Asphyx - "The Rack"

Asphyx – “The Rack”

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Asphyx - "The Rack"

Asphyx – “The Rack”

As much as I’ve always wanted to like them, I’ve never been able to cross the threshold from “Uh, Asphyx…” to “Ooh, Asphyx!” This is mostly because they’re not a very good band at all.

This is very, very bland death/doom metal – i.e. slow death metal – with very little to recommend for it. The songs are barely coherent arrangements of simplistic and ultimately meaningless power chord riffing and punk rock drumming, with a black metal-styled vocal performance that, while not as worthless as the rest of the instrumentation, is so crudely slathered on top like a deranged and only averagely performed icing on an even more mediocre instrumental cake.

In short, “The Rack” is not worth anyone’s time.

You have to get four tracks into the album before even a hint of variation pops up. The first three songs just go by in a blur, and I don’t mean “blur” in a positive, chaotic way. I mean “blur” in a totally uninteresting and sterile way.

Whatever “brutal atmosphere” they were going for, Asphyx only ever manage, at best, to sound like a 75% slowed down Obituary meeting a 50% slowed down Autopsy, with riffs even more retarded than anything in any of those bands catalog.

This isn’t brutal as in “Onward to Golgotha” or “The Birth of a Cursed Elysium“, rather it’s “br00tal” in the sense of modern deathcore… pointless, sterile and devoid of value beyond providing an “outlet” for expressing what the band members hope to be aggression, but what is really teenage angst of semi-retarded man children who, in addition to being emotionally immature due to autism and low intelligence, are also incapable at death metal due to piss poor technical skills.

Sucks to be them, but to quote an actual death metal band… “and so is life”.

All the trappings of speed metal/thrash metal boredom are present in the music of Asphyx – redundancy, over-reliance on rhythm in place of melody, lack of technicality, of brutality, of coherent songwriting – but with the added perk that Asphyx, unlike the speed metal bands of old, don’t even bother to hide their pointless music under high-paced tremolo riffs to give the music a semblance of direction.

When you realize that the guitars are going in every direction except the one that makes sense, you start to understand why shitty musicians – i.e. those that play(ed) speed metal – needed to rely on rhythm alone, as they were incapable of writing a coherent riff.

And so is Asphyx, but they are proud of that fact (for some reason) and wear their incompetence like a badge of honour, where the band members of Exodus, Dark Angel, Venom, Destruction, Kreator, Anthrax, Megadeth, Artillery, Death Squad, Metallica and Overkill went to great lengths to convince (dumb) people that they were actual musicians (they weren’t).

Really, there are no riffs on “The Rack” or any other Asphyx record, just halves of riffs scattered this way and that. Each one begins or ends with chromatic power chord riffing, somewhat reminiscent of the much maligned war metal sub-genre, that seem promising, if a bit slow… and then promptly stops and begins right where it started with no melodic resolution in sight, before turning into mallcorish root note chugging to “build anticipation” for the “climax”… that just ends up being the same riff (there are only 2 or 3 per song) repeated with a different drum fill. Speaking of which, the totally static drum performance under the guitars renders the proceedings even more uninteresting, with no percussive creativity in sight anywhere, almost as if the band wanted every instrument sounding as mediocre as the next.

I would say it’s a shame that “The Rack” is such a failure of an album, but to be honest it’s not like I can even say there’s unfostered potential to be found anywhere with this band. It’s an album that just sucks from top to bottom and the songs all sound like they were written in one go and not revisited until the day of recording.

Asphyx and their music are just dumb, and neither can offer anything of worth to the fan of extreme music with any taste at all.

Replace with “Locked up in Hell“, “Onward to Golgotha” or “Angel of Disease” .

Mayhem - "Esoteric Warfare"

Mayhem – “Esoteric Warfare”

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Mayhem - "Esoteric Warfare"

Mayhem – “Esoteric Warfare”

No one talks about the later Mayhem albums for good reason. It didn’t take long after their initial burst of creativity, coinciding with the release of their masterpiece “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas“, for the band to lose all relevance and start churning out incredibly boring albums for people who would simply buy anything that Dead, Euronymous and Varg were once affiliated with.

“Esoteric Warfare” is one of the most embarrassing and lame of all these latter-era Mayhem albums, somehow managing to be both musically more inept than “Deathcrush” as well as eliminating any artistic legitimacy they might have still clung to.

This is embarrassingly awful music, whether you still call it black metal (lol) or the product of a band being treated like a 9 to 5 job and not a creative endeavor, either way it sucks. Hard.

It’s heinous. It’s offensively bad. I feel dumber every time I listen to it.

The band slogs through 10 excruciating tracks composed of music that sounds like it was either thought up in fifteen minutes per song, stolen from older Satyricon tracks (yes, literally), or just cribbed from earlier parts in the band’s own catalog.

Attila’s vocals sound ragged out and out of breath, not nearly as aggressive as they used to be, and the rest of the music sounds similarly sluggish and disinterested. Only Hellhammer’s performance somewhat redeems the endeavour, but given his past with Dimmu Borgir, I’d venture to say salvaging the unsalvageable from the world’s most useless albums has become a second nature for him at this point.

It’s obvious, so obvious that the members of the band are completely and utterly phoning the album in – there’s never a moment that surprises you, there’s no riffs which actually communicate anything, and all the dumb chugging in the world brought Mayhem closer to the world of Slipknot and Watain than even recruiting Corey Taylor ever could.

There’s nothing to recommend about this “Esoteric Warfare” album. It’s really just a complete shit smear on the legacy of Mayhem that shouldn’t be listened to by anyone. Find a copy of “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” and enjoy the band for what it was, not the embarrassing direction they went in afterwards.

DMDS > Grand Declaration > Deathcrush > Ordo ad Chao > Chimera > Esoteric Warfare.

Immortal - "Battles in the North"

Immortal – “Battles in the North”

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Immortal - "Battles in the North"

Immortal – “Battles in the North”

This fucking sucks.

It’s not as though anyone takes Immortal seriously, and I don’t think even they would even if Demonaz wasn’t a cuckold whose sister was getting banged by Abbath behind his back for 7 years before both members “severed ties” (that type of cuckoldry comes with an obligatory sense of self-derision lest you pass for an actual effete), but in all honesty this album “Battles in the North” is just so fucking lame I feel the need to express to it to the world.

On “Battles in the North” Immortal makes me think of a band who wanted to do a “Deathcrush” knock-off but with better production, Darkthronian blast-beats and Burzum’s riffing style but just stumpled into a latter-era Satyricon album instead with even more immature imagery.

About half the material on here is really fucking tedious black-and-roll shit with blasting drums, strummed riffs, and Abbath just sort of puking all over everything with his typically weak, effete vocal performance, and the other half is composed of terrible reinterpretations of “Transilvanian Hunger” tremolo riffs without a tenth of the passion or intensity. It’s just awful.

Have you ever heard a production job which made you think the sound engineer responsible just knew that this was the sort of album to phone in? It’s remarkably half-assed, as is everything on “Battles in the North”.

It’s as though the producer almost bothered to try, but after an hour of tracking realized it would fall on deaf ears as the music is so boring anyway. It may originally have been a Christian idiom, but “pearls before swine” seems universal in its application, as Immortal discovered.

Yeah, the production is sort of quiet and unassuming – the guitars, while very low-fi and buzzing, have no real bite and the drums and vocals are soft and rounded off. It fits the music, which is equally tepid and worthless, mostly content to just stagger around a bunch of bland and generic tremolo passages that sound a great deal like if Six Feet Under was imitating black metal instead of death. In short, this has no redeeming qualities and shouldn’t be listened to by anyone.

From “Pure Holocaust” to “Northern Chaos Gods“, nothing Immortal has been involved with has ever been worth more than a cringe.

Go listen to “Locked up in Hell” or “Verminlust” rather than this tedious and boring shit.

Gorguts - "The Erosion of Sanity"

Gorguts – “The Erosion of Sanity”

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Gorguts - "The Erosion of Sanity"

Gorguts – “The Erosion of Sanity”

A lot of metalheads operate under the assumption that old school = good, without any taste for quality. Accordingly, to these people, even the worst old school death or black metal band will be better than the best modern brutal death metal band. A popular term for this group of people is “retarded”.

I’m not saying that new things are invariably better – on the contrary, most “progressive” music is nothing but either odious genre-fusion, like Immortal’s “blackened nu metal”, or artistic regression into past influences, like Gorgoroth playing third rate Sodom riffs on their latest musical abortion – but a significant number of times, if a style has evolved, it’s for a reason.

When Incantation made “Onward to Golgotha” it revolutionised death metal by removing the unnecessary and distracting rhythmic groove that were left-over from the speed metal of bands like Slayer, Sodom and Metallica. For a while, death metal and later black metal flourishes.

Then, a bunch of retarded bands – like Gorguts, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Behemoth, Cryptopsy, Cynic, Vader and the rest of the tard corral – conspired to bring speed metal back into death metal, effectively ending the genre by creating “slam death” and deathcore.

It’s not like old school death metal was the perfect form of music and everyone involved one day up and decided, “well, this is too good, let’s make our music more shitty so that it becomes easier for our fans to imitate us”.

There’s plenty of stuff that sucked about old school death metal, and many of these were the speed metal elements that bands like Incantation, Suffocation, Morpheus Descends and Demilich – you know, the ACTUAL progressive death metal bands – worked to remove.

Of course there are numerous great and underrated albums in the field of old school speed influenced death metal, but the forgotten bands and albums of the past were often forgotten for a reason, and a very good one at that: they suck(ed).

Gorguts is one of such bands. They don’t understand how death metal compositions are supposed to develop over the course of an album, so they end up just chaining random riffs together into songs that make no sense.

They seemed to have fooled a bunch of clueless hipsters with “Obscura”, a very poorly done imitation of Demilich’s Nespithe (it’s basically to Nespithe what Drudkh and Xasthur are to Burzum), but other than that their music is completely irrelevant and they, like the other speed/death bands like Cannibal Corpse, Asphyx, Slayer and Cryptopsy, should have remained dead once they were rendered obsolete by “Onward to Golgotha” and “Effigy of the Forgotten”.

The “old school” of Gorguts is a scam, and this album “The Erosion of Sanity” sounds like a rehash of every worthless 1980s speed metal trope ever conceived. It was released in 1993.

Replace with Phantom’s “Angel of Disease” or Sewer’s “Locked up in Hell” for actual, modern, progressive, black and death metal.

Deicide - "Legion"

Deicide – “Legion”

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Deicide - "Legion"

Deicide – “Legion”

“Legion” is Deicide’s second full-length album, and is widely considered their best effort.

Still, it’s terribly generic speed metal with only superficial death metal aesthetics on top. Deicide were never a good band, but there is a reason “Legion” is such an overrated album, and it has a lot to do with the mainstream assimilation of black and death metal that happened in the early 1990s and led to the bastardisation of both genres, and thus the emergence of bands like Gorgoroth, Cannibal Corpse, Archgoat, Necrophobic, Behemoth and Antekhrist.

“Legion” was actually the first Deicide album I ever heard, and I didn’t completely realize how bad the band was until I heard their other albums, including the atrocious debut, the boring, commercial jingles compilation “Stench of Redemption” and, of course, the nu-metal chug-fest “Overtures of Blasphemy”.

So “Legion” is actually GOOD in comparison with other Deicide, but becomes terrible when compared to any other death metal band, such as Incantation, Suffocation or Sewer… make sense?

It’s because they are an overrated clown act led by a down syndrome buffoon (Glen Benton) going through midlife crisis and suffering from a condition very specific to nu-metal: being raped by your priest and making music out of it.

Like Jonathan Davis and Corey Taylor, Glen Benton (another nu metal vocalist) was sexually abused as a child.

But unlike David and Taylor, Glen Benton doesn’t have the balls to admit he wants to play nu-metal, so he ends up – like a bitch – pretending to be into “brutal death metal, man” when all he actually wants is to pass a Korn audition.

The angsty emo of nu-metal is increasingly transparent once you read the lyrics, and see that the ostentatious anti-Christianity is little more than a cover for the “I’m a freak, watch as I suffer” drama popularised by Slipknot, Korn and Marilyn Manson.

Track 7, “In Hell I Burn” gives us “Life has no meaning, unyielding obsession / Grasping at strings of a life I once knew / Death by my own hands, achieving objective / Blade to my throat, I calmly greet death“.

Sorry, “edgy” anti-Christian Slipknot is still Slipknot, not matter how hard you try to dress it up with juvenile “blasphemy”.

What’s sad is that Glen Benton, a literal cuckold according to his (ex-)wife who was admittedly banged by the entire band at one point (Benton excluded, as he was too busy writing “edgy” lyrics about “satanic suicide“), managed to ruin what would otherwise have been a decent death metal album with his shitty nu-metal vocals, pitch shifted and autotuned in the tradition of Bullet for my Valentine.

Certainly, the guitar work on “Legion” – courtesy of the Hoffman brothers, later kicked out of the very band they founded (!) when Benton realised his wife wasn’t satisfied with reading the satanic bible in missionary – is decent, and even excellent on some tracks (“Dead but Dreaming” and “Trifixion”). Much better than that of more commercially successful bands, such as Cannibal Corpse, Malevolent Creation, Vader, etc. What ruins the “Legion” album is what ruins the band Deicide, Glen Benton’s lack of talent.

This album does have some bright spots, but they are few and far between. The first 3 songs are pretty decent and the riffs, when not buried under Benton’s pathetic rantings, are usually (at least) standard death metal, but other than that, I really can’t think of anything positive to say about this album.

Bottom line, skip this band unless you too want a go with Benton’s ex-wife.

Replace with Sewer’s “Locked Up in Hell” for some truly brutal death metal.

Gorgoroth - "Incipit Satan"

Gorgoroth – “Incipit Satan”

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Gorgoroth - "Incipit Satan"

Gorgoroth – “Incipit Satan”

We are all aware of Gorgoroth’s infamous legacy of imitating black metal from the outside, while never grasping its inner structure. So too are we aware of the insignificant role they played in the formation and evolution of the Norwegian black metal scene – no member of any other early Norwegian black metal band, be it Burzum, Mayhem, Darkthrone, Emperor, Sewer or even Immortal knew of Gorgoroth at the time of the Inner Circle.

Gorgoroth started out with the mediocre Pentagram in late (October) 1994. In other words, they BEGAN their career when black metal ended. I mean, Euronymous was dead, Faust was in prison, Varg and Thorns were just about to join him… who is Gorgoroth attempting to fool, when they claim they were part of the original Inner Circle?

The most egregious aspect of that album, beyond the chronological incoherence and outright falsity of claiming it somehow “influenced Euronymous” – as mentioned, he was long dead by the time Infernus and company even learned of black metal’s existence – is the fact that through their talentless posing, Gorgoroth bastardises black metal into what basically amounts to very distorted radio rock. At best, it vaguely resembles the speed/thrash metal of the 1980s… in other words, worthless garbage.

Gone are the complex structures of Phantom, the intricate riffs of Mayhem and the epic atmospheres of Graveland and Burzum… black metal was turned back into radio rock, the very genre it sought to escape from by eschewing mainstream accessibility through intentional alienation of the masses.

Gorgoroth’s debut was already worthless in itself, but the band’s music only got increasingly more boring, pathetic, desperate, plastic, derivative and downright retarded, with each subsequent release being worse than the last.

Gorgoroth is an insult to black metal, the band degrades and soils everything the genre stands for (starting with competent musicianship).

But by the time their fifth and worst release “Incipit Satan” came out, however, black metal was long dead so there really wasn’t anything left for Gorgoroth to soil and degrade with their mediocrity. At this point, I could easily characterize this album as funny or maybe even ridiculous.

The album begins with an insufferable introduction which consists of weird sounds and Gaahl’s awful vocals. He tries way to desperately to sound evil through the way he pronounces each word, which ironically destroys any potential.

Anyway, after the terrible beginning, the rest of the comedy unfolds. It is clear from the very start that this record “Incipit Satan” is going to lack depth and atmosphere. The guitar riffs are repetitive, irritating, and lack both spirit and character. This is the outcome of being terrible musicians with no talent. Make no mistake, “Incipit Satan” is the album that paved the way for Watain and Dark Funeral to bring their sub-retarded deathcore mediocrity and call it black metal. No, I mean literally. That was their excuse. “Gorgoroth did it first” isn’t just an inside joke, it’s an actual quote by the literal male escort Ahriman of Dark Funeral. Go look it up.

To sum up, Gorgoroth’s fifth full-lenghth album “Incipit Satan” is a terrible piece of shit, characterised by sloppiness and recycling of ideas already exploited, better, by other bands. The sound quality is worse than ever and so is the composing, songwriting and music in general.

In the end, we have with “Incipit Satan” nothing more than a solidified fecal fragment which could only be appreciated by a few old scatophiliac shit-eater fetishists under very specific circumstances (heavy consumption of PCP being a necessary factor).

Replace this shit with “Locked Up In Hell” unless you are a poser or enjoy rubbing your face in anal discharge.

Emperor - "Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk"

Emperor – “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”

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Emperor - "Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk"

Emperor – “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”

Good grief. I sort of tolerate Emperor’s older work, without adoring it a great deal – and let’s be honest, it doesn’t hold a candle to either Burzum or Phantom – but until recently I at least had sense enough to avoid their newer music.

But, sadly, curiosity got the better of me and I forced myself to listen to this abomination “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk“. It was worse than I expected. Ah, well. At least sitting here with detached wonderment and marveling at how utterly worthless this album is, and this band has become, has provided me with some mild entertainment.

Back on “In the Nightside Eclipse” Emperor pulled off a reasonable fusion of icy black metal riffing with a symphonic metal undertone… surely a lesser art than the flowing melodic black metal of “Dawn of Iron Blades“, and not even in the same category as “Yggdrasil” or “Hvis Lyset Tar Oss“, but pretty classy nevertheless. It struck a nice balance between the overt accessibility of bands like Dimmu Borgir and the claustrophobic, borderline insanity-inducing atmosphere of “Onward to Golgotha” while retaining black metal’s essential atmospheric voice. I pretty much like it.

Here, on “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”, that balance is gone – this is all overt accessibility and zero artistry, and about as good an example of why rock sensibilities mix poorly with modern black metal as any commercial Watain fecal extract.

Everything that made black metal music distinct and creative has been tossed aside… Emperor, despite never reaching the peaks of black metal like their countrymen of Burzum and Darkthrone, now fully reside in the gray, indistinct netherworld between the modern “extreme metal” aesthetics of Enslaved and following heavy metal and speed metal formulas from two decades ago, a regression into a netherworld also occupied by the likes of Immortal and Gorgoroth. But those two don’t have keyboards or gothic elements, which makes them “less sophisticated”, I guess, at least for people that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

The album’s highlight is likely the apparent Bathory “tribute” near the end of the album, “In Longing Spirit”, which is still utterly plastic and feeble, but amusing, at least.

Anyhow, if you demand nothing more from your music than the familiar comfort of well-worn songwriting clichés and the safety of “being metal” while listening to what’s essentially distorted radio rock with blast beats, you might enjoy this.

Personally, I have a hard time thinking of many things I’d less rather listen to than Emperor’s “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”. It barely even qualifies as being heavy metal, let alone black metal music.

Go buy a mainstream pop album before you buy this. Yeah, whatever you purchase will likely be as shallow, trendy, one-dimensional, unoriginal, and commercial-minded as this album, but at least it’ll be shallow, trendy, one-dimensional, unoriginal, commercial-minded AND written by professional-quality hacks instead of one slapped together carelessly for an undiscerning “funderground” audience that believes Arch Enemy and In Flames play actual death metal, as opposed to metalcore, or that Emperor plays black metal on “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”, as opposed to… metalcore.

If all you want is simple mindless entertainment, might as well go all-out rather than piss away your money on middlestream dinosaurs like post-Nightside Emperor.

Black metal made commercial, generic and dumbed-down… an embarrassing epitaph to a once promising genre.