![]() As such, this is Romanticism in theme and lyrically elegant music within the rubric of black metal gnarled riffing and drop-beat throbbing time division. Here’s a sample from his review of Mutiilation’s 1996 offering ‘Remains of Ruined, Dead, Cursed Soul’:ĭramatic nocturnal inversion metal invades aural consciousness with screams and riffs dissonant in both tone as chords in patternings constructing intersections at irregular rhythms and harmonies form the primordial antagonism from which the rest of the album is crafted, emphasizing a strong sense of transcendence in the phrases which rise from the dying chaos of disorder to create an intimation of direction so profoundly universal in the translation of its relative motion to tokens of order that its presence alters each song to conclude in an unfinished sense of emptiness within the mind of something desiring more. Their reviews were senselessly styled like nothing I’ve read before or since. I promptly moved on to their best of death metal list. I slowly worked my way down their top fifteen artists list on the black metal section, and discovered such innovators as Darkthrone, Burzum, Summoning, and Enslaved. Growing up in the home counties of England, a very sheltered area of the world, I couldn’t conceive of there being many other fans of this music out there, so to find this website was something of a revelation, a readymade bible for my musical coming of age. ![]() I stumbled across Prozak’s history of heavy metal by a chance google search of Bathory, I was 14 years old and only just embarking on my sonic journey into the abyss, having discovered Bathory from an Emperor cover, and Emperor by a chance mention in an edition of Kerrang. There was also a large reviews section with an archive of ‘approved’ bands and their releases (The Dark Legions Archive, or DLA), a list of approved non-metal artists, an online forum, and the occasional interview. This obscure website prided itself on being one of the earliest to cover underground metal on the internet having its origins in the early 1990s, in the Wild West days of the worldwide web (the WWDHe posted a cultural thesis online, probably written for a university degree, on the history of heavy metal in relation to developments in 20th century Western politics and society.This was the meat of the theoretical orientation of the website, interpreting any new releases or occurrences within metal through the lens of this framework. ![]() Nowadays, the writings and ideas espoused on this website would be lumped in with other creepy websites in the deep dark now known as the ‘alt right’, but its origins go back to a time long before this term made its way into the common vernacular. For those not familiar with this site here follows an account of this website and the influence it had me in in my formative years. Throughout my development as a human unit, I was unfortunate enough to come across one such website that severely influenced my growth as a critical consumer of not just heavy metal, but also my opinions of the world at large this website was called the ‘American Nihilist Underground Society’, comedically abbreviated to ANUS. ![]() For people of my generation, our coming of age coincided with that of the internet, so the inevitability of us defining much of our identity and perception of the world as teenagers through this medium was grimly predictable by the late 1990s. ![]()
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