The point of Things You Might Have Missed is to point out great records we didn’t cover in time, which wasn’t exactly the case with Tenacious D, but definitely is the case with Aeternam’s 2012 offering Moongod. We never received promo of this record ahead of time – but it appears to have been released […]
Steel Druhm has a sordid history of black metal bashing. Now he turns his bitter attention to the new opus by Weapon. Will Embers and Revelations avoid his typical blackened butt spankery? They better hope so; the man has an iron hand.
Morbid Angel, Nile, Sweden, AMG and Motorhead. Now THAT’S a party!
Middle-eastern tinged metal has become a slight trend. Since Nile really took off with the sound and influences, slowly but surely the metal scene has followed with. Behemoth played the Nile card and won big with it and Melechesh has grown to great popularity, releasing great records left and right. However, that bands from the middle-eastern or north African region are actually put out records influenced by their own culture, that’s pretty new. Sure, Orphaned Land has been around a long time, but they didn’t really catch the popular metal imagination until 2006. Myrath still hasn’t caught on and now we have Raven Woods of Turkish extraction.
While the metal world has gone agog for Egyptian metal, and actually I’ve seen these guys linked up with Nile and Aeternam in other places, Melechesh is a unique band in that they are ultimately Sumerian metal. What’s the difference you say? Well, melodically not much. However, Sumeria is a totally fascinating historical place which was where modern day Iraq is (which is technically Mesopotamia, Sumeria was a grouping of city-states, this also includes the Israel and Palestine region). It is considered by most Biblical scholars to be the place where the “tribes of Israel” and the other natives of the region must have come from and it is south of or in the Fertile Crescent, which for anyone who knows their history is where agriculture is supposed to have come from. Some of the oldest texts in the world that we’ve ever found are Sumerian (written in Cuneiform) and the culture was highly advanced in math (inventing the abacus) and writing.
