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Hails to Finland. Sweden is over rated. YES I said it. Let us not forget Sweden is responsible for both Slaughter of The Soul AND Wolverine Blues, the two biggest poxes on death metal forever after. While many of the Finland mighty did fall to the Death ‘n Roll curse, I can’t hold them responsible for the bad idea that Entombed started. So many Finnish bands go overlooked from the dawn of the death metal craze, well I hope to at least set a few people on the right path.

Belial (who by the way did unfortunately go death ‘n roll eventually), had a great little run for a couple years with a demo, a 7″ and a mlp. That 7″, “Gods Of The Pit Part II” was one of the first releases on the at the time newly minted Moribund label. Things bust out with a completely savage guitar charge on the opening track The Invocation and never let up. The old Finnish bands had a certain atmosphere that the Swedish ones never quite matched. Along with Belial, the early releases by bands like Disgrace, Necropsy, Abhorrence, and a lot more were able to bring a sort of mystical sombre feel to their metal. It makes me feel almost the same way some of the early Norwegian black metal does, although sound-wise it’s completely death metal. Swedish bands also seemed to often have some melodic underpinnings whereas more often than not Finnish bands of the same era were just dealing in full on brutality. Absolutely forgotten classic this one is.

I’m backdating this as a Metal Monday posting but it’s really like Thursday here…

I found a nice bunch of death metal demos here. A couple of serious classic status.  I just finished recording a death metal record for my friend and so I’ve been really brutally oriented lately. Anyway here’s a list of the good shit; alphabetically:

• Crematory “Wrath From The Unknown” cs (1991):
  • Crematory were a lesser band in the Swedish cannon, managing one mlp and a few demo tapes over a couple years, Wrath From the Unknown being the 3rd of 4 demos. They never quite distinguished themselves from some of the bigger bands, but they played the Swedish style of DM quite well and some of them went on to be in lineups of Regurgitate, Afflicted, and Nasum.  I generally feel like this is their best release, outclassing the Denial mlp a bit and being the best of their demos as well.
• Dismember “Reborn in Blasphemy” cs (1990):
  • Ah Dismember, my favorite of the Swedes. Their simple brutality colored with dark melodies is fully-formed for the first time on this tape which basically serves as a teaser for their debut lp “Like An Ever-Flowing Stream”. Their two previous demos, though good, don’t really show the Dismember sound as many of those songs sort of became shared songs with Carnage. So when this demo kicks off with the band’s theme song Dismembered, it must have shocked a few people. It’s a beautiful and sinister melody that plays over the detuned chords. An instant classic.
• Morpheus - “Accelerated Decrepitude” cs 1991:
  • The only non-Swedes on the list here, Morpheus (later becoming Morpheus Descends) were a brutal New York based band, that still haven’t quite got their due (IMO). This is their first demo, which was also issued as a double 7″ on Seraphic Decay under a different title (”Adipocere”). I’ve heard these dudes were serious about their drug consumption, and took to smoking dust in graveyards while listening to Soulside Journey on a boombox. That should give you an idea what to expect from this musically.
• Nihilist - “Only Shreds Remain” cs (1989):
  • As you might know, Nihilist is the band that eventually became Entombed, and about half the songs on Entombed’s debut lp “Left Hand Path” come from Nihilist’s demo recordings. Only Shreds remain contains two songs later to be re-recorded for this album (”Abnormally Deceased” and “Revel In Flesh), as well as the exclusive “True Face Of Evil”. Similar to Reborn In Blasphemy, this is the first Nihilist tape to really have the full formed Nihilist/Entombed sound. Their previous tape almost sounded like a more detuned Kreator, but here is the first appearance of LG Petrov’s signature death growl.

Turning this Metal Monday over to Stuart Schrader of Shit-fi dot com. Check it out it’s a good ‘un.

V8 “Luchando Por El Metal” LP
By: Stuart Schrader

V8 was the first true heavy metal band from Argentina and arguably the first from South America. Like the classic Argentine punk band Los Violadores, V8’s first LP was released by the independent label Umbral in 1983. “Luchando Por El Metal” is a landmark record, and it’s a shame it is not more well-known outside Argentina. It’s such a classic in Argentina that one can hardly walk down the street without encountering headbangers pledging allegiance to V8 (pronounced VAY-OH-CHO).

The online heavy metal archive site Encyclopaedia Metallum is full of effusive praise for V8, as is the South American metal history site Metaleros, which includes a great history of the band and Argentine metal in general. To really understand where the band was coming from, you need to know about Argentine guitar god Pappo, whom I’ll get to in a minute, but this riff-driven LP really just sounds like a mixture of Motörhead and Judas Priest, with a dash of Black Sabbath. It’s not NWOBHM, it’s FWOAHM. Some of the faster (and better) songs even have a feeling akin to metal-influenced UK hardcore of the early 80s, unfortunately minus Discharge’s drumbeat. Think GBH. (Fans of Canada’s Inepsy would probably love this record.) The production is perfect for this type of music, without any fancy embellishment: guitars prominent, bass drum and vocals next in line.

“Luchando Por El Metal” is not particularly rare because thousands were pressed, but it had zero distribution outside Latin America when it was released as far as I know. Also, Argentines do not have much of a collecting culture, meaning “mint” in Argentina is quite different from “mint” here in the land of Puritanism, and the flimsy stock used for the jacket doesn’t lend itself to durability. In addition, one listen to this LP will demonstrate why it tends to be in “partied-on” condition. It’s a ripper.

Like Los Violadores’ first LP, “Luchando Por El Metal” includes a printed inner sleeve with lyrics. And what lyrics they are! True headbanging fanatics will derive great pleasure, if not goosebumps, from songs like “Brigadas Metálicas,” “Tiempos Metálicos” (lyrics: “Basta de hippies / basta de rogar / estalló el tiempo del metal”), and “Hiena de Metal”—yes, Hyena of Metal! About that last one, which closes the album, V8 collaborated with their hero Pappo on this one (he plays the solo), which I found surprising because it’s the shortest and fastest tune on the record. It actually reminds me of Chelsea’s guest solo on that one Selfish song, if that helps: the whole band concept was inspired by this virtuoso and when he collaborated with them on a song, he threw a curve ball, unlike anything he’d done before. Anyway, the lyrics, as far as my rudimentary grasp of Spanish tells me, combine the dumb dark “poetry” typical to metal since Sabbath with cheeky irreverence, as in the song about a visit to a torturador known as the dentist! (In a country where people were actually being tortured and killed by the military dictatorship, such a joke probably came across as tasteless to both sides.)

To digress on Pappo (né Norberto Napolitano), who died in a motorcycle crash in 2005, this guy was without peer. He was a hero to millions, especially those who saw him as a working-class rocknroll outsider type, the perpetual underdog. He released over a dozen LPs and even more singles throughout his career, which began in the late 1960s. His group Pappo’s Blues, which released seven albums in the 1970s, was a pioneering hard-rock/psych/heavy blues-rock act. In 1977, he formed Aeroblus, another heavy blues-rock band. And in 1980, influenced by AC/DC, he formed Riff, which is the band of greatest interest to me. (I haven’t heard all of what he released, but Riff seems better than either of the previous bands.) Veering more toward heavy metal, away from blues rock, Riff is a band quite worthy of its name. Fans of riff-centric rocknroll would do well to check them out (obviously). I saw a few copies of their records in Buenos Aires; the first, “Ruedas de Metal,” is pretty cool. Don’t pay much more than US $20 for it because thousands of copies were pressed. Psych collectors seem to think that Pappo’s Blues Vol. 3 is the most desirable of his 70s albums, but it doesn’t move me much. Vol. 7 from 1978 was recommended to me as much heavier than Vol. 3, but this one seems to have some sort of “Southern” rock influence, with a bunch of slide guitar. It’s got some cool, slow riffs, but overall it’s not really heavy or ballsy in comparison to what was happening in the UK or Australia at the time. Headline: “Southern rock meets the southern cone: Scumbags rejoice, ride motorcycles, drink maté.” Oh yeah, most Pappo’s Blues songs are instrumentals. You’ve been warned.

Anyway, if you’re not ready to delve too far into Argentine 70s–80s rock, the only records you need from this site’s perspective are V8’s and Los Violadores’ first LPs. “Luchando Por El Metal” is on eBay relatively frequently for buy-it-now prices around $80. That’s too much, in my opinion. But I say you ignore this record at your own peril. One listen and you too will become a hiena de metal.

I Was going to finish this post at home last night, and wouldn’t you know it, our internet was down most of the night. So here we are Tuesday morning, revisiting my Metal Monday. For this particular Monday of Metal, I give you the fairly hard to find Ripping Corpse - Dreaming With the Dead on Maze records. This is pretty easy to track down on CD, but since it was released in 1990 the vinyl doesn’t turn up too often, and was probably mostly relegated to Europe anyway.

Ripping Corpse took their name from an early Kreator song, and for the first part of their existence (the demo phase) were basically sub-Kreator/Slayer/Dark Angel evil-thrash. A bit techy, a bit predictable, but good mosh parts. While I’ll always prefer their Splattered Remains demo recording, Dreaming With the Dead is still a great chunk of not quite Death Metal tech-Thrash. You can tell that by the time they got to record this album, the Thrash thing was already waning, Death Metal and Grindcore were on the rise, Metallica and Slayer were long gone from the underground, and Ripping Corpse were basically obsolete. Their solution is basically to get a little more technical (like Kreator “Extreme Aggression”), try and sing a little harder, and kind of just cover up for the fact that they’re not really a death metal band. Maybe that’s an inglorious view of the whole thing, but lets be real, I’m probably not far off. Rift Of Hate, a holdover from previous demos now contains sections that are much slower and more sinister sounding where previously there was just a heavy slam section. Unearthly death grunts and shrieks are now added in places for emphasis while Tom Araya style “high-notes” are gone.

Part of what makes Dreaming With the Dead kind of awesome though is that it really could have only been made at this one point in time. When a New Jersey thrash band was trying to adapt itself to new extremities and depths that they couldn’t have been expected to predict. Erik Rutan’s notable guitar shredding helped them through to at least gain minor notoriety in metal circles, but there was no place for a band like Ripping Corpse by the time this album came out.

Snowed in today… how about a classic:
Sarcofago - “I.N.R.I.”

As far as I can tell from the information in the auction this is the original Cogumelo pressing of the album with an orange tinted cover photo, (COG 007).

A lot of necrolords out there love to throw this one in the ring as a band that helped lay the foundations for modern black metal. Honestly I think it’s a bit exaggerated. 2 notable aspects of this record later adopted by black metal bands:

1) corpse painted members (it’s not like they were the first band to do this)
2) heavy use of blast beats, even in places where a more standard fast beat would do

Riffwise there’s really very little in common with what’s considered “black metal” now , and it’s a lot more like what you’d consider “black thrash”, sort of a post thrash metal grey area between black and death metal. Somewhere between a mix of Hellhammer, Slayer, Bathory, Possessed, and Sodom. As for the blasting, it’s helped along considerably by some kind of heavy studio magic. I can’t say if it’s triggering or if it’s an extremely heavily gated/EQ’d sound, but it’s definitely the most processed snare I’ve ever heard on a metal record. I honestly thought it was a drum machine the first time I listened, also partially due to the relative loudness of the snare in the drum mix. It’s much louder than any of the other drums, and the cymbals are barely audible at points, giving it a very artificial, and drum machine-ish sound. It’s emphasized more by the relatively high number of beats-per-minute due to the blasting. Drummer D.D. Crazy, despite the weird drum sound though, does come pretty hard on this and really does set the pace for a lot of extreme metal thereafter. He also went on to play on another landmark Brazilian lp, Sex Trash’s “Sexual Carnage”, another album your Mom should never know about.

There’s just no denying I.N.R.I. is an extreme and landmark album. The riffs, while inspired by the bands mentioned above, seem determined to make absolutely no concessions for anything other than all out brutality. Whereas Possessed were getting experimental via Larry Lalonde, Slayer were working with a major label, and most of Hellhammer were making avant-garde doom in Celtic Frost, Sarcofago are pushing in the opposite directions here. Determined to violate the listener with stomach churning tasteless thrash that in the end sounds most like the early Sodom offerings beefed up to much more disgusting and focused levels of evil. If extreme metal that followed in subsequent years is comparable to the horror movie genre, then I.N.R.I. is Last House On The Left. A completely shocking and new level of sickening garbage to inspire future death and black metal shut-ins and freaks. Even though it’s technically been surpassed since it was released, it still remains gruesome and affecting. In the 80’s parents were worried about bands like Judas Priest or maybe Slayer, but if they’d been aware there were records being released that sounded like this I really think a lot of them would have died of shock. Vocalist “Antichrist” (birth name: Wagner Lamounier – currently a professor of economic science and applied statistic at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil), shrieks, howls, and gurgles his way through numerous new (at the time) lows in the lyrical department (I’ll leave it to you to google for lyrics). Vocals drown in tons of canned reverb at some points, and at others double and triple over pitch shifted versions of themselves. At this point Lamounier also began cultivating a long standing feud with his former band Sepultura, probably the biggest band in the Brazilian metal underground at the time. Eventually this also led to encompass Ratos De Porao (who took the Sepultura side).

Dude another Seraphic Decay post? YES. (I hope I haven’t done this one before. I don’t really trust the search.) One of the finest and most desirable SD releases Mortician - Brutally Mutilated 7″. This is as low brow as music can get. There’s no way you can explain this to your parents, your girlfriend, your co-workers. You are a fucking freak if you dig this pile of excrement. The cones on your speakers will actually start to emanate the smell of wet garbage. Believe me, I know; I own this classic slab.

Listening to brutal death metal, grindcore, and other such harsh musics is what I think being a drug addict is like. I’ve never been a drug addict but I’ve heard about that shit. The first time it’s disorienting but something brings you back for a second fix, and then a third, and then you’ve got a taste for the foul stuff. Pretty soon the only people you talk to are other crackheads about the last hit you had: “dude the Traumatic - “The Process of Raping a Rancid Cadaver” demo…” (yes this is a real demo). In a word this is the most degraded catagory of music available on earth. Absolutely the lowest. However, there is something to be said for such a thing.

The incredible paradox of most death metal bands is that they are absolutely the most micro niche-specific music ever, but unlike say, “Noise”, “Lofi Black Metal”, “Hardcore”, etc. they generally require hours of practice and high levels of skill to perform. In that way I expect the late John Peel, was right in comparing the early offerings of bands like Carcass to “Free Jazz”. As they say, Jazz is made for other Jazz musicians, in that way it’s kind of vulgar and excessive, and a record like Mortician’s “Brutally Mutilated” is much the same. Virtually no one outside of genre followers can appreciate what’s on display on this record. A side note here, the level of skill is actually fairly low for a death metal record, which maybe actually insulates it more from the understanding of outsiders. At least on some level even the most uninitiated have to admit that “Left Hand Path”has skillful performances, whether they can appreciate the sound or not. The skill level on Brutally Mutilated though, probably gets up to a 4 on a scale of 1-10. Sloppy performances, simple riffs, and the band is never all that in sync. To me this makes for a better listen. It’s the difference between a CGI monster and a make-up and corn syrup job in a horror movie.

Speaking of horror movies - that’s basically as deep as it gets with Mortician. The alpha and omega of their influences. If the song titles “Mortician” and “Brutally Mutilated” didn’t flesh that out enough for you, just refer to “Necro Cannibal”. For early death metal and grind this is a pretty great single. The vocals aren’t so deep that they lose the flavor, the drums actually sound great (big boomy bass drum, very uncommon for this style), the guitars are nice and thick and not too treble-ful. A genre classic to be sure. Oh for those in the know, this is actually when the band still recorded w/ a live drummer (Matt Sicher R.I.P.).

Like I said before this is one of the more desirable Seraphic Decay items, though it comes up frequently, this was one of the bands that actually “made it” (you know… in the scene), so a lot of people want it. I’ve seen a lot on blue vinyl, some with different color covers (mine is tan). I know there’s black vinyl too. 

ps. This post shoulda gone up yesterday sorrrrry.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something that I love about old thrash metal sleeves like nothing else. The combination of poor execution, and ridiculous concept, and all the bright colors and airbrushing too. Many times I’ve bought records for killer sleeves only to have them suck when they hit the stereo back home.

Picked this Virus lp on Metal Works up over the weekend. Pretty good UK thrashing. A bit like the first Onslaught lp, very ignorant with lots of war themes. I expect at least one of these dudes was in a punk band at some point. Very simple, school notebook level art on this one. Totally 2-D.

This Viking Do Or Die lp is an alltime fav that I’ve mentioned before. There was some Dark Angel member involvement and this is almost as good. Lots of good meaty riffs. I think Gene Hoglan may have helped get this band their start, but I’m not entirely sure. The cover looks like it should be some reject power metal band with the terrible logo made of rocks, but this is total Slayer worship.

Love the hell beasts on the cover of Sacrifice’s Torment In Fire. It looks like someone’s high school art project for like a colored pencil unit, which makes sense because on the back of the sleeve none of these dudes look old enough to even vote.

Wehrmacht are a bit more party metal than the rest, as is evidenced by the zombie water skiing on 2 sharks, but at least they’ve got some carnivorous creatures of the deep and a zombie in the mix. I don’t really know how this would work out in real life, I don’t think the zombie would be able to balance and the sharks don’t look to be going that fast. Apparently one of these dudes went on to the band Everclear. Oops.

Awww jeez - another leave of absence. Here we are again though ready to roll out this hits in the frozen hellish tundra of Boston MA. Today - feast upon Slaughter’s blasphemous “Strappado” lp. If you are a poser you might confuse this fine album with the work of that late 80’s hair metal band of the same name. I’ll save you the embarrassment dude. Canada’s Slaughter were one of the earlier metal bands to really push some of their tempos to the extreme. Proto-death metal, etc. Honestly they’re a little tame by our standards today, kind of in the same way Venom can be for the uninitiated, a little more cartoony, a little less serious, and with rudimentary recording and playing.

For me this makes Slaughter all the better. When the yell of “make way for the Incinerator” hits, and the worlds stupidest drum beat kicks in, it’s impossible not to laugh a little, but as you may know, I’m of the belief that primitive delivery often suits metal better than the more well known approach of precision and technical proficiency. Slaughter actually has kind of a punky vibe, and this song is a perfect example. Basic riffs, basic drumming, and simple lyrics, but they come together for the kind of low brow fun I love. Slaughter kind of sounds like a less grinding Repulsion to me, maybe less Slayer and more Venom in the mix. Although a lot of these songs were several years old and had been on a number of demos, Strappado didn’t actually hit the street til ‘87 on Diabolic Force Records. A little late in the game for songs like Fuck Of Death, or Tales Of The Macabre. By that I only mean that the metal masses had already moved onto stuff that was more extreme and over the top, I just think the timing was wrong for a big breakthrough.

 That said this is one of the greats, and the only album Slaughter actually managed in their time, though I highly recommend you download all of their demos too.

“How many Mondays that serve me with evil, I know not. / My empires has no limits.”

Metal Monday vol. 45

I’m trying to get back to numbering these posts, and though “I know not” for sure, I’m pretty sure we’re on 45 here.

Today, an Earache classic: Godflesh’s - Street Cleaner. You probably know this album even if you’re not much of a metal fan, because it’s been adopted by hardcore, indie rock, and post rock, fans alike as an acceptable piece of kill your mother type music on a label best known for being the original home of bands like Napalm Death, Entombed, and Carcass. Unlike those groups though, Godflesh is a band beloved by idiots who think a record can only have artistic merit if it involves brooding things like… questioning oneself and other such difficult ruminations on humanity. This is no fault of Godflesh (on this album Justin Broadrick and GC Green, with some additional contributions from Paul Neville), but it gets kind of rough when one record is appropriated by so many bespectacled dorks and hateful mortains. Of course to make up for it, my roommate who spends 2-3 hours of the day at the gym, and wakes up everyday at 6 AM, wears a Godflesh sweatshirt while he watches the discovery channel and eats chicken. So yea, there are cool people that like this cool band too. But enough about that. What’s the appeal?

Street Cleaner is basically a post death metal version of Big Black “Songs About Fucking” +  Swans “Cop”. Mechanical drum machine smashing, guitars that sound like a steel mill, deep dark reverb drenching everything, and bleak, miserable lyrics. The vocal approach is deep and guttural, and that, combined with Broaderick’s ex-Napalm Death status, was enough to get them a featured player status on some of the major Earache tours of the time (I think the US version of the Grindcrusher tour). Maybe because of that, Godflesh never made another album like Streetcleaner, preferring to experiment with, ahem, “electronica”, “shoegaze” and “dub” elements on most of their subsequent recordings. Here though they’re all monolithic, monochromatic focus. Each track works a slow crawling tempo against a wall of guitars. Sometimes there’s notes, and sometimes there’s just feedback and scraping noises. It’s oppressive, and harsh, like a prison planet run by robots in the horrible and inevitable future. For all the metal bands that refer to themselves as harsh or cold, I don’t think there’s any colder than Godflesh on this lp. They’re a lifeless, emotionless void that will envelope you. It’s a simple formula, but it can’t be stated enough how perfectly they do it here.

Welcome to 2009, hope all your holidays went well.

Anyway, back to the ‘ol Metal Monday feature that almost no one but me loves. I was going to do a Saint Vitus entry until I realized there were no good Vitus records for sale right now, and then I found this lost Finnish nugget:

Necropsy - Never to Be Forgotten 7″ on my favorite, Seraphic Decay records.

This one is absolute head-spinning death metal insanity. Real skull crushing power, that just lends itself to my theory that Finland is the most brutal death metal locale in Europe. First of all the vocals on this one are just absolutely first rate growling, throat shredding, and evil. Reminds me a bit of Johnny Hedlund from Unleashed, or at least in the same ballpark. Very deep but still very full and expressive sounding, not at all the kind of whispered gurgling employed by bands much shittier than this.

Musically Necropsy kind of tow the typical Finnish line which is a little bit darker/less melodic version of the typical Swedish/Euro death metal sound. Probably the best known of this style is Amoprhis (and their precursor Abhorrence), so if you know them picture a bit rougher version of that. Another thing that sets Necropsy apart for me is that their blasts are noticeably quite fast, although there isn’t a ton of blast beats on here, when they do use them they really dig in at top speed. Some of their earlier recordings made a little bit more use of blast beats and were a bit more influenced (at least in the drumming) by grind bands of the day.

Necropsy never managed a proper lp release, which is a goddamn shame, because I think it would have solidified them as a major contender in their day. They do have a split lp with Demigod (another of the Finnish greats), also on Seraphic Decay, and a slew of great demos which REALLY should get the discography treatment sometime before the end of this decade. Anyway, Never To Be Forgotten is one of the few records on Seraphic Decay that doesn’t look like a total bootleg (has a 2 color sleeve, and isn’t pressed on scrap vinyl), although from an email I got from one of the guitar players not too long ago, the “label” never bothered to actually give the band copies of it.