This band was created as a side project by two of the most prominent members of Croatia’s Black Metal scene (Insanus and Morbid, both of whom were/are involved in many bands), to play Black Metal the way they thought it should be played. That said, I had mixed expectations for this release. On one hand, it’s a project created by two scene veterans who, theoretically, should know what Black Metal is supposed to sound like. On the other hand, these guys come from a scene that isn’t exactly world famous for spawning awesome Black Metal in the same way that Norway, Sweden, and Greece are. Black Cult was either going to be good or shit, depending on what these guys thought Black Metal was supposed to be about. That said, Neo-Satanism is actually pretty good. It’s a throwback to the older era of Norse/Scandinavian Black Metal with lots of nods to old Bathory and the usual suspects (Emperor, Burzum, Darkthrone, etc.) as far as musical influences. The music itself isn’t groundbreakingly original, but at the same time, it does possess some of the old Punk energy that was a hallmark of early Black Metal, particularly when it came to the most ancient bands, namely Venom and Bathory. That energy elevates this LP from being a project that shamelessly apes old Scandinavian bands to a band that actually has convictions. These guys want to play this kind of music, they believe in what they’re playing, and their enthusiasm shows. What’s lacking, though, is a dark atmosphere. The music itself is a lethal cocktail of catchy riffs and corrosive vocals, but seems to lack an aura of menace or pervasive evil, something almost as essential to Black Metal as guitars and drums. I think the root cause of it is the cleaner sound. This could have used a dirtier and rawer guitar tone (preferably one that was bass-heavy) and maybe some more reverb on the vocals. Neo-Satanism has a sound that shows the riffs in razor sharp clarity and I think that clarity came at the expense of the band’s natural rawness. I imagine that if you saw Black Cult perform live, all of these songs would sound fucking insanely dark, but it doesn’t translate as well here. This is a minor thing because I also factor in how much damage this band delivered to my neck - and this album did a considerable amount of it. There is room for improvement in the production side of things, but as far as the music and its execution, this is excellent.

Although Loudblast is huge in their native France, their releases have been ridiculously hard to find in the United States. The last time I remember seeing any domestic release from this band here in the USA, it was the Century Media compilation, In the Eyes of Death, which also featured Unleashed, Asphyx, Tiamat, and Grave. That was in 1991! It’s been a long time since I’ve heard Loudblast, to say the least. Back in the early ’90s, I pretty much devoured anything that was extreme in Metal music. I’d grown tired of Heavy Metal because so much of it was Butt Rock masquerading as Metal. My diet became Death Metal and brutal Thrash because it was dark and evil sounding and I craved that in my music. I purchased any compilations that l could find from labels like Century Media, Nuclear Blast and Roadrunner to hear new bands because the Internet didn’t exist as it does today. I remembered Loudblast pretty clearly because they were one of those bands that I could never track down, even though I had managed to purchase releases from every other band that was on that Century Media compilation. I was a voracious consumer of evil music and I spent every spare dime on Metal, with my collection focusing on obscure and hard to find stuff. For a band to elude me for so long was an anomaly and finally having a full-length Loudblast LP to listen to feels like a bizarre accomplishment. Thankfully, I’m not disappointed. The band has changed a lot since their days of playing straight-forward Death Metal. Burial Ground, their latest album, is still heavily influenced by old Death Metal, but they’ve become far more melodic and Thrash-influenced over the years. It hasn’t diminished their impact, but it has added an additional layer of memorability and even some atmosphere that their old stuff was lacking. The only issues that I had with this LP were with the production, and a lot of that has to do with my personal feelings on how a Metal album is supposed to sound. I like loud guitars, and Burial Ground could have used slightly louder guitars and also a thicker, more bass-heavy guitar tone. The guitars seemed to be constantly at war with the drums for attention, and I found that to be distracting because when the drums were in blast mode, they made the riffs harder to discern. Another distraction for me was the bass drum sound. It’s like a light switch and I hate that. A bass drum is supposed to have a deeper tone, but so many bands want to make it sound higher pitched than the snare. This is particularly annoying when the drummer goes into blast mode. When the double-bass kicks in, it sounds like a hyperactive kid messing with a light switch. Production issues aside, this is a pretty sick LP. I was wearing a neck brace for a week after listening to Burial Ground, and neck damage from headbanging is the hallmark of a great Metal album. If you like your Death Metal on the Thrashy side with memorable riffing, sick guitar solos and corrosive vocals, this is an album to check out.

I’ve delayed the review of Cannibal Corpse’s 13th full-length album for a multitude of reasons. There’s the whole slavery thing. Got to put in 40 hours a week to ensure that the money from my employers gets properly transferred from one master to another. Then there’s that sloth/gluttony angle. Most days I’d rather be reading Marvel comics through a haze of pot fog in post-masturbatory, stuffed-crust nirvana. But those are pretty cheap excuses. First and foremost, I just haven’t been able to get into the record. I’d hoped that repeated listens over an extended period of time would remedy the situation, but who the fuck am I kidding? Cannibal Corpse is a first-listen band if ever there were one. Not even 50-plays-per-day exposure to lead single “The Murderer’s Pact” on MusicChoice’s Metal channel has warmed me up to said track alone. Look, I love this group and wanted to love this LP, and considering they’d been on such a roll of maximum-quality releases over the last decade… well, I had to be sure the problem wasn’t me. Sadly, for once it isn’t. The legends are simply on auto-bludgeon here. It isn’t so much the music. Webster, Mazurkiewicz, Barret & O’Brien are able to drop jaws on their worst day. As is often the case with Death Metal, it’s usually on the vocalist whether the end result flops or flourishes, and given this is the biggest Death Metal band in the world, that’s a ton of weight squarely placed on George Fisher’s barbarically broad shoulders. Proof that even one of the best —not to mention most easily recognizable— growlers on the globe can have a bad outing. Then again, terms like “bad” and “flop” may be somewhat harsh. “Unenthused” probably sums it up a little better. Corpsegrinder just doesn’t sound all that into it this go-‘round. It’s evident from opener “High Velocity Impact Splatter” —with its chrous of… you guessed it… “High velocity impact splatter”— that he’s in robot mode. Granted, it’s one monstrous angry-sounding robot, but the vocal patterns suffer nonetheless. When a guy screams repeatedly to “Fire up the chainsaw!” (see “Kill or Become”), and the listener at no point during the song feels even mildly motivated to fire up the chainsaw, something is amiss. But at least this cut is memorable in its own way. The same can’t be said for the majority of the album, which goes in one stabwound and out the other. Perhaps it’s time for a vacation. Satan knows they’ve earned it. At the end of the day, these guys are still the master butchers. A Skeletal Domain just isn’t going to make it into too many DM lifers’ Cannibal Corpse top fives when it’s all said and done.

There are those who are going to see the “SS” in the beginning of this band’s name and immediately write them off as NSBM, but please don’t make that mistake. For those still reading, this is not NSBM. The band’s name, according to what I’ve read, comes from a Russian nuclear missile. Naturally, the band’s lyrics are heavily influenced by war, mostly the nuclear kind, but they do stray into other forms of destruction and chaos. Musically, I thought that this was going to be in the Blasphemy vein, but the music is actually a lot more interesting than that. There is still some of that War Metal style in their sound, but the band incorporates other influences, going from the primitive and abrasive stuff on “Firewing” to a more atmospheric style on “Battalions of the Last War,” occasionally interspersing Ambient or Industrial bits to spice things up. These additions add a lot to the band’s sound because they come out of left field, introducing additional layers of complexity. It takes a song that sounds primitive (such as “Dead Reality”) and makes it more interesting musically. I definitely recommend checking out this band because they don’t easily fit into one category. This LP has a surprising amount of diversity, though sometimes it isn’t noticeable it right away. It took me several listens to pick up on some of the nuances, but that’s a good thing. If you get more out of an album over repeated listens, it’s more rewarding. Unfortunately, like many other Russian Black Metal bands/labels, they’ve made this limited to 418 physical copies. Hopefully, there will be a digital version available or somebody else will re-release this later because the music is really good.

A number of people have been pushing me to listen to Greek Death Metallers Dead Congregation for a while now, and while I’ve looked around for their music, my local indie record store never seemed to have any. Either they’ve sold out immediately (distinctly possible) or the buyer just never stocked it because it wasn’t “kvlt” enough (kind of unlikely because these guys are pretty “kvlt”), but their releases have been pretty hard to come by in my neck of the woods. Listening to Promulgation of the Fall takes me back to the early ’90s era of Death Metal, to the period when bands like Incantation, Pyrexia, Immolation, Imprecation, Vital Remains and many others were the norm when it came to the more brutal side of the genre. Dead Congregation has a style similar to that era of Brutal Death Metal, and while it’s hardly original, it’s rather refreshing to hear a band that is both brutal and possesses a dark atmosphere at the same time. If there’s one thing I love in Metal music in general, it’s atmosphere. It has to have that special “feeling” for me to get into the music. If a band can capture that, it elevates the music to a different level. Dead Congregation has that “feeling” and it gives their brand of Brutal Death Metal an aura of darkness and oppressiveness. Musically, this would appeal the most to fans of the previously mentioned Incantation, Immolation and Vital Remains as well as fans of old Morbid Angel. The music has the darkness of the more brutal bands, but also the sometimes atonal riffing that marked Trey Azagthoth’s guitar style, lacing the brutality with a taint of technical playing that serves to inject some diversity into the song structures. As far as production goes, the sound on Promulgation of the Fall is pretty murky. It adds a lot to the atmosphere, but it makes things hard to discern sometimes when the vocals and the guitars go into the same tonal range. Also, the snare drum sounds like a trashcan lid. It isn’t bad enough to always call attention to itself, but it does become noticeable at times, distracting from the otherwise engaging music. The detractions are pretty minor, though. While I’m hesitant to bestow the title of “the future of Death Metal” upon them, I’d rather see them have the title than the overly technical bands that want to cram 5,000 riffs into a three minute song. If you like evil sounding Death Fucking Metal, this is it.

For me, the album that I compare any Industrial music to is Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. If there were any LP that, to me, defined dark and heavy Industrial, that was it. Nothing has been able to top it. Even the almighty Godflesh was never able to exceed the sheer evil and hellish atmosphere that was Streetcleaner. Years and tons of experimental releases later, Godflesh broke up. Now, they’re back with a new EP, that, according to the marketing, was a return to form. Decline & Fall was going to be a release that would recapture the oppressive feeling and atmosphere of the old days, and the early hype seemed to indicate that this was going to be more focused and less experimental than anything they’d done since Slavestate. Hearing that, I just had to check out this EP for myself. Sadly, it didn’t live up to my expectations. Of course, the caveat here is that I’m comparing Decline & Fall to the legendary Streetcleaner. If none of their other releases could live up to Streetcleaner, it was doubtful that this was going to do it either. The best I was hoping for was a solid EP that was more in the style of Streetcleaner. On its own, Decline & Fall is odd sounding. Listening to it, I couldn’t help but notice how similar it was to the new Triptykon album. The guitars have that Celtic Frost/Tryptikon tone and vocally, Justin Broadrick sounds a whole lot like Tom Warrior. The music is pretty punishing, but it still lacks the dark and brutal feeling that I remember from Streetcleaner, which is what I was hoping to find, if nothing else. This EP almost sounds like what would happen if Tom Warrior and the gang decided to do a bunch of Tool covers, but without the sinister atmosphere that Triptykon is known for. Hopefully, Godflesh’s new full-length LP, A World Lit Only by Fire will be a full return to form for them. Decline & Fall is a step in the right direction, showing a more focused and mature sounding band, but without that atmosphere, they’re still missing a key ingredient in their sound. I’ve heard that the atmosphere is starting to creep back into their sound, and my fingers are crossed that this is a good omen.

Much like every instrument Anders Nystrom and Jonas Renkse have ever picked up, and every song the duo has ever recorded together, the publicity stunt regarding the new Bloodbath vocalist was played perfectly. Subtle clues were given, and months of guesswork and speculation followed. A team of NASA scientists were assembled, along with a field research unit that included Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dr. Gabor Mate, and the guy that invented the Etch-a-Sketch. (A waste of tax dollars some were quick to accuse, but this is only the greatest Death Metal band of the 21st century we’re talking about!) With the data painstakingly analyzed, all signs seemed to point toward former Grave vocalist Jorgen Sandstrom. Okay… a solid choice based on his monumental performances on Into the Grave and You’ll Never See… but would he be able to live up to feats of long ago? We’ll never know, because the announcement finally streamed through the interverse, taking the stunned masses completely by surprise. The replacement wasn’t even a Swede! The new Bloodbath singer would be… Nick Holmes? Really? Okay… a solid choice based on his monumental performances on Lost Paradise and Gothic… but would he be able to live up to feats from long ago? Umm… yeah. He does, and seems to do so with relative ease. All skepticism and doubt are instantly annihilated upon first listen, and with Grand Morbid Funeral, a legacy of dominance is further forged and a legend is reborn before our undeserving ears. Regardless of your opinion of recent Paradise Lost output, I’m not sure anyone could have expected ol’ Holmesy to sound this brutal so late in the game. Perhaps his comrade’s endeavours in the mighty Vallenfyre ignited a healthy competitive flame? Whatever the case, Old Nick is in classic early ’90s form here. Tearing through the lyric sheet of soon-to-be classics like “Let the Stillborn Come to Me,” “Total Death Exhumed,” “Mental Abortion,” “Unite in Pain,” and the ominously paced, “God of Emptiness”-flavored “Church of Vastitas,” Holmes attacks with a morbidly gruff-yet-understandable serrated edge, earning the praise of many a longtime devotee of the most super of all supergroups. One fan and close friend of mine even proclaimed Holmes, “the perfect singer for Bloodbath.” A compliment of no equal, and with no disrespect whatsoever to the legends that have manned the most prestigious of microphones in the past, one I’m hard-pressed to refute while listening to the album. Of course, with the Godz among men —brilliantly listed as “Blakkheim” and “Lord Seth” in the credits here— creating the always-flawless musical backdrop, perfection is merely protocol. Dare I presume that having a member of their beloved Paradise Lost —a major influence on early Katatonia— on board has even inspired them to sneak a Katatonic melody in here and there? Only something for mortals to ponder. Eternals do what Eternals wish. Alas, there is one somewhat ill-fated decision here that prevents Grand Morbid Funeral from entering the halls of absolute Death Metal perfection. Of course I’m referring to the closing title track and the guest vo… y’know, I can’t even call them “vocals”… the guest mouth-noises from Autopsy’s Chris Reifert. A noble gesture given Reifert’s legendary early ’90s status, but not since the mighty Black Bolt has a voice caused so much destruction. Bloodbath has a scant few less-than-magnificent songs under their bulletbelts —the unmemorable Unblessing the Purity EP springs to mind— but this is their first completely unlistenable track. Let the record show it is by no fault of their own, musically speaking.

Though they aren’t the longest running Japanese all-girl Metal band out there (Destrose has been around considerably longer), Aldious is among the most prolific. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that the band founder, Yoshi, was able to find a stable lineup early on, and for the most part the band roster has remained unchanged for the bulk of their history. The only major shakeup that they had was when their original vocalist, Rami, had to leave the band for health reasons. She was replaced by former Suitei Shujo vocalist Re:NO and the band soldiered on, releasing the District Zero LP and a subsequent live DVD (District Zero Tour - Live at Shibuya-O East) that showcased the new lineup in action. Just slightly over a year later, Aldious has unleashed their latest LP, Dazed and Delight. Picking up where District Zero left off, the band has diversified their sound a bit more. Of all of their albums, this is the most experimental. Where their previous works were solidly within the realm of standard Power Metal, Dazed and Delight goes places that they never went before. This isn’t to say that Aldious has suddenly become the Power Metal version of Sigh. They’ve just broadened their sound beyond basic Power Metal. I don’t know if this has to do with RE:No’s influence on the band or that they just felt that they could do different kinds of material with her as a vocalist, where Rami was more limited. On District Zero, they proved that RE:No could handle their old material because that LP was essentially in the same style as their previous stuff. You could have dropped Rami in on any one of those songs and she would have fit in perfectly. I don’t know that she could have done some of these new tracks like “Puffy Eyes” or “The Breeze at Dawn,” though. It’s definitely an evolutionary step forward, but the band is still firmly rooted in Metal. Face it, as long as Yoshi is in the band, she’s going to want to shred. It’s pretty easy to tell which songs she wrote because all of them are either heavy as fuck (“The Breeze at Dawn”) or there’s some seriously technical guitar work on them (“Butterfly Effect” and “Dominator”). I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t include “Dark” or “Suicide” on this LP, though. Both of those songs were on singles as B-sides and they are really good. I guess it’s an incentive to track down the singles, but I thought that those songs were album worthy. If you’re already a fan, or if you want to hear a really good Japanese all-girl Metal band, Aldious is probably the first one I’d recommend checking out.

With a one-and-done stint as vocalist for The Crown behind him, Jonas Stalhammar can now focus all his attention on endeavors closer to his Old School heart. Namely resurrected Swedeath legends God Macabre, and of course Bombs of Hades, his Death/Crust outlet since 2002. Although on album #3, that genre tag can be a bit misleading at times. Certainly not on opener “Fracture,” which is textbook D-beat-to-the bone Crust pudding, but you could almost Go-Go dance to “And Your Flesh Still Burns.” In fact, mental images of Austin Powers and his ’60s entourage flailing their arms downright prevent me from fully enjoying this track, not to mention keeping a straight face. In all fairness, the song isn’t really that goofy, and it isn’t Stalhammar’s fault that I’ve seen way too many stupid American comedies, but I much prefer the more straightfoward Crust assault of “Palace of Decay.” Meanwhile, “Omens” manages to invoke the spirit of mid-’80s Sodom, Slayer, and Onslaught with ease, and all in a ball-hair under two minutes. Unfortunately after this, Atomic Temples hits somewhat of a lull. Aside from a 40-second red-hot burst of Punkish intensity at the 3:32 mark, “Cadaverborn” is a bit of a bore. Then we have “Crawling Wind/The Tyrant Embryo,” which is four minutes of ambient noise with a baby crying, and then comes the title track… which is long. I mean looong. This song is so long, I was able to read Jon Konrath’s Surgical Steel review twice!! In truth, it’s not a bad song. Mid-paced Death and flashes of Speed Metal trade-off amidst a sea of solos until a gentle acoustic intermission provides a backdrop for introspection before the chaos resumes. I just don’t know if a 12-minute song on an irrefutably Punk/Death ‘n’ Roll-rooted album is ever the best idea. The quartet attempts to remedy the situation with a couple quick cuts to close the LP out. “Through the Pandemonium” is two minutes of speedy OSDM fury, while “The Last Gateway” is pure Motorhead worship. Then again, I suppose most Crust is.
In summary, this multi-headed dragon of an album is far more adventurous than 2012’s The Serpent’s Redemption, though not quite as consistent. At the end of the day, I’ve got a pretty fucking awesome 5-song/14-minute EPs worth of material to work with here, and all I’m really doing with my life is making mixtapes anyway.