do you think the internet has changed music, from your
first album in 1993 to your second in 1996, and now to the current
time?

The internet is excellent for underground bands like us to get
exposure...it's amazing how much stuff is out there...I can always
find something interesting on the web....

Heidenlarm: do you think most metallers have a common general
direction of their ideology, or is there no unity in thought in the
scene?

I honestly think everybody is different anymore, I always hear
different opinions about every topic...,sure theres unity but not
really where i'm at...i live in a city that has everybody thinking
differently I don't know why...theres always bands that are jealous of
others or pissed offf that they're opening for a band that they think
sucks,i've been dealing with this shit since 89...we used to get every
tour package that came through philly no matter who was headlining the
tour we always got the top slot on the bill...this made all the local
bands hate us instead of supporting us which would come back to them
in the end...i think nowadays its different theres more unity in the
scene...back in the 90s we could've all stuck together and the philly
scene would've been the next tampa bay thing,instead when the cell
block closed the bands dissapated,noone astuck to gether and bands
broke up, its a shame because we really had some good bands in our
scene,to tell you the truth most of those bands are like invisible
because I haven't seen many of those muscians again....

Heidenlarm: after the rise of nu-metal and bands like slipknot, does
metal any longer have the "coming in from the outfield" strangeness
and dramatic impact that it once had?

I feel that this is the metal years all over again, history is
repeating itself but in a grander way...a majority of people today
appreciate metal and hard rock, its not that uncommon anymore,you hear
metal on the radio everyday...we have such a wide variety of bands to
chose from along with a generation of people that grew up om metal
ranging from 10 to 40 years old....most like something heavy if not
ozzy/sabath then metallica or godsmack or something...to me this is
positive for the scene...

Heidenlarm: why metal? it's not an easy artform, there's no money and
most people seem to hate it or disparage it. why do you keep going?
(this is not a criticism, hopefully obviously, since i'm still in this
after as many years too!)

I can't stop! I love it the heavier it is the better....then again
everybody will probably hate me for this but I like Marilyn Manson
alot...his music is super creative, its full of hate, evil, and other
postive shit that just makes him an icon for heavy mainstream music
he's actually helping the world get into heavy music which opens the
doors for bands like mine,he has the flow we were talking about
earlier, I am open minded to some degree....I like stuff from almost
every genre doesn't mean its good for everybody else, but it's good to
me and I don't care what anybody thinks....who cares what I listen to
anyway you know? To each his own....theres a litttle bit of everyting
in bands today it means that awider range of audiences will buy into
heavier music...[i hope]...

Heidenlarm: if you could tour with two or three bands from anywhere
and anytime in metal, who would it be?

Voivod!!!!!!!Slayer!!!Morbid Angel!!!

Heidenlarm: where do you think metal will go next?

Its going to get even bigger, I know I want more of it and I'm not
going anywhere but more angrier then before...I have more anger in me
than ever before and I need bands to fuel my fire!!!

Heidenlarm: jazz, ambient, industrial, and punk: all of them exist as
separate genres, niches if you will, from the mainstream as does
metal. but somehow jazz and ambient get more respect and never quite
fully are able to integra te with the mainstream of radio music. do
you think this is due to increased technicality, radically unpopular
song structures, ability of audience to appreciate complexity, or
other factors? do you think this same distan cing from mainstream
radio music could help metal?

Maybe the jazz thing is of the other half of society that doesn't
listen to rock or metal or mainstream music...it could be an older
generation or possibly the trained muscicians of the world are more
appreciated...I know I've never had a lesson in my life but it still
kept me busy and somewhat talented...

Heidenlarm: it used to be there were tons of zines, and people mailing
stickers and dubbed cassettes all over the world. metalheads today
trade web links and mp3s, and there are now thousands of websites each
offering small fragm ents of information. where is this weak(er), and
what's next after this? do you think metal will consolidate its
information?

it can only get better,the more publicity for my style of music the
better...

Heidenlarm: do you believe humanity is about to blow itself into
vapor?

Not really its pretty much the way its always been to me, bullshit,
politicians, religon it's all always there its just a matter of what
you buy into...

Heidenlarm: what has changed about the songwriting process for
"treading on divine" that is separate from how deteriorate worked in
both incarnations?

Actually not much maybe different tempos or not so much blast and
grind beats...I have been working on more catchier riffs that have a
more grooving sound to them its still in the black/death metal vein...

Heidenlarm: who's in the band now?

Thorous[guitar/vox] Mike Trush[drums/vox/bass]

Heidenlarm: are you going to repress "rotting in hell" and "the
senectuous entrance"?

Actually we have the original recording of "Rotting in Hell" which was
recorded at an entirely different rcording studio...the vox are even
more brutal..we are going to release it soon with the original cover
that was deemed to satanic for our onr guitar player....

Heidenlarm: where do you hope to be in ten years?

hopefully touring the world and playing brutal music forever!!!!!!!

Heidenlarm: what do you do outside of metal, as individuals, and who
is in the band?

I have my historic renovations business...I do old world/european
style stonework and replications. I'm planning to do a house in Spain
this spring, its my other passion in life!!

Heidenlarm: any final additions?

Its cool to know that there's people out there still into Deteriorate
and the old school metal bands...I appreciate any people who would
like a copy of unreleased material and videos...send me tapes and
postage to: thorous----170 smithtown rd.   pipersville,PA   18947 Keep
the metal world alive! Don't give up playing your instruments,follow
your dreams, I had dreams when I started playingt and so many came
true, if I can do it anyone can do it! Keep trying your best,sing your
heart out! Play all day and night! Make a difference, speak your mind!
Don't take any shit from anyone! Don't let anyone push you around,
you're only as powerful as you believe you are! Keep metal alive! Kick
some ass! - And support the local bands in your area, without people
like you local bands will fade away, go to as many shows as you can,
and buy as much merchandise as you can, it will come back to you in
some way! Thanks for giving me the chance to vent SRP! -
thorous...treading on divine....

-~-

Severance: Cut Off From the World

Jaime Perez/Severance

Heidenlarm: what first made you want to be a metalhead?

The extreme pleasure and solace I received from listening to a variety
of older bands when I was growing up like Riot, Accept, and Black
Sabbath compelled  me to become a metalhead back in the early 80's.  

Heidenlarm: are different neighborhoods in houston more tolerant of
metal?

I would think so.  We are from the far south part of Texas, and I know
it's like that here.  

Heidenlarm: does the heat and humidity inspire more hateful metal?

It must because Texas spawns out such brutes as Devourment, Mortality,
Putrilage, Infernal Dominion, Condemned and a shit loads more.   

Heidenlarm: what's the difference between houston and LA?

Los Angeles has more Hispanics than Houston does.  I believe Houston
is a little bigger or more populated.  

Heidenlarm: what are your favorite houston bands? and texas bands?

From Houston: Condemned and Infernal Dominion.  From Texas: Putrilage,
Devourment, Mortality and Vesperian Sorrow.

Reviews
-------

Cenotaph - Rise of Excruciation

For those tracing the history of this melodic technical death metal
band, here its roots can be found in a hybrid style of Carcass-era
grindcore and several flavors of death metal, including the Swedish
influences that eventually became predominant on later works.
Hardcore-paced vocals rant over alternatingly mid-paced and blasting
drums, roaring out a cadence which neatly bisects the rhythmic space
not occupied by explosion of percussive impact. Riffs in the style of
early British grindcore have clear correspondences between rhythm and
developments in metal, as it exists here in the fragmentary glimpses
offered between grinding chromatism. Rhythms recurse frequently and
pace themselves carefully against the building intensity of song.
While song structures are not as fluid in culmination as works on
later albums, here the freshness of youthful ambition as admiration
for a raw and uncomplicated style work to the advantage of the band,
although it is fair to say that one should be a fan of the band before
considering this work.

Graveland - Memory & Destiny

Crafting in the new style something reminiscent of older Graveland
merged with more recent Lord Wind releases, this longstanding
blackmetal outfit use the appearance of "Creed of Iron" - balanced
guitars, home studio sequencing and keyboards, percussion that now
does not sound backward to drummers - for an epic on the level of the
works of Summoning or Burzum in its gently inductive melodic logic.
While it is easier listening because of the refined production and
efficient songwriting, the raw spirit that made this music once
violent now makes it contemplative, broadreaching and vastly
perceptive of the sounds and patterns that stimulate the human spirit.
Arcing melodies radiate above simple/rock metal drumbeats and
keyboards shadow the fuzztone guitars, creating a sea of harmony into
which the waves of sound return. Darken's vocals are subdued,
announcing in a black metal voice the lyrics which hold place in each
song, capturing some melody but mostly an abstract and distant
rhythmic positioning. Song structures are extensively customized
variants of the theme/motif juggling common to classical-inspired
soundtracks. While for much of the black metal crowd this may have
drifted too far into the Summoning and Abigor school of slick melodic
soundscapes, underneath its shiny exterior there is a ferality
devoutly opposed to the valueless plastic of our time.

Disharmonic Orchestra - Pleasuredome

As if deliberately attempting to find the next generation in metal,
these Austrian musicians mutate their thrashy grindcore into a fusion
of alternative rock and the metalcore to come, creating a melodic form
of music with the standoffish two-hit drumming of technical hardcore
laying foundation to surprisingly hookish riffs which recurse into
their own melodies for a bittersweet sensation of movement
unfulfilled. A vigor and righteousness of anger underscores the
delivery of this message, which is often couched in the quirky and
self-referential vagaries of postmodern music, yet the communication
is felt in lingering moods of both irresolution and firm declaration.
The blocky style of spelling out major rhythmic points in powerchords
and then filling harmonization with chord voicing and lead riffing has
its advantages, but succumbs like most metalcore to ultimately being a
victim of its own consistency, and the rigor of dogma thrust behind
these words and music seems now hollow. Underneath these disadvantages
however is a prime album with unforgettable melodic appeal and a style
which predated hte metalcore explosion by enough years to make anyone
take note.

Weakling - Dead as Dreams

Unlike most American bands, Weakling selection an approach which is
distinct for its embrace of the fluid speeding melody that
distinguished both Norwegian black metal and their hardcore forebears,
Discharge. From abruptly-dispersed silences onslaughts of riff emerge,
changing their internal pacing with the barest consideration of
relevance to a running battery of percussion, altering subtly and then
dramatically as intensity builds before dissipating in a complex
texture of song structure fading out to a conclusion in exhaustion.
While the sheer energy of this work thrusts it forward, it does not
escape the "American problem" of mixing death metal phrasing and punk
riffing consistently into songs that would have been better served by
subtlety. Additionally, this album shows like certain Ulver works an
affinity for what would have been excellent rock music played quickly
with blistering distortion in the midst of otherwise style-slavish
black metal. Influences from past generations of metal integrate into
the mix, and a soundtrack-like affinity for delicately staged
denouement often succeeds in adding more plot points than song
development can bear. Instrumentation is top-notch and literate in a
range of styles both within and outside the genre. Despite having
well-executed music, this band does not pull together the pieces of
its songs into a coherent enough whole for them to be memorable except
as proof of stylistic unity.

Slayer - Reign in Blood 

Both immensely reductive and powered by an affinity for the chaotic
nature of life itself, the music of Slayer reached its apex with
screaming feast of speed and musical deconstruction that is "Reign in
Blood." Architectures of narrative song development flourish and die
in a teeming population of tremolo blitzkrieg riffing which whips
across the face of the audience like molten shrapnel, and for every
gently circuitous fill there is a portion of the riff which descends
into alternation between two chords of often no more significance than
seemingly random often chromatic harmony. Vocals are shouted in a
bickering diatribe of lightning speed enunciated on the pulsing of
breath and drums are a study of texture in different cadences and
intricate fills. Like serpents self-assembling underwater these songs
construct basic spaces and then fill them with doubt and division,
building within the new areas miniature empires of internal dissent.
Through that technique this album tapped into the latent neoclassical
ambitions of metal bands to compose in motif and narrative, and gave
these tendencies wing with the undulating strum and self-realizing
melodic technique of Discharge, creating something that is at once
both tone-suffocatingly acerbic and embedded with melody at the edge
of its vitriol.

Summoning - Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame

The flowering symphonies of Summoning start with a simple association
of a melodic phrase and blossom into short labyrinths of melody,
leading passages through a space of dense harmonization to differing
conclusions that wield their contrast with the surrounding sound like
an argument of philosophers, in which a different conclusion to a
familar passage brings a radical change of context hinged on a single
note. Harsh vocals in a murmur backgrounded like those of darkambient
bands, several voices of keyboard and lavishly overdubbed guitars in
hazy distortion meld to form a continuously viscous and oceanic sound
in which the listener is a lost vessel traversing unknown geometries.
An improvement over their previous effort, "Let Mortal Heroes Sing
Your Fame" is a simplified but streamlined process in which the
melodies are more studied and weighted toward a discernible conclusion
than the somewhat vague directions of past.

Vile - Depopulate

Advancing their art of deathgrind at the same time approaching its
roots, Vile choose to make a technical feast of changing riffs for
their second album, anchoring the spindly legs of melody with abruptly
recursive and rhythmically dense bluffs of derangedly precise power
chord blasting. Songs enter on one melody and exit on another, in the
middle shifting between rhythmic configurations and melodic figures
which are strung together like the impromptu speeches of an embattled
dictator in that each change is introduced abruptly and then
bootstrapped by allusions to previous seemingly random inclusions. The
result is like a simple fourth dimensional jigsaw puzzle, interlocking
at unseen angles which seem tenuous until the inclination of the
planar space is revealed as a cooperation between subordinate angles
upon which the structure depends. Guttural vocals sent surging along
at a higher rate of speed unite with rolling gatling-gun percussion
which clusters bursts of impact around the areas between a fluttering
of metals and a dull rumble of bass drum syncopation, producing a
framing in which the unconcerned but precise motion of guitar is
surreal. This is an improvement in both style and content over the
first Vile album without sacrificing any of its combative energy.

The Misfits - Collection I

Hearing this band is like going into a long-empty house and finding
amidst the decayed relics of a grander time traces of recent life that
abruptly reveals itself to be malevolent. From within the shadowy
remnants of 1950s crooner rock songs comes a gnarled and wailing punk
that unites the gritty industrial tones of distorted guitar with song
forms from a more innocent time, as if merging a public image and
private reality in a hellish detour into the subconscious. Riffing
uses standard hardcore techniques of fast downstrumming over
three-chord clusters, but what holds these songs together is the
ethereal synthesis of melody from the barest harmonic boundaries, an
expertise which vocalist Danzig wields like a sword strike. Lyrical
topics approximate a coherence with the overall theme, narrating
perverse combinations of suppressed mental ailments and fears and the
shells of social pretense than contained them. While the music alone,
especially the discordant but sonorous melodies of the vocals, speaks
a clarity of this position the combination of setting and musical
development creates a suspension of belief in which a world of
silhouettes can survive.

Prong - Rude Awakening

From the disintegrating remains of speed metal Prong arose in a
broadly reaching commercial form to challenge the then barely visible
specter of nu-metal and mallcore on the horizon. This album almost
seems to know, in the quiet spaces between dynamic changes in
signature rhythms under breathy soft vocals that suddenly sour into a
harsh twist of invective, that it is the last of the old-guard of
public metal albums that were still metal and did not have to duck
underground. That being said, it's important to note that this is
metal with an ambient twist that involves no keyboards, and that its
heritage from hardcore to speed metal now includes the bouncing,
rhythmic-expectation music into which its sound fully developed, but
this combination has been tweaked with a smoothing process that allows
the band to accentuate selective rough edges. Chording uses multiple
voices adroitly to slide between fixtures of a sonic landscape, and a
range of strumming techniques create an ongoing dialogue in texture.
Drumming follows basic, snappy patterns similar to a cross between
Killing Joke and Filter, pounding to highlight the emphatic syllables
in anthemic synchronicity of motion and tone. Where this album
succeeds is in the areas in which Prong has always bested others, most
prominently melodic vocal lead songwriting, it pushes into new
territory with its integration of happier rockish beats under changing
guitar as a lead rhythm instrument, creating an immersion of sound
that is both aggressive and contemplative in its panoramic emotion.

At the Gates - With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness

The fully evolved form of the intricate music of At the Gates emerges
here, using a style of harmonizing riffs that creates a refulgent
melodic sensation within the forward surge of music. Delicately
skipping between rhythms inserted in the subdivisions of arrangements
constituting the boundaries of structure, riffing on this album
concentrates on the use of power chords where later albums would let
melodic leads dominate. Of all the At the Gates releases, this one has
the most rushed feeling without losing the intensity and drive toward
invention that marked this band from their debut EP; it seems as if
there is a desire here to fall into more conventional song structure,
but this want is balanced by an artistic mindset which ploughs ahead
full speed with variation and attempted flexibility to emotional
symbolism in combinations of a poetic mechanism. All instruments are
strong but relative to later work are boxier and lack some of the
organic texture in design that made earlier works alien to death metal
at the time, making this album the closest thing to mainstream metal
this band created during their healthy years. While as a whole the
work here is excellent, this is not the strongest album from At the
Gates, but provides an engrossing listen nonetheless.

Fireaxe - A Dream of Death

This garage project band aims for epics inspired by the grand and
ethereal symbolism of writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, in which the
highest of human ambitions are slowly dragged into tragedic hell by
the inability of people to see the limitations inherent in their
desires. Far from being nihilistic music however, this album is
melodic heavy metal with speed metal technical leanings, producing
something like Bathory or Mercyful Fate meeting a NWOBHM band in an
open jam. Of note are the intricately conceived but joyfully organic
solos and the use of melody in songwriting to draw together
exuberantly massive concepts of sonic space. Sung with a slight rasp,
this music is aggressive and mellifluous as due its concept of surface
function and inner twistedness.

Liquid Tension Experiment - Experiment 2

Trying to seek new levels of progressive music, Liquid Tension
Experiment represent a knowledgeable rock or heavy metal band
re-learning what many technical death metal bands have already found
out: the riffing styles of metal are twisted enough that the only
remaining thrills are in song structure and the change of context that
permits disparate riffs to be joined with a few alterations in both
riff and surrounding song. Most of this is lead riffing in twisted
framents of continuous melody sliced and reassembled in circuitous
ways, which with offtime percussion and some of the harmonic reaches
of jazz and progressive rock comes together in a strangely
backgrounded fluttering of silvery notes. While this is half as
ambitious artistically as the second Morbid Angel album or Gorguts
"Obscura," it will be comfortingly familiar to the heavy metal crowd.

Green Carnation - Light of Day, Day of Darkness

With some well-known names on the roster and quite a bit of thought
having gone into its unique style, Green Carnation stood poised to
make a great impression, but translates into reality as an unfocused
vision behind a definitive style, with moments of brilliance and
overall musical skill but not artistic clarity. Its lush tissues of
overlapping sonic innuendo in keyboard, guitars and whispy voices of
distortion meeting female vocals, combined with tortuous but simple
basic variations in phrase, propel forward pieces that despite their
depth of instrumentation emphasize silences: uncannily lengthy pauses
in guitar rhythm leads or vocals, and layers disintegrating slowly
from a whole at erratic abrupt seizures of tempo. It borrows
fruitfully from black metal and doom, while remaining within a Cocteau
Twins-inspired form of placid heavy metal. While this is not bad, it's
also half cliche and fails to pull out its most dramatic elements for
use in its somewhat half-hearted attack of hook, space, wandering and
closure. 

Agmen - Damnation

One of the more competent bands to attempt a melodic black metal
outfit in the underground style, Agmen put well-toned and spacious
melodic hooks side by side with rushing death metal riffs in a
heavy-metal-influenced type that is similar to what Mayhem did, but
more evenly applied with less emphasis on epic moments of separation
and closure than on a steadily building but consistent atmosphere. As
a result this is sometimes breathtaking and a musically competent,
enjoyable listen that somehow will never truly pierce the
consciousness of the metalhead beyond being proficient in its assembly
and gratifying in its consistent delivery of the elements of beauty
and anger that combine to make powerful metal.

Sonic Vocalizer - Hiroshi-Ultra

In the distortion feast of Japanese noise, one recurrent theme has
been the merging of primal man with technology overdriven and
electronically wrecked to produce incoherent, unclassifiable noise
that forces a reassessment of the boundaries of each sampled datum.
It's like writing without letters, painting without any solid colors,
or music without scales: a constant gradient sweeping across the aural
viewscape of the listener. These pieces aim to combine vocals and
noise in a method that allows voices to define texture and tonal
motion, which noise fills in structure in layers and a divisional
effect on phrasing, giving the unclearly measured clear containers of
assessment. Songs range from rainforest arias to a hilariously
dischordant take on early blues, all within the instrumentation of
beautiful female/male voices and guitar feedback and speaker noise.
This disc is highly recommended if you can find it.

Subarachnoid Space - Delicate Membrane

Like a Feng Shui of arrangement, this band specialize in layering
noise collages together around simple pop songs spelled out in
distorted tones droning in the background, like a minimalistic My
Bloody Valentine meeting a guitar underground noise band. Shreds of
tone descend while a bluesy harmony interplays across stretched-note
distorted guitar, as drums take the foreground with a busy nonlinear
syncopation and structurally significant dropouts. The result is
something to which listening is easy despite the strangled guitar,
animal noises in feedback, and howling overrun of sound breaking the
confines of definition. While it's simple and effective, it is also
somehow half-hearted, like one of the interchangeable anonymous
punk/pop bands from the previous generation somehow figured out noise
as a medium.

Subarachnoid Space - Endless Renovation

On their second work, which is not improvised, Subarachnoid Space
break out a greater range of samples of instrumentation with which to
imbed their 1970s pop psychedelia into howling and sometimes
whispering noise. While the big "D" (diversity) factor is thus
improved, which is typical for bands on Relapse, so is the triviality.
In fact, I'd argue where this band falls down is how trivial and
careless their work is. In true postmodern method, it has allowed the
same old shit to get sold as something innovative or expressive when
really most of what this expresses is a boredom so hopeless that
novelty on the level of complexity of wallpaper is somehow amusing.
This is not unique to Subarachnoid Space, but to the genre from which
they come in general, and here the traits are simply amplified,
despite this being a relatively consistent album and a fine production
job.

Minor Threat - Complete Discography

From the period of time when punk drifted into hardcore, Minor Threat
put the finishing touches on their own take on the new genre, one
which would define the flavor of their home city's underground for
over a decade. Usually fast, two riff riff songs with a an added
two-chord melodic transition, the music of Minor Threat took on a fast
and rolling tempo while emphasizing bashed skins and crunchy
punctuative chording guided by the youthful singshouting voice of Ian
MacKaye. The symbolism is one-dimensional, most of the politics are
lame, and often the anger is so teenage angst-y that a learned
listener will break out laughing, but the passion toward a new form of
art itself and the energy behind these churning simple songs is for
real. Thanks to a liberal record label policy, the band's entire
studio discography can be had on one CD, adding to the listening
experience the slight changes in songwriting and rhythmic proficiency
over the years.

Cathedral - Forest of Equilibrium

Former Napalm Death frontman Lee Dorrian established his next project
as the antithesis of his former band, turning grindcore into a
technique and making ultra-slow, bass-heavy music that emphasized the
darker romantic moods of melancholy and sadness. Surprising as it
seems in the current era, this was the first band to apply death and
grind technique to a slower, old school band in an even hybrid that
carefully buries its roots in the foundations of a new style. Gently
descending melodies minimize themselves over shuddering slow changes
in power chords, a rumbling rising from above to descend like a
distant wave into an infinite, formless ocean. Some riffs momentarily
cling to the upbeat tendencies of metal from a former era but then
freeze on a repetition and by way of transition begin their glacial
dominant motion. Dorrian's Napalm Death vocals have become
swallowed-throat, bass-heavy dirges which keep the extreme texture of
his previous work but infuse it with melody rising to collapse into
overwhelming lower tones. Periodic interludes of flute and acoustics
vie for space with unrelenting slowness and formidable, basic riffs.
This album is both the highpoint of Cathedral's career and the doom
metal genre.

Winter - Into Darkness

The slowest band ever recorded comes to life amidst rumbling depth
which sounds like the starting of machinery in the obscuring fog of a
postnuclear wasteland. The metal is barely tonal at all, moving
through death-metal-styled riffing of minimal harmonic potential with
a pace barely above ten downstrokes a minute, allowing chords to
accumulate tension by holding space well past a normal expectation of
their sustain, grinding into open conflict at the pace of a slug
dipped in hashish. Between the chording which traces no particularly
consistent rhythm keyboards and feedback noise intertwine to form a
fine patina of background sound which pulls the listener to the next
throbbing drone. Gravel-voiced and bass-intensified vocals lash out
across a strictly cadenced pattern, emphasizing the changes betwixt
segments of song, and some moments of pure noise disorient further
those trying to track the progress of phrase. Percussion hangs between
changes with metals and a carefully understated pacing, sometimes
dropping a layer to allow the muted roar of power chords to extend the
range of their undulating distortion. While sometimes a tedious
listen, this album satisfies all of the grinding resistance inherent
to the expectations of doom metal.

Saint Vitus - Mournful Cries

Where other bands had licks and studied fills, Saint Vitus would play
a two chord riff twice within the same pass and produce a
downtreading, thunderingly simple metal style that was more rhythmic
and far less melodic than Sabbath but held a mood like a grim punk
band, letting a tone ring out in enduring distortion and boxy open
pocket rhythms. Like a sudden outpouring of smoke from a blasted
factory, the churning noise of St. Vitus rises in an unsteady
repetition which synchronizes with its internal rhythms to form a
motion cadence. Songs are basic patterns of two to three riffs in
arrangements that are modifications on a wallpaper of verse-chorus
songwriting which slices through redundancy with a clear central
theme, no matter how simple. What makes these works enduring is the
hooks embedded in vocals balanced between a whine and a drunk's hoarse
whisper, and the metallic sense of articulation in these riffs which
like raw sculpture resemble the symbolic objects of each song.

Pathologist - Putrefactive and Cadaverous Odes

Of the two Pathologist albums, this one is hopelessly in love with the
mess and thrashing grind of early Carcass. For that, it does well,
with a sense of melody imbued in each of these simple songs developing
along a modal line and a collection of rhythms, but this work is not
as developed as their second in either style or art, causing this to
take a backseat to more evolved works. Bunches of short, blasting
songs rush through guttural corridors of sonic texture and conclude in
dissonant but balanced phrases. Each song is well-assembled and
relatively unique, although most major riff types from grind/HC are
visited, and the whole is an engaging listen, but in comparison to the
second album this first work generally gets written off as Carcass
cloning, while the other accentuates its unique traits to take on a
life of its own.

Blohole - Leave it to Blohole

Removing the pretension from a supposedly unpretensious form of music,
Blohole take some of the more refined ideas of rock and metal and drop
them into urgent, unrelenting, basic speed punk. Riffs are based
around a rhythm and a chord in the style of older rock, but harmonize
and move according to the lax rulesets forged through the heavy metal
and punk years, giving melodic choruses and sweetly dissonant refrains
to otherwise snowplow songwriting. Like much of the work of parent
band Rigor Mortis, the songs on this CD are mostly abrasive but show
their attempted sensitivity through concern for some artistic
narrative. While philosophically this album could be summed up as a
reflexive expletive, its musical side produced a type of light but
fast and emotive punk that predated the radio explosion of the a few
yeas later.

Extreme Noise Terror - The Peel Sessions

Probably the most representative recording of this band, the 22 tracks
here capture the hardcore/crust transition this band represents, with
fast strumming pounding out mostly repetitive songs with a
Discharge-style ambient rhythmic structure but none of the emphasis on
melody that defined that band. Bursts of hell unleashed in whipping
speed of playing, awkward but militant drumming, and a tendency to let
the guitar lead all other rhythm like a voice of harmony in the midst
of chaos, as a basis for musical cohesion, holds this band together
long enough to let each song leave an imprint. Yet a brief impression
is all that is left, as no voice of a future plan is found to
counteract the obsession with negativity and deconstruction, leaving a
void after the punch. 

Eyes of Ligeia - The Night's Plutonian Shore

Rising from a previous stature as an ambitious but musically unsteady
doom band, Eyes of Ligeia have unified artistic and instrumental ideas
in an album that captures what doom metal would be if it were not as a
genre so self-pitying. A keyboard piece which carefully constructs
itself from its own introductory fragments opens the album, leading
the way for songs centered around undistorted guitar playing melody
lines over which intermittently crash darker passages of slow but
thunderously jarring doom metal riffs. The entire EP flows together as
a single conception across several compositions, using silence as a
potent weapon in opposition to its more aggressive but still
melancholy roar. Many of its endeavors use a wider palette of guitar
technique than has been pursued in this genre so far, borrowing
liberally from the learnings of folk and rock to make for a greater
context, into which the intrusion of distortion is proportionately
more exciting. Its range of moods are cloaked in an overwhelming
pallor of dark emotion mantled in the adept fingerings of
NWOBHM-styled self-harmonizing riffs, which in addition to the other
elements of songwriting build an adept immersion of romanticist heavy
metal which stresses the prolonged and morbid feelings of
contemplative, helpless humanity. While this can wear down the
listener over time, its raw impulse toward larger ideas is welcome in
the doom genre.

Filter - Short Bus

Based on a sparse but potent bed of industrial beats, the music of
Filter is a product of the generation which came to fruition in the
middle 1990s. As a result, the hip-hop elements that infused seemingly
everything after are gone, and a frustration with traditional rock and
heavy metal has allowed the band to preserve the articulate quality of
metal riffing, which uses contrast and structure to generate a motion
that specifically addresses situational aspects of a song in order to
conclude it via ongoing transition, and to avoid the tendency of rock
bands to bleat out a chord and hold tight to it with rhythm and
throwaway fills. Like idols Black Sabbath, this two-man band slash out
a dominant motion and back it up with power chords surging to life in
phrases which complement rather than repeat a central theme in tone.
Vocals are youthful, but often harsh, and while overdone to
underground listeners they are passionate to the degree allowed, and
vary style enough to give a sense of both diversity and centrality.
Melodies fit in with the best that music produces, and song topics
seem to be at least a pragmatic look at many of the emotions
afflicting a generation who grew up under the shadow of the cold war
but ahead can see no change. Consequently, this album balances between
desire and hopelessness, and gives a giant middle finger to the
useless music which dominated mainstream radio after its demise.

Filter - Title of Record

The half of this songwriting pair with creativity has departed, and
the jackals have gathered and done as they have been told, resulting
in a completely worthless and inspid record. "Total shit" doesn't
describe it; everything is well done but obviously pandering to an
audience. More Guns and Roses than industrial this time around, the
band hit every focus group multiple choice form success relentlessly
and disregard the passion and intelligence in songwriting that made
the first album great. Oh, and every aspect of instrumentalism has
lost its tight and tidy minimalism in favor of overdoing
alternative-rock whines, wheedling guitars, and the sycophant voice of
a peddler silken in its production. Forget this; it's not even worth
picking up from the 99 cent bins. Even if you need a CD case, it's
better not to sully your hands with this total waste of time.

Eyehategod - Confederacy of Ruined Lives

If you like boredom and self-pitying drug addiction masquerading as
insightful music, buy this album at full price and then go to church.
The first two Eyehategod albums wandered all over the place, but
somehow on album number three the band pulled itself together and made
a simpler, more varied, more metaphorical look at its own angst and
the futility of existence in a postmodern time. After their label,
Century Media, released a dubious compilation of old material which
the band alleges was not authorized, the bitterness set in and while
the effort was clearly put into this album with an eye for its
success, the formula does not include artistry and so this album is
completely lost. Ashen riffing murders any chance of harmony but has
nothing to replace it. Song structures are too obviously convenient,
with randomness and then compensation substituting for form. Although
the anger is all there, there is no communication, meaning that you're
jerking off to someone else's dead-end fantasy when listening to this
album. Buy this only if the other Eyehategod work was too "profound"
for you.

Eyehategod - Southern Discomfort

Demo tracks, we got demo tracks, and seven inch tracks, b-sides, and a
live studio jam or two, but like Eyehategod themselves, these tracks
are second-stringers and don't offer any elucidation although they
prolong an ongoing bitterness resonant with this band. Probably the
band are right when they say the label threw this together as a
profitmaker; there's no real point to this unless you like mediocrity.

Burzum - Ragnarok (A New Beginning)

As a great example of how MP3s took the metal world by surprise, this
CD features tracks downloaded from burzum.com and burned to a limited
edition CD of 1,000 - I mean, 2,000 - wait, that could be even more.
They keep popping up everywhere and seemingly the audience for them is
highly limited. Reasons: as a thrown together collection, with
post-MP3 distortions evident, these tracks present no compelling
argument for an album. Either functionally identical to album tracks,
representing an earlier, more heavy metal stage in Burzum composition,
or random bits like forgotten outros, remixes and a cover of Cliff
Richards, as a collected whole these are only of interest to the 4 of
you in North America who are concerned with tracking the details of
musical development in Burzum. None of the money from this went to
Norway, as stated on the back, nor did Vikernes see any of it. Get the
MP3s from a napster network instead.

Gutted - Gutted

Four new tracks, a Venom cover, and a four-song demo of tracks from
this band's 1994 album "Bleed for Us to Live," this release showcases
a more deathgrind sound for Gutted, who originally were more rhythm
intensive in bass and drums than guitar, and did not favor as much of
a constant onslaught of sound as one based upon pauses and
expectations in the bouncy rhythms they would invoke, and then
reiterate, to hammer home a chorus pattern. In this light, the
original Gutted was like a bluesy heavy metal/death metal hybrid of
the anthemic style of bands like Destruction or Kreator, and despite
some of its cheese, was a bludgeon in that format. Here, while it is
improved greatly, its consequential dilemma is one of finding a new
voice and developing it while struggling for elbow room in a market
oversaturated with death metal.

Unanimated - Ancient God of Evil

Where the first Unanimated album pushed aside some genre archetypes
and like Cemetary did a year earlier, created a space for more
contemplative pacing and a form of music which emphasized melodic
articulation over sheer intensity in rhythm and tonal rift, the second
Unanimated formed an archetype for all melodic Swedish-style death
metal to follow. Smoothly changing power chords assemble
self-harmonizing riffs around a main theme in metaphor of motion
itself, like a ballet over polished floors gesturing the transcription
to a piece played in a distant room. Differing from most vocals of the
time, Unanimated refined their hoarse shriek which could also hold
tone, turning vocals into something between a shout and a whisper in a
singing voice. The combination of more varied emphasis in tempo, less
rigid vocals and melodic riffing produced the basis for a new style
that is today everywhere, but few albums touch this for clarity and
emotional depth.

Engrave - The Rebirth

Ripping rhythm music from a group composed of former members of
longtime LA bands. Similar most to the South American bands like
Mortem or Krisiun, Engrave rip through the dimensions of a riff
pattern in several locations and configurations, using rhythm to unify
the disparate fragments of related but not necessarily contiguous
ideas. The hoarse calling of vocals urges different passages of riff
to fit into the boundaries of each bar, enforcing a continuity through
synchronization. While there is nothing here that is rocket science,
the approach to rhythm in songwriting is powerful enough to provide a
cohesive listen that transfers a manic energy to the listener.

Iuvenes - Riddle of Steel

Under the guise of being nationalistic music, this is soundtrack
material mostly borrowed from Judeo-Christian artists in Hollywood
borrowing from European classical. The result is hideous schmaltz with
a few moments of great clarity and beauty, but it's no more impressive
than any number of over-emotional, third string soundtracks. If you
can't stop listening to the Conan soundtrack (large parts of which are
lifted from more reputable classical artists) and would like something
similarly cheesy, plastic and dishonest, let me sell you this disc.

Disfear - Soul Scars

Like the raw energy of a human voice, the first album from Disfear
screams in unison with Discharge-inspired melodic guitar drone over a
fast unchanging beat creating an atmosphere of suspension of belief in
externality in which tone and texture create order. The intensity of
energy and its emotional convergence of anger and a righteous caring
is from the longest-lasting lexicon of punk music, but here is luckily
undirected and thus communicates an urgency and a passion that is as
diffuse as it its impact is intense. Songs vary minimally in structure
but riffs are intricately worked from similar phrases placed in
different contexts and harmonies, basic as they are. In the crustcore
tradition vocals are leaden-throat shouts in a cloud of white noise.
While there is no rocket science here, for the feeling of insurgent
change which made hardcore great this album is both beautiful and
well-qualified.

Disfear - Everyday Slaughter

This album smashes much of the hope had for this band. Where previous
efforts had creative riffing, here the guitarists seem to follow the
crustcore maxim of more linear and more rhythmic, failing to
incorporate phrasing in interesting ways that allowed songs to be
articulate in their metaphor, with structure of riff matching
expression in content and form. The result is a pretty good
hardcore/crust album, but nothing inspirational, which is probably why
this album went nowhere while people are still searching for the
first. With some luck, their next will regain the passion once
flaunted by this rising band.

Myring - Engage the Enemy

Although this is instrumentally closer to underground black metal, its
structure is narrative in the style of early Cradle of Filth and its
musical roots are closer to heavy metal and speed metal than they are
to modern black metal. Muffled chord rhythmic strumming and hard rock
riffs interplay with keyboards for verse/chorus songs with a vocal
that dances in linear variation around cadences, causing an eerily
happy effect. Phrasing is completely unplanned, utilizing known
pentatonic patterns and then working its way into a looping structure
via semi-elaborate but evident fills. There is nothing here to
recommend this album to a black metal listener, but if you liked the
Metallica or Dimmu Borgir clones of the last two generations, it's a
bizarrely predictable hybrid.

Necrovore - 87 demos

One of the bands that started the death metal genre knocked the last
speed metal out of it, and that was Necrovore, who in a style later
popularized by Morbid Angel emphasized darkly minimal tonal changes in
melodic songwriting and extended phrasing which grounded phrases in
chromatic intervals and modalities unrelated to a central scale except
obliquely and through the logical mapping of each phrase into its
continuative nexus. Unlike Morbid Angel, Necrovore are somewhat
unsteady on their instruments and specialize in riffs which drive
linearly and then alter through the tonally perverse into a new
incarnation of the same contextually-shaped idea, but despite the
relative simplicity of their work the Necrovore tracks possess a
nihilism only duplicated by the first hardcore bands and some black
metal acts. Gnarled rhythms counterpart a nihilistic lack of
preconceptions about tone and an artistic spirit whose intent is power
in the feral, primal, lawless sense of the word. While this is not as
slickly refined as most metal today, its germinal conception provided
the archetype from which most death metal derives its aspect.

Sacramentary Abolishment - River of Corticone

Inspired by the blasting chaos of Australian black metal bands,
Sacramentary Abolishment put together longer songs of mostly unruly
rhythm riffing with a few moments of melody with the sentimental
aspect of older popular music, forming strangely like Carcass and the
Misfits before them a satire of social pretension of stability inside
of ostensibly completely alienated music. This band has a formidable
grasp of percussion and arrangement, and uses this to contort the
passage of song between different extremes of speed and coherence.
Vocals form the final impression, in a mucosal throat-lining retch
which spans rhythmic divisions to create an uncertainty which unifies
often sporadically related compositions. This band is strong in their
abilities but often lost in focus, making music that has all the
makings of an epic sound except for the twentieth of compositional
effort which determines its ultimate relevance.

Funeral Mist - Devilry

Embracing the excessive, Funeral Mist use a grindcore-styled constant
blast and short riffs to come together in pieces that harmonize on the
edge of dissonance as a means of tucking their exuberant and linear
rhythms into a final direction. These pieces succeed in that despite
their construction of smaller phrases, they change through a series of
motifs and are able to recirculate ideas across multiple settings,
providing a unique narrative to each song. Vocals are rendered in
several voices, often simultaneously, with over-the-top screams and
searing breathless howls interlacing in a descending smog of noise.
While this is at its heart a form of primitive black/death hybrid
similar to the work of early Impaled Nazarene, for that slice of the
metal genre this advances a generation in specificity. Where it fails
is the immediate nature of many of these patterns and the lack of
focus that often occurs when manipulating similar ideas across
multiple songs. As a whole however this is one of the more inspiring
releases from Sweden in recent memory.

Agalloch - Pale Folklore

This band is reminiscent of two things: Tool, and the caution of F.W.
Nietzsche to be wary of "grand statements." Fundamentally a hard
rock/heavy metal band in the doom metal cadences, like Tool these
musicians do an excellent job of dressing up the standard as the
profound. Female operatic vocals intrude for a few notes, and there
are well-rock-trained uses of minor key melodies to introduce a sense
of longing and nostalgia, but the musical structure underneath is
consistent with what pretentious metal bands have done for years,
given some technique from the extreme genres. While it is ultimately
clever in this regard, it goes nowhere with this impetus except to
suspend itself in a directionless emotion that celebrates its own lack
of motion in grand statements of position. Thus underneath a pretty
surface is a stagnant and fundamentally fatalistic outfit whose
musical statement is, if anything, "give up, take the money and run."

Thy Majesty - German Black Metal Art

While this band is completely competent, they are solidly fixated on a
style which has become a fundamental component of black metal in this
era. Fast, clipping beats over quickly undulating chords form melodic
pieces of three riffs which blur the difference between verse and
chorus over time through bridges which soar above the shorter
intervals and faster-grounding phrases of the bulk of each song.
Vocals stress the first syllable and trail off on every beat. Melodies
do not reach the complexity to be anything more than reconfigurations
of convenient motions from a root note, and thus most of this has a
mazelike, configuration-puzzle feel. Consistent emotional emphasis
makes it impossible to miss the infectious mood of light morbidity
here, but the musical genericism of its attack and lack of definitive
statements in its content make it clear this is not an important
release, only a competent one.

Suffer - Structures

While most of the world was celebrating the poppish Swedish death
metal and melodic Swedish metal movements, in the north a quiet storm
of the primal urgency of death metal was building in a style similar
to a more technical Asphyx, with all of the advantages of minimalism
that band illustrates. Since songs have been stripped down to a few
riffs with varying motifs used for transition, rhythms dominant
provide an obscure method of connecting disparate ideas, and from the
riff salads unifying principles of modality or structural similarity
in fills connect a sequence of ideas to provide the layout of a final
space of conclusion for each song. The enjoyment of broad and
far-reaching articulations and thunderous repetition giving way to
landslides of dramatic change in a few chords replaced and redirected
gives this thunder, but its pensive sense of natural topography grants
this music a sublime and enduring impact.

Heidenreich - A Death Gate Cycle

Somewhere in the vein of new neoclassical heavy metal with black metal
stylings that fellow countrymen Hollenthon also pursue, Heidenreich
make winding microsymphonies from rock-based phrases shaped by the
influences of baroque and modernist melody. These are set into a
background of instrumentation which resembles a soundtrack that
decided guitars and black metal vocals were necessary, causing a
spatial offset between resounding foreground clarity of percussion and
vocals and a lush absorption of keyboards interlaced with guitar
noise. Some undistorted vocals and guitar also emphasize sections of
some tracks. The songs like those of Hollenthon show great promise but
are disturbingly immature in their tendency to hang on to the
conventions of rock songwriting, which make this a pretty face on a
so-so body.

Equimanthorn - Nindinugga Nimshimshargal Enllilara

Music of the unnoticed twilight ceremony, the audial approach of
Equimanthorn is a "knotting into" of layers colliding in conceptual
significance as numerological and lyrical-symbolic phrasing reaches a
complexity engendering automatic cyclic regeneration. Filtered through
a haze like memory from within the watery confines of an eternal
suspension, compressed strips of harmonic motion are stacked in a
selective topography which creates a vision in context with a dramatic
presentation of narrative in voices and singing. Tastefully, natural
sounds including chanting or lightly cadenced singing voices, and
organs or wind instruments shape the presentation of change. The
sensation of descent with an internal excitement for the cryptic
experiences conveyed by these musics narrating horror attracts the
chaotic plunge, yet an artistic sense of extreme tastes guides the
oblivion-drop of this release, and as a result it is bizarrely
attractive collage music.

Carpathian Forest - Strange Old Brew

For a long time, I'd filed this band under the Ulver-style of rock
bands trained too well to make anything but musically compact,
harmonically distinct combinations of ear-friendly modal structures.
Something in this approach normally misses the mark and becomes
somehow part of the safe format of heavy metal more than the lawless
patterns of death/black metal which are completely chaotic in their
interpretation, making perception a challenging proposition of
balancing what is known equally against the possibilities of any
portion of the data itself. Consequently, when I hear most of this
stuff, I think "Motörhead!" and run off to grab "Ace of Spades"
instead. A lexicon of riffage descending through heavy metal to Slayer
and recent melodic metal hides a fundamental desire to reach the
quintessential grandeur of metal's reductive, instantly
reinterpretable phrasing. Although this succumbs to every instinct in
a cariacture of the form of metal, the music of Carpathian Forest is
enduringly more inventive than any other from this stylistic
subsegment of the metal genre, and despite its share of genre traits,
qualifies as good third-tier listening from the camp of "black metal"
stylists. 

Illogicist - Polymorphism of Death

A progressive band that intriguingly blends metal styles without
losing a coherent voice and sonic appearance to the music, Illogicist
make a jazz-influenced metal that at its heart is like Atheist an
advanced speed/death hybrid with a progressive rock heritage, like
Atheist or Pestilence. Its phrasing is metal and often heavy metal,
often at intense speeds and offtime rhythmic events staggered to
transition within a pace and harmonic difference. Riffs are melodic
and come quickly in a series of rotating motifs of constant change,
texturing song arrangements which favor a wide range of possible
dynamic events. Often explosive and sometimes random, these songs find
means of concluding in a padded datum of pop hook, turning a vast
journey into an emotional, slightly sentimental, destination. Density
is appropriate and countered by variation. Despite stylistic
reservations, even the most hardcore will enjoy these for their
spirited rhythmic interpretation of the depth of possibility in
phrase.

Armagedda - Final War Approaching

Well - to adopt a style and to create something unstupid, one must
have a raw spirit that serves as an overconcept for what is about to
be made. For this band of Swedish shredders, it is to play the
blistering trebly black metal of the first modern generation, which is
to say fundamentally melodic in a series of movements that are almost
pure rhythm. Torn, fast riffing covers ground in feet not miles but
does so at such speed one is soon moving quickly across the plateaus
of infinite chance. The listener is dropped into an environment of
radical antipathy and change in some very likable music, and it works
out well.

Carbonized - For the Security

If this album is legendary, it is for extending the earliest
death/grind hybrid to its hardcore-derived extreme in thunderous,
impactive, rudimentary music. Rigid strips of powerchords in downstrum
rhythm of simple divisions of meter blast out a monologue while drums
riot beneath. The grindcore essence is in the even intervals
comprising chord progressions, the death metal is in song
arrangements, and the hardcore in the energetic and bombastic but
simplistic and consonant. Songs unravel to spew forth a subconscious
paranoia underlying modern social reality. Vocals are a gruff shout
from a dry throat and work within a basic instrumental setup of
guitar, bass, drums, vocal with occasional keyboard (rare). In each
song is a varied pacing with a dramatic sense of structural change on
a grand scale, giving to some sections an emotional solemnity and to
others, an abrasive and authoritative howl of injustice. Musically
there is a good amount of experimentation in phrasing and rhythm
within the parameters established by the grindcore genre, yet the
music never loses its sense of what makes underground music exciting:
revelations of a submerged reality.

Metallica - Kill 'Em All

There is a sense of the Tank/Venom/Blitzkrieg/Motorhead fusion here
but it obscures the fundamental reality of this album in that it is a
blues album, and a great one - albeit a basic one - at that.
Underneath the muffled power chord punching is a simple but studied
blues which gives this album a basic listenability seemingly strange
considering how extreme this was considered when released. Open chords
meet clamping crunch of two finger chording, following a velvet pocket
of rhythm like a heartbeat. Stoutly defiant riffs, vocals of a weak
caliber cast out in reverberant tone, and guitar work from Kirk Hammet
who macguyvers twisted fragments of scales into absurdist intense
tempo and softly swooning harmonizations, in a space guaranteed by an
optician's tolerance in synchronicity of intonation make for a pulse
increasing album. As a culmination of the heavy metal years, this is a
sensually fascinating CD in which the basics of current metal
technique can be seen forming.

Fleshcrawl - Soulskinner

Like some kind of Swedish Deicide, this band press the assault with
consistent but well-formed music that demonstrates its basic
principles in both aesthetic and content. Using the trademark Swedish
distortion and percussive death metal stylings, this band is beginning
to resemble its core of hardcore-like, unrelenting intensity music
that throbs through cycles in order to establish a consistency which
must be violated, then switching into the next of a rotating series of
riffs which eventually conclude at an ungentle tribute to their
origins. With guttural vocals pulsing in the foreground, well-produced
drums lay down a clear rhythm track which is obliterated by the
carefully reigned but still vitriolic blasts of distortion that
Fleshcrawl are fond of using. Songs often drop from top speed and use
death metal conventions of epic but minimal transitions to conclude
their themes. High-energy music for intense lives.

Mesrine/Traumatism/Nyctophobic - 3 way CD

Mesrine - rumbling deathgrind which uses a constant bombastic pace to
establish a firm sense of theme upon which rhythmic deviations expand
a chaos of riffing and textural layering through multiple instruments.
The vocals alternately spits a single scream of syllables in a moment
or howls incomprehensibly alongwith the surging blast. Reminiscent of
a more deathgrind Carbonized.

Traumatism - bouncy hardcore with grind influences fuels the most
primitive angst of this band, a rigid diatribe of guttural vocals and
quickly moving phrases that fly over a landscape of even intervals at
high speed or a surly, organic midpace. Drums are notable for their
delight in messy variations of standard patterning and there is a
tasteful amount of micromelody in these riffs.

Nyctophobic - here in a haze of distortion unmatched by previous
releases, this band can be seen as a fusion between melodic hardgore
and extreme deathgrind that delights in pummeling cascades of
exploding riff patterns. The opened-throat of self-sacrifice ranted in
these vocals matches a righteous strident pace and rigorous, basic
division of the scale into even patterns.

Autechre - Gantz Graf EP

Attempting to find "new dimensions" in an artistic movement mainly
governed by novelty, Autechre put three tracks of their most absurdist
and noisily violent music to CD with a release whose fundamental
theory is to put forther a sonic cloud of diverse and scattered
noises, creating within it several looping structures which internally
guide each motif until it can transfer to another by introducing a new
sequence of sonic textures. There is beauty underneath the noise, in
the same way some death metal bands weave melody into battering noise,
but mostly what makes this intriguing is form itself. Allusions to
"normal" drum-n-bass and extreme hardcore techno fill the later two
songs, with the gentle slow-building keyboard melodies for which
Autechre is famed building under a chaotic assault of rhythmic change
and texture. Although relatively short, the album covers an impressive
amount of ground given the narrowness of its target aesthetic, and
with the minor key harmonizations of a subtle yet enduringly friendly
sense of melody, and as such leaves a lasting impression of ambience
meeting metallic, mechanical reality.

Immolation - Unholy Cult

The battered warriors from the east coast return with their latest
onslaught of death metal, this time delving deep into their influences
and emerging with a heavy/death metal hybrid that emphasizes all of
the aspects of playing previously favored as well as experimentalism
of a newly loosened variety, within the context of dissonant riffing
and complex rhythms that has made the last three Immolation albums
remarkably enduring listening experiences. Ross Dolan's throaty vocals
open up fullbore on the bounding grooves and surging, diving chorus
structures encased in rhythm of balanced pause and momentum overthrow,
slinging forward an album in which dead weight is carried far enough
to deposit it again on a load-bearing transition. Separation between
bass and guitars as independently orchestrated instruments has
occurred, giving this band more tactical depth to their strategic
mission. Interestingly, the music of Immolation has moved farther from
death, heavy or black metal per se and into its own unique hybrid,
with a sense of dissonant chord like Voivod, the pacing and melodic
counterpoint of Mercyful Fate, and the understated but deftly simple
pharsing of black metal. This results in an album that emphasizes less
percussive guitar playing and more the structural and melodic
components of riffwriting amalgamated into song. Of note are lead
guitars, which cut themselves free into studied sculptures of sonic
change fitting nicely within their context. As a refined statement of
the direction in which Immolation have been going for the last two
albums, this album represents a return to their inspirations as well
as the highest point yet gained by this band in the craft of
songwriting.

Deceased - The Radiation Years

One positive aspect of the boom in metal labels has been that some
older outfits have chosen to focus on the formative works of
underground metal by releasing demos and other non-album material from
established or niche-effective bands. Deceased, known by many as the
rampaging heavy/death metal hybrid of their past few albums, exists
here as they did in 1988-89 as a fusion between Voivod-style technical
speed metal and the wave of neo-death bands like Kreator, Sodom and
Destruction. Racing verses and anthemic choruses match a smugly
precise sense of rhythmic conclusion and vocals in a hoarse voice
chant over the fluttering punctuation of drumming. While these songs
have individual riffs and transitions that stand up to the best in the
genre, the second demo and more recent work reveal how Deceased have
improved in assembling these pieces into songs. Included after both
demos is live material from 1998 which shows the band at the height of
their efficiency shaping streamlined versions of older works into a
style of more varied technique and great flexibility. Even for those
who are not Deceased fans, this release provides an insight into the
primordial elements from which death metal arose.

Tank - Filth Hounds of Hades

Riotous rock with the far-gone metal vision that allowed this band to
be proto-speed metal and extreme for its time, Tank is music with the
soul of hard rock/heavy metal neoprogressives like Budgie, but it is
given more emphasis with tempos in a higher range and more consistent
approach to song structure and texture. This means the album comes on
strong but often is unlistenable over time because of the unvariant
consistency. Vocals are squealy and all of the guitar flash you'd
expect from the 1970s is here. For its genre it is proficient and for
its time, groundbreaking, but its audience is perhaps limited to those
who enjoy the older generations of metal.

Impellitteri - Stand in Line

If you don't like Motley Crüe-styled hard rock, forget this
release. Highly articulate guitarplaying and more speed and muffled
strum packed into longer-running riffs are common, but any structural
change from the basic modalities of hard rock and many of its
time-tested riff patterns is completely avoided. Shrieking vocals in a
trilled falsetto match flowerings of guitar dexterity that somehow
manage by default of larger option to fall right back into predictable
solo topographies. While this might be a great CD for students of
guitar, as listening it's total cheese.

Spear of Longinus - ??? / MP3s

This band has several variations on its basic music, which is a hybrid
of underground metal and the power metal riffing of the 1980s. Fast
patterns internally changing on the offbeat chase understated but
ahead of the break percussion, and songs develop from a few riffs to
simple but effecting bridging structures on the bounding epic feel of
a speed metal breakdown. Vocals are gruff grunts of the guttural with
esotericist philosophies, but this music is more earthy and of an
older style, a mixture best described as 2/3 Slaughter Lord and 1/3
Blasphemy.

Incantation - Blasphemy

Moving away from the more standard death metal of their previous
album, Incantation reach toward the style which originally made them
famous, using long phrases of dryly chromatic riffs joined together by
rhythm and a necessity of continuing motion, taking Black Sabbath and
classical music and making them into a functional and deliberately
basic grinding imposition of sound. The ability to sustain a of
complexity throughout a song for the development of shifts in
structure and tension that present a grandeur of vastly encompassing
change is gone, replaced by a tendency to dive above and through a
riff salad like a fish in an ocean of encoded motion. While this album
is competent, and a return to a more useful caliber of music, it's far
from the best these New Yorkers have created.

Aeba - Im Schattenreich

Nice mid-paced black metal that doesn't go far enough. Its riffs are
well placed and clearly a study of music underlies this work, which
approximates something halfway between Summoning and a faster, darker,
simpler act like Setherial, but its generic stylings and lack of
direction makes these songs tepid in a genre that demands dynamism. A
talented vocalist can't save the ship. Once again, it's not
incompetent: this is a highly competent album, just one that
artistically goes nowhere.

K(r)eep of Kalessin - Agnen

Approximating an aesthetic like that of Enslaved's "Frost," this band
place simple hardcore riffs into melodic songs for an effect that
artistically resmelbes the process of loosening a bolt: back and forth
repetition until something falls apart, giving way to change. There is
no particular enlightened design here but musicianship and production
is vastly improved from first generation black metal.

Resistant - Ancient Future

Halfway between later Sepultura and melodic hardcore in the style of
Terveet Kadet, this band manage some good three-chord riffs underneath
a righteous, nearly-rap-cadenced ranting guttural vocal. The
fascination with either straight flowing rhythm or stop/start groove
that is derived from mainstream music marks this release, as do some
attempts at sudden melodic singing abutting the monotone chant. While
it is very easily listened to and bounces along like later hardcore or
middle Napalm Death releases, this CD is hopelessly indistinct
regarding its own eventual message and comes across, like later
Sepultura, as a Rage Against the Machine hybrid with the boring
aspects of underground metal.

Sabaoth - S/T

A sonorous effort that nonetheless does not make it past basic punk
music in terms of its organization, this CD matches basic riffs with
an array of picking and melodic tangential techniques in order to
disguise their basic, rockish nature. The result is something as
pretty and repetitive as the lulls in Philip Glass compositions with
an underlying punk beat and structure, making for an absolutely bland
listen. The frenetic heartpump of drumming gets some credit for its
honesty in the midst of otherwise indistinguishable music.

Hirax - Barrage of Noise

This is quite well done for what it is, which unfortunately is too
slow and too simple for the taste to which most listeners have been
conditioned at this time. It is thrash in the style of later DRI or
COC, where longer songs stretch basic riffs across boxy beats in the
hardcore style, but metal dominates aesthetic and the minimal changes
required to mutate song structure. Choppy, on-beat riffs pounce in the
way that Exodus and Metallica used to be able to do, but trembling
dark chords amalgamate slowly for introductions and transitions in a
style reminiscent of Hellhammer. The bulk of most songs however are
basic riffs of an even strumming pace in the hardcore style. It seems
clear from this release that this band is at the top of a genre that
retains its hold on life despite the changes in its audience as a
whole, and that while the precepts of the genre may bore many of us,
these gentlemen have handcrafted a lease on life for this style.

Pyaemia - Cerebral Cereal

Straight from the deathgrind genre, these bashers pump out a
constantly changing riff fabric which in unaltering continuity flings
forward a narrative of rage and constant angry change. There is no
pleasure in pauses, silence, or continuity except as a sounding board
for the perverse combinations to come. What this band does that most
bands in this genre fail is to maintain a powerfully centric
continuity between diverse tempos and riff textures, allowing a
listening experience that is not obstructed by the violence but flows
with it as if a battle on a floating island caught in a storm that,
from the vantage point of miles above, seems to be swaying gently in
the currents. Throat-swallowed grunting and speeding right hand
technique are also notable.

Pantheon - Galder Vjkodlaks

At the tactical level, this is great melodic black metal, suspended
between sparse beats with an extrusion of melody. On the strategic
side however, this album does not qualify itself by enough structural
variation in songwriting and its overapplied technique of rushing
blast beat/pace beat combinations in a style reminiscent of
Sacramentary Abolishment does nothing to change this. Sense of rhythm
is competent overall and these three- and four-note riffs
inoffensively provide a comforting aesthetic of harmonizing depth into
which the listener sinks, but there is no overall motion or seemingly
direction despite the wide variety of banned symbols scattered across
the CD.

Enter VI - Dreams

Cut from standard issue metal of three generations, this band combine
the pounding modern death metal styles with the songwriting and easy
hook of speed metal from two decades before. Vocals reflect some
rap-influenced postmodernisms, but otherwise fall directly into the
cadenced chant of early Exodus in a slightly distorted vocal. While
there is use of dissonance and disturbingly abrupt phrasing as a
counterpoint to the dominant rhythmic pile, these usages are
embellishment and do not change the essential repetition of metal
history that qualifies this release. All instrumentation is competent
and imaginative within the unimaginative parameters established by a
lack of conceptual unity in direction to the band as a whole.

Dark Sanctuary - Royaume Melancolique

From the darkwave bend of the post-pop spectrum, this album is
keyboards, acoustic guitars and female voices assembled in ambient
songs that if they have any flamboyant failing lack a deviation into
distinguishable melody and song structure. Very "soundtrack" in its
approach, this music usually opens its major passages with keyboard or
acoustic riffs which descend from the well-known but apply themselves
in the way of a background composition, in repetitive layers
disguising the motion between verse, chorus and bridge which contexts
the changing texture of aesthetic. Beautiful in many ways, cheesy in
as many others, this is a release which despite its high listenability
on first encounter and general proficiency has yet to break past its
neo-Enya aesthetic in search of melodic development or broader
artistic implications than a dark mood, a forgotten kiss stranded in a
past time and place, and an enchantment of spaces suspended suddenly
beautiful music arising from scattered sounds.

Shadowcaster - Psychelectronic Experience

Ambience in the form of stretched electronic landscapes over which
strangely apocalyptic and youthfully lisped chanting etches its form,
these songs come from sparse creativity and take seemingly forever to
develop in what is music clearly designed for background psychedelic
trance experiences. There are no obvious beats except those on rhythm
keyboards, but songs clearly shape themselves around a fragment of
rhythm and a keyboard riff and let noises and the chanting of Night
Conquers Day mastermind Mikael lead each track. It's about one-fifth
of what the first Neptune Towers disc was, and will probably get no
attention outside of metal.

The Black League - Ichor

When Scandinavian metal bands burn out, they return to a mishmash of
their roots and the newer technologies of underground music in an
approach that is reminiscent of South American thrashers, but with a
slicker appearance that belies the heritage of winning pop music from
the northern states. This is rough 'n' ready heavy metal in a form
that would make Gehennah and Motorhead eat out their hearts, but it is
fundamentally vapid excluding a few musical devices which give some
uniqueness and context to these sped-up, darkened hard rockin' minor
key tunes. While undoubtedly the audience wants something with the
power that Sentenced wielded, there is no such hope on this CD.

Rotting Christ - Thy Mighty Contract

Slender rivulets of melody encased in blurring rhythms shape songs
toward racing conclusions and epic conjunction of themes. Black metal
in a sickened highly evolved version of the heavy metal grandeur of
the beginnings of the genre, the simple songs of Rotting Christ fold
melodic potential into their mixture until tension snaps and
transition to unveiled breakdown occurs. Similar to countrymen
Varathron, this band use doom-paced harmonization less frequently and
uphold a near-constant level of assertive dynamic intensity which like
techno enwraps the listening in pulsing waves of harmonizing sound. A
classic of the genre that is mostly buried by musical irrelevance to
the evolution of its general sound.

Enslaved - Frost

A flowing mixture of chromatic and dissonant riffing cloaked in
Voivodian tone, the metal portions of this album are precise and
dramatic rhythmic narrative caught in quick, violent riffs poised on
an offbeat pause. Short keyboard transitions and songs building from
the melodic to the absurdly disharmonized, together with a virulent
balance to rhythmic hook, form the outline on which musical change is
draped. While these songs sometimes veer too much toward losing their
melody, earlier works from this band related strips of harmonizing
sound to shape an overall sense of changing landscape, yet that
approach has here given way to a more explosive attack with a grand
setting of discernible emotion and mostly percussive technique. The
result is clearer to most metal fans, but despite its newly enlarged
scope, a divergence from what made this band excellent, despite many
innovations in riff formulae and aesthetic.

Blutaufe - mein flesich an deinen lippen...

In a bouncy almost digital slipstream, speed metal riffing with black
metal intonations in the style of Samael merged with an offbeat Voivod
or DBC, in a whirlwind of consistent activity creates a listenable
metal. Vocals fit the Cradle of Filth style with phrases chanted in
constant undulated dynamics to a rhythm not specific to the phrase.
Instrumentation and production are clean and consistent. One could
make the comparison of an underground version of later Prong, when
including the dissonant chord voicings and phrases of this energetic
metal.

click - Live at the Thirsty Whale 1997

In a prescient take on the style of music that would mix mainstream
metal with industrial rhythm and hardcore instrumentalism, this band
put simple riff progressions in a rock style together over a sustained
beat in a style similar to that of Prong or Ministry, giving songs
unique shape through arrangement reconfiguration. Vocalist Anand
Bhatia carries a simple melody well but most aptly is able to read
textures and rhythmic placement like a pop star and/or underground
grindcore absurdist, appealing to the universally human physical
tendencies of appreciation to melody and motion. While this concept
has now been explored further, this band is better at being
deliberately random than most in the style.

(Black) Witchery - evil shall prevail demo 1998

An earlier take on this band shows them in a more fluid style where
melodic songstructuring and general modern black metal influences are
more evident, with a roaring dirge of power chords style supplanted by
lead riffing or power chording in dissonant voicings carries the
mainstay of song delineation while abrupt rhythm is reserved, in hints
of their Blasphemy-esque future, for final blasts in which all is
revealed. Apocalyptic in an early and somewhat hopeful take on
existence in its capacity for strength as presumably a conduit to
change this album captures an intersection of emotions travelling at
high velocity in different directions overlapping over time, and in
that sense delivers the most honest and compelling work from this band
yet heard.

Ouroboros - Invoking the Worm demo 2001

In the absurdist unbalancing of the rhythm to the sequence of phrases
keeping momentum energized with beat and response that gave bands like
Havohej surreal entry to the resonantly disturbed, the music of
Ouroboros mixes a legacy of heavy metal and nihilistic chromatic
riffing with the melodic sense of underground black metal, sweeping a
hierarchy of dissonant notes into sequence across the liquid dynamic
topology of each phrase rendered in fast power chords tremolo-strummed
to synchronize doppler motion with the uneven fills counterbalancing
expectation of phrase style that percussionist Sabazios Diabolus
favors. Electronically distorted vocals tear apart internal rhythms in
phrase but leave boundaries hazy and often insert random rhythms of
their own, periodically pausing at random times like the unsteady
guitars which also somehow manage feats of technicality when required.
It is designed to be controlled chaos and in the obscure cryptography
of its riffs and transitions an overall motion unique to each song is
rendered, yet within the lead guitar fills and harmonizing chord
progressions of this work another realm is suggested. Fiends of bands
such as Burzum, Mütiilation or I Shalt Become will notice similar
motions at times cut between the raw and chaotic gestures of inverted
approaches to values begetting dissonant and violent music.

Myrdraal - Blood On The Mountain

From the distant dewy plains of Australia comes this work in the epic
black metal style. At the high end of rock/metal musical learning,
this band carefully assemble riffs and make songs in the approximate
form of Forefather meets Trelldom. Riffs rely on harmony devices and
repeated patterns in arpeggios stretching across the scale before
thundering home. The diligent use of interludes and gently building
guitar-based transitions helps Myrdraal maintain a quiet mood that
expands to evident conclusions after some preparation. While all of
the elements of songwriting are very present here, this band needs
more study in making form fit content, something best seen in some
awkward riff assemblies and a delayed and often too-obvious device and
conclusion to each song. The work and planning that has gone into
making these components is overshadowed by their ill-fitting assembly,
making music that is both inspiring and restrained at the same time.
Vocals are reminiscent of Summoning, and guitar work uses a harmonic
riff style that has been used in the underground as an answer to
commercial black metal. If this release itself does not raise your
blood, remind yourself that it is a demo foretelling of better things
to come from this young act.

Other voices
------------

Cursed Productions - A label that releases demos and rare works from
classic death and black metal bands, in addition to being home to some
esoteric metal acts. www.cursedproductions.com

Decius Productions - Dedicated to pulling the gnarliest out of the
black metal underground, Decius releases obscure bands and champions
others through its worldwide mail order. www.deciusproductions.com  

Leather'n'Spikes - Zine devoted to all that is esoteric in the
underground, with original artwork and in-depth articles about bands
and ideas in the community. www.destructionritual.com

Radar
-----

Playlist: Spinoza Ray Prozak (NASDAQ: SRP) -

Ludwig von Beethoven - 9th Symphony 
Autechre - Gantz Graf EP 
Graveland - Memory & Destiny 
Summoning - Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame 
Immolation - Unholy Cult 
Robert Schumann - 4th Symphony 
Sonic Vocalizer - Hiroshi-Ultra 
Ministry - animositisomina 
Franz Schubert - Unfinished Symphony

-~-

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-~- 

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-~- 

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[EOF]