Rolling Metal 2018

Anyone heard the Conjurer LP? Can’t say I’m bowled over but I like their synthesis-oriented approach.

RIP Killjoy...Necrophagia is one of my favorite bands. like, I write up stuff about their albums just for myself to think in full sentences about how much I like them. he was still doing good work and it's a shame he's gone.

Aww damn RIP

Bought the Scumpulse record today and damn it's good. "Broken Reflection" is like Carcass-level songwriting tbh, just riffs flying all over the place, catchy as fuck, and that bouncy-ass d-beat.

Live Nation is offering a $70 lawn ticket in My Local Area that covers four shows:

• Rob Zombie/Marilyn Manson
• Avenged Sevenfold/Prophets of Rage
• Five Finger Death Punch/Breaking Benjamin
• Shinedown/Godsmack

Wotta bargain!

whomst would like some very fine pagan metal

https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/horn-retrograd

lol @ that title.

Here's some post-black/sludge metal from Bucharest, Romania, if anyone's interested. It occasionally tries to do away with the usual Transylvanian clichés about nature spirits and the like (which I love btw):

https://ucigan.bandcamp.com/album/ucigan

If you liked The Key by Nocturnus, you will like the new Nocturnus A.D., i.e.: Mike Browning's offworld command post.
https://youtu.be/1k07H4_OAzE

I don't have the slightest idea what's going on with that video. Very Windows 3.1. But then, so is the song (in a good way).

Can't wait.

Noc AD an incredible live band too

Bought the Scumpulse record today and damn it's good. "Broken Reflection" is like Carcass-level songwriting tbh, just riffs flying all over the place, catchy as fuck, and that bouncy-ass d-beat.

whomst would like some very fine pagan metal

I often visit my local record store and check out the new release wall and then stream things. In doing this, I found two albums I will likely buy from them at some point:

The American Nightmare comeback disc. They're from Boston but the disc sounds like NYHC but smarter. I never heard their older stuff save for checking out a song or two when I was reviewing a SxE book written by Tony Rettman but this is really solid.

Also...

The debut by the strange supergroup Legend of the Seagullmen. The band, Tool's Danny Carey on drums, Mastodon's Brent Hinds on guitar, director Jimmy Hayward (Jonah Hex) on guitar, David 'The Doctor' Dreyer on vocals, Zappa Meets Zappa and Dethklok bassist Peter Griffin and Chris DiGiovanni on synth, put together a quirky prog metal album that is surprisingly accessible.

new Mournful Congregation is *fantastic* if funeral doom floats yer boat

Uhhh hesitant to ask this but has anyone heard anything re: Inquisition. Rumors floating around they're being dropped by Season of Mist and that Dagon's arrest record is involved.

Dropped from the label, shots of a criminal conviction for possession of child pornography. Welp, that's them done.

Fuuuuuck.

In totally unrelated news, the new the Sword record is sounding good, totally committing to the 70s gauzy AM hard rock vibe.

Although Hyborian, Vol. 1 came out last year on a label called The Company, I saw it at a local record store new release shelf and that it was on Season of Mist who reissued it so I streamed it and I like it! Kinda like old ass Mastodon though a little less proggy than even that. Definitely sounds like a band that should have John Baizley do their art.

It never got even a mention in Rolling Metal 2017 so it definitely slipped under a lot of radars. They're evidently from Kansas City.

http://www.metal-archives.com/images/6/3/8/5/638593.jpg?4432

https://open.spotify.com/album/0OMhJ8tWNPcPAfe6nZSjjj?si=4UaXskhXQAaHX35Kv6hpng
https://hyborianrock.bandcamp.com/album/hyborian-vol-i

wow, they sound a *lot* like early Baroness

xxposts re: inquisition: http://www.metalsucks.net/2018/03/23/report-inquistions-jason-dagon-weirbach-plead-guilty-to-child-pornography-related-charges-in-2009/

Dropped from the label, shots of a criminal conviction for possession of child pornography. Welp, that's them done.

― my dreams in the hell-pits (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Friday, March 23, 2018 8:33 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

should have known after their landmark album Morose Cogitation of Neonatal Impurities

That is funny but also horrible
But funny

Incantation are coming like, within 3 miles of me for a headlining show Sunday. last time I saw them downtown O-Town, I paid like....$7, and it included Impaled and a headlining Nile. Today it's...still only $12! whadya know, nice in a time where even like a Lividity show costs $730.

(speaking of Lividity, like headlining one day of this brutal metal fest in Tampa and I'm like, snap guys, this crap is all you could get? But Morta Skuld another night so *shrug*)

(last time in downtown O-town was 2000)

Posted at my Facebook page but I figured someone here might enjoy this...

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZBiPzzW0AAMt43.jpg

In the new issue of Decibel Magazine I saw that Greg Pratt did the Hall Of Fame interview with Grief (sorta aka Come to Grief) and I wondered if the tour with Extreme Noise Terror came up and wouldn't you know - they unearthed a postcard from Century Media Records with the whole itinerary.

I know that itinerary well because I booked that tour.

I had moved to Raleigh, NC to be a booking agent even though I knew nothing about Raleigh or the booking business. Although I did some dates with Christian industrial metallers Circle Of Dust and hair metal reprobates Tuff - as well as middling southeast dates for Stuck Mojo - the ENT/Grief tour was my proudest moment.

I have that itinerary on the back of an ENT shirt. I also have the Grief shirt you see me in. It still fits although that is because I've always been a fat ass.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZBiRRwW0AAl1Ix.jpg

Best memories of the tour was when the folks at Earache were amazed that they got contracts from me and really wanted to work with me some more. Apparently booking bands at that level didn't attract superstars because even my learn-as-I-went and youthful enthusiasm was enough to stand out.

I also had other agents call me about how on earth did I know some of those venues? My secret was the old Maximum Rocknroll BYOFL book which I consulted as much as the Pollstar guide. It was fun talking to people used to doing basement crust punk shows about how they needed to send a deposit to me and a signed contract.

As for the tour itself, I am sad to say that it went as well as one could expect. Though I remember people such as Thomas Pascual, the old booking guy at Wetlands who was a bit of a mentor at the time, telling me he couldn't believe that I was able to get $600 a night for the package (the NYC Limelight date paid $1,500), ENT didn't seem to understand that meant they probably shouldn't have two hotel rooms every night.

Also, I made a mistake by having the contracts be for both bands. I assumed that ENT would give about $150 a night to Grief which seemed fair. Evidently that became a point of consternation between the two camps when ENT stopped doing that. Grief were damn near starving at one point. I felt terribly but there wasn't a lot I could do.

I caught a few shows on the tour. The Limelight went great - I was back in NYC, my old stomping grounds, guys from the bands were psyched, Earache and other NY metal industry types were around - I was psyched for the tour as was everyone else.

I also caught the Richmond date and of course the Raleigh one in my then-current home. It was all the first week and still, I remember only good times. There's a YouTube video of the Raleigh ENT set that can be found. And 1:15 of Grief!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mA36-jQco

The trip south and then to the midwest did not go as well. Longer drives smaller guarantees, smaller attendances, even with SOILENT GREEN jumping on a week of dates. I was hearing it from both bands but very far away and unable to do much other than tell them that the Milwaukee Metalfest would be great for merch and morale so just hang on.

I went out to Milwaukee - my friend Ann Kautz drove up from Minneapolis and crashed with me in the shitty dorms that us poor metalheads not on cushy expense accounts stayed at during the fests. Pascual was there too. I think both of them saw as members of ENT - disenchanted with America (and my apparently piss poor job booking the tour) glared at me threateningly and called me a wanker and other British euphemisms. I felt like shit. I do recall the Grief guys being a lot more understanding.

The bands never played that last show in Cincinnati which was a damn shame because that was a MR&R show with some really enthusiastic kid who sent in the deposit with a certified check and was psyched but the band was so pissed at everything they refused to play. I sent the deposit back and apologized, the last time I had to apologize for something that happened or didn't happen on that tour.

It was a big part of me leaving the booking agency. In the pre-internet days, I ran up such huge long distance bills trying to book the tour, we probably lost money. The company I worked for was happy to see me go and i was happy to leave.

Still, I have a concert shirt with a tour I booked on the back, which is one of those silly "Accomplishment: Unlocked" things I kinda like. And even today, 23 years later, Grief mentions that tour in the best metal magazine in America. And I maintain that it was and likely remains the biggest disparity in terms of velocity between two touring bands.

And Albert Mudrian, sorry I didn't book Philly. I'll make it up to you someday.

megacool story! just read it on FB.

Count me on board with the Slugdge love. Tech death with dark space rock tendencies and actual songwriting? Sign me up!

I only like a couple of death metal albums every year these days and this is definitely one of them.

Count me on board with the Slugdge love.

Me three. Doubt I'll ever love anything they do more than Gastronomicon, but the new one is a lot of fun. Cleaner sound works surprisingly well, don't even mind the mucus-deficient clean vocals & djenty fretboard workouts (present on the last one, too).

Speaking of terrestrial enslavement, Xoth have a new single up on Bandcamp. Sound is much improved since Invasion of the Tentacube, still with the riff onslaught & slap-happy bass, but the chaotic weirdness is maybe dialed down a notch (for better or worse).
https://xoth.bandcamp.com/track/plague-revival

new Mournful Congregation is *fantastic* if funeral doom floats yer boat

― Simon H., Friday, 23 March 2018 01:38 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh god yes this is premier stuff. MC are one of the bands that got me listening to funeral doom, since they're as morose and glacial as any other band in that genre but they've got a sense of forward momentum, their ideas develop rather than just wallowing on one riff for 15 minutes at a time.

I feel like its weird that no one ever mentions that Damon Good of MC is also a driving force behind StarGazer and Cauldron Black Ram. I didn't even know until I was tooling around metal archives one day and discovered that.

Maybe it's mentioned all the time and I just don't read enough reviews and interviews and shit

Totally hanging w Steve Asheim right now!

new Xoth slays!

Really enjoying Dautha's Brethren of the Black Soil, plaintive historical doom with nearly-choral backing vox and crawling tempos

Man this Pyrolatrous record slaps

Rock Against Anything: How Metal Became So Fucking Reactionary and What to Do About It

An essay from Toilet ov Hell that's very much worth your time. (Unlike the comments, but that should go without saying.)

Thanks for that, Unperson, that was a really great read.

The very fact this person felt the need to write this the way he did, offers some hope.

A worthwhile grand narrative, to be sure, but I'd rather metal (the music, not the scene, assuming they can be told apart) remain as neutral as possible with regard to conspicuous, politically political politics.

Point me to what you see as the golden era when metal was politically neutral. Name specific artists, songs, albums, etc. Thanks!

"neutrality" is a sham

It never existed and never will sub specie aeternitatis but insofar as some music is more overtly political than other music, it's not too far-fetched to argue that the political in art is a spectrum. Hence my wish that metal 'remain as neutral as possible'. Deride it all you like, but I don't care about the politics of, say, Darkspace and the experience of listening to their albums does not strike me as closer to the left or the right.

eh

metal has both anti-political/escapist as well as knee-jerk anti-establishment characteristics so it's easy to write narratives supporting either stereotype.

Pretty much. I general prefer the former but am not averse to the latter, as long as there's more to it than just that ('this music is good because it supports good politics' is both aesthetically and politically naïve).

*generally

('this music is good because it supports good politics' is both aesthetically and politically naïve)

has anyone said or thought this in the history of saying or thinking things

Politics is prescriptive. When it takes over aesthetics, it does tend to separate the chaff from the wheat on the basis of extra-artistic (which is a misnomer since art qua art does not exist according to this logic) values. Very few people who condemn aesthetic neutrality would admit to it, but the implication is there (we all must take sides and said sides cannot be neutral, hence we must seek the political good even in music). My position is that there is politics in all music but that this does not make it inherently or essentially political. It is traversed by something else (some ‘thing’, which can be equated with politics but is not reducible to it). When all is said and done, this ‘thing’ is precisely what we’re lending our ears to when we listen to music.

('this music is good because it supports good politics' is both aesthetically and politically naïve)

has anyone said or thought this in the history of saying or thinking things

Yeah, I'd like one specific example of a band pomenitul thinks makes shitty music, but gets a political thumb on the scale from critics or fans. Just one will do.

I love how you’re all just focusing on the straw man. Anyway, socialist realism, which was an official, state-sanctioned ideology being the Iron Curtain (and still very much exists in various parts of the world today) would be a classic example.

*behind (sorry, on my phone).