Mr eel
Music
New Metal Irregular #1
She Said Destroy - This City Speaks in Tongues
In my opinion their last LP was seriously under-rated and this LP is even better. Mechanistic and limber, it’s fucking vicious. It’s got all your metal tropes, but is precise and emotive — a record of tightly controlled and clearly expressed rage.
I have to make mention of the production on this album; it’s fantastic. The drums in particular are excellently recorded and mixed. Rather than a low-end rumble of kick-drums, they’re mixed into the mid-range, which suits the fast and mechanical rolls across the toms, the punctuated kicks and blast-beats.
Agalloch - The Mantle
Many black metal bands have been open to traditional/folk influences and honestly, the results are usually complete shit. Agalloch have dodged that bullet here, by framing the integration of folk in acoustic-rock. Beautiful melodies and crisp guitar. It doesn’t have the form of black metal, but it certainly shares the spirit of much of it. Yearning and sorrow and loss.
I honestly didn’t expect to like this album so much, but it’s very good.
Menace Ruine - The Die is Cast
Traditional European music passed through the lens of black metal. Cold and bitter elegies smothered in distortion and pinned down by dim, cavernous blast-beats. It’s a bizarre but beautiful combination.
Mord - Christendom Perished
Basically these guys are fucking pissed off and hate everything. Not particularly innovative, but if you want some harsh and unremitting black metal, these dudes will sort you out.
Black Metal for a Terrifying Future
I haven’t done this for a little bit and I do like talking about music, so I thought I might go over some of my more recent Metal discoveries.
Somehow I’ve found myself listening to more and more Black Metal. Like most forms of music, pretty much all of it is awful. For Black Metal it’s pretty obvious where things can go wrong; the awful production values, the temptation to just play the same riff for minutes on end, the blast-beats ticking over through every moment in the song, the at times ridiculous mythologising and ugh… the corpse-paint.
Just the same, when it’s good, it’s fucking awesome. Sometimes when it’s meant to be scary or oppressive, it really is. Sometimes it really does express the horror and sorrow of living. Sometimes it really does touch something inside your heart.
So here are some of my picks for awesome Black Metal and related releases. Admittedly some or most of these aren’t strictly BM according to your more boring fans and critics, but whatevs. At the very least BM is the axis they swing around.
Wolves in the Throne Room - Diadem of Twelve Stars
I put this release first because it’s my favourite. Much BM is weighted down by what I consider frippery — the stupid mythologies and uniforms. WITTM eschew most of that thankfully.
To be honest I find it a little difficult to articulate why I like this album, after all, there is so much that could have gone wrong with it. It has the dim screechy vocals, the operatic backing, the blast-beats thrumming away under everything. The difference here I think is that WITTR’s skill matches their intent. It is oppressive, it is sorrowful, all without being ridiculous.
Having some beautiful chord progressions and really epic breakdowns also helps. I really dig it. If you only listen to one album on this list, make it Diadem of Twelve Stars.
Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters
Again with WITTR, they really are that good. Basically, what I said above. Seriously check these guys out.
Krallice - Krallice
This is what happens when Prog and Black Metal collide — an explosion of awesome! This album basically takes the spazz-prog-metal of bands like Behold… The Arctopus and Oct and applies them to the BM format. The similarities aren’t surprising considering that Krallice shares members with the aforementioned bands. The resulting songs are built of complex and shifting guitar-lines. They stay true to the demands of the genre by repeating to the point where you think you’ll go nuts, then moving in a direction you hadn’t expected.
I honestly didn’t expect to like this one, since on first listen seems very dense and uniform. But since listening often means patience and adjusting your frame of reference, I gradually came around to it.
At it’s core this is actually a very taut and emotional album. The final song Forgiveness in Rot really seals the deal for me. Just beautiful stuff.
Live in some guy’s backyard… or something.
Sunn O))) - Black One
Well yes, I had to get a bloody Sunn O))) release in here somehow. FYI, the name is pronounced as just ‘Sun’. They’re a polarising band. Some people really love them and most people who’ve heard their stuff hate ‘em. It’s pretty easy to see why. Sunn O))) typically operate as a drone, doom, noise outfit. No drums, lots of low end, very very slow and typically sans vocals. Basically, you either like letting bass-noise fuck you over, or you’ll hate this stuff.
Personally I’m on the fence. I may come to like it, but right now I’m more curious. This particular release however, I do like. Strictly speaking this is not BM, but it does riff on the atmospherics, vocals and general aesthetics of BM. Basically it’s BM sans-drums, terribly slow. It’s also frankly scary shit.
Brik - CC-licensed Beats and Bass
After a long time gestating, my mate Simon and I are finally beginning to push our latest little enterprise onto willing listeners. It’s a net-label. The music releases are variously Drum and Bass, Dubstep, Hip Hop etc. Basically anything with a beats and bass focus — we just like that stuff a lot, right.
All releases are licensed using Creative Commons and are free to download.
I’m very proud to have the first release on the label, using my Rule of Three alias. So if you have ears and are willing, go and have a listen.
Communion by Septicflesh
I like a bit of symphonic death metal — blast-beats and choirs ftw. That said, I don’t actually like a lot of the stuff that I hear. Most of it is frankly ridiculous, but I can deal with that as long as the tunes are good. And therein lies the problem. It’s pretty boring to hear metal racket with some strings slung behind it. Too few bands explore the possibilities of orchestration, treating it as mere colour. Additionally too many give into the temptation of writing long tunes, perhaps under the impression that it makes them epic. Few tunes deserve to be ten minutes long though.
Which brings me to Septicflesh. These guys get it. For one, the songs are nice and short. Only a few push five minutes long. The constraint of writing shorter songs seems to have made them focus on songwriting and it’s really paid off.
At the core, these songs are structured like most rock songs. Verse, bridge and chorus. No stupid orchestra only break downs, no martial marches, no weepy acoustic guitar solos. Just short, sharp and epic songs.
And the tiny things matter… one of my favorite moments is the introduction to Sangreal. The double-kicks roll for a bar, then for the next bar hit on the up-beat. It sounds off kilter and distinctly mechanical. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just one of those little things that keeps me listening again and again.
I can foresee this one being on heavy rotation for awhile now.
To: Mute Records
Hello,
I unfortunately have a complaint to make. Today I purchased a copy of Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry.
Tomorrow I’ll be returning it to the shop where I bought it. It was only when I arrived home that I discovered the disc uses copy control. This means that I cannot for example rip the CD and listen to it on my iPod — a perfectly legitimate use considering I _paid_ for the album.
I’m actually quite annoyed. I buy a good deal of music, going out of my way to find and purchase music I like. I don’t appreciate being treated like a criminal!
It amazes me, that at a time when record labels moan about losing money to piracy, you guys are actually going out of your way to stiff paying customers.
Here after I’ll be avoiding any releases from your label and I’ll suggest that everyone else I know does the same.
Regards,
Luke Sutton
Kickrush, Kickrush, Kickrush - I Love Metal
Spanning everything from slow, doom, sludge to high-speed thrash, Heavy Metal covers a lot of ground. If you like some heavy tunes, you’re guaranteed to find something you love. Even if you don’t there is still bound to be something that you can dig.
My non-scientific, incomplete list of favorites:
Mastodon
These guys often get tagged as progressive. I think that’s because they use… you know melodies and stuff. For a time metal was dominated by death, thrash and variants — loud and fast was the name of the game. Now minds seem to be opening up again. I absolutely love Mastodon. This is the thinking man’s metal. Good solid grooves, plenty of energy and some top guitar work. They also love a bit of conceptualising, which gives the music an interesting flavour — for example the album Leviathan is about Moby Dick. Highly recommended. These guys are fuckin’ awesome.
Chimaira
Yes the misspelling of the name is intentional, don’t look at me. Straight up fast and violent. This stuff is just plain capital-H Heavy. I recommend their self-titled album as a starting point. Previous to that release they had a slight nu-metal influence — that horrible metal/rap cross over rubbish — but Chimaira - Chimaira is almost a return to the roots of metal. If you dig Pantera and Slayer, check em out.
The Dillinger Escape Plan
Dear sweet Darwin, I can’t tell you how much I love this band, but I’m gonna try. Math-metal — they make heavy use of odd time signatures, mid-song signature changes and stop/start dynamics. They’re also flat out fuckin’ brutal. The LP Miss Machine gets heavy play from me. More energy and technical-chops than most. Thank you DEP for being totally awesome.
ISIS
Ahhh, sludgy. ISIS sit at the slower end of the metal spectrum. Most of ISIS’ music is built around a slow and steady build-up to a heavy wall of sound. It’s a dynamic they use repeatedly, but it never gets old. I recommend the album Panopticon in particular.
Other notables
Here is a few other albums that I’ve been thrashing lately:
- Year of No Light - Nord
- Behold… the Arctopus - Skullgrid
- The End - Transfer Trachea Reverberations from Point
- Neurosis - Through Silver in Blood
- Soilwork - Sworn to a Great Divide
Music in progress - Flake
I was going to post more music as I was working on it, but I got distracted and forgot. But perhaps I’ll try again. I might remember to keep doing it this time. Here is a little something I was working on tonight.
BASS!!11111eleventy
I only wish I could have been there. This track is solid solid solid. It’s made for a hefty system. I’m a big fan of The Bug and I’m really looking forward to his work on the new Warrior Queen LP.
Announcing The Modern Ghost
After a fair period of gestation my collaborator Chris Lee and I have decided to make some of our work public. We’ve been working on a Drum and Bass project called The Modern Ghost. We’ve finally grounded the project. It has a sound and approach that we’re really happy with and we are going to expand on it with more music.
In the meantime we’ve set up a page on Virb which has some biographical guff and some audio previews. We’ll be adding more music as we work on it. You can check it out here.
Missy Blood
Just lately I’ve been working on music more heavily. Typically I’ve got loads of different bits on the go at any one time. That’s good and bad. Good because I’ve always got something to work on. Bad because it can make it difficult to finish anything.
But oh well!
Here is something I was doing for kicks. After listening to loads of Acid tunes, I decided to make something kinda old school. Download Missy Blood.