Sometimes a record comes along that is both firmly rooted in a genre and that transcends that genre. It’s a tough task to make something that is readily identifiable as death metal, for instance, but that also includes elements and ideas that are pretty far afield from what you’d normally get with a typical release…
There’s not much better fodder for death metal inspiration than horror. It doesn’t particularly matter if the horror in question is the kind that hunts you down in your dreams with a knife glove or the more realistic kind that sneaks into your house while you’re away and waits in the closet for the lights…
Death metal needs bands like Nothingness. There’s nothing wrong with sticking firmly within a specific genre and making art that doesn’t stray from the boundaries of what makes that genre unique. Bands do it all the time and plenty of my favorite bands aren’t the most experimental in their approaches. There’s nothing wrong with that…
Going it alone can be tough, especially when you’re a band. Writing, recording, and performing music is an onerous enough task when you have partners around you, let alone when all the decisions fall on your shoulders. There certainly are benefits, like not fighting over creative directions and figuring out how to split revenue, but there’s…
There are some places around the world that just seem to breed great music. Whether it’s the climate, the attitude of the natives, the local water…some places just seem to be hotbeds for creativity. Anyone that loves extreme music (or Hell, music in general) knows that New Orleans is one of the strongest scenes for pretty…
You ever listen to something new and pretty quickly think, “Wow, that was nice of the band to make something specifically tailored to me!” Granted, bands make music for the unwashed masses to enjoy but still, every once in a while, something hits you that feels like it was your own personal taste profile that…
Like the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That old chestnut works when describing extreme metal as well as anything else. When a genre like death metal has been going strong for decades and decades, there’s not much of a reason to stray too far outside of the bounds of the style…
Ashes are usually what’s left at the end. When the fire has burnt out and everything that it’s consumed has been taken, ashes are all you’re left with. There’s a finality to something being reduced to ashes. Few things feel more like a definitive ending than everything distinctive about something being burnt away from it….
Sometimes the metal release calendar doesn’t make you wait too far into the year to have new faces rip your old face off. The ink is barely dry on the shitshow that was 2022 but we already have one of the most exciting debuts of 2023. That Repulsive Nature, the first LP from Seattle death metallers…
It doesn’t take long into Ritual of Ash, the debut longplayer from Australian death metallers Ashen, to realize that these dudes know what the Hell they are doing. If you’ve listened to enough death metal over the years, Ashen’s influences should be pretty readily apparent upon firing up their first LP. Pretty much any band that…