It’s funny how experimental, extreme, and essentially subversive genres become just as susceptible to tropes and cliches as any other genre out there. It probably has something to do with how creativity works, that most of us need a common scaffolding from which to work, leaving the truly wild explorations…
Over the past several years, death metal has experienced a renaissance of epic proportions, fueled by movements of radical innovation (propelled by bands such as Ingurgitating Oblivion, Pyrrhon, Alkaloid, Artificial Brain, and a host of others) and adherence to the genre’s most cherished and essential elements (think early Horrendous, Blood…
Brutal death metal, especially in its more technical manifestations, has been experiencing something of a renaissance as of late. Devourment, Wormed, Organectomy, Infant Annihilator, Unfathomable Ruination, Disentomb, and a host of others dropped albums in 2019 that could easily be counted among their finest work, setting the table for a…
We’re going to do something a bit different today – I’ve been joined by Janice from Heavy Blog HR. She’ll be monitoring the content I’m contributing and, if we’re lucky, she might pipe in with her sanitary, milk’n’cookies thoughts. Grind, powerviolence, cursing, and quality TV shopping – you’ll find them…
The world is a crazy place that calls for crazy music. Enter technical death metal, one of extreme music’s most slippery and indecipherable subgenres. From the space-aged weirdness of Artificial Brain to the entombed, unknowable horrors of Portal, tech death spans a wide array of sounds that are difficult to…
Tech death is a weird branch of the metal tree. Focused primarily on performative fireworks as opposed to standard songwriting structures, the music can at times come across as highly robotic. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for me as a listener there’s only so many insane guitar passages…
The murky and amorphous style of extreme metal that has taken root in the wake of acts like Gorguts, Portal, and Deathspell Omega has seemingly become the predominate driving creative force in the underground extreme metal zeitgeist in recent years. The emphasis on weird, Lovecraftian atmospheres has infected both black and death metal, with acts like Imperial Triumphant, Artificial Brain, Pyrrhon, and Dodecahedron, to name a few, land on year-end lists with wonky, dissonant riffs, and a flair for the experimental. The trouble at this point is that when working within such an esoteric sound, it becomes difficult to carve out a niche and break out from the pack. Up and coming bands, take note: murk chords and blastbeats aren’t cutting it anymore.
It’s hard to write these intros without spoiling other posts from our end of year content; after all, this intro is focused on 2018 and what it has been and that’s addressed in multiple upcoming posts as well. However, it still needs to be done and this post is, nominally…
Man, technical/progressive death metal’s really been having somewhat of a boom at the moment, huh? Rivers of Nihil, Obscura, Alkaloid, Monotheist, and Augury have all put out great albums this year, and 2017 saw some landmark drops as well with the likes of Archspire, NYN, Artificial Brain, and Cytotoxin. And as much as I enjoy name-checking bands to remind…
The fact we’re amid a death metal renaissance has been widely covered over the last several years, and particularly the last few months. Along with our usual monthly praises in Death’s Door, sites like Bandcamp and Toilet ov Hell have recently published odes to the modern crop of death metal ingenuity.…
