VaccZine #3
The Plague Rages Podcast Newsletter
Lars-Göran “L-G” Petrov died on March 7, 2021. He was only 49. Cancer is the worst. Still, L-G did a lot with his time here.
A number of mainstream outlets posted obits for the Swedish singer. Thanks to its 1993 commercial breakout, the Columbia-distributed, unsanctioned-by-the-band Marvel Comics tie-in Wolverine Blues, Entombed pierced the regular-degular hard rock fan’s conscious. I’m sure many streamed “Hollowman” as a salute. L-G is one of the few in the world of death metal that I can imagine would receive a sendoff in Rolling Stone.
But, after learning of Petrov’s passing, many more heavy metallers of a sicker bent briefly shared in the same epiphany:
Man, Left Hand Path whips ass.
Of course, I don’t think anyone forgot that LHP whips ass. Considering the amount of bands from around the world that still bite Entombed’s 1990 debut, you’ve probably heard it at least a dozen times every year without actually listening to it. The dimed HM-2, gritty riffs, slapping drums. LHP and the preceding demos from its forbear, Nihilist, remain foundational. They’re the Swedeath Bible, the old testament that’s still informing the new.
Still, spinning LHP again after a long layoff is always an awesome refresher. It never fails to obliterate most of its derivatives. Like few other albums in the Swedish death metal catalog, LHP just goes. It’s always a little more frantic than you remember, a little more brutal than a lot of what it would eventually beget. It’s an all-timer.
It’s also easy to forget that it’s the work of kids. Guitarist Ulf “Uffe” Cederlund was the old man in the band when it was recorded in December 1989 at Sunlight Studio, Stockholm. He just turned 18 that October. On the one hand, it’s amazing that people this young could cut such an enduring classic. On the other, that youthful ambition, the kind of DGAF untrammeled by experience, is why LHP continues to kill.
LHP’s booklet, credit: Earache Records
And, at the center of it all, surrounded by those iconic Entombed chainsaws, is L-G’s gruff yell.
“There was another band called Devastation from Texas, but these guys were from Chicago,” L-G said to Louder, counting down “11 metal songs that changed [his] life” in 2016. “Their singer Troy Dixler inspired me a lot. You could hear what he was singing!”
That was kind of the thing with L-G: you could hear what he was singing. While peers were getting more guttural, L-G chose relative clarity. He was still brutal, though. It’s crazy that a 17-year-old is making that noise. Even when that gnarled voice eventually turned into an alcohol-soaked bellow in Entombed’s death ‘n’ roll years, the brutality remained. (His cleans on LHP are also hilarious, some real double-digit-beers, last-call-at-the-karaoke-bar howls.) He inhabited a sort of every-metalhead energy, but his exact tone was near-impossible to duplicate. Part of the reason for that was he had a knack for singing with the music instead of over it.
“Hehe, so you have noticed it, too?!” L-G said in a 2001 interview with metal’s Zelig, Luxi Lahtinen, when asked about the Slayer-ish turn on the underappreciated Morning Star. “I didn't mean to copy anyone vocal-wise. I just listened to the songs and tried to fit my vocal parts into them as well as I was able to do at the time. I just thought of our songs as Entombed songs and tried to do my best with my vocal parts for them. The only thing that matters to me is to get my vocals to fit into the songs and not to think about too much whether I could sound like someone else at that point when trying to fit my vocals for the songs.”
While we’re here, let’s camp out in that interview for a bit. I love L-G’s take on setlists:
Yeah, we try to play at least a couple of songs off each of our albums, but naturally as our MORNING STAR album is the latest one we have put out thus far, we cover our set by mainly songs off that album and besides those songs are most fun to play. But sometimes when we sit down, 15 minutes before the show and someone realized like all of a sudden: "Hey, shouldn’t we do a set list or something?!" It’s like a thing that may drown into oblivion from time to time as we unfortunately are rather lame to come up with one for each of our shows (laughs). And like a couple of weeks ago we had a gig in Halmstad in Sweden. We handed over a pen and a piece of paper to our ‘t-shirt guy’ who sells shirts for us at gigs and said to him that: "Write down all your favorite Entombed songs what you want us to play tonight!" (laughs)
That was the other thing about L-G. In plenty of interviews, he gave off an unpretentious air, that of a dude who just wanted to hit the stage and play metal. Even a bizarre and byzantine dispute over the Entombed name, waged between L-G and OG guitarist Alex Hellid, one that led to a Queensrÿche-ian split and two different bands, didn’t seem to sour that spirit. “A thousand people have a thousand different opinions — good and bad,” L-G said to Revolution-Music.dk when asked if the spat and subsequent rebranding to Entombed A.D. tarnished the legacy. “But we do what we felt was right. And we're out here touring, and that's the most important [thing], I think. And leave the childishness aside and play metal, basically.”
(Worth noting: The reformed Entombed Mach 1.0 posted a sweet farewell to its estranged frontman on Facebook. I hope they buried the hatchet.)
From my perspective, L-G just seemed pretty self-aware and good natured. Here’s a great line in an interview with Agoraphobic News about the equally classic Clandestine, the album L-G didn’t sing on due to…uh, “personal disputes”: “It's awesome, actually. It's a good thing I don't sing on it, because it's already good as it is. I don't want to destroy it.”
From that same interview, L-G’s attitude even seems to have rubbed off on Per “Dead” Ohlin, the future Mayhem singer, when the two, along with Cederlund, were in the band Morbid.
We met through a local record store called Heavy Sound that was only metal. You put up advertisements, like ‘Singer Seeks Band.’ That’s how we met, and then from then on, we did the demos and stuff. He was also a good soul within the black metal community…we had good fun. Maybe he got depressed throughout the years, but when I knew him; we were happy. We’d drink beer, do music, sit at my mother’s house, drink beer and play guitar and stuff like that. He was a happy soul. Nobody knows what happened, but we have the memories and the good times we had.
That’s the other, other thing. Playing drums for Morbid alone would’ve established L-G as a kvlt legend. At the very least, it’s one hell of a line on a résumé. What’s crazier is thinking of these people, who have now been consecrated as deities, rubbing shoulders. Two dudes that had a hand in shaping the next 30 years of black metal and death metal, hanging out at ma’s house, drinking beers.
Likewise, it’s similarly crazy to think about how chance played a part in making Nihilist, L-G’s next stop, as important as it is. (For the record, the second and third Nihilist demos also whip. “Face of Evil,” man.) If co-founder Nicke Anderson wasn’t such a rabid tape trader, does he ever hear R.A.V.A.G.E., the pre-Atheist death/thrashers that dropped two influential tracks on the Raging Death comp? If Leif “Leffe” Cuzner never gets a Boss HM-2 — the perfect pedal for teenage death metal idiots because you just turn the dials all the way up and it sounds awesome — does anyone else ever stumble into that classic guitar tone? If L-G and Cederlund didn’t hang around after their studio session work was completed, with L-G “ impulsively [joining]” the Andersson/Hellid/Leffe lineup on stage, does Nihilist ever find its voice? If future Unleashed frontman Johnny Hedlund doesn’t have differences with the rest of the band, causing Nihilist’s eventual split, does Entombed or Unleashed happen?
Those are some what-ifs. And, really, we’re only thinking about those what-ifs because everything happened to click into place for Entombed. Two top-tier death metal albums and actual, measurable success. Entombed, after all, is one of the better selling death metal bands of the early SoundScan era. It’s so rare for things to work out like that, to get the classics and the career.
That kind of dual achievement could make someone feel like all of this was foreordained. That they’re actually a genius. A god. That they could do no wrong. And that they’d keep chugging along, not because they continue to love it, but because it always seems to work. Get poppier, stack cash, coast.
L-G, when engaging with the press at least, came off as pretty chill, never losing his link to the obscure death metal demos that he used to collect. For a spell, he’d reliably drop a recommendation for Angelcorpse in interviews if asked. And, while the urge to find new stuff waned, he still dug the trenches. “I don’t actually go out and search for music but last Friday I was at this local bar in Stockholm where there was free entrance and there was two black metal bands playing and it was like fucking hell this is cool,” he said to The Metalist in 2016. “Went upstairs, bought a beer and went to the front row. I never found out what they were called but they were excellent! It’s good when music comes to you spontaneously.”
Of course, L-G kept making music. Entombed A.D. released Bowels of Earth in 2019. He still seemed to enjoy the process, like an elder Ichiro still finding a way to sneak into the batter’s box. “As you go on in life, you experience new things, you wanna try out other things, and Entombed has always tried to do that,” he said last year. “Maybe more than for our own good sometimes, but now we're just going straightforward and we just do it again — over and over again. And as long as you don't get tired of it, you just continue. If you get tired of it, you should quit. You don't do it because…if you don't like it, step aside and let it roll.”
The dude never got tired of it. RIP, L-G. You were a real one.
NEW ARRIVALS
SPOTLIGHT
Seputus - Phantom Indigo (Willowtip Records)
Man Does Not Give, Seputus's previous banger, was a blast. It ripped through the early Willowtip and Relapse catalogs, a katamari that adhered to a ton of genres in the ultimate pursuit of flattening your face. I say then, with no small amount of conviction, that Phantom Indigo is an upgrade in every way. Where the NY trio previously created depth by layering styles, Indigo is all about layering sound. It’s one of the most texturally dense albums I’ve heard this year. Stephen Schwegler’s guitar playing has gotten way more interesting, not only rhythmically but in the way he lets tones crash together. A lot of these riffs are like two chrome balls colliding. It’s not so much about tapping along to the chug as it is hearing the way the jagged shrapnel, raining down from above, tears holes through the rest of the compositions. Crazy stuff. I have no idea how long it took to map all of that out, but it was worth it. Elsewhere, Schwegler’s drumming is as characteristically inventive as ever. Doug Moore's singing continues to evolve as he adds a bunch of new howls to his arsenal. Erik Malave’s bass is just rad, unifying the disparate universes of death metal and noise rock. (Disclosure: I have, at the very least, briefly hung out with everyone named so far and worked with one of them.) And there are some killer guest spots. “The Learned Response” contains fret fireworks by Dan Gargiulo.
What keeps knocking me on my ass about this album, though, is the way it feels. Indigo takes it title from an Oliver Sacks anecdote, which kind of doubles as a review of this album. This is from a 2013 interview between the neurologist and NPR’s Fresh Air:
“I had been reading about the color indigo, how it had been introduced into the spectrum by [Isaac] Newton rather late, and it seemed no two people quite agreed as to what indigo was, and I thought I would like to have an experience of indigo. And I built up a sort of pharmacological launchpad with amphetamines and LSD, and a little cannabis on top of that, and when I was really stoned I said, ‘I want to see indigo now.’ And as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo appeared on the wall.
“Again it had this luminous, numinous quality; I leaped toward it in a sort of ecstasy. I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven.’ ... I thought maybe this is not a color which actually exists on the Earth, or maybe it used to exist or no longer exists. All this went through my mind in 4 or 5 seconds, and then the blob disappeared, giving me a strong sense of loss and heartbrokenness, and I was haunted a little bit when I came down, wondering whether indigo did exist in the real world.
“I would turn over little stones. I once went to a museum to look at azurite, a copper mineral which is maybe the nearest [to] indigo, but that was disappointing. I did in fact have that experience again, but when I had it the second time, it was not with a drug, it was with music — and I think music can take one to the heights in a way comparable with drugs.”
Likewise, Indigo feels like a search for something, some kind of meaning within the chaos of life. Sometimes that search is empowering, other times it is the reason one feels so empty. These six songs encapsulate that experience better than most pieces of present-day media. As Schwegler says in the PR copy, Phantom Indigo “is a window into the kind of ‘mental loops’ that can occur from repeated fixation, meaningless daily routine and negative mental thought patterns. The thoughts themselves are phantoms, and the spectrum of feelings are a color that cannot concisely be expressed.” And yet, here’s 47 minutes and 47 seconds of prime metal that does just that.
HIGHLIGHTS
Abominable Putridity - Parasitic Metamorphosis Manifestation (Inherited Suffering Records)
Described by an associate as Wormed without the tech parts. Accurate. The highlight is “Paroxysm,” a big ol’ slam stomper that widdles around with an Arty B part in its middle. Decent. Spacier than I remember. To that end, there have been a lot of changes since AP’s breakout, 2012’s The Anomalies of Artificial Origin. The mic once held by scene legend/current Unique Leader co-operator Matti Way is now gripped by new burper Ángel Ochoa. Apparently, something…happened and Alexander Kubiashvili, owner of Inherited Suffering Records, became the sole member. I don’t think this is even getting a Unique Leader release. There’s probably a story there if anyone is interested in telling it. Anyway, if you have to pick one Kubiashvili project, I’d go with Deracinated since it’s basically this but way dumber. Still, if you need some background slams, this’ll do it.
Bridge Burner - Disempath (Hibernation Release)
Headline: The charred vocals belong to Ben Read, singer on Ulcerate’s Of Fracture and Failure. There's a bit of early Ulcerate in Bridge Burner, a crusty metalcore throwback with bulging death metal muscles. Some dissonance, some tricky rhythms, touch of black. Disempath, however, is much more in line with early ‘00 Relapse core merchants. Uphill Battle is probably the primary comparison. For that reason, Bridge Burner is so steeped in my kind of nostalgia that I can’t help but like it. I think this bangs hard enough for most — “Flaying God’s Children” has a groove that could’ve made ALOL’s A Great Artist — but it’ll really land for anyone who, for instance, loved that Graven album from a couple years back.
Cambion - Conflagrate the Celestial Refugium (Lavadome Productions)
If early Slayer played like Angelcorpse. I guess that’s how you’d sum up this three-piece. Fast, brutal, black as hell. Definitely putting the “power” in power trio here as it pushes Mithras in the sustained BPMs department. Few lineup notes for nerds: Chason Westmoreland, previously on Hate Eternal’s Infernus, drums. Thorben Rathje, currently of German BDM nutters Medecophobic, guitars. That said, I don’t know what’s up with the release. There’s a 35-second sample that has been up on Bandcamp since April 2020. Pending Lavadome drop in late March, but no previews yet. I, uh, hope you get to hear this at some point.
Carcinoma - Labascation (self-released)
I've written this a bunch of other places: Portal’s haunted aesthetics mixed with Pig Destroyer's ferocity. The vox definitely has some of that JR Hayes, lost-my-goddamn-mind screech to it. And the riffs are devastating, utilizing that Altarage shivering, hanging drone. Later tracks dip into post-metal the same way that Rune used to when exploring the same void. A true highlight. We’ll be talking about this more.
Decortication - My Knife is Still in Good Order (Pathologically Explicit Recordings)
WELP, if the real-deal crime scene photo didn't tip you off, this is BDM about Jack the Ripper. The conceit? Whatever. The album? Rips. The members? The usual suspects. Here's the CV: [*deep breath*] Ergosphere, Esophageal, Induced, Molecular Fragmentation, Perpetual Gestation, Scatology Secretion, Strappado, Infibulated, ByoNoiseGenerator, Fetal Bleeding, plus a ton of others, those are just the ones I’ve covered recently. Musically, this reminds me of Brodequin since it’s similarly speed-obsessed. The very wet sounding slams are in the Meathook zone. Good stuff all around and you’ll never be able to talk to a normal person about it. “THEY SAY I’M A DOCTOR NOW HAHAHA” sure hits different during COVID.
Forhist - Forhist (Debemur Morti Productions)
I will attempt to spend the rest of this bleb abstaining from making a For Hims joke. So, this is the newest project by Blut Aus Nord mastermind Vindsval, who has spent the post-Memoria Vetusta III years trying on different hats such as the Godflesh-y Yerûšelem and the stoner-y Hallucinogen. This, though, is something of a return to BAN's “purer” BM roots. Specifically, the sales copy points out that it’s “inspired by the ‘90s Norwegian Black Metal scene.” In sound, Forhist, which tellingly shares its name with a song title on MV III, isn’t unlike the vaunted MV trilogy, just with the leads stripped out in favor of keyboards and naturalistic field samples. However, I’d almost call this a second-wave flip on Hallucinogen. Like that album, Vindsval doesn’t use his voice as much more than texture, preferring long instrumental passages. Because of that, Forhist exudes a hypnotic quality throughout, which, like recent BAN works, takes a few spins to really sink in. Good stuff.
Maggot Priest - Panegyric Exaltatations for the Glory of Cystic Infestation (What’s the Point Records)
Even for goregrind, these are easily some of the grossest vocals I’ve heard in a bit. Like someone drowning in a septic tank. Maggot Priest is members of Tunkio, the Finnish sickos that recently hopped on a split with Kuvotus. What’s going on in Finland?
Monte Penumbra - As Blades in the Firmament (End All Life Productions / Oration)
This is my first bite of the Monte Penumbra apple, a Portuguese duo doing weirdo, disso black metal. Have to be honest: I am getting pretty tired of this sound. Like, I’m not sure I need to hear another Icelandic citizen squeezing out a murky DsO take. But Monte Penumbra delivers something fresh on As Blades in the Firmament, its second full-length. I think it’s because it prioritizes riffs over atmosphere. Don’t get me wrong, there’s oodles of atmosphere. Many heebie-jeebies. But, tracks like “To Anoint the Dead,” which I’m linking below in lieu of a Bandcamp (guys, c’mon), have a cascade of neato riffs. It’s almost like a black metal platformer since the band is so unceasing in its pursuit of the next riff. You end up in these fully formed, 15-second worlds before they leap to another one. And the riffs are dope! That little Ved Buens Ende spine-crawler makes all the difference.
Twitch of the Death Nerve - Beset by False Prophets (Comatose Music)
Alright, I’ll eat crow. This UK BDM trio didn’t do much for me in the past, but I’m going to chalk that up to me being an idiot. This new EP is both crazier and tighter than I remember the band being, embracing some of Twitch’s live energy. And hey, tacked on as a bonus is a complete live set. Sounds good, too! The thing I like the most is how real and sweaty this sounds while still maintaining a tech precision. It gives it a “classic” BDM feel, like a band you would’ve caught in a NYC basement opening for Suffocation.
Want to keep up with what I think is good this year? Follow my lists on RateYourMusic: 2020, 2021.
FROM THE VAULTS
Memento Waltz - Division By Zero
I had some fun with the Black Market guys recently. I asked them to make a list of underappreciated metal albums. This is that list. It’s…insane. If I saw all of this sitting within a CD rack in real life, I would leave the owner’s home immediately. Way too schizophrenic. It’s a detail that any FBI profiler would be sure to include in any report. I love it.
One of the big takeaways from putting that thing together, though, is how much the metal masses don’t seem to like prog metal. And that’s…curious. Dream Theater, one of the biggest metal bands in the world, is a prog metal band. (Dream Theater also sucks.) They’re one of the exceptions. Most everything that sits below the Fates Warning prog metal tier is strangely fringe, accessible only to a certain type of ultra-dork. It’s the classic metal conundrum, really. Would you spend 10,000 hours reaching the end game of technical ability if you knew that there’d be no fans there to greet you? Prog metal is like, [*screeching Watchtower vocals*] YOOOOOOLoooooooooooooo.
At the time I’m writing this, Memento Waltz’s 2013 full-length debut, Division by Zero, has 23 ratings on Rate Your Music. The paucity of interested parties may be due to the band’s relative inactivity. The Italian quartet has been around since 1994. It has one full-length and two EPs to its name. (Both of the EPs clock in around 30 minutes. Guys, that’s a unit of measurement I call “one Reign in Blood.” You can mark those as LPs. It’s fine. Nothing matters.) But, I have to imagine that the other part is that Division by Zero is a tough hang for average-joe metal types. It’s kind of a mindfuck.
In my fucked mind, the gold standard for this stuff is Spiral Architect. Memento Waltz doesn’t quite reach those levels of nuttiness, but it’s certainly sitting in the left field bleachers of that ballpark. Still, what you get is a ton of shred linking together a surprising number of metal styles. The thing that really works in Memento Waltz’s favor is that it can get legitimately heavy. Second track “Opus Alchemicum” has some riffs that thud in a very thrashy, near-deathy way. That this band manages to balance the bugfuckery with hooks is why I’ve grown to love it so much. Imagine being like, Oh yes, this is catchy, and then surrounding that part with widdles that sound like Richard Feynman’s brain on crank. That is supremely my kind of shit. No wonder they don’t have fans.
Fittingly, the opening sound of Division by Zero is the old Windows error noise. I wonder if that’s the only thing other people hear. Perhaps my brain is too far gone and I’m meant to walk the opposite-but-the-same wastelands of prog and brutal death metal forever more. Maybe walk it with me this one time?
BUT I GOT ONE THING LEFT TO SAY
The podcast is real. You didn’t believe me. Well, who is laughing now? Probably you at my dumb Muppet voice. Listen to Episode #1 here. We’re recording the second episode soon. Still trying to get it cleared on podcatchers. That…has been an ordeal.
I am now heading into column hell, so the next time I’ll see you this month is for a countdown of the best albums so far in 2021. Next VaccZine will be in April.
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