Rant - Another Hectic Malaysian day: no comments

I at present am stuck with Overkill’s 2010 album Ironbound. It is in my book, one of the best sounding metal albums so far for this year. The guitars were clean, heavy and chunky and the drums sounded amazing and the iconic Bobby Blitz never sounded better than in Ironbound. A fast and furious album indeed it is, a billion times superior then their scrawny little album, Immortalis (or Metallica’s Death Magnetic so to speak) which was released in 2007. Having said that…

I have been busy for the past few weeks with my myriad of never-ending and bludgeoning cases thus the reason for the lack of updates in TheBulletBelt recently. I am still doing my weekly browsing of any innovative and fresh sounding Malaysian heavy metal bands to promote to the whole wide world regardless of the hectic time schedule though.

I will be preparing a couple of classic Malaysian metal albums for downloads in the nearest of time and for those metalheads out there who have been on the tenterhooks that I will be putting up local metal stuff online, please accept my request for forgiveness. I have said it before and I am going to say it again, I am not going to turn this blog into a download blog. All the albums that have been or will be featured in this blog are the classic landmark albums, deemed fit to introduce the world to the Malaysian heavy metal sound. I do not take requests but I do take suggestions.

The latest mouth watering brouhaha for the local metalheads was the Vokill Record’s Vokill Fest gig that will be held at One Café Kuala Lumpur, next month, 1.8.2010 to be exact. The Malaysian black metal godz, Black Fire will be headlining. The legendary Ipoh death metal band Profane Creation and Kuala Lumpur’s own black metal battalion Aradia will also be performing. The other bands that were listed to play were Dark Nirrajim, Infernal Void, Hayagriva, Farasu, Ensemble of Silence, Vetis, Demonical Crisis Assembly, Nefarious Azarak and surprise surprise, Vermillion.

Laters.

Books - Steven Adler and Acrassicauda: no comments

According to Blabbermouth, Steven Adler had just begun promoting his tell-all autobiography called “My Appetite For Destruction: Sex and Drugs and Guns N Roses”. If you do not know who Steven Adler is then you are an idiot. Adler commended his popularity and super stardom status for his 5 years stint as the drummer for the world renowned heavy metal band the mighty Guns N Roses. When everything's not working for you, your projects were not that well received by the popular culture, always remember that you can at any time write a book about your previous band for a few chunks of cash, even though you’re just the drummer. Hell, drummers have stories to tell too.


Have you seen Heavy Metal in Baghdad in 2007? Never heard of it? Well, Heavy Metal in Baghdad was the name of a 2007 documentary film about this one heavy metal band who called themselves Acrassicauda from Baghdad the glorified capital city of Iraq. Basically, it was about these four Iraqi headbangers trying to endure playing heavy metal music and surviving the bombs and bullets from the second gulf war in Baghdad. It was a very fine and pleasurable documentary which I would recommend to everyone. I shall write a late review of that film some other time. I have just found out that they also had a book accompanying the film which was just recently released. The book was basically the complete autobiography of the band and their myriad of experience relocating from Baghdad to Turki to the good old Uncle Sam.

Hopefully these books will be available here in Malaysia.

Bands - Death Story: no comments

I am currently listening to Vociferation Eternity – Meadows Yearn. Fuck yeah.

DEATH STORY

Death Story is a death metal band hailing from the royal city of Kuala Kangsar, Perak, Malaysia. First of all I must say that I like the simple and memory friendly moniker. I like the visible logo too. It reminds me of Septic Death and I do not know why.

This five piece death ripping band plays stripped down straight forward death metal, the sort of death metal that I personally favored. Started off as a jam band in 2002 covering songs from bands in the likes of Hypocrisy and Therion, the band later evolved into this unit of death metal deadly assassins (so death metal) with one demo under their metal belts fittingly titled “Endless Stories of Death” which was on the rampage in 2008.

There were 5 songs available for preview on their Myspace page, one of which was a one minute acoustic intro I guess and I do believe that most of the songs were taken from their debut 2008 demo.

Death Story

I love the fact that the songs sounded organic and simple, maybe due to the fact it was only a demo. In terms of the songs, straight forward death metal meant that there were neither of those ultra technical riffs nor those ultra hyper blast beasts that would end up confusing the listeners and making emo boys vomit blood. All you got were these plentiful chunks of gritty and straight forward dark and deathly riffs through out the 3 minute period of each of the songs, headbangable mid tempo drums with a few blast beats here and there just to keep things interesting.

The bass was audible enough in the mix and it managed to hold the whole structure of their songs to be quite solid and heavy despite of the gritty guitar sound. I was quite annoyed with the vocals though, I honestly believe that the vocal effects were unnecessary and the vocalist should concentrate on producing traditional brutal death growls and extreme high pitch shrieks. For a demo I guess the production of this demo was quite ok although it could have been better.

Death Story: Harryat – vocals, Lord Raven – Guitar, Eibon – Guitar, Amygoth – Bass and Mme – Drums.

Death Story Myspace