Jan
10
2012
Things You Might Have Missed 2011: Nader Sadek – In the Flesh
For me 2011 was a year devoid of a death metal record that really knocked it out of the park. While Vomitory produced a pretty damn solid album, and Diocletian and Ulcerate were really good, but they didn’t exactly get me writhing around on the ground in ecstasy like a lot of other people seemed to have experienced it. So when I was digging through my unopened promos, I stumbled upon Nader Sadek‘s debut record which came out in 2011 from Season of Mist Records. And let me just say that I wasn’t even mildly prepared for what I was going to get. I’ll give you a hint though: it was 100% win. Continue reading
Doom metal is a sub-genre that gets a lot of flak from orthodox metal fans for being “boring” or “too slow”, even more so for the processionary pace of funeral doom. Enter Denmark’s Woebegone Obscured, self-described as a “blackened funeral doom” band, with their debut full length Deathstination (self-released in 2007 and now re-released by I, Voidhanger records) – a crushingly slow doom album punctuated by high-energy black metal flourishes and a very apparent progressive mentality. 
As world metal takes the stage, something that is happening more and more frequently these days, we’re going to be seeing more of these bands coming from places where metal just hasn’t ever shown its face earlier. Demonic Resurrection, as those of you familiar with Sam Dunn’s documentary Global Metal already know, are a band from India who play symphonic black metal. The third record in a trilogy The Return to Darkness is being released (as I understand it) as the band’s first international release via Candlelight Records. That Sam Dunn is a rockstar creating machine, it turns out. Though, when it comes to Demonic Resurrection, their music speaks for itself and if you give that music a stage that myriads of metalheads have access to, it’s not hard to see how they managed to break beyond their borders. 
If you ask any black metal purist what real “black metal” should sound like, you will probably get a slew of bands that, seem to blur into each other somewhat in a slew of blast beats, tremelo-picked riffs and shrieked vocals – and woe betide he who dares to experiment with this time honoured recipe. Black metal is a cutthroat genre among its fans, and bands that defy the trends of the genre yet still dub their metal “black” are quick to draw the ire of the once faithful. Blake Judd’s Nachtmystium took a major gamble when they decided to pursure a more avant-garde approach to black metal with Instinct: Decay and have both won and lost fans, but so far, (In this angry metal guy’s opinion, at least) their less orthodox releases have been consistent and relevant to the modern black metal landscape. 
