Bands - Akhnakh 1 comments

AKHNAKH

Akhnakh is a five piece melodic death metal band from Ipoh Perak. Citing Amorphis, Sentenced, Dissection and Shadows Fall as their influences, the listeners might have some idea of what to expect from Akhnakh. The band was formed in 2004, and being a band from the mighty Ipoh, I do believe that these guys have a reputation to live up to since Ipoh had been known since the early days as the breeding ground for local extreme metal heavyweights in the likes of the mighty Brain Dead, Vociferation Eternity, Langsuyr, Necrotic Chaos, and Hayagriva just to name a few.

I have always been rather fond of Ipoh. I would usually go there four or five times in a year and would always find it funny and amusing that Ipoh townsmen would normally have myriad kinds of fried rice for breakfast, the kinds of which the KLites would usually have for dinner. They got a thing going on down there in Ipoh with their Ipoh Metal Militia thingy and all of the above mentioned bands were either originators or instigators commanding godly respect in the league of their own.

Judging from the three songs available in their Myspace page, musically, Akhnakh seems quite promising if you are looking for your typical one-lead-guitar-riffing-through-a-structure-of-chords melodic death metal with a few chunk of heavy metal here and there. My only complaint was the vocal and the guitar solo department.

I was never really a fan of those choking core growls that were neither brutal nor horrifying. It was too monotonous. Unfortunately the vocalist seems to be having a hard time catching up with the tempo of the songs, something that I could not really tolerate because it would just spoils the whole song, not to mention my mood. The guitar solo was done half heartedly, that I can tell.

It is quite normal for the local bands to produce their songs themselves rather than having an actual producer with them in the studio, which is for me is quite an unhealthy prcatice since band members have the tendency to get themselves immunized of the mistakes or glitches that would sometime (most of the time) result in fatal.

Having a producer in the studio can actually help you a lot in terms of identifying mistakes in the production and giving a breath of fresh air in to the creativity department. Financing a producer, however, was always the main problem with most of these bands, not to mention that there are only a few producers nowadays who produce metal anyway.

I honestly do hope that these guys can produce better songs in the future since they have already got a few releases under their belt since the inception of the band anyway. Akhnakh is Ajak – vocals, Amzar – Guitar, Abe – Bass, Nan – Drums and Soll – Guitars.

AKHNAKH on MySpace

Rants - Malaysian Metal Downloads: no comments

I am currently in the office and I am too lazy to read my files or to attach myself to anything related to work. I had been contemplating to put up a download section in The Bullet Belt, weighing the pros and cons of having the section in this blog, for a more than a couple of weeks now.

When I first started this blog, it was solely out of the idea to promote the obscure Malaysian extreme metal scene and its music. Come to think of it, the best way to promote the music is by letting the music speaks for itself. I can write and promote the bands as hard and creative as I wanted, but at the end of the day, the only thing that would remain relevant will always be the music.

Sure, I can write about how good and cult Malaysian local bands, in the likes of Sil Khannaz or Silent Death or Nebiras or Negation, are, but with out the pleasure and opportunity to listen to their respective brand of good and cult heavy metal, all the promotions that I have been doing all these while, at the end of the day would only land on deaf ears and blind eyes.

Thus, I believe among the best way to promote Malaysian metal music would be by giving the readers (non Malaysian especially) the opportunity to experience Malaysian metal music for themselves.

No, I am not going to turn this blog into a music download blog. I will only feature the albums which to my personal opinion should have been regarded as local landmark albums or those local metal albums that I think should be shared to the rest of the world.

Looking at it from the brighter side, having a download section would also attract more international visitors especially those metalheads out there who often scour and scavenge the cyberspace for downloadables (I should know because I am one of those so called cyberspace scavengers haha). Hopefully they would remain to be unique frequents of this small unattractive blog.

Bands - Ghastly Of Gill no comments

I am currently listening to Entombed - Clandestine. Fuck yeah!

GHASTLY OF GILL

I like the name of this band; it has a nice ring to it. Having said that, Ghastly of Gill, according to the depiction written about the band in their MySpace page, plays melodic black + death metal, hailing from Pulau Pinang, the pearl of the orient, located to the north of Malaysia.

The band itself is not really new to the scene and has been around since the year 2000, recorded a four track demo which never had the chance to see the light of day, was invited to contribute a song for local compilation arranged by one of the most prominent local record label at that time, Psychic Scream Entertainment which also was never released, before breaking up in 2004. The band was reformed in 2006 with an almost entirely new line up and a new headquarter, Shah Alam Selangor.

There are 3 songs uploaded in their MySpace page. Although the sound quality was a bit sub par and the solo was a little bit everywhere and the notes were like all over the place, evidently in the track “The Tyrannical”, the riffs were not as bad and headband friendly in most of the chops. I honestly think that, musically, the band gave the monotonous Malaysian Metal scene a breath of fresh air. The band even added layers of synths appending a really dark and gloomy atmosphere to the chaotic, frequent tempo changing songs that they’ve had, reminded me of another local death metal band called Mandatory.

I personally liked Damnation of Eternity. A decent black metal-isque track with crazy tempo changes. Kudos to the drummer. Even though I love the addition of the keyboards but I sincerely think that keyboard players in general should really crack their heads once in a while and come up with better ways to utilize the keyboard sound. I am really tired and exhausted of listening to the same Dimmu+Cradle orchestraic synths and to that typical classical piano riff that you would find in almost every melodic black metal song there is nowadays.

The problem with the Malaysian heavy metal scene is that you can not earn a good living with music except if you are involved in the music production business. Even that doesn’t guarantee you a decent meal on the table. At the end of the day, music would only be considered a side project for some, rather than being the primary. This usually led to bands breaking up, talents being unpolished so on and so forth.

What ever it is, Ghastly of Gill is a band worth supporting and I hope they will write more songs in the future. Ghastly of Gill’s current line up is: Jepp – Vocals, Aizad – Drums, Isey – Bass, Menn – Guitars and Fuad – Guitars.

Ghastly of Gill on MySpace