Rolling 2020 Metal Thread

Speaking of Obituary, they have live streams a-comin'. SWR, COD, and an "other."
https://obituarylive.com/

re: Undeath, lol @ "Kicked in the Protruding Guts"

xpost word, I saw the Slowly We Rot in-full tour and hung out on their tour bus, but never heard CoD live. just bought that stream

Undeath is my most anticipated record this year. Both of their demos cracked my top 20 last year and they're great live.

Re: Akhlys

Apparently Naas Alcameth is a bit of a shitbag - In a Decibel interview for Nightbringer's 2017 album Terra Damnata is this Q&A:

Can you clarify the spoken word accompaniment to “The Lamp of Inverse Light”?

Naas: The spoken accompaniment was taken from an interview with Julius Evola, [who’s been described by linguistics professor Aaron Gillette as ‘one of the most fascist racists in Italian history’ and is favorably cited by both Steve Bannon as well as white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer, F.P.] an individual who is of great importance to us all, and has to do with the Left Hand Path in its original and accurate context.

This came up on a Facebook group I frequent that is loosely involved with the Toilet ov Hell blog when the Akhlys came up.

regular jeans guy sure picked the wrong place to go hiking

this is the funniest thing i've read in a while. i'm in tears.

xp ah Evola, the guy you mention when you know that Hitler will get you kicked out of the cocktail party.

oh yeah and he's not only in Nightbringer but also Bestia Arcana and Excommunion. wonderful.

At least with Hitler there's always a chance it's an attempt at edgy humour. With Evola, there is no such thing: to look up to him is to out oneself as a cryptofascist from the get-go.

Ugh, had no idea about Nightbringer. I remember liking their song on that 4-way split that I bought for the Aluk Todolo song, but iirc that had no sampled Nazis on it. Good to know now though.

glad this type of shit is at least being outed now.

I'd already bought a Disma album before I learned about Craig Pillard

You aren't the only one.

new Svalbard sounding really strong, RIYL Rolo Tomassi etc.

gonna check out the latest Morta Skuld that came out

A couple of my Twitter-length reviews on new albums that came out today...

Chrome Waves
Where We Live
(Disorder Recordings)

The melancholy mood makes this a proper send off to
Bob Fouts (RIP); this is rare Black metal to be Beatlesque with actual subversive odes to pop-craft along with the psychedelics. https://t.co/WacMCAkvXp #NowPlaying️

— Brian O'Neill (@NYC__Native) September 25, 2020

Early Moods
Spellbound
(Dying Victims Productions)

LA band debut employes the same proto-metal influences as Witchcraft - vocalist Alberto Alcaraz even approximates Magnus Pelander's plaintive wail - but a touch heavier, which is rarely bad. https://t.co/chAw5twAq9 #NowPlaying

— Brian O'Neill (@NYC__Native) September 25, 2020

The Morta Skuld is...ehh

I’m no Evola apologist but if he’s a non-starter for metal dude name checks, some here will be surprised to learn the breadth of his influence. He wrote a lot about hermeticism and the occult and is as accepted as, say, Nietzsche in many extreme music circles.

bog body side of this split is killer:
https://stygianblackhand.bandcamp.com/album/the-gate-of-grief-undulating-torment

their demo was total ride for revenge worship and this one's... still kinda that but with improved songwriting and production (as far as these primitive affairs go)

other side's pretty cool too

This Prometheus EP "Astrophobos" is some great evil-sounding blackened death from Greece. Looking forward to the full album coming out later this year:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=623774115185544

Barnes/SFU blocked me from posting on their page after I insulted them on it the other day.

Lord, is Chris Barnes one of the thinnest skinned weenies alive. they also blocked comments on Youtube, and yet he regularly insults and harasses other bands on Twitter.

lol how long has that dude's career been running on fumes now?

an old man was on death row, but on the day he was to be executed, he's visited by the Attorney General, who promised to drop all charges under one condition - he listened to every Graveyard Classics album.

The man was pronounced dead that evening at 4:13 pm

in other news, uh, not that I was the hugest Morta Skuld fan (hell, I actually...forgot what they sounded like), but I picked up the new one out of curiosity, and...it's pretty dull.

weirdly commercial in a sense in that every chorus from a vocal perspective is nu-metally, not sonically, but in the sense that the lyrics are simple, inane, very "base emotion" focused, and are repeated frequently over a riff that is much dumber than the riffs that preceded it.

it's just odd. there's nothing really amazing about the non-chorus parts of the songs, per se, but the verses are your standard 'good' death metal fare, blasts, well-written tremolo riffs, and then they just kinda halt forward progress at the chorus.

vocalist is also just underwhelming in general, feel like there should be a Death Metal Idol or something to find these much-needed amazing, distinctive death metal vocalists that are lacking lately. Are you the next Sylvian Houde? show us if you have what it takes.

Man I was a Morta Skuld fan since their demos but somehow didn't feel like a 2020 MS album was something I needed to hear; sounds like my instincts were correct.

You'd be right. I do wanna revisit Dying Remains, tho, which i recall liking

Bête Immonde is a strange album from Griiim, a side project for Maxime Taccardi (also of K.F.R).

http://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2538237594_16.jpg

http://griiim.bandcamp.com/album/b-te-immonde

Sometimes it makes me think of Zeal & Ardour except way more minimalistic, way less song oriented, way less bombastic, way-way-way stranger. Sometimes it is cloud rap dressed up in corpsepaint. Sometimes it's like Captain Beefheart if he grew up on black metal instead of the blues. It's pretty intriguing.

Captain Beefhjerte

The production is indeed intriguing but his voice is kinda wheezy, impacting the delivery of his ridiculous lyrics, almost all of which would benefit from the usual unintelligibility (this won't be a problem for everyone, obv.).

Yeah, I think that's a feature, not a bug (though one that I concede is an acquired taste).

This is a really disgusting story about a major behind-the-scenes figure in the metal scene (I'm pretty sure I met him when Nightwish were signed to Roadrunner) and I never thought I'd say this, but kudos to MetalSucks for putting in the work to do the story properly. This is serious journalism, handled carefully and professionally.

Indeed, very well written and handled.

Impressive stuff, yes. What a piece of shit.

Everything is awful about him from what it seems, but beyond the typical horrors of a harrasser and abuser, the detail that he taunted Nature Ganganbaigal of Tengger Cavalry a year before the latter's suicide...yeah, hell isn't hot enough for him.

holy shit.

my only run in with him was something innocuous - his stupid booking system somehow booked a second ticket for me by mistake, and I told him, but he refused to refund me the money, insisting I purchased it, and then threatened to get his legal team involved eventually. even got my chargeback reversed from Bank of America, he felt he was so entitled to my money.

i had thought him just to be a swindler and a dick, I had no idea about any of THIS shit.

75% of way through an my word, it's like a demon's resume

What amazes me (not really) is that it took this long for his behaviour to be called out as fucking monstrous.

Jesus Christ, I worked with Finberg many years ago. Well, not with him like co-workers. But when I was a booking agent in Raleigh, NC he was the only guy who would deal with the smaller indie metal bands. He booked almost all of them - if you were a baby band signed to Metal Blade, he was the only guy who would book your tours. There weren't many other options even though every label and band had a horror story.

None of them were what is in this piece that I will be digging into shortly - Usually they involved just being bad at his job, i.e. he would book shows 600 miles apart on consecutive days, and good luck getting your deposit money from him.

I ran into him in person a few times - at the first Ozzfest tour date in Manassas, VA outside of CD where he mooned everyone, at a Milwaukee Metalfast where I booked Extreme Noise Terror and Grief and he likely had half a dozen bands playing as well. Spoke to him on the phone a lot because I used to do what was called "middling dates." Back in the dat a booking agent would handle regions for national agents spo they could book a run of dates through one person. This became less and less needed as communication made it easier for a guy to just do it all himself and cut out the extra pound of flesh, and in fact it was pretty dead even then, but he was lazy so I would book a week of dates in NC, SC, VA, and GA for Stuck Mojo (who were big in the southeast back then) and take a cut (from the band, not from him of course).

He was obnoxious and overbearing. Everyone on that side of the industry hated him but considered him to be a necessary evil because, like I said, there wasn't anyone else doing it at the time. So I am not at all shocked he was also a piece of shit in other ways. Yuck.

welp Chris Barnes now has me blocked on Facebook AND Twitter, and he reported my Tweets.

god, what a weenie.

xpost and he's hiding in Thailand now, apparently, though apparently he's lived there off and on over the years

Southeast Asia, eh? Getting Jim Watkins vibes from this guy.

Many bands, including his cash cows Nightwish and Amorphis, are publicly firing Finberg:
http://loudwire.com/nightwish-amorphis-fire-booking-agent-john-finberg-sexual-assault-harassment-allegations

Better late than never, I guess.

I sent Tweets to a few of his other clients - Hammerfall, Nervosa, Nile, and Obscura - asking them if he was their booking agent (all of their contact info on line indicates that he is) and linking to the original story. Hopefully they will all respond "not anymore."

New Skaphe is up and PWYW (for the time being at least) on Bandcamp:

https://skaphe.bandcamp.com/album/sk-phe-3

Haven't had a chance to listen yet, but if their track record is anything to go by, I'm sure it slays.

After a formidable collab with Mare Cognitum as Spectral Lore and a first LP as Mystras, both of which are bound to make my metal top 50 this year, Ayloss goes dungeon synth on his latest (and last?) 2020 release:

https://spectrallore.bandcamp.com/album/ontrothon-saga-of-the-ancient-glass

Exciting. Will check it. Mystras might make my top 5 tbh, definitely top 10, which is saying really quite a lot

preordered the new Fuck the Facts album without even listening to the single first

unexpected to me and great news, thanks. listening to the single rn, they're playing to their strenghts here and plus! like they're branching out. once more. these weighted dynamics and movements that ebb and flow and grow and crushes! her vocals unsurprisingly killing it. it's really good

New Isengard out tomorrow.