The Horde

And the winner of part 2 is... Spheres, three to one!! Pestilence wins the tournament!

Entombed - "Clandestine" (1991)

Just revisited this old favourite from 1991 & it's still my favourite release from the whole Swedish death metal movement. My review may be one of my biggest ever but I just started talking & I couldn't stop. Probably because this album came at such a key time in my musical development. For fans of Dismember, Grave & Carnage.

4.5/5

I originally had this album at a 3, being very surprised at how much I enjoyed its unique blend of super heavy extreme metal with legitimately beautiful atmospheric sections with a flourish of electronic Breakcore thrown in for good measure. As I went back to the album to write my review, I felt the need to bump it up to a 3.5 just because I realized how seriously unique this album is. 

Don't get me wrong, it has a ton of stuff I still dislike just because extreme metal is a difficult pill for me to swallow just due to certain elements that make it extreme, but I was very, very interested by this album nonetheless. Pound for pound, this 30 minute album doesn't even have that much Grindcore in it. Maybe 15 minutes maximum. The rest is a cool blend of atmospheric, electronic breakcore, and actually good riffs and grooves that are intelligible and not just playing some riff so fast that it blends in with the electronic drum sounds in the background. 

I think this album is a fantastic example of moderation. This "Cybergrind" album could have easily been what the genre is alluding to, which is just Grind with crazy electronic melodies thrown in there for who knows what reason. But Genghis Tron really tried to experiment and made a legitimate album that is more than just anger, aggression, and yelling. Even though I'm only giving it a 3.5, a 3.5 is incredibly high praise from me regarding anything with "Grind" in the description. My full review is on the album page.

Any of you heard of the gorenoise subgenre before? Well if not then look out for my upcoming review of this record which sees me investigating what it's all about.

Phyllomedusa - "Desiccation in Progress (Version II)" (2011)

Incredibly short & abrasive blasts of grinding electronic noise from Maryland, USA for fans of Vomitoma, Anal Birth, Menometrorrhagia.

3/5

Wow. This goes hard. 

I think this is the first Brutal Death Metal release I've been able to enjoy, since the riffs and beats are so well written and heavy. It takes all the foundations of Death Metal riffing and just cranks it up to 11 with insane drumming, disgusting chord and scale progressions, and compositions that have a ton going on but are still clear and headbang-able. The album definitely loses me when it dips into the brutal side of things with certain vocal passages just sounding random and thrown together with no real structure, but those are surprisingly few and far between.

I still have a really difficult time getting into this kind of stuff, and the brutal sections I mentioned before really ruin the experience for me overall, but this is a new high for me in a genre I normally can't stand. 

3/5, which is high praise considering the average Brutal Death Metal album for me is a 2/5.

Well that was too easy. At that rate, Slaughter of the Soul would remain on top, so I declare Slaughter of the Soul the winner of part 1, three to none!

Look, I definitely understand what you're saying because I agree with you but "Consuming Impulse" would be in the top few most celebrated death metal albums of the 80's & was released in the same year as "Altars Of Madness" so it was as close as I could get. I do think it's unfair not to mention that Pestilence took the sound of Death's "Leprosy", added additional complexity & sophistication & presented it all with a thicker & heavier production though. It wasn't sending death metal careering to new heights in the same way that Morbid Angel were but it was still giving it a fair nudge forward. It's a great death metal record in its own right. Just not a genuinely classic one in my opinion. "Altars Of Madess" on the other hand is the best death metal album ever recorded. Every fucking track is a classic (with the possible exception of "Lord Of All Fevers & Plague" which was omitted on the vinyl version anyway).

Altars Of Madness 2 - Consuming Impulse 0

Although I will agree that I prefer this over other Deathgrind/Grindcore stuff since it has some nasty riffs and actually decent song structure, I still can't get too far into it. The genre itself just melts together into something that sounds exactly the same at all points in time for me and I like my aggression to be delivered in a slightly different way than what Grindcore presents. If you're looking for absolutely mental shredding and insanely technical drums then this album is definitely the way to go, but as a package it still doesn't bring me over to the Grind side yet. Still glad I checked it out, classic Deathgrind is just a better put together product than the randomness that the genre has seemed to turn into in modern days. 

I'm glad I waited a year before checking this out, since I listened to Scream Bloody Gore and Spiritual Healing at the beginning of 2019. I don't think I would have appreciated Symbolic as much as I did today if I didn't have to wade through an entire year of newer Death Metal releases. Ben's review pretty much sums up my thoughts, with this album just being exciting to listen to in general. The riffs aren't necessarily super fast like modern Death Metal tends to be, but they are still super technical and the abrupt melody changes still add that Death Metal flair to an otherwise very Progressive album. I had zero problems with the vocals, since apparently that's a sticking point for some. 

I do wish that modern Death Meal, especially modern Tech Death, would look to its roots a little bit more. This album that came out 25 years ago feels more technical and virtuosic than any I've listened to in the recent Tech Death scene, and maybe that comes back to clarity. The Death Metal crunch of the guitars and the overall aggression and chaos is still there, but everything is perfectly clear and set up in a way that highlights the actual notes of the riffs rather than just the muddy, dark rhythms and chug that modern Death Metal tends to lean towards. 

4.5/5 for me, I'll be going back to this one for sure. 

(Also I'm with Daniel, Crystal Mountain wasn't as impressive as I was led to believe)

I've not listened to a huge amount of death metal this year, especially if you don't count death doom, which I don't as that is covered by my Fallen list. Still despite that, here goes:

#1 Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

#2 Coffins - Beyond the Circular Demise

#3 Vastum - Orificial Purge

#4 Exhumed - Horror

#5 Minenfeld - The Great Adventure

#6 Pulchra Mortem - Divina Autem et Aniles

#7 Immortal Bird - Thrive on Neglect

#8 Gatecreeper - Deserted

#9 Ossuarium - Living Tomb

#10 Tomb Mold - Planetary Clairvoyance

Since my review was short I'll just copy and paste it here for discussion sake:

A Molten Foundation

Bestial Devastation shows the remarkable beginnings of a young Sepultura as they recorded this fiery but disheveled EP in just two days. While obviously messy and laden with performance issues, the amount of ideas and concepts for an even darker and more aggressive take on Thrash Metal is ambitious and impressive. I think their ambition got the best of them as they struggle to keep up with the intense tempos and compositions that require the band to play perfectly on time together, but the messiness on an already lower quality EP adds that classic grime that early Death Metal thrives on. It's raw, furious, and somewhat exciting even by today's standards. Certain parts and melodies sometimes just end out of nowhere and could have been written better and expanded more, but for what Sepultura had to work with at the time the riffs and solos that come out of Bestial Devastation are more than sufficient. Not to mention the drummer goes absolutely nuts on the entire album, showing that Thrash style drumming can be expanded upon to hit even harder than it already did. A fun but definitely dirty EP that shouldn't be skipped over when looking at the classics of Death Metal.

I think most metal fans go through a similar transition. I took to the likes of Metallica and Slayer quite quickly, but Sepultura were initially too much for me due to Max's gruff style. Once I accepted his vocals I quickly found myself loving them, and it wasn't long before Morbid Angel, Death and Deicide were banging out of my speakers.

I found this article to be really interesting. I love it when bands cite more unusual sources of influence & you certainly won't see anyone else championing these. Perhaps that's what makes Fleshgod Apocalypse so unique?

1. Yngwie Malmsteen – "Live with the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra" video (2002)

"This was fucking fantastic. It was like Paganini with a orchestra but in the modern days. It's unbelievable how he could do that. When I saw that for the first time I was like man, I want to do something like this. We'd end up like doing a band, but we never had the chance to play with a big orchestra so far. It's in the planning. We just did the DVD recording where we used the quintet, which was cool. But you know that the dream remains the same.When we saw Yngwie Malmsteen it was fucking crazy."

2. Metallica – "S&M" (1999)

"S&M"live with Metallica was big for us, because in some way it was the moment where this mix with the symphonic thing became in some way mainstream. I read that the already happened in the past with Deep Purple or Black Sabbath doing some stuff like that back in the days. But I think this was the concert when it became really a mainstream thing you know, something that all the metalheads can accept. This symphonic orchestral world in some way is not mixed with metal. But it's a normal thing. It's not just a strange thing."

3. Dimmu Borgir – "Forces of the Northern Night" video (2017)

"One of the best performances we ever saw is Dimmu Borgir on the DVD Forces of the Northern Night which is the live video that they did in Osolo in 2011 I think. It's just a highlight for one of the bands we liked most. And it was crazy. They had like super huge choir, and it sounds great. The DVD is fucking awesome."

4. Rhapsody

"There are two main bands that inspire us the most. One is the Italian Rhapsody (now known as Rhapsody of Fire). I know it might sound weird because they're power metal but it's one of the best. Even if they didn't do it like with a real orchestra, they worked around it like us, and back in the days the sounds were a little bit more unprofessional I will say. But still the ideas behind them … this Italian vibe they have and the melodies It definitely influenced us a lot."

5. Septicflesh

"Septicflesh were hugely influential, and are good friends of ours. They are pioneers of this thing as well, in the more obscure Gothic, you know, dark sort of way."

Those that know me well will probably be aware that Suffocation have been my favourite metal band since the mid-90's & that I've been following them obsessively since their debut "Human Waste" E.P. was released in 1991. So the news that vocalist Frank Mullen would be permanently retiring from the band was not something that I got much pleasure in reading when I was perusing an online article on the topic a couple of days ago. Suffocation have been touring without Frank sporadically during periods of unavailability for 6 or 7 years now with Disgorge drummer Ricky Myers, Dying Fetus front man John Gallagher & Pyrexia vocalist Kevin Muller all handling the microphone duties at various times but Frank had always returned for the studio albums. But I'm afraid I'm now going to have to come to terms with a Suffocations without Frank The Tank & his signature hand movements. Ricky Myers is apparently the most likely candidate for a full-time replacement & while I have nothing against Ricky, it's certainly a sad day for death metal with one of the scene's most charismatic & influential figures bidding farewell to the scene that he helped build.

*runs off to infect a crypt*

Bad news