So on my social media feed, I just read this article where Cradle of Filth frontman Dani Filth is quoted saying that he'd love to get his band's shirts into Walmart because he'd like the money. Walmart, as I'm guessing the 3 of you that are reading this are aware, sells band merchandise for a variety of well known, mainstream rock artists. For example, their website offers a wide arrange of hideous looking KISS merchandise from many resellers.
Unfortunately, the KISS Kasket is not among their offerings.
Of course, they also sell stuff right on their shelves, and as crazy as it sounds to a 40 something like myself, there's kids who are out there wearing Nirvana t shirts from Walmart that couldn't name a song by them. Metal has it's rules of conduct, and only wearing a band's shirt if you actually listen to that artist is most certainly one of the core tenants. So while the likelihood of someone running afoul by buying a Metallica replica tour shirt at Walmart in Bumfuck, Indiana is rather unlikely, should more obscure bands be trying to get their shit into Walmart?
You can't name their third album or their original lead singer either, you fucking poser.
I get that Dani Filth is a tiny little drowning kitten of a metal vocalist in a band that has only ever written a smattering of good songs entirely by accident but I don't think he's wrong to have those aspirations. If anything, it'd be brilliant given that while CoF themselves might be a bit too edgy for Walmart, for other bands to get their merchandise on shelves would represent a revenue stream at a time when bands aren't really selling their music (outside of a few luddites like myself who still buy CDs or the vinyl snobs who have money to re-purchase their entire collections) band merchandise represents probably their best income stream besides touring and playing shows. It also promotes awareness of the bands themselves, which you'd hope would lead to people streaming their music on Spotify or YouTube and eventually buying a ticket to the concert, or ordering the album on vinyl. Or another shirt when 18 of their peers also have the same shirt that they bought at the same Walmart.
It's pretty likely that the teenage'd me would be rather confused, but with the disappearance of record stores in every shopping mall and music sales in general, trying to cling to an old model because it represents some idea of "cool" or "true" just doesn't make a lot of sense. If musicians or artists want to devote themselves fully to their art, they need a revenue stream to finance their endeavors. That's why so many bands have expanded their merch from just t shirts to shot glasses, thongs, action figures, and yes, the KISS Kasket.
I just want to remind you again that yes, this was a thing!
I guess this has all been shaped by two semesters taking post-grad classes in Marketing, but if your goal is to make your band bigger and promote awareness, then by all means you should not just be producing merchandise branded with your band, but you should be pursuing an "omnichannel" approach to distribution. Not just at concerts, or through a bandcamp website, but if you can pull it off, by getting it into a big box store. Get it in front of people in as many ways as possible, and perhaps it's time for me to come around and reshape my own thinking. Instead of saying you already need to know the band before getting the t-shirt, maybe the year 2020, getting the t-shirt makes the kid search the band on Spotify. Maybe in the near future having an eye catching logo and creative merchandising really will be just as important as the music itself for successful bands (after all, fans who are wearing your band's logo across their chest are literally providing free advertising for your art.)
Marketing Genius. Still sucks at vocals.
I'm agreeing with Dani Filth. Interesting times we live in!
A few years back when talking about something to do with my childhood/teenage years, M and I somehow ended up on a toot about music, identity, and how for me personally, a lot of my life was shaped by my relationship with this obscure, mildly rhythmic noise. So as I sit here with a vacation largely interrupted by our ongoing COVID-19 Apolcalypse, which neat enough, is being broadcast in real time on Cable TV news while a reality show president only somewhat coherently rants each evening about how we should ignore science and send old people to die in the name of boosting the stock market so said buffoon can get re-elected in November...holy run-on sentence batman! These are fucked times, and as M and I are largely staying at home to avoid the latest, greatest, newest plague, I guess I have some free time on my hands. So I dedicate this post to M, who has occasionally pestered me to put this in writing.
I think this whole pandemic is really just marketing to get us to watch this guy's Netflix series.
I suppose in a sense this has to be autobiographical. It's largely a story of coincidence as well. So let's get right to it. I was born just over 40 years ago and raised in the outskirts of a small southern college town in the middle of Virginia. The kind of place where said college town equates to the "big city", and said college is the "center of the universe" that gives locals a certain sense of inflated importance. As though there aren't several hundred similar towns scattered about the United States. Residents here can be split into two groups; somewhat snooty white collar people (the Gilded Caste, if you will) who are brought from outside the area because of some affiliation or relationship with said college, or the "townies"; the "Jesus, Guns, and NASCAR" crowd who work in the service economy that serves said affluent crowd. There's a noticeable tension between these two groups. This became magnified as any type of blue collar factory work evaporated in the 1980's and 90's via globalization, free trade agreements, yadda yadda.
My hometown, inside of city limits...
and outside of city limits...
I was born to a teenage mom and a dad who was a factory worker, so it's easy to see what the anticipated trajectory of my life would be. "Townies" are just that, the people that never leave the damn place. My family, on both sides, goes back many generations, as people from the surrounding mountains that gradually gravitated towards said college town since it was a hub of commerce and economic activity...
So my family, if you went back enough, were like the Central Virginia equivalent of the Hatfields or McCoys.
(Side Rant: okay, so my mom's side basically relocated there after being forcibly evicted from what would become Shenandoah National Park, you can read about it here or here. The TL:DR is that during the New Deal, it was determined to be too expensive to bring electricity and sanitation infrastructure to the hillbillies of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so they were given a pittance as compensation and thru eminent domain evicted to create the National Park and Skyline Drive. Somewhere in the vicinity of Jarman's Gap Overlook on Skyline Drive is where my great grandmother was born; she passed away only in 2013. This is relatively recent history that still lives for many people. Interesting story really.)
...and took up jobs serving the general economy of the college town. They stayed, their children stayed, etc....I'm pretty sure that only two relatives that I can identify off the top of my head don't currently reside somewhere in Central Virginia within 45 minutes or so of "college town." You're born there, you go to school there, you get married there, you find a shit job there, eventually you die there.
So where does heavy metal fit into all of this?
I wish I was awesome enough to say that in 1987 I was listening to Sodom and Bathory, but I was in 2nd grade and that wasn't what they were playing on MTV.
Remember that I'm a product of the 80's, born right before Reagan was elected. So as a young kid, I'd play in the field with the kid next door that was close to my age. Now and then we'd go over to his house since he had a Nintendo (I wasn't that cool, I just had a Sega Master System. I guess having both between us was kinda cool though.) Anyhow, his older sister was all in with the glam rock/hair metal thing going on at the time, so via her, we were exposed to the hairspray and spandex shit like Whitesnake, Poison, Motley Crue, etc. We're talking late 80's so it also turned out that Guns N Roses was breaking big, and a particular California band had released their first ever music video.
Metallica was heavier, darker, and absent the spandex and hairspray, looked more identifiable and relatable. I was immediately hooked. Quickly, I became addicted to staying up late on Saturday night's to watch MTV's Headbanger's Ball seeking to hear not just Metallica, but other heavier bands, which at the time for me meant stuff like Ozzy, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, etc. Remember that my exposure was entirely due to cable TV; I've never known my dad to listen to ANY kind of music to speak of, and my mom's tastes were a combination of pop/country and whatever played on the "oldies" FM station. Why staying up so late though? Because my mom was convinced that heavy metal was "vulgar" and "satanic."
Fuck you, Geraldo Rivera.
Anyhow, at school, the children that would be my classmates in elementary school were either the children of the Townies or the Gilded Caste of Central Virginia. If you were the kid of a Townie, you generally liked to roughhouse around, bully other kids, and your social circle was probably mostly the other Townies. Likewise, the Gilded Caste would keep to themselves. I liked comic books and heavy metal. I didn't really fit with either group, which was fine by me because for someone who is quite verbose, I'm very much an introvert. Oddly enough, classes from the time I was in elementary school were broken up by academic ability, and curiously enough the "mediocre" group was the Townie kids, and the "gifted" group were the Gilded Caste. (These would eventually become the "rednecks" and the "preppies" by high school.) Someone fucked up somewhere, because I was grouped with the "gifted" kids. Talk about being a fish out of water in terms of peer group.
I will say that being grouped with these kids in elementary school is probably the number one thing that prevented me from developing the stereotypical "Southern Accent" that the entirety of my family is infected with to some degree, ranging from that dignified "Gone with the Wind" variant to more of a barely coherent mumblespeak. With only the occasional embarassing voice "breakage" to remind me that I am white trash at the core, I generally speak with an almost neutral, perhaps Midwestern dialect (except I don't do anything stupid like call Coca Cola a "pop" or a water fountain a "bubbler.")
Anyhow, developing niche interests has a way of bridging across gaps that otherwise exist among groups based on dividers like ethnicity, economic background, etc. Turns out, some of these other kids were also into comics and heavy rock music, and I began to form friendships with kids who were otherwise part of the Gilded Caste. That means meeting the parents of these kids, who were doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc. People who had traveled and been to places.
Owning a copy of this definitely broke a lot of ice in 5th grade.
For perspective I had never left the Eastern Time Zone in my life until I was 28.
What that did was open my eyes to what was possible, and in a sense what normal life looked like for a lot of people. Why couldn't I be one of those things? After all, for the kids I was befriending, it wasn't aspirational, but an expectation to be those things.
As the 80's became the 90's and hair metal became grunge rock then an entire alternative subculture, it became this broader subculture around which I grew up and understood life; because it was still "small college town", the goths, punks, stoners, and dwindling number of metalheads all kinda had to be around each other by necessity; there just weren't enough of us to further splinter up into sub-cliques. Unfortunately (or maybe not?), some of the collection of misfits and broken toys weren't the greatest people for a variety of reasons, or I just didn't "click" with them, or whatever. Certainly wasn't doing much to help with the old dating life. Lucky for me, the internet became a thing. And with that, there was a deep rabbit hole of obscure bands to discover and vile online trolling to engage in. To the point that I began to realize that I basically had nothing in common with the people around me; as I became captivated by the still fresh drama of the Norwegian black metal scene and was discovering exciting new bands via the My Dying Bride mailing list and those fold outs that came in Century Media CDs you'd get from mailorders, I was losing any sort of cultural frame of reference with the people around me as I increasingly nerded out on heavy music (they had all moved onto whatever new hip thing among the "alt-scene" was.) And here's the thing; the smart members of that alternative scene went to college elsewhere or packed up and moved but somehow got the fuck out of that small college town. The ones who stayed behind...were becoming Townies. But at least via the internet and chat forums and whatnot, I had a connection to a world beyond. Made friends. Some that are still friends to this day.
You'd probably quickly get tired of being around people like this too.
My life sadly through this point wasn't particularly stable; between family and school, I was basically accused of being some combination of "drug addicted", "homosexual", and "devil worshipping", with a bunch of people who thought they were doing the right thing for me by wrecking my life and making everything 50 million times harder. All because I wanted to have ordinary teenage fun and had a proclivity for the color black and listened to angry music. The eventual outcome of this was dropping out of high school and moving in with people I went to high school with for a few years.
By 2005 or so, life circumstances, as they're wont to do, provided me with a pair of options. I could accept my fate and try to make the best of it pumping gas or whatever in small college town, or I could pack up my life's belongings in my Toyota Corolla and relocate to the Washington DC area. I had a job opportunity via my McJob and had made enough friends and acquaintances via a shared love..of extreme metal music of all things. This was the "shit or get off the pot" moment. So I packed my shit up and slept on an air mattress in someone's apartment and put together a life. Someone I met online because of...a shared love of extreme metal music.
My new home, or at least across the river from it.
Washington DC and the surrounding metro area, thanks to lots of government contracting and IT money, offers a lot of economic opportunity for someone willing to work hard. I was done with making excuses or just "waiting" for the right opportunity; it took 25 years of waiting to get the hell out of that small college town. Free from distractions, burdens, and excuses, I enrolled in community college, transferred to McState University, earned two degrees from McState, and began earning a professional salary. A lot of that was pure work ethic, because I'm no genius or savant; I just wanted better for myself. But that very pathway was opened up, really, because I was able to network with people via a shared love of heavy music.
Perhaps even more remarkable, and for which I'm incredibly thankful for, is that it was also heavy music that brought M into my life. It was M sending me a random message on social media because we had a shared love of doom metal that brought her into my life...almost 13 years ago. A really awesome, fun filled 13 years that saw my life accelerate on hyperdrive; and it all began because I knew useless heavy metal trivia about her hometown (neat fact: Sepultura and Sarcofago are from her hometown. Way more awesome than what my town gets to claim) and didn't make dumb assumptions about her country of birth.
Another Ice Breaker.
So yeah, every good thing that happened in my life can be attributed to heavy metal. Imagine that. It's probably why I still get excited about hearing the latest 5th generation Devourment clone and still sacrifice sleep now and then to go see a show in the warehouse of a brewery with 50 people. It's why I've probably spent too damn much money buying tour shirts from bands who have had their tours dates cancelled by COVID-19/Coronavirus. It's probably why my walls of filled CD shelves still bring me joy when other people are downsizing their collections and "growing up."
Thanks for everything guys.
Ultimately, it was heavy metal that got me the fuck out of that small college town, a place that feels more foreign to me each time I return to it for whatever obligation. The longer I am away, nothing is more obvious to me than how
small town life is the death of the possibilities and optimism that
comes with youth. It horrifies me to even imagine what would have happened had I not escaped. I don't know where I'll eventually drop dead, but hopefully it won't be for a long time and I'm reasonably confident it won't be there. And for that, ultimately I owe a completely ridiculous subculture of obnoxiously loud, blatantly offensive, barely listenable "music." Funny how life works.
It's New Years Day, 2020 so most likely I've heard everything from 2019 I'm going to hear at this point. I'm sure down the line I will discover some obscure records from the past year I missed out on and find myself deeply impressed, but for the time being, I think this is where we're at.
2019 wasn't a triumphant year for me; there were no amazing adventures to speak of though there was a fun filled football weekend in October and there was a short excursion to Quebec City. At this point M demands we visit the Great White North once a year so she can stop by Costco and acquire various home necessities on the cheaper Canadian dollar. The joys of being old and domesticated, I guess? (As long as I can stop at Freeson Rock in Montreal, I can be a good sport!)
This year for me personally was mostly just about the grind. The effort to build that financial nest egg and to cultivate the skills I need for my next professional step. M has basically been in the same boat, if feeling less urgency given she's a few years younger than me. The MBA has gone well enough to start, and while I'm not really one for New Year's Resolutions, because they never get followed through on, I don't think it's a big risk for me to say that M and I will be having another big adventure of some sort, if not two of them, in 2020.
Sitting here experiencing old man fog regarding the best live bands I saw this year, and there were two shows that really stand out. One was a lineup featuring Saor, Wayfarer, and DC locals Sickdeer at a Atlas Brew Works in Washington DC. It was miserably hot and humid inside the crowded backroom of a brewery, but it was a fantastic performance by all bands. The other M and I saw the night before, in the basement of a coffee house called Songbyrd, also in Washington DC, where Khemmis absolutely crushed with their stoner-influenced doom and Atlanta black metal/black n' roll act Cloak made a fan out of me. Between the local venues of Baltimore (MDF in particular) and Washington DC, in 2019 the other highlights included Sinmara, Suffering Hour,Spirit Adrift, Rippikoulu, Naglfar, Guttural Secrete, Tomb Mold, Theories, Full of Hell, Borknagar, Scour, Brutality, Blood, Disassociate, Shape of Despair, and Vanum. There was also a roadtrip to Richmond, Virginia because Hypocrisy was playing and who knows when they'll be back in the States again.
Best development of the year that I observed is the plethora of Agalloch and Ulver inspired atmospheric black metal bands that are now dropping records. I'm not suggesting that these artists are tremendously "original" sounding, because you can't recapture the way "Bergtatt" or "Pale Folklore" sounded when they first dropped again. But bands like Minnesota's Ashbringer, Italy's Enisum, and multi-national band Sojourner all released outstanding albums that aren't even making my top 10 list. Collectively, these bands are releasing albums that sound "fresh" and "relevant" to my ears. Maybe it'll be remembered in a few years the way late 90's doom or early 90's death metal is.
The worst development is the abundance of YouTube videos of "reviewers" (i.e. nerds with even more spare time than I've got) who spent inordinate amounts of time telling you if or if not something is good. I mean, obviously I'm writing my thoughts here so I can see a little bit of "pot, meet kettle", but do you need a 45 minute album review to tell you if a 33 minute album is good or not? Here's a crazy idea, google the band or search them on Spotify, give it a few listens, and decide for yourself. That's why I try to find links for each of my top 10 albums; I like that shit and I want other people to check it out, like it, and give those bands money like I did so that those bands keep creating more art.
Most Disappointing Record of 2019
Tool Fear Inoculum
So there's two Batushka's out there and I can't keep up with which one is the one that isn't a whorish money grab by Metal Blade Records (after a quick internet search, I guess the one that released "Panichid" is kvlt and trve and the one that released "Hospodi"is the Faketushka...). There's also a coked up Abbath playing mediocre black n' roll when he's not in rehab for alcoholism...the rest of the Immortal guys win that dispute in artistic terms for sure (I do hope for a reunion though.) Death metal in general hasn't had the abundance of high quality releases I'd expect this year. But that said, there hasn't been a lot that I felt failed to meet my expectations.
That brings me to "Fear Inoculum". I like Tool, and I like proggy Tool. But Tool is at their best not when they're being proggy or playing stupid fucking nerd bullshit Fibonacci Sequences or whatever. Tool is at their best when they're being bombastic and writing bangers like "Vicarious". I don't give a fuck how many notes a musician can play or how precisely they can play those notes that might involve complicated finger techniques on their instruments. Does your music fucking rock? Do I want to crank it at high volume? If you can bust out a bunch of musical wizardry like Spiral Architect or Auguryand blow my mind while still rocking that's awesome and yeah, you get more kudos than Devourment does for playing cave man riffs. But if your music just sounds like a bunch of pointless doodling that doesn't lead anywhere, I don't give a shit how complex it was to play or how much thought was put into writing music that makes me want to go to sleep. "Fear Inoculum" has exactly one good song, "7empest", and if you listen to the album in sequence you're going to be asleep when it begins as track nine, 1 hour and 10 minutes into the record. Knowing that, I just go to Spotify and listen to the one good song, rather than sit through the snoozefest that leads to it. The worst part? This album will cost you a fortune to buy, see for yourself! (That's just the audio cd version, not the spiffy one that has it's own music player and visual do-hickey..)
My expectations for this were never that inflated, but given the nerds clutching their pearls about this band and dropping dumb money to buy the CD and see them perform at inflated prices and who have some bizarre belief that being willing to sit down bored out of your mind for 1 hour and 26 minutes makes you smarter and more sophisticated than the next music fan, I guess I'm gonna call this the big disappointment of the year. Much like Opeth, this band was better before 2010.
Honorable Mentions
Ashbringer Absolution Belzebubs Pantheon of the Nightside Gods Blood Red Throne Fit To Kill Ceremony of Silence Outis Cloak The Burning Dawn Continuum Designed Obsolescence Dead To A Dying World Elegy Devourment Obscene Majesty Disentomb The Decaying Light Encephalic Brutality and Depravity Enisum Moth's Illusion Esoteric A Pyrrhic Existence Exhorder Mourn The Southern Skies Fen The Dead Light The Great Old Ones Cosmicism Glare of the Sun Theia Hath Of Rot and Ruin Hideous Divinity Simulacrum Imperium Dekadenz When We Are Forgotten Isenordal Shores of Mourning Mayhem Daemon Mgla Age of Excuse NecroticGoreBeast NecroticGoreBeast Nile Vile Nilotic Rites Obsequaie The Palms of Sorrowed Kings October Tide In Splendor Below Officium Triste The Death of Gaia Organectomy Existential Disconnect Pathology Reborn To Kill Prostitute Disfigurement Prostitute Disfigurement Sinmara Hvisi Stjarnanna Spirit Adrift Divided by Darkness Sojourner The Shadowed Road Theories Vessel
10.) Mortiferum Disgorged from Psychotic Depths
Dark, ominous doom/death of the sort that Profound Lore Records is known to release. I love the tone that they capture, and they manage to be plodding and miserable without losing my interest, which is what happens when you're slow and heavy but not actually creating a harmony or building to anything epic in your songwriting. Swampy, dank, and guttural. The way it should be.
9.) Nightfell A Sanity Deranged
Take someone from the hardcore scene during the "Entombed-core" revival, and introduce them to Celtic Frostand Bolt Thrower.That's what this sounds like; perhaps a WW1 tank plowing through trenches and murdering everything in sight on a particularly grey, miserable, damp day.
8.) Dawn Ray'd Behold Sedition Plainsong
Absolutely ferocious and dark at the same time. Anarcho-Antifa punks with a healthy dose of Napalm Death's politics playing second wave black metal with serious urgency in their delivery. Heavy use of violins to carry a lot of melodies helps create a distinct sound. Incredibly righteous and a welcome counterbalance to the conservatism and NSBM bullshit that often plagues underground black metal. Not that it doesn't rage pretty fucking hard regardless of one's personal politics.
7.) Vitriol To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice
Featuring a few songs from their debut EP, this is a ferocious blend of Hate Eternaland death-metal era Behemoth with the anger of Man Must Die. Raw vocals, non stop blasting drums, and just all around fast and furious top tier death metal in a year where I feel that there were a lot of death metal releases that were rather ordinary.
6.) Falls of Rauros Patterns Of Mythology
One of the many well crafted albums by the emerging flock of post-Agallochbands, FoR occupies the same space of warm, mellow acoustic passages that melds into tremelo heavy black metal that feels like it ever so pensively seeks something more grandiose and epic. Drenched with sorrowful melodies and even a smidgen of Spirit Adrift-styled guitar theatrics, I think the best way to experience Patterns of Mythology is on an open highway in a single complete listen.
5.) Alcest Spiritual Instinct
Full admission; I'm a "Johnny come lately" to this French band. I think they opened an Anathemashow that M dragged me to some years ago. By this time, Anathema sucked ass and ceased playing any of their old, good songs, so I was probably drinking and in the mood for something much more bloodthirsty. So my impression of Alcest wasn't great, and it wasn't until some years later when I heard them randomly on Spotify that I "got it"; I soon bought "Ecailles De Lune" and became a fan. So while I'm not really familiar with their more black metal incarnation, and barely hear anything black metal about the band, I deeply enjoy the ethereal, atmospheric sort of slightly "post" metal they perform. "Spiritual Instinct" is a bit more bombastic, a slight bit of the black metal influence is present, and overall this album is a whole lot catchier than the previous albums I'm familiar with. Is it still shoegaze-y and trippy? Absolutely. But it's constantly going forward, and flows in such a way that these 6 songs come and go before you know it, leaving you wanting a bit more.
4.) Horrific Demise Excruciating Extermination
What happens when you pull a bunch of seasoned veterans from the Midwest death metal scene of the early 2000's? Featuring members (and ex-members) of Gorgasm, Lividity, Sarcophagy, Necrotic Disgorgement, and Human Filleted, the sum of the parts here surpasses all of those bands. Horrific Demise hits the right notes to recapture the glory days of late 1990's/early 2000's riff driven brutal death metal yet it sounds fresh enough that it's not some crappy attempt at nostalgia. The production and performances sound top notch professional, the songs are lean, mean, and have a lot of that early Dying Fetus"bounce" to them, and this album just feels fun. Absolutely no filler to be found in this collection of songs, the only sad thing is that because it lacks the sort of originality that tastemakers in the scene look for, it didn't get the attention it deserved. This is nearly perfect death metal and my hope is that the members of this band make Horrific Demise a priority.
3.) Borknagar True North
First album with just ICS on Lead Vocals since "Quintessence" came out almost 20 years ago yet none of the evolution over that time has been lost as Borknagar still sounds like a massive, epic, ambitious melding of folk, 70's moog drenched prog, and black metal. Vortex shines in all of his varied vocal deliveries, and "variety" might be the best word to use to describe this album, which ranges from the fury of "The Fire That Burns" to the subdued yet majestic closer "Voices". Borknagar has created a space for themselves to create a wide range of sounds that seemlessly flow together and feel "right". Borknagar is long in the tooth, but still feels fresh, vibrant, and essential. There isn't a weak album in their catalog, and "True North" may rank among the best of them.
2.) Saor Forgotten Paths
2019 was the year I discovered this band, and I consider that, along with the opportunity to see them perform in July of this year (where I eagerly purchased their entire back catalog), to be highlights of the year. Saor plays an epic, melodic style of black metal with occasional nods to Scottish inspired folk music. Tasteful usage of keys, flutes, violins, and gentle guitar interludes lend further in creating an emotional sounding ode to Scotland while distinguishing Saor from the American bands looking to Agalloch for inspiration. More importantly, none of it sounds like cheese! It could be easy for something like this to fall of the rails, but the performances by multi-instrumentalist Andy Marshall (only permanent member of the band) are absolutely top notch, the production quality more than adequate, and the songs may be too drawn out for some, but I feel that the extended lengths of the tracks (3 out of the 4 songs surpass 10 minutes in length) give space to allow the harmonies to implant themselves in the listener.
1.) Blood Incantation Hidden History of the Human Race
I probably gave this one away when I put it on my "best of the decade" list. I tried to think of reasons why it shouldn't be number one, and nothing was valid. I can't hold the fact they've got some buzz behind them against them; hell it's not like I was handed a copy of their demo and followed them since. I got into the band because "Starspawn" was a straight-fire album and I discovered it because there was hype. I guess now that they're starting to become less obscure (which is silly anyway, this is death metal released on Dark Descent Records, if it sold 10,000 copies I'm shocked) that certain elements of the underground predictably shit on them. Heaven forbid they get signed by Relapse or Nuclear Blast. The thing is, this record is recorded the way death metal should be recorded. It sounds murky yet clear, there's warmth in the guitar tones, all of the instruments are audible, nothing sounds overly compressed. I see more bands, if they have the means, going this route in the future, especially as vinyl becomes the predominant physical media people purchase (I'll stick with CDs since I don't have a vinyl turntable in my car, where I consume most music.)
Musically, it hits the notes of the more "progressive" 90's death metal bands, especially Immolation and Death. Maybe Morbid Angel to a lesser extent with its obsession with themes (Morbid Angel had ancient Sumeria, Blood Incantation has space aliens and ancient Egypt.) Reverbed growls layer over churning, twisting riffs and healthy doses of over the top guitar theatrics and tones that would have made "Sound of Perseverance" era Chuck Schuldiner proud.
Blood Incantation made a thoughtful, intelligent record that clearly had a lot of work and love put into it to make it sound great. The fact it's only 4 tracks, including the 18 minute epic closer, leaves you wanting more when its over. I'm won't award them the championship belt for best band in death metal quite yet, but another release of this quality would probably be all that it takes.
