sludge (original) (raw)
The task before a reviewer varies widely. If you want to be a big shot, you need to write about what the labels want, since they are the only source of top-down money coming into the genre. They will then reward your publication with advertising, it will then reward you with a promotion, and eighteen months later, you can ditch it and move up to the big leagues.
Tags: 2018, Angantyr, archgoat, best of, black funeral, Black Metal, condemner, death metal, deceased, Drawn and Quartered, Grindcore, Heavy Metal, internal bleeding, iskandr, judas priest, kever, master, monstrosity, nachtlieder, phosphore blanc, progressive metal, retortion terror, Satan, slam metal, sludge, Speed Metal, Summoning, Therion, trenchant, underground metal
Poseur cash grab Finnish label Blood Music posted his favorites albums of 2017 recently on his Mosh Core Trends Fun book page. Nobody needs a 24 LP boxed set of Emperor (Only need In the Nightside Eclipse and Wrath of the Tyrant / Emperor compilation CD) featuring rehearsals of Ihsahn’s mom telling Emperor to stop dressing up like The Lost Boys and nobody needs anything on this poseur’s shilling list. Nobody wants to pay to join Blood Music’s fan club to buy his hipster merchandise. Blood Music should go shoot himself. A hollow point to the back of the head gets the job done as he has to blow up his shill lizard brain to make sure he dies for good. Do it.
Tags: 2017, blood music, cash grab, cormorant, crypto-indie, danger, elder, Enslaved, hipster, indie rock, jeremy enigk, master boot record, metalcore, poseur, poseurs, sadistic metal reviews, septic flesh, septicflesh, shills, slowdive, sludge, stoner rock, techno, the faceless
Axl Rosenberg, the founder of social justice warrior metalcore website MetalSucks, called blackened glam metal band Destroyer 666 racist over frontman K.K. Warslut’s altercation with masked antifacist thugs at a Danish festival. Earlier Rosenberg called Todd Jones from sludgecore band Nails a “scene bully” for titling their new album You Will Never Be One of Us, which he took as directed against social justice warrior internet agitators like himself.
Tags: Axl Rosenberg, beer metal, black 'n roll, communists, Denmark, destroyer 666, festivals, glam metal, hard rock, hipsters, metalcore, metalgate, MetalSucks, Nails, pop metal, scenesters, sjws, sludge
Coming soon to a used CD bin near you!
Tags: acanthrophis, Age of Agony, Aggressive Mutilator, Arktogäa, beer metal, Black Metal, blackened death metal, Cranial Engorgement, Dawn of Disease, Dead War, deathcore, folk metal, Garroted, gothenburg metal, Hardcore, Hardcore Punk, hipster bullshit, In the Court of Nyarlahotep, melodeaf, national socialist black metal, nsbm, nu-metal, pseudo-prog, pseudo-progressive, sadistic metal reviews, sludge, stinking shit, techdeaf, tek-deth, Tennger Cavalry, Victorian Whore Dogs
More mass murder of the unworthy.
Tags: 2016, al-namrood, Black Metal, Centinex, Darkestrah, deathcore, diamond head, Forteresse, gothenburg metal, hard rock, metalcore, novelty metal, pseudo-progressive, quebec, Québécois, random, sadistic metal reviews, saudi arabia, sludge, stinking shit, Sweden, War Metal
Resistance fuels hatred and must be crushed beneath an iron fist.
The Oath – The Oath (2014)
“Whoa!” – Keanu Reeves. These women are actually fairly attractive! Usually metal girls are fat, under 5’4, and have saggy tits. Or they love Slipknot. I can see why Lee Dorian is dicking the hot one. This at least has riffs even if most of the songs wear out their welcome fairly quickly. There are Cathedral albums more boring than this but most of these songs feel like Motorhead if they smoked dope instead of cranked speed. Motorhead if Motorhead were boring and the songs went on two minutes too long and had random riff salad bridges. If these two would actually get naked on the cover like the real Coven and separated or refined their compositions, maybe this would be more listenable. Hold it is that riff from Bad Company? Who steals riffs from Bad Company? What kind of degenerate does that? If this is among the more listenable grrrl metal…
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Arc (2016)
As ridiculous as their band name, Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s 2016 effort is a lazy mixture of stoner rock and deathcore. It consists of interleaved Black Sabbath-core grooves and pointless breakdowns accentuated by a menstruating screamo vocalist. By the very definition of those two genres, the reader should know this is but a string of feel-good moments with absolutely no point whatsoever.
One has to wonder if the band even knows what “agoraphobic” means, given their blatantly idiotic use in their band name. From there, we can easily tell how they would also try to use “fancy vocabs” from the metal terrain without even knowing what they are for, hence the constant groove with no beginning or ending. The meaningless breakdowns that do not necessarily make the stoner rock more bearable, but just emphasize what white trash trailer park music this is. It is an updated distorted-guitar redneck music.
Baroness – Purple (2015)
The most generic heavy metal rhythm guitar riffing possible clipped with too much compression and mixed with queer hipster rock for those who question their sexuality. I’m pretty sure the hairy girls in this band are in a polygamous relationship with the dude singing and blow roadies on the side. Kind of like how Carrie Fischer let the crew members of the original Star Wars rip the tape off her tits only with more Hepatitis C positive semen from people who tried intravenous drugs. This album sounds like my local modern rock radio station who plays Bush twice a day. Baroness is the most generic 2003 rock possible only maybe one of these girls’ brothers had Led Zeppelin and Metallica posters in her bedroom. Baroness should go back to VH1. Wait VH1 doesn’t air this crap anymore as even VH1 realized how terrible it is. VH1 is Rock of Love now.
Wolvserpent – Aporia:Kāla:Ananta (2016)
Who knows why we ever receive these sort of promos that are not remotely metal, though perhaps some suppose there is a connection because the sound and procedure may remind one of the pointlessness of post metal/rock. At the center of Wolvserpent’s music is a violin playing repetitive music while the fringes are filled with synthesizers, bass and some kind of distorted noise to fill the space. I imagine this purports to be ambient, and it evidently takes cues not only from what we know today as classic ambient but from the old, more noise-inclusive and experimental one. At some point during the 40 minutes of this release, towards the approach of its middle section, a growl-screech appears and we become the audience of a post-doom-black nothingness that lasts for about 5 minutes. After this, the music tries to pick up by adding some synths to beef up the emptiness of the lame doom metal writing that approximates what Esoteric do most of the time (waste your time with largely content-less sections while pretending to have an ambient edge). This amounts to little more than piled up noise with some consonance. This melting away proceeds for about 8 more minutes, after which we are introduced to a 4-minute hum. This hum gives then serves as background for some 3 classical string instruments playing repetitive disonant arpeggios for 3 or 4 more minutes until only they remain and the music fades out to the sound of soothing, rolling, waves. Empty and boring. Throw this away
Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner (2016)
Enya songs with randomly inserted post-metalcore sludge bridges. Are those bongos? Is this Arise? Who thought of this? Whoever thought of this should be shot in the back of the head by their local troika, have their children post-nataly aborted, and their women deported to the camps for wives of traitors to the motherland.
Snake Tongue – Raptor’s Breath (2016)
Random stolen eighties metal riffs made into Entombedcore with gang vocals by Kurt Ballou. I think that’s a woman in the promo picture. Maybe it’s a man who is just confused that his baby dick is a big clitoris. Yeah they can get that big. Haven’t you seen Backdoor to Chyna?
Necrosic – Putrid Decimation (2016)
These girls imagine what would have happened if in 1990 Autopsy had written songs entirely out of mosh riffs broken up by hardcore and shameless lifts from Slayer’s catalog. The answer is a metal band that would have only have been fit to play pizza parlors filled with 17 year olds too busy playing arcade games to pay attention. Anthrax if Anthrax decided to cash-in on sludge instead of nu-metal in the early 90s.
Sacrilege – Behind the Realms of Madness (1985)
This is the sort of release that exemplifies that some releases were never meant to be heard, not to mention be re-released. To pretend this is some sort of hidden gem is to pander to the clueless audience’s sense of nostalgia in the most dishonest way. Sacrilege never amounted to much as their music was never much. What we hear in hear in Behind the Realms of Madness is the sort of simpleton’s generic metal any angry teenager could be writing and playing in his garage with his friends after huffing glue. Each of these songs is based entirely upon a single riff played ad nauseam while an angry woman shouts about how much she hates her father. There are random supplementary riffs here and there but they are just meant to provide some sense of dynamism to the propulsion of the main riff. The main riffs in every song are generic and almost indistinguishable, the vocals are identical (some angry British woman screaming about how she got fucked over by her dad who wouldn’t pay for her BA in Womyn’s and Sexual Identity Studies), and every single song has the same kind of poser-trudging-accross-the-mall-food-court from Hot Topic vibe about it.
Sacred Few – Beyond the Walls (1985)
Another mediocre eighties heavy metal album with an annoying vocalist that deserved to be forgotten. Manilla Road this is not; the songwriting is generic, the riffs unoriginal, and the guitar tone too thin. This was only pressed to CD to cash in on idiot hipsters dumb enough to be deluded by Vice into believing that metal needs more dumpy women. I would rather listen to every Motorhead album I don’t remember even exists than this lame woman who drinks too much Budweiser again. This is retro-metal for cuckolded submissive males who think Steve Harris is Pogrom and jerked off to the blonde women in catsuits from The Oath instead of real porn. I’m going to crack open another Coors Banquet and use this CD as a coaster. Wait is the Puerto Rican guy in the collar her slave?
Lizzies – Good Luck (2016)
Judas Priest covered by Spanish pre-op transsexuals. Listening to this album makes me want to chop my leg off so my femoral artery will bleed out in three minutes. Two tracks in and I just put on Unleashed in the East instead. Let’s all listen to that classic instead of this crap:
Tags: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Baroness, crust, Crust Punk, crustcore, crustfundies, Cult of Luna, deathcore, doom, Doom Metal, entombedcore, hipster bullshit, idiots, Julie Christmas, Kurt Ballou, Lizzies, metalcore, metalgate, necrosic, nuclear war now! productions, nwn, post-hardcore, reissues, relapse, relapse records, Rise Above Records, Sacred Few, sacrilege, sadistic metal reviews, scantily-clad women, shadow kingdom records, sludge, Snake Tongue, Speed Metal, The Oath, Wolvserpent, women in metal
Oh here she comes. Watch out boy she’ll chew you up. She’s a maneater. – Darryl Hall and John Oates, 1982.
Black Tusk – Pillars of Ash (2016)
A fusion of party rock, screamo, and hardcore punk, Pillars of Ash brings a risible contribution to the rock/punk spectrum that many a beginner is prone to confuse with metal. The relevant question here is whether or not Black Tusk have anything worthwhile to offer to the listener that may not be found in higher quality elsewhere. The answer is a resounding NO. The album plays like a tenuous stream of echoes of 1980s hardcore bands rearranged with Mario Paint.
Tombs – All Empires Fall (2016)
Tombs is described in some places as black or post metal, and while there is some borrowing from black metal techniques in the use of some blast beats and an imitation of traditional black metal vocals, Tombs isn’t isn’t black metal. The post-metal is correctly applied in that this isn’t much more than a poor excuse for pseudo-ambient experiments with haphazardly connected sections being paraded as composition. There are strong references to doom metal, cheap and stompy heavy rock, with post rock being added as the way to get away with 3rd rate writing. All in all, boring, generic, unfocused, and unoriginal background music. Tombs is lounge music.
Howls of Ebb – Cursus Impasse: The Pendlomic Vows (2016)
Entirely random pastiche of metal clichés loosely held together by psychedelic interludes and a drunk vocalist feigning faux lunacy. If a blend of Voivod, galloping heavy metal, canned black metal and fuzz drenched noise rock wah wah soloing wasn’t pointless enough, the band commands and impressively dissociated catalog of occult vocabulary to match.
Nucleus – Sentient (2016)
Nucleus have fun in the studio and they want you, dear listener, to have fun at home with them. If you like Demilich but thought it was too strange, too serious, or too weird to play around your sister then Sentience is the record that delivers all the thrills of Finnish extradimensional insectoid death without danger of unthrashability. All the more perfect for fucking your sister behind the dumpster at the skatepark.
Candelabrum – Necrotelepathy (2016)
Two twenty minute tracks of spooky landscapes, sad vampire vocals, and canned drum patterns. If the goal was to stride the line between hysterical and uncomfortable, this record is a resounding success. Necrotelepathy is more Vampire Diaries metal.
Abyssus – Once Entombed (2016)
Another pizza thrash band with a veneer of death metal fronted by a Greek John Tardy fan. The album art and song titles make adequate use of Death Metal Band Generator. Perfect comedy for those Saturday mornings when you are drunk with fellow “scene veterans.”
Clawhammer Abortion – Slaughter Campaign (2016)
This band took every criticism levied against death metal and wrote an album of it. In order to get through, I turned it into a drinking game: Hear a cliché, drink. The only problem is I passed out drunk after three songs and the Editor took over. He heard so many Sodom breakdowns and generic grindcore riffs that he kicked my ghetto blaster into the campfire. Only the most calcified kidneys and fattiest livers prevail in the Eternal War.
Tags: Abyssus, beer metal, Black Tusk, Candelabrum, Clawhammer Abortion, death metal, Doom Metal, goth metal, Grindcore, hipster bullshit, howls of ebb, lounge music, modern metal, Nucleus, party metal, pizza thrash, post-rock, relapse, relapse records, sadistic metal reviews, sludge, Speed Metal, Tombs
Vociferian comes to us from the European sprawl through members who are originally French, but now reside in Belgium, and make a type of death metal/rock hybrid that rumbles in the right places but never really gets enough direction beyond drone to make a point. The songs do not ramble, but also never reach that moment of really wrapping around what the riffs have unleashed and transforming it into a new energy. In addition, many of these riffs are clever variations of very well-known types, which makes one wonder what is being said.
Although the band lists “crust” along with its other influences, the main focus here is droning doom metal of the hard rock variety, more like Crowbar and Sleep than Neurosis or Amebix. Unlike funeral doom bands like Skepticism, the songs do not gain momentum from the increasing layers of atmosphere but move in a circular pattern much like Sleep Holy Mountain. The result is a pleasing veneer on background sounds of collapse with more aggression than most of these bands can muster, wandering into sludge territory with rock/punk patterns.
Princess of Violation presents an album that falls far from bad, and has some interesting twists, but for death metal fans will not be internally varied or purposeful enough to seek again. Like most music, it has found a method without a cause, and so while this band scrupulously avoids randomness or wandering, never gets to its end point. Now that Vociferian has mastered its basic style, one can only hope for greater expansion of content and internal dialogue for the next work, as that would give this fertile style the power it needs to cruise forward.
Tags: Doom Metal, hard rock, sludge, vociferian
In support of their Relapse Records debut LP, Random Cosmic Violence, Portland, Oregon’s decimating cosmic doom/sludge act, USNEA, has just embarked on the band’s most extensive tour ever. Kicking off in their hometown tonight, the quartet will take their dredging hymns across North America with nearly three dozen shows through mid-June. Leading off with several solo gigs,USNEA will rendezvous with Italian psychedelic doom trio, Ufomammut, mid-next week, and will directly support them for the entirety of their first North American tour, with several one-off shows confirmed along the way, in addition to a performance at this year’s Maryland Deathfest with Ufomammut as well as Primitive Man, Mantar, Conan, Yob and more.
USNEA Tour Dates:
- 5/08/2015 High Water Mark – Portland, OR * tour kick-off w/ Eye of Nix, Hiding, Shine of the Serpent
- 5/09/2015 Neurolux – Boise, ID – w/ Inter Arma, Uzala, Yautja5/10/2015 Metro Bar – Salt Lake City, UT w/ Odium Totus
- 5/11/2015 Lost Lake Lounge – Denver, CO w/ Inter Arma, Yautja, Prison Death
- 5/12/2015 Frank’s North Star Tavern – Lawrence, KS
USNEA North America Spring 2015 w/ Ufomammut:
- 5/13/2015 Reggies – Chicago, IL w/ Bloodiest, Cokegoat5/14/2015 Now That’s Class – Cleveland, OH w/ Contra
- 5/15/2015 Bug Jar – Rochester, NY w/ Blizaro, The Highest Leviathan5/16/2015 Mod Club – Toronto, ON w/ Olde, Sons of Otis
- 5/17/2015 Le Ritz – Montreal, QC w/ Tunguska Mammoth, Show Of Bedlam5/18/2015 Middle East Upstairs – Boston, MA w/ Stomach Earth, Wormwood, Slow Mover [no Ufomammut]
- 5/19/2015 Saint Vitus Bar – Brooklyn, NY
- 5/20/2015 Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA w/ Ominous Black
- 5/21/2015 Ram’s Head Live – Baltimore, MD @ Maryland Deathfest
- 5/22/2015 King’s – Raleigh, NC w/ Make
- 5/23/2015 Drunken Unicorn – Atlanta, GA w/ Order Of The Owl
- 5/24/2015 HiTone Café – Memphis, TN [no Ufomammut]
- 5/25/2015 Siberia – New Orleans, LA w/ Space Cadaver
- 5/26/2015 Walter’s – Houston, TX w/ Holy Money, Defending The Kingdom5/27/2015 Red 7 – Austin, TX w/ Unmothered
- 5/29/2015 Sister – Albuquerque, NM w/ Black Maria
- 5/30/2015 Flycatcher – Tucson, AZ w/ Sorxe, Inoculara
- 5/31/2015 Complex – Los Angeles, CA w/ Kata
- 6/01/2015 Sweet Spring Saloon – Los Osos, CA [no Ufomammut]
- 6/02/2015 Catalyst – Santa Cruz, CA w/ The Bad Light
- 6/03/2015 Elbo Room – San Francisco, CA w/ Badr Vogu, Hornss
- 6/04/2015 Press Club – Sacramento, CA w/ Lycus, Church
- 6/06/2015 Rotture – Portland, OR w/ Survival Knife, Church
- 6/07/2015 Chop Suey – Seattle, WA w/ Survival Knife
- 6/08/2015 Neurolux – Boise, ID w/ Brett Nelson & Snakes
- 6/09/2015 Bar Deluxe – Salt Lake City, UT w/ Subrosa
- 6/10/2015 Hi-Dive – Denver, CO w/ In the Company of Serpents
- 6/12/2015 Turf Club – St Paul, MN w/ Vulgaari
- 6/13/2015 Metal Grill – Milwaukee, WI w/ Asatta
War Iron released their first album in 2010 with the explicit intention of making pulverizing heavy music and creating bone-crushing riffs. If they accomplish the first of these is up to each particular listener to decide, the second is true by the very nature of slow-tempo, duple-time patterns played in de-tuned guitars with incredibly fat but clear distortion. But music with a profound and long-lasting repercussions, that is, with depth, relies on its concrete and intrinsic (rather than an external argument for possible)multiple levels of appreciation, which go beyond attributes of heaviness.
As the sharp observer of metal artwork covers may notice, the colors and penmanship of Procession of the Equinoxes are a fair warning of what this music is and what it is not. The lyrical topics are a cartoonish and theatrical representation of topics deemed occult and dark in popular culture. It is then no surprise that the music is consistent with these as well. Sludge (a slow counterpart to the vacuous Stoner) riffs march in procession. One by one they march. They do not talk to each other, they do not communicate anything. They do groove though. And they groove heavily. And then the album is over.
Fans of intense and heavy riffing, slow trudging music and a cool, and dark atmosphere that feels like the music accompanying a recitation of _Evil Dead_‘s Necronomicon will love this for its uncompromising devotion to heaviness.
Tags: 2015, procession of the equinoxes, sludge, stoner, war iron