To coincide with Enemy of Man, the new full-length LP from Poland’s Kriegsmaschine, the band has also unleashed a compilation of demo and unreleased songs that they recorded over the period between 2002 and 2004. Naturally, the sound quality on these tracks isn’t the same as their new LP, but for something like this, it’s pretty damn good. Most of the time, demo and unreleased tracks sound pretty bad, the reason being that they were never recorded in the same quality as a serious release, especially if the band didn’t intend for the songs to be available to the public. Considering this, Prism is very listenable. The music here is on the raw side, showcasing a more stripped-down and straight-forward Black/Death Metal style. There isn’t as much Ambient/Atmospheric stuff on Prism, but the music itself has a dark feeling to it that comes from the rawness and the aggression. It has a “live in the studio” quality that makes you feel almost as if you’re in the rehearsal space with the band, listening to them go through a full set of material. Another thing that I noticed about the music on Prism is that it’s far more Punk-influenced than their full-length albums. It has an ancient Bathory feel to it that you don’t get on Enemy of Man, which has more in common with Mayhem and Behemoth. Tracks like “Goathammer Sorcery” and “Deathcult Supreme” get your head banging immediately and they’re instantly engaging. If these guys played either of those songs live, I’d put money down that there’d be fatalities. Though the songs on Prism sound considerably different than on Enemy of Man, I found that I enjoyed them almost as much, but for different reasons. I liked the rawness and Punk energy that the band has and though the songs aren’t really representative of what Kriegsmaschine sounds like today, they do what good Metal should: they kick ass. That makes this compilation worth tracking down and listening to.

Funeral for a Witch is a concept LP about the life of Margaret Aitken, a woman who was forced to confess to witchcraft under torture but was spared when she agreed to help the witch hunters by outing other witches. The story goes that she sent many innocents to their deaths by fingering them as witches - being a witch herself, she’d know another when she saw one, or so the logic went. In the end, the guilt she carried around with her eventually consumed her and drove her mad. The truth that she was a fraud eventually came out, whereupon she was burned at the stake for her crimes. On paper, this sounds pretty interesting. It was the main reason I wanted to check out this record, in fact. In practice, though, the Doom/Death Metal that Throes of Ire sets this story to isn’t very exciting. The song structures are pretty simplistic, the riffing and pacing are ploddingly slow and the songs are overly long. The lyrics, though, are great. The story is interesting and it’s well written. The delivery and the music, on the other hand, turn a rather riveting read into an exercise in drudgery. Only on “Solitary Mourning” (the last track on the LP) does the pace kick up and things get interesting - but you first have to get through eight minutes of music similar to the other songs, which were lethally boring. Even that doesn’t last very long, though. Sadly, Funeral for a Witch lacks the kind of diversity and dynamics in the songwriting that it really needed in order to make a concept piece like this work. Though this is their second release, Throes of Ire still needs a lot of development before they’re ready for the big leagues. The lyrics are up there already, but everything else is severely lacking. The songwriting is simplistic - which isn’t a sin - but simplistic structures get tedious when you stretch things out over ten to twenty minutes. The songs needed something to break up the monotony in the worst way. Even the vocals needed diversity. The only style employed on this album is the standard Death Growl, but it was delivered without passion. The vocals were dry and lifeless, which, when blended with the already dull music, did nothing to spice things up. They did the equivalent of adding dull and tasteless oatmeal to dull and tasteless oatmeal. All you got in the end was more dull and tasteless oatmeal. Though there’s a lot of improvement necessary in the sound of Throes of Ire, I hope these guys can figure things out. They have some interesting stories to tell, but their musical abilities haven’t caught up with their imaginations yet.

Silliness. Pure fucking silliness. Not this album itself, but the bullshit surrounding it. For those unfamiliar with the situation, essentially LG Petrov says that Miller Lite “tastes great,” while Alex Hellid is convinced that the American beer’s #1 attribute is that it’s “less filling.” Bandmates of nearly 30 years, the pair agreed to disagree on this matter, but things really started to boil over when Petrov went on record stating that toilet paper rolls should be placed over —the “6” formation, if you will— in the dispenser, while Hellid vehemently defends the under position. “It should be like a 9, godammit,” the guitarist recently told Metalpenisfucker.com. “A 9 is more fucking evil! Just ask King Diamond!” “Bullshit,” the vocalist fired back on Extrememusicassram.org. “A 6 is a fucking 9! An inverted 9 is even more evil, motherfuckers!” This dispute has caused a seemingly unrepairable rift in the Entombed camp, and since both gents own the rights to the name, we have this whole Back to the Front fiasco. Petrov intended on using the moniker for this LP —which was already finished and being promoted in the Fall of 2013— but Hellid apparently needs it for the carpool lane. So, after months of legal battles, now we have Entombed A.D. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, wouldn’t you say? What’s worse, this record is now faced with the unenviable task of overpowering the drama attached to it. For the most part, it succeeds. Look, I gave up on the hope of another Left Hand Path a long time ago. (That’d be like expecting Slayer’s forthcoming Nuclear Blast album to be another Reign in Blood. Isn’t gonna happen.) At this stage of the game, expecting another Wolverine Blues would probably be a tall order, but I wouldn’t mind another Uprising, or even an Inferno. Based on those expectations, Back to the Front not only delivers but exceeds. Basically Serpent Saints minus the goofiness, the majority of these songs charge hard and hit heavy. The patented Death ‘n’ Roll style this group has steadily been rebuilding since disastrous career-low Same Difference comes to fruition here. Tracks like “Bedlam Attack,” “Pandemic Rage,” “Second to None,” “Bait and Bleed,” and “The Vulture and the Traitor” combine stomping Punkish energy with headbobbable groove, and then there’s the left-field Thrash assault of “The Underminer.” Of course, it helps that LG sounds equal parts pissed and focused. This might be his most straightforward vocal performance since those glorious early ’90s, while guitarist Nico Elgstrand occasionally pays homage to the period with a melodic lick or two of his own. But let’s hold off on that Left Hand Path II stamp for now. It’s a fair enough compliment to acknowledge that this is the best Entombed record in 10 years, and more so that it is an Entombed record. Fuck the dumb shit.

Out of pure embarrassment and shame, I almost passed on reviewing this record. I just never seem to get Lantlos right. If I were writing a review of my 2011 Agape review, I’d most likely give it the lowest possible score after chastising myself in haiku fashion.
Stupid cokehead.
Get off Neige’s nuts.
Listen to the shit more than twice.
The clueless douche I was just 2 years ago doesn’t even mention that “Bliss” is the greatest song ever recorded! Luckily with this follow-up, Markus “Herbst” Siegenhort has delivered something even I can’t screw up. Actually, I might want to rescind that statement on the probable chance that I fail to describe how amazingly fucking perfect Melting Sun is. Melting Sun is the musical equivalent to having your balls licked during orgasm. It causes the same floating effect as the “Mr. Nice Guy” weed in Half-Baked. It’s like smelling a Cold Stone Creamery for 40 minutes while watching Hulk and Thing fight in slow motion while Alexis Texas feeds you bacon wrapped in bacon with her ass. Juvenile humor aside, this LP is completely flawless and far too beautiful for the confines of my vocabulary to do justice. When I learned that Alcest’s Neige was no longer doing vocals, and that the band had removed all traces of Black Metal from their sound, I was momentarily skeptical. But that skepticism was buried and forgotten about halfway through opener “Azure Chimes.” Herbst’s clean vocals are fantastic, often made all the more mesmerizing by backing vocal harmonization, and the music… holy shit! It’s so good I’m pissed. Crushing heaviness and airy Shoegaze delight co-exist in a euphoric paradise where darkness is achieved through light and sadness by joy. Nowhere is this more evident than on the heart of the album: “Aquamarine Towers” and “Jade Fields.” Both tracks display an attention to detail in songcraft that emotional music so often lacks. Downtuned, distorted guitars carve the flesh while clean guitars caress the brain, as unforgettable melodic passages glide around sparse-yet-incredibly-addictive verses. I remember being a teenage musician, staying up all night, trying to fill the entire page with the perfect lyrics. Little did I know that “I’ve seen you / I’ve been through the sun” could comprise something a million times more effective in its abstract simplicity. Instrumental segue “Oneironaut” gently guides us into slow and soothing closer “Golden Mind.” This shimmering lullaby is like the cigarette after sex, or in this case, aural pleasures. I can’t say enough about how excellent this is. A benchmark for Post-Rock and the Album of the Year nominee I didn’t see coming. By following in Alcest’s Black Metal-shedding footsteps, Herbst has unequivocally surpassed his comrade for now. As much as I’ve enjoyed Shelter, it wilts in the glow of Melting Sun.

Lord Dahthar started out as a side project by Dahthar when he was the keyboard player for a now-defunct band called Vision of Mara. So, quite naturally, this band has a very keyboard-centric sound. In fact, a third of this EP is just straight keyboard playing without any other instruments. Though the first and last songs aren’t specifically denoted as intro and outro tracks, that’s essentially what they are. They’re probably the most adventurous and interesting parts of this release because for the most part, anything with guitars and drums isn’t very exciting. The riffing is pretty basic, sporting a very “single chord played over and over again with occasional changeups” style. All of the intricate stuff is handled by the keyboards, though most of the time, you can’t hear them because the treble-heavy guitars and the light switch drums drown them out. I was a bit surprised by this, mostly because I expected a band fronted by a keyboard player to sound a lot like Dimmu Borgir. This might have been a better EP had Dahthar and company pushed the keyboards out in front, because there’s no faster way to annoy me than to make me listen to light switch drums and bass-free guitars. The tones on the guitars and drums were pretty bad. It was so annoying that this review almost turned into a rant about how Dahthar should have made this a keyboard-only project. It took me several listens (rather painful ones, at that) before I could get past the production issues. If the next release by Lord Dahthar has better production (turn the bass up on the guitars, get a better drum tone and bump the keyboards up so that they don’t get drowned out by the other instruments), I’ll probably appreciate their music more. The sound here really brought it down for me. Though the keyboard-only tracks were good, the other ones just didn’t have the same quality. These guys still have some growing to do, but production issues aside, the music on The Tower shows a lot of promise. Their next release will be the one that’ll tell us whether Lord Dahthar is worth following or not. If they can get a good studio engineer and put together a package that showcases their skills, they could be serious contenders.

When I thumb through issues of my old fanzine [Portrait of Defiance -Editor], so many things piss me off. Poor grammar, typos, errors, bad interview questions, bad jokes, half-assed reviews, my constant misuse of the Power Metal genre tag… I could keep going but it’s too painful. In my defense, I was as young, dumb and full of cum as a Metalhead could be, but that’s no excuse for being a semi-retarded asshole all the time. (There’s a reason that —assuming I can outlive, like, 6 people— there won’t be a soul at my funeral.) But what makes me cringe the most about those old rags is how mean I was to Incantation. And not only when I’d review their material. I’d often go out of my way to take shots at them in other bands’ reviews! I was such a bullheaded, all-or-nothing kid. If I didn’t find something instantly memorable, I’d take a Dumb and Dumber shit all over it and disregard its value altogether. Back then, I didn’t realize that an album’s feel could yield the same staying power as great songs and riffs. That vibe alone could stand the test of time, or that the menacing aura of pure unbridled evil that Incantation achieved with Onward to Golgotha and Mortal Throne of Nazarene would never be equaled, despite countless imitators. These days I can put those records on and easily get lost in a sound so ominously brutal it’s soothing, even if 20 years later I still can’t hum any of the riffs to you. The good news is that present-day Incantation is still heavy as fuck, and that whole memorable thing has been significantly ironed out. John McEntee has become quite the songwriter in his old age, and for about the last decade-plus we’ve been treated to the best of both underworlds. Dirges of Elysium picks up right where 2012’s Vanquish in Vengeance left off. A whirlwind of powerful hooks encased in blast paired with… well… dirges of Elysium. This might be McEntee’s best vocal performance since taking over the mic a decade ago. A few slight hiccups, but for the most part he revels in Old School guttural glory while even managing to be understandable at times. Some of the LP’s longer cuts tend to drag on a bit, and 16-minute closer “Elysium (Eternity Is Nigh)” is just about impossible to sit all the way through, but overall Dirges is yet another worthwhile addition to a body of work that speaks for itself.
Suggested mixtape selections: “Debauchery,” “Carrion Prophecy,” “Charnel Grounds,” “Impalement of Divinity,” and “Dominant Ethos.”

Some people lump Primal Fear in with the Power Metal bands and that’s really a mischaracterization of their music. While the band shares many qualities with Power Metal, Gamma Ray in particular, they’re really more of a Traditional Metal band. If you really get down to it, their claim to fame is being a German version of Judas Priest. Naturally, they’re not as good as old Judas Priest, but then again, few bands ever achieve that level of success and recognition based solely on their musical abilities. Judas Priest was one of those groups that got huge because they created some of the best pure Metal ever recorded. A band like Primal Fear is going to have a tough time even coming close to the edge of the monstrous shadow that Rob Halford and company cast over the Metal world. Even though they’ve augmented their sound with copious amounts of old Accept and post-Uli Roth Scorpions, they still have that glaringly obvious Priest influence. The thing that’s most striking about Primal Fear isn’t that they’re still trying to be Judas Priest (they are), but that they’re only taking the most recognizable aspects of the Priest sound and leaving out the things that made JP original. They don’t do any experimentation with weird harmonics or different styles. Their sound isn’t versatile enough to go there, it seems. Their music is rock-solid Heavy Fucking Metal, but Primal Fear hasn’t figured out a way to distance themselves from obvious clone status. To make matters worse, they haven’t really evolved much. They still pretty much sound the same as they did back in the ’90s. They’ve refined things a bit, but ultimately it’s still the same old shit all over again. Delivering the Black isn’t a bad album, but if you already own a couple of Primal Fear’s LPs, you’re really not getting anything you haven’t heard before. Maybe the guys in Primal Fear need to stop listening to Judas Priest and start listening to the bands that influenced them. They know what Priest sounds like but they don’t know what made Priest great. The range of music that Priest employed spanned from ’70s Hard Rock to Speed Metal to Thrash and everywhere in between. They could take all of that and craft songs and records that were uniquely their own. I’d like to see Primal Fear be likewise more adventurous. Cloning Judas Priest is fine if you’re in a tribute band, but after more than fifteen years and ten full-length albums, you’d think that Primal Fear would have more up their collective sleeves than rearranging riffs from Defenders of the Faith. Delivering the Black is still a solid LP of Heavy Metal music, though. It has good riffs and melodies, but ultimately all you ever do is compare it to any Judas Priest LP from Stained Class to Nostradamus. In the end, I always end up asking myself, “Is it worth it to listen to Primal Fear when I already own the Judas Priest discography?” If you’re wondering what my answer to that question is, I’m listening to Screaming for Vengeance right now.

“In a world consumed by ashes, where there’s only misery and despair, pessimism has seized the human race… Hate has aroused, accompanied by a general delirium, only survival and immediate satisfaction is looked for. There’s no judgment, no punishment, no sensibleness… neither sanity. Humanity has become an aberration, tainted and perverse, condemned to misfortune and decadence, wandering in a desolate environment without resources, weakening slowly until the breath leaves them.”
This is the concept behind Wrong’s second full-length. I chose to print it here because I wish I had written it. Truer words never spoken, just ask anyone who deals with the general public for a “living.” That’s why I say we ought to change the term Depressive Black Metal to Working Man’s Black Metal. Not only would that serve to identify the genre’s fan base, but also to expose its detractors. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate, nay, crave the sadness, pain, and unaffectedness that Black Metal bands like Deafheaven, An Autumn for Crippled Children, and Madrid’s Wrong bring to the table is enjoying life a bit too much. Should happy people be listening to extreme music? I certainly don’t think so. For me, extreme music is one of very few sources of happiness. That said, if it’s a lack of extremity and/or technical skill that has the underground masses so butthurt over DBM, Wrong might be just right to soothe the manginal burn. They are far more intense than most. After all, this is one of the dudes from Wormed. Pessimistic Outcomes is a slightly different beast than last year’s masterful debut. While Memories of Sorrow was more… well… sorrowful, this follow-up is angrier and considerably more demented. At about the 2:40 mark, leadoff cut “Thru the Grey Path to Nowhere” bursts through the gate with bereaved blasting and Phlegeton’s hideous snarl, while “His Hatred Breathes” follows with even faster frostbitten kingdoms. But where there’s anger and dementia, sadness is never far behind, and this duo always keeps Brave Murder Day in its back pocket. Dejected melody is a constant throughout, tying everything together tighter than a noose. Even the awkwardly-moving schizophrenic title track is graced with melancholy, not to mention a vocal attack sure to have Anti fans raising the horns. “Dragging My Soul Until the Sunset” has multiple personalities also, as the track leapfrogs from ambient to dreary to experimental to furious and back, with Phlegeton sounding absolutely possessed all the while. “I Thought I’d Woken” closes the LP out on a downcast note, as somber tones prepare the stage for a near-Lifelover level of vocal insanity by song’s end.
Overall, Pessimistic Outcomes does lack the immediate memorability of Memories to some degree, but both records capture the true essence of misery in remarkable fashion. What Wrong is doing here borders on hypnotism. Long songs that feel short, as the listener gets lost in dystopian soundscapes that are equal parts abstract and focused. Long live WMBM. Praise Negativity. Hail and kill (yourself).

When I see an album come into my queue that’s one track and just a hair under fifty minutes in length, I think one of two things: “Oh fuck, the label decided to combine all of the tracks together so you can’t listen to each song individually” (this happens more often than you think…), or in this case, “That’s one fucking long song!” Yes, A Etilla is one long track. That leads to the automatic second part of this, which is the question, “How painful is this going to be to listen to?” Russia’s Epic Funeral Doomsters, Ea, have been writing songs in excess of twenty minutes for quite some time now, having started in 2005 and, after four previous LPs, have honed their craft to a fine art. This might be one long track, but it’s never boring. This is an epic-length song that goes somewhere. It’s akin to listening to a combination of Turn Loose the Swans-era My Dying Bride and a Dark Ambient band. They have a heavy, more Death Metal-inspired style when it comes to their vocals and guitar tone, but with a far more integrated and developed sense of atmospherics. Instead of plodding, boring music that has been artificially stretched out, A Etilla is constantly changing. The music is dark, ominous and heavy - all of which are essential in creating awesome Doom Metal. The band uses ancient sacred texts as the basis for their lyrics, and to a degree, their music is like a spiritual journey. I’ve always found things like this to be fascinating, mostly owing to my interest in ancient mystical texts, occultism and forbidden knowledge. Of course, I’m one of those crazy kids that was playing D&D, reading H.P. Lovecraft and drawing pictures of Cthulhu in the third grade. As you can imagine, I was one of the “weird kids” that would be a Ritalin zombie in today’s school system. Ea taps into the area of my brain that likes the mystical. They use Ambient passages and choir parts to great effect, breaking things up and then segueing into a new sections, all the while keeping things moving. By the time the song is over, you’re almost exhausted because it takes you all over the place, from punishingly heavy guitars to ethereal Gregorian choirs. If you’re into Atmospheric Doom/Death Metal, they’re definitely a band to check out if you haven’t already done so.