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 turns out that publishing is dying from the same problem, too much supply and not enough big wins, as well as no long-lasting wins:
The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.
They staked their money on big pop wins like Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, and Game of Thrones, which drove away their core audience of readers and brought in the television-watchers, sort of like later Dimmu Borgir brought in the Hot Topic kids and drove out the metalheads.
Now they find themselves broken on the cross of their own humility to the crowd. What is popular is not good; what is good is not popular. Unless you focus on a goal like quality, you end up with the same old human entropy converting your genre into the same mediocre distractions as everything else.
What is God? Everything that humans hope will banish their fears. What is Satan? The knowledge that those fears represent necessary things: call it reductionism, nihilism, absolutism, realism, or some combination of the above, Satan is The All asserting itself against The Herd.
Life is struggle, not subsidy, but humans turn it into subsidy either through outright socialism or the consumerist version, where lots of idiots buy garbage and drive it to a mean of mediocrity, but lots of careers are made before people figure out that they have parasitized and destroyed an industry.
Metal needs hierarchy. Tape traders, zine writers, radio jocks, metal fanatics, and internet trolls shaped a hierarchy based around quality. When the herd came in, they brought big profits for dumbing it down but in doing so, made it so that no one could rise above the mediocre norm.
“Good” is bottom-up design. Whatever is popular, wins. “Evil” — and civilization! — require the opposite, which is promoting the good and culling the weak. This is the eternal pagan, realist, and aristocratic mindset: good to the good, bad to the bad, leave everyone else alone.
I keep describing myself this week as “culturally liberal, economically libertarian, politically conservative, and environmentally fascist.” If what you are doing harms no one, you should be accepted; harms, including low quality people, need to get on those boats and go elsewhere.
The same applies to metal. This site has long argued for Metal Darwinism, or promoting good releases and savagely sodomizing the weak. If you do that, metal rises. If you do what “everyone” wants, you get the same crap as everywhere else. You will be judged by your choice.
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And now, for something completely different:
A founding member and former bassist of Saxon, one of the UK’s most successful heavy metal bands, has been jailed for assaulting a six-year-old girl.
Stephen Dawson, 72, was sentenced to five years in prison at Sheffield Crown Court on Thursday after he was convicted of four counts of indecent assault of a child under 14.
Dawson founded Saxon with Oliver in 1976 before Peter ‘Biff’ Byford joined on vocals and Paul Quinn came in on guitar.
The band that inspired Spinal Tap turns out to be too much like the parody and not in a good way. However, all the people on metal social media who are collecting Saxon albums now have a new fandom goal to add to their Reddit-tier list of sweaty mouthbreathing non-objectives.
If we could ask for a better future, it would be metal healing itself through joining the strong and discarding the weak:
Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process.
“What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale,” Boyce said.
Metal certainly needs to heal itself at this time. As you will see from the queue below, an endless stream of slick surfaced empty repetitive voids awaits.
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Darkthrone – It Beckons Us All: Darkthrone fused the slower parts of their Celtic Frost appreciation with atmospheric 1970s rock and came up with something that trudges along, has some atmosphere, and changes riffs in patterns that make sense, but is evocative of nothing and creates an atmosphere of indecision and regret, which in the end turns out to be not very memorable or exciting.
Fearwell – Well of Fear: remember those Celtic knotwork style melodies at the Ren Faire? this combines an energetic power metal that sounds more like NWOBHM than speed metal but borrows precision riffing from the latter, aiming more for a rigid machinelike percussion and pace than the organic, athletic speed metal rhythms, but does a good job of internal variation in tracks although they never really move past echoing a theme and its contrasts.
Bloodcrusher – Bloodcrusher: when you were a kid, you probably drove somewhere far off with your parents and listened to the noise of the road under the car while landmarks flashed by, with the usual stoplights and traffic jams, and this album resembles that experience: very familiar, subconscious rhythms that build on another in interesting piles of riffs and variations that flash by like the layout of a city but in the end have as much relation as the layout of buildings in your average sprawling urban mass.
Witch Vomit – Funeral Sanctum: we live in the age of recombination since everything peaked in the 1990s and then began its graceful descent into oblivion, and this album hides SweDeath behind a New York style death metal facade rather convincingly; the riffs fit together, song structures are not absolutely cyclic, and all aesthetics are preserved, but none of these things add up to more than a general sound of nostalgia with melodic riffs hanging together like a pop song.
Ba’al – Soft Eyes: all this post-metal crap comes from the same factory and it stinks like 1960s rock with emo chord progressions and different pacing, since the guitar fans out at speed but chords change slowly, and each song features a mood between a verse and chorus that is then repeated in different forms to maintain an atmosphere of resentment of the world and probably life itself, but then they fake in an “inspirational” building melody which makes it all seem like hollow plastic politicized broken promises.
Vulcano – Epilogue: for years many of us have tried to like the Vulcano crossover between NWOBHM and early proto-death metal like Slayer, but in the end this falls too far toward the Hallmark movie bar scene where some really simple riff crashes into another and then there are wheedly bluesy solos until everything falls apart in chaos, at which point we are supposed to feel catharsis but mostly feel the emptiness grasping our testicles from below, even though this is massively instrumentally improved over early Vulcano.
Verberis – The Apophatic Wilderness: who wants to be first to admit that all of these sheep deep underground bands sound the same? This is basically post-metal that builds to a raging denouement which incorporates elements of black metal, death metal, war metal, and hardcore punk, but like most atmospheric post-emo stuff it is linear and develops through a verse-chorus like structure until the explosion which is about as surprising as a sticky floor at a glory hole.
Godspeed – Religious Death: if you wonder where speed metal transitioned into slam, this album gives you an idea of what existed before Exhorder and Prong got borrowed by Pantera and the whole metal world started to mix hip-hop and blues back into really basic bouncy metal, and although here it is executed with a faith in mission, it is still about as interesting as a later Exodus album played like early Exodus with more focus on basic stacking-boxes-in-the-attic riffs.
Quantum – Down the Mountainside: post-metal seems to be a great way to remake the music from fifty years ago but with more emotion worn prominently on its sleeve, throwing in metal riffs like a kind of periodic support structure as if this were a soundtrack where different bits get thrown in for different scenes, but it always returns to theme, which is the plaintive human voice wailing about its desires and fears, like primitive hominids screaming songs at the moon.
Pthumulhu – Tungumál svarthola: unlike most of the stuff that flows across the review desk, a battered orange metal rectangle covered in stickers and cigarette burns, can be immediately determined as the usual manipulative narcissistic brain-marionette material that pop and politics are, but Pthumulhu serves up primal noisy doom which focuses on using two (sometimes more) power chords to make a basic formula on which it riffs in layers, doing a reasonable job but not particularly something one would want to listen to much.
Nithing – Agonal Hymns: some bands hope to distract you with what are ultimately production artifices piled on top of the usual, such as in the case of this band that uses ambient background guitar leads changing very slowly to produce a backdrop for the usual gurgling blast beat driven chromatic death metal pile, but while the riffs knit up okay it is too linear in internal commentary and consequently has very little development.
Ecocide – Metamorphosis: solid primitive death metal that borrows from Gorguts, Sinister, Immolation, and the Swedish bands while mixing in fragmentary bits of speed metal and early proto-death for a primitive but atmospheric sound, not many surprises but songs develop cleanly with internal tension so that song structure enhances content without supplanting it, but eventually much of it fades into too much similarity of technique.
Nothingness – Supraliminal: cool concept, great cover art, and brutal death metal that plays to a doom atmosphere with detuned emo chord progressions emerges for that sort of “Reddit mood” of futility, FOMO, and self-pity all at once, giving this album an aura of sweat and Ramen in a basement room with a 1990s CRT TV hooked up to a PS5 next to some kind of weird three foot long dildo and bong combination.
Morbific – Ominous Seep of Putridity: one can find a lot to like here in the faithful old school concept administered in an idiosyncratic way, but at the end of the day this plodding death-doom album moves forward like a peat bog in an earthquake, becoming both too predictable to avoid the entropy of repetition of form, and yet erratic enough that its bits hold together by the thinnest thread of plasticine, then collapse into a churning formlessness that resembles the mentation of a Walmart shopper with a half-dead gift card.
Purulent Remains – Stages of Decomposition: now that the Incantation clone season is over, people are rediscovering Bolt Thrower and how well it mixes with classic death metal, as in this short EP which despite the Carcass-era imagery has more in common with the early years of death-doom, making slow or mid-paced death metal with hints of underlying melody and a good sense of direct but context-sensitive structure.
Hemorrhoid – Raw Materials of Decay: metal hit Late Hardcore stage sometime in 94-96 and since then has been kicking around recombinations of good ideas from the past of metal and bad ideas from outside metal, but some like Hemorrhoid try for the older grindcore styles somewhere between early Carcass and later Dead Infection, ending up with decent but undistinctive riffs, straightforward song structures, and an album that despite being faithful is mostly unexciting.
Idle Ruin – The Fell Tyrant: we might call this soccer metal because it sounds like skinny guys in eurojeans wearing backpacks and kicking around a football in the field between the Ministry of Truth and the Pfizer building, meaning that it has good rhythms from hardcore, speed metal, and some death metal but basically generic riff forms and song structures that seem to be based around nothing but making the first riff really hammer itself into what is left of your central nervous system.
Fessus – Pilgrims of Morbidity: you get a solid B when you do nothing major wrong but also get very little right to the point of distinguishing yourself from the crowd, and this old school death/grind hybrid — sounding like Autopsy crossed with Terrorizer and Nunslaughter — delivers what one would expect in forms unique enough to be discernible but at the same time, not with enough spirit or elan to the point that you want to reach for this again.
Juha Jyrkäs – Väinämöinen: it is difficult to avoid smiling at any work which invokes the Kalevala but this collection of power metal tropes mixed with medieval festival melodies and tortured basement gimp vocals simply evokes a desire to avoid it; nothing is badly done here, but the result is not compelling nor does it have enough distinctive expression of something other than typical metal to be worth its mythological inspirations.
Hellpriests – Sermon: imagine someone took the first half of an Immortal or Darkthrone song, slowed it down and threw it into a verse-chorus cycle, then focused on the vocals and repetition, and you might realize why Americans are as bad at black metal as Germans are because both of them try to turn it into boring schlage music played on detuned guitars with rock ‘n roll posturing and the result holds together as well as Taco Bell and Natural Light in the intestines of an obese power bottom running home in tears.
Shroud of Despondency / LanzerRath – Split: when a genre dies, it gets replaced by carnival music for mentally underdeveloped people, and the comedic attempts at Marilyn Manson with more edge and doom pretensions that Shroud of Despondency flog are basically just boring unless the voices in your head shout really loud, while LanzerRath is more hair stylistic music that goes nowhere but makes pleasant strumming sounds while some dude wails his schizophrenia at the moon (actually the light in his cell) while dancing the rumba.
Plastique Noir – Dead Pop: if you wanted a Sisters of Mercy approach with Duran Duran mechanics, you might appreciate this relatively straightforward pop with dark aesthetics that manages good four-cornered radio songs that perhaps miss what the really great songwriters do, which is a crossover at the turnaround which leads to a new context and that frisson that comes with dynamic thematic movement.
Holycide – Idiocracy: the whole world keeps reliving the 1980s because that is the last time anything made sense, yet speed metal still makes my skin crawl, although this Exodus, Slayer, and Biohazard influenced band does not cause immediate vomiting because its members seem to enjoy bending old tropes, but still it is hard to want to listen to this stuff instead of either the originals or something that is not speed metal.
Electrocution – Inside the Unreal: “coordinated thuds” best describes this band who take the speed metal percussive style to an extreme with an energetic attack that like all repetitive things eventually becomes background noise, especially given that songs are very similar thematically and do not stand out significantly from each other, nor come to any particular point of conflict or synthesis, meaning that this is like the soundtrack to a frustrating life where every object is square and unbalanced.
Óðkraptr – Óðkraptr: did you want more of a post-metal and doom metal fusion that kind of rambles on, then unintentionally wanders to a point and then staggers off into repetition of contrarian responses to its initial direction to the point of being as organized as the duffel bag of a captive sex worker in the bilge of an international freighter sailing through an AIDS zone? well, maybe this will amuse you for a few minutes then.
Sog – Man Demonic: this type of speed metal moves between bouncy riffs and groove, connecting them with verses in the German style of really chanty stuff where all the instruments play the same stuff at the same time, making for a jostling experience of shuttling between the utterly predictable and the pummeling ironism that dances around like urban high school students after the rock drops during third period gym and all the lessons are about dead people and math.
Alwanzatar – Engsyre: nice attempt at minimalistic electronica with flute and vocals captures a good take on an ancient mood but ends up focusing too much on layers and not enough on developing themes, resulting in a musical experience that would be perfect for cleaning a whole bunch of artifacts in the attic but otherwise compels very little except a rhythm and a slight desire to spot elves in the “erotica” section at the local library.
Spiter – Enter the Gates of Fucking Hell: this reminds me of a lot of the late 1990s transitional black metal bands that substituted raw speed and pounding drums for atmosphere, and similarity it produces a very listenable high-speed romp with melodic underpinnings but soon the nearly unchanging dynamics and similar tempi cause this to form a fungible sonic liquid that simply pours over the listener like semen on a mouse at a glory hole.
Deicide – Banished by Sin: around the boardroom, everyone agreed on the plan, which was to make a heavy metal album but use the styling of old Deicide to give it an edge over the competition, and even the union representatives and the hippies from the commune agreed, this would bring in more income for the poor and disabled, so it was a moral good blessed by Christ and Buddha as well as more importantly the shareholders, but in the end it was just chanty chorus-heavy slightly heavier new Metallica and is painful to listen to.
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Give praise to Satan, for He has won.
As time reveals that religion failed to hold off “evils” and in fact simply incorporated them in its business plan, people are turning on the false Abrahamist faiths which plague our modern world:
Isaac Jordan Soto-Olivarez, 27, was booked Thursday in El Paso after police say he was “observed on video surveillance” trashing the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church 10 days earlier.
Cops say they found holy oil poured throughout the church, as well as crosses turned upside down — and “666” scrawled on a rosary candle, mirror and prayer-room tabernacle.
If you wanted to vandalize a church, the best thing to do would be to deconsecrate it by burning human bones on the altar. Then they have to get the funny hat people out there to do some kind of ceremony involving adrenochrome and the sphincters of young Haitian boys.
This floated across my email the other day:
Save up to 30% off select packages and bundles! Or if you purchase the Decibel package, you will get a Free Gold Bundle or get a free Decibel package with the purchase of a Total Devastation Bundle!
(Sale ends tonight at midnight!)
The issue we are currently working on, will be #230, going to subscribers in mid/late October, on newsstands approximately November 14th). These fill up super fast! Secure your spot today!
The best thing about getting into Decibel is that you are getting in front of not only the eyes of millions of music fans but also everyone and anyone in the industry like promoters, managers, labels and other bands that read it!
Metal is now an industry. If you follow the procedures, use the right methods, avoid the bad words, and do something “edgy” like set your own feces on fire, you too can get promoted to the level of being a part of the funderground.
Then your album will sell a thousand copies and go on the shelf, utterly forgotten as the herd runs off to something new.
In other words, it is an inverted market: if you make something good, it gets ignored, but since everyone is equal you get a participation award, essentially.
Remember that metalcore is inhumane and therefore prized by those who have no faith in life, only a desire to exert power over others through peer pressure:
The orcas left them alone. But his second encounter with the animals in November was less civil.
This time, to deter them, the crew also tried another idea that had been passed along: booming a curated playlist of heavy metal — titled “Metal for Orcas” — through an underwater speaker. But the animals had moved quickly, targeting the rudder and disabling the boat’s steering.
It is hard to blame the Orcas for attacking a moronic species with its moronic music, knowing that this species sacrificed everything good in order to avoid evil and make everyone feel special, winding up with equal mediocrity instead.
Typical human logic.
