The Press Gazette taught me how to hate

It's been a long time since I've updated Extreme Responses. Am I betraying its sacred mission by writing about myself and not about some cr00sh crust punk? No, probably not. It's my site.

While studying journalism at university we were all encouraged to subscribe to the Press Gazette, a chuntering trade magazine so largely unremarkable that I can remember only one thing about it.

We were also encouraged to join the National Union of Journalists as student members, which entitled you to a pretty boss PRESS card but apparently not to any sort of communication from them, as attempts to get advice on a copyright issue were resoundingly ignored. Tbh, it wasn't actually that important and they were right to ignore me.

The one aspect of the Press Gazette that left any sort of impact on me was a column entitled “My First Editor” (probably, as I said - “unremarkable”), which I used to air my imagined grievances.

As I suffered humiliating knockback after humiliating indignity, I got a lot of mileage out of imagining the floral smackdown I'd dispense in the column in a decade's time when I was a respected industry professional. In truth, my knockbacks weren't all that humiliating and my indignities weren't that humiliating and I was just as much the problem thanks to a toxic combination of arrogance and entitlement that I've not entirely overcome.

In fact, next time I'm asked my weaknesses in a job interview, I'm probably just going to come clean and say “arrogant and entitled.”

But my future contribution to My First Editor (or whatevz) bubbled away like revenge gumbo, constantly evolving as I discovered a new hate figure. Time has been far kinder to me than I deserve, and some of the people I blamed I can now credit for teaching me, guiding me and inspiring me. Some of them are still dickbags, mind you, and they'll get their reckoning in the My First Editor column of the afterlife.

At some point in the last half-decade (I've been in print for eight or nine years now), the role that My First Editor played in my brain-tank evolved. I stopped using it as a dartboard for my wounded ego and I started to think – to worry - about how I would be remembered. I used to picture old editors' faces going grey with shock and realisation as they poured over my words and realised how wrong they were.

Now my greatest fear is that the haunted look will be my own.

Everything I can remember about Obscene Extreme 2011

Which energy drink branded megatour package at the beer-brand venue will you be taking in today then, my friend? Poor Western World, for all its success and prosperity and network of crystal clear soundboards, its success has shunted top tier grindcore and crust punk off the radar by creating an enviroment about as welcome to DIY, tofu-pressing values as a Coca Cola Popemobile. Thank MOSH001 then for the Czech Republic's annual grindtopia Obscene Extreme.

The sound is occasionally shitty, the big screens alternate between showing the actual bands to showing horror movies, kids' TV and porn, irritating old hands insist on loudly recalling a time x years ago when they could buy a hundred beers for a fiver, and there's no shortage of fashion disasters emptied out from the overflowing squats of Berlin, Budapest and Bratislava. Vice magazine would clap their little pudgy hands together and squeal with glee, setting up the DOs/DON'Ts for life.

This review is very, very late, and subsequently all I have to offer a series of disjointed memories. No apologies though, I do have a project job and I don't owe you anything at all.

Entombed are the perfect festival band, because they're FUCKING ENTOMBED.

Skitsystem definitely happened.

Benediction arrive late on the Thursday, storm through a killer set and spend the rest of the weekend drunk and over-excited, like they're peering through the mirror into their own mispent collective youth, sniffing glue and watching Discharge.

The Varukers are the band of the weekend, no doubt. Great presence, great fun, great snarling Cockney stage banter (I know they're not Cockneys), Benediction and Brutal Truth look on with absolute delight. Bands like The Varukers are the reason punks in Europe still wear Union flag shirts and patches, nobody does blue-collar, working class pugelism like anarchopunk survivors.

Kofola, the Czech equivalent of Coke, is much nicer than Coke – it's really tangy and not as gassy, and comes in a beautifully ergonomical bottle. Also, you get to feel as though you're sticking a middle finger up at capitalist pigdog west while enjoying the only legit culinary experience you can have in the Czech Republic if you don't want beer-fried dumplings wrapped in pork.

Though Brutal Truth play a double-set, the entirety of their new album plus a regular set, it only feels like it lasts about six minutes. BOOO. Was that because they're so bloody good, or because I was so drunk I was well on my way to doing a chocolate sick?

Instinct Of Survival feel as though they should be Americans or Swedes, given they spend so much time looking perfect, like they have little pictures of Deviated Instinct stuck up on their big flash-bulb covered dressing room mirror.

Rotten Sound are furious, treading that fine line between contrived perfection and genuine rawness.

Magrudergrind got an unexpectedly foaming reaction, given how ambivalent OEF's audience can be about American bands sometimes. Good for them, you will never, ever get bored of watching Magrudergrind, regardless of how many times you've seen them.

Last Days Of Humanity cancel every single show they ever play so I can't remember if I actually saw them, but one band was this year's Rompeprop – dancing bananas and rumbling, gurgling swamp-grind– and I can only assume if they turned up it was them.

Brujeria had a stage invasion to that fucking Marijuana song. Amazingly, the worst thing about them will never be their music, it'll be the money-grabbing, petulant cowboy from St Helens, Jeff "Am I not punk now?" Walker. Jeff, you're a cunt.

I got drunk, had a cocoa Trek energy bar and threw it up again later. Nicest tasting vom ever.

I also chipped a tooth somewhere, somehow. Perhaps biting down on a railing while grindcore entered me.

Photographers at festivals who alternate between shooting bands and taking wierdly voyeuristic photos of attractive girls like their appearance is somehow public property are extremely gross, creepy and wrong, and need to urgently stop doing so.

Come with me next year, yeah?

Review: Human Error '10 Reasons To Kill Your Boss And Destroy The Whole World' 7" (Total Addiction)

Hungary always stands apart from its neighbours in almost every respect, with its alien language (most closely related to Finnish) comes a whole different way of thinking from their Slavic neighbours, and whatever quality inherent in fast and chaotic powerviolence that resonates with Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, seems to have largely Hungary by, perhaps losing that spark which ignites the raging fire in its translation to Magyar.

Budapest's longrunning Human Error are seemingly the exception, forming in 1996 they're a rare Hungarian grind unit with an international following and reputation to rival their neighbours in the likes of Idiot's Parade, Gride or Lycanthropy. Freewheeling gaily out of Budapest's DIY crust scene in 1993 like neighbourhood scrotes on a stolen fixie, Human Error have kept that crust-caked chaos close to their hearts and '10 Reasons To Kill Your Boss And Destroy The Whole World' surfs atop a frothing title-wave of high octane d-beat that gets the heart racing and the fists pumping like a Fight Club-style bare-knuckle boxing match with Victims. All melodic guitar lines and blasting d-beats, and no doubt a cause for numerous edit wars between the highly strung life-virgins of Metal-Archives.com, their aggressive salvos seem perfectly at home in the same cancerous category of bloody-knuckled grind-punk as Phobia.

Band of the Day: Repuked

Flick up your collar, don some mirror shades and head to the graveyard to party like its Return Of The Living Dead, Sweden's Repuked are swaggering, strutting death punk circa 1988.

Channelling Autopsy, Death Strike and Repulsion, with the punkish, d-beat attitude of Entombed, these new pupils to the old school turned heads with the sickening, toxic assault of their 2011 full-length debut Pervertopia.

Armed with a new drummer and a steady stream of forthcoming split 7”s, one with Sicilian gorelords Haemophagus, get set set to spend detention with the old school's chain-smoking, gum-chewing drop-outs.

Band of the Day: Splitter

Sweden's grindcore heritage scarcely needs any qualification here. Seemingly every month our collective eardrums face a brutal house invasion from some of the most furious, ripsaw-savage bands that Northernmost nation can produce.

Typical in their fury, but perhaps atypical in their line-up - while Swedish musicians leapfrog between bands like VD, Splitter's five-piece remain wholly dedicated to their mission.

Forming in 2003, these Stockholm-based brutalists joined the Obscene Productions grindcore family for their second EP, 2006's En Sorglig Historia, impressing the crowds at Obscene Extreme that same year with their unrelenting barrage of death-laden, up-tempo grind. Playing again in 2008, they also took the devastation to North America with a 2009 set at Maryland Deathfest, and ended that same year touring with the mighty Napalm Death.

Back from a break, with new material and a renewed sense of vigour, Splitter are primed to hit 2012 like a rockfall over a mountain highway, hopefully bringing with them a follow-up to 2007's ice hot Avskräckande Exemplar.

Tombs of the Blind Cred: the use and abuse of Amando de Ossorio's cult horror franchise in extreme metal

Extreme horror and extreme metal have long been kin, well beyond such obvious overlapping concentric circles like wildly dreadful soundtracks or dull, plodding songs about zombie movies. The rise of VHS and the rise of death metal occurred in tandem, and arguably you wouldn't have had the latter without the former making Cannibal Holocaust widely available to a generation whose idea of horror was otherwise limited to grabbing their first boob to the opening bars of John Carpenter's Halloween at the drive-in. Just ask Kam Lee, of Mantas, Death and Massacre, or Killjoy of Necrophagia, both still as unabashed horror fiends as they were when they first growled into an 8-track.

The first decade of the 21st Century is the decade of options. Every single strata of human activity is categorised and sub-categorised, codified and transformed into merely another consumer option. Would sir like a hazelnut triple-shot soya latte, PVC gimp suit with chrome nipple clamps, or a late '70s Spanish horror classic? Extreme metal has always relied on an element of historical re-enactment. The reference points aren't even yesterday's bands, they're last Tuesday's bands, and unsurprisingly '80s horror has remained one of the most oft-mined seams of material for midwestern brutal death bands and Scandinavian buzzsaw riffmasters both.

As if this lazy aping of yesterday's genre conventions wasn't enough, the world of uberkvlt-deathdoom is infamous for its monomaniacal fixation with just one series of films - late Spanish director Amando de Ossorio's Tombs Of The Blind Dead series. This entered the circle of true doom thanks to Cathedral, whose constantly evolving career frequently inspired tomorrow's trends in a genre supposedly immune to them. Fire up Doom Forever Doomed, the forum of choice for scene policing and historical revisionism, and you don't have to look hard to find people boasting about having just watched the original cut of La Noche Del Terror Ciego, or asking where they can get a copy, while mum sewson their latest silver-thread Solstice patch in the next room. Admittedly they're little knowN outside of full on dorky horror circles, but when you can get a five-disc set from Play.com, or the Region 1 five-disc set that comes in a cringeworthy brilliant coffin pack, maybe it's not worth crowing about in your underground fashion show.

"The whole purpose of Cathedral forming was to record a 7" about the Blind Dead!" agrees Moss drummer and True Doom archivist Chris Chantler, partly responsible for the lip-blistering creative drought with his own coffin-rattling jam, Tombs Of The Blind Drugged.

As with all micro-scenes dedicated to historical re-enactment, patch jacket old school death/doom concerns itself with aping the canon of a number of approved bands who can all be counted on one severed hand - Autopsy, Winter, early Asphyx, Disembowlment and the Cathedral demo that introduced these furrow-browed revisionists to films they'd place autistic emphasis on - and whose interest in the world outside of death/doom orthodoxy is limited only to one film. “We are old school new jack death/doom,” they scream, tugging on your sleeves like desperate toddlers, “we like this one film and these three bands. URGH! URGH!!!! Pls choose us to be your band of the week Fenriz!”

"That's a much more recent development," Chantler adds of the scene's fascination with those films. "I wonder if Johnny-come-lately trendies like Hooded Menace and Moss have been responsible for it becoming such a cliche. I doubt Moss would've called an EP Tombs Of The Blind... anything nowadays, it's too obvious innit?"

Finland's Hooded Menace are perhaps the single greatest modern catalyst for transforming this relatively obscure series of video nasties into a full-blown convention for death/doom, and almost as big a part of the scene as leg-askew promo photos and faded Autopsy t-shirts, with their 2007 demo The Eyeless Horde and 2008 full-length Fullfill The Curse tipping over the cart of joyless technical death metal tedium and placing raw and atmospheric deathdoom on top.

Hooded Menace: Lasse second from left.

“Well, of course we weren't doing anything new when adopting those films,” admits Hooded Menace guitarist Lasse Pyykko, “but I guess no one had embraced the subject this comprehensively. Even our band's name, the logo and the album cover art refer to the movies. It doesn't bother me too much if there are more bands inspired by the same flicks. It's rather interesting but yeah, it's often like when a certain idea gets overdone it kills some of the fun.

“The best bands will do it the most authentic way though,” he adds. “If you have internalised the feeling and are able to translate it in notes you´re doing just fine. We have already treated all the four movies of the series in our songs and on the top of that we have tracks like 'Vortex Macabre' that is inspired by The Blind Dead but not exactly based on any particular movie. I think this is the approach we can handle the subject with in the future as well. However I take it day by day and do things that I feel good about at the time. I'm not painting myself into a corner. Anyway, I don't see myself getting tired of the subject any time soon as we have always written about other movies too. If The Blind Dead became a HUGE cliché I don´t think the trend would last too long anyway. Then again how long is this band going to stick around? I don´t have a crystal ball. Who knows what the future will bring? Enough of speculation.”

The late Amando de Ossorio, and a friend.

Released in 1971, Tombs Of The Blind Dead was followed by Return Of The Blind Dead in 1973, The Ghost Galleon in 1974 and Night Of The Seagulls in 1975, all based around the hooded menace of long dead Knights Templar, staring from their empty sockets and hunting by sound. Not great films narratively, their iconic, authentically drab ghouls and baroque mythology of old school gothic horror in an era of splatter and gore, nods to Lovecraft (especially in the final film), and a soundtrack that launched a thousand doom bands with its monastic chants and eerie piano builds. It's not hard to see why Tombs... was latched onto so wholeheartedly by a community looking to combine the visceral, open-wound rawness of early death metal with the leaden atmosphere of doom.

“Our music and and the movies share similar menacing and creepy vibes, slowness and all,” agrees Pyykko. “It's a match made in heaven, or hell if you will. The first film of the Blind Dead series I saw was the weakest of the four, The Ghost Galleon. I came across it not too many years before forming Hooded Menace actually. I used to borrow lots of horror movies from my friend and The Ghost Galleon was among the stuff I took home on one occasion. Even though it´s not the best of the Blind Dead series it stood out from the bunch of films I bummed at the time.

“We could not make a song about Toxic Avenger or Evil Dead II,” he continues, adding that he loves both films. “We're not here to crack jokes. However we are not taking it too seriously either of course. There must be a certain amount of foreboding, creepy and rugged atmosphere in the film to make it a Hooded Menace song. A little bit of grace in the mix too. It's a bit hard to put in words.”

Machetazo: Dopi centre.

Hooded Menace are just one of a handful of scattered artists who saw something they could use in these films, perhaps even something that called out to them. But if they inspired a community who adopted the same source material for all the wrong reasons, one tribe dedicated to horror movies in a very big and very right way is Spain's death metal and goregrind underground, in which the country's vast output of trashy and exploitative horror in the '70s and '80s is fertile territory for bands. Machetazo, the fathers of the scene, evolved from straight up Carcass-inspired gurgle into more atmospheric prehistoric death metal for listening to naked in churchyards, and while they have an entire LP dedicated to Amando de Ossorio, 2005's Sinfonías Del Terror Ciego, but in making up only one of many horror references in their canon, the effect is very much different.

"I don't know what to say about the Blind Dead 'cliché'," despairs Machetazo vocalist Dopi Diablo, "obviously I understand what you mean, nobody gave a fuck about those movies when we made the Sinfonias Del Terror Ciego album and now I see the Blind Dead in every fuckin' cover."

Although dying the same year as Italian eyeball-piercer Lucio Fulci, Amando de Ossorio never achieved the same level of feverish fan worship as Fulci, or even that of his countrymen like the innard-tugging, supremely crass Jess Franco. It feels mean spirited to begrudge his work any sort of afterlife, because he certainly deserves it. Perhaps then, the problem is that he deserves better.

REVIEW: GHOUL 'TRANSMISSION ZERO' (TANKCRIMES)

If you ever needed one glorious reason why Ghoul are a notch higher than the vast majority of bands dully lacing their sub-par Jungle Rot stodge metal with horror samples, you get it seconds into 'Transmission Zero' - a static burst of horror movie synth, instantly bringing to mind Goblin's work on the 'Dawn Of The Dead' soundtrack or Dennis Michael Tenney's 'Night Of The Demons' intro, and some stark blood red titles in your mind's eye. That it's followed up by some lacklustre DVD menu screen riffing saps some of the momentum from its shambling zombie movie lurch, but it's an effective statement nonetheless. It says, 'Hey dickhead, we're the real thing'.

Well, about as 'real' as you can be when you wear sacks on your head, in that they're committed to their theme, which elevates it above a mere gimmick and into foam-phallus territory, where looking stupid is a full-blown lifestyle choice and you feel shitty for making fun of it.

Their fourth album, and their first since 2006's ambitiously daft 'Splatterthrash' made them a definite cult band, a sort of Misfits-like awesome party squad for death metal fans unafraid to express an enthusiasm for more than one type of music (so roughly five of them), 'Transmission Zero' doesn't really drive their music off road and into any terrifying new directions. 'Splatterthrash' did the hard work of parking them thoroughly in thrash territory following their more conventional death metal origins, but if you were expecting progression, maybe thrash metal isn't really for you because this is superbly anachronistic stuff - all fist-pumpingly punkish, up-tempo grinding crossover thrash, with Carcass-bothering high vocals and Massacre-like slab-battering lows, as befitting a line-up culled from lead-Carcass botherers Impaled. Possibly their entrenched status in the extreme metal ghetto, as well as sporadic levels of activity thanks to having other bands and (un)lives are what has denied them the sort of crossover appeal-slash-hype-laden oversaturation that bands of a similar sound and vintage have experienced.

Maybe this'll change with Tankcrimes being an obvious boutique brand of quality for fans of luminous shorts, because frankly, and thankfully, it's the only thing that will, and they deserve a change to upgrade their circlepit of grinning loons to a bigger circlepit of grinning loons.

REVIEW: LET IT DIE 'DEMO' (SELF RELEASED)

Too much time is spent blaming magazines for the path they're leading music down, at the end of which is a shed where they'll be tied to a post, buggered and then dismembered. Truth is so much of the blame belongs with the readers who choose to abandon all reasoning and submit wholly to the coded newspeak of bullshit music hackery.

A staggering number of people armed with functioning sight orbs can't even read anymore, they can asertain the meaning of invidual words, but sentences ellude so totally that they have to cling to the window dressing of review writing like a set of rosary beads over the projectile vomiting demon baby of literacy. Everything sounds like something else, but if one were to say "Kettering straightedge crust unit Let It Die sound like a heads-down Cursed or a less knuckledragging Tragedy, all feedback laced aggro tooth-spitting, and powerviolence dirges" the aforementioned illiterate would be confused, because in the magazines they read, bands only ever sound like other bands when they're bad. And when they're good, they sound like other bands being raped by a third band, or a fourth band on acid, or nothing to do with music at all, but a film or an object.

To merely sound like another band is A Bad Review, but to sound like another band with a flimsy qualifier is A Good Review, consequently they prefer: "Let It Die sound like Cursed forcing apart the bumcheeks of Tragedy and sozzling them with a mixture of blood and semen." Somehow that's better. That has become A Good Review despite not actually telling you anything more about the music than the first statement, and carrying with it unwanted images of anal rape. Or perhaps wanted, I don't judge. "Let It Die sound like the scene in Evil Dead where Ash is being dragged through the forest by the feet" - man alive, that is A Very Good Review Indeed, not only that but I came away completely unburdened by knowledge!

Marks play a part too, they're the lifebelt that the ignorant cling to in the swirling sea of words, and anything 7 or less is A Bad Review, regardless of the reasoning behind it. Our friends are unable to wrap their minds around the simple, irrefutable fact that if nothing is perfect (10), and 9 represents albums that are near perfection - Black Flag's 'My War', Napalm Death's 'From Enslavement To Obliteration', Aqua's 'Aquarium', Avril Lavigne's 'Let Go' - then there's no possible way that Let It Die are an 8, and it's highly unlikely they're a 7. But 6 is unforgiveable, 6 isn't only A Bad Review, it might even be A Shit Review and to them, there's no worse crime.

Well, other than pretending to throw a ball but actually keeping it in your hand.

REVIEW: LITTLE SISTER 'REPERCUSSIONS' (TAPE HAUS/BIG PURPLE)

Little Sister is some scary shit. Little girls in horror usually are, nothing good every comes of a set of pigtails, Regan in the Exorcist, Karen in Night Of The Living Dead, and the twins in The Shining - it's the classic horror trope of innocence subverted. If you can't trust little girls, well, who can you trust? Heavy stuff, eh? 

I've already pissed away a good 80 or so words appearing to make some sort of profound statement about Cleveland blackened hardcore five-piece Little Sister, yet without saying anything at all. You may feel as though this is going somewhere, but it really isn't - and to think you pay about £4.40 for this kind of horsecrap on a monthly basis for whichever mainstream metal rag you throw your lot in with. You really are fantastically stupid.

In fact, go ahead and print out this page and insert your own list here: [




                                                                                       ] because the more of that bullshit I pad this review out with, the less I need to say about the music.

Containing members of Masakari, a reference point we're never too far from in this four-track blast of blackened Motörcrust in the same vague ballpark as Cursed or Antimelodix, Little Sister's 'Repercussions' cassette is limited to 100 (distributed in Europe by Witch Hunter) and streamable below, and seems to be locked in an arm-wrestle with its own vocals, a True Norwegian rasp like a tin of beans being opened.

At odds with the buzzsaw punk and tinny, melodic noodling of the opening track, the awkwardness of the meeting is faintly reminiscent of those sludgier, blackened hardcore bands that Himsa's John Pettibone threw his lot in with when the aforementioned failed to become the new Bleeding Through. It finds its equilibrium in the last few seconds, feeding into the far superior and effortlessly menacing 'Young Invincible' which struts and swaggers through those frost-caked woods, like they're no scarier than the haunted house at Alton Towers.

What with varied combinations of black metal and crust punk being one of the watercress and chocolate flavours of the month in the boutique end of underground music (you know, where people screen print zines in silver ink and 'curate black masses' rather than 'put on shows') it's nice to actually see those chunks of Swedish crust and coppery black metal guitar tone being beaten white hot and forced together over four tracks until the seam is no longer visible in the glare and sparks from the anvil.

So what if it starts gracelessly? Beating metal with a hammer isn't exactly a ballet.

REVIEW: ALTAR OF GIALLO/BRAIN CORROSION 'SPLIT' (ROTTENPYOSIS)

Leading dealers in disposable splatter, there's no possible capacity for surprise with Spanish three-piece Altar Of Giallo - they delivery chugging, gurgling practice studio goregrind, only dissimilar from Gruesome Stuff Relish - with whom their share vocalist/guitarist Noel Kemper - in that they don't sound quite so much like 'Reek Of Putrefaction' being played back on a Fisher Price cassette player. Opening up their side of the split with the ominous, six-minute-plus 'Zombie Reign' and a sample of '80s incidental music that could come from pretty much any bongwater stained VHS in their collection, Altar Of Giallo write trudging, Impetigo-like death that can be played with either the leprous digits of the song's subject matter, or a complete lack of skill, talent and decent equipment - but that's goregrind for you.

'They Need Flesh' picks up the pace like that first cadaver bashing on the car window in 'Night Of The Living Dead' before it shatters under his fists, giving way to Taiwanese trio Brain Corrosion - who misleadingly share their name with a Dead Infection album. In actuality, Brain Corrosion have far more in common with the skin-lashing death metal chug of Cannibal Corpse or Necrophagia, and a hefty dose of punkish grindcore swagger, that makes Brain Corrosion's four tracks instantly stand out over that of their more experienced and better known disc-mates, rounding off proceedings in suitably gastric fashion with a cover of 'Bleeding Peptic Ulcer' by Swedish gorelords Regurgitate.

Altar Of Giallo lurch, Brain Corrosion strut - making this split 1985's zombies versus punks splatterfest Return Of The Living Dead. So then, somebody's going to have to die.

REVIEW: BRUTAL TRUTH 'END TIME' (RELAPSE)

Brutal Truth are not Napalm Death.

Hurrr durr indeed, but while Napalm Death have simply rearranged the same set of core influences across three decades, and are capable of producing fantastic albums and mediocre ones both - all carefully stitched together by the same twine - Brutal Truth have never been so predictable. The vastly disparate set of backgrounds and influences - vocalist Kevin Sharp's 7" cough syrup punk rock, bassist Dan Lilker's horns-aloft mullet metal, drummer Rich Hoak's nutso free jazz and guitarist Erik Burke's octopus mathcore - resulting in a far more unpredictable and nomadic canon. The point is that what we'd accept from Napalm Death (who've produced a fair bit of filler over the years, along with some solid gold), we wouldn't accept from Brutal Truth, like a precocious A student whose grades suddenly slip and need a good talking to.

Why this is relevant is that 'End Time' sounds, at its most basic, like 'Need To Control', and any other points of reference - Swans or Boredoms for example - all link back to 'Need To Control' either by sounding like it or influencing it. Opening track 'Malice' even has a similar brand of same bell-tolling, feedback-laden disease as 'Collapse', albeit passed through the frantic immediacy filter of their post-'Sounds Of The Animal Kingdom' output (ignoring how oddly reminiscent  '.58 Caliber' is to a Killswitch Engage intro because there's absolutely no way they found themselves influenced by that), with an impenetrable wall of sonic whitewash around the mid-section that recalls 'Kill Trend Suicide'.

Brutal Truth albums though, have always referenced other Brutal Truth albums. Their canon may be unpredictable, but like a Zeppelin in a thunderstorm they remain tethered to the landing platform. Said Zeppelin may be tortured by lightning tempos and hailstorm drumming, buffeted like a dead dog on an escalator by the whimsy of the elements, but its arc of chaos is checked by the steel cables that represent this pure, Platonic force of just what it is that Brutal Truth are. Order amid chaos, familiarity and unfamiliarity, spittle flecked statements of intent and hair-tearing, flesh rending sludge dirges - play loud and give up trying to understand.

THE HYPOCRISY LOOP OF ENGLISH HERITAGE BLACK METAL

“Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

So said George Orwell in one of a series of fascinating essays designed to separate patriotism – which he defines as a love of your country as it is, as it constantly changes and evolves – and nationalism – the longing for an imagined country rooted in the past. They're a brilliant read, especially in the current climate – beyond music, obviously – where a right wing conspiracy theory about a liberal agenda steadily chipping away at 'Britishness' insidiously enforces a dichotomy between patriotism and liberalism that's all too easy to buy into.

Against this backdrop, the rise of English Heritage Black Metal as a homegrown metal media darling has become a vehicle for the sort of views that would be vigorously questioned were they coming from any other band, from any other background. There's obviously an inherent regressive component to English Heritage Black Metal – which is based upon a yearning for some anachronistic set of imagined values, usually associated with Anglo-Saxon Britain. Comparable to any number of 'Viking' bands, it'd be a horrendous libel to suggest that all of these po-faced beat combos were effectively marching bands for the English Defence League, because they're not – they're merely using history as another theme to explore like zombies, pirates and infantile sadism – but there are bands with a right wing agenda, and with it comes an endless feedback loop of hypocrisy and opinion policing from all corners –  the labels want to keep their bands in magazines, magazines want to keep their support from labels, and the bands want to be popular, and simultaneously keep their message alive.

Part of the problem is that black metal thrives on subjects seen as taboo and many completely apolitical bands won't actually come out and unequivocally confirm or deny their beliefs – preferring to leave plenty of fertile ground for speculation and interpretation in case it kills off their mystique and they have to come out as just being dysfunctional manchildren like the rest of us. Again the genuinely right wing will frequently out themselves far more clearly in doing this, complaining about “cultural Marxism” in the media, the old phantom of “political correctness”, and any other combinations of frothing BNP forum screed.

The arbitrary cherrypicking of history, and their inflexibility in discussing it is the most direct proof of Orwell's patriotism/nationalism divide. English Heritage Black Metal bands most likely to be giving allegory to their ethnonationalism will focus on one specific era of English history, usually Anglo-Saxon Britain as the birth of all that is English, and the exclusion of all that came later – it's sometimes as clean cut as the bands who focus on nature having no obvious politics, and the bands who focus on history – or at least their distorted edition of it – being very much the opposite. Aside from the irony of using an wedge of immigrant communities (these Angles, Saxons, Jutes and the like were loosely related, but disparate and divided into numerous kingdoms and tribes)  that displaced the indigenous Britons and Celts, brought its own faiths, cultural traditions and funny smelling cooking, as a thinly veiled metaphor for criticising the imagined threat those noble Anglo-Saxon descendants face from the evils 20th and 21st Century immigration with their own faiths, cultural traditions and funny smelling cooking, it's the very dictionary definition of Orwell's unchanging, unflinching fantasy view of a nation.

Lyrically you don't have to go too far to find evidence of xeno/Islamaphobia, one band promise “Children of the Crescent moon, your desert god isn't welcome here” (the claim it's aimed at all monotheistic religions is a pretty weak defence when it refers to only one, Islam, by name) and another pledge to “defend the land from the thieving hands of the infidel” (their defence is that it's a historical verse, but so is the Horst-Wessel-Lied and still they made the choice to have that song say something about them). Aside from the aforementioned cringing attempts to dismiss the issue, the most often uttered protestation is to point out how many black metal bands are allowed to criticise Christianity, and surely, they reason, isn't it fair for us to critise other faiths? While there's no doubt that's a more than played out trope in extreme metal, Britain is nominally a culturally Christian society - not an Islamic one as the Daily Express would have you believe - one which it's fair to assume the various band members are a product of, and it's no way the moral equivalent to target Islam in such unflinching, militant terms, just as it would be if these predominantly white, heterosexual bands were to write songs about saving Britain from gay people, black people or gypsies.

The biggest indicator of any sort of extreme agenda lurking beneath these tales of swords thwacking on shield is in how much they're prepared to have a dialogue about it, and what they say in that dialogue. Nobody wants to be branded a Nazi, but the genuinely far right ethnonationalists want to balance maintaining that cosy relationship with the people who'll ensure they get their 9/10 reviews, and remaining honest about their beliefs (because as Orwell observed they're utterly convinced of being in the “right”). That tightrope walk between denial and confession leads to some amazingly transparent statements that all parties can project their own meanings onto, and can be easily be deciphered.

One of the best “I'm not racist, but...” statements is “You use the words 'blood and soil' in a sentence and people instantly assume you're one of the Nazi brigade”, which was even flagged up as a pullquote in a mainsteam metal magazine. Anyone looking to instantly dismiss the whole thing can just go, 'Look, they said they're not Nazis – you're just over-reacting', an act of deliberate, wilful ignorance given it's almost a provocation to see just how much of a brazen Sieg Heil they can sneak into their own defence. Of course using the words 'blood and soil' in a sentence makes you look like a Nazi, 'blood and soil' was a Nazi theory, and is shorthand for ethnonationalism. It's almost like a little shout-out to the Far Right following they've claimed to have no control over.

It's not what they believe that's the problem – people are more than welcome to believe whatever they like, its people's reluctance to confront it, engage with it, talk about it and debate it. And this is true for every medium, how many more interviews have you seen with fantasy author China Mivéille being probed on his left-wing beliefs compared to Frank Miller's right-wing libertarian ones? Similarly music magazines are more than happy to probe bands on their Christianity, their evangelical vegan straight edge, or their socialism, but a sniff of ambiguous nationalism and they start to sweat. It's fine if a band go so far as to actually come out as pantomime Nazis, like Varg Vikernes of played out woodland elevator music outfit Burzum, because there's no sweeping that under the carpet and no danger of inadvertently opening up some unwanted controversy, but when it comes down to either advertising bucks and a quiet life, or good journalism that provides readers with a genuine service, the former always wins.

If you really believe you're right and that you're free hold whatever beliefs you like, why not share them? And if you really believe you're any sort of journalist, why not ask the questions and hold up bullshit for what it is?

REVIEW: LYCANTHROPY 'LYCANTHROPY' (BONES BRIGADE)

There are few releases as eagerly, seemingly endlessly anticipated as the debut from the Czech Republic's furious flurry of blasting chaos, Lycanthropy, and through its twenty minute burst of stipped-down, bullshit-free rage you get a clear understanding, as short, sharp and communicative as a blow to the side of the head, as to what fastcore actually means.

It's nothing new, built from the mud like an ancient city, or an egotistical, pretentious partition to divide something that's 'yours', and is therefore wonderful and exclusive and elite, from something that belongs to others, and therefore is popular and diluted and meaningless. Fastcore, like powerviolence before it, is a line in the sand between that hoary old chaos that grindcore first unleashed upon unsuspecting, unbelieving cider-sodden crusties, and the regimented, death-heavy bullshit of twenty years of bands like Misery Index and Aborted, panel beating anarchy into equilateral rods of predictable brutality under the sprawling aegis of grind. Fastcore isn't a bold new movement for grindcore's bright future, it's a reminder of the core values that made grindcore great, and the churning inferno that seethes and splutters behind the ribcage of every true grindcore band.

Grindcore is filth, energy, violence, and release, and over their seventeen-plus minutes of Insect Warfare/Agents Of Abhorrance-like orthodox barbarism, all rat-ta-tat machine gun percussion and a guitar tone like a chainsaw digging into a car door, Lycanthropy prove a potent reminder of just how that sounds.

REVIEW: EXHUMED 'ALL GUTS, NO GLORY' (RELAPSE)

Ah, at long last (made slightly longer by the time spent listening to this album and not reviewing it), the eagerly awaited return from the best 'Carcass clone' that don't actually sound that much like Carcass.

While Bay Area gore metallers Exhumed once had more than a little reek of putrefaction about their person (olol), they've since become a tightly honed warhead of Floridian death metal guitar heroics (there's a whiff of Deicide's 'Dead By Dawn' on 'Death Knell'), tech death drumming fury courtesy of the extremely prolific Danny Walker, and good old fashioned grindcore call and response that may as well be Extreme Noise Terror if they'd opted to drench themselves in chicken innards, rather than refuse to eat them. And yeah, there's a bit of 'Heartwork' in the bell-tolling guitar tone, but that's a mere stitch compared to the rusted braces and fat ugly sutures holding the component chunks of Necrophagia, Obituary, Dismember and Death to this slice of non-specifically old school bludgeon. Reminiscent of no one band or era, but brilliantly evocative of every slice of pose-striking ferocity to have ever hidden behind an impenetrable logo.

'All Guts, No Glory' will never be mistaken for the next step in the evolution of death metal, or its next piece of retrograde trendsetting to capture the limited imaginations of the 'underground', but if there's ever cause to stick one piece of extreme metal in a time capsule, or escape pod, to keep the cultural memory of the human race alive after some cataclysm, Exhumed do a pretty good job of summing up the absolute best of classic and contemporary savagery, like the eerie, muscular superman of Mary Shelly's 'Frankenstein', before Hollywood gave him an eight inch forehead and a cadaverous shuffle.

BAND OF THE DAY: NEW MORTAL GODS

Be a better crust band, practice what you preach, and make your music available for free. Don't expect people to support you if you're not even remotely willing to do anything for them. You want to take apart all the hypocrisy of the old order, but you still insist on providing a service in exchange for cash/beer, and selling CDs and vinyl with enough of mark-up to make a tidy profit. And to think every generation in turn wonders when it was that the scene became another consumer option for idiots to flash cash at, before emptying their PayPal account into the lap of an overpriced distro in Germany. If you're not even prepared to step outside of the society you're condemning, how can you expect anyone to take you even remotely seriously YOU POSER?

Start by learning from New Mortal Gods. The Belgrade crusties make their one and only release so far, their 2010 demo, free to download, and seem to be very much in favour of this brand of thinking, dismissing the idea that punk itself is dangerous, and saying "To become a threat it is necessary that people change at the individual level." Identifying broadly as anarchopunk, that seems to say more about their attitude (and their shit name and their vocalist's no-fuck-given sartorial elegance) than it does their music, which has the coppery ambient chime you'd associate with atmospheric black metal, while the melodious riffage itself and the hoary bellow that accompanies it are very much a product of driving d-beat, rolling you up like a corpse in a carpet and tipping you into a quarry.

INTERVIEW: HUMMINGBIRD OF DEATH GET RADICAL

Not quite as hyped as some bands, and nowhere near as hyped as by all rights they should be, Radical Paul Praise of the frankly incomparable Give Praise Records has not only coerced Boise, Idaho Speed Force-channelling fast-pack Hummingbird Of Death into releasing a split 7" with him (stream that sucker here), but coerced drummer/vocalist Mike into talking about it. I KNOW, AWESOME RIGHT?

You have had a radical history of being in six or so other bands and projects. How did HOD become more of a serious project?

"Hummingbird Of Death became a serious band after our demo got such a good response in '05. We don't necessarily devote more time and energy to Hummingbird Of Death than to our other bands. This is just the band that has generated the biggest following. We got really lucky there."

How long does it usually take you to write an album, do you turn the speed generator on and blast 'em out?

"It usually takes months, if not an entire year, give or take. Sometimes we go through periods where we play a lot of local shows or the occasional tour, and we have to spend our practice time on our live set instead of learning new stuff. That just drags it out even longer. I want to make sure every song we write is good and stands on its own. If it takes a while to achieve a whole album's worth of those songs, so be it."

You played the coveted 2009 Speed Trials at 924 Gilman Street. How did that go? What was it like actually being measured on speed alone?

"Actually, the winners are judged on quality of performance, not necessarily speed. SFN won that year because they turned into fucking angry demonic beasts when they played, not because they played ultra-fast. It was an honor to be part of that show, but it was quite the whirlwind too - we drove ten hours from Boise that day to play, then drove right home the next day. I wish we'd had more time to hang out with all our friends that were there."

You have worked with a few record labels: Cowabunga, Sound Pollution, and now Give Praise. How do you get hooked up with these folks? Any other labels you have worked with?

"When we made the demo, I sent copies to my two favorite labels, Sound Pollution and 625. It kinda snowballed from there. I'd also like to acknowledge To Live A Lie, 1332 Records, Unholy Thrash, Sick Thought, Relapse and Deep Six, who have all worked with us too."

How did you feel when Sound Pollution went under? I always looked up to them and loved a lot of their titles - I was bummed!

"I was bummed too, but I was even more bummed when I wrote to Ken some time later and found out he wasn't even doing Hellnation anymore. One of my favorite bands."


You recently released a Floppy Disk, with a Hummingbird Of Death song and some artwork, how has the response been for that? Do you think it is important to up-keep with unusual release medium?

"Well, we haven't really done too much to get the word out about it yet. I think people are intimidated by it a little. Their first thought seems to be, 'I don't have a floppy drive, there's no way I can play it.' Those people aren't being imaginative enough, if you ask me. I don't think it's necessary for bands to do wild packaging or format ideas, but it might make kids more interested in buying physical representations of music instead of just getting formless mp3s off the internet for free."

 You are scheduled to play at New Direction Fest alongside Downsided, Quiver, Dehumanized, Migraine, and more. How did that come about? Are you one of the few "faster" bands on the bill?

"Yes, we will be there August 20! One of the folks involved with New Direction Fest is an old friend of ours from Boise, actually. I don't know much about the other bands aside from Downsided - our friends from Boise - Migraine, and RVIVR - our guitar player Justin is a huge fan of theirs. I kinda like my first exposure to a band to be their live performance, because I'm more likely to enjoy that than a studio recording."

You have a split LP coming up with Titanarum, who have unfortunately disbanded. How did the LP come into play?

"We discovered their EP around '07ish, and we were really impressed with their abilities and approach. We told them, 'Hey, you guys rule', found out the feeling was mutual and kept in touch. We hit them up for the split a couple years ago and they said yes. Then they broke up. Haha. The split was almost canceled because Titanarum didn't want Give Praise to 'waste' resources on a defunct band, but we and Give Praise basically wouldn't let them cancel. We were grateful that they could do one last show when we came through San Diego last year. As I recall, we only made $22 that night but it was absolutely worth it to see them play."

There are so many "fastcore" bands around at any given time, you do a really good job of standing out - such as your new split LP, where you have two songs, each about six minutes each. You have to keep a unique sound in your genre, and do a good job! What is the secret?

"I'm really appreciative of comments like that. Thanks a lot. I'm constantly aware that there are so many super-fast bands out there. We don't want to write boring stuff that no one will remember later. There's no secret. Anyone can do what we do if they keep two things in mind. One is stretching the boundaries of what fastcore can be and trying to find something new. The other is not trying to force anything. When I feel inspired, songs can pop into my head almost instantaneously. When I sit there with one or two riffs and feel like I have to 'work' on a song for an extended period of time, it usually doesn't work out for me."

You have been on about three/four tours, how have they been? Do you find the support system is good when you hit the road?

"We've had some pretty good adventures. Our first weekend trip to Washington state in '07 was kinda shitty, but ever since then we've been able to break even on most of our trips. I think it helps to know that people want you to play their town before you just hop in the van and expect to have a successful tour."


What is your favorite roadside food, and more importantly, where are the cleanest restrooms?

"Oh you know, skunks, the occasional dog. We swooped an armadillo one time in Arizona, that kept us fed for the whole rest of the tour. You can save so much money. If you are worried about finding clean restrooms on tour, you have no business in a punk band."

Any last words?

"Thanks for the questions! Check out our new 'Archaic Technologies 2' floppy disk, our split with Titanarum coming out in September, plus a split with Downsided and new LP coming out after that. Visit hummingbirdofdeath.com for information. Listen to Six Brew Bantha."