The other day I was walking to work listening to Slaughtbbath, a standard fair primal black metal outfit from Chile. And like the vast majority of dirty black metal artists, they ‘sing’ about blasphemy, desecration of the sacred, gore, death, all the lovely violent themes common to this violent variant on extreme metal. Occasional lyrics... Continue Reading →

Doom metal takes many forms. The stoner doom variant, otherwise known as acceptable metal for non-metalheads, is the most direct descendant of Black Sabbath. The epic doom variant championed by the likes of Candlemass is essentially a slowed down form of traditional heavy metal. Then in the late 1980s doom became an optional add on... Continue Reading →

Because version 1 of this manifesto turned more people on to meat than off. If we set aside any facts about modern food production for the time being, the case for vegetabilism rests on two things. The first is the strength of our interest in consuming animal products, as opposed to an animal’s interests in... Continue Reading →

Finland boasts the highest proportion of metal artists to population size in the world, seen by many as one of the spiritual homes of this global phenomena, it touches on all colours and stripes of the subculture. In terms of death metal however, there is not a uniquely ‘Finnish’ sound in the same way as... Continue Reading →

When music of speed reaches some unknowable tipping point and morphs into ambient noise, it becomes akin to music at the opposite, unbearably, sluggish pole. These pioneers of doom played so slowly the prefix ‘funeral’ was added to emphasise just how fucking slow it is. They are aesthetically closer to black metal than they are... Continue Reading →

Primitive death metal’s ability to constantly re-invent itself within such simplistic parameters really is remarkable. By the early 1990s death metal was in danger of stagnating on all fronts. But despite the risks, there were those that insisted on carrying the flame for simple music that avoided the pitfalls of being simplistic. Two releases by... Continue Reading →

Tampa Florida, what started life as an extreme take on thrash metal, by the 1990s, developed into a surprisingly diverse set of artists that swept to international stardom as a result. Morrisound Studios, where the majority of these works were recorded, became something a spiritual home for American death metal, indeed for the international scene... Continue Reading →

For a style of music that developed in the late 1980s from heavy metal, thrash metal, progressive rock, and punk, deeply rooted in the traditions of romanticism, narrative composition, high fidelity musicianship, and a smattering jazz of jazz and horror film scores, by around 1992 death metal was proving to be a surprisingly limited subgenre.... Continue Reading →

You may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost, was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal, and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer The first batch of episodes that make up Star Trek Deep Space Nine watch like a Krusty-Brand-Imitation-Gruel version of its predecessor, Star Trek: The Next Generation.... Continue Reading →

Following the rebirth of Swedish extreme metal in the form of Nihilist and Grotesque came a plethora of artists set to take the world by storm and pioneer a style of simple yet grandiose death metal that is still cherished today. Here, we discuss two of the best. At the Gates formed out of the... Continue Reading →