ILX Metal n' Heavy Rock Poll 2018: NOMINATIONS thread - open till Jan. 19th, 2019!

is that everything nommed then?

Give it until the morning! I've assumed you've all nominated everything but there's usually something that slipped the net

Divide and Dissolve - Abomination

I'll throw in some last minute adds.

I love Triple B. They've been putting out the best dumb hardcore I've heard in years.
https://bbbrecords.bandcamp.com/

The Mindforce album might have been my favorite Triple B record from 2018. Their guitarist sadly had a bad accident a couple weeks ago. The band are on indefinite hiatus and they started a gofundme for his hospital bills. :(

Mindforce - Excalibur
Three Knee Deep - Wrong World
Candy - Good To Feel
Criminal Instinct - Sweet Dreams

tt has just awoken from her drunken stupor and is quickly informing me of her last-second additions (if there are any), give me ten minutes haha

Weedpecker - III
Orphaned Land - Unsung Prophets And Dead Messiahs
Descubriendo a Mr Mime - F
Djinn and Miskatonic - Even Gods Must Die
Storm {O} - Ere
Agrimonia - Awaken
Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard / Slomatics - Totems
Windhand / Satan's Satyrs - Split
Erdve - Vaitojimas
Gost - Possessor
Sectioned - Annihilated
Ivar Bjørnson & Einar Selvik - Hugsjá
Thou - The House Primordial
Drawn And Quartered - The One Who Lurks
The Night Flight Orchestra - Sometimes The World Ain't Enough (I think she's still drunk tbh)
The Final Age - The Final Age
Anthroprophh - Omegaville
Thou - Rhea Sylvia
Underoath - Erase Me
Ostraca - Enemy
Green Lung - Free The Witch
Shylmagoghnar - Transience
Thumpermonkey - Make Me Young, Etc
Runemagick - Evoked From Abysmal Sleep
envy - Alnair In August
Azusa - Heavy Yoke
Remote Viewing - Blood Loss

More to come!

I always say to her "they'll have nominated everything" and she says "no way have they done so" and she is always right

Q'uq'umatz - Kukulkan
Ling Tosite Sigure - #5
złota jesień - W tobie nie jestem soba
The Ex - 27 Passports
Star Period Star - Daylight Spending Time
Protoplasma - -
Magim - Ignis
Koenjihyakkei - Dhorimviskha
Blosse - Era Noire
Machine Girl - The Ugly Art
Cadaveric Fumes - Heirs Of Hideous Secrecies
Svartidauði - Revelations Of The Red Sword

Ivar Bjørnson & Einar Selvik - Hugsjá

Excellent album but obligatory NØT TRVE METÅL.

It is a homeopathic metal dilution

I do wonder what the most not-metal thing we nominated is. possibly Thumpermonkey except the opening track is nigh-on the heaviest thing I've heard all year

We!

Glad somebody else heard Magim, love that shit.

Musically speaking, I very much enjoyed that Nécropole album but I won't be listening to it again. Describing Jews as malicious 'vipers' and 'cosmic enemies' then outright stating that 'the Jewish "race"' (I'm quoting the quotation marks, which totally sanitize the sentiment, amirite?) 'must die' is a kind of pubescent edginess that induces more eye rolling than is anatomically bearable on my part.

Yikes, uh I think that goes beyond edginess

Well it's mixed with pseudo-profound terms scavenged in online thesauruses such as 'eschatology' and 'oblation', so I assume it's all part of a neo-Maurrassian fantasy according to which they, the unsung, unacknowledged protagonists of recent French History, must transgress contemporary ethics in order to live up to their solitary, aristocratic ideals. The more loathed and despised you are by the plebs, the closer you come to achieving Sadian transcendence or some such. Sounds pretty pubescent to me.

Can we un-nominate them please?

We'd probably have to un-nominate a great deal if we were to carefully comb through every lyric. I'm afraid this kind of hateful bullshit is statistically inevitable in a genre that prides itself on exploring the darkest recesses of the human psyche. That said, these lyrics cross the red line for me and I certainly won't be voting for Nécropole.

I'm removing Nécropole. and lj quit nominating thumpermonkey, they are not metal!

Is there a tribunal

Apparently so.

And as an addendum to my post upthread, I'd like to point out that the Divine Marquis was no antisemite.

"Hateful bullshit" isn't inevitable if you strongly vet your BM bands beforehand. Will concede that I may not be on 100% solid ground as I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to, say, folk/"pagan" bands so long as it manifests itself as nature worship or ancient folklore etc and there are no obvious signifiers of nationalistic crap. There might be stuff that slipped through the net, maybe you're right, this shit's inevitable and I'm too naive but I like to hope not.

Really though thanks for bringing up this band as I now know to avoid them. But look, you don't have to find excuses for this stuff, it's not necessary, there is no historical or philosophical context that could make lyrics like the ones you brought up acceptable.

Yeah, I don't think I was trying to 'find excuses' for this band or I wouldn't have brought up their antisemitism in the first place.

If we're gonna follow this through to the end, though, we also need to think about how we tend to give a free pass to older, canonical Norwegian BM acts: Emperor, Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone and Gaahl have all crossed the line at various points in their careers (in different ways and to varying degrees). And if we move past the narrow purview of BM, should we squelch Gesualdo or Wagner or Sibelius altogether? Or Pound or Céline or Dalí? Historical distance attenuates the sulfur somewhat, yet it is often deceitful. For instance, because Vikernes is older and the controversy surrounding him began so long ago, I don't think about his extramusical persona when I listen to his albums, whereas Nécropole released their debut EP in 2014, which makes them more present and palpable, as it were (not to mention the current international context means I have less patience than ever for this kind of crap). Yet Vikernes, even though he retired his Burzum moniker last year, is still very much alive, running a neopagan enclave with his 'Aryan' wife in the Limousin – his views don't appear to have shifted all that much over the years. Perhaps we should keep that in mind next time we listen to Filosofem?

Familiarity with the language makes a difference, as well. I can't in good conscience listen to Peste noire because Famine's lyrics leap out at me and make me feel like I'm at a French skinhead rally. But I can never quite catch the Norwegian racist slur (penned by Vikernes iirc) on the über-classic™ that is Transilvanian Hunger. All in all, I guess I prefer sticking to the Wagner/Heidegger line of defence: both were antisemitic pieces of shit, no doubt about it, but the former influenced Mahler and Schoenberg, whereas the latter's philosophy left an indelible mark on Arendt and Derrida (all four were Jews), which goes to show that, yes, it is possible to divorce the person from their work (assuming it's of some import), at least in part and as long as you're willing to go through all the necessary caveats, understand where it all went wrong and rework it accordingly. Nécropole's case is thankfully clear-cut but I don't like the notion that we don't need to know more about the context. Listening responsibly also consists of parsing said context (which is why I looked up the lyrics after reading a disturbing review of Solarité in a French e-zine), of trying to understand what draws a certain strand of young white men to this garbage, just like I'm also interested in why certain young men are attracted to incel culture. So it's not about contextualizing for the sake of excuses but about trying to understand where the hatred is coming from and what it means, if that makes sense.

All in all, I guess I prefer sticking to the Wagner/Heidegger line of defence: both were antisemitic pieces of shit, no doubt about it, but the former influenced Mahler and Schoenberg, whereas the latter's philosophy left an indelible mark on Arendt and Derrida (all four were Jews),

why must you leave oor neechy out of this?

Anyway the dividing lines for the poll have always been the actual lyrics. If pointed out (usually i cant make any out tbh)

I'm pretty sure jjj banned Peste Noire one year despite the fact he enjoyed the actual music.

To be clear on this, can we get nominations removed for anti-christianity or disproportionate violence in the lyrics?

I assume any extreme non-racist material is fine. Bands who openly oppose Islam would make for an interesting litmus test.

pomenitul 'making excuses' was an unkind reading of what you were saying, sorry about that. I didn't consider the angle you're taking as my attitude towards racists and anti-semites is without nuance or sympathy, they made the choice to be that way and I don't care about the why.

I've just made the personal choice to not to listen to certain bands on ideological grounds, while a) admitting I can only be less than pure in that regard and make exceptions if and when I want and b) leaving anyone else to draw their own lines. Incidentally I'd think Burzum was absolute dull dogshit on a musical level even he wasn't the way he is and I've never heard an avowedly leftist BM band that wasn't a bit poor. So it's not all about politics.

As far as the poll's concerned I think we can all parse the difference between OTT violence, cartoonish anti-christianity and actual racism/hate speech. I'm not clamouring for anything to be removed as again, anyone else can make their own decisions. But even if we combed through every nom and removed anything even slightly dodgy, this is a poll on an obscure music forum, it wouldn't be the thin end of the wedge.

pomenitul - i've thought a great deal about this myself. in the past i was in theory a "separate the artist from the art" kind of person but in practice i can't actually do this sort of thing. my personal guidelines is "no cadaver synods" - if someone's dead they get a free pass. when the artist no longer lives i can generally separate the artist from the art. having said that, however, i am so repulsed by florent schmitt that i am unable to do this in his case.

regarding anti-islamic music - thoughts on someone like abu lahab?

I'm not sure that I'll be seriously participating in the poll (I'll probably follow it, but doubt that I'll vote), so please discount my vote-to-ban yesterday accordingly. People who are more serious about the poll should have more say.

As far as anti-Islamic BM goes, I assume bands that come from Muslim-majority countries would be acceptable (Ayat, for instance). Jewish BM bands heavy on the anti-Judaic (but not antisemitic, obv.) rhetoric would probably be alright as well. Basically any theological contestation from within the community at large is fine, so Abu Lahab (which I wasn't familiar with btw, I'll have to check his stuff out) would be fine in my book. These are easy enough. But what about a European band like Taake? If your goal is to blaspheme against all monotheisms, where do you draw the line? (The 2007 Swastika scandal gave us a pretty good sense of where their allegiances lie, though Hoest argues that their entire shtick 'is built upon provocation and anything evil'.)

things were much easier in the old days with totally pished metal bands on lilos in swimming pools

when the average metalhead would be inspired "hey I could do that".

The discussions around Slayer back in the 80s were the same, it’s really nothing new. All the arguments back and forth are well-worn.

I personally don’t see the point of “extreme metal (but not too extreme)” but I’m not running this poll. I’ll just nominate and vote and if the results will be sanitized then so be it.

https://i.redd.it/5m36cu4m6mb21.jpg

save us seandalai

I've never heard an avowedly leftist BM band that wasn't a bit poor

ultros, your rym account is how I'd found out about that Sordide record from a couple years ago that I ended up really loving, so it's funny to hear you say this

This study is required reading then:
The Devil is Red: Socialist Satanism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract:

During the nineteenth century, socialists all over the Western world employed Satan as a symbol of the workers’ emancipation from capitalist tyranny and the toppling of the Christian Church, which they perceived as a protector of this oppressive system. Starting with the English Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century, European radicals developed a discourse of symbolic Satanism, which was put to use by major names in socialism like Godwin, Proudhon, and Bakunin. This shock tactic became especially widespread in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and accordingly the article focuses on the many examples of explicit socialist Satanism in that country. They are contextualized by showing the parallels to, among other things, use of Lucifer as a positive symbol in the realm of alternative spirituality, specifically the Theosophical Society. A number of reasons for why Satan gained such popularity among socialists are suggested, and the sometimes blurry line separating the rhetoric of symbolic Satanism from actual religious writing is scrutinized.

xp lol blame my poor memory. Though to be fair it's been over 2 years since I last heard that album or even thought about it, and apparently I wasn't overly impressed anyway.

hey guys there's no excuse for "I missed the nominations" this time. If you have anything you want to add you're in luck

Can I still nominate Ascension - Under Ether - I didn't see it listed. Also Svartidauði - Revelations of the Red Sword is listed twice.

Also Cult Leader - A Patient Man and Pale Divine S/T, please.

Ugh - sorry - House of Atreus - From the Madness of Ixion , too, please?

Augury - Illusive Golden Age
Holy Grove - II
Dunbarrow - Dunbarrow II
Ulthar - Cosmovore
Psycroptic - As the Kingdom Drowns
Embrace of Thorns - Scorn Aesthetics
Mongrel's Cross - Psalter of the Royal Dragon Court
Deathhammer - Chained to Hell
Arsis - Visitant
Faustcoven - In the Shadow of Doom

added

Astronoid, yes.

Closet Witch - Closet Witch

if it's not too late

got it

I think voting might be able to start around friday/the weekend im not sure though.