I had a whole stream of bile directed towards everyone’s favorite load of pre-teen pandering, Attack Attack!, when I realized their latest record actually came out like six months ago. I assumed an album was on the horizon and I typed out all these dire predictions about its quality. And a quick Googling showed that my forecast wasn’t far off. Their self-titled sophomore effort is, in fact, awful, even worse than the first record and belittling to fans of almost any genre of music. But let’s focus our sights on new single “Smokahontas.”

First off, you’ll be happy to know that while running in place didn’t make the cut for this clip, there are some very crab-like movements. The band truly has no problem owning the meme, and have yet to grasp that aside from literally playing while astride potty-training toilets, there is nothing that looks more humiliating.

The video itself is pretty harmless. The storyline is mostly jumbled shots of the band dressed like Mafioso as they kill people, smoke cigarettes and play in front of a burning car while the babyfattish singer leans on a gas can for no reason. If it wasn’t for the music and brief glances of arthropodic dancing, this video would pass by unnoticed. But luckily there is still that music to deal with.

You get thirty seconds of random chugs from a Meshuggah warm-up, twenty seconds of something from an episode of Jem, another round of both and by this point you’re just salivating to hear what’s next. Because remember, even though bands like this love to wear fucking Gorguts shirts or whatever, these songs are crushingly predictable and they will almost always follow their verse chorus verse with something incredibly precious. And, well, I just heard this term today- Trancecore. That is what music has come to. While Rapcore was an unquestionable blight, at least there’s a discernible canon of hip-hop. But whatever you do, for the love of God, couldn’t you have had the decency to keep fucking Paul Oakenfold out of metal?

Little is more offensive than when a band is shown “playing” a part that is obviously all electronics. And now that the keyboardist has decided that scrambling around his synth units wasn’t tough enough, there is a scene where out of five dudes, four of them don’t do anything for an entire section of the song, while three mime playing instruments. I mean, you can argue the merits of many aspects of this music, but when 60% of your band are the literal definition of poseur, it’s hard for me to envision a counterpoint.

And if we assume that most of their new record is like this (and I’ve now read that it’s quite keyboard heavy), then when you see these songs live, a majority of the music is coming from offstage, probably triggered by the drummer’s dad or their overworked sound guy (likely the same person).

While I was late to the party on the new Attack Attack!, I’m closer when it comes to discussing a band that really embodies Trancecore in all its tired, worthless, opportunistic ignorance. Not only are Toronto’s Abandon All Ships recklessly trying to co-opt both the Christian demographic while also promoting profanity, partying, violence and objectification of women, but their music is a much more seamless blend of fey autotune and dopey, metal thug posturing. They could very well be the true future of this music. All they need is some dumb fucking dance move.

As you may remember, Richard Johnson and his merry band of grindparents, collectively known as Drugs of Faith, are releasing their first macerating full-length, Corroded, and were kind enough to give us first dibs on their debut video (check it out, again, HERE). Pieces of our interview have appeared and will soon appear, but like picking at the juiciest leftover morsels the night after Thanksgiving dinner, here is some more wisdom from Mr. Johnson:

On being extreme-
Some of the grind parts we have on the new record, we could have played them more extreme but I’m really looking for clarity. It’s not a revolutionary thing to have to have all of the string instruments audible in order to put the riff together. You’ve got classic rock bands where the bass is just walking around the riff and not just playing the root notes of the riff, but for a lot of grind and death bands you have a lot of bass players that are just used to making the riff thick. So having said that, we really try and put riffs together where you need both the bass and guitar. We couldn’t play a show if the bass player couldn’t make it.

On being the guy from Enemy Soil and ANb-
Well, I got to the point where I didn’t want to reference any of my own bands. I thought the music could stand on its own and didn’t need to ride any coattails. But I was saying this at one point to my old bass player while I had a record on in the background. She asked what it was and I said, “Oh, it’s Death by Dawn, the new band with a guy from Pestilence.” And she said, “Oh, you’re listening to that band because he used to be in another band,” and I said, “Well, you got me.”

On the evolution of grind-
Scum came out the way it did because they didn’t know what they were doing and they were drunk and just trying to bang it out in eight hours on a night shift because they didn’t have any money. Then the stars aligned and it was a classic thing. And I think people now buy bands to hear how it’s evolved and I think they want to hear records that are recorded better but are still aggressive. But also I think that bands should just play. I don’t see the appeal of quantizing and using triggers. If you have to clean all your shit up then you need to keep practicing so you can play it for real. Things are getting too sanitized and processed. If you listen to a bunch of slickly processed grind records you have the desire to put on Led Zeppelin II so you can hear something organic and analog.

On Decibel’s rating system-
There’s so many records that get an eight or a nine in Decibel, and do that many records that good come out every month? I mean, Altars of Madness or Master of Puppets would get a 10, right? Our first record got an 8 in Decibel and I don’t think we deserved that even.

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The Shit. Today’s submission is our first from an actual musician, although it’s not about his band. Former Deciblog tour diarist extraordinaire Heath Rave of Wolvhammer gives a shout-out to Pantera’s Power Metal.

You know, this is what it is: Some of us were in high school during this time; some, like myself, were in fifth or sixth grade or right around junior high school, but I’m guessing I heard Cowboys From Hell right around sixth grade, after seeing the “Psycho Holiday” video on MTV and thinking Phil’s Last of the Mohicans haircut was pretty fucking badass. Didn’t know what to think of the fat drummer—still sort of don’t—but that’s neither here nor there. I got that shit on tape and found that my favorite song on there was “Heresy.” Not “Domination,” not “Primal Concrete Sledge,” but fucking “Heresy,” dude. You know the one: it sounds like he’s screaming “Hershey.” At least that’s what my buddy Dan Baker and I thought.

Anyway, seventh grade rolls around. Out comes Vulgar Display of Power. Holy shit! These dudes got tough! Like, these dudes are real fucking badasses! Oh wait, is the jock from my shitty high school in my shitty farm town in South Dakota wearing a Pantera shirt? Goddammit, I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. And as retarded as that mindset is, when you’re 13, some shithead football/basketball/track all-around douchebag who called you a metal faggot and told you to skate or die is not allowed to like my shit. So, I bought a Morbid Angel tape and never looked back.

Far Beyond Driven: Meh. Boring. Props for the Eyehategod and Crowbar shirts, Phil. Your drummer’s even more of a lardass and every hick shitkicker in my town is blasting this out of their giant trucks. Good job on that #1: that just means you made metal for stupid people.

So, around this time, I get to meet some older friends in the bigger city north of my town, and I end up getting to fill in on the metal night at the college radio station there purely by coincidence and a suggestion from a friend. They didn’t care that high schoolers did it
since all the college kids thought it was pretty lame to do a radio show. I was fucking stoked. Anyway, I’ll get to the point here—being sick is making me rambly. I’m going through the head dude of the metal night’s CD collection, and lo and behold, I’m like, “What is this Power Metal thing from Pantera?” He’s like, “Well, technically, it’s their fourth record.” Bullshit. Then he gives me the rundown. I had no idea. He gives it to me thinking I’ll have a good laugh. It wasn’t funny. It was deadly serious.

Right out of the gate with “Rock the World,” these dudes are screaming for vengeance as hard as they can right into the title track, just painkiling it in the hardest Judas Priest style they can muster. Now this is what I’m talking about. By the time “Over and Out” and “Down Below” hit, I’m fucking sold. This is the kind of shit my sister showed me when she introduced me to metal. It was thrashy, technical, and had just enough glam sleaze on it to make way more dangerous than that tough-guy posturing bullshit of the last decade. This shit was for drinking, drugs and driving your car fast. Not for beating up gay dudes ’cause you’re afraid you’re gay yourself…

Speaking of that. Look at the cover. HOLY SHIT!!! How did Phil predict the haircut of so many jerkoffs in the 2000′s??? Is he psychic? And tubby, you’re looking good—can’t button that shirt all the way up, but goddamn, that Aqua Net is really helping. I’m guessing that was the Bear look in the ’80s. Shit, Dime’s all to the side cause they were afraid of his hair—it looked so damn good.

And how can you deny a song called “Proud to be Loud,” co-written with the impeccable Mike Ferrari of Keel fame. “We’ll Meet Again” is the best stripper jam that none of us will ever get to see danced to in a shitty strip club while doing coke off of some lame Caesarian bitch’s fake tits, ’cause you know it’s just not the ’80s anymore, and frankly, none of this shit is dangerous now. None of it—fuck, Varg’s a fucking farmer now. I’ll take some Sunset Strip sleaze rock any day over some of the shit that’s force-fed as metal now. Remember real biker gangs? No you don’t, cause you’re probably 15 if you’re reading this and trolled some messageboard saying my band isn’t “tr00″ or “kvlt.” Guess what? We’re not, and I like cock rock.

Speaking of rock for my cock, how about “P*S*T*88″? That stands for PUSSY TIGHT 1988. Goddamn I’ll bet it was back then. That song speaks for itself. And I can’t go away without mentioning the fact that this shit record singlehandedly holds the greatest ’80s movie montage song ever that never got used in an ’80s movie. Put on “Hard Ride” and tell me you can’t see Ralph Macchio or Jean Claude Van Damme learning two months’ worth of karate in less than three minutes. Fuck it, I’m buying a fucking Firebird today. With T-tops.

Walk on. Homeboy.

Tracklist:
1. “Rock the World”
2. “Power Metal”
3. “We’ll Meet Again”
4. “Over and Out”
5. “Proud to Be Loud”
6. “Down Below”
7. “Death Trap”
8. “Hard Ride”
9. “Burnnn!”
10. “P*S*T*88″

Immortal, Decibel and Nuclear Blast are teaming up to make this February’s All Shall Fall Tour even more chilling, grim and noctambulant. If you’ve been eagerly concocting corpsepaint for the following exclusive domestic dates…

2/19 – New York, NY – Gramercy Theatre (16 & older)

2/20 – Baltimore, MD – Sonar (all ages)

2/21 – Pittsburgh, PA – Mr. Small’s Theatre (all ages)

2/22 – Chicago, IL – Bottom Lounge (17 & older)

2/24 – Denver, CO – Summit Theatre (all ages)

2/26 – San Antonio, TX – Backstage Live (all ages)

…the first thing you need to do is snap up a copy of our Black Metal Hall of Fame Special Issue, featuring a six-page oral history on the making of the belligerent Bergenites’ ’99 classic At the Heart of Winter. You’ll be entered in a drawing to win two spots on an Immortal guest list for any one of those six U.S. shows (all with opening guest Absu). There will be one winner per show, and winners cannot opt out for the cash equivalent—which, c’mon, would be the definition of untr00. The thaw is nowhere on the horizon—let us help you withstand the fall of time.

By Pär Olofsson

When Charles [Elliott; vocals/guitar] contacted me the only lyrics that was written was Leveling the Plane of Existence. It makes reference to us crawling out from the primordial ooze and is basically about wiping us from the planet so that everything starts from zero again. It had great potential as a cover piece since the concept included fossils and things crawling out from ooze. So I made a quick sketch of a fossilized human hand with never before seen bugs crawling around it, a lake of ooze and some city ruins in the background.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

Charles kind of liked it but wanted more focus on the new evolution, if I remember correctly. We talked a lot about how these new life forms should look like. There should be a sense of primal beings but with elements in there that you wouldn’t recognize such as lights.  Drew a pencil sketch with a pile of bugs climbing on each other to rise from the ooze, like a birth scene. The event takes place in a pit surrounded by fossilized human remains.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

Got a positive response from the band on this one so I scanned it and started giving it some color.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

Still feels gray and boring but this is often the case in the early stages of the process. At this point I think everybody including myself was pretty happy with  the progress.  Charles suggested having a couple of bigger bugs walking along the edge of the pit. The image needed some background elements to create more depth.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

At this point, after working with the piece for many hours I started to question the composition. It looked crammed and the message “our world is gone, a new one is coming” was a bit fuzzy. But mainly I felt the image looked a bit flat. Also if we were to add the trademarked eclipsed sun and a logo the whole thing would be a complete mess.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

So we made some radical changes and removed the background (it  always feels like a punch in the gut to throw away so many hours of work). Someone (from the band) had the great idea of bringing back the ‘thing’ in the sky that ate the world in the previous album. Also added some structures in the foreground for more depth.

Copyright 2011 Pär Olofsson

Work was easy after that. Everything fell into place with the new composition. The ruins in the background gave more sense of a post apocalyptic world than the skulls in the previous version ever did.

———————

Pär Olofsson is an artist based in Sweden. His work can be seen on albums by Annotations of an Autopsy, Pathology, Immortal, Immolation, Malevolent Creation, Natrium, The Faceless, Exodus, Miseration, Brain Drill, and more!

Visit Pär Olofsson’s website, www.parolofsson.se, to see more awesome, if slightly grotesque, art.

———————

Abysmal Dawn’s Leveling The Plane Of Existence is out February 1, 2011 on Relapse Records. Order it here.

Ukraine has had a tough go of it of late. The glow of the 2004 Orange Revolution has dimmed significantly, one of the nation’s most celebrated playwrights, The Pagans author Anna Yablonskaya, was killed in yesterday’s Moscow airport suicide bombing, and amidst these woes the international press seems predominantly interested in a human chain of topless women. Thus perhaps it should come as no surprise that Kharkov, Ukraine’s atmospheric pagan black metallers Khors have simultaneously upped the primeval thrash-and-brood ante considerably on the glorious-by-way-of-grandiose Return to Abandoned.

Khors was kind enough to offer Decibel readers an exclusive glimpse of its newly refined, alluringly dark aesthetic via the below stream of “Asgard’s Shining,” a song which presumably references Valhalla, warrior gods, and otherworldly treasure–as only befits a band that posts awesome updates such as “Happy Vodokres!!! Hail be the Gods. Hail be the Rod!” on Twitter. Enjoy!

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We’ve got 7 sweet inches of Skeletonwitch that are just aching to penetrate your brain. “The Skullsplitter” is part deux of the new 7-inch trilogy from Ohio’s dirty denim-clad metalheads. Incidentally, if you’re familiar with the Viking brew known as Skull Splitter, you’ll notice that the dude on the label looks a lot like the lost member of Skeletonwitch.

What the hell were we talking about? Oh yeah, the vinyl prize. It’s a re-recorded version of track that originally appeared on the band’s self-released debut At One With The Shadows. The B-side is “No Rest For The Dead,” recorded with legendary producer Jack Endino during the Breathing the Fire sessions. The pressing is limited to 500 copies on green vinyl, and we managed to swipe one to give away to a Deciblog reader. Click through for details on how to enter and for a listen to “The Skullsplitter.”

All, well most, metal writers are members of or ghost message boards. You know, places where like-minded folk with very niche-musical tastes congregate. In fact, Decibel has a forum. You should join and sling your David-sized opinions against dB forum goliaths! Anyway, it’s where we digitally travel to pontificate (very important), research (not very important), and, sorry members of the fairer sex, have fun (only when proverbial shit hits the fan).

When I discovered a post titled, “Design Cover art upgrades for the Black Metal classics”, at a Relapse Records (no official affiliation, actually) alternate universe message board, I had to click it. Now typically these types of posts elicit a chuckle or two but no more than that. Then it’s on to other posts, possibly NSFW-type ones while I’m at W, for the good stuff. Not this time. The “cover artists” have some true gems here. Really laughable stuff. That is if you know the artists and the albums Reeelapse forum members are lampooning.

All-too-required legal notice: If you are drinking a beverage (hot or cold or lukewarm) and spew said beverage onto your monitor, keyboard, desk, or laptop we’re not responsible. So, put down the “I <3 Squirrels” coffee mug and enjoy. Oh, if you’re in cubicleland it might be wise to wear a muzzle (if you have one handy).

Bathory - "Octagon"

Samael - "Ceremony of Opposites"

Diabolical Masquerade - "Nightwork"

Immortal - "Blizzard Beasts"

Beherit - "Drawing Down the Moon"

Emperor - "Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk"

Marduk - "Panzer Division Marduk"

Darkthrone - "Transilvanian Hunger"

Mercyful Fate - "Don't Break the Oath"

Burzum - "Filosofem"

Darkthrone - "Soulside Journey"

Immortal - "Pure Holocaust"

Dissection - "The Somberlain"

Carpathian Forest - "Black Shining Leather"

It’s been three years since Jack Osbourne’s favorite “Norwegian death metal band” wowed us with the punishing poly-rhythms of ObZen. The good news, according to Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake and vocalist Jens Kidman, is that you won’t have to wait another three years to hear the follow-up. In this exclusive interview for the Deciblog, Haake tell us that the band won’t be, “as anal about every single little hit [that] has to be super-tight but be more focused on the vibe of a track and let some of those tiny errors slip through. I think that kinda breeds a bit of life into a song.”

The bad news is that we’ll have to wait at least another eight months to hear this, um, “laid back” approach.

Look for Meshuggah’s new studio LP this fall on Nuclear Blast.

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love, stuff that’s essential listening for students of extreme metal that you may not have ever heard of.  Stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for.  First off, we have one of my all-time favorites: Cirith Ungol’s King of the Dead.

I was introduced to this band a decade ago by a guy I used to role-play online with.  He sent me the MP3 of “Master of the Pit,” saying it was the heaviest thing ever.  He wasn’t wrong.  And he should know — he was an Alan Moore look-alike who claimed he lived in a commune somewhere in Washington (and may be a Wolves in the Throne Room roadie at this point, who knows).

Cirith Ungol were a Ventura, California-based group that started off in the early 70s doing psychedelic rock, but by the time they actually got around to recording albums they were full-on heavy metal.  Their first proper full-length, Frost and Fire (released on their own label, Liquid Flame, in 1980), featured an intriguing blend of first-two-albums Iron Maiden with fuzz-laden 60s-70s rockers like UFO, Grand Funk Railroad, and Iron Butterfly.  And it’s a great record, don’t get me wrong, but it only hinted at what was to come.  Frost and Fire was still a little too derivative for them to truly carve out a name for themselves.  No, they didn’t craft their all-time classic until their next record: 1984′s King of the Dead (Enigma).

I don’t know what happened in the preceding four years (other than the departure of second guitarist Greg Lindstrom), but the resulting album is one of the flat-out heaviest unsung classics of the 80s.  And a big part of its charm lies in its lack thereof: this noise ain’t pretty to look at.  Tim Baker shrieks so raw it’ll skin your ears, and that’s the only instrument not giving off feedback.  I’m pretty sure they used a table saw as the guitar amp, the bass pops into your face like a snapped rubber band, and my best guess is that the drum kit was made out of actual human skulls.  Unlike contemporaries like Hellhammer, though, Cirith Ungol weren’t primitivists — they went for Baroque, crafting melodic and complex compositions (even tackling Bach’s “Toccata in D. Minor”).  The group brought their psychedelic origins fully to bear on the New Wave of Brutish Heavy Metal, then slammed it between the hammer and the Anvil.

The first sound you hear is rumbling, the last sound their theme song, but the rumble might as well be the theme song.  The words were inspired by Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Robert E. Howard.  “Atom Smasher” and “Black Machine” roar towards oblivion, “Finger of Scorn” is the same one Iron Maiden’s Wicker Man points at you, and I wouldn’t want to encounter the “King of the Dead” in his crumbling underground dominion.  They built their true monument, though, with “Master of the Pit,” a seven-minute stunner that flows seamlessly between steel anthem and some of the most soul-destroying jamming ever recorded.

You can hear the legacy of King of the Dead today, in groups like The Gates of Slumber, Hammers of Misfortune, and even Boris (although I can’t think of anyone who screeches quite like Baker).  And while Cirith Ungol never found the success they deserved (or even replicated the quality of this record), King of the Dead remains a perfect little diamond in the rough, waiting to be discovered.  BY YOU.

Official site

Buy it here!