It’s bad enough to write an entire hour-long album of generic, boring, Proggy Death/Thrash, but to give your band a horrifically shitty name on top of that just adds insult to injury. It’s not like they’re from Guam or Egypt, or even Latvia. They’re from fucking Riverside. So, why the need to sound so exotic? What if I had liked it? How would I refer it to someone without sounding like I had Downs? How am I even supposed to say this? What the fuck is this, Wheel of Fortune? I’d like to buy a vowel, please. Are there any “O”s? I’d like to solve the puzzle: “No Living Person in 2011 Cares About Your Shitty Band.”

This is the main band from Black Sun Aeon mastermind Tuomas Saukkonen, whose harsh but intelligible voice and melodic riffing is almost instantly recognizable. Deathstar Rising is the sixth full length album from Before the Dawn and sadly, 11 years into their career, it is my first encounter with the Finnish powerhouse (that also features Gloria Morti members). Fuck, what else have I been missing?! These guys don’t fuck around. They are here for one purpose and that purpose is melodic Death Metal. No wheel reinvention here, each song follows essentially the same pattern. Harsh verse, depressive melodies, harsh verse, clean sung chorus/hook. It works most of the time. Lars Elkind’s clean vocals can get a bit too Power Metally at times, enough to completely ruin a few songs, but on the other hand he singlehandedly saves others. I’m going to have to backtrack now and check out their older stuff, but luckily I started with a solid album. Highly recommended. Favorites: “Winter Within,” and “Remembrance.”

I usually don’t get into shit like this. Lo-fi Black Metal with absolutely zero production value had its day nearly two decades ago, but it seems the older I get the less time I actually care to invest in bands that are just fucking around. But there is something different about this two-man Dutch outfit. Something I just couldn’t immediately dismiss. Maybe it’s because they have apparently gone back in time and stolen Hellhammer’s gear and tuned it down even lower. Maybe it is because I can actually hear the torture in the ominously woeful roars, bellows, and wails of these vocalists. Maybe production value is overrated when such a dismal vibe is so perfectly obtained. Maybe this is what Hell really sounds like. Whatever it is, I can’t take this out of the stereo for some reason. At the end of the tedious day it becomes the perfect soundtrack for my meaningless, sorrowful, hateful existence. This is pure, misanthropic, aural darkness and it’s somehow all achieved with the same sound quality as a Gonkulator demo! Imagine Venom, Hellhammer, Order from Chaos, Bestial Warlust, Black Witchery, and Loss all thrown in a blender and chased with Absinthe. Getting the picture? Well, get this album and try not to kill yourself (or others). Best hymns for sacrifice: “Vision of the Twelve Priests Before the Altar” and “Yaldabaoth.”

Oh, how the Death Metal world hath missed the mighty Gorgasm! Be slaves no more to the gayness, Deathly legions! After a 5-year hiatus following the 2006 break up, Tom “My Real Name Is Damian” Leski is back with all new members to fuck some fucking shit up. This is sickeningly brutal, fast Death Metal at its finest. It’s almost like they never stopped. Picking up right where their double homicide duo of Bleeding Profusely (2001) and Masticate to Dominate (2003) left off, these Midwestern maniacal misanthropes are only good for one thing, and that one thing is fucking crushing. Crushing riffs, crushing blasts, crushing guttural vokills, and lyrics that crush Christ and like-minded cunt ilk. “The meek shall inherit my wrath…” that’s pimpin’ pimpin’. If I had one Asian dick-sized complaint, it would be that I wish they would listen to more shit, because then they’d realize that half of their samples have already been used 850 times. No big deal, happy as fuck to have Gorgasm back! Mixworthy morsels: “Dirty Cunt Beatdown,” “Decapitation Sodomy,” “Exhibit of Repugnance,” and “Scourge of the Christians.”

Well, these cheerful Hard Rock lame-asses are smart enough to put their best song, the peppy title track, first, and if the entire album had been at least that (barely) minimally tolerable, maybe I wouldn’t have had to pause it 666 times to think things like, “What the fuck are they doing?!?” and “Are they serious with this bullshit?!” But amid my sighs of disbelief, I did contemplate those questions, and many more, because the other tracks incorporate disgusting, sister-fucking Southern Rock groove and insipid Butt Rock idiocy, to name only two of their litany of offenses. And I can’t even explain the acoustic AIDS of “Happy Zombies,” which is possibly the worst, most mind-withering thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, and I have reviewed some truly awful crap over these many years. The annoying, wailing vocalist tries very hard to sound like Alice in Chains’ dead singer, but completely fails in all but the most superficial ways, because he obviously doesn’t understand that Layne Staley was a tortured, wretched husk of a person, and that his anguish fueled his emotional vocals. This limber-dick sounds like he’s in the gayest cover band in all of Arkansas, but the group is actually the great embarrassment of Germany. The New Black guys are at least competent musicians, but maybe that makes it worse, because their talents (and the good recording/production) are utterly wasted here. Better in Black is such pathetic, useless junk -such nothing- that’s it’s not even really worth making fun of. So, I’ll stop.

It seems as if there are no bad Death Metal bands in Poland, but they do all tend to sound somewhat similar. So, it is no surprise that Pandemic Genocide doesn’t stray too far away from the established Vader/Behemoth territory, although perhaps slightly simplified in execution and with a hint of Immolation mixed in, as well. This is not exactly a problem, in my opinion, as that is prime real estate to explore, and there are 666 metric tons of great, memorable riffs here. To carve out a more unique identity, PG occasionally slows down and gets a little atmospheric, which maybe works the best in the excellent “Arcana Mortem.” These guys also have no problem with faster tempos, as is evidenced in the amazing title track, and really all over the place, with surgical precision. It took eight years (filled with demos and split releases) from when this band was formed to release this, Mighty Apocalypse, their debut full-length album. Hopefully the next one will arrive a little faster, because I’d certainly like to hear more.

I don’t think that I’ve ever listened to an entire album from this band before, but I have heard a little here and there, and thoroughly enjoyed their “Warmachine” video. (If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about.) Debauchery is an odd mix of Hard Rock and Death Metal, which I’ve heard described as “Death ‘n’ Roll.” Imagine a lot of repetition and the simple song structures of maybe AC/DC, along with a somewhat more Metal production, occasional Death Metal style drumming, and fairly easy to understand sort-of-growly, sometimes double-tracked, vocals courtesy of main-man Thomas “The Bloodbeast” Gurrath. And thank Satan that he’s German, because his accent makes his vocals sound a little better than they would without it. Honestly, Germany’s Next Death Metal is a bit too much Hard Rock and not enough Death Metal for me to completely endorse it, but that formula does make the songs pretty catchy. I think that taking this band too seriously is a mistake like trying to punch yourself in the taint. So, just enjoy this admittedly guilty pleasure, and let’s hope that Debauchery’s next release will be a live concert DVD, with all of their uncensored video clips as a bonus feature.
Favorite song: “School Shooter,” wherein The Bloodbeast seems to snarl, “I’m the psychopath. I’m Mr. Evil. Die motherfucker! I’m the Dallas dick sucker!” That’s so stupid it made me laugh.

The legendary Amon Amarth perfected melodic Death Metal with the band’s previous album, 2008’s sacrosanct masterpiece Twilight of the Thunder God. So what’s left after supremacy? A million years ago, Slayer switched gears after their ferocious magnum opus, Reign in Blood, and so its follow-up, South of Heaven, was a classic of another kind. Amon Amarth, however, have very much stuck to their established songwriting formula with the long-awaited Surtur Rising. And that is the furthest thing imaginable from a complaint. There is no need to change what works this well. It’s hardly surprising to say that this album is absolutely amazing from beginning to end, because that’s exactly what I expect from AA, and they always deliver. But maybe just one cool surprise (other than the iTunes-only bonus System of a Down cover song, “Aerials,” which is unexpectedly good) would have secured these Vikings something that is virtually unheard of: Two perfect albums in a row. This is, however, as close as it is gets, only held back from a ten by less than the thickness of Gleipnir. (Look it up!)
The CD comes with a DVD featuring all four of the live shows from Bochum, Germany, that were used for the bonus CDs that accompanied 2009’s reissues of AA’s first four full-length albums. There is also a deluxe version that comes with the DVD plus a small statue of the fire giant Surtur, as well as two bonus tracks (which I have not yet heard); covers of Accept (“Balls to the Wall”) and Kiss (“War Machine”). Oh, and then there’s the vinyl picture disc… I’m not thrilled that there are so many different versions of this album, but it’s not to be missed, whatever the format.

Motorhead is my all-time favorite band, and I have had the honor of meeting Lemmy himself twice. So it’s somewhat of an understatement to say that I had been greatly looking forward to seeing this documentary about the life and times of Motorhead’s main-man since the instant I learned it was being made. But I never stopped to consider who all would likely be interviewed, or how sparse the narrative would be. There is some of Lemmy’s history detailed here, but very little that any fan didn’t already know, and not much anyway, as we never get an in-depth interview with anyone, and often hardly more than a soundbite. There was no mention of Wendy O. Williams, Girlschool, or Lemmy’s acting career, to name a few glaring omissions. I suppose that it was good to see that Lemmy’s influence has been as far reaching as Billy Bob Thornton and Ice-T (which is perhaps not all that far, really, if you think about it), and of course there is an overdose of Metallica and Dave Grohl footage, as well as interesting snippets from Alice Cooper, Dee Snider, Jason Newsted, WWE wrestler Triple-H, Steve Vai, Lemmy’s son, and a few others. But almost all of the rest of the interviews are a torturous plethora of LA Butt Rock burn-outs. I could not possibly care less what C.C. Deville, Nikki Sixx or Kat Von D have to say about anything, even if they are talking about what a nice guy Lemmy is. And he has, personally and with Motorhead, influenced so many people and bands that I find it ridiculous that the scope of the people interviewed was not extended a bit more past the Rainbow and Sunset Strip. So, by the end, this was something of a mixed bag, with essentially no new ground having been covered and honestly quite a bit of annoying footage. However, close to the finish, the interviewer, backstage after a Motorhead performance, asked Lemmy if he had any regrets. Lemmy very quickly, but not exactly immediately, replied, “None,” but looked so monumentally sad saying it, and while the camera lingered for a second afterward, that I was sort of momentarily stunned. Throughout the movie, Lemmy was shown playing video games and slot machines, and watching Family Guy, as well as giving the documentary crew a tour of his small, cluttered apartment (he’s apparently a hoarder). He seemed to be fully alive only while performing (whether on stage or telling a joke), and this documentary felt like little more than a eulogy for a man not yet dead. I hate to not recommend anything involving my hero, but thanks to the sub-optimal execution, I don’t know if I can in this case.

Somehow I managed to lose track of Rudra, arguably Singapore’s greatest band, after 2003’s Kurukshetra album, and so I have foolishly missed the first two parts of the Brahmavidya trilogy, 2005’s Primordial I and 2009’s Transcendental I. I’m going to track those releases down as quickly as possible. Brahmavidya: Immortal I has a bit more of a Black Metal feel than I recall the band’s early work possessing, especially with the amazing drumming, which brings Behemoth to mind at times. But the base here is melodic Death Metal, as it has always been, with some of the most instantly memorable riffs you’ve ever heard. Just try to get “Vultures of Slavery” out of your mind, for example. You can’t do it! Nor would you want to. Occasionally Kathir uses variations on his raspy vocal style, and every now and then he even sings clean, but it’s always exactly what the song needs at that moment and, amazingly, never fails to impress. And that carries over to every aspect of Immortal I, which was stunning from the first listen and then continued to reveal more and more with each subsequent spin. That’s what elevates an album from “great” to “classic,” and Rudra makes this nearly impossible task seem like simplicity itself.

The only knowledge I had of this Long Island Deathcore unit prior to having to review it was that all the major Metal print media (Decibel, Terrorizer, etc…) REALLY hated it. One publication even gave it a 0/10! I don’t know about you, but if Kevin Stewart-Panko & Co. don’t like something that much I figure it must be good. At the very least it makes me want to check it out. It’s immediately apparent halfway through the second track, “Fire Crotch,” why said douchebags don’t like it. While it is heavy and brutal, it’s essentially party music. And there’s nothing more sinister and tainted than the word “party” to a human being who’s only companion in life is the searing glare of his/her computer screen. I think Slander is a good time, granted I have had sex, and while this band clearly don’t take themselves too seriously, they never become more joke than band. The humor doesn’t destroy the listening process. Musically it’s standard Bury Your Dead-style Metalcore with heavy breakdowns, which I still like and probably always will because I’m not a trendfucker who stops liking something just because everyone else has. I’ll tell you, if this band wanted to shed just a little of their “fucking around” vibe, like the Cock Rock bullshit on “Cocaine Avalanche” or the queer intro riff to “Slampig (…and Then the Bitch)” to name a couple, they would really be fucking dangerous. But for the most part I like what they’re doing. The Earth Crisis-style screams work well with the Whitechapel-style growls, the lyrics are hilarious in an evil way, and the release overall for lack of a better word is fun. I’ll take this over whatever everyone’s favorite Neurosis clone is this month any day of the week.

There are some bands, when you receive their newest work, there can be no hesitation. You have to listen to it immediately. There is no putting it off, the rest of the world can just hold its fucking horses for a half hour. Finland’s Rotten Sound are one of those bands, and let’s face it, quite possibly the only Grindcore band going today worthy of putting the rest of the world on hold for. Simply put, Rotten Sound is Nasum fistfucking Entombed’s planet. Cursed (great title, by the way) continues and perfects the slight stylistic change the band underwent with 2006’s Consume to Contaminate EP, that is the addition of breakneck groove and piledriver breakdowns amidst the sea of machine-gun speed and pummeling heaviness. Not that they need it, but Cursed boasts a somewhat all-star selection of guest performances, topped by vocal contributions from none other than LG Petrov and Misery Index’s Jason Netherton (ex-Dying Fetus). This album is nearly perfect. The brutality can be enjoyed from beginning to end as if it were one 27-minute long, fucking awesome song. And honestly from these guys, I expect nothing less. I just hope no one at Relapse gets canned for signing a band that isn’t a 10th rate Photoshopped version of Sleep.

I hate to admit to liking anything on Southern Lord, but Earth isn’t too bad. This slow-motion… I guess I’ll say “Rock,” because I really don’t know what else to call it… is so mellow and sparse that it’s almost Ambient. Thankfully it is also all instrumental. I’ve never heard this band before, but I understand that they used to have a singer, and I’m a little morbidly curious about what vocal styles were tried with this music. But it’s probably better that I don’t know. A few minutes into the first song, I thought that Angels of Darkness… might quickly become boring, but despite the droning pace and repetition, or perhaps because of it, the music sort of melts into the background and provides an interesting soundtrack. It’s not anything I would want to listen to all the time, and when I’m looking for background music, I generally want something more ominous and dark, but if the right mood ever does strike, I think that Earth might be the only option.

I don’t remember why anymore, but for some reason, I was really looking forward to checking out V01D, even though I’d never heard of The Amenta before. Maybe I had hoped that these Aussies would sound like The Project Hate MCMXCIX. As usual, no such luck. The title track is apparently the only new song on this nearly 59-minute “EP,” and is a good example of melodic Death Metal, and quite enjoyable for its duration. Hopefully this is indicative of the future direction of the band, because almost all of the other songs (taken from the previous albums) sound like a blast-beat drum machine programming seminar (even though The Amenta’s drummer is human, but the drums are processed as fuck) in the conference room right next to the “annoying riffs” symposium. Except for the Ambient parts. And the “remixes.” And, thankfully, the cover of Armoured Angel’s “Enigmatize,” which is, along with the song “V01D,” really the only reason to ever listen to this. Seriously, the other tracks don’t even sound like the same band. It’s absolutely weird. And frustrating, because The Amenta has a tendency to be really impressive for a few seconds at a time, before trying something goofy like overdriving the otherwise excellent vocals, or the aforementioned stupid-riff/drumming-masturbation-frenzy combo. I do, however, possess fast-forward and next-track technology, so it’s easy enough to convert V01D from a disappointing, confusing hour, to an amazing 13 minutes. Sometimes less really is more.

This album is like a time machine back to the mid/late 1980s, mixing Slayer, Exodus, Whiplash, Destruction, and 666 more into something I didn’t think I’d hear in 2011: new Old School Thrash. There is no stupid Groove Metal influence here, no Metalcore, no Nu-Thrash, no Post-Thrash. No shit! Havok really impressed me. I had deliberately skipped their debut album, 2009’s Burn, because, honestly, I thought it would have to suck. I can admit when I’m wrong, and I’m going to track down a copy of Burn and check it out ASAP. In the meantime, though, there are a couple flaws to point out here. The songs, while supremely high-energy and amazingly well-played, could be more memorable. I’ve listened to Time Is Up many times now, and really enjoy it, but as I sit here in silence, I’m having some difficulty remembering how any of the songs go. And their songwriting influences are so transparent that this might as well be a tribute to 1986. David’s vocals are thankfully not of the high-pitched wailing variety (except for his kind of awesome “Angel of Death” homage scream in “D.O.A.”), and are what might be described as gruff, and where I get the Whiplash comparison even more than musically. He does, however, very occasionally get a little too close to sounding like the terrible modern Thrash squealers, or otherwise misstep. But, the only real problem here is what my associate Jack pointed out to me when I mentioned how good Havok is. He said, “I have Slayer to meet my Slayer needs.” In 2011, any new Thrash that’s worth two shits in a cup is rare indeed, and I’m glad that Havok exists, but the originators all had unique identities, which is the single thing that this band lacks.

Over the years, I have occasionally wished for a mythical “vocal eliminator” to save otherwise high-quality bands from their terrible singers. Upon first hearing of Russia’s all-instrumental Annorkoth, I thought that I might hope for just the opposite, but that turned out to not be the case at all. These simple, repetitive Black Metal structures have a doomy, depressing Dark Ambient quality to them that is almost hypnotic thanks to the (I think) deliberate decision to sometimes mix the sparse drums quietly into the background, and, of course, the lack of any vocals. Annorkoth is a one-man band, and its prolific mastermind B.M. has somehow already released three albums and an EP so far this year (and it’s only March!), with The Eternal Coldness being the first. Admittedly, the right mood would have to strike to want to hear this, and things could have been a bit more sonically ominous, but B.M. has created something unique with this album, and I’m looking forward to hearing his other work.

I’m happy to say that I haven’t heard The Haunted for over a decade, since I reviewed 2000’s The Haunted Made Me Do It, but as lame as this group has always been, I would have never guessed that they could fall this far (or have this far to fall). I didn’t even think that this was the same band at first, and was disgusted to discover that it is. I remember The Haunted as being at least a little aggressive, and some cut-rate form of Metal, if nothing else, but those qualities are utterly absent here. Honestly, I’m at a loss to even begin to describe how ridiculously terrible Unseen is. The horrible, whiny, cunty Alt Rock vocals seem as if they would have to be the worst thing I’ve ever heard, except there is also what the band calls “music” to go with them, which is often somehow even more lifeless and useless. It’s like a combination of the most homo-erotic fantasies of a Pantera cover band somehow filtered through Creed’s used ass tampons. Except nowhere near that heavy or interesting. Avoid this monument to weakness at all costs, as if your very life and sanity depended on never hearing it - because they do. I suffered through listening to this ridiculous testament to the pussification of the world so that no one else will ever have to. Kill anyone you see wearing a The Haunted shirt. BE CAREFUL TO NOT GET THEIR BLOOD ON YOU! Burn the corpses.

I’ve always enjoyed Dodsferd’s brand of dismal Black Metal, but considered Wrath’s vocal experimentations to all too often be the weak link. Nadiwrath is his new band, with a couple of the guys who were/are Dodsferd’s “session musicians,” so I’ve been waiting to see what the stylistic differences would be between the two groups. I assume that Wrath writes all the music himself for Dodsferd, but that with Nadiwrath the writing is more of a collaborative effort. That’s just a guess, though, but however it works, the end result is an entirely different kind of Black Metal. Dodsferd’s gloomy atmosphere is completely absent in Nadiwrath, usually replaced with what I guess I’ll call Punk Rock speed and songwriting. And not in the terrible new Darkthrone way, either. I rarely get to say this about a Black Metal album (although it is becoming more common), but the recording quality and overall sound are amazing, and I can clearly hear Maelstrom’s impressive basslines. If not for the corpse paint in their pictures and Wrath’s vocals (and presumably the lyrics, although I don’t have them to check), I don’t know if anyone would immediately think to call Nihilistic Stench Black Metal, as musically this is often more straightforward Thrash/Punk. That, however, is not a complaint, and the DNA of Black Metal is all over the place in the forms of speed and ferocity, and makes itself known very clearly every now and then. As with Dodsferd, Wrath’s schizophrenic vocals hold this back, but he seems a little more in sync with the music here, with somewhat fewer terrible ideas escaping his tortured throat. Parts of this album prove that these Grecian blasphemers have perfection within them (“There Is No Light” for example, even with the sometimes-goofy vox), and really make me wish that Wrath would just stick with maybe two or three vocal styles that actually do work and forget about the embarrassing, headache-inducing shit he tries, thus making Nadiwrath invulnerable.

Not exactly sure what to make of this new Fen album. My first brush with the UK gloomsters came in 2009 with the nearly flawless Malediction Fields record. I was so smitten by their brand of Agalloch worship, I backtracked and hunted down 2007’s Ancient Sorrow EP, a decent release but a little on the boring side. Perhaps that would be the best way to describe Epoch? Maybe it’s one of those albums you have to lock yourself in a room with for a year, but I’ve been listening to this non-stop for about a week now and absolutely nothing sticks, save for the haunting “Half-Light Eternal,” which powerfully showcases the lighter, more mellow side of Fen. It might just be the right direction for them to go in. The clean vocals are more than good enough. The Black Metal vocals, again very similar to Agalloch, work very well, but some of the extreme vocal experimentation on Epoch does not do the music justice. And these songs feel LONG! Lengthy tracks are nothing new to these guys, but The Malediction Fields material of equal length did not feel quite this long. I don’t know if it is the somewhat less-than-stunning production (that also plagues the new Agalloch, while I’m at it) that makes this so hard to digest, but there is something missing that was just there two years ago.

Dodsferd isn’t the first band I think of when Greek Black Metal is mentioned, nor is it even in the top 10. But repeated listens to the often melancholy, depressing Spitting with Hatred…, are convincing me that perhaps it’s time to re-examine the list. Although typically billed as a one-man band, singer/guitarist Wrath actually gets a little help on bass and drums from members of his other group, Nadiwrath, which I haven’t heard yet, but am looking forward to. Wrath’s screechy vocals are at best an acquired taste, but are generally tortured enough to fit the music. He occasionally tries styles (too-high-and-thin, clean-ish, “ooh,” etc…) that don’t really work in this context, which holds the album back from a higher rating.