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

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.