What Are You Listening To?

[navybsn]

Wolvennest - Ritual MMXX

 

[MacabreEternal]

Sleep - Sleep's Holy Mountain (1992)

 

[navybsn]

Sinira - The Everlorn

Serpent Column - Mirror in Darkness

Satyricon - Volcano

Lamp of Murmur/Ebony Pendant - Plenilunar Requiems split

 

[Arioch]

Hate Eternal - I, Monarch (2005)

 

[JonoBlade]

Went to Cattle Decapitation on Friday night. The highlight was probably not the gig but meeting up with a mate and going to the pub afterwards until 1am, which is pretty much unheard of for me these days. Luckily I didn't have to get home afterwards, but nearly missed the last northbound tube to where I was staying. 

Anyway...to the show:

I missed the first band but saw the whole set from 200 Stab Wounds. Slave to the Scalpel | 200 Stab Wounds (bandcamp.com) Enjoyable, if unremarkable, fairly old school death metal.

As is the curse of opening acts, the guitar tone was pretty muddy so I just concentrated on watching the drummer. By the end of the set the balance was pretty good. I will give this a few listens and probably pick up on a BC Friday.

The next band was Signs of the Swarm. Absolvere | Signs of the Swarm | Unique Leader Records (bandcamp.com)

Oh dear. I believe this is what the kids call "deathcore." The above link doesn't quite capture what I took away from watching this band live. Every song was a prolonged breakdown. Each breakdown a raging torrent of breakdowns, flooded with rivulets of breakdowns, cascading into a waterfall of more breakdowns.

The typewriter drum sound and one trick vocal delivery, interjected with "circle pit" was so distracting I couldn't derive much enjoyment from this. Others around me seemed to "get it" but I was minded of the discussion of Slipknot on that other thread. This is metal made by AI for people that think lots of tattoos and flesh tunnels equate to talent. Tasteless.

Earlier in the day I had been genuinely worrying that I was just liking too much stuff I was listening to lately. I have been enjoying the shit out of the likes of post black Underdark and surf rock King Gizzard wondering if I was losing perspective. But this band renewed my faith in misanthropy. 

The main event, Cattle Decapitation, is a band I hadn't even heard before a few months ago. I had always assumed they were some joke grind band, but the AOTY accolades for Terrasite were too frequent to ignore. I am a convert, and had picked up a few other albums to cram for this gig. 

Luckily for me, I seem to have picked the albums they decided to pull pretty much the whole set from. There was only one, perhaps two, tracks I did not recognise.

I have the same gripe about the drum sound as Signs of Breakdowns mentioned above. Triggered to the point of distraction and outright offense, so that it removes any soul from the kit; I just can't fathom why any band would want this sound.  200 Stab Wounds' drum sound was so much better.

Apart from that, CatDecap were great. Vocal delivery was about what I knew it would be - flawed but so difficult to pull off live I was not expecting perfection. Still Travis Ryan is a great front man that did not once feel the need to request a circle pit or wall of death or make any other cliched idiot frontman comment. All class.

Lead guitar work is excellent with tasteful solos. Great bass tone. Rhythm guitarist had great hair and tight jeans.

From photos, it is obvious that unless I can fly, pics were taken from a balcony which was almost too steep of an angle, but a good vantage point. I stood in the same spot for 3 hours so as not to lose my place.

Finished at 11pm which vindicated my decision to stay in London rather than try to get home on a slow train and risk waking up in Crewe or Glasgow.

But, as mentioned, highlight of night was probably talking metal with buddy I don't see that often. He'd bought an autographed Terrasite LP, the bastard.

[Arioch]

Hate Eternal - Conquering the Throne (1999)

My favorite Hate Eternal album. Maybe already, because I took a slap in the face when I discovered the band with this album. But also, because I love the tracks that weren't composed by Eric Rutan but by Doug Cerrito (Suffocation): Nailed to Obscurity, Dethroned, Spiritual Holocaust. I find that on these 3 tracks, there's an original research in the riffs.

 

[navybsn]

Black Reaper - Birth of Extinction

Tømhet - Dødsblikket

Killing Joke - Killing Joke 

Vauruvã  - Manso Queimor Dacordado

 

[navybsn]

2 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

Rhythm guitarist had great hair and tight jeans.

The old bass player was even worse. I think he's playing guitar in Scour now. Derek Engemann

[BloodHornVital]

Anal vomit - Gathering of the putrid demons

[FatherAlabaster]

2 minutes ago, BloodHornVital said:

Anal vomit - Gathering of the putrid demons

My daughter has been home with diarrhea for a full week, so I can attest that this is accurate.

[BloodHornVital]

1 hour ago, FatherAlabaster said:

My daughter has been home with diarrhea for a full week, so I can attest that this is accurate.

Maybe listening to this record could overcome it?

 

Not so long ago we were all having a whole vomit battle (2 kids, me and wife)

[GoatmasterGeneral]

8 hours ago, Arioch said:

Hate Eternal - Conquering the Throne (1999)

My favorite Hate Eternal album. Maybe already, because I took a slap in the face when I discovered the band with this album. But also, because I love the tracks that weren't composed by Eric Rutan but by Doug Cerrito (Suffocation): Nailed to Obscurity, Dethroned, Spiritual Holocaust. I find that on these 3 tracks, there's an original research in the riffs.

 

Alrighty then. I dismissed Hate Eternal years ago as one of those boring American one-dimensional rapid-fire blasty-blast death metal bands that just aren't for me. But you and JT just keep bringing them up. You just can't stop yourselves. So I guess the time has come for the old goat to revisit them. You say this is your favorite Hate Eternal album, so I'm going in, wish me luck. 

#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#*#

Well ok I'm back. They're not quite as bad as I'd remembered, not terrible at all. There were even a few spots where I almost found myself enjoying this. Almost. Vocals aren't annoying or anything, but they're really not that good either, they're just there. These horribly clickety rapid-fire drums definitely aren't good at all, that's the worst part of this for me. The overdubbed guitar solos seem weird and out of place and take my head out of the song. These songs aren't memorable, can't hum along with any of them, and they all have the exact same rapid-fire tempo that becomes a blur. This became quite tedious by like track 3 or 4. I won't say I hate them eternally, but this style of death metal semble fastidieux et ennuyeux.

Makes me a bit curious as to why people who don't listen to a ton of death metal like you and JT would latch onto this band out of all death metal bands. Leprosy or Cause of Death this is not. What's the main appeal here? It's not overly accessible, it's not very melodic, it's not particularly brutal, it's not breakdown city, it's not dynamic, riffs don't stick in your head, totally one-dimensional. They're not really bad, any one song taken on its own is reasonably listenable, but a whole album full of these is just not good. It's unremarkable, middle of the road, generic American rapid-fire clickety drum death metal that I'll forget as soon as I go downstairs to make coffee. They'd be serviceable as an opening band maybe, acceptable background noise for while I'm over at the bar purchasing a tasty cold beverage. Don't see these dudes as headline material. 

 

NP: Siniser - Hate, Netherlands 1995. Another legacy band I haven't spent a ton of time with, but right from track 1 this is far more interesting to me than Hate Eternal.

 

[Arioch]

3 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

wish me luck.

So good luck... Or not 🙃

3 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Makes me a bit curious as to why people who don't listen to a ton of death metal like you and JT would latch onto this band out of all death metal bands.

You know, when it comes to music, film or reading, taste and colour are generally hard to argue with. Everyone has their own, which they defend tooth and nail (I don't know if tooth and nail will be easy to understand).

One day, on a French Metal forum, I read a guy posting a YouTube video of a Death Metal band. He said of the album from which the title was taken: pure mega-violence. No one can come away unscathed.

Curious, I wanted to listen. I listened for 30 seconds. Not that it was ultra-violent, but it was Death Metal with mono sound, not stereo. What's more, it sounded as if the band had been recorded 3 km away from the microphones, which made for a distant hubbub. You needed a particularly attentive ear to make out anything. The singer's voice was so cavernous and distant that it sounded like he was whispering. It wasn't violence that I felt. More like deep and immediate boredom.

I think I bought this Hate Eternal album because Eric Rutan was playing on Morbid Angel's Domination. I really liked that album, so I went straight for Conquering the Throne. And like you at first, I listened to it and quickly put it on the shelf. But a year or two later, I decided to give it another chance and I listened to it for weeks. Every morning, every evening. By dint of this, all the songs have become permanently ingrained in my skull and I'm now able to hum them without a care in the world. Incidentally, a little anecdote: I have a terrible time falling asleep at night and when I want to fall asleep very quickly, I listen to Spiritual Holocaust. It's rare that I'm still awake when it's finished. I just love this track! Every time I play it, I stop everything I'm doing and concentrate on it. And concentrating on the music is one of my secrets for falling asleep faster.

[FatherAlabaster]

1 hour ago, Arioch said:

when I want to fall asleep very quickly, I listen to Spiritual Holocaust

There you have it... even their fans admit the music puts them to sleep

[Nasty_Cabbage]

Gridlink - Coronet Jumper

▶︎ Coronet Juniper | Gridlink (bandcamp.com)

I don't know that I'd call this grind, as the MA page suggests. It's just more to the point than almost anything out there with a similar tonality. Everything on this album is in service of brevity, precision, and concisely realized musical statements, and it seems to have led them to a surprising range in style. When you have no room for ostentatious ornamentation you boil everything down to a matter of 'then we play this riff' with no padding to ease the listener into the rapidly changing modes, so the riff in question has to function on it's own. It's charming in the way I can admire a huge kitchen arranged with all kinds of weird and food specific devices and a pantry bigger and more precisely arrayed than my first apartment. It's a joy to see, and fun to cook in, but ultimately a bitch to clean, and will make you hate the inventor of the home pasta arm on a faucet. Then something like this which is spare, functional, arranged for effective storage and easy access rather than visual effect looks just as admirable by comparison.

Anyway enough with overwritten metaphors. Hadn't heard these guys before, but I definitely like what they're doing. I need to stop letting the 'grindcore' tag keep me away from things.

EDIT: Wait. That album cover. Is that some sort of mech-figurine from one of those weird tabletop games where they expect you to buy the thing and paint it yourself? - 0.25 points. 

Edited March 11 by Nasty_Cabbage
Further detail

[GoatmasterGeneral]

5 hours ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Gridlink - Coronet Jumper

I don't know that I'd call this grind, as the MA page suggests. It's just more to the point than almost anything out there with a similar tonality. Everything on this album is in service of brevity, precision, and concisely realized musical statements, and it seems to have led them to a surprising range in style. When you have no room for ostentatious ornamentation you boil everything down to a matter of 'then we play this riff' with no padding to ease the listener into the rapidly changing modes, so the riff in question has to function on it's own. It's charming in the way I can admire a huge kitchen arranged with all kinds of weird and food specific devices and a pantry bigger and more precisely arrayed than my first apartment. It's a joy to see, and fun to cook in, but ultimately a bitch to clean, and will make you hate the inventor of the home pasta arm on a faucet. Then something like this which is spare, functional, arranged for effective storage and easy access rather than visual effect looks just as admirable by comparison.

Anyway enough with overwritten metaphors. Hadn't heard these guys before, but I definitely like what they're doing. I need to stop letting the 'grindcore' tag keep me away from things.

Interesting review Cabbie. Problem with grindcore is there are a variety of styles within that sub-genre. I happen to really like a lot of grindcore, guess I've been on a bit of a grindcore kick of late, but I hated this. Hate might be too strong, but I didn't like it. This doesn't sound like the same sub-genre as most of the grindcore I generally listen to. I guess I lean more toward the extreme end of gc and I prefer some death metal mixed in with my grindcore. Not saying Gridlink's been mis-genred, it's definitely grindcore, just not the 'good' grindcore. I will now proceed to go on a grindcore binge this evening.

 

NP: Sickrecy - Salvation Through Tyranny, Sweden 2022 - ahhh, the good grindcore

 

Internal Rot - Grieving Birth, Melbourne Aus 2020 grindcore

 

7 hours ago, Arioch said:

You know, when it comes to music, film or reading, taste and colour are generally hard to argue with. Everyone has their own, which they defend tooth and nail (I don't know if tooth and nail will be easy to understand).

One day, on a French Metal forum, I read a guy posting a YouTube video of a Death Metal band. He said of the album from which the title was taken: pure mega-violence. No one can come away unscathed.

Curious, I wanted to listen. I listened for 30 seconds. Not that it was ultra-violent, but it was Death Metal with mono sound, not stereo. What's more, it sounded as if the band had been recorded 3 km away from the microphones, which made for a distant hubbub. You needed a particularly attentive ear to make out anything. The singer's voice was so cavernous and distant that it sounded like he was whispering. It wasn't violence that I felt. More like deep and immediate boredom.

I think I bought this Hate Eternal album because Eric Rutan was playing on Morbid Angel's Domination. I really liked that album, so I went straight for Conquering the Throne. And like you at first, I listened to it and quickly put it on the shelf. But a year or two later, I decided to give it another chance and I listened to it for weeks. Every morning, every evening. By dint of this, all the songs have become permanently ingrained in my skull and I'm now able to hum them without a care in the world. Incidentally, a little anecdote: I have a terrible time falling asleep at night and when I want to fall asleep very quickly, I listen to Spiritual Holocaust. It's rare that I'm still awake when it's finished. I just love this track! Every time I play it, I stop everything I'm doing and concentrate on it. And concentrating on the music is one of my secrets for falling asleep faster.

I understand taste is subjective mec, and I'm not discrediting your love of HE, but I just kept seeing you guys post Hate Eternal over and over so I thought I'd weigh in and offer my thoughts on the matter. Guess I just like the death metal that doesn't put me to sleep, that's all. And yes, we say 'fight tooth and nail' over here as well. Funny I don't like Morbid Angel either, so maybe that whole side of the death metal world is just not for me. Anything with the rapid-fire clickety drums I'm almost always going to pass on. There's just too much other death metal I really like a lot to waste time on stuff I don't. But hey, I'm glad you've found a reliable method to help you get to sleep!

[markm]

10 hours ago, JonoBlade said:

Went to Cattle Decapitation on Friday night. The highlight was probably not the gig but meeting up with a mate and going to the pub afterwards until 1am, which is pretty much unheard of for me these days. Luckily I didn't have to get home afterwards, but nearly missed the last northbound tube to where I was staying. 

Anyway...to the show:

I missed the first band but saw the whole set from 200 Stab Wounds. Slave to the Scalpel | 200 Stab Wounds (bandcamp.com) Enjoyable, if unremarkable, fairly old school death metal.

As is the curse of opening acts, the guitar tone was pretty muddy so I just concentrated on watching the drummer. By the end of the set the balance was pretty good. I will give this a few listens and probably pick up on a BC Friday.

The next band was Signs of the Swarm. Absolvere | Signs of the Swarm | Unique Leader Records (bandcamp.com)

Oh dear. I believe this is what the kids call "deathcore." The above link doesn't quite capture what I took away from watching this band live. Every song was a prolonged breakdown. Each breakdown a raging torrent of breakdowns, flooded with rivulets of breakdowns, cascading into a waterfall of more breakdowns.

The typewriter drum sound and one trick vocal delivery, interjected with "circle pit" was so distracting I couldn't derive much enjoyment from this. Others around me seemed to "get it" but I was minded of the discussion of Slipknot on that other thread. This is metal made by AI for people that think lots of tattoos and flesh tunnels equate to talent. Tasteless.

Earlier in the day I had been genuinely worrying that I was just liking too much stuff I was listening to lately. I have been enjoying the shit out of the likes of post black Underdark and surf rock King Gizzard wondering if I was losing perspective. But this band renewed my faith in misanthropy. 

The main event, Cattle Decapitation, is a band I hadn't even heard before a few months ago. I had always assumed they were some joke grind band, but the AOTY accolades for Terrasite were too frequent to ignore. I am a convert, and had picked up a few other albums to cram for this gig. 

Luckily for me, I seem to have picked the albums they decided to pull pretty much the whole set from. There was only one, perhaps two, tracks I did not recognise.

I have the same gripe about the drum sound as Signs of Breakdowns mentioned above. Triggered to the point of distraction and outright offense, so that it removes any soul from the kit; I just can't fathom why any band would want this sound.  200 Stab Wounds' drum sound was so much better.

Apart from that, CatDecap were great. Vocal delivery was about what I knew it would be - flawed but so difficult to pull off live I was not expecting perfection. Still Travis Ryan is a great front man that did not once feel the need to request a circle pit or wall of death or make any other cliched idiot frontman comment. All class.

Lead guitar work is excellent with tasteful solos. Great bass tone. Rhythm guitarist had great hair and tight jeans.

From photos, it is obvious that unless I can fly, pics were taken from a balcony which was almost too steep of an angle, but a good vantage point. I stood in the same spot for 3 hours so as not to lose my place.

Finished at 11pm which vindicated my decision to stay in London rather than try to get home on a slow train and risk waking up in Crewe or Glasgow.

But, as mentioned, highlight of night was probably talking metal with buddy I don't see that often. He'd bought an autographed Terrasite LP, the bastard.

I always enjoy your gig write-ups Jon. Great stuff. You are a true metal fan. I love your passion. 

[Innominate]

Abhorrence - Completely Vulgar

Jungle Rot - Dead and Buried

[Nasty_Cabbage]

43 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Interesting review Cabbie. Problem with grindcore is there are a variety of styles within that sub-genre. I happen to really like a lot of grindcore, guess I've been on a bit of a grindcore kick of late, but I hated this. Hate might be too strong, but I didn't like it. This doesn't sound like the same sub-genre as most of the grindcore I generally listen to. I guess I lean more toward the extreme end of gc and I prefer some death metal mixed in with my grindcore. Not saying Grindlink's been mis-genred, it's definitely grindcore, just not the 'good' grindcore. I will now proceed to go on a grindcore binge this evening.

Such a large part of my aversion to grindcore is completely baseless, and has lead me to dismiss a ton of albums I might actually like if I gave them a chance. I really like Terrorizer, and a few others from the older class. I discovered the genre through Relapse records 2005-2015 crop of grindcore bands like Pig Destroyer and Nasum. I've picked up a few other bands here and there through the years, but I have to confess that at some point I kept chasing the older bands to really get a feel for the origination of the genre and that inevitably lead me to Napalm Death. I don't know what or why it is, but hearing Barney's vocal style and seeing interviews with the man, I feel an absolute biochemical level of irrational hatred that I usually reserve for serial killers and people who walk on escalators. I just don't think I could be in the same room as that man and not attempt to cause bodily harm to all present. All indicators and people I've talked to go to bat for him and say he's actually a pretty chill guy. I know this is a bad way to think, and I know it makes no sense, but knowing that doesn't all of a sudden quell my involuntary repudiation. It makes no sense, but that's what it is.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Wormrot - Voices, grindcore Singapore 2016. Digging this, seems I've unfairly overlooked these dudes. There's just so may bands with Worm in their name I get them mixed up. There's a band from Spain called Wormed everyone was all ga-ga over a few years ago that I can't stand, and I guess I must've seen these guys' albums and thought they were that band. Those Spaniards Wormed are not grind though, I believe they're some type of wacky tech death thing.

 

Grindfernö - Human Stupidity, 2023, two-piece crusty grind band from Spain. Spain seems to have a high concentration of quality death/grind bands. This is one of the better ones, solid debut, hope we see more from these hombres. Although Machetazo will probably always be my favorite Spanish deathgrind band.

 

 

 

16 minutes ago, markm said:

I always enjoy your gig write-ups Jon. Great stuff. You are a true metal fan. I love your passion. 

I enjoy his gig write-ups quite a bit as well, even though in most cases the band lineups for these gigs he goes to leaves much to be desired from my perspective. This particular gig I could not have stood through for all the Queen's filthy lucre. 20,000 Stab Wounds and Cattle Decap with a kiddie deathcore band sandwiched in between? Sweet creamery Jesus on a stick, please don't ever drag me to something like this! But keep the write-ups and pics coming Jon-O, us cantankerous old farts are living vicariously through your British tube riding metal adventures. I'm just waiting for the day when he finally gets stuck at Crewe Station.

[GoatmasterGeneral]

46 minutes ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Such a large part of my aversion to grindcore is completely baseless, and has lead me to dismiss a ton of albums I might actually like if I gave them a chance. I really like Terrorizer, and a few others from the older class. I discovered the genre through Relapse records 2005-2015 crop of grindcore bands like Pig Destroyer and Nasum. I've picked up a few other bands here and there through the years, but I have to confess that at some point I kept chasing the older bands to really get a feel for the origination of the genre and that inevitably lead me to Napalm Death. I don't know what or why it is, but hearing Barney's vocal style and seeing interviews with the man, I feel an absolute biochemical level of irrational hatred that I usually reserve for serial killers and people who walk on escalators. I just don't think I could be in the same room as that man and not attempt to cause bodily harm to all present. All indicators and people I've talked to go to bat for him and say he's actually a pretty chill guy. I know this is a bad way to think, and I know it makes no sense, but knowing that doesn't all of a sudden quell my involuntary repudiation. It makes no sense, but that's what it is.

Napalm Death started out as a grindcore band, but somewhere along the line amidst all the lineup changes they veered pretty hard into death metal territory. Some of their albums sound quite different to some others, but overall I'd call them deathgrind. At this point in their career (1990) I'd say they were closer to death metal than they were to grindcore. Although in more recent years they've since come back to embrace the grind a bit more. I like Barney's vox, think they add a lot to their sound, as does his stage demeanor. But then I tend to like most things with hardcore overtones, whereas you say that you don't. But fair enough, that's cool, absolutely nothing wrong with not liking stuff whatever the reason may be, baseless or otherwise. But still I don't see why anyone who's into the more extreme end of metal wouldn't like this. Watch a few minutes of this and tell me you don't want to get in there and mix it up with those kids (who are probably all old men now 34 years later) or jump around your cubicle and start breaking shit.

 

Napalm Death - Live Corruption, Filmed at the Salisbury Arts Centre, UK, 30th June 1990. One of the best extreme metal live performances ever recorded imho.

 

[JamesT]

Judas Priest - "Invincible Shield"

Saxon - "The Inner Sanctum"

Saxon - "Thunderbolt"

Saxon - "Call to Arms"

[GoatmasterGeneral]

Dahmer - Our Worst Recordings comp. Grindcore Quebec City, Canada 2007

 

Regurgitate - Carnivorous Erection, goregrind Sweden 2000

 

[MarkhantonioYeatts]

1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Napalm Death started out as a grindcore band, but somewhere along the line amidst all the lineup changes they veered pretty hard into death metal territory. Some of their albums sound quite different to some others, but overall I'd call them deathgrind. At this point in their career (1990) I'd say they were closer to death metal than they were to grindcore. Although in more recent years they've since come back to embrace the grind a bit more. I like Barney's vox, think they add a lot to their sound, as does his stage demeanor. But then I tend to like most things with hardcore overtones, whereas you say that you don't. But fair enough, that's cool, absolutely nothing wrong with not liking stuff whatever the reason may be, baseless or otherwise. But still I don't see why anyone who's into the more extreme end of metal wouldn't like this. Watch a few minutes of this and tell me you don't want to get in there and mix it up with those kids (who are probably all old men now 34 years later) or jump around your cubicle and start breaking shit.

 

Napalm Death - Live Corruption, Filmed at the Salisbury Arts Centre, UK, 30th June 1990. One of the best extreme metal live performances ever recorded imho.

 

....just a slight correction there, WhiteNoise.....NAPALM DEATH actually started out as a punk/hardcore band and recorded several demos and the first version of F.E.T.O., before slowly making the change to an anarcho influenced grindcore band....they are a pivotal band in extreme music(...as much so as THE SEX PISTOLS, MOTORHEAD, CELTIC FROST and G.I.S.M.) in the rest of the world outside of the U.S.A........

 

...and yes that Live Corruption video is one of my favourites....

 

G.I.S.M. - Live At RoadBurn

.....one of my all time favourite bands.....maybe my favourite....

[MarkhantonioYeatts]

G.I.S.M. - Detestation

 "....and if ya don't know...now ya know..... "