DO U REMEMBER ANUS.COM????
Longtime metallers will remember a time in which it was very hard to find information about metal on the internet. I know it’s hard to believe, because these days you can’t go five seconds without someone blogging, tweeting, or YouTubing a mountain of trivial details about some band I have never heard of and don’t want to hear, but back in the late 90s, you took whatever scarce metal info you could find. And forget about actually HEARING the music. Bandwidth was still in short supply, so the best you could hope for was a written description of the Demilich album — a far cry from today’s broadband-laden world in which nobody actually reads anything, they just listen to the first three seconds of a song they pirated before eagerly mashing the keyboard with their sausage-like fingers to type some subhumanly-stupid comment ["ONLY TRENDY HOT TOPPIC FAGGORTS LIKE THIS BAND I ONLY LISTEN TO VINYL BOOTLEGS OF THE 1ST BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME CD"] and hitting the “submit” button.
One of the lone outposts of metal in those bad old days of the internet was a sad little site called ANUS.COM. It was at the top of the Yahoo/Altavista search results for most death metal bands, but the content left a bit to be desired. I never really bothered to look at the non-metal stuff for more than a second, but I think the site is mostly about some kind of Nietzche-inspired, vaguely-NS, pseudo-intellectual ramblings about philosophy or something. However, I did read every single one of their metal pages, which were pretty much along the same lines: short reviews of early/mid-90s death metal bands that were written in an incredibly affected, pseudo-intellectual tone (most likely in an attempt to sound smart, which failed hard). They were so over the top as to be barely intelligible, but hey, it was 1998, so you’d take whatever info you could get on Disharmonic Orchestra or Von!
Here are a few of my favorite nonsensical, idiotic attempts at intellectualizing death metal [via Word's "thesaurus" function], along with my translation:
Cianide
“With falling oblique slabs of chords like darkness invading an evening room, Cianide make basic grindcore into a science of sustained tension between essentially rhythm riffs that resolve into a complement of the fragmentary modality of linear structure.”
Translation: Incredibly generic, brutally dull grind/death metal from Chicago.
Pyrexia
“Heavily influenced by New York’s Suffocation, so much that the greatest criticism of this band will be ‘Suffocation clone,’ Pyrexia wrest blasting structuralism from a handful of power chords and an interval to move in. While the style is dependent on the work of percussive speed/death coming before, in Pyrexia a uniquely linear and recursive interpretation of this makes for a labyrinthine but pummeling listen.”
Translation: Fukk yeah browe, slamming fuckin pitt riffment!!! WOOP WOOP!
Cryptic Slaughter
“Breath of dissent pulses forward alongside blasting drums in a cadence of desperate angst borne on the spit-tinged vocal barrage of the infamous Bill Crooks, who generated after an evolution of hardcore the ultimate extension of its verbal style, a hoarse and calloused voice shrieking with the uncertain tones of adolescence a certainty of logic untainted by learned helplessness.”
Translation: What happens when punk rockers try to play faster than their technical ability permits; results are kind of awesome.
Did you also suffer through the bad old days of metal on the internet?? Did you force yourself to read through the nonsense on ANUS.COM? Is their summary of Discharge the most overwrought piece of prose since Noam Chomsky??
-Sergeant D.
