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…
Continue reading “Oodles of Brutals X: In Space, No One Can Hear You Slam”
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.
Continue reading “THKD’s Top 10 Metal Albums of 2018 (print edition)”
We’re only a month and a half into 2017 and it’s already turning out to be a great year for all things brutal death metal, so it seems like as good a time as any to resurrect Oodles of Brutals. For those not familiar, I have an unhealthy obsession with this most ignorant of subgenres and its various offshoots, and OOB started over at my old blog as a way for me to round up all all things brutal, gory and slamming in one space. So w/o further ado, let’s dive back into the BDM cesspit, shall we?
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.
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.
Continue reading “Oodles of Brutals IV: Brutal-Fu, da Return”
Hard to believe it’s been a decade since Wormed took us into the maw of the death metal black hole with Planisphaerium; in that time, numerous bands have attempted to rip off the quintet’s science fiction-influenced brutality, but none have been able to measure up to the intergalactic maelstrom these Spaniards were capable of unleashing so effortlessly with their stunning debut. At last, Wormed’s long-awaited sophomore album Exodromos is about to drop via that exalted bastion of mind-altering extreme metal known as Willowtip Records, and to say it was worth the wait would probably be the understatement of the year.
Well friends, it’s time once again to wallow in the gore-soaked cesspool of brutal/tech/slam death metal. A few THKD readers seemed to really dig part one of this series, so I thought I’d crank out a follow-up ASAP, since I’ve been enjoying the hell out of getting my gutturals on with all these crazy-ass bands. Fortunately, it appears that there’s no shortage of this stuff to trawl through, so as Ric Flair says: “Whether ya like it or not, learn to love it…”
Spain is not the first place I think of when it comes to metal. Hell, it isn’t even the 20th place. But one of the gnarliest bands to come along in years hails from the land of bullfighting and Salvador Dali. The band is Teitanblood, who released the brilliant Seven Chalices in 2009… and I slept on it. Yes, I somehow managed to miss out on the duo’s eerie, crushing, miasmal black/death assault until early 2010, but once I did finally hear it, I became obsessed. Had I heard the album sooner, it would have given my 2009 top ten black/death albums (as seen in Dethroned Emperor #25) a run for their money, to say the very least.
What is most interesting about Teitanblood’s assault is how difficult it is to categorize. Elements of black metal, death metal, doom and even a hint of crust all rear their ugly heads throughout Seven Chalice’s lengthy duration, creating a sound that is extremely enjoyable in it’s fetid, suffocating noxiousness, but also extremely difficult to pin down. The picture becomes even more hazy when you consider the numerous ambient/atmospheric interludes (which sound like orchestral maneuvers in hell) that pop up throughout the album. It is almost as if the band distilled everything that makes 4 decades worth (if the release of Black Sabbath’s s/t marks year one) of dark and evil sounding music great and out came the vile afterbirth that is Seven Chalices.
There is a very ritualistic quality to the album and an emphasis on atmosphere characteristic of black metal, but the crushing and cavernous guitar tones are pure oldschool death. Indeed, this is what is missing from so much modern so-called extreme metal, the average big budget death metal album is about as nauseatingly squeaky clean and sterile as the average Disney film. I sincerely doubt anyone believes the true purveyors of the coming apocalypse will use Pro Tools to deliver their message of destruction. Seven Chalices sounds like it was recorded in a dank garage by people that are actually possessed, but instead of doing crab-walks and 360 degree head-spins, Satan is compelling them to beat the living shit out of their instruments.
Bands that take this violent/primitive/lo-fi approach often forget about two of the most important aspects of good metal, guitar riffs and leads. This is not the case with Teitanblood. There is some killer sludge-ridden buzzsaw guitar-work going on throughout the album, and the leads are psychotic, atonal spasms of distortion that conjure images of early Slayer on a crack binge. The drums are a bit buried in the album’s deep, dark mix, but they perfectly suit each song and have a punk/d-beat quality to them at times that makes the record feel like Teitanblood could fly right off the rails at any moment, impaling your skull with projectile guitar necks and drumsticks. But they keep it together even when the songs reach a psycho-Satanic fever-pitch, always managing to return from the brink of total chaos.
It seems as though there is a return to the primitive happening in the metal underground and Teitanblood are arguably the focal point of this movement along with a handful of bands such as the mighty Vasaeleth, Blasphemophagher, Diocletian, Deiphago, Impetuous Ritual and Proclamation (who shares a member with Teitanblood). As someone who has recently grown increasingly fed up with the pap the “bigger” metal labels are attempting to cram down our throats under the guise of death metal, Teitanblood is a breath of fresh air… even if I am kicking myself for not discovering them sooner. If you share these feelings and have yet to check out Seven Chalices, I strongly recommend you rectify the situation at any and all costs.
THKD 