DECIBEL #189 - July 2020

The U.S.’s No. 1 Extreme Music Magazine!

REFUSE/RESIST

AT THE GATES & DISSECTION the Year of Melodic Extreme Metal WITH

PARADISE LOST EARTH CRISIS DOWN MONSTER MAGNET FEAR FACTORY DEADGUY ULVER

JULY 2020 // No. 189

FLEXI DISC

INCLUDED Don’t see it?

Then please speak with your newsagent...

BLACK METAL DEATH METAL DOOM HARDCORE INDUSTRIAL & MUCH MORE!!

EXTREMELY EXTREME

July 2020 [R 189] decibelmagazine.com

upfront 8

metal muthas This little piggy

10 low culture Bruce almighty 11 no corporate beer Water into wine is for chumps

features 12 1995: the year in

death metal Major pains

14 1995: the year in

black metal

Orthodox black metal is so 1994 16 1995: the year in

doom metal

When slow was really low 18 1995: the year in

industrial/noise

The future was then

reviews 20 q&a: phil anselmo Metal’s most prolific vocalist remembers when he was really down 24 the decibel

hall of fame Earth Crisis exhibit the new ethic and discipline needed to become the gold standard of vegan straight edge hardcore with Destroy the Machines

34 the top 40

albums of 1995 Number one may shock you!

(Spoiler: it won’t)

53 lead review Old Man Gloom surprises with the brutal one-two punch of Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning and Seminar IX: Darkness of Being 54 album reviews Releases that wish they could party like it’s 1995, including -(16)-, Lamb of God and Paradise Lost 64 double negative Murder in the front row

42 The Dissonance of Melody COVER STORY CONTENTS ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $29.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia PA 19107. © 2020 by Red Flag Media, Inc. ISSN 1557-2137 | USPS 023142 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.

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www.decibelmagazine.com

REFUSE/RESIST

July 2020 [T189]

PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy alex@redflagmedia.com

What were you doing in 1995?

Obviously, depending on your age, the answers can be pretty varied. For example, our art and ad sales directors are both in their mid 30s, so back then, Mike Wohlberg and James Lewis were each regularly involved in spirited bouts of Street Fighter and Super Mario World, respectively. One of our elder statesmen, Kevin Stewart-Panko, was editing his infamous Doomhauled zine and “working in the first (and final) year of my PhD.” While Decibel’s youngest contributor, Vince Bellino, was such a poser that he wasn’t even born for part of 1995.

What a Johnny-come-lately!

Me? I was practicing old-school social distancing at college with the aid of what’s likely a now-valuable collection of black and doom metal longsleeves. When I wasn’t invisible on campus, I worked in a record store warehouse, generally despising 99% of the stock sold. I’m not proud to say it, but I had completely embraced underground elitism in 1995. Of course, digging deeper into the underground unearthed a number of precious gems that I would have otherwise never encountered in the pre-internet era. Fortunately, a few of those albums I ignored in 1995 ultimately became some of my all-time favorite records years later upon finally excavating my head from my ass.

No matter what trip you were on 25 years ago, Decibel’s Yearbook: 1995 issue is designed to transport you back. Part history lesson, part welcome escape from our unpleasant current reality, this issue examines a year where four of extreme metal's flagship genres—death metal, black metal, doom metal and hardcore—splintered into subgenres and scenes that still dominate the pages of this magazine today.

Though it’s rarely mentioned in the same revered breath as 1983, 1986 or, really pretty much any year from the 1980s, 1995 should rightly be considered a landmark year in extreme metal. There are a dozen albums from ’95 already enshrined in our Hall of Fame and a few more currently in production. So, if you’ve never battled in the north or you just want to destroy the machines one more time, take the 25-year-old advice of one formerly dreaded Swedish frontman and go! albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian albert@decibelmagazine.com

AD SALES

James Lewis james@decibelmagazine.com

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND SALES ART DIRECTOR

Aaron Salsbury aaron@decibelmagazine.com

Michael Wohlberg michael@redflagmedia.com

Patty Moran

CUSTOMER SERVICE

patty@decibelmagazine.com

COPY EDITOR

Andrew Bonazelli

BOOKKEEPER

Tim Mulcahy tim@redflagmedia.com

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Chuck BB, Ed Luce Mark Rudolph

Online DECIBEL WEB EDITOR

Albert Mudrian

DECIBEL WEB AD SALES

James Lewis

albert@decibelmagazine.com james@decibelmagazine.com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Vince Bellino Adrien Begrand J. Bennett Dean Brown Louise Brown Chris Chantler Richard Christy Liz Ciavarella-Brenner Chris Dick Chris Dodge Sean Frasier Nick Green Raoul Hernandez Jonathan Horsley Neill Jameson Scott Koerber Sarah Kitteringham Daniel Lake Shawn Macomber Shane Mehling Justin M. Norton Andy O'Connor Dutch Pearce Forrest Pitts Greg Pratt Jon Rosenthal Joseph Schafer Rod Smith Matt Solis Kevin Stewart-Panko Adem Tepedelen Jeff Treppel J Andrew Zalucky Bradley Zorgdrager CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

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READER

MONTH find them) long before there was the internet. I have always wanted to know more about the bands I listen to. There is still a sense of excitement each month when I know a new issue will be arriving in my mailbox. At this point there is also a sense of growing a collection and being a completist.

Michael Hanson Lewistown, ME

According to our admittedly spotty records, you've been a Decibel subscriber since issue #16. First, THANK YOU! Second, why?

Why do I read? Because you are all that is left.

Honestly though, it is the unwavering commitment to quality. Every journey is paved with missteps, but it’s obvious the destination has always been the same, a quality product. Decibel’s passion for heavy and extreme music is always clear. It never feels like the magazine is pandering to the readers, band or label. That devotion gets me to read the whole magazine, thereby introducing me to new— and new-to-me—bands not on my radar. Plus, I’m an “aging metalhead” (copyright pending) that grew up with an obsession for magazines like Circus, Hit Parader, Creem, Metal Edge and Rip (Kerrang! and Metal Hammer when I could

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As of this writing, we’re into week seven of the social distancing and self-quarantining. Rather than dwell on the obvious negatives, what's been one positive for you that's come out of the last two months?

Working from home. I have had the option for a couple of years now and finally my hand was forced. I doubt I’ll go back to the office when this is over. I love being able to listen to my tunes without earbuds. Reaffirming heavy and extreme music can bring a sense of comfort during uncomfortable times. I have been busier than usual facilitating my son’s “distance learning,” so I haven’t been able to use this time for musical discovery, but reaching out for bands I know or are still getting to know. It helps to calm the waters for me, personally. Bands like Enslaved (loved the recent cover story), Wormrot, Sleep, Cattle Decapitation (Death Atlas is the soundtrack of our times), Clutch (kudos for the recent HOF induction on my favorite album by them),

Cannibal Corpse, Conan, Napalm Death, Kadavar, Amenra, Monolord and Bongripper. Another plus has been finding and catching up on some killer high quality live performances on YouTube and a few of the streaming sets some bands have done since the pandemic began.

This issue is a special “Yearbook” issue of Decibel devoted to 1995. What records were you spinning most 25 years ago?

First of all, 1995 was 15 years ago at most. Seriously though, 1995 was a weird time. It was a time of transition for music (grunge was already on the way out) and for me, personally. I was still heavily into more mainstream metal acts at the time like Rollins Band, Megadeth, Testament and Pantera. I wish I could say I was listening to more extreme stuff back then, but Slayer was about as extreme as it got. My favorite album from that year was, hands down, Monster Magnet’s Dopes to Infinity. I was living in Dave [Wyndorf]’s part of New Jersey during the ’90s and that enhances my connection to it. I still love that band.

When this is all over, what’s the first venue you wanna see a show at?

It’ll depend where the shows are happening.

Living in Maine, I have to take what I can get, but I imagine it will be at Geno’s In Portland.

John Morse and Last Mercy Emissions have been putting on some amazing shows there in the last few years and it’s the venue/organization I would most like to support. Maine needs them to be able to continue to bring the metal to northern most New England.

Chuck BB is the illustrator of the graphic novels Black Metal, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 For more info and art, head over to chuckbb.com

PHOTO BY TOM COUTURE

OF THE

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month?

Well, here are the CDs that we spun most on our PlayStation console when we weren’t working through a marathon session of Wipeout.

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month's Mutha: Rhonda Stone Mutha of Travis Stone of Pig Destroyer

Tell us a little about yourself.

I was a military brat. I have lived in Georgia, Florida, Washington state and Southern California. Me and my sisters would sing with my mom using records and a record player. I had the best time ever in Washington. Lots of plays and talent shows and competitions. Moved to Southern California [when] they cut all of the music programs. I got married, had my girls and then, surprise, here comes Travis. I am a very lucky mom to have such talented and creative kids!

Travis tells us you used to sing in musicals in high school and do a lot of karaoke. What were your go-to karaoke songs?

I have a wide range: Melissa Etheridge, Gladys Knight, Alanis Morisette. All-time favorite has to be Heart’s “Dog and Butterfly.”

Is it true you taught him how to harmonize listening to Boston on the way to school every morning?

This is true; we listened to them a lot. Noisem actually let me sing with them years ago. When I was still taller than them.

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Were you surprised that Travis got national notoriety at such an early age when he played guitar in Noisem?

Was I surprised? Nope. His first real taste of music in a large setting was [Washington D.C.’s] HFStival in 1999. Yep, he was 4. He was a big hit with everyone. Everyone gave him high fives and bottled water.

What were your thoughts when you learned your son was joining a band called Pig Destroyer?

My thoughts on Pig Destroyer—I had heard him talk about them before. I trust my son. He knows I support him regardless. Oh, I have also told the band that I am always available for cowbell. But seriously, these guys look after him.

What is something most people would be surprised to know about your son?

He cooks with me. I’m not trying to embarrass him, but he got his nickname “Bud” because when he was very short, he would not lay down until he watched Urban Cowboy. And he watched the whole thing every night!

—ANDREW BONAZELLI

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Fudge Tunnel, The Complicated Futility of Ignorance  Earth Crisis, Gomorrah’s Season Ends  Down, NOLA  Paul Chain, Alkahest  The Gates of Slumber, Conqueror ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  The Black Angels, Passover  Grand Blanc, Mémoires Vives  The Blue Angel Lounge, The Blue Angel Lounge  Slowdive, Slowdive  Sonic Youth, Sister ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  Blut Aus Nord, Ultima Thulée  Dimmu Borgir, For all tid  Deicide, Once Upon the Cross  Maleficarum, Across the Heavens  The Gathering, Mandylion ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  Necrot, Mortal  Svartidauði, Revelations of the Red Sword  Deadguy, Fixation on a Co-Worker  Zous, Pandemicon  Nifelheim, Nifelheim ---------------------------------Aaron Salsbury : m a r k e t i n g a n d s a l e s  Against All Authority, Destroy What Destroys You  Violent Society, Not Enjoyin’ It  Converge, Caring and Killing  Swing Kids/Spanakorzo, Split  Angel Hair, Insect Mortality

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------KW Campol : v i l e c r e at u r e  SEA, Impermanence  Former Worlds, Iterations of Time  Elizabeth Colour Wheel, NOCEBO  Bismuth, The Slow Dying of the Great Barrier Reef  Cavernlight, As We Cup Our Hands and Drink from the Stream of Our Ache

I Wore a Karelian Isthmus Longsleeve in My 1995 Yearbook Picture think it was some old Carpathian Forest interview where a theory was proposed that we only get a few good years in our lives. I’m paraphrasing and probably getting it entirely wrong, but I’m sure we all have a few years under our belts that we would gladly relive, which lends some credence to the wise philosopher I kind of quoted above. I’m sure this was before they had the naked fat guy in a diaper with them anyway. Now, while I haven’t had one of those “good years” in quite some time (probably because they’re used up), I can recall with great fondness 1995, which is a good thing since that’s the theme of this issue and I’m nothing if not timely.

The story about the free dildo in the previous column occurred in 1995, so it was obviously a magical time for me. I entered the year obsessing over Danzig IV and Covenant until a radio show at Stockton College took me further down the death and black metal roads towards the end of my sophomore year in high school. By the end of ’95, I was co-hosting said show, and had begun the work I’m still involved in with Krieg, as well as another band, Abominus, which was a death metal band in the loosest sense possible. It was a lot of life packed into 12 months, and probably the most formative year of that half of my life.

And while I’m sure you’re at the edge of your seat to hear about everything, I think it’s ungentlemanly to give it all up on the first date, so I’ll give you just a peek.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the most important experiences of this year, but I’d honestly be remiss to say it started anywhere else but “The Abominations of Desolation,” a weekly metal show on WLFR. My friend Ralph (one of the other heroes in last month’s epic dildo tale) turned me onto the show, which aired from some 1 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

asshole time at night to an even more asshole time of night. The range for the station was dogshit during the best of times, so most weeks I would have to plug into the rusty outlet outside on our porch and listen there. Eventually, my friends and I would form the most dedicated audience of the program, which likely only included three other people. We would all tape the program and scour it for new bands or call in and request bands that, at our time and place, were absolutely impossible to get a hold of. As the months ran on, we would eventually branch out into our subgenres of choice and try to impress the show’s host, Bruce, with shit we hoped he hadn’t heard before. None of us were dating anyone, so this is the kind of shit that occupied our time.

Eventually, I became pretty tight with Bruce, so he invited me up to the station to be his intern when his show was moved to an afternoon slot. I was just starting my junior year of high school, so it was a pretty pivotal moment in my life where I realized I could be a part of something. Looking at my bank account, past drug use and horrible social skills, I know now this was all a fucking mistake, but at the time it was everything. I stayed with the show for about a year and a half until Bruce left the station. A year later, I ended up co-hosting with a listener who went to the college and had his own show until I was offered my own, fittingly at the same asshole time “Abominations of Desolation” was on. I stayed with the station until 2005, and still occasionally guest host when I’m in the area.

I lost touch with Bruce probably 15 years ago. I hope he’s doing well wherever he landed, and it’s a testament to his impact that I’m talking about his college radio show 25 years later. Thanks for fucking up my life, Bruce.

TRAPPIST FRONTMAN crafts a monthly journey through

MORBID ALES

BY CHRIS DODGE

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Extreme DIY!

W

e’re all stuck at home,

self-quarantined, selfisolated. Taprooms and pubs are closed. A lot of us pass the time under quarantine by drinking more than usual. Truth be told, I’m a bit more pear-shaped these days because of it.

But there’s a hell of a lot of folks who don’t drink. What do they do? Turns out a few rare individuals with no vices whatsoever are still spending their time drunk without ever hitting the hooch. Such is the freakish world of Auto-Brewery Syndrome.

I read an article about this last summer.

Some poor schmuck in Pennsylvania was shunned by co-workers and family as a raging alcoholic when he was sober and the exact opposite was true. Then I caught another article about a 13-year-old girl thrown in a rehab center for alcoholism; even in lockdown with no access to booze, she showed the exact same symptoms of a Municipal Waste fan on a 24-pack bender.

Auto-Brewery Syndrome is also known as Gut Fermentation Syndrome or Intra Gastrointestinal Alcohol Fermentation Syndrome. (Aren’t they playing Obscene Extreme next year?) It’s ridiculously rare with a lengthy—albeit scattered—history of worldwide cases dating back as far as the 1940s. It’s found in people who don’t drink,

Ancient brewing tactics  (from top l) Two generations of Dodge boys plan their new line of “organic” craft beers while noted Three Floyds beer scientist and gut fermentation syndrome truther Todd Haug shares his professional opinion on the identification of the culprit

yet their bodies create their own alcohol, resulting in self-inebriation and the consequential DUIs, lost jobs and broken marriages. The stomach draws from yeast and bacteria in the intestines to ferment sugar and carbs into alcohol. Some studies identify this intestinal yeast as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, one of the most common strains used in brewing beer.

“Yeah, I have some doubts on it being that yeast specifically,” disputes Todd Haug, legendary brewmaster at 3 Floyds and string-slinger for Powermad. “All yeast will ferment sugars, and there is nothing remotely close to ‘brewing’ in this syndrome. In my opinion, it’s a yeast infection of the gut, and not the romantic notion of brewing.

Spontaneous fermentation happens all around us, not just in beer; why couldn’t it happen inside us?”

Your body brewing its own beer does sound like an absurd urban legend. Like thieves stealing a kidney and leaving you in an ice bath.

Or like technical death metal without triggered drums.

But then I received this message last November from my dad, Mike Dodge, about going to the ER overnight after his blood pressure spiked to a near-fatal 280/150: “I was about one breath from passing out; I was really messed up, but the hospital accused me of being drunk and weren’t moved much by my claim of not having a drink in 25 years. I was at four times the legal limit for drunk driving according to the blood test.” He followed this with a link to an article noting, “The above Auto-brew must be what I have.” Mind you, I never shared my previous knowledge of this syndrome with him.

And it is true he’s been sober for the better part of three decades.

Since then, my dad has experienced two more episodes, most recently in late January. “Last night, out of the blue, it happened again. I was drunk on the bathroom floor unable to move. It took three hours to get off the floor and into bed. I feel like shit…” His doctors are still convinced he’s a closet boozer. When and if they do believe him, the treatments are as poorly defined as the syndrome itself. It’s most commonly recommended to trim your diet to eliminate carbs and any foods that break down into sugar, so your gut has nothing to ferment. I have a more direct solution: Your body is telling you it needs beer, so go back to drinking.

A famous quote credited to Ben Franklin is “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” I’ll take it further and paraphrase: Maybe Auto-Brewery Syndrome is proof that God wants us to make beer. It’s only a matter of time before some aspiring thrasher tries to induce this condition and tap his own belly.

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the year [in] Dusk of the angry  Morbid Angel circa 1995, with new guitarist Erik Rutan (center r)

Scene progenitors deliver the exclamation points on their classic eras, while a new wave of Swedish melodic upstarts cement their own legends

B

by DEAN BROWN

y the time 1995 rolled around, death metal in general had fallen into

a state of autosarcophagy. Prominent metal labels such as Earache and Roadrunner had taken the grisliest of subgenres to unexpectedly high levels of sales and mainstream legitimacy only a few years prior, but what was once innovative in the extreme from a creative perspective had become homogenized—such is the case with most musical trends. ¶ “1995 was the last year Roadrunner dabbled in death metal,” reflects Monte Conner, the A&R mastermind who played a huge role in commercialization of DM during the ’90s. “By the end of 1995, the owner [Cees Wessels] basically forbade me to sign those types of bands any longer, as the market was completely flooded and the scene began to get stale. But I agreed with him—the genre no longer felt cutting-edge to me.” ¶ However, while many DM classics were already in metal’s hallowed annals of extremity by 1995 (with some of their creators on their heels and their acolytes a sad pastiche), in the U.S., four of DM’s pioneering pillars released LPs that would, with time, all become regarded as absolute masterworks.

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For one, Morbid Angel were confidently coming off the back of their major label debut, the highly successful, mainstream-decimating Covenant (1993). Follow-up Domination introduced DM Terminator Erik Rutan as a guitarist/songwriter in replacement of Richard Brunelle, and their archetypal sound focused more on evil groove, immovable tempos and otherworldly atmospherics.

“I remember a tremendous response to the album,” says Rutan. “It really was just the natural evolution of the band at that time. It was one of the proudest and most amazing experiences in my life and career. I felt so honored to not only be a part of Morbid Angel and play with Pete [Sandoval], Trey [Azagthoth] and David [Vincent], but to also compose five songs on the album, which, to this day, I am very proud of.”

While Conner might have had an impending embargo on signing new DM acts for Roadrunner, he still had his hands full in ’95, as the label pushed Fear Factory’s industrial metal circuitbreaker Demanufacture alongside Deicide’s überblasphemous Once Upon the Cross, Suffocation’s techdeath milestone Pierced From Within, and Death’s prog-death masterpiece Symbolic.

“Deicide were always incredibly difficult to deal with,” admits Conner. “Mostly Glen Benton, as you can imagine. If you were to meet Glen today, he’s a total sweetheart compared to the person I dealt with back then, and he made my life a living hell. But I always tell people that, to me, with Once Upon the Cross, Deicide became the Bon Jovi of DM; meaning every single song is perfectly arranged and crafted, verse/chorus style, with huge chorus hooks and not an ounce of fat in sight, with most songs hitting the threeminute mark.

“I don’t recall hearing any demos of Death’s Symbolic—in fact, I probably heard it for the first time when it was completed,” Conner recalls. “A proven talent like Chuck [Schuldiner] was a total master at his craft—he did not need label involvement or some asshole suit to try and fuck with his vision. Symbolic blew me away… [It] stands out as unique in the band’s catalog and it was the moment when Chuck married his recent progressive direction on Human

and Individual Thought Patterns with more songbased material to create the perfect blend of both worlds where the playing and flash never overshadowed the songcraft.”

Though no one would know it during the dying embers of 1995—or indeed probably for a year or two later—the month of November would breathe some new life into death metal’s increasingly fetid corpse. Earlier in the year, Swedish death metal gave us the baroque, progladen debut from Opeth, which existed beyond scene classification, as well as the more groovedriven and divisive Dismember record, Massive Killing Capacity, and two of black/death metal’s early texts—Naglfar’s Vittra and Unanimated’s Ancient God of Evil.

All of those albums would go on to gain greater cult status in the decades to come. And yet, there were even harder-hitting groundbreakers released during and immediately following what is known in the Runic calendar as Gormánuður (“the Slaughter month”): At the Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul and Dark Tranquillity’s The Gallery—both melodic DM torchbearers— and the scythe-swingin’ black/death majesty of Dissection’s Storm of the Light’s Bane.

“Slaughter of the Soul was a fucking kick in the face when it came out—great album,” says Richard Cabeza, who tirelessly pulled double duty with Dismember and Unanimated in 1995.

“Dissection were a fantastic band, too, and I am glad they received the success they did. I was friends with Jon [Nödtveidt] before he had Dissection. He was a fan and influenced by Unanimated. I don’t think we ever saw any of the bands around as rivals, maybe because all those bands used to open for us back then. [Laughs]” Dark Tranquillity vocalist Mikael Stanne admits that it took plenty of time before he realized that 1995 was very significant for metal coming out of Gothenburg, but recalls the release of The Gallery as being a very exciting time for his band, and he holds the sophisticated Swedish melodeath classic in high regard to this day.

“I love it still, and am incredibly proud of what we did then,” he says. “Not having any idea of what we were doing combined with youthful confidence turns out to be a great recipe for success. But no matter how much we hear how important that album has been to people, it’s still hard to fully fathom. It’s just something we did as kids, basically.

“It was crazy thinking that bands from our little part of the world were considered among the best of the genre at that time,” Stanne concludes, “but it made us proud and inspired us to stick to it.”

13

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the year [in]  Fleur peur Black metal/prog fusion theorists Fleurety find that 1995 was their time

The long-smoldering flames between orthodoxy and new genre revolutionaries erupt into fire

B

by JON ROSENTHAL

eing pulled in several directions after a banner year of definition (1994), the now-tentacled, formerly conservative (mostly, lest we forget bands like Sigh and Master’s Hammer) approach was finding its way to the new millennium as a confusing, now-suddenly progressive beast. Much like the rest of the world viewed the impending year 2000, black metal, too, made its best efforts to modernize by way of punctuated equilibrium, and 1995 was a landmark year in stylistic expansion. ¶ Black metal’s more traditional side began to move toward orthodoxy, rather than strict traditionalism, as well, and Gehenna’s Seen Through the Veils of Darkness: The Second Spell is a shining example of the concentration on aggression—as well as atmosphere—which gave way to what is now known as “orthodox black metal.” ¶ “I think we were all over the place because it was the first record we had a decent recording budget for,” says primary songwriter Sanrabb, “so that led to us trying out different things when it came to the writing of the songs, and also the recording of the songs. Some of it worked out really well, some of it didn’t, but that sort of happens when you experiment. Bands were really all over the place, pretty experimental. It was sort of tight-knit—everyone knew who everyone was, at least here in Scandinavia—but we were in contact with bands from all over the place like Sigh.”

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Taking up the middle ground was a young, excitable Ulver, whose Bergtatt expounded upon the Viking lore that bands like Burzum and Enslaved had concentrated on lyrically.

According to guitarist Aismal, in a rare statement, “After going through a very intense period the previous years—and especially in 1994 with the burning of churches and killing of Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth—I think the black metal scene felt a need to change and regain focus to making great music.”

Opting for a folkish/neoclassical bent, their melodic, classical guitar-led debut—a vast evolution from the avant-garde Vargnatt demo (which included Carl-Michael Eide on drums—more on him later)—featured a completely new lineup and credo, beginning the folk-inflected Trilogie with strong footing. Of Bergtatt, Aismal recollects, “It may have contributed to a more experimental path some black metal took in the years to follow—being the first black metal record

with classical guitar, flutes and piano. Also, it demonstrated that black metal could be about Norwegian national romance with fairy tales and trolls, and not be dependent on the traditional corpsepaint from the earlier days.”

Much like Ulver, Primordial, too, found footing in the past and pride of culture. Taking from their Celtic roots, Imrama blended ripping black metal with mournful folk music. “I think we were one of the first bands playing maybe pagan black metal, something like this,” reckons vocalist Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill. “It was obvious we came from this second wave of black/death metal; the demo came out in ’93, but even though we had some of the same spiritual concerns, we wanted to mix it with culture and history, and have echoes of our own Irish and European folklore.” Of the year itself, Nemtheanga recalls, “[I]t was clear things were about to change. It was the year, at least for me, quite a bit of the magic and mystique died.”

Though the Ulvers, Primordials and Gehennas truly make 1995 special, it is important to remember that black metal was suddenly broken into parts that year. No longer was there an “essence” of black metal; rather a philosophy through which creativity could be shown. The mid-’90s was the wider birth and dissemination of the avant-garde in black metal, something

that would later be known as “post-black metal” (and no, that doesn’t mean the portmanteau of post-rock and black metal): a blanket statement that encompasses all the weird in black metal, be it progressive, avant-garde or… more.

People like Carl-Michael “Czral” Eide, Hugh “Skoll” Mingay (also of Ulver) and Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez (also of Dødheimsgard, which released Kronet til Konge the same year) could be described as the impetus of all things strange and whimsical in black metal. Their band Ved Buens Ende fused a greater progressive and avant-garde nature with black metal, something clattering, smooth and emotionally devastating.

A young Vindsval, having privately recorded demos before his first full-length, unveiled his Blut Aus Nord project in this landmark year. Though his futuristic take on black metal wouldn’t emerge for almost a decade, the seeds were sown in Ultima Thulée’s icy, mechanical atmospheres. “Black metal is nothing but a feeling, elusive, and therefore the possibilities are endless,” he says. “The subversive essence of black metal is this perpetual regeneration.”

Of his first LP, Vindsval reminisces, “[t]here are a lot of ‘errors’ on this album, and a dose of naiveté, but Ultima Thulée is a testimony to a bygone epoch.”

Fleurety, having released a demo and an EP in previous years, made their first full-length exhalation with Min tid skal komme, a whimsical black metal giant with as many as 30 riffs per song and a proclivity for rock music. “1995 was the year black metal died,” says drummer and vocalist Svein Egil “Zweizz” Hatlevik, “and then something else had to be built atop the grave… or ruins.”

Avant-metal duo Solefald had only just formed in 1995, amidst the madness and creativity of a now bygone scene. Though their Jernlov demo would not be released until the next calendar year, Solefald’s roots were laid in this particular year. “Back in 1995, the plague of burning churches and murder had started to die down, and musical experimentation within the genre began unfolding,” Cornelius Jakhelln recollects.

“The schism between the black metal orthodoxy and the ‘revolutionaries’ became apparent. I guess that the mainstream public in Norway began to appreciate that there was also something of musical value within the music.”

In a truly transformative year for black metal, the corpse of the second wave rotted and blossomed into a tentacular new form. Parts of which resembled its former self, but others branched out even further into a new existence.

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the year [in]  A Scene to suffer in

My Dying Bride circa 1995, likely unaware of their growing influence

In which the death-doom generation strikes an unexpected balance between grief and groove

by CHRIS CHANTLER

recious few bands were proclaiming themselves “doom metal”

when the 1990s began. A select scattering of born-too-late eccentrics had struggled through an ’80s metal landscape obsessed with speed and brutality, but soon the brutalists caught onto this emotive throwback sound. After extreme metal’s cutting edge was applied to doom circa 1990-’94 (by Winter, Paradise Lost, Autopsy, Cathedral, My Dying Bride, Thergothon, Esoteric and diSEMBOWELMENT), we saw an inverse equivalent to the hyperactive one-upmanship of speed/thrash/death scenes circa 1982-’86. The new impetus was not just to be slowest and heaviest, but to go crazier than even Ozzy imagined. ¶ At metal’s most fathomless depths, Italian wrist-slitters Ras Algethi gave us our first taste of where doom was headed in ’95, releasing their devastating sole LP Oneiricon - The White Hypnotic on New Year’s Day. No less mysterious at the time, Skepticism’s debut Stormcrowfleet seized upon the concerted evocation of sorrow and blight, hotly contesting a key strand of doom’s “one-downmanship”: Who can make the saddest album? ¶ Competition was fierce, especially from Norway’s appropriately named Funeral, but the doom underground kept dredging up these deadly downbeat debuts. NYC’s Ceremonium; pastoral Czechs Dissolving of Prodigy; Chicago mopes Novembers Doom; Finnish occultists Barathrum; San Francisco trippers Acid King; Dutch depressives Deinonychus and Orphanage; 16 : JUNE 2020 : DECIBEL 16

Norse melodicists Paradigma; SoCal mood-ruiners Mindrot; Italian hypno-goths Monumentum; all launched inaugural LPs across these 12 bedeviled months. Then came the killer sludge splits—Grief/Corrupted, Eyehategod/13, Floor/ Sloth—and EPs from future Swedish gloom royalty Katatonia, Italian black-doom freaks Cultus Sanguine and Virginia’s epic tragedians While Heaven Wept, 1995 truly tapping a incalculable torrent of woe.

These were among the most inhospitable doom events of the year, but closer to the mainstream, gothic death-doom was becoming a veritable sensation. Paradise Lost, Anathema and My Dying Bride, having set genre standards, were eschewing deathly traces. MDB’s Aaron Stainthorpe, in particular—dropping the growls for the first time—pioneered the concept of vulnerability in a metal band. “Believe me, I wanted to rock and roll like most other frontmen,” remarks Stainthorpe, “but as soon as our first-ever live gig happened, I melted onstage, realizing I now had to sing those personal lyrics I wrote several weeks earlier. I was shocked at the impact on my psyche that moment created and knew, by the end of the show, I won’t be high-fiving the audience anytime soon.”

1993’s Turn Loose the Swans was proving particularly influential on European scenes... not that the band noticed. “The impact of the LP was a long gestation period,” insists Stainthorpe, “so its impact wasn’t immediate, and therefore not really felt by us that much. The adulation was sort of drip-fed, so it never got the chance to knock us off our collective feet. It was only the advent of social media that really made us aware of the impact Swans made, and as we’re all older and wiser now, we never got that chance to blow our own trumpets very loudly.”

Nevertheless, a post-Peaceville Three feeding frenzy was rushing in to satiate this new hunger for dejected guitar harmonies, Iommi-frosted riffs and pseudo-Shakespearean odes to thwarted romance. Of all the bands vying to express lovelorn poetic dismay in ’95—Ablaze My Sorrow, On Thorns I Lay, Lacrimas Profundere, Silent Stream of Godless Elegy (Flowing Tears and Withered Flowers even)—the crown of pretension was seized by Theatre of Tragedy’s grandiloquent debut opener “A Hamlet for a Slothful Vassal.”

A key text in what became known as metal’s “beauty and the beast” aesthetic, the Norse goths’ duetting male/female vocals represented a shift in doom’s sexual politics. In the essay “A Gothic Romance: Neomedieval Echoes of Fin’amor in Gothic and Doom Metal” (The Oxford Handbook

of Music and Medievalism, OUP 2020), Ross Hagen notes, “[the band] attempt to provide some sense of balance to their narratives by extending the lyrical perspective beyond that of the lovesick male poet. The lady is no longer an objectified quasi-deity, but a more fully realized character who brings her own opinions to the scenario.”

1995 was a boom year for ladies bringing their opinions to the scenario. In addition to Funeral’s Toril Snyen, Orphanage’s Martine van Loon, Novembers Doom’s Cathy Jo Hejna and Paradigma’s Zilla Eidskrem, the Gathering introduced exciting new frontwoman Anneke van Giersbergen, making Mandylion such a sublime breakthrough. Acid King’s Lori S. was flaying audiences with her belligerent sneer; promising Londoners Mourn released an enjoyable Rise Above debut featuring the faintly Alison Moyet pipes of Caroline Wilson; Thorr’s Hammer recorded the demo that became their sole LP, Dommedagsnatt, introducing the subterranean gargle of 19-year-old freak of nature Runhild Gammelsæter, while the Third and the Mortal’s enchanting Nightswan EP contained the Trondheim sextet’s last doom material, and first recordings with soprano jazz chanteuse Ann-Mari Edvardsen.

Amid these diverse impulses, bastions of true doom got rather left behind. Candlemass were over, Pentagram in disarray (again), the Obsessed destroyed by an ill-fated Columbia deal. Trouble survived their major label dalliance, but were cheerfully covering the Monkees on the herbally

relaxed Plastic Green Head, and although Saint Vitus regrouped for the monumental Die Healing, it was planned as their last LP due to widespread indifference. Their German label, Hellhound, put out fine records in ’95 from Revelation and Blood Farmers, but the imprint soon folded, their soulful, blue-collar house style unable to keep pace with new extravagant extremes.

Cathedral always represented the bonding of both approaches, but The Carnival Bizarre was largely a euphoric flurry of rollicking British thunder—quirkily lurid, but aeons away from the dour solemnity that doom had come to represent. Alongside Trouble and Sleep, Cathedral had spearheaded a “grooving process” that palpably affected the direction of doom in ’95; Celestial Season’s Solar Lovers caught the Dutch septet endearingly equidistant between grief and groove; Welsh caners Acrimony, growling miseries in ’93, took the full psych pill on The Acid Elephant EP; ads for the Rise Above debut by Electric Wizard—evolving out of Dorset U.K. death-doom extremists Thy Grief Eternal—trumpeted the arrival of “heavy stoner doom rock.” In this regard, one of 1995’s most significant events was Our Haunted Kingdom changing their name to Orange Goblin.

As singer Ben Ward recalls, after a 1994 demo influenced by “the Northern Peaceville bands,” youthful Londoners OHK were just cutting their first vinyl: a Rise Above split with Electric Wizard, showcasing a pivotal new song. “It

was a different direction and a definite transition,” affirms Ward of hazy, Cream-inspired headbanger “Aquatic Fanatic,” the tune that changed the band.

“It was a case of finding that our name wasn’t really suitable for our style of music,” the frontman continues. “The new name suited the music far more because we’d started introducing elements of psychedelia. And we thought Orange Goblin could have been one of these band names you’d find on [guitarist] Gaz Jennings’ early Cathedral thanks lists!” Swiftly styling themselves “heavy hippy trippy doom rock,” the rechristened Goblins had learned that “doom metal didn’t have to be all about the slow tempo and heaviness; there was a groove to it. Even Wizard at that stage had a bit more of that up-tempo feel, rather than the old stuff they’d done with Thy Grief Eternal, so there was definitely a change.”

Solemn gothicism, having peaked, was being repudiated for psychedelic fun times, setting the tone for a fin de siècle milieu where carefree hedonism could enjoy its last gasp. Ward’s summation of the mid-’90s doom scene is way less wanky. “It was a great time in the U.K. around then; there was a real mixture of styles that made shows interesting,” he enthuses. “It was such an exciting time to go see bands. I look back on it fondly.”

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the year [in]

Industrial-influenced acts rewired the mainstream charts, while a new breed of noise experimentalists became unlikely bedfellows with extreme metal

by JEFF TREPPEL

Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.

O

—The Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell

ne of the key works of cyberpunk, Mamoru Oshii’s anime adap-

tation of Ghost in the Shell dropped in 1995. In it, cyborg protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi wrestles with her self-identity (via lots of explosions and philosophical exposition). Similarly, by 1995, extreme metal was suffering through its own identity crisis. The breakout successes of Ministry’s 1992 crossover hit Psalm 69 and Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 masterpiece The Downward Spiral opened the doors for the genre to install the soul of a new machine. ¶ “The Nine Inch Nails/Ministry thing was a big thing for me when I was in my late teens,” says Devin Townsend of Strapping Young Lad, whose industrial-influenced debut Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing came out in 1995. “It seemed like there was this kind of romantic dystopian thing that

18 : JUNE 2020 : DECIBEL 18

hearkened back to Blade Runner. I was interested in that until it fell out of fashion or I fell out of interest, but Godflesh brought it back. I really liked the whole Morbid Angel/Carcass heavier metal sort of thing, but also having that lineage of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry just seemed like a really interesting combination of styles.

Fear Factory were the first ones within the metal scene that I felt did it effectively.”

Fear Factory guitarist/songwriter Dino Cazares also feels his band blazed trails. “We met Rhys Fulber from Front Line Assembly and we decided to do some remixes on the Fear Is the Mindkiller [EP from 1993],” Cazares recalls. “And this is before any extreme band did that. Sure, you might have Trent Reznor doing that, but as far as like extreme bands doing industrial grind and death metal, nobody was doing that.”

 Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, ect.

White Zombie say "yes" to mainstream success, circa 1995

While the EP was a good start, Fear Factory’s Demanufacture is No. 8 on our Top 40 for a reason. Demanufacture took the fusion they’d initiated on Soul of a New Machine and brought it to the next level, perfectly combining extreme metal crunch with industrial atmosphere. In the process, it introduced the template for dozens of artists that followed.

In addition to that foundational text, 1995 also saw the introduction of German love machines Rammstein with Herzeleid and industrial icons KMFDM’s top-selling Ministry move, Nihil. New York art-rock scuzzballs White Zombie had the biggest commercial success with their multiplatinum smash Astro-Creep: 2000 - Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head—although bassist Sean Yseult says the group didn’t consider themselves industrial metal. “I get that Rob [Zombie]’s voice sounds a bit like Ministry in a few songs, and that the record is heavy with movie samples and a few other bells and whistles, but we were trying to top La Sexorcisto and this is what came out,” she reasons. “I know none of us were thinking,

‘We’re going to become industrial metal!’

Honestly, the sampling aspect of White Zombie was more an influence of rap and hip-hop bands, which we listened to a lot being from NYC.” Still, their use of horror/sci-fi movie samples and martial rhythms made them incredibly influential on bands that followed (including frontman Rob Zombie’s own solo releases).

It wasn’t just bigger acts with their ears open; Relapse’s Release subsidiary, home to some of the weirdest noise on the planet, unveiled the first album from Neurosis’ experimental offshoot Tribes of Neurot, Silver Blood Transmission in 1995. Matt Jacobson, Relapse label founder, says of the genre-bending release, “It really felt like a very natural link [between metal and experimental music]. Neurosis is one of my all-time favorite bands, so needless to say, we were super stoked to work with those guys.

Neurosis came out of the punk scene; they were playing music that was heavier than most metal bands, and they were into and influenced by artists from a huge range of genres. I think that is part of the reason the music they created was so distinct and incredible.”

However, this bastardization of their favorite form alienated actual industrial fans (the ones way into drum machines and a different use

for leather). John Giovanazzi, a promoter for influential L.A. industrial club Das Bunker since 1996, remembers his compatriots’ rejection of the metal elements: “As far as the metal spectrum goes, they were pretty much going in their own direction, and the industrial fans wanted nothing to do with that. They’d been over Nine Inch Nails for a while, seeing them as dabbling in the scene and on their way to however you want to describe them—postindustrial rock, dad rock, whatever you want to call it. And Ministry—once you add two guitars to a song, the industrial scene doesn’t want anything to do with you. One is pushing it a lot of the time.” On the other hand, Giovanazzi says that year saw pivotal releases from upand-coming scene stars P·A·L, Wumpscut and Project Pitchfork, thus ensuring that specific underground would continue to thrive.

While it may have alienated some purists (in both camps), the melding of metal and industrial that the class of ’95 perfected helped solidify the new genre for years to come, just like how, at the end of Ghost in the Shell (spoiler), Kusanagi and the Puppet Master combined identities into a powerful new entity. As Townsend would say on a future album: All hail the new flesh.

Records are essential.

But times are weird.

2 02 0 AUG 29 • SEPT 26 • OCT 24

So instead of one big party, we’re DROPPING records into indie record stores on three RSD DROPS dates. Find out which titles on the RSD 2020 list are coming on which dates at recordstoreday.com Things will look a little different, but we’re still all about the culture of the indie record store. Support the indie places you love now, so they’ll be there for you later.

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interview by

QA j. bennett

PHIL ANSELMO WI TH

The man of

a thousand bands was doing it all in 1995

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P

antera. Down. Superjoint. Christ Inversion. Phil Anselmo was active bands—Superjoint, Down, anything outside of

in all four bands during the year of our unholy lord 1995. Pantera were still touring the tail end of Far Beyond Driven, but Anselmo had enough free time to wrap up Down’s monumental debut, NOLA (which dropped in September ’95), crank out Superjoint’s first sludge/crossover excursions (Demo 95) and unveil the second demo from black metal miscreants Christ Inversion (13th Century Luciferian Rites). Not to mention the fact that his other black metal band, Viking Crown, had officially started in ’94—so it’s not unlikely that he was dabbling with some of that in ’95 as well. Somewhere along the line, ideas for 1996’s The Great Southern Trendkill must’ve been percolating. “Back then, I was listening to black metal and hardcore and everything in between,” our man recalls. “I’d make compilation tapes that would have Impaled Nazarene, Black Flag, Saint Vitus and the Melvins on them, so it’d be this big mix of stuff that really did it for me at the time. Plus, I was rediscovering Black Sabbath and Celtic Frost, which was huge. So, it was a very fertile ground of creativity back then. It was beautiful.”

From what I can gather, the sessions for Down’s NOLA wrapped in early ’95. What do you remember about that?

We started recording at David Farrell’s studio in New Orleans, and then a huge flood came. It was, comparatively, a small flood compared to what we had in later years—but it totally fucked up that studio for a couple weeks. There were pictures of floor toms floating through the place.

It was crazy, man. But other than that, the sessions went really smooth. The last song we did was “Jail,” and we had everybody in the studio.

Lil Daddy [Joe LaCaze] from Eyehategod—rest in peace—was doing percussion with Jim [Bower], so that was awesome. We had the lights out and everyone was buzzed up.

You’d had your back injury a couple years prior—you sang about it on Pantera’s “I’m Broken”—but you didn’t actually have your surgery until 2006. So, you must’ve been suffering in the studio with Down.

Totally. Just sitting there, suffering. I remember talking to Lil Daddy and his girlfriend at the time—who ended up being his wife—about it.

Now that I’m thinking of it, this was probably just before hard drugs chewed me up. I was starting to dabble a little bit.

Pretty much anyone who was a fan of Pantera, COC, Eyehategod or Crowbar was cranking NOLA back then, but you didn’t really tour on it. Was it frustrating not to be able to capitalize on that?

I guess it was, but we were all in more established bands. We had to do what we had to do.

So, it was a little frustrating, but we were all still working. We all had our main bands. Nobody was waiting around.

The first Superjoint Ritual demo came out in ’95 as well. What do you remember about that?

Pantera—those were our songs. But it was a bigtime creative spurt in my life.

This seems like the period when Pantera started to fray a bit internally. Did you get the sense that the Abbott brothers were frowning upon your other musical activities?

Not outwardly, but when I would show up to get back on the road with Pantera, I would always come to the tour with a new demo. And it wouldn’t be shitty—it would be good, you know?

I think for anybody that could get a little old.

Pantera was working so much. In my mind, it was like, “What am I supposed to do when I’m home? Not write music?” The Abbott brothers never really voiced displeasure, but at the same time… I don’t know. I can’t see them being too happy about it, either. But that’s how it goes.

The second Christ Inversion demo, 13th Century Luciferian Rites, came out in ’95. Where did that title come from?

Superjoint started as just a bunch of friends jamming together. It was one of those things, anytime I’d have some time off, we’d get together and think, “This is pretty good. What do we do now?” It was tough to stop the flow of creativity, and I didn’t wanna stop it. It was just pouring out of all of us. So, that’s the spot I was stuck in between those three bands—not to mention Christ Inversion.

The singer, Wayne Fabra—“Doobie.” He was— and I think he still is—a practicing Satanist. I mean, I can’t get on board for any religion, but if you’re gonna say you’re a Satanist, you’re basically saying you’re a Christian. For me, it was more about the music and the attitude—always the attitude.

How did you organize your practice schedule back then?

Well, I’ve never shied away from such things.

I love my odes to the devil—I do. I mean, my favorite Slayer record is Hell Awaits. The stuff they put out after that, you can’t really say was Satanic. They might mention the name Satan here and there, but Hell Awaits was Satanic. It’s what you’d wanna hear if the gates of hell were opening before you. So, I’ve always been partial to that type of music, that type of lifestyle, that type of imagery—I love all that shit, man.

Everybody kinda had a time slot. I’d be at home, and at six o’clock, Soilent Green would get here and practice. At seven, we’d have Christ Inversion practice because Tommy Buckley from Soilent Green ended up playing drums in Christ Inversion. Then a little bit later, we’d have Superjoint practice. And then late night, we’d have Body and Blood practice, which would end up being En Minor years later.

All the guys around me were talented, and it couldn’t be stopped.

Did doing all these different projects give you a new perspective on Pantera at the time?

To me, it felt like Pantera had our style down.

We were very comfortable with that. But I definitely had other ideas that I couldn’t really do with Pantera, necessarily, because of the stylistic clash. And then, once you get into a room with a group of guys, then you have other musicians giving input to the song, which makes it that group of guys’ songs. So, I couldn’t take those to Dime [Darrell Abbott], Vince [Vinnie Paul] and Rex [Brown]. Everybody that was in any of the

But at the same time, did you seek him out for Christ Inversion because he was a Satanist?

It looks like Viking Crown started in ’94. Do you remember doing stuff for that in ’95?

Dude, Viking Crown was me and a four-track, and it’d take me about a half-hour to make a record. It was just me, for the most part.

Actually, the first record was me and Big Ross Karpelman. He played keyboards on The Great Southern Trendkill—“Suicide Note Pt. 1” and another song. He played on the Down album, too.

Black metal at that time was heading into a more atmospheric and trippy direction. Varg Vikernes was doing his thing, and his approach was different with keyboards. Emperor was doing stuff with keyboards—and so was Christ Inversion.

But Viking Crown, to me, was more raw and

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I couldn’t take [certain songs] to Dime, Vince and Rex. Everybody that was in any of the bands—Superjoint, Down, anything outside of Pantera— those were our songs. But it was a big-time creative spurt in my life. super under-produced. I didn’t need a band. I did everything on four-track cassette, and that was the quality I wanted.

and put out some bizarre record. So, I think we were pretty adamant about staying true to heavy metal, but we added different flavors and influences along the way.

So, Viking Crown is done, then?

Oh yeah. So is Christ Inversion. And as far as I know, so is Superjoint. Those bands are done.

You recorded your vocals for that album in New Orleans, away from the rest of the band.

What’s the story there?

I know it wasn’t until ’98 or so that photos of you with Fenriz and Satyr started surfacing for the Eibon project. But do you think that was already percolating back in ’95?

By the time we were in the studio, I was totally in the throes of hard drugs. I think I was ashamed and embarrassed by it. After we wrote the music portion and it was time to record, I ended up staying at home in New Orleans and singing my stuff over at Trent Reznor’s studio.

Our producer, Terry Date, would go do his thing in Texas with the band, and then he would fly to New Orleans and work with me over at Trent’s place. So, I wasn’t with the band, and that was different for me, man. It was really tough for me to face those guys because I had dug myself a pretty hefty hole with the drugs and booze and shit like that. Honestly, I was ashamed to be around those guys at that point in time. I was ashamed of myself—very much so.

Well, Frank [Pucci]—Killjoy—heard the Christ Inversion demos and flipped out. He loved them.

He begged me and Doobie to join Necrophagia.

Doobie was the singer for Christ Inversion, but in all reality, he was a drummer. He was the drummer for Graveyard Rodeo back in the ’80s with Pepper [Keenan]. So, we joined Necrophagia, and then Killjoy sent all the new Necrophagia stuff to Fenriz and everybody without telling them who was playing guitar—until after they said they liked it. When he told them, “That’s Phil Anselmo on guitar,” they were like, “What do you mean?” [Laughs] So, it started off like that.

Whatever happened with Eibon? It seemed like it just fizzled out after releasing that one song on a Moonfog comp in 2000.

Everybody has their theory, but I’ll just come out and say it: Fenriz and Satyr didn’t see eye to eye.

That was it.

At some point in ’95, you must’ve started writing or at least tinkering with ideas for The Great Southern Trendkill. Do you think any of the side projects you were doing seeped into that album somehow?

I really don’t think they did. Heading into that album, the Pantera guys wanted to rethink the approach—different elements we could add to the songs. I know Vince was listening to a whole bunch of Nine Inch Nails back then. There are a couple little parts on there that I don’t think you would’ve heard on any earlier Pantera records— like “Floods” and shit like that. But there was no way I was gonna leave heavy metal high and dry 2 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L 22

Do you remember your lyric writing process for that album?

I think the overall tone and subject matter was different for sure. I wasn’t Mr. Positive, I’ll say that. I realize now that the whole back injury thing was just me being dealt the cards I was dealt. But back then, it felt like a rip-off because I was still young, still in my strongest body and then—bam!—the lower back went and I felt vulnerable. I felt cheated. It felt like my whole life was uprooted because I couldn’t just hang out anymore. I couldn’t go to the bar anymore. I couldn’t do a show and hang out after anymore.

There was no more hanging out for me. It was misery, 24/7, and anything in between that was how I dealt with that fucking misery. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

After my second back surgery, I was on painkillers for a long time. And even though I was out of it a lot, I had one of the most productive periods of my life in terms of writing

music for different projects. Since that’s what you were doing in ’95, I’m wondering if you had a similar experience—even though you hadn’t had your surgery yet.

Sure. Hydrocodone is a pretty trippy thing, man.

It’s speedy, it’s buzzy; it’s vibey. The drug itself, mixed with talent and youth and all the different things you wanna do? Hydrocodone can facilitate an energy. You mix booze with that and it makes a whole different energy, but I totally agree with you and I absolutely see what you’re talking about. But I honestly don’t wanna give it too much credit.

Of course. The creativity obviously comes from within.

Yeah, but there is something about the drug.

Even heroin, and opiates in general. There’s something about opiates and a young, hungry spirit that will put you in a creative mode. I do agree with that. But I don’t wanna glorify it. I want everyone to know that. I really don’t wanna glorify it, but there’s no way I can go back in time and take away the injury or the drugs, because it happened. If I had never been injured, would I have done so much? I really don’t know.

Also, when you have an injury like that—and again, I’m speaking from my own experience— something kicks in that makes you realize your time is limited. Which makes you wanna get shit done.

That’s a great way to put it, and I hope that makes it into the article somehow. It’s true.

There is that, “Oh, shit—I can’t live like this forever.” There haven’t been colossal propaganda campaigns about how bad drugs are for no reason—these types of drugs, anyway. All you have to do is look at rock ‘n’ roll history and see the deaths that opiates have brought us, from Hendrix to Janis Joplin and the whole list. So, you know you’re skating on thin ice and you better get done what you gotta get done. I gotta say, though—talking about this time period with you this much, it’s almost like the back problem wasn’t there because there was so much music to immerse yourself in.

story by

shawn macomber

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

Eden’s Shield

definitive albums

the making of Earth Crisis’ Destroy the Machines

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very day our consciences are inundated with invitations—to silence, to rationalization, to apathy, to accommodation, to convenience, to normalization. And each time we choose to participate in an economy of suffering—whether over the cries of a terrified pig prodded onto the killing floor or the whimpers of a daughter wishing for invisibility in the corner of an alcoholic household or the howl of a fox desperate to escape a fur trap’s steel jaws or the lamentations of father helplessly watching an addiction-riddled son snuff out his one precious spark of life—that is our RSVP. To stand by, of course, carries a price. “How can we hope that peace and prosperity will reign on Earth,” Leo Tolstoy noted, “if our bodies are living tombs, in which murdered animals”—or aspirations or ecosystems or species—“are buried?” Conversely, a single act of compassionate defiance can ripple into a tidal wave. Imagine, for example, a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman paying a perfectly ordinary visit to her husband at the Chicago food processing plant he manages. Imagine her catching a glimpse of the reality of abattoir, the suffering of cattle. Imagine her immediately becoming a vegetarian, effectively renouncing the very meat industrial complex upon which subsistence relies. Imagine her tearing up that RSVP. Decades later, inspired by her bravery, that woman’s grandson, one Karl Buechner, would join forces with a small cadre of deft, philosophically like-minded, DBHOF187 trailblazing musicians to launch not only one of the few true revolutionary countercultural mass movements of the last quarter-century, but also infuse these breathtakingly original, genre-refracting songs with that same iconoclastic impulse, leaving extreme music Destroy the Machines forever changed in its wake.

VICTORY This is the story of Destroy the Machines, the platonic MAY 25 , 199 5 ideal of a metallic hardcore record and one of the best, most pioneering heavy albums ever, period. Dedicated, The gathering (fire)storm like the release itself, to the vegan straight-edge.

Scrawl it across your own rejected RSVP: “From love comes this hatred.”

EARTH CRISIS

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PHOTO BY DANIELLE DOMBROWSKI

the

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EARTH CRISIS destroy the machines

Destroy the Machines is such an eclectic, unorthodox record—especially for its time. I’m curious about your respective musical journeys.

KARL BUECHNER: My grandmother played piano.

My mom and her sister were both opera singers in Europe, then became voice professors at different universities back in the States. But for me, punk came before everything. My cousin played in a band called Crucifixion of Christ, and he was basically my tour guide, playing me Angry Samoans, Motörhead and original Black Flag, all of which appealed to my obnoxious sense of humor. From around age 13 on, I also took skateboarding very seriously—I put close to a half-pipe together in my backyard—and high-energy music of all different kinds was a part of that culture. In the back of Thrasher, I’d read about bands like Verbal Assault, Cro-Mags.

When I discovered metal, I skipped over Maiden and Priest and gravitated toward the early Slayer albums, Metallica, Testament. I loved the sound, the aesthetic, the storytelling aspect of the lyrics—all of it.

IAN “BULLDOG” EDWARDS: I met Scott [Crouse, guitar] at school. I used to put my combo amp on my skateboard, lay my bass across it and skate over to his house to jam. Eventually, this killer drummer, Mike Riccardi, joined us. It was going great until I got grounded over some bad grades.

While I was out of commission, Scott and Mike started a band called Forefront. Once I could leave the house again, I ended up in a metal band with some older thrash dudes and played my first show at a biker bar. I was 14. My dad, also a bass player, got in the pit—supportive parent! I quit to play with Framework, which was basically everybody who would go on to play in Earth Crisis except for Karl.

SCOTT CROUSE: Ian and I were full-on metal kids.

Thrash, some crossover stuff. The closest we got to hardcore for the longest time was Cro-Mags until Mike brought Minor Threat and Youth of Today to the table. And along with that came straight-edge and vegetarianism, which both struck a chord with me immediately—more so than the music, really. That mix is maybe why… I don’t want to come off as arrogant. I’m not a fantastic musician by any stretch of the imagination. But that process of learning to play from Metallica tab books rather than banging through punk songs gave us a leg up. Our musical approach and chops, for lack of a better term, were a little bit more refined by the time we got into the hardcore world.

BUECHNER: Over a short span of time, through skateboarding and going to shows, I met a lot of interesting creative people—artists, musicians, photographers—and, unfortunately, watched as drugs and alcohol doused their passions. I didn’t want anything to do with it—and the bands I

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loved at the time, like Youth of Today, Uniform Choice and Bold, were reinforcing the wisdom of that decision. A few years later, though, a lot of the standard-bearers had abandoned straightedge. I could respect their decision, but it definitely felt like a letdown. So, at 17, I decided to do my own band to share what straight-edge meant to me—that it wasn’t a chapter; it essentially is the path.

The first version of Earth Crisis was me on bass, John Moseman and D.J. Rose on vocals.

That fell apart pretty quickly. The next guy I wanted to try out on vocals, Shane [Durgee], sang in Framework. I had met Scott at a skate demo, and he offered to let us practice at his house while his mother was at work. One day Shane didn’t show, so I started doing vocals. Scott liked what he heard enough to come downstairs and pick up a guitar. That’s how things got going.

“I remember plotting with Karl [Buechner] down in the basement: ‘Let’s be the Slayer of the hardcore—take all the breakdowns and slower parts we love and make that the whole song.’”

S COT T CRO USE CROUSE: Earth Crisis and [1992’s] All Out War EP

was really Karl’s vision. Framework was just kind of helping him out as a side project. We all felt something powerful happening, though, and it got more serious quickly… I remember plotting with Karl down in the basement: “Let’s be the Slayer of the hardcore—take all the breakdowns and slower parts we love and make that the whole song.”

BUECHNER: [Guitarist] Ben [Read], Mike and Bulldog liked both the idea of blending metal and hardcore and my lyrics, which no one had before. In the past, the forcefulness of what I wanted to do freaked some people out and drove them away. But those guys loved it. That was a big deal to me.

JOHN “PORCELL” PORCELLY (YOUTH OF TODAY, JUDGE, SHELTER): We played with Earth Crisis in Syracuse early on, before their rise. All the members had big Xs on their hands, which at the time was not seen that much anymore—and I took note. I recall Karl wearing a bandana over his face like a protester. I thought, “These guys are serious.” Karl walked up to me, shook my hand and kept saying, “Straight-edge, man...

straight-edge.” I actually didn’t pick up on their vegan vibe at that time, but it was cool to see straight-edge being revitalized. They were definitely at the forefront of that, since straightedge was thought of as a passing phase in the early ’90s. Later, when the band started making waves, I heard about their stance on veganism and thought it was really cool. This was when Nirvana was the biggest band in the world and even the punk scene was moving in an artier direction. Vague lyrics were in vogue, yet here was a band just laying it on the line. It made an impression on me. I also appreciated those guys, personally. I had many deep conversations with Karl. The band often got pegged as almost fundamentalist, but I always found Karl to be a very open-minded, thoughtful guy.

EDWARDS: We were all so young, and just ready to take on the world. I can remember selling Earth Crisis CDs out of my backpack in my gym class.

When did Dennis Merrick enter the picture on drums?

DENNIS MERRICK: I left Buffalo to attend Hamilton College, about an hour east of Syracuse. I missed the Buffalo hardcore scene, which had been a huge part of my life. I met this guy Paul who grew up with Karl, so we all started hanging out. When Earth Crisis lost their drummer a couple weeks before the ’93 More Than Music Fest in Dayton, I was sort of a logical choice—straight-edge, vegan, they’d seen my old Buffalo hardcore bands play Syracuse. It’s crazy thinking back on it, but I almost turned them down. Spring break was coming up and—you probably see where this is headed—I had met a girl at school. But I loved the All Out War 7-inch, so I had to say yes. Of course, the girl broke up with me like a week later. [Laughs] Sad, but it was clear I made the right choice when I got the Firestorm cassette demo. I’d never heard anything so insanely heavy and pissed off before—music that met what I felt. Honestly, I was pretty nervous because I was such a fan, but we clicked almost instantly.

BUECHNER: Dennis would come to our shows, run around in the pit. He played in a Buffalo band with Tim [Redmond] from Snapcase and Scott Vogel from Terror on vocals. From our perspective, it was like, “Whoa! The guy from Cinderblock said he would play with us!

This is amazing!”

EDWARDS: I couldn’t skate to Dennis’ first rehearsal because of this insane blizzard. So, Scott called me, put the phone down, and they played “Forged in the Flames.” We were so stoked. Dennis is more of a hardcore drummer than a metal drummer, but he’s more of a hiphop drummer than a hardcore drummer, if that makes sense. That bounce and tightness and groove became a huge part of our sound. I had a Biohazard influence going on back then—the song “Destroy the Machines” definitely has

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EARTH CRISIS destroy the machines

an [Biohazard bassist/vocalist] Evan [Seinfeld]ish vibe—so we locked in well together. He did fight the metal at first, though. [Laughs] We literally got him to play the double bass intro on “Born From Pain” by playing it off as a joke.

When he realized we were serious, he was like, “Yeah, no way.”

MERRICK: It’s true. I was very resistant to metal for some reason. Obviously, I relented and came around to a lot of that stuff. You have to when you’re playing with a guy like Scott—this prolific songwriter with an endless supply of unique, interesting heavy riffs—and Ian, who never plays just a supporting bassline. Then Karl put these profound lyrics that gave it all so much meaning. That’s not an environment you want to be dismissive of anything in.

CROUSE: Mike was a fantastic drummer, but Dennis is just so creative and weirdly versatile.

You could turn off the rest of the music and know which song is playing. That deep, nasty, almost bluesy groove was exactly where I wanted us to be. If I had to pinpoint three records that shaped the direction of Destroy, it would probably be Carcass Heartwork, Believer Dimensions and Corrosion of Conformity’s Blind. Dennis made going to those places possible.

Karl, when did the lyrical themes start to crystalize for you?

BUECHNER: I was volunteering at the Syracuse Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, helping to treat animals that had been burned, stomped on, intentionally run over. And then Syracuse is on the shores of Onondaga Lake, which for decades was the most polluted body of water in North America. The surrounding factories were dumping all manner of caustic chemicals that sank into the lakebed and poisoned everything indefinitely. North of us, acid rain was destroying the lakes in the Adirondacks. In Buffalo, there was Love Canal, which was the toxic waste site that a development was built over, leading to cancers, stillbirths. We were surrounded by environmental devastation.

And, as I mentioned, the lives of people I grew up skating and playing music with were being torn apart by drugs and alcohol. The disgust and rage I felt over all of this animated much of Destroy the Machines.

MERRICK: All the arguments we would get into— and sometimes physical fights and combative interviews—I think really motivated Karl [to] formulate as bulletproof an argument as possible for what we believed. In my opinion, he accomplished that and then some.

CROUSE: Coming from a metal guy background, steeped in Nuclear Assault and Carcass, Karl’s lyrics didn’t seem that over the top. But we were in a very literal-minded scene. There

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sometimes wasn’t much room for artistic expression or metaphor in hardcore. And from day one, Karl excelled at combining our ethical message with very dark imagery. But in hardcore at the time, if you had a song about vivisectors getting shot, you better shoot a vivisector or you’re a hypocrite. You know, “Walk the walk.” Sometimes we were held to a different standard because of the intensity of our focus.

Like, “Dead Wrong” on In Contrast of Sin is about killing a hunter, but no one gave Integrity shit about not taking some guy in an orange vest out. And, to be fair, we did support the Animal Liberation Front, Earth First!, monkey wrenching—and still do because we recognize sometimes protests don’t work.

BUECHNER: We liked how Boston bands like DYS, SSD and Slapshot presented straight-edge as a movement. We really wanted Earth Crisis to become a flash point inspiring kids to start a vegan straight-edge band in their own town, launch an animal rights group at their high school or college, organize a protest at a local laboratory or fur store. We didn’t want it to begin and end with our records.

CROUSE: I remember being upset when Syracuse hardcore got popular and kids from my high school started coming to shows. It’s like, “You don’t have any business here. You fit in. You were popular. This world is for the broken.”

Eventually, it hit me: Do I want to be an elitist?

Or do I want to help launch a true movement?

Because if you want revolution, straight-edge and animal welfare will need to become a concern of well-adjusted people who grew up in nice houses, too.

Becoming a vegetarian is kind of a mindfuck— it forces you to acknowledge you’ve been engaged in this economy of suffering. It’s a bitter pill that not everyone is eager to swallow.

And Earth Crisis put a thumb right on that bit of cognitive dissonance, that pressure point. You expected pushback, right?

BUECHNER: Of course. Maybe I didn’t expect people to throw meat or burning cigarettes or, once, even dead mice at us, but I expected adversity. We weren’t antagonistic for antagonism’s sake, though. I do believe most people are good and will do the right thing when presented with irrefutable proof of injustice. But the truth can be painful at first. If you have a broken bone, do you want a doctor who tells you everything is fine and gives you a BandAid? No. It’s going to hurt more at first, but you want a doctor who will reset the bone to actually fix the problem. That’s kind of the way I thought about it.

CROUSE: We got a lot of hate, so we had a lot of fuel. If someone said, “You’re going to have to tone it down,” we’d turn it up. If someone said, “Hey, you’re not welcome in this town again,” we’d be like, “Great. See you next week.”

Tell me about the writing process for Destroy.

BUECHNER: We were practicing in a building on the north side [of Syracuse]. It was a rough neighborhood—the kind of area where people got shot on the sidewalk, unfortunately. The room was barely lit, it was winter, there was next to no heat. The conditions that we wrote that record in were pretty wild.

CROUSE: The metal bands in this place, the Love Shack, would turn off the lights in the middle of our practices, and we’d have to walk out in the dark past these huge holes in the floor to turn them back on. The building alarm would sometimes blare for hours. It’s Syracuse, so it’s like five below in the winter and our space is right next to a cargo bay loading door. We’d go into the bathroom to put our hands under the one little heater in there just so we could play our instruments. But we loved jamming together and believed in what we were doing so much that we spent as much time in that unbelievable fucking dump as possible.

BUECHNER: We recognized there were other bands on the same path combining metal and hardcore. Conviction, for one, who we loved and had played with. Integrity in Ohio. Groundwork out west. So, it was important to us to basically put a magnifying glass over All Out War and [1993’s] Firestorm and take our ideas as far as we possibly could… [The record] really did just come together. I feel like it was meant to be.

EDWARDS: We were about to pack up our gear to head to the studio and decided to play through “Behind the Mask” and “The Wrath of Sanity” again. We kinda liked them both equally and weren’t sure which we were going to record.

And “Wrath” just hit us harder that night. I think about that a lot, actually, because 25 years later we still open almost every show with that song. It’s one that really stuck and helped define us, you know?

CROUSE: Destroy was us putting all our cards on the table. None of us were really groomed for success, shall I say, and we put everything we had into music at a young age. To us, it was like, This is it. How many bands in hardcore back then made it past an LP? It was almost unheard of, really. So, there was definitely a sense of urgency. I mean, I quit school to tour with Earth Crisis. I didn’t even finish high school.

Both Conviction and Believer have come up, two bands with Jim Winters in their ranks. He’s also credited with “additional guitar” on Destroy.

How’d you hook up with him and what happened to Ben Read?

CROUSE: We recorded Destroy as a four-piece

because… well, Earth Crisis had a lot of fun, but there were also a lot of threats. Nine times out of 10, it was all bullshit. Nothing happened. At the same time, when you’re a teenager and word is these grown men are going to attack you in a town you’ve never been to before, it’s intense.

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We refused to ever not go, but it was pretty stressful to constantly be in battle mode.

Ben just wasn’t cut out for it. He’d have legitimate panic attacks. We almost had to leave him on a picnic table one time because he wouldn’t get back in the van. Then at this show in Scranton, PA, he just bailed. Jim happened to be there. We asked him, halfkidding, “Hey, want to fill in?” Nothing but the clothes on his back, but he said, “Yeah, sure.” I warned him there was a rumor some guys were planning to jump us in Cleveland.

As usual. “That’s fine. I don’t give a shit.”

So, we took Ben’s gear out of the van, Jim jumped in, and we spent the five-hour drive teaching him the set.

EDWARDS: Jim not only seemed to always be there when we needed him, but his talent was off the charts. I remember our tunings were different, but he was like, “Yeah, I’m not adjusting my guitar.” He played everything perfectly. It was crazy to watch. We definitely learned a lot just being around him.

JIM WINTERS (CONVICTION, BELIEVER, STARKWEATHER):

The long-running hardcore scene punchline about Earth Crisis had been the “Firestorm” open E chug, so when they approached me to fill-in, I said, “Fuck it,” and just played in drop D. More often than not, I show up to bring in spice, so I took some liberties with riff voicings when it felt appropriate.

CROUSE: We loved Conviction—they were a massive influence on Earth Crisis; just a cut above everyone else—but after Jim played us [Believer’s 1993 album] Dimensions? Most of the songs for Destroy were already written, but I’d be lying if I said we didn’t go back and Believer-fy a few.

WINTERS: Honestly, I gave little thought to their awareness of Believer’s music during any of this. There was quite a bit of cross-pollination going on. I love pushing any contrast boundaries and distinctly remember playing a lot of Crowbar and Buzzov•en in the van. To my ears, one seemed to have rubbed off, while the other… not so much. [Laughs] Did you consider bringing Jim on as a full-time member?

CROUSE: Jim did a few tours with us after that,

playing guitar or selling merch. We loved having him around. But at the time it was inconceivable that someone who lived five hours away could be in your band. Which is funny in retrospect, because now we all live much further away from each other than that.

I’m assuming the Jim connection is how you landed at Trauma Studios.

CROUSE: Yeah. Tony Victory [label founder Tony

Brummel] was pushing for us to go to the usual

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“We were all so young, and just ready to take on the world. I can remember selling Earth Crisis CDs out of my backpack in my gym class.”

IA N “B ULLD O G ” E DWA RD S suspects: Mars, where Integrity recorded and where we did Firestorm; Don Fury Studios, where all the Revelation bands recorded. But after hearing Dimensions, I immediately wanted to go where Believer went. They were on Roadrunner, so I was worried they’d gone to Electric Lady or somewhere really expensive. Instead, it turned out to be [drummer] Joey [Daub]’s mother’s basement.

JOEY DAUB (BELIEVER): I built a studio in my mom’s basement for Believer demos and preproduction work. We’d also done the first Conviction record… Jim knows the genre and is a very good judge of talent, so I knew the band was going to be good. [I]t humbled us to hear Earth Crisis were fans of our band and especially Dimensions, which is a bizarre record. The Destroy songs were very interesting and solid; they are such a bunch of talented musicians, and it showed in their writing. Plus, super down-to-earth guys… no BS. CROUSE: They lived in this tiny town near Hershey, PA, called Colebrook. There was a small restaurant, a grocery store, and that was about it. The studio was really small, with a makeshift control room. You could only fit maybe three people in there at the time, but Joey and [Believer guitarist/vocalist] Kurt [Bachman] were awesome and got great sounds. We had the best time staying at Jim’s house a couple doors down watching Deliverance and eating his homemade peanut butter ice cream, which blew our minds.

WINTERS: Aside from “Born From Pain” and “The Discipline,” which I learned for tour, most of what they came in with was new to me. When Scott started with “New Ethic,” I knew they were onto something fresh and beyond anything I was expecting... The more pocket drum approach felt more like rhythmic hooks, and it’s apparent Karl had given more thought to his overall cadence and flow. I remember being in awe as we waited for any pause during his vocal tirade at the end of “Deliverance”—done in one take every time!

Musically and lyrically, Destroy remains an undeniable statement.

CROUSE: Songs are never finished, if you want to get artsy about it. I’ve been in bands where the attitude is, “Eh, that’s good enough.” I promise you, no one in Earth Crisis has ever said that.

We’re never satisfied. Ever. So, there are lots of little things we’d all change. Karl, for example, was in a real transitional phase as a vocalist. Not that it’s bad at all, but it never reached its full potential. Karl actually reached out to his mom to learn how to sing from his diaphragm and all that. He really nailed it down touring Destroy.

That’s why [1996’s] Gomorrah’s [Season Ends] starts the way it does, with that roar.

CROUSE: A lot of our friends in Syracuse were bummed when we played them the record: “It’s too slow. The demo was better.” It took a little while for the shift to catch on. But we felt like we were on the right track. Time bore that out.

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“Maybe I didn’t expect people to throw meat or burning cigarettes or, once, even dead mice at us, but I expected adversity.”

How did the horrific van accident on the 1995 Shelter tour change the band’s trajectory?

EDWARDS: We left Seattle for Salt Lake. It was

raining. Not cold. Back then, we used to load our equipment in the van, put a mattress on top and lay up there, side by side. I remember waking up at a rest stop and seeing snow. The next time I opened my eyes, we were sliding sideways down a mountain road at around 70 miles an hour. We hit a dry spot in the median and the van flipped four times. On the first flip, everybody next to me got launched out. Karl was in the front wheel well, the driver on top of him, head busted all open. Blood everywhere. Smashed equipment everywhere. I found Jim in the snow, maybe 40 feet away, conscious, but not reacting to anything. I think he ended up losing his spleen.

Dennis landed headfirst, so his face was a mask of blood. He couldn’t breathe because both his lungs had collapsed. None of us had cell phones, but luckily, a nurse leaving her shift at a nearby hospital found us and called an ambulance.

PORCELL: Shelter actually hit a patch of ice, too, and slid off the road; but luckily, we were able to dig the van out. We ended up staying in a hotel—literally the first hotel I had ever stayed at in my whole musical career! Later, we heard about the accident, which was awful. Touring is hard sometimes.

MERRICK: It was a seminal moment for me. We recorded Destroy the Machines my junior year of college. The day I graduated, I drove to New York to catch a flight for our first European tour. At the time, I had a serious girlfriend. We both signed up together to take the GREs. Up until the accident, the band to me was something I’d do for a year after college before figuring out the rest of my life. I don’t know how you feel about religion. I’m relatively religious. And the crash felt like a sign to me. I felt like there was a reason we survived a crash that would typically

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leave no survivors. I had a renewed sense of purpose. I wanted to make music that would create positive change in the world.

WINTERS: Whether blessing or curse is something I’ve never bothered to suss. I usually take these events in stride. Considering I’d eventually end up in other van calamities, it obviously did little to sway my touring proclivities. [Laughs] At least I survived to tell the tale.

EDWARDS: The accident was awful, but if the question is whether to go work at the mall or travel the world alongside my best friends spreading a message I believe in with all my heart, I’m choosing the van. We didn’t really stop. While Dennis was recuperating, the rest of us obviously did the Path of Resistance record with D.J., Mike and Shane. I can tell you the moment I saw Dennis moshing from the stage during that first Path show was a very happy one—I knew he’d definitely be coming back.

A quarter-century later, Destroy is still a landmark, still making waves. What’s your take on its legacy?

MERRICK: Despite the people throwing shit at

us onstage or wanting to fight us or tearing down our flyers, I think ours was—and is—an overwhelmingly unifying message. It provided a positive, constructive channel for anger to people who might have otherwise misdirected those emotions at themselves or others. I still see people from those early shows out there as activists, as animal advocates, as vegan restaurant owners, as people who just serve as examples of principled and compassionate living.

For me, Destroy the Machines is a reminder of how every choice we make in life, however small, can affect so much more than we realize at the moment we make it.

CROUSE: The impact is almost difficult to comprehend sometimes, just in that the messages we get

from people all over the world are so unbelievably heartfelt and heavy. It can be overwhelming. That’s a gift. The Destroy era also cemented my identity and values: I’m vegan straight-edge.

I’m going to promote this agenda until the day I die, raise my children under that banner, and try to instill the same philosophy into them that helped me and obviously so many others as well.

That love and self-knowledge is worth all the adversity we went through.

EDWARDS: There’s nothing more humbling or amazing than when someone comes up to us at a show and says, “I was addicted to drugs and your band saved my life,” or “I’ve been a vegan for 25 years because of your songs.” What more could I ask for?

PORCELL: Earth Crisis were way ahead of their time. Back then, veganism was viewed as something radical, and it must be validating to those guys that now it’s such a part of mainstream culture. They were groundbreakers and influencers, and their hard work had a lot to do with that. Throw that stone into a pond, the ripples it creates are far-reaching.

BUECHNER: Honestly, there’s no time for a victory lap. Certain things are better, but we don’t just want a veggie deal at Burger King; we actually want the animals to be free. We want the cruelty towards them to cease. When we were younger, my friend Micah’s graffiti tag was “G-O-A-L: Generation of Animal Liberation.” That’s where I got the “Wrath of Sanity” line: “Generations of oppression—one generation will break this chain.” But it won’t be our generation, which is horrifying to me. And so, while fur and vivisection and whaling and big game hunting still exist, while gorilla, elephants and rhinoceros are running out of habitat, while more and more species teeter on the verge of extinction, the thumb needs to remain on that nerve. The pressure needs to be constantly applied.

PHOTOS BY DANIELLE DOMBROWSKI

KAR L B U E C H N E R

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MINDROT Dawning RELAPSE

Back in the year of JNCOs and the backwards baseball cap, there weren’t many American death-doom miserablists to get excited about. Orange County’s Mindrot, however, blazed California sunshine and a grind-punk ethos that burned through the gloomy clouds gathered over the Peaceville Three. Dawning’s calamitous downcast was patented by a collision of monocleworthy keyboard swells, squat house grime and aristocratic darkness that didn’t get its due until long after drummer Evan Kilbourne vacated for Save Ferris’ ska-punk pep, which is probably the most mid-’90s move anyone has ever made.

of

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

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CATHEDRAL The Carnival Bizarre EARACHE

ow rad was 1995? Consider that Team Decibel couldn’t manage to find room for Anathema’s The Silent Enigma, Blut Aus Nord’s Ultima Thulée or Clutch’s self-titled record when ranking the 40 best albums of the year. Conversely, we had absolutely no trouble leaving Iron Maiden’s The X-Factor off of this list. What we deserve we just don't get, you see! —A LB ER T MU D R I A N

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DEICIDE

Once Upon the Cross ROADRUNNER

Outside of the sensationalism caused by Glen Benton’s scorched crucifix forehead-branding and threats of suicide, musically, Deicide were still the eviliest death metal band on the planet in 1995. Once Upon the Cross, their third Christ inversion, followed Legion’s increased technical complexity and mainstream-baiting success by reverting back to the raw savagery of their 1990 debut. With blasphemy rampant, the title track, “When Satan Rules His World” and “Kill the Christian” went straight for the Roman-collared jugular of the Church with serious blood-lusting intent. —DEAN BROWN 34 : JUNE 2020 : DECIBEL 34

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FAITH NO MORE King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime SLASH/REPRISE

Neither as Real Thing as the trend-chasers wished nor as Bungle as the weirdos hoped, King for a Day... is the red-covered stepchild of Faith No More’s unstable discography.

It’s the gateway-est of gateway records, slipping slow-jam tentacles around wrists and ankles with “Evidence,” “Take This Bottle” and “Just a Man,” bearing down with mean rockers like “Ricochet” and “The Last to Know,” then chewing brains and balls with “Ugly in the Morning” and “Cuckoo for Caca.” Lick the surface clean; it never tastes better. —DANIEL LAKE

The Carnival Bizarre marked the debut of Cathedral’s most stable and enduring lineup, and the new rhythm section of Leo Smee and Brian Dixon proved to be great foils for Lee Dorrian and Gaz Jennings.

This overlooked gem opens with a sly nod to Black Sabbath and just barrels through. The cameos here are pretty fascinating, too: Patron saint Tony Iommi guests on “Utopian Blaster” and Repulsion co-founder Scott Carlson co-wrote two of the album’s heaviest tracks. —NICK GREEN

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MORTIIS Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør C O L D M E AT I N D U S T R Y

Despite its master’s recent reinterpretation, the second Mortiis album remains the Norwegian dungeon synth godfather’s strongest effort. Mortiis recorded all of his first-era material straight to tape—which to this day remains a staple for true dungeon synth, as it gives the listener that heightened sense of hearing something from the ancient past—and yet Ånden is no droning tapestry of sustained chords. Actually, it joins two epic and everchanging compositions of atmospheric, exquisitely layered and adventurous medieval orchestration.

A humble and subtle—but frequently breathtaking—masterpiece. —DUTCH PEARCE

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QUICKSAND Manic Compression ISLAND

As Jay-Z says, while others make the same shit, he makes the blueprints. When it comes to

whatever defines “post-hardcore,” Quicksand laid the groundwork for pretty much every direction the genre would head with Manic Compression. From exuberant rock to brooding art-punk to venomous metal barbed with feedback, the record is experimental, yet economical. Because despite how many trails were blazed, Manic has no extravagance or digressions. It’s as focused, aerodynamic and impactful as a bullet from a gun. —SHANE MEHLING

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FLEURETY Min Tid Skal Komme A E S T H E T I C D E AT H

In a 2017 interview with Decibel, Norwegian black metal duo Fleurety described their eccentric take on the genre as a matter of life and death—they thought Euronymous would kill them if they didn’t sound unique. Melodic, eccentric and groundbreaking, Min Tid Skal Komme certainly checks that box, as well as a few others. Raw black metal freely mingles with melancholic piano, prog-rock expeditions and plaintive acoustic folk in its riff-packed compositions. These songs each contain a world’s worth of ideas. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

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SENTENCED Amok

CENTURY MEDIA

Widely considered the band’s crowning achievement, Amok was inarguably Sentenced’s breakthrough in terms of sales and profile uptick. Before they really got down with the goth rock—zing!—on its follow-up, the band’s Century Media debut had the Finns rejigging their freak flag with sweeping bluesy swaths, classic rock swagger, psychedelic swirls, boogie-woogie piano and Virpi Rautsiala’s soulful backing vocals all weaved into a goth/death/ trad/thrash gumbo akin to Pete Steele doing an album-long tribute to “The Call of Ktulu.”

—KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

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CELESTIAL SEASON Solar Lovers DISPLEASED

From paisley-printed acid rock to lavishly filmic death-doom, Solar Lovers is of two minds—part of it is inclined to play it cool, part of it is tripping balls. Consider the inexplicable Ultravox cover “Vienna,” which sounds a bit like doom and a lot like an outtake from Bowie’s Low album. And yet, Solar Lovers brings its eccentricities to heel more masterfully than any doom outfit could outside of Sabbath, and thus remains a hallowed star within the pattern of our dour universe. —FORREST PITTS

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CROWBAR Time Heals Nothing PAV E M E N T

Remember when Beavis and Butt-Head watched “All I Had (I Gave)” off Crowbar’s self-titled 1993 breakthrough and dubbed Kirk Windstein an “assistant football coach”? Well, the sludge guitar legend apparently seized a promotion, ’cause Time Heals Nothing is definitely a runningthe-show type record, from the soul-stirring punk-doom grooves of “The Only Factor” straight on through the grimy, punishing closer “Numb Sensitive.” Is it under-loved? Hell yes, it is. Is there any better tell that it’s the best album of Crowbar’s classic initial run? —SHAWN MACOMBER

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MORBID ANGEL Domination GIANT

“We must dominate!”

Whoever was left standing after Covenant had no fucking prayer once Domination clawed its way out of Trey Azagthoth and David Vincent’s collective hells. With new guitarist Erik Rutan (ex-Ripping Corpse) providing structure to Azagthoth’s cosmic fretboard chaos, Morbid Angel wrote 11 tracks that defied logic. The deal at the crossroads must’ve had blood on it. “Dominate,” “Eyes to See, Ears to Hear,” “Where the Slime Live,” “Inquisition (Burn With Me)” and the unstoppable “Hatework” are un-fucking-touchable.

—CHRIS DICK

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MR. BUNGLE Disco Volante WARNER BROS.

What sets Disco Volante beyond the margins of jejune categorization is the genius of its pacing. No album unspools tension like this, cyclically agonizing—then rewarding— the listener throughout its hour-plus progression. No album shuffles through circumstances of nuisance, playfulness and peril so shrewdly that they become indivisible. No album provokes baffled smiles and righteous aggravation from its audience so surely. And even now, when the record spins itself out, it feels like being startled from a lucid dream. —FORREST PITTS

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DISMEMBER Massive Killing Capacity NUCLEAR BLAST

Instantly divisive upon its release, Massive Killing Capacity’s more melodic, mid-paced approach and cleaner production made DM purists scoff.

Still, there’s no denying the record’s palpable ferocity. Discharging nearly 40 minutes of bonecrushing riff work and anthemic harmonies centered on tales of death, war and violence, MKC retains Dismember’s primal menace while more conventional song structures and a penchant for delightfully gruesome grooves keeps things catchy and intrinsically headbangable (see “Casket Garden,” the title track and masterpiece closer “Life, Another Shape of Sorrow”).

—LIZ CIAVARELLA-BRENNER

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KYUSS …And the Circus Leaves Town ELEKTRA

The Southern California quartet’s swan song suffers a bit in comparison to the two albums that preceded it, but the massive bait-and-switch accomplished by front-loading the heaviest song (“Hurricane”) is pretty delightful. For fans of Josh Homme’s more blues-inflected work, “Phototropic” and “Size Queen” both hint at what would follow with Queens of the Stone Age, but the standout is closer “Spaceship Landing,” a stoner jam that showcases remarkable clarity of vision from four guys who couldn't figure out how to get along.

—NICK GREEN

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NIFELHEIM Nifelheim NECROPOLIS

According to my search for lyrics, nobody has been able to decipher Per “Hellbutcher” Gustavsson’s slobbering for an entire quarter-century. Impressive! Nifelheim threw back to the first wave of black metal while the second wave crested, pledging their allegiance to the sign of the black mark before (and better than) the atavists that followed.

The Swedish trio even enlisted Dissection-ists Jon Nödtveidt and John Zwetsloot to conjure killer guest solos on morbid tales like “Black Curse,” “Storm of Satan’s Fire” and, uh, “Witchfuck.” —JEFF TREPPEL

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UNSANE Scattered, Smothered & Covered

A M P H E TA M I N E R E P T I L E

After two previous fulllengths and a slew of 7-inch singles on a number of different labels, NYC’s most vicious noise rock purveyors finally end up on the label that

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defined noise rock in the ’90s, Amphetamine Reptile. This Decibel Hall of Fame inductee traded most of the post-punk tribal rhythms of previous efforts for a more caveman-ish thump, yet kept the everything-through-distortion aesthetic fully intact. It’s as bleak as Neurosis, as fucked up as Black Flag and as apocalyptic as Killing Joke—yet it still retains the grit, dirt and ugliness of NYC’s mean streets in this era.

—ADEM TEPEDELEN

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DARKTHRONE Panzerfaust MOONFOG

Named after a German anti-tank gun, Darkthrone’s fifth album is the sound of Fenriz playing all the instruments in his bedroom—recorded straight to four-track cassette—as Nocturno Culto screeches for blood under the sign of the black mark. A triumph of lo-fi grimness and vicious riffery (especially halfway through “En Vind Av Sorg” and the opening of “Triumphant Gleam”), this cult classic also achieves the appropriate level of mid-’90s shadiness via lyrics from Varg Vikernes on epic centerpiece “Quintessence.” —J. BENNETT

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EARTH CRISIS Destroy the Machines VICTORY

1995 was a turning point for extreme music, especially hardcore. And few records embody this shift as much as Earth Crisis’ Destroy the Machines. It’s one of the first records that fits our modern definition of hardcore, taking the spirit of ’82 and seamlessly blending it with not only the force of crossover, but the attitude of the straightedge and youth crew scenes. The last 20 years of metallic riffs—plus breakdowns—owes its existence to this crushing masterpiece of activistfueled rage. —J. DREW ZALUCKY

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IMMORTAL Battles in the North

OSMOSE PRODUCTIONS

The most vicious album Immortal ever released, and one of the most quintessential black metal albums ever. It’s both a necessary entry point, yet inaccessibly hostile. That trebly, spikes-inthe-ears trademark Immortal sound began on Battles. The blinding tremolo fury, the incessant pelting of blast beats, Abbath’s throatbox-esque croaking vocals—it’s all here in the blackest 36 : JUNE 2020 : DECIBEL 36

of spades. And from “Cursed Realms of the Winterdemons” through “Blashyrkh (Mighty Ravendark),” Battles in the North reps the strongest Side B of any black metal record to come out in ’95. —DUTCH PEARCE

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IN THE WOODS… HEart of the Ages MISANTHROPY

1995 was filled with strangeness—black metal’s youthful mold was already breaking. In the Woods… found their way into misshaping BM early on with the death-doom-inflected Isle of Men demo, but the ever-changing Norwegians didn’t find their true stride until their debut, HEart of the Ages (or so the typo on the original CD tells us).

Finding a powerful medium between progressive, psychedelic/alternative rock and their black metal roots, the mania that led the young outfit’s unbridled creativity still goes unmatched by modern standards. —JON ROSENTHAL

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INTEGRITY Systems Overload VICTORY

We know from Shawn Macomber’s Systems Overload HOF [dB#107] what Integrity themselves think of their sophomore “magnum opus.” Remixing and re-releasing hopefully allayed that Victory curse, but all along Integrity possessed something darker than any production job could hinder. Evil screams resound, from the opening of “Incarnate 365” with Charles Manson yammering about genocide to the album’s noisy dark ambient outro; some songs even call out for blood. Strip away all its mythology, listen to either mix: This album will leave its mark.

18

RED STREAM

Finland’s doom underground had already spawned devout extremists Thergothon and Unholy, but none sounded as abstract and enigmatic as Skepticism’s devastated debut. Indistinct photography, often monosyllabic elemental lyrics and suffocatingly cavernous walls of sound combined to produce one of metal’s most cryptic and affecting artifacts. Stormcrowfleet’s oppressively mournful pipe organ, bitter strung-out roar and despondent fuzz chords blazed a trail, but few in the subsequent funeral doom scene could temper the high tragedy with such primeval alien mystique. —CHRIS CHANTLER

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UNANIMATED Ancient God of Evil N O FA S H I O N

The legendary Unanimated were, like Dissection, not cut from the same cloth as the rest of Sweden’s wind’em-up black metal acts of the ’90s. What Dark Funeral wrought, Unanimated scoffed at (musically), then bravely took from heavy metal and hard rock, writing what is possibly the most unsung gem in our collective—if sordid—history. Ancient God of Evil is 39 minutes of killer riffs and savvy brutality, flaunting some of the best vocals (courtesy of Micke Jansson) to ever come out of Stockholm’s wickedly rich (in talent) neighborhoods. “Eye of the Greyhound,” “Dead Calm” and “Die Alone” cut black metal off at the neck when I was a young’un, and they’re still just as deadly today. —CHRIS DICK

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—DUTCH PEARCE

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SKEPTICISM Stormcrowfleet

VED BUENS ENDE Written in Waters MISANTHROPY

THE GATHERING Mandylion CENTURY MEDIA

The Gathering mounted the comeback of comebacks on 1995’s Mandylion, their first for Century Media. After a disastrous second album, Almost a Dance, the Dutch masters of atmospheric metal picked up their third vocalist in unknown songstress Anneke van Giersbergen. While female-fronted metal bands in the mid-’90s were still relatively rare—the Dutch were wildly ahead of the curve with Acrostichon, Occult and Orphanage—the Gathering phoenixed into the upper reaches of the stratosphere on Mandylion. From rockers like “Strange Machines” to the vocal acrobatics of “Leaves,” this 25-year-old masterpiece remains a must-hear. —CHRIS DICK

Throw a rock at a Norwegian Second Wave dude and you’ll also hit a huge prog nerd. Ved Buens Ende’s sole album, Written in Waters, exemplifies black metal’s not-so-secret prog affinity. They were among the first to use the dissonance so common amongst avant types now, and here it’s more hazy than harsh. And nothing strikes prog gold like singing and drumming simultaneously: Carl-Michael Eide’s jazzy drumming and warbly vocals further blur the path best blurred. —ANDY O’CONNOR

15

BLIND GUARDIAN Imaginations From the Other Side VIRGIN

Released in a melodically dominant year, Imaginations From the Other Side is an

of unparalleled triumph of epic power metal. Blind Guardian’s most melancholic offering to date, it represents an unusual embrace of grandiosity, and was unveiled during a period that saw numerous ’80s power metal greats plummeting towards utter irrelevance while the new guard was just starting to emerge. In defiance of these troubling trends, Blind Guardian unleashed their apex and carried the torch of power metal into a new era. —SARAH KITTERINGHAM

14

DARK TRANQUILLITY The Gallery OSMOSE PRODUCTIONS

No one in the famed Gothenburg scene of the early ’90s brought as much nuance to the burgeoning melodic death metal sound as Dark Tranquillity. That pristine balance between aggression and melody is perfect on the Swedes’ second album, as savage rhythm riffing intertwines with ornate, sophisticated melodies, boasting a level of dexterity that is a marvel to hear 25 years later. Slyly (and smartly) accentuated by keyboards, acoustic guitars and melodic guest vocals, The Gallery remains a visionary work. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

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MY DYING BRIDE The Angel and the Dark River PEACEVILLE

By 1995, My Dying Bride already had two future sacrosanct texts in their burgeoning canon. The Angel and the Dark River would be their third in consecutive order, a grandiose LP that aesthetically—and in many ways musically—owed more to 4AD’s roster of gothic romanticism than the deathly doom of their metal peers. Here is the moment when ’80s goth and extreme metal became eternally tethered together with Victorian velvet, and laden with an increased abundance of fitting violin and piano embellishments. —DEAN BROWN

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SUFFOCATION Pierced From Within ROADRUNNER

Suffocation had already released two landmark albums that reshaped death metal, but Pierced From Within took their vision of extreme music even further, establishing that the band’s powers were near mythical. With production that could finally harness the full spectrum and totality of their heaviness, it was confirmation that groove could coexist with technical prowess, 38 : JUNE 2020 : DECIBEL 38

T

he extended play format might be generally advertised as a simple hors d’oeuvre, but that’s never been its highest function. Whether a device to satiate some reckless artistic caprice or a place to offload those redheaded stepchildren that just don’t sit well with the cream of a full-length release—or even as a passive-aggressive means to check some box on a contractual obligation—EPs are a hothouse in which to mill some genuinely oblique fruit (and the mid-’90s yielded a bumper crop). Here lies the best nostalgic headfakes, flagrant bellwethers and flip-but-sweet-ass sucker-punches committed to the format in ’95—with a few erstwhile suggestions scattered in as well. — FOR R ES T P I TTS

KATATONIA

For Funerals to Come...

AVA N TGA R D E

Katatonia have always waxed brightest when their allotted recording time is kept nice and lean. They’re natural born sprinters, not distance runners. Funerals keens like a widower having the last thing they truly love ripped from their fingertips while Blackheim’s absurdly gorgeous leads provide a chilling interpretive dance that should’ve seen Gregor Mackintosh donating his whammy bar to charity and making a pilgrimage to Stockholm. There’s no fifth stage in this here grief cycle—the mourning hurts too good.

SAMAEL

Rebellion

CENTURY MEDIA

Attempting to describe Rebellion is undeniably frontier work, but let’s say that it lies sandwiched somewhere between a very well-rehearsed Venom, the best MechWarrior soundtrack you’ve never heard and a heart-in-throat 2 a.m. visit by a state trooper. We all knew that Samael possessed a certain Gollum-like shrewdness, but this new quality of slicked-back erudition, futurism and calculating fiendishness was startling. Cut ‘n’ pasting your ransom note to Rebellion’s amazing cover of “I Love the Dead” is sure to satisfy, but this recording really demands to be taken in as a whole, you psychopath.

DROŸS

Experience X - M E TA L

Look, we know full well that we’re eschewing some pretty big names here in order to insinuate a decidedly

uncelebrated French tech-death trio in their place, but don’t blame us—blame your band of choice for not being this fucking good. Imagine Watchtower reinterpreting Individual Thought Patterns and then imagine Coroner reinterpreting that. Now picture the playback speed bumped up a click or so and prepare to be eaten alive. Interested in quantum physics? Experience is the best teacher.

These riffs can warp time.

IN FLAMES

Subterranean WRONG AGAIN

Gather ’round, kids, and let us tell you about a time when In Flames’ ’80s-metal-acid-washed-with-’90s-DM approach was actually pretty damn fresh.

Subterranean benefits from being both a touch starry-eyed and inexact. That ruddy-cheeked abandon cleaves right through the production’s attenuated crunch, and the tunes all slay like Ride the Lightning high on bath salts.

This was In Flames at the tipping point that distinguishes mere avocation from worldclass act. Any guesses as to which side of the divide these lads emerged on?

AMORPHIS

Black Winter Day RELAPSE

Tempting as it is to give this slot to Beastie Boys bruiser Aglio e Olio, Amorphis keep gazing at me with those beady little avian eyes that they know I can’t resist. Sure, the title track’s a layup, and though the instrumental’s dumb (it’s like their keyboard had its demo button set to Neverending Story), the EP’s kind enough to give the listener its Tango and its Cash by way of the utter smokeshow “Moon and Sun” (parts I and II). You can have Ukko’s hammer when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

and hooks could actually emphasize brutality. In the first minute, Frank Mullen growls, “Welcome to my church.” He knew where we would all be worshipping. —SHANE MEHLING

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FEAR FACTORY Demanufacture

For 25 years, Symbolic has kept growing; every spin is like increasing the scale of a map. Chuck’s causROADRUNNER tic yelp bleeds with raw emotion on lyrics both cosmic and intimate; the solos are godly; Gene Ah man, I miss those times.

You’d say “industrial,” and if Hoglan’s drumming is all-time-great; and sparks someone got upset, you’d say just keep flying, from quizzical opening riff to “metal.” Or you could do combinations, like “indus- faraway acoustic coda. —CHRIS CHANTLER trial-metal.” Most of you guys are dicks, but I’ve got to warn you: Everything Fear Factory predicted VICTORY on Demanufacture came true. Mainstream metal fell off the map for a while, the Skynet Funding Bill When Deadguy first got passed and the whole world basically went to emerged from metallic A&M hell. We fought back, but that triggered a bunch of hardcore’s clean-cut scene, danger was at a premium. They may have slopped on dollops of timelines where I don’t even exist... yet somehow This Decibel Hall of Fame Five Finger Death Punch survived in all of them.

Brylcreem and sported the occasional buttoninductee is arguably Monster Major drag, huh? —JOHN CONNOR down, but the Jersey juggernaut also armed Magnet’s high-(bong)water mark, and is unquesthemselves with slinging guitars and a din that tionably ground zero for the onslaught of stoner was equally unholy and mind-expanding. This rock/metal that followed. MM had their peers in made Fixation on a Co-Worker’s explosion of sharp1995—Fu Manchu, Kyuss, Down, Clutch—but this shooting staccato and razor-wire dissonance was the band and album that seemingly every subseCANDLELIGHT seem more like the creation of unbalanced quent upstart listened to while blazing up. By this serial killers instead of angry suburbanites point, frontman Dave Wyndorf had mostly abanRecorded in March 1994 by attending to the detail of revolutionizing doned his garage rock and punk influences, comvenerable renaissance man extreme music; in reality, they were kinda bining pop hooks with fat spliffs—I mean riffs— Dan Swanö, Opeth’s debut both. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO and dusting it all with psychedelic flourishes and didn’t see the light of day for more than a year lyrics that really only make sense if you’re baked after. The tape-trading scene was hip to Opeth out of your fucking mind. —ADEM TEPEDELEN through their prized rehearsals and a now superrare cut-up, so when Orchid hit mail-orders in 1995, the album with a no-logo cover (and blue disc) ELEKTRA changed death metal forever. The Swedes wrote long, winding songs, often without repetition, Down are the rarest of but they were utterly brilliant and absolutely beasts: a regional superNUCLEAR BLAST group of heavy metal lifers unique. “Under the Weeping Moon,” “The Apostle that seamlessly blends and elevates the distinct in Triumph” and especially “Forest of October” still To what heights might have yet to find an equal anywhere. —CHRIS DICK styles of each conspirator. Boasting members Dissection have scaled if of Pantera, Crowbar, Corrosion of Conformity guitarist/vocalist Jon Nödtveidt had been a bit and Eyehategod, NOLA sizzles with the titular less dedicated to lowercase “m” mayhem? After city’s summer swelter. Propelled by N’awlins catapulting themselves into rarefied air with sludge and southern stoner rock, the harmokiller 1993 full-length debut The Somberlain, the nized leads and dark undercurrent create a Swedish quartet rocketed even further on Storm dichotomy of struggle and strength. While the of the Light’s Bane—essentially the melodic blackHEAD NOT FOUND triumphant “Swan Song” offers a redemptive ened death metal equivalent of Master of Puppets, reprieve, album closer “Bury Me in Smoke” is Heartwork or Slaughter of the Soul. Nödtveidt’s 1997 Wolves change. They always the genre-bending finale an extraordinary col- do. This was the beginning of something new, murder conviction, several-year imprisonment laboration like this deserves. —SEAN FRASIER and 2006 suicide brought Dissection crashing back something unprecedented in the still-young cauldron of black metal. Completely shifting from their to hell. —SHAWN MACOMBER avant-prog sound on Vargnatt, the now canonical “Trilogy Ulver” lineup brought forth a harmonious fusion of their lyrical brand of black metal with neoclassical and folk influences. Taken by the NUCLEAR BLAST M U S I C F O R N AT I O N S mountain folk, our hero experiences folklore and mysticism firsthand; the trolls and gray eyes from Contradictions Collapse is British death-doom institubehind the forest line play a significant role in the fine. Destroy Erase Improve tion Paradise Lost shed their beginning of the lauded Trilogy. —JON ROSENTHAL is revelatory. The Swedes’ second full-length crusty roots and embraced is faster, noisier and more immediately excittheir sleekest inclinations in 1995. Their fifth ing than its predecessor, but it’s also got more album, Draconian Times, further streamlined the introspective melody whenever a more confisupremely catchy goth rock-inspired songwriting dent Fredrik Thordendal commands the spotof its predecessor, Icon, and added an x-factor: ROADRUNNER light. The only subgenre this album is guilty then-new drummer Lee Morris’ energetic percusof spawning is that of the next seven mastersion. The resulting morbid delights cannot be Chuck Schuldiner happily pieces the band has since nano-engineered to denied. Songs like opener “Enchantment” and the copped to embracing his skitter through our synapses. Meshuggah even Charles Manson-sampling second single “Forever beloved melodic metal and have the good grace to feel a little remorse Failure” aren’t just fan favorites; they’re among prog influences on Symbolic, cohering via compoas they crush our meager human ambition the most earworm-y songs in the metal canon, sitional genius and intensively rehearsed magic underfoot. —DANIEL LAKE into dazzling new forms that compel immersion. regardless of subgenre. —JOSEPH SCHAFER

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DEADGUY Fixation on a Co-Worker

4

7

10

9

OPETH Orchid

DOWN NOLA

3

6

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DISSECTION Storm of the Light’s Bane

ULVER Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr i 5 Capitler

2

MESHUGGAH Destroy Erase Improve

5

MONSTER MAGNET Dopes to Infinity

DEATH Symbolic

PARADISE LOST Draconian Times

1

AT THE GATES

Slaughter of the Soul EARACHE

C’mon, what did you think was gonna be here? Of all the top-notch records released in ’95, none can quite claim the endurance or influence of Slaughter of the Soul. It’s the best melodic death metal album ever released, and easily one of the finest records—of any genre—to come out of Sweden. It’s all there: dynamite riffs, killer leads, bombastic drums, glorious twin guitar harmonies and the unmistakable roar of Tomas Lindberg. This eternal banger changed metal forever and inspired a few hundred of the bands you’ve read about in these pages. As always: Go! —J. BENNETT

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As extreme music’s commercial consideration faded, melodic inclinations and experimentation defined the pivotal year of 1995 story by

SEAN FRASIER

illustration by

MARK RUDOLPH

THERE ARE FEW PLACES COLDER than the shadow of your predecessors. Except maybe a Norwegian winter. But if you’ve ever listened to Immortal, you knew that already. ¶ After the ’80s spawned new wild-blooded subgenres, heavy music’s underground bustled with imagination as glam rock dominated radio play. But as hair metal started balding, the new decade emerged with an arms race for extremity. Death metal and black metal blueprints were written in blood. While grunge emerged as a marketable commodity, major labels sampled more extreme acts to taste-test their commercial viability. In 1989, it would have been daft to envision Morbid Angel on MTV or My Dying Bride touring with Iron Maiden. But there they were—gutturals where glam used to preen.

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In 1995, however, heavy music sat at a precarious crossroads. If grunge’s sustain was already fading, Kurt Cobain’s suicide turned off the amps. In grunge’s place, Nine Inch Nails’ upward spiral offered an industrial alternative for outcast tunes in the music video age. Death metal’s major label flirtation revealed the genre’s commercial ceiling, while death-doom heavyweights migrated from their primal origins. The stranglehold of black metal’s orthodoxy was being challenged from within. Doom-adjacent rock bands were packing the communal bong for the stoner metal scene’s future tokes. Subgenres exploded as artists sought to differentiate their creations from the projects repped on their backpatches.

And with all these moving parts, the dark clouds of nü-metal inescapably loomed on the horizon.

“Metal became less physical and more cerebral around 1995, but unfortunately, that was a sign of the weakness of the times,” explains Ian Christe, Bazillion Points publisher and author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. “MTV’s Headbangers Ball went off the air in January 1995. That was like pulling the plug on a huge source of metal’s power. Then venues became skittish about lawsuits after some high-profile injuries at metal shows during the early 1990s. It was like an ice age came and totally changed the landscape starting in 1995. Of course, the benefit of the music retreating to the underground was this rash of experimentation. So many wild halfrealized concepts coming from everywhere.”

1995 was a chance to raze the overcrowded forest of uninspired copycat projects cluttered like the trees adorning Ulver’s Bergtatt cover.

A controlled burn of redundant foliage would allow new blossoms to grow.

THE FLAMES OF THE END ARE SOMETIMES THE BEGINNING

“We are blind to the worlds within us, waiting to be born.”

Whispered by At the Gates vocalist Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg in the instantly recognizable “Blinded by Fear,” the sentiment opening Slaughter of the Soul was eerily fitting. Recorded a year before the young band’s collapse, Slaughter now exemplifies Gothenburg’s melodic diversion from old-school death metal. Twenty-five years later, the twin guitars of Anders Björler and Martin Larsson still feel like they can slice through double-plated steel. But as At the Gates huddled around producer Fredrik Nordström in Studio Fredman, they couldn’t possibly ascertain just how formidable and formative their (temporary) swansong would be.

“In 1995, without hindsight, it felt like not much else was going on,” Lindberg admits.

“Dissection, Death, Suffocation and Meshuggah were putting out great records. But from our perspective, we wanted to do something different. We felt most death metal bands were going 4 4 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L 44

through the motions, I guess. That’s what fueled us to participate. We felt frustrated in a way, you know?”

“Death metal reached for the golden ring in 1993 with the release of all the major label records,” Christe recalls. “Then, just as those bands came down to Earth, they were blindsided by a blasting pressure wash of fire from the Norwegian black metal bands. So, death metal was on its heels in 1995.”

While there were also exemplary releases from Deceased and Unanimated, some of the genre’s heavyweights were facing fan blowback from stylistic deviations. Deathgrind pioneers Napalm Death were entering the wilderness years of their groove metal phase.

Sepultura’s Ross Robinson collab Roots was on the way. In Sweden, the ever-flowing stream of Stockholm death metal has slowed to a trickle.

Entombed were a few years away from delivering their universally panned Same Difference. Tiamat traded in their Sumerian cries for the wildhoney of goth rock. With rock rhythms and a more subdued guitar bite, Dismember’s Massive Killing Capacity also reflected a band simplifying and streamlining their sickening art.

If you stocked up on cassettes and held your piss, you could drive from Stockholm to Gothenburg in less than six hours. Not a brutal drive, but enough distance to ensure that Sweden’s second-largest city had a metal aesthetic uniquely its own. Also released in 1995, The Gallery was Dark Tranquillity’s extravagant melodeath masterpiece; a more embellished approach to revitalizing death metal. Avid tape-traders with eclectic influences, they were inspired creatively by everything from Nocturnus and Atheist to synthpop and classical music. They were also deeply invested in Swedish progressive rock bands such as Änglagård, Anekdoten and Landberk—which were also influences on Opeth. But the reality that they were crafting something singular dawned on neither Lindberg nor his peers in Dark Tranquillity.

“If you were on the inside, as we were, we didn’t see we were doing something special,” Lindberg shrugs. “We certainly tried, and our goal was to create a classic metal record, I guess.

But we didn’t think of ourselves as special, and the scene that was around was composed of our friends. Dark Tranquillity and In Flames were coming out with records and stuff like that, but we didn’t see it as a big achievement at the time.

Maybe it’s Swedish humbleness, I don’t know— we just felt insulated from outside opinions because we were all friends.”

“I think that it wasn’t until ’98 that the phrase ‘Gothenburg sound’ began popping up regularly, and I honestly thought that it was a bit silly,” says ex-Dark Tranquillity guitarist Niklas Sundin.

“It felt a bit lazy to lump us together on the basis of being a bit more melodic than the norm at the time, but eventually we learned to just accept it and see it as a compliment. I know that there were some other Swedish bands that were annoyed by being grouped under the Gothenburg umbrella when they lived in completely different parts of the country.”

Unprepared for the laborious mental stamina required to support Slaughter on the road, At the Gates broke up and multiple members formed the Haunted. Lindberg distanced himself from metal while emotionally rebounding. Like Sundin, he didn’t discover until years later how influential Slaughter had become when artists like Killswitch Engage and Shadows Fall emerged in America.

“We really try to remain humble; we’re just happy some people like it,” says Lindberg. “I think the cool thing for us is that we’re not that far from that style now; we’re still close to what we wanted to do from the beginning.

Sure, some albums are darker, others are more progressive, but we still feel close to the music on Slaughter of the Soul.

“But in some way,” Lindberg laughs, “I was happy when bands stopped being influenced as much by [At the Gates] and started becoming influenced by bands like Entombed instead.”

SHADOWKINGS OF PEACEVILLE

Death-doom heavyweights Paradise Lost are

preparing for the release of their 16th LP, Obsidian, which means their days are packed with press interviews. Alas, there’s no more convenient time to be tethered to a phone or computer than during a global quarantine.

In a break from talking about their upcoming album, vocalist Nick Holmes and guitarist Greg Mackintosh ruminate on the quarter-century since Draconian Times revealed Paradise Lost’s yearn for change.

Tethered by the phrase “the Peaceville Three,” Paradise Lost’s labelmates My Dying Bride and Anathema also pursued stylistic variations with coincidental synchronicity.

On The Angel and the Dark River, My Dying Bride abandoned their growls for an album that still possessed the dark skies of its swan-feathered predecessor. Once an unquestionable touring tandem with Cannibal Corpse, Anathema’s sound also shifted as guitarist Vincent Cavanagh assumed vocal duties following Darren White’s departure. While harsh vocals still remained, the lush synths of The Silent Enigma ventured further from death-doom’s murk.

But Draconian Times symbolized the most commercially appealing output from PL. While the dark rock gravitas caught fans off guard at the time, the band’s trajectory shouldn’t have been surprising considering one of their seminal albums was named Gothic.

2CD/2LP/digi

Hexvessel

Blight

Kindred | LP / CD / Digital

Temple of Wounds | 2LP / CD / Digital 5.6.2020

“Weaving English folk, lilting Americana, and mushroom-induced psychedelia, Hexvessel are The Doors misplaced and found wandering the vast forests of Finland.” - Noisey

Rising out of obscurity to share their violent, radical, and illuminating vision, Blight’s nine song new album is a 52-minute exercise in galvanizing, and relentless Black Metal.

Psychedelic forest folk-rockers Hexvessel return to Svart Records with spellbinging new album Kindred

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In 2 0 2 0 t h e Wi n t e r s a g a co n t i n u e s

E N TE R TH E WE BSH OP w w w . s v a r t r e c o r d s . c o m

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“Gothic was recorded in 1990 and released in 1991, and we had definitely brought in some of our ’80s goth music influences,” offers Mackintosh. “Bands like Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Christian Death were things that I always listened to, but being more into punk and metal in the ’80s, it was a guilty pleasure. I noticed that around 1995, a few bands who originally started out more extreme were following a similar path.” “[Draconian Times] is pretty different to our early albums, but is an obvious follow-up from [1993’s] Icon, I think,” muses Holmes. “Above all, I think it just totally encapsulates rock and metal music in the year in which it was made—the production, the songs, the big hair, everything.”

whines,” concedes Holmes. “Had the internet been around at the time, I’m sure it would have been different, although not as much weeping as when we released the Host album. The trolling for that album would have collapsed entire ISPs in Germany alone.”

While each band’s path would traverse different terrain in the immediate and distant future, 1995 was a snapshot of three labelmates simultaneously stepping from the shadows of extremity. Paradise Lost would soon leave Music for Nations (which was distributing Peaceville at the time), and the unholy trinity’s shared chapter would close.

Many years and albums later, Paradise Lost would return to their downcast death-doom

We saw their faces  Paradise Lost circa 1995, dubbed "the new Metallica" by the European metal press

There’s the usual narrative of unrest in the ranks when a beloved band alters their signature sound.

While the most severe aesthetic vacillations were still to come, Draconian Times was the slightest glimpse into the Depeche modification ahead. But after the resounding success Paradise Lost experienced upon charting in England for the first time, they remained focused on enjoying the excess of the ride. From the band’s formation, there was a contrarian spirit that served them well whether they were playing crawling choruses or muting naysayers.

“We never felt confined by the scenes which we were part of, or perceived to be part of,” Mackintosh explains. “When we started out, we played slow because everyone else was playing fast. When we did Gothic, it confused a lot of people and we had a hard time getting a release in some countries. By Draconian Times, we didn’t even know what scene we were supposed to be part of, but we were becoming tired of people touting us as the new Metallica or something.

So, we decided to change and experiment, which ultimately pissed a lot of people off.”

“Our popularity grew so well thanks to MTV and mainstream rock mags at the time that we felt propelled far and clear of the sneers and 4 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L 46

roots. Most recently, Obsidian’s first single “Fall From Grace” features both crooned gothwave choruses and vintage snarls. To Holmes, turning back towards death-adjacent heaviness was almost an inevitability.

“The Draconian Times stuff excited us at the time, but by the time we had finished touring the album, that mid-’90s uptempo fashionable style felt a bit old hat,” he admits. “Musically, we felt like we had run with that as far as we could at that point. [That’s] something we have never actually felt with the death and doom stuff, before [Draconian Times] or after. Death metal is timeless, really.”

MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”

Ulver’s founding mastermind Kristoffer Rygg recites the William Blake quote above as we

parse through the project’s enigmatic discography. While working on a concept album about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Rygg memorized nearly all of Blake’s book. Now 25 years removed from Ulver’s Bergtatt debut, Blake’s focus on dichotomy is fitting considering it has been over 20 years since Rygg created music as Garm—his pseudonym during Ulver’s initial black metal trilogy. While Rygg holds fondness for those albums, he thinks of them as archaic expressions in more than one sense.

“They’re archaic not only in terms of songwriting, but also in terms of adopting this aesthetic almost as a worldview,” Rygg explains. “We wanted it to be a reality, as in a sort of poetic realism. We would write in this ancient tongue, Dano-Norwegian, and were very conscious when we were taking band photos of not having a modern accessory—like a [wrist] watch—present. Just totally embracing the illusion we were creating, wanting things to feel as if it could just as well be hundreds of years ago.”

It may not have felt like a hundred years ago, but by 1995, the most outrageous headlines of the Norwegian black metal scene didn’t define the next wave of releases. While some notable Norwegian musicians were still incarcerated for their crimes, illustrious bands like Darkthrone and Immortal added new records that only fortified their legacies. But the stifling guidelines of TRVENESS that dictated the genre’s orthodoxy in the early ’90s were eroding.

While Ulver and Enslaved were part of Norway’s youth movement, their most dynamic departures from traditional black metal were still a few albums away. Dissection’s Storm of the Light’s Bane was a damn near flawless black/death crossover. But it was bands like Blut Aus Nord, In the Woods…, Fleurety and Ved Buens Ende whose experimentation clawed at the genre’s boundaries.

With its uneasy time signatures and discordant eccentricity, Ved Buens Ende’s first—and only— LP, the recently Decibel Hall of Fame-inducted Written in Waters, reflected a bold distancing from the genre’s uninspired blasts and tremolos.

“You have to remember that [Written in Waters] was released in the ‘true’ era, so I think we were probably regarded as less cool than the Satyricons, the Darkthrones and the Emperors— at least for the common black metal peer,” Ved Buens Ende guitarist/vocalist Yusaf “Vicotnik” Parvez shared in our HOF story. “On the other hand, we were probably the best thing that happened to the scene for a select few people in [said] scene. I really also think that a few people deliberately chose not to listen to Ved Buens Ende due to not being sure if it was accepted to listen to this sort of hybridization of black metal.”

Finding freshness in a genre notorious for its own violent self-policing was essential to

inviting new talent to push the boundaries of black metal. In the U.K., Cradle of Filth’s vampyromantic promise kicked off a label bidding war.

Dimmu Borgir’s symphonic inclinations commenced. Enslaved brought their Viking helmets stateside for their American tour debut. Twentyfive years later, Enslaved had their own solo Decibel cover for the first time and just played a social-distancing set of sophisticated progressive metal for the Verftet Online Music Festival during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other artists opted to create side projects for their stylistic departures. Darkthrone icon Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell was working on his electro project Neptune Towers. Even Christe was developing a style “fusing chaotic experimental metal and black metal with high-speed breakbeat sequenced samples,” which would later become Dark Nœrd. With hindsight clairvoyance to guide us, Ulver’s eventual metamorphosis seemed predestined from the first crisp croons of “I Troldskog faren vild.”

“Black metal was becoming a prison of sorts,” shares Rygg. “It sounds childish when I say it out loud, but it’s true. We still felt connected to black metal as an idea; more as an idea, actually, than a musical infatuation by 1997. [Black metal] was getting quite big and getting noticed around the world and stuff, but by that time it had lost a lot of its initial draw for me. So, to us, it felt like the most black metal thing you could do was say, ‘Okay, let’s go make a fucking techno album.’”

DIE WITH YOUR MASK ON From the first serrated stab of “Doom Patrol,”

Deadguy’s Fixation on a Co-Worker shares only the most auxiliary components of hardcore. Armed with the jagged riffs of ex-Rorschach and future Kiss It Goodbye guitarist Keith Huckins, the album envisioned hardcore through the calloused fingers of someone raised on Voivod and Slayer.

“I started out as a full-fledged metalhead and got into punk rock afterwards,” Huckins recounts. “I dug the early ’90s Earache and Peaceville stuff. I worshipped Neurosis and listened to them morning, noon and night. But I veered away from metal and got into noise rock when it was reaching its apex—stuff like Craw and Dazzling Killmen.”

While Tim Singer’s desperate screams were a more familiar fit for hardcore, his vocal performance still embodied a uniquely unhinged mania. The balance of metallic and hardcore components made Deadguy outliers during their brief, but influential active years. Unlike other pivotal hardcore bands proudly staking their claim as NYHC, Huckins felt no sense of camaraderie with the scene.

“I hate hardcore unity,” Huckins stresses.

“It’s dumb, and has always been dumb. I fuckin’ 4 8 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L 48

hated jocks in my high school, and then I had to go see a bunch of shaved-head jocks who just had slightly better taste in music. It might make sense if you’re a teenager, but then you mature quickly. So, by the time I was in my mid-20s, I just wanted everyone to shut up. I heard this stuff being shouted by dudes older than me, and was like, ‘Come on, stop it.’”

To Integrity founder Dwid Hellion, hardcore’s fraternal elements never meant shaping his sound to check off the prerequisites. While he might honor the tenets of hardcore’s original DIY punk ethos, his apocalyptic poetry and inspiration from metal and Japanese noise separated Integrity from the breakdown bros dominating the scene. Listening to 1995’s Systems Overload, the album’s thick low-end and wailing solos are a hardcore anomaly. Integrity have always been about music as personal expression, and that remained paramount. Genre-first commitment might be the oxygen that initially feeds the fire, but it’s also what snuffs it out later.

“I think that there have always been groundbreaking bands throughout every era, but I can say that it felt like during the late ’80s and early ’90s that bands had seemed to get overly formulaic,” theorizes Hellion. “Perhaps by the mid-’90s younger bands wanted to rebel against that dull conformity and create something more alive.

“From the start of Integrity, the idea was to make music that I wanted to hear,” Hellion continues. “Combining genres, sounds, styles and adding even other more unconventional approaches to music creation. Creating songs like a collage filled with a cornucopia of inspiration and contempt. At the same time, the music seemed to retain a flow, scent and cohesiveness that allowed the songs to be identifiably Integrity.”

Hardcore was the bedrock of Victory Records, and bands like Hatebreed and straight-edge champions Earth Crisis featured that sound before their metallic elements. Meanwhile, Deadguy printed a hoodie with Satanic imagery and “Death to False Metal” emblazoned on the back. Their more brazen collision of aggressive sounds inspired a number of artists from Converge to the Dillinger Escape Plan, launching the metalcore genre that would later become less and less recognizable to Huckins and Hellion.

“I am not certain about being a part of a movement,” Hellion ponders. “It has always been more about creating what I personally want to listen to. If along the way that direction has happened to inspire others, then the infection may be taking hold. I have been told over the years that certain bands are being compared to the sound of Integrity. Some have even told me that they were inspired by Integrity. But personally, I can never notice any recognizable similarities.”

“To me, [the term ‘metalcore’] was just kind of goofy,” Huckins fires. “If this is what they wanna call it, that’s fine. Tim was a hardcore singer and we sounded pretty metal, so that’s

fine. I mean, it’s certainly better than ‘hard metal,’ right? Years passed after I stopped playing, and I don’t see how what we were playing evolved into metalcore.

“But it’s weird,” Huckins continues. “It was years ago when [Decibel contributor] Kevin Stewart-Panko interviewed me for the Rorschach Protestant Hall of Fame piece. He sent me a few things and said a few bands totally copped us. I shrugged it off, I didn’t really care. Then a few days later, I looked them up and was like, ‘Whoa, that’s straight-up thievery. You gotta hide that a bit better, boys.’”

ME AND MYSELF KILLED A WORLD TODAY

“With every genre of music, it might last a decade, but eventually people are going to look for something new,” comments Dino Cazares, founding guitarist of Fear Factory. “Grunge had its time, but then the drugs got darker. Instead of alcohol and cocaine, it was heroin; this whole other level of drugs mixed with the music. Don’t get me wrong: I know Mötley Crüe was doing that stuff, too. But when they were singing about heroin, it was still fun, like with ‘Dr. Feelgood.’

The party was still raging. But grunge became so serious that it killed the party.”

Although Soundgarden and Alice in Chains were still releasing music with their prime lineups intact, the writing was clear as day on America’s plain white tee: So-called corporate rock was on the decline. The darker elements of early grunge oozed into the sludge genre that was still a few years away from exploding after seminal releases from Eyehategod, Crowbar, Dystopia and Acid Bath. But those bands would never cross over to the mainstream. In grunge’s stead, some options for riff-forward heavy rock emerged. In place of grunge’s tragic relationship with opiate abuse, the allure of bong-ripping stoner rock exhaled a plume of smoke into 1995.

“That golden age of 1990s stoner metal exploded creatively in 1995—that was the year when Sleep made Jerusalem, after all,” Christe argues. “Fu Manchu had a couple records out, the first Electric Wizard started to get around and Kyuss waved goodbye. I think a lot of the glut of releases that came a couple years later were still following the footsteps of this first rash of mid-’90s bands.”

After their deal with Columbia unceremoniously ended, Cathedral returned to Earache and released The Carnival Bizarre. Dubbed “New Metal Messiahs” by Kerrang! in 1995—along with Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Pitchshifter—they further distanced themselves from death-doom with an equilibrium of downer rock crunch and ’70s proto-metal indulgence. Meanwhile, New Jersey rockers Monster Magnet were enjoying major label support on A&M. While the band’s biggest hits wouldn’t

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explode until Powertrip a few years later, their smirking pastiche of psychedelic garage fuzz and gonzo sci-fi sleaze was swiftly grouped with other early stoner projects.

“My radar was on bands like Kyuss and Fu Manchu, and it looked like maybe mainstream radio would get cooler after the grunge thing,” recalls Dave Wyndorf, Monster Magnet’s founding space lord. “Like, if it happened with that shit, maybe it could happen with other stuff, too.

Riff-based rock unadorned, with a crazy tinge to it. Like, maybe things could get a little more outrageous, with some wilder ideas. Intelligent and stupid at the same time; stupid-smart, which is always my favorite.”

Dopes to Infinity was Wyndorf’s aim at cleaning up 1993’s Superjudge and creating a record that was more varied. Pretty, even. While referencing Motor City rock ‘n’ roll and Sabbathian doom, the album incorporated everything from ’60s bossa nova to ’70s Mellotron and Hawkwind’s space rock. Wyndorf wasn’t considering revamping the band’s sound for the label. He doubled down on writing Martian sex music instead.

“At that time, I was sort of drunk on the notion of going down in flames on a major label,” Wyndorf laughs. “The sooner you sign to a major label, the [closer] you are to the end. Like, it was just a matter of time. So, I wanted to take every idea I had in my head; any sound that I would ever want in a heavy psychedelic record.”

While generations since have borrowed elements of Monster Magnet’s sound, the mimicry often misses the point. It’s like the movie directors inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s mixing bowl of references instead of the French new wave and spaghetti western oddities that inspired Tarantino directly. It doesn’t help that the stoner tag still confounds Wyndorf.

“In the late ’80s, we put out a single for songs called ‘Murder’ and ‘Tractor,’” Wyndorf notes.

“The cover had a hippie with a gun and had the words ‘drug rock’ on it. A British writer picked it up and kept talking about drug rock, and it feels like that turned into stoner rock. I can’t claim that was all us or anything, but it felt like any time there was a band with a certain sound, they applied that genre tag.

“We got thrown in with all that stuff, and in Europe they’d call us the kings of stoner rock,” he continues. “I was like, ‘Okay, we’ll take it.’

But at the same time, I was a prick, and I was like, ‘What do you mean, stoner rock? This is LSD, motherfucker!’ ‘Stoner’ implies lazy, but I’m not lazy. This is like methamphetamine and speed.

I can’t just vibe on a riff for 10 minutes, you know? This thing has gotta go to Mars and back.

It’s gotta stop off in head shops and planetary outposts and visit God and all this shit.”

Propelled by the hot-boxing grooves of “Spacegrass,” Clutch’s eponymous sophomore LP brought college rock and funk to the stoner 5 0 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 19 : D E C I B E L 50

munchie buffet. Down pulled off the unthinkable and released a supergroup record that earned classic status by melding Southern-fried sludge and stoner metal (NOLA). But despite the wide array of influences, hailing the sweet leaf would not save mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. Starting the year touring with Corrosion of Conformity and ending it with Korn and Deftones, Wyndorf felt the tides changing. Nü-metal’s theoretical momentum was backed by the hard data of album sales.

“It was like reading the tea leaves of the future,” Wyndorf laments. “I didn’t know at the beginning of 1995, but I could see at the end.”

CITY OF INDUSTRY

After pitching his industrial metal band Fear Factory to Roadrunner Records’ Senior VP Monte Conner, Dino Cazares was encouraged to get back in touch when they sounded less like Godflesh.

The feedback made sense; if you listen to Fear Factory’s 1991 demos, you can hear Streetcleaner rumbling through their bleak soundscapes.

But after Trent Reznor’s success with Nine Inch Nails, heavy industrial was suddenly en vogue. Along with White Zombie and Pitchshifter, Fear Factory were one of the few bands on the cutting edge before it was proven palatable. They were a new breed separate from the reactionaries who hired session DJs to throw mediocre loops over their songs. That said, they still needed to harness the promise of 1992 debut Soul of a New Machine to turn Conner’s head. While Fear Factory remodeled their sound, their Los Angeles home reeled.

“Boom, the Rodney King riots hit L.A.,” Cazares recalls. “We had massive fires, then this massive rain that just created mudslides and killed people while washing their homes away. Then in ’94, an earthquake happened. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we just saw the destruction of Los Angeles over the period of like four years.’ We’re in the heart of all these guns and the National Guard patrolling the streets and people protecting their businesses with AK-47s and M16 assault rifles. You’d see cars ramming into stores to loot whatever they could. Me and our singer Burton [C. Bell] were sitting on the rooftop watching all this go down, hearing fucking bullets whistle by. It was like watching live television; it was insane.

“That’s what inspired Demanufacture,” Cazares continues. “It was basically the sound of dismantling Los Angeles, and the rebuilding process. At that point, we were already past our roots. On our first record, we wore our influences on our sleeve: Helmet, grindcore, industrial, early goth.

We loved all of it.”

Surrounded by death metal on the Roadrunner roster, Fear Factory had to emerge on the strength of what set them apart. Adding

Front Line Assembly’s Rhys Fulber to contribute keyboards and electronic textures felt like the final gear clicking into place. The old Hollywood adage “Give ’em the same thing, but different” is too cynical and condescending.

Fear Factory created what was familiar, but appealed to extreme tastes and those waiting for the lure of a clean-sung chorus.

“Whenever there’s a popular genre or band, there’s a million copycats, and the labels try to sign every band,” Cazares speculates. “Even though you could dissect our influences, we still had our own thing going on. So, Demanufacture, to me, is when we came into our own. Here’s a band that turned someone’s heads with something they hadn’t heard, but still sounded familiar.

Like, it was heavy enough for most metalheads, but could still appeal to people who weren’t usually into that music.”

Fear Factory would appear on the first incarnation of the Ozzfest tour a year after Demanufacture, along with genre giants like Slayer, Danzig and Sepultura. But like Monster Magnet later in the year, Fear Factory had a front row seat for nü-metal’s ascent as they toured with Megadeth and Korn that summer.

Yet another example of it being a small fucking world: The demo that Fear Factory used to eventually impress Conner—by way of ever-enthusiastic ex-Sepultura frontman Max Cavalera—was recorded by Cazares’ friend and roommate Ross Robinson. An aspiring producer, Robinson’s Fear Factory recording—later released as Concrete—was used in lieu of a portfolio to attract interest from other bands. A few years later, Korn recorded with Robinson. His role as the architect of nü-metal was cemented faster than you could say A.D.I.D.A.S. (You can read even more about that unfortunate tectonic shift in Shane Mehling’s brilliant essay “They Did It All for the Nookie” in dB #132.)

“To me, you can’t mention nü-metal without mentioning Los Angeles,” Cazares asserts. “L.A. in 1995, that’s the timestamp of the actual creation and marketing and how that subgenre blew up. It was next on the assembly line: hair metal, grunge, hip-hop going mainstream and then nümetal. Because if you’re going to mention Korn, you better mention Cypress Hill and Helmet and Prong and Faith No More. And we were different, but if you talk about Fear Factory, you better talk about Godflesh and Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and early thrash, which is where my guitar influences were coming from.”

Twenty-five years have raced by since Cazares watched Los Angeles combust like Nero’s Rome.

Now in the middle of a shelter-at-home order, L.A.’s streets and highways are a whisper of their usual roar. Time’s passage will ask us in another quarter-century what music was born from the anxiety and fear of our uncertain times. Here’s hoping 2045 is as stacked with Hall of Fame releases as 1995.

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INSIDE ≥

54 ACXDC Let there be powerviolence 58 FUNERAL LEECH Life sucks, then you die

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

58 PARADISE LOST Between a goth rock and a hard place 58 LAMB OF GOD Again they rise 60 ROTTING OUT This is your fucked up family

Tragedy and Transcendence

In the wake of Caleb Scofield’s shocking 2018 death, extreme metal supergroup OLD MAN GLOOM rages against the dying of the light—and wins

JULY

OLD MAN GLOOM

22

years of pain

15

clicks and it’s time to say bye

15

trips and a love that won’t die

1

8

Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning P R O FO U N D LO R E

single lamp

8

Seminar IX: Darkness of Being P R O FO U N D LO R E

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

I

n his mind-scrambling 1983 treatise Nada Brahma: The World Is Sound: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness, Joachim-Ernst Berendt recounts an allegory that the 14th-century Persian mystic Hafez often told concerning the reluctance of the first soul to be “imprisoned” in human form. Only after a gang of angels began playing an ecstasy-inducing song would it, “in order to make the music clearer to itself,” submit to corporality. “People say that the soul, on hearing that song, entered the body,” Hafez concluded, “but in reality, the soul itself was the song.” ¶ Now, from Plato, Ptolemy and Boethius to Kepler, Newton and Schopenhauer; from the quantum physics to the cosmology, positing that the architecture our reality, universe and selves are comprised of—and bound together by—“harmonic entities” (or, essentially, songs) is nothing new. Six hundred years later, however, it is Hafez and the mystics who receive an unlikely boost courtesy of the longrunning sludge-y post-metal supergroup Old Man Gloom via D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : 5 3

Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning and Seminar IX: Darkness of Being, a pair of albums dedicated to—and clearly animated by—bassist Caleb Scofield, who died in a 2018 car accident at age 39, and festooned with lines such as: “Close your eyes / You’re the instrument” and “So filled with life / The body can’t contain / Where once you stood / climbs vapor to the stars.”

It isn’t simply that these records include material written by Scofield. Rather, it is as if the Cave In/Zozobra bassist’s transition from this world has anchored his surviving bandmates—Aaron Turner (Sumac, Isis), Nate Newton (Converge), Santos Montano (Zozobra) and newcomer Steve Brodsky (Cave In)—in something deeper, something further, something extremely affecting and more profound.

And, while you can’t un-ring the tolling bell, the best guess of your humble correspondent is that even those unaware of the tragic backstory will feel the shift in vibration: The esoteric nature of the album titles is raised and actualized through the immersive flow and vast scope of the music within.

Which is to say, Light of Meaning and Darkness of Being cover an incredible amount of emotional and sonic ground—the Fudge Tunnel-meets-You Fail Me-era Converge of “Heel to Toe”; the driving death ‘n’ roll of “True Volcano”; the ’60s troubadour acoustic lilt of “Death Rhymes”; the Jesus Lizard-y bridge of “By Love All Is Healed”; the Failure-esque “Calling You Home”; the lush, soulstirring anthem “ Love Is Bravery”; the manic math metal of “EMF”; the melodic punk-deathdoom of “The Bleeding Sun”—all of it is vital, weirdly cohesive and impeccably conjured.

The members of Old Man Gloom have a bevy of heavy music classics under their collective belts, but this is a tribute for the ages. Though what was lost can never be completely recovered, the soul itself was indeed the song.

—SHAWN MACOMBER

–(16)–

8

Dream Squasher RELAPSE

Keeping the hate alive

Unfortunately, Los Angeles stoner/sludge/doom veterans –(16)– have toiled in part-time obscurity for most of their existence. Fortunately, the graybeards still manage to vomit forth some of the most misanthropic, miserable and black-hearted metal this side of a thrice-divorced, needle-sharing, scrapyard-squatting suicidal junkie. That the perpetual double barrel the band has held at society’s temple has been historically paired with rhythmic thunder, loping down-picked crush, bluesy strut and the sound of Cris Jerue’s 5 4 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

vocal cords ligaturing his aorta has created a nearly 30-year rallying cry for the disenfranchised, frustrated and fed-up.

As unlikely as it may seem, however, –(16)– are about more than hating everyone from those in the seats of power to those clogging up the passing lane. While there are few bands happier at nature’s present herd thinning, their manifestation of misery is coupled with riffs still designed to get fists pumping. The clobber of opener “Candy in Spanish” and the slo-mo shake ‘n’ pummel of “Acid Tongue” won’t be a revelation to fans of Fudge Tunnel, Crowbar or Eyehategod, but heaps of soulful conviction target the listener’s breadbasket with inarguable impact before “Me and the Dog Die Together” picks up the pace with a tightly executed, swaggering haze and wailing lead guitar bends.

Dream Squasher also corrupts other musical modes and moods—southern rock organ and bathtub gin clean vocals elevate “Sadlands”; Sabbathian harp honking (performed by our own Justin Norton) slithers from the pores of “Agora (Killed by a Mountain Lion)”; “Ride the Waves” is full-on hardcore punk with awesome bass driving the half-time chorus. There’s even off-time accenting akin to Dillinger mixing sludge and winding proto-metal boogie around the archery arrow deadliness of “Harvester of Fabrication,” demonstrating how animosity comes from the heart and the mind. —KEVIN STEWART-PANKO

AARA

7

En Ergô Einai DEBEMUR MORTI PRODUCTIONS

Pure energy

Father of metaphysics (the nature of being “beyond the physical”) Aristotle coined the word “energy.” According to Austrian philosopher Rudolf Eisler, “for him, energeia [en ergô einai] means the living reality and effectiveness, the impact, the realization, the reality in difference from the mere potency.”

Actuality v. virtual.

Swiss black metal trio Aara ground sophomore album En Ergô Einai in the Age of Enlightenment, wherein Aristotle’s physical sciences yielded to liberalism and revolution. “En Ergô Einai serves as tribute to the duality in man’s pursuit of perfection and the futility found therein,” writes the band. “The search for meaning and [man’s] bitter insight of his own insignificance.” In Aara’s quest for atmospheric perfection behind the wall of shriek, they’ve realized an energeia far greater than full-length debut So Fallen Alle Tempel 13 months earlier.

That 2019 bow (translated as “all temples fall”) raged about the Anthropocene by employ-

ing a classically symphonic matte of melody overlaid by BM vocal immolation and sweating guitar exfoliation. Their first canvas for French black arts obsessives Debemur Morti, En Ergô Einai erects another five temples, cuts down the runtime by five minutes to 34, and boosts dynamics straightaway with labelmate Vindsval from Blut Aus Nord picking two minutes of delicate, snow-covered ambiance on opener “Arkanum.” In parallel pointillism, the group enters by launching post-rock ascendance through a Scandinavian veil.

That touch alone pops the furious beats, dead-crow vocals, and whirlpool of extremity and harmony in the nine-minute scene setter.

Rising and falling waves, “Stein auf Stein” climaxes anthemically mainstream. Thunderstorm field recordings give shape to “Aargesang (Aare II),” and titanic closer “Telôs” stages a black metal aria. En Ergô Einai: effective, impactful, actualized. —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

ACXDC

8

Satan Is King PROSTHETIC

No, it’s a different band

Despite being on the scene for over 15 years, ACxDC— or Antichrist Demoncore—are only now putting out their second full-length, Satan Is King, and it’s a full six years after their debut. Was it worth the wait? Well, let’s not go that far. But it’s still quite good.

The four-piece works deep inside the hardcore/powerviolence/grind morass where most songs are pretty short and everything has the potential to spark bloodshed. Over the course of 15 tracks, the band blasts, D-beats, opens the pit and breaks it down, with no movie samples or any of that filler shit to keep them from their appointed task. Drummers are usually where bands like this really sink or swim, and this guy has the skills and also beats the fuck out of his kit, while the cat/dog vocal attack is another one of those old, reliably killer tools in the arsenal.

The only real complaint is that, while all the standards you want and demand from this kind of music are here, it doesn’t go anywhere else.

Is that a requirement? Goodness no, but that’s one wrinkle knowing it’s been six years since the last full-length: There is some expectation for a few new tricks up their cut-off sleeves.

Antichrist Demoncore have not risen to show the world how powerviolence should actually be played. But when you need something done well, straight to the point and just pissed as all hell, Satan Is King is guaranteed to satisfy. —SHANE MEHLING

W HO IS

SCARLET BABYLON?

O N LY T I M E W I L L T E L L OUT IN 2020

@contrarianofficial @contrarianband @contrarianmetal

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BPMD

7

American Made N A PA L M

Your home-based speakeasy’s first hit is ready

Few 21st century metal releases—if any—have justified late-night TV ads anywhere near as much as BPMD’s inaugural full-length. “What makes American Made so special?” you ask.

Simply put—potential mass appeal. Everybody loves covers, and the record is 100 percent made of them. Not just any old covers, either, but a carefully selected clutch of big rock hits from the golden age when people still drove cars with 8-track tape decks. The metal supergroup’s strategy is fiendishly clever and pretty much the antithesis of the tribute band approach. Rather than emulating their sources as closely as possible, vocalist Bobby Blitz (Overkill), drummer Mike Portnoy (Winery Dogs, Sons of Apollo), bassist Mark Menghi (Metal Allegiance) and guitarist Phil Demmel (Vio-lence) take the album’s 10 classic rock chestnuts and metalize them, pretty much making them their own in the process.

BPMD’s preference for stripped-down arrangements that emphasize soul and musicianship yields varied results, depending on your perspective. On one hand, the band’s rendition of Ted Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” serves as a cogent reminder of what a loathsome dipshit the original artist is and was long before Trump. On the other, the track is bound to be a boon for DJs who play a lot of incel parties. Luckily, nothing/nobody else on the album carries much of a political charge, which makes it both the ideal party metal solution and the first fruits of an idea that BPMD could easily explore for a dozen albums, and at least as many years. —ROD SMITH

CAULDRON BLACK RAM

4

Slaver

20 BUCK SPIN

Don’t get chained to the oars

If you have loved Damon Good’s work in Mournful Congregation and StarGazer over the past 20 years, get ready to like Cauldron Black Ram quite a bit less. Maybe you already do—Slaver is CBR’s fourth full-length since 2004, the band’s pedigree is worth a double take, and their label homes at Weird Truth and 20 Buck Spin are hardly strangers to the scene. But it’s hard to recommend spending 35 minutes with an album as staid as Slaver when there’s so much more to be had elsewhere.

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Slaver is a mostly martial slog through some of the most obvious tones, cadences and chords in all of metaldom. Is that fair? Maybe not. But when Slaver starts playing, it immediately tells your brain that Some Metal Record Is On, and it rarely engages any higher gear than that. The performances are fine. Vocals all seem fairly convincing, and some of the guitar textures and solos have real flair, but it all feels squandered in a miasma of songs lifted out of metal’s least daring locales. Maybe this argument feels hypocritical, coming from people who routinely feed you dozens of pages meant to celebrate minimalist drone or old-school-something-orother, but where many of those records convey gallons of sloshing emotional content inside their jagged frequencies, Slaver just feels like leaden popcorn. It’s not even “coldly emotionless,” that weird hype phrase we throw at those detached and depressive records we like. Before this ship docks with its damned cargo, best to burn it to the waterline. —DANIEL LAKE

END

8

Splinters From an Ever-Changing Face C LO S E D CA S K E T ACTIVITIES

Let the metallic hardcore maelstrom sweep you up

End will tear you apart. Not with blades or anything—they’re hardly Cannibal Corpse— though their grinding metallic hardcore is sharp.

No, they’ll shred you like a hurricane would, oscillating ferociously. The furious pace comes from former Dillinger Escape Plan drummer Billy Rymer, who blasts in bursts (“The Reach of Resurrection”). This is blown along by guitarists Will Putney (Fit for an Autopsy) and Greg Thomas (ex-Misery Signals), both monolithic producers, who recall the Secret, Advent, Dead in the Dirt, Cult Leader and the Banner.

Vocalist Brendan Murphy, nearly unrecognizable from Counterparts, bellows and roars atop piercing pandemonium, which manifests in discordant panic chords and blunt breakdowns. In the gale, they’re the projectiles thrown around by whistling winds, either slicing as they pass or barreling over you. Brief forays into melodic death metal and its dissonant opposite subgenre meet the same fate, rearing their head before being taken off violently—sometimes in the same track (“An Apparition”).

Slower songs “Pariah,” “Hesitation Wounds” and “Sands of Sleep” disorient in spite of—or perhaps thanks to—breathing room. Bassist Jay Pepito (Reign Supreme) shines as each reins in the speed more than its predecessor, transitioning from mid-tempo mosh to near post-metal

dirges à la Converge’s epics. That beautiful decay is accentuated via the closer’s haunting, airy singing from O’Brother’s Tanner Merritt. The placement of these songs throughout really elevates Splinters. It also makes the hurricane more dangerous, acting as the eye of the storm. That calm center is a safe haven, but the journey from within to without is even more dangerous than the squall swirling around.

This is encapsulated as “Hesitation Wounds” transitions out of “Fear for Me Now” and into “Captive to My Curse.” Don’t get too comfortable.

The storm’s not brewing—it’s already here.

—BRADLEY ZORGDRAGER

FAKE NAMES

6

Fake Names E P I TA P H

Survival sweetness

Thirty-five years after the “Revolution Summer” that altered the shape of punk to come in our nation’s capital, members of that movement’s key bands are back at it with an older, possibly wiser supergroup of sorts. Of course, that has always been the D.C. way—almost every act that followed Minor Threat was a descendant of two other local bands, creating infinite combinations of musicians that often seemed like they were put together in a fantasy punk rock draft.

With Brian Baker (Minor Threat/Dag Nasty/Bad Religion), Michael Hampton (S.O.A./Embrace) and Johnny Temple (Soulside/Girls Against Boys), 75 percent of Fake Names already reps the DMV. The other cat—Refused frontman Dennis Lyxzén—never stopped kneeling at the altar of the Nation of Ulysses, so he fits right in.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Fake Names are profoundly influenced by the emotional hardcore of Baker and Hampton’s mid-’80s bands Dag Nasty and Embrace, respectively. This compact and economical 10-song, 28-minute debut is all about the clean (i.e., no pedals or effects) sound of their guitars, which punctuate an uncluttered mix. None of the tracks has the emotional heft of old-school Embrace (or Refused’s earlier material, for that matter), but there are some extremely catchy songs (“First Everlasting” and “Lost Cause”) that build upon the “emo + Springsteen” formula that the Gaslight Anthem has mined to such great effect over the last decade.

The sum effect is unfussy and uncomplicated, which suggests that it will not change the world outside of the New Jersey studio where it was incubated. But the hooks are endless, the choruses are on point and it’s realistically the most fun any D.C. band has had since Baker skipped town for Bad Religion. —NICK GREEN

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FROM HELL

7

Rats & Ravens SCOURGE

Bay Area scaremongers offer up compact jewel

George Anderson isn’t one to rush the creative process. The guitarist/ vocalist also known as Aleister Sinn’s thoroughness and attention to detail as the driving force behind From Hell is such that six years has passed between the quartet’s 2014 debut and Rats & Ravens. Sinn’s patience yields big rewards for anyone who digs long-form horror metal; From Hell’s second full-length is conceptually compelling—at least for anti-witch types—and impeccably played and recorded.

You can blame much of the former on guitarist Steve Smyth (ex-Testament), bassist Stephen Paul Goodwin (ex-Vicious Rumors) and drummer Wes Anderson (Les Claypool’s Frog Brigade), all of whom do a magnificent job with Anderson’s tale of a mid-13th century witch somewhere in Eastern Europe who kidnaps a bunch of kids, sacrifices them (to the god of vermin?) and eventually brings them back to a sort of life with the help of rat-related magic.

As for the recording, the fault resides with Greg Wilkinson (High on Fire, Autopsy), who makes a point of affording everyone involved enough breathing room to make his results sound more like a performance captured by humans than a product manufactured in Pro Tools. While rooted in thrash, the album rarely lingers in a single genre; in essence, it’s a pan-metal opera with Sinn playing all the characters. His dedication to the story is such that he occasionally steps out of any and all known metal vocal styles (as on “Don’t Cry for Help”) and portrays a character with unsettling vigor. —ROD SMITH

FUNERAL LEECH

7

Death Meditation CARBONIZED

Deathlike focus

The debut album from these downtrodden New Yorkbased newcomers to the subterranean rumble that is the American death-doom scene sounds nothing like a debut album. Most bands exude a visceral, sometimes reckless eagerness on their first fulllength, but Funeral Leech—which formed five years ago and released their demo tape in 2017— sound like they’ve shouldered these monoliths for decades already. Other bands muster this much sonic power, but Funeral Leech hit like a wrecking ball maneuvered in slow, graceful swings by a preternaturally mature operator, a poet of demolition. Deeper than that, as heard on songs like “Lament” and the re-recording of “Downpour,” a dreariness plagues this album, like the self5 8 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

loathing experienced by a dreadful monster every time it completes what it is compelled to do— namely, crush the life out of things.

On Death Meditation, Funeral Leech show the restraint of a veteran band, taking riffs and subtly reworking and reusing them. But on “Morbid Transcendence,” the album’s secondto-last track, they’re like a band set free of their ponderous curse. Five minutes in, this song opens up into a starved world-eater of galloping breakdowns. This moment marks the climax of the record, but Death Meditation’s extinction-level event closer is not to be skipped.

Death Meditation succeeds at a slow and steady pace, never losing sight of its own purpose.

Its strengths smolder, and the best moments come subtly and hypnotically. We haven’t seen a killer quite like this one before. Fascinating.

—DUTCH PEARCE

IN THE COMPANY OF SERPENTS

9

Lux

SELF-RELEASED

Lords of light

Lux is an album of hulking baritone riffs and cinematic atmospheres; trippy guitar tones and bass drones; death growls, airy textures and surprises. It is the Denver doom band’s third full-length, following 2017’s superlative Ain-Soph Aur, and their first recorded as a trio, with Ben Pitts joining drummer J.P. Damron and guitarist/vocalist Grant Netzorg on bass and lap steel(!). And if your wont in life is to prowl the twilit perimeter of doom and sludge-death-whatever as you await enlightenment, Lux should be on your record shelf or hard drive, stat. The blood and bones of this expansive sound has numerous antecedents—YOB, Neurosis, Electric Wizard—but it is in the details and the wide-open spaces of their compositions that In the Company of Serpents define themselves.

Consider the imaginative left turns and grace notes of genius, like the tremolo-picked black metal melody that insinuates itself in the brawny climax of “Scales of Maat,” or in the haunted Americana of “Daybreak” and “The Chasm at the Mouth of It All,” a raspy incantation best experienced under a canopy of stars. Yet throughout, the transition between dark and light is as natural as sunrise and sunset. Netzorg said that Lux explores the concept of prima materia, the universe’s “root essence,” but as the accompanying liner notes explain, Lux is not just a meditation on the arcane mysticism of light and its place in the cosmos; it is in reference to his two-year-old daughter. Parenthood doesn’t reveal the mysteries of the universe, but for Netzorg it’s a start, base camp for epic and daring spiritual expeditions such as this. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

LAMB OF GOD

7

Lamb of God EPIC

New new American gospel

By self-titling their first album without drummer Chris Adler, Virginia’s Lamb of God assert that his contributions aren’t central to the band’s identity. Bold move—a segment of their fanbase won’t even listen to this record for that reason.

Those people are missing out. Art Cruz hits the skins like a champion, and after years of touring as Lamb of God’s session drummer, he’s already internalized much of Adler’s style. Cruz doesn’t try to imitate Adler’s sculptural approach, but his more stripped-down take suits this material.

To my ears, these 10 songs sound more focused and intense than any of the band’s records since Sacrament—that may be because Mark Morton has consigned his lighter material to solo records, but mostly it’s because Randy Blythe delivered his angriest performance in years. It’s also Blythe’s most overtly political performance in years. Lamb of God’s pinnacle, 2004’s Ashes of the Wake, was a fiery protest of the Iraq War. Since then, Blythe has shied away from current events as a topic, and the temperature on each successive album has cooled. His obvious fury with polarization and inequality in America gives songs like “Memento Mori” and “New Colossal Hate” both enthusiasm and gravitas.

Lamb of God’s second half doesn’t match the intensity and inventiveness of Ashes of the Wake’s.

Guest spots from Jamey Jasta and Chuck Billy buoy a pair of otherwise paint-by-numbers songs.

That first half, however, sounds like rejuvenated and relevant—a consolidated Lamb of God ready to take on a hostile world.

—JOSEPH SCHAFER

PARADISE LOST

7

Obsidian

NUCLEAR BLAST

Brussen ‘n’ twiny

Hand it to Paradise Lost.

Three decades (and change) together. Sixteen (counting Obsidian) full-length albums. Through thick (Icon, Draconian Times) and thin (Believe in Nothing), the Brits have persevered. Not because they have to or because it’s convenient. No, Paradise Lost is their everything. It’s been evident throughout the albums before, but it’s especially true on Obsidian.

Whereas 2017’s Medusa attempted to out-doom Gothic as a response to “Beneath Broken Earth” from the album prior, Obsidian returns Paradise Lost to their mid-’90s heyday, when it was cool for bands like the Mission and New Model Army to blend surreptitiously (and sometimes conspicuously) into Gregor Mackintosh and Nick

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Holmes’ heavy end-times doom. Indeed, speaking with Mackintosh last year, he described Obsidian as, “part Icon/Draconian Times, part Gothic, part Medusa and some new elements.”

Our man isn’t too far off. Tracks like “Darker Thoughts,” “Fall From Grace,” “Serenity” and “Hope Dies Young” have that ready-for-metaldominance feel to them. The opposite side of the West Yorks shrubbery is the “new.” What kicks off with the tribal beat of “Ghosts” extends into its neighbor “The Devil Embraced,” and finishes off in the introspective “Ending Days,” a track that—like the intro to “Darker Thoughts”— showcases Holmes stepping out from and doing away with his comfort zones. If there’s one thing to Obsidian, it’s Holmes’ vocal performance.

There’s a rub, however, to all this highfalutin innovation this many years into Paradise Lost’s illustrious career: Obsidian is a bit of a bear to get into. “Darker Thoughts” and “Ghosts” have that special something, but elsewhere it’s diehard territory only, especially the gristle that is album capper “Ravenghast.” —CHRIS DICK

PYRRHON

8

Abscess Time W I L LOW T I P

Probably more like Autopsy Time, but that’s splitting hairs

New York City’s Pyrrhon have long tapped into something special. What Ulcerate are to death metal, Pyrrhon are to... well, there’s the rub.

While Pyrrhon have elements of death metal in their sound, there’s also grindcore, noise rock, straight-up noise, sludge and hardcore. It’s delivered by way of huge and expansive (in other words, long) songs, except when it’s not and the bursts come in short blasts. It’s just a glorious cacophony, a fantastic release both emotionally cathartic and musically intriguing, and it sounds as great as ever on fourth album Abscess Time.

Take the opening title track: It’s Unsane by way of Immolation, urban clang fed through fantastical DM. It devolves into a complete racket by song’s end, and it’s perfect. “Down at Liberty Ashes” is like if Kerosene 454 were much, much, much heavier and decided to cover a Knut song; it’s pure sonic oppression. And “Teuchnikskreis” is a one-minute noise-grinder that wouldn’t sound out of place on a prime-era Relapse grindcore record.

“Another Day in Paradise” lays down the confusing rhythms and ugly dissonance that is this band’s calling card in a relatively concise (for Pyrrhon) six minutes; the interplay between the bass and drums is fantastic here. “The Cost of Living” slows things down to a sludge trawl, dissonant-jazz guitar solo snaking over the labyrinthine rhythm as the band pulls you through the subways, through the sewers, through the 6 0 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

dodgy park at nighttime. “The State of Nature” tips its hat to the weirdest and most obtuse moments of Hydra Head’s late-era catalogue.

The record is just this side of an hour long, which is way too much; after 35 minutes, you just sit, glazed over, while the band continues to pummel. It’s my only complaint about this fantastic, genre-defying piece of art. —GREG PRATT

ROTTING OUT

8

Ronin

PURE NOISE

Fresh fruit for rotting breakdowns

Are there any communities in hell or on earth more primed to be skeptical of the popular self-help phrase “the comeback is always stronger than the setback” than those composed of… well, you, dear extremely extreme readers? We’ve had winning resurrections, sure, but plenty of others that left us gazing wistfully at never-should’ve-been-opened graves. Now, there’s no denying Rotting Out got the setbacks locked down: In January 2015, the Los Angeles quintet was confirmed for that summer’s Warped Tour. Two months later, on March 10, the band released the ferocious and searing Reckoning EP. They should’ve blown up. Instead, on March 25, they broke up. A year beyond that, ex-vocalist Walter Delgado was arrested in Ohio on drug trafficking charges and eventually sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Only five years removed from immolation and two years after an instantaneously legendary Sound and Fury Fest reunion set, the comeback is strong—and hard—as a motherfucker: Ronin’s deft, smart, goddamn near-perfect amalgamation of Cro-Mags, early Suicidal Tendencies and circaJust Look Around Sick of It All doesn’t merely establish it as very likely the best, most enlivening hardcore punk record you’ll hear this year; it’s probably destined for the short list of the greatest hardcore punk records of the last couple decades.

The album unquestionably rages and pummels—no other band is revolutionizing/ revitalizing the breakdown on this brilliancemeets-brutality level—but is also authentic and stirring in a unique, almost magical way. Yes, Rotting Out appeared dead. As Dr. Frankenstein promised us of another monster soon to emerge from the shadows, though, the band was, in fact, “just resting—waiting for a new life to come.”

Let the slaying commence. —SHAWN MACOMBER

SOJOURNER

6

Premonitions N A PA L M

The perfect average roll on a d20

International “black” metal

outfit Sojourner made a fair bit of waves on predecessor The Shadowed Road. Now, some two years later, the ’journer are growing up, focusing the wayward elements of their past oeuvre into a more singular statement. If comparisons serve the greater good, Premonitions is a lot like Dark Tranquillity’s The Gallery without the sophistication, or Saor’s Guardians without the Highlands mystery.

That’s not necessarily a knock on Sojourner’s melancholic exhortations. More a reminder that Premonitions—while composed of the very same composites that made Rapture, Fractal Gates or Atoma great—is in need of more fine-tuning to truly transport its audience into legend.

Much of it has to do with instrumental tones.

The keyboards, for instance, sound as if ripped from a Casio CTK-520L. The leads are almost always strangely fragile. And the soundscapes are often completely washed out. But Sojourner’s biggest problem area is songwriting. For every great part (the intro to “The Monolith,” the general stride of “The Deluge,” the mid-section of “Fatal Frame”), there’s whole songs that vampire time. Take, as examples, “The Apocalyptic Theater,” “Eulogy for the Lost,” “Atonement” and closing track “The Event Horizon.” Each features parts that—in 1995—would’ve blown the doors off things; but in 2020, they’re too noticeable in their elementary execution and placement.

Consider Fall of the Leafe’s August Wernicke, Throes of Dawn’s Binding of the Spirit or Draconian’s Arcane Rain Fell, and it’s apparent that Sojourner are very much in the ingress of where they’d like to be. Certainly, there’s a lot to like about Premonitions—I’ll come back to it in a decade—but at the moment, it’s all too “ground floor” for it to convincingly craft lofty musical treatises to landscapes impressive and deeds brave. —CHRIS DICK

STERILEPRAYER

6

Accepting the New Normal BLACKHOUSE

Get by with less help from your friends

First off, credit to SterilePrayer for coming out with a record titled Accepting the New Normal right in the middle of these plague times. But anyway, let’s talk about this dark ambient industrial thing we got here. This is a solo project of Scott Rozell (known for his work with Moral Crux and, no shit, Green Jellÿ), along with a handful of guests doing some often atmospheric, occasionally aggressive electronics.

The most compelling tracks are when the guests take charge, particularly Slug Christ, Jay Gambit of Crowhurst and Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson. Robinson’s hard-boiled schizo rant is very much what he’s known for, and it’s bolstered by the grim, digital waves flowing underneath. As

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far as Gambit and Christ, they team up on the shockingly effective “Reviled (Earth Sick).” A propulsive, mechanical beat, Gambit’s monster bellow and Christ’s nasal rap flow work exceptionally well together, even if it seems there’s no way that could be true.

But the unfortunate irony is that those tracks diminish the rest of the record. The majority of the music is brooding and cinematic (sometimes with more subdued guests like Philippe Petit and Pig Destroyer’s Blake Harrison), and features multiple layers and interesting dynamics. But when you feast on something more substantial, it turns everything else into long segues. Rozell has put a lot of care and thought into Accepting the New Normal, and it would be great to hear more. And the more of him, the better. —SHANE MEHLING

STYGIAN CROWN

8

Stygian Crown CRUZ DEL SUR

Come sail away

It’s not every day that you come across a singer who so vividly captures the power of Robert Lowe, but Melissa Pinion does just that on Stygian Crown’s superb debut album. With her resonant contralto voice, she conveys supreme power— something this form of doom metal relies heavily upon—and immediately captures the listener’s imagination as she sings tales about Egyptology (“Devour the Dead”) and Greek mythology (“Two Coins for the Ferryman”).

Particularly noteworthy is “Through the Divine Master,” a spellbinding eight-and-a-half minute epic that accentuates Pinion’s commanding presence with riffs that echo the cinematic grandeur of Ennio Morricone.

It’s also encouraging to discover that the rest of the band doesn’t lean on slow tempos too much, as the bracing “Flametongue Master” proves that they can rip through a gargantuan galloping sequence as well as any of their contemporaries. Stygian Crown are indeed devout students of the genre, and this album serves up such a tried-and-true sound with vitality and originality. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

ULTHAR

8

Providence 20 BUCK SPIN

These cats kill

Ulthar fuckin’ play cavernous fuckin’ savage fuckin’ nasty fuckin’ black fuckin’ death fuckin’ metal.

Maybe you read that sentence and think, 6 2 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L

“Wow, he’s really trying to pad out that word count.” So, what if you’re right? What else do you need to know? Guitarist/vocalist Shelby Lermo brings his searing talents from Vastum and the short-lived Extremity; drummer Justin Ennis kept frenetic time for Tombs and Mutilation Rites before getting on board with Void Omnia and Vale; and bassist/vocalist Steve Peacock fucked your face off in Pale Chalice and Mastery before starting Kneel with Crebain/ Amoeba Records heavy Steve Lucas. If you had read my review of Ulthar’s last record, Cosmovore—and trust me, you didn’t—you would know all this already and be eardrum-deep in Providence as we speak.

“Churn” launches its spastic attack without a moment’s pause, feeling like classic San Francisco black metal pumped full of death-enamored steroids. “Undying Spear” starts like a tribute to Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka before emerging into an almost Absu/Melechesh frenzy.

“Through Downward Dynasties” and “Cudgel” build their pulpit-worthy proclamations out of menacing subterranean fuzz drone intros.

Through ghoulish grunts and primal shrieks, Lermo and Peacock steer Providence toward being one of the most energized releases you’ll hear this year. From a bunch of guys who could be forgiven for playing the mature scene vet card, this record crackles with authentic, unchecked passion. Ulthar are destructive and distinctive—a novel combination that deserves your undivided attention. —DANIEL LAKE

VOODOO GODS

5

The Divinity of Blood REAPER

Terrible certainty

Reaper “vacation fund” band Voodoo Gods is reminiscent of other side projects that metaldom had to endure for whatever reason. Cases in point: Catastrophic, Tardy Brothers, Murder Squad, Sinergy, etc. Voodoo Gods once had Behemoth’s Nergal upfront, but now sport “King Neck” George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher on vokills. That’s the selling point. The only one.

Fisher, with Cannibal, is a veritable monster, but here his power, projection and all-out domination are reduced to puppy grunts by the tired attempts to shove old-school Kreator antagonisms into Down’s dude-bro Trouble-isms. There’s also smatterings of teenage death metal about, too, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking happening in that department either; the introspective bass and guitar bits spread haphazardly across The Divinity of Blood were done with far more flair, class and ingenuity on, well, “Cosmic Sea.”

Musically, Voodoo Gods aren’t sophomoric— far from it, in fact—but they write like they’ve emerged from rudimentary (online) courses in theory. Throughout The Divinity of Blood, it’s hard to spot where one juvenile idea ends and another begins. Look at: “Forever!,” “Rise of the Antichrist,” “Serenade of Hate” and the title track. It’s as if Voodoo Gods have too many influences—let’s not mention the sordid cover of Necrophobic’s “Before the Dawn”—and not enough people saying, “No!” The intro to “Serenade of Hate,” for example, is Atheist’s “Sambra Briza” auditioning for Danzig’s “Mother.”

Indeed, almost every song on The Divinity of Blood starts out impressive enough—lots of nods to Schuldiner—but descend predictably into half-baked thrash... the middling kind that died a yawning death with Atrophy’s Violent by Nature.

—CHRIS DICK

WITCHSKULL

8

A Driftwood Cross RISE ABOVE

Which witch is which?

Enough already with the “witch” names. Seriously, the dozens of other bands using some iteration of the word pretty much guarantees that you’ll sink in a morass of similarly named outfits, rather than floating to the top—you know, like an actual witch would. King Witch, Witch Vomit, Witch Breath, Witchkiller—who can keep track?

Australia’s Witchskull are on Rise Above, so of course they sound more like Witchfinder General than, say Witch Taint. This doomy trio channels Sabbath in all the best ways, but tends to look to the Dio years for rhythms and riffs. The vocals are uniquely higher-pitched (almost Perry Farrell-ish at times), with plenty of vibrato, but this complements the sludgy riffs nicely.

A Driftwood Cross is definitely distinguished by guitarist/vocalist Marcus de Pasquale’s howls, as well as the wide range of tempos and interesting dynamics. While many similarly doomy records can become claustrophobic in their adherence to simply worshipping the almighty riff, Witchskull leave plenty of space when appropriate, and even incorporate some interesting, almost postpunk-ish chords.

I’ll likely forget the name of this band— or confuse it with some other witchy unit— but Witchskull have created a sound that’s a refreshed take on a tried-and-true style. The songs are strong, the production is solid, and the playing is in the pocket and tight, which elevates them well above the majority of their similarly monikered peers. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

D E C I B E L : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : 6 3

6 4 : J U LY 2 0 2 0 : D E C I B E L ANSWERS: 1. The security guards’ shirt colors have switched 2. The ATG dude’s mustache and soul patch connect to his massive beard 3. The holes in the barrier are larger 4. The Carcass fan’s ginger fro is getting crowded out by the ATG dude 5. The security guard on the left has a fu manchu 6. The guard on the right is speaking into his walkie talkie 7. The ATG dude’s antiperspirant has gone all cakey 8. The ATG dude’s leather cuff has jumped onto the Carcass fan’s wrist 9. The Death woman’s shirt has an intact collar and sleeves 10. There’s a wee bit of puke on Jesus in the ATG shirt 11. The Death woman has an over-21 wrist band on her left arm 12. Someone is giving the ATG dude devil horn “bunny ears” 13. There’s a legit snake in the Death woman’s dreads 14. The security guard on the right has tribal tat sleeve on his wrist 15. It would appear Satan himself is in the back row of the crowd, toward the far right

There are 15 differences in these pictures.

How many can you find?