Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
Listening to the new Queens of the Stone Age album ‘Villains’, it is apparent that a desire for exhibiting the so called virtues of ‘progression’ and ‘musical exploration into new and uncharted waters’ has - for these musicians - completely taken the helm from the more traditional catalyst of creativity: the undefinable artistic impulse behind... Continue Reading →
Our young hearts are born with grief, And we have paid the penalty of truth, A season, of our stolen youth, Shall teach old hearts to break Between the years 1845 and 1852 some 2 million Irish people left Ireland in search of a better life abroad. The chief motivation for this mass displacement of people was intolerable... Continue Reading →
Rammstein’s Mutter was essentially the sound track to my mid-teens. It rarely left my stereo. For the Kerrang! TV generation they were something of a staple. The interesting thing about them as a popular phenomenon is the same line many of the more metallic industrial bands must walk. Too metallic for goths and cyber-goths, too... Continue Reading →
NokturnalMortum and The Ruins of Beverast both released an album this year. Beyond that there’s not much connection between the two outfits other than their status as masters of post 2000 European black metal. The Ruins of Beverast have been releasing material fairly consistently both chronologically and qualitatively over the past few years. Starting with... Continue Reading →
So I guess it's time to say a thing or two about alcohol. One thing that distinguished heavy metal and its offshoots in the late 1970s and early 80s from its fellow counter-cultures was the departure from human centred themes in the lyrics. Metal was not the first nor the only form of contemporary music... Continue Reading →
In order to survive in the day to day, we possess a wealth of behavioural norms carefully cultivated to navigate the complex world of the civilian. To engross oneself in the world of metal is to temporarily take leave of these things. Part of the point of subcultures is their offer of an alternative and... Continue Reading →
Conventionally conceived, fun is a life affirming disposition that takes hold of people when partaking in certain activities, it is associated with smiling, laughing, socialising, colour, activity, and sharing. Black metal is a subset of extreme metal music, dark, fast, depressive, atmospheric, preoccupied with the occult, sometimes satanic, sometimes pagan, unlike its cousin death metal... Continue Reading →
For all the writing and argumentation Prozak produced justifying the music he loved and the music he hated, the notion that if the music is that good it should speak for itself never really entered his head, or was never articulated. To contradict this now I’m going to drop some names and descriptions for a... Continue Reading →
For people of my generation, our coming of age coincided with that of the internet, so the inevitability of us defining much of our identity and perception of the world as teenagers through this medium was grimly predictable by the late 1990s. Throughout my development as a human unit, I was unfortunate enough to come... Continue Reading →
Ozzy even told us part way through the set that a lot of people don’t believe that this will be Black Sabbath’s final tour. Given that it’s something of a running joke among many of their contemporaries who seem to be in a perpetual state of final touring, I almost shared the same cynicism until... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 