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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.
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