Rolling Metal Thread 2014

eagerly anticipating: new Gridlink album Longhena next month! the first track sounds great and seems to me to edge a little closer to the more melodic Hayaino Daisuki stuff:

Gridlink - "Ketsui"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ZprczVr_k

unfortunately also sounds like this album will be Gridlink/Jon Chang's last; statement via facebook:

In a few weeks you guys will lay your hands on the last GridLink record and probably the last record I will ever make. It wasn't always going to be that way, but during the recording I realized that this was the end of the line for me. I don't think I will make a better record and I don't want to be in a band with anyone other than Takafumi Matsubara, who was cashing out his chips as well. This is a hard genre to play in. I've loved the style since I first heard it in the late 80's, via Napalm Death, however I have been notoriously critical of the genre and really only ever liked a handful of bands that play "grind"(I have gone so far as to say 99% of bands that call themselves grindcore are just playing short death metal songs). It's earned me a lot of scorn over the years but I haven't lost any sleep over it

I think about how lucky I have been to work with such talented people over the past 20+ years creating music in a genre that few can understand or engage with. I'm especially lucky to have met and worked with people like Rob Marton and Takafumi Matsubara, people who were not content to play in that space, but were committed to carving out a whole new sub-genre that was distinctly their own. Then there's the percussion team of Witte and Fajardo, both guys who were the absolute best at what they did, eclipsing not only their peers but those that inspired them to something more. And then there's the bass, which I grudgingly agreed to but turned out pretty damn good LOL

To this day, I am still surprised anyone listens to or vaguely understands any of the music I've been a part of. So once again, I find myself saying goodbye. I'm going to be focusing on writing new graphic novels, making video games and films, etc. Feel free to tag along.

Yeah the Gridlink is pretty damn good, and OTM with the Hayaino Daisuki nod - it's like a merger of those two projects. Also, it's pretty prog by Gridlink's standards, at a bit over 20 minutes run time!

Not to mention the instrumental that sounds like Starless-era King Crimson to me. (No, I'm not joking.)

oh man, excited for this! hope chang gets bored watching anime during his free time and grinds again. I've def come to view his involvement in a project as a serious mark of quality.

Phil -- have you ever seen Slough Feg live? I don't listen to any of their albums. But every time I see them, they blow the roof off. It's a superlative performance. But I won't argue on the studio output.

I'll argue. Start with last year's nicely priced reissue set of Twilight Of The Idols (1999), Down Among The Dead Men (2000) and Traveller (2003). I don't see how anyone who likes that type of music could say those albums are terrible.

This one is pretty brilliant. The Simpsons featured Judas Priest in the last episode but erroneously had a character call the band "death metal." Apparently the ire of thousands of raised, angry fists reached the show's creators who issued an apology of sorts with Bart's ubiquitous introductory chalk board mea culpa:

http://metalinjection.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Simpsons-Judas-Priest-is-not-death-metal.jpg

I got bored with the Simpsons but should definitely watch that episode.

Don't forget everyone to join us on the rollout. Some really great albums so far on 101-83.

~~~ 2014 ILM METAL POLL TRACKS & ALBUMS COUNTDOWN! ~~~ (Tracks top 30 first then Albums)

Wow I thought for sure that Bart pic was fan art. If it's really directly from the Simpsons, then I have to say, "apology accepted!"

and really only ever liked a handful of bands that play "grind"(I have gone so far as to say 99% of bands that call themselves grindcore are just playing short death metal songs). It's earned me a lot of scorn over the years but I haven't lost any sleep over it

I agree with this statement!

Looks like Graveyard and Bombus are touring together this spring. That's a sweet bill.

If you haven't seen Graveyard, you need to see Graveyard. INSANELY good live band.

I haven't seen Graveyard.

The new Avichi just kinda dropped my jaw. Their (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary but this might be. Comes out next week on PL. Black metal that manages to sound modern without wobbling into other subgenres.
http://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/catharsis-absolute

glenn m on pazz n jop results:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2014/01/pazz_and_jop_tabulation_notes.php

• Enthusiasm scores (the average number of points awarded by each voter, which can range individually from five to 30) favor the extremes. Four of the top 10 albums by enthusiasm are metal (In Solitude, Black Sabbath, Locrian, Carcass), and three of the others (Dean Blunt, Autre Ne Veut, Julia Holter) are conversely atmospheric and oblique. The top of the full Enthusiasm table is quite a bit more adventurous than the raw winners list, and well worth poking through for new discoveries. At the bottom, the top 10 album with the lowest enthusiasm score is Haim's Days Are Gone, whose 9.6 average indicates that voters actually went out of their way to change the suggested 10-points-per-album default in order to properly quantify the limpness of their support. Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time would be ninth by simple vote count, but drops to 16th on points. The lowest enthusiasm score for any album with at least five votes is the Bon Iver spin-off Volcano Choir's Repave, which managed a remarkable 6.3.

• If those aren't quite adventurous enough, the Kvltosis table re-ranks the albums with an inverse weighting by how popular each voter's tastes skew, to deliberately look for intriguing anomalies. This reveals even more underground metal (SubRosa, Gorguts, Ghost B.C., Inter Arma, Windhand) and a variety of contrastingly rootsier folk/world/psychedelia (Tedeschi Trucks Band, Wayne Shorter, Mavis Staples, Rokia Traoré, Tal National, William Onyeabor). The Kvltosis winner (the album that people who don't tend to agree with anybody kind of agree on) is Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's English Electric. (Did you know OMD had a new album this year?) At the other end, the least kvlty album, and thus arguably the one even more definitively representative of the voters' aggregate tastes than the raw winners, is Miley Cyrus's Bangerz. Let this modulate your opinion of the whole enterprise however it must.

some album placements… i don't think i missed any before #89

19 Deafheaven, Sunbather
Deathwish Points: 361
Mentions: 35
37 Carcass, Surgical Steel
Nuclear Blast Points: 220
Mentions: 17
64 Black Sabbath, 13
Vertigo Points: 120
Mentions: 9
68 Gorguts, Colored Sands
Season of Mist Points: 110
Mentions: 10
79 SubRosa, More Constant Than the Gods
Profound Lore Points: 92
Mentions: 9
81 Kvelertak, Meir
Roadrunner Points: 91
Mentions: 9
89 In Solitude, Sister
Metal Blade Points: 81
Mentions: 6

o and:

• The Metalism table, which re-ranks the albums by prorating each voter's votes according to how much metal they voted for, turns up mostly metal, as it better, with In Solitude taking the title of Most Metal. Scanning through the rest of the Metalism top 20, though, makes me wonder if voters have actually listened to the things they say they like, as the non-metal entries show a distinct and frankly suspicious bias toward names you might mistake for metal bands if you didn't know: Chelsea Wolf(e), Burial, Forest Swords, Joanna Gruesome, Darkside. Although they didn't fall for Chvrches or Volcano Choir, which both seem like perfectly good metal names to me, so maybe it's fine. The two most popular completely un-metal artists, by this calculation, are the hip-hop group the Uncluded, and Elvis Costello and the Roots, which seems plausible.

They're having some technical difficulties, but that will all be back again soon...

60% of my ballot was metal, but i had two albums in the top ten so i think my kvltosis and eccentricity numbers are going to go haywire this year :/

congratulations, metalists:

http://furia.com/pjs/table_voter_2013_metalism.html

Chelsea Wolfe makes sense as metalist imo.

SURRENDER OF DIVINITY SINGER/BASSIST MURDERED FOR "TARNISHING SATANISM": http://www.ztmag.com/blog/news/?p=19655

heir (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary

mebbe not, but there's no way I can fail to queue up a song titled "The Devil's Fractal Part I"

new finnish metal documentary, no subtitles in the trailer (and a pretty shocking-to-me 91k views so far) - some sieg-heiling a band at one point that's pretty ugh, I think a fair number of these finnish bands are some strain or other of nazi (Goatmoon, Ride for Revenge maybe?) which sucks because they make good records imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWzlSeGR5bU

Currently loving Exmortus's Slave to the Sword. Firstly because that's the title, secondly because this is the cover (apologies for gigantism)

http://www.metalsucks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/exmortus-slavetothesword.jpg

and thirdly because the band has this totally kick-ass blend of death metal, thrash, and shredtastic power metal going on, like 3 Inches of Blood with less shrieking and more balls. Basically, they're what I wish Revocation sounded like. How power metal are they? There's a version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on this album.

I hope it's okay to post this type of thing, a Math Metal band I was in a bunch of years ago set up a Bandcamp page because we found a bunch of CDs, would appeal to fans of Russian Circles/Dysrhythmia maybe.

http://foeband.bandcamp.com/

Hey, what was the name of the project that made heavy metal soundtracks for sermons? IIRC it was a self-released deal, available on bandcamp, with at least 2 releases, within the last 2-3 years. Having trouble turning it up with a search engine.

Nevermind. Megachurch was what I was looking for.

oooh MaresNest I happen to love that kinda thing, will check it out

How power metal are they? There's a version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on this album.

hah, alright, I'll bite

Long-time lurker... Anyone else thinking the Aevangelist album got kind of lost in the year-end shuffle?

didn't hear this until today...really really interesting record, good stuff

this is apparently Kvelertak performing on the Norwegian version of the Grammys and it is kinda bizarre:

http://youtu.be/eMRn4GMwTfA

Kinda?

That actually could not have been timed any better as I'm in a discussion on another forum about metal not being perceived as threatening anymore, contra the satanic panic 80's. I was grimly reminiscing about being hassled by authority figures for my interest in such socially disruptive music. That video had octogenarians clapping along like they were in the pews.

To be fair, they always seem to be polite at awards shows. There is some incredulous laughter in the crowd shots at the end of the infamous KLF/Extreme Noise Terror collaboration at some UK Awards show, but a lot of applause, if nothing else because that's what they're trained to do.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2suew_the-klf-vs-extreme-noise-terror-3am_music

I had planned to spend 2014 avoiding black metal entirely, but I'm about to check out the new Murmur album because a) Alex Perkolup (Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident) is in the band, and b) they cover King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part 2."

do they do the jamie muir percussion??

Just check out Aevangalist for the first time myself, this is great. I need more demented, blackly psychedelic metal.

Nice to finally see the Aevangelist album getting some love! It seemed a bit unfocused to me at first, but it gets more gripping on subsequent listens. "Demented, blackly psychedelic" pretty much sums it up just right.

Haven't listened to the Murmur disc in full yet. The KC cover is kinda muddy-sounding, but I don't have much more to say than that yet.

Morning listening: Corpsessed, Abysmal Thresholds and Exmortus, Slave to the Sword. The Corpsessed disc is Finnish death metal that sounds more influenced by Immolation and Incantation than Swedish acts; I've already talked about Exmortus above, and they continue to rule.

New At the Gates in 2014? Sure, why not, everyone else is doing it.
http://youtu.be/EFKuR3-G4K0

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18827-indian-from-all-purity/

omg what is that noise on 'rhetoric of no', you know the one i mean ftftftftftftftftftftf

righteous screaming too

Great record! The aggression is off the charts.

I had planned to spend 2014 avoiding black metal entirely, but I'm about to check out the new Murmur album because a) Alex Perkolup (Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident) is in the band, and b) they cover King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part 2."

― Humorist (horse) (誤訳侮辱)

Apparently this is gonna be the year of black metal King Crimson because the new Hail Spirit Noir could not be Fripping any harder. Might wanna wait til next year to avoid. (The whole thing is on YT; I don't know if it's anywhere, uh, legitimate and I'm not sure how this forum feel about YT rips.)

On the same label and from the same country, the new Aenaon, despite the generic band name, is a really good, if less well integrated, black prog funhouse experience. Has some quality guesting on it.

I did some repping for that Hail Spirit Noir on the rolling middle eastern etc metal thread. I think it fucking kicks ass

Ah, cool, I only noticed and read that thread yesterday. Coincidence! (I wanted to love that Al Namrood too but the vocal effect made me wince.) And yeah, HSN is something special.

Skull. Fist.

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

I love Canadian metal bands.

Apparently this is gonna be the year of black metal King Crimson because the new Hail Spirit Noir could not be Fripping any harder. Might wanna wait til next year to avoid. (The whole thing is on YT; I don't know if it's anywhere, uh, legitimate and I'm not sure how this forum feel about YT rips.)

huh so they have kind of a carnival music prog thing huh

I wouldn't say "carnival music;" if anything the other band I mentioned, Aenaon, fits more with that. That term makes me think "novelty" or "flippant." Whatever HSN is doing, it sounds well thought out and developed. But we may be using the term differently.

That Skull Fist was the Headbangers Ballsiest thing I've seen in a while. Usually with these throwback METAAAAAL!!! bands I'm too wrapped up in suspicions about whether or not they're making fun of this favorite genre of mine, but that seemed miraculously genuine. Or yeah maybe it's a Canadian thing.

I tried to explain the Canadianness of Skull Fist and that ilk last week over at the Deciblog:

http://www.decibelmagazine.com/featured/sucker-for-punishment-the-new-wave-of-moose-molten-metal/