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Slit Your Guts - Cryptopsy (None So Vile. Regain Records, 1996) Live @ the Trois-Rivieres Metalfest IV.
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Crystal Skull - Mastodon (Blood Mountain. Relapse Records, 2006)
Two words: Fuck showers!
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Living Footage # 06: Suffocation live in Moscow playing Jesus Wept off of their 1991 ep Human Waste. I personally love how Mullen (“most brutal New York accent in metal”) describes Jesus.
I’ve stated it before, but along with fellow New Yorkers Immolation, Suffocation basically created and popularized the sub-genre of Brutal Death Metal. They essentially pushed Death Metal further away from its British and Thrash Metal roots — listen to any given song by Death and I guarantee you you’ll hear heavy amounts of Judas Priest — and fused it with a rhythm more akin to 80’s Hardcore. They will forever stand as one of my favourite bands.
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Living Footage # 05: The mother fucking Kings of core, the Fathers of grind, the Holy Lords of Blastbeat, Napalm Death (circa 2007) playing a medley of songs off of the unfuckwithable Scum: The Kill (23 seconds in length), Deceiver (29 seconds) and You Suffer (1 bloody of bloodiest seconds in length). For those who are ignorant of the glory that is ND I’ll lay down a few quick facts: well respected British DJ John Peel refered to You Suffer is as one of the greater songs ever written and listed in the Guinness Book of Record as the world’s shortest song the actual lyrics are “You suffer, but why?”
Currently, the boy-men of Napalm Death are in the studio, working on Time Waits For No Slave. Here’s hoping they wont pull a Death Magnetic and prodcue an over hyped turd. Eat a dick Metallica. Eat it so hard.
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Living Footage # 04: This is one of the few live videos that I have found of Gorguts performing anything off of Obscura (1998), and so far this is the best one. Though the album itself wasn’t set to be released for a couple years, Gorguts wrote the Dadaist’s wetidream that is Obscura back in 1993. Here they are performing La Vie Est Prelude… on a 1995 tour with Death.
Obscura is easily one of my favourite albums of any genre and style of music. Its posisiton keeps changing but it always remains in my top 5 albums of all time and it is on the short list for “Album I’d have with me if I was stranded on a desert island.” Although it tends to loose out to Nile’s In Their Darkened Shrines purely due to the compatablility of Nile and desert aesthetics.
Gorguts are also shaping up to be one of my favourite bands. Their music has influenced my own in many ways and I never tire of their songs, ever. Each time I listen to an album like Considered Dead or even From Wisdom to Hate I find new things to love and adore.
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Living Footage # 03: Pig Destroyer performing Forgotten Child at CBGB circa 2000. Quick histroy: This song original appeared only on their 1999 spilt EP with the band Gnob, yet was later compiled in the 2004 release, Painter of Dead Girl, on Robotic Empire.
This clip is interesting for a number of reasons, which I will shorten to 3, sparing all the nerdy details:
1) This shows PD, pre-Terrifyer , playing a tight-as-a-Nun’s-asshole rendition of a Forgotten Child at the famous CBGBs (RIP), however, the main point of interest is found 24 seconds in after J. R. Hayes breaks the mic, yet you can still hear him scream.
2) This clip seperates people based on personal taste and mentality (a personal aim of mine with this here blog): I fucking love this. I love the fact that J. R. is screaming his head (almost literally) off, showing a complete release in aggression and tension within his person. This is him, giving himself, body and mind, to his performance.
or
You don’t enjoy any form of “extreme vocals.” You view him as some guy just screaming his head off.
3) This Youtube clip shows that not all people who Comment on Youtube are mean-spirited people exploiting the Internet’s veil of anonymity to be as hatefilled as they want. Just look at the comments and try and find one blatantly negative one.
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Living Footage # 02: Carcass playing Reek of Putrefaction (off of their 1989 sophomore album, Symphonies of Sickness) live in 1992. I post this up because I just got tickets to the Carcass reunion tour (with motherfucking Suffocation). I nearly crapped my pants when I found out about it because I wasn’t aware that they were coming to Vancouver. It was the frist time I bought a local ticket online, because it was a 15 second timeline from me finding out and me jetting to Ticketmaster.ca and over-paying for a ticket.
About this video, it’s more popular than the other videos that I have found (with a View count already past 86,000) but it is one of the few Carcass videos that is at all audible. Most other videos are either music videos, live footage with the recorded music edited in, or just a mess of noise. Also this shows Carcass at their fucking element in 1992, right before the mid 90’s collapse of Death Metal’s popularity (93-97). The reason for this crash in popularity in the underground was due to an influx of too many death metal bands playing essentially the same thing. This was before Death Metal and Grindcore were being experimented with inorder to create the multiple sub-genres that exist today. It was also before the time when the technical aspect of death metal wasn’t properly utilized: bands were not good at writing complex instrumentation. It would tend to come across as sounding forced or messy (which is a problem that is happening again with some modern bands).
Another aspect of it was Corperate tie-ins but that is for another post.
As for Carcass, I have always felt as though they never recieved enough credit. They get credit for being one the the first few popular genre-benders with the grindcore and death metal world. However, what I love most about them is their lyrical and “poetic” focus. The lyrics were based on medical jorunals and old Gray’s Anatomy texts, which led to heavy use (and missuse) of scientific terms and themes. Because of this, dead bodies, all things rotting and pussing, diseases and furmenting blood were all cornerstones to their songs’ imagery. This is were Goregrind started; this is where extreme metal’s morbid fascination with general death and horror films was ripped open to expose the jucier innards of the macabre. It’s because of this that Carcass have had a large history of imitators, but like anything that is worthwhile, nothing beats the original… expect for the Batman movies.
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Living Footage # 01: Dying Fetus @ London Underworld, May 21 2007 playing Praise the Lord (Opium of the Masses). I post this because it is a hard thing to find quality live footage of concerts on Youtube, but it is even harder to find audible video footage of decent Death metal live. The main reason for this is because it’s mostly jackoffs with their own shitty video cameras that were made to record sounds at ignoble decible levels. The majority of good quality footage is shot with professonal cameras, which most venues only allow to be used by publicity photographers, journalists and any other persons affiliated within a “professional” media or the band’s label personel. But, again, this only applies to “professional cameras and recording devices.” Plus, not all of that footage is released to Youtube as the majority of it is produced for DVD’s. Ergo, there tends to be alot of slipsod videos of just pure noise released on the web. However, there is some good stuff, and I intend to display it with my new Living Footage series. It’s basically a “song of the day” kind of thing. I plan to use it to highlight some of my favourite bands with quality footage of them playing live. I don’t plan on doing many, as there isn’t a lot on youtube.
…And yes, I did more or less borrow this idea off of max abelson. Although I did have the idea before I found out about his Tumblr. It’s a quality Tumblr, I’m not trying to rip him off, but I do feel that I should just cover base here.
This Maryland act is one of my more favoured groups; their technical ability is nicely complimented by their sheer power and utterly evil and grotesque vocals. Be warned, this footage is still kind of harsh, and because of that a few of the verses are lost due to the quality of the footage. I highly recommend Destroy the Opposition, it is a classic in 2000-era death metal and it is a must listen to anyone. And I fucking mean anyone!
