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Trollheims Grott – Aligned with the True Death (W.T.C. Productions)

This was dipped in black metal flavoring, but it has more than one drum beat, and the vocals aren’t the faggy screeching of someone trying to be like Edith Bunker from “All in the Family.”

The production is still a bit on the black metal side, favoring treble, and there are the usual dissonant chords. Here and there a bit of atmospherics get added. In one song, the vocals vaguely remind me of the first Infernal Majesty album.

My favorite song is “LXFR” which is the most unique on the album. That should be your gateway into the rest of the music.

Altarage – The Approaching Roar (Season of Mist)

This is a dirty, muddy sort of death metal. The vocals sound like a wounded boar, which is interesting, and for me, this is the chief selling point of the album. It is a dying beast that I hear.

The insistent pounding of the drums is interspersed with thick, oozing sludge. The production isn’t very pretty, but that is because it delivers an atmosphere of ugliness.

This monstrous music is hard to compare to others, which is good. It can be safely added to your metal diet without side effects.

Altarage - The Approaching Roar
Altarage – The Approaching Roar

Woebegone Obscured – The Forestroamer (Aesthetic Death)

Woebegone Obscured – The Forestroamer (Aesthetic Death)

This is an older album, but I must review it because I have only discovered the album a few months ago, and if I was unaware of this excellence, there is a chance that you may also have somehow lived without this music. I am seeking out their other works, but this CD on Aesthetic Death is a must-have in any doom-lover’s collection.

I really need not tell you anything other than to just go buy it. The album has all that you would ever desire of a doom band with death metal vocals (as well as parts that have clean singing, which are quite fitting to those passages, like the words, “Beyond this world there is a hope the sun will burn a sign for you”).

Each flavor is measured and applied only in the amounts that are needed. The ear is constantly stimulated this way. Tempo changes not only snap the ear out of the abyss, the transformation is sometimes frightening, deepening the darkness. Indeed, this is even sung, “Nothing but the dark to live for.”

One of the songs has lyrics that are presumably in Danish (this is a band from Denmark).

I am still shocked that I had not been made aware of this album, or band, until now. This is why it is good to take chances on music. You need only yourself and a willingness to explore. I found this album by going on the Aesthetic Death web site (https://www.aestheticdeath.com) in search of any music by the band ESOTERIC that I may have not heard about, and yes, I found their demo double CD, but I kept snooping around and investigated their other releases. THE FORESTROAMER is one of the albums I decided to support, and I am incredibly happy that I did, even though it is the anthem of my sorrow for now.

Bergraven -Det Framlidna Minnet (Nordvis Produktion)

Bergraven -Det Framlidna Minnet (Nordvis Produktion)

This is quite an odd album. When I first heard a random spot, I expected black metal, and indeed, I did get the sense that this comes from that world, but the album has no known category, which is good.

The voices are not the screechy bitch-vocals of black metal – they are more on the exasperated shouting side, mixed with the melancholy folk sort of singing.

The music ranges from unusual timing and long riffs. to more straightforward and recognizable passages, but the songs seem to have been made to put the listener in a strange place. Even the upbeat portions have something twisted going on, as if a mad clown attempted to play something catchy, but is so bonkers that the otherwise accessible tune becomes demented.

There are bursts of aggression, but that’s just an ingredient in this insanity-potion, not the main flavor. Add to this, non-English lyrics, making this a welcome visit to another realm.

Maniac – Caroline Munro

This is an old movie that I had not seen until this anniversary 3-disc edition.

The enjoyment that I derived from viewing the movie was to see how things were done once upon a time.  The gore was humorous.  It seems that, back then, fake blood looked more like red paint in a child’s arts and crafts class rather than an attempt at a simulation.  Flesh was rubber – it stretched, as is seen during a decapitation.  But the funniest gag is the blood squirting from behind a knife – the side of the blade that you don’t see.  I keep hearing that this was once a shocking image, but I disagree.   When I was a kid, I didn’t know the exact method for the gag, but I had fun putting ketchup on the side of a knife that a person wouldn’t see, and I pretended to cut my arm, so I don’t see how this was innovative or scary.

I don’t know if this period of movies was just giving the viewer the barest essence, as if it were a play.  I thought that this was why older TV shows show just a red dot when someone gets shot, but after talking to a detective, he said that there is no blood spurt – people bleed internally.  Yes, there are exceptions, but it seems that the modern way of having squibs is just as silly as the gore of yesteryear, or yesterdecade, ha ha.

There are two unrealistic things about the movie.  One is that Caroline Munro’s character would be involved with the slob who plays the maniac.  The more striking error is that the maniac is asexual.  All serial killers are sexual predators, whether the victim is alive or dead.  This is the problem with many movies – there is only surface level knowledge.  However, there is some merit to the maniac being stuck in a childhood experience.

No, I don’t hate this movie, and I don’t regret the time I spent watching it.  I liked the spirit of the movie – it felt like a passion project.  The behind-the-scenes extras provided proof of that.  It was a step back in time to see how things were done in those days.  There are also time-capsule elements like rotary phones and cars that weighed a lot more, ha ha.  It’s a peek into the past.

Maniac - Caroline Munro
Maniac – Caroline Munro

WARREL DANE – Shadow Work (Century Media)

Listening to this album inflicts the same sadness as when I see “The Crow” because I know that this will be the last offering by the artist.  It is ironic that Warrel sings, “Mother is the Word for god” – a line from the movie “The Crow” (and it is sorrowfully coincidental that I recently met the writer of the graphic novel prior to hearing the song).

It is hard to hear “Kill me in my dreams” – I wonder if Warrel was conscious when he died.

The guitar on this album seems imitative of Jeff Loomis at times, a tad shameful, not so much for the mimicry, but because the style isn’t why I like the music – it is, and always was, Warrel’s voice that carried the tune.

There are some new approaches, however.

It doesn’t seem necessary to review this album – it will be heard out of respect, curiosity, or a friend’s insistence.

I am grateful that enough was salvaged to finish this final work. Another Great One is gone, and I  see no replacements for those we lost.  Farewell.

 

Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE (Blue Underground)

I had not seen the movie until now,  so I have no nostalgic blindness that makes me overlook the stupidity.

This movie is one of the reasons why horror is considered a low form of cinema.  There are too idiotic parts to make this anything but a dalliance.  Perhaps that is all that one wishes in a horror movie, but there are some horror movies that are cerebral, or that provide more than cool shots here and there.

Before I begin ridiculing the movie, I would like to point out that there is one very good aspect, and that is the inclusion of nudity.  It comes from a time when there wasn’t as much fear to show the female form.

Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE
Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE

Another positive thing that can be noted is that the zombies in some scenes appear to be dead.  Their faces do not change expression, which makes them appear undead.  I favor this depiction, but of course, the movie has zombies that look like someone was reading too many newspaper pages and smudged ink in their faces.

The action is ridiculous.   Molotov cocktails are prepared.  When thrown, inside a dwelling, of all places, they miss a gang of zombies completely.  While the fire burns, another bottle is hurled, but the shot that was previously in flames now appears as if no fire had ever occurred there.  This happens again.  It was so stupid that I actually laughed.

The zombies are noisy and lumbering retards, but they manage to appear like ninjas, suddenly and silently behind people who are on guard.  There is also a zombie in the ocean who adroitly fights a shark.  The funniest straying from zombie behavior is when a woman’s hair is grabbed, and she is pulled into a shard of wood.  If a zombie just goes around biting people and acts retarded, how would it suddenly devise such a tactic?

This brings me to the behavior of the humans.  Older movies like these seem to show people as idiots who forget self defense when there is a monster.  A woman is grabbed only by a few strands of hair, and as her face is pulled toward a sharp splinter of wood, all she can do is look at the object in total stupidity and fear.  If you ever play-wrestled a girl, you know that they are masters of squirming out of any hold.  So this legendary scene that reportedly horrified audiences was actually a source of laughter for me.  It was just too stupid to be taken seriously.  I would use it in a comedy, actually.

There are other silly bits of action and behavior, like when a person driving a jeep to escape zombies isn’t paying attention to the road.  In front of him there is a zombie.  Instead of running over it, the driver reacts as if it is an insurmountable barrier, and then he drives out of control and slams into a tree after a minute.  Why didn’t he use the breaks.  To make matters more silly, a backseat passenger tears the front of his ankle.

The story elements are ignorant or boring.   Perhaps the special effects at one time were considered good, but I found them to be funny.    I watched the movie more an an outsider who was trying to see this as someone from the past would have, but I had to change attitude and view it as a comedy.  There was no substance, nothing nightmarish, and nothing interesting, side from the exquisite form of the topless actress.

Fallout 76

When I played Fallout 3, I wondered why there wasn’t a massive multiplayer world like World of Warcraft that was set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout.

When Fallout 76 was announced, I felt like a dream came true.  But the dream became a nightmare.

The disappointment was immediate., however,  I forced myself to play because I hoped that the disillusionment was just a matter of me not being accustomed to the changes.

The social aspect was retarded.  When I encountered the first actual person, he communicated with the equivalent of an emo-gee.   By the way, anyone who uses an emo-gee when writing to me is immediately dismissed as a simpleton.  Adults use words.

I was a fool for expecting the social experience of World of Warcraft.  I don’t expect games that are played on consoles to bear the same text-chat of the Blizzard game, but the emo-gee limitation was almost enough for me to take the disc out and sell it.

I had imagined bands of people grouping together to become raiders, protectors, and other options.  There was not even a hint of this. In the time that I have been playing, the only interactions have been the handful of retarded emo-gee communication, and the three times that I was attacked, which seemed more like player boredom than malice.

The social aspect was non-existent.

The worst part of the game is a nag to eat and drink.  I don’t know why the game forces a player to do this.  When Grand Theft Auto introduced that, it made me hate the game.  But it is far worse in Fallout 76. You get nagged EVERY 10 MINUTES !!!  You even get nagged when you are in combat!!!  This is not an exaggeration.

Yes, I would have complained if I had to eat and drink even if it was a nag once a week.  Why not have a nag to defecate and urinate?  The game is not realistic.  I fall five stories without a scratch in some areas, and in other areas I fall ten feet and die.  My character can hop up five feet, but cannot walk over a small branch (I have to jump over that tiny obstacle).

I tried to love the game despite the frustration and disappointment.  There were a couple of hours when I pretended that I know nothing about Fallout games and that I was in a Walking Dead episode, but the nag for eating and drinking kept taking me out of the pretend -reminding me that the game isn’t anything like I thought it would be, and even there were no predecessors, this game is just a time sink.

I stopped playing because I realized that it’s not going to get better unless there is a new game and I get a refund for what I have suffered.