Burzum: Fallen

In countless interviews, Varg Vikernes reminded journalists he's not playing black metal. The insistence was that it's his music, free from any righteous categorization, if it happens to be black metal, so be it. After listening to Fallen, which isn't is English (but that's besides the point), I can't seem to remove the fact that it is a black metal release. More importantly, Burzum had not gone astray from its roots, the music remains to be a coarse assault to the ears, with very little respect in ensuring a balanced EQ as far as guitar tones go. I enjoyed Varg Vikernes' post-confinement manifestation, Belus, because the guitars in there, despite being very repetitious & protrusive, had good inter-play. Just listen to them carefully through head phones & you can hear the variation in certain phrasings. In many twin guitar bands, the two guitarists at work often confine themselves to the specific roles of rhythm & lead players; they often play the riffs in unison. The more interesting establishments would make efforts to vary their riffs, so we hear interesting differentiation through the left & right channels of our speakers/ headphones. It's good to know that Fallen is no different but the stark contrast here lies with the vocals; there are more clean spoken words this time. In fact, some of these are quasi-whispers, there were no efforts to raise vocal intensity. Fallen is a deserving follow up by Varg Vikernes, to say the least.

According to Varg, Fallen was recorded with the above Peavey guitar. Regardless of whichever guitar was employed, it got the job done (tone-wise).

Eastern Front: Blood on Snow

Eastern Front is a quintet of black metal proponents from the UK. What they offer in Blood on Snow is a chapter of war tunes. You might expect some savage production here by virtue of the genre but this has to be one of the most well-produced releases with each & every instrument playing, clearly audible for scrutiny.

Music-wise, Eastern Front embraces an up-front, brash guitar assault, akin to the materials churned out by Endstille & Krieg, among others. The difference here would be the efforts by the band in making the riffs melodic & differentiated, audible in both left & right channels if you enjoy your music through headphones.

Despite a praise-worthy performance & certainly making Blood on Snow one of the better releases in 2010, what's inadequate here is a touch of class. In the attempt to be presentable, maybe the subconscious ingredient- a relentless, attacking element - could have been more up-front. Nevertheless, this is recommended listening.

A Blaze in the Northern Sky

M: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/981989/spiralling-sky-light-baffles-experts

J: i saw that in the paper yesterday; it's obviously the second coming of
my master, euronymous!

M: :O
or its odin

J: something to go with varg being out :D
no doubt it's some kind of wizardry he's done :)

M: ahh :)

wizardry :O summoning the gods!

or its saint lucia :)

J: saint lucia is an island ;)

M: she is also a saint :p the 12th or the 13th is her saints day and lucy means light. its a scandinavian celebration maybe, so i have decided that makes sense and is obviouly what's happened.
in your face odin!

J: i knew that, i looked on wiki, i was just being silly :)

M: ahh :))

still, i'm glad. i'm not keen on the christians as you know, but i'm not entirely at ease with the norse gods. they're not very nice, as far as i can tell.

thats the only thing i don't like in a lot of scandinavian metal - although i love a nice anti-christian sentiment....i hate the norse gods. thor and odin are in some ways pretty cool....but they just make me uneasy. and they're not a patch on the greek gods, who of course rule the pantheon supreme ^__________^

J: I find the use of satanism in metal boring and, more than not, childish - these folk moan on about how Christians believe this farce, etc, etc, but then they have their own farce in Satan - that's why it's good if it used loosely, but you take early Mayhem, etc, it was all just that, used loosely and in image with the music - the lyrics were more something from a goregrind band or such. The BM bands now just take it to a level that makes me embarrased with a stage full of inverted crosses, and all that guff, it's just not for me.

M: i hate the whole "church of satan" thing - you know where you get people (like jizzzzzzzahn) who go on about how it's really serious and adult and it's more about hedonism and stuff then devil worshipping etc....actually no, if you read it, it IS just teenage angsty bullshit embarassing crap. i hate all of that shit, the over the top satan worship and the people who think they're being more subtle.......

its just embarassing and i have no interest in satan, the devil or whatever. for me, those are christian principles - and i know how many satanists will go on about how the devil existed before christianity....yeah, so did god, you heard of judaism? he's the same guy folks. and concepts of devils have existed just as long as concepts of gods have....besides, neither are real.

i hate how people in metal make fun of christians and go against all that......the whole satan thing is just as absurd, if not more so. it's chronically embarassing. glen benton and his stupid upside down cross - is he fucking serious? well i know we all know he's a fucking retard (who got married in a church) but there are people who think that kind of behaviour is cool!

the horror.

J: Satanism IS teenage angst - i remember lots of kids around the time I was a teen thought the whole ideology was really cool. The guy Mandy went out with after me was that sort of guy, he even had 666 tattooed on him, FFS :/
Glen Benton is a fucking arsehole! He used to say in interviews he was going to kill himself at the same age Jesus died at, etc. The guy is a fucking twatter. And as I always say - keep satanism out of death metal; it's not the place for it, old DM bands were never like that, and nor were the early BM bands. People like Euro and that were still kids at the time and as we said; the whole teenage angst thing is rife then - but muscally they were never satanic, it's more so now with bands that take it to a level that makes you die inside. Like with the idiots that throw their horns - they're all gears to the lame band they're at the sermon of.
I don't have anything against using any of it in art, or like writing darkthrone with an inverted T/cross - I just see that as a cool touch.

M: oh yeah, i love cool images and symbolism - the image of the inverted cross is fun, just in the sense of turning something upside down, quite literally - but like you said, it's just for playing around with - having 666 tattooed on you is one of the lamest things you could ever do to yourself!
We all love skulls and death and shit like that - it'll always be synonymous with metal and there's nothing wrong with it - we love it and that's cool. i always remember ozzy osbourne saying that "people make horror films - why can't we make horror music". i love films about shit like that, i fucking LOVE the omen - but i love it as a film and that's it. metal i love as music and that's it.

J: Yeah, what you just said, 110% :)

Into infinite obscurity

M: SATURDAY MORNING DOUBLE FEATURE: THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE - .....Quite simply, The Somberlain and Storm of the Light's Bane are two of the best fucking black metal albums ever made, packed with equal amounts of both demonic hatred and epic, Wagnerian bombast.
these 2 albums DO rule (was listening to one the other day when you came over i think) but i don't like black metal :/ i always forget that these are, they're quite melodic in bits. you know the kind of crap i like ;D

J: yeah, you were listening to them :)
i always think they're a DM band :3

M: me too! always so surprised when people say they're bm :O

J: their name isn't really BM :)

M: yeah, even that's more dm :) and they're from sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeden i think :?

J: they obviously got death threats from euronymous at some point :3

M: the dude in it is a murderer or something anyways :/

J: srsly :/
LOL, that always helps album sales, unless you're in emperor, it just makes you look like a poser fag because you only burned a church or two and the only killer in your band fagged out when arrested :D

M: ooooops :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_N%C3%B6dtveidt
ohh, he was accessory to murder, then formed the band, then killed himself :/

J: > self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a circle of lit candles
what a way to go ;O

M: :O
wow thats pretty fucking mental :/
no wonder people assocate them with bm ;D

J: wiki says they're blackened death, dunno what marchives say :)

M: >Melodic Black/Death Metal (early), Melodic Death Metal (later)
yeah not really black metal then :)))

J: it didn't sound like DM when i heard them at yours :)

M: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZZq37WRKyg
here tis. umm no, not so much death.....i guess blackened death (maybe more black than death tho?) more along the lines of....i dunno

J: i think the DM comes into the fact it sounds kinda clean. my idea of BM differs to most, but this is pretty polished BM if anything... with melodic bits :)

M: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQMmh3BHqc
stuff like this one is 100% melodicy stuff - yeah, it's clean and singy and...yeah, doesn't fit with the death metal sound (although if you changed the vocals it would) but doesn't fit with black either

That was as far as we got in figuring out exactly where Dissection fit into the metal world. What do you guys think? Black metal? Death metal? Blackened death? Deathened black isn't a category, but should we invent it (or one to that effect but with a better name) for this? All of the above?

Ihsaaaaaaaahn

M: IHSAHN Selling His Jackson DK1 on eBay

J: LOL, ihsahn looks like such a douche :D

M: he does indeed!

J: i'd win it, just to smash it up :D

M: :O

J: actually..... i will win it, then smash it up over a copy of X lame emperor album, preferably in the nightside eclipse, post footage online, then offer ihsahn and any other BM wankers outside to fight.

A friend of mine, MP, was at Wacken a few years back and happened to see Ihsahn and Mikael Akerfeldt watching the same band as him. Overjoyed to see two of his heroes right there in real life (and probably more than a little drunk) he stumbled over for a chat.

He enthusiastically tried to shout to Ihsahn, over the noise of the band, that he thought he was "great":

Ihsahn: You think I'm gay?

MP: No, I think you're REALLY GREAT!

Ihsahn: Oh. Well that's okay then.

Illdisposed

I have been full of rancid illness this week, which means few emails between me and J and a complete lack of motivation to post anything whatsoever.

So now, because I feel like it, here's some shit pictures and some shitter updates on the vaguely metal-related things I've been up to recently.

I passed my latin exam with 85/100 - that's not metal, but I do like to tell people about it. Started back at college for the new academic year at a new location and now use Bond Street Station, which appears to have a touch of the kvlt about it:

Can't work out if they're a Burzum fan, a typography fanatic or just a bit goth.

As the nights grow longer, everything's been getting a bit more grim. I've been on a black metal binge lately, reading Lords of Chaos. I was too cheap to buy it and so printed out the PDF: free but makes for inconvenient reading on the tube.

I also drew the Moonblood logo onto my shirt:

Not very exciting, but I was pleased with how it turned out. I had to rip the German flags off the arms so a) people stop accusing me of trying to be hip and b) to stop visitors at work thinking I speak German. I said they were fucking retards, P said it was kind of fair enough. Whatever.

The NHS wants my blood!

I don't think they really want it though, because I had two new piercings done.

It brings the count up to...21. Hardly Elaine Davidson, but sadly I have to remain employable.

After the 'mutilation' as my grandmother likes to call it, I met J and we walked up to see Tankard at the Underworld.

Shit picture, great gig.

Last weekend I went with P and S to see Speed Theory, Mutant and Evile in Islington. Speed Theory I've never heard of, but they were pretty good to watch.

Now I have supposedly seen Mutant before when they supported Municipal Waste downstairs in Islington a while back. I have NO RECOLLECTION of this whatsoever (although I remember watching MW and TH), so I treated it like it was my first time seeing them.

Turned out they were really good fun. P and S moshed away whilst I stood at the front and a wonderful time was had by all. I got some insane bruising on my legs from the front speaker stand:

And here's a really bad picture of the set list:

It's a shame we didn't just leave the gig there and then, because headliners Evile were massively boring. Well executed and technically faultless...but really fucking dull nonetheless. Drunk and disappointed, I spent some time in the ladies', defacing a poster:

So there you have it, one month of craziness in the life of a twenty-something metal-loving Londoner.

(Sense the sarcasm. Life south of the river is slllllllllow).

Old news - Mayham

(From 22nd September 2008)

M: SUNN 0))) - Cover Artwork For Dømkirke Live LP Revealed, Live Dates Announced

J: it's got that Attila Csihar on vocals :( :( :( :(

M: i don't know who that is

J: he's the singer for Mayhem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58o17dnB6hk as someone noted: "So cold and vicious too bad attila's vocals almost ruin this otherwise powerful album, but for most of this song at least they're listenable"

M: is he the one you showed me before? although i think that might have been someone else.......

J: I only deal in Dead as the singer for Mayhem. the other one is Maniac who left originally because he was a drunk, then he replaced attila and left again due to stage fright. i saw them with Maniac, he's also a tool - but now attila is back on vocals attila is hungarian and most tr00 norweigan black metallers feel that he's not tr00 black metal because he's not from norway and therefore shouldn't front mayhem

M: yeah i remember you saying about maniac - stage fright :D :D :D that actually the funniest yet lamest thing ever, that's like a soldier seeing a spider and running away in a war :D

J: it's gay, and he looked like a gay.
mayhem need to quit, because they're just a fucking joke now!

M: well they're nothing like they used to be that's for sure. they used to be all kind of mysterious and cool, 'cause they were associated with so much of the stuff with varg and because of dead being dead and everything......but now all these years later, they're just like a parody, or a tribute band or something - there's nothing mysterious or cool, thye're just another famous band of old men selling records to twats who hang off their balls because they think doing so makes them cool. uhh.....no.

J: here's Maniac looking lame: http://ruthlessreviews.com/pics5/bm2/bm4a.jpg
I know i have a weird sense of what looks cool, but they went from this:
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f205/Nocturnal_Abyss/Mayhem/mayhem1.jpg
Note the 2-for-1 bullet belts :)
to this
http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/basement/1702/mayhem2000.gif
sell outs!
an honourable mention goes to this:
http://klavs.net/Web_Main/Images.aspx?id=mayhem_therock_2007
WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
same with Emperor - they went from the same thing as mayhem to a load of fools that wouldn't be out of place at a melodic death metal gig. they also might love giger and lovecraft!

M: come on they totally bum giger and lovecraft!!! they've turned into sell out parodies......not in a whiny "ooh they've sold-out" way but in a totally and utterly shameful way.

that first pic was cool :)

J: yeah, exactly - parodies, nothing more.
more like mayham ;)

Massive Aggressive

M: Massive Aggressive has leaked!

J: it's not bad actually

M: yeah, not bad at all. altho i've only heard the first song still; i'm watching hollyoaks :O

J: wolves is a cool song, but it's all pretty much standard municipal waste.

tony is trying to sound like mike muir in places, which annoys me. if the music was shit then it'd be a massive dissapointment (not massive aggressive).
Upsidedown church is the worst so far, just sounds like a Suicidal song.

M: music sounds pretty good to me. not much has changed tho. kinda slower, fewer lyrics about "beer and puking" as JA put it. or P. or whoever said that

J: it's probably because they're turning into Suicidal :)

M: the picture i used of him today he's wearing a suicidal t-shirt

J: listened to it all now, wolves is the best track easily.
the first half of the album is good, the rest kinda sounds like one song which is why when it ended i was like.... oh.

M: wolves is a good song. it's because it has the spirit of those dogs of metal in it :D :D
umm yeah i think it might take a few listens. but i think their catalogue would have been fine without this record.

J: they should have released this as an ep or just trimmed the tracks down
i'm now on the 2nd part of the album, it's all sounding the same :)
good, but forgettable. i was right, art of partying was their peak

M: yep :(

J: the thing that's annoying me is that upside down church is gonna be one of them songs they play live for the value that we're down with black metal and because landphil has BM patches :)

M: yeah i'd thought about that :( what they fucking around with bm for? fuck off!

J: because they know everyone loves Venom ;)

Neseblod Records - The Sutton Hoo of black metal

J: bear dollar!
i won these tonight:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260459450204&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

M: neat, not bad for a tenner each :))
http://www.neseblodrecords.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1117529931&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&.php
this is a cool list hardly looked at any of them yet, but it'd be wicked to have a look through some of these for real

J: i'm almost half way thru, this shit is awesome!!!!
hey look;
http://www.neseblodrecords.com/cutenews/data/upimages/IMG_0801.JPG
looks like TH logo :)

M: yeah does a bit, same shape :)
i know how cool are some of those?! i wish there were stores in the uk where we could go and actually look at that kinda of crap. i think i'd just die right there, thats actually better than sweets or anything :D

J: i want them slayer magazines!!!!!! ;O
you see the pantera gold disc?

M: a gift from phil :D that is fucking priceless, i'd actually crawl over dead people to own some of that shit. even just to hold it. those magazines are amazing, it's like the sutton hoo of black metal :D

J: there's all sorts of cool shit there. the tape that got smashed after the killing of euronymous.
this reminds me of a dude on ebay, he was selling all kinds of shit like this, but mainly mayhem stuff. he was selling it on behalf of someone from the scene at the time, like someone from emperor or some shit. he had letters from euronymous, bloodstained stuff from the dead suicide room... mad shit like that.

M: aww it'd be so fucking cool to own some of that. so fucking cool. makes me sound all fanboy like but...its just like in archaeology, when even crappy bits of samian ware are so cool, 'cause its stuff the romans used. this is all the stuff they had when all of these bands were just starting out, plus some of the drawings are unbelievably awesome!