Rolling Metal Thread 2014

I guess as a company there's three ways you can deal with controversial artists:
- refuse material with questionable content
- refuse material that in itself has nothing offensive on it but happens to be made by an artist with questionable opinions
- just arbitrarily ditch stuff whenever someone complains

Ebay have banned Skr3wdr1v3r records for years, it's a bit inconsistently applied, I often see other neo-nazi skinhead bands on there but they're not so well known I guess, I expect it'll be the same thing with NSBM bands who are far more explicit than Burzum still being available on Ebay. Or people will just sell Burzum records as VV or something like they do with Skr3wdr1v3r (just search for oi isd rac and you'll see what I mean)

Yeah but those records have pretty explicitly racist lyrics and liner notes, Burzum has none of that. It's more akin to banning Wagner records - the material itself is not racist, but the guy was.

(difference is obv that Wagner is long dead)

i dunno, i mean eBay is free to moderate their "store" anyway they choose

this is all second hand sales so it's not like varg is really being hurt by this though

Oh yeah they can do whatever they want, I don't think there's any law in the US against inconsistency?

i almost wonder in a weird way if this benefits varg, making it harder to get 2nd hand copies forcing more to buy new?

can't imagine eBay cares how much it benefits him as long as they can avoid the irritation of having to process a few complaints now and again

do they not sell nazi historical memorabilia either?

just checked - appears there is ton of german ww ii stuff all over ebay

They don't but the point is I guess that this ban implies that any material that happens to be *made* by a racist guy is not kosher, regardless whether it has any questionable content or not. Guess it's easier for Ebay to blanket ban everything to do with Varg than to look at items individually.

witchrist sounds like a light summery wheat christ brewed according to german brewing purity laws so im just going to go ahead and believe that

lol, otm

Man, it looks like they actually have pretty restrictive policies around Nazi memorabilia: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/offensive.html

I mean, banning 1936 Olympic medals? You wouldn't have to be a Nazi fetishist to be interested in those, I don't think.

But I see some of this stuff is being sold, so maybe the policy just isn't enforced (until someone like Varg gets convicted of hate speech and they get nervous?)

His stuff isn't banned because of racism, it's banned because of his "history of violence." So the comparison isn't to Nazi memorabilia, it's to, say, someone trying to sell a John Wayne Gacy painting. They wouldn't let that go up, either. Which seems fair to me. The dude is, after all, a convicted murderer.

I guess the Burzum ban doesn't fall foul of any racist-related rules, but:
"Out of respect for the families and friends of victims, we don't allow listing items closely associated with notorious murderers within the past 100 years."

xpost :)

Oddly enough I see plenty of Max B records, and loads of Phil Spector-produced records.

But I guess Dissection records are the next to go.

as a rule I wouldn't be quick to rush to the side of eBay but the sheer volume of items the site processes means that they have no realistic chance of implementing their guidelines in a way they'd profess to

if you recall that long blog post from a dude who worked at Facebook about how they deal with offensive pages etc being flagged up, I guess it's on that kind of scale, or at least closer to that than, eg, someone moderating comments on a blog or w/e

GODFLESH ANNOUNCE DETAILS OF FIRST ALBUM IN 13 YEARS, SHARE NEW SONG "NEW DARK AGES"

A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE SET FOR OCTOBER 7 RELEASE

HEAR ALBUM OPENER "NEW DARK AGES" HERE:
https://soundcloud.com/godflesh-2/new-dark-ages/

woah

really boring.

I like the new Godflesh song but Broadrick sounds a lot like Tom G. Warrior on it to me. Kept waiting for a big "UNGH!"

I totally love the Sabbath Assembly disc, especially "I, Satan," the only really metal song on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9iGhXJhI5g

Finally got the latest Dream Death album. So much better than I had any right to expect, really sounds like it could've been recorded a year or two after "Journey Into Mystery."

oh wow didn't know there was one! kick ass

The new Obituary album, Inked in Blood, comes out in October. It's really good. Totally organic-sounding, just dudes in a room cranking out old-school groovin' death metal, Donald Tardy in particular delivering an incredible performance. The guitar tones are so full and grimy, you can almost get an oily taste in your mouth while they're playing. It's so good it's making me want to go back and check out their previous post-Roadrunner albums, which I've never heard.

Kim Kelly, who most of you know of if not know personally (and who posts here on occasion) did an interview with Dragonforce for Vice that exposes members of the band for their past project Demoniac.

This group released three albums in the mid to late '90s and had some racist and homophobic lyrics and Kim wanted the band to explain it now.

It's an awkward interview with a band member who obviously wants to forget the silly past and talk about their new record, but I guess that's to be expected.

The comments below it are an explosion of hate against Kim, calling her out for hypocrisy for enjoying black metal bands with similar lyrics, and for being Anal Cunt's publicist. Amazingly the very first commenter is Phil "Landphil" Hall from Municipal Waste and Cannabis Corpse and it's a sarcastic jab directed at Kim.

I respect the hell out of Kim and she's a big girl who knows how to handle herself. But it's tough to defend taking a guy in Dragonforce to task for a band he was in two decades ago when she was doing PR work for Seth Putnam. Of course I am just as "guilty" as she is. I wrote about Anal Cunt and own several of their releases, but I abhor racism, sexism, violence against women, antisemitism, etcetera and would like to think I would call someone out on it when appropriate; does that make me a hypocrite?

It's cool that she had the guts to push on with what was a very confrontational and uncomfortable interview, and it's also cool that Sam Totman (the interview subject) didn't just hang up the phone on her when things got dicey.

It sounds like you guys are really excited about the future and you’ve got a lot of good stuff going on, now that you’ve grown up and aren’t singing terrible things anymore.

Ha!

You guys were talking about it when it came out in March but I just now got to c heck out Sargeist's latest "Feeding the Crawling Shadows." It's is a lot more raw and uncompromising than the last album "Let The Devil In," a throwback to the band's more primitive Bathory-ensconced early material. Which is fine with me.

jfc that interview with the singer w/the disma/incantation guy (linked from the chaos in teja article linked from the dragonforce one). super gross. somehow missed this one :-/

oof, one day I'll learn to proofread my own damn posts >_<

anyway, I don't really know how kim would respond to the AC stuff but I'm guessing it wouldn't be all "hey, we were just having a laugh!" like the dragonforce guy. p weak.

The second one kind of turned into NOFX crossed with black metal

maybe the most offensive thing in there

listening to the new Belphegor. digging but i always liked em to begin w/, death/black hybrid kind of my 'thing'

Listening to the new Nachtmystium and I'm wondering just how much the negative press for this album is the metal crit world circling the wagons to punish Blake for being an asshole. Cuz while it certainly isn't their best, it also doesn't scan like the complete failure and abomination that most reviews are making it out to be.

NB I'm not saying Blake doesn't deserve all the shit he's getting for the stunts he's pulled, but this feels to me like a case of people punishing this album for it. I just don't hear a terrible album. A minor disappointment, maybe, but not a failure.

The new Nachtmystium sounded good to me when I listened to it for the first time the other day. This is just the old "is it okay to listen to Burzum" conundrum all over again. It's weird how some critics still are unable to separate the personality from the actual music. If you're writing a think piece about how a person's beliefs filter into their music, then by all means talk about the person's beliefs. If your assignment is to review an album, though, just review the goddamn album and let the personality shit go. An artist doesn't have a moral obligation to be a good person or a role model. An artist is allowed to make mistakes just like the rest of us. It sucks that people got ripped off. I hope he finds some way to repay them. But that doesn't categorically mean his music is bad. Beethoven was supposedly an insufferable prick. Does that make his 9th any less glorious and moving? (not that I'm putting Blake Judd's musical talents on the same level as Beethoven's or anything)

Or it could be that some reviewers honestly think it isn't any good.

I don't think Nachtmystium were ever that good, so I don't mind giving it a pass for non-musical reasons. But don't assume just because he's a dick that critics can't separate that from the music.

Frontwoman Uta Plotkin to Leave Witch Mountain after Release of New Album, ‘Mobile of Angels’

You got a source for that quote? WTF, that would be disappointing.

Well, shit.

Revolver.

Nachtmystium was never good, but

An artist doesn't have a moral obligation to be a good person or a role model.

says who?

artists lol

WRT to the Dragonforce thing....I got on an argument with some random dude on EZ Snappin's facebook page and random dude turned out to be the singer of Primordial haha

EZ Snappin: I don't assume anything about critics. I go by the evidence of their words. And a certain percentage of them seem to struggle with the separation of church and state, so to speak. I'm definitely not talking about anyone on this forum, by the way. Y'all are consistently fuckin' awesome.

Aero: Says me. I wasn't claiming anyone else's opinions but my own. Do you have a point? (I'm playing devil's advocate here.) To me, an artist's obligation is to make art. I don't see an artist as having any more obligation to be a good person than anyone else on this planet. If a plumber is known to be a racist, I'm not going to hire that plumber. But I'm certainly not going to publicly claim that he's a terrible plumber.

I don't understand the inherent cognitive dissonance of wanting to say extremely offensive things to piss people off but not having to deal with the consequences that come with pissing people off

well, the first one involves getting something you want, and the second one involves avoiding something you don't want, if you can swing it it works out pretty sweet

jfc that interview with the singer w/the disma/incantation guy (linked from the chaos in teja article linked from the dragonforce one). super gross. somehow missed this one :-/

Yeah, that is disappointing. He's on some great albums. :(