THKD’s Top 100 Metal Albums #16: Danzig – Thrall-Demonsweatlive (Def American Recordings, 1993)

First thing’s first; yes, realize that Thrall-Demonsweatlive is an EP not an album.  But it deserves a place in the top one hundred because it marks the beginning of my life-long obsession with all things Danzig.  Like many Danzig fans in my age bracket, I was mesmerized by the video for “Mother ’93,” a clip mainly comprised of footage from the band’s legendary 1992 Halloween performance at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater; the image of Chuck Biscuits’ 15 foot high skull drum riser is permanently burned into my brain.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt that “Mother” is a fantastic song, but combining it with the imagery of a rowdy-as-fuck live show took it to a whole other level.

Real1 (Enzo Amore) – “Phoenix”

Oooooooh, Enzo Amore.  I legit loved Enzo and Big Cass, I really did.  They were an oasis of silly catch phrases, off-the-wall humor and most of all fun in a WWE era that’s often not terribly fun to watch.  Sure, neither of them were technical marvels in the ring, but they had personality, dammit, and personality goes a long way in the world of professional wrestling.  Amore was easily the best promo guy in the entire company and together Enzo and Cass were giving the New Day some stiff competition for the title of WWE’s most entertaining active tag team.

20 years of the Misfits’ American Psycho

For the most part, everyone already knows the scoop on American Psycho; after years of bitter legal disputes with Glenn Danzig, bassist Jerry Only was finally given the rights to record and perform under the Misfits name.  Recruiting new drummer Dr. Chud and vocalist Michale Graves along with longtime guitarist/Only’s brother Doyle, the resurrected Misfits signed with Geffen records and released their first album in nearly a decade-and-a-half.  End of history lesson.

Misfits – The Devil’s Rain (Misfits Records, 2011)

Over the past several years, Jerry Only has been both lauded for keeping the Misfits alive and demonized for continuing to milk the Crimson Ghost cash-cow.  To say that I’ve been skeptical of the Jerryfits would be an understatement; aside from the Project: 1950 covers album, I hadn’t checked any of the band’s post-Michale Graves discography until this year.  Sure, Project: 1950 was a fun little experiment, but there was just something about Only continuing to front the band that didn’t sit well with me.

Interview: HERCYN

In early 2014, New Jersey-based black metal band Hercyn sent me a copy of their debut release, the excellent Magda.  To say that I was blown away by the twenty-four minute, single track demo would be an understatement; this was the kind of gloomy, neo folk-tinged black metal I had been yearning for more of ever since Agalloch released their classic The Mantle back in 2002.  A subsequent split with Thera Roya spoke to the band’s dedication to continuing to refine their sound, but it also left me wanting more.  Fortunately I don’t have to wait any longer, as Hercyn are about to release Dust and Ages.  Indeed, the band’s first full length makes good on the promise of the their previous shorter releases, delivering a pair of epic tracks (plus an intro and outro) that are easily the band’s most accomplished and fully-realized works to date. Curious to know more about the band’s inner workings and the creation of Dust and Ages, I sent the band a slew of questions which they graciously answered in great depth via e-mail.

THKD’s Top 100 Metal Albums #11: Danzig – Danzig II: Lucifuge (Def American, 1990)

How in the blue hell did I manage to get even this far into the THKD Top 100 without covering a Danzig album?!  Granted, the list is in no particular order, but given my Danzig super-fan status, you’d think I would’ve touched on one of the man’s records within the first few posts.  The bands/artists you love the most are always the most difficult to write about and let’s face it, I’ve already devoted a fairly exhaustive amount of digital ink to the goddamn mighty GD (here, here, here, here… need I go on?).  What’s left to say about my love for the man and his music at this point?

Body Count – Manslaughter (Sumerian Records, 2014)

It’s weird to think there’s a whole generation of kids who only know Ice-T as “that dude from Law & Order” and have never even heard the man rap, let alone heard his metal band Body Count.  In spite of being young at the time, I remember when the band released their self-titled debut and the controversy surrounding the song “Cop Killer,” which was eventually deleted from all subsequent pressings of the album.  I was only twelve when the album came out and didn’t hear it until a few years later, but it was evident that lost amidst the controversy was the fact that Body Count was an incendiary album of hardcore punk-fueled heavy metal that should’ve garnered acclaim for making mainstream heavy metal dangerous again thanks to Ice’s willingness to express himself in whatever way he saw fit without giving a fuck about who he might offend, rather than being a target for uptight and out-of-touch folks who believe the average American isn’t intelligent enough to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Hercyn – Magda (self-released, 2013)

It’s a testament to the amount of great metal released last year that I’m still playing catch-up three months deep into the new year.  One of the “ones that got away” in 2013 is Hercyn, a quartet hailing from Jersey City, New Jersey who are off to a most impressive start with Magda, their self-released debut demo.  Consisting of a single track that clocks in just shy of twenty-four minutes, Magda is proof positive that even at this early stage in the game, Hercyn are already aspiring to be much more than your run-of-the-mill black metal outfit.

Finally… Danzig.

At this point, my status as a Glenn Danzig maniac is far beyond well-documented.  Between the Misfits, Samhain and Danzig, I’ve devoted more digital ink to the man’s music than to any other artist I’ve covered here at THKD.  The last time I took stock of my music collection, the Evil Elvis dominated it with over twenty releases, not to mention all the t-shirts and other random paraphernalia I own.  My one and only tattoo is based loosely on “Thirteen,” the song Danzig wrote for Johnny Cash (my favorite metal singer meets my favorite non metal singer).  Cosmo Lee, the founder of Invisible Oranges, even based a post around my admission that I celebrate Danzig’s entire catalogue in my review of 2010’s excellent Deth Red Sabaoth.

Evoken – Atra Mors (Profound Lore, 2012)

For the past several years, I’ve felt very close to death.  No matter what direction life has taken me in, it seems that death is there to meet me at every turn, taking away family, friends and acquaintances with a disturbing frequency.  In the past month alone both my cousin and an old college professor have passed from this mortal coil, both well before their time.  This increasing familiarity with death has indeed bred contempt; contempt for the callousness and randomness with which it has wrenched my loved ones from this already painful existence.  Of course, no one in their right mind is fond of death, but the inordinate number of deaths I’ve had to weather recently has served to make me despise life’s final chapter that much more, if such a thing is possible.

Disma – Towards the Megalith (Profound Lore, 2011)

At first the old school death metal revival was refreshing.  Since its early 90s heyday, death metal had become overly produced and overly technical, a bloated, sterile, wank-fest that had absolutely nothing to do with the guiding principals the genre was founded upon.  In other words, the death had been taken out of death metal, replaced by endless sweep picking and squeaky clean production values.  A seemingly endless legion of bands were either cranking out spastic, antiseptic anti-songs,  picking the bones of Slaughter of the Soul, or otherwise dragging death metal’s name through the cesspool (and not in a good way).

Of course, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, so along came came a slew of bands flying the flag of old school death metal, attempting to take the genre back to its unholy roots.  Some of them were impressive upstarts (Vasaeleth, Impetuous Ritual, Grave Miasma) some of them had been here all along (Nominon, Vomitory, God Dethroned), but the vast majority of them weren’t worthy to lick Bolt Thrower, Entombed or Incantation’s boots. Putting the death back in death metal brought with it a dearth of innovation and attention to craftsmanship.  I can live without the former, but the latter is an absolute necessity.

Enter New Jersey’s Disma.  Featuring legendary ex-Incantation throat Craig Pillard, as well as members of the long-running Funebrarum, Disma aren’t a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids who just discovered death metal.  They’re a group of battle-tested veteran musicians with a thirst for devastation, and no other modern band to date has managed to capture the old school death metal zeitgeist as well as they have on their debut full length, Towards the Megalith.

Towards the Megalith is heavy.  Impossibly heavy.  It might just be the heaviest death metal album of the year, hell, it might be the heaviest death metal album of the last five years.  The guitars and bass are de-tuned to the bowels of hell and drenched in distortion, and Pillard’s vocals are so abyssal that they actually add another layer of heaviness to Disma’s slow ‘n’ low sonic assault.  You might think that all this unabashed pursuit of heaviness and distortion would lead to a murky Incantation-esque sound, but Towards the Megalith retains a high degree of clarity without sounding overly slick.  In fact, being able to hear the filth dripping off of each individual instrument just makes it that much heavier.  Hey, did I mention that this album is heavy?

The other immediate highlight of Towards the Megalith is its tempo.  Although the band does pick up the pace occasionally, the bulk of the album is characterized by lumbering, doom-y passages, like a horde of legless zombies slowly dragging themselves across a desolate graveyard turned quagmire in search of flesh, their rotting entrails leaving a trail of putrescence behind them.  I’ve always been drawn to sludgier tempos over the relentless blastbeats that characterize modern death metal, and the album’s glacial pace, combined with it’s aforementioned sonic weightiness makes for a totally suffocating listening experience, the musical equivalent of being buried alive in concrete.

I’ve talked a lot about a lack of “futurism” in death metal of late, but I’m also a big proponent of the idea that progression simply isn’t necessary if a high level of craftsmanship is present.  What Disma lacks in innovation, they more than make up for with an unwavering desire to be the heaviest fucking band on the planet and an inherent understanding of what makes compelling traditional DM.  Forget reinventing the wheel, Towards the Megalith crushes it into dust.

I bet you’re gonna like it in A.D. (or the first trve black metal album).

“When you feel like you’re going too slow / I bet you’re gonna like it in / A.D. A.D / People gonna talk about / A.D. A.D. / Bloody hell and sacrifice”
-“Earth A.D.”

I’ve been listening to the Misfit’s Earth A.D. for over a decade now.  Every time I listen to it, I hear something different.  Sometimes I hear a bruising hardcore album.  Sometimes I hear proto-thrash.  I most often hear the roots of black metal.  Is it a mere coincidence that Quorthon started Bathory the same year or that Slayer’s Show No Mercy was released the same month?  Sure, Venom’s Welcome to Hell and Black Metal albums had already been released by the time Earth A.D. hit record store shelves.  But the Misfits of Earth A.D. possessed several things that Cronos and his cohorts, or just about any of the proto-black metal bands for that matter, severely lacked.

The first of these key components is speed.  I recently read in Steven Blush’s book American Hardcore  that Glenn Danzig had tried to get the rest of the Misfits to play slower during the sessions.  Thank goodness he wasn’t successful.  To my knowledge, the blast beat hadn’t been invented yet in 1983 (Mick Harris didn’t join Napalm Death until 1985), but the blistering speed of Earth A.D. often comes close.  A huge part of the album’s power comes from the reckless abandon with which the band plows through songs like “Earth A.D.” and “Demonomania”.  It’s a ragged, violent speed, the kind of speed that sounds like the band is going to fly apart at the seams at any given moment.  Somehow, the Misfits keep it together for the original album’s fourteen-odd minutes (reissues would include the tracks from the posthumous “Die, Die My Darling” single), but the approach lends a sense of real danger, menace and foreboding to the proceedings that would also be present on second wave Scandinavian black metal albums such as Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas or Burzum’s self titled debut.

The second element that pushes Earth A.D. over the edge is brutality.  Unfortunately the word “brutal” (and every permutation thereof) has been thrown around in the heavy music world so often that it has lost nearly all of its meaning as of 2011.  This is a brutal album.  Primitive, barbaric, nasty.  Black and death metal bands surely took a great deal of inspiration from the positively corrosive assault of songs like “Death Comes Ripping” and “Hellhound”.  Danzig himself sounds like a snarling hellhound throughout Earth A.D., ready to claw his way through your speakers and “rip your face off” while the rest of the band violates their instruments in a manner that’s probably legally questionable in more than a few countries.  Earth A.D. was the first Misfits recording where the aggression of the playing and production scheme matched the violence of Danzig’s lyrics.  It’s a level of rubbed-raw vitriol that makes early Venom, Slayer, Celtic Frost et al sound quaint by comparison.

What about atmosphere?  Earth A.D.‘s got it in spades.  Granted, this probably speaks more to Spot’s ineptitude as a producer/engineer (see also: Black Flag’s Damaged) or the lack of a recording budget (probably both), than it does to any grand design by Danzig and Co.  Still, the vibe of the album is pitch black and claustrophobic, it reeks of rage, hate and desperation.  It’s a document of a band ready to explode and doing their damnedest to take all of us down with them.  The fact that the Misfits broke up only a few months after the album was recorded (on Halloween, 1983) leads me to believe that the palpable fury bursting out of every part of Earth A.D. is much more than just for entertainment value (“and that blood’s so real / ’cause I just can’t fake it”).

If all of this doesn’t make for proto-black metal, then I don’t know what does.  Add the grotesque, lovably amateurish artwork and black and white band photos, and you’ve got the blueprints for the sound, style and overall aesthetic that Darkthrone would take to the next level almost a decade later with A Blaze in the Northern Sky.  Some call Earth A.D. “the speed metal bible”.  I’m more inclined to think it’s the goddamn Necronomicon.