Rolling Metal Thread 2014

I wasn't even aware of those sections, as I always just made my own playlists. The playlists within it must have existed previously, such as the Best of Metal & Rock with 42,559 followers. Looks like they need one for Doom!

A couple of those playlists had already been featured in Rock, thus the high follower-counts. But we did a bunch of new ones. Exoskeleton (metal covers of non-metal songs) and Satan's Molten Tears (ballads) are mine, and I worked on a few others.

Got the new Cavalera Conspiracy album yesterday; listened to it this morning. I never liked Soulfly, but I like CC a lot. The new record is a pretty big departure for them. Max's vocals are buried in the mix, and they sound electronically pitch-shifted to more of a death metal roar than his usual bark. The actual music is a kind of shiny industrial thrash, rather than the hardcore/death metal soundtrack-to-a-beating that was on the first two discs. It honestly sounds kind of like Max's tribute to Ministry's "W trilogy." I like it, but I'm wondering if the few hundred people who actually care about Cavalera Conspiracy are gonna be into it.

interviewing Power Trip in a bit! open to suggestions for questions besides what i have so far, which is just "why do you guys slay sooo hard?"

Who are you talking to? Riley and Blake? Just Riley?

Just Riley, as far as I know.

Hmm. I guess you could ask how his being far away (he moved to Chicago) has affected the band, if at all. Maybe ask him to compare where they were before the release of Manifest Decimation a year ago to where they are now. He's a good guy, and usually warms up to folks pretty quick.

yeah, def gonna talk to him about the sort of status of the band, given that last summer in interviews he basically said they were gonna go full time last fall and make a run at it. he *also* said he was gonna give it 2 years and if it didn't work, he was fine to bail and do something else.

i'm not too worried about it, i can tell from reading interviews he's a talker. so am i, we'll be fine.

had no idea he moved to Chicago!

i read an interview he did with The Quietus last year ... pretty good stuff. dude is SHARP.

Sharp is an apt description. At the last show he introduced "Conditioned to Death" as being inspired by reading Foucault.

You're sure it wasn't reading fuck-all?

this interview is pretty amazing, i think. (if you read it i think it's pretty clear it was done via email.)

i mean i'm a dummy so maybe some of you smarter folks will scoff at some of this, but:

http://thequietus.com/articles/12719-power-trip-interview

Q: I read somewhere that you've read a lot on existentialism and post-modern French philosophy, which is not what you'd expect to read about a vocalist in a thrash/crossover band (no offense!) How did you get into that and how, if at all, do those ideas work their way into Power Trip?

RG: Damn, I could go for a while on this one. I was a writing major in college and I discovered a professor who became my academic mentor. He got his PhD at 27 and is the most brilliant person I know. I can thank Dr. Kyle Jensen for not only pushing me academically and artistically, but teaching me critical thinking skills, and introducing me to some of the greatest, most influential works from thinkers I've ever experienced. Foucault, Derrida, Burke, Deleuze & Guattari, Žižek, and more. I'm into existentialism and transformation, like what Tolstoy went through, and there's definitely song topics that deal with that. Because hey... if you're going to be a conscious individual in this world, consider yourself attempting to be intellectual, you've got to constantly question your role in the universe and embrace change. Everything changes. Society is like space – a swirling mass of different elements, intermingling in different densities, causing reactions from interactions that affect their environments... Creation and destruction. Even though we can't directly observe it, it is constantly moving and changing. Time and perspective are everything when observing what goes on around you.

I relate to Foucault and many of the French post-modern thinkers because it's all about examining social phenomena, examining the environments that lead to those phenomena, the social conditioning as a result of them, theorising paradoxes in established ideas, and the general attitude of obliterating traditional perspectives. That intrigues the hell out of me, and makes for some killer song topics. An author named Kenneth Burke coined the term 'Perspective by Incongruity', which is a rhetorical device meant to take a word, phrase, or idea that belongs by custom and characteristic to a certain category, but by rational thought and rhetorical manoeuvring, you wrench it loose, turn it on its head, and metaphorically apply it to a different set of characteristics.

I wrote a new song on the new LP, 'Conditioned To Death', which was influenced directly by the Foucault book Discipline & Punish. In less eloquent language, it basically comments on the fucked up penal system, where punishment in society has moved from torturing the body with physical pain, to torturing, and ultimately killing, the soul through things like isolation and sensory deprivation, and how much more awful and damaging those acts are to the human spirit through psychological suffering. Songs like 'Hammer of Doubt', 'Divine Apprehension', and others, often at times boil down to 'You think you know how it is, but you really have no idea' – plenty of songs about war and our demise at our own hands. But ultimately, I just want to write songs that make people think about something in a way they may not have thought of before.

Wow, cool!

Well, yeah, he was terrific.

Love this band.

glad to hear it! yeah, great guys making great music.

I didn't like the first new Slipknot song; I thought it was a just-OK rehash of stuff they'd done many times before. This new one, though, I like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wKw3oGb9-g

I saw Zvi (Rob Zvi Varod of Kayo Dot) on Saturday night. He's doing some interesting stuff with solo processed guitar (+ a synth box) and vocals: heavier and more dark doom/drone-like compared to Kayo Dot, a bit Sunn O))) perhaps?: http://ronzvivarod.bandcamp.com/album/zvi

I like the Opeth-y vocal melodies on the Slipknot track, way better than the other single

The new Sanctuary, which for some reason I'd been imbuing with high hopes, is boring and sounds like Nevermore.
http://youtu.be/dywhFx-piIE

We already have a better version of Nevermore, anyway; they're called Communic.
http://youtu.be/43kWDrJtJ7Q

And this is incredible:
http://www.decibelmagazine.com/featured/streaming-rigor-mortis-poltergeist/

All my complaints about the vox being too out front were obliterated by that slow, moody passage. Wowie.

That Zvi stuff reminds me a little of Keiji Haino's guitar+vocal stuff. Which is a compliment. "This Is Healthy?" is pretty raw.

Black Trip – Goin' Under (Prosthetic) - Some really catchy Swedish trad rock n' metal along the lines of Saturn and Death Penalty
― Fastnbulbous

I went back into last year's thread to see if anyone had any love for this since it apparently came out in 2013 on Entombed's Threeman Recordings imprint before being picked up by Prosthetic for a US release last week plus it features some guys who spent time in some better-known bands (three dudes spent time in Nifelheim, two guys were in Exhumed and Necrophobic, Peter Stjärnvind drummed for Entombed for a decade) but the only mention in either Rolling Metal thread was this.

I liked the disc a lot! Very much like Thin Lizzy if they were a NWOBHM. Hell, they coulda just called it The Soundhouse Tapes.

So what do you guys think of the Black Tongue? Century Media is reissuing two EPs from the band. On one hand, it's neanderthal deathcore mook-metal with the kind of aesthetic that Victory Records loves so they can sell tons of horribly multi-colored shirts and the band embraces the dumber side of that scene lyrically.

But on the other hand, it's considerably heavier than the band's peers, with minimalist electronic-triggered percussion that makes me think of Godflesh.

Is this stuff heavy enough to get past still being part of the dumbest and most personally offensive metal genre around right now? I don't think so, but it did make me at least think about it, which is more than I can usually say about such bands.

At least one of those zillion millennial bands with Black _____ as the name must've sucked because I've gotten a probably irrational aversion to all of them now. I couldn't tell you which are good or bad: Black Breath, Black Tusk, Black Monolith, Black Anvil.

Perusing one of those sites that list upcoming releases, I've noticed Desecravity, who are from Japan and sound like a somewhat more erratic Whisper Supremacy/And Then You'll Beg era Cryptopsy (but with a more conventional, guttural dm vocalist), have a new one out in November on Willowtip. I'm listening to their sole other album right now and remembering that I like 'em. Zero song identity but good for a skull sandblasting.

That Zvi stuff reminds me a little of Keiji Haino's guitar+vocal stuff. Which is a compliment. "This Is Healthy?" is pretty raw.

Yes! Haino is a good comparison.

Was ear-bleedingly loud live (although he was playing in a little bookstore).

I've always figured just about all "Black" bands are pretty great - Black... Sabbath, Flag, Capricorn, Cobra, Dice, Moth, Mountain, Pyramid... Maybe not so much Black Grape!

black eyed peas

band updates brought to you by the letter V, pt. 1

Colin Johnson Are you guys gonna release any new material this year?
Like · Reply · August 7 at 3:13pm

Vektor Not sure yet if it will be out by the end of the year but we're knee deep in writing it
Like · 1 · August 7 at 3:34pm

band updates brought to you by the letter V, pt. 2

John Cobbett @johncobbett · Aug 7
guitar tracks for VHOL are almost done, re-amping in September

Profound Lore @profound_lore · Aug 8
Currently being blown away by the rougher-than-rough vocal-less mixes of new VHOL material. Ruling too hard.

Profound Lore @profound_lore · Aug 11
The next VHOL album is going to be totally next level compared to the debut.

is it wrong to get excited over a six second cameraphone VHOL teaser

https://twitter.com/ssheie/status/484110138035679232

last Vektor album was prob in the top 5 metal recs of the last 5 yrs for me

Vektor lives in Philly these days and as a result will be playing on what might be the best four-band bill I have seen in a while with Skletonwitch, Ghoul and Black Anvil.

I can only afford so many shows (and nights off to see them) so I picked that evening to request off meaning that I have to scheduled off in order to meet Nate and see Witch Mountain who are in town the day before. :(

>> The next VHOL album is going to be totally next level compared to the debut. <<

That's almost scary.

I guess I can deal with Vektor's production pace if it's all as awesome as the first two albums.

Our new record is the best we've ever done!

I think Tom G Warrior's the most recent example of bucking that trend with trying to distance himself from his newest record, but he's wrong.

It's typical of a genius to disown a piece of work so quickly. Won't change my opinion, though! At this point it's looking like a lock for my metal #1 this year.

Black Grape are pretty smoking stood next to Black Lace.

lovin the new Midnight album.

Ooh, apparently most of the Japanese all-female power-metal band Destrose split off and formed a new band called Mary's Blood. Their album Countdown to Evolution is out and highly recommended if you like this sort of glossyspazzy thing.

http://open.spotify.com/album/0BT9R3G81VVc6Yn8PFyzPv

feel guilty I have almost 100 earsplit emails that I haven't checked..

what, were you out of the office on Friday?

I could swear I saw the band Emptiness mentioned somewhere itt but a search tells me otherwise. Even though my last post was about Dark Descent bands, this post is about a Dark Descent band that sounds nothing like other Dark Descent bands. Seriously have no way to describe or categorize this. Reminds me of first hearing something like Swans or Devil Doll or Current 93 when the part of the brain responsible for drawing parallels just shuts up so you can stare glassy-eyed into the new space created by the ... sound.

http://youtu.be/0sRmPbxk_I8

It's slow but it's not doom. It's cavernous and I guess it's death metal but it's not "cavernous death metal." I ... I really dunno. Totally hypnotic and out of this world.

Or I could've just posted this:
http://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-but-the-whole

Good lord, two of these guys are from Enthroned? All their creative fire must go into Emptiness.

I remember seeing David Lynch on The Tonight Show years ago. He was talking about his efforts to make guitar-based music. I remember he said that he had no idea how to play the guitar so he taught himself to play "backwards," whatever that means, and that the music came out sounding like death metal. That's what Emptiness sounds like: David Lynch playing death metal backwards.

Actually a lot of these riffs remind me of black metal. Like Thorns or even DSO. Weird.

"David Lynch playing death metal backwards" - okay, I'm sold. Will check out today.

this Emptiness stuff is fucking awesome

also there's a (completely brilliant) new Jute Gyte that I've been going on about in the BrancaMetal thread: https://jutegyte.bandcamp.com/album/ressentiment

but yeah this Emptiness is like nothing I've heard. the field recordings are an inspired production choice

Yeah I dug what little of Emptiness I listened to as well

I wouldn't necessarily say the the new Code Orange Kids (I Am King) is hardcore, or post hardcore, or post rock, or screamo, or grindcore, or experimental black metal. I would say that it has aspects that remind me of all of the above, and it's heavy as hell, and I like it a lot.

new Jute Gyte wat

7 minutes from the new Dark Space III I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwAy6MAjUgI