Maybe I’m not the biggest fan of this band, but the third and final album of the trilogy that came out on Hell’s Headbangers showed a version of Denouncement Pyre that was evolving from that mishmash of second rate Australian bands that sound a bit like the unfortunate cousins of their Swedish counterparts a la Nifelheim or the recent Ultra Silvam, and unfortunately, under a hat of bands of the caliber of Abominator, Bestial Warlust, Cemetery Urn or Eskhaton there are a lot of them that repeat the usual riffs in a D666 key with more or less protein.
With the third album “Black Sun Unbound”, however, we saw a version of Denouncement Pyre that came out of the trap of the first two, entering into fluider dynamics made of multilayered and well-balanced compositions. We shall see.
As anticipated, after three albums on Hell’s Headbangers they switched to Agonia, which may not be a guarantee of quality but has an established rapport with bands like these.
I really forgot about these in the previous articles, but I have to make amends because Tyrannizer Order with the dieresis on the “o” in Motorhead style is actually one of the best early Marduk style Black Metal bands we have left, a band featuring Max from Natron, a band who I have to admit I started to lose interest in after the sophomore record. This band doesn’t rely on chilling atmospheres typical of the genre, but goes towards the spear-point massacre typical of bands like Black Witchery, even if without that depth of field. More than good in my book.
Lebbra
Known absolutely by chance, these Lebbra from Salerno were a pleasant discovery, as they prove that not only Americans like Gruesome can make their own reference to early pre-masturbation Death, those Deaths that many of us old fuckers grew up with. Leprosy don’t play a plagiarism, opps I mean tribute, like the band above, but are more generically inspired by that early 90’s Death Metal that has its roots in bands with distinctive vocal tracks like Morgoth, Asphyx, Obituary. The songs are few but decently recorded, more than anything else I find it interesting that they sometimes indulge in such banal structures that in other formulas might be overly adolescent but that in the sphere, let’s call it OSDM, have their interest.
Pugnale
Here, however, we are missing the point. These Pugnale, from Bergamo, show how you can do formally perfect homework at the art academy but fail to express anything interesting when you go to exhibit in a proper gallery. There’s nothing formally wrong here, if anything it’s a band perfectly capable of fusing crust, powerviolence, even certain black/death metal atmospheres into a single sound that however resolves, on the whole, to be a completely forgettable track after track, as often happens with bands from Eastern Europe or Germany. Add to that a singing as bland as boiled rice and no matter how hard I try I can’t find anything interesting. There’s a live show on YouTube, though, that shows they’re good on stage, so we’ll see how that develops.
Blood Artillery
This wonderful little gem is intolerant’s Soul Devourer solo project and it’s objectively a small bijoux. Probably recorded in a Pakistani 7/11 store, with a martial minimalist layout seen a million times and a general blurring of sound like early Beherit, this is overall a work of heart and you can hear it, especially because you can hear actual songwriting going on within the chaos. By the way a full-length was released by local label Extreme Chaos this year, unfortunately only in digital format, but we hope to see at least a tape soon.
Derelict
Here instead is a band that works great, in my opinion. Also from Rome and also on Extreme Chaos like the band before, but this time it’s the right combination of punk instinctiveness applied to a form of putrid Black Metal that would fit on a seven-inch with a photocopied cover of some shitty punkabbestia label at Leoncavallo, and boy, I would invest my euro I saved on warm beer cans for it, any day. Not as filthy necrotic as Gonkulator but some of those vibes are here. I really like it when these genres so distant and yet so close mix well.
Demonomania
My rotten heart silently and manly approves when he hears this shitty attempt at playing Black Metal while high on acid. Everything falls apart and goes its own direction in these tracks recorded on lo-fi noise/grind label Olivia. This is a band that makes Derelict sound like Sabaton. Actually what I heard is probably just a late-night intoxicated jam session and I love it: think Goat Vulva after overeating spaghetti alla trabaccolara and cold wine + various psychotropic drugs.
Paradoxical as it may seem, I had never seen the evolution, particularly the recent evolution, of the world of music publishing, of which this fanzine is a miserable part, from an external point of view.
Living it from the inside, I have always had an immobile and obtuse vision, willing to change only by virtue of personal choices and in relation to the evolution of technologies, but never from a social point of view. Of course, the first online articles date back to the end of the 90s and belong in a way to a pioneering era when even the big publications had practically not yet approached network technologies. That sea of shit of professional magazines was still clinging pitifully to paper, limiting itself to a paltry online presence as was usual in web 1.0, with the difference that no one, at least in Italy, and I mean this seriously, no one who wrote on any newsstand magazine, had even minimal competence in the world of underground extreme metal.
The first journalists capable of delving beyond the usual 3-4 major labels and doing a bit of research (we’re talking about a time when archives were the preserve of a few) appeared with the webzines of the early 00s. You only have to pick up any magazine from the 90s to see that the people writing about it didn’t understand shit. Yet there was something going on in the underground and there were some very nice and well written fanzines in Italy. There was a period at the turn of the 2000s when many American fanzines had become freebies, free copies given away with packages in collaboration with certain labels that could afford it.
It was at that time that this fanzine began an alternation of formats from print to online, an alternation that still persists today.
Although Nuclear Abominations has been online since about 1999, as I said before, I’ve always stubbornly limited myself to reviewing what labels and bands decided to send me, to avoid actively searching for new stuff, as I used to do in the 90s when I spent my evenings writing letters, duplicating tapes and flipping through mountains of flyers. It’s more comfortable to lazily wait for something new to come along to hear, after all. And my justification was that at least, I had to force myself to listen to genres and records that, by my own volition I would never have put on my turntable.
With little side effects, though.
One of them was listening to hours of crap records or completely useless stuff, just for the sake of ethics. The least I could do to repay the trust of a band or label that had spent money to send me something was to listen to the worst shit at least a couple of times, even if that also guaranteed that I could butcher a record as I did with some regularity. I’m sorry but the least you get if you send me a promo of crap music is an abrasive review. Secondly, there was also the problem that I’d end up wasting hours reviewing bands from the same big labels and missing out on the more interesting stuff that was circulating directly between bands without a contract. Add to that the shop break between 2002 and 2004 that took away all interest in the genre and all in all the last 20 years has been a disastrous series of false starts.
But then, in reality, I felt like writing from time to time and so every now and then I tried again, but I progressively saw the world changing at every false start, finally adapting to the new technologies, the physical promos gradually disappearing and a huge mass of interesting bands coming out every day. There was also the factor that, after 2005, certain sounds that today are called OSDM were rediscovered (that those who follow me since day one know well that I have always preferred here compared to all the rest), without counting the real Black Metal, the putrid and very violent one of Conqueror and Black Witchery, finally got an upper hand thanks to labels like Nuclear War Now.
In 20 years the world has changed radically.
Today there are no more promos, or rather there are thousands of electronic promos to browse, select, and first of all decide what to waste your time on, time which is increasingly limited. What seems to be a limitation, however, leads to a new vision of the profession of fanzinaro: even if now I have no guidelines to follow, I can only talk about the stuff I like because I no longer have moral duties towards anyone.
While it’s true that the music world is infested by woke, dry losers who are afraid of words, who are wary of reading a review of a record that might destabilize them, apart from the general weakness of these shits, the world is now proposing a very, very free perspective. Probably nobody follows blogs anymore, but it’s time to go back to the early days when you could select your own playlist. Incidentally, I have never earned a penny from this publication, but nowadays I am completely not willing to compromise. So I welcome the era of electronic promos, videos on social platforms. There might still be something to say, after all.
How did this scene mega-dux in Ghost clothes get his throne?
I recently (in 2014 when I wrote this draft) read two blog posts by two very different guys who are both complaining about the general lack of professionalism around today. You know how it goes, complaining is always a win-win strategy, you will always find somebody that is going to agree with you. I’ll skip on the fact that some other counter-complainers love so much to ask first instance complainers to propose real solutions to the perceived problem. Me, I personally enjoy the freedom to complain destructively without necessarily having to propose a solution. I might not like one thing, but that doesn’t mean I am an expert on the topic nor that I believe I should be one to show my disappointment.
That brings me to one of the main mysteries of this huge mashup that we could call “scene” – and with the term “scene” I am not referring just to the Isten-defined “scene” of band pictures first and “music-comes-second” attitude. I am referring to the whole world of people that, in some way or another, have ever had something to do with extreme Metal, Punk, Grindcore and so on (I have my own theory on how total 1-click availability to most human production spoiled what once was a fairly elitist environment but I might add that this imagery of a golden age is mostly inflated by so-called veterans, believe me, most of our days in the ’90s were just hours upon hours of plain boredom).
I am referring to the fact that apparently there seems to be a hierarchy in this sort of monstrosity called “scene”. There are presumed experts and veterans that believe they can talk and silence people just by the mere fact that they bought “Reek Of Putrefaction” in a store when they were teenagers. And then there are people that instead “can’t talk” because they’re like 14 today, and open their own blogs or Youtube channels and just give their own personal opinion of the stuff being released 20 or more years ago. Obviously, sometimes (well, OFTEN) I cringe when I hear some of these guys talking about stuff they definitely have no clue about, but I personally have no problem with non-experts expressing their opinions.
On the contrary, this is all music fan “journalism” in 2022 is supposed to bring to the table.
If someone is born in 1999 and has a passion for this music in my book he deserves to talk about it even more than 45-year-old guys that pretend to be veterans of the Black Metal scene because they were listening to Emperor and all that (shitty) stuff at the time of the infamous stabbings and church burnings. I know SEVERAL of these, and personally, I feel absolutely no respect for their attitude (not to mention, they are probably – not to say basically always – not experts in the field as they pretend to be, but that’s another matter).
Just to clarify my thoughts a little better I’d like to get back to the very core of this problem: what the hell is a “veteran” or an “expert” of grindcore, or death metal or black metal, or what have you? What makes you one?
For some reason, I reckon I could be called an, albeit minor, “expert” on the field of Death/Black Metal or a particular kind of grindcore that I very rarely recognize today (my concept of what grindcore is supposed to sound like is probably lost today since the boundaries that defined it back then do not exist anymore). Probably not on a planetary level, but I cut my niche in that list a long time ago, at least in my country. I have several thousand records, did my homework during the tapetrading days, and when the stunt still had meaning I could describe and talk about thousands of bands, quote whole segments of interviews, and so on.
Do you know what I did to deserve this? Nothing.
It was only by a complete coincidence that I managed to see records like “In The Sign Of Evil”, “Under The Sign Of The Black Mark”, “Pleasure To Kill”, and so on when they were released in the shops and mailorders. Having an older brother that brings in records lent by other friends is the way most of the guys my age managed to be introduced to metal and punk. Not only there was obviously no Internet around, not only glossy mags were still talking only about Black Sabbath and other big bands, but the greatest problem was that even back then, people cared relatively about extreme music.
I grabbed the records, stared at them, and went through the thanklists, but when my curiosity brought me to talk about these bands with people who were supposed to be “real” punks and metalheads, I recognized that none of them cared about this passion as much as I did. That was until 1994, but I’ll talk about that year in the future. Those kids were the equivalent of today’s Youtube kids that talk about Hellhammer, with the main difference being that these kids actually listened to Hellhammer. Only when I realized that my curiosity could not be sated by the people around me I had to grab a pen and managed to enter the world of xeroxed zines and tape traders. But that’s another story.
So what is this post about? It’s about recognizing that there is no hierarchy and no “respect due” to the so-called veterans that just had the luck of being born at the right time.
Having said all that, that period at the turn of the 1990s (before and after about three to four years) was really something to remember, not so much for the quality of the music being produced as for the fact that we were all very young and everything was forming. I’ve read a few books and accounts from those years and I’ve noticed that it’s never quite clear enough that we didn’t have any money, that it was difficult to get around, and that scams were around every corner. But even less clear is the fact that there were very, very few of us in those days. There was punk to talk about punk with, and that metalhead who, apart from a handful of classic records, would occasionally put on something heavy, but until 92-93 basically in Italy nobody knew shit about extreme metal and we were all sailing by sight. The next time some fat, balding guy talks about his tapetrading days, look him in the eye because 95% of the time he’s bullshitting you.
There’s no doubt that Father Befouled takes a lot from the Pillard-era Incantation but, I mean, it’s not that big a crime when the songwriting is fresh and articulate enough to distinguish the tracks from each other. All in all, in five albums, this is a band that has deserved its dignity of existence, also because in 2006 there were still few people playing this style and the bubble was not yet in its maximum expansion period.
In comparison to the previous four albums, I think that this “Crowned in Veneficum” on Everlasting Spew (which takes care of all formats) has a sharper production and more edginess, even if I prefer the filth of “Desolate Gods”. In any case, give it a listen, the label takes good care of its releases and on vinyl, it looks good.
No really, I shouldn’t be here. And instead, I’ve been all evening sorting out and rereading drafts of old articles I wrote between 2011 and 2014, some absolute crap, most basically just quick messy notes, plus a couple of interesting ones that I plan to fix when I get an inspired night like this again.
Because even though I should be doing something else, and I really should, I always end up back here in the comfort zone talking about filth and rotten stuff. Nuclear Abominations stuff you know, disturbing horror ugliness in various forms.
To be completely honest, I barely buy new records nowadays. Most of my old, heavy collection is firmly closed into boxes on the upper floor of my house waiting for some construction works to finish one day. Like most people today, I too listen to a selected few records I have bought recently but most stuff I check online with headphones on. How relevant can be an opinion on this or that record anymore, considering everything is already at hand?
I have written posts on how completely different the job of a zine editor is today. Basically, I think I cannot even call myself one anymore since I hardly do what a zine editor is supposed to do. And I don’t have the patience or interest in carefully selecting words to safeguard some shitty album. I am not so sure what this last shot at the fanzine will lead to. Who knows.
This blog is destined to be just a reflection of how I feel about this and that record with no specific calendar, so check here every now and then. I might also be using this blog for updates on the label even if the proper blog for that is supposed to be the distribution one. But since the distribution is slowly folding, let’s keep everything here for the moment.
