Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

Memento Mori

Album Review: DIPYGUS – Dipygus

While death metal was born swathed in gore (I mean, it is death metal, right?), since the mid-‘80s the genre has morphed into subgenre after sub-subgenre after sub-subgenre, resulting in…well, if we’re going to take brutal death, goregrind, and gore metal as examples…does anything truly shock and appall anymore? When’s the last time a song’s lyrics truly creeped you out? When’s the last time those lyrics joined with the music to create something utterly terrifying? Returns DIPYGUS with its third full-length, ready to spew blood, choler and phlegm in a fountain of yellow bile ‘cross us all, ‘Perverse Termination (Bulb […]

Album Review: Martyrdoom – As Torment Prevails

I often lament the utter lack of individuality and originality amongst modern death metal bands, but now and then an act arrives that is in such total mastery of the genre’s basics that such concerns are irrelevant. That brings us to Poland’s MARTYRDOOM and As Torment Prevails…these gross motherfuckers just plain plow you under the rancid Earth with this pulsating pustule of doom-tinged rottenness. Two things help elevate MARTYRDOOM; the quality of their riffs, which is outstanding, and the true feeling of morbid sickness, which is something that just can’t be faked. If you like greasy, oozing riffs drenched in […]

Album Review: Marduk – Memento Mori

Time sure hasn’t sanded the edges off of MARDUK. Memento Mori has some of the fastest, most vicious metal these guys have ever played. There’s a hardcore contingent of “fans” that complain the band has lost its edge when they ditched their Sieg Heiling bass player. You sure can’t hear it here. ‘Blood Of The Funeral’, ‘Coffin Carol’ and ‘Red Tree of Blood’ are like barbed wire whips that rip the flesh from your bones. Yet if you listen carefully, there is also strange melody and even a kind of brutal elegance that slips into some of these tunes. The […]

Album Review: Dipygus – Bushmeat

Not many who hear this album will realize the significance of the track ‘St. Augustine, FL 1896’ but with the Good Doctor’s abiding interest in cryptozoology and all things bizarre, I immediately recognized what this date and time meant. That was when the carcass of some enormous sea beast washed up on the Floridian shore, with many believing it to be the body of a titanic octopus. Ah ha, so DIPYGUS are kindred spirits! That’s confirmed by the title of the next song here, ‘The Khunjung Scalp’, which is the purported scalp of the Himalayan Yeti. Yessir, DIPYGUS, whoever they […]

COFFIN CURSE sign with MEMENTO MORI, will release debut album early next year

In their endless quest to push and support current underground acts that perpetuate the odor of vintage death metal, Memento Mori are extremely thrilled to announce a new signing: COFFIN CURSE, from Chile. COFFIN CURSE was thrown into this worthless world in Santiago in mid-2012, as a side-project of the main band Inanna, to spawn and vomit forth death metal in its purest form. Max Neira (guitars, bass, vocals) conceived this beast as a two-piece squad to explore the caverns of everlasting pain and horror. Musically, this is malevolent, straightforward, headbang-inducing death metal, inspired by early ’90s U.S. icons such […]