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THE REARVIEW MIRROR: OBTAINED ENSLAVEMENT

Jun 122016

As I’ve mentioned before, I wasn’t listening to extreme metal in the late ’80s or the ’90s. With the help of some knowledgable guides, I’ve spent time over the last decade trying to catch up on what I missed. It’s a deep history, and the process of exploration isn’t nearly finished. Today’s Rearview Mirror focuses on my most recent discovery (with thanks to Jan K. once again for turning me on to the album you’re about to hear).

Obtained Enslavement was a black metal band formed in Stord, Norway, in about 1989. The band’s founding members included Pest (who went on to become the frontman for Gorgoroth both before and after Gaahl), guitarist Døden, and drummer Torquemada, and they were soon joined by a phenomenal keyboardist who used the name Heks. Together they recorded two demos and four albums before disbanding (though additional musicians also participated on some of the albums). Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (BIOMECHANICAL)

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May 292016

(DGR presents this Sunday’s Rearview Mirror installment, reflecting upon the metal of yesteryear.)

I have to confess that there was a moment in writing this when it occurred to me that I was going to have to justify enjoying Biomechanical’s last album. It was an oddly sobering thought, especially in the face of discs like Eight Moons and The Empire Of The Worlds, which are albums it feels like history looks upon more kindly.

The last time I sat down and took over the Rearview Mirror column for a bit, I found myself vouching for the idea of an album that is “half-good” — one of those discs that isn’t the strongest, but half of it really seems to be on to something and for that reason always sticks out in your mind. Since then, I’ve played with a couple of other ideas for Rearview Mirror posts in order to alleviate some of the burden on our glorious editor-person, but the half-good album idea has continued to gnaw at me, at least for another edition. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (MORTICIAN)

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May 222016

Despite the fact that it’s a Sunday, we’re going to have at least three new posts on the site today, beginning with another installment of this series in which we reflect upon metal from yesteryear. Our focus for this edition of The Rearview Mirror is the NY death metal band Mortician.

While many of the bands we’ve remembered in this series are long gone, Mortician aren’t officially dead yet, though more than a decade has passed since their last album. For most of their career they existed as a duo, originally formed by Will Rahmer and Roger Beaujard in 1989 under the name Casket but soon re-named Mortician in honor of the late Angus Scrimm’s character in the 1979 horror movie Phantasm and its sequels.

This isn’t going to be a retrospective on Mortician’s discography. I simply want to play for you the band’s 1996 debut album Hacked Up For Barbeque, which was discharged following a hand-full of short releases. I hadn’t thought about the album in eons, but a conversation on Facebook yesterday reminded me of it, and I impulsively dived back into it. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (NIDEN DIV. 187)

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May 152016

Over the last couple of months one of the musicians in the excellent Dutch black metal band Kaeck has been turning me on to underground releases from the distant past that I’d never heard (or heard of) before. His own roots in the black metal scene go back decades — far longer than my own — and I’ve realized how much I still have to learn. I’ve already devoted several of these Rearview Mirror posts to bands he has recommended, and this is another one.

The focus of this post is a Swedish band named Niden Div. 187, and specifically the only full-length album they ever released, 1997’s Impergium. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (CENTINEX)

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Apr 172016

Death metal will never die, and some death metal bands are really hard to kill, too.

After eight albums going back to 1992’s Subconscious Lobotomy and a dozen shorter releases, Sweden’s Centinex disbanded in 2006 — but they crawled out of their grave in 2014 and released a comeback album named Redeeming Filth, which was a hell of a comeback. And they have another album on the way now. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (MÖRK GRYNING)

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Apr 102016

The same person who put me in mind of Summoning for last Sunday’s Rearview Mirror installment is responsible for this week’s choice as well. But while I was already a fan of Summoning before being reminded of their great Stronghold album last week, this week’s suggestion — Mörk Gryning — was a new name to me.

After listening to the album that I’m featuring today, I began to do a little research and soon discovered that the German label Eisenwald re-released this very album on CD in January as the first part of a series of Mørk Gryning reissues, and so I’m going to quote Eisenwald’s own introduction to the band: Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (SUMMONING)

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Apr 032016

Tons of metal bands have mined the works of J.R.R. Tolkien for everything from band names to album and song titles and lyrics. Few have excavated his writing as extensively as Austria’s Summoning, in part because the band have been plying their trade for such a long time. Since their formation in 1993, Summoning have produced seven albums (the last of which was 2013’s Old Mornings Dawn), three EPs, and an assortment of early demos and splits.

Summoning are probably best known for creating an epic, atmospheric, synth-heavy sound that captures the mythic, heroic sagas that have often inspired them and that have been reflected in their lyrics. But the album I’ve chosen for this Sunday’s look back at metal’s past — 1999’s Stronghold — is the first one in which the lyrics were not all derived from Tolkien (according to this source), and it’s often referred to as one that marked a change in the band’s sound, one that even Summoning have described (here) as “much more guitar orientated with more compact keyboard-melodies”. And this further statement about Stronghold appears on the band’s official site: Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (ASUNDER)

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Mar 272016

Asunder made their home in Northern California’s Bay Area, with a line-up that included drummer/vocalist Dino Sommese (Noothgrush) and guitarist/vocalist John Gossard (Dispirit, ex-Weakling). Between 2000 and 2009, when the group disbanded, they released splits with Like Flies on Flesh and Graves At Sea, as well as two highly regarded albums — A Clarion Call (2004) and Works Will Come Undone (2006). The former included four tracks, each of them in the 12 – 15-minute range, and the latter consisted of two tracks totaling 73 minutes.

I discovered the band’s music only after they had ceased to exist. Of the two albums, my favorite is Clarion Call. It’s a wrenching, devastatingly powerful doom/death album, both titanically crushing and heart-achingly beautiful. The pacing is generally slow (though it’s still rhythmically dynamic), and the vocals are divided between a voracious, agonizing, bestial growl and clean, melodic, quasi-chanting. Despite the songs’ significant lengths and deliberate pacing, they are so well-written that they hold the attention all the way through — or at least until you get to the last track. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (NOOTHGRUSH)

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Mar 202016

My introduction to Oakland’s Noothgrush came in 2011 via Southern Lord’s The Power of the Riff tour, a limited run of west coast dates that marked the band’s return after splitting up in 2001 (and their first show in Seattle since 1997). What I wrote about that show (here) was my best effort to explain the impact of the music:

“Imagine this: You’re chained in an iron receptacle, and through vents in the bottom, hot paving tar slowly flows in. Inexorably, at a glacial pace, it covers your feet, it climbs up your legs, it reaches and passes the part of your body that does all the thinking, it covers your abdomen and your chest, your arms strain at their chains and you scream as the tar boils the flesh away until it reaches the empty cavity on top of your shoulders and pours into your ears, mouth, and nose, suffocating you in a blistering black agony. Your last sensations are the smell of your own incinerating flesh and the shrieking chants of this band’s vocalist…. Sick, sloooooow, sludgy, and ultimately irresistible.”

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (KAWIR)

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Feb 282016

Welcome to another Sunday edition of this continuing feature, in which we recall metal from the past. The band I’ve chosen for today — Kawir — is a Greek black metal institution, with a long string of splits, EPs, and albums dating back to 1993. The last full-length was 2012’s Ισόθεος (Isotheos) — though a new one will soon be upon us.

Though widely respected and influential, Kawir don’t have quite the same name recognition as other Greek black metal bands of a similar vintage, such as Rotting Christ, Septic Flesh, or Varathron, though perhaps to a greater extent than any of those bands, Kawir has embraced ancient Hellenic culture in their music, with lyrics sung in ancient Greek and songs built upon the rich traditions of Greek myth and legend. Continue reading »

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