“”In the name of the Code, and of the Sacred Disk, and the Holy System. Our Core, which art in Data, Hallowed be Thy Code.” These words adorn the lavish brochure you were handed as you stepped into the Keygen Church. There, behind the altar, stands the robopastor/technosorcerer Victor Love. You recognize him; our IT prophet Sentynel has lauded Love’s work in Master Boot Record twice, but now the doors to Love’s liturgical side project Keygen Church have swung open.” Room and motherboard.
Sentynel and Twelve crafted Top Ten(ish) lists with great care and you must stuff them in your stockings or beware.
“There’s electronic metal, and then there’s this Vengeur record. Superficially similar, Herman ‘Vengeur’ Pańkow’s solo project could hardly have less in common with that subgenre. ‘Witch house,’ ‘dissolved genres,’ and ‘avant-garde’ are just some of their Bandcamp tags. The fact that this is on I, Voidhanger should also give fair warning of its idiosyncrasy. Nothing, however, could prepare me for what would come after I pressed play on Par Feu et Par Flammes.” Beat of the electro-heart.
“As Summer begins in earnest in sunny, ever-friendly New York, it’s a good time to look back on the Record(s) o’ the Month from Spring. Yes, we must look way back to the month of May, where the metal is now a bit olde.” Tardiness is a human construct.
“For the three of you who haven’t yet encountered me gushing about Master Boot Record, here’s the summary. Decreasingly anonymous Italian musician Victor Love, inspired by classic 16-bit video game soundtracks and the harsh sound of a floppy drive stepper motor, synthesizes heavy metal. Despite sounding like a one-album novelty, Personal Computer is MBR’s eighth full-length in seven years and they’re signed to Metal Blade.” Boots and scans.
“So many questions. So few answers. Who decided mathcore, industrial and grind needed to be matched up with chiptune? Where did that idea even come from? Who was this made for? The answers, I believe, are, respectively: Next Life did; who the fuck knows; and me, probably. I love genre mashups, and if chiptune is even remotely involved, I go to there with haste.” Love Guru?
“Master Boot Record first came to my attention a few years ago as a novelty synth-metal nerd music act that made good coding music. After a hard disk full of releases in their first couple of years, Interrupt Request was released in 2017. At that point, I suddenly realized that MBR had privilege escalated from novelty act to serious music. Nothing had changed about the style or the presentation, but after iterative improvements, the quality of the songwriting demanded that they be taken seriously.” Disc blaster.
“To begin, Öxxö Xööx sits most comfortably under the doom metal umbrella, tending towards (but not exclusively using) slower rhythms and riffs, and leveraging gothic instrumentation such as organs, harpsichords and string sections. But Ÿ is far from any ordinary doom release with which you may be familiar. It’s a distinctly singular release, a patchwork of textures, timbres and tempos with the words “AVANT GARDE” metaphorically stitched over the top.” Ÿ no Igorrlips mumblepants.
“Unusual genre crossovers are a tricky thing to get right. Done well, by bands like Diablo Swing Orchestra, they can produce brilliant music that sounds like nothing else. Done poorly, they certainly sound like nothing else. When we last saw 80s horror-themed black metal/synthwave crossover act GosT on their previous album Possessor, Eldritch Elitist noted the combination was sometimes awkward, but great when it worked.” GosTed.
![The EP, Demo, and Oddity Post [Things You Might Have Missed 2018]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/cuervoportrait.jpg)
“As a younger man I had no concept of the “EP,” nor the “demo,” nor the “split.” When was the last time Iron Maiden had to curb their excesses by squashing ideas into half an hour? When were Judas Priest not able to afford a professional recording studio and production job? And when’s that Metallica/Megadeth split due again? Such formats are reserved for the underdogs of the metal world, those bubbling beneath the surface of popularity who write music for the sheer creative expression and who will never see monetary reward for their time and effort.” Short is sweet.
