Kenneth Thomas, in a tunnel.

If you care about heavy music and still believe that art should trump commerce every time, you owe it to yourself to check out Blood, Sweat & Vinyl: DIY in the 21st Century. I’ve written about Kenneth Thomas’s music documentary in these e-pages before. After watching the film a second time, I’m even more convinced of its importance as both a document of bands that you rarely (if ever) got to hear from outside of the concert hall, and argument for the importance of underground music makers, making music underground. Thomas chose to keep the focus tight, centering on the musicians, artists and label heads associated with three independent labels that are doing things their own way: Hydra Head, Neurot Recordings and Constellation. While there are certain characters that emerge as the spiritual ballast for the film – Aaron Turner of Isis & Hydra Head, Steve von Till of Neurosis & Neurot, and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in particular – the overwhelming sense is of a giant inter-connected family of passionate people, united by nothing other than a desire to pursue truth and clarity through music.

Aside from a couple off-camera giggles during an adorable scene with Justin Broadrick (Jesu/Godflesh), Thomas himself doesn’t show up in his film. So we figured we’d find out what the director had to say about his opus.

Click to read more…

A headline like “Tori Amos Issues Challenge to Metal Bands” is hard to ignore.  So I went over to Spinner.com to read this interview with Ms Amos, and this is what she had to say:

“Well, look, sometimes you don’t know how music affects people. I embrace that because I don’t think that just because I talk about emotional stuff that it’s not mother—er stuff. I’ll stand next to the hardest f—ing heavy metal band on any stage in the world and take them down, alone, by myself. Gauntlet laid down, see who steps up. See who steps up! I’ll take them down at 48. And they know I will. Because emotion has power that the metal guys know is just you can’t touch it. Insanity can’t touch the soul. It’s going to win every f—ing time.”

Before we get too riled up, it’d be smart to remember that homegirl has a new album to promote, and will spout any number of ridiculous soundbites to sell some plastic. Also, the offending paragraph showed up at the end of the interview, and feels like an offhand remark. Metal news sites went apeshit over it, though, so here we are. I sincerely doubt that Ms. Amos really intends to stand onstage next to Iron Maiden (or Manowar!) and “blow them off the stage.” Unless she’s got about sixteen Orange amps to blast her whispery, piano-driven poem-songs through and 4/5 of Vader providing backup, she ain’t gonna have much luck.

Click to read more…

Depressive black metal is a definite hit-or-miss of a subgenre. When it’s good, it’s bone-chillingly great. When it’s bad (and a LOT of it is bad), it’s just embarrassing. Remember when Xasthur used to be cool, before Malefic started collaborating with Pitchfork-approved songstresses and ultimately threw in the towel? Yeah, me neither (what happened after Defective Epitaph, bro?).  Alas, Shining have jumped the shark entirely, Make A Change… Kill Yourself haven’t put out a record in four years, Bethlehem spat all over their once-shining legacy with that rerecorded abomination (Kvarforth really just needs to disappear), I haven’t heard a peep from Nortt in ages, and it seems like Leviathan’s on ice while Wrest sorts out his legal woes. What’s a suicidal black metal fanatic to do? After all, someone’s got to chase away all this sunshine, and as depressing as the new Morbid Angel album is, those world-destroying techno beats just ain’t gonna cut it.

At least we’ll always have Krohm.

Click to read more…

I don’t think anybody ever really reads these little intros Vince or myself write every week, so I’m gonna dispense with one today, and if that makes you sad, uh, you’re weird.

Here’s how we got our pull this week:

• We debuted new music by Abysmal Dawn, Full Blown Chaos, and Årabrot.
• We spoke to Jeff Paulick from Lazarus A.D. and Ginger from The Wildhearts.
• We checked out new releases from Xasthur, haarp, and Hesper Payne.
• We watched a nerd’s video about seeing Sunn O))).
• We tried to understand why The Big Four are only doing one show in America.
• We debated the merits and demerits of this year’s Mayhem Fest line-up.
• We celebrated the way that metal makes everything better.
• We enjoyed some new All Shall Perish music (kinda).
• We prepared for Zakk Wylde to boldly go where no guitarist has gone before.
• We got even MORE excited for Meek is Murder’s Algorithms.

Next week we’re gonna, like, totally talk about metal n’ stuff. You should come back and read it, it will be fun.

-AR

Critical success was a no-win situation with Xasthur: “basement black metal” is a hard thing for the uninitiated to get into, much less keep up with. It’s harsh, challenging, unlistenable, and is often created by immensely prolific misanthropes with no use for quality control. It’s hard to find a way in, and even if you do find one, it’s even harder to expand your knowledge from there. So that’s exactly what the metal media did: they popped mega-huge critical boners for a few Xasthur releases (2006’s Subliminal Genocide in particular), and then, like they do with most bands, got bored and stopped paying attention. And this didn’t stop the band (well, the guy) from making and releasing more albums, splits, demos, and what-have-you. So when the band/guy decided to abruptly call it quits last year, they went out with a whimper instead of a bang (well, a muffled, tortured bang). The sense that mainman Malefic seemed to give in his statements were that he was as tired of the band as the media were, and while Xasthur did (and do) mean a lot to me, the possibility that Scott Conner (the dude’s real name) has found some sort of sanity or happiness in his life, and that said happiness means he doesn’t have to make suffocatingly bleak funereal black metal anymore, is a strangely heartwarming one. Xasthur’s music always sounded as thought it were made by someone at the end of his rope, so it was good to hear that maybe that’s no longer the case.

It’s interesting, then, to hear that last year’s Portal of Sorrow is an anomaly in the Xasthur catalog. It’s the band (fleshed out with some guest musicians, thus actually almost warranting being called “a band”) at its most expansive, perhaps even to the point where the Xasthur concept begins to collapse in on itself. The classic Xasthur sound is still here — the woozy wall of untuned guitars and that sickly haze of synthesizer s– but is filled out with female vocals and Malefic’s improved drumming (a welcome sound after it killed any kind of forward momentum on 2007’s Defective Epitaph). After a decade of meandering in the basement, Portal of Sorrow hints at the prospect of looking out the window, if not actually venturing outside. Of course, violent introspection and isolation were the band’s lifeblood, and thus the idea of the outside world is Xasthur’s flashpoint. The album as a swan song is both disappointing in that it’s an endpoint in terms of potential, and fascinating in that it serves as a statement of the band’s progression throughout more than two dozen releases. In a lot of ways, it may be their most easily digestible album (which, for some, equates it with being its worst), which for a band so obsessed with suffering and anger, is about as close to a happy ending as the Xasthur catalog could come.

Click to read more…

This weekly column from our brethren at Decibel — the only metal magazine still worth caring about — was supposed to run earlier today. But Axl fucked up and forgot to run it! A million apologies. Now here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli to school your ass.

You’re probably already on your way to spend six hours in your bedroom listening to Xasthur while your dad and uncle fart their way through the Lions and Cowboys games, so I’ll keep it brief. Top 40 time. Gobble gobble. No, I’m not reprinting the list, which has probably leaked already. Take it easy — or hard —on us. Just leave the wife-beater and half-sleeve at home.

Reminder/plug for something that can’t be fucked with: the January issue marks the premiere of our limited-edition monthly flexi series. Brutal Truth detonate two never-before-released tracks (lyrics appropriated from Sharp’s Grinding It Out column — just kidding). As with all future editions of the series, once these things are sold out, they’ll never be repressed. Not to mention, sweet Christ, that cover.

If that’s not enough to keep you occupied over the long weekend, you can make some “loved one”’s Friday much, much blacker with our exclusive Hall of Fame edition of Onward to Golgotha. To celebrate Incantation’s sick Chicago/NYC/Cleveland run, we’ve hooked up with Relapse to press 1,000 copies of the classic. The 180-gram special edition comes with an exclusive woven patch and album cover sticker. Boom, your shopping’s done. Little sis is pumped.

Have a stellar Thanksgiving, commenteriat. See you at Love and Other Drugs, or at least in the Parking Lot for Real Drugs.

-AB

You can order the January issue of Decibel here, but the only way to ensure that you never miss the mag’s sexcellent new monthly flexi disc series to get a full subscription. You’ll be thankful you did!!!

It’s no secret that the music industry is in a shambles, with both profits and revenues at an all time low. With Napster, eDonkey and Audiogalaxy more popular than ever, anybody with a DSL connection can download an album in a matter of hours, often at CD-quality 96 khz. While the unprecedented access that we the fans have to new music is amazing, it comes at a price: the ability for artists to eke out a meager living by making music.

Sure, on the one hand it’s pretty funny to think about, say, the bassist for The Autumn Offering working at his dad’s ravioli factory when they’re not on tour. Admittedly, the contrast between some D-level metalcore band’s onstage persona (“U MIRIN OUR STAGE PRESENCE BRAH?!”) and the sad reality of seeing them try four times to get their 1998 Saturn to turn over in the parking lot after the show is pretty amusing, but this isn’t high school. Music isn’t about who’s making money and who’s 27 years old and still thinks it’s cool to be in a band, it’s about COMMUNITY. To me, the scene is one big family, and I look out for my family members. Whether you are the “fuckup-idiot-with-a-heart-of-gold cousin that everybody feels sorry for” (Eyehategod) or “ridiculously good-looking older brother we r all jealz of” (Oli Sykes/Bring Me The Horizon), if you are family I will always have your back — and family members do not steal from each other!!

Click to read more…

Vince brought the shits back with him from Egypt and in the past twenty-four hours I’ve been hit with a cold so bad that I’m probably gonna go to sleep right around the time I hit “publish” for this post. So before I pass out, here’s a run-down of what we did while Vince was playing Camel jockey:

• We spoke to Mutiny Within’s AJ Jacobs and producer/mixer Kevin Antreassian.
• As I Lay Dying’s Nick Hipa discussed fate versus free will on L O S T.
• We premiered “The Last Horse” by Tiger Flowers.
• We checked out new releases by Xasthur and Borknagar and read a book by Andy McCoy, too!
• Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy is recording with Avenged Sevenfold; black is white, up is down, cats love dogs.
• The new Bullet For My Valentine song makes a lot of people angry, either ’cause you had to tweet about it just to hear it or simply because it exists.
• One thing MS Suckalos seem to agree upon: Jake E. Lee was not Ozzy’s best guitar player.

Okay, NyQuil time. See ya Monday!!!

-AR

I’d like to argue that basement black metal gets a bad rap, but, really, it doesn’t. Though the “genre“ – mostly consisting of one-man bands of wildly varying musical ability recording almost painfully lo-fi, Burzum-inspired black metal – has its share of visionaries too brilliant/socially retarded to work with others, it is, as you would expect, by and large full of dudes who desperately need an editor and/or collaborator to hone/help shape their raw talent (or to tell them to cut it the fuck out and try something else/get a job). In the end, just because you’re one dude that likes black metal, it doesn’t mean you can in-and-of-yourself be a worthwhile band. But of course, in the MySpace era, any dude can lay down something he thinks is brilliant, upload it, get himself a Metal Archives page, and become a contemporary instead of an awkward admirer. No “band” has better typified, for better or worse, basement black metal than Xasthur, a horrifying, dissonant, almost comically bleak collective that provide the prolific soundtrack to sole member Malefic’s personal hell. At best, it’s brutally unflinching, disturbing, surprisingly well-crafted, and FASCINATING; at worst, it meanders endlessly, borders on unlistenable, and is painfully dull. And Xasthur’s latest, 2005 Demo, sheds light on the best and worst Malefic has to offer.

Click to read more…

Last year, I got way too busy with this thing called life and ignored this other thing called metal. As a result, I missed out on a lot of quality music as was evidenced by my paltry contribution to the year-end MetalSucks Best Of 2009 lists.

I am here to rectify the error of my ways, month by month.

Here are the January 2010 releases that got under my skin, burrowed their way into my brain, made my ears bleed, or simply tickled my unmentionables:

Click to read more…

So as I was perusing a downtown HMV last week, I rolled to the end of the aisle labeled “metal” with my nose held high in complete conviction of my superior taste over all this mainstream piss. While asking a bored wage-jockey for an impossible request (“Oh you don’t have any Ecstatic Flagocephalation? Figures, this place is a dump.”) my snobbery was brought to a sudden halt as my slack jaw knocked over a whole pile of records under the label XASTHUR (black/ambient – USA). Wide distribution is totally not tr00.

Click to read more…

Alt-country superstar Ryan Adams revealed his love of metal in a recent NY Times piece published this past weekend, in which he shared with writer Winter Miller what’s been making the rounds on his playlist lately. “Metal gets a bad rap, that it’s just satanic or screaming, but sometimes it’s really just pop songs that are more forceful. Metal is not to be feared, it’s still storytelling.” True ‘dat. On the new Metallica record:

I’m still absorbing it all. It’s a 100 percent return to form. I have been a lifelong Metallica fan, and I’ll admit, I have been disappointed in some albums. “Death Magnetic” (Warner) is lyrically astounding; the musicianship is incredible.

Click to read more…