rolling 2024 heavy metal and boutique blast beat thread

One of my Bandcamp Friday purchases today is gonna be the whole discography (3 albums) from the German band Attic, who play trad shred metal with an extremely King Diamond-y vocalist. They have an awesome band photo:

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0004303157_10.jpg

the new Austere album is out

file Witch Vomit and Hour of Penance under "bands who are always reliable and knocked it out of the park again".

ok Witch Vomit is an incredible band name

one of the many that lead my friends to say 'you're just trolling now, right'

it always amuses me when bands have goofball juvenile names like that and you expect they're just going to be caveman shit and it's actually well-crafted, like the aforementioned WV, Anal Vomit, and Bathtub Shitter

similar to Detroit's Shitfucker, who are actually really well put-together 80s metal/punk but they're also called Shitfucker so who in the hell am I ever going to talk to them about

Bathtub Shitter is, for real, one of my favorite band names ever. Instantly alienating, instantly memorable, a disgusting but totally vivid image...it's perfect.

It's always hilarious to type, but honestly, big Shitfucker fan right here.

Shitfucker's "Suck Cocks in Hell" is an album title for the ages too

I had a pretty great time at Monochrome, would have been better if I hadn't been struggling with the flu which meant I had reached my limits after Gnaw Their Tongues (so only 10 bands). Pace was relentless though, one thing finished and the next started in the other room immediately afterwards, and there was no neutral space except out in the street so pretty full-on.

Highlights were the absolutely immense Gnaw Their Tongues, who delivered Lustmord death ambience with guttural screeching over the top - let's face it, every music festival needs a 50 year old overweight guy stumbling about on an unlit stage - and the other noise act Distraxi, who were heavily Masonna influenced.

Guttersnipe and Cuntroaches both unfortunately let down by the sound on their stage, the former with not nearly enough top end and the latter with gtr and bass way too low in the mix, but enjoyed both hugely despite the issues. Guttersnipe sound much less like Rudimentary Peni than they used to but also seem less keen on writing things that sound at all like traditional songcraft so very much swings and roundabouts. Cuntroaches are like a crust version of The Ex, and much like them are at their best when they try something totally different - their take on a disco track could have been epic if the mix was right.

I really wanted to like Psudoku a lot, given how they'd been written up but it smacked of jazz guys putting together a grindcore band as an experiment, and reminded me more of Battles than anything else - more interested in the technical difficulties rather than the songs.

Human Leather were my favourite non-noise thing, kind of sludgy but with a sort of Killslug undercurrent. Huge lots of the appeal is down to the singer though who (without wanting to trot out tropes about large non-conventionally-attractive women, but finding them very accurate in her case) has the best personality on stage all day and is funny and disarming in a way that overcomes some of the technical shortfalls (both in sound and ability).

The remainder were fine at what they did but were straight down the line and didn't do anything interesting with it, although thanks to Cavalerie and their bog standard death I did at least have one spell outside.

Would have liked to have stayed for Aluk Todolo but just wasn't up to it.

I really wanted to like Psudoku a lot, given how they’d been written up but it smacked of jazz guys putting together a grindcore band as an experiment, and reminded me more of Battles than anything else - more interested in the technical difficulties rather than the songs.

I’ve liked the solo Psudoku stuff, but I prefer Brutal Blues, the Psudoku guy’s collab with one half of MoHa!. So your view is understanable; the jazzbo tendency has been there for a while.

And now I’ve just learned that the j-word is actually racist, so I wholeheartedly retract it.

xxxxp add Attic to the "legitimately good band promo photos" thread!

"Evil is Everywhere" on the Iron Curtain album is such a jam.

new replicant out today:

https://replicantband.bandcamp.com/album/infinite-mortality

more metalcore slammin groove parts than i expected but not complaining. a couple moments bordering on meshuggah circa catch 33 too. im guessing the band members may have some history with moshy hardcore, but theyre from NJ, so might just be in their blood.

I pre-ordered that but listening to it at 8 AM was a mistake; I thought it had been on for about 40 minutes and it turned out I'd only heard the first three songs. Might go back to it tonight while I'm editing a truly awful manuscript.

Just got a promo of the new Six Feet Under album and...it's...not...completely...terrible? Jack Owen's in the band now, so the guitars at least rule. The second guitarist, Ray Suhy, is a jazz player who put out a really good album with pianist Lewis Porter, bassist Brad Jones, and drummer Rudy Royston a couple of years ago:

https://sunnysiderecords.bandcamp.com/album/transcendent

Also, there's a song on this album called "Neanderthal," so I'm predisposed to like it.

How did I not know until today that there's a new Necrot album coming out tomorrow? Mortal, from 2020, was amazing, and on first listen this is just as good.

https://necrot.bandcamp.com/album/lifeless-birth

yeah I"ve been excited for it.

I went to see them open for Muni Waste despite not liking Muni Waste, only to find out they're doing a headlining US tour a few months from now. lol...welp, cool!

also excited to hear it. not just because i liked the other one but but because, as the old saying goes, “if the cover has a giant demon with an evil devil crotch sucking up naked guys, its gotta be pretty cool”

I read it exactly the opposite way — that the demon was giving birth to those guys, and then eating them.

🤔

fuuuuuuuuuuuck, the Necrot cooks

dude's leads are underrated too, the solos r tasteful as hell

"Winds of Hell" has the most triumphant melodeath riff in recent memory, even though melodeath isn't even remotely what Necrot do, they just threw it into the song and it worked

now onto the new Benighted

solid as normal but it's not touching the Necrot. it's weird, they don't live in the fast Autopsy tempo mode they did on the previous album, they settle in for mid-tempo moments a lot more. the riffs are just sharper, and as said above, the guitar solos are better than ever, they're surprisingly tasteful and melodic for a band of thsi style

Necrot-style OSDM is the stuff that makes me dream about taking up drums and being a death metal drummer.

There's a very interesting essay on Stereogum about the changes in big-name, mass-market metal. It's really long and I'm not done reading it yet, but he deals with Ghost, Bring Me The Horizon, and Sleep Token in depth and his analysis of metal overall, while it definitely comes from someone much younger than me, is all the more fascinating for that. And the first few paragraphs provide some excellent slash-and-burn:

Let’s just get this out of the way up top: No, metal isn’t dead. If you look around the underground today, there are plenty of thriving pockets: death metal, black metal, doom, thrash, sludge, etc. Metal as a holistic genre of music is alive and well. But as a cultural force that extends beyond small clubs, filling stadiums and festival grounds worldwide and provoking the uninitiated masses with its wicked sounds and filth-mongering imagery, metal — the sound, spirit, and culture — is in a precarious state. The genre’s longstanding A-listers feel less vital (and less cool) than ever, and the generation of bands who are slated to take their place are less metal (and arguably less cool) than at any previous era in the genre’s history.

Metallica and Megadeth are each more popular and more uninteresting than they’ve ever been — safe, sterile, and flagrantly leveraging their brand values to disrupt the whiskey and NFT markets. Slipknot are little more than a masked LLC at this point, shedding beloved members, getting sued by the estate of a dead one, and barely keeping a lid on their creative bankruptcy, all while frontman Corey Taylor pursues one of the worst solo careers in recent memory. Ozzy Osbourne is too incapacitated to tour, but has enough spring in his step to bang out a third LP with grandad-whisperer Andrew Watt, the 33-year-old whizkid who oversaw Ozzman’s geriatric jerk-off anthem on 2022’s woefully limp Patient Number 9. I can already feel the anticipation building around which Pearl Jam guitarist will guest on the next album. Heavy fucking metal! Speaking of make-work programs for Zakk Wylde, Pantera are touring again — and without the co-founding Abbott brothers — but somehow that doesn’t feel as heinous as Static-X barreling forward in “tribute” (i.e. cha-ching) to late singer-songwriter Wayne Static. It appears that Linkin Park are about to do the same thing.

Avenged Sevenfold took seven years to follow their Elon Musk-inspired 2016 dumpster fire, The Stage, with 2023’s Life Is But A Dream…, a pseudo-intellectual shitstorm inspired by Daft Punk and Yeezus that’s genuinely more grating to listen to than Lulu. To make matters worse, the band, arguably the closest thing the 21st century has produced to a capital-“m” Metal act who can fill stadiums when Metallica and Mötley Crüe aren’t in town, see heavy music’s future in Silicon Valley, having inundated their fans with NFT evangelizing, atrocious-looking VR concerts, and their “heavy-metal approach to token-gated ticketing” — i.e. partnering with Live Nation on a blockchain ticketing service. “It’s your fuckin’ nightmare” indeed, boys.

Who’s left? Judas Priest and Iron Maiden have, at most, a decade left in the tank. Korn will continue to release the same song every three years for the rest of eternity if they can, but Limp Bizkit’s improbable return to headliner status already feels doomed as nu-metal’s memetic revival starts to wither. Deftones are thriving, no doubt about that, but they’re an anomaly among their peers. System Of A Down hate each other and will likely never tour again (although they did just announce a special one-off show with Deftones). Rage Against The Machine (probably) hate each other and will likely never tour again. Marilyn Manson is certainly hated but will, unfortunately, tour again. The alleged serial abuser will make his controversial comeback this summer opening for Five Finger Death Punch, who’ve cornered the market on Pantera cosplay and army recruitment office balladry now that A7X are off in the meta-verse. But don’t worry, Tool are still kickin’, and they’ve got plenty of $2,500 tour posters and $800 fetus-in-skull sculptures to go around.

Korn, Limp Bizikit, Deftones, Marilyn Manson, Tool and RATM were all scraping the very borderlines of Metal though, the criticism that "today's big metal bands are less metal/less cool than at any previous era" has been a constant lament since the mid-90s.

But yeah, Metal at this point is pretty much where Jazz has been since the 1970s - thriving in the sense that it's absorbed into music history, there's still lots of people playing it and listening to it, and the heritage acts like Metallica, Slayer and Maiden are still as widely loved and respected as Miles, Satchmo, Nina and Billie, but it's dead in the sense that it's done both as a major cultural force and as something at the artistic forefront of today's music.

I mean, at this point it's very difficult to draw up a list of the 100 most important Metal bands ever, and make a solid case for a spot for even a single popular/big band that debuted post-2000.

the conclusion is obviously true but tbh accessibility as well as mainstream radio being more centered around rock in past decades had a lot to do with it. there will probably never be bands with the stature of Maiden or Priest again, but that's largely because mainstream radio seems to move further and further from guitar-based music as years progressed.

Blink 182 were the first rock band to top the Billboard Top 200 chart in 2023 (in October), and only RHCP and Machine Gun Kelly topped it in 2022. Not a single rock act topped it in 2021.

Compare that to 1982, when AC/DC, Foreigner, and J. Geils Band, Asia, and John Cougar topped the charts, or 1987 when Springsteen did it TWICE in one year, Bon Jovi, U2 and Los Lobos also owning the charts. Obv these aren't metal bands but it shows rock more in the front and center in mainstream consciousness.

add on top of that the earliest progenitors are metal were also catchy as hell and that helped a lot. the metal that was ear-wormy in the earliest incarnation of the genre though just so happens to be a style that devoted lifer metalheads like us also liked, whereas now, most of the mainstream shit sounds watered down and boring to us since it's largely metalcore or diluted stuff.

more abrasive subgenres of metal were never huge cultural forces, they were always big fish within a much smaller swimming pool. the sheer number of albums easily accessible now also dilutes attention, whereas you had to make effort to hear all of these bands pre-streaming era. I buy no shortage of albums a year that I forget I even have now.

Neanderthal OTM as far as my own thoughts about this go. Especially with regard to the (more extreme) metal that’s my preference. Like, how close did we get to mainstream acceptance there? Morbid Angel on Warner Bros and a clip or two on Beavis and Butt-Head?

Cannibal Corpse in Ace Ventura?

add on top of that the earliest progenitors are metal were also catchy as hell and that helped a lot. the metal that was ear-wormy in the earliest incarnation of the genre though just so happens to be a style that devoted lifer metalheads like us also liked, whereas now, most of the mainstream shit sounds watered down and boring to us since it's largely metalcore or diluted stuff.

more abrasive subgenres of metal were never huge cultural forces, they were always big fish within a much smaller swimming pool.

Maybe it's just my own perspective based on not reading Revolver, but it feels like over the last however many years, underground metal has dominated the discourse to the point that not only can trad/power metal bands not get a fair shake at all from US journalists, but anything that's not black metal, death metal, or metalcore/deathcore isn't even considered metal at all. Witness the fact that 80s bands like Ratt, Warrant, and Poison don't have Metal Archives pages. (Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P do, though.) So there's really no way for a melodic but heavy band to even build up a support base in the metal press, such as it is.

xpost I feel like a traditional heavy metal band COULD become big again, not by 80s standards, but by 21st century standards. Ghost at least started like a NWOBHM-esque band before going poppier. and the Canadian band 3 Inches of Blood seemed to want to become that next big heavy metal band, they cracked the Billboard Top 200 and Canadian charts, they opened for Maiden and Metallica, their albums were well received*, their drummer beat up the guy from Saxon....and then they disbanded for 11 years before they could grow any further.

*I hate Cam Pipes's vocals

Maybe it's just my own perspective based on not reading Revolver, but it feels like over the last however many years, underground metal has dominated the discourse to the point that not only can trad/power metal bands not get a fair shake at all from US journalists, but anything that's not black metal, death metal, or metalcore/deathcore isn't even considered metal at all. Witness the fact that 80s bands like Ratt, Warrant, and Poison don't have Metal Archives pages. (Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P do, though.) So there's really no way for a melodic but heavy band to even build up a support base in the metal press, such as it is.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Monday, April 15, 2024 1:22 PM bookmarkflaglink

my perspective too and it drives me insane. "extreme or go home" is just the most boring way to be to me, and I say that as a dude who eats death metal like Corn Pops. when there are still a significant number of traditional heavy metal/epic metal bands out there making quality music. it's had quite the revival, and it's more inspired than the thrash revival ever was.

like I keep running into a growing number of revisionist metalheads who are essentially saying it outright isn't metal at all and that's nuts. I remember some shitlord black metal musician hearing In Solitude's second album and saying "what does this crap have to do with metal?" in Decibel magazine, and it's like....did you miss out on 1969-1987? or something.

in honor of this thread, listening to nothing but Angel Witch, Diamond Head, Saxon, and Blitzkrieg

my friend Ed, who I saw Satan with, when I complained about this, shook his head and said "I don't think these people realized that NWOBHM bands WERE the 'extreme' metal bands when they came out. metal itself was extreme!"

Ghost will probably end up being the sole traditional flag bearer in mainstream rock/metal, because it's skewing crazily towards surreally mediocre deathcore right now. I can't see the metal my generation grew up with ever becoming as big ever again.

As for 3IOB, they're doing reunion shows in Canada this year, and holy moly they've been selling out fast. They had to move the Montréal show to a bigger venue. A lot of us have missed that band like crazy. And big Cam Pipes fan here!

I don't think it's realistic to think any big new metal bands to sound or be like the 80s bands you grew up with. If nu-metal is anything to go by, it almost certainly will be something we all hate but the kids love it.

I feel like what's popular is cyclical though. Nu-metal have way to metalcore and then deathcore seems to have taken over slightly but there's no reason a more traditional band can't do it.

Perhaps Maiden/Priest need to retire first to leave a vacuum though

I do think the people who listen to deathcore/metalcore who are averse to traditional heavy metal object to what they see as the datedness of the material from the 80s, what they think is cheesy production, perhaps the vocals being too 'dramatic' for them.

but I feel like when the sound is modernized a bit they're more amenable. two of my good friends always said they hated Priest and Maiden and stuff like that, they were more into the deathcore-y/nu-metal stuff, and the new Priest came out and both were like "wow this is actually really great", and it's cos Rob is shrieking, and it sounds slick and full.

i'm sure a new sound will come along that takes off at some point. I don't see an old fashioned sound taking off other than to people like us who lapped up Ghost, Uncle Acid, Witchcraft, In Solitude etc

Personally I find metal as it is perfectly fine. It's the heavier rock groups that's lacking IMO

As weird as it may sound, I don’t think Slipknot get ENOUGH credit for innovating and experimenting. Their last album was great.

I have yet to hear a single song by Slipknot. Maybe I'll give them a shot.

If you do, try the debut album and 2019's We Are Not Your Kind (the one I was talking about above; I forgot they put out one more after that).

like I keep running into a growing number of revisionist metalheads who are essentially saying it outright isn't metal at all and that's nuts. I remember some shitlord black metal musician hearing In Solitude's second album and saying "what does this crap have to do with metal?" in Decibel magazine, and it's like....did you miss out on 1969-1987? or something.

liking the new Early Moods record

yeah it's awesome

It really is great, even better than the debut imo. Glad to see some love here.