You know my interest in digital and CD is basically non-existant, although I have to report that this little precious is finally going on vinyl this summer in July, 2022. I love this band. In barely 5 years Kapala managed to enter my top selected records besides the turntable already twice, even if with just two EPs and no albums in sight. I guess a full 40 minutes worth of Kapala might be much even for someone grown up with Japanese harsh noise?
In any case I already have listened to “Doomsday Requiem”, it’s fully available on Dunkelheit’s YouTube and eventually Bandcamp, and it’s freaking delicious. Compared to “Infant Cesspool” their sound has become much thicker and one can finally unravel the songs in just a few listens.
EP on vinyl out in July
It is worth also mentioning another band on the same label, Brahmastrika, whose “Abhabaniyastral Samsarimplication” was also released last year. They’re too part of that Kolkata Inner Circle like Banish, whose demo tape I released last year on the label (sold out, sorry).
Hellflame magazine is one of the oldest Black/Death Metal fanzines from Italy, dating back to the early 90’s. I know that, I was there, it’s right from my city, actually.
Certainly, Hellflame is one of the first fanzines that focused on a wide variety of extreme metal bands focusing on niche ones with a particular spark of talent regardless if it was German Black Metal or American proto-slam. Written by Nicola aka “Litanie De Dumuzi” who also draws most illustrations and basically coordinates everything. After a long pause during which he lived in UK to wash the clothes in the Strait of Dover, the man is back and is ready to release his new issue. A solid 60-page work with a scattering of interviews with Vilifier, Nuclear Abominations records (yep!), Dreadful Relic, Mara, Iron Tyrant, Crucifier, House of Atreus, Cruciamentum plus the usual flood of reviews and accounts.
Order your copy straight from him also for wholesale, or you can get your own from me.
A full hour-long plus massacre of pummeling South-American influenced Death Metal with a full-bodied production that properly complements the album. This is a band that holds the same banner as the Demonized of some years prior with some spectral moments that mark the slow descent into the lower layers of Hell, sometimes reminding The Chasm. Mostly however this stuff is a machine gun of blast beats and guttural vocals of finest Death Metal, I never get tired of albums like these. Get it.
Talking about Memento Mori, on the 25th of April the second Rotheads album should be released. The first one was pretty rotten and this one looks good so far.
Il 25 di Aprile dovrebbe uscire anche il secondo album dei Rotheads, sempre su Memento Mori. Il primo era bello marcio e questo per il momento si presenta bene.
This is a one man/two men band from Ohio run by the guy who also plays in Mortuary Ghoul (out in CD format on Dismal Fate from Italy, get it it’s great Mortician-like massive Death Metal). They mostly exist online but they have released also some CD/tape in the past. There might be a gazillion digital bands online today if one digs deep enough but I admit I like this Imperium and I hope they can release something proper soon. Expect good savage abrasive shit like Revenge, Goatpenis etc. but a little more linear. The layout is quite terrible from the image we see but nothing that cannot be fixed somehow by a good label. They used to have a bandcamp page that does not exist anymore, so maybe they signed already? Below a link to the second album that was released two months ago, check it out.
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.
