Videos - Until The Light Takes Us: 5 comments

Until The Light Takes Us, Audrey Ewell & Aaron Aites.

I have managed to watch this yesterday and as a huge fan of documentary flicks and black metal music in general, I was quite disappointed with how "Until The Light Takes Us" turned out to be. In fact when I first heard the rumors about the making of this documentary a couple of years before its actual production, I was quite reserved as to how they're going to pull this off. Disappointed but I think I kind of saw that was coming.

I must admit that I am not really a big fan of the earlier Norwegian black metal music due to lack of exposure and to the fact that I could not really bring myself to tolerate with the lo-fi sound production, the gritty cold sound opted and championed by most of the bands from that era, although I have to say that I have always been a snotty fan of Immortal and the earlier stuff by Emperor. I have always been fascinated with the controversies though, thus the reason why I’ve made myself endure this time consuming piece of frog crap.

The phase was too sluggish. There were quite a number of scenes which I regard as absolutely unnecessary, absolute waste of time and contributed absolutely nothing to content of the documentary. For example, the part where they filmed the mighty Fenriz in a black metal art exhibition or the part where they filmed Frost doing some silly pantomime while cutting himself open and shocked some Greek teenage emo girls.

Do not miss the part where they found a crazy hobo, dressed that poor fucker with a leather jacket, corpse paint and all, and filmed that buffon doing a tap dance routine to a gothic score, headbang, metal horns and all. What does that got to do with black metal? I have no fucking idea.

Basically, UTLTU is a documentary about the Norwegian Black Metal music scene, its history and its world renowned notoriety. If you are fascinated with the myriads of myths behind that celebrated scene, you might want to check this out just for fun. But if you are looking for in depth researches and investigations, I would simply recommend you to go and read Lord of Chaos.

Well, for a kick, you will be able to see Abbath and Demonaz, a whole chunk of Fenriz, a whole chunk Varg Vikernes, Some chunk of Frost, Hellhammer, Garm, Faust and some other names you might recognize. Dont forget Tony the tap dancing black metal clown.

Rants - Metal : A Malaysian Headbanger's Journey Part 2 no comments

Metal : A Malaysian Headbanger's Journey

Being a very naive and somewhat dormant kampong (rural community far from the outskirts of the city) boy, I was so thrilled about this new “satanic” music, so thrilled that I went out and bought my first record soon after. Instead of scaring this naive 13 year old (which the tabloid is still trying to do till this day to boost the sale of their crappy tabloid), that bloody tabloid converted me to Heavy Metal. Haha in your face assholes.

I saved my daily allowances (which was not much), took a bus ride to the city and head straight to the record store with a mission to buy me a “satanic” heavy metal record. My first heavy metal record was Helloween’s Keeper of the Seven Keys Part 2 and that fucking Kiske blew me away. It was quite an old release since the record itself was released way back in 1988 but I had no time to give a damn. I was on a mission to be a headbanger and a headbanger I have been ever since.

The supercool "black metal" album! haha

My second record was Kreator’s Endless Pain. I bought it because it had a super cool cover artwork and Kreator had a super cool heavy metal logo. I hurried home and put the cassette tape (ahh those were the days) into the player and got myself my first dose of Teutonic Thrash fuckin Metal. Unfortunately being a naïve 13 year old still with the ears for singing birds and late night lullabies, I hated the record. Petrozza’s growls were so alien to me and I couldn’t figure out the riffs because it was too fucking loud and it was too fucking fast. “This must definitely be a black metal record” I said to myself.

It was from this point on that I started to learn to appreciate band’s logos. I think it is an under rated art. Look at those early Norwegian black metal bands, you need to have a very imaginative head to come up with those wicked logos. It was fun trying to decypher the name of the band just by looking at the logo. Back when I first started buying my own metal cassette tapes, if it aint got a cool logo, it aint heavy freakin metal and I aint buyin it.

to be continued...

Read Part 1

Bands - Irotori: 4 comments

I have been browsing the net again keeping my eyes and ears open for any talented Malaysian metal bands in the rough. Lo, seek and I shall find and look what have I found. I kept my ears opened every now and then for the bands with promising skills on their respective instruments. It is not just about promoting Malaysian bands; it is also about promoting the quality of Malaysian instrumentalists. Behold.

IROTORI

Wow! Irotori is one promising melodic death metal band ever to come out from the muddy banks of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. First of all I have to admit that I was totally captivated by the vocals when I first listened to their song “Winds of Pain” on youtube. The singer’s high pitch black metal-isque growl has that robust grimness quality and it was executed perfectly by the vocalist.

In that one song alone featured an impressive three sets of vocal styles; the high pitch growls for the main verses, harmonized clear vocals for the choruses and some angry hardcore screams at the end. The brilliantly constructed flow of emotion was all over the place. Well done. Yeah, everybody can do multiple styles of vocals but how many have you heard doing it nowadays?

As a drummer myself, the first thing that I would try and appreciate when I listen to a particular song was the drums. I can seriously say that I felt that the drummer had fun recording his part, flawless tempo changes showing the faultless musicianship of the drummer, executed beautifully through the song.

3 second after the drum intro, waves of keyboard riffs, which was a bit high in the mix, were thrown into the song giving the listeners some ideas on what will they be getting next. Needless to say that guitar parts, although unfortunately were a bit low in the mix, were also beautifully done. The band even gave a few slots here and there for the low end guy to show off some of his skills behind the four strings. A perfect song indeed.

I felt the sincerity in the song and I have nothing but positive words for this band. I highly recommend this band. Try and give them a listen, they will blow you away with their powerful brand of melodic death metal. Untowardly, my review was only based on one song, the only song they had on youtube as well as on their myspace. Hopefully we can here more songs from them soon.

IROTORI MySpace