I gotta tell ya, that tumblr stuff will suck your life away. Don’t spend too much time on there, unless you’re a cubicle cat who can sit on G-chat all day, or a poor musician with no future.

Cool new jams by Kurt Vile:

• Notodden Rock City: sweet Norwegian TV special about Notodden and the substantial bands from there, specifically Emperor, Peccatum and Zyklon. Pretty cool look at the town and so on. Wish there were subtitles or they talked to Ihsahn’s wife, Heidi Solberg more I guess.

Doesn’t even sound like him anymore:

So — false metal: Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, false metal referred to glam bands, who were basically boy bands in poor disguise, cashing in on the popularity of the metal trend. The whole shit has come full-circle again today, so now you have all these metalcore/deathcore bands, which are essentially boy-bands, mistakenly giving normal people the impression of playing heavy metal, while marketing their merch and music to teenage kids. I’d think only girls would listen to it for the cute boys, but I’ve met plenty of young guys playing this stuff seriously. So weird, bro. All ya gotta remember is: deathcore = false metal; don’t tolerate people describing Bring Me the Horizon as a metal band. So obv I know, but hey I gotta water it down for the massive volume of readers I get on a daily basis.

There is also some weird hipster stuff making the rounds in the (adult?) metal scene, but in no large enough capacity to really make a lot of money. It’s just weird when mediocre stuff gets so popular. Or that is, mediocre stuff that has no real gimmicks. I mean, there are plenty of bands now just aping early Ulver, doing a half-assed job of recreating it in their Brooklyn studio space, and then marketing their avant-garde angle of being eco-green black metal or something similar.

It’s weird anyone lets them get away with this; black metal happened already, and less than 20 years ago. It was a pivotal extreme metal movement, and it brought a lot of anti-Christian/religious sentiment into the mainstream — not too mention a lot of those artists from the original black metal movement are only now reaping the meagerly lucrative benefits of being able to play live to large crowds (Immortal, Ulver, etc.). It just blows my mind when people want to plug these granola/urban/fixie-black metal bands like they’re something fresh or new. Dudes! Black metal was perfected in Ulver and Emperor and Enslaved back in 1994! Not being a jerk here, but people who release Bergtatt rehashes at this stage in the metal scene, with an eco-green twist, really seem like hipsters (Agalloch being the obvious exception lolz).

BTW: In addition to ordering the latest Ulver album on vinyl, I also snagged a CD copy of the latest Star of Ash album, Lakhesis. The press for Star of Ash has been kinda quiet since her first solo release in 2001, Iter.Viator. It’s all too artsy (as in, substantial) for the extreme metal scene these days, but top-notch stuff. Maybe you can describe it as nouveau-classical noir/darkwave? The previous album, The Thread was a fantastic minimalist, artistic concept album with some of the most gorgeous vox Kris G. Rygg has ever laid down!

The review itself came from one of the primary contributors over at the metal review blog From the Dust Returned. I think their review is thorough — and is well-observed — but 6.5/10 must be more respectable to me than the reviewer himself. I mean, the same guy gives Scar Symmetry’s latest release a 7/10. That particular band is objectively terrible; they’re on a big label and the sound is so dated and artistically stale.

Ilsa is meanwhile a good looking-glass into the sound of an underground wave of metal that has emerged in the past 10 years. The review does them justice, describing a wave of heaviness unlike previous generations, and an inspiration unhappier than anything else I can really think of. FYI — the band also did an interview with Brooklyn Vegan recently, and there were some nice words here.

Other cool bands to check out:

• Northern Cali’s Amarok is the heaviest live band I have seen in a long time (maybe ever at a house show?).

• Austin’s Lions of Tsavo is rolling through DC in mid-May, and plays a killer progressive sludgy form of blackened metal, kinda like Inter Arma and other bands of that ilk happening now.

• Melodic doom/sludge/drone dudes Anhedonist, out of Seattle, are playing some upcoming east coast dates

• Ohio’s Artillery Breath just played some cool dates in the area and they are most excellent. Hear for yrself.

BONUS: the Norwegian group Ulver has a new album out in 2011, Wars of the Roses — and it sounds much promising from what I’ve heard:

Lately I have been considering throwing together a quarterly heavy metal zine for the DC area. I’ll keep you fanboyz n gurlz posted. It will feature all the hip underground metal news, plus all those satirical comedy stylings you have come to love me for.

Devil’s Crush

The most important part is the music; here it is preternaturally fantastic. Some of the score was written or co-written Toshiharu Yamanishi, who is one of the masterminds behind the great soundtracks to the Thunderforce series, also released by Technosoft. Listen to this hot tamale of a song and experience vicarious battle with the spiritual underworld.

But the vibe — yeah, that’s what this band is about. The Doors were some dark-siders; specifically, Jim Morrison was into some dark-ass shit. The Doors have some catchy hit songs for sure, but they aren’t light-hearted the way a lot of their peers were. There are some strange-feeling passions going on underneath there. The funny thing is how bands like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones tried to market their dark “occult” side with references and symbolism. The Doors never did that so blatantly, but were naturally much closer to that sort of thing. To play it up would have been overkill at the time.

“Light My Fire” was the hit single off of their debut full-length, but it’s a 7+ minute song. That only makes sense if you listen to tracks like “Crystal Ship” or “Alabama Song” or “Take it as it Comes” — more concise tunes, but with a much darker feel. It’s like you’re at some weird occult seance or orgy. It’s a real direct window into the bizarre spiritual landscape of California in the 1960s. It has a strong emotional feeling to it.

The band’s sound becomes easier to describe with more musical movements to compare it to. The music hints at elements of dark-wave, prog rock/metal, and noise. I could imagine The Doors having gone into a free-jazz direction, or getting truly lounge-y with their sound. I could even see them getting drawn into sludge or early heavy metal, though I doubt anyone in the band had that interest. Between the mix of blues, jazz, acid-rock and a neo-beatnik feel, they result in a very peculiar mix.

And then that whole ’60s spiritual scene fractured and Jim Morrison was gone. An arbiter of that cultural decadence with nowhere to go once the tides shifted. He died in Paris, some Bohemian out of a Henry Miller novel, a casualty of drugs like so many people, then and now.

And despite being so well-known in metal today, Death didn’t even sell enough albums or make enough money throughout its existence to pay for Chuck’s cancer treatments, so as far as I’m concerned you didn’t support it enough no matter who you are. Chuck wasn’t a party-animal, he didn’t blow his money on drugs or live like a scumbag. And yet most of the artistic credence of death metal came from him. A national treasure and he got second-rate health care.

Anyway, before Chuck died he was working on the project Control Denied, with a bunch of other awesome musicians. It was like, yet-even-next-level prog-death-metal, but with awesome clean singing, of which is the cat’s meow. This puts to shame basically all other metal out there — even wigger-slam and deathcore (believe it or not!). I hear a lot of this in the new metal supergroup, Charred Walls of the Damned (which is also quite solid stuff and features the same drummer, Richard Christy).

Supposedly their second release is coming out in 2011, like 8 or 9 years later. Dunno how much of Chuck’s actual playing is on it, but I’m pretty excited! It’s too bad, his best stuff was probably yet to come.

And what is this particular song called? Metal Squad! Of course it is. Well damn, this is about as metal as you can get. This is the real deal. I don’t even think a real guitar is in the song. I wonder what it’s like to live in a country where technical skill is still admired. Must be a different kinda place…

Lacking energy or vigor or enthusiasm in life will make you a callous person, consumed with shallowness, bitterness, fleeting drives and emotions, greed, envy, fear. So much of the art and culture that surrounds us seems to reflect this stuff, people wallowing in these emotions and dishing it out for us to consume in likeness. Ghouls at the trough.

Despite the rampant advertisements and peer pressure, corrupt financiers, untalented people in positions of influence, and the general unfairness of it all, it’s important not to become a negative or hateful person. And from that position, seeing it for what it is but not becoming as such, that’s where good stuff comes from.

It’s like that Henry James quote from before:

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. –Henry James

Nobody can live your life for you, nobody can take care of your troubles, and nobody will care about you more than themselves. It seems so cruel, but there are glimpses of something nicer if you know where to look.

So his stuff is certainly poignant — but not just because he’s funny and exaggerating the excited, critical “nerd” angle, but because he’s saying what I think is some important cultural shit I’ve touched on before, here at CRM Industrial Corp. Some of the games he reviews, film adaptations like Ghostbusters and or Back to the Future or Karate Kid — were pretty much scams. I think if you do not give a flying fuck about a game to the degree that it is unplayable, and then push it out the production window super fast to make an easy dishonest buck off of uncynical kids by it, you are a scumbag. Goes without saying, right?

An adult consumer would (presumably) know better and be honest about where their own dollar goes, but a kid? I remember buying Batman Returns for Sega Genesis as a kid without knowing anything much about it beyond that it had Batman. It was… tolerable. Not a very good game, but it had some fun aspects. The thing is, I almost bought Revenge of the Joker (which the AVN covered here), and that game is all sorts of fucked up. And I almost bought games that were even worse, where even my dad had to step in sometimes (despite knowing not a fucking thing about games whatsoever, nor thinking they had any cultural worth) and refuse to buy a game because he knew it was pure 100% scheme and kultur-crime.

I think making intentionally shitty games you don’t care about, with a franchise kids love, is one of the more depraved things you can do in modern capitalist society. It’s basically soft child-abuse, but also soft-crime against culture. You are actually ripping people off who are not developed enough mentally to even know any better. I understand — it might sell, you might make some money, and I just “don’t realize the business side of things”.

Nah, that’s horseshit. Let me put it this way: that kind of rationalizing and cheap opportunism is what all the financiers were doing in the housing bubble 2+ years ago — pushing mortgages on people who didn’t understand or deserve them, and then intentionally making money off of that ignorance. And then those same sellers were investing in risky mortgages in the last housing bubble because, even though it was economic sewage, it stood to make them some easy money. So fuck all that – quick easy money is for sewer scum; always has been, always will be, and it always ruins the economy and culture in the long run.

Yet I should point out, lest this incredibly important sound bitter or unreasonable, that a lot of the shitty games out there were often more naive or oblivious or miscalculated, rather than nefarious in design. Some of it is just uncalibrated experimentation, like Legend of Kage, Buck Rodgers, Solar Jetman, or say… the original Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. The latter two shaped up to be important games that were actually good, but at the beginning they weren’t scamming kids to buy into what they were doing (which were actually pretty original ideas in the first place, despite being implemented poorly, and much better already than some junk like Legend of Kage). And a lot of sequels were also just attempts at innovation or changes which fell short or didn’t take the time to be thoroughly tested (Castlevania II, Ninja Gaiden III, Double Dragon III).

But! Even if this shit is only being revealed in hindsight, kudos to the Angry Video Game Nerd. I remember games like Shaq-Fu getting decent reviews in magazines that I read as a kid (even gems like Game Players!), who were basically paid or endorsed to not shit all over a high-financed game. In this area, GamePro was often the worst, with arbitrary ratings systems, impersonal articles written by fake personas that the staff writers could hide behind (you could tell it didn’t fucking matter who wrote any of those, Sushi X might as well have been Scary Larry), and more ads than any of their competition. I think the kind of honest criticism the AVGN puts up is entertaining cultural polemicism, like what real film criticism should/could be.

But what the fuck is up with that opening video-game-nerd song dude? Has no one made a spoof of this? The song he uses at the beginning of each episode is so long and terrible!