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Posts tagged as “Metal”

Church of Misery’s “Brother Bishop”

Leave it to the Japanese to add harmonized growls and a singer who sounds more like he takes his cues from Phil Anselmo or Kevin Sharp of Brutal Truth than your typical doomy, Black Sabbath-inspired singer, but very very badly. Actually, you know, if you replaced this guy with Phil Anselmo, you could tell me this was a Down song and I would totally believe you.

Either way, though I like what he’s trying to do and this band’s sound overall, the singer just isn’t good. Not “not good enough to pull off what he’s trying to do”, but “not good at all”. Which is a shame because this band could be great if they had a more capable singer.

Shining’s “I Won’t Forget”

I think I like this band. I sent this video to Deegan and it blew his mind that there would be saxophone in metal and I was all, “Holy shit, Deegan, have you not heard Ihsahn’s solo records?!” And HE was all, “Dude, I don’t find a lot of weird metal unless it comes from you.” And I’m all, “http://open.spotify.com/album/78cdLSogu9HIZyD540GTZC” And we had a good laugh.

But, as it turns out with a little digging, it’s the same saxophone! Same dude! No wonder they’re both awesome.

So, yeah, in conclusion, I like this band. Check it out. Also, there are naked boobs in the video, so if you work in a place where people care about that, wait until you’re home.

Kvelertak’s “Månelyst”

Back with some more death n’ roll, Kvelertak’s new video for “Månelyst” is an homage to all the schlocky horror tropes that we as metalheads hold so dear to our hearts. And that’s the thing about metal which people who don’t like metal usually don’t understand. We don’t get into extreme metal because we are gore-obsessed sociopaths, but because we are horror-movie-loving geeks who find the same escape in our music as we find in our movie selection. Horror and metal go hand-in-hand, always have, always will.

Kvelertak are playing on that in this video with allusions to all sorts of classic horror movies. You’ve got vampires! You’ve got gimps! You’ve got bloodied tools! You’ve got monsters in the woods! You’ve got blood and darkness and death and gore and it works so magically I want to hug it and whisper nice things in its ear.

A thing I love about metalheads.

A little bit ago, I was listening to the stream for Defeated Sanity’s Passage Into Deformity and reading the accompanying article. I had a thought which I expressed in a comment on the post.

Screen Shot 2013-02-13 at 5.45.01 PM

Nevermind the typo, the point is totally true. How many times have I sat there chatting with my brother or a friend or whoever and said things like, “I think The Bleeding is the pinnacle of Chris Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse. ‘Stripped Raped and Strangled’ is an amazing song.”

Or, “Braindrill’s ‘Forcefed Human Shit’, for all its brevity, is a masterful piece of death metal.”

Or, “When it comes to old school proto-grind, you can’t argue that General Surgery is basically just a very competent Carcass-clone.”

I’ve said things like this thousands of times over the 20 years I’ve been listening to metal, and I don’t foresee it stopping. As metalheads, we are so accustomed to absurd song/band/album titles that it becomes a total nonissue for us. We can talk about Once Upon the Cross by Deicide, or a band called Torture Killer, or whether or not you think Goatwhore is a solid example of the New Wave of American Black Metal without thinking twice about the actual words you are using. I am sure that an intrepid explorer of old blog posts could find tons of examples on this very site.

We can say absolutely vile things unfazed because we’re used to them. Quickly scanning my Spotify death metal playlist reveals the following song titles as perfect examples.

  • Remnants of the Tortured
  • Let The Blood Spill Between My Broken Teeth
  • Trapped, Terrified, Dead
  • Swamped in Gore
  • Regurgitation of Giblets
  • Boiling Vomit Through My Veins

That list took me about 1 minute to compile. Consider it a random sampling of bands that start with the letters A through D. A THROUGH D. THAT IS AS FAR AS I GOT THROUGH THE LIST. And I didn’t even dig into me black metal or grindcore playlists.

No one whose idea of heavy metal ends at Metallica could say the song titles above without being acutely aware that the words they’re uttering are just not normal. But metalheads? Nope. No problem. And there are lots more where those came from.

And I will say this in closing, I’ve only ever really listened to Broken Hope’s The Bowels of Repugnance, but recently gave Grotesque Blessings a listen and, man, that is a good record.

Metal for life.