No F*****g Lists.com

Scorpions - "Blackout" So there I was sat here in the realm of Eminent Silence on a rare week off work, flicking through some album cover artbooks and internet sites and "ping", an idea formed.  There are lots of great album covers out there in the history of music that artists have (quite rightly) received accolades and praise for.  However, the thing I always hated as a kid was picking up a record and it's cover art promised the sound of hell opening or orcs fighting dragons in a fiery pit of damnation, only to find once I got home that the bulk of the songs were about broken hearts and endless tears, instead of broken swords and endless rivers of blood! So, as part of a new series on my still fledgling blog I am going to champion the albums whose content was every bit as good as the artwork suggested, whose cover image was representative of what lay inside.  The series will start with Scorpions and "Blackout". Lets look at what we have here.

Being a satanist isn't evil enough for some people.  The act of sacrificing goats or a buxom virgin in the name of the horned one probably wouldn't cut it in the world of Hoath Torog of Behexen, instead he and his band mates chose the power of black metal to get their message across .  It is alleged that those who carry the black flame will find the work of Behexen "pleasurable". I am not holding any flames of any colour in my hands and nor am I particularly a worshipper of anyone but I cannot deny the sheer satanic fury and dense evil atmosphere of Behexens` 2000 album release "Rituale Satanum".  Raw and blistering like a rotting carcass in the desert, you can hear in every morbid melody and every ghastly shriek that Behexen mean every last measure of the effort they pour into their art form.  The album drips with intensity from start to finish, drenching the listener like a tsunami of hatred and blasphemy. So this weeks' rediscovery of how spitef

Black metal is dull nowadays.  Everybody has done "true" and "cvlt" to fucking death.  We have had tremolos picked so many times as an audience our ear drums are on permanent vibrato.  I have had to play "A Blaze In The Northern Sky" or dust off my copy of "De Mysteriis...." to remember that most of the stuff released since then is not new and is a dull regurgitation of former genre defining releases. Enter Sun Worship.  Billed simply as "black metal from Berlin", I stumbled across their "Elder Giants" release yesterday by complete accident whilst on a trawl of Bandcamp.  The frantic yet well paced BM is held together by a real atmospheric density that at times is so obvious you could slice chunks of it off and roast them over a fire. The first 3 tracks on offer here all build perfectly into blistering displays of scathing emotion and fury.  They draw you in with a sense of intrigue that isn't as obvious as you f

I seem to be spending the first part of 2014 still catching up with and waxing lyrical about all the quality DM that was released in 2013.  Irkallian Oracle's "Grave Ekstasis" is another one of these squally, squidy and horror inspired blends of DM that are synonymous with last year for me. Available via Nuclear War Now Records  "Grave Ekstasis" is that familiar blend of Aevangelist and Portal done very well and with blistering intensity.  Sit back and get lost in the ebb and flow of opening track "Ekstasis" and then by forced further back in your chair by the savage attack that starts off "Iconoclasm" with it's chanting lyrics and agonised cries mixed with blistering pace interchanged with almost doom death sections. By the time you reach "Dispersion" which opens like the mother of all motherfucking storms breaking, you know this is a must have release. I hear Antediluvian as another influence in their sound too as the re

Jute Gyte has released arounf half a million eps and albums in the space of about 8 years if his Bandcamp page is anything to go by.  It must be around 12 months since he last released anything (he being Adam Kalmbach) so it was with great zeal that I opened the email this morning informing me of his latest release "Vast Chains".  What we have here is 58 mins of the shrieking, dissonant, discordant, dark thumping majesty that fans of Jute Gyte have come to love. The avenue into Jute Gyte is it's sheer inaccessibility.  Forget order and form or structure Kalmbach throws convention out of the window at every turn as he forges his twisted and turgid blend of metal in a furious and blinding blast of terror.  Described on the Bandcamp page as "Microtonal experimental black metal with irregular meters, dense polyphony, and wastelands of trudging black doom" I really couldn't put it much better myself in terms of a description. Head on over to BC here  and pi

Talent.  I read somewhere once that you should never take a lack of talent as an obstacle to becoming a genius.  If you listen to Cynic's latest release "Kindly Bent To Free Us" you will quickly realise the limits of that statement as the obvious talent and ability of Masvidal, Reinert and Malone have combined to make a genius of an album, one that will chart on my end of year list quite highly I suspect. Move away from boxes when you put this record on, stop wasting your life putting things in pigeonholes and just open your ears to free flowing, thought provoking, heart warming and genuinely well thought out music.  Once you realise that the prominent bass sound is meant to sound like that (which should be in the opening few minutes of "True Hallucination Speak") you are already identifying one of the key driving components of this largely experimental outfit. You'll soon come to hear on repeated listens that this is a band very much bettered by

This weeks hidden gem is another late 80's mercilessly thrashing assault from US mob Morbid Saint.  Imagine Kreator even more pissed off than they already were on "Pleasure To Kill" and you are in the right thought pattern. There is nothing morbid or saintly about these guys, they are savage thrash metal with sneering vocals so intense you can feel the spittle on your cheek from the speakers on your desktop.  Their logo is almost as crap as my other recent find Demolition Hammer and the artwork on "Spectrum of Death" is equally laughable in that kind of sucks in a really cool way mentality. Check out "Scars" above from "Spectrum Of Death" and snap you neck like a wasp just crawled in your ear and started shagging your eardrum! Then be sure to leave a mention in your will to Eminent Silence for helping you (re?) discover one of thrash metals all time classics. You're welcome!

Yep, Corpsessed.  As in obsessed with dead bodies one would assume?  In the history of poor choices for the name of your DM band it ranks quite high in a top ten of names that surely not everybody in the group consented to? Thankfully these Finnish bringers of darkness more than make up for this bizarre name choice by delivering an excellent slab of DM on their debut album "Abysmal Thresholds".  From the off it's clear that Incantation are an influence (who fucking isn't influenced by them?) but album opener (proper) "Of Desolation" has stabs of symphonic synths that bring to mind a meeting of the aforementioned Incantation and Emperor too. The rule is book is not torn up and re-written on "Abysmal Thresholds" but the established format and recognisable structure of what Corpsessed do is done very well.  Dripping with riffs, seeping with atmosphere and dragged along by vocals that dredge all the filth, murkiness and grime out of every lyric, Co