“Two years ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing The Monolith Deathcult’s 2015 EP Bloodcvlts. And by ‘pleasure,’ I mean something else entirely. The band is everything Leave It to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell would be in reality. At first, the band seems like a serious, straight-laced Dutch death metal group. They seem polite and always outgoing, straight-to-the-point and never misleading. Then you discover the truth: that’s all bullshit.” Bloodcvlts, BS, Beaver.
“‘May you dream of the devil and wake in fright.’ This old curse serves as the inspiration for the novel and later film adaptation Wake in Fright, a harrowing descent into madness that tells the tale of an English school teacher in a remote Australian town who wrestles with conformity, misery and the innate self-destruction that clings to man like a shadow.” To sleep, per-chase to scream.
“When faced with a work of art that purports to be avant-garde, invariably a question must be asked: is the all-but-total abandonment of classical song structure and melody a hallmark of innovation and a refutation of the musical establishment or is it merely the flotsam-and-jetsam of musicians lacking the skills to write a decent song in the first place?” Challenging.
“Rigor Mortis is about as cult a name as there is in the annals of thrash. Unable to capitalize on the genre’s first wave in the mid 80s, the band’s 88′ debut was a wild, almost cartoonish dose of speed with death undertones that arrived just in time for the entire thrash genre to go over the proverbial cliff due to oversaturation.” This may be the surprise of the year right here.
“There’s something about the call of psycho-bombastic, industrialized black metal shunning the hypocrisy of cult religions that arouses my curiosity. To give you a bit of background, Invertia are in the process of launching their second full-length release via ultra-angry, techno geeks Ohm Resistance Records.” Madam X likes dark stuff. This is dark stuff. Does she like it? Find out!
“There’s a moment in time, at a certain point and it doesn’t even matter where, when one starts to wonder: how big is this machine? Does it have thoughts of its own? Where does the medium start and the human mind end? But does it matter, after all? Author & Punisher is a true son of post-industrial America: one of those people who may end up living their entire lives without having to turn the handles of a proper mechanical apparatus, smell the iron, wonder why its aroma is so similar to that of human blood and confuse form with substance. Machines – greasy joints dripping oil as if sweat – belong to zoos together with those strange animals (cows, goats, donkeys, etc.) young kids rarely see.” I for one would love to visit a mechanical zoo! Anywho, Alex provides us with more of his thoughtful musings on life, machinery and metal as he examines the new Author & Punisher opus.
Morbid Angel is elite death metal and has been the standard for as long as I can remember. They have defined death metal for listeners of the genre for decades, influenced all of the great bands to come out of the genre after them, and have been away for 8 long years. 2003’s Heretic was not the best record they’d ever produced, this is most certainly true. But there was no reason not to believe after hearing “Nevermore,” the single that was released ahead of time, that the return of David Vincent would usher in the kind of catastrophic reaction that has ensued. I make it my business to never read reviews of any record before I write my own review, hell, I haven’t even read Steel Druhm’s (which is below this one) of this record. But it was hard to miss the fury, anger and disappointment that has been floating around the ether. I had to ask myself “could it really possibly be this bad?” You see, I’m a stalwart defender of some pretty hated records (most notably Iron Maiden’s The X Factor and Mayhem’s Grand Declaration of War), and I try to listen to every record with a clean slate. And I attempted to do so with this record, as well.
