By the time black metal and death metal made it back, the actual inspirations — Slayer, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Bathory — were almost forgotten in a rush toward the new style that was birthed from combining their approaches. Now the history fleshes itself out a bit. For most of us, Bathory seemed like a 1980s thing and by the following decade was acknowledged more as history than an active force, since Blood Fire Death was its last really solid release that could be listened to as a whole without drop-outs in consistency. Many of us point out that the self-titled, The Return……, and Blood Fire ..read more

Condemner pursues more of an explicit war metal sound that merges Havohej with touches of Demoncy and Beherit along with ancient death metal like Mythic and modern war metal like Kaeck. It grinds, it establishes a primal and intolerant logicality, and then it expands into mystical texture ..read more

Unholy Craft builds in the style of later Darkthrone with the pacing of Mayhem, delivering an enjoyable journey through melody meeting noise and pummeling d-beats and blast beats, which although somewhat fungible manages some unique riffs based in compelling rhythm accented by melody. Unlike Darkthrone, this band aims more for an earlier style of black metal which does not emphasize continuous motion with shifting melody, but rather employs ordinary rhythm riffs and then layers melody into them before arriving at a final exposition at mid-pace with atmospheric melody and drums. Perhaps not he ..read more

We write; you complain; everyone else ignores us. Later on, the world catches up, and everyone hides how they read it here first. We call the metal trends by looking at reality instead of social influences, and this makes people feel like the small puny slave power bottoms they really are. First up, we told you that the metal industry was dying of internal competition and too many albums were being released for anyone to get any traction, which means that — outside of a few big pop style bands like Tool, Gojira, and Silencer — good musicians are incentivized to stay away from the genre. It tu ..read more

Attempting to create continuity between older and newer works, Pestilence re-recorded a selection of “greatest hits” that leans hard on the more recent albums, as such compilations always tend to do. This proves an intelligent idea since it creates an album that sounds internally consistent and gives the band a chance to give these songs a more aggressive edge. Levels of Perception features two songs from Testimony of the Ancients, two from Consvming Impvlse, and the rest from their last few albums. Not surprisingly they leave off Malleus Maleficarum, because on re-recording the Destruction-i ..read more

Before the moniker Goat found me, friends called me Sven because after a few bonghits my conversation tended toward praise of Swedish death metal. The Swedes perfected death metal, working in melody as structure and turning rhythm into a primitive but nuanced weapon. Unleashed — like Therion, Carnage, At the Gates, Necrophobic, Hypocrisy, Nihilist, and Merciless — laid the groundwork for a new vocabulary of death metal songwriting and the moods required to perceive the world in order to conceptualize mythopoetic atavism from horror, folkloric, and Romantic literature tropes. This compilation ..read more

As our longtime readers know, this site started out in the hacker days of the 1980s as a type of free speech protest designed to expand the various Overton-style Windows through shocking, disturbing, blasphemous, gory, apostatic, and sodomitic propaganda. We dislike censorship. In addition, as part of our quest for Dark Pluralism, we believe in an escape from viewpoint discrimination and letting everyone be heard. Until rabbis, Nazis, stoners, Black Panthers, and hippies can meet and talk about why they disagree with civility, humanity is going to stay caught in this current loop. Thus it was ..read more

What is our purpose? Resurrecting a dead genre via natural selection, which means promoting the good, smiting the bad, and ignoring and accepting everything else. Why would anyone care? In the transcendental view, life is worth living for the experience of life itself. It is there to be enjoyed and as a learning process; we are reporting back, not to a perfect moral Heaven, but to a much larger world that needs a source of finite decisions. Metal is worth enjoying. Metal is part of life. It appears in the form of the avatar of the heavy metal genres, now, but it is an eternal spirit like one ..read more

Judas Priest came out of the era that melded Black Sabbath with Led Zeppelin and came up with some of the most creative guitar riffology in history, raising the standards by which any new album will be judged, and Invincible Shield tries to balance their past with multiple career peaks. Perhaps the largest influence on this album is the 1990 release Painkiller which melded Slayer-style proto-death with the melodic heavy metal for which Judas Priest and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) are famous, but it is balanced by contemporary power metal influences as well as classic Judas Pr ..read more

The news filtered down through the grapevine the other day that Yosuke Konishi of Nuclear War Now! Productions had entered into a new venture named Helios Press which will manufacture vinyl records in Brady, Texas. This hopes to serve the rising vinyl market which has not only not fizzled but continues to gain strength: Following a 51.4% year-over-year increase in vinyl album sales in 2021 and a 46.2% year-over-year increase in 2020, sales in 2022 rose just 4.2% over the year. Whether that’s due to slowing demand or supply issues that more pressing plants could help alleviate — it marks a si ..read more