NORWEGIAN SUPER TEAMS TO STORM WACKEN
Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 4:00pm by David Bee Roth
While Anthrax, Testament, Heaven and Hell and motherfucking Motorhead are among the most anticipated bands that metal pilgrims are converging on western Germany to see, it would appear that my favored people, those crafty Norwegians, also have a few things planned for the mayhem. While Enslaved will be appearing (and hopefully represented on a good stage, because you know they fucking deserve it) some others are teaming up with foreigners in combinations that are hard to ignore.
“Apocalyptic Havoc” is one hell of a heroic entrance for Goatwhore on Carving Out the Eyes of God. It sounds like a pack of angry attack dogs (Dobermans or maybe Rotweilers) breaking their ropes and charging full speed into a crowded nursery. Not a lot of bands can build up your adrenaline from 0 that fast and after a couple listens you’ll be screaming “Alriiiigggghtttt!!” in unison with Mr. Falgoust. Forty minutes later, as you catch your breath again, you’ll probably be thinking the same thing as the rest of us: This is the catchiest album Goatwhore have ever released.
Q: What’s the heaviest part about Nile?
In 1994 Ved Buens Ende released their demo For Those Who Caress the Pale and from then on everything, well, everything pretty much stayed the same as if it had never been released. Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse were released the same year, and I can only imagine that the whole underground metal scene worldwide was too busy trying to pick its collective jaw off the floor to notice a lo-fi demo from a band with a funny foreign name. The next year, VBE recorded their full-length Written in Waters and broke up without much notice in 1997. The band reformed briefly in 2006 but broke up again in early 2007 without having fulfilled any of their promises of live performances or new material, leaving Written in Waters as their first and final album.
The new millennium has signaled the transformation of American black metal. What was originally a subterranean scene mostly represented by obscure tape demos from Burzum-worshipping one-man bands (or the split releases they did with other sequestered basement dwellers) has now surfaced. With Nachtmystium’s major label hype machine in full swing last year USBM can finally claim a recognizable figurehead, something that had always separated them from their European cousins. Riding this new wave, Wolves in the Throne Room have emerged as another familiar name.
As a man, I’m painfully aware that at any metal show the chances of me being squeezed between two sweaty fat dudes in the front row for 90 minutes is infinitely higher than me being near anything that remotely resembles a female. I say “resembles” because I still remember the time my buddy wrestled a “dude” to the floor of the Commodore Ballroom after they both caught either end of Jimmy Bower’s drumstick. The look on his face when he heard obscenities yelled at him in a screeched, soprano voice ranks pretty highly among my favorite concert memories.
Absolute garbage. It’s taken me a little while to absorb what Rose Funeral’s sophomore effort, The Resting Sonata, has to offer to anyone with a mature vocabulary of metal, and, unfortunately, the answer is resounding: Not a lot. Though I’m aware that I can sometimes hold bands to a pathetically low-standard as long as they are representative of a sub-genre, play tight and have a lot of heart, Rose Funeral is a grand example of a band that is upsettingly unoriginal and, to be honest, creatively flawed.
So words like pagan, heathen and folk get thrown around in metal pretty indiscriminately and most of the time bands who describe themselves thus usually don’t have more barbarian blood than what I’ve got circulating in my foreskin.
