Pessimist – Cult of the Initiated, Blood for the Gods, Slaughtering the Faithful (Season of Mist reissues, 2021)

In every music scene, there are always bands that continually fly under the radar no matter how much noise they make and the metal scene is no different. Formed in 1993, Baltimore, Maryland’s Pessimist is one of those great unsung bands. Although they released only three albums before breaking up in 2006 (they’ve since reformed), each one is an incendiary slab of blasting violence from a band that doesn’t get nearly enough recognition for their commitment to the fine art of brutal death metal. In 2021 Season of Mist wisely decided to re-release all three Pessimist full-lengths with remastered sound and updated artwork, bringing the quartet’s old school brutality to a wider audience and giving them a chance to be seen and heard the way they were always meant to be.

Cult of the Initiated (1997) After first hitting the scene in 1993 with their Dark Reality demo, it would take Pessimist another four years to conjure up their debut full length, Cult of the Initiated. While this is most certainly a brutal death metal album, there is also a heavy thrash influence at work, as well as just a hint of black metal, making for a singular release that doesn’t sound quite like anything else from that era. Somewhat technical but not as tightly wound as subsequent albums, Cult of the Initiated isn’t nearly as pummeling as what would follow for Pessimist, but its looseness at times recalls early Morbid Angel at their most unhinged, and that’s never a bad thing. While Cult of the Initiated might be Pessimist’s least brutal album, it is a thoroughly unique death metal listening experience that deserves to be heard.

Blood for the Gods (1999) By the time Pessimist released Blood for the Gods in 1999 they’d for the most part excised the thrash and black metal influences in favor of a more pure brutal death metal sound, resulting in what many consider to to be the band’s best album. The performances are tighter here than on Cult of the Initiated, resulting in something that’s also more straightforward than what came before, but still avoids the monotony trap by piling on the killer riffs and sick solos. Tracks such as “Demonic Embrace” “Unspeakable Terror” and “Tunnel Rats” emphasize Pessimist’s increased emphasis on speed and technicality, making for a nearly flawless brutal death metal album that still holds up over two decades later, thanks to the high degree of songwriting acumen on display throughout. Indeed, Blood for the Gods is the album where Pessimist found their signature sound and remains an impressively intense slab of technically precise yet memorable brutality.

Slaughtering the Faithful (2002) Pessimist’s third and final (so far) album is their most brutal release; listening to this thing is the musical equivalent of being hit repeatedly over the head with sledgehammers. And while the band’s continued dedication to making the most brutal death metal they possibly could is highly admirable, the over-the-top brutality ultimately makes for an album that isn’t quite as memorable as Cult of the Initiated or Blood for the Gods. That said, there’s still plenty to like about Slaughtering the Faithful; songs like “Infernal Abyss” and “Metempsychosis” are whirlwinds of unmitigated violence that were clearly designed for maximum neck-snapping, aided and abetted by an Erik Rutan production job that’s so goddamn thick you could stand up a fork in it. This is some quintessential early 2000s brutal death metal that can go toe-to-toe with the best of them.

Pessimist reformed in 2013 with a re-tooled lineup that now includes current and former members of Morbid Angel, Hideous Rebirth and Black Mass in addition to founding guitarist Kelly McLauchlin. So far they’ve yet to grace us with a comeback album, but if and when they do it’ll no doubt be a total skull-crusher. Here’s to hoping that day comes sooner than later.

https://pessimist666.bandcamp.com/

Oodles of Brutals XII: Brutal on Both Sides

It’s been just a little over a month since the last Oddles of Brutals; that has to be some sort of record.  2020 continues to be a banner year for all sorts of sonic brutality, so without further ado, let’s take a look at another batch of brutal, slamming and technical death metal marvels.

Ceremonial Culling: THKD’s Top 5 Metal Albums of 2019

In terms of new releases, 2019 was pretty damn dire.  But in spite of the rampant mediocrity, I did manage to find a small handful of releases that were truly outstanding and can more than hold their own against the best this dying decade has to offer.  So without further ado and in no particular order, here are the five albums that stuck with me throughout the year…

Oodles of Brutals X: In Space, No One Can Hear You Slam

Devourment for Relapse Records, January 17, 2019.

Well friends, it’s been nearly eight months since the last Oodles of Brutals, which means we’re long overdue for another deep dive into the world of all things brutal and slamming.  So without further ado…

THKD’s Top 10 Metal Albums of 2018 (print edition)

With the dawn of the THKD YouTube channel, I decided to do something a little different this year. I’ve split my year end top 20 metal albums list in two; half of them can be found below, the other half on YouTube.  So, once you’re done reading this list, head on over to THKD TV and check out the rest of the list… if you don’t mind watching a semi-drunken nerd rant and rave about heavy metal for thirty minutes. But enough of my rambling; as I’ve been saying for almost a decade now, long-winded intros are bullshit.  Let’s get on with it.

The Lion’s Daughter – Future Cult (Season of Mist, 2018)

Where has this album been all my life?  It isn’t every day that you find a record that seems to have been tailor made to satisfy your personal listening palette, but on Future Cult, St. Louis-based trio The Lion’s Daughter have managed to successfully combine a few of my most favorite things, namely pulverizing extreme metal and creepy, John Carpenter-esque synthesizers.  I’m not quite sure yet if it’s as delightful a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, but they’re definitely two great tastes that taste great together.

Destroyer 666 – Call of the Wild (Season of Mist, 2018)

Destroyer 666 released one of the year’s best pure metal albums back in 2016 with Wildfire and it appears that they have no intentions of slowing down, because they’ve released what is sure to go down as one of 2018’s best pure metal EPs in the form of Call of the Wild, a four song fist to the face that’s guaranteed to wreck your neck in under twenty minutes.

THKD’s Top 10 Metal Albums of 2016

Long-winded intros are for jabronis, so without further ado and in no particular order, THKD nails the lid shut on 2016 with a list of ten metal albums that grabbed a hold of my crank and kept on yankin.’

Inquisition – Bloodshed Across the Empyrean Altar Beyond the Celestial Zenith (Season of Mist, 2016)

Let’s just get it out of the way now; Inquisition is the best active US black metal band.  Hell, they might very well be the best black metal band on the planet.  Not only have the Seattle-based duo never released a bad album, they’ve somehow managed to fiercely adhere to the traditional black metal paradigm for over two decades while at the same time expanding the genre’s course and scope beyond what had been thought possible.  Indeed, few bands have done as much to push traditional black metal forward, yet they still seem to remain somewhat under the radar.

Wormed – Krighsu (Season of Mist, 2016)

Let’s just get it out of the way; Wormed is the best brutal death metal band on the planet.  They proved themselves to be head and shoulders above the blast-beat ridden competition with the release of 2013’s Exodromos, an album that raised the bar for the subgenre to an almost impossibly high standard and was one of that year’s best albums.  Fast-forward three years, and the Spaniards have returned from the maw of the black hole to cement their supremacy with Krighsu.

Urgehal – Aeons in Sodom (Season of Mist, 2016)

With the untimely passing of guitarist/vocalist/mastermind Trondr Nefas in 2012, it seemed unlikely that Norwegian black metal stalwarts Urgehal would ever be heard from again.  The surviving members of the band had other ideas however, and at long last we have a fitting epitaph for the band as well as a heartfelt tribute to their fallen frontman in the form of Aeons in Sodom, Urgehal’s seventh and final(?) full length.

Oodles of Brutals IV: Brutal-Fu, da Return

Holy shit you guys, I haven’t done one of these brutal/tech/slam death metal roundup features since 2014!  Wasn’t this supposed to be a semi-regular feature?!  I guess 2014 was also the year that I realized I’m far too disorganized/scatterbrained to pull off regular features, so they’re more like whenever-I-feel-like-it features and apparently I haven’t felt like it in almost two years.

THKD’s Top 10 Metal Albums of 2014 that I didn’t write about.

In early December, I decided I wasn’t going to do a year end list.  It isn’t that I’m all of the sudden anti-list; I still love lists, but this year I just wasn’t feeling it.  I gotta be honest, after five years of doing THKD I’m fucking weary, and laboring over a list just felt like yet another metal writing chore.  Besides, if you read the blog regularly and follow me on social media, you already know what I liked this year.

Benighted – Carnivore Sublime (Season of Mist, 2014)

There are brutal death metal bands, and then there’s Benighted.  The French five-piece do everything they possibly can to shit all over the subgenre’s rule book by crafting catchy songs that you can actually tell apart, utilizing highly eclectic vocals and injecting their music with a classiness that other bands just flat-out lack, and yet somehow they come out the other end sounding even more devastating because of it. What’s more brutal, a beating that you can recall nearly every bone-snapping minute of, or one that goes by in an unmemorable blur?

Murmur – s/t (Season of Mist, 2014)

Black metal is getting weirder.  From Aluk Todolo’s blackened krautrock to Oranssi Pazuzu’s astral psych attack and beyond, the genre has decidedly taken a turn towards the freaky and far-out, and even though it’s only January, it’s hard to imagine another BM band in 2014 getting freakier or more far-out than Murmur have with their self-titled second album.  The Chicago band’s debut for the resurgent Season of Mist label appears poised to kick black metal into interstellar overdrive with a singularly intricate yet highly atmospheric sound that must be heard to be believed.

Your world will hate this: THKD’s Top 15 Metal Albums of 2013

Normally, this is the part where I get all reflective regarding the year in metal.  I had a scathing year-end rant all ready to go, an ice cold glass of haterade to throw in the faces of the all the people and things that annoyed, dismayed and pissed me off in 2013… and then I read what I’d written and realized that I sounded like a complete dick.  What’s the point in dwelling on the negative when there was so much good this year?  I had one hell of a hard time whittling down my list to just fifteen albums, and there’s still a lot out there that I’ve either yet to hear or yet to fully digest.  It’s pretty darn easy to ignore the mountain of crap when there’s an equally tall mountain of greatness staring you in the face, and yet sometimes I forget that… I guess that’s what my anti-depressants are for.

Koldbrann – Vertigo (Season of Mist, 2013)

Although the prominence of Norwegian black metal isn’t what it once was, it could still be argued that they invented it and no one does it better. As often and as hard as I’ve been singing the praises of all things USBM of late, even I find it hard to refute that argument when presented with an album as front-to-back badass as Koldbrann’s Vertigo. I had heard the band’s name prior to receiving the promo from Season of Mist, but as yet hadn’t had the opportunity to give ’em a fair shake; turns out the the quintet’s hard rocking take on traditional Norse BM is right up my dark alley.

Rage Nucléaire – Unrelenting Fucking Hatred (Season of Mist, 2012)

The last time we heard from Lord Worm was on Cryptopsy’s rather lackluster 2005 album Once Was Not, and as a result of his absence, the scene has been a much less interesting place.  So what does the most deranged-sounding vocalist in death metal do to signal his return from a seven year silence?  Start a grim and twisted black metal band, that’s what!  And so it is that Herr Worm is back to mangling his vocal cords with new outfit Rage Nucléaire, a band that has allegedly been festering since 2000 but is only now seeing the recorded light of day with their Season of Mist-backed debut Unrelenting Fucking Hatred.

Grave / Dark Funeral / Morbid Angel @ People’s Court, Des Moines IA, 10/07/12

Morbid Angel, Dark Funeral, Grave; listening to metal in my early teens and twenties, I never imagined such an excellent lineup would roll through my hometown of Des Moines, IA.  When this tour was announced, I found myself checking the dates on several websites just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things and that there really was a Des Moines stop scheduled.  This would be my first time seeing all three bands, and being that all three bands are legendary (at least as far  as my own personal metal pantheon is concerned), I was just as giddy at 33 as I would’ve been at 18 had this lineup desecrated Des Moines back then.

Morbid Angel – Illud Divinum Insanus (Season of Mist, 2011)

Morbid Angel’s Illud Divinum Insanus is a bad album.  A shockingly bad album.  An album that doesn’t work on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  It’s hard to believe that it comes from the same band that gave us death metal classics such as Altars of Madness and Covenant.  Hell, let’s be honest, it’s hard to believe that this comes from the same band that gave us Heretic (I’ll never understand why that album gets such a bad rap).  After eight years of silence, many were expecting Morbid Angel to come back from the death metal void and blow our minds, but to be perfectly frank, Illud Divinum Insanus just plain blows.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people in positions of “power” within the metal industry are hopelessly out of touch.  Bands, label owners, journalists, you name it, typically the more successful and longer in the tooth one gets, the further and further away they get from being aware of/understanding what’s actually going on in the metal underground. Illud Divinum Insanus is a classic example of this.  This album is the sound of a band desperately trying to stay current, but the problem is that they are utterly clueless as to how to do so.  What we’re left with is a train wreck that sees under-developed death metal slapped haphazardly up against hokey electronic/industrial elements that sound like they were swiped from 1998.  The results are about as stimulating as a Sasha Grey film with the sex scenes edited out.

I can’t help but wonder what Trey Azagthoth and David Vincent were thinking when this album was being conceived and recorded.  Were they looking to go mainstream and live out some sort of twisted rock star fantasy?  Were they genuinely in the frame of mind that what they were doing was cutting edge, groundbreaking or experimental?  Were they doing a shitload of coke and listening to Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar on repeat?  I would kill to have been a fly on the wall during the sessions, especially when Vincent was recording the “killa cop” bit from the song “Radikult” (Earache’s Digby Pearson claims that Vincent is actually saying “killa kult”, but I’ve yet to see definitive proof. You can read his sac-less assessment of the album here).  That shit is hilarious.  Don’t even get me started on the rest of the lyrics.

I’m not going to lie to you, I enjoy electro-pop metal/shock rock gems such as the aforementioned Antichrist Superstar, Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe and the like (if I’ve just killed all my underground metal cred with that statement, that’s just a case of tough shit), but that shit has no place whatsoever on a Morbid Angel album.   If the band had actually worked to make this album a legitimate techno-industrial-death metal freakout, I might have been interested, in fact I would have welcomed it. Death metal could stand a bit of a shake-up, not to mention a bit of futurism to counteract all this retro business that’s currently running rampant.  But Illud Divinum Insanus reeks of shameless (albeit dated-sounding) pandering to the mainstream, not of experimentation or artistic growth.  Songs like “Too Extreme!”, “Destructos vs The Earth/Attack” and especially “Radikult” aren’t good enough to lick Marilyn Manson circa 1996’s boots.  Who am I to tell Morbid Angel what they can and can’t put on their records?  A longtime fan, that’s who.  This album is a slap in the face to all of us that have followed the band and excitedly awaited their return.

And what of the legit death metal tracks on Illud Divinum Insanus?  They sound like afterthoughts, like they were ghostwritten by the bands you’ve never heard of on that used Morbid Angel tribute album that’s collecting dust in the ninety-nine cent bin at your local shop.  Songs like “Nevermore” and “Blades for Baal” feel like half-assed attempts to appease the band’s original fanbase and don’t come anywhere near the past glories of quintessential Morbid Angel compositions such as “Maze of Torment” or “God of Emptiness”.  At this point it’s clear that the bands that Morbid Angel directly inspired, the Niles and Behemoths of the world, have surpassed their once powerful masters.

More interesting than the album itself (at this point about anything would be) is the potential fallout.  The album has already taken a critical bashing, but how will the metal masses react?  How will Morbid Angel and their label Season of Mist handle what is shaping up to be this decade’s Cold Lake?  Will the mainstream embrace tracks like “Radikult” and give them a spot on the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Tour?  Will the band continue to put out albums and go even further down this bizarre path? Will oldschool fans riot when they attempt to play “Destructos vs the Earth/Attack” live?  It is difficult to speculate, but one thing is for certain, Morbid Angel deserves to be called out for releasing this steaming turd.

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Postscript…

You’ll notice that no actual songs from Illud Divinum Insanus were posted along with this review.  I only post good music here.

Click here for a link to what is possibly the only positive review of Illud Divinum Insanus in existence.  Thanks to THKD reader UA for the tip.

With that said, those of you who are still having trouble washing the bad taste out your mouths after listening to Morbid Angel’s nadir would do well to give Season of Mist’s other, less-publicized recent death metal release, Nader Sadek’s In the Flesh, a try as a palate cleanser.  The album features ex-Morbid Angel bassist/vocalist Steve Tucker on vox, Cryptopsy’s Flo Mounier on drums and ex-Mayhem six-stringer Blasphemer on guitar.  In the Flesh is concept piece based on the work of Egyptian-born visual artist Nader Sadek, who also played and helped w/ songwriting.  Below is the video for “Sulffer”.