Category Archives: Underground News

Italian report 2021 addendum

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TYRANNIZER ÖRDER

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

The Old School Certification of Authenticity

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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.

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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.

#1990 #osdm #deathmental #blackmetal #grindcore #scenepoints

Father Befouled – Crowned In Veneficum new album out

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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.

https://www.facebook.com/FatherBefouled/

https://youtu.be/Lbyr59mcaZQ

#deathmetal #everlastingspew #osdm #usdm #fathebefouled #incantation #darkdeathmetal

The future of this blogzine

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I have been pondering about what to do with this webzine for a long time. Partially I just don’t want to let it go but on the other side I see little use for a blogzine that just files album reviews in a strictly structured fashion today. Let’s be honest: things have changed enormously in the last 13 years, when the first Internet become a commonly known technology and MySpace and Napster begun circulating again older music. Up to 2000, things were just happening in waves. There was the so called old school DM sound, which at first was the crossbreed of a dying Thrash Metal scene (have a look at earlier Death Metal zines, to see what I mean) and then we got shitty second generation “cold” black metal and that horrible thing that is the so called gothic metal, and the whole Machine Head/late Sepultura “department store metal” which somehow went hand in hand with grunge, when everybody was considering himself an alternative guy. Each of these eras were able to dig a grave for the previous ones. Yet in 2000 information started to circulate unbelievably fast and the alternative guys who were into mass market music (the same that today is embodied by all those 3-part-names bands with funny haircuts and colorful tattoos) began to fracture in smaller groups and all kind of old genres have been exhumed and created their own brand new ecosystems. My guess is that at the time some older guys finally got their chances to shine, and they began drifting into these smaller ecosystems as micro-stars of the moment. Fast forward 10 years and all this has been staured to the point of no return. A million ecosystems exist today, every one of which aware of the other, some smaller and more elitaristic, others way more common (the sideburn/funny fringe haircut bands I was talking about beore). But yet, everything has been exploited at every possible level, incuding MY music. Thank you sirs. I really like to see Nihilist demos on Youtube and mega deluxe boxed sets pressed by labels that completely disregarded the genre in the middle ’90s, not to mention completely stop the production of vinyl records. In the beginning I was pissed off, very much. Someone once said “when everybody knows it, the magic is gone”. That was my feeling for a while. Lucklily, not anymore. It’s the progress baby, we have new challenges ahead. We can’t just grumble about the past. Things are like that today. This music has been spiled in every possible way – EXCEPT for one thing: the music has not been spoiled at all. The sound is exactly the same. So exactly, WHO has REALLY changed in all these years. Really, your dear records are not as good as they once were just because everybody in your building can listen to it in a couple of minutes with a broadband access and some electronic device? But let’s get back to the zine. I was writing my first reviews in 1993. 20 years ago. At the time, zines were a great work of love, the glue of the whole undergroudn movement as we understand it today. Zines were the essence of the underground, together with the letters we used to send and the talk out of the concert venues. But zines have drifted to the web, and even they look a bit faded to my eyes today. I have seen forums die in a few months when Social Networks became the new place to exchange informations. Today, we have Metal Archives for every kind metal reviews. You want to know about a band? You go straight there and read. Some of the reviews are even not total bullshit, I swear. And then there’s Youtube! Basically all the new records go straight up there is a nanosecond, oftentimes BEFORE the proper release date. And I’m not even starting with magnet links and torrents and all the shit that has been going in this business since the 00’s (Napster, Kazaa, DC++, Limewire, eMule etc.). And if you’re just straight lazy, there are a couple of rather good blogs around that offer direct downloads of albums, demo recordings, live shows and so on. The point is not anymore about crude information, we have plenty of that in our hands. And we have a shitload or records to hear, whenever we want, more than we can ever listen in our life. From a certain point of view, it is really not much different than what we did with tapetrading in 1990 – you sent out a 90 min TDK cassette to your pen pal filled with recordings and then wait patiently to have another tape back with other recordings you asked for, or just trusted your friend will choose well. Sometimes you just got the same record several times (I probably have 6 or 7 tapes with Suppurated Fetus, ah ah.). Things have just gotten lighting fast, and then you don’t even need to personally know whoever is sharing the songs.

The medium is gone, the music is still here, though.

I am not going to complain here, like I hear so often. I am not a Death Metal/Grindcore grognard, not anymore at least. I simply realized that while music was certainly and objectively better between the ’80s and the early ’90s due to reasons I might discuss one day here on Nuclear Abominations, the point is that I was also terrificly younger! My feelings for that music are inevitably connected to memories of a feeling of freshness and discovery that I used to have at the time. Everything was new ground, and completely undiscovered. Thanks list were the main source for knowing new bands for me! As time progressed, though, everything began taking form and structure. Man, I was already pissed of in 1992, ahah. Guess what.

I certainly don’t regret never having learnt how to play an instrument, that’s probably the only part of the whole extreme music ecosystem that I never got familiar with, and I am happy with that. Music still sounds like some weird magic to me, and I am grateful for that or else I’ll be just doing my stupid strongman routines with other bisons in the gym today. But, luckily, I can still put on records and note down some riffs and some nasty bridges, and thanks the gods below, I have no clue what’s really going on there. I completely ignore the technical name for that trick or that sound. Some time ago I read a line by a guy who said “Metal should not be self aware”. Well I don’t care much for Metal in general, but the guy was completely right. I hack systems for work, it’s my job. I wirk in IT. But this is a system I don’t want to know any more details about, I like it to be a black box.

So to start wwrapping things up – what am I going to do with this blogzine? I have some dozens, probably one or two hundred, records in queue to be reviewed. And I have some (hopefully) interesting ideas for non-conventional articles and interviews and maybe even a report or a retrospective that I have been wanting to write for a while. How am I going to do all this shit, I am not sure, though. What I perfectly know is what this zine can’t be about: it can’t be about news. You got all the web for news, the whole world. And it can’t be about technical, objective, politically correct reviews. You got plenty of those too and so called “metal journalists” (AH AH AH AH AH) today grab the virtual pen very prepared about what’s going in the underground music movement which is something I am generally uninterested in. It certainly can’t be about stricly old school death metal. I love that music and is probably my main interest even today, but right now the market bubble is at its height, it’s a style that (understandably, while definitely unexpected from me) is hugely popular today and its aesthetics are being drained to the point of spoling the ground of all life (how ironic). It can’t be about goregrind only either. Goregrind as I mean it is probably not as fucked up as grindcore today (and conceptually my vision of true grindcore is not far for my vision of pure goregrind but that’s another story), but the abundance of comic reliefs and spineless pornogrind is getting always more boring and sterile by the day.

What to do then? Well, I have more or less this idea:

I have no clue.

The draft for this post is originally dated a few years ago, At the time the sewage sound of decrepit metal and grind was relegated mostly in the past. Thats why I didn’t regret losing touch with basically everything released in the last 10 years. But that’s not true anymore, not strictly at least. I have managed to be good terms with the whole “system” today (I am not going to call that scene. I am referring to the whole ecosystem, not just the interpersonal blabbermouth relationships). There is some good shit under all these layers of boring derivative, boneless garbage, actually.

What I will probably do is going very unstructured. I’ll probably post rants like this, and opinions, very personal opinions. And memories and maybe some unrelated shit as well. I am just not interested in going on the same way as I always did. That stuff I have done so far, you can read that basically everywhere. I might probably mix old and new and maybe just grumble about some things that still manage to piss me off.

Who knows. Stay tuned and you’ll see what happens next.

G.O.R.E. (Cze): “Stand up sexy ladies, the Boogie Band is here!” full-length Cd 2013 Khaaranus

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gore-standup

Among the various albums I got for review lately this must certainly be the absolute worse. Basically everything in this album is wrong in my agenda, everything. Once I recovered from the shock of seeing this is not the Brazilian Gore (as I expected, my hopes were crushed by the cover art the very second I picked the Cd out of the envelope) it took me just a few seconds to stare at the Cd, a digipack so glossy it looks oily. You got a scattering of pictures about sexual perversion scattered on the layout going from dildos, latex-wrapped whores, blasphemous images of Jesus, streaks of blood and so on. Not only however the Cd doesn’t come with lyrics but the very titles of the songs are in broken English.

While the overall layout is harmonic and certainly a result of some professional designer  it is the music that is just tragically bad. G.O.R.E. plays a disastrous patchwork of death/grind with among the worse vocals I have ever heard since Caninus or Anael (eheh). The growls are little more than dog barks, and in a pitiful attempt to quote Macabre they even manage to make it worse with Mickey Mouse choruses. The songs themselves have some decent groove in them sometimes (remind me a bit of late Neuropathia) but just as some good massive riff comes in another sloppy one intrudes and then those terrible, terrible vocals just spoil everything. I will not mention the last track, some sort of disco-remix that probably will make someone laugh. But – me – I personally think I just lost some minutes of my life.

How could a band like this get signed is really beyond me. If they ever managed to somehow kick out the vocalist(s?) and truncate all these shitty moshpit chugs in between, something good could be harvested from this shit, but I have little hope in that. Sorry, it was a pity since the label has been producing good stuff in the past, and this is probably the only updated review you are seeing in a long time. But stay away from this stuff, very FAR.