To the layperson, blackened death metal may look like a tagline too far. But even a casual sampling of artists tasked with playing this style should make one see the light (or the black). Take the ear candy of melodic death metal, the euphoria or Iron Maiden, add a smattering of gothic melodrama to the... Continue Reading →

When I was young I made a new friend called a-load-of-obscure-racket. Whilst knitting this into my adolescent identity, I would've lapped up videos like this without question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNFmiLYjX48 I really wanted to interpret this as music made for and by the misanthrope. ‘Extreme music for Extreme People’ as the saying goes. There was plenty of... Continue Reading →

As well as Celtic Frost and Bathory, it’s a well-documented fact that the black metal movement of the early 1990s took a lot of influence from ambient and darkwave such as Dead Can Dance. It’s also no secret that they listened to a lot of film music, most notably the work of Ennio Morricone and... Continue Reading →

Fair enough, the title is somewhat hyperbolic, but it’s time to take a look at two foundational death metal artists as they were in the middle of their careers. These are selected from the two towers of American death metal: New York and Tampa. By the late 1990s  it’s fair to say death metal was... Continue Reading →

Old days are passing into younger days. In the late 1990s, with the millennium on the horizon, black metal was established enough, and ubiquitous enough, to have a ‘typical’ version of itself. Variations abound. But by this time there was now such a thing as a ‘standard’ black metal riff, usually made up of minor... Continue Reading →

Not half way through December Spotify asked me to do the year end number crunching. I happily obliged, despite my misgivings about excluding stats from late December. Apparently I had listened to over 7000% more minutes of music in 2018 than in 2017. I verified the data. I’m not sure I had Spotify in 2017.... Continue Reading →

Grindcore - that furiously primitive bolt-on to death metal - got cruel and weird in the early 1990s; otherwise known as the end of history. What started as a one dimensional catalyst for new levels of making an unholy racket suddenly morphed into extreme metal’s equivalent of an avant-garde movement. Not all grind went this... Continue Reading →

It’s 1995, some of black metal’s most revered works have already been released, and many of the musicians responsible are now behind bars. But the movement is stronger than the murderous actions of one or two people. Music is louder than words and wider than pictures. Well, it's certainly louder than murder anyway. What better... Continue Reading →

Okay, so if we’re weighing it up against European death metal alone it’s a close run thing when you look at the early output of Therion, At the Gates, Bolt Thrower and Dismember, but in terms of quality and quantity I’m afraid the Americans just clinch it. And it’s consistent workhorses like these two artists... Continue Reading →