Yeah, the lyrics in extreme metal frequently lag every other part of the package in terms of quality, IMO. Honestly I'd be in favor of a genre-wide moratorium on Satanic lyrics, but I also listen to tons of bands that go hard on the whole Satan schtick, so obviously I can look past it when necessary.
As for your question: the short answer is "with difficulty." Some people just have the knack for screaming naturally and don't need to do anything to care for themselves, but for me, performing in a range of registers without blowing out my voice has involved a long and ongoing learning experience. My regimen involves lots of warmups and vocal exercises, careful attention to breath support while 'singing,' staying hydrated, & making sure that I get plenty of sleep and don't overindulge on substances when on the road. I also practice every day, which I would guess is pretty unusual for harsh vocalists, but it's improved my abilities and endurance tremendously over the years.
Thanks dude! Glad ya dig. I met MT at an Aevangelist show here in NYC around 2012-2013, and we kept in touch remotely afterwards. Those tunes were my first opportunity to perform in a black metal context, which I've always wanted to do, so naturally I jumped at the opportunity.
That's why I said "Zorn-related". He wasn't in Last Exit, but they're part of the same orbit, and Zorn's got way better name recognition in rock circles than just about anyone from that scene, including Sharrock and Laswell.
Ian and I are both pretty heavy-duty Meshuggah fanboys, but we decided to hold off on that one until another single comes out. The first one wasn't a disaster, but it didn't really rev me up, either.
That's pretty much why I think it's worth reiterating every so often. People in the metal community get wound up over some new transgression of this sort seemingly every three months, myself included at times, but it's a poor use of energy and makes us all look like dicks.
Yes, for the record, "hipster metal" is a fucking awful term. I mostly went with it because it's indicative of the mindset of the people who like to rail against such things.
Strong list! Buncha stuff that'll probably make my year-ender, though the task of putting one together is not something I've ever relished TBH.
Also, for some reason, that reminds me of Joe Caper from Righteous Pigs at MDF 2012 giving the entire audience revulsion shudders by declaring that after set they were gonna go off and "DRINK SOME LITE BEERS...BANG SOME YOUNG BROADS!!!!!"
He had bleach-blond microbraids.
Hah, I should've shouted you out in the intro — knew you wouldn't give up on ya boys. Comparatively lukewarm feelings about their new record aside, Rotten Sound live is not an experience to be missed.
How was Demolition Hammer? I'm always skeptical about reunions, especially for bands so focused on playing at speed, but if Morbid Saint and Dark Angel can pull it off as well as they did...
It rarely accomplishes anything to respond to pedantic crap like this, but since I'm feeling grouchy, I'm going to anyway:
"(do you know the difference?)"
I've been a member of what amounts to a technical death metal band for close to a decade. We used drum sound replacement on some of our earlier recordings, but we have never used triggers. (Against our old drummer's wishes; he typically uses them when he performs with Malignancy, but we didn't want to deal with them for some of the reasons you described.) So yes, I know the difference.
"playing a triggered kit isn't anything new"
Didn't say it was, though anyone who's been paying attention to extreme metal would concede that this practice has become much more popular over the past 15 years or so.
"or confined strictly to metal"
Didn't say it was.
"playing triggered drums in a live setting does not turn the drumkit into a "prop"."
This is obviously a matter of opinion, but my feeling is this: if the audience doesn't actually hear the sounds coming out of the acoustic shells onstage, you might as well just use electronic pads, which are much lighter and less cumbersome. In spite of this, most metal drummers who use triggers haul acoustic drums around anyway, because electronic pads / electronic kits look lame as fuck, and real drums look cool. That is what I mean when I say the kit is a prop if you're triggering all the shells. Cymbals are a different story, but I've seen death metal drummers go as far as triggering their cymbals too.
"a trigger is a device that takes the transient from the drum head caused by the stick hit and converts it into an electrical signal that "triggers" an electronic sample. triggers do not hook directly into the PA, they are connected to a module, just like an electronic drum kit, where you tell which input is which drum and correlate the correct sample to the correct trigger/drum ie, you don't want the kick drum triggering the snare etc etc."
This is certainly a more detailed explanation of how triggers work, but as you might say, it adds nada to the discussion. It does not appear to me that condensing this stuff to "they're little boxes that cause drum samples to come out of the PA when you hit your drums" misrepresents the process in any significant way, and I omitted most of these details because virtually nobody cares about them. I'm talking about Brodequin and extreme metal drum techniques on a website that mostly covers indie, pop, and rap; that's enough to make most readers' eyes glaze over without throwing terms like "transient" and discussions of trigger sensitivity into the mix.
"you still have to play the drums, and that is harder than playing a drum machine, I don't care how good you are at programming drums."
I agree! And interestingly enough, I don't recall anyone saying otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, I love those influences too — Swans, Neurosis, Tool, etc., and Cold Forever uses'em very effectively. But I also loved the frenetic, brutal side of the band — Wunder executed that stuff in a really unique fashion, and it'd be awesome to hear more of it. Guess we'll see what happens in 9 years when Cobalt finishes another record!
I like that Cobalt album a lot, but it hasn't hooked me the way their previous two did, which puts me in the minority here. Fell's performance is great, but I miss hectic intensity the instrumentation used to deliver. My pick off that one is probably "Elephant Graveyard" or "Cold Breaker."
Oh, and a strong honorable mention for PHANTOM GLUE, whose bruising High On Fire-inflected metalcore I wrote up early in the month:
http://www.stereogum.com/1869789/phantom-glue-hundred-hand-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/
That Inter Arma song is the only thing to give the Guts a run for its money as my favorite metal tune of the year so far. (Thus the #1.) The rest of the album is fucking fantastic too. If you get an opportunity to see them live, DO IT.
Michael, Wyatt, and I were all at that show. It was my first time seein' them and they more than lived up to my (massive) expectations. Still not sure how Bruce manages to nail those parts while constantly sprinting / leaping across the stage. Still hungover, too.
As for Rotten Sound: I knew you'd have something to say about that! I like'em overall and love some of their past work, but the new one doesn't compare favorably to their catalog for me, so they've just gotten outpaced by alternatives for the past few months of eligibility. Gotta make some tough decisions with just 15 spots!
Hey Ben – just now saw this. Let me see if I can answer your questions:
–My anecdotal, personal experience suggests that metal fans are more likely to be unhappy with the state of the world than members of certain other musical subcultures, though not all. I'd say it's comparable to the punk and hip-hop subcultures in that sense, though metalheads seem more likely to despair of solving large-scale problems than members of these other cultures do. Again, that's just my impression.
–I don't see any contradiction between sociopolitical dissatisfaction and regressive politics. The sense that things have gone wrong with the world is hardly unique to the left. The current electoral popularity of Donald Trump serves as an unfortunate but clear illustration of this fact.
–As for Gorguts: they effectively occupy the central position of a subfield of like-minded technical death metal bands, which includes the likes of Ulcerate and Baring Teeth, as well as others: Gigan, Flourishing, Artificial Brain, my own band Pyrrhon, etc. This niche is growing in size and popularity, but it's still a comparatively small portion of the broader world of technical death metal, which is more commonly rigidly clean and melodic (think of Necrophagist, Gorod, etc.) or more "brutal" and slam-oriented (Defeated Sanity, Wormed, etc.).
We actually contemplated making TBM a weekly feature back when we started the column in 2013, but elected not to for a few reasons — we weren't sure how much interest there would be, and the fact that most of us (i.e. everyone but Michael) are freelance contributors, rather than regular SG staffers, would make it hard to coordinate such a column on a weekly basis. We're gonna stick with the current format for now, but who knows what the future holds?
I've actually been meaning to check out that Pogavranjen album for a while now, though I didn't get to it until just now — it was released by Arachnophobia records, who have put out some other black metal albums I really enjoy recently (such as the Entropia album we covered last month). It sounds way up my alley so far, so thanks for reminding me! If you like them, you should definitely check out Virus from Norway (or their older band Ved Buens Ende), whom Pogavranjen seem to be heavily influenced by:
https://virusnorway.bandcamp.com/
This was actually recorded by Sanford Parker, not Rutan. The overall production tone of this one suits them better than Rutan's work on Savage Gold did IMO, though it's not a full return to the atmospheric/washy Congleton approach.
HONORABLE MENTIONS, since we had to leave so much stuff out this week:
Spektr - The Art To Disappear: dissonant, rigidly precise progressive black metal. Equally indebted to Red Harvest and Dodheimsgard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhJn16tFjPM
Death Fetishist - S/T: debut EP from this Aevangelist side project. Eerie, atmospheric BM that splits the difference between Blut Aus Nord's icier material and early Leviathan.
https://soundcloud.com/deathfetishist
The Clearing Path - Abyss Constellation: one-man metal with a lot of structural and stylistic ambition. The harmonic sensibility reminds me of Artificial Brain if they were a European black metal band. Great basswork, which is a rarity in these one-guy projects.
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/abyss-constellation
Khthoniik Cerviiks - SeroLogiikal Scars (Vertex of Dementiia): I may or may not have excluded this one because I didn't feel like typing that name out more than once. Heterogenous extreme metal that marries proto-extreme metal primitivism with sharp, gnarly Voivod chords.
https://soundcloud.com/iron-bonehead-productions/khthoniik-cerviiks-biinary-epitome-spyders-web/s-kMR58
Personally, I loved Gaza, but the Cult Leader material leaves me kind of cold for some reason. I admittedly haven't spent tons of time with it, but my impression is that the unpredictable songwriting that characterized the first two Gaza albums (which I listen to a lot more than the third one) has been replaced by a greater interest in moshy groove parts. Which I love! But overall, the modulation isn't in line with what I'm looking for from that band.
Glad to hear you're digging Pyrrhon too!
To be clear, I don't mean to discourage you. I've just spent way too much time trying to gradually condition friends and family into enjoying even comparatively accessible extreme metal bands — Death, Emperor, Eyehategod, that sort of thing — usually to no avail. It's an incredibly rewarding world if you can come to appreciate its idiosyncrasies, but it's also totally understandable to me that so many folks can't get past them.
Thanks for the kind words, man! Indeed, all Pyrrhon releases are excluded from these kinds of features for more reason than just the format.
As for the lyrics thing — I'd also like to see more metal bands take on that kind of subject matter, but it's not surprising to me that they don't. Despite its dark aesthetic, metal's always had strong escapist tendencies for a variety of reasons, and writing about politics well in metal lyrics is pretty risky/difficult to boot. (Remember Iced Earth?) IMO, so many metal bands look to Satanism and other kinds of supernatural/occult evil precisely because it's safer and easier to talk about stuff that isn't, y'know, real.
BECAUSE THERE'S NOT ENOUGH MUSIC IN THIS POST ALREADY:
For the sake of our sanity, we didn't consider anything but standard LPs (i.e. single-band releases of 25 minutes or more in length) for this list. However, there were a lot of great short format releases this year; here are some that might've made my ballot:
Yautja - Songs Of Lament
Die Choking - III
Fight Amp - Constantly Off
Blood Incantation - S/T EP
Okazaki Fragments - S/T EP
Lycanthropy / The Afternoon Gentlemen - Split
Dephosphorus / Hapooja - Split LP
Cryptopsy - The Book Of Suffering: Tome 1
Fulgora - Stratagem
Chain Gang Grave - Bury Them And Keep Quiet
Hell - 7"
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